House-Scrub, or After Porn by Rob Halpern at Margaret Tedesco's [2nd floor projects]

Sunday March 1, 2015--at Margaret Tedesco's [ 2nd floor projects]

projects2ndfloor.blogspot.com  
Sundays 12–5pm, Wednesdays 1–8pm, and by appointment

 

 

Left: Nancy White, Untitled; Center: Courtney Johnson, I am Living My Fantasy;
Right: Gregory Kaplowitz, Untitled (Shroud)Photos from M. Tedesco's blog

 

We celebrated the artwork by Courtney Johnson, Gregory Kaplowitz and Nancy White along with the publication of Rob Halpern's chapbook HOUSE-SCRUB, or AFTER PORN. 

Tedesco's light-filled and airy room accommodated some 35 or so people eager to hear Rob read. Many of these same people later headed over to Small Press Traffic's 5pm event, a Field Report with Jennifer Tamayo, Amy De'Ath and Cassandra Troyan. For a report on that event, click HERE.

photo courtesy of Margaret Tedesco




 

Here's a brief excerpt from Rob's compelling and beautiful work:

There are so many things I want to tell you, things that embarrass me most, though it's hard to voice any one of them, even for you whom I've come to trust. So far, all my writing amounts to these strategies of evasion. That's what I was telling Dana & Lee, sitting outside in the late August heat as we tried to grasp where it all might be going. Casting idols on my brain, the sun produces these false appearances, the dahlias burning under gunmetal skies, so I've yet to discover what real life feels like. At least that's what I tell them. But what I want to tell you is, well, take my body, for example, a place where incommensurables collide rhetoric & blood, price & value, datum & event the bad equivalent of a hole in a soldier's bladder before he's given the form to join the donor's club. The dialectic, having come to such dumb arrest, yields this taxonomy of wounds pasted to a straw man I'll never fuck, a cheap shot at militarization, its so-called human face. What figure do combatants cut against a company that earns the bulk of its twelve billion in annual revenue from army contracts, and whose product tracks my car as it moves thru any one of eight hundred Oakland intersections. This is why my book amounts to a simple X without the algebra to resolve its value in the world where the word 'decorative' modifies unintelligible things, thereby assisting sales. As in every cash-starved city, the promise of federal dollars makes military surveillance an easy cow. See what I mean, in the absence of incident, structure eludes, the poem being but the gesture of a body groping its own withdrawn architecture. Whether bound or bundled, all my usable parts compress to the volume of a prosthetic device shoved inside a foreign orifice. This is how capital explodes in song, usurping the air you might be privately singing, the way the very idea of the flood dries up after the deluge. That's so dutifully Rimbaud, but what would the equivalent be? After the idea of collapse recedes, my use of disjunction will bear no relation to a break in the chain of title, a detainee's autopsy report, or any old forensic audit robo-signed& withdrawn in hazy spells of law. But nothing appears to accumulate inside the hole my organ makes when, mortally wounded in grenade attack, his blown genitals get contracted to a public utility, a city square or park, this being but an asset to securitize, a convention by whose rhyme scheme 'scars' and 'cars' seem to be of common scale, a sound to sing no polis.