Treat me like a King Be

I've been to a gig by Père Ubu yesterday in Ghent. First time I saw David Thomas and his band on stage.



David Thomas has a mouth so small he has to survive in a container of dust.
He looks more and more like the original King Ubu… a pear-shaped body in a sharp suit. After the other members had started to play, he appeared in a dark brown raincoat and a black leather hat. Which raincoat added to the sense of Lynchean surrealism on stage. I don't know about the white socks though.



David Thomas knows his chair is haunted.
And he seems to like hangovers, alternating nips from a bottle of cognac or brandy with (cheep) beers… not a healthy idea to combine. He returned to his chair in the middle of the stage every once in a while while the rest were playing instrumentals. His attitude towards the band members reminded me of Tadeusz Kantor, the Polish stage director and last dada who used to appear on stage during his plays sitting in a chair as himself, acting with lots of disdain towards his actors.

David Thomas' beauty is an insult forever.
For his self-proclaimed favourite song he chose to look into the eyes of a young girl in the audience and sang "one day I'll be your man… one day I'll be the best you can get" offering his big bald head in the spotlights for everyone to admire. He said he had become a spokesperson for ex-punkrockers with a midlife crisis and a prostate problem (and indeed he went on and off the stage quite a bit), which he said seemed very well represented in the audience.

David Thomas has a voice like a ripping wound.
One of his mikes was the mouthpiece of an old telephone with voice distortion. His is still sharp and intriguing as it ever was. In France he said they got the reputiation of hoodlums after attacking and beating up the first act which wasn't very good. An act of violence he was very tempted that evening to encore, having to endure the outlets of a very drunk fan. But things remained friendly, in a David Thomas sort of way.

Oh and Robert Wheeler is a virtuoso on Theremin.

It was one of the best concerts I've seen in ages. Which was nice.
The Avant Garage Online
Ubuprojex
Ubu on Youtube

The train of missed opportunities

Visiting all the wagons in a drunken brawl
Not realizing what is not in the picture
Only later on, missing the station
A pair of eyes in the distance
A fragment of laughter
Warmth

Is it ever too late?
I can still go back and make the change
I'm only twenty
said the nonagenarian, rising from his bed, falling over his muscleless legs
and breaking his hip

All of value is impermanent

RIP


It has come to my attention through the excellent Laughing Bone blog that the blog which for me meant the absolute summum in weblogging, the encyclopedic and sublime Giornale Nuovo has come to an end.
This comes as a blow. For years now Mr H , the visionary archiver behind the blog, has enchanted me with the biggest marvels online. Not only did he manage to find the most rare and bizarre pieces of art, spanning the entire history of mankind, but he was able to distill his critical thoughts into a very pleasant reading. And he had a great addendum to this apogee of curiosities: he put Isaac D'israeli's "Curiosities of literature" online as well, a treasure well for a fan of 'fous littéraires' or 'kooks' as myself.
As I'm used from the writer, an very casual note appears on top of the homepage:
"A weblog was updated here between October 2002 and October 2007. Although now closed, its archives will be kept on-line until further notice"
In my opinion, this entire site should be kept as a time-capsule and protected as a monument by the United Nations. And for once I'm not being sarcastic: visit the site and if you have some decency you'll admit there's some truth in what I claim. Giornale Nuovo offered an interlinked overview of hermetic engraving, outsider art, bizarre children's books, hidden masterpieces and much more. I shall miss it dearly.

Who am I?

A question I finally decided to ask myself using one of the most advanced tools available. So I googled 'Borsky'.
Here I discovered my animus is a painter, my anima a writer (influenced by the moon), my id is an actor from Prague in the thirties, my ego a photographer from Sao Paulo, my superego's a researcher on the psychological effects of aircraft noise no less. Oh and my family probably comes from Russia. And I directed a masterpiece of experimental cinema putting all perspectives upside-down.

I finally realize some questions remain better in the shadows of a doubt.

The smile of Schrödinger's cat

"According to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle one can either acknowledge the spin or the exact location of a quantum particle. This strange idea resulted in the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox, which basically said if two particles were separated over a long distance and one was measured, information about the other could arrive at a speed faster than light, which according the the general relativity is impossible. Now Aspect used this as a model to design an experiment in which he proved the EPR was wrong. Het took apart two spinning particles, send them to two different directions, measured the spin on the first and intantaneously knew the spin on the second. According to some, information is not a physical resource and as such might travel faster than light."

The professor put down his glasses, and suddenly said: "But… if you measure the spin of a particle, don't you first have to localize it?"

Universe collapsed.
And god took the dice and gave them to the professor. "Your turn", said a hoovering voice.

Shift

Suddenly he realized he felt like a ragged empty shell of worn-out meat.

Trying to keep the shape he had formed his entire life into until then, he started to shiver.
The combustion was gone, all that was left was the memory of heat.
There was, however, no pain.
He wanted to feel the pain, real bad, but it had left with all his other lodgers.
Like if it had had its importance while it longed, sheltering him, revealing itself to him when it was gone.
His pain had been working as an essential organ all that time and he had been convinced, more, certain, that he had to soothe it to have a worthwile life.
Not so.
Pain had kept him in shape.
Pain had kept his engine running.

And now he floated surrounding emptyness, surrounded by noise.
He was quite convinced there was still some spark in him; according to his actions outside in the world of apparences it certainly seemed so, even more, much more than before.
All his innards were projected outside and he didn't have clue if that was a good thing or not.
The emptyness he used to feel at his edges had moved to the inside, and the richness he had felt at his core had shifted to his surface.

It dawned on him.
That was the spark:
Everything was reversed.
He had no idea whatsoever who he was.
And he had never been so sure about what he would become.

a small one

As an answer to the question "Who’s your favourite actor?", I’d say the guy who played the lost trapper in the movie 'Dreamcatcher' written by Stephen King, who was completely off the map, and then in the course of the movie started meticulously to shit himself until he died with his bowels all over the place. I cannot imagine the poor guy ever had the opportunity to work for the film industry again.