Heterogeneous Spectacles(Jamie Lyons News) ❖ Jamie Lyons

Heterogeneous Spectacles

Twenty-Eight and Twenty-Six and Gone

Let My People Go isn’t some polite meditation on mortality. This is Astrid Bas standing in a room and saying: here are two women who made extraordinary things and then they were gone. One chose to go. One had that choice ripped away from her in the most obscene way human beings have ever devised.

Sarah Kane writing plays that made audiences walk out because they couldn’t handle what she was showing them about violence and love and the impossibility of connection. Charlotte Salomon painting over 700 gouaches while the world was actively trying to erase her and everyone like her from existence. And then…nothing.

Twenty-eight. Twenty-six.

What Astrid does here, and this is where it gets under your skin, is she doesn’t try to explain it or make it comfortable or wrap it up in some redemptive narrative bullshit. She just puts their words, their images, their courage up against the reality that they’re gone. The movement, the text, the video, it’s not healing. It’s not cathartic. It’s just there, like a wound that won’t close because maybe it shouldn’t.

You watch this and you think about all the art that was never made, all the plays Kane didn’t write, all the paintings Salomon didn’t paint. You think about the unfairness of it, not in some abstract way, but in your gut where it actually matters. And Astrid doesn’t let you look away from that. She honors them by not prettifying it.

This is what art should do when it looks at death: it should refuse to make it easier than it is.

Oct 12, 2012 | Categories: Industries | Tags: actors, Dance Documentation / Photography, dancers, The Performance Art Institute | Leave A Comment »

The Most Interesting Dog in The World

I’ve spent time with supposed intellectuals, credential-clutching Ivy League types who couldn’t find their own ass with both hands and a roadmap, people so wrapped up in their own mythology they’ve forgotten what actual intelligence looks like when it’s staring them dead in the face with those dark, knowing eyes.

And then there’s Sharka.

This Portuguese Water Dog, this magnificent, curly-haired genius, operates on a frequency most humans will never access. She’s not just smart in that “oh look, the doggy learned a trick” patronizing bullshit way we congratulate ourselves for training lesser beings. No. Sharka’s intelligence is the real deal, the kind that makes you question every smug assumption you ever had about consciousness, about who’s really in charge here, about what it means to actually see the world instead of just stumbling through it half-blind with your Ph.D. flapping behind you like a fucking security blanket.

You know what Stanford gave me? Debt and the ability to name-drop Stanford. You know what Sharka’s got? Pure, uncut awareness. The kind of intuition and perception that cuts through the noise, the pretense, the endless human carnival of self-importance. She watches. She understands. She judges. And unlike most people I’ve met, in seminar rooms or boardrooms or anywhere else where credentials supposedly matter, when Sharka decides you’re worth her time, she’s not performing some elaborate social ritual. She’s making an actual choice based on actual intelligence.

The rest of us are just catching up.

I’ve seen a look in dogs’ eyes, a quickly vanishing look of amazed contempt, and I am convinced that basically dogs think humans are nuts.
John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America

Oct 05, 2012 | Categories: Individualism | Tags: Portraits | Leave A Comment »

Franconia Performance Salon #3

It’s a hot summer night in San Francisco, the kind that feels like a mistake, like the city forgot what it’s supposed to be, and I’m at Michael’s house for salon number three. I don’t want to be here. I should be literally anywhere else. And for some reason as I’m thinking about this night I’m channeling the voice of Raymond Chandler. What the fuck is that about?

My mom’s been maybe dead three months and I’m running her gallery now, spending my days surrounded by her taste, her choices, her ghost. The last thing I want to do at night is stand around Michael’s talking about art. Pretending any of this experimental performance shit matters when nothing matters, when everything’s just absence and heat and going through the motions.

Jordan Essoe is slamming bricks into Michael’s floor. Actually SLAMMING them. The sound is sickening, crack, crack, crack, and Michael’s pacing around the edges of the room and into the kitchen, saying out loud to anyone who’ll listen, “How am I going to explain this to Alice? Jesus, how do I tell Alice?” His landlord. He’s literally narrating his own panic while Jordan keeps destroying his floor.

But he doesn’t stop it. He’s moving around, sweating, wringing his hands, telling everyone about Alice, about the deposit, about how fucked he is, and he lets it continue. Because that’s what it means to believe in something. You let it damage you while you openly catalogue the destruction.

Now here’s what happens when you’re broken open by grief: you start seeing the cracks in everyone else.

I’m watching Niki through the lens, and for the first time in months, I actually see her. Not the person I’m angry at, not the person fading away, but the person who’s also damaged, who’s also barely holding it together.

My damage lets me see hers. And Jordan’s. And Luciano’s. We’re all walking wounded, all of us, making our weird art in Michael’s living room because the alternative is staying home alone with our demons.

And that’s when it becomes the intentional one. When I stop photographing at people and start photographing with them. When I realize we’re all just damaged people documenting our damage.

Franconia Performance Salon #3

Jul 30, 2012 | Categories: Collusion | Tags: Collected Works, Performance Art Photography / Documentation | Comments Off on Franconia Performance Salon #3

Franconia Performance Salon #2

So here’s the real truth: I’d just bought a Canon 5D Mark II and I’d found this gorgeous 1950s Zeiss 35mm lens, put an adapter on it, and I was looking for any excuse to shoot with the damn thing. That’s it. That’s why these photos exist.

That’s pretty much why this website exists.

And at this moment it’s not called anything yet. Michael just said he wanted to try this idea out, doing Andy Warhol’s Life of Juanita Castro live, with him directing from Tavel’s script. That’s it. That’s the whole pitch. No Franconia Performance Salon, no #2.

Last time, and I’m not calling that “#1” either, because there’s no series yet, there’s no concept, last time was wigs and iPhones and nobody pretending we were doing anything anything more than playing, like we had three dozen times before. But this time… all I’m actually thinking is: I can bring the new camera. I can see what this Zeiss glass does with skin tones, with depth of field, with the way light falls across a face when someone’s mid-performance.

And fuck if that Zeiss doesn’t render beautifully. That bokeh, that fall-off, the way it catches Helen’s expression, this is what that old glass does that modern lenses can’t quite touch. There’s a softness without being soft, a clarity without being clinical. The engineers at Zeiss in 1955 or whenever weren’t thinking about ironic performance art; they were thinking about light, and somehow that purity comes through sixty years later when you point it at people performing a performance of a film about Fidel’s sister.

So I’m shooting, and yeah, Michael’s directing, and yeah, the actors are committing, but honestly? I’m half in my own world, playing with focus, seeing what happens when I open up the lens all the way, watching how this ancient piece of German engineering interprets the present moment. This is gear-lust masquerading as documentation. This is me justifying my first EBAY purchase.

Fuck me with this fetishization of equipment… the belief that the right gear gets me closer to something true, even though I know that’s probably bullshit, that it’s the eye and the moment and the luck, not the glass. But I believe it anyway because I want to believe it. Because that lens cost real money and it’s beautiful and heavy and it better make everything I point it at more real.

And the sick joke? It kind of does. These images have a quality that my iPhone shots from the wig thing don’t have. Not because this night was more important or more “real,” but because that Zeiss glass is just better. Seventy years of engineering better.

So now these photos exist, and later someone’s going to construct a narrative around them, call it “#2,” make it mean something more than it actually did. But the actual reason they exist is because I had a new toy and my friends, as they had three dozen nights before, gave me an excuse this night to play with it.

That’s more honest than anything we could’ve planned.

Franconia Performance Salon #2
Andy Warhol’s film The Life of Juanita Castro

May 20, 2012 | Categories: Collusion | Tags: Collected Works, Performance Art Photography / Documentation | Leave A Comment »

no idea of what is going to happen

Wanderlust in Tangier, Morocco…

I have no idea of what is going to happen
or in which parts the pain will be.
We are only in spring, and spring has a twisting light.
Spring’s images are made of crystal and cannot be recalled.
There will be suffering, but you know how to coax it.
There will be memories, but they can be deflected.
There will be your heart still moving
in the wind that has not stopped flying westward,
and you will give a signal. Will someone see it?
Paul Bowles, Next to Nothing

May 10, 2012 | Categories: Wanderlust | Leave A Comment »

Hostage to the Golden Hour: Beni & Kathy’s Barn

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
Robert Frost, Nothing Gold Can Stay

Beauty… it’s a goddamn trap, and this photograph proves it.

That golden-hour glow spilling across some rich couple’s “barn” (read: renovated monument to disposable income) in Healdsburg is the aesthetic equivalent of a Venus flytrap for anyone with half a soul and a functioning retina. You know you should keep walking, know that nothing good comes from lingering in spaces where the patrons of the arts confuse their checkbooks with genuine appreciation, but there’s that light, that impossible California light that doesn’t give a shit about your class resentment or your need to escape.

Del Sol Quartet probably played their hearts out, real musicians always do, even when they’re performing for people who clap at the wrong times and discuss their Napa wine portfolios during the diminuendo. The music was likely transcendent, a genuine moment of human achievement happening outside a barn for people who’ll remember it primarily as something to mention at their next dinner party. “Oh yes, we host concerts at our place in Healdsburg… it has a barn. We believe in supporting the arts.” Sure you do, Benny and Kathy. Right there between your locavore dinner parties and your Prius, you’ve carved out a little space for culture to perform like a trained seal while you congratulate yourselves on your refined sensibilities.

But I stopped anyway. The vista, backlit barn, that wine-country pastoral fantasy, the whole fraudulent American dream rendered in amber and shadow, it nailed me to the spot. I raised my camera, and in that moment, I became complicit. I created evidence that something beautiful existed there, which means now it’s harder to write the whole thing off as a total loss. That’s the cruelty of it: beauty doesn’t care about my politics or my principles. It just is, and it demands witness, even when bearing witness means staying put in exactly the place I need to flee.

I should’ve kept walking.

Apr 29, 2012 | Categories: Absolute Solipsism | Tags: Music | Leave A Comment »

Palo Alto Lawn Bowling

Palo Alto Lawn Bowling Club

Donny was a good bowler, and a good man. He was one of us. He was a man who loved the outdoors… and bowling, and as a surfer he explored the beaches of Southern California, from La Jolla to Leo Carrillo and… up to… Pismo. He died, like so many young men of his generation, he died before his time. In your wisdom, Lord, you took him, as you took so many bright flowering young men at Khe Sanh, at Langdok, at Hill 364. These young men gave their lives. And so would Donny. Donny, who loved bowling. And so, Theodore Donald Karabotsos, in accordance with what we think your dying wishes might well have been, we commit your final mortal remains to the bosom of the Pacific Ocean, which you loved so well. Good night, sweet prince.
The Big Lebowski

Mar 31, 2012 | Categories: Engineering | Leave A Comment »

Mavericks

Mavericks Surfing: surfers enter the water at Pillar Point on their way to the Mavericks break.

It was all balance.
But then, she already knew that from surfing.
Eve Babitz, Sex and Rage: Advice to Young Ladies Eager for a Good Time: A Novel

Jan 11, 2012 | Categories: Adventure | Tags: beach, Pillar Point, surfing | Leave A Comment »

The Gorgeous Futility of Roses in Sand

It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

You don’t stick hundreds of roses in the sand at dawn on New Year’s Day because you’re well-adjusted. You do it because something broke open inside you, or because you needed to make something beautiful before the year could grind you down again, or because, and this is the real shit, you understood that the gesture itself, the sheer stupid gorgeous futility of it, was the only honest response to whatever wreckage December left behind.

Because here’s the thing about roses on a beach: the ocean doesn’t give a fuck about your symbolism. It’s going to take every single one of those flowers and drag them under, petals scattering like the promises we make ourselves when we’re drunk or desperate or both. But maybe that’s exactly the point. Maybe whoever did this knew that permanence is a con, that the only thing that matters is that they were there at sunrise, alone probably, hands freezing, cramming stems into wet sand while the Pacific roared its indifference at their back.

It’s a punk rock move disguised as romance, this magnificent waste, this refusal to let beauty be practical or lasting. It’s saying: here, world, here’s something fragile and doomed and completely unnecessary, and I’m giving it to you anyway because the alternative is going numb, and numb is death.
That’s why someone does it. Because they’re still fighting.

Jan 01, 2012 | Categories: The City, Wanderlust | Tags: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, beach, Iphone, Ocean | Leave A Comment »

Great Expectations = Brief Encounter

The Stanford Movie Theatre on University Avenue in Palo Alto. For a few days in the late 80s I worked a jackhammer on a construction crew remodeling this iconic movie palace.

I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be.
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

Dec 17, 2011 | Categories: Absolute Solipsism | Tags: Iphone, Stanford University | Comments Off on Great Expectations = Brief Encounter

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