𝗦𝘂𝘀𝗶𝗲 𝗥𝗲𝗮𝗱𝘀 𝗧𝗼 𝗡𝗲𝗼𝗶𝘀𝘁𝘀
"Susie reads to Neoists": I met Jackson Mac Low when he came to Baltimore with Franz Kamin, his piano teacher, to the Red Door Hall in 1978 to perform. I gave him a copy of my 1st book, "t he bk / t he referent 4 wch consists of / t he non-materialized transparent punch-outs from a letter/whatever stencil" & I showed him some of my number writing. I explained that I wrote a number sequence until I made a mistake & then I started over again. This appealed to him & he complimented the writing. On March 30, 1981, he gave me a copy of his book entitled "Asymmetries 1-260" on Dick Higgins’s Printed Editions press & inscribed it to me. I was 27. These were chance-generated poems with large amounts of space in them that were meant to be performed. The spaces were to be silences. The book comes with detailed instructions about how to perform the poems, starting with the "Basic Method". I decided to read them seriously but I only got through the 1st four before I gave up, defeated by the tedium & /or difficulty of doing so. Now, 44 years later, I decided to read the entire book in accordance with the Basic Method & to make a movie of my doing so. I’m 71 years old now & while I can still read & drive my eyesight has finally started to deteriorate somewhat. As one can see from watching this movie, sometimes I have to hold the book closer to my face to read it & I have difficulty seeing yellow on white. I have to clear my throat a fair amount & I read slower & more awkwardly than I prefer. I make mistakes like reading "h"s as "n"s. My reading is far from its best but I consider it 'passable'. I also don’t even follow the Basic Method correctly because I don’t read words enclosed in "s, 's, & []s in a way similar to the way I read words in ()s. There are, probably, other incorrect procedures too. When I make mistakes & notice them, I correct them (if I can). Other mistakes stay in. As Jackson writes on page 246:
"I composed Stanzas "Asymmetries" by variations of the above method, but if after I’d set a poem aside, I dsicovered a mistake in working it out, I usually accepted the mistake-making as an auxiliary chance operation and kept the poem, mistake and all."
In November, 2024, before I started reading "Asymmetries 1-260", I started screen-capturing images of the lockface over a photo of Undisclosed Location on my iJones. As these started accumulating I figured I’d make a movie with them. A few months later, while I was in the midst of my Mac Low reading, a crew came to cut down a preciously fallen dead tree across the street from where I was doing my reading shots. I started coumenting that, too, because I was interested in the problem-solving process. That was going to be another movie. Six or so years ago, a neoist named Pata-No UN LTD sent me a repurposed Risk board game + a battleship game that he’d called, combined, "War Games". It’d been my intent to make a movie using that but I’d shelved the idea when I was censored out of a project that Pata-No had been editorially involved in. My friend Kenny Haney helped me with the War Games animation & provided extra set pieces that he’d made & extra player pieces that he’d collected.
In the meantime, I met Susie Lofaro, an acquaintance I hadn’t seen for 12 years. She asked me if she could be in one of my movies. That was astounding! Very few people have any interest in my movies, let alone want to be in them. I had an idea that I thought she might fit in. but then I decided against it. Instead, I decided to just shoot some scenes with her that I’d create a movie around. The humor is that I then decided to call this "Susie reads to Neoists" even though I’m the main one doing the reading & Susie doesn’t even know what Neoism is (does anyone?). I like making movies that aren’t centered around just ONE idea so I decided to combine everything mentioned above into one movie with (mostly) unrelated multiple threads. This is the "attn expandex version" because I kept it at its full 10:25:59. Do you mind?!
- tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE April 7, 2025, notes
a. "Fallen Tree Removal" — 1080p, 29.97fps, Stereo — 35:40 — shot March 20 & 22, 2025
b. "Spinning Clocks" — 1920X1440, 30fps, Stereo — 22:59 — shot from November 19, 2024 to March 25, 2025 — edit finished March 26, 2025
c. "tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE reading Jackson Mac Low’s "Asymmetries 1-260"" — 1920X1440, 29.97fps, Stereo — 10:08:00 — shot February 22 to May 28, 2025 — edit finished April 1, 2025
d. "Susie reads to Neoists" [see above]
