During my stay in New York from Friday, the 30th of July to Sunday, the 1st of August, I undertook four separate missions.
I noted all of my impressions instantaneously and in a stream-of-consciousness manner in a spiral notebook. Unfortunately, much of my writing, which is depicted here, is legible only to me. Therefore, I retyped the observations contained in the notebook pages linearly and without alterations.

Between some passages, the reader will find additional comments and links formulated in arrears. These italicized notes may be interesting and helpful in relation to my exploration.

30. July:

1:48 pm

Her arm said 'jouissance'! My NY Motto. I'm in Cafe Gitane, 242 Mott St. This is not a diary - this is a 36 hour experiment. Or 48h? Or 72h?

Need: drop my bag, adopt the game plan(s), call Florian Peter,  Kimsy, Liora (at 7 pm), Jenny, etc.
I need to transfer my project data!

A coincidental encounter through my drift: she's queer. Jouissance (click here for Lacan links), the sexual pleasure of the 'other', one's lack as desire, desire as lack - for her it's in reach.

I need to take a photo of her!

Games:

This section is itself in a way a game, a meta-game: The challenge consists in accumulating a multitude of games and practices that I can play during my brief stay in New York in order to obtain a maximum of insightful experiences.

  1.  The Drift: no rules.
  2.  The Detourned Detective Story: search for arbitrary but connecting clues. Proliferate a narrative, seek connections.
  3.  note how time passes...
  4.  assume different name, different itinerary, different persons to chat to, get lost, take photos of things that are next to the actual object of interest...

This last point was intended as a photographic transposition of the mechanisms of desire-fetishism.

  5.  play with pace and rhythm of walking
  6.  investigate non-places.

The conception of non-place assumed here refers back to the work of Marc Auge  and his discussions of airplane departure lounges, car-parks, supermarkets, etc.

  7.  set boundaries - only to break them!
  8.  establish circles of repetition - but can 60h really be enough?
  9.  dislocate type of place - type of practice [time/space/practice]
10.  circles of music?
11.  quotidian? or the extraordinary?
12.  Let the project unfold!!! Let patterns emerge!!!

This exclamation, vehemently uttered, became the guiding principle of my adventures.

13.  defamiliarization
14.  Look for the loci where art and life fuse
15.  reformulate in rigidly structured way quotidian taxonomies and structures of practice...
16.  ruses, tricks, individualized types of practice in places that are rigorously structured

I was inspired, here, by the work of Michel de Certeau.

16b. What about writing a script with all this?

As if the cinematic medium were the most authoritative text. As if the ultimate narration of this exploration would be filmic...
Point 16b, added after my list of games was completed, was inspired by the film "Smoke" and its implicit juxtaposition and discussion of various media.
What is the most effective form of presentation? Oral narration? Painting? Writing? Photography? Film? Or perhaps an interactive, electronic, combination of such media?

17a. What about finding a hallow place? By the way, earlier in Soho, I bumped into Lenny Kravitz.
17.   Organized Disorganization!
18.   someone else makes my decisions - but only children
19.   speak with every tenth brunette
20.   hop on a cab and go to the driver's borough
21.   Art and the Museum - subvert the disciplinary rigidity of the museum!

I base my conception of the modern museum on the work of Michel Foucault and particularly Donald Preziosi's interpretation thereof.
 
 
 
 

Mission Statement:
Deliver a lived experience - of a certain duration - of 'undoing' conventional categories of time, space, practice. Defamiliarize myself, protocolize and evaluate the observations.
 

2:22pm

Let's not start at the start because there is no start: Strictly speaking, the Chinese bakery was the beginning, then the shuttle, Paul Auster's book finally finished, etc.
But experience is intensity - not pragmatic effect (linearly evolving from certain practices). Experience forms, takes shape, emerges unplanned, unexpected: a cloud that rises around the coincidence of several non-premeditated centers of force.

Cafe Gitane: the map. I sit in the far corner of a squared place. The map I drew is the little rectangle on the lower third of the notebook page.
I hear French spoken, French girls sit next to me, there was just a photo shoot of the central table... For a second, the smiles and gestures of young, stylish, multicultural NYers - or tourists - transmits to me the romantic sensation of a Bohemian life in late 90s terms. I feel - for only an infinitesimal moment - the power of the imagined, mythical life of the fashion high-culture protagonists. Stylish boys and girls, making a living by working for creative magazines, chic offices, photo studios and showrooms. They're designers, models, actors. The music is delirious: Tom Waits meets Led Zeppelin and the Doors. Not anachronistic, though. Too hard to locate on the timeline. Is this old? New? Are these dreams real? To any degree?

A model sits at the bar: pink pants and red top... Is she impeccable? Does she know NY fashion photographers - the type who only travel first class? Does she always smell nice? Are these people trendy? What is trendy?
I hear now the 60s sitar-pop tune that has become the theme song of these hipsters. It's technically uncool.
Anyway, the place I'm in is real. Lives really centered on events that ground such dreams of Bohemia intersect here, once, twice, daily, then never or sometimes again... It doesn't matter. Today is as indexical as ever. 'As ever' - does it imply a moment of eternity? An instance of transcendence?

It's Friday, 2:34 pm.

I feel underdressed. I feel part of it (as I was just last year) and at the same time not at all. During my last visit to NY one year ago, Cafe Gitane was my favorite hangout. My role as observer puts me temporarily out of the role as agent - or is it me being alone here and not as 'regular'? My spot here is already an inferiority symbol. Although ideally placed to observe, to see, I am outside of the buzz, at a tiny table next to the bathroom.
In a cafe there is sometimes the trademark writer. It's a firm social archetype. The poor pseudo-intellectual, endlessly laboring to publish his first - I don't know - set of poems...

I experienced at that moment a kind of dialectics of inside and outside. Or was I really on the outside of 'inside'? Would this be the juncture Deleuze had in mind in his elaboration on the interstices of language? Was this the place of Visions and Auditions of Life?

Where to position the "I"? Does it belong to the general topography of the Cafe? Is it external to it? Is it trapped in a fold, sequestered, removed from the general surface but not entirely detached? The question of subjectivity and its transformations became an important area of investigation throughout all of my explorations.

The more the busy boys and girls here make the impression of having things to do, places to go, euphoric smiles, furtive glances, cool snickering - the more they know others that know others, etc., the more dense the net of impassioned, wild, exciting youth lifestyle becomes. Imagined, mythical, chimerical lives become ever more substantial as this net of social interrelations complexifies and proliferates. Members disappear into a unique fold of happenings, intensities, immersed in their own norm/ value economy. Other heroes, other tales: Hussein Chalayan not J.P. Morgan. Film shoots, fashion shows, music studios - not conference rooms! Their intensities are fevers. The more I sit here, the more I want to be infected, want to join forces. Arrange fleeting dates, assemble projects on napkins, and write in spiral notebooks.

Suddenly I became scared by the vision of the intellectual as modern-day monk, existing alienated from passion in the ivory tower of academia. How to find the balance between simple pleasure and excitement on the one hand and intellectual discourse on the other?

Time: 2:50pm

A van is parked outside. Its panel reads: Hot and spicy people - hot and spicy music.
Anyway, it's gone now.

The phenomenona of immediacy and coincidence continued to mystify me throughout the entire project.

My idea of art could be compared to the model of a blackboard after a class. Ossified metaphysics, fossilized thought. Dried thought.
This notion was developed further in a conversation with a classmate, Zahr Said, and then finalized in writing. It can be found here.

The crowd has significantly reshuffled. Different atmosphere. While I have remained static, the cafe has spun around. I begin to feel that this is fun and somehow important. Or expressive of certain profundities. Maybe I'm just dreaming. Hardly would that be a contradiction.

I have a love-hate relationship to working in pencil: its nature is ephemeral; I could smudge it all away. Make it illegible. But at the same time that condition coincides with the nature of the observations and experiences. AH! The girl with the jouissance tattoo left before I could take a photo!!!
Here again, the phenomena of coincidence and immediacy are uncannily at work. The instant I finished my deliberations on the topic of temporal instability in terms of the pencil aesthetic and in terms of experience as such - an event unfolds, someone leaves, plans are altered, perspectives change, etc.

In terms of Gilles Deleuze, in his essay Literature and Life, page 5, I summarize:
I am looking for Visions and Auditions that no longer belong to any language. But fall into the interstices of language, in its intervals. They're not outside language - but on the outside of language. I'm the writer here now. As seer and as hearer.

3:08pm

Let me see if I can steal a quick snapshot.
The beauty of the girl in the bathroom right now is phenomenal.

This marks the end of my Cafe Gitane experience.