Swim bladder

Mid Hudson Taffy Company Self Feeding Forked Bishop Lecture Installation

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• published: 08 Feb 2015
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Video from Elizabeth Bishop lecture given in 2009 at Vassar Collage, by Thylias Moss, invited to Vassar as a limited fork theorist; members of the audience became part of the experience; as did some students asked to play various items in the auditorium as. instruments, every 15 minutes, a recording of what had happened was played back into the auditorium so that we would have to interact with what was already performed. Exciting! --this video offers what was played back (shown on screens as the event moved forward) Thanks to all the Vassar CollaboratorS! --their film also. Please refer to the website of the event" "The Mid-Hudson Taffy Company (http://www.midhudsontaffy.com) Much can be downloaded from that site for free! Vocals by Forker Gryle and students of Vassar, and audience at the Elizabeth Bishop lecture. Music by Joseph Bertolozzi (Mid-Hudson bridge music [Bertolozzi used the bridge as a percussion instrument, and one had to drive on it in order o hear it, to become part of it]; recorded while driving on the bridge repeatedly, and additional sounds added using the "Bloom" app for iPhone and iPad. as well as members of the audience, and student volunteers, meeting me on the day of the performance!--how brave they were to agree to say a single word, and to "play" auditorium chairs and chalk on the chalkboard as "instruments" --good thing I was invited as a "limited fork theorist" --I had to explain what I had in mind for playing back what had been done into the space 00there were screens set up, but I didn't want my prepared video, nor video captured of the event to be so confined; I wanted the video to spill of the screen, to be viewable on the floor and on persons between projectors and screen; I wanted some playback in corners --finally I said to a technician, similar to what John Cage might want, and there was immediate understanding, that as long as there was an outcome, everything was fine! --imagine that! --yes; there's always an outcome! --none of this was rehearsed; how could it be? --and I took the sound from the three videos, and made additional sonic forms, all of which contain all of the events as "performed --all available for "free" (not this sense of "free" assumed internet access; assumes sufficient download space; assumed that some of that strange music (soul of the event) might be something someone might want to capture, perhaps only because it's free, some of it sped up, slowed down with me supplying all additional vocals... Some of the words in the video come from Elizabeth Bishop's poem: "The Fish" reprinted here from this URL:http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/fish-2) The Fish Elizabeth Bishop, 1911 - 1979 I caught a tremendous fish and held him beside the boat half out of water, with my hook fast in a corner of his mouth. He didn’t fight. He hadn’t fought at all. He hung a grunting weight, battered and venerable and homely. Here and there his brown skin hung in strips like ancient wallpaper, and its pattern of darker brown was like wallpaper: shapes like full-blown roses stained and lost through age. He was speckled with barnacles, fine rosettes of lime, and infested with tiny white sea-lice, and underneath two or three rags of green weed hung down. While his gills were breathing in the terrible oxygen —the frightening gills, fresh and crisp with blood, that can cut so badly— I thought of the coarse white flesh packed in like feathers, the big bones and the little bones, the dramatic reds and blacks of his shiny entrails, and the pink swim-bladder like a big peony. I looked into his eyes which were far larger than mine but shallower, and yellowed, the irises backed and packed with tarnished tinfoil seen through the lenses of old scratched isinglass. They shifted a little, but not to return my stare. —It was more like the tipping of an object toward the light. I admired his sullen face, the mechanism of his jaw, and then I saw that from his lower lip —if you could call it a lip— grim, wet, and weaponlike, hung five old pieces of fish-line, or four and a wire leader with the swivel still attached, with all their five big hooks grown firmly in his mouth. A green line, frayed at the end where he broke it, two heavier lines, and a fine black thread still crimped from the strain and snap when it broke and he got away. Like medals with their ribbons frayed and wavering, a five-haired beard of wisdom trailing from his aching jaw. I stared and stared and victory filled up the little rented boat, from the pool of bilge where oil had spread a rainbow around the rusted engine to the bailer rusted orange, the sun-cracked thwarts, the oarlocks on their strings, the gunnels—until everything was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow! And I let the fish go.