No. 8 — After the egg, the war
Film presentation by Perwana Nazif
January 15 – March 1, 2021
Los Angeles, California

To schedule a viewing, please email us at contact@mascot-studio.com We will be limiting viewers to 2 guests at a time. Masks are required.

The following films will be screened in-person, under a lemon tree at sunset, in Los Angeles, California.

Qulliq (oil lamp) (1993) by Arnait Ikkagurtigitt Collective (Video, 00:10:21)

Statues Hardly Ever Smile (1971) Created and Edited by Kathleen Collins, Directed by Stan Lathan (Acetate film, 00:19:31)

The Bus in La La Land (2008) by Hatice Güleryüz (Video, 00:10:03)

Excerpt of Four Women (1971) by Ilanga Witt (16 mm Film, 00:4:48)

This Thing I Want, I Know Not What (2017) by Mona Varichon (HD Video, 00:4:55)

3PM (2018) by Gillian Garcia (16 mm Film, 00:4:34)

To become accustomed to the sound of the cricket stuck in the apartment since night before last. To dream of pizza stains on white bedding. To find that the center is about loss. To kiss with a chipped tooth and forget to wait for acknowledgement. To light the kettle only to walk into rooms forgetting what you came in for. To turn on the radio because frequent static. To greet the dried leaves found in the morning bed. To rub in sunscreen to no avail. To the pink city on your right, the mounds in front. To kneel on the carpet for the to-do. To continuously turn the wheel, snap the blinker to the diachronic dance of the 405 N cars.

At seven past dusk, the purple truck passed me by lit with what seemed like life. No, that shade of Purple is what is german for the Sehnsucht of our life longings. We like to be redundant and, despite knowing this, I write on without words. The cars in which women change into shiny clothes for the club now the [covid] streets of Detroit summers. Back on earth, it is only in this present presence of expanse that greets both activities of slumber and/or secret. We don’t question the dry foliage the wind brings in to our beds. A uselessness that weighs. But it weighs contrary to the sensitivity in regards to the passing of things. Heavy Transience. But it’s getting late now. There’s a man in a van on Tuesday AMs in my neighborhood park. He reads with the newspaper spread on old knees. He snaps to the jazz playing out of his stereo. As if the absence is counted by snap. That subject of loss, dis-acknowledgement as such, echoes into the ether, bouncing back into from the stereo. It is the only good thing that has happened to me on my walks. Hoping this isn’t coming across as a justification for a means to an end in itself. If there is any truth to the words I say, the water it looks as though I pour into the ice tray is not congealing. In fact, it is undoing itself as if melting against totalizing tongues. Instead of melting of, I pray when I first see the moon. Then I hold it in my curved hands gesturing upwards: a genuflected dexterity. This is the type of thing I would write about, not live. Like, in the manner of drawn flames on discarded tissue papers. I want to be poetically productive here. I am screaming. I am screaming! And what of what came before? On the phone, I ask my young brother to tell me about the old days. It is only said with a certain inflection of the voice. He refuses the extreme and limits to 2005-2003. For me, I continue on in life saying I will film the people of Los Angeles in their cars, as a perverted voyeur captures apartment window scenes of banal intimacy laced with impenetrable desire. The moth, now, finally, imitating my earthly gestures, vanishes into the flame I draw.

by Perwana Nazif

Supplementary to the screening are texts from Jake Nadrich, Grace Denis, Kersti Jan Werdal, and Joan Lee; images and research from Perwana Nazif; and the following film selects for online viewing only:

Alice Coltrane (Black Journal Segment) by William Greaves

Intensive Care by Hatice Güleryüz

Trailer from the Navajo Film Themselves (from A Navajo Weaver, 1966)

shapes and anything by Majeed and Perwana Nazif, edited by Gillian Garcia and Perwana Nazif (below)

The Lyre

He recently stumbled upon a playlist of songs edited to simulate the feeling of hearing music from the other room, or crying in the bathroom at a party as the playlist was titled. It felt right, for a year which glared so menacingly at the world, to place music at a distance like this. He mused that while art generally reproduced the emotional or alienated needs of a society, it was hitherto rare for any creative gesture to so perspicuously reproduce the general sadness of say, walking away from a party alone, wishing the night went differently. Instances of feeling sprouted at an alarming rate.
He was intrigued by the implied oppositions: Unchained Melody but you're dancing with your crush in a dream, Carmina Burana but you're in hell, Tonight You Belong To Me but you're alone in an abandoned mall, Alison by Slowdive at a house party in 1995 while you're outside smoking a cigarette. He got up from his chair and walked over to the window to admire the rain. Wasn’t there some kind of masochism involved in this? 
There was real pleasure in longing, in deprivation, in the fulfillment of broken promises. Instead of singing along to our favorite music in the car with our friends we could actually listen to what that experience might feel like. He reasoned that it was also difficult logistically at this current moment for spontaneous socializing in close quarters, but this was too obvious and boring of a detour to dwell on. It was also too cynical to assume this was designed for the express reason to remedy loneliness. 
An Adorno quote popped into his head: ‘pleasure always means not to think about anything, to forget suffering even where it is shown.’ He felt, however, that in taking on this kind of project, the opposite was happening, that this simulated distancing amplified memory and narrative reflection and sent the listener deep into a bag of their own hurt or whatever John Hughes type plotline they longed to feel.
He chuckled, repeating the phrase ‘deep into a bag of their own hurt’ while walking away from the window and into the kitchen to make a cup of coffee. It sounded as flimsy and corny a phrase as any that might show up in a pop song. He even hummed it to the melody of a Drake verse he had heard on the radio earlier that day. It was plausible.
The whole project really reflected a desire to weave oneself into a narrative where the listener experienced listening through the ears of a protagonist, themself. But maybe it was no different than other performative methods of displacing the I. Surely journaling was a similar project.
He always wanted to keep a detailed and up to date diary but never could manage, usually exhausting himself on every attempt around three days in. He felt it unnatural and needlessly performative and not to mention horrified by the thought of anyone, including his future self reading it. Sure, he wrote things down all the time, but, figuring himself as the protagonist of his own life on a daily basis felt contrived. However, he envied and felt grateful for the great and diligent diarists of history. If he was one of them he could possibly sell his story to Hollywood. The liar in you, in us all.
He sipped his coffee and watched the rain. Deep into a bag of their own hurt returned. Maybe
he drifted too far, perhaps into dangerous, existential territory. Why do people do anything? . This was a useless exercise. This was more a matter of locating the critical through very
. specific acts of distancing. It reminded him of his own futile habits of hoarding vast amounts of media on watchlists, playlists, and wish lists that he would never in his life be able to engage with, as if saving things for later was more satisfying than consuming. Perhaps a perversely irrational archivist's impulse. Perhaps he was fucking lazy. 
He returned to his desk and reviewed the playlist once again. It was unnecessary to listen to the different songs to grasp the aural affects suggested in the titles. They were memes he realized, micro narratives, and like memes they inadvertently assumed a dimension of criticality in their patterning of social and political constructs, but what the crying in the bathroom at a party playlist revealed to him was how this desire to soundtrack one’s longing and personal experience very clearly situated the social dimension of music and the act of listening within our lives.
This was not merely an exercise in triggering sense memory; the thought of which reminded him of a song that soundtracked much of his late adolescent life and now deeply disturbed him physically when he heard it to the point of serious nausea. Rather, it was an expanding feeling. What if, instead of listening to something moody while pensively gazing out of a train window, you could listen to that experience, with the sounds of the tracks and the light chatter of the people sitting behind you and actually hear the air in the room. What if you listened to what it sounds like listening to music on the train while riding the train? Would your head explode? Maybe that was too much doubling. 

The Song Tail 

The summer the insects left,
brown leaves curved north
under my sole. 

We found long treatments of vines
on the wall in a winged posture 

where I assigned thee
reddish thrush. 

The grass flicked outside
alone.

by Jake Nadrich 

Excerpt from Table for One 12.24.2020

I sit at a table for one, gazing at an agitated sea, in cognizance of the fact that bodies which shine do not cease to emit light merely because night falls. Light too burns in the night, and I become once more an exhausted star. I think about Vela, the star that died 11,000 years ago that we continue to encounter traces of. Scientists found evidence of a radioactive surge in the trunk of a tree in Tasmania that indicates the death of this star. Love must be like a star; it dies and we continue to expand in harmony with its extinction, our bodies becoming some sort of physical ode to departure and simultaneously an archive of arrival.

I romance the empty seat, embracing the fact that it belongs to none other than my echo. I inoculate myself with my own song, harmonizing with the hymn of isolation. If I were to subscribe to one force, I would tether myself to the cult of change in the pursuit of infinitude. I exist in ardent enamourment with my annotations. Has this life I constructed become a footnote to the nebulous “I” ? Or rather, am I the footnote in and of itself ?

I dream about mountains full of rotting fruit that forget the pungency of their own flesh.

by Grace Denis

Images 1-5: Untitled, by Kersti Jan Werdal

Compraggio (excerpts)

Carlo Levi’s story (Christ Stopped at Eboli) is a memoir that details the year he spent exiled in a small village in Basilicata, Italy from 1935-1936. He was a writer and political activist against fascism, which is how he wound up in this situation. In one part of the book, he describes each evening’s dinner ritual. There was a fellow prisoner banished alongside him in the same village, however they were prohibited from speaking to one another; they had never seen one another, nor knew why the other one was there. Each evening, alternating nights, one would make dinner for the other. There was a fountain in the center of the village main square, if my memory serves me, and that is where they put the plate of food, most likely some type of simple pasta. I couldn’t find this passage when I leafed through the book, but I found another one about how the members of this Italian village in the southern most region before a boat takes you to Sicily, considers friendship.

Each summers’ night on June 23rd, members of the village ‘acquire a symbolic kinship called comparaggio, and thus became compari di San Giovanni. This is a relationship considered closer than brothers. Their choosing and the ritual initiation they went through makes them members of the same blood group.  (Paraphrased from the text).

Carlo Levi, Christ Stopped at Eboli, pp. 89., 1945.

The Regular Traveler

I’m a runner, I try to run some sort of distance every day. This thing happens when I run that I’ve heard is a common experience: the exercise feels a bit robotic, like I’m totally spaced out and just doing the repetitive physical motions of pumping my arms, hitting the ground with my feet, keeping my eyes in front of me at the horizon line. At the same time that I feel spaced out, I’m as present as I wish I was at all other times of the day. My mind feels blank, the most I think about is ‘oh look at that leaf’ or ‘that person has a hat on’.Any rumination or distraction comes to a halt, I’m there and only there. The practice of running sounds like it could be really mundane, but each time I run I am sure that there’s a movement inside, no matter how nuanced. A memory, a feeling, an emotion, moving through me. It doesn’t always pass out of me, but it transforms in some way and leaves me feeling new in relation to it. This Marc Augé passage is tedious to read. The act of reading the passage itself resembles the subject he is describing. I think both running and this passage about the regular subway traveler have some things in common, a seemingly redundant and repetitive daily act that actually quietly demands complete presence of the senses.

Cody Goebl, “Port Authority 625 8th Ave, New York, Ny 10018”, watercolor and pencil on paper, 2020.

“The regular traveler on a given line is easily recognized by the elegant and natural economy of his or her way of walking; like an old sailor who calmly descends toward his boat at dawn and appreciates in a glance the billowing waves at the exit of the port, measuring the force of the wind without appearing to touch it, with style, but in a less studied way than a taster sniffing a glass of wine, listening without seeming to heed the waves slapping against the jetty or the clamor of the seagulls gathered on the shore or already scattering over the sea in little avid flocks, the seasoned traveler, especially if he or she is in the prime of life and strongly resists the desire suddenly to burst into the stairs for sheer pleasure, can be recognized in the perfect mastery of his or her movements: in the corridor leading to the platform, the traveler walks swiftly but without rushing; without letting on, all senses are on alert. When, as if surging off the walls lined with enamel tiles, the noise of an oncoming train becomes audible, disrupting most of the occasional riders, this traveler knows whether or not to hurry, either by assessing the distance to the boarding area and deciding to take a chance or not, or by having identified the source of the crescendo of din and heard in this lure (peculiar to stations where several lines intersect and which for this reason French calls correspondances, while Italian, more evocative and more precise, speaks of coincidences) a call from beyond, the deceptive echo of another train, the temptation of error brings an invitation to loiter. Once on the platform, he or she knows when to stop walking and determine the site that, allowing easy access to the doorway of the train, corresponds, furthermore, exactly to the nearest point of “his or her own” exit on the destination platform. It is seen among old habitués who meticulously choose their point of departure, get set and on their marks, like high jumpers, in a way, before they thrust their bodies toward their destination. The most scrupulous push their zeal to the point of choosing the best spot on the car, from where they can exit most rapidly as soon as the train pulls to a stop.

 Marc Augé, In the Metro, pp. 6-7., 1986.

by Kersti Jan Werdal