The Making of a Place
Honesty dodging too much self dignity ... "the lightness of being harmlessly wrong" sounds like a pamphlet offered at a community center ... wonderful garbage doctrine starts with what seems to be by far the most appropriate simple title ... Place perceived as an angle .. where our infrastructure crosses a river ... where ancestral stable ground meets relative fresh water ... Somebody Tag it now ... Old river aqua slow motion flowing under graffiti metro bridges ... Below Twin Cities Zero(s) ... The river doesn't care about any of this ...
That's geology's wholeness ... and a history of permanent ruminating lines that know a little bit less than what the wondrous haha waters here knows ... Concrete thinks it's permanent ... shifting descriptions to gentle commands ... Graffiti isn't always considered to be an artist's type of vandalism ... Mark it with a willow branch ... claim it for the next most notable auction ... Grounds and mounds of the Twin Cities aren't one er level ... they're a vast array of zones ... they're like basements for starting points stacked under each other ...
Our river just laughed joy and it should ... This old landscape ... a sunken boundary we can't see until we're standing at its edge ... receiving into our whole body both meanings breathing at once ... That's the gentlest possible set of oak branches ... Forgot what we were going to say ... Sacred land is always in the process of being sold ... Settlement joke ... new real estate displacement ... Words disguised ... The Dakota and Ojibwe knew X's and 0's long before the asphalt showed up as paved petroleum and pretended to be the first floor.
Our story is putting effort into building a sister and brother city from the river up ... they share a river and disagree about everything else ... with "I suppose" shrug honesty ... our practice sometimes loses its thread and admits it ... and the admission becomes the new consistent thread that flows through everything that will be happening during the week or month ... ancient tic-tac-toe systems reduced to modern art ... three t's hammering home a point ... three warming grids share our river with an inward engine growing outward from the water's ripples ...
Ellipses and quotation marks ... casual shrugs and formal gestures ... That's our register ... where sincerity and indifference ... blue and red ... autocracy and democracy ... hold hands ... Looks like this segment just expanded its timeframe from geology to politics ... Nice! ...
Our practice has multiple neighborhoods ... or parenthetical hoods ... and the language that comes out of those local streets is turned into happiness raw dialogue ... Not cleaned up or overproduced ... Everyday speech treated as high art without anyone's permission ... Prestigious enduring taste is a type of inside smile ... Emotional highs and lows are the weather of making work in an aging theatrical parts place ... Is this the closing stanza? ... Maybe maybe maybe ...
Acts of bricolage wishes released with contemporary noise ... We couldn't have said it better ... joy without apology ... raw keeps everything uncooked ... Will give you three chances to figure out an ending for this little story of yours ... Watch while we procrastinate or fail to make some necessary decisions ...
The practice's other names arriving late to their own play ... Gall Rake Dusty and Torn Drapes ... bitterness ... gathering ... weariness ... things that used to hang and a serious condition ... By Chance Moose Legs ... enormous and awkward ... showing up by accident ... The most wonderful titles imaginable ... We couldn't plan for it ... It just came to us from somewhere out of the darkness or lightness ...
O Soul of Feverish ... falling into deep water then tackling something gentle ... colonial and non-colonial in the same lake ... our practice lives inside both ... Relative and Ancestral ... Family and History sitting next to each other ... And then it all bottoms out to precariousness of existence ... Romantic disillusionment ... Tormented connection to childhood experiences ... it keeps choosing us back harder ... No humorous cushion for our bum ... behind ... rear end ... Bareness underneath decades of Personal efforts ... Please don't laugh at the river ... That going to help anything? ...
Definitions of what should be carried and what shouldn't be held ... Not talented Sister Cat Stir ... Not skillful crafts for creating new sumptuous disorders ... without malice ... English carriage innocence is what saved oyparaploo push back fragments ... saved them from Kings and dictators ... When songs fall apart sweetly ... well ... all of a sudden chaos becomes less hostile and more curious ... The disconnection itself is the gift ... That's why we stay back and listen even when it seems like nothing is connecting ...
Anagrams of characters ... English language happens to be the vessel that carries our practice to safety ... anti colonizer's tongue used as a sort of escape route ... is our quietest possible answer ... Stay ... Listen ... Land ... where do you stand?
The most refined voice in Western pristine polyphonic barnyard runs ... Led not by a long haired conductor but by a frantic heartbeat accompanying a clean contaminated harmony ... Dirtied on purpose ... Manure is doing double duty ... as BS and fertilized theories ... The practice grows things in both ... we begin with something high and drag it through something low ... and what results is something less alive ... because it's been scraped by desert stones ... tumbleweed ... and other thorn bushes ...
We don't save everything that has been dragged through an Arizona landscape ... The practice doesn't promise resurrection ... it promises contact ... Everything damaged and that's exactly why it works ... Air got thin ... there's less oxygen ... we have to breathe harder to hear them ... Limping evokes trembling scars ... the rhythm is injured and vice versa ... the limp isn't a flaw ... it's more of a time signature ... Not a shattered connection ... a shattered disconnection ... The breaking apart broke apart ... What's left might accidentally be wholeness ... A song that can't stand straight ... spread out on a surface like soft butter ... or a newspaper ... or a marked body ... diagnosis ... every note making contact and pulling away ... that's the sound ... it touches everything and holds nothing ... while shit happens ...
We just named our deepest register ... everything before this was the surface of our practice ... Big River, Noir Rooms, Weird Pop Sounds, Basements for Humor ... A calling that keeps sending us back to what we left ... Idiom turned into pronouns ... A deathbed that has a donkey or mule ... Not survivors ... Servants ... Trauma isn't something we endure ... it's something we serve ... we carry its dishes ... we answer its door ... Family as found material ... Let's rewrite the entire segment about inherited pain ... period ... After all the slow circling language ... one flat clinical word sits alone ... What is it? ... The diagnosis the whole piece has been circling ...
Unlikely to win ... lost cause from the Amalgam piece came back ... our practice doesn't just win ... it navigates stories on one side ... scars on the other ... and practice makes imperfect lives in the hallway between them ... Our beginnings aren't young anymore ... they've aged gracefully ... Lo-fi threads connect them ... because high-fidelity is often rough, hissing, warm ... Our practice has a face ... we know because we saw it many times ... after all the fragmentation, limping, detachment ... The Thing still holds together enough to be recognized ...
Credits rolling ... Not at the end of a life's work described while it's still happening ... Every phrase is a category that ... Returns ... Wishes ... Tears Up ... Table of contents for an emotional inventory ... rhyming because it can't help it ... practice described in musical language ... Ghosts ... People who show up once and leave a mark ... got credited ... Never mainstream Never wanted to be ... Niche found was carved with a hand tool ... Sentences can be frustrating signatures ... producing a style by refusing to complete ...
Crying and ripping things apart in a world ... stripped to bone ... dressed up ... working forwards and backwards ... True relationship ... with intentions that also come from the big river placed in the body ... Stand up one more time ...
Wait For Us ... hold on ... Whole practice ... Every single voice in it ...
And then it floated ... Soprano above raspy murmurs ... highest over lowest ... operating in that gap ... sitting on top of rough without pretending the rough rough isn't there ... "Nothing Stretched Processing" in quotation marks ... nothing being stretched ... or Nothing itself being processed ... both ... another inside title ... practice naming its own methods as they happen ... And then it comes back down to the floor ... Everyday objects ... clatters, handcrafted, freeform ... a spell made of stuff not ideas ... as a sound ... Unpredictable bursts of distorted unease ... down here someone's banging a pot lid ... Staying alive ... Active ... Continuous ... We have to keep doing it ... It's not a state we reach ... It's a thing we do every day ...
Space after space ... Everything before stood ... walking into the echoes of itself ... clinking glass and tapping small sounds ... after pot lids and distorted bursts ... the volume dropped to almost nothing ... then delicate floating ... a soprano returned but quieter this time ... Then the switch ... reverberant, cavernous, haze ... a small room opened into a cathedral made of fog ... the song doesn't save us ... it makes the lostness prettier ... the final posture ... Standing ... Leaning ... Tilted toward something it remembers ... Held together by charm ... Whimsical because after everything ... Trauma ... Dysfunction ... Staying Alive ... Our oyparaploo practice still thinks it's all kind of funny ...
The heavy texts dropped through the floor ... just when a comedian closed a window ... a trapdoor opened ... Underneath a funny ... salvage yards of dismissed playgrounds ... Places where children used to play that became abandoned ... Piled up ... Wonderful Garbage taken to its darkest literal form ... Not charming found objects ... Dismissed ... Whole playgrounds ... Quite the sucker punch ... Pushkins mounted on staged opera ... the highest literary tradition ... performed globally ... and then restrained tragedies ... the kind that don't scream ... the kind that sit in a Baroque chair and say nothing ... Saint John of the Cross showed up in a salvage yard ... The mystic's crisis surrounded by actual fires ... Minneapolis knows about surrounding emergencies ... The practice was there for that too ...
Yesterday ... after geological time ... ancestral grievances ... decades of practice ... someone had a bad day ... From epic to intimate ... from the city to one person's yesterday ... A voice went high and squeaky from something that was supposed to be a lot of fun ... luck ran out because mischief saw them home ... Not a loved one or friend ... Not a troubled crab walking into a poem sideways ... It isn't easy falling into a confederate ballad ... because it catches you slowly and you don't realize you're in one until you're already immersed into one of those very disturbing songs ... Wonky whilst snorts of abused bolstering ... the language or foul string of words is drunk ... The phrase wasn't standing up straight three stanzas ago and now it's stumbling ... The inevitability isn't the romance ... it's the roughness of the path ... The making of a place is also just a Tuesday ...
Confederate ... that word loaded the stanza with gunpowder ... The South lost cause and surreal or absurd romance of defeat ... sitting inside a piece about South Minneapolis and our practice ... that lives near loons and under the great North Star compass ... A ballad pulling an aspiring dream down is from somewhere else entirely ... Until you're already immersed into one of those very disturbing Confederate songs ... sentences will keep going past where they should have stopped ... the ballad never ends when you want it to ... Time folded ... which happens to be when it first started ...
Making things without shoe polish ... Atmosphere manufacturing a piece that says "It's not that, it's one house shy of silly dissonance." ... The honest voiced language won't even let itself be described properly ... It ... for some reason unknown ... insists on being harmlessly wrong ... dodging its own dignity ... Almost every time we climb up to something ... sacred, painful, true ... we sidestep away from having said it while also staring into a severely cracked mirror ... the reflection comes back in pieces and every piece shows something different ... That's not avoidance ... that's a skill only thirty years could produce ...
Joyful and impossible ... Falsely fragile practice ... delicate when it's an indestructible costume ... the instrument that's been taken apart ... and the emergency that's still screaming ... They fit ... Of course they do ... The most alive ... specific ... present tense imagery ... and then the piece dismisses it ... The chipmunk was everything and nothing ... the piece lost track of its own metaphor and didn't care ... A bra became a snow owl ... which became someone watching ... which became someone who was just there ... correction multiplying ... it doesn't get fixed ... it gets more ... Emotional algebra ... reverses everything ... Loneliness isn't sad ... it's a rave ... colors aren't visual ... they're a meal ... Self-portrait of a Guardian and Freak on the frontlines of far too many things to name without hyphens ...
Old river aqua slow motion still flowing ... underneath all of this ... The place got made ... it's still being made ... it's also just a river that doesn't care about any of this ...
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Locked at 10 — April 7, 2026
Forged in the Conversational Forge — Reach & Clod Hopper
