9.13.2010

Shoot The Freak- Attack on the Body Part II


the body is the sponge and not the sponge. correction. a body is a sponge and not a sponge. thread things together-- writings & ideas flow through a body and come out the other end. the mouth is an asshole of sorts. AR was right when she told us that eating was like shitting backwards. she didn't say it like that but she could have.

somewhere between Piu Piu's Pollo Palace and a frozen pina colada stand, toward the end of the boardwalk on Coney Island, is Shoot the Freak, a game where passersby line up along a wall and take paint ball shots at a cigarette smoking 19 year-old wearing a face mask and torn up jeans. romantic. 3 bucks gets you 5 shots. 5 bucks gets you 15. a boy tells his dad as they part from the crowd, you got him in the head, dad! yea, dad says, and the groin. The Freak in this scenario is not freakish enough. or perhaps too freakish. too unrecognizable from the freaks I'm expecting. Immediately I want to write a book called "Shoot the Freak". The opening paragraph will describe in elaborate detail the colorings and images on the shoddy wooden shield the teen boy is holding as he, pathetically, scurries from wall to wall to avoid getting blasted in "the head" or "the groin". Come on, Freak! Run around! Whirling out from ekphrastic narration to the action at hand, this paragraph will reference, obscurely, the opening of The Illiad. I think.

Immediately, as I write this, I give up hope on the project. And in rivers the self-critique (See, JDH's post about --- writing).

This is how my body experiences the world. I see something I find interesting and my mouth wants to shit out a story, a poem.

[I'm the Freak]


[I'm the Freak]


[I'm the Freak]

next day...

Yes, I'm the Freak. Or, at least, I want to be.

musings on freak "shooting"

1. death-expose the vulnerability of a body (need to make distinction between freakish body and non-freakish body-- and i want to say something like... .... .... all written bodies are monstrous, freakish because they have no physical/tangible substance. they are not bodies but fragments of bodies. flattened out bodies, etc. yikes.)

2. power- and all the post-colonial thinkings on the body as the final (re)source of agency and authority.

3. esthetic- bodily gore can be beautiful. enchanting. grotesque. etc.

4. therapy.

5. ... 6....

written exercise- shoot up the freak to excess. make him fail. revolt.

3 comments:

questionlockeddoors said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
questionlockeddoors said...

The next logical step: You must shoot the freak.

Gather up 3 bucks in nickels and dimes around the apt, and go, shoot the freak.

Ben Pelhan said...

...7) This "freak" is paid to play the part of the freak, to wear the literal paintball mask with its otherworldly look as well as the figurative mask, the role of other/outsider/estranged one. We encounter both the idea of the "freak" and its necessary inverse, the assumption of "normality," or of a "normal" way to be.

This "freak," though, gets paid. Collects money with his/her welts. Gets to wear a mask, and most importantly, gets to take it off. This "freak" is substantially better off, for being conscious of its pretended nature, than those who fall outside of "normalcy" when it comes to their everyday identities. A similarity exists in both "Shoot the Freak" and our daily social practice: the shooters always get to pretend that they aren't wearing masks. Theirs are the natural faces and all "others" are masked. Whether the "others" choose to wear their "masks", or have been forced to wear them, they don't come off at the end of the shift.

Frankly, I'd prefer to get paid.