#thepartywithin

SHIT BEK,

U lit a fire in me bek, it’s no secret. i haven't been able to shut up about it before and i still can't shut up about it now! it’s still burning too. It didn’t get lit by just you of course, it was a team effort, but your part really set the scene and teed up a whole lotta destiny, not to mention dancing, drama, disco and density. You were the cosmic door to a world that would dramatically colour my crystalline lenses and dictate my direction for years to come and all you had to do was do your thing and be bek coogan. which i know from knowing you, is not as easy as it looks.

i can't help but be aware that you are not the only one party to this letter...it's actually being read aloud at a thing by Beth so she is party to it, and anyone in the room that I (beth) am in is party to it too. so i won't be as personal as i usually am in my fan letters to you and i'll be more expositional for the benefit of the people in the room. well we are well beyond the fan stage anyway aren't we..i mean we are still fans but also we are much more than that..we are radically fused with each other...we have been playing parts in each others hearts and art since the early 2000s.

i was but a tender peachy teen when kristine crabb betrothed us by summoning us both to auckland for fashion reasons. when we drove through the night from whanganui in your purple ford escort with the dragon painted on the front, you began to gently unlock the party within my mind. there was no tentative chit chat or cagey barriers between us, the convo flowed to places i'd never been at seventeen..it felt like travelling through time and dreaming in a really real way..heavy topics were not danced around but dissected playfully, with a light and cheeky touch while still being drenched in pain of a cellular degree..we bonded over our palpable ratness in the chinese horoscope department, even though you are water and i am wood.

i'd admired you from afar before this meeting..we had briefly met when we'd both modelled in kristines end of year collection, The Perpetual Stain, for her graduation show, lurching down the catwalk to the tune of heavy breathing..i observed your mystical earthy charisma with a hushed awe, too intimidated to interact. I'd seen you around town, being art all the time. starting a night dressed as a pious brethren in voluminous denim only to disrobe and reveal the animal underneath...always shedding layers to reveal more layers.. voluptuous curves and untended hair bursting from a catsuit..cartoon cocks, lightning, starbursts and doors drawn vividly over your body..a vamp little dog nose and unashamed camel toe.. dispensing candy floss with a plastic sword.

So i couldn't believe it when you liked me and wanted to hang out with me. what could i possibly have to offer? you told me i was amazing and i had no idea where you could be getting that from. how could someone as special as you be stimulated by someone as nondescript as me? you told me on that drive about how you'd been playing a she-wolf in your friends movie..he'd drawn hair on your arms with vivid and directed you and the other main werewolf to attack couples pashing in a graveyard with stuff like audio tape and bras. you identified strongly with the she-wolf role, part woman, part beast, in a constant state of transformation.

we got to auckland and a friend of yours took us to a party. i didn't know what to say to 30 year olds so i downed my vodka soda a bit too quickly.. accidentally falling asleep standing up and slinking to the floor under the table, knocking over my drink on the way down..you met me on the floor and naturally assumed the party was too boring so i'd decided to make a waterfall and play in it. you came down to my level amongst the legs of the party and we giggled and critiqued it from the floor perspective. no one was really partying yet.. your company down there re-energised me, you put your chicks on speed tape on the stereo and we birthed a dancefloor together.

birthing a dancefloor is one of your many talents. i have seen you get a bar full of mainstream revellers dancing passionately to obscure avant garde finnish metal they've never heard, such is the power of your charisma!!!

then i saw CORTINA and was electrified to the depths of my base chakra...shit coogs!! how did that happen. l feel so lucky to have grown up thinking cortina was a normal occurrence..angels of rock birth! you with your electric blue possum fur togs with the embedded toy car, seatbelt belt and crash helmet for protection and ace born-again bursting with conspiracy theories, mushroom clouds scrawled on his ample belly, devastating lead breaks, gold sequin lightnings on white paints and hang loose cap with the stuffed hand on top teamed with tony roeven so shy and unassuming clad in woollen jersey and roman sandals...

you defied the commercially enforced laws of femininity and glamour..or partially employed them but mixed up with their antithesis, a hairy buxom body comfortably on display, undies with a burger on the front, a neck brace that says FUCKED OFF, rugby socks pulled up, a pie mooshed between your cleavage only to emerge out the keyhole of your red and black lace negligee and be fed to your dad in the front row.. you laughed in the face of beauty ideals and created an image so raw, squirm inducing and magnetically compelling..always so at home on stage we felt at home with you, full of surprises, even to yourself, casually voicing heavy truths with a chuckle..

there aren't words that can encapsulate your powers,

you taught me C's get degrees

you told me to trust in my nuts

you fucked a log and filled your thighs with splinters

you stood naked before the stockmarket

you dressed in a cow catsuit and gave people milk shots

you heckle with the genius of a child with no filter

you wore clouds on your thighs

you played Sex/Art with your band for an art crit with your tutors

you crowdsurf over businessmen in taupo

you weren't really made for this digital age

if people say vinyls coming back you start crying and choking and vomiting a little bit

you told me ARTS A COSMIC JOKE IF YOU'RE NOT LAUGHING YOU'RE NOT GETTING IT

SHIT BEK!!!

I have just today at 5.10am returned to Aotearoa to go to TMI writing school with Hera Lindsay Bird in Wellington. A couple of weeks ago I did a recall for all the puzzle pieces (diaries) I have sent into the world so as to process this info at TMI school and crystallise The Party Within in book form. 

The night before I left there was a knock on my window at midnight. At first I was freaked out but then delighted when I realised it was Javed returning the fire engine red volume Spiritual Healing Evolution Party 2011. I opened the package on the plane to discover an accompanying electrical hot pink and yellow VISUAL INDEX of the volume with all the info filtered out!!! 

NEW WEBBY : http://thepartywithin.me/

The book project I am working on "The Party Within: A Smart Casual Connecting Principle" explores and unpacks psychic happenings surrounding the strong, unexpected awakening I began to undergo in 2009 and have been manifesting instinctively in various physical forms ever since. In the book I am re-interpreting Jung's concept of "individuation" (integration of the contents of the unconscious into consciousness through the ”hermeneutic treatment of creative fantasies”) developing a more casual turn of phrase that relates the act of shamelessly shining a spotlight on previously hidden facets of ones psyche and socialising newly illuminated findings to a party within oneself. The host sees these discoveries as reason to celebrate and sends out oblique invites to their psychic nether regions. Whatever happens is cool to discuss, exchange, channel and share openly, in the spirit of Lewis Hydes’ enthusiasm for gift exchange.

  (Or How I survived profound psycho-spiritual metamorphosis through an instinctive act of profuse and puzzling gift exchange.)

  I am interested in how bold explorations of psyche can encompass unconventional behaviours, and social difficulties most commonly referred to as mental illness in the West are often hastily treated in a way that is more destructive than helpful to the sensitive psyche of the blooming individual. Whereas with proper support, acceptance, empathic response and understanding these experiences can be channelled into a positive revolutionary movement, creatively handled in a safe space. Fusing Carl Jung’s call to understand the images of the unconscious and convert insight into them into an ethical obligation with Lewis Hyde’s studies on ideas evolving through exchanges across many minds in the spirit of gift exchange. 

I obviously recommended Letters to a Young Poet by Rilke.. then took my own advice and am re-reading it four years since the first time. There is a bit where he copies out the young poets poem by hand and sends it back to him. There is something new and validating about re-imbibing your own joules delivered back to you from another benevolent source. Being translated back to yourself. Even if it is a direct translation, it bears a hearty weight and you gain a dimension of realness which was previously invisible to the inner eye. Perhaps because it was so focussed on external muses.

It occurred to me my party puzzle has something of this embedded in its purpose. (One of many facets). Seeking permission to speak aloud. Whispering into the ear of a solo doted-upon recipient.. so that they can eventually translate it back to me in a more audible tone and I can gauge whether it's trueness still rings tuneful, a few years post penning.. but if yes and if no, then what tho?

Koller’s art epitomises this optimism, as it demonstrates the potentiality of what I propose to call an existential exuberance, i.e., a way to perform without any mandate or legitimation, in response to the desires and dreams of other people, but without the aim or pretense of merely fulfilling an existing demand. It is a way of always giving too much of what is not presently requested. It is a way of giving what you do not have to others who may not want it. It is a way of transcending your capacities by embracing your incapacities and therefore a way to interrupt the brute assertiveness of the I Can through the performance of an I Can’t performed in the key of the I Can. It is a way of insisting that, even if we can’t get it now, we can get it, in some other way at some other point in time.