Musical performance by Devin Brahja Waldman
February 8, 2018 - 6 PM
Dear DB,
I have been thinking about what you said on the phone last week, which I wrote down at the time. It’s really stayed with me. “When I look for something that’s lost, first I look in all the wrong places.” I think this has something to do with what I have been thinking about with this exhibition. Rehearsing the moment when you find something. Rehearsing the calamity of finding the outside or finding yourself, which are the same. Losing yourself and looking in the wrong places as a kind of labour of being in the world. To live, you have to look in the wrong places for the thing you lost, which is the world, or yourself in the world. That in looking the strangeness of the act becomes clear; there is nothing to find when you keep looking in the wrong places. All places are the wrong places for the calamity that you can’t find.
Here I think of kneeling down to find what you have lost as a kind of blessing. To keep looking is a blessing. I want to ask you to compose a kind of blessing to the outside, to the thing that you are looking for in the wrong places, that can only be sought in the wrong places, that you can never stop looking for.
What do you think?
xx, AK
Devin Brahja Waldman is a saxophonist, drummer, synthesizer player and composer who has appeared in venues such as The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Town Hall and Berlin Jazz Festival. He has performed with Patti Smith, Thurston Moore, Malcolm Mooney, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, CA Conrad and Sam Shalabi; and is a dancer in Adam Kinner’s The Weather In Times Square, Today. He has collaborated with his aunt, poet Anne Waldman, since the age of ten. Waldman leads a NYC/Montreal group known as Brahja Waldman and is a member of NYC’s Heroes Are Gang Leaders. Waldman is a co-producer for Fast Speaking Music— an independent poetry and music label which has released the works of Amiri Baraka, Meredith Monk, Eileen Myles and Joanne Kyger.