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OF MARINA A Of less & less: funeral, artist’s last piece before leaving. Move my body: almost looks sweet & naive. Re-edit. I was inspired by Bunuel. I hope my eye can negate power of the star on me. And so on went on for some time, almost at the end. Barry Alpert / Silver Spring MD US / 4-5-11 (7 PM) >> 6-16-11 (10:51 AM) Initially drafted during a lecture by the internationally-known performance artist Marina Abramovic at a museum which has become increasingly offensive to its original audience after a takeover by its DEVELOPMENT staff. Unlike those who simply boycott the tarnished receptacle, I'm still willing to dash in & dash out in order to catch exhibitions, talks, and films which I would otherwise miss. On this occasion, however, I had to waste energy on an online lottery for tickets and even when I got lucky I still concluded I would be denied admission because of what I assumed was a disqualifying visual blackout on the printout of the ticket. None of the locally-based individuals with whom I talk about performance art won the lottery, and i found the whole occasion alienating and overly time-consuming. Especially in comparison to her previous lecture at the same institution, after which the curator (also a poet) introduced me to Marina Abramovic and I got to talk to her under relaxed circumstances and arrange for transmission of two earlier texts I had written via her activity. In the interim, however, her successful exhibition/performance at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC unfortunately plunged her into pop culture. I wouldn't say I detected evidence that she had sold out, but I didn't bother to look at my drafts until yesterday (and then purely by chance). One acrostic was salvageable, compared to what I quarried out of her previous, more performative lecture--a much more challenging serial work of four 9-line texts, alternating between acrostic and diastic. I'm still not in an appropriate state of mind to work on my intuitive notation from April 5, and in fact, I left that occasion thinking I might have got just the nine-line work you've read and that I was lucky to get that, considering . . .