luxor
Above are many images I collected for ideas to stage the work.
Luxor would be the follow up performance work after Everything is Everything. A mix of poetry, history, philosophy, and dreams, here I reflect and invent stories about the body of the earth, the history of histories, the memory of memories, the formation of deserts and cities, geographies, weather, hormones, camels, coral reefs, countrysides, gods, tools, cults, memes, etc. Each comes together at different speeds and intensities.
–––––––
While writing the piece, I had thought we’d do a new performance, something different but along the lines of the last work. Yet, while scoring Luxor, COVID-19 had made live performance close to impossible.
I considered shooting it in my home. Andreea and I started designing the sets. At the same time, I met various performers and wrote notations for its staging.
The work was intended for performance for summer 2020. Then in March 2020, as we all know, COVID-19 appeared. In the end, it was released as a sound piece with 10 episodes, which you can listen to above, each ranging from 45-70 minutes.
Over the next two and half years, throughout the pandemic, I would write the last three works. We would perform scenes from those last three, and scenes from Luxor in The Practicing Human, in May 2023 – almost exactly four years after our first work.
Luxor: Or Can I Pass My own Antibody Test (or my own Turing Test).
A 10 hour epic oddessy of the contemporary.
In this tale Luxor is simultaneously in Egypt and Las Vegas. An all too real and imaginary place where reality is displaced and the ‘I’ and the earth fractured into many zones of being, of presence, image and the actual. All now is infected with constructions of dissuasion, possession, control, virus, autocrats, free thinkers, all agitated in a fevered body of the earth and populace
Luxor the story
If the question of exile was pre-eminent in Marc Lafia’s Everything is Everything and There is Nothing Else the question of ‘we’ is at the heart of his new work, Luxor Can I Pass my own Antibody Test.
If in Everything exile suggest an exit, somewhere to go, a place of refuge, an outside of ‘bare life’, Luxor, tells us ‘We’ have no where to go, no escape. No amount of social distancing will protect us from political oppression or violence or climate catastrophe or this or future viruses, only a ‘we’ will take ‘us’, humanity in a new direction.
For part 2 of his trilogy (the 3rd part to take place in India, Japan, Vietnam, Nepal, China), Lafia has created a 10 hour aural work with layers of subtle and distinct soundscapes and music, texturing his voice as he reads and narrates his epic travelogue, real and imagined. In it, reality is displaced. The ‘I’ is fractured into many zones of being, of presence and image. Memory is amplified and reality augmented; intelligence made prosthetic. All now is infected with constructions of dissuasion, possession control, virus, autocrats, free thinkers, a fevered body of the earth and populace. Both physiologic and biologic time has captured space and the cybernetic dream of surveillance capital, almost complete.
Blurring fiction and the the real, focusing it, eclipsing it, isolating it, keeping it hypnotic, this time he recounts his travels to Egypt and the Bedouin deserts of Wadi Rum (this being very real). Where in the first piece he picks up from the canon of western liberalism, the move from myth to reason, the Greeks and western philosophers, and the anomie that comes with the death of god, Lafia here wants to go further back in time and considers the Ancient and current Egyptians whose culture, religion and state apparati, might be more pertinent to the future than we may have imagined. As he did in Everything is Everything, here he cross cuts between the older cultures and civilizations of Egypt and Arabia, their polytheism becoming monotheism, with California, (the supposed last frontier of freedom).
Under quarantine on a cruise on the Nile, our narrator recounts his travels, and his working for the Egyptian Antiquarian society and Mirrorworld, a Beirut-Silicon Valley multi-national that has developed technology to synthesize sensation. Unbeknownst to him our narrator, is a construct, and an unwitting triple agent working for Angelina Jolie and Greta Thunberg as a soul contact to save the real world while others are building the biggest alternative reality world ever made.
A mix of poetry, history, philosophy, dreams, he reflects and invents stories about the body of the earth, the history of histories, the memory of memories, the formation of Deserts Cities geographies weather, hormones, camels, coral reefs, countrysides, gods, tools, cults, memes, etc etc. Each of them coming together at different speeds and intensities.
The work intended as a second performance for early summer is now as an audio book. It will be released in 10 episodes: 10 sections or Realms each with their own titles (index below poster and some impressions from friends). Composed and sound designed by Chad Raines, composer of last years work Everything is Everything.
Luxor Realms and Scenes Index
Preamble
Realm 1 GIZA
1. What We Call the Middle East p.6
2. Far From the Center of Anything p.9
3. A much Greater Us p.11
4. Confronting Time, My Every Breath p.14
5. Once Upon a Time in Cairo p.15
6. Romy Our River, Navigating the Chaos p. 17
7. Dead Desert Kings and Their Seashells p.18
8. He Did Not Want To Be Alone; Sheri Our Guide p.18
9. Over a Hundred Journeys to the Next World p.21
10. Instructions of the Sun p.23
11. Her Purple Mascara, Her Diaphanous Wings p.26
12. Words of Power for the Imperishable Stars p.28
13. The Hours of Night in Solar Flotation p.30
14. They Took My IPhone p.31
15. Love As a Practice, As a Sphinx; That’s Why I Thought of Greta p.33
16. Digging Up the Body p.37
Realm 2 CAIRO
1. Men Under Construction p.40
2. Tomb of Dualistic Thinking p.42
3. A Shared, Persistent Place, A Mirrorworld p.45
4. Hollywood’s Skeleton Crew of Eight Billion p.47
5. Make This World with Me p.50
6. I Can Never Be at Home Here p.52
7. Young Americans, Like Cairo, Macho and Helpless p.54
8. Graciously He Assures Me of the Unimagined Image p.56
9. Intuitive Arts and One Too Many Cortadas p.63
10. To Give the Body of the World an Afterlife p.67
11. With Samir in the Dark Labyrinth of Paranoia p.69
12. I Am Both Lie-Detector and Menace As a “Private Ear” p.72
13. Take These p.74
14. A Blue Alfa-Romeo p.75
Realm 3 NILE CRUISE
1. Humans and Their Goats Reduced to a Number of Clicks p.77
2. Sand, Sand, Sand p.80
3. The Human Mind’s Dilemma with Names p.82
4. Goddess Isis, Kerouac, and This Most Excellent Man Hady p.85
5. The Best-Mapped Country In the World p.89
6. Fertility of the Nile p.90
7. No One Can Save Venice p.92
8. Eternity in One Yoga Pose and Then the Next p.94
9. Displaced Nubia and the Lost Art of Memory p.98
10. In a Pit with Just A Few Pots, the Nile Flowing Through Me p.101
11. The Truth of Frail Happiness p.105
12. If the Soul Is A Quantum Package With the Same Fate as the Universe p.107
13. Derobed and Fully Dressed For Crocodiles p.108
14. Metaphysics of Supplication and God Forms p.111
15. Piety Into Rampage, Monotheism Until Spinoza, Rimbaud Preparing for ‘Nothingness or God’ And What Was the Aspiration of the Farmer? p.113
16. Reactivating the Corpse p.120
17. Building a Tomb with Declarations of Innocence p.121
Realm 4 EDFU
1. Low-Rent Ideology of A Higher Authority p.126
2. Teenagers in Black p.128
3. Be Invisible, She Said p.130
4. The Deep Fake; Instagram: Your Own Little Tomb in the Ether p.132
5. Simultaneously, Persons and Gods p.138
6. The Reptilian Brain and the Hawk’s Higher Functions p.140
7. I’m Arranging Your Fall From Grace p.141
8. Seth, The Red One p.144
9. Forces To Balance, Not To Banish p.148
10. Myself As An Alien, Here to Import Camels p.150
11. The Comfort of Tyranny p.153
12. A Fortuitous Encounter of Bergsonian Duration p.155
13. Why Do So Many People Think I’m Working For Them? p.158
14. That Trial Without Witnesses p.162
15. Day-trading, Fish-circling p.164
16. Rescue Me p.165
17. Four Baboons and All the Marvels That Conflict with Faith p.166
Realm 5 LUXOR
1. A Young Rail Thin Man Without Guile; I think I Am Seeing Greta p.169
2. We Watch p.171
3. A Landless Mass with Faces p.172
4. Nature Religion Cannot Support a State p.174
5. Afterlife With IPhone p.178
6. B Movie Tombs in the Sin City of Egypt p.180
7. Peggy Lee, You Have to Hurry p.183
8. Hormones At the End of an Arab Winter p.186
9. In Alternation, Institutions of Closure p.189
Realm 6 AKHENATEN 1
1. Designs For a New God p.193
2. Ordinary Aliens, Earthly Beings, and A New Study by Scientists p.196
3. Which “I” Do “I” Bring Out? p.198
4. An Affair of Intrigue Around the Monarch p.201
5. Soft Layers of Wealth Through Twelve Hours of Night p.204
6. The Static Established Order and the Anxiety of Elections p.205
7. Inverted Flower on Artificial Lake p.208
8. Unnecessary Fictions p.211
9. Screen Writers Organize the Ruling Class p.213
10. Feverishly Drugged Waiting for the Train, Hyenas Eating You Like Garbage p.215
11. Manifold of the Mind, Religion of Dataism p.217
Realm 7 WADI RUM
1. Economic Hardships in 1148 p.219
2. Valley of the Moon p.220
3. History of Beduins and Outbreak of Tribalism in US of A p.221
4. God is a Derivative of Spinoza, and Spinoza, a Derivative of God p.227
5. They Call Themselves Brothers p.228
6. Like a Body in a Cage p.229
7. Shared Murder and Meme Magic p.232
8. The War of All Against All p.234
9. To What End and For Whom p.237
10. Agency Hymn of the Nomadic Colonial p.239
11. Spectacle of an Ideal Without Idealism p.248
12. Ecology of Fear p.251
13. A Hollywood Lot Every Monday Morning p.253
14. Tonight, I Would Sleep Under the Stars p.254
Realm 8 AQABA
1. Stigmata and Ambiguous Parentage p.255
2. Narratives Fall Apart With Decolonization p.261
3. Swimming Pools Cascading Like Wedding Cakes p.264
4. From Formed By the Generic City p.266
5. They, Being Chevron p.269
6. Below the Sea, All the World’s People p.271
7. An Enormous Beginning p.274
8. The Temperature in Antartica Today p.275
Realm 9 AKHENATEN 2
1. Alive in That Corner of Time and the World p.276
2. A Whole LIie-style of Failed Seekers p.278
3. Looking In At Ourselves, Condemned to Be Free p.279
4. The Purely Secular Was Purely Trivial p.281
5. Ain’t Nothin But A Party, Starchild p.283
6. The Spoiled Child Man God p.284
7. Jewel Encrusted High Platform Red Shoes p.287
8. Brought the Court to a Civil War p.289
9. Playing Dress-up p.292
10. Maybe You’re Delusional p.295
11. This Humble Narrator p.298
12. I Know This Won’t Last p.302
13. No Need of His One and Only God p.303
14. Putting It On Everyone Else p.306
15. About to Assassinate Him and His Royal Family, I Send an Emoji p.307
16. Never Mind What Hegel Said p.308
17. ‘It’s Coming Electronically’ p.312
18. Successful Viruses p.314
19. Ancient Egyptians are Scientologists p.315
Realm 10.1 DEEP HISTORY, RIOT, BURNING LOVE
1. Specialization and Division of Labor p.317
2. Beings That Interpret Their Situation p.319
3. Repair It with the Surplus p.320
4. A Zombie Without Bunny Suit p.324
5. The Usual Grief Stages p.327
6. Marionettes and Meat Bots p.331
7. I Am a Spinozist - Sounds Hideous Written Down p.333
8. Time-sharing Nietzsche, Marx and Hegel p.334
9. Between Amnesia and Nostalgia p.337
10. Digging Tunnels to the Sky p.340
11. A New Fidelity p.342
12. The Emoji Told Me To p.344
Realm 10.2 DEEP HISTORY, RIOT, BURNING LOVE
13. The Anarchists Sat p.347
14. I Don’t Want A Messiah; Long Live the Accidents p.351
15. The Human as Program p.359
16. Luxor is Everywhere No Outside Bubbles p.361
17. Did You Find What You’re Looking For? The Insight. p.364
18. Dead Sea Without Dome or Foam Black with Sun p.368
19. Can I Dance My Own Turing Test as Me? p.372
List of Appearances and Mention p.375
Luxor Preamble p.378
Luxor PDF of writing available upon request.
Impressions from friends hearing the work in the last month.
i loved it! i love the way you mix poetry, history, philosophy, dreams! my favorite part is when monotheism becomes the phantasy of being a fig, instead of just eating them! but clearly this requires all what is before to make sense listened to it in bed, before going to sleep, so maybe your voice will appear in my dreams? buona notte! much love and well done!! -Chiara Bottici (full time professor of gender studies at the new school)
Oh, it’s marvelous. Adam and I just listened to the first half. It’s beautiful, mesmerizing, inspiring, bringing together so many threads of knowledge. The sound editing is intriguing, bringing us back to your subjective reality at times and taking us away to mystical thoughts worlds in others. Will return eagerly to listen to the second half later today. Thank you!! -Cece Cutler (full time professor in linguistics at Cuny
Marc what I’ve heard so far is completely mesmerizing. I’m lost in your descriptions of sound and texture and sensations.. the words and narration are so gooooooood....!!! I had to pause for a few minutes to sanitize my delivery... but omg it’s fabulous -Susan Eschel (artist)
The 40 minutes of sound work is fantastic. layers of subtle & distinct sounds & music, texturing/contexturing your voice; blurring it, focusing it, eclipsing it, isolating it, keeping it hypnotic yet with momentum. it engrosses the listener while relaxing them. once again, a soundbath reminiscent of a mind spa. -Kat Mandeville (poet)
Love the Luxor intro, and the descent into Cairo... Indeed, the invisible veil has descended upon us all and the world as we knew it has turned into a mirage... -Romy Turko (hollywood screenwriter)
Cool sounds and delivery. Your appeal to Turing, Plato, and the ancient Egyptians to me is an appeal to mathematization of everything and to the mystical - but it doesn’t matter it’s still cool. It is like listening to a play - I like to listen to Plato’s dialogues rather than reading them. Your point about sensing being and how it can be reduced to a formula is phenomenological - consciousness is like sensing being rather than ordering the world. -Lior Rosenfeld (philosopher)
A delicious mix of history, time travel, sci-fi, world gamification, high and low brow cinema and youtube, pandemic hysteria. Your voice is so good and the audio mix is a perfect accompaniment. -Irena Rogovsky (solution architect, intel)
Listening to your egypt/ levant piece, entranced, grateful for the weaving train of thought and the escape entwined in the education. Great to sit on the couch together thinking on it. -Adam Synder (photographer)
Cool, I started listening the other day big have not finished, great narrative and so wonderful to hear your voice! -Jose Richards Fernandez (investment manager)
Love it! -Lila El-Sissi (author, Out From the Shadow of Men)
It’s so cool! I have to stop so I can listen with my bf. It’s the best podcast! So fantastical! -Sarah Lapinski (costumer)
Wonderful. your voice and tonality, are very very nice. -Michael Chichi (designer, musician)