Wednesday, November 30 7:30 pm, Midway Airport baggage claim. The last of the phoned-in peerformances for Karen Christopher. Performances for Karen occur when I call her cell phone, which is programmed to play Beethoven's "Fur Elise" on the occasion. The performances explore the theme of letters to a faraway lover.

Our correspondence is what got her through long days at a boring job, hating sitting at a desk inside all day. She was marking time, saving money, dreaming about what it would be like to dedicate a year of her life to her own artmaking and learning. It got me through months of planning for and insecurity about a big hairy performance project. That writing was a little touchstone, a secret space.

Monday, November 28 Tonight Riley learned that one of the ways that I work is to assess which parts of my day include a built-in audience.

I have been trying to memorize Mayakovsky's poem "Listen!" in Russian. A somewhat unsatisfying translation appears on the right.

I explained the poem, then read it in Russian. Then I proposed that we both get temporary star tattoos. His choice was the inner arm, mine was the space under my ear. Riley was a sweet and perfect audience/collaborator.

Listen!

Listen,
if stars are lit
it means - there is someone who needs it.
It means - someone wants them to be,
that someone deems those specks of spit
magnificent.
And overwrought,
in the swirls of afternoon dust,
he bursts in on God,
afraid he might be already late.
In tears,
he kisses God's sinewy hand
and begs him to guarantee
that there will definitely be a star.
He swears
he won't be able to stand that starless ordeal.
Later,
He wanders around, worried,
but outwardly calm.
And to someone else, he says:
'Now,
it's all right.
You are no longer afraid,
are you?'
Listen,
if stars are lit,
it means - there is someone who needs it.
It means it is essential
that every evening
at least one star should ascend
over the crest of the building.

Saturday, November 26 in August of 1995, about six weeks after the heat wave ended, the 41 heat wave victims whose bodies had never been identified were buried in a mass grave in Homewood, IL. They were buried with 27 other unidentified people who had died between July and August.

A 160-foot-long trench was dug, and the bodies were buried in plain pine boxes.

I'm not one of those people who visually calculate distances. I didn't understand what a 160-foot grave would look like. Weatherbeaten and prone tree trunks always reminded me of corpses. So I began at the end of this log at Pratt beach.

I measured feet in footlengths, and started walking toward the cement wall of the pier. Imagine my surprise when the footstep that ran into the wall was the 160th. I dug a trench back along my footpath and discarded all further plans. The gash was so stark, its shape so touchingly made by a human hand, there was nothing more to say.

Friday, November 25 Tonight I offered some words from Rob Breszny's new book, Pronoia is the Antidote for Paranoia, for an assembled audience of twelve family members. (Left: Nicole, Natalie, & Jill Garneau). Below is an excerpt from what I read.

DEFINITION: Pronoia is the antidote for paranoia. It's the understanding that the universe is fundamentally friendly.

HYPOTHESIS: Evil is boring. Cynicism is idiotic. Fear is a bad habit. Despair is lazy. Joy is fascinating. Love is an act of heroic genius. Pleasure is our birthright.

PROCEDURE: Act as if the universe is a prodigious miracle created for your amusement and illumination. Assume that secret helpers are working behind the scenes to assist you in turning into the gorgeous masterpiece you were born to be. Join the conspiracy to shower all of creation with blessings.

Thursday, November 24 My niece Renee and I talked a lot about artmaking. She's familiar with past work that involves leaving something for someone to find. When we talked about something she'd like to find, she suggested a dollar. We clipped it to a painting she made today. I left the house and promised to leave it somehwere. Yesterday Renee's pre-K class had delivered food donations to a local pickup site for Clare House, a soup kitchen and grocery dispensary. So that's where I decided to leave our art project.

Wednesday, November 23 What better use of a vocal talent than to entertain a four- and a two-year-old? With Mom & Dad out at the movies, we made a makeshift campfire and sang songs from the Phantom Lake YMCA Songbook, circa 1981. Audience instructions: sing silly songs! Any that turned out well had to be repeated 3-4 times, although in the case of the Bubble Gum Song, it was probably more like 18. Their favorite verse? Of course, the most morbid:

My mommy gave me a five, she told me to stay alive
But I didn't stay alive, I choked on my bubblegum!

Tuesday, November 22 in June, I dropped 19 postscards around Rogers Park, each with a stamp and a request: if you find this, please write a list of 19 things you'd do if you had only 2 months to live. There was one person who made a list, attached a return address label, and sent it back immediately. Her list has made quite a journey this year, including being featured on WBEZ. I've carried her worn-out postcard around for months, but never managed to thank her. So today I collected a bag of the leaf stems that fell off the tree outside my house, counted 739, and bound them together to make a broom. I chose to send this postcard participant a broom because the new year is coming, and a new broom is a good thing to have. I also wrote her a letter explaining the project and thanking her for turning me on to Karmal Sutra ice cream.

Sunday, November 20 Today's work involved indulging wonder at the work of other human beings, and calling attention to it. Exhibit A: an egg carton purposely impaled on the posts of a wrought iron fence. The styrofoam positively shimmered in the streetlight, and the egg carton swayed slightly in the wind, but stayed put. My contribution: a post-it with an arrow. Exhibit B: one Cheeto jammed into a crack in the seat of the train. I mean, there is no way this Cheeto could have gotten into this space without the concerted effort of some industrious person. So I added an arrow to this installation as well. To reassure those of you familiar with my previous found-food work, I did not, in fact, eat the Cheeto.

Saturday, November 19 I am aware of wanting to share gems from Mark Doty's Heaven's Coast with you, dear audience member, and anyone else who cares to read these messages. Yesterday's quote, and today's beach writing:

We couldn't keep the dead out of the present if we wanted to. They're nowhere to be found, and firmly here, now.

Wednesday, November 16 A change in me since the beginning of HEAT:05 is that the being outside in severe weather feels like part of the artmaking process. It feels like information gathering, like how could I consider making outdoor work without first experiencing today's outside reality? On a lunchtime break from a windowless room in a corporate training I go for a walk. Of course there are no sidewalks, this is not pedestrian territory. The wind threatens to blow me off my footing, and I am thinking about the ways in which the approaching winter makes us curl toward lovers, and not just for warmth. I loved this pile of bricks along the highway, looked on by a vast wall of office windows. So I anchored some words by Mark Doty & Lynda Hull:

Touch, among other things, makes the body real to us; confirmed by another, making contct at the boundaries of our skin, we come back to ourselves, experience ourselves--contained, uncontainable--anew.

Making love was a way of saying yes,

I am here, these are my borders, hold me down

a little while. Make me real to myself.

Tuesday, November 15 Full Moon Beet Planting. For the first time in 2005, I'm starting to believe winter is really coming. We've had winds that make Chicago legendary. It's cold and dark and we all want to hibernate. I'm reading Mark Doty's Heaven's Coast and I'm increasingly, poetically, lovingly focused on death. But in these last six weeks of the HEAT:05 project, I want to live in some stories of hope and generosity and ferocious life.

I know November is no time to plant beets. But I smuggled these seeds home from St. Petersburg three years ago. For three years I have admired this beautiful beet photo on the package, and waited to figure out how to use them.

Thursday, November 10 lecture/demo in Laila Farah's Women in Chicago Theater class at DePaul University. This group of students and I also made the performance below. I had them draw their cherries on white stickers, and then pledged to install them somewhere. When I asked for their input on where I should install the stickers, they suggested I travel to the cemetary in Homewood where anonymous heat wave victims are buried in a mass grave and leave the stickers along the way.

1. 739 percussive sounds
2. Draw a cherry
3. Hear a story
4. Give a cherry
5. Take a cherry

Wednesday, November 9 lecture/demo in Therese Quinn's "Dialectical Practices in Research, Cultural Production, and Visual Culture" class at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She had her students read Eric Klinenberg's Heat Wave book! Together we all made a performance that consisted of the following tasks, and then spent some time discussing HEAT:05.

1. 739 percussive sounds
2. Draw a cherry
3. Hear a story
4. Give a cherry
5. Take a cherry

Tuesday, November 8 It was my homework to memorize and recite Vladimir Mayakovsky's poem, "Listen!" In Russian.

Indeed, if the stars are shining,
That means--someone needs them to shine?
That means--someone wants them to be?
That means--someone sees these bits of sputum and calls them pearls?

Monday, November 7 A couple of weeks ago someone put up flyers on my block. The flyers consisted of small, dense black text in Spanish printed on plain white paper and taped carefully to signposts and a mailbox. If I recall correctly I think they were advertising a remedy for depression.

Then it rained. Evidently the flyers had been printed on an inkjet printer, because one morning, where there had once been flyers, now there were only blank sheets of paper tenaciously affixed in their original positions. I've been interested in the dissolution of ink on a number of occasions this year: I laid flat on the sidewalk to watch ink travel upward in a river of black from the bottoms of cups installed at the morgue containing names of heat wave victims. I crouched with eyes at table level as permanent ink flaked off dissolving sugar cubes and floated on the surface of a cup of water.

So I visited the papers with my copy of Annie Dillard's For the Time Being and wrote out some new flyers for the neighborhood.

And we like it this way, at least in the West; we prefer to endure any agony of isolation rather than to merge and extinguish our selves in an abstract "humanity" whose fate we should hold dearer than our own.

-Annie Dillard

It took only a few typhoon waves to drown 138,000 Bangladeshi on April 30, 1991. We see generations of waves rise from the sea that made them, billions of individuals at a time; we see them dwindle and vanish back. What will move you to pity?

-Annie Dillard

One death is a tragedy; a million deaths are a statistic.

-Joseph Stalin

In 1976 an earthquake in Tangshan killed 750,000 people. Before it quaked, many survivors reported, the earth shone with an incandescent light.

-Annie Dillard

Thursday, November 3 when she lost her keys on the CTA bus, Katherine's biggest worry was the fact that her bike was still locked up at the Granville El stop and the only key was gone.

There was nothing I could do to help the situation besides get off the train at Granville to sing to the bike and encourage it to stay put while Katherine figured out a way to rescue it. I sang Go to Sleep you Little Baby, dusted its bumpers, and patted its seat.