caroline contillo

bye bye bushwick, originally uploaded by ccontill.

life’s ridiculous. i friggin graduated, had a life-changing month at naropa, moved to queens, started working, & am writing my brain out. my new e-mail address is cmcontillo@gmail.com use it wisely.

They’re seeding the clouds with spindly spider webs meant to engineer the weather, the filaments falling down upon amber waves of ConAgra corn and worming their ways out of fissures in our flesh as inorganic fibers in unnatural shades of red and blue. Don’t pull on that piece of lint because it might be connected to your nervous system. In Vietnam they seeded clouds with silver iodide to extend monsoon season for more effective warfare, why not coat them now in veils of noxious film that give rise to delusional parasitosis, brain fog, stiff joints.

A sinkhole opened up in Guatamala recently and devoured entire city  blocks. To see even a picture of this gaping maw of the earth I feel myself falling headlong into it, and instead of coming out the other side I am caught in a subterranean cavity albino amphibians of pre-history brushing against my legs, writhing creatures that metabolize sulpher and have never seen the sun. The sun which NASA has said is rising from a deep slumber, with a burgeoning solar maximum that might fry our twitters our facebooks our continuous partial attention. My eyes become accustomed to the phosphorescent glow of the slime mold and Dick Cheney’s menacing grin comes into focus. He lives down here now, with his kind. He still loves the thrill of the chase, his predilection for human hunting has been transformed to a hunger for eyeless crab-like creatures. He licks his lips. I scream. Dick scuttles away into the dark recesses, sensitive to soundwaves which move through the cavern.
I have the intuition that everything would be fine if all the world’s leaders could just, for a moment, see the earth from the vacuum of space, experience such a return to the womb in orbit, float untethered by terrestrial gravity, maybe they would just stop putting the screws to us so hard.
The Scientologists have recorded their doctrine on titanium cylinders and buried them deep beneath California’s desert.  Humans and our decadent beauty, our staggering accumulation  of ephemera, minutia, syllabi solutions cures cultivations designs Art with a capital A all the arts with little a’s  These will ALL be gone… Once we have dreamed our eradication into being by mistaking these envelopes of flesh for I capital I’s once we have wiped ourselves clean from this Earth those that come afterl ask themselves “but what of those who came before us,” and they will find only Suri Cruise’s birth records.

This all seems familiar like the aura of a grand mal seizure visual artifacts, solar storms & ash plumes,  ictal orgasms of the earth that shake tsunamis loose. There is a global weirdening increased occurrences of sleep paralysis. Flouride in your drinking water is petrifying your third eye so make sure you use a Brita filter if you want a full on awakening.
America’s auto-immune system is ravaging itself, its circulatory mechanism has prolapsed, slick black blood coats all of our hands and we use it to finger-paint hieroglyphs from an orthogonal present where (this never happened), the symbols radiating across to us as waves of mortification.  I can make out a few prescriptions, like turn around inside yourself and shake hands with the obsidian void, and use your non-dominant hand to high-five the darkness. If it were a letter from the future the post-script would read: Yours In Solidarity Against the New World Order

"I’m having a Loretta Lynn Style Breakdown on Stage tonight" , originally uploaded by ccontill.

My slight obsession with Kembra Pfahler started back in 2003, when I saw a segment of the quickly discontinued DisinfoTV on her performance art. On the topic of her video art piece Sewing Circle, in which she sews her vagina shut, she said in a relaxed, southern californian manner, “My mom was like ‘Kembraaaaa, why did you DO that?’ and i was like “Mommmmm, i was upset!’” Her matter-of-fact surfer drawl, when applied to the topic of something like, you know, sewing an orifice shut, was just another layer of cake that would become my obsession. I had already been into her band, The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black, for awhile. I grew up listening to female-fronted punk bands of either riot-grrrl or goth persuasions, so her dark, borderline metal & VERY new york influenced music was right up my alley. The only problem was that the band didn’t perform anymore, since Kembra had decided to dedicate herself to visual art. I was, of course, interested in that as well. I’ve always loved artists who can work in a variety of media, from music to visual to whathaveyou. Combining them in the way Kembra does is, for me, the ultimate. What the germans call Gesamtkunstwerk, or ‘total work of art.’
When I saw The Volutuous Horror of Karen Black at the Park Ave Armory in 2008, the spectacle was insane. There was upwards of 50 girls in traditional Karen Black body paint during what ended up being probably the most insane stage show I had ever seen. It was followed, in a few weeks, by an acoustic set at the Whitney, where Kembra made jokes the entire time. “I feel like I’m Cher impersonating myself,” she said. And, most importantly: “I got tired of making subversive art without also making subversive rock & roll. So here I am.”

Here she is indeed. My life kind of went into mini-apocalypse mode recently & when I discovered that The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black were opening for the New York Dolls next weekend, it kind of kicked off a change in perception that is ushering in something awesome. That’s how a mini-apocalypse works. It only seems like the end. But, duh, it’s totally not.

I just really, really REALLY hope she plays “Shopping Spree”

i want to go back to halifax and project kenneth anger movies on every surface i come across. i want to get my permaculture certification and learn more about medicinal plants, rendering myself something of a good witch. i want to win an oscar for best original screenplay. i want to have lunch with cher and talk about eckhart tolle.  i want to go back in time and catch djuna barnes on a good day before she became a complete curmudgeon. i want to spend at least one day on the surface of the moon, riding a horse & drinking kombucha. and i want you to come to coco66 on Sunday May 30th @ 5, for I will be doing stand-up.

on valentines day, i will be doing stand-up at coco66 in greenpoint, and sarah will play as noveller at the same show. here are the details.

Valentine’s Show @ Coco 66 Caroline Contillo,  Bad Credit No Credit,  Noveller and the Shivers. 9 pm, $8 -> 66 Greenpoint Ave, Brooklyn NY (the g train is maybe not running next weekend? so plan accordingly)

i am infinitely apologetic about the fact that i never update this. i am turning comments off until i can figure out how in the world i got 9488 spam comments since i last logged in. here are some quick updates:

i am doing standup on VALENTINES DAY Sunday Feb 14th at Coco66. Sarah will be performing as well as my friend Carrie-Anne’s awesome band Bad Credit No Credit. It will be awesome.

I will soon be entering my final semester of my undergraduate career. Finally. No, seriously, fricking finally. If you feel like employing me once my commencement has, uh, commenced, I am NOTHING but ears about that. *nervous laughter*

be well, dudes.

Flushing Farms Opening, originally uploaded by ccontill.

I lived in Germany for a month, did some standup, played a scantily-clad mummy queen in a play, went to tangier island in the chesapeake, and canoed the pine barrens. My final year as an undergrad is now underway, and my internship at the Department of Environmental Conservation starts soon.

the north end of halifax, originally uploaded by ccontill.

went to halifax, nova scotia for the obey fest this weekend. 3 and 1/2 days of awesome/experimental music/film etc. I caught a cold by the end and slept through the zine fair as a result, which was a bit of a bummer. but it was awesome to be in halifax again. i freaking love that place. it’s like some manner of shambhala for me, a hidden city where I can feel tranquil for a modest sum of money.

let’s face it. i don’t update this thing often enough. however, i have begun making use of twitter on a regular basis now that i’ve figured out how to phone it in. literally. i literally phone it in.

here is my twitter profile.

also, i’m doing stand-up next tuesday, May 19th, at Sweet-Ups bar in Williamsburg, for Giggles comedy night. i’ve never done stand up before so things could get really messy. come out and participate in the carnage.

here is a link to the specifics.