ovo0301

OVO 3

November 1987. 24 pages. 4.25 inches by 3.6 inches. Black and white photocopy inside envelope with stencil and stamp exterior and page from first edition of “Queer” by W. S. Burroughs (also with stencil art).

“At every turn in its thought, society will find us waiting.”

Publisher/Editor: Trevor Blake

About OVO

OVO is a magazine published on an irregular basis introducing new works to the public domain. Issues are available in electronic form free of charge, printed editions at a nominal fee. Complete information on subscriptions, back issues, limited editions, errata, books and more is available on the Internet or by sending a send a self-addressed stamped envelope. See below for address.

Inquiries

Send a self-addressed stamped envelope for contributor's guidelines. Unsolicited manuscripts not accompanied by a self-addressed stamped envelope will not be returned. Unsolicited manuscripts addressed to OVO will be considered submissions for publication unless expressly stated otherwise. Publication in OVO does not necessarily constitute an endorsement by Trevor Blake or other contributors; the opinions expressed by contributors are those of the contributors alone. All inquiries should be sent to OVO at address listed below. No one besides editor and publisher Trevor Blake speaks on behalf of OVO.

Public Domain

The person or persons who have associated their work with this document (the "Dedicators") hereby dedicate the entire copyright in the work of authorship identified below (the "Work") to the public domain. Dedicators make this dedication for the benefit of the public at large and to the detriment of the Dedicators' heirs and successors. Dedicators intend this dedication to be an overt act of relinquishment in perpetuity of all present and future rights under copyright law, whether vested or contingent, in the Work. Dedicators understand that such relinquishment of all rights includes the relinquishment of all rights to enforce (by lawsuit or otherwise) those copyrights in the Work. Dedicators recognize that, once placed in the public domain, the Work may be freely reproduced, distributed, transmitted, used, modified, built upon, or otherwise exploited by anyone for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial, and in any way, including by methods that have not yet been invented or conceived.

Contact

Trevor Blake

P. O. Box 2321

Portland OR 97208-2321 USA

http://www.ovo127.com/

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

31 May 2004

ovo0302

ovo0303

ovo0304

ovo0305

ovo0306

ovo0307

ovo0308

ovo0309

ovo0310

ovo0311

ovo0312

ovo0313

ovo0314

ovo0315

ovo0316

ovo0317

ovo0318

ovo0319

ovo0320

ovo0321

ovo0322

ovo0323

Lunalogue

Cunnichant Night Owl

You're not the first fag to spend the night here. How else do you think I got this deadly poison blood? Fags, queers lipstick on my collar, my creamy thighs, my lacy panties from late night drag queens in the park. Some sweet boy thought I was called “Ciel,” French for sky like his eyes, but it was “C. L.” for cock lick. I ain't no fag hag or missionary trying to show you how good a real woman can be. I'm some sort of ink blot, magic talking mirror. “Hey hon, it's not your fault you were born. You can stay here, relax. Nice nail polish. Nice jacket. Nice song. Oh, is that what happened when your daddy found out? Did it hurt?” Rushes of tears, outstretched arms in the dark, sobbing passion with fags, dykes, breeders, like up between my legs is the mother nature of some other planet where whips aren't erotic and the night is only moonlit and sweet. Like my womb is the proverbial one we're all trying to get back to.

Hey, I'm not trying to feed my ego. I'm not even saying I could pull off the role. I barely knew what it was until I woke up with bruises and nausea, smelling like Jack Daniels, looking at some puppy dog face that said I was supposed to fix things. I just really believe in all that corny shit about peace and harmony. I didn't know y'all would want to find it in a warm place hidden in me.

You're not the first faggot to wake up next to me. He takes a deep breath and throws back his gorgeous lion mane and says maybe we're too queer for the fags. Because somewhere safe and warm beyond the anger is a world where what we do does not reassure the oppressors that they are the “natural” ones and our white skin does not buy us money to spend on companies that keep the darkies down. And somewhere on the streets of Southern Carolina it ain't like that at all. We want to do right in a place where queers are the ones going to concentration camps and breeders are sending us, where women are raped and men are raping us. Where whips are sexy and at night doors are locked. Where you left me to write a poem for a man, to relax in the belief that men are men and women are women. Ambiguity gets more and more intolerable when you can see the death of yourself and your planet so god damned clearly on your TV, in the smog, in your heart.

Now, sometimes my stomach tightens when I see two men walking together and I yell at myself “You're wrong!” Malcolm X is somewhere in my head shouting how even the nice blue-eyed devils won't show up when the time really comes. But I know I'd stand by what I believe before I'd lose that other sweet world I keep in my womb. And they'd send me to the camps with you in a second, baby, because we all got the same deadly blood in the salty warm night, when for once something didn't ask if we were queer. So, I'm standing firm and you're back in my bed living with the terrible ambiguity of honesty, where you make my nights feel moonlit and sweet.

Annotations

OVO 3 was first published in 1987. The information on page two is accurate but it is unlikely that any of the addresses seen elsewhere in this issue are still valid.

ovo0301 – Cover. Scratched photocopy.

ovo0302 – Statement. First mention of OVO in electronic form.

ovo0303 – Introduction. This issue was made for distribution at an anarchist event in Knoxville, Tennessee in 1987. My goal was to introduce surrealism to anarchists.

ovo0304 through ovo0310 – Art Poetique. Andre Breton and Roger Callois. One of my favorite surrealist poems.

ovo0311 – More About OVO. Text files for Commodore computers announced. Among them was A Call to Heresy, a collection of contradictions and absurdities from the Christian Bible. Heresy was placed on a local BBS. In the decade that followed, Heresy appeared on a disk distributed by Palm Computers, on many Web pages, inspired the name of an Internet domain in Hong Kong, and spawned at least one Web page countering it. For many years it was the best resource of its kind online, and is still being distributed hundreds of times every year. I don't think I ever distributed any music on Commodore disk or tape, but my simple animation work on the Amiga was used on two videotapes; Arise! by the SubGenius Foundation (later distributed by Blockbuster Video) and The Popular Reality Videotape.

ovo0312 – Collage. I was around 21 in these photographs. Nearly all of the hundreds of cassette letters I recorded were made while driving, and the photograph was made while recording. The bifurcation in the lower photograph was an interesting accident achieved by being an unskilled photographer with a low quality disk camera. This was not a digital camera that used a disk, but a cheap camera that used a now obsolete format of film that was disk shaped.

ovo0313 – Cut-up text from Queer by William S. Burroughs. This issue of OVO was distributed in a sealed envelope with a spray paint stencil cover and a page from a first edition copy of Queer that was also decorated with a spray paint stencil.

ovo0314 through ovo0317 – Operation Negation by Karen Elliot. Although I received this text and Give Up Art, Save the Starving by Karen Elliot (also printed in OVO) at different times and in different states, years later I learned they were both by a particular Karen Elliot that was a friend of a friend. Neoism, the Art Strike and mail art were described by Stewart Home four years later in his book The Assault on Culture.

ovo0318 – Collage.

ovo0319 through ovo0321 – Lunalogue by Cunnichant Night Owl. Drawings by a high school friend. I first heard of what would be known as AIDS in 1981, when Judith Hooper wrote an article in OMNI about a mysterious 'decreased resistance' to disease among gay men. In 1987, when OVO 3 was published, I did not know anyone like the people described in this story. I published it because I could tell Cunnichant Night Owl was describing something important. She disappeared from my mailbox soon after. Who she was, how she found me, why she wrote me and what happened to her are all mysteries.

ovo0322 – text by Andre Breton.

ovo0323 – Back cover.

26

OVO 3

Public Domain http://www.ovo127.com/

2004-05-16T19:15:55