Difficult Birth

I was born with a black eye.

Fifty years ago today, I was born with a black eye. My first moment of life was an act of violence. My face was bruised and bloody. It took decades for the scar to go away. Apparently, the forceps were used incorrectly. When I was a kid, I think I saw on some talk show, maybe it was Oprah, that the type of birth you have determines your attitude in life. I had a difficult birth. Somehow, through early childhood, I naively trusted the world. But humanity is mostly rotten, and I was often reminded of those forceps scraping across my face.

I must have been a toddler when my sister pushed me into a wooden magazine holder and cracked open my skull. Fragments of that hospital trip still live in my memories. Maybe I have brain damage? Maybe it was the classmate who accidentally smashed her metal lunch pail into my face in the second grade and broke one of my teeth in half? When I recently got a brain scan, they said I have old dried blood in my brain. My first thought was, "How old?"

Then there's the time my grandmother tried to strangle me at Thanksgiving. "Why doesn't he just behave?" she was probably thinking. “You should have hit her,” my grandfather, her husband, said to me after. “Never let a woman put her hands on you!” From that day on, I knew I was done with family. I started thinking of myself as an orphan, a lone wolf. I wasn’t even in middle school yet. Why was everyone trying so hard to fuck with me?

Growing up, it was hardly ever my peers who came at me. It was always my parents, my friends’ parents, teachers, cops, security guards, coaches, grandparents, uncles, anyone vying for authority, anyone who wanted to control me. When I was in grade school in the 80s, I had a rat-tail haircut. A step-uncle of mine, an Air Force asshole who would go on to screw up his own step-kids, simply couldn’t handle it and constantly harassed me. Every smile, every ounce of individuality, was met with some lame attempt to humiliate me.

Sophomore year in high school, to my family’s horror, I quit all sports and grew out my hair. My mother was so disappointed. She wanted her son to be a star sports jock. I’d rather be dead. Another uncle, this time on my father’s side, harassed me endlessly about the long hair, saying I looked like Charles Manson. This didn't bother me, but it did upset my mother. Soon after, I stopped going to family get-togethers. As the only boy on my father’s side of the family, they were put off by my rejection of their version of masculinity.

The next year, I shaved all my hair off, bought some used combat boots, and started wearing a trench coat (given to me by Nova). This transformation brought my mother to tears. She would eventually help me shave my head into a mohawk, but only because she wanted the mohawk to be straight and orderly. “What will the neighbors think?” she said, with the clippers in hand. “Why are you doing this to me?” Then she’d run off to do some damage control gossip with said neighbors. Maybe stick up for me, Mom? Who cares what those bitches think?

"What will the neighbors think?”

Half a century on, I still hate adults. I can forgive the kids. Kid-on-kid hostility is to be expected and forgivable, but those adults can go fuck themselves. I know my gripes aren’t unique for a lot of Gen Xers. We are all damaged in some way, and many kids had it much, much worse.

Yeah, I guess life hasn’t been too bad. I can think of plenty of good times growing up in Portland. I remember constantly taking the 33 bus downtown to flaneur around, or to visit the all-ages City Nightclub, or the X-Ray Cafe (later the O Cafe), or to submerge myself in Powell's small press section, or stop by Reading Frenzy, or see a poetry reading at Umbra Penumbra or Cafe Lena, or maybe hang out with the gutter punks and street kids at the square. Nova, Nate (RIP), and I were lucky enough to see Nirvana and the Smashing Pumpkins before they were big. Sometimes I’d pile into a vehicle full of misfits, usually Nova’s car, or Dan’s bug, or Ali’s van, and take an outing to the beach, visiting Astoria, Seaside, or Cannon Beach. Other times, we’d walk along the now burnt down Oak Grove train trestle and hang out in that little safe room in the middle.

I remember loving to draw, but many teachers told me to stick with sports or go into the military. I got the military thing a lot from adults. Fuck them for seeing me as expendable war fodder. Fuck war and fuck the military! I remember unleashing my creativity in the off-campus offset printing class, where I wrote many nonsensical newsletters and flyers. These were mostly just me experimenting with free-writing and automatic writing. I remember one teacher questioning me about the meaning of these things I was passing out, as they tried to find some fault with them. This would ultimately become my throughway into taking words seriously, into poetry and surrealism. The following year, my friend Kris and I would put out a poetry zine of student writing, They’ll All Laugh. We found refuge in the journalism department and the poetry club. The writing teachers were much more encouraging than any of the other teachers we had, and writing has stuck with me as my primary weapon.

I wrote many nonsensical newsletters and flyers.

If I tried to mirror anyone as a high schooler, it was Jason Dean from Heathers or Andrew Schofield’s portrayal of Johnny Rotten in Sid and Nancy. That’s how I saw myself, believe it or not. I remember my friend group like they were the teens in River’s Edge, cynical weirdos stuck in a gloomy white trash suburban hell. That’s the way I remember growing up in Oak Grove and Milwaukie in the 90s. I wish I could have done more during this time, but a weight always felt like it was holding me back. It was my parents. Any thought about leaving or trying something new was met with hostility and doubt. College? To them, I was dumb and talentless. Travel? Move out of Milwaukie? Get a fresh start? It was too much money. How would I pay for it? I was stuck in Milwaukie forever. But, against their wishes, I went to college.

At community college, I took some painting classes and was surprised by the instructor's enthusiasm for the semi-abstract work I was making. He was retiring and, despite being a Bob Ross-type landscape artist, encouraged me to use abandoned canvases and materials in the art barn to do whatever I wanted. "Go crazy!" he'd say with a big smile. His replacement the next year, a social realist who made portraits that fetishized Portland's street punks, wasn't so supportive. After I got accepted into PNCA, she told me, "I wouldn't have accepted you into PNCA.”

I began to doubt myself and decided not to attend PNCA, opting instead to attend PSU. There, I studied art history and never took an art class. I loved doing research and writing papers, and took advantage of the university library to study Dada and surrealism. A modern art professor, fresh off the plane from Chicago, was very encouraging to me. "Why are you here?" she'd ask. "You should be going to school in Chicago or New York." But, as usual, my parents told me that it was impossible.

Almost bookending this time in college were two chapbooks of experimental fiction I had published by Future Tense Books, the first in 1996 and the second in 2001. I was very proud of these collections, but again, many of the adults in my life looked at these things I’d written with contempt. I remember one adult I looked up to picking up one of my chapbooks with two fingers, like it was a turd or contaminated.

College gave me much-needed structure, but after I graduated, I felt lost and struggled with my own social shortcomings. I ended friendships and mentally wrestled with my own period of emotional dysregulation, negative self-image, cynicism, and suicidal ideation. I was also becoming a real toxic asshole, like all the men in my family. When some very important people in my life cut me off, I realized I needed to change. If not, I was either going to become a sociopath or maybe even kill myself. It wasn't easy, but over the next few years, I focused on recognizing that I wasn't the center of everyone's universe. People had their own lives. I acknowledged my own destructive behaviors and worked to change them. Mostly, I tried to stay grounded. I guess a psychiatrist would call this mindfulness.

The funnest time of my life.

It was during this culturally important post-9/11 period that I started attending anarchist reading groups and, with several like-minded acquaintances, co-founded the Portland Surrealist Group. Then, like a life-saving shock to my heart, I met some kids from Louisiana, displaced by Hurricane Katrina, and became obsessed with their band, Here Comes a Big Black Cloud. I was their number one fan, and they became my closest companions. What followed was years of drunken house shows and an esoteric understanding of the true nature of rock n' roll.

The mid-aughts were the funnest time of my life, as Portland's countercultures seemed to blend. Zoobombers, grindcore kids, noisers, metal heads, bike punks, art punks, garage rockers, punk rockers, puppeteers, clowns, goths, queers, genderfuckers, riot grrrls, poets, anarchists, surrealists. I hung out with them all! Everything crossed over, and I could go to a house show six nights a week. It was cheap to live in Portland then, and it felt like I was in a state of semi-retirement (Portlandia, be damned). I also got my master's degree in publishing at the end of the aughts. It was a useless degree, but it was a fun waste of time (and money).

In 2012, after my mother died, I left Portland with a girlfriend and moved to New York. We broke up soon after, and life suddenly became like a delirious rollercoaster ride. I found myself living in San Francisco, New Orleans, and finally back in New York in 2018. It's too early to summarize this period, and I'm also getting tired of writing about myself, but along the way, I’ve met many creative outcasts and weirdos, for which I am grateful.

Entropy is real.

Some of you are probably like, "Who cares, Brandon? Why write all this shit?" Well, it's my fucking birthday, and I’m fifty fucking years old! A lot of my friends didn’t, and some won’t, make it this far. If my mother were alive and read this, she would say, "You only remember the bad times.” And, when it comes to my childhood, that’s mostly true. The thing is, I feel these are some of the moments, positive or negative, consciously or unconsciously, that made me who I am. They formed me.

What have I learned in fifty years? I would love to write something here, but everything I jot down comes off as pretentious and self-important. What I have learned recently, though, is that entropy is real. As I get older, gravity fights me at every step. The body breaks down. I realize more now than ever that sooner or later, I’m going to die. I didn’t respect this knowledge when I was younger, but I do now. Both my parents died in their mid-sixties, so I imagine I have about fifteen years left. I want to spend that time creating shit and having fun. I want to make the most of life before I drop dead.

Report #20: I'm Afraid of Americans

What a terrible, shitty year 2025 was. Let’s be clear, Trump’s inauguration was enough to contaminate a decade, not just a year. It was bewildering to see how quickly the masks came off, and the unapologetic shift toward fascism charged in. In New York, we responded by electing a socialist democrat mayor, Zorhan Mamdani, but my distrust of politicians remains. Does the election of a socialist mayor fall under the banner of revolution by any means necessary? But the awfulness doesn’t stop on the political level. I’ve seen loved ones suffer from homelessness and addiction. I’ve seen mental illness destroy friendships. And I’ve experienced my own hellish and expensive medical bills. This has been one of the gloomiest years I can remember. I would comment here about the deaths of Ozzy Osborne, who wrote one of my favorite songs of all time (“Fairies Wear Boots”), or of Bruce Loose of Flipper, but their deaths seem irrelevant when I hear about the deaths of actual acquaintances and friends. Less than a month ago, I learned of the death of an old Portland friend, Nigel, who was homeless and had occasionally requested money from me during his hard times.

In October, I was saddened to learn that my old writing mentor, Hal Sirowitz, passed away. I first contacted Hal when I was a teenager. I had been reading Rant magazine, a New York-based literary zine that often published Hal. I wanted to get a hold of one of Hal’s chapbooks, so I wrote to the editor of Rant, who passed on Hal’s information to me. This started an exchange of letters between Hal and me that would last for years. Hal read and critiqued my prose poems, recommending authors and artists he thought I’d like. He introduced me to René Magritte and surrealism, and also to his New York poet friends, including Sparrow, Steve Dalachinsky, Joe Maynard, and Ron Kolm. I wrote to them all, and it felt exciting to be connected to something so far away from me. In 1996, Hal wrote the introduction to my first chapbook, Who the Hell is Brandon Freels? I remember the excitement of seeing him read on MTV’s Spoken Word Unplugged. “I know that guy!” I told my parents. I first met him in person when he was on tour for his book, Before, During, and After. That must have been around 2003. When I visited him in Philadelphia in 2016, Parkinson’s disease had debilitated him, but he insisted on meeting me in town. The two of us explored Isaiah Zagar’s fantastic outsider piece, Magic Gardens, and later, at Hal’s home, he showed me a poem he’d written about a train conductor. It was amazing. Hal had such a way of stepping into the mind of the speaker, creating vivid, poetic internal monologues. I wish I had a copy of that poem.

In mid-July, I flew out to Portland. I had a fairly satisfactory trip and spent most of the time catching up with old friends. As always, I stayed with Nova and tried to convince him to buy Baldur’s Gate 3, as he was the one who introduced me to the originals when we were younger. I was able to meet up with my old friends Jai, Marcella, and Toby, all people I know from the Stankhouse era of my life. I was also able to catch up with Kevin Sampsell of Future Tense Books and Mike Daily, whom I met through Kevin many years ago. Mike and I had an impromptu photo session with my Instax camera, and I quite like the results. The thought of moving back to Portland still lingers in my mind sometimes. Visiting Portland in the summer will do that to you.

While in Portland, I checked out the hardcore band Dry Socket. At one point, the singer of Dry Socket yelled, “Circle pit!” On cue, all the kids started circle-pitting. I enjoyed that atmosphere much more than the weird kung fu dancing that had been going on previously. I went up to Olympia the next day and was able to catch Dry Socket again at a place called Lamplighters. I was in Olympia to find an ex-partner of mine, but was unable to. She sent me a message that she was homeless and addicted to fentanyl, and that I wouldn’t want to see her right now. That evening, while in my crappy hotel room, I noticed some fireworks going off down by Capital Lake. It turned out there was a fair happening. They had one of those old-time photobooths, and I saw all the bands that played earlier having their picture taken as cowboys. I would love to have a picture like that taken with friends. I wandered through the fairground and was hoping there was a freak show or something, but there wasn’t. I thought about my ex. She and I would have had a great time together at the fair. I imagined a parallel universe where we went there together and had our pictures taken together in cowboy hats.

Last year was the 100th anniversary of the Surrealist Movement, and New York is finally catching up. The MET had a Man Ray show based around his rayograms. I’ve never seen so many rayograms in one place. There were hundreds in the central rooms, while the surrounding rooms explored the other aspects of his career. There were some very Dada paintings he’d done, similar to Francis Picabia’s style. Many had geometrical shapes and forms, like his famous The Rope Dancer Accompanies Herself With Her Shadows, which is easy to mistake for a Duchamp. Man Ray also created a series of abstract color collages that were placed on ballbearings, allowing the viewer to spin the collages around. He called this work Revolving Doors. For the era, this kind of inventiveness would be unheard of in the art world. Who, back then, would call this art? Also included were some playful aerographs, created by experimenting with an airbrush, including one that mimicked a Braque cubist painting. Man Ray seems very good at mimicry, but he’s also keen on following new paths. Like Duchamp, he worked with glass panels and pieces that had two-sided frames. They had some of his surrealist objects in the collection and also displayed items he used in photos to create the strangeness in his rayograms.

MoMA added to the surrealist celebration with a mind-blowing Wilfredo Lam exhibit. I didn’t know much about Lam beforehand, and saw him as an understudy of Picasso’s, but Lam’s body of work was much broader and more fascinating than that. The works felt lived-in, as if they had a physical presence to them. They felt like you could walk inside of them. I didn’t expect that. His piece The Jungle is thick with bodies and limbs, and the jungle is both plant and flesh. There are little faces scattered throughout his works, as if the paintings are haunted by secret gnomes. Can the subjects of the painting see these creatures, or am I the only one? It’s hard to tell the difference between leaves and wings, and there’s a recurring little guy in a bowl. I imagine that’s the artist putting himself in the works as a passive observer. Breasts are in abundance, but are they human breasts or udders? Limbs that could both be arms or entire beings droop off larger figures, while other limbs stand up taut and erect. Some of his works appear to be formal portraits, but with the uncolonized eye, the clouds part and the world of the marvelous is revealed.

In early December, I took the Acela train to see the Dream World: Surrealism at 100 show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. There were some incredible works there, my favorite being Jacques Hérold’s sculpture The Great Invisible One, which was new to me, and sent a jolt down my spine. I’m a sucker for a good sculpture. In my head, I couldn’t help seeing this work as a good counterpart to Giacometti’s Hands Holding the Void (Invisible Object). Two other works I really enjoyed were by Max Ernst, and they, too, seemed to complement each other. The first was Chimera, which was then followed by The Triumph of Surrealism, a piece known for gracing the cover of the English version of Breton’s Surrealism and Painting. Chimera is another work that’s new to me. Here, Ernst is playing with the dancing bird form as it appears to be morphing together with a female human torso and the headstock of a musical instrument. When comparing these two works, I can’t help but see them, made fifty years apart, as part of the same evolutionary path. It was an enjoyable show, but personally, I was put off by the inclusion of Calder and Klee. I was less put off by the inclusion of surrealist-influenced works by Pollock and Rothko, but felt these inclusions could confuse someone new to surrealism. There were also some names I didn’t recognize, and I wondered if they were surrealists I was unaware of, or artists the critics and curators wanted to sell as surrealists.

Hauser & Wirth had a fantastic Picabia show that explored his later works, featuring many biomorphic forms and abstract images. Picabia considered this a third path between surrealism and abstraction, but I see them as an expansion of his Dada style into abstract forms. I often wondered: what was he sitting in front of while painting? Objects in a clear plastic bag? Some aquatic aliens trapped in an ephemeral prison? Many of Picabia’s late works really minimize the form and shape. The Di Donna Gallery had both a Dali show and a Magritte show. In the Dali show, he basically took reprints of old masters and painted on them. These were all made for Dali’s book Wines of Gala. The cover is my favorite piece as it shows a multitude of Galas. The Magritte show at Di Donna was a joint show with Les Lelanne. The Magritte works were interesting, but not outstanding. Many of the works were his see-through style. Les LeLanne had some curious works, like a hippopotamus-shaped bathtub.

Printed Matter’s Art Book Fair was in September, and it was hot as hell at MoMA PS1. What a shame that such a fascinating collection of books and zines was ruined by the evilist of heat. I was able to wander through PS1, getting away from the crowds, and came across a memorable metal flower that opened and closed hydraulically. It reminded me of something out of the video game Horizon Zero Dawn. In the basement of the building, I came across a collection of work by the Detroit Printing Co-op, which printed the first English translation of The Society of the Spectacle. They also printed The Reproduction of Everyday Life, The Wandering of Humanity, and many Fredy Perlman projects, plus copies of Radical America. It’s fascinating to see books and pamphlets I own under glass.

In October, with my friends Jaz and Ripley, I went on a small gallery run. We traversed Lower Manhattan through a multitude of galleries and found our way into a gallery I was not familiar with. The show was for Geumhyung Jeong’s robots. These were weird part-vehicle, part-mannequin objects. They looked as if they were motorized, with their thick go-cart wheels, but they couldn’t function in any way. Some of them had plastic human genitalia and guts, or arms sticking out of their wheels. We finished the run with the Ted Joans show at the Zürcher Gallery. These were collages and drawings based on The Statue of Liberty. I spoke with the curator, telling her I had met Laura Corsiglia, Ted’s lover before his death, many years ago, when I was a member of the Portland Surrealist Group. I wonder if Ted’s sexualization of The Statue of Liberty in some of the collages was related to Duchamp’s, as seen in his work Étant donnés. Some time later, on my own, I stumbled my way to the Levy Gorvy Dayan Gallery, where they had an 80s show, featuring Warhol, Basquiat, Barbara Kruger, Keith Haring, Mapplethorpe, Richard Prince, Piss Christ, and more. This show was rather unremarkable, and I wouldn’t even comment about it if I wasn’t moved by Francesco Clemente's piece Name. It showed a man’s face, and inside his ears, nose, eyes, and mouth are little heads and faces peaking out. For some reason, this fascinating painting made my skin crawl.

Lastly, I made my way to the Whitney for one of their Free Fridays. I went straight to the top of the building and found Calder’s miniature circus spread out over a giant room. Moving through the next two galleries, I came across a striking piece by Dalton Gata called I Don’t Need You To Be Warm. The picture was the first thing I saw that excited me. In it, a woman or drag queen in a fur coat and boots stands in some kind of windswept wasteland, with dark clouds and a rocky terrain behind her. Honestly, I was skeptical about visiting the Sixties Surreal show at the Whitney because I felt it would misrepresent surrealism. This is one of the reasons I went on a Free Friday. I needed to see the show for myself, but didn’t think I’d want to pay for it. The first thing I noticed was a colorful piece by Raymond Saunders, with its striking red abstraction that commands the image. Barbara Chase-Riboud’s Confessions for Myself also stood out like some dominating Darth Vader figure, or black gown meant to be worn by some otherworldly shaman. Other things I liked were the collage prints by Romare Bearden and photos by Luis Jimenez. Judith Bernstein’s Vietnam Garden was funny, but underneath it all was a darkness about war. In another room, I found a fantastic piece by Joan Brown, a cat-headed woman in a wedding gown, surrounded by fish floating in the sky! Later, I saw paintings by Karl Wirsum and Robert Smithson (yes, the Spiral Jetty guy) that impressed me. Curiously enough, there wasn’t much mention of Fluxus or Neo-Dada in this exhibit. I felt it did a decent job of showing how surrealist interests spread throughout the underground and art world, influencing many artists who may not have been aware of surrealism as a living movement.

I’ve been slowing down when it comes to punk and noise shows. I’m feeling exhausted in general. I did finally make it out to Far Rockaway for a noise show at the legendary Red Light District. And, in August, I got to see L.O.T.I.O.N. and Dollhouse at Tompkins Square for an intense and fun summer show. I was joined briefly by surrealist Wayne Kral, who frequents Tompkins. This might have been my favorite L.O.T.I.O.N. show. At some point, a musclebound Mr. T look-a-like ran in circles in the pit with a purple smoke bomb, and it made for a beautiful sight, as the kids in dirty punk clothes kicked and swung their fists in the air, and mashed into one another. I saw my friend Derek in the pit, kicking their feet and stomping like they just learned how to lift their legs. They were covered with sweat and just letting it go, and that’s kind of what I think the pits are all about, letting your body do the thinking. The second outdoor show I went to happened the day after Charlie Kirk was shot. Haram and Blue Anxxiety headlined, and during Blu Anxxiety’s set, the vocalist came out dressed as an I.C.E. cop, but it was spelled L.I.C.E. instead.

Speaking of I.C.E., as I’m writing this, the government is claiming the murder of Renee Good in Minneapolis by I.C.E. agents was justified. All one has to do is watch the video to know they are lying. I.C.E. is no longer about immigration, and maybe never was. They are a confirmed anti-civilian force. If it’s not blatantly obvious, the right wing wants us all dead. If you are a leftist, they want you dead. If you are a socialist, they want you dead. If you are queer, they want you dead. If you are a person of color, they want you dead. If you are anti-capitalist, they want you dead. If you are a liberal, they want you dead. If you are handicapped, they want you dead. If you are homeless, they want you dead. If you are the wrong religion, they want you dead. If you didn’t vote for Trump, they want you dead. If you protest, they want you dead. If you are working class, they want you dead. If you are anti-fascist, they want you dead. In their minds, human life that doesn’t serve capital is disposable. How close are we to a totalitarian government? Earlier today, I tried to share a post on Instagram of David Bowie’s video for “I’m Afraid of Americans.” Instagram blocked it. This is the world we live in. The United States no longer exists. Here’s to a shittier 2026! Stay safe.

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What I’ve been watching:

• Weapons (Zach Cregger, 2025)

• It Ends (Alexander Ullom, 2025)

• Punishment Park (Peter Watkins, 1971)

• Mister Designer (Oleg Teptsov, 1987)

• The Long Walk (Francis Lawrence, 2025)

What I’ve been listening to on the subway:

• Get Hustle - Down From the Clouds (Out Louds)

• The Misfits - Earth A.D.

• Bad Brains - Black Dots

• America - America

• The Wipers - Is This Real?

What I’ve been reading:

• Jennifer L. Shaw - Exist Elsewhere: the Life and Works of Claude Cahun

• Shane Kowalski - Are People Out There

• Evan Nicholls - Easy Tiger

• Yoko Ono - Grapefruit

• Vítězslav Nezval - A Prague Flaneur

Report #19: Beautiful World

It hasn’t been the greatest year for me. I’ve found myself losing my temper more and more often. I’ve been tired, stressed, and overworked. I can’t seem to find enough time for myself and my own projects. I’d prefer to be reading, writing, and collaging, but I seem to spend my leisure time sleeping or doing nothing. Two weeks ago, my hatred of this year peaked. While at work, I overheated and found myself spinning and vomiting. Heat exhaustion had brought on a violent case of vertigo. I spent the night lightly sedated in the emergency room. To the left of me was a man who’d been stabbed in the face. I could hear screaming and cursing all around me, like I was in an insane asylum. Voices from patients I couldn’t see shouted profanity at each other, and also at no one in particular, as the nurses sat by unaffected.

While in the ER, I had an MRI scan and found it to be somewhat entertaining. They put this cage over my face and these big headphones on my ears, then stuck me in this white machine ("I hope you're not claustrophobic!"). I can’t help but compare the hole in the machine to an orifice. Through the headphones, they played this pulsing electronic music, which was extremely beautiful. It was like a simplified Wendy Carlos or old 8-bit video game music. When they discharged me, I was still zigzagging when I walked. I was unsure how safe it was for me to leave the hospital, but they wanted me out. I made it home via Uber and spent the week in bed, tending to a vestibular migraine.

If my head felt like it was going to burst, then maybe it can be seen as a metaphor for the world at large. I’m not one to be long-winded about these things, but the continued onslaught against the Palestinians by Israel and Israel's attack on Iran make it feel like we are tiptoeing closer and closer to World War 3. When you compound this with the current Gestapo-like I.C.E. raids throughout the United States, all I expect from the future is a world of misery, destruction, and death. Why do people want this? What do ordinary people think they can gain from state violence? In the United States, the culture wars have ruined any semblance of a collective identity. Capitalism and religion have poisoned the world, and we have forgotten we are all a part of humanity.

In January, in what I see as a horrific display of the future to come, a homeless woman was mercilessly burned alive on a subway train. Several news sources detailed her life and interviewed her old high school friends. It made me think of how easy it is under capitalism to find yourself one of the undesirables. For me, this was a good reminder that homeless people are not others, they are us. They went to high school with us, worked with us, are our brothers and sisters, and mothers and fathers. They have histories and families and people who love them. As the saying goes, many of us are just a paycheck away from being homeless. This incident coincided with the discovery that one of my ex-partners is addicted to fentanyl and homeless, supposedly living in a tent. She requested some money from me through Venmo in December with S.O.S. in the comment line. Since then, I’ve heard nothing. Will she, too, be set on fire? Will she be murdered or raped? Will she be consumed by drugs? Not long after she requested the money, I had a dream. There was a knock at my door. I looked out the window and saw it was her, but seconds later, when I opened the door, she was gone.

David Lynch also passed away in January. This was not unexpected, but I wonder how much damage the Los Angeles fires had on his troubled health. I could say a lot about Lynch. I admire his unapologetic use of dream logic. My first Lynch film and one of my first ever DVDs was Blue Velvet, which I purchased sight unseen. I’ll never forget the first night I watched it with a girl, and the horny and youthful awkwardness brought about by the scene in Dorothy Vallens’ apartment where she pulls down Jeffrey Beaumont’s underwear. I also remember when Nova and I watched Lost Highway for the first time. It had just come out on VHS, and at the time, Nova worked at Blockbuster, giving us first dibs. But we hated it. It was only until I saw Mulholland Drive several years later, which I also bought on DVD sight unseen, that I understood Lost Highway. In my brain, one film unlocked the other. Now, I consider them both masterpieces and two of my favorite films. I feel like Lynch was truly the only master of art to live in my lifetime. As a surrealist, I consider him a fellow traveler, but not all surrealists feel this way, as he was ignorant of the ideas behind surrealism and its history. What always struck me was how many of his films are secretly about heartache. Most people don’t talk about this. Recurring behind the ethereal motifs is the pain caused by romantic betrayal.

Speaking of Los Angeles, in February, my friend Teysha invited me to stay with her in West Hollywood. I was able to decompress there as we mostly just hung out around the apartment and played the video game Fall Guys. I convinced Teysha to take me to the Corey Helford Gallery for a fantastic Ryan Heshka show. Heshka’s work has a sexy post-war monster movie vibe, but with strong dream-like undertones. Imagine if Tod Browning or James Whale were surrealists. My favorite piece was this one of a woman’s huge head, which almost looks like a mirror image instead of a complete head, the symmetry starting vertically at the chin. But then the bottom half of the woman is a bunch of women’s legs. This is a curious kind of poetic substitution, where the female body is reduced to just her legs. After this, Teysha convinced me to go with her to the nearby Balloon Museum. I was skeptical at first, but the Balloon Museum had many playful exhibits, like a pool filled waist-high with black balls or an almost room-sized ball with chalk tips placed around its surface, causing it to create abstract markings on the walls as it’s pushed against them.

I also saw some paintings by surrealist Jorge Camacho while in Los Angeles. The Francois Ghebaly Gallery has spaces in both New York and Los Angeles, and both spaces were showing his work. All these works of Camacho at both locations were made in the late 60s and early 70s and contain the same dusky backdrop. They remind me of towers or assemblages on shish kebabs, weird figurines of flesh and wood that tower up from the ground, many of them appearing dependent on the ground, anchored to something hidden below. One even had the corpse of a unicorn on it, pierced like one of Vlad the Impaler’s victims.

Another exhibit I went to was my annual visit to the Nameless Art Show. This was, once again, run by Art Without Intent, the same group that runs the Found Object Show. There, amongst all the nineteenth-century figurines and masks, I saw a formless piece of bronze, apparently created when the bronze was spilled and then it cooled into this weird formless shape. I love this kind of work, something completely involuntary, but still seen as art. Another recurring event for me, and of a similar vein, was the Outsider Art Fair in March. Like previous shows, the fair boasted a lot of familiar names from the self-taught world: Scottie Wilson, Minnie Evans, Howard Finster, Adolf Wolfli, Augustin Lesage, and so on. I was pleased to see some works by punk rocker Nick Blinko in the show this year. The artist I enjoyed most this year was the Irish painter Sarah Lee. She paints these self-portraits that at times resemble the simplest Leonora Carrington works. They usually involve her being seduced by a wolf or tiger. When I looked her up on the internet, I found that many of her pieces have people in masks not unlike James Ensor. I find her work devilish and erotic.

In June, I went to a small surrealist collage show at the Di Donna Gallery, a location I’d avoided before because you have to be buzzed in. There were lots of amazing pieces, but my favorite was surprisingly a collage by Dali with this big white cat surrounded by these nymphs. The whiskers were dripping wine, and Dali had painted goblets in the nymphs’ hands, catching the wine. There were a lot of familiar names at this show: Aragon, Breton, Ernst, Eluard, Styrsky, but there was a surprising amount of work by Georges Hugnet, and someone new to me, an artist named Max Bucaille.

A few weeks later, I had the pleasure of attending the closing event for Joe Coleman’s Carnival show at the Jeffrey Deitch Gallery. This was a wondrous collection of works curated by Coleman on various themes related to the sideshow. The entire room was filled with costumed mannequins that reminded me of the mannequins from the International Surrealism Exhibition in Paris in 1938. There were also paintings of sword swallowers and clowns, sculptures of fortune tellers and oddities like Johnny Eck, a merry-go-round with beaded creatures on it, a miniature Coney Island, and two large wood figurines in coffins. At the closing event, I saw a fun performance by burlesque artist Dirty Martini. She was wearing an outfit where her left arm was a swan. It was a unique blend of the striptease with ventriloquism. My favorite piece on display was Narcissister’s automaton sculpture. It was a female figure leaning backward. Beneath her were used bicycle parts that, when the crank was turned, caused the head to move up and down. I’m always a sucker for automata!

I attended two events at Pioneer Works this year. The first was a conversation between Eileen Myles and Ariana Reines. Both Myles and Reines discussed the coincidental birthdays and death dates of their parents and current events. They also discussed how untraditional and anti-story Reines’ new book, A Wave of Blood, is. They pushed the idea that storytelling is overdone and that there needs to be something more. It’s too easy to go from point A to point B, and maybe they feel that betrays the poetics. I remember Reines said, “Writing is like bleeding,” and this seems to be a theme for the book: menstruation, bloodletting, cutting.

The second event was the opening night of the Ende Tymes Festival, featuring a top-tier collection of the best of noise and experimental music. Charmaine Lee had some “feedback gun” that looked like a megaphone. She pointed it at the crowd, and it gave off this loud, low tone. The droning sound was so loud that it shook the dust off the pipes on the ceiling, causing particles of dust to slowly drift down on everyone. I could feel the vibration in my body. The best part was when she pointed the megaphone at her face and screamed into it. Aaron Dilloway was the headliner and was impressive as always. He looked like a substitute teacher, dressed in a button-up shirt and slacks. The combover balding head didn’t hurt, either, but his biker boots gave his secret away. Dilloway has an amazing way of using spasms in his work. At one point, he had two small bows. He put one in his mouth and used the other to strum it. He did this violently, shaking about, like the victim of some evil, invisible dentist. His live acts are like a cross between a Dadaist performance and Reagan’s bedroom antics from The Exorcist.

Most of the notable punk shows I went to over the past six months were held outside or in secret locations. I saw Dollhouse and Melissa at the old punk headquarters in Chinatown. On Friday the 13th, I saw Olympia’s Physique in the now-famous derelict train tunnel. Playing with them was an anarcho-punk band called Kaleidoscope, which I loved. Kaleidoscope is not a new band, but this was my first time catching them. The vocalist had a pre-Rollins Black Flag feel to his voice, a sort of Southern California snarl, but the guitars were noisy, heavy, and almost grunge-like. I guess these guys are also members of Tower 7. I was able to catch an old anarcho-punk band, Detestation, play in the rain at Maria Hernandez Park. The members of Detestation looked familiar to me, and that’s because I later discovered several of them are actually from Portland! Speaking of Portland, I caught two more Portland bands these last few months: pronk (which I guess means “progressive punk”) band Nasalrod opened for Alice Donut at the Brooklyn Monarch and the DIY punk band The Taxpayers, who I hadn’t seen since they played the Sea Shanty on Russet Street over fifteen years ago, headlined at the Meadows.

The musical highlight of the past six months, though, was seeing Devo live at the Brooklyn Paramount. Devo had a flashy multimedia introduction and three outfit changes that spanned their history. Seeing them perform “Peek-A-Boo,” I couldn’t help but think of what a weird song it is, almost like a children’s song. But it’s great live! Once they got to "Uncontrollable Urge" and "Mongoloid" I was in pure heaven. They finished with "Gut Feeling" and a version of "Beautiful World" where Mark Mothersbaugh dressed as Booji Boy and sang in the Booji Boy voice. During "Beautiful World,” Booji Boy talked about how, when they first came to New York, William Burroughs pinched his ass. Looking around the crowd, I wasn’t sure if anyone in the audience even knew who William Burroughs was.

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What I’ve been watching:

• Gandahar (Rene Laloux, 1987)

• She is Conann (Bertrand Mandico, 2023)

• The Vourdalak (Adrien Beau, 2023)

• A Boxer’s Omen (Kuei Chih-Hung, 1983)

• Bring Her Back (Danny and Michael Philippou, 2025)

What I’ve been listening to on the subway:

• VS. - Leather Complex

• Kaleidoscope - Decolonization

• Devo - Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!

• Lana Del Rabies - Shadow World

• Prince - Purple Rain

What I’ve been reading:

• Desmond Morris - 101 Surrealists

• Ariana Reines - Wave of Blood

• Ariana Reines - The Rose

• Joseph Cornell - Dreams

• Michael Richardson, ed. - The Dedalus Book of Surrealism: The Identity of Things

Publishing note:

• An old text of mine from Black Giraffe #2, “Base Poetics,” was translated and published in the thirteenth issue of Natan Schäfer and Jasmina Schmidt’s Brazilian publication Caça E Pesca.

Report #18: Eve of Destruction

It’s hard to recap the last seven months. Genocide rages on as Israel, with the aid of the United States, attempts to stomp the Palestinians out of existence. It’s daunting that anyone I’m associated with could side with Israel as its murderous, racist militarism embodies everything I hate about nationalism and patriotism. But I know there are a few of you out there, confused by your brainwashed allegiances. In other world events, the US people elected the murder-suicide vibe of Trump over the straight-up homicide of Harris. I guess they want this country to go out with a bang. But neither was really an option for they’re both part of the death cult called capitalism. Everything feels as unstable and hopeless as ever, almost as if life could crumble beneath our feet at any moment. It feels like the culture wars have eclipsed any bit of class consciousness left. The rich have won. This last month we saw a vigilante who murdered a homeless man go free, while a vigilante who murdered a CEO get labeled a terrorist. Billions of bootlickers rejoiced!

Amongst all this dreadfulness, I had to have a colonoscopy and endoscopy in the fall. My fear of the medical bill was more terrifying than the actual experience of having someone stick a camera down your throat and up your ass. Luckily, all is good and my insurance covered the bill without question. Meanwhile, my friend Sofie, who lives in North Carolina, had to deal with the wrath of Hurricane Helene. Her and her family had to be evacuated from their new home in Burnsville. They witnessed the true power of the natural world. Several of their neighbors were killed in horrific ways, while others had their properties wiped out. I saw a video of a road in Burnsville that was completely uprooted, hammered by the water into a mess of asphalt slabs that would be hard to walk over, let alone drive. We couldn’t contact Sofie for a number of days, causing a lot of worry from friends and family around the country, but she and her family ended up being safe, despite their trials and tribulations.

Of the positive highlights of this year, the biggest was seeing Penny Rimbaud and Gee Vaucher from Crass. Vaucher had an exhibit at the White Columns Gallery in the West Village. There was an entire room dedicated to Crass paraphernalia, featuring an overwhelming amount of photos, fliers, and posters. Many of these items were featured in the new book Crass: A Pictorial History. The other room contained Gee’s more recent creations, all of which contain a similar subversive theme to them, such as one painting of ducks in flight. If you looked closely you’d see that a few of those ducks were actually fighter jets. My housemate Aaron and I went to see Penny and Gee speak at the American Film Archives for a showing of their Crass film Semi-Detached. We arrived early, and got there at the same time as Penny and Gee. We met them at the door and Aaron got Penny’s autograph. During the question and answer, both Penny and Gee spoke about looking inward and finding that the revolution also involves an inner transformation. They spoke of being content with what you can do on your own, but don’t expect revolution without the help of others. You can’t do it on your own. Afterward, I got Penny to sign my copy of The Diamond Signature. He and I spoke briefly about Walt Whitman. His smile was so genuine. One of the few times I’d gone out of my way to shake someone’s hand.

In late May I read a news article about the band Jane’s Addiction unearthing from storage the papier-mâché sculpture they used for their Ritual de lo Habitual album cover. Growing up, I was a huge fan of Jane’s Addiction, especially their movie Gift, which, along with the sculpture, was made by Perry Ferrell’s then-girlfriend Casey Niccoli. I loved Niccoli’s aesthetic, and after she disappeared, so did my love for the band. I’d google her name every so often to see if she was working on any new projects. For decades I found nothing. I wondered where she was and if she’d forgotten who she was. Was she making art? Was she alive? Not long after the article about her sculpture being re-discovered, I was pleased to read a piece she wrote for Huffington Post about being erased from the band’s history. I also learned she’s making collages and posting them on Instagram. Many of Niccoli’s new collages play with and repurpose religious iconography, giving them a hermetic and alchemical feel. Their symmetry and balance resemble a sort of mandala or ritual diagram. There’s no piety in these pieces, but there is a sense of a personal journey, a map hidden behind the veil of images.

In terms of gallery visits, on the suggestion of one of my fellow surrealists, I went to the Gerome Kamrowski show at the Lincoln Glenn Gallery. I was unfamiliar with Kamrowski, but I found his work pretty amazing. Kamrowski was an American painter who collaborated with Andre Breton on VVV and was part of the abstract expressionism and surrealism crossover in New York during the 1950s. His paintings often resemble a kind of X-ray vision, like seeing what is unseen to the basic eye or what happens when you put your They Live glasses on underwater. It’s like looking through a lens and seeing another world hidden behind your own.

My gallery visits also took me to see a Dorothea Tanning show and a Ted Joans show. The Tanning show consisted of her late collage work. She messed with decalcomania in some parts, taking ink blots and cutting them into different shapes. In others, she messed with Xeroxed images, like photocopies of her hands. They also had some paintings of hers with these weird cat motifs where the cat’s paws replaced the cat’s head. At the Ted Joans show there were a lot of drawings on paper bags. I was thinking about this and how often Joans seems to be taking the everyday things he has around him and making simple art that feels very community-based. I guess Kembra Pfahler would call this tendency availabism.

Another memorable gallery visit was the infamous “bathroom stalls” show at the Lisson Gallery. This was Hugh Hayden’s Hughmans show. There were an odd mix of artifacts inside those stalls. Pinnochio dolls, giant wooden skeletons with brooms and mops for feet, and brass instruments made to look like African masks. There was a recurring theme here with the phallic gun. One sculpture had a side cut of a gun that showed its interior not to be metal but flesh, notably having the interior organs of the male genitals. This was followed by a black abdomen and pelvis with a gun for a penis. It reminded me of the “use your prick like a gun” line in Crass’s song “Big Man, Big M.A.N.” Personally, I think if you have a chance to put a dick or a gun in a piece of art, you should. Hayden even took the big dick metaphor further by using the Empire State Building to represent an erect and then a flaccid penis.

One local discovery of the past year was these anonymous abstract paintings at the Greenpoint Avenue Station. I found these mysterious works one day while riding the G train but there was almost nothing about them online, just other people asking the same questions I was. The paintings are done right where advertisements would normally be and seem to change over time. Another discovery was the performance artist Sweaty Eddie. I discovered Eddie at a Necropolis drag event. Sweaty Eddie is hard to classify, but I think they’re considered a drag king. At the performance I attended, they dressed as the Eggman from Pink Flamingos. One arm was fake, a prothetic. In the performance, they acted like they swallowed an egg, and then removed their shirt to expose a prothetic chest where you could see the egg move down through their stomach, to their crotch area. There they unzipped their fly and began shooting eggs out of their crotch. It was hilarious and reminded me of when Narcissister dropped eggs from her pussy.

Some other performances I attended included seeing Martin Rev of Suicide at TV Eye. He basically played loops from familiar records, like disco and flamingo, and then had a distorted keyboard he banged on with his fists, creating some kind of rhythm over the loops. It was borderline noise but hilarious and fun. His vocals were often just mumbles. He seemed to be enjoying the whole experience. Then there was Narcissister’s large performance at Pioneer Works, a sort of play built around a Rube Goldberg machine, where three women in masks appear lost in the funhouse at night.

On the punk and noise scene, I saw Jon Benét Bataille perform in which Gyna Bootleg wrapped her naked self in barbed wire. Dollhouse performed in an abandoned building in Manhattan. The basement was so hot and sweaty that perspiration was dripping from the ceiling. I saw Hank Wood and the Hammerheads for the first time at Market Hotel. Reading up on the band, whose lineage crosses a history of Brooklyn punk bands, made me angry I left New York in 2013. There are a lot of bands I missed that I would have loved. Especially a band called Dawn of Humans, who I have been listening to nonstop all winter. Sadly, Dawn of Humans no longer exist.

Also this year, I became fascinated with the concept of "death stairs,” which I discovered through a Facebook group called Death Stairs. The term generally refers to dangerous stairs, stairs that seem impossible to climb, or are haunting in some way. My attraction to the group seems to be drawn from my memory of these stairs in dreams. I have recurring dreams of staircases that appear damaged and unstable, disintegrating beneath me, stuffed in tight tower-like stairwells, or hanging over some dark void. They are often in ruinous apartments or buildings that feel on the verge of collapse. Do you also dream of death stairs?

Speaking of dreams, I’ve left my most personal note for last. In December I finally finished my ebook Living In My Head: Selected Dreams, 2008-2022. This collects over a decade’s worth of dreams I collected from social media posts, diary entries, notebooks, emails, and the like. Obviously, dreams are a large part of my life, and it was fun to read over these and see the patterns. My parents were reoccurring characters in my dreams as was the house I grew up in. I hadn’t even noticed how often they appeared until I put the first draft of the book together. For better or worse, my parents live on in my dreams! The book is free to download on my website.

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What I’ve been listening to on the subway:

• Dawn of Humans - Slurping At The Cosmos Spine

• Rudimentary Peni - Rudimentary Peni

• Alan Vega - Mutator

• Pharmakon - Maggot Mass

• Public Trust - Pagan Day Parade

What I’ve been reading:

• Laura Davis-Chanin and Liz Lamere - Infinite Dreams: The Life of Alan Vega

• Philippa Snow - Which As You Know Means Violence

• Blake Butler - Molly

• Molly Brodak - A Little Middle of the Night

• Rene Ricard - Love Poems

What I’ve been watching:

• Daaaaaalí! (Quentin Dupieux, 2023)

• Oddity (Damian McCarthy, 2024)

• The Substance (Coraline Fargeat, 2024)

• Strange Darling (J.T. Mollner, 2023)

• Make Me A Pizza (Talia Shea Levin, 2024)

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Report #17: Seeing Is Believing

As I’m writing this protesters at campuses across the country are being forcibly removed by the US government. My Instagram feed is filled with images of protesters being thrown down stairs and attacked by pro-Israel thugs. There are videos from Gaza on social media of dead children whose limbs and heads have been blown off and of Palestinian civilians being assassinated by Israeli soldiers. Meanwhile, our government puts Israel over the voices and needs of its people. It’s not a big revelation for me to say that Trump and Biden are just two raving heads on the same insidious monster. None of this is any surprise. I’m not much of a political writer, but I wanted to get this down for the record.

Other than these international horrors, the past eight months have been less active than I’d hoped. On October 1st, I saw Goblin perform the score to Demons at a screening of the movie. Goblin is Claudio Simonetti’s band that has scored many of Dario Argento’s films and other Italian giallos. This was a sit-down event, and I was surprised to discover, when speaking to the person next to me, that he was following the band around on their US tour. Later that month, I took a chance and saw Gwar perform in Manhattan. I’m not a huge fan of Gwar, but I enjoy their vile humor and overwrought, cartoonish costumes. I understood that Gwar relied heavily on fake blood in their set, but I had no idea just how drenched I’d get. Coming out of the show, the shoulders of my green coat and my exposed skin had been stained purple. The coat took several washings to clean, and my gray hairs remained pink weeks after.

For me, nothing is more important than keeping an eye on the local punk and noise scenes. Wonderful things can be seen when you do. One notable recent show was seeing punk band Crazy Spirit reunited at a secret location in Brooklyn. The spot was just a dead end street near some train tracks. I'm not good at counting, but someone said over a thousand punks showed up. When I first moved to New York, Crazy Spirit was all the rage. But because of all the personal chaos involved with that experience, I was never able to see them. Luckily, they temporarily reunited and I was able to catch them in this unique situation. I missed a similar outdoor show where Dollhouse played on the Williamsburg Bridge. One thing I love about New York is all the outdoor shows. Who needs a venue when you can just set up and play anywhere?

I also saw Dreamcrusher at the Market Hotel. I’d seen Dreamcrusher several times before, and while I found them good, they never hit me like this set. At this performance, they had a partner, a very hip-hop guy countering Dreamcrusher’s afro-gothism. There was a strobing white light that mixed with the fog machine, creating a truly otherworldly feel. Dreamcrusher invited all the people they “fuck with” on stage, and a bunch of their friends came on stage and danced around behind Dreamcrusher. I could only see people’s silhouettes on stage as they all moved and gyrated. It reminded me of the scene in The Last Temptation of Christ when Jesus meets John the Baptist. Dreamcrusher thrashed their dreads around on stage, and at one point, reached down from the stage and put their hand on my shoulder, gripping my hoody tight and tugging me around to the rhythm.

When it comes to the visual arts, the New Museum had a fantastic Judy Chicago show. I’m not a big fan of her, but I think she does some things that are of extreme value. With that being said, my favorite part of this show was her Atmospheres series, where she uses colored smoke and human bodies to create “smoke sculptures.” This is something I would have loved to have seen in person. I also really enjoyed Chicago's photography. Personally, I didn't know she made use of photography. Even weirder, I'd seen some of her photographs on Tumblr! There is a famous picture of a man with a gun in his mouth that I didn’t know was her’s. Another photo I got a kick out of had a gun pointed at a person's asshole. My problem with Chicago is that she seems to be coming from a dated feminist view. “Would the world be different if it was ruled by women?” she asks. No, it would be the same. The problem is power, not people. As part of the Chicago exhibit, there was a floor of works by female artists that influenced her. Many of these were surrealist and dadaist artists: Suzanne Duchamp, Ithell Colquhoun, Unica Zurn, Varo, Carrington, Meret Oppenheim, Hannah Hoch, Leonor Fini, Dorothea Tanning, Kahlo, Claude Cahun, Dora Maar! An exceptional collection to see.

The Brooklyn Museum isn’t one of my favorite museums, but it did host Copy Machine Manifestos, a show devoted to zines made by artists. The bulk of these zines came from mail artists, punk artists, and queer artists. The mail art room had works by Monte Cazzaza, Vile Magazine, Genesis P-Orridge, and the Bay Area Dadaists, while the punk room had works by Nick Zedd, Richard Kern, David Wojnarowicz, Cassandra Stark, Raymond Pettibon, and so on. It was a true treasure trove. I found it curious to see Kern’s use of word collage in many of his pieces. I remember a friend of mine recently stating that true collage artists look down on this practice of overlaying text on images. Well, I think it’s punk as fuck. My biggest thrill was seeing a copy of Cassandra Stark Mele’s Your World, Not Mine, the text of which was included in Ron Sakolsky’s 2002 anthology Surrealist Subversions. I wonder where she is now and if she still considers herself a surrealist.

I also made it to Manhattan for a few gallery visits. The first was Oda Jaune’s show Miss Understand at the Templon Gallery. I first saw her work at the Armory Show, a nude with a gorilla mask. I like how she condenses opposing realities in such a physical and grotesque manner like having a Barbie doll torso for the head of an old nude woman, or a nude selfie that shows the iPhone as part of the body. There was even some of puppies with human infant legs, but the bodies were turned the wrong way. It’s all wonderful and devious in a body horror sort of way. Another show I went to was centered around surrealist Lee Miller (who was subsequently name-dropped in Alex Garland’s new film Civil War). The show wasn’t just of Miller’s work, but also included works inspired by her, like Roland Penrose’s Seeing is Believing. After visiting a disappointing Francesca Woodman show, I stumbled upon a show of Karl Wirsum’s work, which borders on the cartoonish, but also has a symmetry that evokes something beyond psychedelic. Every piece seemed like it was chaotically trembling.

Two events I went to put on by Art Without Intent, were the Nameless Art Show and the annual Found Object Show. The shows had a lot of old objects that take you back in history. Many of the items appear abstract and odd because today they have no function. At the Found Object Show, I saw one of Dr. Hietrick’s hypnosis discs. It reminded me of Duchamp’s piece Rotary Demisphere at MOMA.

In March I visited my second Outsider Art Fair. They had the usual subjects: Adolf Wolfi, Mr. Imagination, Henry Darger, Howard Finster, Ionel Talpazon, and Augustin Lesage. Lesage was particularly impressive in this show. Of the new faces, Lance Letscher and June Gutman caught my eye. Letscher is a collage artist. I guess there’s a documentary about him but I haven’t been able to find it streaming anywhere. June makes small little paintings that have strange figures and weird diagrams, with women milking their breasts and directional arrows running down their necks and chests. Wesley Anderegg’s head spinner proved memorable as well, if not because of the eyes of the figure, which are the most human looking things on the sculpture. Perhaps the most amorphous works of the show were Cindy Gosselin’s Barbie bundles. They seem so ridiculous. Grosselin, who has one dead eye, seems to be obsessed with wrapping objects in yarn. There’s almost a drowning feeling to them like the objects are being erased by the suffocating and caccooning yarn.

In addition to seeing all this art and music, I spent a great deal of time revisiting the Aeon Flux cartoon series. Like most, I first encountered this as a teenager in the early 90s on MTV. I wasn't too into it then and found it hard to judge on those tiny violent episodes alone. It wasn't until I bought the entire collection in a fit of nostalgia that I realized there were longer episodes, and that the show evolved from a pointless assassin exercise into a strange sci-fi world. Cloning, amputees, super tongues, angel-like bird creatures in captivity, people with hands for feet, coffins with parachutes, magic glowing cats with three eyes, a giant baby with fangs, a robotic stick skeleton that's inserted through the belly, and so on. The marvelous is here! In this world, it's hard to make out if our heroine Aeon, and her antagonist Trevor are enemies or lovers. There is literally a wall between them, a boundary, that she continually transgresses to interrupt his harebrained schemes. Trevor is less of a ruler to his side of the world than a mad scientist. But his actions are all driven by his libido. Sex is always there, hidden in the background, or seen symbolically. Everything is a metaphor for sex, even surgery, beating Cronenberg's Crimes of the Future by a good thirty years.

In April I took a trip to see my friend Sofie and her family in Wilmington, North Carolina. I thought I’d find myself rather bored in Wilmington, but as we passed an apartment building I realized, from its strange archway, that it was the building David Lynch used in Blue Velvet for Dorothy Vallens’ apartment. I spent much of my time in Wilmington hunting down the other Blue Velvet sites. One curious thing about Wilmington is that it was the home of artist Minnie Evans, whose work I’d seen at various outsider artist events. At the Airlie Gardens, where she worked for many years as the gatekeeper, they had a bottle chapel she'd constructed, while at the Cameron Art Museum, they had a replica of the gatehouse where she would do her paintings. One of the other highlight of my time in Wilmington was the Museum of the Bizarre. It had two items that I appreciated. The first was Aleister Crowley’s doorbell, which almost sounds like a work of conceptual art. The second was an authentic funerary cooling board. I’d heard about cooling boards in old blues songs, like Son House’s “Death Letter,” but had no idea what they actually looked like.

Death is a regular topic these days, especially as our idols grow older and military violence rages on. This time death came for Gary Floyd of the punk band The Dicks. I’ve been listening to The Dicks special brand of queer blues punk for many decades now. When I lived in San Francisco I had the pleasure of seeing Floyd do a live set at the SF Eagle, and was able to buy his book Please Bee Nice from him. He seemed so shy and humble. I regret being born too late to see Floyd in full drag singing songs about hating the police or fist-fighting the Klan. This one hurt.

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What I’ve been watching:

• Savage Messiah (Ken Russell, 1972)

• Fauve (Jérémy Comte, 2018)

• The Swimmer (Frank Perry, 1968)

• Singapore Sling (Nikos Nikolaidis, 1990)

• The Timekeepers of Eternity (Aristotelis Maragkos, 2021)

What I’ve been reading:

• Thurston Moore - Sonic Life

• Mark Polizzotti - Why Surrealism Matters

• Phillipa Snow - Which As You Know Means Violence

• Ronnie Burk - SkyBoat

• Benjamin Peret - Four Years After the Dog

What I’ve been listening to on the subway:

• Crazy Spirit - Demo

• Babes in Toyland - Spanking Machine

• Fang - Landshark

• Crass - Peel Session

• The Dicks - Kill from the Heart