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.

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

Report #15: She's Lost Control

It’s been a decade since I left New York that first time. Escaping an abusive partner, I found myself in the Bay. I remember how disorienting it was. Suddenly, I was standing on a BART platform in Oakland. I remember the heat. I remember asking myself what the fuck I was doing there. I couldn’t believe how my life had collapsed so fast. It took me time to accept what should have been obvious: I was a victim of domestic violence. Being punched in the face while asleep should have been a red flag, but we are repeatedly told these things don’t happen to men. The depression was heavy, like a claw digging into the back of my skull. In some ways, returning to New York has been cathartic. I feel like I’ve regained control over my life.

Despite the gloomy anniversary, positive things have happened over the past six months. In November, I went to the Brant Foundation to see Jordan Wolfson’s Female Figure. It’s an automatic woman, a robot, done up like a stripper and covered in bruises. She’s wearing a half-mask that makes her look like an old hag. Her body is attached to a mirrored wall with a chrome rod that allows her to move and dance. I guess this automaton is an example of teledildonics. This work seems to coincide well with the ongoing discussions about artificial intelligence in the arts. My big question about artificial intelligence doesn’t revolve around the legitimacy of the art made. My question is why can’t we create A.I. that does the work we hate? Shouldn’t A.I. be freeing us to make art, not doing the creating itself? I’m reminded of Richard Brautigan’s poem, “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace,” where the coming of robots lets humans return to nature. Unfortunately, as much as I love Brautigan’s vision, the powers that be would never let this release from servitude become a reality.

David Lynch had two shows in New York recently. One was at the Pace Gallery and another at the Sperone Westwater Gallery. Lynch used a lot of recurring motifs in these works: planes, car crashes, physical conflict, and weird black balloons. They reminded me of those old séance photos where ectoplasm is floating in the air. But these are done in cartoon form with a crime scene feel. Another show I went to was Leonor Fini’s at Kasmin Gallery. It was a tiny show. I remember seeing drawings of hangings and in another, there was a deer fucking a woman. What I greatly enjoyed was her masks. They appeared made from wood and other natural elements. In another room at Kasmin, I found a piece by Diana Al-Hadid called The Long Defeat. It was as if dripping paint was turned upside down and dried into a sculptural form, almost like stalagmites, or an alien ice castle in a fantasy movie.

Narcissister was in a group show at the Margot Samel Gallery. It was a quick stop for me. They had three of her masks, but one was cracked. They also had some of her collages, which I hadn’t seen in person until this show. There is one I found very clever where she uses Cezanne’s The Large Bathers and mixes woman from porn magazines within Cezanne’s bathers. The Found Art Show made its annual return in March. It was a much larger show this time, and there was a cover charge. I was disappointed to see price tags on many of the pieces, but I tried to enjoy the experience nonetheless. They had a collection of weird stuffed animals, but I also noticed a running theme of masks, or mask-like objects, throughout the different vendors. Most of the masks were removed from their original purpose, and it was fun to wonder just what many of them were originally used for.

And, of course, I made several trips to the Museum of Modern Art. I revisited the Meret Oppenheim show, and then returned to see the Georgia O’Keefe show. I’m not a fan of O’Keefe’s, but these early works were curious. There was one I liked that represented a migraine headache. It almost looked like an abstracted version of Munch’s Scream without the figure. On the top floor was a show dedicated to video art, with works by Sandra Mujinga and Sondra Perry as standouts. There were some new works on the lower floors as well: Yoko Ono’s hilarious film Bottoms was playing, and there was a collection of Toyen prints on display. One of the reasons I returned to MoMA so soon was to see John Giorno’s Dial-A-Poem exhibit. While the show was just a number of black telephones, each that played one of the archival recordings, I was kind of giddy seeing it. I dialed the number a few times on the black phones, then tried the number on my iPhone. The number still worked!

In terms of film, I went to Spectacle Theatre to see a collection of Carolee Schneemann’s short films. I was somewhat disappointed by Schneemann’s cinematic works, but I did enjoy one film where she had a group of women inside a water-filled cave reenacting her Internal Scroll piece. I went to The Bunker to catch Jean-Jacques Lebel’s film Sun Love, an event hosted by the Giorno Foundation. Label’s film felt like a voyeuristic step into the world of a 60s sex cult. There is a band playing in one scene, but the music they’re playing is replaced by a sort of proto-noise piece, creating a disembodied quality to the film. I also finally got to see Beth B’s notorious film Black Box at Metrograph. The story is simple but impactful: a beautiful man is abducted. A sort of dominatrix, played by Lydia Lunch, abuses him while he’s naked. She berates him and puts him in a black box. The box has a silver lining to it, and there’s a flashing light. Using some sound equipment, Lunch pumps weird noises and squeals into the box, which causes the naked blonde man to squirm and twist. The film is like a masochistic fantasy, a type of torture porn, that, like Lebel’s film, anticipates noise music.

At the beginning of the year I watched the controversial Skinamarink, one of the most hated films in recent memory. I enjoyed how untraditional this film was. We almost never see a human face, just two shots of the kids with their faces obscured. There’s little to no soundtrack, no musical queues, no musical tension, just the television cartoon noises bleeding through the kid’s quiet whispers. I think these two factors are why people have a hard time watching the film: the lack of faces and the lack of sound. It’s like when people say they can’t stand silent films. I guess this type of filmmaking is referred to as analog horror and the director, Kyle Edward Ball, has a youtube channel devoted to this kind of stuff called Bitesized Nightmares. On the channel he asks people to submit their dreams and then he attempts to illustrate them through short abstract films.

Musically, I only had a few highlights this time around. My friend from Portland, Rex Marshall, opened for Modest Mouse in Manhattan at Terminal 5. Rex’s quasi-lounge persona Mattress can be a challenge for a rock-focused crowd, but I love his one-man band confidence. I was also able to see the legendary Swedish noise rock band Brainbombs twice, once at Saint Vitus and another time at TV Eye. Admittedly, Brainbombs were not up to par, as it was hard to hear the vocalist. He seemed kind of fragile and terrified. He had a binder with his lyrics in it, and at the TV Eye show, a kid stole it from him. But the old man gave chase, and the kid gave it back. The kid apologized and the old dude gave the kid the set list in exchange. Brainbombs rarely play, so just seeing them was amazing. But I did see Skinny Puppy on their final tour and they sounded perfect. When Ogre came onto the stage, he was wearing a black frilly cloak that covered his entire face except for his mouth. His head looked very big underneath the cloak, like the Elephant Man, but that’s because, when he removed the cloak, he had the head of an alien. My favorite part was when they performed “Assimilate” and the crowd sang along.

In early April I took a trip to Texas. I started in San Antonio, because I wanted to go to the Natural Bridge Caverns. The Caverns are an expensive Uber drive outside of San Antonio, but worth the price. I went through both caverns, and it felt like I was on a different planet. It’s incredible how deep these caves can go into the ground. Even more shocking is that there might be a cavern underneath the ground where you’re standing right now! The rooms were as big as football fields, and some of the stalagmites towered upward like mythical ghosts. The next day, after the trip to the cave, I went to the San Antonio Museum of Art, which wasn’t as impressive. One area it did excel was its Latin America collection, which had a lot of popular and modern works of art, and strange miniatures, many unlike anything I’d ever seen in another museum. And I really loved this cat mask.

After a few days in San Antonio, I went to Austin. The first place I visited was the Museum of the Weird. They had a lot of strange artifacts, but much of it was a rehashing of Leonard Nimoy’s In Search of… TV series. They did have a fascinating painting of a Pancho Villa centaur with an explosion behind him. Following this, I went down to the Congress Avenue Bridge to see the bats come out at dust. They did come out, but they looked more like a swarm of insects than the flock they’re advertised as. The weather in Austin turn rather intolerable the next day. Heavy rains came down and I felt trapped at the rather shitty hostel I was staying at. I was rather pissed about all this, but braved the rain to visit the Blanton Museum of Art, home of Ellsworth Kelly’s Austin chapel. There are some wonderful little pieces by Leonora Carrington, Enrico Donati, and Alice Rahon, at the Blanton. The highlight though was Brazilian Cildo Meirceles’s Missions (How to Build Cathedrals). In a dark room, there is a square of pennies on the floor and an upper portion, like a canopy, covered with bones. A light shines through the bones. From the canopy hangs black see-through drapes. In the middle of the square of pennies is a tower of pennies that reaches up to the bones.

That evening it was still raining, and my friend Bad Joel picked me up at the hostel. We drove around Austin getting drunk. Joel would tell me things about Austin’s history, and I wasn’t sure if he was making shit up or if he was telling me the truth. It didn’t matter either way. We went to a bar that my friend Kitty worked at and got even drunker. I know both Joel and Kitty from the old Cook Street days in Portland.

My final day in Austin, the weather cleared up and I took the bus to the Cathedral of Junk. I was shocked to learn there are three stories to this tower of trash. I guess the guy, Vince Hannemann, is actually a concrete layer. The walls are filled with barbie dolls, toys, and just about anything he could find. In the back there’s a pyramid structure that acts as a tomb for his deceased cat. He said many of the things incorporated were simply dumped on his lawn, like an old vending machine. My favorite parts were obviously the mannequins. One had a unicorn horn, while another had shells on her breasts. But there was also a fantastic pillar of toy horses. The mirrors and glass in the walls make a maze of it all. I was truly impressed with just how tall and sturdy this thing was.

At the end of April, I went to the second day of the Ende Tymes Festival. The second to last performer was Alessandra Zerbinati. When she was setting up I noticed she had some makeshift boxcutters. She set them down next to two My Little Pony dolls. She had something wrapped to her ankle. It reminded me of an ankle bracelet they use for people on house arrest, but I think it was just something to create noise with. She had these long blonde dreads and, after she disrobed, she began dancing around wildly in a blue light. The performance was almost butoh-like. Then she took one of the razors and began cutting herself. She cut her leg rapidly and viciously. Then she lied down on the ground and began cutting her stomach while placing a contact mic in her vagina. This was followed by her sticking her tongue out and slicing it with the razor. Her blood was all over her body, and she smeared it over her face. Alessandra came down from the stage and into the crowd, covered in blood, and started confronting the audience. She looked in people’s faces and many people hid or looked away. I was the last person in the front row, and when she got to me, we looked into each other’s eyes. Then, as if we had known each other for our entire lives, we embraced, hugging each other for what seemed like hours. When we finally let go, she said thank you to me. Her blood was all over my overalls.

What I’ve been watching:

  • Skinamarink (Kyle Edward Ball, 2022)

  • Alphaville (Jean-Luc Godard, 1965)

  • Boro in a Box (Bertrand Mandico, 2011)

  • The Wild Boys (Bertrand Mandico, 2017)

  • Mill of the Stone Women (Giorgio Ferroni, 1960)

What I’ve been reading:

  • Kid Congo Powers - Some New Kind of Kick

  • Paul Eluard - Capital of Pain

  • Ric Kasini Kadour, ed. - Kolaj Magazine #11

  • John Maizels, ed. - Raw Vision #107

  • Adam Keith, ed. - Baited Area #5

What I’ve been listening to on the subway:

  • Brainbombs - Disposal of a Dead Body

  • U-Men - U-Men

  • Melissa - II

  • David Bowie - Low

  • Skinny Puppy - Too Dark Park

Notes:

  • My review of Nick Zedd’s film War is Menstrual Envy appeared in Cinema Schism #3.

Report #14: Doll Parts

Since my last report in July, I had some bad encounters at work with a new manager. After I contacted the regional management to complain, I was given a raise and put into an easier role. It’s strange how more money can amount to a less stressful position. Because of this drama, I decided to shave my head, but first I took a vacation, going back to Georgia just in time for the Atlanta Surrealist Group’s Undertakers and Underselves: A Surrealist Excavation. The event was split into four days and held at the No Tomorrow Gallery in Atlanta’s Underground. The walls were full of collages and paintings from surrealists across the globe. Some of my favorite works were the paintings by Tori Lion, a mask made from yak skin, James Robert Foster’s collage paintings, and the suitcases full of strange sculptures, teeth, and various components. There was a lot of work to take in. Many pieces were small and anonymous. There were also a number of modified dolls, including a very haunting red one with elongated limbs. The excessive amount of dolls could be the influence of Doll’s Head Trail on the Atlanta group. I actually went to Doll’s Head Trail on this trip, and while I found it unkept and cluttered, I could see how people find the decay and bricolage inspiring.

The first day of the event was an improv day. There was a lot of freeform experimentation with noise makers, movement, and costumes. It was somewhat intimidating for me, as I’m not much of a performer. I spent most of the time playing with a Monotron someone handed me. There seemed to be a lot of cathartic screaming happening and Butoh-influenced dance. Many of the costumes seemed to touch on the “under selves” theme of the event. The second day was devoted to game-playing, and I was surprised at the number of random passersby that participated. Also present on that night was someone named Alvaro Michael who performed as The Alumified Man, a persona he created that sits at a table and wraps everything presented to him in aluminum foil. The woman who runs the space, I believe her name was Patricia, also participated by handing out “Admit One” tickets, giving the receiver permission to “admit whatever you’d like.” It was a confessional game.

The third night was for musical performances. Steven Cline asked LaDonna Smith to perform with a dancer named Lucifer, and the improv collaboration left me kind of speechless. The two performers really played off each other. Lucifer exhibited a wildness and childlike quality and LaDonna was very receptive to Lucifer’s bodily movements and sounds. At first, it was LaDonna with her fiddle leading the way, but somewhere in the performance, Lucifer took control. The two had never met before, and the spontaneity of it all added to the magic. LaDonna also brought along with her a certain Dr. Khlurr who was using one of Quintron’s drum buddies. It was fascinating to see one of these machines functioning in real life. The final night was for cinematic creations. The main feature was the Japanese cult film Horrors of Malformed Men, but I felt the truly important moment was seeing the short film The Face of Oblivion by Aaron Dylan Kearns. It’s a strange psychosexual transmission, which I may write more about in the future.

After my time in Atlanta, I again traveled to Savannah, where my friend Sofie Buck gave me two new tattoos and showed me a painting she’d been working on. The painting was based on a postcard collage I sent her earlier in the year, and I do believe she improved the piece. I rarely collaborate with people on artistic projects, but I was very pleased with this one.

Returning to New York, I went to both the Méret Oppenheim show at MOMA and the Morris Hirshfield show at the American Folk Art Museum. The Oppenheim show surprised me with the depth and diversity of her work. Of course, her famous surrealist objects were on display, but her work transcends the typical boundaries of art, tossing back and forth between abstract and realistic styles. I enjoyed her Stone Woman painting, where above water a woman is made of stones, while beneath she is flesh. The show was overwhelming and I plan on making a return visit before it closes in March. I enjoyed the Morris Hirshfield show too, but he’s not as complex of an artist as Oppenheim. The show felt very comprehensive of his work, even including his famous Nude at the Window (Hot Night in July), which is often seen in a photo surrounded by Breton, Duchamp, Ernst, and Leonora Carrington. While Hirshfield’s work primarily focuses on the female form, I found his animals to be charming. The man could simply capture the personalities of animals like no other, whether they are zebras, lions, cats, or dogs.

September was Penny Slinger month in New York. A number of her movies were shown at Spectacle Theater, while Pace Gallery was displaying some of her collages. When I went to Spectacle, Slinger was there with a much younger man who I assumed was her lover. We watched Lilford Hall, a late 60s collaboration with Peter Whitehead. The silent film was shot entirely in an old mansion and has a lot of repetitive moments, often showing the same thing happening over and over again, but in different ways. There are a lot of doors that lead to other doors or nothing at all. Two women, often dressed in black Musidora-like suits, could be found kissing and running around the large empty structure as if playing hide and seek. Sometimes the women were caged or behind fenced-off areas like captured animals. Other times they were nude, lying in bathtubs, or white as ghosts looking out old windows. I found the repetitive moments rather dreamlike as they broke with traditional narrative storytelling, and the doubling and mirroring between the two women reminded me of Bergman’s Personaor Lynch’s Mullholand Drive.

On a different day, Spectacle also showed several of Slinger’s short films. Many of these were just exercises but explored some of the same themes as Lilford Hall. I watched a documentary on Slinger called Out of the Shadows and was pleased to learn that Slinger was once supported by surrealists Roland Penrose and Lee Miller. The collages at the Pace Gallery were taken from Slinger’s book 50% The Visible Woman. There was a newer piece by her at the Pace Gallery, or rather it was a digital monitor that showed some of her newer self-portraits morphing into one another. She showed herself lying naked in a bathtub which then morphed into a sea, and so on. The bathtub is a big feature in her work, as it appears in many of her shorts and in Lilford Hall. What is the symbolism of the bathtub? It’s a private space where you cleanse yourself, but it’s also where you can die, slit your wrists, get electrocuted by a toaster, or just plain drown.

I went to the Whitney Biannual over the summer but found it rather unremarkable. In addition to that, I went to two other art fairs: the famed Armory Show and the DIY underground Spring/Break Show. My favorite piece at the Armory Show was Kapwani Kiwanga’s Ground which linked a series of photos of lightning to create one long stream of lightning. I also enjoyed Woody Vasulka’s video work, where a distorted electrical signal is somehow projected onto a television, then printed to create a “work of art.” The next day I went to the Spring/Break Show, where the art was hit or miss. One of my favorites from this show included Horacio Quiroz’s cubical figures that look like they are made from stone or a halal cone. Jessica Lee’s Lady of the Lake was also a favorite as was Alexandra Evan’s painting of a mermaid surrounded by trash. I noticed that two popular techniques utilized at the Spring/Break Show were mimicry, where one thing acts as another, and multiplicity, which can be seen in the self-portraits of Maya Mason.

Another art event I went to was the show at O’Flaherty’s called The Patriot. I went with surrealists Wayne Kral and Andrew Mendez. While we didn’t go on opening night, apparently there were so many people at the event the police came and shut it down. Originally, the show was supposed to be viewed with flashlights in the dark, but we went after all the hubbub and saw the show with the overhead lights on. Although I am doubtful, I was told nothing was rejected for this show. The whole thing felt very anonymous. Regardless, many of the works had a level of skill about them. There was a painting of a black cat hissing that was my favorite. Wayne pointed out a suitcase with some toilet paper embedded in its casing. There was a painting of two lions eating a zebra, and below it was a weird mongrel dog surrounded by human body parts. There were many mutilated dolls and in the bathroom I found another favorite: a bird with a human hand for a head.

On the music front, in July I went to both the Punk Island festival and Summer Scum 7. Punk Island was free and held in Maria Hernandez Park, a short walk from my apartment. Many bands, mostly local, were selected to play at the festival, but, honestly, not many of them were for me. A band that stood out was The Dilators, a rowdy in-your-face trans-punk band. Summer Scum 7 was a noise festival held this year at TV Eye. I’m never sure how to write about noise artists because I’m not sure I understand the genre, but I do like watching them. One performance I enjoyed was Form Hunter, where some dudes had a metal box and used all these objects to create sound from it. Then a guy named Gnawed performed and had an interesting video being played behind him. The video was in reverse and showed some chains wrapping themselves around a piece of wood, like a couple of snakes or tentacles. It was filmed in a small tunnel and had a cavernous feel to it. My favorite performance at Summer Scum 7 was Rectrix, a solo project of Pippi Zornoza, a Providence-based artist. She used two mics with lights on them and one she would swing, so it would only momentarily capture her voice. The event was intense and half the time I wasn’t sure who I was watching because everything was happening so fast and there were many performers.

As with every city I live in, I find my favorite bands to follow. In New York, it’s been the projects of two sisters. I started following Melissa several years ago after catching them at the Market Hotel. I believe I’ve written about them before. This summer I saw them play two amazing outdoor shows and one really fun, cramped set at Bootleg Bar. Unbeknownst to me until this summer, Melissa’s singer is the sister of Pharmakon’s only member, who I also saw play multiple times this summer. Pharmakon played their first show in three years at the Knockdown Center with Aaron Dilloway of Wolf Eyes, who had a zombie-like set. I first saw Pharmakon many years ago at my house in San Francisco, Bay Area 51, and have been hooked ever since.

At the end of October, I saw a jaw-dropping performance by Narcissister. She was performing at a sort of cabaret event in Brooklyn. For her piece, she came to the stage in what I would call a traditional 1950s mother’s outfit. At first, she was mopping the floor, but when she tried to cook some eggs the carton was empty. Then, Narcissister squatted over the mop bucket and pushed out an egg from her vagina. She did this twelve times, fried the eggs on stage in a frying pan, and handed them out to the crowd. She gave one to me and I ate it. It was humorous, disgusting, revolting, sexy, and giving. I think most people were turned off by the eating of the egg that had been in her pussy, but I found it rather exciting and charitable.

Movies I’ve been watching:

  • Pearl (Ti West, 2022)

  • Fire of Love (Sara Dosa, 2022)

  • Satantango (Béla Tarr, 1994)

  • Fascination (Jean Rollin, 1979)

What I’ve been reading:

  • Genesis P-Orridge - Nonbinary: A Memoir

  • Penny Slinger - 50% The Visible Woman

  • Jacqueline Burckhardt and Bice Curiger, eds. - Meret Oppenheim: Beyond the Teacup

  • Matthew Ragsdale - Cinema Schism #1

Music I’ve been listening to on the subway:

  • Babes in Toyland - Fontanelle

  • Black Sabbath - Paranoid

  • Thee Oh Sees - A Foul Form

  • Killdozer - Burl