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

Report #16: Violent World

I’m opening this letter with a few words on the murder of Jordan Neely, a homeless Michael Jackson impersonator who was killed in May on the F train, a train I ride frequently. If you’re a regular commuter on the New York City subway, you’ll often come into contact with people begging for change. Sometimes, these people have mental health issues or are just exhausted and angry at the cards they’ve been dealt. Recently, a man who was screaming about his life threatened to attack anyone who laughed at him. In another incident I saw a man at the back of the train suddenly stand up and let out a very loud cry. These things happen often, and these people who are struggling are rarely a threat to anyone.

In the case of Jordan Neely, the good samaritan who murdered Neely is truly the one who’s the problem. He brought violence to the train. If he didn’t get involved, no one would have been hurt or killed. Neely was angry and frustrated, but also harmless. Most people who ride the train understand this. If you don’t want to be around it, move to another train. If you want to ignore them, fine. If you can help them, good. But once you start interacting with someone who is in the middle of a mental breakdown in an aggressive way you are choosing to be part of the problem.

Death also came for Kenneth Anger in May. In remembrance of Anger, I did a marathon viewing of his Magick Lantern Cycle. Personally, I love Anger’s queercentric films, like Fireworks and Scorpio Rising, both of which give a glimpse into his homosexual world. I find the mixture of ultra-masculine posturing with gay eroticism weirdly fascinating. Anger saw film as an alchemical process to transform the viewer. “I call them cine-poems,” Anger said in 2011. “They are not narrative films but rather, stories told in pictures.” Anger’s work isn’t as controversial as, say, The Cinema of Transgression, but they are a poetic blending of topics like Crowley-influenced satanism and erotic queerness.

Another notable death was that of Portland poet Walt Curtis. Walt was a Portland icon and downtown fixture in the late 80s and early 90s. He had a radio show on KBOO and was considered the quintessential street poet. Walt had a talkative personality and was very approachable. But he also wasn’t afraid to write a poem about having a hard-on. After his death I went out of my way to purchase some of his older works like Peckerneck Country and The Erotic Flying Machine. There is a documentary on Curtis by Bill Plympton called The Peckerneck Poet, where Curtis monologues about human genitalia. In the documentary, I remember him, a gay man, talk about female genitalia and his fear of being castrated by the pussy. Curtis draws a link between logging and castration, as he once lost his finger at a sawmill. Trees are phallic to him, and Oregon is “where the boys have hard-ons like Douglas Fir trees.”

In regard to art, I saw the Agata Slovak show at the Fortnight Institute. I’d seen her work previously in Savannah. What’s great about Agata’s work is the charged imagery she produces, like a polar bear and a coyote tearing a woman’s head in two. There were several paintings in this show that had mutilated genitals, and she often plays with flanking and parallelism, like a woman’s hand on one side of a cock and a cat’s paw on the other, or juxtaposing blood and sperm. In one piece, she shows herself and another woman, almost like lovers, posing near an unconscious naked man. His dick flops towards his belly, as if just after sex. His chest has a slit in it, like a vagina, or a cut where his heart was removed. There’s a swan that appears to be pecking at his pecker.

Then I went to the New Museum to catch the Wangechi Mutu retrospective. Mutu’s work spans collages, paintings, and sculptures. Her collage work is exemplary and playful, but it’s her large sculpture Sleeping Serpent that was the best piece for me: a thirty-one foot long snake woman that has eaten something big, so big her belly is swollen. Her ceramic head rests on a pillow that’s surrounded by empty bottles. The sculpture felt alive and I found myself tiptoeing around it, afraid to wake the serpent. At the Whitney they had a fantastic Juane Quick-to-See Smith show. I’ve only recently become familiar with Smith’s work as it appeared in both my trips to Richmond and Washington DC. She did one sculpture, or rather assemblage, I liked of a Native American woman made from different objects related to Native life. The woman’s face is flat, a drawing in a picture frame. Her hands are feathers. She’s wearing moccasins and an American flag rests over her legs like a blanket. On her back is a baby also with a flat picture framed face. In one of her feathered hands is a book, God is Red.

For the surrealist in me, there was a joint show at the Helly Nahmad Gallery for Kay Sage and Yves Tanguy. This is the most I’ve seen in one place of either artists. While I have always envisioned Tanguy’s works as seascapes, the pieces here looked almost like landscapes. You can see the silhouette of the mountains, and the sky looks like the gods are at war with weird formless blobs moving about. Tanguy’s world is filled with things taking shape, forming, but Sage’s world is often made up of constructions, buildings, that appear to be frozen in a state of disarray and collapse. She takes us down roads where gravity is defied and discarded. Everything is frozen in chaos.

For Armory week, I went to both the Armory show and the Spring/Break show. I wasn’t as impressed with either show this year, but I did find my favorites. At the Armory show, Guillermo Lorca’s My Little Brother stood out. It’s a swarm of cats, swans, hands, bodies, like a tornado of feathers, around a female child. Another was Rajni Perera and Marigold Santos’s collaborative sculpture. It’s a giantess in a flat mask, crawling on the ground, with her coned breasts functioning like limbs. She feels like a mythical figure, haunting and strange, almost alive and big enough to crush you. At the Spring/Break show there were a lot of disembodied legs, heads, arms, and mannequins dressed in odd ways. Can a mannequin be a sculpture and vice versa? Jessica Damsky’s Sleeping Venus was my favorite painting in the show, showing a nude woman half submerged in water, her bottom half surrounded by fish. Her top half, on the snowy banks of the river with a bald eagle biting her forehead. It reminded me of Meret Openheim's The Stone Woman. Another piece I enjoyed was Mary DeVincentis’s Therian Baptism, with it’s animal-headed people and occult overtones.

On the sound front, in July I went to see an assorted collection of demented folio artists and micro sound archaeologists at Summer Scum 8, a noise festival in Queens. I also discovered two local bands: Sediment Club and Dollhouse. While Sediment Club is not a new band, they are new to me, and I was impressed with their disjointed guitar and post-punk rhythms. Dollhouse grabbed me with their fantastic demo, especially the song “Eating Angels.” The biggest highlight for me musically, though, came in September when I saw the Steve Ignorant Band. At a time when others were going to see a movie like Oppenheimer, a film which humanizes the inventor of a mass murdering weapon, I was at a club in Brooklyn watching Steve Ignorant sing Crass songs such as the anti-war “They’ve Got A Bomb” and I couldn’t be happier.

In August, I took a short trip to see my sister and nephew in Portland. The trip was uneventful. I stayed with my friend Nova and spent much of the time decompressing. I took a brief trip to Olympia to visit my ex-partner, Allison, who I hadn’t seen in over ten years. Allison showed me her art studio where she does riso printing at a cool DIY space called The Mortuary. Allison’s house burnt down under mysterious circumstances several months earlier, and I felt it was necessary to see her. Getting older, I’m starting to look backward more, and I hope the people I’ve loved along the way know how much I appreciate them. When I returned to Portland, I went to the Wolf Eyes show at Mississippi Records. There was a guy in the front spazzing out, then suddenly he grew calm and began reading a book by Herman Hesse, while Wolf Eyes played on.

As I’m working on this letter, Israel is now two months into their assault on Palestine. In lieu of my own words, and to avoid sounding redundant, I’ll quote the surrealists in Atlanta on this matter:

“Any surrealism, any revolutionary outlook worthy of its heritage stands at this exact moment, I reckon, with the Palestinians, against any zionism, against the pseudo-state of Israel, against its bombings, impending ground incursions and ongoing massacres, against the current knotwork of empire and aircraft carriers and threatening double-speak, insinuations and spectacle, against the erasure of history and the forced displacement of indigenous peoples, against the repression of free expression and legitimate protest, against false pretenses and real genocides, and against any middling excuses for the actual impending destruction of the world.”

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What I’ve been watching:

• Beau Is Afraid (Ari Aster, 2023)

• Dream Lover (Nicholas Kazan, 1993)

• Lynch/Oz (Alexandre O. Philippe, 2022)

• Sisters With Transistors (Liza Rovner, 2020)

• The Deep House (Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury, 2021)

What I’ve been reading:

• Walt Curtis - The Erotic Flying Machine

• David Wojnarowicz - Dear Jean Pierre

• Kevin Sampsell - I Made An Accident

• Meret Oppenheim - The Loveliest Vowel Empties

• Genesis P-Orridge - Coumplete Poems

What I’ve been listening to on the subway:

• Stage Bitten - Volume 1

• Nurse - Nurse

• M.D.C. - Millions of Dead Cops

• Wolf Eyes - w/ Spykes

• Dollhouse - Demo

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.

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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.