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.

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.

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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

Report #13: Empire of Light

I started April off by using the last of my vacation hours to take a trip to Providence. I treated myself, booking a room at the fancy Biltmore Hotel. I chose this hotel solely on the rumor that it’s haunted. The room I stayed in was odd. It was a single room with two bathrooms, one by the bed and another by the door. There was a full-length mirror that appeared to be covering up where a door used to be. I kept waiting for something interesting to happen. One night I heard a rather loud party but couldn’t locate where the party was. It wasn’t spooky at the time, but when I got back to Brooklyn, I read up on the Biltmore and one of the paranormal activities reported was “laughter from parties that can’t be found”!

In Providence, I did a lot of walking. I explored Olneyville, looking for the ruins of old Fort Thunder, the squat where a thriving noise rock scene once flourished. Without a guide, I came up empty. Walking down Westminster Street, something drew me to a bar called The Scurvy Dog. Inside I was surprised to see the vèvè of Papa Legba painted on the wall. It’s the same one I have tattooed on my chest. Throughout the bar were other voodoo-inspired assemblage boxes containing animal bones and dolls painted completely white. They reminded me of something Joseph Cornell might do. The bar had a similar vibe to the Saturn Bar in New Orleans, a homely spot for outsiders and punks alike. Another location I visited was the Haven Brother’s Diner, a famous hamburger joint. I primarily went there because I saw a sign that said it was founded in 1888, my recurring number, but later I learned it was actually founded in 1893.

I did go to one museum in Providence, The Rhode Island School of Design’s museum. The two most interesting discoveries at this museum were the pieces by Leonora Carrington and David Wojnarowicz. Carrington’s piece was called Stella Snead and Her Cat. It had a woman sitting next to a strange orb, with a castle in the landscape behind her. In front of the orb and next to the woman’s feet was the outline of a cat. Perhaps the cat is meant to be invisible, like the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland. Wojnarowicz’s piece was a print where an angel of death (the words DEMOCRACY AT WORK written on its cape) swoops over the dispossessed with a sickle. The sun hovering over the people has a swastika made from dollar bills inside it.

On my last day in Providence I headed to Swan Point Cemetery in search of HP Lovecraft’s grave, which I found in the Phillips plot. After that, I wandered around College Point, hunting the houses relevant to Lovecraft’s life and work. There was something about College Point that reminded me of Magritte’s painting Empire of Light. Perhaps it was the time of day, but the streets seemed to get dark before the sky. When passing through the Brown University campus I came across my recurring number again, 1888, written on a fence. A sign that I’m headed in the right direction? After midnight, I took a walk down Benefit Street. When I passed the Athenaeum, the library where Poe got dumped by his girlfriend a hundred and seventy years earlier, something odd happened. Of the two exterior lamps in front of the entrance, one began mysteriously flashing like a strobe light.

Later in April, the garage rock band the Mummies came to Brooklyn for two shows. These were make-up shows for a concert that was canceled the previous year because of Covid. I was able to attend one of them at Elsewhere. I was disappointed the Mummies played such a short set, but was impressed with how tight and entertaining they were. There was something very clownish about their stage presence, and I didn’t expect that. They have a sort of beat-up rock aesthetic to them, like how a used book that’s been been read a hundred times fits comfortably in your hand. I first heard of the Mummies from my friends in the Portland band Big Black Cloud, who used to cover the Mummies’ song “Stronger Than Dirt.”

When I was in Providence, I got word that Negativland would be playing in Manhattan at Le Poisson Rouge. I wasn’t sure what to expect from the venue, and it turned out to be very uncomfortable. In front of the stage, there were tables set up as if in a restaurant. I was told I could only stand around a roped off perimeter because the people at the tables had paid more. They also had to order a meal and several waiters were running in and out of the roped-off area. I was baffled by this, as were other attendees. One stranger started talking to me and they turned out to be from Portland. We talked about the noise scene in Portland, old house venues like Pocket Sandwich, and some mutual friends. Negativland had a woman named Sue-C doing visuals for them. She was using a computer and a camera to project these shadow-like images onto a screen beside them. They reminded me of Man Ray’s rayograms. The music was classic Negativland: vocal samples mixed humorously with prerecorded statements and placed over beats and noises. I enjoyed the set despite having this weird barrier between me and the performers. The sounds of people eating and clunking their forks and knives wasn’t that distracting, just ridiculous. At the end of their set, Negativland made a FaceTime call to the Weatherman in Oakland, an older member who couldn’t make the tour. The Weatherman then sang for them, his FaceTime call projected on the wall beside them, as they played a series of simple beats and noises.

Another performance I saw was Kembra Pfahler’s band The Volumptuous Horror of Karen Black. This was an anniversary show at Pioneer Works, and had a very intimate feel to it. Equal parts rock show and art project, I found Kembra’s Karen Black performers to be bordering on the uncanny. They moved around the set with their nude bodies painted blue and wearing huge afro-like wigs. Most of them walked around very ridged and robotic, like automatons, probably because of the thigh high high-heeled boots they were wearing. In one of the rooms was a collection of Kembra’s props. The one I was most drawn to was a Statue of Liberty painted completely black, and the lantern replaced with a pentagram. Pioneer Works also had a show of Genesis Breyer P-Orridge pieces. While I respect P-Orridge, I felt underwhelmed by this collection. There just wasn’t a lot of work to see or think about.

A handful of Richard Kern’s films were shown at a basement in the Lower East Side by a group called the Cinestra Collective. I was lucky enough to make the event. Kern was there, but as usual, he provided little to reflect on and deflected many of the questions from the audience. They did show one Kern piece I’d never seen before. It was a lo-fi 2003 video called Cutter, where Kern interviews a Japanese model who is prone to cutting her flesh with razors. She demonstrates this for him, causing several audience members to leave in disgust. Kern said he tried to contact the model sometime after the video was made, but couldn’t get in touch with her. He feared she might have killed herself. 

I went to Spectacle Theater to see a collection of short films by author Chris Kraus. These films were made before she became a writer, and many of them were rough to watch. Quality wise, they were done at the level of the Cinema of Transgression, but as Kraus said in the FaceTime interview, her films were less “blood and guts” and more cerebral than artists like Kern or Nick Zedd. I found one, How to Shoot a Crime, to be very good. In it, Kraus interviews a crime scene videographer and shows some of the graphic content of his work. That interview is juxtaposed with a conversation between two dominatrices about the nature of their work. The juxtaposition is meant to highlight the differences between the real violence of life and the play violence of BDSM.

Another short film I saw was Narcissister’s Breast Work which was shown at the NADA Art Fair in Manhattan. The film dealt with public nudity in New York, but it didn’t seem to push all the buttons Narcissister had hoped for. She gave an interview after the screening and said she considered the experiment a failure. I was glad I went to the NADA Art Fair though. It had a handful of excellent works: Al Freeman’s inflatable men, Bessie Harvey’s sculptures, Lise Stoufflet’s fantastic Memory-Mushroom Cloud which has a nuclear explosion trapped in a snow globe, and Matthew Hansel’s weird The Mycophile, where a man seems overcome with mushrooms. My favorite piece of the fair was a telephone booth titled 1-800-Happy-Birthday, which had family members of people who had been killed by the police leaving happy birthday messages to their deceased loved ones. “Happy birthday, wish you were here. We miss you.” I could only listen to a few messages before getting choked up.

On the noise and punk front, I attended an evening of the multi-day Ende Tymes noise festival. I saw John Duncan and Jim Haynes perform. Duncan’s work was more reserved and theatrical, while Haynes was more like a mad scientist with odd noise-making techniques and tricks. Personally, I’m a fan of destructive noise music. In this regard, a performer who went by the name Magnetic Coroner impressed me most. He started his set playing some kind of pop-religious cassette tape, which he then slowly began to distort and destroy. At some point, he was swinging the tape over his head and the contact mics were making an awesome and sublime wind sound. 

One weekend I randomly discovered a free punk show happening at Maria Hernandez Park, just blocks from my apartment. It felt great to see such a large and active turnout for a daytime punk gig. I’m still having trouble finding DIY punk shows in Brooklyn, but as the summer is rolling in, more are appearing on my radar. I also attended a punk photography exhibit at C-Squat in the Lower East Side. One of the ways I find out about shows in New York is through the Instagram accounts of punk photographers, and many of them showed their work at this event.
 

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What I’ve been reading:

• Alex Danchev - Magritte: A Life

• Shane Kowalski - Small Moods

• Nick Zedd - Totem of the Depraved

• Eric Paul - A Suitcase Full of Dirt

• Jason C. Eckhardt - Off the Ancient Track: A Lovecraftian Guide to New England and Adjacent New York

Music I’ve been listening to on the subway:

• Rocket From The Tombs - Black Record

• Negativland - True False

• The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black - A National Healthcare

• David Bowie - 1. Outside

• Pure Hell - Noise Addiction

Movies I’ve been watching:

• Les Vampires (Louis Feuillade, 1915)

• Crimes Of The Future (David Cronenberg, 2022)

• X (Ti West, 2022)

• Men (Alex Garland, 2022)

• The Earth As Seen From the Moon (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1967)