In August, I visited Portland for a wedding and couldn’t believe how depressed it got me. It was good to see old friends but I felt disillusioned. I hope I never have to move back to that city. Now that I’m in New York, I’m happier than I’ve been in years. Despite this, I’m still having trouble adjusting socially. Finding a bar I love has been hard. There’s nothing like New Orleans’s Saturn Bar here and I’ve yet to tap into the punk community. It doesn’t make it any easier that all the fliers for the cool underground punk shows have the location listed as “ask a punk.” I don’t know any New York punks to ask!
The summer was muggy but not nearly as bad as the previous summer in Louisiana. In New Orleans, you’d step outside for just a few minutes and suddenly your shirt would be soaked in sweat. The hottest place in New York over the summer was the underground stations. Sometimes, while waiting at the West Fourth Street station, I’d just get on the wrong train to enjoy the air-conditioning. I really have fallen in love with the subway though. One of my favorite subway stops is at Smith and Ninth in Gowanus. This is where I hop off the G train when heading to work. According to Wikipedia, this stop is the highest rapid transit station in the world. You can look out across Brooklyn, or down at all the filth in the Gowanus Canal. Hell, you can even look across the bay and see The Statue of Liberty.
With my ridiculous work schedule, getting out of the house hasn’t been easy, but in New York, there’s always something happening. On a whim, I went to see Karen Finley perform at Issue Project Room. I have mixed feelings about her writing but enjoyed the chaos of her undulating voices. I saw Lydia Lunch’s band Retrovirus play at the Brooklyn Bazaar. It wasn’t my first time seeing them. I always get a kick out of guitarist Weasel Walter’s Italian riding pants. I also caught the krautrock band Faust in a strange room above the Murmrr Theatre, the San Francisco punk band The Avengers at El Cortez in Bushwick, and the punk band Fear, with original members Lee Ving and Spit Stix, at the Gramercy in Manhattan. Spit Stix is an acquaintance of mine from Portland and plays with some of my friends in a band called Nasalrod.
Another Portlander, Rex Marshall, also known as Mattress, won over a crowd at a bar in Williamsburg. I’ve been a follower of Rex’s end-of-the-world lounge crooning for over a decade. I wonder how he keeps that gold suit so clean? Oakland’s electro-noise artist Adam Keith also came through, performing in Queens with his project Cube. He played at a large multi-roomed performance space called the Knockdown Center. A number of friends from the Bay Area flew out to see Adam perform. I hadn’t seen most of these people since I left San Francisco in 2016. Many horrible things have happened to that community since then, namely the fire at the Ghost Ship warehouse that killed 36 people, and after that, the untimely deaths of my two friends Ronny Burke and Noah Marmalefsky. It was good to reconnect with the Bay Area folks, although, the whole thing felt very melancholic.
For me, the biggest highlight of the last few months was the Alberto Giacometti show at the Guggenheim. I expected it to focus on Giacometti’s human head studies, but there were many of his early surrealist works on display too. It was my first time seeing Hands Holding The Void (Invisible Object) and I can’t begin to tell you how excited I was. Like most, I became aware of this piece through André Breton’s Mad Love, and I’d always wanted to see it in person. It reminded me of some kind of ancient Egyptian statuary but with extraterrestrial origins. I was beyond thrilled and must have taken nearly a hundred photographs of it from every angle imaginable. Giacometti’s later works, his squashed and slender heads, have never really interested me. Yet, seeing them in person did open my eyes up a bit. Some were micronic in size, while others were detailed with tatters as if they were slowly being torn apart.
It’s tempting to compare Giacometti’s heads with the brute alien heads of David Wojnarowicz, which I saw at the Whitney. Like Giacometti’s, Wojnarowicz’s heads also had some kind of violence inflicted on them. Some had eyepatches and looked beaten up or their mouths were covered in gauze. Growing up in Portland, Wojnarowicz was kind of a mystery. His name would pop up in publications I’d find at Powell’s in the small press section, but I really had no idea what he was about. I liked the work they had on display at the Whitney, yet even after seeing it, Wojnarowicz is still an enigma. His oeuvres feel overwhelmingly diverse. I’ve been reading Cynthia Carr’s Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz and I guess its given me something to go on. I was hoping the Whitney exhibit would have Wojnarowicz’s “IF I DIE OF AIDS, FORGET BURIAL, JUST DROP MY BODY ON THE STEPS OF THE FDA” jacket. Its absence made the show feel incomplete. Maybe the jacket no longer exists? But at least they had his Arthur Rimbaud mask.
More books I’ve been reading:
David Lynch and Kristine McKenna - Room to Dream
McKenzie Wark - The Beach Beneath the Street
Steve Dalachinsky - Where Night and Day Become One
Istvan Kantor, ed. - Rivington School: 80s New York Underground
Kathy Acker - Hannibal Lecter, My Father
Music I’ve been listening to on the subway:
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Push the Sky Away
Pigface - Washingmachine Mouth
3 Teens Kill 4 - No Motive
Big Black Cloud - Black Friday
Butthole Surfers - Butthole Surfers
Some publishing notes:
My piece "I'm Really Scared When I Kill in My Dreams" was reprinted in the Thrice Publishing anthology I Wagered Deep On The Run Of Six Rats To See Which Would Catch The First Fire: Surrealists and Outsiders - 2018, edited by RW Spryszak. You can buy the anthology here.
My friend Nova recently made a PDF of my first chapbook Who the Hell is Brandon Freels? The chapbook was originally published by Kevin Sampsell’s Future Tense Books in 1996 and has an introduction by Hal Sirowitz. I was just a teenager when I wrote it. You can download the PDF here.