A few weeks ago, thieves ransacked my storage unit in Portland. It looks like they took all my old X-Men comics and a bunch of dated electronics. My sister sent me some photos of the unit and in one there’s a blanket my mother made me when I was a toddler sort of tossed aside. I guess it’s easy for strangers to trample your memories. The last few months have been kind of rough. One of my crowns came off. I don’t have any dental insurance. Hell, I don’t even know how to find a dentist. The crown still hasn’t been put back but the tooth doesn’t hurt. For me, not having any health insurance has become a consistent source of anxiety. Over the last four years, I’ve had a large lipoma over my right clavicle that I need to get checked out. I guess, if it was going to kill me it would have already. The last time I saw a doctor was back in 2013 after I escaped an abusive relationship. They said my blood pressure was incredibly high. Six years on, I’m still nervously waiting for my first stroke or heart attack.
As far as writing goes, I started 2019 off with a bang. I’ve had more writing published in these first few months than in all of 2018. My plan is to have a new PDF ebook out by the end of 2019. It’ll primarily be made of prose poems I wrote while living in New Orleans. The working title is Brandon Freels Versus The Reality Principle. One of my New Year’s resolutions was to shake up my writing a little by focusing on some third-person flash fiction. I’ve been writing exclusively in the first-person for twenty years, and it seems to experiment with a change in perspective might do me some good. My goal is to have fifteen of these flash fiction pieces written by the end of 2019 and then make a PDF ebook out of them in 2020.
Honestly, the snow made it hard for me to get motivated to go anywhere, but I did go to a few art shows and events this winter. There was the Leonor Fini show at The Museum of Sex. I was impressed with how transgressive Fini’s delicate drawings could be. In one she had a woman fucking a deer, and in another a man eating a turd out of a woman’s ass. I went to the Whitney Museum’s Andy Warhol show and finally got to see one of his oxidation paintings. I attended a lecture by Pam Grossman about Remedios Varo. The lecture focused on Varo’s connection to the occult and how she saw art as a form of invocation. At the Museum of Modern Art, there was a Joan Miro exhibit, but it was mostly just pieces they pulled out of storage. They did have his Portrait of a Man in a Late Nineteenth-Century Frame on display, which I’d been wanting to see. There were also these two collage pieces incorporating rope into the composition. Both works disturbed me. I didn’t find them visually appealing, but they bothered me so much, I felt it was important to acknowledge them. While it’s great to have all these big museums accessible to me now that I live in New York, in the future I’d like to visit smaller, more contemporary galleries. If anyone has any suggestions, let me know.
One of the highlights for me over the last few months was seeing the Lou Reed Drones installation at The Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Lou Reed’s amps were set up near the pulpit of the church in a semi-circle, then his guitars were placed against them. There was a man, a conductor of sorts, adjusting the guitars to create different levels of feedback. Other avant-garde musicians, including Laurie Anderson and John Zorn, played freely throughout the church, improvising over the feedback that Reed’s guitars made. I’m not sure what attracts me to this kind of music, but I also spent two days at this year’s Ende Tymes Festival. Each night contained a wealth of performers doing their own variations of drone and experimental music. Most of it was what a Portland friend used to call pedal violence, where an artist would string a number of guitar pedals together to create a wall of chaotic sound. But other performances were more delicate, like two musicians playing long-form drones on their clarinets. I went to the previous year’s Ende Tymes Festival too and was fascinated by a performer called Nonhorse (I only recently learned their name). Nonhorse impressed me with the way he “scratches” tapes on old cassette decks. To scratch them he pushes down on the spindle that holds the reel. It's almost like how a turntablist scrubs a record.
On a different note, I was pretty excited to learn that my new apartment on Chauncey Street is only a few buildings away from where Ralph and Alice Kramden lived in The Honeymooners. Apparently, Chauncey Street is where Jackie Gleason grew up.
Books I’ve been reading:
Quintron - Europa My Mirror
Melissa Broder - The Pisces
Mark Fisher - The Weird and Eerie
Jean Ray - Whiskey Tales
RW Spryszak - Edju
Music I’ve been listening to on the subway:
Crash Worship - Asesinos
Controlled Bleeding - Rest in Peace
Einstürzende Neubauten - Tabula Rasa
Sun Ra - The Antique Blacks
Mike Daily - Kevin Sampselliana Pt. 1 and 2
Some publishing notes:
My prose poem “Hello” appeared on the Punk Lit Press website.
My flash fiction pieces “Why I Left” and “Doggone” appeared on the Soft Cartel website.
My flash fiction piece “I’ve Got a Gun” appeared in the third issue of Alien Buddha Zine.
A PDF of Race Traitor #13-14 is now available online. It was published in 2001 and includes responses I made to a surrealist inquiry. Keep in mind I was in my early twenties when I wrote these responses.
My prose poems “Tulip” and “Calligraphy” appeared on the Misery Tourism website.
My prose poems “Lull” and “Birds” appeared in the twelfth issue of Deluge. Also featured in that issue is a story by my friend Kevin Sampsell.