I didn’t go out much these past four months. I couldn’t afford to see Killing Joke, but I was able to see their frontman Jaz Coleman speak at a bar in the Lower East Side. When asked if he thought civilization was coming to an end, he cleverly responded, “Civilization hasn’t even begun!” I saw a fascinating show at the Superchief Gallery of Sarah Sitkin’s Body Suits. The wearable suits were made to look like another person’s naked flesh. I tried to share some photos of the show on Instagram but Instagram found them offensive and removed them. I went to the Frida Kahlo show at the Brooklyn Museum and saw another kind of bodysuit, Kahlo’s decorated corsets. I also caught the Alice Farley Dance Theatre at The Bronx Museum of the Arts, with their ethereal, inhuman costumes. Lastly, there was the Leonard Cohen tribute at the Jewish Museum. My favorite piece was The Poetry Machine by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller. It was an old organ you could play where each key was aligned to a different speaker. When you hit the key it played a recording of Cohen reading a poem. Each key had a different poem. You could hear him read one poem by pushing just one key, or you could hear a chorus of Cohens reading different poems all at once by pushing multiple keys.
More important to me than the art I’ve seen are the two visitation dreams I had this summer. The first involved my parents and my step-grandfather Lyle. I was on a swampy island with Lyle and he kept talking about having electrical problems at his home. He lived in a collection of elevated trailers, all connected by wooden walkways. In the middle of the trailers, there was a tiny patch of land higher than the rest where all the electrical cords went. I helped Lyle fix his electricity by turning everything off and then on again. When it was time for me to leave, I got on a boat that reminded me of the Staten Island Ferry. It was night, and on the boat I ran into my real-life friend Captain Shirt. Shirt said, “I thought you were leaving in the morning?” He was right. I wasn’t supposed to leave until the morning. I called my father and asked him if I could stay overnight at my parent’s place. My father said I couldn’t and that I had to leave the island now. Then he hung up on me. When I tried calling again, he wouldn’t pick up. For some reason, the boat was traveling to New Orleans, and I remember Shirt said, “Maybe you could spend a day in Amsterdam?” When I woke up it occurred to me that everyone in the dream except for Shirt was deceased, and I immediately thought of Arnold Böcklin’s painting Isle of the Dead. I Googled the painting, and at the bottom of the Wikipedia entry was an image of Arnold Böcklin’s painting Isle of Life. This piece was painted in 1888, and, as those close to me know, 1888 is my recurring number.
The second visitation dream had my friend Ronny Burke in it. Not to be confused with the surrealist poet Ronnie Burk, this Ronny Burke was the guitarist for the Oakland band Mansion. The dream opened with me at work in some kind of department store, but the building was only geometrical shapes and didn’t have a ceiling. I was alone, finishing up whatever job I had to do. It was very dark, with only the moonlight to see by. Ronny came walking down one of the aisles and stopped when he saw me. We looked at each other for a moment and he began walking toward me with his arm stretched out and his index finger pointed at me. As he approached me, his finger touched me. “You real?” he said. Yes, I told him. “I’m dead, aren’t I?” he said. Yes, I said, then I asked him if he remembered anything. He said something next but I couldn’t understand him. I looked down at my iPhone to open up my Camera app. I wanted to get one last photo of Ronny. But when I looked back up, he had started floating in the air, seemingly against his will. Then his body started to fold in on itself like it was being pulled into a small invisible hole. He didn't seem to be in any pain. I took a picture, and after he completely disappeared, I looked at the image. At first, it was a picture of Ronny, but then it slowly transitioned into a picture of a forest.
In July I went back to Portland to assess how much of my storage unit had been pilfered. Much more of it had been taken than I thought. It even appeared as if the thieves came back a second time and removed the hinges on the door to get inside again. Sadly, I failed to find a pendant my father had given me that contained some of my mother’s ashes. While I was in Portland, I also visited the Portland Art Museum. My favorite piece there was Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla’s The Bell, the Digger, and the Tropical Pharmacy. I don’t know much about the politics behind the piece, but I enjoyed watching an industrial machine destroy a building from the inside out. The slow build-up with the shaking walls reminded me of a kaiju movie. Before I left the Pacific Northwest, my friend Nova and I took a trip to the Ape Cave in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest. I was surprised at how dark the cave was, even with flashlights. The cave was made by a lava flow and much of it took an hourglass shape. The ground looked like mud, but it was stiff and hard. The walls were wet with white slime. It was an eerie experience. Afterward, Nova and I drove around trying to get a view of Mount Saint Helens, which erupted almost forty years ago. Eventually, we drove down a road that disappeared under a wave of large rocks. We assumed this had happened during a recent flood. Some signage had been torn down and was very weathered. Nearby, we found a small creek but the rocks proved difficult to traverse. An opening in the trees gave us a view of the mountain. We were much closer to it than I had even realized.
Books I’ve been reading:
Sun Ra - This Planet is Doomed
Dominique Laporte - History of Shit
Ariana Reines - A Sand Book
David Kalat - A Critical History and Filmography of Toho’s Godzilla Series
Movies I’ve been watching:
Subconscious Cruelty (Karim Hussain, 2000)
Permanent Green Light (Dennis Cooper and Zac Farley, 2018)
King Kong vs. Godzilla (Ishirō Honda, 1962)
Vigil (Vincent Ward, 1984)
Possum (Matthew Holness, 2018)
Music I’ve been listening to on the subway:
Cube - Decoy Street
Two or The Dragon - Prelude for the Triumphant Man
Sadness - I Want To Be There
BlueBOB - BlueBOB
Hogg - Self-Extinguishing Emission
Some publishing notes:
My prose poem “Celsius” appeared on the Misery Tourism website.
Four of my prose poems ("Face," "Trains," "Mythology," and Flaneur") appeared on the Surfaces website.
My prose poem “Arms” appeared in the twentieth issue of Reality Hands.