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.
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)