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.”
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