As I’m writing this protesters at campuses across the country are being forcibly removed by the US government. My Instagram feed is filled with images of protesters being thrown down stairs and attacked by pro-Israel thugs. There are videos from Gaza on social media of dead children whose limbs and heads have been blown off and of Palestinian civilians being assassinated by Israeli soldiers. Meanwhile, our government puts Israel over the voices and needs of its people. It’s not a big revelation for me to say that Trump and Biden are just two raving heads on the same insidious monster. None of this is any surprise. I’m not much of a political writer, but I wanted to get this down for the record.
Other than these international horrors, the past eight months have been less active than I’d hoped. On October 1st, I saw Goblin perform the score to Demons at a screening of the movie. Goblin is Claudio Simonetti’s band that has scored many of Dario Argento’s films and other Italian giallos. This was a sit-down event, and I was surprised to discover, when speaking to the person next to me, that he was following the band around on their US tour. Later that month, I took a chance and saw Gwar perform in Manhattan. I’m not a huge fan of Gwar, but I enjoy their vile humor and overwrought, cartoonish costumes. I understood that Gwar relied heavily on fake blood in their set, but I had no idea just how drenched I’d get. Coming out of the show, the shoulders of my green coat and my exposed skin had been stained purple. The coat took several washings to clean, and my gray hairs remained pink weeks after.
For me, nothing is more important than keeping an eye on the local punk and noise scenes. Wonderful things can be seen when you do. One notable recent show was seeing punk band Crazy Spirit reunited at a secret location in Brooklyn. The spot was just a dead end street near some train tracks. I'm not good at counting, but someone said over a thousand punks showed up. When I first moved to New York, Crazy Spirit was all the rage. But because of all the personal chaos involved with that experience, I was never able to see them. Luckily, they temporarily reunited and I was able to catch them in this unique situation. I missed a similar outdoor show where Dollhouse played on the Williamsburg Bridge. One thing I love about New York is all the outdoor shows. Who needs a venue when you can just set up and play anywhere?
I also saw Dreamcrusher at the Market Hotel. I’d seen Dreamcrusher several times before, and while I found them good, they never hit me like this set. At this performance, they had a partner, a very hip-hop guy countering Dreamcrusher’s afro-gothism. There was a strobing white light that mixed with the fog machine, creating a truly otherworldly feel. Dreamcrusher invited all the people they “fuck with” on stage, and a bunch of their friends came on stage and danced around behind Dreamcrusher. I could only see people’s silhouettes on stage as they all moved and gyrated. It reminded me of the scene in The Last Temptation of Christ when Jesus meets John the Baptist. Dreamcrusher thrashed their dreads around on stage, and at one point, reached down from the stage and put their hand on my shoulder, gripping my hoody tight and tugging me around to the rhythm.
When it comes to the visual arts, the New Museum had a fantastic Judy Chicago show. I’m not a big fan of her, but I think she does some things that are of extreme value. With that being said, my favorite part of this show was her Atmospheres series, where she uses colored smoke and human bodies to create “smoke sculptures.” This is something I would have loved to have seen in person. I also really enjoyed Chicago's photography. Personally, I didn't know she made use of photography. Even weirder, I'd seen some of her photographs on Tumblr! There is a famous picture of a man with a gun in his mouth that I didn’t know was her’s. Another photo I got a kick out of had a gun pointed at a person's asshole. My problem with Chicago is that she seems to be coming from a dated feminist view. “Would the world be different if it was ruled by women?” she asks. No, it would be the same. The problem is power, not people. As part of the Chicago exhibit, there was a floor of works by female artists that influenced her. Many of these were surrealist and dadaist artists: Suzanne Duchamp, Ithell Colquhoun, Unica Zurn, Varo, Carrington, Meret Oppenheim, Hannah Hoch, Leonor Fini, Dorothea Tanning, Kahlo, Claude Cahun, Dora Maar! An exceptional collection to see.
The Brooklyn Museum isn’t one of my favorite museums, but it did host Copy Machine Manifestos, a show devoted to zines made by artists. The bulk of these zines came from mail artists, punk artists, and queer artists. The mail art room had works by Monte Cazzaza, Vile Magazine, Genesis P-Orridge, and the Bay Area Dadaists, while the punk room had works by Nick Zedd, Richard Kern, David Wojnarowicz, Cassandra Stark, Raymond Pettibon, and so on. It was a true treasure trove. I found it curious to see Kern’s use of word collage in many of his pieces. I remember a friend of mine recently stating that true collage artists look down on this practice of overlaying text on images. Well, I think it’s punk as fuck. My biggest thrill was seeing a copy of Cassandra Stark Mele’s Your World, Not Mine, the text of which was included in Ron Sakolsky’s 2002 anthology Surrealist Subversions. I wonder where she is now and if she still considers herself a surrealist.
I also made it to Manhattan for a few gallery visits. The first was Oda Jaune’s show Miss Understand at the Templon Gallery. I first saw her work at the Armory Show, a nude with a gorilla mask. I like how she condenses opposing realities in such a physical and grotesque manner like having a Barbie doll torso for the head of an old nude woman, or a nude selfie that shows the iPhone as part of the body. There was even some of puppies with human infant legs, but the bodies were turned the wrong way. It’s all wonderful and devious in a body horror sort of way. Another show I went to was centered around surrealist Lee Miller (who was subsequently name-dropped in Alex Garland’s new film Civil War). The show wasn’t just of Miller’s work, but also included works inspired by her, like Roland Penrose’s Seeing is Believing. After visiting a disappointing Francesca Woodman show, I stumbled upon a show of Karl Wirsum’s work, which borders on the cartoonish, but also has a symmetry that evokes something beyond psychedelic. Every piece seemed like it was chaotically trembling.
Two events I went to put on by Art Without Intent, were the Nameless Art Show and the annual Found Object Show. The shows had a lot of old objects that take you back in history. Many of the items appear abstract and odd because today they have no function. At the Found Object Show, I saw one of Dr. Hietrick’s hypnosis discs. It reminded me of Duchamp’s piece Rotary Demisphere at MOMA.
In March I visited my second Outsider Art Fair. They had the usual subjects: Adolf Wolfi, Mr. Imagination, Henry Darger, Howard Finster, Ionel Talpazon, and Augustin Lesage. Lesage was particularly impressive in this show. Of the new faces, Lance Letscher and June Gutman caught my eye. Letscher is a collage artist. I guess there’s a documentary about him but I haven’t been able to find it streaming anywhere. June makes small little paintings that have strange figures and weird diagrams, with women milking their breasts and directional arrows running down their necks and chests. Wesley Anderegg’s head spinner proved memorable as well, if not because of the eyes of the figure, which are the most human looking things on the sculpture. Perhaps the most amorphous works of the show were Cindy Gosselin’s Barbie bundles. They seem so ridiculous. Grosselin, who has one dead eye, seems to be obsessed with wrapping objects in yarn. There’s almost a drowning feeling to them like the objects are being erased by the suffocating and caccooning yarn.
In addition to seeing all this art and music, I spent a great deal of time revisiting the Aeon Flux cartoon series. Like most, I first encountered this as a teenager in the early 90s on MTV. I wasn't too into it then and found it hard to judge on those tiny violent episodes alone. It wasn't until I bought the entire collection in a fit of nostalgia that I realized there were longer episodes, and that the show evolved from a pointless assassin exercise into a strange sci-fi world. Cloning, amputees, super tongues, angel-like bird creatures in captivity, people with hands for feet, coffins with parachutes, magic glowing cats with three eyes, a giant baby with fangs, a robotic stick skeleton that's inserted through the belly, and so on. The marvelous is here! In this world, it's hard to make out if our heroine Aeon, and her antagonist Trevor are enemies or lovers. There is literally a wall between them, a boundary, that she continually transgresses to interrupt his harebrained schemes. Trevor is less of a ruler to his side of the world than a mad scientist. But his actions are all driven by his libido. Sex is always there, hidden in the background, or seen symbolically. Everything is a metaphor for sex, even surgery, beating Cronenberg's Crimes of the Future by a good thirty years.
In April I took a trip to see my friend Sofie and her family in Wilmington, North Carolina. I thought I’d find myself rather bored in Wilmington, but as we passed an apartment building I realized, from its strange archway, that it was the building David Lynch used in Blue Velvet for Dorothy Vallens’ apartment. I spent much of my time in Wilmington hunting down the other Blue Velvet sites. One curious thing about Wilmington is that it was the home of artist Minnie Evans, whose work I’d seen at various outsider artist events. At the Airlie Gardens, where she worked for many years as the gatekeeper, they had a bottle chapel she'd constructed, while at the Cameron Art Museum, they had a replica of the gatehouse where she would do her paintings. One of the other highlight of my time in Wilmington was the Museum of the Bizarre. It had two items that I appreciated. The first was Aleister Crowley’s doorbell, which almost sounds like a work of conceptual art. The second was an authentic funerary cooling board. I’d heard about cooling boards in old blues songs, like Son House’s “Death Letter,” but had no idea what they actually looked like.
Death is a regular topic these days, especially as our idols grow older and military violence rages on. This time death came for Gary Floyd of the punk band The Dicks. I’ve been listening to The Dicks special brand of queer blues punk for many decades now. When I lived in San Francisco I had the pleasure of seeing Floyd do a live set at the SF Eagle, and was able to buy his book Please Bee Nice from him. He seemed so shy and humble. I regret being born too late to see Floyd in full drag singing songs about hating the police or fist-fighting the Klan. This one hurt.
What I’ve been watching:
Savage Messiah (Ken Russell, 1972)
Fauve (Jérémy Comte, 2018)
The Swimmer (Frank Perry, 1968)
Singapore Sling (Nikos Nikolaidis, 1990)
The Timekeepers of Eternity (Aristotelis Maragkos, 2021)
What I’ve been reading:
Thurston Moore - Sonic Life
Mark Polizzotti - Why Surrealism Matters
Phillipa Snow - Which As You Know Means Violence
Ronnie Burk - SkyBoat
Benjamin Peret - Four Years After the Dog
What I’ve been listening to on the subway:
Crazy Spirit - Demo
Babes in Toyland - Spanking Machine
Fang - Landshark
Crass - Peel Session
The Dicks - Kill from the Heart