It’s hard to recap the last seven months. Genocide rages on as Israel, with the aid of the United States, attempts to stomp the Palestinians out of existence. It’s daunting that anyone I’m associated with could side with Israel as its murderous, racist militarism embodies everything I hate about nationalism and patriotism. But I know there are a few of you out there, confused by your brainwashed allegiances. In other world events, the US people elected the murder-suicide vibe of Trump over the straight-up homicide of Harris. I guess they want this country to go out with a bang. But neither was really an option for they’re both part of the death cult called capitalism. Everything feels as unstable and hopeless as ever, almost as if life could crumble beneath our feet at any moment. It feels like the culture wars have eclipsed any bit of class consciousness left. The rich have won. This last month we saw a vigilante who murdered a homeless man go free, while a vigilante who murdered a CEO get labeled a terrorist. Billions of bootlickers rejoiced!
Amongst all this dreadfulness, I had to have a colonoscopy and endoscopy in the fall. My fear of the medical bill was more terrifying than the actual experience of having someone stick a camera down your throat and up your ass. Luckily, all is good and my insurance covered the bill without question. Meanwhile, my friend Sofie, who lives in North Carolina, had to deal with the wrath of Hurricane Helene. Her and her family had to be evacuated from their new home in Burnsville. They witnessed the true power of the natural world. Several of their neighbors were killed in horrific ways, while others had their properties wiped out. I saw a video of a road in Burnsville that was completely uprooted, hammered by the water into a mess of asphalt slabs that would be hard to walk over, let alone drive. We couldn’t contact Sofie for a number of days, causing a lot of worry from friends and family around the country, but she and her family ended up being safe, despite their trials and tribulations.
Of the positive highlights of this year, the biggest was seeing Penny Rimbaud and Gee Vaucher from Crass. Vaucher had an exhibit at the White Columns Gallery in the West Village. There was an entire room dedicated to Crass paraphernalia, featuring an overwhelming amount of photos, fliers, and posters. Many of these items were featured in the new book Crass: A Pictorial History. The other room contained Gee’s more recent creations, all of which contain a similar subversive theme to them, such as one painting of ducks in flight. If you looked closely you’d see that a few of those ducks were actually fighter jets. My housemate Aaron and I went to see Penny and Gee speak at the American Film Archives for a showing of their Crass film Semi-Detached. We arrived early, and got there at the same time as Penny and Gee. We met them at the door and Aaron got Penny’s autograph. During the question and answer, both Penny and Gee spoke about looking inward and finding that the revolution also involves an inner transformation. They spoke of being content with what you can do on your own, but don’t expect revolution without the help of others. You can’t do it on your own. Afterward, I got Penny to sign my copy of The Diamond Signature. He and I spoke briefly about Walt Whitman. His smile was so genuine. One of the few times I’d gone out of my way to shake someone’s hand.
In late May I read a news article about the band Jane’s Addiction unearthing from storage the papier-mâché sculpture they used for their Ritual de lo Habitual album cover. Growing up, I was a huge fan of Jane’s Addiction, especially their movie Gift, which, along with the sculpture, was made by Perry Ferrell’s then-girlfriend Casey Niccoli. I loved Niccoli’s aesthetic, and after she disappeared, so did my love for the band. I’d google her name every so often to see if she was working on any new projects. For decades I found nothing. I wondered where she was and if she’d forgotten who she was. Was she making art? Was she alive? Not long after the article about her sculpture being re-discovered, I was pleased to read a piece she wrote for Huffington Post about being erased from the band’s history. I also learned she’s making collages and posting them on Instagram. Many of Niccoli’s new collages play with and repurpose religious iconography, giving them a hermetic and alchemical feel. Their symmetry and balance resemble a sort of mandala or ritual diagram. There’s no piety in these pieces, but there is a sense of a personal journey, a map hidden behind the veil of images.
In terms of gallery visits, on the suggestion of one of my fellow surrealists, I went to the Gerome Kamrowski show at the Lincoln Glenn Gallery. I was unfamiliar with Kamrowski, but I found his work pretty amazing. Kamrowski was an American painter who collaborated with Andre Breton on VVV and was part of the abstract expressionism and surrealism crossover in New York during the 1950s. His paintings often resemble a kind of X-ray vision, like seeing what is unseen to the basic eye or what happens when you put your They Live glasses on underwater. It’s like looking through a lens and seeing another world hidden behind your own.
My gallery visits also took me to see a Dorothea Tanning show and a Ted Joans show. The Tanning show consisted of her late collage work. She messed with decalcomania in some parts, taking ink blots and cutting them into different shapes. In others, she messed with Xeroxed images, like photocopies of her hands. They also had some paintings of hers with these weird cat motifs where the cat’s paws replaced the cat’s head. At the Ted Joans show there were a lot of drawings on paper bags. I was thinking about this and how often Joans seems to be taking the everyday things he has around him and making simple art that feels very community-based. I guess Kembra Pfahler would call this tendency availabism.
Another memorable gallery visit was the infamous “bathroom stalls” show at the Lisson Gallery. This was Hugh Hayden’s Hughmans show. There were an odd mix of artifacts inside those stalls. Pinnochio dolls, giant wooden skeletons with brooms and mops for feet, and brass instruments made to look like African masks. There was a recurring theme here with the phallic gun. One sculpture had a side cut of a gun that showed its interior not to be metal but flesh, notably having the interior organs of the male genitals. This was followed by a black abdomen and pelvis with a gun for a penis. It reminded me of the “use your prick like a gun” line in Crass’s song “Big Man, Big M.A.N.” Personally, I think if you have a chance to put a dick or a gun in a piece of art, you should. Hayden even took the big dick metaphor further by using the Empire State Building to represent an erect and then a flaccid penis.
One local discovery of the past year was these anonymous abstract paintings at the Greenpoint Avenue Station. I found these mysterious works one day while riding the G train but there was almost nothing about them online, just other people asking the same questions I was. The paintings are done right where advertisements would normally be and seem to change over time. Another discovery was the performance artist Sweaty Eddie. I discovered Eddie at a Necropolis drag event. Sweaty Eddie is hard to classify, but I think they’re considered a drag king. At the performance I attended, they dressed as the Eggman from Pink Flamingos. One arm was fake, a prothetic. In the performance, they acted like they swallowed an egg, and then removed their shirt to expose a prothetic chest where you could see the egg move down through their stomach, to their crotch area. There they unzipped their fly and began shooting eggs out of their crotch. It was hilarious and reminded me of when Narcissister dropped eggs from her pussy.
Some other performances I attended included seeing Martin Rev of Suicide at TV Eye. He basically played loops from familiar records, like disco and flamingo, and then had a distorted keyboard he banged on with his fists, creating some kind of rhythm over the loops. It was borderline noise but hilarious and fun. His vocals were often just mumbles. He seemed to be enjoying the whole experience. Then there was Narcissister’s large performance at Pioneer Works, a sort of play built around a Rube Goldberg machine, where three women in masks appear lost in the funhouse at night.
On the punk and noise scene, I saw Jon Benét Bataille perform in which Gyna Bootleg wrapped her naked self in barbed wire. Dollhouse performed in an abandoned building in Manhattan. The basement was so hot and sweaty that perspiration was dripping from the ceiling. I saw Hank Wood and the Hammerheads for the first time at Market Hotel. Reading up on the band, whose lineage crosses a history of Brooklyn punk bands, made me angry I left New York in 2013. There are a lot of bands I missed that I would have loved. Especially a band called Dawn of Humans, who I have been listening to nonstop all winter. Sadly, Dawn of Humans no longer exist.
Also this year, I became fascinated with the concept of "death stairs,” which I discovered through a Facebook group called Death Stairs. The term generally refers to dangerous stairs, stairs that seem impossible to climb, or are haunting in some way. My attraction to the group seems to be drawn from my memory of these stairs in dreams. I have recurring dreams of staircases that appear damaged and unstable, disintegrating beneath me, stuffed in tight tower-like stairwells, or hanging over some dark void. They are often in ruinous apartments or buildings that feel on the verge of collapse. Do you also dream of death stairs?
Speaking of dreams, I’ve left my most personal note for last. In December I finally finished my ebook Living In My Head: Selected Dreams, 2008-2022. This collects over a decade’s worth of dreams I collected from social media posts, diary entries, notebooks, emails, and the like. Obviously, dreams are a large part of my life, and it was fun to read over these and see the patterns. My parents were reoccurring characters in my dreams as was the house I grew up in. I hadn’t even noticed how often they appeared until I put the first draft of the book together. For better or worse, my parents live on in my dreams! The book is free to download on my website.
What I’ve been listening to on the subway:
Dawn of Humans - Slurping At The Cosmos Spine
Rudimentary Peni - Rudimentary Peni
Alan Vega - Mutator
Pharmakon - Maggot Mass
Public Trust - Pagan Day Parade
What I’ve been reading:
Laura Davis-Chanin and Liz Lamere - Infinite Dreams: The Life of Alan Vega
Philippa Snow - Which As You Know Means Violence
Blake Butler - Molly
Molly Brodak - A Little Middle of the Night
Rene Ricard - Love Poems
What I’ve been watching:
Daaaaaalí! (Quentin Dupieux, 2023)
Oddity (Damian McCarthy, 2024)
The Substance (Coraline Fargeat, 2024)
Strange Darling (J.T. Mollner, 2023)
Make Me A Pizza (Talia Shea Levin, 2024)