Report #6: Cure For Pain

The last six months have been difficult. I started working full-time and overnights, which has cut back on my creativity. I hardly have time to do anything anymore. I even have trouble finding time to go to the doctor. I go to bed at nine in the morning and wake up around six in the evening. The only benefit I get from this is that I no longer have to deal with customers at work. I’ve been feeling very short-fused too, so this is probably a good thing. My health problems persist, and I’m now seeing three different doctors. I was told my aorta is dilated by thirty percent. My blood pressure is ridiculously high, so much that each doctor has to do a double-take on the numbers. The new medication I’m taking for my hypothyroidism seems to be helping. This has all been very scary. My uncle died of a heart attack last year, and I don’t want to follow in his footsteps.

On a brighter note, last month, I finally released my second ebook, Brandon Freels vs. The Reality Principle. It consists of twenty-three prose poems. I wrote most of them in New Orleans, but some are from when I first moved to New York. The cover image is a collage I made several years ago while visiting Kevin Sampsell’s collage night at the IPRC in Portland. I released this ebook as an ePub and with it re-released my previous book, Seven Nightmares, also as an ePub (instead of a PDF). Both can be downloaded on my website.

Also in writing news, this summer Rob Mcleenan asked me to write a non-fiction piece for his blog, My (Small Press) Writing Day. At first, I was hesitant, but I found the experience fulfilling. Not long after, I was asked by an editor from Reality Hands to answer some interview questions for their website. In the interview, I was able to revisit some of the same ideas I wrote about on Mcleenan’s blog. Unfortunately, it appears the editors of Reality Hands shut down the website before my interview was posted. It’s a shame too because I enjoyed the writing and design of that website. If you want to read the interview, I’ve uploaded a PDF of it here.

On a sadder note, my friend and mentor Steven Dalachinsky passed away in September. I first came into contact with Steve when I was in high school. I had been writing letters to Hal Sirowitz and Hal decided to introduce me to other New York City underground writers. Steve was one of them. Eventually, my friend Kris Hagner and I published a xeroxed broadside of one of Dalachinsky’s poems. We were teenagers but Steve welcomed the venture. He humored us. As I got older, in my twenties, Steve and I would lose touch on and off but he’d always come around and send me a collage-postcard. I’d visit my parents and get all these collages he’d mailed me.

I met Steve in person for the first time when I moved to New York in 2013 with Allison. He was feisty and fierce yet very personable. The first time we met, he spoke about taking me to The Stone to see some jazz. He patiently listened to my relationship woes and when I, unfortunately, had to leave four months later to escape Allison, he gave me a list of poets and artists to meet in San Francisco when I got there. When I returned to New York two years ago, Steve was reading everywhere. He was prolific. He was so ingrained in my understanding of New York, I’m not sure what New York will mean to me without him. I’d run into him and Yuko at readings, noise shows, avant-garde music shows, and art shows. He always knew what was happening. He was in so many worlds. I will miss him.

As for highlights, one for me was seeing Brad Abrahams’ documentary about the painter David Huggins, Love and Saucers. Huggins believes he lost his virginity to an alien named Crescent, and his paintings document his encounters with her and other aliens. Huggins’ paintings are nocturnal and intensely libidinal. Many of his works include nude alien women, sometimes mounting him, or at other times having him suckle their breasts. I also saw Gee Vaucher of Crass speak at the New York Art Book Fair and caught Francis Bacon’s monumental work Three Studies for a Crucifixion at the Guggenheim. Lastly, I was very proud to have one of my involuntary paintings included in the Involuntary México show in Mexico City. The show was held in the Hidalgo Station of the Mexico City subway, which I found curious considering my piece that was included was taken at the Ralph Station in Brooklyn. From one subway wall to another.

Books I’ve been reading:

  • Kenneth Patchen - The Journal of Albion Moonlight

  • Benjamin Péret - Mad Balls

  • Steven Jesse Bernstein - I Am Secretly An Important Man

  • Bessel van der Kolk - The Body Keeps The Score


Music I’ve been listening to on the subway:

  • Don Cherry - Brown Rice

  • Pharmakon - Devour

  • Joe Jackson - Steppin’ Out

  • Sonic Youth - The Destroyed Room


Some publishing notes:

Report #4: Baby, Take Your Teeth Out

A few weeks ago, thieves ransacked my storage unit in Portland. It looks like they took all my old X-Men comics and a bunch of dated electronics. My sister sent me some photos of the unit and in one there’s a blanket my mother made me when I was a toddler sort of tossed aside. I guess it’s easy for strangers to trample your memories. The last few months have been kind of rough. One of my crowns came off. I don’t have any dental insurance. Hell, I don’t even know how to find a dentist. The crown still hasn’t been put back but the tooth doesn’t hurt. For me, not having any health insurance has become a consistent source of anxiety. Over the last four years, I’ve had a large lipoma over my right clavicle that I need to get checked out. I guess, if it was going to kill me it would have already. The last time I saw a doctor was back in 2013 after I escaped an abusive relationship. They said my blood pressure was incredibly high. Six years on, I’m still nervously waiting for my first stroke or heart attack.

As far as writing goes, I started 2019 off with a bang. I’ve had more writing published in these first few months than in all of 2018. My plan is to have a new PDF ebook out by the end of 2019. It’ll primarily be made of prose poems I wrote while living in New Orleans. The working title is Brandon Freels Versus The Reality Principle. One of my New Year’s resolutions was to shake up my writing a little by focusing on some third-person flash fiction. I’ve been writing exclusively in the first-person for twenty years, and it seems to experiment with a change in perspective might do me some good. My goal is to have fifteen of these flash fiction pieces written by the end of 2019 and then make a PDF ebook out of them in 2020.

Honestly, the snow made it hard for me to get motivated to go anywhere, but I did go to a few art shows and events this winter. There was the Leonor Fini show at The Museum of Sex. I was impressed with how transgressive Fini’s delicate drawings could be. In one she had a woman fucking a deer, and in another a man eating a turd out of a woman’s ass. I went to the Whitney Museum’s Andy Warhol show and finally got to see one of his oxidation paintings. I attended a lecture by Pam Grossman about Remedios Varo. The lecture focused on Varo’s connection to the occult and how she saw art as a form of invocation. At the Museum of Modern Art, there was a Joan Miro exhibit, but it was mostly just pieces they pulled out of storage. They did have his Portrait of a Man in a Late Nineteenth-Century Frame on display, which I’d been wanting to see. There were also these two collage pieces incorporating rope into the composition. Both works disturbed me. I didn’t find them visually appealing, but they bothered me so much, I felt it was important to acknowledge them. While it’s great to have all these big museums accessible to me now that I live in New York, in the future I’d like to visit smaller, more contemporary galleries. If anyone has any suggestions, let me know.

One of the highlights for me over the last few months was seeing the Lou Reed Drones installation at The Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Lou Reed’s amps were set up near the pulpit of the church in a semi-circle, then his guitars were placed against them. There was a man, a conductor of sorts, adjusting the guitars to create different levels of feedback. Other avant-garde musicians, including Laurie Anderson and John Zorn, played freely throughout the church, improvising over the feedback that Reed’s guitars made. I’m not sure what attracts me to this kind of music, but I also spent two days at this year’s Ende Tymes Festival. Each night contained a wealth of performers doing their own variations of drone and experimental music. Most of it was what a Portland friend used to call pedal violence, where an artist would string a number of guitar pedals together to create a wall of chaotic sound. But other performances were more delicate, like two musicians playing long-form drones on their clarinets. I went to the previous year’s Ende Tymes Festival too and was fascinated by a performer called Nonhorse (I only recently learned their name). Nonhorse impressed me with the way he “scratches” tapes on old cassette decks. To scratch them he pushes down on the spindle that holds the reel. It's almost like how a turntablist scrubs a record. 

On a different note, I was pretty excited to learn that my new apartment on Chauncey Street is only a few buildings away from where Ralph and Alice Kramden lived in The Honeymooners. Apparently, Chauncey Street is where Jackie Gleason grew up.

Books I’ve been reading:

  • Quintron - Europa My Mirror

  • Melissa Broder - The Pisces

  • Mark Fisher - The Weird and Eerie

  • Jean Ray - Whiskey Tales

  • RW Spryszak - Edju


Music I’ve been listening to on the subway:

  • Crash Worship - Asesinos

  • Controlled Bleeding - Rest in Peace

  • Einstürzende Neubauten - Tabula Rasa

  • Sun Ra - The Antique Blacks

  • Mike Daily - Kevin Sampselliana Pt. 1 and 2


Some publishing notes:

  • My prose poem “Hello” appeared on the Punk Lit Press website.

  • My flash fiction pieces “Why I Left” and “Doggone” appeared on the Soft Cartel website.

  • My flash fiction piece “I’ve Got a Gun” appeared in the third issue of Alien Buddha Zine.

  • A PDF of Race Traitor #13-14 is now available online. It was published in 2001 and includes responses I made to a surrealist inquiry. Keep in mind I was in my early twenties when I wrote these responses.

  • My prose poems “Tulip” and “Calligraphy” appeared on the Misery Tourism website.

  • My prose poems “Lull” and “Birds” appeared in the twelfth issue of Deluge. Also featured in that issue is a story by my friend Kevin Sampsell.




Report #3: Shuffle It All

A lot has changed since my last report. At my apartment, we were having trouble with our landlord who refused to fix a large water leak in the basement. Because of this, the master tenant withheld the rent for two months. We called the city about the landlord, and when the city assessed the situation, they told us we weren’t even supposed to be living in that part of the apartment, that we were occupying it illegally. Since then, I’ve moved to a new apartment. It’s more expensive but still in Bed-Stuy. I’m now near the Ralph Ave stop on the C line. I’m unsure if I’ll have to take the master tenant to small claims court. He still owes me about two grand of the rent money I gave him that he never paid the landlord. Hopefully, this will all be resolved by the end of January.

Because of this, my funds have been drained, and I had to publish my chapbook Seven Nightmares as a PDF-only release. You can download it here. I like physical books, so I’m unsure how I feel about this, but embracing technology will save me some cash. I sometimes wonder where my old chapbooks and zines end up. Do people just throw them away? Years ago, my friend Mike Daily found my first chapbook at a Goodwill store in Portland. With a PDF-only release, I won’t have to think about that. I started writing Seven Nightmares while I lived in San Francisco and finished it in New Orleans. To be clear, they aren’t real nightmares, although some might have been loosely based on dreams I had. When I began writing them my intent was to do something like Barry Yourgrau.

Another project I finished this winter was a joint statement with Craig Wilson in regard to the Trump regime’s attack on transgender people. In these trying times, we felt writing a statement was the least we could do. You can download a PDF of the statement here. Craig and I were in the Portland Surrealist Group together years ago but chose to sign the statement as The Claude Cahun Transmutation Society. When I first started studying surrealism as an undergrad in the late 90s, Claude Cahun was a central focus of my studies. Personally, I’ve never really identified as anything. It's the exterior world, the superego, that tries to pin us down and label us.

As for art, I was lucky enough to see Lydia Lunch read with Umar Bin Hassan of The Last Poets. I never thought for a second that I’d ever get to see him read! I also went to the Bruce Nauman show at MOMA and PS1, the Sarah Lucas show at the New Museum, and the Hilma af Klint show at the Guggenheim. I’m not sure how much I like Bruce Nauman’s work but I do like his ideas. His piece “Clown Torture” was a highlight for me. Sarah Lucas surprised me with her visceral understanding of convulsive beauty. Her Nuds, with their twisted bodies, reminded me of something Hans Bellmer might do, or perhaps of the late furniture work of Dorothea Tanning. Hilma af Klint’s paintings were amazing in their abstraction, calculation, and color. For me, to stand before her triptych Altarpiece paintings was unexpectedly cosmic. I couldn’t help but think of how much her work pre-dated not only abstractionists like Kandinsky but also Dadaists like Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia.

This winter, I’ve spent a lot of time watching documentaries. My housemate and I went to see Narcissister Organ Player at the Film Forum. Although I’ve never seen her perform live, I first became aware of Narcissister when I was living in San Francisco where I saw a video of her’s at the Museum of African Diaspora. In the video, she pulled her entire wardrobe out from her vagina. Other documentaries I watched were Shadowman, about NYC street artist Richard Hambleton and the anonymous silhouette figures he spread throughout the city, and I Am Secretly An Important Man, about poet Steven Jesse Bernstein. I’ve fallen in love with Bernstein’s piece “Face” and have been listening to it a lot these days. I remember, back in the day, Kevin Sampsell raved to me about Bernstein, but I was skeptical and never bought Bernstein’s books. It’s a shame because today they go for hundreds of dollars.

Lastly, I found a new favorite place in New York. When I first moved to my new location I took a long train ride up to The Cloisters and discovered Fort Tryon Park. The park has the ruins of a gigantic archway on it, The Billings Arcade. It was once part of the Billings Estate, which occupied the land before it was a park. For me, it’s always refreshing to see the property of the rich taken to decay and repurposed for us all to enjoy.

Books I’ve been reading:

  • David Wojnarowicz - Memories That Smell Like Gasoline

  • Anna Vitale - Our Rimbaud Mask

  • Gavin James Bower - Claude Cahun: The Soldier With No Name

  • Jennifer L. Shaw - Reading Claude Cahun’s Disavowals

  • Bud Smith - Double Bird

  • Dylan Angell, ed. - Funeral Songs


Music I’ve been listening to on the subway:

  • Boris Dzaneck - In His Own Words

  • UT - In Gut’s House

  • Morphine - Cure for Pain

  • Iggy Pop - Avenue B

  • Steven Jesse Bernstein - Prison

  • Beastie Boys - Licensed to Ill


Publishing note:

  • In late December, two of my prose poems (“Fame” and “Dick”) appeared on the Philosophical Idiot website. I wrote both poems while I was living in New Orleans. You can read them here.