Report #1: Lost In New York

It’s been six months since I moved to New York. I live in Bed-Stuy, the Brooklyn neighborhood where Spike Lee filmed Do The Right Thing. The apartment I’m in has two floors and one and a half bathrooms. My bedroom is tiny. I have four housemates, two of whom are jazz musicians. There is a door in my room that leads to a backyard. The backyard is basically just mud. The apartment is less than a block from the Flushing and Broadway intersection, and I can catch the elevated J and M trains pretty easily. I’m also within walking distance of the G and L trains.

Something I appreciate about the subway is how it can be a place where the unexpected happens. Coming home from work the other evening, a homeless man got on the train and announced he’d be reciting a poem. I expected something trite, but what he began reading was modern and inventive. I started listening more attentively and, as we rolled into the next station, he abruptly stopped mid-sentence. He then robotically announced what stop we were at and listed all the connecting lines at that particular station. After the train started moving again, he continued the poem from where he’d left off.

A lot of my time in New York is spent just wandering around photographing the ground and decaying walls. On Facebook, I’m in a group that documents involuntary painting. I’ve been trying to write a blog post describing involuntary painting, but I can never piece together the right words. Involuntary painting is basically industrial residue that was not purposely made to be art, but through the eyes of the viewer, there is an unintended beauty that can be seen. Sometimes involuntary painting resembles abstract art, like a Jackson Pollock or a Mark Rothko. At work, a co-worker of mine spilled a can of paint. That’s the simplest example of involuntary painting I can think of. To her, it was just a mess, but to me it was art. I wish I would have taken a picture.

One of my goals upon moving to New York was to visit John Zorn’s legendary jazz club The Stone. I didn’t have much time (it was closing at the end of February), but thankfully my friend Steve Dalachinsky had a poetry reading scheduled there. The Stone was just a simple black room with folding chairs. It was located a short walk from Houston Street. There was no drinking or video recording permitted. Dalachinsky read with Frank London's Shekhina Big Band. I was impressed with everything I saw. These were serious musicians. Steve read between each musical composition and the way it was handled by the musicians made the whole performance feel like one big piece. Honestly, the poets of New York are the best I’ve ever seen when it comes to reading to an audience.

Around this time I saw Zorn himself play at the opening for Performance Space New York. I also caught the Sun Ra Arkestra in a movie theatre near Times Square, the industrial rock band Chrome somewhere in Greenpoint, and James Chance at the Bowery Electric. Chance’s show was my favorite. When Chance took the stage I was kind of worried. He looked a lot older than I expected. He appeared disheveled like he'd been walking the streets of New York in an anxiety-laden haze. He was constantly squinting his eyes and tugging up his pants. At one point, he tried dancing on the stairs in front of the stage but tripped and fell down in front of me. I was afraid he’d broken a hip. Instead, he got up and continued dancing and playing the saxophone. He pushed himself to his limits and didn’t give a shit how frail he was.

Speaking of artists who don’t give a shit, at the end of March I attended a screening of Boiled Angel: The Trial of Mike Diana at the IFC Center. Directed by Frank Henenlotter, the film focuses on how cartoonist Mike Diana became the first artist ever convicted of obscenity for his work. Later that month there was a show of Diana’s at the Superchief Gallery in Queens where Diana displayed huge grotesque and pornographic banners alongside small petite paintings. The gallery workers created this long intestine that stretched throughout the space, and they were still painting it with bloody drips as I arrived. After I got home I found the red drips had somehow gotten all over the legs of my brand new overalls!

When I first got to New York, PS1 had a Carolee Schneemann exhibit with her Interior Scroll on display. Although I wasn't crazy about everything Schneemann did, Interior Scroll is like some kind of modern art relic. The Whitney also had an interesting show of Zoe Leonard's work. There I was able to see another sort of relic: an original typed version of Leonard’s infamous piece I Want a President. But the show that impressed me most was Nobuyoshi Araki fantastic exhibit at the Museum of Sex. Araki is mostly known for his bondage photography, but there was a series of photographs he did that really blew me away. They were from his book Erotos, which contained black and white abstract images of flowers and other natural elements, juxtaposed with close-ups of genitalia, body parts, and various orifices. I wanted to buy an edition of Erotos, but all of them on eBay were in the triple digits.

In May, I took a quick trip to Boston to see my friend David's band Casual Burn play. Casual Burn is a punk band from New Orleans and they were on an East Coast tour, but both their New York and Philadelphia shows were on nights I worked. I was able to spend the day after the show at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, a museum that seemed to rival the MET in size and quality. My favorite piece in the museum was Elihu Vedder’s The Questioner of the Sphinx, which they had hidden away in a little corridor. I also took a trip to Cambridge and visited the Harvard Art Museums where I saw some rare Hannah Höch collages.

Lastly, I finished Cosey Fanny Tutti’s Art Sex Music which took me several months to work through. The book is largely a big call out directed at Cosey’s former lover and Throbbing Gristle bandmate Genesis Breyer P-orridge. Band drama aside, there was one particular moment that really bothered me: after their final split, Genesis violently assaulted Cosey in a jealous rage. I’ve seen Genesis speak on a number of occasions, most recently at Mast Books promoting Brion Gysin: His Name Was Master. It’s hard for me to reconcile the abusive partner I’ve read about with the intelligent, positive teacher I’ve seen at lectures. I realize their breakup happened over forty years ago, but I wish Genesis would acknowledge Cosey’s words. Some kind of attempt at accountability would be appreciated.

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Other books I’ve read since moving to New York:

• Chris Kraus - After Kathy Acker

• Sarah Schulman - Conflict Is Not Abuse

• Matthew Zapruder - Why Poetry

• David Antin - Code of Flag Behavior

• Daniel Kane - “Do You Have a Band?” Poetry and Punk Rock in New York City

• Mike Diana - America: Live/Die

Music I’ve been listening to on the subway:

• Black Tape For A Blue Girl - The Rope

• Chris and Cosey - Technø Primitiv

• The Birthday Party - Hits

• Wall of Voodoo - The Index Masters

Some publishing notes:

• Three poems of mine were accepted by Five 2 One magazine. They will appear in the spring 2019 issue.

• I answered a questionnaire on smallness for the surrealist magazine Peculiar Mormyrid.

• I’m working on a new chapbook called Seven Nightmares. After having it rejected by one press, I’ve decided I’m better off doing it myself. I plan on having it finished this year. I’m just waiting on some paper samples.

The Night Parades

Originally appeared in Peculiar Mormyrid #6.

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I was told the parade would start around ten. It had no official title, but locals often referred to it as the Witches’ parade. It would begin in the Holy Cross neighborhood of the Lower Ninth Ward. Although I lived in the Upper Ninth Ward, I’d never crossed the Industrial Canal to the Lower Ninth. We were to gather at a site off Reynes Street. There was an abandoned school there, which isn’t an unusual thing in New Orleans. The windows of the school were boarded up, and the parking lot was covered in cracks and weeds. I was dressed in civilian clothing, and when I got there my friend Sauce lightly chastised me for not wearing a costume. The parking lot was full of punks, hundreds of them in disguises. Some of them dressed as witches or warlocks, while others just wore weird masks. I remember one person wore tree branches like horns. We were all drinking heavily.

There seemed to have been a group of thirteen women leading the parade and they all wore shiny silver outfits. Some of them had skintight suits, while others wore silver robes. Each had a staff with a symbol at the top. I remember one had the Circle A on it and another had an upside down cross. There was also a pickup truck sitting in the parking lot and it had a float attached to it. The float appeared to be in the shape of a pirate ship. The silverclad women got inside the pirate ship, and the pickup pulled the float into the street. A brass marching band walked alongside the pickup, and the rest of the crowd, including me, followed.

We marched behind the truck as it made its way down Dauphine Street. When we came to the Industrial Canal the pickup stalled momentarily, giving people time to sit on the levee and socialize. I ran into my friend Captain Shirt and he had a machine he was carrying that distorted his voice. I remember he kept laughing into it. Shirt gave me one of his beers and I walked around in the crowd where I found a moveable shrine made from hubcaps. It had a grinning demonic face painted on it and looked like it was built on a shopping cart. 

Once the pickup truck was moving again we turned down Sister Street and ended up inside a tunnel that ran below Saint Claude Avenue. The marching band took this opportunity to play an extended jam as people danced at both ends of the tunnel. After exiting the tunnel, we passed through a rather vacant part of the neighborhood. The marching band took a break as some hiphop music was put on and a handful of women started twerking. Eventually, the silver-dressed women took center stage and performed a ritual involving their staffs.

When the parade got rolling again it crossed the Saint Claude Avenue Bridge to the Upper Ninth Ward. There we walked along Japonica Street, but near the train tracks the pickup stopped permanently, and both it and the pirate ship were parked in a nearby lot. Despite the loss of our float, the brass band played on. People continued to party, and I remember seeing a girl spray paint the word “witches” on a nearby wall. My friend Bren approached me and appeared concerned. “Why are we here? We aren’t supposed to stop here,” she said. Bren pointed towards a gated entrance. “The parade is supposed to go there,” she said. As if on cue, a group of people rallied the crowd and we all started walking through the gates, behind which was a marshy grassland. It felt like we walked forever, and my shoes got covered in sludge. I found one of the silver women’s staffs lying in the grass and began carrying it around with me. It had a large triangle on top of it.

At the end of the marsh, we came to an abandoned industrial pier where a makeshift bar was set up and a DJ was playing. The pier looked out over a body of water that, in the dark, appeared much larger than it probably was. At the pier, people started getting careless. I saw a punk squirt some lighter fluid into a puddle and set it on fire. He claimed the pier was not made of wood and that it wouldn’t burn down. The crowd objected, and a scuffle broke out. Eventually, the fire was extinguished, and the brawl prevented.

Sometime after three in the morning, the police arrived, and the crowd dispersed. I went back to my apartment with the triangle staff I’d found. Drunk, I passed out for what was probably only half an hour. When I awoke, I headed to another spot I’d been told about where the Krewe of Eris was gathering. This spot was on the levee in the Upper Ninth Ward. It was known by the locals as The End of the World and was located where the Industrial Canal meets the Mississippi. When I arrived it was nearly pitch black, but I could hear voices and still see shapes of humans in the moonlight. Some of the voices sounded intoxicated and some familiar. Perhaps they’d been at the other parade as well? But there were many new voices too, and the new voices were sober and older. I ran into

Captain Shirt again. He seemed very high. “You made it,” he said before drifting away. I sat down at the end of the levee and watched a cruise ship move along the Mississippi. For a few minutes, its lights brightly lit up the giant river.

Moving closer to dawn, a handful of people started igniting large torches by the river’s edge. Almost at the same time, a brass marching band began playing on the levee. They were playing what sounded like a slow dirge. The torchbearers slowly ascended the levee and lined up alongside the brass band while the rest of us crowded around them. As the sun rose, we all marched down the levee and into the adjacent Bywater neighborhood. With the dawn’s light coming down on us, I could finally look at all the fascinating costumes people were wearing. One man was dressed as a bear. Another person simply looked like a bush with antlers. A lot of people were in drag. There was also a group of women carrying red and black flags.

We weaved in and out of the Bywater neighborhood. We went down Chartres Street and the crowd stopped to have an early morning dance party. Many people climbed the nearby trains and danced on top of them. Turning off Chartres, I believe the next street we walked down was Dauphine. Some residents came out of their homes in their bathrobes and drinking coffee. They waved to the crowd, unfazed by the early morning parade. As we approached my street, Clouet Street, I decided I was too exhausted to continue. I returned to my apartment and slept for the rest of the day. I never found out where the parade ended.

Mardi Gras, 2017

Diamanda Galás in New Orleans

Before this summer, I’d only listened to a few albums by Diamanda Galás. I knew she rarely toured the United States, and that her April show in New Orleans was a special occasion. The tour was promoting her two newest releases, All the Way, a collection of covers, and At Saint Thomas the Apostle Harlem, a live album. Her New Orleans performance was at the Joy Theatre. From all the things I’d read about Galás, I expected her to be theatrical, dripping with blood and guts like on the cover of her album Plague Mass. Instead, the show was quite reserved. Galás dressed in a dark gown that was almost funerary in appearance. It was like something someone would be buried in. She was seated at a black grand piano in the center of the stage. The minimal atmospheric lighting was accentuated by clouds of smoke.

Many of the numbers she played were sung in languages I didn’t understand. They weaved in and out of tongues. The music wasn’t restricted to any one form. It shape-shifted through cultures, melodies, and rhythms, making her work hard for a layperson such as myself to classify. At it’s best, the music was abstract and animalistic. The vocals ranged from the guttural to the angelic. Added lyrics often changed the meanings of the original lyrics, and the pounding tempos of the piano altered the demeanor. It is partly this transformative power that makes Galás so interesting. She deconstructs these songs and digests them into her own vision. What she does can be likened to appropriative art, but instead of glue and scissors she might as well be using flesh and knives.

It was the second number, a thunderous rendition of Bobby Bradford's “She” (also known as “Woman”), that impressed me most. Galás hammered on the piano like a singular force of nature. The music of the piano was accompanied by a sequence of almost never-ending wails and moans. It’s hard to believe Galás created all of that sound with just her voice and a piano. Beams of light reigned down on her like abstract laser lightning. There was this brutal, emotional weight to the tune. It was a feeling that picked up again at the end of the first set with her rendition of “O Death,” an American folk song. After three encores, that emotional gravity peaked once more with Galás’ version of “Let My People Go” (a song based on the American Negro spiritual ”Go Down Moses”). Galas’ renditions of these songs, with all their screaming and growling, are mutated and personal. They feel confessional, not traditional, and have an expressive violence that speaks to the nerves.

Galás has stated that her new live album At Saint Thomas the Apostle Harlem is a collection of “death songs” meant to reaffirm life. They are songs about the struggle to live in a world that is constantly trying to destroy you. Her music comes to me at a time of seemingly endless death. Over the past year I’ve had a number of my friends, all of them younger than me, pass away. They’ve succumbed to drugs, suicide, accidents, and even natural causes. For many, healthy mourning can often collapse into a kind of toxic lamenting. Listening to Galás, I am reminded that mourning, no matter how full of rage, doesn’t have to be self-destructive. The best funerary rites are cathartic and recognize what a privilege it is to be alive. I believe what Galás has given us in her music is on par with that kind of experience.

Picabia and Pettibon in New York

In March of this year, I visited Manhattan to see the Francis Picabia retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. Our Heads Are Round So Our Thoughts Can Change Directions presented major works from every phase of Picabia’s shapeshifting career. Picabia never settled on a specific style and opposed any herd mentality, but central to his life’s work, and most important to me, was his Dadaist period.

Picabia was a master of Dada, and his Dada room was a gold mine of Dada history. Copies of both Tristan Tzara’s Dada and Picabia’s own 391 were present, and around the corner were copies of the Parisian Dadaist journal Littérature. The walls were covered with his mechanomorphic paintings. More like a draftsman than an artist, during his Dada period Picabia turned the spotlight on modern machinery. In these works he modified and repurposed images of machines from advertisements and catalogs. With a deadpan sense of humor, he made machines that would never be able to function in the real world and enhanced them with titles that humanized them.

The crown jewel of these mechanical works might be Amorous Parade. Picabia connected a phallic machine by way of some joints to a strange pumping device. This, in turn, was attached to a record player above it. The title, written in large uppercase letters, suggested some kind of hydraulic and kinetic orgy. Picabia, displacing the machines from their utilitarian purpose, reinvented them to serve a symbolically erotic one.

Walking around the room, I was suddenly drawn to a different kind of painting altogether. Placed on the back wall was The Cacodylic Eye. It was created in 1921 when Picabia was ill with an eye infection. As the story goes, he asked all of his Dada friends to sign and comment on the canvas. Some did, but others glued their pictures to it. At first glance, it seemed Picabia’s only contribution to the piece was the title and his own signature, both painted in an extra-large headline and byline. But he may have added the large looming eye in the lower right quadrant. Curiously, there is a contradiction in authorship with this piece. It was collectively made, but the orchestrator, Picabia, took credit. Also of importance is how Picabia presented the signatures. The piece resembled the graffiti on a bathroom wall, but when framed what was once not thought of as art was now seen as a work of art.

On the same wall as The Cacodylic Eye was a splatter of ink Picabia blasphemously named The Blessed Virgin. Another piece next to it was simply a sheet of paper with his name written across it. The title of that piece, naturally, was Francis Picabia. Walking through the exhibit I was reminded that, no matter how often his style changed, Picabia continued to play and experiment. At every turn, he fought the bourgeois concept of art. Sometimes he did it with humor, but he also brought together unexpected figures that were contradictory in color, form, or concept. And like with his mechanical works, his other periods often borrowed from popular culture. Even his earliest works, the faux-Impressionist paintings, were based on postcards, while his later Kitsch period lifted images from Hollywood.

The following morning I left my hostel in the Chelsea neighborhood and ventured through the freezing weather to the New Museum. While my main reason for visiting New York was the Picabia show, I was also there to see Raymond Pettibon’s first major survey A Pen of All Work. Pettibon is largely known as an illustrator of punk rock albums and fliers. While the show covered that period, it was broader in scope and exhibited works less familiar to punks.

I started the exhibit from the top. The first room I entered contained many of Pettibon’s political drawings. A portrait of Joseph Stalin cleverly read, “I should be president of the United States.” Another, this time of Che Guevara, was headlined, "At least I still got my own good looks.” Like Picabia, Pettibon often lifted images directly out of the mainstream. His drawing of Guevara was no different than the iconic image of Guevara. Yet, by a simple juxtaposition of words with images, Pettibon morphed the image into a provocative caricature. More than often on this floor, Pettibon’s drawings took on a less comical tone. In Untitled (To Make Him Decent), a flag was used to cover up a dead naked soldier’s genitals. The piece touched on how society’s irrational fear of sexuality can often overshadow two things that are truly indecent: war and violence.

Untitled (To Make Him Decent), 2004

The next floor down showcased Pettibon’s best-known material. These works centered around self-destruction, drugs, teen culture, punk rock, and suicide. A woman hung herself over Elvis’ death. A nameless commentator judged The Beatles by penis size. A teenage girl expressed her lustful feelings about Jesus to a nun. In the main room, a number of Pettibon’s zines were placed under glass, while Pettibon’s most famous publication, 1978’s Captive Chains, was posted page for page on the center wall. Throughout it were images of bondage, rage, and murder. One of these pages, an image that would later adorn the cover of Black Flag’s Nervous Breakdown single, had two men fighting in what appeared to be an office. One held up a chair like a lion-tamer, and the other his fists. In a world that has criminalized our humanity all we have left is our animal anger.

Untitled (Don't Complicate The Moral World), 1987

Occasionally, Pettibon’s humor appeared juvenile, like drawings of Gumby with an erection. Other times, he entered the sublime with large portraits of cathedrals and surfers on giant waves. These works seemed like anomalies in his body of work. The large sweeping waves, in particular, seemed to represent an escape from the chaos of everyday social formalities. In one a surfer rode a large red and black wave. Looming above the wave like a caption in a comic book were the words: “Don’t complicate the moral world.”

Leaving the Pettibon exhibit, I passed a poster in the subway for the Picabia show. The poster had a quote from Picabia in black bold letters. It read, “Civilization invented crime.” I was taken aback by how much this quote complimented Pettibon’s work. Pettibon’s attitude doesn’t come out of a vacuum. The hypocrisy he cynically attacks in his work is the same that Picabia and the Dadaists revolted against a century ago. The common ground between these two artists isn’t just in the borrowing of images and turning them on their head. Each artist expressed contempt for a world that has remained stubbornly two-faced and toxic throughout modern times.

The Red Disk

The first time I went to the New Orleans Museum of Art was in the Fall of 2015. I remember being surprised when I reached the second floor and discovered the George L. Viavant Gallery. Several Joan Miró paintings were hanging in that room, and one in particular dramatically stood out. The Red Disk was different from the usual Miró paintings I’d seen in museums throughout the United States. A large red disk in the middle of the painting is placed over a blob of white tendrils. The tendrils reach out haphazardly in all directions surrounded by white specks. The blob’s texture is more like that of an industrial spill, and around the red disk it looks as if the surface has been repeatedly rubbed. The disk is slightly off center. On its left is a much smaller transparent yellow dot. In the upper right corner there is a purple dot with an additional blue dot to the right of the red disk. All of this is set against a black and dark blue void.

In many ways, the painting is like a Rorschach inkblot. It can have a variety of interpretations. But what is not ambiguous about the painting is its explosiveness. The static paint tricks the eye and appears to be expanding outwardly and infinitely. Action and aggression permeate from the canvas. There is something bodily about it. It excretes a volcanic discharge. Without words, the painting seems to speak directly about the intimacy and violence of nature. It expresses something primordial in a way language cannot.

Joy of a Little Girl in Front of the Sun, 1960

Jacques Dupin, in his book Miró: Life and Work, sees The Red Disk as a pendant to a similar work, Joy of a Little Girl in Front of the Sun. Both were produced around the same time, and each has the red disk as a central theme. But the sweeping red brushstrokes of Joy of a Little Girl in Front of the Sun distract the viewer. Its colors have contrast, but lack depth and variety. The whiteness has been watered down to dry brushstrokes. It doesn’t have the raw power of the thick nebula seen in The Red Disk. In addition, Joy of a Little Girl in Front of the Sun is somewhat whimsical, like much of Miró’s earlier work, while The Red Disk is harsh and brutal.

Miró created The Red Disk in 1960 after spending the previous five years focusing on lithographs, engravings, and ceramics. His return to painting was backed by an intent to break from his traditional forms. While The Red Disk still hides some of Miró’s trademark symbols within the disorder, it shows him taking chances with techniques outside of his regular arsenal. Due to the lack of drip marks, I imagine Miró laid the canvas down horizontally and poured the excessive amount of white paint onto the canvas, like something an abstract expressionist might do. In Miró’s lesser known mature works, he would increasingly use this sort of improvisation. He would focus on space, spontaneity, and rage. The Red Disk predates these concerns, but it’s clearly a catalyst for the work he would do in the seventies. Its seed can be found in the violence of his Burnt Canvas series, the anger of his May 68 painting, and the splatters of his celebratory Fireworks triptych.