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.

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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.

Report #2: Hands Holding The Void

In August, I visited Portland for a wedding and couldn’t believe how depressed it got me. It was good to see old friends but I felt disillusioned. I hope I never have to move back to that city. Now that I’m in New York, I’m happier than I’ve been in years. Despite this, I’m still having trouble adjusting socially. Finding a bar I love has been hard. There’s nothing like New Orleans’s Saturn Bar here and I’ve yet to tap into the punk community. It doesn’t make it any easier that all the fliers for the cool underground punk shows have the location listed as “ask a punk.” I don’t know any New York punks to ask!

The summer was muggy but not nearly as bad as the previous summer in Louisiana. In New Orleans, you’d step outside for just a few minutes and suddenly your shirt would be soaked in sweat. The hottest place in New York over the summer was the underground stations. Sometimes, while waiting at the West Fourth Street station, I’d just get on the wrong train to enjoy the air-conditioning. I really have fallen in love with the subway though. One of my favorite subway stops is at Smith and Ninth in Gowanus. This is where I hop off the G train when heading to work. According to Wikipedia, this stop is the highest rapid transit station in the world. You can look out across Brooklyn, or down at all the filth in the Gowanus Canal. Hell, you can even look across the bay and see The Statue of Liberty.

With my ridiculous work schedule, getting out of the house hasn’t been easy, but in New York, there’s always something happening. On a whim, I went to see Karen Finley perform at Issue Project Room. I have mixed feelings about her writing but enjoyed the chaos of her undulating voices. I saw Lydia Lunch’s band Retrovirus play at the Brooklyn Bazaar. It wasn’t my first time seeing them. I always get a kick out of guitarist Weasel Walter’s Italian riding pants. I also caught the krautrock band Faust in a strange room above the Murmrr Theatre, the San Francisco punk band The Avengers at El Cortez in Bushwick, and the punk band Fear, with original members Lee Ving and Spit Stix, at the Gramercy in Manhattan. Spit Stix is an acquaintance of mine from Portland and plays with some of my friends in a band called Nasalrod.

Another Portlander, Rex Marshall, also known as Mattress, won over a crowd at a bar in Williamsburg. I’ve been a follower of Rex’s end-of-the-world lounge crooning for over a decade. I wonder how he keeps that gold suit so clean? Oakland’s electro-noise artist Adam Keith also came through, performing in Queens with his project Cube. He played at a large multi-roomed performance space called the Knockdown Center. A number of friends from the Bay Area flew out to see Adam perform. I hadn’t seen most of these people since I left San Francisco in 2016. Many horrible things have happened to that community since then, namely the fire at the Ghost Ship warehouse that killed 36 people, and after that, the untimely deaths of my two friends Ronny Burke and Noah Marmalefsky. It was good to reconnect with the Bay Area folks, although, the whole thing felt very melancholic.

For me, the biggest highlight of the last few months was the Alberto Giacometti show at the Guggenheim. I expected it to focus on Giacometti’s human head studies, but there were many of his early surrealist works on display too. It was my first time seeing Hands Holding The Void (Invisible Object) and I can’t begin to tell you how excited I was. Like most, I became aware of this piece through André Breton’s Mad Love, and I’d always wanted to see it in person. It reminded me of some kind of ancient Egyptian statuary but with extraterrestrial origins. I was beyond thrilled and must have taken nearly a hundred photographs of it from every angle imaginable. Giacometti’s later works, his squashed and slender heads, have never really interested me. Yet, seeing them in person did open my eyes up a bit. Some were micronic in size, while others were detailed with tatters as if they were slowly being torn apart. 

It’s tempting to compare Giacometti’s heads with the brute alien heads of David Wojnarowicz, which I saw at the Whitney. Like Giacometti’s, Wojnarowicz’s heads also had some kind of violence inflicted on them. Some had eyepatches and looked beaten up or their mouths were covered in gauze. Growing up in Portland, Wojnarowicz was kind of a mystery. His name would pop up in publications I’d find at Powell’s in the small press section, but I really had no idea what he was about. I liked the work they had on display at the Whitney, yet even after seeing it, Wojnarowicz is still an enigma. His oeuvres feel overwhelmingly diverse. I’ve been reading Cynthia Carr’s Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz and I guess its given me something to go on. I was hoping the Whitney exhibit would have Wojnarowicz’s “IF I DIE OF AIDS, FORGET BURIAL, JUST DROP MY BODY ON THE STEPS OF THE FDA” jacket. Its absence made the show feel incomplete. Maybe the jacket no longer exists? But at least they had his Arthur Rimbaud mask.

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More books I’ve been reading:

• David Lynch and Kristine McKenna - Room to Dream

• McKenzie Wark - The Beach Beneath the Street

• Steve Dalachinsky - Where Night and Day Become One

• Istvan Kantor, ed. - Rivington School: 80s New York Underground

• Kathy Acker - Hannibal Lecter, My Father

Music I’ve been listening to on the subway:

• Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Push the Sky Away

• Pigface - Washingmachine Mouth

• 3 Teens Kill 4 - No Motive

• Big Black Cloud - Black Friday

• Butthole Surfers - Butthole Surfers

Some publishing notes:

• My piece "I'm Really Scared When I Kill in My Dreams" was reprinted in the Thrice Publishing anthology I Wagered Deep On The Run Of Six Rats To See Which Would Catch The First Fire: Surrealists and Outsiders - 2018, edited by RW Spryszak. You can buy the anthology here.

• My friend Nova recently made a PDF of my first chapbook Who the Hell is Brandon Freels? The chapbook was originally published by Kevin Sampsell’s Future Tense Books in 1996 and has an introduction by Hal Sirowitz. I was just a teenager when I wrote it. You can download the PDF here.

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.