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.

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.

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.

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.