Report #14: Doll Parts

Since my last report in July, I had some bad encounters at work with a new manager. After I contacted the regional management to complain, I was given a raise and put into an easier role. It’s strange how more money can amount to a less stressful position. Because of this drama, I decided to shave my head, but first I took a vacation, going back to Georgia just in time for the Atlanta Surrealist Group’s Undertakers and Underselves: A Surrealist Excavation. The event was split into four days and held at the No Tomorrow Gallery in Atlanta’s Underground. The walls were full of collages and paintings from surrealists across the globe. Some of my favorite works were the paintings by Tori Lion, a mask made from yak skin, James Robert Foster’s collage paintings, and the suitcases full of strange sculptures, teeth, and various components. There was a lot of work to take in. Many pieces were small and anonymous. There were also a number of modified dolls, including a very haunting red one with elongated limbs. The excessive amount of dolls could be the influence of Doll’s Head Trail on the Atlanta group. I actually went to Doll’s Head Trail on this trip, and while I found it unkept and cluttered, I could see how people find the decay and bricolage inspiring.

The first day of the event was an improv day. There was a lot of freeform experimentation with noise makers, movement, and costumes. It was somewhat intimidating for me, as I’m not much of a performer. I spent most of the time playing with a Monotron someone handed me. There seemed to be a lot of cathartic screaming happening and Butoh-influenced dance. Many of the costumes seemed to touch on the “under selves” theme of the event. The second day was devoted to game-playing, and I was surprised at the number of random passersby that participated. Also present on that night was someone named Alvaro Michael who performed as The Alumified Man, a persona he created that sits at a table and wraps everything presented to him in aluminum foil. The woman who runs the space, I believe her name was Patricia, also participated by handing out “Admit One” tickets, giving the receiver permission to “admit whatever you’d like.” It was a confessional game.

The third night was for musical performances. Steven Cline asked LaDonna Smith to perform with a dancer named Lucifer, and the improv collaboration left me kind of speechless. The two performers really played off each other. Lucifer exhibited a wildness and childlike quality and LaDonna was very receptive to Lucifer’s bodily movements and sounds. At first, it was LaDonna with her fiddle leading the way, but somewhere in the performance, Lucifer took control. The two had never met before, and the spontaneity of it all added to the magic. LaDonna also brought along with her a certain Dr. Khlurr who was using one of Quintron’s drum buddies. It was fascinating to see one of these machines functioning in real life. The final night was for cinematic creations. The main feature was the Japanese cult film Horrors of Malformed Men, but I felt the truly important moment was seeing the short film The Face of Oblivion by Aaron Dylan Kearns. It’s a strange psychosexual transmission, which I may write more about in the future.

After my time in Atlanta, I again traveled to Savannah, where my friend Sofie Buck gave me two new tattoos and showed me a painting she’d been working on. The painting was based on a postcard collage I sent her earlier in the year, and I do believe she improved the piece. I rarely collaborate with people on artistic projects, but I was very pleased with this one.

Returning to New York, I went to both the Méret Oppenheim show at MOMA and the Morris Hirshfield show at the American Folk Art Museum. The Oppenheim show surprised me with the depth and diversity of her work. Of course, her famous surrealist objects were on display, but her work transcends the typical boundaries of art, tossing back and forth between abstract and realistic styles. I enjoyed her Stone Woman painting, where above water a woman is made of stones, while beneath she is flesh. The show was overwhelming and I plan on making a return visit before it closes in March. I enjoyed the Morris Hirshfield show too, but he’s not as complex of an artist as Oppenheim. The show felt very comprehensive of his work, even including his famous Nude at the Window (Hot Night in July), which is often seen in a photo surrounded by Breton, Duchamp, Ernst, and Leonora Carrington. While Hirshfield’s work primarily focuses on the female form, I found his animals to be charming. The man could simply capture the personalities of animals like no other, whether they are zebras, lions, cats, or dogs.

September was Penny Slinger month in New York. A number of her movies were shown at Spectacle Theater, while Pace Gallery was displaying some of her collages. When I went to Spectacle, Slinger was there with a much younger man who I assumed was her lover. We watched Lilford Hall, a late 60s collaboration with Peter Whitehead. The silent film was shot entirely in an old mansion and has a lot of repetitive moments, often showing the same thing happening over and over again, but in different ways. There are a lot of doors that lead to other doors or nothing at all. Two women, often dressed in black Musidora-like suits, could be found kissing and running around the large empty structure as if playing hide and seek. Sometimes the women were caged or behind fenced-off areas like captured animals. Other times they were nude, lying in bathtubs, or white as ghosts looking out old windows. I found the repetitive moments rather dreamlike as they broke with traditional narrative storytelling, and the doubling and mirroring between the two women reminded me of Bergman’s Personaor Lynch’s Mullholand Drive.

On a different day, Spectacle also showed several of Slinger’s short films. Many of these were just exercises but explored some of the same themes as Lilford Hall. I watched a documentary on Slinger called Out of the Shadows and was pleased to learn that Slinger was once supported by surrealists Roland Penrose and Lee Miller. The collages at the Pace Gallery were taken from Slinger’s book 50% The Visible Woman. There was a newer piece by her at the Pace Gallery, or rather it was a digital monitor that showed some of her newer self-portraits morphing into one another. She showed herself lying naked in a bathtub which then morphed into a sea, and so on. The bathtub is a big feature in her work, as it appears in many of her shorts and in Lilford Hall. What is the symbolism of the bathtub? It’s a private space where you cleanse yourself, but it’s also where you can die, slit your wrists, get electrocuted by a toaster, or just plain drown.

I went to the Whitney Biannual over the summer but found it rather unremarkable. In addition to that, I went to two other art fairs: the famed Armory Show and the DIY underground Spring/Break Show. My favorite piece at the Armory Show was Kapwani Kiwanga’s Ground which linked a series of photos of lightning to create one long stream of lightning. I also enjoyed Woody Vasulka’s video work, where a distorted electrical signal is somehow projected onto a television, then printed to create a “work of art.” The next day I went to the Spring/Break Show, where the art was hit or miss. One of my favorites from this show included Horacio Quiroz’s cubical figures that look like they are made from stone or a halal cone. Jessica Lee’s Lady of the Lake was also a favorite as was Alexandra Evan’s painting of a mermaid surrounded by trash. I noticed that two popular techniques utilized at the Spring/Break Show were mimicry, where one thing acts as another, and multiplicity, which can be seen in the self-portraits of Maya Mason.

Another art event I went to was the show at O’Flaherty’s called The Patriot. I went with surrealists Wayne Kral and Andrew Mendez. While we didn’t go on opening night, apparently there were so many people at the event the police came and shut it down. Originally, the show was supposed to be viewed with flashlights in the dark, but we went after all the hubbub and saw the show with the overhead lights on. Although I am doubtful, I was told nothing was rejected for this show. The whole thing felt very anonymous. Regardless, many of the works had a level of skill about them. There was a painting of a black cat hissing that was my favorite. Wayne pointed out a suitcase with some toilet paper embedded in its casing. There was a painting of two lions eating a zebra, and below it was a weird mongrel dog surrounded by human body parts. There were many mutilated dolls and in the bathroom I found another favorite: a bird with a human hand for a head.

On the music front, in July I went to both the Punk Island festival and Summer Scum 7. Punk Island was free and held in Maria Hernandez Park, a short walk from my apartment. Many bands, mostly local, were selected to play at the festival, but, honestly, not many of them were for me. A band that stood out was The Dilators, a rowdy in-your-face trans-punk band. Summer Scum 7 was a noise festival held this year at TV Eye. I’m never sure how to write about noise artists because I’m not sure I understand the genre, but I do like watching them. One performance I enjoyed was Form Hunter, where some dudes had a metal box and used all these objects to create sound from it. Then a guy named Gnawed performed and had an interesting video being played behind him. The video was in reverse and showed some chains wrapping themselves around a piece of wood, like a couple of snakes or tentacles. It was filmed in a small tunnel and had a cavernous feel to it. My favorite performance at Summer Scum 7 was Rectrix, a solo project of Pippi Zornoza, a Providence-based artist. She used two mics with lights on them and one she would swing, so it would only momentarily capture her voice. The event was intense and half the time I wasn’t sure who I was watching because everything was happening so fast and there were many performers.

As with every city I live in, I find my favorite bands to follow. In New York, it’s been the projects of two sisters. I started following Melissa several years ago after catching them at the Market Hotel. I believe I’ve written about them before. This summer I saw them play two amazing outdoor shows and one really fun, cramped set at Bootleg Bar. Unbeknownst to me until this summer, Melissa’s singer is the sister of Pharmakon’s only member, who I also saw play multiple times this summer. Pharmakon played their first show in three years at the Knockdown Center with Aaron Dilloway of Wolf Eyes, who had a zombie-like set. I first saw Pharmakon many years ago at my house in San Francisco, Bay Area 51, and have been hooked ever since.

At the end of October, I saw a jaw-dropping performance by Narcissister. She was performing at a sort of cabaret event in Brooklyn. For her piece, she came to the stage in what I would call a traditional 1950s mother’s outfit. At first, she was mopping the floor, but when she tried to cook some eggs the carton was empty. Then, Narcissister squatted over the mop bucket and pushed out an egg from her vagina. She did this twelve times, fried the eggs on stage in a frying pan, and handed them out to the crowd. She gave one to me and I ate it. It was humorous, disgusting, revolting, sexy, and giving. I think most people were turned off by the eating of the egg that had been in her pussy, but I found it rather exciting and charitable.

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Movies I’ve been watching:

• Pearl (Ti West, 2022)

• Fire of Love (Sara Dosa, 2022)

• Satantango (Béla Tarr, 1994)

• Fascination (Jean Rollin, 1979)

What I’ve been reading:

• Genesis P-Orridge - Nonbinary: A Memoir

• Penny Slinger - 50% The Visible Woman

• Jacqueline Burckhardt and Bice Curiger, eds. - Meret Oppenheim: Beyond the Teacup

• Matthew Ragsdale - Cinema Schism #1

Music I’ve been listening to on the subway:

• Babes in Toyland - Fontanelle

• Black Sabbath - Paranoid

• Thee Oh Sees - A Foul Form

• Killdozer - Burl

Report #13: Empire of Light

I started April off by using the last of my vacation hours to take a trip to Providence. I treated myself, booking a room at the fancy Biltmore Hotel. I chose this hotel solely on the rumor that it’s haunted. The room I stayed in was odd. It was a single room with two bathrooms, one by the bed and another by the door. There was a full-length mirror that appeared to be covering up where a door used to be. I kept waiting for something interesting to happen. One night I heard a rather loud party but couldn’t locate where the party was. It wasn’t spooky at the time, but when I got back to Brooklyn, I read up on the Biltmore and one of the paranormal activities reported was “laughter from parties that can’t be found”!

In Providence, I did a lot of walking. I explored Olneyville, looking for the ruins of old Fort Thunder, the squat where a thriving noise rock scene once flourished. Without a guide, I came up empty. Walking down Westminster Street, something drew me to a bar called The Scurvy Dog. Inside I was surprised to see the vèvè of Papa Legba painted on the wall. It’s the same one I have tattooed on my chest. Throughout the bar were other voodoo-inspired assemblage boxes containing animal bones and dolls painted completely white. They reminded me of something Joseph Cornell might do. The bar had a similar vibe to the Saturn Bar in New Orleans, a homely spot for outsiders and punks alike. Another location I visited was the Haven Brother’s Diner, a famous hamburger joint. I primarily went there because I saw a sign that said it was founded in 1888, my recurring number, but later I learned it was actually founded in 1893.

I did go to one museum in Providence, The Rhode Island School of Design’s museum. The two most interesting discoveries at this museum were the pieces by Leonora Carrington and David Wojnarowicz. Carrington’s piece was called Stella Snead and Her Cat. It had a woman sitting next to a strange orb, with a castle in the landscape behind her. In front of the orb and next to the woman’s feet was the outline of a cat. Perhaps the cat is meant to be invisible, like the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland. Wojnarowicz’s piece was a print where an angel of death (the words DEMOCRACY AT WORK written on its cape) swoops over the dispossessed with a sickle. The sun hovering over the people has a swastika made from dollar bills inside it.

On my last day in Providence I headed to Swan Point Cemetery in search of HP Lovecraft’s grave, which I found in the Phillips plot. After that, I wandered around College Point, hunting the houses relevant to Lovecraft’s life and work. There was something about College Point that reminded me of Magritte’s painting Empire of Light. Perhaps it was the time of day, but the streets seemed to get dark before the sky. When passing through the Brown University campus I came across my recurring number again, 1888, written on a fence. A sign that I’m headed in the right direction? After midnight, I took a walk down Benefit Street. When I passed the Athenaeum, the library where Poe got dumped by his girlfriend a hundred and seventy years earlier, something odd happened. Of the two exterior lamps in front of the entrance, one began mysteriously flashing like a strobe light.

Later in April, the garage rock band the Mummies came to Brooklyn for two shows. These were make-up shows for a concert that was canceled the previous year because of Covid. I was able to attend one of them at Elsewhere. I was disappointed the Mummies played such a short set, but was impressed with how tight and entertaining they were. There was something very clownish about their stage presence, and I didn’t expect that. They have a sort of beat-up rock aesthetic to them, like how a used book that’s been been read a hundred times fits comfortably in your hand. I first heard of the Mummies from my friends in the Portland band Big Black Cloud, who used to cover the Mummies’ song “Stronger Than Dirt.”

When I was in Providence, I got word that Negativland would be playing in Manhattan at Le Poisson Rouge. I wasn’t sure what to expect from the venue, and it turned out to be very uncomfortable. In front of the stage, there were tables set up as if in a restaurant. I was told I could only stand around a roped off perimeter because the people at the tables had paid more. They also had to order a meal and several waiters were running in and out of the roped-off area. I was baffled by this, as were other attendees. One stranger started talking to me and they turned out to be from Portland. We talked about the noise scene in Portland, old house venues like Pocket Sandwich, and some mutual friends. Negativland had a woman named Sue-C doing visuals for them. She was using a computer and a camera to project these shadow-like images onto a screen beside them. They reminded me of Man Ray’s rayograms. The music was classic Negativland: vocal samples mixed humorously with prerecorded statements and placed over beats and noises. I enjoyed the set despite having this weird barrier between me and the performers. The sounds of people eating and clunking their forks and knives wasn’t that distracting, just ridiculous. At the end of their set, Negativland made a FaceTime call to the Weatherman in Oakland, an older member who couldn’t make the tour. The Weatherman then sang for them, his FaceTime call projected on the wall beside them, as they played a series of simple beats and noises.

Another performance I saw was Kembra Pfahler’s band The Volumptuous Horror of Karen Black. This was an anniversary show at Pioneer Works, and had a very intimate feel to it. Equal parts rock show and art project, I found Kembra’s Karen Black performers to be bordering on the uncanny. They moved around the set with their nude bodies painted blue and wearing huge afro-like wigs. Most of them walked around very ridged and robotic, like automatons, probably because of the thigh high high-heeled boots they were wearing. In one of the rooms was a collection of Kembra’s props. The one I was most drawn to was a Statue of Liberty painted completely black, and the lantern replaced with a pentagram. Pioneer Works also had a show of Genesis Breyer P-Orridge pieces. While I respect P-Orridge, I felt underwhelmed by this collection. There just wasn’t a lot of work to see or think about.

A handful of Richard Kern’s films were shown at a basement in the Lower East Side by a group called the Cinestra Collective. I was lucky enough to make the event. Kern was there, but as usual, he provided little to reflect on and deflected many of the questions from the audience. They did show one Kern piece I’d never seen before. It was a lo-fi 2003 video called Cutter, where Kern interviews a Japanese model who is prone to cutting her flesh with razors. She demonstrates this for him, causing several audience members to leave in disgust. Kern said he tried to contact the model sometime after the video was made, but couldn’t get in touch with her. He feared she might have killed herself. 

I went to Spectacle Theater to see a collection of short films by author Chris Kraus. These films were made before she became a writer, and many of them were rough to watch. Quality wise, they were done at the level of the Cinema of Transgression, but as Kraus said in the FaceTime interview, her films were less “blood and guts” and more cerebral than artists like Kern or Nick Zedd. I found one, How to Shoot a Crime, to be very good. In it, Kraus interviews a crime scene videographer and shows some of the graphic content of his work. That interview is juxtaposed with a conversation between two dominatrices about the nature of their work. The juxtaposition is meant to highlight the differences between the real violence of life and the play violence of BDSM.

Another short film I saw was Narcissister’s Breast Work which was shown at the NADA Art Fair in Manhattan. The film dealt with public nudity in New York, but it didn’t seem to push all the buttons Narcissister had hoped for. She gave an interview after the screening and said she considered the experiment a failure. I was glad I went to the NADA Art Fair though. It had a handful of excellent works: Al Freeman’s inflatable men, Bessie Harvey’s sculptures, Lise Stoufflet’s fantastic Memory-Mushroom Cloud which has a nuclear explosion trapped in a snow globe, and Matthew Hansel’s weird The Mycophile, where a man seems overcome with mushrooms. My favorite piece of the fair was a telephone booth titled 1-800-Happy-Birthday, which had family members of people who had been killed by the police leaving happy birthday messages to their deceased loved ones. “Happy birthday, wish you were here. We miss you.” I could only listen to a few messages before getting choked up.

On the noise and punk front, I attended an evening of the multi-day Ende Tymes noise festival. I saw John Duncan and Jim Haynes perform. Duncan’s work was more reserved and theatrical, while Haynes was more like a mad scientist with odd noise-making techniques and tricks. Personally, I’m a fan of destructive noise music. In this regard, a performer who went by the name Magnetic Coroner impressed me most. He started his set playing some kind of pop-religious cassette tape, which he then slowly began to distort and destroy. At some point, he was swinging the tape over his head and the contact mics were making an awesome and sublime wind sound. 

One weekend I randomly discovered a free punk show happening at Maria Hernandez Park, just blocks from my apartment. It felt great to see such a large and active turnout for a daytime punk gig. I’m still having trouble finding DIY punk shows in Brooklyn, but as the summer is rolling in, more are appearing on my radar. I also attended a punk photography exhibit at C-Squat in the Lower East Side. One of the ways I find out about shows in New York is through the Instagram accounts of punk photographers, and many of them showed their work at this event.
 

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What I’ve been reading:

• Alex Danchev - Magritte: A Life

• Shane Kowalski - Small Moods

• Nick Zedd - Totem of the Depraved

• Eric Paul - A Suitcase Full of Dirt

• Jason C. Eckhardt - Off the Ancient Track: A Lovecraftian Guide to New England and Adjacent New York

Music I’ve been listening to on the subway:

• Rocket From The Tombs - Black Record

• Negativland - True False

• The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black - A National Healthcare

• David Bowie - 1. Outside

• Pure Hell - Noise Addiction

Movies I’ve been watching:

• Les Vampires (Louis Feuillade, 1915)

• Crimes Of The Future (David Cronenberg, 2022)

• X (Ti West, 2022)

• Men (Alex Garland, 2022)

• The Earth As Seen From the Moon (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1967)

Report #12: On The Road Again

In February I left the snowy streets of Brooklyn and traveled to Richmond, a city that’s been on my bucket list for years. Walking to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, I saw a plaque on the street outside the museum that I mistook for a Toynbee tile. It was actually a Toynbee-inspired House of Hades tile. These mysterious tiles are found throughout the United States, somehow melted into the street in secrecy. I think it’s good luck to find one. The museum itself was small but well done. There was a Man Ray exhibit, but nothing I hadn’t seen. They had excellent pieces by de Kooning, Masson, Rothko, and a somewhat humorous one by Henri Rousseau. He embarrassingly has a Native American fighting a gorilla. I like the painting because it exposes Rousseau’s naivety towards non-European cultures. One piece that stood out for me and contrasted Rousseau’s obliviousness, was Jaune Quick-To-See Smith’s War-Torn Dress. This painting is of a Native dress in two panels. The top half, smeared in red, has the words “Your God” written on it, while the bottom half, covered in green, has the words “My God” written on it.

After the museum, I met with an old Portland friend, Nonnie, who now lives in Richmond. They took me to the fascinating Hollywood Cemetery, where Gwar frontman David Brockie is buried under a neo-medieval slab. Another plot had a cast-iron dog overlooking a child’s grave. The dog is said to come alive at night. There’s also a giant pyramid of blocks that seems to appear from out of nowhere. A complicated legend is attached to this cemetery. It’s said that the tomb of W.W. Pool was once home to a vampire. While I can’t do justice to the ins-and-outs of the legend, you can read about how the legend developed here. As it got darker, Nonnie and I walked to Belle Isle, a ruin-covered island in the James River. There were no lights and we walked the rough trail in the darkness. A thick fog covered the river and the rapids looked supernatural. Following this, Nonnie and their partner Katrina took me to Gwar Bar. The next morning, when I got on my train for Washington, DC, I rounded out the visit by listening to Gwar’s Scumdogs of the Universe.

DC was cold and wet. My first stop was the National Gallery’s modern wing, which was closed when I visited in 2016. Perhaps it was my mood, but I felt let down. They did have some nice work by surrealists Kay Sage, Tanguy, William Baziotes, Matta, and Magritte, not to mention Joan Miro’s famous The Farm. There was also one of those wonderful early works of Rothko’s that defy what people expect from a Rothko, and another work by Jaune Quick-To-See Smith. After checking into my hotel, I ventured out into the cold night to Meridian Hill Park where I saw the noseless and handless statue of Serenity, the most beat-up sculpture in the city.

In the morning, I made a trip to the Phillips Collection, where William Merritt Chase’s Hide and Seek made an impression. It was painted in 1888, my recurring number! After that, I went to the Hirshhorn. They had a rather lame Marcel Duchamp show, which was juxtaposed with a cool Laurie Anderson exhibit. In part of her exhibit, she projected human images onto little clay figurines, making them look alive. It reminded me of the Dr. Pretorius scene from The Bride of Frankenstein. I also learned about her Institutional Dream Series where she would try to sleep at different locations in New York to see if it would change her dreams. Next I visited the Smithsonian American Art Museum, which always has a slew of self-taught artists. Bessie Harvey’s Birthing shook me to the core. I followed that up with a trip to the Renwick Gallery which had a few interesting objects, such as a glass chandelier meant to look like it’s made from sausages. I had time to kill before my train to New York came, so I went to the natural history museum on a whim. They had some great objects, such as a square pumice deposit from Crater Lake, a small boulder of purple quartz, and an erotically suggestive double coconut.

In March I took a trip to Florida to see Edward Leedskalnin’s Coral Castle, a lifelong goal of mine. From my hotel in Miami Beach, it took three hours, two buses, two trains, and one rainstorm, to get to Coral Castle. The structure is mostly a square of coral walls, with coral furniture and household items of coral inside the walls. People like to dwell on the question of how Ed built the castle, but really it was just hard work over twenty-eight long years. I’m more interested in why he made this castle. Ed said he was building the castle for his long-lost love, but she seems to be just a myth. It feels like a tribute to the family Ed never had, where a man’s home is his castle. There’s some symbolism happening with the rocking chair, a motif repeated throughout the castle, but I don’t really know what it means. Something about Ed that doesn’t get mentioned is that he was good at repurposing old tools and items. Many of the tools he used to build Coral Castle came from old model T cars. Another thing that doesn’t get mentioned is that the entire place is engulfed with African rainbow lizards.

I’m not sure what to say about Miami Beach, but it was full of bare butts and alien-looking Banyan trees. Not far from my hotel was the Wilzig Erotic Art Museum. Although it’s a very lo-fi museum, it’s the best museum in Miami-Dade County. It’s full of penises of all sizes. One was about ten feet tall. There was also a wall of vaginas. A lot of the work was anonymous, but there were some works from major artists: Mose Tolliver, Hans Bellmer, Klimt, Schiele, Tom of Finland, and Milo Manara. One of my favorite pieces was a painting from the early twentieth century of a large penis growing out of the ground. Next to the penis were two monkeys shamefully looking at the penis. There was a puncture wound through the painting as if someone had once tried to destroy it. I went to The Bass next and discovered the work of Haitian Edouard Duval-Carrié. In one piece, he has a lifeboat with a carnivalesque cast of characters on it, and a humanoid tree seems to be magically directing the boat.

That evening I went to a punk and drag show at Las Rosas, and in the morning the first place I visited was the Pérez Art Museum. The Pérez disappointed me. It felt small and empty. But it did have an exhibit inspired by Breton’s concept of the object-poem, with works by John Giorno, Joseph Cornell, and Claude Cahun. Michael Richard’s Travel Kit was my favorite object-poem. I went to the Rubell after and was overwhelmed. It’s one of the better curated contemporary art museums. Throughout the museum were Yayoi Kusama’s silver balls, and the museum had two of her Infinity Rooms. All the big New York names were there: Basquiat, Wojnarowicz, Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince, and Keith Haring. Karon Davis had some interesting plaster cast sculptures. One has a woman coming out of the ground, as if to pull down the man in front of her. But it was Hernan Bas’s work that surprised me. Bas’s work seems to document the life of a teen boy as he exists in a psychedelic and sexualized fantasy terrain. Bas’s painting On the Jagged Shores intrigued me. It shows one boy with a flashlight, walking along a cliffside. His light is projected at a deer, but he is unable to see all the shadow men behind him making love. After the Rubell, I finished things off with a trip to the Institute of Contemporary Art to see Betye Saar’s Serious Moonlight show. Saar appears to be heavily influenced by Haitian culture. My favorite part was a boat full of rocks, with hands that reach out from the rocks. Shadowing the boat from below is a diagram of a slave ship.

In March I also went to the Outsider Art Fair in Manhattan. There were a lot of paintings with eyes on them. Claude Bolduc painted a picture of Jesus with an erection and an eye at the end of his penis. Then there was a pillow covered with eyes. Another booth surprised me by having the UFO photography of Billy Meier. Even if it’s fake, it’s still art, right? I saw a lot of work by well-known names too: Henry Darger, Daniel Johnston, Joe Coleman, Minnie Evans, Ionel Talpazan, and Augustin Lesage were all represented. My favorite piece was a part of a triptych at the Joshua Lowenfels booth. It’s the middle piece of three works collectively titled The Enigma Puzzle Paintings of Ginsberg. No one knows who this artist is, but the works are dated to the 1930s and are from San Francisco. The piece I liked had a fallen tree crashing on an outhouse. The outhouse has collapsed on its back, and a woman in a red dress is climbing out of the shit pit, apparently having fallen into it when the outhouse was tipped over.

At the Outsider Art Fair, I found out about Art Without Intent: The Found Object Show, which was held a few weeks later at a gallery on Rivington Street. There were a handful of dolls and human-shaped objects that had been weathered in haunting ways. Decay was a big part of the show. Other objects had things written on them that, when out of context, seemed strange, like a plate with the word “tongue” printed on it. My favorite piece was a series of old rubbery toys in the shape of African animals. They deflated over time, and a rhinoceros, elephant, and hippopotamus had all become as flat as a pancake.

That evening, after I went to the found object show, I saw Nick Cave perform at the Kings Theatre in Brooklyn. I’m partial to Cave’s work with The Birthday Party and his cynical albums of the 1990s. But it was still enjoyable to see him perform his newer songs, many of them awkwardly about God, love, and hope. He did perform “God Is In The House” which always gets a chuckle out of me. I spent much of the concert wondering how I can get a suit to fit me as well as Nick Cave’s suits fit him.

I’ve gone to many punk and noise shows these last two months. I saw the synth-punk band Girl Dick perform at Purgatory. I felt obligated to check them out after Kembra Pfahler recommended them in an interview. At times they reminded me of a trans-fronted version of The Screamers. I saw the goth-punk band Melissa perform at Trans-Pecos. Of all the bands in New York, I’ve seen this band the most. Their singer Jane Pain is also a writer and photographer. She has a website that I like very much. I went to a random house show and saw an all-female punk band named Witch Slap perform a cover of Black Flag’s “My War” and a fistfight broke out. I saw Austin Sley-Julian’s post-punk noise project Sunk Heaven twice. Sley-Julian uses a weird self-made noise-making device (the combination of some kind of flat tool with a flashlight and a contact mic) to create emotively reverberated sonic scrapes. And finally, I saw Gyna Bootleg perform with Tim Dahl and Tamio Shiraishi at TV Eye. This was my first time seeing Gyna Bootleg, whose vocalizations came off as feral and hyper-aggressive. The performance felt like a dress rehearsal for some kind of cathartic sacrifice or explosion.

After hearing about filmmaker Nick Zedd’s death, I decided to have a marathon of his films. His work can be hilarious, like the one where a little boy enters a giant woman’s pussy. Other times, they’re weird mash-ups, with scenes from porn films mixed with images of cops, or are reminiscent of Warhol’s screen tests, just profiling the people in the scene. I laughed out loud when I saw Greer Lankton dancing in The Bogus Man wearing her Dee Dee Lux Fat Suit. My favorite short film was The Wild World of Lydia Lunch. The title is ironic, as Lunch is anything but wild in this film. It starts with Lydia reading a letter she wrote to Zedd, trying to dissuade him from coming to London. We know he comes anyway because all the footage is of Lunch walking around London looking depressed and irritated. Once the saxophone music kicked in I realized I was watching a very personal piece. This is the most vulnerable I’ve seen Lunch. It's a portrait of her but painted through the eyes of unrequited love. Zedd’s feature film, War is Menstrual Envy, is the crown jewel of his oeuvres. In it, Zedd shows us his mastery of lo-fi effects and uses them to create an ethereal post-apocalyptic landscape. Watching Kembra Pfahler swim in front of a green screen seems campy at first, but becomes simultaneously otherworldly and erotic. And the unwrapping of the mummy-like burn victim, makes for an eerie finale, with Pfahler and Annie Sprinkle flanking him as they put him on display for the viewer’s prying eyes.

Surrealism also turns a century old this year but lives on because the antagonist of surrealism, that drive towards misery and repression, still exists. Because of this anniversary, the Paris group issued a critical statement on digital technology and social media. I've always had skepticism of digital art. When I encounter a “laptop musician” at a show, I feel less than enthused. I also think there's a big procedural difference between a digital collage and an analog one. Still, I’m not ready to throw technology out in one fell swoop. Apps powered by artificial intelligence and spam poetry do play with chance. It’s like pulling a lever on a slot machine. We can still find within them what Philip Lamantia called the touch of the Marvelous. I believe the negative feelings people have about these methods have more to do with their conservative notions of what it means to be an artist. It feels like the same battle Duchamp fought with his readymades. Personally, I believe art should be made with what’s available.

Lastly, the International Exhibition of Surrealism in Cairo has generated a lot of negative criticism. Unfortunately, it appears the organizers chose to have questionable sponsors, rather than doing it themselves. I can’t help but side with the critics. State and corporate sponsorships are antithetical to surrealism’s core values. It has been said that many Westerners are privileged. We don’t live in Egypt or know the circumstances there. It’s true, we don’t have the same struggles they have. But if you have to compromise your values to put on an art show, why have the show at all? I feel this will be a sore spot for years to come as it shows a fundamental difference in thinking. I do want to congratulate them on putting together the show, as any event is difficult to organize. And I would also like to salute the La Sirena group for admirably making the trip to Cairo, which seems like a huge undertaking considering the La Sirena members all live in England and the United States.

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Music I’ve been listening to on the subway:

• Menace Dement - Nanna

• The Birthday Party - Live 1981-82

• Billy Idol - Whiplash Smile

• Melissa - Melissa EP

• Nick Cave - Distant Sky (Live in Copenhagen)

Movies I’ve been watching:

• Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles (Jon Foy, 2011)

• Gas Food Lodging (Allison Anders, 1992)

• King of New York (Abel Ferrara, 1990)

• Leptirica (Đorđe Kadijević, 1973)

• Love Rites (Walerian Borowczyk, 1987)

Report #11: A Little Night Music

Since I haven’t been writing poetry or fiction lately, I decided to start the new year off with a visual arts project. One of my new year’s resolutions was to create one hundred collages on postcards that I could mail out to friends and surrealists. This project was largely influenced by the late Steven Dalachinsky, who would often send me postcards with collages on them. I’m already well on my way to making these collages and will probably surpass my goal. I like the idea of sending the collages through the mail as a sort of potlatch of art. Too often I find myself attached to my own art and I just end up keeping it stored in a drawer forever. If you would like a postcard collage, send me your current snail mail address. I hope to be mailing the cards out this summer.

When I’m not collaging, I’ve been killing time by making simulated images via the Wombo Dream app. This app, which I have on my iPhone, was brought to my attention by artist James Koehnline. The way it functions is you give the app a series of words and the artificial intelligence uses an image database to construct a morphed collage-like image from those words. The melding of these images can often have uncanny results. As I wrote on Facebook, I have conflicting feelings about the creation of these images. It feels like cheating, but it’s also kind of like rolling a pair of dice. Can programmed randomness make poetry too easy? I agree with Koehnline that apps like these are just tools and it’s important to know how to use them. But I also agree with Robert Lindroth that something is disturbing with how these kinds of apps eliminate the human element from art. For an example of some images I created, you can see my Six Portraits of Maldoror here.

A third project I’ve been casually working on is a collection of photos of Brooklyn at night. This project grew out of my tendency to take walks at night and was somewhat inspired by photos Craig Wilson shared years earlier. The night itself can add a level of mystery to any photograph, but, because of the pandemic, the streets of Bushwick are often vacant after sundown. Nothing pleases me more than finding a dark empty street with a bunch of junk lying around to photograph. My iPhone may not have the best camera in the world, but I could care less about professionalism. I also believe the limitations of the camera, the way it captures light, adds to the haunting quality of some of these night shots. At times they remind me of a Giorgio de Chirico painting. I especially like finding abandoned industrial machines at night. Photographed in the dark and out of context, they take on a personality of their own.

The first movie I watched of 2022 profoundly shook me. It’s a Russian film from 1985 called Come and See. It’s about the Nazi invasion of Byelorussia. I don’t think cinema can get much closer to the true horrors of war. It was originally planned to be titled Kill Hitler, but why not War Is Hell instead? I spent the week after viewing it processing what I saw, running the story over and over in my head. How did humankind survive this period of brutality? The movie takes you on an adventure from innocence to a complete loss of humanity as you follow a thirteen-year-old resistance fighter through the bleakness of war. The Nazis roll into town like a gang of bikers from The Wild One and some unspeakable things happen. There are magical moments towards the beginning of the film that counter-balance the horrors to come, but by the second hour, there’s nothing to smile about. Perhaps the best World War 2 movie I’ve ever seen, if not one of the best movies I’ve ever seen. It would make a good double feature with Barefoot Gen or Threads.

I’ve seen some great performances over the past four months. In October, I was lucky enough to catch Narcissister perform at Purgatory. She did her “reverse striptease” routine, which involved her coming out on stage nude, pulling her clothing out from her various orifices, and leaving the stage completely clothed. She’s my favorite living performance artist. Later that month, I saw the industrial noise-punk band Deli Girls live at a three-day DIY all-ages event put on by the photographer Daggers For Eyes. In person, Deli Girls were as primal and aggressive as their recordings. The next month, I saw a friend from Portland, Susan Subtract, perform at Saint Vitus in their electro-punk band High-Functioning Flesh. This was a reunion show for the short-lived band. It’d been years since I’d seen Susan sing on stage (in their former band Terraform) and I was surprised and impressed by the kamikaze feel of High-Functioning Flesh’s live show. In December, I saw my former neighbor Leila Bordreuil perform with Tamio Shiraishi at Trans Pecos. I felt the two complimented each other well, with Leila’s droning chello noise and Tamio’s high pitched saxophone screeches. I could physically feel Tamio in my ears. And finally, in January, I saw Loren Connors, an improv guitarist, parred up with Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth. Connors is one of the unsung heroes of New York’s music scene. Despite his disability he’s constantly bringing artists together to experiment and collaborate with.

As for museum visits, I went to the Museum of Modern Art to see the Sophie Taeuber-Arp show, but found myself not that impressed. Instead, I discovered the work of Joseph E. Yoakum, a self-taught, ball-point pen landscape artist. Yoakum subverts the traditional landscape, mixes perspectives, and sometimes his work appears almost map-like (maybe even dreamlike). Everything seems to be floating in membranes. But, the big museum show of the season was the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Surrealism Beyond Borders exhibit. The exhibit focused on surrealism outside of Europe and the people who spread surrealist ideas, like Ted Joans, EF Granell, and Wolfgang Paalen. There was work from the Caribbean, Asia, Latin America, and beyond. For me, the highlight was the inclusion of the Chicago Surrealist Group, with an entire wall devoted to their pamphlets and publications.

On a personal note, I had an episode of vertigo in November after getting home from work. It was terrifying. It lasted for several hours and I was vomiting and unable to stand or walk. My doctor asked me if the room was spinning or if I was spinning. I told him the room was spinning and he quickly responded that it was probably just an ear infection. In addition to that, my New York curse continues. A few weeks ago, during a thunderstorm, I noticed some water leaking into my room through the window seal. Suddenly, a large section of siding on my apartment building came off right outside of my room. Luckily, it was promptly fixed. I don’t trust the apartments in this city. But, hey, this is the first one I’ve lived in without mice or cockroaches.

January also marked the ten year anniversary of my mother’s death. I hate being a downer, but I don’t think my mother ever really loved who I am. I believe she loved me as a son, but not as a person. She wanted a son who played football and sports. I was never going to be that person. In my high school years, she made me feel like an outcast and instead of supporting me, we were constantly at war. Identity is so important, especially to a teenager. She was embarrassed by her punk, weirdo son. I guess it was beyond her that if I fulfilled her fantasies about being the jock son, I would have killed myself. When I was fifteen I became extremely depressed. She was incredibly insensitive about this. I was put on prozac, and went to a therapist my sophomore and junior years of high school. Thankfully, the therapist told me to be myself and to not worry about what my family thinks. One of the reasons I support people’s identity choices is because I know what it’s like when others try to impose an identity on you. It wasn’t until my mother’s first battle with cancer that she stopped caring about “what the neighbor’s think” and we developed a friendship. All this makes me angry because, as someone who has become a perpetual loner (and reluctant to be attached to anything or anyone), I feel like my life could have been different if my mother wasn’t my mother. I never hated my parents, but if you are my friend and have kids, please don’t be dicks to them. Growing up is hard enough.

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What I’ve been listening to on the subway:

• Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - The Firstborn is Dead

• Nirvana - Bleach

• Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band - The Mirror Man Sessions

• Wipers - Is This Real?

• ​Body Count - Body Count

What I’ve been reading:

• Allan Graubard - A Crescent By Any Other Name

• Kurt Eisenlohr - Stab The Remote

• Alice Paalen Rahon - Shapeshifter

• Bob Kaufman - Solitudes Crowded With Loneliness

• Valery Oisteanu - Passport to Eternal Life

Movies I’ve been watching:

• The Velvet Underground (Todd Haynes, 2021)

• And When I Die, I Won’t Stay Dead (Billy Woodberry, 2015)

• Titane (Julia Ducournau, 2021)

• The Body Beautiful (Ngozi Onwurah, 1991)

• Cuadecuc, Vampir (Pere Portabella, 1971)

Publishing note:

My responses to “An Enquiry Into the Poetry Made by All” appeared on the La Sirena Surrealist Group’s blog.

Report #10: The Phantom Of Liberty

In early July, I took a morning train back to Philadelphia. I’d been wanting to revisit the Philadelphia Museum of Art since 2016. On my first trip there, Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) wasn’t on display. Seeing Gallery Rrose Sélavy again was a real treat. I was surprised at how small Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) was. It seemed almost invisible while in the same room as The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass). A note by Duchamp’s readymade Bicycle Wheel said something about how Duchamp would look into the moving wheel for inspiration. I can see that inspiration in a painting like Nude Descending a Staircase where motion is paramount. But this note also made me think of Burroughs and Gysin’s stroboscopic Dreamachine. Perhaps Duchamp, in his earlier years, had similar ambitions?

Of course, Duchamp’s masterpiece is The Large Glass. Seeing the shattered glass in person, I find it amazing that he took the time to put it back together. Currently, it’s only held in place by the pressure of the additional panes it’s sandwiched between. This constrained way of displaying the piece gives me a feeling of anxiety as if I have to tiptoe around it. Many people walked by Duchamp’s other masterpiece, Étant donnés, without a second glance. They didn’t realize, when you get closer to the two doors, as if by magic, eyeholes appear, and looking inside them you’ll see a reclining nude holding a lantern. My friend Ron Kolm has a haunting interpretation of this piece. In his book Night Shift he sees the nude woman as The Statue of Liberty herself, stripped bare and eroticized for the viewer.

There’s another masterpiece at the Philadelphia Museum of Art: Paul Cézanne’s The Large Bathers. I wrote a paper about this piece in college. My interest in it then was due to art critic Sidney Geist’s cryptomorphic interpretation of the painting, where he sees a pareidolia of a woman’s head taking form amongst the composition of the female bathers. Today I’m still intrigued by Geist’s point of view, but seeing the painting in person brings out its true power, which can’t be reduced to a simple visual trick. The Large Bathers is an imposing piece that dominates an entire wing of the museum. It seems as if it were carved from stone. Cézanne turns the subject matter of the bathers, which I generally find bland, into something sacred and ancient. The painting almost feels like a half-remembered dream on the verge of disappearing into amnesia.

Feeling good from my trip to Philadelphia, I decided to take another day trip to New Haven to see an additional work by Duchamp, Tu m’. Unfortunately, the trip didn’t go as planned. Despite what the Yale Art Gallery’s website said, the painting wasn’t on display. The trip was not a total waste though. Unknown to me at the time, the gallery had Vincent Van Gogh’s The Night Cafe. This painting is important to me for several reasons. First, when we moved into the Chauncey Street apartment several years ago, I salvaged a reproduction of this painting from the garbage outside our building. Second, it was painted in 1888, my recurring number.

In September I made a second trip to Pennsylvania, visiting Pittsburgh for the first time. Upon landing, I took the bus out to the Phipps Conservatory to meet with my friend Jeff, his wife Kait, and their daughter Levi. While walking to meet them I crossed an overpass covered in combination locks. Each lock had a pair of names written on them. Apparently, it’s a tradition in Pittsburgh to leave these locks on bridges. I guess it’s a ritual to secure a positive relationship between two people. You could call them love locks. Also near the conservatory was a statue of Christopher Columbus covered by a white tarp, which reminded me of something Christo might do. A sign recognizing the original sculptor, Frank Vittor, said he was born in 1888, my recurring number.

The next day I went to the north side of the Allegheny River to visit the Andy Warhol Museum. Although the museum lacked a lot of Warhol’s classics, it did have a few of his oxidation paintings and a bunch of punching bags that he painted with Basquiat. Each punching bag had a drawing of Jesus on it with the word “judge” written multiple times in different sizes. After I was done at the Warhol Museum, I walked up to the Mexican War Streets neighborhood, where I visited Randyland. It’s an outsider artist’s takeover of an entire building and yard, which he filled with dolls, mannequins, and brightly painted objects.

Only a short walk away was the infamous Mattress Factory. This contemporary art museum is spread out over the neighborhood between three different buildings. They had some great installations by Luftwerk, Meir Tati, Yayoi Kusama, and Greer Lankton. The one installation that stood out amongst them though, was Andréa Stanislav’s Surmatants, Mars Rising. I won’t pretend to understand the piece, which is done in three acts, but the minute I entered the opening room I knew I was in the right place. In that room is a spinning upside-down white horse. The horse’s head has been removed and replaced with a mirror. Beyond the horse was a red room with rows of circular curtains automated to turn and rotate as you walk among them. Even further down is the last act of the installation, which has three videos playing about immigration, and if I remember correctly, industrialization.

That night I went to a place called Collision for a punk show, but I still managed to wake up early the next day to go to the Carnegie museums. The Carnegie museums are split into two museums, the first being the natural history side, with the second being the art museum. To begin with, I’m not a fan of natural history museums as I see many as just graveyards for animals that have been stuffed. But there was one fun exhibit in this one about Native American astronomers and how Native myths mixed with their interpretation of the stars. It was a very simple domed show, with pinpoint lights representing the various constellations that would light up when a taped Native voice would explain the myth and how it related to the constellation.

The art museum side had works I liked from Magritte, contemporary artist Didier William, and Pittsburgh surrealist William Baziotes. The big surprise though was their CoBrA exhibit. This is the first time I’ve seen such a collection of work by CoBrA artists. Constant, Pierre Alechinsky, Asger Jorn, Enrico Baj, Raoul Ubac, and Karel Appel were just some of the artists represented. Unknowingly walking into this exhibit gave me the chills. I spent the early evening, my last in Pittsburgh, riding the two Inclines on the South Shore, and then I bussed to East Liberty to have a drink with my friend Chi Chi. After talking to Chi Chi for sometime I noticed two red and black flags stealthily hanging in the front of the bar.

In October, after my housemate had a narcissistic meltdown, I moved out of the Chauncey Street apartment in Bed-Stuy for a room in Bushwick, my third apartment in Brooklyn. New York can be a very challenging place to live. After what happened with Allison all those years ago, and now this, I’ve often wondered if my experience here is cursed. Luckily, my new housemates seem chill. One is a rapper and another is a painter. The Bushwick neighborhood is very vibrant and artistic. Not far from me, at Willoughby and Central, there is a strange automaton show that happens irregularly. Sometimes at night the window display curtains open, revealing a mannequin-like female figure that moves and dances to music. It’s like something out of Musée Mécanique in San Francisco. When this happens there is usually a man sitting outside the window with a row of six chairs around him. He’s always holding a camera. I believe this man is the artist, Rob Ebeltoft, but I’ve never spoken to him, as I like to let the work speak for itself.

Lastly, October 5th was my friend Doug Misner’s birthday. I hadn’t heard from Doug in many years, but when Googling his name I learned he passed away the previous year. I first saw Doug in 2007 at PDX Pop Now, thrashing to Black Elk. I was surprised at his age and the audacity he had to mix it up with the kids. We quickly became friends, and he started tagging along with me to house shows in northeast Portland. He loved live music and had an extensive respect for musicians. When he first started coming to punk shows I thought it would be hard for him to fit in, but he made friends fast and wanted to meet creative people and young artists. Sometimes, he'd come to my house with two bottles of tequila and drag me out of bed to go to some party. He had a real lust for life. Around 2011, Doug disappeared from the scene. He no longer had a phone and it was impossible to contact him. He was squatting at his dead mother’s house and was having some health problems, so perhaps those factors contributed to this. The last time I heard from him was on Facebook around 2013 where he said he was enjoying a “monastic life" in Gresham. I've missed him these past eight years and will continue to miss him.

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What I’ve been listening to on the subway:

• Delta 5 - Singles and Sessions 1979-1981

• Depeche Mode - Music for the Masses

• Mission of Burma - Signals, Calls, and Marches

• Richard H. Kirk - Black Jesus Voice

Movies I’ve been watching:

• Wojnarowicz: F—-k You F-ggot F-—ker (Chris McKim, 2020)

• Venom and Eternity (Isidore Isou, 1951)

• Pig (Michael Sarnoski, 2021)

• Lydia Lunch: The War Is Never Over (Beth B, 2019)

• Fire Music (Tom Surgal, 2018)

Publishing note:
A blog post I’ve been working on for some time, “Notes on Vertigo,” is now available to read on my website.