I turned fifty in June. It still seems unreal. I feel it in my bones and flesh, though. Sometimes, I worry my mind has slowed. I’m not as quick or as witty as I used to be. To mark this milestone, I wrote a piece for my Substack and website, Difficult Birth. The piece was meant to map out my life and examine the moments that formed me, for better or worse. I was a little surprised by a few of the responses. Some took the piece as a plea for sympathy. I found this odd. I’m not claiming to be some abused child, but my interactions with shitty adults definitely shaped me. I’m more shocked that so few people grew up knowing as many assholes as I did. A few people who were there along the way felt the need to fill me in on their own opinions. That’s fine. But we all have our own facts, and this was my experience. There’s no need to try to invalidate how I remember my life.
The last six months have been hellish on my limbs. Getting older is really something. In February, I could barely get up a pair of stairs. My knee felt like it had collapsed in on itself. A co-worker of mine even offered his cane. My feet have also been a problem, mostly caused by my plantar fasciitis. I now know what it’s like to gingerly descend the stairs at the Metropolitan-Lorimer station, as the crowd rushes around my slowpoke ass. Thankfully, my knee has returned to its former glory, but my feet are still sketchy. It’s a toss of the coin if I’m going to wake up with usable feet, or wake up in pain. I’m sitting here right now as I write this with a badly sprained ankle. I had to take leave from work, and I’m not sure how long I’ll be out.
In April, Trump continued to exhibit his idiotic recklessness, tweeting “A whole civilization will die tonight,” in an attempt to bully Iran. The prospect of nuclear war and the end of the world looms over us all, while those in power flippantly throw out the idea of mass destruction and world death. On the bright side, in June, New York was on another level, as the hometown Knicks won the NBA championship. Many people used Durkheim’s term collective effervescence to describe the positive energies and attitudes that were spreading through the city during the Knicks run. It was fun to experience. I generally disdain sports, but I grew up watching basketball in Portland, and it might have been one of the only ways my family bonded. I’m always amazed at how sports can change people’s emotions. When a call didn’t go the Knicks way, or when they were losing at halftime, I heard shouts of anger and violence at the bars near my apartment from upset fans who felt the NBA was favoring the Spurs for monetary gain. If only these people could be this angry over the real life injustices that we see in the world daily. If only they could rise up against how fixed and scripted the actual world is.
Art wise, I started the year off going to the Nameless Art Show. Yes, it’s an annual thing. I found this one better than the last. I thought there was a theme this year, something like Adam and Eve, because several pieces depicted the two biblical figures, but was told by a vendor that it was just a coincidence. There was one painting I really enjoyed of a woman peeking around a tree at a man also peeking around a tree in the distance. I’ve always enjoy the Nameless Art Show for its weird furniture, human-shaped objects, bricolaged heads, old creepy puppets, and the recurring pile of old photos. This year they had photo booth pictures from the early twentieth century. Some had cardboard or metal frames. Someday I’d like to learn the history of the photo booth. A weird furniture piece they had was this hideous room divider with glass panels, and within the glass a handful of taxidermic hummingbirds had been smashed to create a nature scene. My favorite piece, though, was a painting of a hand with legs. It looked like it was in the corner of a film noir prison. The hand was flipping the viewer off.
Another annual event I regularly try to attend is the Outsider Art Fair. After wandering through this year’s show, I grew a little worried the meaning of the term “outsider art” is being warped to include what I would call “post-outsider art,” which is art that is stylized to look like outsider art. I’m also not sure if the random simple collages in certain vendors plastic bins, collages that were just scraps thrown together to create an abstraction, really qualify as “outsider art.” Now that I’ve complained, I’ll tell you about my favorite piece at the show, Peter Aspell’s painting The Bride. I know nothing of Aspell, but I thought the title was fitting for this strange Frankenstein monster of a Pharaonic, robotic woman. It was only a coincidence that Maggie Gyllenhaal’s weird Frankenstein monster of a movie, The Bride, had just come out. Of artists I already admire, both June Gutman and Sarah Lee had work on display again. Gutman’s work sometimes verges on body horror. Lee has a tad of Leonora Carrington in her, that Alice in Wonderland playfulness, but maybe she’d be better described as a modern-day James Ensor. James Watkinson had a nice piece where these dogs are walking through a Magritte-like forest, but the dogs have really long stilt-shaped legs. At one booth, I saw a very strange historic phenomenon. At some point in the nighteenth century, it was popular to make photomontages based on towns, schools, or whatever grouping you had, and the montage is just a tight cluster or blob of floating heads. As I was leaving, I saw a busker on the sidewalk using dolls, syringes, and puppets to create a butoh-inspired ramshackled psychodrama. He had a voice distorter that made it sound like he was throat singing. I was told later on Instagram that his name is Kalan Sherrard and that he sometimes performs in the subway under the name Enormous Face.
For me, the highlight of the last six months was the Duchamp show at MoMA. I was taken aback by his pre-Dada work. He did drawings for newspapers and paintings that look like they’re riffing off early Picassos. Like Man Ray, Duchamp enjoyed messing with different styles. It’s interesting to think what he might have become if he’d stuck with graphic works. His foray into cubist and futurist-inspired experimentation is impressive, and many pieces are wholly original. There seems to be a point where he stopped trying to capture time and started to, like Picabia, show the body as a machine, something industrious. This is the genealogy of The Large Glass we are witnessing, where humans have motors that run on “love gasoline.” It seems like a silly idea, but one that resonates through pop culture even today, with the analogies between sexuality and cars and guns, and so forth.
One thing this show accomplished is that I finally got to see Duchamp’s Tu m’ in person. I tried to view it several years ago when I went to the Yale Art Gallery, but, despite their website saying it was on display, it wasn’t. I remember sending them a very Karen-like email about this. After all, I took the train all the way to New Haven to see it. Now I’ll never have to go back to New Haven! It’s easy to overlook how influential Duchamp is and how his work pre-dates so much of modern art and the anti-tradition. For example, Tu m’ has some very visible safety pins holding the canvas together, the same way a punk rocker in the 70s might use safety pins to hold together their t-shirt. I also love the prankster, lowbrow aspect of Duchamp’s work, which I think gets the least attention. The toilet, the defacing of the Mona Lisa, the schoolboy humor and puns. He’s knee-deep in sarcasm and dirty jokes.
One thing that made me laugh was how the readymades and the replicas were not always the same. The bottle racks, for example, were all different sizes! Can these really be called replicas? It’s even more humorous because no one knows what the original was like. His precision optics works seemed more serious. They were were these big machines meant to create optical illusions when viewed a certain way. Not all of them were functional, but there is an irony to having this big mechanical thing to produce a simple optical illusion. And we can’t forget Duchamp’s role as Rrose Selavy, which predates much of gender subversion, identity theory, and drag. Étant donnés is probably my favorite work of Duchamp’s, and there were some amazing behind-the-scenes polaroids he took of the construction of the work. It’s such a fascinating thing to look behind the doors of Étant donnés. I was shocked to see a photograph of the signature on the doll’s arm. It’s always curious how, when looking at art, what raises the hair on your arms is sometimes the backside of the work, what’s hidden.
Of the smaller art shows I visited over the last six months, the Di Donna Gallery’s Salvador Dali exhibit outdid itself with one single piece. They displayed a fascinating catalog from his 1936 Julien Levy show. The front of the catalog had a figure whose entire body was covered in hair, like someone out of Dr. Seuss. Only the droopy breasts were free of hair, and you could lift the breasts, where an accordion booklet of reproductions of Dali’s work would unfold vertically. I followed this visit with a trip to a nearby show devoted to surrealist women at the Richard Saltoun Gallery. It was a tiny show, but they had some Stella Snead watercolors that I enjoyed, plus works by Manina and Cossette Zeno. Next, I went to the Keith Haring show at the Brant Foundation. I’m not a big fan of his work, but I did get a free ticket. I was surprised by how violent and sexual Haring’s work can be. It was good to see a different side of him, one that wasn’t marred by pop culture and Christmas. There were a lot of bodies and dead people in these paintings, and many erect dicks. Speaking of dicks, another show I visited was the Vaginal Davis retrospective at PS1. Personally, I don’t like shows that have big spaces with small art spread out across the walls, and I felt this show could have better displayed who Vaginal Davis is. There was one set I really liked that was supposed to be Vaginal’s bedroom. The room was pink and had photos of what I remember to be famous actors hanging from the ceiling. In the middle of the room was a rotating bed with a giant phallus resting on it.
On my birthday, I took a train ride to the galleries in Chelsea to see the Leonora Carrington sculpture show at L’Space. These bronze pieces were all brought in from Mexico. I love seeing surrealist figural sculpture in person, and Carrington’s The Catwoman did not disappoint. Both front and back of this strange figure, which reminds me of Giacometti’s Hands Holding the Void, are blanketed with hieroglyphic-like images of weird-headed creatures and strange markings. There was also a crocodilian bench I really liked. Carrington was truly a master of the imagination. I feel her strong imagery determined much of modern fantasy. After wandering in and out of a few galleries, I found myself inside Dia Chelsea. They were having a show that somehow integrated time, like four screens each showing a different city at different hours. I wasn’t really into this, but in another room I saw a very funny piece. A movie was playing, showing a glass of milk being filled up over and over again. Each time was different, like sometimes the glass was broken, or the pouring mechanism was misaligned. It was silly, and I enjoyed it. Sometimes I feel weird about art like this. It feels like it’s a prank made by some high school science teacher.
The last museum visit I made before my ankle injury was a trip to the New Museum. This was my first visit since they remodeled. They had some kind of exhibit going on regarding robots and what it is to be human. I started on the top floor, where there was a room with mannequins, tin men, prosthetics, and human-shaped constructions. I believe it was referred to as the Hall of Robots. The room had work by Greer Lankton, Nam June Paik, HR Giger, and the animatronic figure from the movie E.T.. There was also an impressive series of collages in this section by an artist named Wayne Hodge called Android/Negroid.
The next floor down seemed to focus on what it means to be human versus what it means to be animal. I really enjoyed the pieces by Danish artist Ovartaci. One seemed to depict alien-beast creatures enjoying a summer day at the beach. But things got more intense in the body horror sense with Jana Euler’s work, where people’s bodies are limited to certain features, like the feet and the penis. Grotesque and gigantic, I can’t help but laugh at the little guy at the tip of the two penises. This piece was definitely my favorite of the exhibit! “The eye exists in a savage state,” Breton says. Maybe it should come as no surprise that there were works by CoBrA artists Jacqueline de Jong, Asger Jorn, and Karel Appel in this section.
Taking another staircase down, the following section looks at human conception through mechanical metaphors and means. Naturally, Duchamp’s work makes an appearance, and a strange Dali painting of a man being born from an egg. Eventually, we move on to one of Hans Bellmer’s dolls, a series of Hannah Höch’s amazing collages, and a curious mannequin by John Heartfield and George Grosz that I really enjoyed called The Middle-Class Philistine Heartfield Gone Wild. Peg-legged and petite, the mannequin sported a lightbulb for a head and wore the number 27 like an athlete. In this same room was a holographic image by Cyprien Gaillard of Max Ernst’s The Triumph of Surrealism, which is brought to life by some animation. As we got into more motorized art, a version of Brion Gysin’s Dreamachine appeared, as did a work by Jean Tinguely. Then there was a strange room that didn’t seem to fit into the exhibit, but I loved it all the same. It was a room mostly full of works by surrealist women, and featured printed works by Valentine Hugo, Valentine Penrose, Toyen, and Unica Zurn. Overall, I enjoyed the show, but I wonder if I would have understood it better if I had started at the bottom and worked my way upward. I’ve been to enough museums, though, to know that’s not a good idea. Always go to the top via an elevator and work your way down!
I haven’t gone to many punk shows this year, but in April I did catch Crazy Spirit at the Market Hotel. Blu Anxxiety opened for them. The vocalist of Blu Anxxiety wore this nun costume and had a puppet or totem in one hand. It was like a mop turned into a person. I like how Blu Anxxiety crashes these hardcore shows with what is essentially dance music. They climaxed, as usual, with their cover of Real Life’s “Send Me an Angel.” The bulk of the crowd was here to see Crazy Spirit. This was only my second time. I feel like a lot of the people at this show were old timers, as I didn’t recognize much of the crowd. There was a lot of sweaty jumping, crazy stage diving, and pogoing. One guy in front of me pogoed right into me. I put my hand up to stop him, and stubbed my finger!
The Ende Tymes Festival was also in April. I went the day it was held at Pioneer Works, and saw Jeph Jerman, Pedestrian Deposit, Relay for Death, Las Sucias, Shot Dog, and Raven Chacon with Iggor Cavalera. Jeph Jerman was my favorite of the noise performers. He used various everyday objects to create sounds, as well as a drum with small vibrators laid on the drum skin. The noise table he was using was aluminum, and I liked how, at the end, he used it as a noisemaker too, dragging it across the floor. Kind of magical how someone can take such a common object and make such a curious sound spectacle with it. My second favorite act was Pedestrian Deposit. They started on the stage with a man playing guitar and a woman playing some hand-crafted stringed instruments. One of her instruments looked like a tree branch. At some point, she left the stage and, unbeknownst to many of us, a rope ladder was dropped behind the crowd. Soon she was behind us while the other musician was still in front of us. She began climbing the ladder under a blue light. At a certain height, she paused and began rubbing a bow against the ladder, which contributed to the duo’s tsunami-like soundscape.
My friend Adam Keith put together a noise show at Selva, headlined by another Bay Area friend, Max Nordile. Max didn’t recognize me at first with the beard. The opening performers included Karol Konstancia, who did some vocalization and noise improv over some beats, and a duo named Here. One member of Here played a small saxophone, while the other created beats and noises on his phone and spoke poetic passages into a mic. Max played next. He had a series of cassette players that he overlapped. One in particular had the sounds of him playing a clarinet, which he used to contrast with found noises, and he also scraped a chair across the floor, which made me laugh because he and I had just spoken about Jeph Jerman’s performance at Ende Tymes. I like the minimalism and the use of practical items. The last performers were 973 Future Yooka, which included Austin Sley from Sunk Heaven. Austin had two noise musicians behind him, and the three of them wore protective gear, like people handling toxic substances. They also had these weird glasses they were all wearing with lights on them. At some point, Austin picked up a huge light, like a stage light or something, and started using it like a microphone. The bluish lights of the glasses clashed with the red light of the room.
The day before my birthday, I went to see Witch Club Satan at the Bowery Ballroom. The witches came in through the side door carrying candles and in white robes with their breasts exposed. After cleansing the area, they got on stage and did what black metal bands do. There is some controversy about this band in the black metal community. Many men are put off by their feminism and lyrics. I don’t know much about black metal, but it seems to be a conservative genre, supporting individualism and nihilism over speaking for the oppressed. Is it possible these ladies are trolling these dudes? The set was broken up into three parts. Each one ended with a type of a cappella moment where the three women sang, often softly, into the three mics. Their first outfit change had them transitioning from white-robed witch-priestesses to nude, long-haired hag-women. I have to admit, I couldn’t help looking at these beautiful women and their butts. Men are going to sexualize female performers no matter what, so why not sexualize yourself? After some songs, there was another a cappella-like moment, and I believe the women were yelling “mother.” When they came out again from their next costume change, they were wearing some outfits that looked made of human flesh. These outfits reminded me of the witches in the movie Beastmaster, both grotesque and sexy. These fantastic ladies in this band are also part of an experimental theatre group in Norway called Lost and Found Productions. I’ll have to look more into this.
What I’ve been watching:
Pixote (Héctor Babenco, 1980)
964 Pinocchio (Shozin Pukui, 1991)
Tales from the Crypt (William Gaines and Steven Dodd, 1989-1996)
Obsession (Curry Barker, 2025)
Backrooms (Kane Parsons, 2026)
What I’ve been listening to on the subway:
Witch Club Satan - Witch Club Satan
Rollins Band - Weight
The Birthday Party - Live 81-82
The Pixies - Doolittle
Calamity Jane - Martha Jane Cannary
What I’ve been reading:
Steven Belletto - Black Surrealist: The Legend of Ted Joans
Roddy Bottum - The Royal We
Joe Simpkins - Beyond the Blindfold
Mark Beyer - Agony
Charles Maturin - Melmoth the Wanderer