Ringling was a good spot as soon as I plugged in. First
semester was equal parts in between legs, and time
alone in an isolated classroom-made-studio in the latest parts of the night. I
rocked and rolled and made school-based artwork which reflected my
rollercoaster intoxicated-to then-sober-again lifestyle. I compromised insofar as
I spent time with a person who had not much to do with my painting or drawing
or writing, mostly technically speaking. I guess there’s two sides to this of
course, she was with me- and she was a support, a challenge, a teammate, and an
opponent- a muse. There’s not much use in splitting hairs I suppose, I painted
a bunch, and whatever seems to keep it flowing lord knows is a great gift
indeed. We got caught with weed together, by a city-cop. We quit smoking it and
went to drug school, and court, and a probation officer for three months. We
each did community service for fifteen hours or so, and somewhere within this
timeframe, the not smoking, the demands of school, and her agitated demeanor,
we broke it off. Then I went to Mexico for a bit over a week, as one might to
reset after a breakup, or classes, or likewise, but I couldn’t find much peace
within myself at that time, or perhaps I became stir crazy and an ungrounded
feeling crept in. I recall a great time in Mexico, everything was perfect. I
walked from my hostel into the wild streets of downtown D.F. in search of a
suitcase lock for my belongings. What a zoo, what a flourishing and lively
environment! I did not become hungry for nearly two days, and coasted on the
crystal rays of the sun, there, one mile above sea level in a town built from a
lakebed atop Mexico’s high plateaus. I
returned to the states fatigued. I had made my stay objective in someway,
pertaining to drawing, and manically painting instead was my excuse and my
downfall in regarding my health. I came back sick. I recovered from the cold or
whathaveyou and proceeded to go up through Jacksonville, my ol’ stomping
grounds, and then catch a bus up to New York. I stayed two nights in Cork Arts
district, then took a bus to New York, where I got a gig painting a mural in a
hostel that I stayed at. I took an acrylic painting workshop at the Art
Student’s League of New York, and filled all of the rest of my time in The City
before flying back to Sarasota for another go-round of school. My time in
Brooklyn, other than painting eight hours a day, could be charachterized by
excessive drinking and smoking rolly-cigarettes. Charlie was a truck driver and
temporary denizen of the hostel. He’d tried to take his semi-truck across the
Brooklyn Bridge, and was quickly trapped, causing a huge block in traffic. Cops
came and gave him a huge fine. A towing company came and drove his truck away
to an impoundment lot. He was stranded. He didn’t even have shoes. He took a
cab to the Hostel and made a vacation out of his circumstanecs it seemed. We
called him Uncle Chuck. And his drinking curriculum and late-night stories over
a game of basketball, no matter what team, constituted Camp Chuck. I missed my
first flight out of New York due to drunkenness and optimism, instilled in me
by Camp Chuck. When I returned to the hostel to wait for the next flight, the
guys were there waiting for me, and a good small handful stuck it out with me
through the night, drinking and watching the clock, making sure that I not miss
the next. I didn’t miss the next and went back to school for the spring
semester. A few weeks in I returned to New York to see a Picasso sculpture show
in a ‘hundred-dollar-hamburger kind of
way. I spent three days in New York that time around, one jet-lagged and
walking the streets, one in jail for doing graffiti, and one visiting the
Picasso show at the MoMA. Back to school where I would continue a
self-destructive lifestyle. At some point I missed an exam because I’d
committed the night before to drinking, and woke late and sick. I took a
city-bus towards downtown Sarasota to get some vitamins from the store. I’d
been eating satirically, and the joke had ceased to be funny any longer. I
became nauseous enough on that bus ride to vomit into my handbag. I was still
drunk from the night before, and had not much in my stomach. It was like a hard
reset. I turned my habits around that day. And like suit the latter half of my
semester became a great opportunity to live healthily and motivated. I kept
some allegiances, like those to caffeine and sugar, but out with alcohol, and
out with smoking. I excercised, small goals which yielded dividends. I attended
many more sit-in painting and drawing sessions. I became very happy, and manic at times with
productive fervor. My productivity was influenced, I believe, by my competitive
nature amidst a large population of students. It’s vital to have a community
for art-making, or art-practice.
Not much to report on I suppose. I did have a date. She and
her mom scoped me out at the Ringling Museum, while I was making a drawing
study for a painting. We exchanged
numbers. She was from Berlin, in town to visit her grandmother and to help take
care, as her health had diminished. She texted me the next afternoon, as I’d
mentioned that there would be a three-hour drawing meeting that night, which I
would host as a guest monitor. Her mother drove her to the campus and dropped
her off. We went to the drawing session together, and afterwards to the little
beach overlooking the bay, walking distance from the school campus. She knew
how to play like a child, truly, and I was inspired by her explorations. We
waded out into the shallow water to an exposed sandbar, where we watched the
moon, and dug into the mud. We made percussive instruments out of mud tunnels,
and dug towards each other’s hands under the mucky ground, giving a little
finger-hug when we met. It was the sweetest. I recalled another time like this
with a young girl named Sam. I at the time was eight or nine myself, and my
father and I were boating in the keys. At a marina, the dock-owner’s daughter
and I likewise explored the shallows, though in the daytime, picking out hermit
crabs and sea cucumbers and curious sea grasses. I can’t get her out of my mind
still. It was so sweet, so whole, and at some point it was not. The Berliner
and I walked back to campus. I brought her to my room and showed her paintings,
then back outside into the courtyard to play some more and stretch our muscles.
Her mother texted and wondered when would be a good time to pick her up? She
mentioned ‘when I get tired of her’, which seemed impossible, in a friendly
way. We agreed on midnight, and her chariot arrived at that time. I made a
quick run upstairs to my room again, as in a flash of inspiration, I wanted to
give her a painting which I’d made in the very spot we were standing. We met
her mother in the parking lot, and Berliner went into the car to retrieve for
me a pressed leaf as a gift. And oh, how I forgot that this being the second
gift. Upon her arrival, she gave to me a brown paper sack, filled with perfect
pastries, made by her and her master-baker grandmother. The pressed leaf was
from a forest nearby her mother’s home in Germany. This all was like a
daydream, and once they took off, I kind of half-kept the kernel with my heart,
and half shook it all off. Maybe ‘let my gut out’, was a bit accurate. I think
I’m an animal when I’m alone, and most of the time, I’m alone.
The second half of that particular night, I stayed up and wrote
a final paper for a History of Illustration class, and polished up two
paintings for the same assignment. I got a half-hour of sleep before turning
all of the work in. As a continuation of that magic night perhaps, I got a full
one-hundred percent on that capstone project.
I painted strong through the remainder of the semester, and
towards the end felt betrayed by the curriculum slowing down to a grinding halt
(as was scheduled), and likewise, the students tapering their work-ethic. I
wondered what would become of this school, if the students had no required
curriculum, but rather had to write it themselves. I attended a few sessions at
the Southern Atelier down the street in Bradenton, where I logged some good
hours drawing and painting. It was good to get away a bit on these days and
nights too. That’s the most of it, but one big big project I have yet to
mention was this sculpture pair. I kind-of don’t want to talk about it much,
but 3-D class was mostly a time-pit and a bust, as the teacher was phoning in
just about everything. I spent more time on these sculptures, than any other
project. They turned out well, but had I better guidance, I feel they would
have transcended student-work. I felt robbed.
I captured a good 18-hour pose. That felt good. I need about
thirty more of those before I’m convinced I’ve got something.
That’s the most of it then.
I packed up my things, and my mother came from Crystal River
to graciously help me move out. I spent a week in Crystal River, organizing my
things and packing for a studio-residency in New York offered to me by the
school. The residency details were remarkably vague, and I packed and re-packed
in hopes to strike a good balance of enough and not too much. I chose to limit
myself to back inks, charcoals, and gray values of other mediums. This was to
be a colorless summer. Tooling around the house as I sometimes do when I visit
my parents, my mother mentioned that I might re-do her commissioned painting,
which I’d worked on last summer. She wanted a more refined and polished version
of what I’d done, and suggested I go back into it. I jumped at the opportunity,
I don’t know why, mostly for the sake of having a task. There is a lingering
sense of purposelessness that comes with having privilege and resources. I want
to kill myself, and I don’t think there’s actually much harm in saying that. I
spend a lot of time alone. I think shutting down in any and most every regard
is good policy toward the greater earth. Sure there’s joy from small things,
and miracles literally everywhere, but there also pain and hurt, and evil. I
have no plans to self-harm. I understand this is walking line here. The goal is
to kill the dream, (this from a lyric I have taken as a prayer, ‘the dream is a
lie, you wake up when you die’). Though what it means is still unclear, it has
taken much cognitive time and space as of late- what a thing to meditate on!
Another aspect of the goal is to cease to reproduce, this from my
interpretation of ‘ending the cycle of suffering’. I believe chastity is good
policy, and masturbation is likewise good practice, though not positive on this
one, perhaps this is a good next-exploration. Culturally speaking, I think it
is important to stay within one’s tribe and such, I think it would be best for
me to return to Germany and at some point to die alone, preferably of
starvation. This life I believe would right wrongs committed by generations
before me, and if I am to close the cycle, these are right-actions as far as I
can surmise.
So mom drives me to the Orlando airport, where I catch an
eleven AM non-stop to Newark. I don’t sleep on the flight but thirty minutes,
despite having only an hour’s rest from staying up with that commissioned
triptych, fiddling around with values and trying to capture (or create effect
of) iridescence. I came up short, but had in a way not left any loose ends
hanging out and at some point the level of completion reached a stasis with the
time allotted, so I called it. I ate an English muffin for breakfast and had a
coffee, then as mentioned off to the airport, etc. Though skies were clear, we
experienced much turbulence on the way in to Newark to the tune of forty
minutes. It was agonizing and between my lackluster diet choices and lack out
sleep I came very near to vomiting. Some heavy breathing got me through it. On
the ground, my seat-neighbor mentioned that she did not think I was going to
make it. I got well and took a train to Brooklyn, where I met with Kyle at the
Dumbo warehouse. I call it this because I might as well. There are many
warehouses in Dumbo, but this one is the one I am in and fuck. I’m going to go
to bed. I hope I don’t go back into this at all, to cherry-pick and censor. I
write with honesty I hope. I never know whether things will be a good move or a
bad one, and times of great clarity in retrospect seem flat, while the times of
struggle more real.
Logging back in here, that suicide stuff felt very real. It
felt good to be honest with myself, and to write it down likewise. I think it’s
a fantasy, maybe like a martyrdom more than anything else, but again, writing
wrongs equals moving back to Germany, and dying alone in the woods. It’s kind
of boring to write about now.
So I call Kyle and come to the warehouse. It’s a building
that I’m actually already familiar with- my roommate and former band-mate used
to work in there in a graphic design firm. I would come by to pick him up from
work (ie ride home with him on bike together) or bring him lunch or likewise. I
recall distinctly being outside of the front of the building, by the stairs on
the phone with a lover. I was late, and she was upset. There was nothing I
could do but show up fifteen minutes late from there. That night she took me
out to a performance a-la Cirque Du Soleiu, put on by punch-drunk theater company.
It was a hall of mirrors kind of immersive theater experience, and there were
homos in tights everywhere you looked. One homo, tall, handsome, black one,
gave a challenge (in a confrontational, this is part of the performance, and
it’s magical-sort-of-way): “you must either kiss someone tonight on the lips,
or tell someone that you love them”. Like that, like a hot-potato. Not wanting
to hold on to this elementary to-do list, I looked him in the eyes and told him
(with a bit of fag-magic*) “I love you”. He was tickled, he’d been playing a
fag-magic game with me too, so I think he got what I was giving him. He said,
“not me silly.” I said “alright”, then got out of that shitty
white-fur-and-sparkles room. I thought
‘fuck, am I supposed to tell Leah that I love her?’ This sent me into a dialectic
that is as nonsensical as anything else that was going on that night. Leah had
been courting me hard. The rules were pretty straightforward- her life, career,
opinions, etc. took priority, and I would be privileged to kneel before her
glorious pussy, and to be fair, it was glorious, and I felt the arrangement
mostly worked. So, I did not tell her that I loved her, and I made no point in
trying to steal a kiss. At these parties/ performances, if you’re in the circle,
you get special treatment, and Leah was well within the circle- that’s how she
knew it would be advantageous (in a albeit akward-for-me kind of way) to dress
in all white. She handed me my skin-tight outfit before we went in, and I
changed into it on the street near times square. All night, she and I were
regarded as performers, since we matched their outfits. People looked at us for
a sort of bit-of-magic, but at the end of it, I’m not one for acting. In fact,
I might consider it as a sort of sinful deception. An obliqueness, which sends
people into (yet more) unreasonable dialectics, with a kernel that from the
outset was made up. Like, I guess it
would be fine if the kernel wasn’t something faggy and forced feeling like to
tell someone that you love them, and I get that it’s a fine thing to spread
love and what not, but the façade of theater, and the sexual eyes made at me,
asking me to submit to his gayness, and the hypocrisy which came with the slaughtered
boar as supper thereafter. It asked to be subject to quality-assessment and to
me, it did not line up. So Leah and I were pulled hither and dither by
performers, to experience this thing, and the other thing, and it was very
sensational. I became critical, I don’t know at what point- probably when I
found out that we were going to a theater performance. So we got out of there
eventually. And Leah probably said something sweet and scripted it would seem
to me, and give me a kiss and a wink, breaking the spell of mental dialogue set
to me by the black man. At least I didn’t have to tell her that I loved her,
however true it may have been.
*fag-magic – magic possessed by fags. Fag magic works on
those with weak intellect, or those with daddy issues. To an accomplished
practician of fag-magic, a straight (boy) can be converted gay (if only for a
brief time, say, one night), and an otherwise reasonable person can be cast
into a spell of irrationality. Fag-magic works on the pretext that to be gay is
to be better than others, and shifts the basis to the conversation to this as
its reference point.
So I called Kyle, and came into the warehouse. He met me at
the door, and handed me a key. “Here’s your key.” And “Let me show you around.”
I knew before I met him somehow that Kyle would be a submissive artist, a
kind-of hidey-hole art school grad, who works other jobs so he can keep the
shell of a story of his visual-art practice intact. And I’ll put here that I
have not had a “job” in a long time now. I have worked gigs surely and taken my
studies very seriously, but job- no. So I may come across as a judgemental
arrogant mean person, but I don’t think so. A fantasy that I hold dear though is being
without a home, or a job, or anything but my abilities as an artist, and making
do, and pulling myself into a good situation, with studio practice and
representation and everything. That’s the game I’m playing, to get so
undeniably good at picture-making and likewise, that I can make do from
nothing. By going to school, I am kind of hacking this fantasy, by learning
techniques, and with persistent practice, but there it is- and also school is
one way to get rid of (or make personal investment with) all of this family
money that I have found myself with. How am I to live out this martyr fantasy,
with such a filled bank account? So I set to spending my money, outside of
school at first. I bought plane tickets and coffees, and more coffees, and
hostel-rooms, and nice clothes periodically. And I felt bed every time I spent
the money. I invested and did well on my investments. But you understand the
lonliness that comes with this. Do you? I have the opportunity to to many
things, financially speaking. As it is, I make paintings, a very solitary life.
I do not need to work, so I only work, I do not need to go out even, so I stay
in. School is more social life than I have had in a long while, and when it
gets out, I am reminded of how alone I am. Last night I became sick, and I
arranged a room in the upper-west side to sweat out this fever in. It was a
hotel. I left the studio, after taking a figure-drawing a class in the morning
(which I had to leave from feeling so ill), and then another figure session st
the Society of Illustrators in the evening (which I got sneers at the whole
time, as I was visibly ill, and blowing my nose periodically). I went back to
the studo, then realized it would be hell to sleep on the floor tonight, so I
called this hotel, and took a train out to it, but I overshot my stop and ended
up in a neighborhood that looked like a war-zone, so I got a cab back down to
the hotel address, and I got out of the cab, paid, and into the hotel, where I
ckecked in. It was just after mid-night at this point. I took a shower and the
water turned cold. And this arrangement I realized was normal for me. Alone,
nothing special, and that’s the only way it can be. I go to bed alone, I wake
up alone. My thoughts are mine alone. And I think about the dreams that a
younger version of myself would have, though trivial, of a special someone, or
having children and grandchildren, ahich are so foreign to me now, and I don’t
even like them. They are the death of my self, my lonliness. So Kyle- He was
the appointed Ringling representative of the space which measured roughly
seventy by fourty, and was subdivided into about thirty cubicles in which one
might claim and make work in. I’d seen studios like this in art-schools. I’d
always found that art-cubicle concept kind of funny, and wondered how I would
work in one. He walked me over to my designated cubicle, and showed me how the
track lights therein were operated. It was nice. The space measured roughly ten
feet by ten feet by ten feet with an open front. It was in the middle aisle
rather than with a window, and my view out was into someone else’s studio which
did have a window- one that looked out across the street on the second floor to
the façade of a neighboring warehouse, and its fire escape.
Kyle said that I could mix and match my furniture from other
studios and with that he was gone. I swapped my stopple with one that had a big
drawer, so I could conceal my clothes within. I spent the night there that
night. I was the only one in the studio-plex so, why not? This became the m-o,
and was the plan even before I came, to sleep in the studio. I felt the
dominance of the space yield to me, which is to say, I showed up to work more
than any other in the space. This is a good feeling- to tow the line, or to be
the pace-horse for a studio-set. I had it a few times during my stay in
Jacksonville, at CoRK. It would happen when Morrison would go out of town, and
I would be the appointed ‘man of the house’, which at the end of the day means
a couple things, namely that you can work unfettered without being second to
alpha (so your work becomes defacto the highest quality), and that occasionally
you might have to take out the garbage or help someone move furniture. So here in these New York studios, I have
been working unfettered, though I have let my lead wane, due to my poor health.
Right now it’s a toss-up between Kayla (who’s been working on a great acrylic
commission for a book publication), and maybe Eric (who’s set-up is comically
simple, like the old man who brought a pen and paper atop a mountain to write
his heartsong. He’s also illustrating for a book- a children’s book I believe,
and logging some pretty serious hours, poor bastard.
The reason I got sick in the first place is my own fault. It
often is. I am a real jackass. Really not smart in the life category. I am
irresponsible, and I have wild kicks which lean closer toward the idiotic side
than the noble. At times I will take to fasting, and meditating, and this is
well and good, but lo, may I be warned that with high highs come retarded lows,
and my self-induced sickness is one such case. I got into a routine well
enough. In the mornings I would wake early and get the studio into ship shape,
(to guise that I was a live-in). I think most of the others have a keen
suspicion that I am a live-in but my diligence in maintaining the look of the
space-as that of a working space only, choose to overlook it. I think I am well
respected for my work ethic, but also I believe my quixotic delusions show very
much too. I would shower in the sink in the shared-kitchen after the others had
left for the night. I showered twice in there, and one Friday my friend asked
me to come out to the Russian Spa, so I was doing alright-but-not great in the
way of hygene there. One night, the night before last, I got a real hankering
for a shower. There’s an anonymous app called yik yak, where you can talk to
strangers essentially. One mentioned having an apartment to themselves, and
no-one to share it with. In desperation, I replied something about coming over
and using their shower. They seemed cool with it, but sketched out, and as a
matter of collateral, I looked for other options, where I found a nearby YMCA.
I went, and got a guest pass for the night. I think this was beyond protocol,
but the man at the counter took a liking to me and I think smelled my
desperation for a shower. I used the rowing machine for ten minutes, as I do,
then hit the showers. It was a wonderful shower, much needed, and from there I
set out, healthier than before. I was doing great, I even made a post about it
on the snapchat app. I did not want to go back to the studio for a couple of reasons. One was that
I suspected Kayla to be in there, painting away, and I thought it would be
suspicious to enter the studio as late as midnight, and secondly, I wanted to
have conversation. I stopped by a bar just up the street from the studio, to
hopefully strike up conversation over some cigarettes. I approached a group of
three girls, and aone guy, and asked for a light. Then I asked if I could join
them. The guy said sure, and you could just feel all of the girls roll their
eyes real big. It was an immediately hostile social environment, and the guy
and I tried to make do for a bit, but the girls were negating me, and being
bitchy and pretentious. One statement saw silence follow, and it was clear,
they were intent on my leaving. Real bithces, really. So I gave an ‘alright’,
(a trick I learned from the streets, conveying that you’re not being met) and walked
three steps to the north to smoke my cigarette alone. On yik yak the other day,
someone was giving a rant about every race, and gender. I’ll not go too far but
it was funny to read white girls being summarized essentially by their false
assumption that they have pussies made of gold.
I suppose here I’ll recount an occourance about sexism. I
went to Talahassee to witness my friends wedding. I traveled there over a
weekend toward the end of the school semester. I met with my long-time friend,
Sarah (and former roommate), and mostly stuck with her. I stayed on her couch,
and went to brunch with her. She’d been acting strange in the months leading up
to this meeting. Where before, we would call one another every week or so to
catch up, she had fallen off for a few months, despite my calling and
voicemails (I laid off after three, ball was in her court). So before I come to
Tallahassee, she calls, super manic, and emphasizes how good it is to talk with
me, and how she had something to tell me, and that she’d written her feelings
down. Freaked out, I said I’m here and will hear her. She said she would prefer
to send the letter. Alright, I said. We got off the phone and no letter. I call
back maybe next week, and she says she’ll tell me in person. So it gets all the
way into the second day, and at brunch, like a wet fish, she plops out “I think
you’re sexist.” Oh God, oh God, what a goddamn boobie trap I thought. She layed
it out there, no evidence, nothing. I’ve had this happen before too, regarding
my spectral whereabouts in relation to autism- no evidence, just an empty
statement. And it broke my heart a little of course, even without any evidence or
recantations or whathaveyou. I said, “Oh man.” She said, “yeah”. I said, “well,
like, how?” She said it was more of an ongoing thing than any one occurance. I
said that I can try to work on it, but without any examples cited, if I were to
try to make a defensive case, I could only defend sexism itself. “I’m sorry
that you feel that way, “ and “I will try to work on it”, were all that I said.
How strange. I felt that Sarah was someone that I could speak my mind to, as an
individual, but her finding offense in my ideas toward women might speak to her
own gender-bunching. She was offended, apparently, as a woman, and again with
no evidence or supporting argument there was no conversation that could happen.
Well, you get it. People are people, and that’s the long and short of it. But
what came later really did break my heart. At the wedding, I was in my head about what sexism was, and
the hegemony that came with altering one’s views toward equality et al, Sarah
began getting cute with me. Kind of annoying at first, and also repulsive. It
seemed to me that I was being objectified, and hit on really. I was horrified.
I hadn’t made eye contact hardly with a woman or conversation, as they were
mostly married among other things, and here was Sarah touching my arm, asking
me to dance. I couldn’t. Horrified. The reception to the wedding moved its way
outside, and yb this point, Sarah had become inebriated. She continued to
schooch-in closer to me, acting cutesy, and I would scoot away, showing that I
would not like to be touched. She grabbed my arm, and it felt acidic to my
heart. I felt betrayed. I scooted away, enough that the group noticed and asked
me if everything was alright. I was clearly in a fetal position- very closed
off. I eeked out that I was overwhelmed. This was a lot for me, and taking the
hint, the conversation righted its course once more after some time. I told
Sarah that I did not want to be touched. It wasn’t too long after, that out in
front of the wedding venue, she asked for a hug. I told her I could ont give
her a hug. She tried anyway, and I had to touch her toxic arm to avoid the full
contact. That was it. I took a long walk. I was crushed. There’s a lot that
comes with being told that you are toxic to a gender of people, ie ‘sexist’. I
balled crying through that haunted town. I took my glasses off to let the tears
fall, and to be blind to the irrelevant landscape. I was lost.
I’d stolen a can of spraypaint from behind the theater,
there at the venue, and I had my backpack with me for the walk, ready to be
gone for real at any points notice. (good traveling policy). After much alone
time, I began to pick up the pieces, and somewhere in there was Tobias, my
friend. I caught a few tags, made some drawings, simple things. Just little
touchstones, to regain my self. When I’m Tobias, I can be no one, and no one
can’t hold bias. I snuck back into the wedding. It was winding down at this
point. The party went to a guest-house, and Sarah’s offenses only got worse,
speaking my childhood name inappropriately,
and objective speech about my underwear as I prepared to go into the pool. I
couldn’t be bothered at this point- she was gone to me. I drove her home, walked to the greyhound
station, and blocked her contacts from my phone.
So there I was at the bar in Dumbo, Brooklyn, smoking a
cigarette definitively separate from the anti-social crew. I gave a cigarette
to a friend who walked up, and had a conversation for only a moment before he
was on his phone, mentioning that he was meeting someone. He found his
girl-date and split. This bar was lame, but I’d made a commitment, and perhaps
some group or person might come eventually and be up for conversation. So I
drank tonic waters with limes. (three in total) and smoked cigarettes (four in
total), and waited, and read a book on the disintegration of form in the arts.
And I felt mostly alright- an island of possibilities in a desert of decisive
ignorance. I moseyed out around one-thirty, saying goodbye to the gentleman in
the dismissive group of women, who’d expressed a cocked-shouldered sympathy for
my lonliness. I slept that ninght like a fever was brewing. I recall a
visitation from the devil in my dream. I woke before my alarm, and got out of
the warehouse. There was a definite ‘red-skies’ feel to the day. I sought to
remedy the funk with breakfast at the diner, once I got downtown. I ordered two
eggs, rye toast, and a tea, and was charged twenty-two dollars. I had to rush
at this point since the service was so slow, to get to class. What a scam,
crazy. In class, the sickness rolled in like a thunderstorm. My throat became
raw and my body became riddled with soreness. I began to weep from the pain,
and snot began to run from my nostrils. It became dire. I had to leave. I went
out into the hallway to regain myself, and became faint, sleeping on the stairs
like a contented drunkard, waxing and waning from consciousness. I gave it one
more shot in the room, figure drawing, but could not keep it together. I had to
leave. I mentioned to my Madeline (whom serendipitously as attending that
class, and whom I met in Prague two years prior and whom I’d given much time to
love in recollection) that I had to go. She said the most perfect thing: “Good,
go to the park and take a nap.” And that’s where I was going, and that’s where
I did go. I slept in the park for I don’t know how long. As the sickness set
in, the time began to abstract and stretch. It was clear that my body was
processing a daemon of some sort. I’d read earlier to take sickness as a
teacher, and let it guide you in short, and there I lay, writhing smally
wrapped in my jacket. I fell out, and woke again again I-don’t-know-how-much
longer thereafter. The field which I’d chosen to be processed, became populated
with afternoon sunbathers, and picnicking families. What a miserable, perfect
place, I thought. Hours elapsed. It seemed like an eternity, and I would again
go in and out of consciousness. My only indicators that I was not out there for
lifetimes were my lawn-neighbors. There was this woman who named her son
something, though I cannot recall what, terribly silly, I surmised from the
mere pleasure she got in crooning it out. She would croon it across the lawn,
and the boy would run around, not bothered in the slightest, like the name was
not registering at all, only as a familiar sound. The name was of a cutesy,
effeminate type. She crooned his name around, and he would just keep on, like a
labradoodle puppy. He ran around in his underwear, and laughed and tumbled
about. He would return at his leisure to his mother, who would reign down
affection and tickles and kisses onto him. His stroller looked very very
expensive. I did not have much time to dislike them, as I was wrestling a
sickness, but how queer it was I thought. And these neighbors came in the
darkness of my sleep, and made apparition, and stayed through the remainder of
my trip. After a very long time, I got up. I thought to soothe my throat, which
had become sufficiently raw by that point, somehow. I looked up on my phone
“Smoking, sore throat”, and found a great recount of someone’s day-after
smoking, which was very similar with mine. The post contained comments which
advised cold things, cough drops, gum. And I had gum, so I chewed a piece. I
walked to a place that sold smoothies and bought one and had a seat. I felt
that I’d not done my best to get enough figure drawing in, and I knew that there
would be a group meeting that night at the Society of Illustrators. I set to
filling what by now was four hours or so to walking and waiting. This all
because I knew I did not want to go back to the studio, where I knew I would fall
into a cycle of useless worry pertaining to my designs there. I walked uptown to the tune of fifteen blocks
and found the Society building .The secretary mentioned that it would be three
hours, before I could come in within the figure-drawing window. I said that was
fine and took a walk to a starbucks, where I got a large iced latte, to soothe
my throat, to bude time with, and to caffeinate myself with. I stayed there for
about three hours. The Starbucks was full of children, who’d just gotten out of
school, and had made their way to the place to get mochas with whipped cream
and chocolate syrups, and big chai teas. What an alien world these children
live in I thought. Their parents don’t seem to give a fuck. I drew into my
sketchbook a decent amount, which felt very pure and honest of intent. The
coffee ran out in my cup at the right time and I walked back to the Society. I
payed my ten dollars, and hung back for a bit before claiming a vantage spot
for the drawing session. I was at this point an hour early, and a few others were
there too, making conversation, and steaking claims to their spots and showing
their familiarity with the place in various little ways. It was clear that this
drawing club was important (and their social standing within) to them. I saw
the some good spots go, and made a grab at a little spot where I could watch
the models and the room, and where I could also be sickly at. We waited, and
the models came, and did their attitude thing, where they are the center of
attention etc. It was good to be zombified by sickness in this environment I
felt- what a social shit-show. The session went altogether well. This one man,
gay man, considered himself the alpha in the group, and felt at liberty to
boast his clever drawings about, and laugh at their cleverness. I could see his
drawings from where I sat, and I can say that they lacked structure, and were
clever only in their wrist-tricks. I felt that I was perceiving the room very
clearly, a good symptom of feeling like death. I got some great drawings,
notably one on a scrap piece of paper from the garbage with a cmyk test
print-out on the side. It was a thick stick, and I knew that I would make an
art-piece from this one. The sketchbook drawings were good practice, and some
were interesting, but this last, loose sheet I backed myself into a corner with
by waiting to use it for the last long-pose. I nailed it. The gay man waved his
drawing around excitedly after that pose too, it was weak, but he had the crowd
worked up by then, and had participants ready to come by and praise him for his
cleverness. One of the models took a picture of it, and on her way over,
glanced at mine. I saw in her eyes that she perceived some infinite quality in
my drawing, a flash of clarity, but her feet were moving her toward the
gay-man’s doodle. I packed up and got out of there on the basis of feeling ill
and the lack of want to engage with the incestuous bunch. So I walked out of
there, and went back to the studio in Dumbo, as goes, and unloaded my things
onto the floor and table. And surveyed my drawings from the day, and I was
feeling wretched. The sickness was coming on strong and I could feel it. There
were a couple artists still in the studio, namely Kayla and her boyfriend, so I
was either going to have to wait them out and sleep on the floor, or find
another option. It was about midnight, and I began to call hotels and hostels
to find a room. My first few calls were dead-ends, but I found a place on 101st
street. I took a shower after checking in, and had a night of dark
fever-dreams. I woke sore and stiff from head to toe. I’d dreamed of getting
caught by a lazy cop who questioned me for being around. I was making graffiti
as it were and that it was a dream shows how I have an association now with
being hassled by cops after making something nice. I mean, that’s a pretty
liberal outlook on the situation. In the dream, the cop said something like,
“Hey, you, what are you doing here?” as he looked up from harassing or maybe
beating a black man, (what fucked up dreams, no doubt tied to modern media and
the recent tragedies involving racist cops, killing black men in the streets).
So this kneejerk association seems clear to me. The setting was in a
Disney-esque train yard, lumberyard, fishing town, like Apalachicola. Metal and
wooden, humble structures, surrounding a meadow with its center worn bare from
traction of yard workers. It was like a stage or a set- like a small dome of
reality-this clearing, this field- in which the flashbulb scenario would root,
an eden, a womb. Railroad tracks tied one alternate reality to another from the
north end of the valley to the south, and tied into the land in a fashion that
would seem they were holding the landscape together and without them, the
trees, the grasses, the flat earth worn down by worker-men’s scooting around,
were likely to float away; or at least drift into disorder, like how braces
relate to teeth in an adolescent mouth. I had no business there per se, outside
of looking. What, if I were to make graffiti in this place, would it look like?
Would it be for the picture?- probably. A flick on a phone, square formatted,
so I can show it to, well, the world. And the local scooters-about would be
none but bystanders of a global visual
community, and the scooters-after, would watch the paint fade, or maybe there
would be no scooters-after, maybe they would only give birth to more
media-driven army-men like myself, and I might get extra ups, like historical
graffiti ups, but this is unlikely- the scooters tend to stick around. After
all, they are really the ones making the wheels go-round. So fuck everything
that wasn’t what I was going to do- not from anger, rather from purity of
intention. I was going to create, and that’s what there was to be done. So
cop-man, with a struggling scooter in hand, yells at me, and I might have
rattled off a “piss off”, or so. So he comes cartoonishly barreling toward me,
dropping his one recipient of latent daddy issues, like a stereotypical school
bully. I, likewise cartoonishly, take off in a run. This is a fantasy. SO I get
chased, and I run, and I jump into some water and swim, and the cop-man splits
into two constituent parts, his human shell, and a daemon, and the daemon flies
above and behind me, and the chase is a matter of salvation, and I am sweating
and rolling in the hotel bed, and the sheets are bunched up in corners, and the
pillows are wherever and I catch a glimpse of this haunted room with its
morning light, reminding me of circa, and I go back into the fever-dream, and I
stay determined to outrun this cop-man. The daemon catches me, or catches up
with me, or becomes me. I fantasize of typing the cop-man up in ropes, in a
torturous way; his shoulders would touch his knees, his belly tied down to his
thighs- a forward bend- hands behind the back akin to cuffs, legs bent ninety
degrees as in a seated posture. Seated,
in a box, in a cargo hold of a ship or airliner, he would fly to a(nother)
remote place, where at least he would be culturally alienated. Also, important
to this vision, is the insertion of a suppository, inducing diarrhea a few
hours (ideally nine) into the trip. So cop-man would arrive sore, broken,
violated, and covered in his own fecal matter, in an inhospitable and alien
place- not unlike the journey of the African-turned-American slave.
How dark these dreams. But secretly, I enjoyed such clarity
in a vision, and appreciated, if not relished the idea of committing such a
heinous and righteous act.
I tossed around in bed for a few hours. I texted Madeline
that I was feeling very sick and might not make it to figure-drawing class
today, at least, I might be late. She said something sweet, something about how
I should sleep in a hotel, rather than on cardboard. I told her I was in a
hotel, and thank you, and she replied sweetly that I stay as long as my rent
would allow, and I told her that I planned to. And once my rent ran out- once
it was checkout time- I tried a shower, but it ran cold, and I, sickly, put on
pants, and a shirt, and socks, and shoes, and put on my backpack containing a
sketchbook, a credit card, and pencils and a small selection of markers, and I
took the hotel room’s box of tissues and put it in the backpack too, and I
pulled the cord on the blinds over the window above the air conditioner- sunny-
and I opened the door into the hallway, and tromped carefully down a square staircase
into the lobby, and put my room key on the counter and looked at the blond
plainly pretty Germanic front-desk attendant, and I put my hand on the
key-ring-room-number-tag combo and slid it across the glass counter closer to
her, and asked if everything was alright, and she asked me if I was checking
out, and I said ‘yeah’, and she said, alright, and I walked out into the
blindingly sunny daylight, and I got onto a train, and walked into class at the
Art Students League, and over to Madeline, and I had to have had rings under my
eyes, ‘hey’, and nudged her shoulder with mine, and sat down in the back of the
room, and set to drawing a model, and I gave up. I walked to Madeline and said,
it’s not happening. She said sweetly that she hoped to see me later, and I
agreed, I hoped so too.
The next morning, or maybe the morning after that, we met
for a coffee and a bagel. I could feel herpes beginning in my nostril, I was
still in darkness health-wise, but maintained through the date. The worst was
over in terms of the fever, now it was a time to be disgusting and in my head,
or at least the initial phases. Conversation went very well, swimmingly. It was
easy to pass the time with Madeline, effortless. I went back to the studio from
there, and shut-in for a few days, maybe four. The herpes in my nostril
developed- expressed itself, and in time began to recede. I was very fatigued
in these days. Madeline came by in one of the days. I texted her and was very clear
as to my state- that I had herpes, that I was having an outbreak, that I had
experienced outbreaks since kindergarten, etc. I was happy to be honest, and to
say herpes rather than cold-sore or whatever. It’s a new small liberation that
I’ve found which I think has come along with the disillusionment of sex and/or
the game. Mostly, it felt good to be honest, and a moderately force-d delivery
was a small price to pay for the liberation of honesty. She came to the studio,
and I showed her my herpes first thing, then I showed her around the studio.
She wanted some help with a project, an illustration. I scanned her drawing
into a computer and showed her some ways of cleaning the drawing in photoshop,
then took a seat next to her to stand by and have conversation. I saw her out,
and spent another few days in hiding in the studio. There were no classes this
week for ASL, and as it goes, it was as if it were the perfect time to become
sick, develop herpes, etc. The only ones I saw were close friends, and I had no
outside engagements. What’s comforting about an outbreak is the idea that it
will reset the clock, and one might not expect another occurrence for sometime
thereafter.
Angie came by the studio too. I told her about my nose. I’d
just waned into consciousness- again with the sleeping a lot, and we talked for
a few minutes before the conversation made its way to movies. I’d seen a couple
so far. One about a ‘man who saw infinity’, which was worthless- truly a
terrible film, devoid of content and intellect, which is a shame, as its
protagonist character was the most savant-like, holy, clear-minded
mathematician since Newton, apparently. The movie, and I just read a review
which tickled me, noting the extent to which the actors reveled at pieces of
paper, and how it was otherwise lackluster and devoid, there goes that word
again, of content. There was a scene where Ramanujan, the brilliant Indian
mathematician was explaining to his wife while walking along a beach, how
beautiful mathematics was, how it was like a painting in the mind. I thought
this might/could go somewhere interesting, and as it was a half-hour into the
bland film, I hoped it would, but instead the director, or the writer, or whoever
took the boring route and the actor grabbed a handful of sand and let it fall
through his fingers while he said “patterns”. That killed me, as Holden would
say. I was trapped in a movie that was going to be a cop-out the whole time.
Trapped, because I opened my yammer to this gal next to me in line, and we sat
next to each other (with one gap seat) and talked a bit more before the
previews started. And I asked her what, if any one thing, regardless of price
would she commission into existence- this for a project that I’d had in mind
for the ‘perfect commission’. I was fishing for fodder no doubt, and she came
up with a blank; so I helped her out saying, “Ok, for example, you
don’t have to be you, you can make the whole thing up- it’s mostly about an
interesting prompt. So, let’s say you own a scuba sex-düngen on the moon, and
you would like to contract a painting for the interior, or something like
that.” She was weirded out. I dropped it. She said, “maybe like Newton’s
Principia Matematica- she would like to contract something like that.” “A
mathematical document?”, I asked.
She defended, “You are seeing a movie about math.”, and then
the previews started, and I was locked in, and feeling rude and put down, so I
waited through the crummy film. The lighting was all extreme and gelled- heavy
blues on one side meant reds on the other. The whole thing felt flat and
without substance. There were no mentions of concepts or illustrations that a
viewer might be able to tooth in to to catch a glimpse into this what was eluded
to as such a beautiful, invisible universe. As a viewer, I felt only and
perpetually alienated, much like the depiction of his ignorant wife and mother.
There were depictions of racism that were flat. He was beat up for being
Indian, but no supporting.. anything. Im’ tired of talking about it. What a garbage
film. Another film I saw was a little better. It was called Weiner, depicting a
politician, of notable stature and class, who posted pictures of his underwear
bulge, and also his exposed cock, to women in private. The pictures were leaked
by the recipients, crashing his political career, and family life. The movie
was in documentary format, and followed Anthony Wiener around for a few weeks
or maybe a month or more, during his election campaign for mayor of New York
City. Somewhere in the middle of the campaign (the bulge photos had already
been out since before the campaign began) the full frontal photo came out, and
the movie really opened up, so to speak. It was great timing. Any kernel of
hope or animosity that was felt from the almost-healed wound of the alluded to
scandal of yester-week was now shown fresh, new, and tenfold. I felt for his
wife, how embarrassing. I wanted to root for Weiner. Actually, inside, I did
root for him. His scenario is one that I can relate to, with the exception of
being married and having a kid, (which in a more vaccum-like world might mean
that he not trespass like this). He was playing a video game, talking with some
anonymous pussy somewhere in Cybersville, who alluded to sex and went along
(nothing to lose on her end) with the infidelity. It takes two to tango. So,
there were a few of these women, and Anthony got into the business of making
digital mistakes with them, then called it quits. Then the photos came out,
exposing Anthony et al, and I dare not repeat myself. One of these girls was a
casino waitress in Las Vegas. She was the worst. She could not seem to shut up
about the thing, and it seemed very clear that she was seeking praise and
validation for her toppling of this monument of a man. She would go on radio shows,
and television shows, and just yammer on about it. She would read aloud their
text (sext) conversations, she even made a pornographic film-parody of her and
Anthony (keep in mind, they never met in person- she contacted him through
Facebook, initiating, then the interactions went from there). So she’s in some
film sucking some porn-actor’s hard-one, getting checks for appearances, and
destroying him at every turn. This is textbook succubus. She was 23 years old,
and was referred to by the campaign as ‘pineapple’, which shows a simultaneous
thirst for code-words and lack of creativity, but who am I. So Anthony is
running around, campaigning, trying not to look like a schmuck, looking like a
schmuck, kind of paying attention to his family (insofar maintaining the
construct, as politicians do) and in the end, losing the campaign in a
landslide. That film was a real mess in regards to subject matter. It felt that
the perspective was zoomed in real close, so that the information felt almost
meant more for the protagonists themselves than the viewer. At one point the
cameraman, (presumably) asks at a point in the night, in the dining room of the
Weiner family’s home, “Why are you letting me film this?” This demonstrated a
great self-awareness to the film, and got chuckles in the theater.
The third film I saw with Angie. It was a film about five or
six Grecian men on a luxury yacht, who were getting away from it all in a
man-trip fishing-trip kind of way. They talked and competed in a game called
Chevalier, also the title of the film. So a half-hour in, the plot drops, if
subtly. The men, over a late night, table conversation, at a loss for how to
pass the time, devise a contest, centered around quality, in which each man
would respectively devise a contest, criteria for scoring et al, and subject
his friends to scrutiny. Each were not
restricted, and the premise was therefore competitive man-ing. So the men
competed and there was a queerness to it, and some literal and figurative
dick-measuring ensued, and the movie did what it was supposed to do and not
much more. The film was Greek with English subtitles, and was refreshing in its
sustained subtleties. Angie is a friend
I hold quite dearly. She is a Scorpio, as my mural teacher-buddy
(liberally used) Shaun was. Shaun and I fell out in a way. He ratted my illegal
activity out to my landlord (all within an art-context – graffiti), and kind-of
all-around toyed me. We’ve got a brotherly bond, but as summed up by our crew
name, are forever Rival Drifters. With Angie, I can hardly tell that there’s
any particular thing at all to her. She’s great, she’s a good draughtsman and
has good conceptual and application skills in her art making, and as I type
this, it is becoming very clear to me that she and Shaun share this very
strongly- this ability to realize a combination of form and concept. She is
eighteen now I believe, to my twenty-six. She has alluded to our relationship I
feel, and I admit wholly that I fed this and thought of our pretend-future
myself. I’d seen her as a true companion, and I still do. I dared not to take
anything too fast, and it took (and has taken, and continues to take) much
self-control to reel back my ego and sex-drive, in efforts to maintain my
practice uncomplicated. Once, we’d agreed to go to a small gathering of friends
after classes on a Friday. I opted to work out briefly in the gym before
rendezvousing. She used the time to get drunk, and showed up late. Keeping
face, we went together, and at the event, I kept my sobriety. She offered several
times for beers etc., and I turned these down. I danced, and after some time,
in a daze of sober alienation, sank into a hammock and had my thoughts, in
short time Angie came to sit with me, or rather on me, on my lap, and asked
cutesy drunk questions like how I came to be twenty-five, and if I thought it
was time to settle. My dick was getting hard and my mind began to occupy itself
with turning through sexual imagery, complaceny, power struggle, reproduction,
family. I could feel the subtle warmth and radiance from her yoni. It was too
much for me, canyons in consciousness, lapses in judgment. At this point, I
know how to turn my dick off, and my mind, and that’s what I did- I went into a
meditative space ( if I was not already there). I probably began repeating in
my mind the pilgrim’s prayer, which I’d become partial to after reading J.D.
Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, in the same way I’d taken to smoking cigarettes
and abstaining from drinking from his writing. I am in love with his
carachters, and like Picasso, am in a personal dialectic of transcending class,
and further, enlightenment. So, I find
my father in many places in this way. Anyways, after some time of being a
statue of a date, we got out of the hammock, and meandered to another shindig, which
Angie had become aware was going on, where in short time, I found my way out,
and back to the sanctity of my personal apartment room-space. I did not talk to
Angie much after that, and it has taken some time to get back to speaking, but
now and still I consider her friendship dear.
Primitive, reptileian
Eyes forward, skull downward,
An unmonitored gaze
Stasis, potential
Hostility, futility
Occulous orus relaxing as our respective eyes shift into
focus
Back of the tongue drops from the roof of the mouth
Inhalations (respectively, one apiece) through the nose
On our ways.
The other night again I went to the society of Ilustrators
sketch night. It was a three-hour costumed figure draw. The theme was fashion.
I called ahead to ask what it was all about. The desk attendant read the
description of the event verbatim from the flyer (which mostly was fine- I did
not have the flyer), but conveyed a lack of interest or motivation on her end.
I guess what I want to say is that the staff at the Society of Ilustrators is
lazy. It struck me the first time I was there too. There’s a real, huge
parasitic population in the arts who are under the impression that because
maybe they have done some thing well a handful of times or, take minor
successes, they are qualified to take space within fields of applied arts. I
have no patience for these. They are the downfall of shared studios and the
epitome of the lazy artist- producing work with much to be desired, often
charging too much money (because they are the majority, and have established
cottage heresay about their rates etc.), and otherwise occupying day-jobs and
watching the clouds go by. My blindspot occurs in that I do not have to have a
day job, and such, use my time painting, walking, eating, or distracting myself
in online fantasies (such as now, researching Trinidad, in preparation for my
departure from civilization as I know it), and reading and writing of course. A
little more about these types: they are not only ignorant (a forgivable
offense, of which I myself am inarguably guilty), they are contented to
mediocrity, demonstrating through their actions that the way that things are is
good enough for them- as they get a check for mediocre day-work, buy their
garbage food, and indulge in dull conversation- it’s the lack of want to change
that takes it I think. I can see such a huge population of them at Ringling-
phoning it in, it’s terrible. I read Catcher in the Rye before going to
Ringling and I thought this Holden Caufield makes so much goddang sense, and he’s
so smart in navigating a situation, he applies himself, he set himself up for
success. Surely he will be high achieving, once the shake gets shook (shake
being those cop-outs I’m ranting about). Once they get out of the picture, and
settle into their respective mediocrities, Holden will rise abouve. There’s
also a sense of movement throughout the book- one from where he came to where
he now is, writing the book, and I thought how great-this was like that poem by
Doctor Seuss, O the Places You’ll Go, where the protagonist finds himself in a
population of knuckle-draggers, and frees himself by moving along, like a rolling stone. So
naturally, I superimposed Holden’s narrative-
tried to relate it to where I was going and all, and the school from
which he came was everywhere that I had been, since middle school at least.
High school was an unfocused party, (for me it seemed). There was little
genuine guidance, and I free-floated among high curriculum, sports clubs, and
music clubs. At some times I think it is what I am interested in un-doing, at
other times, it is something I see that I can stand on as solid ground to build
upon. Then I took some space, I recall moving out of my parent’s house and having
too much stuff- way too much stuff. I got two storage units to keep this junk-
furniture (which I was pressured not to get rid of as they were family-made
pieces). Now I realize the hipocracy of this. Why am I responsible for these
looms, when on the other hand, you, as a homeowner, are replacing this furniture
with cheap designed goods from Costco and such? So I’m stuck with this stuff,
and a fair amount of time was spent moving it around, and when I’d move into an
apartment, I’d drive my car to a storage unit and load it up with this solid
wood furniture that my grandpa apparently built, and I would lug it to my new
place, and haul it up some stairs, and put a lamp on it, until a year later, I
would move out and do it over again. It was embarrassing. It became clearer and
clearer how backwards and detrimental this was to my trajectory out of school
as I began to meet high accomplishing people. I saw patterns in their
uncluttered living spaces. They were at peace with their parents, and when
they’d left for college, they took with them a duffel bag full of clothes, a
backpack with stationary, and maybe a box fan. This was it. This was the setup.
Even Holden Caufield up-and-left his school with luggage that he could carry on
his person. In the South it seems, especially if your family has history there,
(and maybe its more family history than geography, but I think it’s funny to
speak of the south like it’s a great eddy of inert material things), you are
cursed to mire in objects of yesteryear, each programmed with constructed
sentimentality, and passed down divorced from its utilitarian roots. Too much
stuff, like the cartoon family that, going to the beach, take a cooler full of
drinks and food, towels, a huge umbrella, sunblock products, hats, buckets for
building sandcastles, nets for catching minnows, goggles and snorkels for
looking underwater, boogie boards, frisbees, an inflatable raft, flip flops,
squirt guns, an inflatable multi-colored ball, and naïve ambition- like that,
but maybe all of the beachy items belonged to you grandfather or something, and
it would be a shame to not bring them, or heaven forbid get rid of any of them.
So it’s been a long journey of getting rid of things, and being made fun of for
it by my family-heckled. And sometimes they’ll get me a gift, and I’ll mention
one that I’d preemptively tried to curtail by saying something like, ‘please,
nothing, especially foreign or plastic’, and it will come anyway, and I will
get rid of it, and be heckled likewise. These are troubles that come when you
mix privilege with intellect. It’s getting better, truly. So, I digress, when
the woman at the Society of Illustrators reads to me from a flyer, rather than
try to communicate with me honestly, it really gets me- I think I knew who I
was talking with too, the same girl from last week that I asked if she was
going to draw, and she replied ‘probably not, I have to work during the
event.’, then proceeded to yammer with her colleagues in the back of the room
about whatever-the-heck while the models were on the stand.
Your construct is showing
When I arrived at the Society of Illustrators for the
drawing session, I got a good seat, akin to the one I had the week prior,
kitty-cornered to the stage, two rows back- best seat in the house. All I had to draw in was this grey paper
sketchbook, which has been the bane of my drawings since I began using the
book. The grey is so arbitrary, and does not lend itself well to cool tones,
which are the blacks and white that I have used in it. Using my imagination
now, I believe maybe a warm orange-toned pastel could look nice in there, but
I’m not sure, besides, pastels seem to need a lot of room to breathe, and I
don’t think this smallish format of a sketchbook would suffice in fulfilling
that urge. The paper is ugly, by and large. I planned on doing the usual,
bad-ish naïve-looking drawings with bold geometric simplifications, and no-tan
blocked-in shading. This is something that I have been working on for at least
three months now, since practicing no-tans in landscape painting class at
Ringling. The models took the stage, and the fashion designer with them, to
adjust his dresses for the pose. It was ideal. Beautiful folds, elegant models,
great poses- really a wonderful mixture. The room filled again. Like the week
before with maybe forty people, many concerned with having social time. I felt
fortunate to be alone, and unencumbered with small talks. The was the
occasional polemic glance over toward me from those who felt place in the room,
but I played this game that I’ve become happy with: as quickly as you can, center
yourself, as quickly as you can, mind your own business and drop anything that
is not relevant to you. This game helped me a lot that night, and pays
dividends in a continued practice. The man sitting next to me was the worst. He
was loud and so painfully hungry for attention. The week before, he alluded to
only coming to drink, and half way through, got up, and with a ‘time to go get
drunk’, left. During one of the breaks, I overheard that he was a former
lawyer, after someone asked if he was an illustrator. He said, ‘I should
be’. I dared not to look at his
drawings, which he was doing onto an ipad- he was one of those people that,
like a dolphin, always kept one eye open, in the event that he might glean a
kernel of attention from someone. At the end of the night, I thanked the
models, gave one of them a drawing that I thought was quite special, and
thanked the fashion designer too. The fashion designer said that he was
watching me draw, and that he would like for me to draw his designs during his
show, and that if I were to post these drawing online, that I use his name as a
hashtag, I agreed, and took down his hashtag name, and the date for his show,
sometime Tuesday in mid-September (which I don’t know whether I will be able to
make or not, depending on school). I was excited that he’d said that to me, as
whilst drawing his models, that was exactly what I was thinking about, like, ‘I
could do this for his fashion outside of the context of this Society of
Illustrators gig’. Or even further, ‘I could collaborate with him and his
studio, producing beautiful visual aid to his clothing’, or something like
that. Once I’d talked with those people, I got on up out of there. I was on the
F train, heading back toward the studio, when I thought about the lack of progress
I might make in only three hours or so before bedtime, so I got off at the 4th
Ave stop, to check out what was playing at the IFC. I read through the movie
descriptions, of the two I hadn’t seen were one about a Cinderella-like pop
star story, an American film, and another about a Sri-Lankan family’s immigrant
story. I chose to see the film about the Sri-Lankans, called Dheepan. The movie
was great and deep and French. It was good to see a step-by-step of a refugees
journey into France whos recent history has seen much turmoil in relation to
immigration from the middle east (does Sri Lanka qualify as the Middle East?).
Toward the end of the film, some personal qualifiers were broken for me as to
whether or not I could take something in and enjoy it. I don’t know where it
started- probably when I murdered that deer, or younger, when I murdered that
lizard, both with guns- but the appearance of a gun upsets me to the point
where I ask only transcendental questions, and cease to be capable of
appreciation of the object as prop. It is an immense symbol, and without pun
intended, loaded or not, loaded. The appearance of a gun, and I observed this
more recently than when I saw the film, but also prior, is cheap. I’ll use an
example: during the introduction to our school, one person in a position of
overseen student safety etc. stood up to speak, and said he would list off some
things that we were not permitted to have in the dorms. He brought along props as
visual aid. “No bongs”, he said, pulling out a bong, then “no toaster ovens”,
pulling out a hello kitty toaster oven. He was relishing the attention and was
excited when he pulled out of his waistband of his pants a gun. “None of these,
no firearms.” The auditorium, filled with a couple hundred incumbent freshman
college students and their families, the room where thirty minutes prior, the
president of the college joyfully danced with the female dean of students to
James Brown’s ‘I Feel Good’, working up a sweat and winning me and others over
that they’d made the right if not unique choice of schools. In the same space,
we all fell silent, the president of the college sat behind the speaker holding
the gun, I looked at him, but I could’ve looked just as well as anyone in the
room, including myself, the speaker himself, any parents, ushers, custodians,
students, and read the same thing- embarrassment, awkwardness, sadness,
disappointment. The gun resembled a limp dick. The speaker tried to continue
his point, but we were all gone, we had lost respect for him. The head officer
for pubic safety was there. He wore a gun around his waist, in a holster, and
we hadn’t thought about it really, which is the a product of desensitization
more than anything else really- truly, cops are killing civilians with their
guns at a rate that, well means we haven’t come far in regards to systemic
racism. But anyway, the speaker sat down, gun in hand, then set the gun down on
the floor at his feet with the barrel pointed toward the audience. The cop
sitting next to him set his intention on the gun, and at the first acceptable
moment (the one that would not set a negative reaction from this guy who had
thoroughly proven himself an irrational animal), reached down, turned the gun
around, and slid it under and closer to a leg of the chair in which the former
speaker sat. The rest of the orientation was a blur. A climax had been
established, and all for a shitty attempt at prop-comedy by an idiot. And
that’s what guns do- they for better or worse escalate things, and it’s a cheap
trick, and can make for lazy art. So in this movie, toward the end, this man,
Dheepan, kind of snaps, and its pretty-much understandable, the whole film had
led up to this, and Dheepan had already gained our trust and won us over, and
established himself as capable of profound complexity. And he kind-of relapses
into a militant state, one of which his qualifications were alluded to as a
former guerilla soldier, who lost everything etc. So he goes ape, and hijacks a
car, and sets it on fire, and drives into a building, and carries a gun on him,
shooting two shots (once it took three), to ensure full death to anyone
crossing his path. His intent was crystal clear, which might have been why the
gun didn’t, again no pun intended, trigger me so badly. The film was airtight.
Even the gun was alright, and the quick resolve, the family shot at the end,
with a baby kid, was alright too- it felt earned, so you know, whatever, they
can have one. I was very happy with this film, I even cried, one of those mild
shedding of tears, whose source was not expected, kind of out of the far corner
of the eye, rather than the duct. A couple days after that movie too, I took a
field trip from the studio with a studio-mate and an in-studio guidance-man (on
salary as a type of auxillary teacher from the AICAD- school funded
studio-share program- program). We went to Bushwick, and into some clean,
warehouse studio-development, which as a walker-througher was like a strip mall
for little handmade things, and small slices of half-baked experiences, all
with a lingering vague pretentious marketing scheme- like crawling into a
badgers den and wondering whether or not you are being watched. So I put on
some headphones corresponding to a video piece because, fuck it, and watched a
slice of this film, where teens are being socially manipulative to one another
and brutal. And Bill, the in-house AICAD guy from our studio-plex thing, taps
me and tells me they’re moving on, and I take the headphones off and say ‘okay,
then I’ll come with you.’ The dialogue was moving slowly anyway, and the
subtleties either took a front seat unnecessicarily for the uniqueness of the
film, or there was a lack of clarity, or a constraint to the real (slow) time
of the media. So I went with Bill and Rebecca (the studio-mate mentioned). And
I breezed through the other gallery spaces. There was Kirchner’s palette, and
Hundertwasser’s geometries, and Bourgeois sculptural visceral islands, and no
shortage of re-hashed pop. One artist did sinful big paintings of cropped
logos, like a Microsoft logo, but in a space not large enough to contain it.
This work was endorsed by AICAD-man Bill as that it was his friend, but it
struck me as mostly out of touch- like yes, yeah, but also please don’t and no.
So we went through some others. There were some pieces of relative quality, all
constructed it seemed for a market, which took some enjoyment from their
exploration, as at the end of the intent was a kind of masturbating capitalist
dog, licking its chops to the jingle of change in your pocket. It wouldn’t have
been so bad if the craft was airtight, I’m not sure though. There was one
object in the place that I stopped and felt that I had to ask an attendant, who
clarified that it was a Peruvian sculpture from six hundred years ago. No
wonder, I thought- this is the only good thing here.
There’s a sensation from making things, (outside, or maybe
following on the heels of the bliss of creative process itself) over a course
of time, that you may be doing this for no audience. I feel that way. I have
spent ungodly amounts of time alone- you hear art critics talk about this kind
of stuff, and other accomplished artists too- that this is par for the course.
There’s a sensation of falling off, or away, or out of grace I think that comes
with working in isolation like this. The inspiration is all mine, the
distraction, the triumphs, and defeats. I sing to myself, and exclaim at
success. I shout and pant like a dog when I masturbate, I say ‘fuck, fuck,
fuck’ when a sculpture’s structure becomes compromised under my hands. I eat
when I am hungry, I keep a pack of cigarettes around a, maintaining a
conversation with them regarding my abovedness, or my wants, or my acceptance
of their tobacco spirit as divine gift- everything in its place. And I go to
the store and worry about how much things cost. I buy fruit, and yogurt, and
bread. I think about my thesis (outside of school context) my masterful
thesis-to-be, combing it over, petting it, making changes like a nowhere-man. I
take the train or walk places sometimes, and I see people as miracles! How are
you!? How are you even!? What brings you here!? Often, I feel shy, or content,
or just quiet about my lonesomeness, and do not make such exclamations aloud.
Sometimes I kind-of do. ‘How are you!?” It takes people aback. If I didn’t
care, I wouldn’t ask- why would I care? I got a New Yorker magazine from a guy
the other day on the train. I saw him set it down next to him on the bench,
then pull out another, more current one. I asked if he was done with it, as it
seemed clear that he was to leave it in the seat as an offering. He smiled and
obliged in handing me the magazine. This morning, having read the magazine, I
tried to offer it first-hand to a few others on the Manhattan-bound F train.
There was an (understandable) hiccup in perception that came (and tends to
come) with reaching out to strangers, though I believe this to be at the end of
the day, a construct, or a learned behavior. I had no takers, but a beautiful
girl noticed me and kept glancing up at me. Having become very very dismissive
of women since my friend called me a sexist, I moved into a neighboring car at
the next stop, where I took a seat. Another stop went by, and she transferred
into the same car that I had, and proceeded to take a seat next to me. I by
that time was reading a book and noticed her presence but did not take my eyes
from the book. A flourishing of thoughts emerged and it seemed to me that she
was an angel, or a dove, bearing an olive branch as offering on behalf of
women-kind. I kept to my book, and got off the train at 57th. She
did too, as I recall, but to my knowledge we went our separate ways in short
time. I attended the second day of my interdisciplinary writing workshop at The
Art Student’s League. The first day, I showed up an hour late. It was the
second day of the class too, so no intro for me. (The first day I’d spent
resolving- wrapping up- a court appearance to finalize my graffiti charge from
December here in Brooklyn. That went off without a hitch, and charges should be
expunged in six months time I am told. This is relatively standard procedure,
though I do believe my out-of-state residency and student status played a
significant role too for this decision by the court). I waited out in the
hallway for a class break, that I may enter the room peacefully and
respectfully, as is custom in these art courses, or any courses for that
matter. A student came out and got me and invited me in. The teacher thanked me
and commended me for my patience. It seemed that she was accustomed to students
going in-and-out at their leisure. I became clear to me in short time that this
was one of those classrooms in which everything is gay and astounding and
marvelous. Not a word written or spoken that was not profound. This was the
second day of this class, as I’d missed the first day going to court for a
graffiti charge I’d caught in December. Sylia Keise was her name, the
teacher’s, and she, I believe, was talking to a student when I came in, about
some sculpture project that he was working on. His name, the student she was
helping, was Luke and he seemed to be the golden child of the bunch in a way.
Others had their own forte’s entirely, and had been ticking away at their
respective crafts for linger perhaps, but no other student seemed to have that
blend of intellect and malleability that Luke showed, so the teacher was
frequently talking to him, recognizing fertile ground. I entered the room as alpha, or at least
challenger, my talents and intellect yet-to-be revealed, I had a seat and tried
to get a feel for the pacing of the room. All was well, and Sylia recognized
that I could use some direction, so she turned my attention to a photo of a
kinetic sculpture by Moholy Nagy, a constructivist/moderninst of the Bauhaus
persuasion, and suggested I draw a copy of it. I did in short time, then
another, then another, and a fourth, each time trying to simplify, reduce, and
abstract for my comprehension of the thing. It seemed a complicated object, and
as I drew, Sylia talked about the piece- its brilliance etc. It was recounted
there by Sylia that the wonderful sculpture made sound, was driven by a motor,
and moved otherwise (though I could not perceive in what fashion by drawing its
picture). A kind of disdain began to grow in me for this sculpture. Who was
this Moholy, and why would he make such a fickle and contrived looking
sculpture, and how could something intended to transform still objects into
motion look so static and utterly stuck? After drawing, (and while I was
drawing thinking about writing) I wrote about the piece, which at the end of
the day was a photograph of a sculpture that in real life I was assured moved
around, transmitting, and reflecting light about, and made beautiful eerie
sounds. But I could not grasp this from the still image so my take read more
like this:
1.
Still, tall, complicated, rigid. Greman or
Russian. Non-elegant, impersonal. Contrived, static utensil. Grate, extrude,
sift, sort, cut.
2.
Oblique plates, islands transmuting light.
Reflecting plastic- plasticity itself. Delicate, fickle. If this had wings, an
ultralight, a boxer- a featherweight, a dancer- a ballerina. At any moment
prone to dramatically and drastically fail. To utterly fall apart.
3.
To make this a spaceship would be foolish- all I
can see is schrapnel, space junk, disassembled garbage, doo dads, metal bits,
irrelevancies, parts of a whole that never added up to anything in the first
place, like when the smoke clears from a retail mirage- a vision into this dried-up
lakebed which is the product exhausted, now only rubbish.
4.
Eggs, pancakes, exercise equiptment, pizza pans,
terribly static, defensive, embarrassed, ostentatious, frivolous, hiding
something. . . I want to make it organic, with life, to fast forward past when
it has become rusted and is useful for lattice for plants, and sits in a field
with the rest of the shopping carts and cheese graders. It’s sterile reserved
regalness means the seed wont take. It’s vacuous- air tight, suffocating. It is
like a shopping cart, with arbitrary elements and joints and welds. Being
pushed down a hill would be akin to tying a young giraffe to a wall, standing
on a treadmill which suddenly starts up.
SO those were my thoughts. I was feeling not so bad about
the class at this point. After all, I had drawn and written. I was given
another image, a still picture this time of a painting by the same artist.
Sylia presented it to the classroom as a whole, as another work by ‘Moholy
Nagy’, we were instructed to make a drawing from the picture. It was hung on a
piece of cardboard up on an easel. I drew a spot on study, and decided to
outline the shapes, ( a modernist piece, with seven abstract colored shapes
making a composition on an otherwise raw canvas), in pen and shading the tones
in with pencil. My drawing was a little close to the binding in my sketchbook,
so I cut it out and pasted it in the center of another page, creating a look
akin to a plate in an old book. I was instructed, and did, write about this
piece too.
Here’s what I wrote:
Mohan Nash [SIC], Painting, 1921
Gates, contained within a rectangular frame (of vertical
orientation) as we are accustomed to reading symbol. Passage through and to
that which was
Quiet, rhyming, self-referential an echo chamber. There’s
nothing happening here that we have not tracked in with us, on the soles of our
shoes. I see an archer, a bow, an arrow pointed skyward. A sense of growth,
implications of spiraling out, going upward as the composition ascends (more so
from left to right by height, but by a different measure, by tone, from right
to left). This insistence creates a stillness- a stagnance.
Where are we now, having seen this image? Is this not a
mirror? And it occours to me, or reminds me that masterpieces are boring. What
can affect them? This masterpiece and I share a shimmy-shake. I could tie all
of my heart-strings to it and feel no different. Be none the richer, none the
wiser, not an ounce more joyful or despairing. I could see this as I die and
say something like yes.
We had a break and most of the students stayed in the room.
I did too. There was not much to do down there in the basement of the Art
Student’s League, and the class was only in session for about three hours, and
the teacher Sylia was a precious commodity, as she would only be in for two
days out of the week. We students were asked to share our writings about the
painting, in front of the class. As I write about this, it is sounding much
more structured than it felt at the time. A female got up first and read her
writings alound. She had big titties and wore no bra. They hung heavily down in
her shirt of regular thickness. She was neither fat nor thin, but surely
substantial. Huge titties, nipples pointing toward the tips of her toes. She
was neither clever nor invalid. I got the feeling, that she was from wealth, as
she had a queer disconnect from reality, and was after-all, in this strange
basement with me and the other queers, poets, artists. She made mention at some
point of a house that her family owned, which to me confirmed my suspicions. Sylia
made mention of wisdom at some point, and playfuly singled her out to ask her
if she had wisdom (the answer was surely yes- after all she was in this class). She kind-of
bumble-juggled out something about her name meaning wisdom, then left some
spoken pause for others to fill in on their own.
I hardly notice Sophia’s reading. It had little tooth, and
her titties were so substantial. Next up was golden-boy, Luke. I forgot too
what his reading was like. I was putting
in my revisions to what I’d written. I was called up next, and read my snippet.
The teacher’s jaw opened and she googled out her eyes at me. She insinuated
that the writing was ‘wonderful, magnificent, etc. as goes in these rooms, and
I said thank you and sat back down. I realized while reading my handwriting
that I’d habitualized a sort-of chickenscratch, and I could hardly read my
notes. I typed the writing shortly thereafter for accuracy’s sake. Next up was
an elderly woman, who was taking the
class part-time, and who it seemed had had an insulated and arbitrary life, as
evidenced by her reading. She stood in front of the class, and asked into the
void if everyone liked fairy tales, and proceeded to read some half-baked
narrative short story, a bastardized Disneyesque narrative, in which some owl
did some thing, it doesn’t matter. I thought of a quote from a movie called
Tropic Thunder in which a character, playing an actor in the film, takes on a
role as a retarded boy (with no redeeming traits, like savant abilities or
such), and kills his career. The quote is “Never go full retard.” That’s what
this old woman did in front of the class, she went full retard, bless her
heart.
That was the end of class that day. The next day we would
turn our drawings into 3D elements, to make sculptures from the paintings, then
to write about the sculptures. This class, in all its vagueness was not so bad,
and despite (or maybe because of) it being in the morning, I felt like I was
learning.
That night, I went to a nude draw at the Society of
Illustrators on 63rd Street. The model was a male, and had great
musculature, producing vivid shadow-shapes. I complimented him on his physique
during one of the breaks and realized that he was gay. Where I’d felt
comfortable in expressing my gratitude for his physicality because of his
maleness (guy to guy= non sexual, an assumption on my part) I now felt a bit
sheepish. He read all of this in my face I’m sure, and we let it pass- a
wonderful trait that any and many self-respecting New Yorkers, who don’t have
the time to pursue trivia have near mastered. I try to tap into this mindset
when I come up here, anytime, and took this as another codifying lesson. The
models poses were not ‘out’ looking, or anything, which I think was one reason
I did not assume he was gay, they were beautiful, classically inspired many of
them, heartfelt poses. He held a pose of removing a thorn fron the sole of his
foot for about twenty minutes, to the great pleasure of the room. I tried to
give him a drawing (that thorn-pose drawing) after the session, but he was
quickly off. The room that night seemed healthier, less bitchy and clicky,
(though still a solid eight out of ten on the bitchy-clicky scale) I guess what
seemed different is that I was sitting next to a woman, and one who was somewhere
in between drawing well and not being satisfied with her drawings. Her
diligence was more than tolerable, though otherwise she was glued to her
friend-for-the-night chair-neighbor, and would not receive my notions to engage
in conversations during breaks. It was phenomenal really- during breaks she and
a small group would gather in a semi-circle to chat about paper and pens or
whatever the hell illustrators talk about (I could hear, and that’s a lot of
what it was, and I would have loved to join in), but the perimeter was
constructed quickly as to keep specifically me out. I would sit outside the
edge of their arrangement, like a sad puppy not fully grasping the lesson due
to its subtleties and otherwise consensual understanding, and not be seen. I
felt like some sort of ghost, who had woken from a dream to find out that he’d
passed away in his sleep, and now could be neither seen nor heard. At least she
was not fully content with her drawings, we had that in common.
Studio life was creeping along, a slowness had come over the
studio as my seldom followed one painting at a time rule, had been scrapped,
and as many open projects will make, progress felt slow. I smoked a cigarette
or two, happy to be back at it after that gnarly fever spell in the hotel room,
induced by smoking (and poor diet). I kind-of enjoyed the first one, then less
so toward the butt. The second one I smoked with a friend outside of the Art
Student’s League, a good use of smoking I felt. Later by a number of hours I
began to feel sick again, much like the sickness induced by the first round of
relapse-smoking. It seemed more clear that I could not smoke, personally, for
health reasons. I spent a couple days in less than optimal health, and have
been coming out and into a healthy practice once more. What’s more, I have cut
back on sugar significantly, and coffee, which together made me feel sporadic,
and manic, but ultimately depleted.
Yuseph, that was the kid’s name, remembering back to the
park scene in which I was having terrible lapses in health, from smoking (and
poor diet). The woman called over the open field there in Central Park
‘YUUUSEPPH!”, and he would go on ignoring her. What a hilarious, melancholy
scene.
Wrestling night, pizza afterward, looking for a hotel for a
shower, contacted Brooklyn hotel, didn’t go. Back to the studio. Friday class,
big walk afterwards- uptown east, then train to East Broadway or so, then
around Chinatown and SoHo. Canal Street plastics visit, don’t buy. Five o clock
rolls around, wondering next move, begin asking for hotels. Ask coconut man. I
am feeling sick. Afternoon heat. Landscape is bleaching out visually. Pussy
fever, looking at women on the sidewalk. Coconut man advises that I check the
corner of Broome and Elizabeth, where there are three hotels. I see the Sohotel
and walk in. It is very done-up, very fashionable and chic looking. Contrived
sort of check-in process. I sought to get though all of that as soon as
possible. I was regarded as impatient and rude perhaps, insomuch as the attendadnts
were impersonal and bureaucratic. I took a long shower, then another shower, I
was feeling sick. Hot, cold, hot cold. I made a perch out of pillows and
propped myself up onto them. I felt exhausted. I flicked on the television. I
changed channels a few times until I found a showing of Juno, a movie about a
teenage pregnancy. When I’d first seen it, I thought I was cooler than it. The
dialogue and lingo seemed forced I remember thinking. And maybe still, but to
be honest, there was a lot of ground to cover in terms of millennial
vocabulary, and bridging the gap between those who grew up with cell phones,
and internet, and those who didn’t (basically every film-maker and screen
writer preceding the release of this film). I watched intently, with drive and
focus. I really wanted to get it this time. And the movie paid dividends-
really developing in al the right ways, echoing truths that I’d only
half-grasped upon first viewing. The relationship between the adoptive couple
of the to be born child was poignantly conveyed, though complex. To flatten the
relationship; the woman was suffocating the man, and he flaked when it came
time to commit. This is a subplot, but one that I didn’t feel before when I watched it, just vaguely recognized. This time,
I wept, maybe not at this part in particular, but for a good deal of the later
part of the film. As it goes, of course, I was not just weeping for the moving
symbols, or pictures of people on the screen, I wept from a feeling of loss,
and hurt. A long time queery feeling, which gets flushed out in investing in
someone else’s narrative- their tragedy. I felt broken, and alone. After the
film, I turned off the telley, and thought to take a nap. As it goes, again,
taking a nap too late in the day paired with sickness and exhaustion, meant for
me that I was not in for a half-hour ordeal, rather I slept for maybe four
hours. I took this as healing. I needed to go through something I could feel. I
woke around ten or eleven. I watched some television, and was fortunate to see
a sexy scene from a movie called American Pie. This prompted me to masturbate.
I felt like I need to get it all out and start anew, from this hotel room. It
was (despite all of the TV watching), a quiet time and a healing indulgence.
I’d spent two-hundred dollars on the room. Midnight rolled around and I
wondered if I could get something to eat. I hadn’t eaten much that day. I went
for a walk down and around the Chinatown-SoHo neighborhood, and found after a
short time a Korean Barbeque place. I passed it at first, thinking, well, I’m
not sure what, that maybe I’d find something else, or not eat, but in short
time turned around, went in, sat down, and ordered a spread of food. I was
really hungry by that point, or at least, I knew I could really put down some
food. I ordered a bowl of udon noodle soup, and skewers of cauliflower, kelp,
and straw mushroom (the mushrooms actually came on a plate), and a taro
milkshake. This all added to twenty dollars, which I didn’t have on me. I ran
back to the hotel quickly while the food order was put into the kitchen. When I
came back I chowed down hard. It was a miracle, and I was feeling better. I
could feel the sickness leaving me, not just from the food, but from the sleep
I’d gotten, and from the bed and the shower and the masturbation, and the
crying. Those straw mushrooms were cooked with barbeque sauce, and some of the
very best things I have palette-ed. The milkshake as well was dang gorgeous,
though a bit tasteless from temperature difference. I was really hungry, I
think that was the main thing. I paid my tab and happily walked around the
block again, among the late-night bar crowd, then back to the hotel for another
round of healing rest. I woke in the late morning, and felt a kind-of hung-over
from sickness. I was no longer under the influence of it, but still had some
coming out to do. I wanted coffee, and walked to a shop. On the way, I came
across a bookstore and bought three books; a copy of Kafka’s Metamorphosis,
Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, and J.D. Salinger’s Nine Stories. I had
a beautiful brunch among the yuppies of SoHo, and fingered at the books a bit,
mostly just glancing at them, fantasizing. My breakfast was grand. I was a big
spender here, in these past twenty hours or so, but most-all I thought about at
this point was my glorious food. I had bacon, and eggs, French toast, fruit,
and potatoes, with a cappuccino. A true yuppie breakfast. I can conveniently
excuse myself from the constricting label of’yuppie, in that I am not a professional
(as I understand yuppie is a pseudo-acrynym for young urban professionals).
Outside of being utterly unemployed, I am at times the yuppiest of yuppies.
After brunch as it were, I walked back to canal street, to procure the plastics
and lighting systems I had put off buying the day before I was happy to have
made a conservative decision in postponing my purchasing, as I bought mush less
than I had initially planned, upon becoming inspired to create (many many
things) upon first walking in to the stores respectively. I bought some sheet
plastics, glue, a knife to cut them, a clear acrylic cube for a still-life, and
a couple hanging mounts. At the electronics shoppe, I bought an led circuit,
(which included an LED affixed to wires, joining a battery housing, and a
battery), and another LED system, which came already assembled and resembled
miniature battery-operated Christmas lights.
These I would use in my interdisciplinary writing workshop shadow boxes,
and further work I thought, at Ringling maybe. I went back to Brooklyn, back to
the studio, stopping along the way to pick up a couple egg tarts from a Chinese
bakery. Back at the studio, I whipped into a quick frenzy of work, as a monitor
was there, and he was in mid-shift which got me inspired. The vacation had made
a huge difference I felt in my studio approach, and I was happily making
adjustments and changes to paintings that I’d before slowed down on. I sat down
and read Kafka’s Metamorphosis, not bad. I’d been in Prague, and walked through
a Kafka museum, knowing nothing about Kafka’s work. The museum exposed him and
his psyche so personally, humanizing him so thoroughly, that I did not think
that I wanted to invest any of my time in reading his works, but lo did I hear
Kafka’s name mentioned more and more and more, especially as an influencer of
Salinger, that I knew I had to read him, or at least Metamorphosis. I could
stand to read it again, and am holding onto it still for this tentative
second-go. Today in the studio it was move-out day- the day where we were to
turn in our keys and pack out. I’d struck a verbal deal with Al, the studio
manager, that I could stay longer, on the basis that I had nowhere else to go
before classes back in Florida began again, and that I was currently enrolled
at the Art Students League, and that I could use the time and studio space to
further develop my ideas and work. He agreed obligingly under the condition
that I moved out anyways, to show that I was as mobile as I said I was, and
under the circumstances that the next incoming students had a fair pick of all
available studio spaces. I agreed. When Saturday came around however, I briefly
told the student-watchdog, who had secured his position as a sort of
groundskeeper, that I would be staying for longer too. He called Al, and
reported to me that Al said I just leave my things in the space and that would
be alright. SO this was great news I thought, and I left my things in the
studio. I had a good Sunday, creating things, painting. I’d chatted up a band
at a vegan restaurant the other day and told them that I’d like to come out to
one of their shows. There would be a show that night, and I set to go out to
see them. I contacted on of my Tinder (dating app) matches, to propose that we
go out to the event together. She was so friendly, truly patient. It was all
going well, but it turned out, she stayed on the clock at work, and once off,
went home and did not feel much like going out again. I said that I understood,
and took the long way to the show, (ie arbitrarily riding the subway cars,
drawing people’s portraits to pass some time, before getting off at a stop that
I liked- Morgan Ave, on the L). From the subway stop, I took a walk around
Bushwick, taking in the industrial scenery, the graffiti. I was in desperate
need of some socks. My feet were getting sweaty, and I had neglected to do my
laundry at this point for a couple of weeks. I’d worn all of my socks multiple
times, but right-side-out and in-side-out. SO I walked around Bushwick, looking
for socks. I went into a store which had some, but they looked so silly, and
overdesigned, I couldn’t bring myself to buying them. I imagined they were
fifteen or twenty dollars anyway. I walked a bit further. I did not have to be
at the music show for another hour. I walked into this shop that had a lot of
textiles, and before my eyes could focus on any one thing, from the back, from
an elevated loft up some stairs, a transvestite hollered out to me. “Come join
us for Drink and Draw!”
“You’re drawing now?” I replied as I looked up to meet the
eyes-ish (it was hard to look this creature in the eyes- this transvestite- not
from shame, but her outfit. She was head to toe in checkerboard spandex, black
and white. Her face was painted and
the application of such stark colors (or non-colors) created the jarring effect
of blackface. Her hair, as wig, was a
butchered afro- now cut like a hedge into a downward facing trapezoid, and flat-ish on top like a slice of pie. The
hair was black, furthering what seemed to me to connote racist undertones, or
mal-intent. Anyways, I took her
reaching out to me for a drawing opportunity as one part whoreishness, and want
for attention, validation, and one part desperate loneliness, though typing
these out, they don’t seem too different from one another. I’m being harsh
surely, as one who walks into a barber shop might be asked if he would like a
haircut. I guess the abomination that I see as drag queens put me in a critical
mindset. My idea on this though is to what end? What are you dressing in drag
for at all? Is there purpose to your action? Honest intent? Or is it, like so
many other pastimes, more than other things, just something to do? Something
which brings cheap thrills, in exchange for landfills full of plastic wigs and
spandex costumes, and drains and pipes filled with washed off mascara,
lipstick, wahthaveyou. Its occouring to me that in talking this way about
transvestites, I might be unfairly profiling. Surely, many women wear makeup
like this, and account for drains filled with runoff of mascara and the like.
Surely, many blacks wear wigs, which in time find their way to landfills. But I
digress, what drives one to so harmfully profile and in my opinion objectify
women and cultures, for such foolish ends as attention and engagement? What is
being asked of others in your actions? Acceptance? You have that. Love? You
have that too. Its yours, it yours, no makeup required, no breaking of the
constructs of gender norms etc. It’s not the goddam fifties, and if it seems
that way you either need to read a book or get new friends. So that’s my take
on transvestites I guess. This transvestite introduced (and I’ll stop using
italics now for the gender pronouns now because you get the point) herself as
Madame Vivien V. Not much bitching I can do here, I go by Tobias. I already
described her get-up which I found repulsive, in its sweeping generalizations,
materials, and appropriations. This all was set off by an Arian frame of six
foot, stacked on what else but four inch red heels. The back of her neck was the
only part of her that was not covered in black or white paint, or checkerboard
spandex. Here, on the back of her (his) neck, was her (his, as this section was
not in costume- does the costume make this individual a her, or the personal
preference. And yes, of course the answer is personal preference, but this
particular section of Madame Vivien V seemed male to me- the back of the neck,
the part that was not obscured by costuming.) The pale skin, rose up, in time
meeting with hairs under the wig- short red hairs.
“Yes”, she said, “It’s drink and draw! Come join us!”
Everything that Madame Vivien (she specified that ‘Vivian’
in her case was spelled with an ‘e’, so “V-i-v-i-E-n”) V said seemed to come
out in an exclamation, and when you have a bullshit-filter on, you can’t help
but feel bad for all of the extra time and energy and effort that goes into
communicating simple ideas and concepts. She was part mime in this way, which I
guess is part of the point of drag right?. . . to be a sad, ever-unravelling living
poem of self expression and excess? Am I missing something? Something
beautifully frivolous, like a flower.
“Great, cool. Alright” I might have said, and joined them,
walking up the stairs into the loft section in the back of the store. There, to
my great surprise and pleasure, were two acro-yoga athletes, in a balancing
stack, bathed in warm glow from incandescent spot-lamps, clamped the fronts of
tables which circumscribed them. At on of the two tables sat two women, drawing
away on newsprint. The other table had two chairs pulled up with no-one sitting
at them. It was as if this event went severly underpromoted, in cooperation
with having the booking connections to get two incredible acro-yoga models.
What a treat! (transsexuals aside). The store owner was there too. She asked me
for ten dollars for the draw. I told her I could pay her with a card, and she
said it would be twelve then. She said I could go to an atm, but that would
also probably cost me two extra dollars. All this time we were talking this
over, I was about to explode with excitement, as in my periphery the acrobatics
being underwent begged to be drawn. I asked if I could capture this pose, and
pay her at the first break, and she agreed. I took a seat, and some newsprint
provided by the store, and drew. It turned out, there was no break. The
yoga-athletes went from pose to pose, and when they needed rest, Madame Vivien
V would jump in and do some poses herself, invariably bending over to show her
ass or cupping her comically high-up and conic-shaped stuffed-bra fake boobs or
bending forward to give a winking kissy face. “What the fuck was I going to do
with these drawings?”, I thought. Then when the athlete models had felt rested,
they would return to the stand, and this went on for the duration of the draw,
no breaks. I squared up with the owner at the end of the night, and gave some
money to the models, who were working for tips (yikes). I gave them six or
eight dollars, and a drawing a piece. They were not very excited a bout the drawings,
but that’s just my craving for attention I think. They seemed about as
interested as the imagery on the paper money (and the money itself) as to my
drawings. They were not in the mood quite for picture-looking. They were
exhausted. I gave one of the drawings to Madame Vivien V too, one of her
grabbing a boob whilst leaning on a mannequin and giving a kissy wink. I
thought this pose was a tour de force of queer intent (bastardized as it might
be) and at the end of the day it was a good drawing. She loved it. The store
owner said that was a great idea, as Madame Vivien V was very vein.
I left to walk to the music venue. It was a thirty-minute
walk, and by the time I arrived, the last band was on, so I didn’t go in. I saw
a store on Havemeyer Street that had a great wall, that should be painted. I
remember a trip I took to Williamsburg, I think I was twenty at the time, when
I came across this very wall, and I think it had an EWOK piece on it (East
coast EWOK), and I stood in front of it for a long time, and touched the paint.
I went into the store and asked if I could paint the wall. The store clerk said
the building owner comes in the mornings and that I would have to ask him. I
have yet to ask him, but hope to bring him a few concepts upon doing so. I have
a lot of work to do. A lot.
I have a great deal of homework now with this
interdisciplinary writing workshop at the Art Students league. I made an
incredible light box, with an obscuring pane in front, and a sculpture inside.
The box housing is opaque and is backlit with LED lights (diffused with a
translucent plexiglass pane), creating an illuminated space in which the
sculpture is housed. The result is that of an aperatured light box, in which
the monochrome sculpture achieves visual depth in value and focus, the farther
the sculptural element is from the front obscuring plane, the lighter in value
and the fuzzier it is in the picture plane. The sculpture is clever and the
piece charming. So my homework now is to
A.) write
about (in a free-association fashion) about the sculpture work,
B.) make
value studies of the sculpture work (its picture plane)
C.) draw
variations on the box-format, in which different materials and concepts can be
explored, yielding in the constructing of a series of boxes which explore and
elaborate on visual-spacial concepts illustrated by the works of Moholy Nagy’s
1921 painting
This homework is really a test of intellect, craft,
ideation, visual development, and writing comprehension. Did I miss anything?
It’s a tall order. I love it. Who’da thunk art-making would be such a treasure
trove of a task-set?- a bottomless pit.
Man walks up to the counter at the coffee spot and, as if
he’d been holding his breath, excited to deliver his clever statement-question,
“Forgivemyignorancebut what is a …” I waked out of earshot, and his outburst
was toward the end of the great exhalation.
I’m sure most everyone experiences a similar feeling, but
how interesting it is (I’ll speak for myself here, but surely you are welcome
to retrofit) that you can be a giant an art school. You can be held in high
regard, praised for ingenuity etcetera, then walk into the street and have a
skillset and a product that is not readily commoditized. Who wants to invest in
what I am investing myself into.
I crawled into a cave in Iceland. I used my cell phone as a
flashlight. At some point the aperture of the orifice became small, that to
continue, I had to crawl on my belly and knees and elbows. I could not see the
end, and did not know when or if I would have the opportunity to turn around to
crawl back out headfirst, as I’d come in. Some thirty feet in, the tunnel
opened into a small gallery, like a womb. I should die hear, I thought. It
wasn’t so that I was finished, or anything so poetic as a notion like ‘what was
going to happen, had happened’, though of course this statement is true, (it’s
a thought mirror). No, I just had the feeling that this would be an appropriate
place to die, or a good one- back into the earth, into the womb of the great mother.
From this may come the motif, of returning to the womb- an
(it seems to me) original idea on my part, spurring from my gleaned Buddhist
readings, and ideas of bring the circle to a proper closer. One problem with
this cave in Iceland was that I had very little to do with Iceland, in a way.
What was I doing there, really? The short answer to that question might be
something like, dating this girl. We’d agree to go together, and basically had
a two-week honeymoon, very disconnected from reality. We listened to and album
by Björk a lot of the time, and seldom talked of ideas. It seemed to me that
it, at the end of the day, wasn’t all there for us. The union was built on
less-than-solid ground. It may have worked on a financial level, and perhaps on
a production level, by weight or so, but there were two different frequencies
at play. Both high frequencies, so there was an effect of sustained dissonance,
rather than long-term peaks and valleys- just a lingering uneasiness that we
quelled with lots of sex. So, Iceland, I can hardly speak to it, of it, and I
had very little business dying inside of it.
I spoke earlier of going into the woods in Germany, (as I am
German more than otherwise) and dying of starvation. That would be the way to
do it, maybe in a cave, but only if I earn that- not everyone can just go
crawling into caves, dying like so, the real estate is incredibly valuable only
if you have made personal union with it- no hacks I guess is what I am saying.
It’s incredible how few retarded people there are. There are
very many functioning people, and less many non-functional ones.
Sunday night, after talking with that shop-keep at the
corner-store about painting that wall, I returned to the studio in Dumbo, and
opened a book, probably this book called Art History’s History, which I’m
muscling through. I thought I would get to bed before midnight, that I could
get up early and go to class with a couple hours wort of day-experience prior.
At about midnight, I got a call from a number that I did not know. It was Hope.
Hope and I had hung a show together in Tallahassee, when I was going to
community college there. She was cute, and made soft-sculpture and ceramic
vaginas with teeth and blood and glitter. At the time I was making sexual
watercolors together and it seemed like a good fit all around. She called and
called me ‘Kimmy’, which has always been cute from her, even when I was more
manically insistent about transitioning to the name Kemeys (from my childhood
name, Robbie). We’d had a romantic night or two, and made a good show between
us. She was always about to fall off the planet I remember, and one quickly
learned not to get too involved with Hope. She had her own things going on, and
it seemed important to her that she go through them. What was unfortunate was
that from the outside, it was very hard to relate at all to Hope’s problems.
They seemed disproportionately grand, or unrealistically terrible. Hope called
me and called me ‘Kimmy’, and said, “Kimmy, can I come by, can I sleep in your
studio? “, something like that, it may have been more oblique, as she would do
in asking for a favor. “I’m in a rough spot.”, or something like that. So I
said yeah, yes, of course, come on by. I didn’t want to ask too many questions,
Lord knows it’s a pandora’s box. “My old bandmate, can she come too?”
Yeah, yes, come over, surely, I’ll be here.”
I don’t recall what she said from there, but I doubt it was
thank you. She hung up the phone really really quickly I remember, which I
loved. She called about an hour later, to say that she was walking to her car,
and that she wanted me to stay on the phone until she got in to her car. “Where
are you?”
“I don’t know.”
“What? I mean like where are you?”
“Manhattan, I don’t know. There’s nooobody out here.”
“Aright.” I let it
hang. There was nothing to talk about. She was pulling a stunt keeping me on
the phone like this, the whole thing. I was going to read my book.
After a long silence, “What are you doing?”
“Reading.”
More silence. I could hear her heels colpping along the
street and sidewalk through the phone. She was frantic, manic. I turned a page.
Keys, a car door opening.
“Okay, I’m in my car”, she hung up her phone.
I read my book.
She called at two in the morning, “Okay, you’re going to
have to come down and get in my car and show me where to park.”
“Are you here?”
“Yeah.”
“Which street are you on?”
“I don’t know”
“Alright, do you see building numbers? Like the building
number on the front of this warehouse?, 20 Jay Street?”
“I don’t know, I’m outside.”
“Alright, I’m walking your way now.” Out of my reading
chair, what a great reading chair it was, I should like a reading chair to go
through books in akin to it, sometime between when I no longer have this one
and the time when I die, and down to the street via the side interior stairwell
of the building. I rounded the corner, keeping the phone to my ear the whole
time. I asked her if she was at the end of the street, and she said yeah. I
asked her to turn around, and confirmed when I saw her headlights, then hung up
in a fashion not unlike the way she does. At some point while reading (or maybe
half-reading) my book, while I was waiting for her to drive over, I thought
that I should kiss her- share a kiss- a simple friendly kiss, on the lips would
be fine. I put my hands in the air and gave a small dance from my heart, that
she could see it was me on the curb as she pulled to the curbside to pick me
up. I got in and said “Hi, Hopey.”
“Hey Kimmy” she reached over the center gear shifter, and
pile of stuffed animals and used drink cups, and cocked her neck for a hug. I
gave her a hug, and asked, “Can I have a kiss?”
“Where?.. I mean.. I
don’t even care really, I’m so tired Kimmy, sure.”
I crooned in and around, she’d turned her head down, showing
gently her feigned receptiveness to a consolation forehead kiss. I went down
and turned the overhang of her brow line to get to her face, then hung for an
amount of time that cannot be measured, and if it were it might be somewhere
between a blink and a few years. She blossomed, and we kissed, just quick, a
friendly kiss, no theater.
“Alright, go straight.” She put the car in gear, and we
rolled to an intersection. “Take a right here.” “Left at the next block. I
gotta say, I have never parked a car here, so we’re going to have to be real
careful where we park.”
Found a spot, parked. “They know where I am Kemmy, they
track me through my phone. They’re looking for me Kemmy.”
I stood at the rear passenger’s-side taillight while she got
her things out of the car. Her car was loaded with stud. Back when we had a few
evenings of lovemaking and tumbling about, back in Florida, I remember her room
being a mess- like a reflection of what I thought might be in her mind,
glitter, stuffing, soft things, dirty laundry pushed into corners, a drawer
full of condoms. That really took it for me- the drawer full of condoms. It was
the top drawer of her bedside night-stand. We were definitvely hooking up. I
wanted to get with her and she with me. It was like a transaction. She, it
seemed was within this practice, and climbing socially up (or down, or side to
side) a ladder of sexual liberation, consciousness, empowerment, etcetera, and
we wer on her bed which had far too many plus animals and soft-top plush
blankets, and high thread-count sheets that were shiny in the low amber light
of her bedside lamp. We were kissing. I went downwards and pulled off her
underwear. She was hot. I remember her pussy smelled like an armpit, and I said
it, fucking around. I think I knew it would get under her skin- it was kind-of
slighty, but point was, I didn’t care that she had a sweaty pussy, and saying
so was as to my acknowledgement thereof. I went down. She was wet and had an
alright but not great flavor, I’m sure it was her diet, and the cigarettes. She
put her toes in the waistband of my underwear and pulled them down around my
knees. I pulled my legs out of them, that I was now without bottoms. I may have
still had a shirt on, though this was atypical for my romancing style at the
time. It seems more legitimate to have a shirt on now in hindsight- that can
come off during the fucking, when it gets hot. Anyway she was ready, and she
reached across her chest, and pulled open the top drawer, which had maybe a
hundred condoms in it.
She got some things out of her trunk too, I held a plush
polyester comforter, and we walked to the warehouse at 20 Jay Street.
So I’ll get out of this piece about Hope now as Lord knows
I’ve been sitting on it and no doubt my cadence has changed, and it would take
a great deal of spit to shine it back up, and I’m drinking wine and not feeling
like spitting and shining up this thing forever.
Long story short, in we went and she made note of the
scanner-fob entry and the locks on the doors of the studio. “That’s good. Oh
good.” Emphasizing her want for security. She said she was on the run, that
she’d just been assaulted by her roommate and was scared that he might rape
her. She stole his music gear including a guitar and an amp and a PA system,
and took her clothes and left- made a run for it. She said they were looking
for her. She and I went into the bathroom. I was going into the guys, but she
waited for me at the girl’s door expectantly. We could have fucked, but what a
goddam nightmare it would be to have to deal with this woman any other way than
platonically. We took sink-showers as she talked my ear off about how fucked up
her situation was and this and that. I would kind-of smile now and then and she
would yell at me like “What the fuck are you smiling for? You think this is a
joke Kemmy?” and I wouldn’t have to answer her, because she’d go right back
into it- her woes. And however accurate they were, I had no idea, but it was
clear she was not there to see me, no visit. This was about her entirely and
any other input was an affront. This was her stage, to dance her tragedy upon,
no cough, sneers, snickers, candy wrapper sounds, no applause. Well okay, some
applause was fine. I couldn’t help but laugh, and laughter I felt could not do
any harm. If she was truly offended, she would be truly open to any other thing
than her own voice, but she was not. She just spouted off for her waking hours.
I thought about (as is my fantasy with women as they gabber off) how fucked we
would be if there were some imminent threat about. The talking was tactless-
our antagonist would have an easy time squashing us. I’d have to cover for this
bitch- that was what struck me as funny, that’s what brought the small smiles-
my internal criticisms and imaginary tragedies in relation to her yammering- it
was funny the whole way round. God, I felt stupid. I had class in the morning.
We went to bed. I made her a bed with nice cardboard, and
her sheets, and her plush comforter. I spaced our beds far apart and put myself
into a corner. She asked that I move our beds together. Sure, I said. I pushed
hers over to mine. We lay down, and I took off my shirt and lay on my back. I
was looking sexy as fuck and I think she’d been feeding into my ego the whole
time. I felt like a real werewolf. What I had to be sure to do, I made note to myself,
is to keep my hands to myself. And I laid on my back and looked up, and my ribs
separated rom my pelvis in a way that I am not usually conscious of, and the
lamp light grew warm around us and the room became the chamber of a gun.
“Kemmy, I don’t want to have sex, but can I come hold on to you?”
“Um, yes, yeah, sure.”
She, on her side put her downward-facing knee out and
reached over to my far shoulder with her left hand, then walked on her hip and
rib cage close up to beside under and next to me. Her top-leg snaked over my
left knee and wrapped like a vine around and down my calf. She might have
sampled the bony resonance of my upper abdomen with her fingers, and certainly
made physical note of the hairs on my chest. She tucked her head into my
armpit. I felt her shaven hairs on my pec. Her cheek was soft.
I kept my hands to myself. Goodnight.
Next morning, we rolled up her camping supplies and she
wanted me to get into the car with her. She said she wanted company, but she
was still incessantly talking about nothing but what a fucked up spot she was
in etc. and besides that, I thought it just plain a not-good-idea to be around
her much any longer. I said that I would take the train please, and she lashed
out, and made clear that this was the last time that I’d be seeing her. And I
turned and walked to the bagel store.
Everything bagel, tofu scallion, tomato slice, toasted
please.
_____
Monday: Class as usual. It’s funny being in a poetry workshop,
one taught by a German modernist. Maybe she was a post-modernist. I don’t know.
And it’s cool, her spirit, but so many times, she comes out like off the
rocker. Ones that march to the same drummer to long become cross-eyed.
