Proliferate

In an effort to look more prolific in regards to writing, I’m going back into this thing.

I’ve got an art show to look forward to at a warehouse in west Philly. I submitted pictures of paintings in progress, some sculpture works, and some sketches which I posited ‘could be turned into paintings of any scale’. Well, no bites.

The curators much to my pleasure asked that we show my CV. They thought it was really funny. What’s more they like my writing, and when I put it to them, they said they like the bitchier stuff; and I’m painting with a broad brush here, but I felt understood. So I’ll be a part of a visual art show as a writer, and have got to think up how to write for it, or how to display writing, or whatever.

I’ve taken a practice of non-possession even of thought- that an idea worth doing is either going to get done or is worth showing in its intermediate stages, or shared in words. So, what I’m thinking for the show is a book. A little book. That’s all I can share for now (so much for transparency), because I have a few amorphous ideas floating around up in there. So I’m writing a little bit up to the date, that I taper up, that I wax self-aware.

Johnathan’s Show in NYC

New York trip went moderately well. I read on the bus in preparation for a big essay day. I’m up early this morning for reasons that are centered around my stress about these essay, essays fro Fem:ReConstructs. Technically I don’t need the college credit, but the stuff matters and it’s a good excuse to actually learn citations etc.

Up and down on a bus, nothing too much to speak of. I napped on the way up. I feel that I am in much better mental health today than yesterday. I was regular deadpan in New York, perhaps a better case than some kind of mania, or ego modality which I perceived was how the rest of the carachters at the art opening were operating. I met this cool dude named Anton Bashkin who self-identified as a neo-Hellenist artist, to which I blinked. I heard a lecture on animation where the lecturer was asking the audience to notice blinks in a digital short; “Blink!”, he would yell each time the character in the short would blink. The pacing of the thing was defined by his blinking. It was like a shutter release- the mind taking something in as a dose. Blink!, next concept. I aimed to suppress a jealousy from Anton’s orientation in regards to the works that he makes. “Shit, what the hell am I? I want to be a new-Hellenist, maybe I could just be that. What’s that mean? A focus on nature, animals, satyrs et al? I’m jealous, though it could be limiting, so maybe I’m not.” I thought all in an instance, in a blink. Anton was smart. He’d just curated a show and produced a postcard with th show info on it. His gallery was just up the street at 181 Orchard and closed in twenty minutes, so telling him I’d go and see it, I went on a walk. The gallery had closed ten minutes early so all I could do by the time I arrived was loook through the glass windows. The show looked good. The show looked contemporary, and by that I mean maybe one to three figures in a composition, flat design, texture, mythical narratives, in the school of Gauguin, to me.

Looking up Anton’s work, the new-Hellenist thing makes sense. He’s pulling direct from Hellenist literature, plays and poems. I have to be happy for him.

Jonathan’s show was beautiful looking. The room I’d mentioned was dynamic in a silly way, like undercurrent at the beach, the backdrop of vulnerability was palpably understood, no help from the phone checking, and for that again I was greatful for my deadpan. I sat down and wrote. There was a reading from Johnathan’s gallery book. I bought one for twenty bucks. It has all these pictures of asses, and poetry. Jonathan signed it.

Outside on the street I helped a guy find his bus. We shook hands. He was going to Tennessee.

True to plan, I got a single cake roll and a lotus pastry from a Chinatown bakery, and got on a returning bus, back to Philly. I ate my treats and read with a reader light all the way back.

End of Semester

recap on the semester. 

Today was overcast and people on the street looked cynical and abrasive. They looked ready to get into a fight. I think everyone is spending too much time on their phones. I had many encounters today of a sharp rude look followed by a checked phone. What’s on your phone friend? 

I bought dinner and a month metro pass for a friend named Joseph, who made a parallel account. Today is the fifth of May, Cinco de Mayo, so the yuppies were out in full force drinking and littering. There’s all this polemic on the internet about race and gender and stuff, but when I take a walk all I can see is indiscriminate yuppie culture- entitlement and plastic and corporate groups. Corporations are like crews. Alliances are formed, qualifiers are set by prices, and social groups develop, and haters, too. I called my mom, and she cut it short. She didn’t want to hear about plastics. Grandmother had a stroke. She went to the hospital, then back to her home after a while. Expressing worry to my mother, concern for her mother, she said blankly, ‘No one’s getting out alive’. 

My parents are coming up in a week or so. I told them to bring walking shoes. I want to exercise my parents, and to go on beautiful walks. We could all use it. 

I’m supposed to go to New York tomorrow for a talk in the evening at a gallery in Chinatown. It’s to see my professor Jonathan Lyndon Chase, at his show. Jonathan would be one of those teachers fo me who I’d say helped me come out mostly figuratively speaking. 

I took Feminist Re:Constructs class and read more Maggie Nelson. We read other stuff too. One from NorbeSe Phillips really got my goose, and I hoped that it was not because I was deep down racist. I’m doubling down on my first impressions from the reading though, and although Phillips experiences racism in the text (Bus to Morocco), it’s terribly (tactfully) written and reckless. 

That class had me all upset sometimes, in conjunction with being perpetrator and victim in the most subtle and turned passive-aggressive display of racism, and some reading that I got into a little bit to help give me insight. When a victim claims discrimination, and that we should talk about this stuff, then closes up and retaliates, well, it hurts. I read a little of Racial Matters and a little from W.E.B. DuBois, and a smidge from The ISIS papers. I’m reading Gayatri Spivak, and that’s the best remedy I’ve found; she is constantly zooming out for broader perspective. Suffice to say systemic racism is real, as evidenced in Racial Matters of FBI’s long history of undermining black liberation movements to put it lightly, and we’re all a bunch of no-goods walking on borrowed time and stolen land, drinking out of plastic cups, and buying cheap sombreros on the fifths of Mayos. 

Last day of school I took a bike ride out to west Philly to talk with Larry at The Spread Bagelry in hopes of weekend employment. I’d be taking the job in friend Megan’s summer absence- holding it for her return in the fall. I might get an interview, and a job come Monday tbd. 

I’m slotted to get a job with the school for the summer- that’s the rumor, but I’ve yet to hear anything concrete from the bureaucracy. I’ll stay in Philly. Having a (small and diminishing) trust fund has a way of disqualifying you from opportunities; scholarships, need-based grants, school jobs, residency opportunities, and I suspect some of the school’s bigger cash awards. When I graduate, I may a gaunt resume based on discrimination due to privileges. I’ll do fine nonetheless, and in the meantime, in a state of dysphoria.

Summer plans include working day jobs and painting. Painting comes to my fingers so quickly on the keyboard, yet the paintings I can readily up and do are not my paintings, I don’t think. I wrote this phrase ‘convenient time to have an opinion’, which infects my thoughts when it comes time to deviate from the norm. It’s designed like a koan I think. I intended it fro a thesising student. Oh, year four- opinion. A joke for BFA’s is to not do an MFA because ‘it’ll fuck you up’. 

Even in the BFA here at PAFA, and it’s self imposed- but I do want to not paint the classroom picture much more. I’ve started zooming back- like Spivak, to paint the context of art school. It’s funny; a bunch of easels, all serious, studying looking at a furniture construction of a teacher with nude models somehow in there. So this summer I’m thinking of just working with contractor types, and janitorial types, and gopher types within the school, and then in West Philly on weekends immersing myself in yuppiedom at the bagel shop. While I work and stew, a goal is to make honest and direct art, not separate from the cancerous culture which subsumes ecosystems. I’ll work in the belly and serve lemonades in plastic cups, and keep up my mediation, and learn a register. 

I’ll come back from New York night of. I don’t want to spend money on a hotel room. 

My parents are screwing the pooch by coming up three days after the big PAFA Annual Student Exhibition showcase. I feel simultaneously unloved and disrespected, all on the most topical level. It means more stewing and playing a hidden hand/ long con regarding my art, all while it becomes clearer by the day that my parents, as well as most anyone, is disinterested in my art- what I do, etc. Makes me think of terrorism as art, who’s else names go out there? It’s a stupid thought. Also, just words. Terrorism is a spook word. More liberally applied pop culture, and Facebooks data mining might be considered terrorism, to kick a dead horse. There’s a well written song by the Drones called Why Write A Letter That You’ll Never Send. This song puts it better than I ever can. 

I’m on this album by Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, her new one, The Kid. It’s almost arbitrary what we settle on, and while going through an album list, I got stuck on this one and have been going through it for maybe fifty cycles now. It’s pretty. 

I got halfway through this Roots Of Romanticism Book. I have a silly pile of books to get through. Yet another reason to stay in town this summer and work. I want to live out a little cycle of my Eric Hoffer fantasy. Also I’m sticking around because I’m already paying for a nice apartment. 

One more round in the privelage backfire thing. I lost to some conceptual painting stuff in an oil painting prize- that’s subjective, but has me wondering if there was that kind of bias that goes ‘I GET it!’, and the person next to them goes, ‘I also totally get it!’, and paintings of girls in chairs is not a good M.O., but in an undergrad at an academy, come the fuck on- my paintings were hot fire and they lost out to out-of-the-tube things on store bought canvases. Once I won a car in a raffle, then had it revoked because during the event I jumped the fence to get a towel- it was a pool lock-in, hop out hop in, and was disqualified. The car was given to the daughter of the school front desk admin, deservingly so. 

There’s this concept called negging. I told this person on tinder that I had herpes once and she said, “weirdest negging ever”. I thought I was being forward bc she was beginning to be sexual in tone. I feel sometimes I’m undergoing a kind of negging by some imposed socio-economic political ideology etc. It’s boring, but I feel it. Moving along. Also, a negging by parents means I’ve maybe outsourcing my attention seeking behavior in the arts in some sort of silly long con. 

I met someone and we use each other for sex. I asked for space. I feel used. 

I’m interested in seeing someone for personal mental help, on the basis that I’m paying for school healthcare and ten free sessions with a counselor are covered. I like to get personal quick, to which might not be considerate to others, yet I don’t fucking get it bc I want that sort of trust and vulnerability from others too. I don’t want to mess up this new friendship with my sex partner by using them for therapy. So my summer plans are bagel, wall repair, and therapy.