2/28/11

WHITE TRUFFLE

Stumbled into the nickname of white truffle. I like the idea of calling myself something ugly. Like,
Get a load of these white truffles. Send your pigs into the forest. See if they can dig up some of these. Expensive and dirty. Put me on your dinner plate.



Photo by Walt Cessna. He's really cool and I am so glad I know him. Kind of magickal. Perfect Lil Daniel and I went to do a photoshoot at his apartment on Sunday afternoon. I got some really sweet bodega coffee on the way. Simple pleasures.

Simple pleasures is such an important idea in my life right now. Because right now I feel pretty shitty for various material reasons. Sort of don't want to get into it right away. Feeling so much the power of association, the tremendous weight of social interactions / reactions.



I really want that new Eileen Myles book.

Some nice things going on are that Audrey Marrs, who as you know was in two of my favorite bands ever, Mocket and Bratmobile, won an Oscar. I don't really care about the Oscars but I think Audrey is mass cool, so there's that. Seriously: Audrey was in Bratmobile. She played on the last album. Weird, right? Anyway I didn't see her movie Inside Job yet but I think she's way cool and I'm glad she is getting more awards and stuff.

Gonna go read until I fall asleep.

2/21/11

Ether of your skin

Three More Expediencies:

***



Everything is connected. Same familiar cadences of names, places, colors, sounds, rhythms, poses and regrets. I used to work for this couple, they were industrial designers. They had an office at their home in North Africa, one in Paris, and one with the studio they kept in NYC. I managed the New York studio. Part of my job every Monday morning was to go to the flower shops on west 27th street and pick out two bouquets of flowers: one for the entryway to the studio, and one for the vase in the conference room. I worked for this couple for about six months. Altogether, they spent about a month in New York. That did not matter: I was to buy a fresh new bouquet of flowers every Monday morning and throw the previous week's flowers away. The designers who worked in the studio, constantly in video chat with the designers in Africa, would tell them if I had not bought new flowers. When they hired me, I told the girl who was training me (who I was to replace) that I knew nothing about flowers, could hardly choose a new variety every week on my own. Was there, perhaps, a favorite kind of flower? Or a favorite color, which the head boss designer mistress preferred? No. I was told that it had to be a new arrangement (two new arrangements) every Monday morning. Only that I was never to buy any roses or carnations. She hissed. As if I should already have guessed this. I was told that the flowers were a rare opportunity at the position for me to express some of my creativity. It was all up to me. It could be whatever I wanted it to be, as long as it was right. As long as I got it perfect, all on my own, with no intervention, or correction, or input; I was set.

Shopping for flowers every Monday morning became a recurring stress-test. I hated it. It was the bane of my existence. As I said, the owners were rarely in town to see whatever weird flowers I ended up with (I chose a different kind each week, figuring I'd eventually stumble onto something nice). I remember once, when the couple was in town, I came back with an armful of dahlias and I put them into the two vases and I watched my boss wait for me to sit down at my desk, get from her desk across the room, and with a swift single motion, grab the handful of dahlias out of the small vase in the conference room, throw them in the trash, and walk over to my desk. She tapped a pair of $20 bills onto the table and said "I feel like something yellow, instead."



***



HOW TO BE A HUGE FUCK-UP:
- Be ungenerous.
- Teach them a lesson (a thing or two) about pain.
- Measure everything twice. Cut it twice also.
- Worry/be scared.
- Don't do anything to upset anybody, ever. Ask for permission. Ask again.
- Remember everything. Keep track. Hold grudges.
- Don't dawdle.
- Everything matters and everything counts.
- Stop. Close your eyes.

***



FABLE: Kid from the suburbs reads in a magazine/sees photos on the internet of glamorous overpaid NYC model kids, fresh from college dorms, flocking downtown to engage in a chic new form of drug use or self-mutilation. Kids grinding up expensive glasses and mixing them into their food. Applesauce, mostly. Vodka. One girl in Belgian fashion magazine is seen crunching a spoon full of glittering strawberry yogurt, all curdled with blood. She's sitting in central park and behind her is the Dakota and it is standing ominously. So the kids transmit the idea that this is the good cool thing to do: eat ground glass.

Poor kid from the suburbs wants to instantiate something beautiful, takes a bus or college education to get to New York. Orders expensive glass bottles on credit card and takes them to his shitty rented room in the ghetto on the outskirts of town. Plays a new rock and roll band's CD some faggots swaggering singing in cockney and poor kid from suburbs carefully, cleanly (he thinks) grinds up glass bottles like he sees in TV and spreads it over his peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Just like his mom used to make but now he moms himself yum yum. He eats it with a glass of cheap red wine chilled by the draft from his apartment. The slumlords don't turn on the oil for poor kids. He stares up at the moon as he eats the ground glass sandwich and thinks for the first time that it's so close, everything in the Universe is getting constantly closer and more possible. Kid from suburbs in new Big City feels a strange and unfamiliar, glamorous exciting ache in the back of his throat, as the glamorous ground class shreds him from the inside. Bang boom dead. Compost, the kids in magazines call it. Getting back, they say, to nature.



***



There is no sound in outer space (it's silent-- there's no air out there, so there's no sound).
Probably there is nothing worth hearing or saying out there, either.

2/14/11

No Remote

Anything about a Sunday always makes me think about this video:


I didn't have MTV in 1998 when this record came out, so I didn't see the music video until much later. MTV, for me, in the late 1990s, signified having cable. It signified a certain kind of middle-class comfort which my family never really had. I mean, we did, eventually get cable. But we rented a house for much of my childhood. I felt left out. So I couldn't watch cable, I didn't know what bands were cool. But I did somehow get a subscription to CMJ for my birthday and I got really into A Thousand Leaves and it might be my favorite Sonic Youth album? My little brother, once, for another birthday, got me a huge poster of the album art. Like six feet by four feet. I wonder where it is now. I love this song.

The last two Sundays have been like this. Lazy, weird, happy, nice. Last Sunday I woke up and went to Academy records, and got the Boss Hog Girl + 10" e.p. I have wanted this record for so long, it almost doesn't even matter that I only like half of the songs. Like, here is the cover art:



I remember seeing a CD copy of this in my local record store in Alameda for something like $30. Something totally impossible for me to even consider paying, when I was 15. This image of Cristina Martinez on the cover of this album is such a huge touchstone for my life. This is, for me, an image of a secret girl world. Secret rock records, on secret sleazy record labels, about desperation, desire. Boss Hog has always been a sexy band. They were a superstar side project. Their songs are sort of vague, sort of weird. About getting in trouble. About enticing. I am over-thinking it. I love this record so much and I am so glad that I finally got it. I felt emboldened by running across it at the record store so last Sunday I went out and got a bunch of my other favorite things:



I was inspired by seeing Mx Justin Vivian Bond's nails the other weekend, so I went to the Chanel store and got myself this pretty polish. I am wearing it at work right now. I like it. SPEAKING of MX J.V.B., check out the TRIBUTE TUMBLR. If you would like to be a contributor, please get in contact.

Also like the new smell. Lotus blossom. I'm trying so hard to make it into Springtime.

This weekend was just okay. I have been dealing with some very difficult feelings of (let me list them, like the things I bought last weekend, like accessories, these difficult feelings):
- inadequacy
- uncertainty
- resentment
- fear
- disappointment

These suck! I wish they would end, already. It's like watching TV and you can't find the remote and it's football on TV and you just sort of have to wait until the game is over, or you have to turn off the TV. And maybe read a book. Or something. But in any case you can't time travel and even if you could you wouldn't like it. I am talking mostly (as Lydia Lunch often says) to myself. Y'know. Just time-tracking. Like: you can't turn off the TV. You can't protect yourself from getting hurt.

What a trip, right? You can't, though, protect yourself from getting hurt. I think that a lot of my friends and also myself; we forget this. Like, you maybe think that you can avoid pain by being careful and saying no to opportunities. But that is not true. You will still get hurt in your life so you may as well jump on the opportunity to feel good, to connect with someone, to make yourself vulnerable, to trust someone/something/yourself.

I don't know. I feel like I am tired of ppl making fun of me, and then also making fun of the fact that they think I am too dumb/self-centered to notice. DIVERSION! Anyways I do notice I just don't care. I'm having too much fun FEELING MY FEELINGS.

I performed last night with the legendary RUMI from the COCKETTES in Dumbo. I did some new texts from what is gonna be a new show, Encourager. I think everybody was really freaked out by it, but the only reason I did it was so that I could say the following onstage:

It’s not that I think of myself as the center of the Universe. That’s not the problem. I don’t think that. It’s just that I just so happen to be at the center of the Universe. It’s not that I believe that it’s just the fact. That’s not a problem. And if you, potentially, feel like that is a problem, then maybe it is because you feel that you are at the center of the Universe. And then, you and I have some kind of relationship, your having a problem or your disagreement with me implies a relationship. A potential commonality. And another thing we have in common is that we both think that we are at the center of the Universe. We can’t both be wrong so that means that we must, in fact, be close to the center of the Universe. What if we’re both right?

There are some people who feel that they are definitely not at the center of the Universe. They feel that they would like to be very far away from the center of the Universe. Well, then you and I, here in the center, have some very bad news for them. The sad fact of the matter is that of course we are all the center of the Universe. Together.
So that's kind of where I am coming from.

2/10/11

Dear Susan Sontag,

Would you please read my books and make me famous? Actually I don’t want to be famous because then all these stupid who are very boring will stop me on the street and bother me already I hate the people who call me on the phone because I’m always having delusions. I now see that my delusions are more interesting than anything can happen to me in New York. Despite everyone saying New York is just the most fascinating city in the world. Except when SylvĂ©re fucks me. I wish I knew how to speak English. Dear Susan Sontag, will you teach me how to speak English? For free, because, you understand, I’m an artist and artists by definition are people who never pay for anything even though they sell their shows out at $10,000 a painting before the show opens. All my artists friends were starving to death before they landed in their middle-class mothers’ wombs; they especially tell people they’re starving when they order $2.50 each beers at the Mudd Club. Poverty is one of the most repulsive aspects of human reality: more disgusting than all the artists who’re claiming they’re total scum are the half-artists the hypocrites the ACADEMICS who think it’s in to be poor. WHO WANT TO BE POOR, who despise the white silk napkins I got off my dead grandmother—she finally did something for me once in her life (death)—because those CRITICS don’t know what it’s like to have to tell men they’re wonderful for money, cause you’ve got to have money, for ten years. I hope this society goes to hell. I understand you’re very literate, Susan Sontag.
Yours,
Rosa
-- Kathy Acker, Great Expectations, 1989

When we got into bed I made fun of him for being old (25). He thought I was 18, told him to guess again and he sighed 21, fixed his hair and took of his underpants. I asked what he does and he said he is an actor. I left a note and snuck out and walked to Union Square. No, actually, I left a note and went to the bathroom and put on all of his expensive cologne and Chanel Pour Monsieur moisturizer and hair cream and then snuck out. I walked to Soho and I was wearing the t-shirt I made that says “I fucked Sontag”, and I walked over to Deitch Projects and threw a sledgehammer through the front window. I just found it on the street. It was sitting up against a fire hydrant – a golden hammer and a black metal head. On its side in red paint the name AMY was written in cursive.


-- Billy Cheer, OUR JOB IS TO QUIT, 2006
(Image by BoweryStudio)

2/3/11

Poetry Thin Air

Hi Friends.
Very excited that this video of the interview and readings I did for Poetry Thin Air is now online!

Check it out:


Big thanks to George Spencer for inviting me to be on the show and doing such a thoughtful and nice interview, and also big thanks to the amazing videographer Mitch Corber for making it look nice and uploading it to the internet. Mitch, I later learned after doing the shoot, was a member of the legendary NYC artists collective COLAB along with such luminaries as Kiki Smith, Becky Howland, Jenny Holzer and my beloved Robin Winters. Cool beans!