October 17, 2022
Clothing for Poetry:a Conversation with Chelsea G.
By Addison Bale
Photo taken by Ada NavarroMarch, 2022. This conversation happened in the studio of Chelsea Gelwarg, a US-American textile artist who has lived and worked in Mexico City since 2017. Pre-lunch with Chelsea: like poetry for clothing - grandma - almuerzo y más - friends are my artists / artists are my friends (!) - “normal” is?
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Her cloth-book project, Fuerza, was still fresh on my mind after seeing it at the Avant.Dev group show, Unidades Materiales. Presented as an open book on a pedestal in a brick-laden corner of the gallery space, viewers could turn the pages of the book, wearing cloth gloves provided by the artist.
Photo taken by Ada Navarro
Photo taken by Ada Navarro
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Addison : Where does voice come in for you? You have poetry in your work; does that installation extend into the performance space, into the spoken space?
Chelsea : The installation of the book and how I plan to install my next book is performative– exactly how you just explained it: the time that you have to spend with the piece. Putting on the gloves is an action so that you feel like you're part of the pages, right? You're covered in fabric. And that's why I'm interested in more, more fabric.
A : I like hearing about your relationship with fabric because it's multifaceted. You source fabric locally here in Mexico City but you also receive fabric from your family. There's antique fabric; there's heritage that’s being re-appropriated through these pieces that then come to light as tapestries and rugs, in clothes and books. Can you talk more about fabric?
C : I mean, my practice started, as it exists now, about six years ago, because I was such a high consumer. I had so many clothes. And I literally just started cutting them up to make new things. It started with like trying to make this “jean monster” Halloween costume, and then I turned it into like, one of my first signs, which then became this six year practice of dedicating myself to only using scraps and use materials and old clothes. So, collecting. Literally everybody has clothes in their closet that they don't want. It was so easy. So I've become more picky in the past years as the practice has evolved.
A : What do you look for in clothes now?
C : I'm always looking for texture. I go a lot to the pacas now and I'm always looking for silk and wool, which I can find in the five-peso piles. I always find it. And then collecting from friends or my grandmother who has given me so much material, so much material. She also works with textiles. She crochets more than anything now. But she used to work more with textiles, and just has boxes of things.
A : This family lineage with art in textiles always struck me as kind of unique in your case that you, your mom, and your grandmother have a couple of things in common. And you're not the only artist in your family. Although you might be maybe the most rebellious? Rebellious superficially, I don't know.
C : What do you mean by that?
A : Stylistically, perhaps? But I'm projecting. I don't know your family.
C : You're so funny. My grandmother is for sure an artist but I don't think she would ever or has ever really used that word. She's just like, I have to have something to do with my hands. I always have to have a project. That's who she is, but she's made like, 100 decoupaged chairs. She’s also someone that taught me about re-using materials. A lot of the furniture that she uses is stuff that she found in the junkyard and repurposed.
A : Did she teach you to sew?
Chelsea’s practice connects textile with text: Employing fabric as surface, device, and image, her work ranges from sewn compositions that function like paintings, to clothing, to cloth poems in ambitiously hand-woven fabric books.
C : In a way. Partly. No, I started sewing when I was 11 because my mom and I used to go into this quilting shop and the woman who managed the quilting shop came to my home after school and gave me sewing lessons. I actually still have this box of buttons that she gave me. I've literally had that for almost 20 years now. It’s in the corner right there.
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Chelsea in the studio with costume pieces from her collaboration with Lina _Bailón_ hanging on the wall behind her.C :You mean, how has the culture or the city influenced me? I don’t know about that question. I feel like you asked me that before… I feel like I’m… I’m just me here, I suppose. You know, I’m someone who always goes to the same places. I find the lunch spots that I like and I frequent, I know the people, we say hello to each other, I really get to know my neighborhoods. I love to know the street names and geography of a city. It’s super important and exciting to me… understanding the map [of Mexico City] I think that’s the thing that influences me, that’s what helps me feel at home in the center of one of the world’s biggest cities.
A : Are you thinking about stuff artistically right now that you haven't described yet or that you feel are bizarre thoughts, concerns or unrelated things that are coming up for you?
C : Shoot, I don't know. I've been thinking a lot about applying to residencies recently. I did one. I recently delved into the collaboration of costume work and choreography for this recital with Lina, which was a fascinating experience. My work is usually very solitary. I mean—not solitary. Like, I can sew around anyone and be in conversation while I'm working. But it's mine. So sharing that was, I think, an incredible experience and really important and difficult and interesting.
A : How did you do that? Navigate the collaboration and develop the idea together?
C : Lina came through with a really clear color palette: she wanted to work with flesh tones. And then it was a series of conversations. She also was really interested in having all of the orifices visible and highlighted while covering other parts of the body and came to me with the idea of being inspired by burlesque dancers. And then we went to the pacas together and picked up a bunch of fabrics, everything from the five-peso piles in the color palette that we created together. And then we just had a lot of conversations, and were here sewing together. I have more textile skills, right? She has more choreography. So I mean, I think it was really beautiful. It was difficult. It was interesting. It's definitely a meeting of egos. The end result was so satisfying, to be honest, and it was so inspiring for me—I want to keep making costumes. I've been thinking a lot and actually my application for this first residency, I applied with this idea of combining my loose page series and a nice idea of textile books with my knitwear and costume work. So I'm interested in making an outfit that includes embroidery patchwork, and knitwear that is wearable. But also a book you know, like legible fashion. Delicate, soft.
A : To me it seems to be that you do not discriminate your work as art or fashion.
C : All the fashion I make for me is part of my art. And it's part of my practice. Dude that’s so— I [recently] met this person who is an artist. Well known. Everyone loves his work, (and he’s ultimately a really cool person, I enjoy him) but when I first met him, he was like, really interested in seeing pictures of my work. I told him that I also make sweaters and knit clothing. And he was like, “Oh, I want to see but I only want to see it if it's not normal.” Like, me dio tanta risa pero whatever I was like, of course, the knitwear I make is not normal, knowing all of the history behind how I found this yarn. I make the patterns from scratch. I taught myself how to do all this, like—
A : The word “normal” is also just so nondescript.
C : But that's also really interesting, because the conversation around selling these sweaters later— people look at it as fashion. And people have a certain budget for fashion and they think about it differently than other people. But I took a month to make this sweater and I mean, and that's really interesting to me too. Because like, obviously, I make money because I have to participate in this world. And yes, I'm interested in putting a good price on the time and energy that I spent making something but I also want things to be accessible. He saw the sweaters and immediately was like “these are normal.”Not in person. He didn't see the sweaters in person. He didn't touch them. He didn't try it on. He didn't smell them, you know? But again I’m just like, you know nothing. I wasn't offended. I just was like, I am now discrediting all of your opinions.
A : Just talking about that language again, “normal,” that is very goofy to me.
C : It’s goofy! The piece is normal because It has two sleeves, a back and a front? Anything made by hand isn’t “normal.” People don't put time and energy into the normal.
A : Accounting for normal as an inherent negative.
C : Exactly, and I also don't want to do that to the word either. I hate negative, even positive connotations. I feel like you should be able to use language in a very expansive way. I mean, that's why we're poets.
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Photo taken by Ada Navarro
Photo taken by Ada Navarro
Photo taken by Ada Navarro
Chelsea napping in the studio.
Photo taken by Ada Navarro
Chelsea Gelwarg:
I am originally from New Jersey and I have been living and working in Mexico City since 2017. I have been sewing since I was 11 years old. I work entirely with used fabrics, donated by family and friends and collected at flea markets and discount bins. Each time fabrics are recycled or reused they are given a new narrative, a new opportunity to be experienced. I feel connected to the practice of quilting in this way, the saving and gathering of intimate fabrics and patching them together generates an archive of memory which I believe makes any piece I create into a book even if it doesn't take on the stereotypical form.
Follow Chelsea:
Instagram:@strips0ffabric
Website: https://chelseagelwarg.com
Addison Bale:
is a writer and artist from NYC. His work is viewable online: https://adi-bale.com
More from “Shedding”:
May 27, 2022
Emailing Emna Zghal
By Addison Bale
[Author’s note: It’s fitting that Emna Zghal and I held this over email.
Normally we sit in her Bushwick studio surrounded by paintings in progress while sharing a meal, discusings poems, reading, and considering the differences in the translations of poems that Emna had in two or three languages. Up until this point, we have never spoken through writing beyond the occasional text message. Here we talk about the cross-influences of writing and artistic practice, following a short chain of emails into candid territory. Disguised in other topics, Zghal’s paintings are actually the silent centerpoints of our conversation through which all other matters can be considered. We discuss poetry, language, the art world, capitalism; the themes that contour-trace this artist’s life and work. ]
Normally we sit in her Bushwick studio surrounded by paintings in progress while sharing a meal, discusings poems, reading, and considering the differences in the translations of poems that Emna had in two or three languages. Up until this point, we have never spoken through writing beyond the occasional text message. Here we talk about the cross-influences of writing and artistic practice, following a short chain of emails into candid territory. Disguised in other topics, Zghal’s paintings are actually the silent centerpoints of our conversation through which all other matters can be considered. We discuss poetry, language, the art world, capitalism; the themes that contour-trace this artist’s life and work. ]
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Addison Bale <sayhey.adi@gmail.com> Feb 13, 2022, 1:42 PM
to Emna
Emna,
Remember sharing poetry over lunches? It was a short-lived arrangement but you still managed to show me such beautiful work, reading segments from The Tree, by John Fowles, and translations of Borges. I have his poem you read to me, "Ars Poetica," saved in my notes and, if I remember correctly, you have that same poem pinned to your studio wall. Can you talk about your relationship to literature in your life and practice as a painter?
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Addison
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Emna Zghal <[...]@emnazghal.com> Sun, Feb 13, 7:30 PM
to me
Poetry lunches were great! Literature has always been central to my understanding of art. My most cherished memory of my late father is him reciting poems on all occasions, mundane or solemn—at the dinner table, commenting on the news, or at family events. As a child, I didn’t always understand the words, but his delivery made me feel he was articulating the Truth. When I became an artist, these experiences of poetry remained the aesthetic standard that I aspired to. In my undergraduate years in the school of fine arts in Tunis, I was devouring all the artist monographs I could put my hands on but sought guidance as an artist from poets like Adonis.
Arte Poetica—translated as Ars Poetica—by Borges both validates the beauty of infinity and of being lost. Poetry is immortal and poor, he says. The poem is an antidote for our current culture, which has little appreciation for the lost and poor. I named one of my paintings Arte Poetica in 2008. I often circle back to Borges to reconnect with what is important, sincere, and free of hype. I have that poem pinned above my palette table.
The Tree by John Fowles is a book I bought at the New York Botanical Garden, and I read it three times in a row, because I found in it so much validation of my instinctive relationship with nature and creativity. It taught me so much, and still does, on how to articulate these thoughts. Our relationship with nature is mediated by this drive to name and classify everything, which passes for knowledge. Little is left for the personal and subjective experience one can have of a river or a flower, an experience difficult if not impossible to articulate with the clarity of science. I was intrigued when he mentioned that his novels come from nature, and how such a statement was dismissed by scholars who thought that only literary influences and theories of fiction and the rest of that intellectual midden, as Fowles put it, are valid keys into literature. How foolish! He spoke of the small and tidy garden of Linnaeus, the Swedish botanist who invented the Latin naming and classifying system of plants and much of nature, as the opposite of a shrine for nature lover and akin to a nuclear explosion whose radiations continue to pollute much of the globe. I find this a terrific and terrifying image to be true.
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Addison Bale <sayhey.adi@gmail.com> Feb 14, 2022, 10:43 AM
to Emna
Can I see your "Arte Poetica"?
I love that anecdote about your father. Such a beautiful legacy to have left that in your childhood.
Borges' take on the Ars poetica is so good for it's attention to fluidity and futility; that poetry returns like dawn and sunset daily, as though begging us to see it; that it opens and closes the day, and maybe, for being an expression of daylight, is what begets our consciousness. So Borges explains without explaining, or rather, his examination of poetry is one that opens it up to be the most common, almost unthinking presence and yet so crucial to be the day itself. Borges allows for that subjectivity that we tend to lose when art and nature enters the classifications of academia or the institution. And this is totally what John Fowles seems to be getting at when he writes about trees and nature! And is, actually, what you are getting at too when you talk about painting.
We've discussed before this overarching sentiment you reach for in art and life that you work within the unclassified and perhaps, unknowable phenomena around us, and that in doing so, there is the potential for much feeling and energy to interact with life through art. It seems that by clinging to the jargon of academia and the frameworks of art history, we relinquish so much of the intimacy between ourselves and art, whatever possibilities lie in that interaction. Your paintings, which are abstract but visually recall natural patterns (zoomed-out as in landscapes or zoomed-in as in shells or plumage) seem to be reaching for this conceptual experience of dwelling in the unknown in the myriad perceptions of pattern and randomness.
Do you see your paintings as images in dialogue with the literature in your life?
Are there ways that you are responding to your literary influences (including your father, including Adonis) somehow visually with paint?
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Emna Zghal <[...]@emnazghal.com> Tue, Feb 22, 10:25 AM
to me
Of course, here is my “Arte Poetica”.
"Arte Poetica", 2008, oil on canvas, 32”x 48”
It’s interesting what you brought up about the calcified frameworks of academia and the understanding of art and art history. Somehow the emotional experience of art seemed to have fallen by the wayside or relegated to an order inferior to concepts and art historical positioning. It’s as if that subjective experience of art (and similarly of nature) cannot be trusted, and therefore cannot be something that contributes to knowledge. I touched on this subject in my artist’s book Plato/Pineapple/Poetry/Painting. I see a parallel between Plato wanting to banish poets from his Ideal City (governed by reason) and contemporary art, which abandoned poetry as the language used to speak about art, in favor of theory (aka reason); and all that derived from that choice. All the talk of “subversiveness” does very little to actually undermine power. Many artists rail against capitalism, colonialism, and white supremacy; while little attention is paid to how nominally subversive conceptual art is very convenient for speculation. The making of art is outsourced to unnamed craftspeople or machines, and thus the possibility of failure is minimized and production maximized. The artist is now a brand and a studio CEO. It’s a far cry from being able to distinguish the hand of the master from that of the apprentice in yesteryears. What we lose, or lost, with this scheme is the sidelining of a whole realm of human intelligence. Being able to paint is a genuinely distinct form of human expression that is worth preserving, like dancing or playing musical instruments. Why should philosophizing crush all the rest? To the extent that painting survives, its validity is derived from an ideological content first and visual content second—if at all. Why would artists, critics, and art historians agree to this? I believe the answer lies in how intertwined the 1% is with influential institutions in the art world. Ready-mades are far more convenient for speculation. My ideas are heretical, not only because I was trained to paint and appreciate good paintings, but also thanks to the poetry that provides an anchor for me outside of the visual art world. Poetry emboldens me to operate with a different set of values.
In that sense, and to go back to your question, I don’t see my work as a response to literature. Poetry, and literature in general, schooled me in a certain form of knowledge that is not necessarily averse to reason, but one that fully embraces the full scope of experiences, beyond just what we can rationalize. I remember a quote by Adonis I had on my wall when I was an undergraduate student in Tunis: “Sufism as a method of knowledge.” He refers to the mystical poets of Islam. It struck me then and challenged my views on religion. Yet, seen through that angle, I understood what religion, as a form of human thought, had to offer us. Arguably some of the best music, architecture, or painting came from religious traditions. Poetry is different, the most important Arab poets, like Al Ma’ari and Al Mutanabi, were not religious. I say this because I think that poetry is also a method of knowledge. What I learn from poetry, and literature in general, is that personal experience and feelings anchor me in truth and artistic authority stems from a distinguished personal voice, ideals that the visual arts seem to have abandoned. I quote Ann Temkin, MOMA’s Chief Curator for Painting and Sculpture in my book Plato/Pineapple/Poetry/Painting: “Contemporary artists disavow transcendent goals of truth and beauty.” I think she’s right in her observation, yet I refuse to operate within that paradigm.
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Addison Bale <sayhey.adi@gmail.com> Mon, Feb 28, 2022, 1:03 PM
to Emna
To your point, the tentacles of capital and market-influences operate differently between the fine arts and literature. Speaking for poetry specifically, there is simply much less money involved and therefore much less money at stake in the world of poetry. Compared to the art market, poetry is still an artform relegated mostly to basement bars and living-room readings. Though perceptions of poetry are shifting with this generation, with social media and the work of new poets, it remains less commodified (compared to fine artworks) and therefore its value is always going to be fixed to the standard of a small book. I have often felt that this is actually a good thing for the art of writing, which is largely so exempt from the possibility, however faint, of explosive wealth. Though making money as an artist may be insecure, there is still the specter of prospect and value: paintings are worth x amount of hundreds or thousands. On the contrary, a single poem has no dollar value and its value in a collection is exactly the same on every platform, every mode of download or hard copy—as long as the poem can be read its value is immortal. So as an arbiter of truth, poetry seems to defy (slightly, and not to ignore its own trends and the machine of publishing houses) the erosion of "truth and beauty" through capital...I say this hesitantly though, still thinking as I type.
What is it that we do then? as painters that live by day-jobs, painters that mostly paint in obscurity, hustling for opportunities but likewise wary of the world we tempt to be more deeply involved with?
I consider your work as unique for its unwavering vision and persistence to pursue a practice that explores abstract painting as a reflection of or maybe distillation of the natural world, the imagery of the natural world and the information you take from it—so by painting and continuing to paint against market trends, who are you painting for? Is your practice solitary? Do you paint with a wish against capital? How do we exist as artists and work around that very art market you describe? Is it just a matter of gritting teeth and carrying on?
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Emna Zghal <[...]@emnazghal.com> Sun, Mar 6, 7:45 PM
to me
So many interesting questions there. Let me answer the straightforward ones first. Is my practice solitary? Yes, on some level. Sure. Solitude is crucial for me to achieve any depth. I mix with very few people to shield myself from the uninspiring. To get to your other question, who do I paint for? I am seeking an audience that shares similar values. I believe they are out there. This interview is part of an effort to reach out. I can’t paint on the desert island. What’s the point of self-expression if I’m not communicating with anybody? Looking back at the years when I stopped showing my work, I was blasé. I felt that this purportedly postmodern and diverse artworld had no tolerance for what I wanted to do. I was not ready to toe the line expected from “the native woman” and dish out cheap exoticism and victimhood stories. I felt beat up. I had no support, and still don’t, in my stubborn pursuit of this sort of abstraction. Yet! Yet here I am at it again. I gathered some strength, and I feel like I can take some punches again without being entirely knocked down. I sorted out my immigration status, and I have a day job that allows me to be in the studio. It’s far from ideal, but it’s a workable situation.
Do I paint against capital? No, that makes no sense. I steer clear from preposterous trendy and heroic claims of the sort. I do have a critical view of capitalism and how it functions in the artworld; and most importantly how it seeps through the mentality of art professionals: curators, art teachers, and artists. Books like “Privatising Culture” by Chin-TaoWu, “El Fraude del Arte Contemporáneo” by Avelina Lesper, and “La bêtise s’améliore” by Belinda Cannone are inspiring and empowering writings on this matter. Contemporary art posturing against capitalism is just that, posturing. The validity of a given work of visual art is no longer derived from careful visual examination, rather from statements, biography, and, above all, from market value. It’s lamentable that we, the art professionals, ceded our visual ground to literally stated ideas.
The allure of rebellion and subversiveness is superficial enough as to not threaten any established order. There’s no outrageous art Banksy can do that doesn’t feed the speculation frenzy of his work, or otherwise leads to a concrete social change. It’s important to be lucid about that. When truth is abandoned, the difference between saying and being no longer matters. There’s a classical Arab song that goes like this: Not all who tasted love, know what love is/ not all who drank wine are wine connoisseurs/ not all who sought happiness found it/ and not all who read the book, understand it. Truth matters to me, and so does discernment. I do believe nevertheless that making art and understanding it outside a framework of efficiency, purposefulness, and fame is a step towards lifting the limits put on imagining an alternative value system. That’s the value of being anchored in poetry, because, and as my friend Ammiel Alcalay says, poetry largely escapes capitalism. It’s not purposeful and efficient, it’s imaginative.
To go back to John Fowles and his critique of Linnaeus, it is legitimate to observe that the careful detached taxonomy of nature created all but an illusion of knowledge. Clearly, we’re hitting a wall. Knowing without humility and respect before the examined subject—in this case nature— is leading us on the path of self-destruction. Had we not sidelined emotions in the way we did, perhaps we would have been on a different path.
How do we carry on in these conditions? I didn’t know how to go on for a while. Without ever thinking it could happen, I strayed from the artworld. I got into Argentine tango, and it was like falling into a hole. I applied myself to learn an art form I had no natural abilities in, and at the end, I learned way more than dance steps. Tango taught me anew how to value craft, communication, disciplined practice, and preserving a tradition while being creative.
Now I feel I have a clearer vision of what I want to pursue. How to be a more poignant painter. In my case, the criteria is how to create images as mesmerizing and captivating as nature and its forms: vast landscapes or small shells; while bringing the viewer somewhere unknown and imagined. Being a better painter is more fulfilling an ambition than chasing the next clever idea. It’s not just gritting your teeth and keep on going; it is that of course, but also striving to stand on ever firmer ground intellectually to carry on. The gatekeepers might operate with different values, but you can tempt them to embrace yours. It is a worthwhile pursuit.
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Follow Emna:
Web: www.emnazghal.com
Instagram: @ezghalart
Emna Zghal:
Emna Zghal is a Brooklyn-based visual artist. She was trained in both Tunisia and the United States and has shown her work in both countries and beyond. Reviews of her exhibits appeared on the pages of the New Yorker Magazine, The New York Times, Artform amongst other publications. Noted public collections include Newark Museum, Flint Institute of Art, Yale University Library, The New York Public Library, The Museum for African Art, NY, The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, NY. She has received fellowships, prizes, grants, and residencies from: Creative Capital, The MacDowell Colony, Women’s Studio Workshop, American Academy of Arts and Letters, Cité Internationale des Arts (Paris) and others.Addison Bale:
is a writer and artist from NYC. His work is viewable online: https://adi-bale.com
More from “Shedding”:
February 25, 2022
Kiko’s Practice One Year Later
By ADDISON BALEIn conversation with Kiko Bordeos
[Author’s note:]
[On January 8th, 2021, my first segment for The Quarterless Review, “Kiko’s Jeepneys,” was published online. The article was a narrative account of my first conversations with Filipino painter, Kiko Bordeos, emphasizing his daily practice and the influences from life in the Philippines visible in his paintings.
This article is a year’s long follow-up recorded as a dialogue between Kiko and I in late autumn. One year later, this conversation locates us, two painters who were strangers to each other not so long ago, as friends. As I type these words, Kiko is only a few feet away from me painting against our shared wallspace in the Knickerbocker studio where you can find us on most nights of the week painting side-by-side.]
The Smiths are playing in the background.
Here we are in the studio looking at Kiko’s works in progress…
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Detail image of “Dark Entries/Love Dormancy”
Addison: …you’re almost always looking at your work and then you never go more than 5 minutes without touching something on the surface. The image builds up.
Kiko: It’s definitely getting dense.
A: The density in this piece acts like a surrogate for speed.
K: It's very much like New York City.
A: Tell me more about these paintings. What's going on here?
K: I’m working on some foreground and background action. The background becomes a fun place to juxtapose minimal templates with lines and movements of colors. These simple plays are what I like about minimal art, you know, like Carmen Herrera. Right now I'm not really focused on clarity in my work. Maybe having a studio is what makes me want to go like, boom, boom, boom, boom. There's no story in it. These paintings are visual distortions; maybe, visual sonic booms, visual cacophony.
A: Do you think about specific things when you're working? Is your head noisey when you paint?
K: Not really. Recently I’ve just been looking at a lot of artists that I like, thinking about their work. Some of what I’m doing with paint is like a nod to them, homages to them. But I don't want to name names.
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8:01K: Line and circle: for me being bilingual with English and Tagalog— I’m more fluid with Tagalog. I associate it with lines because I am more comfortable composing a painting through lines. I can’t really work with circles, so I think about them like my English. I began to think about how I enunciate words in English, which takes effort. It’s kind of like how I play with circles, introducing circles into the linear compositions. I don’t think I could make a whole painting of just circles.
A: You’ve never mentioned this before.
K: Never mentioned what, bilingual?
A: I know you're bilingual, but you've never made that explicit connection between English/Tagalog and line/circle which function as the basic elements of juxtaposition in your recent work.
K: Well, maybe it’s more subconscious really, because I want to explore other shapes but I feel like right now I can’t let go of lines and circles. But, I don’t know, maybe in a year or two I’ll be doing landscapes and going on trips upstate, expanding my shapes. [laughing]
A: Do you ever consider your paintings symbolic? Are these shapes filled with the symbolism of an idea or the idea?
K: Not really. I haven’t really thought about it, so not really. I usually just say: it's anxiety. Just make it crazy, sexy, cool. [laughing] I just make humor about it, about painting.
A: [laughing] It’s not easy to put words to your work, especially when it comes to abstract art. Do you know what you're gonna call these paintings?
K: This one is “Dark Entries/Love Dormancy.” I got it from a song. Oh, Bauhaus. I'll send you the song later. In therapy I’ve been talking about dormancy; dormancy when having to move through the changes like Fall becoming Winter…and then love is just such a complex word.
A: I love that love can be used for pretty much anything in English. I love you, romantically. I love pizza.
K: I love pizza. It can be so casual but when you want to say it to that person then it becomes hard.
A: What’s it like in tagalog?
K: Mahal.
A: And you can say it for a love of things?
K: Yeah. In Tagalog, when you say mahal kita it means I love you, but mahal also means expensive. Like, look at this expensive chair. Mahal kita…Yeah. So there's that duality you know. Layers. If you’re gonna say to someone in English I really love you, in Tagalog, you have to repeat. There’s a lot of repetition in the language. If you're gonna say, I really love you to someone, you got to say, Mahal na mahal kita. There’s that repetition.
Just like this duality between Tagalog and English, line and circle, I’m interested in these values of love. How easy, unimportant it is, but then it has this emotional weight that is so intense when you are in love. I feel like you can relate to that.
A: I recently said I love you to somebody and they said it back. It was our first time saying it to each other.
K: I remember, didn’t you say it by accident at first? You were talking about plants?
A: [laughing] Yeah. My partner and I were watering my plants, and my plants have these long names, and I was like, wait I forgot their names now! I was talking to Xin-rui and I was like, wait wait wait—shoot what’s this one’s name again? And she goes, ILoveYou, and I was like, oh right ILoveYou. [laughing] The plant is named ILoveYou.
K: [laughing] Being bilingual, I'm interested in the philosophical mocking of words sometimes—mahal kita—these sounds attached to meanings we make up and agree on and how these sounds can build up so much emotional force over time. Yeah. Like, I would tell you who you are, you know, someone like, Oh, I love you guys. And I love this. That was, but if you're like, you know, that line of being like, romantically, seeing someone or just like, you know, it's just hard. Emotional weight.
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A: I remember talking to you a year ago, and you also explained a little bit about how emotions come through in your painting. How you remember emotions or periods of time when you look at your work, the work takes you back to how you were when you made it. Talking to you has made me ask myself, what form do my emotions take on the canvas, what colors do they come in, What imagery conveys emotion, for me. Do you feel like you have struck the visual language that you need to depict emotions?
K: Yes and no. Words don't come easily for me and this imagery doesn't come easy either. I have this painting in my head. I used to sketch a lot but I stopped because I just don't have time for it. Maybe if I don't have a 9-to-5 job I'll be sitting for like two hours and sketching stuff. But every time I do that, then I create final paintings that become different from the sketches.
So I paint by being in the moment and if there’s feelings involved then maybe I'm kind of aware. But I probably see it more later. It’s a visual cacophony during and after. Did I answer your question?
A: If you had to identify or just pick a shape that corresponds to the feeling of doubt. What does that look like?
K: Doubt?
A: Yeah.
K: Wow. What is that? That's amazing. Probably a half circle and a line interrupting it.
A: Wow.
K: You never see a half circle around. Yeah, probably a half circle and then a slash of line.
A: Maybe you look up sometime and see a half moon and a plane with a chemtrail bisecting.
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21:54
K: I didn’t use any red for this painting because I alway associate red with anger and violence. So no red for this guy who's a happy one. I have one painting that is 8-by-10 [inches], from the early days of therapy and dealing with anger and stuff like that. I’ll just show it to you. Do you want a visual right now? Because I feel like I show it to my friends and my friends are like shit. This is kind of violent for me.
“Seeing Red” Acrylic on panel, 2020
A: Oh, dude, I love this.
K: But every time I look at it now it’s just like a timestamp of what I was in the moment. It’s May, 2018. I think it was the first two months of being in therapy. Therapy is awesome by the way. Shout out to my therapist. [laughing] We talk about painting in therapy a little bit. She used to be a social worker and she deals with a lot of, like, creative people, also immigrants, people of color, so I feel like it's perfect that I fit in that category.
A: I'm really attracted to the earth tones in [“Dark Entries/Love Dormancy”].
K: The browns… I like how it like blends with the teal blue there. I've been trying to work with a lot mars yellow, yellow oxide, and.. Yeah I love yellow. Wiz Khalifa “Black and Yellow.” [laughing]
30:01
K: Three favorite yellows: diarylide yellow, hansa yellow opaque and dark cadmium yellow.
35:13
K: I can't help myself– [gets up to paint] Talk.
A: So what are you doing right now in this piece?
K: I'm just trying to add some more movements. I’m painting in angles that rival one another to create that tension for your energy— I’m thinking of sonic energy. That visual cacophony.
A: Do you consider your work illusionary, as in Op Art?
K: In a way. But I’m interested in the illusions of external forces and influences in my work– not really painting in that way though, playing with your eyes. The world does that work for you, like, you go out on Knickerbocker in 1990 and there's too much shit going on. You hear trucks, you hear people yelling, talking, cars, bicycles. So I feel like my visual references represent this environment; representing street noise, street energy. I don't know what my art would look like if I lived upstate. I’d probably become like Bob Ross. The Joy of Painting!
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44:20
K: I relate to your work because you depict windows. Some of my work from Prospect Heights was looking at windows, very influenced by Jonathan Lasker and Peter Halley.
A: I love windows. I love doorways. Love windows and doorways the most. I like hallways too. I keep coming back to those frames that act as gateways between the private and public hunan. I like the simultaneous transparency & opacity these gateways offer: a door opening/closing.
46:14
K: Do you try to look for a lot of symbolism?
A: I try to some degree. Then I try not to. Honestly, putting it like that, as straightforward as that is the first time that's ever come out of my mouth. When it comes to my own work. I'm aware of what I'm interested in but I can't engineer symbolism. What does it mean? It’s a painting, I don’t know. But this creates an issue for me as well. I reckon with other people’s theses through painting and still yearn to say something but time and again I know the best work comes as a great surprise against my initial intentions. I accept that the work will develop beyond my initial conception and hopefully, it surprises me.
K: Yeah. Surprise is good and sometimes it is like, wow, that’s good, and then again, it can be disturbing for being so far from your expectations. I like sitting around and just like carefully being thoughtful about what to do in the painting.
A: Me too. I'm just looking most of the time.
K: And you know it’s also about getting away from the painting, getting out of the studio, doing normal things, going to the gym or the grocery. It's all part of it.
A: Everything bleeds into it.
Completed work: “Dark Entries/Love Dormancy,” 2021. Acrylic on canvas.
Kiko Bordeos:
Kiko’s work can be followed on Instagram @kikobordeos where he also makes direct sales for interested collectors.Kiko has at times dedicated the sales from his work to Bushwick Ayuda Mutua and we would like to share that for anybody also interested in donating or volunteering with them: https://bushwickayudamutua.com
Addison Bale:
is a writer and artist from NYC. His work is viewable online: https://adi-bale.com
More from “Shedding”:
August 22, 2021
Sculptural Autopsies with Yasue Maetake
[Pt. 1]
By Addison Bale
[ Author’s note: This text traces month’s of correspondence and time spent with sculptor Yasue Maetake. To reflect the diverse nature of our communication, this article has been hewn out of email exchanges, journal entries, notes, observations, and some recorded content. The linear sequence of the writing is unimportant: any lines and paragraphs can be read variably, theoretically in or out of context, mismatched and replaced with lines from other sections. The only important thing to know is that my words as the author are non-italicized. I use italics when quoting Yasue’s words or emails, when quoting her husband, David, and for word or concept definitions. I use italics as opposed to quotation marks for Yasue’s words because most of the time I am not actually quoting her, but interpreting and restating. ]
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A broken-down car, palette-fulls of Benjamin Moore paints, scrap metal, spare ladders, rolling shelf units, panes of glass, a charbroil grill, green True Value bins, aluminum rods, a blue steel rolling staircase, chassis, wood palettes, filing cabinets, planters, spare fuel tanks, rust-covered wheelbarrows, wagons, trollies, a forklift, crutches and a walker, trash cans, piping, milk crates, tarps, foam core, shopping carts, folding table, scrapwood, 2-by-4s, etc, all sit in the lot behind Platz Hardware True Value where Yasue also keeps her studio.
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Email from Yasue:
Hi Addison, you are welcome to stop by my studio anytime. Whether during the week w/o Ai or weekends w/ Ai. I am also fully starting to focus on the studio. For you to observe my real life, how messy and horrible practice, it might be interesting to look at. All past publications embellished my studio practice with cool material engagement, with cool pants with artistic paint marks on it but the reality is really more depressing and miserable being covered by dust than you think. Also, on weekends, I am mad and yelling at Ai while she is climbing 12 feet high scaffolding and tries sneaking to drive a forklift (seriously. she learned by watching David) so, there is no "cool picture" of artists meditating on their practice or a "smiling mother."
Just letting you know for your head-up!
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Now I wanna kick myself for not having recorded more of our conversations. I feel like Francis Bacon painting people from memory and soiled photos towards an image of his own devices (often beautiful, often monstrous). I am scanning my notes and re-membering the things Yasue and I have done and discussed over the past few months of correspondence.
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Politics, for one. Do you consider your work political?
I say, “No,” but this is partly because I know that it is not received that way.
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Day with Yasue and Ai-chan ~ May 1st, 2021. From my journal:
Met at Myrtle-Wyckoff. Ai-chan eating a hotdog. We go to Printed Matter photo show on St. Marks place to see Gryphon (Rue), who is curating/founding D R O N E gallery at Hudson & Chambers St. Stopped at Sunrise Mart & Yasue bought a week’s worth of groceries; Ai-chan nonstop singing/complaining and creating diversions by talking to strangers everywhere we go.
Back on the subway, Ai-chan fake-crying.
Out of the subway, eating umeboshi & onigiri & curry pan & pocky in front of D R O N E, talking about family & poetry. Ai running around, entertaining a woman who is eating a salad.
Inside the new gallery space, Yasue checks to see if this chunk of exposed copper pipe in the cement floor could be used as a conductor for something…Ai-chan & I have moments of calm as she rests on a white pedestal & drinks Yakulte. I ask what she thinks about her Mamma’s art & she gives me a thumbs up. At the same time, artist Viktor (Timofeev) is in the process of muraling on the back wall of the gallery with water-based pastel, hand-painting/smudging them on.
Then → → → → walk across Chambers St over to Chinatown, stopping in playground for Ai-chan to play for a bit, then carrying Aichan all the way to galleries. First, M23 gallery, where a minor incident occurs: Ai-chan taps a resin-brick sculpture with her tiny foot, Yasue goes to re-adjust bricks, the gallery assistant screams at them, sharply and loudly and I am startled from across the room:
“Don’t touch it! Do you know how much that costs?? I am shaking!!!”
Ai-chan scared; Yasue, a sculptor, knows that resin is not fragile…
Then ATM Gallery: artist Kyoko Hamaguchi’s minimal houses of colored threads suspended in hand sanitizer dispensers. Ai-chan chats with gallery owner and people on the street. A cute puppy embraces Ai-chan. Yasue and I enjoy talking to Kyoko—then time to go!
Ai-chan cries, says she is tired and wants Mamma to carry so I take the grocery bags and Yasue takes Ai-chan and I walk them to the subway, promptly realize I have lost my wallet.
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Addison, maybe you can briefly explain: Chan (ちゃん) expresses that the speaker finds a person endearing. In general, -chan is used for the names of young children, close friends, and babies. It may also be used for cute animals and lovers.
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Notes after D R O N E show, “The Location of Serenity” :
Without a photo reference, I recall Yasue’s sculpture like a reaper, like a harpy, like an open heart with long stents, the stilted legs of Dali’s hungry elephants, bag-like and ribbed against a cloudless blood sky—the piece is larger than a person, except maybe an NBA player, though it assumes an airy, almost avian posture echoed in some of her smaller works. Unlike Yasue’s more recent sculptures, “Ascending Industrial Bouquets,” is not made up of animal bones or seashells. Very skeletal nonetheless. This I remember. It is an anemic couplet of steel, brass, and copper with one semi-glossy shock of resin at the waist, and a second, stooped burst of resin suspended at the peak. Baby resin and Mamma resin. Somehow, a composite of materials found and manipulated still draws out the soul of something.
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Am I interested in owning the artwork? No, I told you. I don’t like to have the work around me. The urge ends in the studio. This urge—that is the urge to make, is unconditional and a bit scary—logically I can explain my other responsibilities, but the urge to make things is distinct and probably inexplicable, but nobody asks about this.
What do people ask you about?
Normally, they ask me how I got the camel bones. Then they ask me how much they cost.
Is it possible to understand the motivation that provokes you to make sculptures?
I should write down my thoughts during my process because something very close to the answers for my own process pass through my mind but then I forget. It’s all very elusive, come and go, come and go, so I fully rely on this elusive, ephemeral image. When I nail down this almost-there-form, it is about trapping and archiving it instinctively. Everyday I am thinking about these things.
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Seashells from the beach. Some bones too (camel). Most bones sourced from a taxidermist, some found. Many materials found or given. A neighbor is removing tons of bamboo overgrowth from their yard, so Yasue takes it. I show up at her studio in a moment when she is cutting and curving and grinding down rattan (similar to bamboo but different) as an echo of her other recent materials acquisition: old trumpets and trombones from a hoarder on Craigslist.
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I am back at Yasue’s studio, sitting between a rolling steel staircase and some rusting filing cabinets in the back of Platz Hardware True Value, her husband David’s store. We are talking about many things and then David comes out to say something—I take the opportunity to ask him about Platz:
How did you get involved with Platz in the beginning?
David: They were gonna shut it down, so my brother and I decided to buy. Because the Depots were coming to New York, all the old hardware stores were shutting down. Gottlieb’s, Harry’s—and I’ve been coming here since I was Ai’s age. You see one of my eyebrows, see this scar? That’s from this store when I was 4. If one more hardware store closes in New York, then we are the oldest continuously running hardware store in the city.
How long have you had the store now?
D: 21 years. Almost 22.
Yasue: Yes, so finally cleaning the junk out.
D: You know all those little comments that you try to stick in there, it’s not necessary.
[laughing]
Y: But do you know a lot of idiot art-folk think that this mess is an inspiration of mine!
D: No—I’m an artist also and this is my creation [gesturing to the variable heaps of refuse and backstock piled up in the ass-end of Platz.]
Y: Actually, David is good. He has a very good formal sensibility. Better than many artists. He has good eyes and is good with materials. And physics.
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Ai-chan stumbles over with Yasue’s phone in her hand, singing along to something, then singing loud enough to drown out the conversation. An ice cream truck jingles down the block. Yasue, referring to Ai-chan, says, She knows the vibe! Now we have more critical talk so she sings and distracts. She’s mean.
What is transmutation for you? Is it for us to see the unification of materials through form? Is it about the inanimate becoming free standing? Or brass sharing a leg with bones and bone sharing an arm with glass and glass sharing a spine with seashell…
Unification is certainly an interest of mine but not as an end goal. I view unification as a part of the transitional process of the materials and then we keep going—there is no stopping at unity. Transformation, changing—yes, changing—but after changing, I do not declare the finished product. It is about ever-changing, ever-evolving; continuity where I might have anticipated a conclusion or a logical terminus. For me, none of the sculptures are at their end, per se. The end remains arbitrary, even as I accept the end of labor. Movement and dynamics are how I see everything—this is how I view the world of substance.
Realistically, I am using stone, concrete, animal bone, and metal—these impenetrable hard substances, but my worldview, at least metaphorically if not also metaphysically, is that the distinctions between vapor, liquid, solid, are all unified by the same atomic units, and therefore, their barriers are always, on some level, psychologically imposed. I impose my perception of the world through the image of the sculpture. In looking, viewers can sense this fluid, transforming, dynamic materiality.
Ironically, you perceive the world through permeable distinctions, and yet you understand better than most people the actual compositional qualities that make every material unique. You know from experience what it’s like to cut through bone vs. steel, for example.
Yes, well I deal with the reality of these hard forms but live in a fantasy of transmutation, which is what the show is about.
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Continuity; not just abrupt optimism, but the aspirational journey at the confluence of tune, arriving and re-arriving at beginnings which are naturally optimistic. To begin again is in some way to always repeat. To either doom oneself to repetition or open oneself up to the permutations. The inanimate materials throw out some suggestions to the sculptor, Yasue, throughout the process: save me, assemble me, cut me, smooth me, grind me, melt me, weld me, glue me, fix me, break me, burn me, polish me, splice me, hoist me, name me, repeat me, etc. Brass plumbing rods become korean chopsticks become the bones of wings hinged to the grooves of actual bones, etc.
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Politics are undeniably present, always, somehow, but some people speak louder than others. People do not look for political angle in my sculptures; they look at my work and assess whether it is utilitarian or not, decorative or not. They tend to isolate the identifiable features in the sculpture and then they want to know, how much do camel bones cost? Where did I find them? And these stones, and these metals—where to find and how much?
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Addison, can you write a brief sentence about this sculpture?
I want to quote and introduce you by saying : "My fellow Addison Bale told me "This piece is blablablbal XXXXXXXXXXXXX" that I really appreciate. Now we are working on some creative writing project together. etc etc....."
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“Ascending Industrial Bouquets”: Grim reaper of brass bones and harpy’s wings: a sour-patch polymer with secret soul and it’s stalwart mother with the metal hood. (Baby resin and Mamma resin!)
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Another Japanese sculptor suggested that Americans focus on the material components of a sculpture over form/balance because there are no earthquakes here. Form is taken for granted. Precarity is little more than thematic. In Japan, form is the essential question at the heart of sculpture.
(Yasue’s skinny-legged sculpture, “Ascending Industrial Bouquets,” for example, might not survive in Japan!)
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Symbolism key to Yasue’s most used materials, according to the author:
Bone = beastial death (though since it is repurposed, it is either under examination or given a symbolic new life. Therefore, bone simultaneously represents autopsy, medical science, truth, and reincarnation.) Seashells = mathematics, repetition, whimsy, ancient history, and overfishing. Metal of any kind = human genius, hardness, softness, irony, cyborgs, and most importantly, the future. Stone of any kind = western fetishism, monotheism, and obesity. Paper = weather systems, fruit, and the Edo Period. Plant matter = motherhood, neighborliness, and non-judgement. Resin = regret, remorse, and retrograde.
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Even though I poetically claim to not see the boundaries between materials and states of vapor liquid, and solid, it is true that on the molecular level there is in fact no boundary. Sound is included in this.
Follow Yasue:
Web: www.yasuemaetake.com
Instagram: @yasuemaetake
Yasue Maetake:
Yasue Maetake is a Toyko-born artist living and working in New York. Using
a wide variety of influences, her sculpture evokes associations with
Baroque Dynamism and Animism, along with futuristic variations of
natural forms and industrial aesthetics. They partner directly with
human customs and technology.Addison Bale:
is a writer and artist from NYC. His work is viewable online: https://adi-bale.com
More from “Shedding”:
November 16, 2021
Sculptural Autopsies with Yasue Maetake
[Pt. 2]
By Addison Bale
Yasue outside NADAx Foreland in Catskill, NY. Photo taken by Matt Austin.
[Author’s note: An important thing to note is that my words as the author are non-italicized. I use italics when quoting Yasue’s words or emails and for word or concept definitions. I use italics as opposed to quotation marks for Yasue’s words because most of the time, I am not actually quoting her, but interpreting and restating. ]
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Addison, can you edit the below?
The truth is, I wanted to go to Japan for my upcoming show, but I found I couldn't, so I decided to invite my parents to come spend two months here this summer. During their stay, I have felt like I'm standing around like an idiot, moving at my middle-age speed like a turtle, facing a child and elderly parents whose company is like time-lapse video/film/montage? Passing in front of me—my daughter perhaps became 2 inches taller and I noticed that my parents needed more naps.
And I questioned, what I was doing?
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The weekend of August 28, 2021, we went upstate to the town of Catskill, NY, to see Yasue’s sculpture in NADA x Foreland. Her piece, Mass Inception, was well-positioned on the top floor of the exhibition illuminated by a corner of daylight pouring in from the south- and west-facing windows. Yasue introduced me to her gallerists, Elle Burchill and Andrea Monti of Microscope. We gave them a riso-printed copy of our article, Sculptural Autopsies with Yasue Maetake Pt.1. Yasue got to work, talking, moving around with people. I cruised the galleries, latching on and off to acquaintances for an hour or so before assuming a wallflower's posture at the edge of the room, performing intrigue while idling between the sculptures, arranging myself in relation to Yasue’s position, close by without obviously hovering.
We took several coffee breaks. Just outside the fair at HiLo café, our friend Daniel Giordano had two gross and gorgeous sculptures dominating the window display. Ai-chan, who just learned to use the phone, was calling Yasue repeatedly.
Back inside the exhibit, Yasue was spinning Mass Inception, trying to decide on it’s best angle in relation to the light coming through the windows. Microscope’s Elle and Andrea assisted the process of angling. I resumed my position by the window, pretending to write stuff down in my notebook.
Later, we found surprisingly yummy Thai food on Main Street and Yasue dealt with Instagram, then fielded some very basic questions from me about sculpture. What do you think of the Pietà? What do you think of Richard Serra’s work? Isamu Noguchi?
I know I shouldn’t say it but when I think about any art of the old masters, I feel contemporary sculpture is often embarrassing... Myself included… Richard Serra and Anselm Keifer are influences for sure… Noguchi, perhaps… but the best of all is Toya Shigeo...
Yasue Maetake, “Mass Inception,” 2021. Terracotta, epoxy, polyurethane, coated styrofoam, synthetic paint, steel, marble, resin, natural soil, found bird’s feather. 45 x 43 x 41 inches. Photo taken by Matt Austin; courtesy of the artist and Microscope Gallery, New York.
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It’s just such a waste— $300 dollars for one night in Catskill? I mean, there is not even space for two people! But it’s my mistake. I misunderstand the pricing— it’s just such a waste.
The Airbnb listing was misleading. You showed me the photos— I also expected at least a bedroom separate from the kitchen.
It doesn’t matter what the situation; $300 for me to come one night to Catskill, a day I don’t take Ai-chan to gymnastics or be with her, be at home preparing for my new class’s syllabus tomorrow. I just feel it is a bit embarrassing, this being-an-artist thing sometimes. Why should this be a priority when I have a daughter? I feel bad. Doing all this— networking and leaving Ai-chan makes me feel that way.
It’s not about being an artist. We could be having this same conversation in regards to any other occupation all the same— for any number of reasons we become too busy, pulled apart; art isn’t embarrassing, it’s an occupation. And anyway, Ai-chan likes your work, she told me.
Yes but then Ai-chan gets bored of me. She literally says, No not sculpture again! And this is the 3rd Saturday in a row that I don’t take her to gymnastics. Ai-chan is not progressing as she was before...
What would be better, to be busy for some other reason?
I think about those mom’s that do everything for the children, putting them in music lessons, in sports; I feel I am such a self-centered mom sometimes. It feels silly because I am not some big important artist, I just have one piece in this fair and take my whole weekend to come here, to Catskill, spend money to come here, stay overnight, talk about sculpture. These objects are silly. Ai-chan could be learning things, being taken to lessons that maybe she loves or is prodigy and she grows up with a talent far superior to mine... but I will never know because I don’t take her. That is the irony.
Is Ai-chan particularly good at gymnastics?
Not really. But she is tough. She is better at climbing on scaffolding actually. And the forklift.
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[...] untalking, wordless shimmers of Yasue’s bone, metal, and stone compositions—the anti-narrative bedrock of her practice, which is a performance of tactility and translating the vision into object. In this way, her sculptures yield a totemic power, evoking the smoke of her, the artist’s intentions. On the other hand, there is no telling what they say. Just like Yasue, they are non-didactic. Who do the sculptures address? Do they speak in first-person, third-person? Or do they simply say, you.
What if I write directly to you? Like a letter.
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You. I think I mentioned once this knack I have of hardly recording anything and my tendency to neglect note-taking until later on, trying to remember whatever it was we discussed together. While this has emerged as an integral exercise in our creative approach to dialoguing, it is also painstaking for me to get at the heart of things that left an impression on me, fighting to reprise a memory with some clarity. Even as you create new sculptures and I write these words, we are yielding to a consensual erasure of many things.
Whether to reenact the things we say solely from memory or to rely on the recording device for evidence: I accept both without making a hierarchy amongst them.
But the most important thing is that I know how integral the absence of a recording device is— I mean, for us. Not because the connoisseurs tell me to choose so as to romanticize the artist's perception; we simply and inevitably keep forgetting to record our conversations. And the fact is that, because of this, the most important evidence has been missed, like our natural dialogue, or even a snapshot of us in Catskill. Now I know why I like Western classism. And Bacon.
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Can you tell me what “Mass Inception” is about?
“Mass Inception” was referring to mother nature, mood changes during pregnancy, and a more voluminous approach to form. It is an eruption caught in motion, a volcanic limbo between the land and the air. It is also my body as I became a small mountain, a mother.
I built that foundation made of steel armature covered with urethane foam whose shape was curved by literal burning with blow torch and then coating with varnish. This was right before I retired from the studio practice for a while when I realized I was pregnant and I could not go on working with such materials. I walked away— I had Ai-chan. I thought, ah, now is my chance to stop with sculpture. I was so happy to become less competitive, less pressure to make. I was a mother. That was four years ago.
I came back to the piece this year and applied the surface material which is like a faux-earth: terracotta blended with epoxy resin and spread over the surface of the charred foam.
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Did you see this piece in your head before you began? Or is its assemblage a reaction to the process of sculpting? While sculpting, are you re-interpreting and reacting to unplanned directions?
I have the vision in mind. I get the visions beforehand. They can change, but I see the piece in my head always.
When do you get visions? Are you always open or do they come under particular circumstances?
I get them frequently, doing mundane things. I don’t need travel or to go foraging for inspiration. Actually I have the clearest ideas just doing my routines— I live over there, I take Ai-chan to school across the street, I go to my studio behind Platz where I find David— I see through this, and in moments of isolation. I have the best visions in the bath.
When you finish a sculpture, is it normally close to what you envisioned?
Depends.
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Have you thought about the timing?
Should we have waited to write these things— waited for when artists are typically remembered, when you are old or dead?
You just turned 47. You just spoke to me— you speak to me. You tell me about the cars drifting through the mountain roads in Japan. You saw them racing when you were a teenager. You tell me about driving in New York and seeing the architecture passing in blurs of color and material, fusing with your thoughts of sculpture, thoughts of combining what you have like terra cotta and urethane foam, paper, stone, brass...
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The toughness of being my gallerist is not because I make a grotesque aesthetic. The toughness is that the gallerist almost has to treat/handle my work as a dead artist's rather than a living artist’s, i.g. the gallerist has to curate the work across the artist's age or time period of a life. My life.
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I’m in your studio again as we turn our attention now to translating Pt. 1 and organize a print edition to accommodate the Tokyo Art Book Fair in October (meanwhile, I am writing this, Pt. 2).
By cc’ing me on every email with the translators, Rumi and Nahoko, I intuited that you want me google-translating every correspondence, observing as you coordinate the rewriting of our article, Sculptural Autopsies with Yasue Maetake Pt. 1, into Japanese. There and again I see you all separating the English into fragments, questioning word choices and double-entendres, slowly equating the language to its Japanese mirror-image.
As my original text became logographic, unintelligible to me, you can now read our article for the first time in your mother tongue and understand with clarity what was previously oblique in English. You describe to me the decisions Rumi and Nahoko made when ascribing certain English words to Japanese characters; how seemingly subtle distinctions in their interpretations influenced how to approximate sentiments from the original English text into Japanese.
To lose understanding of my own article was to look once again at sculpture, or at least at yours, which dictate no narrative and no single language in their exposition— if I snag on them, something liquid and sentimental might escape me, dispensing a thought in its wake, a hard-to-say, fleeting thing that suggests I simply look twice at the shapes you’ve made.
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[09/15/2021]Email regarding the word “reaper” and its counterpoint in Japanese:
彼岸" leads to the "boundary" or “barrier” which appears later in the writing. "彼岸" is an unstable "辺獄" while "あの世" is an absolute place, and that which is the antonym to "in this world". Therefore "彼岸" is more oscillant.
Perhaps you might think "辺獄" could also work as a translation. But the character "獄" is too strong and thus, implies hell unnecessarily. Since “Grim Reaper” will appear later, I also want to neutralize the questionable strong connotation of death and hell. Another reason to use “彼岸" is an image of a field and river full of natural light. That is more suitable for my "Ascending Industrial Bouquet," whose translucent body accumulates the light. “彼岸" also means Spring and Autumn equinox, which is my birthday, too.
As for the “大鎌”, I wanted to use the character “刈” which refers more a simple device (a scythe) with a more linear character form, as opposed to “大鎌” which is more arched and compact. The skeletal armature of “Ascending Industrial Bouquets” consists of the linear structure.
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See your hands turning the steering wheel of the car, which turns the wheels of the car, which brings you onto Forest Ave and home again. See yourself at home, alive and surprised (because you are a somewhat bad driver, or so says David). See yourself move automatically through the home. See yourself move deliberately through the studio: see yourself assembling, responding to the thoughts of laundry, thoughts of your daughter, welding certain arguments into lobes of resin, into cages of effort, her little knees, barely recovered from a scrape, air barely different than mesh, oil, seashell, wedding veil, hot glue, photos from your life coming through the glue, sculptures interrupting, air on air, thinly, daily, more shape, more memory in the form of a career, in the form of paper, wet pulp drying on metal whose rust leaves striking blue stains.
︎
Working on the translation of “reaper” became the same intensity as my sculpture making, in which I am constantly maintaining the oscillation between the two places where I regard only the essence can exist. I am very happy to come up with the word "彼岸."
At this point, you perhaps understand that Japanese (especially Chinese) is based on the symbolism called logogram. I am living in a hieroglyphic view of the world while Japanese also uses a half phonographic system, like English. Hope this experience helps you understand. But even more so, I simply wanted to share with you this linguistic epiphany and happiness.
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As we talk, your life becomes a story we both remember, a memory imparting onto me or a confusion lying in wait... your patience with this portrait as I write this all down, as I try to tell us both about your life.
Follow Yasue:
Web: www.yasuemaetake.com
Instagram: @yasuemaetake
Yasue Maetake:
Yasue Maetake is a Toyko-born artist living and working in New York. Using
a wide variety of influences, her sculpture evokes associations with
Baroque Dynamism and Animism, along with futuristic variations of
natural forms and industrial aesthetics. They partner directly with
human customs and technology.Addison Bale:
is a writer and artist from NYC. His work is viewable online: https://adi-bale.com
More from “Shedding”:
MACHINE TRANSLATION
It had been invented after the tech contest we lost. My mom had entered it in hopes that we could win the grand prize of $6000. That was a lot for us back then. I don’t know what we were hoping for, really—I mean, the device she had made was cool, but useless. This stupid freezer-shaped thing that could only appeal to people with time and money to spare, which I guess was everyone in this city. Put in a shoe, a chair, whatever, and then leave it in the freezer (properly named, it was the Frankenchine, but it’s embarrassing to call it that) for 15 minutes or so. And then you—oh, how wondrous—take it out of the Frankenchine, and it would have turned into something else entirely. When we first tested it out, my brother Mike had put in an old science textbook he had from middle school. It came back out as a cake, and there was a squeal of dolphins each time you cut into it, blue frosting the taste of ocean and salt.
Mom used to have dreams and apprehensions, wanted to become something other than a mother—that’s what she was thinking but couldn’t say, at least, whenever she showed us pictures of her smiling and laying around on the grass at Tokyo Institute of Technology, where she got her PhD in Electronic Engineering. She had written her dissertation about Marxism and data infrastructure, risk transference and the proletarian need to reclaim technology for use so people could disperse information, food, stuff like that. I don’t really remember the details very well.
Six years after she graduated, boom: kids, America, deadbeat husband who leaves, blah blah. But Mom was determined, had shown up at the competition at 11 AM, only an hour before it was supposed to start. Mom had spent all night testing, retesting. Putting in our leftover dinner (canned meat came back in the form of a weird chimera thing—docile, though, so we kept it in the yard), her old reading glasses (portrait of some lady who was probably? definitely? British, reading a collection of Yeats’ poems wearing Mom’s glasses), stuff like that. I guess she just wanted to make sure it worked even though it didn’t follow any definitive patterns, that nothing truly hazardous would emerge given the recent safety changes she had made to the software. She wanted other people to have fun even if she didn’t.
Mom, Mike, and I struggled to carry it up the stairs to the entrance. People walked past, wearing expensive watches, their inventions being carried by the help of drones or workers. Something swooped by my head and the three of us ducked. I squinted up and saw a woman riding atop a golden bird the size of a small jet. It spat confetti at us. The collar on its neck said “Frank.” Great. Just fabulous.
We paused for half a second as Frank glided into the colosseum, landing with ease at the registration table before turning into a small golf cart. There was a burst of applause. Confetti stuck to one of my eyelids. It smelled like peaches.
I was glad I couldn’t see Mom’s face as we started moving again. The Frankenchine couldn’t fly. It could spit out confetti, though, if you fed it the right thing. Probably. “Fuck—them,” Mom grunted, “We—win.”
The Frankenchine was so heavy as we pulled it up the marble steps, the damp August heat soaking into our skin and hair. Mike, younger than me but still much larger, was carrying almost all the weight from the back. A man rushed by us and I felt my hands lose their grip. When I looked behind me, I saw Mike’s pink face spreading with panic as he tripped over his feet, no longer able to hold on.
Mom screamed as we watched the Frankenchine escape from us, clanking down the steps. None of us seemed to have the strength left to chase after it. We watched it tumble, dents appearing on the black metal surface with each fall, people jumping around to avoid it. It should be fine, I thought, as it started sparking white fire, two men running down with a fire extinguisher as it grew more and more out of control. This doesn’t seem so bad. Then it exploded.
Mike was still on the stairs, breathing heavily, as people swarmed around, tried to help pull him up. I looked back at Mom, who had sunk down on the stairs and was just sitting there with her head in her hands, unmoving. I hated to see her so embarrassed, and she was always so embarrassed—never enough money, aging rapidly despite all the skincare products she bought, kids who were sort of not the best at being anything but being average and manageable, thinking of herself as stupid, stupid, stupid because no one ever told her how smart she was.
I tried to do the good son thing. Put my arm around her shoulder.
“Don’t touch me, Marcus,” she said, and I knew even without seeing her face that she was crying. “Just don’t touch me.” So I left her alone. I helped Mike, limping with his newly sprained ankle, toward the car, the Frankenchine still smoking as we passed by it.
Eventually Mom showed up. She wordlessly started the car and we sat there stalling in the parking lot. There was a knock on the window. It was two of the conference people, asking Mom if she wanted the remnants of the Frankenchine that they had salvaged. Two plastic bags full of black metal. She shook her head. “No,” she said, and I tried not to look at her not looking at them from the rearview mirror. “But thank you. Thank you very much.”
This part is hard to talk about. This is when things get bad. She was working even harder than before, sometimes even calling out of work to come back home. We weren’t allowed inside the living room any more, after Mike bumped into it once and she freaked out, screaming at him until he was sobbing on the floor.
After that, we grew up inside of our rooms, at school, at our friends’ homes, becoming 18, 19, 20, 21. 21 was the age I was when Mom finally finished it. By that time, we had both more or less developed a conscious way of forgetting that the living room existed. Mike had bumped into the couch late one night as we came back home from getting snacks. We had both frozen, looking at each other with confusion. “I didn’t even remember it was there,” he had whispered as we went down the narrow hallway toward our rooms, still hearing the buzzing and clanking of Mom working, “I really, really didn’t.”
But that night. That night, I had pushed through the apartment door, coming back from my girlfriend’s place after a fight about something stupid, how I had definitely been looking at that girl at the Adidas store the other day, you were looking at her ass, why don’t you look at my ass like that any more, I hate you get out, and when I dipped and came back home, my teeth clenched with anger, there was nothing but silence. Mom was usually up until 5 AM or so, working, punching things in, taking it apart, putting it back together, until she passed out and then got up again at 7 to go to work.
It didn’t make sense. I looked toward the forbidden zone. There it was, pulsing, humming, a steady rhythm of blue lights. Maybe I could just turn it off. I imagined her waking up in the morning, jostling Mike and I awake to ask us if we had done anything to it.
So I walked up to it. The screen was unlocked. Weird. I knew she must have had passcodes, two different types of security verifications, at the very least. There were six options to choose from on the menu interface. Something blurred that I couldn’t make out remained in the background.
「認知アーキテクチャ」Cognitive transference. 「自動モード」 Automatic mode. 「関係データベース」Relationship database. 「空白」Void. 「逆符号化」 Decode. 「ログ」 Log.
There was no off option. I could have just walked away. Instead, I pressed ログ。
The menu changed and suddenly, it was filled with complicated diagrams, equations, notes. I swiped through, barely looking, feeling something bloating inside of my stomach until it threatened to burst.
I wanted to check if Mom was in her room, so paranoid I even looked toward the kitchen as if Mom might have been hiding there all along. I stopped moving for a second. I could hear her, snoring. She hadn’t snored in years, ever since they had put her on Anxiolytics.
I turned back toward the machine. Flipped back to the first page of notes. Gleaned over everything from the beginning.
“Miscommunication...intuitive emotional understanding...chasm of inevitable corruption....forgotten modes of relation…imminent transactional nature of human interconnection…”
Her notes became more frenzied as I swiped through. Initial diagrams showed a small cube. The processor. You input the following: Name, date, place of birth, gender, race, relationship with the following, how long you had known them.
I swiped through, reading everything, feeling as if I were falling apart. The machine would then search all of the available data online about this person: Search history. Family background. Purchases. Social media usage. Medical and job history. Communication patterns pulled from texts and emails with other people.
The last page of the notes featured one last small addition.
Input transcripts of any conversations you had had, in person or otherwise.
She had designed something that translated other people’s emotions. Figure out what they really meant.
It was a total invasion of privacy. Very, very, very illegal. It made me feel terrified that the person sleeping in the twin-sized mattress right next door, the one who had once been so concerned about data surveillance, protecting others, who wanted to see people more unified, less broken, had become this.
I went back to the main menu, pressed on the relationship database button.
Cashier at grocery store.
Friend from grad school.
Friend from doctoral program.
Cousin (dead).
Best friend from childhood (dead).
Yasuhiro Okada. My father’s name.
I clicked on his. She had told us she was no longer in contact with him, could give less of a shit, but here was the truth laid bare. Hundreds of past entries unraveled onscreen, starting all the way back from eight years ago. The texts. Emails. Their translations. Mom had made notes in the corner, more and more frenzied as I flipped through. I didn’t want to read the messages; what was I looking for? I toggled over to just the notes section.
Lying...lying…04/08/2007
WHAT DID I EVER MEAN TO YOU?????? 12/25/2008
Am I going crazy? What did I make? 2/22/2008.
I can’t trust anonye. 04/20/2012.
I clicked back out. Looked at the entry from today, the LINE messages between her and my father.
2/8/2012
hello Read 1:30 pm
hello Read 3:30 pm
how are you Read 3:30 pm
when are you coming home Read 3:35 pm
Yasuhiro? 3:45
Yasuhiro I love you 4:00
I miss you every day 5:05
did you miss me? 5:10
i’m sorry 6:25
I looked at the printed out messages. I thought about my mother not looking at the men when they had asked if she wanted to take the pieces of the Frankenchine home, her blank disposition in the face of pain.
The only note she had put for this one was a smiley face. Thinking back now, I should have gone into the room. It was already 7 AM, the sun was splitting my head open, Mom would be late to work and angry, I would be a good son, I would check on her.
But instead, I went to sleep.
I woke up at 10 AM. Light was leaking through the window and then I saw Mike standing in my doorway, wearing my old soccer jersey, and the kid had tears on his face. I didn’t want to know. I turned away, facing the white wall, thinking about the different wires splintering inside my mind, the invisible wires that connected us to each other becoming frayed, split, cut open, trying to ignore Mike saying over and over again in his stupid fucking kid voice, “Mom’s dead. Mom’s dead. Mom’s dead.”
Daisuke Shen is a fiction writer. You can visit their website at www.daisukeshen.com.
Twitter: dai__joubu
Instagram: ginsengmasque
More From Tiding House 001...
Mom used to have dreams and apprehensions, wanted to become something other than a mother—that’s what she was thinking but couldn’t say, at least, whenever she showed us pictures of her smiling and laying around on the grass at Tokyo Institute of Technology, where she got her PhD in Electronic Engineering. She had written her dissertation about Marxism and data infrastructure, risk transference and the proletarian need to reclaim technology for use so people could disperse information, food, stuff like that. I don’t really remember the details very well.
Six years after she graduated, boom: kids, America, deadbeat husband who leaves, blah blah. But Mom was determined, had shown up at the competition at 11 AM, only an hour before it was supposed to start. Mom had spent all night testing, retesting. Putting in our leftover dinner (canned meat came back in the form of a weird chimera thing—docile, though, so we kept it in the yard), her old reading glasses (portrait of some lady who was probably? definitely? British, reading a collection of Yeats’ poems wearing Mom’s glasses), stuff like that. I guess she just wanted to make sure it worked even though it didn’t follow any definitive patterns, that nothing truly hazardous would emerge given the recent safety changes she had made to the software. She wanted other people to have fun even if she didn’t.
Mom, Mike, and I struggled to carry it up the stairs to the entrance. People walked past, wearing expensive watches, their inventions being carried by the help of drones or workers. Something swooped by my head and the three of us ducked. I squinted up and saw a woman riding atop a golden bird the size of a small jet. It spat confetti at us. The collar on its neck said “Frank.” Great. Just fabulous.
We paused for half a second as Frank glided into the colosseum, landing with ease at the registration table before turning into a small golf cart. There was a burst of applause. Confetti stuck to one of my eyelids. It smelled like peaches.
I was glad I couldn’t see Mom’s face as we started moving again. The Frankenchine couldn’t fly. It could spit out confetti, though, if you fed it the right thing. Probably. “Fuck—them,” Mom grunted, “We—win.”
The Frankenchine was so heavy as we pulled it up the marble steps, the damp August heat soaking into our skin and hair. Mike, younger than me but still much larger, was carrying almost all the weight from the back. A man rushed by us and I felt my hands lose their grip. When I looked behind me, I saw Mike’s pink face spreading with panic as he tripped over his feet, no longer able to hold on.
Mom screamed as we watched the Frankenchine escape from us, clanking down the steps. None of us seemed to have the strength left to chase after it. We watched it tumble, dents appearing on the black metal surface with each fall, people jumping around to avoid it. It should be fine, I thought, as it started sparking white fire, two men running down with a fire extinguisher as it grew more and more out of control. This doesn’t seem so bad. Then it exploded.
Mike was still on the stairs, breathing heavily, as people swarmed around, tried to help pull him up. I looked back at Mom, who had sunk down on the stairs and was just sitting there with her head in her hands, unmoving. I hated to see her so embarrassed, and she was always so embarrassed—never enough money, aging rapidly despite all the skincare products she bought, kids who were sort of not the best at being anything but being average and manageable, thinking of herself as stupid, stupid, stupid because no one ever told her how smart she was.
I tried to do the good son thing. Put my arm around her shoulder.
“Don’t touch me, Marcus,” she said, and I knew even without seeing her face that she was crying. “Just don’t touch me.” So I left her alone. I helped Mike, limping with his newly sprained ankle, toward the car, the Frankenchine still smoking as we passed by it.
Eventually Mom showed up. She wordlessly started the car and we sat there stalling in the parking lot. There was a knock on the window. It was two of the conference people, asking Mom if she wanted the remnants of the Frankenchine that they had salvaged. Two plastic bags full of black metal. She shook her head. “No,” she said, and I tried not to look at her not looking at them from the rearview mirror. “But thank you. Thank you very much.”
***
This part is hard to talk about. This is when things get bad. She was working even harder than before, sometimes even calling out of work to come back home. We weren’t allowed inside the living room any more, after Mike bumped into it once and she freaked out, screaming at him until he was sobbing on the floor.
After that, we grew up inside of our rooms, at school, at our friends’ homes, becoming 18, 19, 20, 21. 21 was the age I was when Mom finally finished it. By that time, we had both more or less developed a conscious way of forgetting that the living room existed. Mike had bumped into the couch late one night as we came back home from getting snacks. We had both frozen, looking at each other with confusion. “I didn’t even remember it was there,” he had whispered as we went down the narrow hallway toward our rooms, still hearing the buzzing and clanking of Mom working, “I really, really didn’t.”
But that night. That night, I had pushed through the apartment door, coming back from my girlfriend’s place after a fight about something stupid, how I had definitely been looking at that girl at the Adidas store the other day, you were looking at her ass, why don’t you look at my ass like that any more, I hate you get out, and when I dipped and came back home, my teeth clenched with anger, there was nothing but silence. Mom was usually up until 5 AM or so, working, punching things in, taking it apart, putting it back together, until she passed out and then got up again at 7 to go to work.
It didn’t make sense. I looked toward the forbidden zone. There it was, pulsing, humming, a steady rhythm of blue lights. Maybe I could just turn it off. I imagined her waking up in the morning, jostling Mike and I awake to ask us if we had done anything to it.
So I walked up to it. The screen was unlocked. Weird. I knew she must have had passcodes, two different types of security verifications, at the very least. There were six options to choose from on the menu interface. Something blurred that I couldn’t make out remained in the background.
「認知アーキテクチャ」Cognitive transference. 「自動モード」 Automatic mode. 「関係データベース」Relationship database. 「空白」Void. 「逆符号化」 Decode. 「ログ」 Log.
There was no off option. I could have just walked away. Instead, I pressed ログ。
The menu changed and suddenly, it was filled with complicated diagrams, equations, notes. I swiped through, barely looking, feeling something bloating inside of my stomach until it threatened to burst.
I wanted to check if Mom was in her room, so paranoid I even looked toward the kitchen as if Mom might have been hiding there all along. I stopped moving for a second. I could hear her, snoring. She hadn’t snored in years, ever since they had put her on Anxiolytics.
I turned back toward the machine. Flipped back to the first page of notes. Gleaned over everything from the beginning.
“Miscommunication...intuitive emotional understanding...chasm of inevitable corruption....forgotten modes of relation…imminent transactional nature of human interconnection…”
Her notes became more frenzied as I swiped through. Initial diagrams showed a small cube. The processor. You input the following: Name, date, place of birth, gender, race, relationship with the following, how long you had known them.
I swiped through, reading everything, feeling as if I were falling apart. The machine would then search all of the available data online about this person: Search history. Family background. Purchases. Social media usage. Medical and job history. Communication patterns pulled from texts and emails with other people.
The last page of the notes featured one last small addition.
Input transcripts of any conversations you had had, in person or otherwise.
She had designed something that translated other people’s emotions. Figure out what they really meant.
It was a total invasion of privacy. Very, very, very illegal. It made me feel terrified that the person sleeping in the twin-sized mattress right next door, the one who had once been so concerned about data surveillance, protecting others, who wanted to see people more unified, less broken, had become this.
I went back to the main menu, pressed on the relationship database button.
Cashier at grocery store.
Friend from grad school.
Friend from doctoral program.
Cousin (dead).
Best friend from childhood (dead).
Yasuhiro Okada. My father’s name.
I clicked on his. She had told us she was no longer in contact with him, could give less of a shit, but here was the truth laid bare. Hundreds of past entries unraveled onscreen, starting all the way back from eight years ago. The texts. Emails. Their translations. Mom had made notes in the corner, more and more frenzied as I flipped through. I didn’t want to read the messages; what was I looking for? I toggled over to just the notes section.
Lying...lying…04/08/2007
WHAT DID I EVER MEAN TO YOU?????? 12/25/2008
Am I going crazy? What did I make? 2/22/2008.
I can’t trust anonye. 04/20/2012.
I clicked back out. Looked at the entry from today, the LINE messages between her and my father.
2/8/2012
hello Read 1:30 pm
hello Read 3:30 pm
how are you Read 3:30 pm
when are you coming home Read 3:35 pm
Yasuhiro? 3:45
Yasuhiro I love you 4:00
I miss you every day 5:05
did you miss me? 5:10
i’m sorry 6:25
Mirai chan, I'm sorry for not responding earlier. I was busy with work. But the answer is yes, of course. Of course I miss you, every day. I think about you all the time, even though things became what they were. I'm sorry. I'm sorry to not know what Mike and Marcus are up to now. I promise I'll visit one day soon. Eventually, maybe, we can be a family again. I love you always...always, always. Will respond more later. 11:46 PM
TRANSLATION:
MIRAI I AM SORRY I AM IN LOVE WITH MY NEW WIFE I DON’T MEAN TO HURT YOU BUT I HAVE BEEN MARRIED FOR FOUR YEARS NOW I FEEL GUILT I FEEL SADNESS I FEEL SHAME I FEEL A SENSE OF UNRAVELING AT ALL WE COULD NOT HOLD I DO NOT KNOW IF I EVER LOVED YOU BUT I THINK I LOVED WHAT WE HAD IN THE TIME WE DID DO NOT FEEL AS IF THIS WERE YOUR FAULT I AM NEVER COMING TO VISIT I WILL FORGET MARCUS I WILL FORGET MIKE IN TIME I WILL FORGET YOU
MIRAI I AM SORRY I AM IN LOVE WITH MY NEW WIFE I DON’T MEAN TO HURT YOU BUT I HAVE BEEN MARRIED FOR FOUR YEARS NOW I FEEL GUILT I FEEL SADNESS I FEEL SHAME I FEEL A SENSE OF UNRAVELING AT ALL WE COULD NOT HOLD I DO NOT KNOW IF I EVER LOVED YOU BUT I THINK I LOVED WHAT WE HAD IN THE TIME WE DID DO NOT FEEL AS IF THIS WERE YOUR FAULT I AM NEVER COMING TO VISIT I WILL FORGET MARCUS I WILL FORGET MIKE IN TIME I WILL FORGET YOU
I looked at the printed out messages. I thought about my mother not looking at the men when they had asked if she wanted to take the pieces of the Frankenchine home, her blank disposition in the face of pain.
The only note she had put for this one was a smiley face. Thinking back now, I should have gone into the room. It was already 7 AM, the sun was splitting my head open, Mom would be late to work and angry, I would be a good son, I would check on her.
But instead, I went to sleep.
I woke up at 10 AM. Light was leaking through the window and then I saw Mike standing in my doorway, wearing my old soccer jersey, and the kid had tears on his face. I didn’t want to know. I turned away, facing the white wall, thinking about the different wires splintering inside my mind, the invisible wires that connected us to each other becoming frayed, split, cut open, trying to ignore Mike saying over and over again in his stupid fucking kid voice, “Mom’s dead. Mom’s dead. Mom’s dead.”
Daisuke Shen is a fiction writer. You can visit their website at www.daisukeshen.com.
Twitter: dai__joubu
Instagram: ginsengmasque
More From Tiding House 001...
COOL BLUE SPRING OF KNOWLEDGE
my grief felt fraudulent
i entertained
a false memory
of the couch
it was a clear day,
a tuesday,
the sky a perfect shade
of 9/11 blue
i couldn’t worry myself
he showed me the diaper girl
until i said fine
at fort greene park
in the middle of everyone
cheering, dancing, drinking
accompanied by dogs
i experienced acute derealization
conceded it was
better than before
but maybe not
i had no hand
in the matter
& i wouldn’t have
even if i had
i entertained
a false memory
of the couch
it was a clear day,
a tuesday,
the sky a perfect shade
of 9/11 blue
i couldn’t worry myself
he showed me the diaper girl
until i said fine
at fort greene park
in the middle of everyone
cheering, dancing, drinking
accompanied by dogs
i experienced acute derealization
conceded it was
better than before
but maybe not
i had no hand
in the matter
& i wouldn’t have
even if i had
MM
i want my shoes tied
by you, you, you
just you
can’t fathom simplicity
i thrash stupid against it,
spill coffee on your sheets,
then hand you the rag
o, woe is me
i miss you
i take pictures of your spirit
from someone else’s phone
the montana sunset,
which i envision as plum,
will certainly be
a never-before-seen shade
of miraculous blue
by you, you, you
just you
can’t fathom simplicity
i thrash stupid against it,
spill coffee on your sheets,
then hand you the rag
o, woe is me
i miss you
i take pictures of your spirit
from someone else’s phone
the montana sunset,
which i envision as plum,
will certainly be
a never-before-seen shade
of miraculous blue
Shy Watson is the author of Horror Vacui (House of Vlad 2021). Her work appears or is forthcoming in Fence, Southwest Review, Joyland, and elsewhere. She is an MFA candidate at University of Montana. She also teaches classes online at Catapult. For updates, follow her on Twitter @formermissNJ.
More from Tiding House Issue One:
FROM TIDING HOUSE ISSUE ONE
Poem by CA Conrad24 SHARD
Momma
Baudelaire
laid an egg
with his
opium
laced
vagina
invitations
for your vodka noir
your excessive
talk about the
recently paroled
cannibal
arms out
sliding down
the bannister
bird of paradise
between your teeth
whispering
his name
last night
not as
hot as the first time
quite grateful
you are vegan
Baudelaire
laid an egg
with his
opium
laced
vagina
invitations
for your vodka noir
your excessive
talk about the
recently paroled
cannibal
arms out
sliding down
the bannister
bird of paradise
between your teeth
whispering
his name
last night
not as
hot as the first time
quite grateful
you are vegan
CAConrad has been working with the ancient technologies of poetry & ritual since 1975.
https://linktr.ee/CAConrad88
Instagram: @CAConrad88
Twitter: @CAConrad88
More from Tiding House Issue One:https://linktr.ee/CAConrad88
Instagram: @CAConrad88
Twitter: @CAConrad88
POETIC ASSEMBLAGES UNDER CONSUMER CAPITALISM
I’m Marlena, the worst hoarder on planet Pink Sands Yankee Candle
My house is like a bomb went off at Walmart
Begins Kate Durbin’s Hoarders (Wave Books, 2021), a book which assembles dynamic freeze-frames in the form of strange, disquieting, and tender glimpses into the lives of sixteen people who have appeared on the reality television show Hoarders: Marlena, Chuck, Linda, Shelley, Craig, Cathy, Noah and Allie, Jim, Alice, Dorothy, Hannah, Ronnie, Gary, Greg, and Maggie. Whereas each episode of Hoarders takes the form of a sixty-minute dramatized intervention into the lives of individual hoarders, Durbin’s Hoarders delinks the people from TV and places them in curious chorus. The frame widens.
According to the internet, hoarding is a medical condition marked by excessive accumulation of things, regardless of actual value due to a perceived or obsessive need to save them. To hoard is to collect and often hide away a supply of something. Kate Durbin’s book glimmers and stirs the mind-body quietly at first. Rather than telling us how to read the show or the book, Durbin’s fifteen portraits seep out from their pages and leave the reader to wonder how hoarding works on the whole weird world. Who or what decides a thing’s actual value? How does the market regulate our relationships with objects and each other?
Hoarders is timely. The top one percent own most things in the US; there are more empty houses and hotel rooms than there are homeless people; the beginnings of the COVID-19 pandemic saw people panic-hoarding mass amounts of toilet paper.
Hoarders, a reality TV show that originally aired on A&E in 2009, is filled with close-shots of accumulation which incite shock and squirmy feelings as we witness one sliver of the hoarding process: the hoarder surrounded by what their objects. The episodes also offer the help of some kind of psychologist and/or cleaning specialist, decluttering experts who will apparently heal the hoarders.
The camera in Hoarders doesn’t roll back to reveal processes of accretion that the hoarders may have undergone or the factories and conditions under which these objects were produced so that the show itself doesn’t become a critique of capitalism.In contrast, Durbin’s book spills light onto certain televisual moments resulting in an exciting testament to what poetry can do in the era of the hyperreal. Away from the show’s close-shots and dramatic music which emotionally distance the viewer from the hoarder, Durbin’s tender translations invite us into the scenes. Here’s Linda from Washington D.C.:
My husband was an abusive sociopath fossilized rat
It was like living with Jim Jones dirty unmarked bottles of black liquids.
Durbin’s poems set up zones wherein we might sit with Linda, Gary, Ronnie, Greg, et al. and read, sense, see. Specific objects serve as windows into larger narratives as Durbin dismantles the show using its own tools. A main ideology of consumer capitalism is the use of brands and products as identity markers. Durbin offers us insight into this reality without didacticism.
How can a poem and a reality TV meet each other, their conversation creating a third curious thing? How does a list of objects work? How do we relate to our stuff, to our lists of stuff, to other people’s stuff? How to navigate the seas of information, clutter, options, mass production of…everything? The final entry in Dorothy’s section begins:
I guess I’m afraid of not seeing The Walking Dead (2010-present), Downton Abbey (2010-2015), Chopped (2007-present), Breaking Bad (2008-2013)
The list continues for eighty-five more television shows and their lifespans. Dorothy’s voice arrives again at the end:
I couldn’t possibly watch them all if I sat down today and started
The list of television shows and their timelines is literally framed by Dorothy’s fear of not seeing them and knowledge that she couldn’t possibly watch them all. Durbin’s Hoarders is filled with quietly acute moments where lack, fear, emptiness, and profound sadness bump up against objects. The objects and the voices act on each other as the voice of the hoarder comes through in italics next to various material and spectral presences. The objects Durbin chooses to list provide insight into the environmental, social, and psychological impacts of hoarding as a collective phenomenon. Simultaneously, Durbin makes surprising, musical, and strange poetic assemblages from Hoarders:
This is how I deal crushed Red Bulls
and
Last couple of years we’ve had a problem with Barbie Dream House with a pink plastic roof
and
I want desperately to change Marlena digging in neighborhood
trash bins, a flashlight strapped to her head; she pulls out Chase
credit card statements, Styrofoam food containers, Starbucks
reusable plastic cups
The show supposes that the hoarders need some decluttering and therapy, perpetuating what Mark Fisher has called the “privatization of stress” which “has aimed at an almost total destruction of the concept of the public—the very thing upon which psychic well-being fundamentally depends. What we urgently need is a new politics of mental health organized around the problem of public space.” Durbin’s Hoarders gestures towards this much-needed public space, for where the show deracinates these individual lives from context, Durbin’s book undoes the spectacle and gathers many moments together in order to weave a wider portrait.
Hoarders deftly lifts moments from the commodified medium of reality TV and assembles them into a poetics which resists commodification or happy endings, as the objects don’t get swept away, decluttered, or judged. Durbin names them, places them in a context, and offers space on the page for lingering. The final entry in the book, in the voice of Maggie, reads:
There’s definitely war on earth between good and evil dust billowing up from the ground; a shadow moving in the window
Emmalea Russo is a writer. Her work has appeared in many venues, including Artforum, BOMB, and Granta. Her books of poetry include G (2018), Wave Archive (2019), and Confetti (forthcoming from Hyperidean in 2022). She edits the multidisciplinary journal Asphalte Magazine.
Instagram: @emmalea.russo
Kate Durbin is a Los Angeles-based writer and artist. Her books of poetry include Hoarders (Wave), E! Entertainment, The Ravenous Audience, and the iOs app ABRA, which won the 2017 international Turn On Literature Prize. Durbin was the Arts Queensland Poet-in-Residence in Brisbane, Australia in 2015 and 2020. Her art and writing have been featured in the New York Times, Art in America, Artforum, The Believer, BOMB, poets.org, The Atlantic, NPR, and elsewhere. She has shown her artwork nationally and internationally at the PULSE Art Fair in Miami, MOCA Los Angeles, the SPRING/BREAK Art Show in Los Angeles, peer to space in Berlin, and more.
Instagram: @kate_durbin
Website: www.katedurbin.la
AN INTERVIEW WITH EXP TV
The paradigm shattering shift from physical to digital home media came about so abruptly it left a society of pop culture orphans in its wake.
In an instant, the rental galaxy imploded and split into a sprawling multiverse of alternatives. Our options suddenly included the barely organized Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime libraries, as well as the YouTube archive of virtually all recorded media.With all of it on-demand, browsing thumbnails became a crippling and stressful omnivore’s dilemma.
Enter the algorithm.
Magically intuitive math automatically replenishing your content trough, relieving you of the soul search necessary to address the ultimate existential quandary: “What should we watch tonight?”
But (sigh) (naturellement) the algorithmic morphine drip was too powerful a tool to withstand corporate opportunism. YouTube now white rabbits you into a spiral of eerily targeted content, Netflix insists on an Orwellian replacement of all entertainment with banal originals, Hulu gaslights you to ‘continue watching’ a show you’ve never heard of...
The algorithm, once a beacon in the darkness of bottomless choice, now has an agenda and can no longer be trusted.
Enter EXP TV.
A sponsor-less, free-to-all, 24/7 live channel which is in its own words, “broadcasting an endless stream of obscure media and video ephemera.” And if that sounds vague it is due to the psychedelically indefinable quality of the channel’s programming.
Created by film/event curators, artists and all-around VHS mensa hounds Taylor Rowley, Marcus Herring and Tom Fitzgerald, EXP TV is a revolutionary return to appointment television in a remote entertainment landscape where schedules are as elastic as sweatpanted waistlines.
The program and times are posted on their site, and there is some TV Guidance as to what you’re in for, but the EXP TV experience is all about curatorial trust. Fixed programming to deprogram your compulsion to text, to scroll, to search, to hoard tabs, to grasp mindlessly at pop-ups and banners and featured content and staff picks.
EXP TV is, in short, an extraordinarily and expertly pre-surfed and re-mixed internet by the kind of cultural crate diggers who unearth every bizarro canary in the media coal mines you never knew existed, but once you do, can’t live without.
![]()
Ben Shearn: How did it all begin?
Tom Fitzgerald: EXP TV rose from the ashes of The Cinefamily, the LA cinematheque we all worked at, after it closed in 2017.
Marcus Herring: All three of us have a sickness that drives us to relentlessly collect obscure media, and we really enjoy sharing our loot with others. That probably led us to working together at an arthouse.
Taylor Rowley: We spent a ton of time in our late night off-hours hanging out, digging up stuff, and riffing off each other’s discoveries. Some of our most bonkers ideas were born out of that activity. Endless hours of one-upping each other and blowing each other’s minds. There were definitely many moments where I questioned our collective sanity.
MH: Maybe we all had this idea at one point or another, but personally, I had been wanting to do 24/7 streaming TV for over a decade—back when Twitch was still called Justin.tv, but I didn’t know exactly how to pull it off or even exactly what the programming would look like.
One of our primary goals initially was to remove all interactivity from entertainment, to take away the tyranny of choices and end the indecisive paralysis we all experience trying to figure out what to watch on the big streaming services.
BS: There was a spate of post-pandemic Twitch-based, arthouse-minded streaming channels (Cinephobe, Cathode TV etc) and EXP TV feels like an entirely new iteration of this almost entirely new format. Would you agree with this statement?
MH: I think the difference is that EXP TV has a distinct concept aside from just being a channel that streams a bunch of old shows back to back or full movies or whatever. EXP is like a giant video collage made up of smaller video collages, and there is so much curation and craft going up and down. Instead of just showing old material, we’ve made new shows out of the old material. It’s a lot of work! So the channel itself is like its own art project.
![]()
BS: I wouldn't dare ask you to give away your magician,'s tricks but I am dying to know where and how you've sourced this overwhelming amount of material.
TF: I’ve been collecting video footage for years and years. Looking everywhere, from mom and pop video stores and VHS collector trading in the nineties all the way to good old YouTube today (as well as various odd connections, miracles, mishaps and accidents in between).
The reason for all this digging has been that, for me, hip hop is the only original and interesting art form from the last 50 years. Taking this and taking that and making something new, it has been a great inspiration for me since I was a kid. Nothing thrills me more than making a video mix that, for example, fuses — a music number from a Mormon cartoon, a snippet of a seance on a public access show, a space shuttle blooper, a nightmare sequence from a Filipino kid’s show, on and on. Fuck yeah. That way of doing things informs EXP TV programming greatly.
MH: The sources are from all over the place, some hiding in plain sight and sometimes it takes an archaeological dig that leads to the filmmakers themselves. Case in point, I recently tracked down a Euro DJ from the 90s who used to make his own animated CG music videos and never released them publicly. I had seen some 240p (we meet again) snippets on Youtube, but the quality was unwatchable. He was so appreciative that I reached out to him that he sent me the VHS masters to rip.
BS: It's impossible not to begin with the Video Breaks, which for the most part take up the 6am-5pm daily slots.
On your site they're described as: "Classic MTV style video collage series featuring never-ending and ever-changing archival clips on every subject imaginable." This is naturally the best overview of what's going on there. However there are additional criteria at play. Are you able to elaborate on what those may be?
TF: Not to sound coy but, speaking for myself, everything I put in Video Breaks is simply a clip or scene I like. No other context. It’s just gotta be something that connects with me.
If I find the clip funny or strange or mysterious or beautiful, it’s in. As for the eras, I do respond most to the “look” of film (and some old analog video) much more than anything on HD etc (and I don’t like how cars have looked in the past few decades). That said, I recently pulled some footage of crunkcore from Caracas.
MH: We all view what we do as some form of video art, so we like the clips to have a strong visual quality. Is it something that looks amazing even with the sound off? That’s the kinda thing we’d go for. Sometimes the relative obscurity of the clip is a factor. Personally, I skip stuff if I feel like it’s too well known. I want the audience to be stimulated and mystified. And most importantly—is the clip truly exceptional? I think that’s something we all talked about a long time ago. The clips must be truly exceptional or what’s the point?
BS: Video Breaks seem to be on shuffle mode, and furthermore the clips contain zero contextual information. This causes in me a profound ambivalence. At first, it's maddening. In the post-Shazam, post-YouTube age of instant algorithmic recognition it truly is a wild feeling to watch these incredible, completely anonymous, usually unsearchable clips for hours.
The more I watch however, the more a magical nostalgic sense of classic television takes over. There're so many hazy half-images of cartoons, music videos and commercials from my TV youth which haunt my memory, and even return in mysterious waves, like weird cultural acid flashbacks. I find that the unidentifiable Video Breaks uncannily replicate this hypnagogic quality of ancient channel surfing.
Did you set out to create this experience with the Video Breaks?
TF: Bingo! There is a specific intent to replicate the old school feeling of just flipping the TV dial at 4am and stumbling on something that is blowing your mind but you have no idea what it is. It took me years to figure what the “little girl at the basketball game who telepathically makes the b-ball explode” movie was. (answer: The Visitor [1980]). I looove that feeling, it’s like remembering a fragment of a dream, and thought it would be fun to let someone else feel it too.
TR: Exactly. I’m a lifelong insomniac, and some of my earliest and most formative memories are from staring at television in the middle of the night, not understanding at all what I was watching but completely transfixed and unable to describe what I saw to my parents the next day. Kind of like Carol Anne in the Poltergeist. Video Breaks are meant to evoke that feeling like you might be the only person who ever saw what you just watched. They’re the ghosts in the TV set.
![]()
BS: One program you refer to as a "culture jam." In a way, that term, as broad as it is, feels like a good place to start as far as an attempt to 'name' the EXP TV format overall.
Would you agree? I'd love to hear some philosophical waxing on this...
MH: It’s funny because your question got us internally discussing this term, with one of us opining that “culture jam” is a dad rock word, but in terms of EXP TV, it was just a throwaway description I used when filling in the caption for our show MELT on the EXP TV guide.
I always thought of “jam” not in a Widespread Panic or Pearl Jam type context but “jam” like a log jam—or like throwing a monkey wrench in the works. In that light, I saw “culture jam” was a way to obfuscate culture or mess it up. MELT is a show that slows down audio/video to a point of trippy delirium. If you sit back and take the ride, you start to experience the manipulated video in completely different, unexpected ways. Sitcom themes become industrial art rock. Unfunny standup comedy becomes deeply disturbing. Dull local news segments become the funniest thing you’ve seen all week.
TR: If we use Marcus’s definition, we do “culture jam” in real life! It would take too long to explain how we once created a connection between Corey Haim’s love for Japanese funk music and an old “I Feel Like Chicken Tonight” commercial, but I can say with certainty that my mind was never the same after that.
BS: The free-for-all and/or optional patreon-support model certainly keeps the format pure. This is of course a massively threatening idea to corporately supported streaming channels. If a free Twitch channel started to somehow outpace, say, Hulu, capitalist knives would no doubt sharpen. Historically, when these forms have emerged in the past, a corporate takeover inevitably kills it. Do you foresee any danger of this?
MH: I would love to imagine a world where the content on EXP TV has grown so popular that it threatens the existence of Hulu, but I think the corporate execs can relax for now. There’s not enough LSD on the planet to make that world a reality. I will say that I see a wide range of possibilities for the EXP TV concept—a video collage TV channel broadcasting an endless stream of obscure media & video ephemera— on the media landscape from the big streaming platforms to cable TV.
I would like to see EXP TV everywhere!
EXP TV can be accessed through its website, periscope profile and (most popularly) its Twitch stream.
Benjamin Shearn is a film editor and writer. His latest work, the films Please Baby Please and Give Me Pity, premiered at the Rotterdam Film Festival in 2022 as part of a retrospective on Shearn's work with filmmaker Amanda Kramer. Their previous film Ladyworld, premiered at BFI London, Fantastic Fest, TIFF: Next Wave and was presented as part of the Frontieres Showcase at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival. Shearn’s work in narrative and documentary films has also been exhibited at ComicCon San Diego, the Louisiana Museum of Art in Copenhagen, la Gaîté lyrique in Paris, as well as official selections of the CPH:DOX, Melbourne International, Planete+Doc, TIFF After Dark, Court Metrage du Clermont, Chicago and Boston Underground Film Festivals, amongst others. For more of his work, go to benjaminshearn.com and/or follow his absurd Instagram account @actorsupset.
In an instant, the rental galaxy imploded and split into a sprawling multiverse of alternatives. Our options suddenly included the barely organized Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime libraries, as well as the YouTube archive of virtually all recorded media.With all of it on-demand, browsing thumbnails became a crippling and stressful omnivore’s dilemma.
Enter the algorithm.
Magically intuitive math automatically replenishing your content trough, relieving you of the soul search necessary to address the ultimate existential quandary: “What should we watch tonight?”
But (sigh) (naturellement) the algorithmic morphine drip was too powerful a tool to withstand corporate opportunism. YouTube now white rabbits you into a spiral of eerily targeted content, Netflix insists on an Orwellian replacement of all entertainment with banal originals, Hulu gaslights you to ‘continue watching’ a show you’ve never heard of...
The algorithm, once a beacon in the darkness of bottomless choice, now has an agenda and can no longer be trusted.
Enter EXP TV.
A sponsor-less, free-to-all, 24/7 live channel which is in its own words, “broadcasting an endless stream of obscure media and video ephemera.” And if that sounds vague it is due to the psychedelically indefinable quality of the channel’s programming.
Created by film/event curators, artists and all-around VHS mensa hounds Taylor Rowley, Marcus Herring and Tom Fitzgerald, EXP TV is a revolutionary return to appointment television in a remote entertainment landscape where schedules are as elastic as sweatpanted waistlines.
The program and times are posted on their site, and there is some TV Guidance as to what you’re in for, but the EXP TV experience is all about curatorial trust. Fixed programming to deprogram your compulsion to text, to scroll, to search, to hoard tabs, to grasp mindlessly at pop-ups and banners and featured content and staff picks.
EXP TV is, in short, an extraordinarily and expertly pre-surfed and re-mixed internet by the kind of cultural crate diggers who unearth every bizarro canary in the media coal mines you never knew existed, but once you do, can’t live without.
Ben Shearn: How did it all begin?
Tom Fitzgerald: EXP TV rose from the ashes of The Cinefamily, the LA cinematheque we all worked at, after it closed in 2017.
Marcus Herring: All three of us have a sickness that drives us to relentlessly collect obscure media, and we really enjoy sharing our loot with others. That probably led us to working together at an arthouse.
Taylor Rowley: We spent a ton of time in our late night off-hours hanging out, digging up stuff, and riffing off each other’s discoveries. Some of our most bonkers ideas were born out of that activity. Endless hours of one-upping each other and blowing each other’s minds. There were definitely many moments where I questioned our collective sanity.
MH: Maybe we all had this idea at one point or another, but personally, I had been wanting to do 24/7 streaming TV for over a decade—back when Twitch was still called Justin.tv, but I didn’t know exactly how to pull it off or even exactly what the programming would look like.
One of our primary goals initially was to remove all interactivity from entertainment, to take away the tyranny of choices and end the indecisive paralysis we all experience trying to figure out what to watch on the big streaming services.
BS: There was a spate of post-pandemic Twitch-based, arthouse-minded streaming channels (Cinephobe, Cathode TV etc) and EXP TV feels like an entirely new iteration of this almost entirely new format. Would you agree with this statement?
MH: I think the difference is that EXP TV has a distinct concept aside from just being a channel that streams a bunch of old shows back to back or full movies or whatever. EXP is like a giant video collage made up of smaller video collages, and there is so much curation and craft going up and down. Instead of just showing old material, we’ve made new shows out of the old material. It’s a lot of work! So the channel itself is like its own art project.
BS: I wouldn't dare ask you to give away your magician,'s tricks but I am dying to know where and how you've sourced this overwhelming amount of material.
TF: I’ve been collecting video footage for years and years. Looking everywhere, from mom and pop video stores and VHS collector trading in the nineties all the way to good old YouTube today (as well as various odd connections, miracles, mishaps and accidents in between).
The reason for all this digging has been that, for me, hip hop is the only original and interesting art form from the last 50 years. Taking this and taking that and making something new, it has been a great inspiration for me since I was a kid. Nothing thrills me more than making a video mix that, for example, fuses — a music number from a Mormon cartoon, a snippet of a seance on a public access show, a space shuttle blooper, a nightmare sequence from a Filipino kid’s show, on and on. Fuck yeah. That way of doing things informs EXP TV programming greatly.
MH: The sources are from all over the place, some hiding in plain sight and sometimes it takes an archaeological dig that leads to the filmmakers themselves. Case in point, I recently tracked down a Euro DJ from the 90s who used to make his own animated CG music videos and never released them publicly. I had seen some 240p (we meet again) snippets on Youtube, but the quality was unwatchable. He was so appreciative that I reached out to him that he sent me the VHS masters to rip.
BS: It's impossible not to begin with the Video Breaks, which for the most part take up the 6am-5pm daily slots.
On your site they're described as: "Classic MTV style video collage series featuring never-ending and ever-changing archival clips on every subject imaginable." This is naturally the best overview of what's going on there. However there are additional criteria at play. Are you able to elaborate on what those may be?
TF: Not to sound coy but, speaking for myself, everything I put in Video Breaks is simply a clip or scene I like. No other context. It’s just gotta be something that connects with me.
If I find the clip funny or strange or mysterious or beautiful, it’s in. As for the eras, I do respond most to the “look” of film (and some old analog video) much more than anything on HD etc (and I don’t like how cars have looked in the past few decades). That said, I recently pulled some footage of crunkcore from Caracas.
MH: We all view what we do as some form of video art, so we like the clips to have a strong visual quality. Is it something that looks amazing even with the sound off? That’s the kinda thing we’d go for. Sometimes the relative obscurity of the clip is a factor. Personally, I skip stuff if I feel like it’s too well known. I want the audience to be stimulated and mystified. And most importantly—is the clip truly exceptional? I think that’s something we all talked about a long time ago. The clips must be truly exceptional or what’s the point?
BS: Video Breaks seem to be on shuffle mode, and furthermore the clips contain zero contextual information. This causes in me a profound ambivalence. At first, it's maddening. In the post-Shazam, post-YouTube age of instant algorithmic recognition it truly is a wild feeling to watch these incredible, completely anonymous, usually unsearchable clips for hours.
The more I watch however, the more a magical nostalgic sense of classic television takes over. There're so many hazy half-images of cartoons, music videos and commercials from my TV youth which haunt my memory, and even return in mysterious waves, like weird cultural acid flashbacks. I find that the unidentifiable Video Breaks uncannily replicate this hypnagogic quality of ancient channel surfing.
Did you set out to create this experience with the Video Breaks?
TF: Bingo! There is a specific intent to replicate the old school feeling of just flipping the TV dial at 4am and stumbling on something that is blowing your mind but you have no idea what it is. It took me years to figure what the “little girl at the basketball game who telepathically makes the b-ball explode” movie was. (answer: The Visitor [1980]). I looove that feeling, it’s like remembering a fragment of a dream, and thought it would be fun to let someone else feel it too.
TR: Exactly. I’m a lifelong insomniac, and some of my earliest and most formative memories are from staring at television in the middle of the night, not understanding at all what I was watching but completely transfixed and unable to describe what I saw to my parents the next day. Kind of like Carol Anne in the Poltergeist. Video Breaks are meant to evoke that feeling like you might be the only person who ever saw what you just watched. They’re the ghosts in the TV set.
BS: One program you refer to as a "culture jam." In a way, that term, as broad as it is, feels like a good place to start as far as an attempt to 'name' the EXP TV format overall.
Would you agree? I'd love to hear some philosophical waxing on this...
MH: It’s funny because your question got us internally discussing this term, with one of us opining that “culture jam” is a dad rock word, but in terms of EXP TV, it was just a throwaway description I used when filling in the caption for our show MELT on the EXP TV guide.
I always thought of “jam” not in a Widespread Panic or Pearl Jam type context but “jam” like a log jam—or like throwing a monkey wrench in the works. In that light, I saw “culture jam” was a way to obfuscate culture or mess it up. MELT is a show that slows down audio/video to a point of trippy delirium. If you sit back and take the ride, you start to experience the manipulated video in completely different, unexpected ways. Sitcom themes become industrial art rock. Unfunny standup comedy becomes deeply disturbing. Dull local news segments become the funniest thing you’ve seen all week.
TR: If we use Marcus’s definition, we do “culture jam” in real life! It would take too long to explain how we once created a connection between Corey Haim’s love for Japanese funk music and an old “I Feel Like Chicken Tonight” commercial, but I can say with certainty that my mind was never the same after that.
BS: The free-for-all and/or optional patreon-support model certainly keeps the format pure. This is of course a massively threatening idea to corporately supported streaming channels. If a free Twitch channel started to somehow outpace, say, Hulu, capitalist knives would no doubt sharpen. Historically, when these forms have emerged in the past, a corporate takeover inevitably kills it. Do you foresee any danger of this?
MH: I would love to imagine a world where the content on EXP TV has grown so popular that it threatens the existence of Hulu, but I think the corporate execs can relax for now. There’s not enough LSD on the planet to make that world a reality. I will say that I see a wide range of possibilities for the EXP TV concept—a video collage TV channel broadcasting an endless stream of obscure media & video ephemera— on the media landscape from the big streaming platforms to cable TV.
I would like to see EXP TV everywhere!
EXP TV can be accessed through its website, periscope profile and (most popularly) its Twitch stream.
Benjamin Shearn is a film editor and writer. His latest work, the films Please Baby Please and Give Me Pity, premiered at the Rotterdam Film Festival in 2022 as part of a retrospective on Shearn's work with filmmaker Amanda Kramer. Their previous film Ladyworld, premiered at BFI London, Fantastic Fest, TIFF: Next Wave and was presented as part of the Frontieres Showcase at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival. Shearn’s work in narrative and documentary films has also been exhibited at ComicCon San Diego, the Louisiana Museum of Art in Copenhagen, la Gaîté lyrique in Paris, as well as official selections of the CPH:DOX, Melbourne International, Planete+Doc, TIFF After Dark, Court Metrage du Clermont, Chicago and Boston Underground Film Festivals, amongst others. For more of his work, go to benjaminshearn.com and/or follow his absurd Instagram account @actorsupset.
Volume #29
Tuesday, March 30, 2023
Featured Artists:
- EMILY SIMON
- SAM BERMAN
- LILY MORRISON-BELL
- MEGHANN BOLTZ
“WHEN I MEET GOD”
FICTION by:
SAM BERMAN
7:04AM: I’m dreaming about dreaming when Lucy wakes me with a big kiss on my nose, my cheeks, my chin too. Lucy’s walleyed and her tail cuts the sun that pours in from the window that faces the airport. 7:14AM: On the morning radio, while the coffee drips, a woman explains that “Identity is a billion-dollar industry.” And her voice is bad. Bruising. Insistent...
︎
“A SELF IN THREE PARTS”
ESSAY by:
LILY MORRISON-BELL
I spend my days scrambling through forests and looking for fossilised jellyfish. I walk for hours towards the mountains on the horizon, but there is always an ocean between us. My nails are strong and naked and caked with earth, but no matter how much I surrender to the outside world all I can feel is the pulse of my Self. A union with what’s within telling me I need to get out...
︎
“I ARRIVED BLEEDING”
POETRY by:
MEGHANN BOLTZ
Left, choking / On feather / On the gap / Between the teeth of / What I meant to say / & what I said...
︎
Volume #28
Tuesday, April 25, 2023
Featured Artists:
- Eleanor Tennyson
- Parker Menzimer
- Matthew Corey
- afoe
EXCERPTS FROM “SELAH”
POETRY by:
ELEANOR TENNYSON
Maybe the shape of my mouth is the word itself - I am looking for./ My body is a plum-sweet alphabet. It does this thing / like rapture, like I’m unsure and atlas./ I want to scream / eyes closed: this is me without / I lift my lips again to the black-smudgy wall / I am a dog with a human face...
EXCERPTS FROM “THE REPRODUCTION SONNETS”
POETRY by:
PARKER MENZIMER
I can imagine a person objecting to the embattled tone, or reacting negatively to the felt impression of arbitrariness. I drove home to take this dictation, listening to The Gould Variations Winning lotteries, I wrote this passage by candlelight. I was born in Oakland, California, in 1991...
“THE NIGHT OF”
FICTION by:
MATTHEW COREY
She kept her eyes on the road, but chanced a quick glance in his direction. He was still slumped in the passenger seat, knee up on the dashboard, right elbow resting on the door, his head leaning on his right hand fist. Despite the air-conditioning turned up, the window on that side was open a crack, just enough to make the maximum amount of noise as air passed in and out of it...
Volume #27
Thursday, March 23, 2023
Featured Artists:
“THE MEN I KNOW WHO EAT ALONE ARE MEN” & “THE BOOM OF THE FIREWORKS TURNS MY MOUTH INTO YOURS”
POETRY by:
CLARE MARIE SCHNEIDER
When we first met I noticed a dark stain / And I knew you as perfect, sloppy too./ If you left me at sea I would find peace, / A new, wet ground that groans and rocks with me...
“OCTOBER”
POETRY by:
EMMA WINSOR WOOD
I am here. As if here. Writing a poem under conditions which are not
ameanable to it. As Bernadette Mayer advised. What if a conjunction
were a verb. I and you a something to keep you from something something. You but me away. I so all alone in my room. Who is
the sad girl, Mommy? Meaning it stinks in here...
“SKETCHES IN THE GARDEN”
POETRY by:
HALEY JOY HARRIS
i saw my face in its geode / reflecting back in tiny / fractured / multitudes / crystal cavity / relic of its own mouth / mechanics / it fit so cleanly / in perrenail robotics / a small continent / i found it in the grass / outside the church / i believe / it underwent a perlious / whiplash...
Volume #26
Thursday, February 9, 2023
Featured Artists:
“THE COMPUTER ROOM”
FICTION by:
EMMA ENSLEY
It’s summer and I spend my days at my best friend and next door neighbor’s house, upstairs in her computer room, surrounded by our sleeping bags. Her name is Liz.I love the computer room at Liz’s, because I love the internet and playing games like The Sims. My family doesn’t have a computer yet. Some nights, we play The Sims until after midnight, because it’s summer and there’s nothing to wake up for...
Volume #25
Tuesday, December 6, 2022
Featured Artists:
- Terry Nguyen
- Serena Devi
- Nathan Stormer
- Giulia Bencivenga
- Torey Akers
- Sydney Smith
- Bradley King
- Juliet Gelfman-Randazzo
- Sophia Le Fraga
- Candela Perez
- Ruby Zuckerman
- Matthew Klane
- Ari Lisner
“MY HEALING JOURNEY”
FICTION by:
SERENA DEVI
I’m on a healing journey. Step one is I will force the world not to deny me. For a long time I thought there was a kind of woman who could just get away with taking, and she wasn’t me. What I mean is, I have an inherently suspect look. I am not a small or delicate girl. Nobody notices me except to regard me with unease...
“THERE IS NO COMFORT”
FICTION by:
NATHAN STORMER
My grandma opened an email with the subject line, There is no comfort...VIEW IN BROWSER. It was addressed to “Jon.” The email said, Jon, there is no comfort like when you bundle home and auto for $89/month. Her son’s name was Jon, my father. I never knew him well. I’m still figuring things out...
“MY DARLINGS”
POETRY by:
JULIET GELFMAN-RANDAZZO
she swung her arms, as they say / with purpose, like she had nowhere to go / and was certain of it. i avoided the break / up spot. the sun wasn’t sunny there anyway / or it was too much so. it didn’t matter...
︎
Volume #24
Monday, October 31st, 2022
Featured Artists:
- KATE GREENE
- FRANCESCA KRITIKOS
- SEOKYOUNG YANG
- SARAH YANNI
Volume #23
Tuesday, September 27, 2022
Featured Artists:
- ARI LISNER
- LINDSAY DYE
- PETER COLE FRIEDMAN
- LILY LADY
T4T FANTASY
POETRY by:
LILY LADY
i often think about / cargo pants that unzip to become short / transitioning effortlessly / you can do whatever you want in this life / is there anything better / than a waffle at 2am / with crunchy peanut butter & honey drizzle? / the testosterone makes my face warm...
︎
Volume #22
Friday, August 5, 2022Featured Artists:
- CARSON JORDAN
- SIMONE ZAPATA
- MICHAEL NEWTON
- SASHA LESHNER
“STRANDED PREPOSITIONS”
POETRY by:
SIMONE ZAPATA
What is memory if not an insistence of duration / phantoms collapsing into / loop / all lyric tracks a kind of / decay / movement between / rooms : / We make maps to / find our way home / and if I were to / draw a blueprint of / mine / it would be built upon / stranded prepositions :...
EXCERPT FROM “VISIONS”
FICTION by:
MICHAEL NEWTON
Jeannie is having feelings about the objects in the house again. She and Greg have talked about this many times. She agreed to try and dim her senses to the messages which the objects send her. He encouraged her to try living in the real world and stop talking to the chairs and the toothbrushes...
“TWO POEMS”
POETRY by:
SASHA LESHNER
I’ve been a thousand years asleep / inside the untied / anchor-patterned robe / my mother got me on / America island / where I first slept off / a slight addiction / all castaway / all prince-white garden...
︎
Volume #28
Tuesday, April 25, 2023
Featured Artists:
- Eleanor Tennyson
- Parker Menzimer
- Matthew Corey
- afoe
EXCERPTS FROM “SELAH”
POETRY by:
ELEANOR TENNYSON
Maybe the shape of my mouth is the word itself - I am looking for./ My body is a plum-sweet alphabet. It does this thing / like rapture, like I’m unsure and atlas./ I want to scream / eyes closed: this is me without / I lift my lips again to the black-smudgy wall / I am a dog with a human face...
EXCERPTS FROM “THE REPRODUCTION SONNETS”
POETRY by:
PARKER MENZIMER
I can imagine a person objecting to the embattled tone, or reacting negatively to the felt impression of arbitrariness. I drove home to take this dictation, listening to The Gould Variations Winning lotteries, I wrote this passage by candlelight. I was born in Oakland, California, in 1991...
“THE NIGHT OF”
FICTION by:
MATTHEW COREY
She kept her eyes on the road, but chanced a quick glance in his direction. He was still slumped in the passenger seat, knee up on the dashboard, right elbow resting on the door, his head leaning on his right hand fist. Despite the air-conditioning turned up, the window on that side was open a crack, just enough to make the maximum amount of noise as air passed in and out of it...
Volume #27
Thursday, March 23, 2023
Featured Artists:
“THE MEN I KNOW WHO EAT ALONE ARE MEN” & “THE BOOM OF THE FIREWORKS TURNS MY MOUTH INTO YOURS”
POETRY by:
CLARE MARIE SCHNEIDER
When we first met I noticed a dark stain / And I knew you as perfect, sloppy too./ If you left me at sea I would find peace, / A new, wet ground that groans and rocks with me...
“OCTOBER”
POETRY by:
EMMA WINSOR WOOD
I am here. As if here. Writing a poem under conditions which are not
ameanable to it. As Bernadette Mayer advised. What if a conjunction
were a verb. I and you a something to keep you from something something. You but me away. I so all alone in my room. Who is
the sad girl, Mommy? Meaning it stinks in here...
“SKETCHES IN THE GARDEN”
POETRY by:
HALEY JOY HARRIS
i saw my face in its geode / reflecting back in tiny / fractured / multitudes / crystal cavity / relic of its own mouth / mechanics / it fit so cleanly / in perrenail robotics / a small continent / i found it in the grass / outside the church / i believe / it underwent a perlious / whiplash...
Volume #26
Thursday, February 9, 2023
Featured Artists:
“THE COMPUTER ROOM”
FICTION by:
EMMA ENSLEY
It’s summer and I spend my days at my best friend and next door neighbor’s house, upstairs in her computer room, surrounded by our sleeping bags. Her name is Liz.I love the computer room at Liz’s, because I love the internet and playing games like The Sims. My family doesn’t have a computer yet. Some nights, we play The Sims until after midnight, because it’s summer and there’s nothing to wake up for...
Volume #25
Tuesday, December 6, 2022
Featured Artists:
- Terry Nguyen
- Serena Devi
- Nathan Stormer
- Giulia Bencivenga
- Torey Akers
- Sydney Smith
- Bradley King
- Juliet Gelfman-Randazzo
- Sophia Le Fraga
- Candela Perez
- Ruby Zuckerman
- Matthew Klane
- Ari Lisner
“MY HEALING JOURNEY”
FICTION by:
SERENA DEVI
I’m on a healing journey. Step one is I will force the world not to deny me. For a long time I thought there was a kind of woman who could just get away with taking, and she wasn’t me. What I mean is, I have an inherently suspect look. I am not a small or delicate girl. Nobody notices me except to regard me with unease...
“THERE IS NO COMFORT”
FICTION by:
NATHAN STORMER
My grandma opened an email with the subject line, There is no comfort...VIEW IN BROWSER. It was addressed to “Jon.” The email said, Jon, there is no comfort like when you bundle home and auto for $89/month. Her son’s name was Jon, my father. I never knew him well. I’m still figuring things out...
“MY DARLINGS”
POETRY by:
JULIET GELFMAN-RANDAZZO
she swung her arms, as they say / with purpose, like she had nowhere to go / and was certain of it. i avoided the break / up spot. the sun wasn’t sunny there anyway / or it was too much so. it didn’t matter...
︎
Volume #24
Monday, October 31st, 2022
Featured Artists:
- KATE GREENE
- FRANCESCA KRITIKOS
- SEOKYOUNG YANG
- SARAH YANNI
Volume #23
Tuesday, September 27, 2022
Featured Artists:
- ARI LISNER
- LINDSAY DYE
- PETER COLE FRIEDMAN
- LILY LADY
T4T FANTASY
POETRY by:
LILY LADY
i often think about / cargo pants that unzip to become short / transitioning effortlessly / you can do whatever you want in this life / is there anything better / than a waffle at 2am / with crunchy peanut butter & honey drizzle? / the testosterone makes my face warm...
︎
Volume #22
Friday, August 5, 2022Featured Artists:
- CARSON JORDAN
- SIMONE ZAPATA
- MICHAEL NEWTON
- SASHA LESHNER
“STRANDED PREPOSITIONS”
POETRY by:
SIMONE ZAPATA
What is memory if not an insistence of duration / phantoms collapsing into / loop / all lyric tracks a kind of / decay / movement between / rooms : / We make maps to / find our way home / and if I were to / draw a blueprint of / mine / it would be built upon / stranded prepositions :...
EXCERPT FROM “VISIONS”
FICTION by:
MICHAEL NEWTON
Jeannie is having feelings about the objects in the house again. She and Greg have talked about this many times. She agreed to try and dim her senses to the messages which the objects send her. He encouraged her to try living in the real world and stop talking to the chairs and the toothbrushes...
“TWO POEMS”
POETRY by:
SASHA LESHNER
I’ve been a thousand years asleep / inside the untied / anchor-patterned robe / my mother got me on / America island / where I first slept off / a slight addiction / all castaway / all prince-white garden...
︎
Volume #27
Thursday, March 23, 2023
Featured Artists:
“THE MEN I KNOW WHO EAT ALONE ARE MEN” & “THE BOOM OF THE FIREWORKS TURNS MY MOUTH INTO YOURS”
POETRY by:
CLARE MARIE SCHNEIDER
When we first met I noticed a dark stain / And I knew you as perfect, sloppy too./ If you left me at sea I would find peace, / A new, wet ground that groans and rocks with me...
“OCTOBER”
POETRY by:
EMMA WINSOR WOOD
I am here. As if here. Writing a poem under conditions which are not
ameanable to it. As Bernadette Mayer advised. What if a conjunction
were a verb. I and you a something to keep you from something something. You but me away. I so all alone in my room. Who is
the sad girl, Mommy? Meaning it stinks in here...
“SKETCHES IN THE GARDEN”
POETRY by:
HALEY JOY HARRIS
i saw my face in its geode / reflecting back in tiny / fractured / multitudes / crystal cavity / relic of its own mouth / mechanics / it fit so cleanly / in perrenail robotics / a small continent / i found it in the grass / outside the church / i believe / it underwent a perlious / whiplash...
Volume #26
Thursday, February 9, 2023
Featured Artists:
“THE COMPUTER ROOM”
FICTION by:
EMMA ENSLEY
It’s summer and I spend my days at my best friend and next door neighbor’s house, upstairs in her computer room, surrounded by our sleeping bags. Her name is Liz.I love the computer room at Liz’s, because I love the internet and playing games like The Sims. My family doesn’t have a computer yet. Some nights, we play The Sims until after midnight, because it’s summer and there’s nothing to wake up for...
Volume #25
Tuesday, December 6, 2022
Featured Artists:
- Terry Nguyen
- Serena Devi
- Nathan Stormer
- Giulia Bencivenga
- Torey Akers
- Sydney Smith
- Bradley King
- Juliet Gelfman-Randazzo
- Sophia Le Fraga
- Candela Perez
- Ruby Zuckerman
- Matthew Klane
- Ari Lisner
“MY HEALING JOURNEY”
FICTION by:
SERENA DEVI
I’m on a healing journey. Step one is I will force the world not to deny me. For a long time I thought there was a kind of woman who could just get away with taking, and she wasn’t me. What I mean is, I have an inherently suspect look. I am not a small or delicate girl. Nobody notices me except to regard me with unease...
“THERE IS NO COMFORT”
FICTION by:
NATHAN STORMER
My grandma opened an email with the subject line, There is no comfort...VIEW IN BROWSER. It was addressed to “Jon.” The email said, Jon, there is no comfort like when you bundle home and auto for $89/month. Her son’s name was Jon, my father. I never knew him well. I’m still figuring things out...
“MY DARLINGS”
POETRY by:
JULIET GELFMAN-RANDAZZO
she swung her arms, as they say / with purpose, like she had nowhere to go / and was certain of it. i avoided the break / up spot. the sun wasn’t sunny there anyway / or it was too much so. it didn’t matter...
︎
Volume #24
Monday, October 31st, 2022
Featured Artists:
- KATE GREENE
- FRANCESCA KRITIKOS
- SEOKYOUNG YANG
- SARAH YANNI
Volume #23
Tuesday, September 27, 2022
Featured Artists:
- ARI LISNER
- LINDSAY DYE
- PETER COLE FRIEDMAN
- LILY LADY
T4T FANTASY
POETRY by:
LILY LADY
i often think about / cargo pants that unzip to become short / transitioning effortlessly / you can do whatever you want in this life / is there anything better / than a waffle at 2am / with crunchy peanut butter & honey drizzle? / the testosterone makes my face warm...
︎
Volume #22
Friday, August 5, 2022Featured Artists:
- CARSON JORDAN
- SIMONE ZAPATA
- MICHAEL NEWTON
- SASHA LESHNER
“STRANDED PREPOSITIONS”
POETRY by:
SIMONE ZAPATA
What is memory if not an insistence of duration / phantoms collapsing into / loop / all lyric tracks a kind of / decay / movement between / rooms : / We make maps to / find our way home / and if I were to / draw a blueprint of / mine / it would be built upon / stranded prepositions :...
EXCERPT FROM “VISIONS”
FICTION by:
MICHAEL NEWTON
Jeannie is having feelings about the objects in the house again. She and Greg have talked about this many times. She agreed to try and dim her senses to the messages which the objects send her. He encouraged her to try living in the real world and stop talking to the chairs and the toothbrushes...
“TWO POEMS”
POETRY by:
SASHA LESHNER
I’ve been a thousand years asleep / inside the untied / anchor-patterned robe / my mother got me on / America island / where I first slept off / a slight addiction / all castaway / all prince-white garden...
︎
Volume #26
Thursday, February 9, 2023
Featured Artists:
“THE COMPUTER ROOM”
FICTION by:
EMMA ENSLEY
It’s summer and I spend my days at my best friend and next door neighbor’s house, upstairs in her computer room, surrounded by our sleeping bags. Her name is Liz.I love the computer room at Liz’s, because I love the internet and playing games like The Sims. My family doesn’t have a computer yet. Some nights, we play The Sims until after midnight, because it’s summer and there’s nothing to wake up for...
Volume #25
Tuesday, December 6, 2022
Featured Artists:
- Terry Nguyen
- Serena Devi
- Nathan Stormer
- Giulia Bencivenga
- Torey Akers
- Sydney Smith
- Bradley King
- Juliet Gelfman-Randazzo
- Sophia Le Fraga
- Candela Perez
- Ruby Zuckerman
- Matthew Klane
- Ari Lisner
“MY HEALING JOURNEY”
FICTION by:
SERENA DEVI
I’m on a healing journey. Step one is I will force the world not to deny me. For a long time I thought there was a kind of woman who could just get away with taking, and she wasn’t me. What I mean is, I have an inherently suspect look. I am not a small or delicate girl. Nobody notices me except to regard me with unease...
“THERE IS NO COMFORT”
FICTION by:
NATHAN STORMER
My grandma opened an email with the subject line, There is no comfort...VIEW IN BROWSER. It was addressed to “Jon.” The email said, Jon, there is no comfort like when you bundle home and auto for $89/month. Her son’s name was Jon, my father. I never knew him well. I’m still figuring things out...
“MY DARLINGS”
POETRY by:
JULIET GELFMAN-RANDAZZO
she swung her arms, as they say / with purpose, like she had nowhere to go / and was certain of it. i avoided the break / up spot. the sun wasn’t sunny there anyway / or it was too much so. it didn’t matter...
︎
Volume #24
Monday, October 31st, 2022
Featured Artists:
- KATE GREENE
- FRANCESCA KRITIKOS
- SEOKYOUNG YANG
- SARAH YANNI
Volume #23
Tuesday, September 27, 2022
Featured Artists:
- ARI LISNER
- LINDSAY DYE
- PETER COLE FRIEDMAN
- LILY LADY
T4T FANTASY
POETRY by:
LILY LADY
i often think about / cargo pants that unzip to become short / transitioning effortlessly / you can do whatever you want in this life / is there anything better / than a waffle at 2am / with crunchy peanut butter & honey drizzle? / the testosterone makes my face warm...
︎
Volume #22
Friday, August 5, 2022Featured Artists:
- CARSON JORDAN
- SIMONE ZAPATA
- MICHAEL NEWTON
- SASHA LESHNER
“STRANDED PREPOSITIONS”
POETRY by:
SIMONE ZAPATA
What is memory if not an insistence of duration / phantoms collapsing into / loop / all lyric tracks a kind of / decay / movement between / rooms : / We make maps to / find our way home / and if I were to / draw a blueprint of / mine / it would be built upon / stranded prepositions :...
EXCERPT FROM “VISIONS”
FICTION by:
MICHAEL NEWTON
Jeannie is having feelings about the objects in the house again. She and Greg have talked about this many times. She agreed to try and dim her senses to the messages which the objects send her. He encouraged her to try living in the real world and stop talking to the chairs and the toothbrushes...
“TWO POEMS”
POETRY by:
SASHA LESHNER
I’ve been a thousand years asleep / inside the untied / anchor-patterned robe / my mother got me on / America island / where I first slept off / a slight addiction / all castaway / all prince-white garden...
︎
Volume #25
Tuesday, December 6, 2022
Featured Artists:
- Terry Nguyen
- Serena Devi
- Nathan Stormer
- Giulia Bencivenga
- Torey Akers
- Sydney Smith
- Bradley King
- Juliet Gelfman-Randazzo
- Sophia Le Fraga
- Candela Perez
- Ruby Zuckerman
- Matthew Klane
- Ari Lisner
“MY HEALING JOURNEY”
FICTION by:
SERENA DEVI
I’m on a healing journey. Step one is I will force the world not to deny me. For a long time I thought there was a kind of woman who could just get away with taking, and she wasn’t me. What I mean is, I have an inherently suspect look. I am not a small or delicate girl. Nobody notices me except to regard me with unease...
“THERE IS NO COMFORT”
FICTION by:
NATHAN STORMER
My grandma opened an email with the subject line, There is no comfort...VIEW IN BROWSER. It was addressed to “Jon.” The email said, Jon, there is no comfort like when you bundle home and auto for $89/month. Her son’s name was Jon, my father. I never knew him well. I’m still figuring things out...
“MY DARLINGS”
POETRY by:
JULIET GELFMAN-RANDAZZO
she swung her arms, as they say / with purpose, like she had nowhere to go / and was certain of it. i avoided the break / up spot. the sun wasn’t sunny there anyway / or it was too much so. it didn’t matter...
︎
Volume #24
Monday, October 31st, 2022
Featured Artists:
- KATE GREENE
- FRANCESCA KRITIKOS
- SEOKYOUNG YANG
- SARAH YANNI
Volume #23
Tuesday, September 27, 2022
Featured Artists:
- ARI LISNER
- LINDSAY DYE
- PETER COLE FRIEDMAN
- LILY LADY
T4T FANTASY
POETRY by:
LILY LADY
i often think about / cargo pants that unzip to become short / transitioning effortlessly / you can do whatever you want in this life / is there anything better / than a waffle at 2am / with crunchy peanut butter & honey drizzle? / the testosterone makes my face warm...
︎
Volume #22
Friday, August 5, 2022Featured Artists:
- CARSON JORDAN
- SIMONE ZAPATA
- MICHAEL NEWTON
- SASHA LESHNER
“STRANDED PREPOSITIONS”
POETRY by:
SIMONE ZAPATA
What is memory if not an insistence of duration / phantoms collapsing into / loop / all lyric tracks a kind of / decay / movement between / rooms : / We make maps to / find our way home / and if I were to / draw a blueprint of / mine / it would be built upon / stranded prepositions :...
EXCERPT FROM “VISIONS”
FICTION by:
MICHAEL NEWTON
Jeannie is having feelings about the objects in the house again. She and Greg have talked about this many times. She agreed to try and dim her senses to the messages which the objects send her. He encouraged her to try living in the real world and stop talking to the chairs and the toothbrushes...
“TWO POEMS”
POETRY by:
SASHA LESHNER
I’ve been a thousand years asleep / inside the untied / anchor-patterned robe / my mother got me on / America island / where I first slept off / a slight addiction / all castaway / all prince-white garden...
︎
May 6, 2022
The Mathematical Catastrophe of (Analog <-> Digital) Love
By EMMALEA RUSSO
“Love’s curious arithmetic.”
Michel Serres, The Parasite
“It is not true that the more you love, the better you understand; all that the action of love obtains from me is merely this wisdom: that the other is not to be known; his opacity is not the screen around a secret, but, instead, a kind of evidence in which the game of reality and appearance is done away with. I am then seized with that exaltation of loving someone unknown, someone who will remain so forever: a mystic impulse: I know what I do not know.”
Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse
“You’re even prettier in person.”
Pam & Tommy (2022)
Michel Serres, The Parasite
“It is not true that the more you love, the better you understand; all that the action of love obtains from me is merely this wisdom: that the other is not to be known; his opacity is not the screen around a secret, but, instead, a kind of evidence in which the game of reality and appearance is done away with. I am then seized with that exaltation of loving someone unknown, someone who will remain so forever: a mystic impulse: I know what I do not know.”
Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse
“You’re even prettier in person.”
Pam & Tommy (2022)
Pam & Tommy (2022)
For an instant, the screen takes up nearly the entire frame. For an instant, the screen takes up nearly the entire frame. For an instant – Oh, fuck. – the screen nearly overflows the frame. For an instant.
READING AND LOVING
Every messenger is ambiguous — noise and signal making and breaking the channel — and the risk of receipt (Rilke’s Every angel is terrible...) is also the risk of all reading. In reading as in loving: zero guarantees. As modes of transmission change, as access to chaotic clumps of information is granted and as we meet with our own images again and again, a mathematical catastrophe ensues. There is so much. Love’s curious arithmetic is always catastrophic, filled with strange messengers and ambiguous geometries. Under digital conditions, the math changes. Alters the structure of relations. A spectrum of numbers and hues get translated to zeros and ones → many becoming 2.
APOCALYPSE
At the end of the world, there are no more secrets. At the end of the world, technology changes. Angels cease their bureaucratic functioning and continue singing glory. At the end of the world, all envelopes open. Apocalypse means uncover, unveil. And revelation: disclosure of information or knowledge to man by a divine or supernatural agency.
ANALOG + DIGITAL
Analog describes a continuous stream ---->
“Love is continuous, it’s a stream, it doesn’t stop,” insists Sarah Lawson in Cassavetes’s Love Streams,
----->
a video’s magnetic tape
- - - -
Digital breaks up analog information into smaller pieces
– 0101010 –
resulting in quicker transmission.
Pam & Tommy, the partly-fictionalized Hulu miniseries based on the unauthorized release of Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee’s infamous honeymoon sex and love tape, is not a show about consent, sex, or fame. It’s a show about the end of the (analog) world and the beginning of another (increasingly digital) one. Analog and digital are not opposites, nor do they exist in separate arenas.
Like the celestial and earthly cities that Saint Augustine outlines in his gigantic 5th century text City of God, analog and digital modes exist alongside one another: translating, transmitting, and overcoding. Augustine tells of the difference between angelic and demonic knowledge, which seems to come down to the question of how a channel holds information – (channel = computer, human, spiritual creature, air…) – writing: “The good angels hold cheap all the knowledge of material and temporal matters, which inflates the demons with pride.” The good angels which are more plentiful than humans in the godly/worshipful city – hold cheap that which they transmit and instead of clinging to it, deliver it straightaway. The demons are demons because of their knowledge, says Augustine. They get inflamed with what they carry. The angels cling to God and the demons cling to information. Eugene Thacker, in “Devil’s Switchboard,” claims that demonology is also the study of “noise’s assault on signal.” And as Michel Serres tells us in The Parasite, signal and noise are structurally hooked-up. When our messaging systems get overfull, we and what we transmit disappear by saturation, too much.
14th cen. Manuscript
ANGELS AND DEMONS
Near the end of “The Dedication” entry in A Lover’s Discourse, Barthes tells us that the visitor in Pasolini’s Teorema is definitely an angel, as he does not speak but rather “inscribes something within each of those who desire him – he performs what the mathematicians call a catastrophe (the disturbance of one system by another): it is true that this mute figure is an angel.” The silence of the angel engraves, leaves a mark. The silence is what happens. An encounter, a puncture, rippled beginnings of texture. Barthes’s “We are our own demons” entry begins with the assertion that the lover is sometimes possessed by a demon of language. The lover is inhabited – an inflamed vessel who babbles hyperspeak. Love and writing are processes of possession and exorcism – stretching bodies to catastrophic limits (the projectile vomit and spinning head in The Exorcist; the catatonia caused by the angel in Teorema). Babble, convulsion, expulsion, inflammation. One system disturbs another. Love> – > l … o ///*& v← )))) e.
Angels reading. Source: The Morgan Library.
Pam and Tommy searching for their sex tape on the internet at the Malibu Library.DARK GLASSES
Pam and Tommy walk into a library and dial-up to the internet. Slowly, carefully, they type out a web address. Press enter. For an instant, the keyboard overflows the frame. Next, the computer screen. There, the mid-90s transition from analog to digital, video to web, flu to plague, unfolds before their horrified eyes. They see themselves. Their (intimate, sweet, stolen) sex tape is there – somehow – in front of them as the screen gleams their dark glasses. At a thresholded region between analog and digital registers. The breath changes. A stolen piece of data broken into bits and reconstituted as something that moves quicker. The breath changes.
In the “Dark Glasses” entry in A Lover’s Discourse, Barthes writes that weeping (“to weep is part of the normal activity of the amorous body”) swells the eyes and so the lover wears dark glasses “to darken the sight in order not to be seen.” Also: dark glasses are meant to preserve dignity, to dim the too-lit world. The dark glasses impel questions: what’s the matter? What’s going on? What are you hiding? Who/what are you hiding from? The dark glasses reinstitute opacity – shield the lover(s) from themselves. At this moment, Pam and Tommy are no longer two lovers falling frantically in love – they are two people on one side of a screen looking through dark glasses at their own images.
JUSTICE?
One can mistake revenge or punishment for justice. The first episode of the 8-part series opens with Rand, a broke carpenter whom Tommy Lee treats terribly and refuses to pay. (Eileen Jones wrote this interesting piece on the show’s class consciousness). Rand steals Tommy Lee’s safe, hoping to get the 20k he’s owed. When he finds the sex tape amongst the items, he believes himself to be performing a dutiful act of karmic justice by selling it: “The righteous, they get rewarded. The wicked, they get punished,” he says. Rand thinks of himself as an amateur theologian, his tone resembling self-appointed moral arbiters of social media. But justice is more than reward and punishment. It is also about complicating a situation with thorough reading and admitting we cannot know. Like love, it is without guarantees and according to Simone Weil, justice is about reading differently:
“Justice. To be ever ready to admit that another person is something quite different from what we read when he is there (or when we think about him). Or rather, to read in him that he is certainly something different, perhaps something completely different from what we read in him. Every being cries out silently to be read differently.”
OH, FUCK.
That a person is never an easy read. That a text is not what it seems. That justice involves close reading and careful attention to what overflows calculation. Jean Baudrillard and Byung-Chul Han have argued that digital communications proliferate societal obsessions with positivity, pornography, transparency, and painlessness. In The Transparency of Evil, Baudrillard writes:
Nothing (not even God) now disappears by coming to an end, by dying. Instead, things disappear through proliferation or contamination, by becoming saturated or transparent, because of extenuation or extermination, or as a result of the epidemic of simulation, as a result of their transfer into the secondary existence of simulation. Rather than a mortal mode of disappearance, then, a fractal mode of dispersal.
In Pam & Tommy, love, intimacy, and secrets buckle under torpedoes of web-based transmission – images of selves sent back to selves ad nauseam – everywhere they/we look, there they/we are. With this hall of mirrors – Oh, fuck. – comes a freaky deletion as the tape’s repetition unspools their togetherness. As the series rolls on, the couple goes from talking about many things to talking about one thing. The viral video won’t go away.
Pam and Tommy search for their sex tape at the library.
The Last Judgment, Michelangelo, 1536-41.
In The Marvelous Clouds, media theorist John Durham Peters writes: “Google revives the ancient dream and nightmare of a ‘book of life’ in which every human deed is recorded for the Day of Judgment and thus stands in a long line of sacral and bureaucratic bookkeeping.” Enter → …///// oh. … // fuck. If love, as Roland Barthes tells us, involves not more understanding but a lingering around the other’s infinite opacity – which is not “the screen around a secret” but another kind of ground – a zone in which exaltation is delivered to the atmosphere as what’s unknown. If love is mystical. If love wears dark glasses. Pam & Tommy shows what happens when a secret gets revealed over and over again in plays of repetitive dispersal. If love means (re)locating textural and textual uncertainty – impenetrable velvet of love’s unknowable transmissions. If love. Then what..////…^^^ now?
Pam and Tommy wait for their sex tape to load at the Malibu Library.
VIRUS
The video was a flu but its internet circulation is a plague, says their lawyer. From analog copying to digital dispersal. Love plagued by plague. The point is not whether we like the show or not, whether we are offended by it or not, whether there is a lesson or not.
If the network holds love. If the network alters the transmission. If the form changes. If what was continuous gets broken up then made continuous again, repeat. If the angel should switch, cease holding knowledge cheap. If the air should morph a particle. If the future should be perfume. If memory is prophecy. If the ecstasy of constant communication should seem unmediated, thresholdless.
LOVE AND VIOLENCE, SIGNAL AND NOISE
Like love, transmission contains within it multiple modes, hues, moods. Not love or violence, consent or unfreedom, but the moods and perfumes that the words and the — can hold as they get altered. Love’s risky spectrum gets echoed in Georges Bataille’s famous statement A kiss is the beginning of cannibalism. Tenderness and brutality, care and cannibalism, analog and digital form complicated and contradictory geometries.
Angels and demons, like reading and misreading, signal and noise, are not opposites but ever-linked. In Transmitting Culture, Regis Debray writes: “A disconcerting reversibility of order into disorder. To synthesize, the devil is not necessarily God’s other; he can be God exercising his power. The noise is in the message itself.”
There is also the terror of too-swift transmission. Messages appearing one after the other in a glitchless zone. There is pain at the threshold and pain of not being able to feel the threshold. There is the demon of noise, a release from smooth communication into a thicker texture. What becomes of love under viral conditions? Baudrillard asks: “Is there still a form of the Other as destiny, and not merely as a psychological or social partner of convenience?” Destiny – often inconvenient, marks that which has befallen us.
HARM
How to read Pam & Tommy (and whatever…) beyond praise or scold, X or Y? Many people have boycotted and/or scolded the show because the creators didn’t get the explicit consent of Pamela Anderson, arguing that the show repeats the original harm of the stolen tape. (For one of many examples, see: “Exploiting the Exploited: The Problem with Pam & Tommy.”)
Consent: agree, assent, accord, feeling together, giving permission. In her reading of the film Amour Fou in Life-Destroying Diagrams, film theorist Eugenie Brinkema writes:
“Any reading that would fixate on consent as the opposite of unfreedom misses the more radical stance that the opposite of consent is an opposite consent. The opposite of love is neither violence nor hatred, neither cruelty nor indifference, neither force nor violation.”
Likewise, readings of Pam & Tommy that focus on “consent as the opposite of unfreedom” fail to register the status of Pam/Pam as a more complicated person and character. Brinkema continues:
“The secret of love is neither kept to oneself nor shared between several–the secret is that the opposite of love is an opposite love, already contained within its bouquet of values–it extends in every direction at once, even toward the indecency of violation, even toward the realm of what would certainly wreck it from within.”
Are we to base what/how we read on what appears to have caused the least amount of harm? How do we define harm? Indeed, can anything promise to not cause harm? Is there also a harm of willfully rejecting the sight of evil, of offing the negative? Of not reading? Positivity, sedation, unveiling – a harm that masquerades as un-harm, safety, I read it so you didn’t have to. To attempt to abolish all potential harm/pain is also to expunge possibilities for reading love’s thrilling and scary “bouquet of values.”
Every angel is terrible.
A kiss is the beginning of cannibalism.
& & &
With the ambient violence of the viral comes a fear of contagion – as though reading or spending time with a particular idea, text, person, TV show, or politics might infect. But love and reading must remain open to contagion and unknowing. The logic of purity which separates and severs, where X is marked good/watchable and Y is scorned as bad/unwatchable, is closer to Rand’s misguided and vengeful crusade for justice than Simone Weil’s generous definition of justice as that which demands we read people more complicatedly.
In The Transparency of Evil, Baudrillard writes: “All this talk is of the minimizing of Evil, the prevention of violence: nothing but security. This is the condescending and depressive power of good intentions, a power that can dream of nothing except rectitude in the world, that refuses even to consider a bending of Evil, or an intelligence of Evil.” Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee were violated – they had a private tape stolen from their home. Does the show violate again by virtue of the fact that it tells a story that is already in the public domain? Is there a chance that the show – with its fun and sad depictions of these events – chases out some of the evil with evil? Readings of the show that shun it for being misogynist or anti-feminist or re-harming Pamela Anderson not only refuse to read the show beyond the closed circuit of either morally righteous or harmful/violent, but seize the agency that they’re claiming to fight for. Their good intentions are condescending, as they won’t allow Pam/Pam to be anything other than either a victim or an empowered hero. For all its faults, I would argue that the show casts her as a sacred victim/hero...
SACRIFICE
Pam and Tommy’s marriage fails coextensively with the video’s circulation. Pam is the hero of the show because she doesn’t react as Tommy does. Instead, says: give them what they want. Says, stop. Stops. Stops the velocity of transmission. Stops feeding the machine. Surrenders the secrets that are already exposed. Pam halts the velocity of transmission by becoming-sacrifice. To sacrifice – to destroy and to make sacred. In Medium, Messenger, and Transmission, Sybille Kramer describes René Girard’s theory of the sacrifice and violence, noting that Girard talks about the immunizing function of sacrifice as the mediator of a transmission event. The potential for violence is transmitted to the sacrifice – in an absolutely literal sense – and it can then be allayed and overcome in and through the sacrifice. The special status of the sacrificed thus becomes significant; like the neutrality of the messenger, it is caught between competing groups enmeshed in the reciprocal use of force.” The show positions Pam as caught between – between Tommy’s rage and her career – between her lawyer’s advice and her own intuition – on and on – until finally she gives the Internet Entertainment Group the rights to the tape for free. Her sacrifice halts the viral attack, immunizes, stops.
SAVE THE WORLD
Erotic love is often described in geometrical or mathematical terms.
TRIANGLES, THREES:
THE LOVER [hypercharged space in-between, sometimes called EROS] THE BELOVED
SENDER [ANGEL-DEMON..HERMES…THE INTERNET…WHATEVER] RECEIVER
SENDER [ANGEL-DEMON..HERMES…THE INTERNET…WHATEVER] RECEIVER
At Plato’s Symposium:
Love is connected to death. The tragedy of love. (Phaedrus)
We are halves walking around searching for wholeness.
Eros = pursuit of the whole that we were before we began and so ½ + ½ = 1. (Aristophanes)
The parents of Eros = Penia (Poverty) and Poros (Resource). Eros mediates between humans or god. Neither human nor god, Eros is a spirit – excess and lack – connected always to death, passion, and sacrifice. (Socrates with the help of Diotima, a wise woman)
A WEIRD NUMBERS GAME:
“Love’s curious arithmetic.” – Michel Serres, The Parasite
Love’s curious arithmetic, digitized.
INTERRUPTION OF THE BALANCE SHEET:
“Eros, however, represents an asymmetrical relationship to the Other. As such, it interrupts the exchange rate. Otherness admits no bookkeeping. It does not appear in the balance of debt and credit.” – Byung-Chul Han, The Agony of Eros
At the end of the world, there are no more secrets. Technology changes. All envelopes open. Pam & Tommy’s problem is our problem. An analog then digital tape’s maddening repetition forecloses the error that allows for encounter – the holy shit of love’s arrow – as networked air secretes secrets, as transmission quickens, apocalypse loops.
Love is mathematical catastrophe, mystical. Pam & Tommy reveals the catastrophic encounter with the Other, the shock of encountering a force that might alter the structure of a life:
Would you do me the insane honor of being my wife?
I would love to f*ck you in space.
What are you, the porn police?
I feel violated.
and the disruptive capacities of a new mode of transmission – secrets unveiled and gone viral – injects a catastrophe into the catastrophe, smoothing and stirring love’s deranged geometry. Saving the world means saving the Other – beholding the whole geometric spectrum of love, reading, messaging – what’s illegible, doesn’t add up, what’s crossed out, halts the drudgery of repetitive virality for the sake of silliness and tragedy. I don’t know. It is kind of supernatural.
I know what I do not know.
WORKS CITED
Augustine. City of God. New York: Penguin Classics, 2004.
Barthes, Roland. A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments. New York: Hill and Wang, 2010.
Baudrillard, Jean. The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena. New York: Verso, 2009.
Brinkema, Eugenie. Life-Destroying Diagrams. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022.
Debray, Regis. Transmitting Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.
Han, Byung-Chul. The Agony of Eros. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017.
Kramer, Sybille. Medium, Messenger, Transmission: An Approach to Media Philosophy. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015.
Peters, John Durham. The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016.
Plato. The Symposium. New York: Penguin Classics, 2003.
Serres, Michel. The Parasite. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.
Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace. Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2002.
Emmalea Russo is a writer and artist living at the Jersey shore. Her books are G (Futurepoem, 2018) and Wave Archive (Book*hug, 2019). Recent writing has appeared in Artforum, American Chordata, BOMB, The Brooklyn Rail, Granta, Hyperallergic, Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. She's pursuing a PhD in Philosophy and edits Asphalte Magazine.
For more of Emmalea’s work, go to https://emmalearusso.com/ and/or follow her on instagram at @emmalea.russo
More from Cloudbusting...
For more of Emmalea’s work, go to https://emmalearusso.com/ and/or follow her on instagram at @emmalea.russo
More from Cloudbusting...
January 7, 2021
On Spiritual Creatures
Analog and Digital
By EMMALEA RUSSO
The Net (Irwin Winkler, 1995)On the winter beach something moves in the zone between where I stand and you speak. Thin gleam of sheet white light on waving repeat when into the space between I throw the light of this screen.
To see the messenger’s form and to make the middle glow or DICE THROW in an attempt to reach you I click on a link which writes its destination:
<a>
<a>
<a>
Wavelength (1967) plays a continuous zoom on an empty-full room —-->
IN
IN
IN
lens revealed as moving eye ruled by what it’s in front of and behind.
Material things, says Thomas Aquinas, must have something holding them together other than their parts. A slice of meat THROWN
into a field of light to make it loop, enter
a body, loop, leave a body, loop, become a body.
Angels and other immaterial creatures of organization (like us) are always dying. MOVING in wave disturbances. An energy-carrying medium.
An angel, says Aquinas, might be pure form. The distance between wave crests. “Spiritual substance” or the speed of a wave divided by frequency or “divine thing” or when the medium’s wings glow then vanish upon delivery. Delivery. Something speaks. A throw of the die’s knife-edge between there and here along wired-up
vertical
road
screen
sea.
When a form makes itself known. Brilliant frock coat appears. Again and again and again without end the wave breaks-crests-breaks-again. I have not reached you yet. AN ANGEL
falls too-bright light
becomes Lucifer as
waves freeze-frame
repeat where I stand
on the beach. Here
and there.
A very very awe-inducing morning star with white light of film and/or beyond. True or false light masquerading as air. Film in which there appear sprocket holes, edge lettering, dirt particles, etc. (1965-66) is a film by George Landow in which we see the form of the film’s trembling noise. The babble at the beginning of a world-film’s test strip. Dirt keeps bizarre time. The system moves. There is the risk of fire. Flicker and lettered glimpses. So close to the form we see its vision shooting from eyes in zigzags, swift dissolve. Wavelength, dying messenger, wavelength, repeated together.
A rebel angel adds its own sound to the message. Like me right now or sprocket holes as translucent form runs along the edge of the wheel. Wavelength getting closer to here. Medium excess gets hard to hold in the head. Light spreads its revelation, loop, wave, moving message.
I write to you and some of what moves thru
POETRY IS ALSO VERTICAL
I write to you and some of what moves thru
POETRY IS ALSO VERTICAL
me to you
sticks and escapes
blue digital
then analog
material between
sea and screen.
Something speaks.
In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche writes: “The devil has the broadest perspectives for God; therefore he keeps so far away from God–the devil being the most ancient friend of wisdom.”
Alarmingly bright thing gets dragged across the sky in between permeabilities this distant vision can’t see. Use something other than the eyes. Rotting light leaving behind RESIDUE
clinging as this light
speaks through me
to you? Reach and decay
repeat
repeat
repeat
then leave the frame.
In a trembling cool white moment from Michael Snow’s Wavelength, a frame shows itself, projector blue's bleeding edge. Lengthy beep where light, angel-demon, gets heard and seen. Falling, something speaks. Dying flare pushing through screen:
What can the painting/screen/sea see? A breeze a breeze a penetrating breeze. Light, meat, famous nativity. Wavelength was shot during one week in December 1966 after years of conceiving. The goal: a moment of pure filmic space time. The blue-green-yellow beep plays behind a scene. The message DELIVERED SMASHED
is delivered again alarmingly blue
serene we speak as we enter
the room. We are in the room
getting closer and closer while
eyeing the lit threshold of a film
moving with the reel. Hearing
it hum. Then we go. Thick
light on digital liturgy. The angel
Gabriel did a fine 3-part job:
deliver, explain, depart.
We end with a photograph of the sea on a wall. The head of a pin is a place. Angels are placeless. A text message’s lit-up blue holds part of the room up on this sizzling winged shelf MICROSCOPIC
not quite itself.
What can film fit on?
How many angels can fit
on the edge of its reel?
What film plays
on the head of a pin?
The text message is
a Paul Virilio quote:
“God has come back
into history through
the door of terror.”
In the 1995 film The Net, computers seem new and strange, digital screens with their own light suddenly mediating sky, ground, hand, film, fireplace. Sandra Bullock plays a computer programmer. All day she clicks. A hyperlink is a wired-up electronic door.
<a>
<a>
<a>
She enters chat rooms and talks to cyberbuddies. We don't know who animates these entities. Angel, skull, smiley face. Michel Serres says that the Annunciation asks the question of the intermediary: “...if he is too magnificent, he may intercept the message; if he is too discreet, he won’t make it heard. Must he appear or disappear? Both one and the other? How?” Serres describes the Annunciation as “the perfect message” because simultaneously “word and act.”
A messenger may fuck up.
Something speaks louder
than its end. Time passes.
A scroll unfurls from hand
hangs suspended midair.
In the above early 15th century depiction of the Annunciation, a scroll extends between the two figures, the angel Gabriel and Mary. An unwound reel. The sea is a fixed image moving on a wall. On screen, I scroll, click. All angels and waves recede for an instant and we’re left with what was delivered. FRIGHTENING
Or,
U
lacerating
catching
hook
Or,
THE MESSENGER IS A CHANCE like in Zorns Lemma (1970) when Hollis Frampton shows us many signs in quick succession, among them this flash of angel and dice:
Thomas Aquinas, angelic doctor, says angels are placeless but they can act upon places, pushing and powering arenas. A hook is the item Georges Bataille associates with chance. A fall blocked by the hook of chance, knife-arrow curved into U may rip and/or act as a saving grace. Bataille writes: “Chance, which eludes me, plays in the heavens. The sky: oblique link uniting me with those who breathe beneath its expanse; even uniting me with beings yet to come. How to bear the question of the multitude of particular beings?”
Innumerable spiritual creatures and oblique (hyper)links. Without divine order, chance mediates.
Alejandra Pizarnik’s poem “Exile” ends:
angels beautiful as knives
that rise up at night
as hope’s devestations.
LIGHT WRITES ITSELF IN LIQUID NIGHT, CUTS THRU
frenetic in Marie Menken’s Lights (1966). She writes: “Made during the brief Christmas-lit season, usually between the hours of midnight and 1:00 A.M., when vehicle and foot traffic was light, over a period of three years. Based on store decorations, window displays, fountains, public promenades, Park Avenue lights, building and church facades. I had to keep my camera under my coat to warm it up, as the temperature was close to zero much of the time.”
On the December beach I watch one surfer carry a surfboard out of the ocean like a heavy wing. Between us: air, cold phones, hair, ocean foam, light blur, something I can’t see or hear.
Emmalea Russo is a writer and artist living at the Jersey shore. Her books are G (Futurepoem, 2018) and Wave Archive (Book*hug, 2019). Recent writing has appeared in Artforum, American Chordata, BOMB, The Brooklyn Rail, Granta, Hyperallergic, Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. She's pursuing a PhD in Philosophy and edits Asphalte Magazine.
For more of Emmalea’s work, go to https://emmalearusso.com/ and/or follow her on instagram at @emmalea.russo
For more of Emmalea’s work, go to https://emmalearusso.com/ and/or follow her on instagram at @emmalea.russo
August 27, 2021
Undigested Fragments
Erotic Goo and Absent Messages
By EMMALEA RUSSO
DREAM STRANGER
We exit the blue-lit room and enter an abandoned stripmall. Skateboarders skate along the empty floor, back and forth as Dream Stranger and me stand in awe. Suddenly, a ringing flip phone in my trembling hand, brand new and very old. The ringing phone means I have to go, pulled away from Dream Stranger. Walking away from him and the mall, his mysterious textured pants and familiar look, our eyes lock, analog and digital and beyond, musical swoosh of wheels on old mall tiles.
Ahead of me: the star-like work of inscribing his message into our own uncertain future and the decay of light. But I already forgot the message. I carry the absence of the message into my day and for hours it hangs like a cloud between me and everything I see. What’s between me and the world is composed of loose threads and turquoise and pink toys, plush and smooshed like Mike Kelley’s old stuffed animals sewn together and hanging from a ceiling. Where is Dream Stranger? What was the embroidered message?
Everywhere: stuffed animals and thread and a foggy absence I carry carefully, trying not to walk through it, disperse it. The cloud’s a cloud. Then: night, the kind that arrives as a dazzling chandelier fuzzing-out the center of the field I’ve arrived in. A shadow of sewn-up cloud moving over Dream Stranger and me, Mike Kelley’s Deodorized Central Mass with Satellites. In the waking world, digitized, deodorized, I am met with a series of yes or no questions and a few boxes to check. I blink into the screen, then into the analog beyond, a mass of matted toys flattened and smoothed into pixels as my limbs leave the screen like candelabra arms in Jean Cocteau’s foggy Beauty and the Beast. Trapped, enchanted, both/and.
Click every image in which a skateboard appears. Click every image in which a thread appears. A thread appears. I attempt to type out the dream message, repeat its absence many times, cloud-like chunk of what I’ve forgotten and skulk around obliquely, no trail. I cannot name it. Outside at twilight, the absence of the threaded message takes on new resonance, sharp like the silver point in Barbara Kruger’s Untitled (Thinking of You), where an unfastened safety pin presses into a fingertip. The red headline reads:
THINKING OF YOU.
Thinking of you, I repeat many times into the cloud I move around. YOU are not there. The absence of YOU is like a pin pressing into the finger. A safety pin is meant to clasp, hold things together. The finger is not yet punctured by the pin, though there’s the YOU’s distance and almost-wound at the flesh’s threshold. If YOU arrive, will the pin go into the skin? A painful relief-release? If YOU arrive, will the pin re-enter its clasp, secured?
Barbara Kruger. Untitled (Thinking of You). 1999
TRANSPARENT OPAQUE
In the book’s preface, Han writes: “Transparent communication is communication that has a smoothing and leveling effect. It leads to uniformity. It eliminates Otherness.” Constant exhibition and masses of information eliminate erotic assymetries, thresholds, edges, ambiguous goo and blurry edges of poetry, those undigestable pieces, toys hanging from the ceiling, stitched together, a needle about to press into a fingertip, writing with one’s bodily fluids. The dream returns, a virtuality I walk around and around, a cloud that secretly shapes my moves, weaving veils and glimmers which illuminate the past in uncanny fractures of light, threading slowly some possible futures.
Under consumer capitalism, information (clickable) is meant to be immediately assimilable. In our digital experiences, largely regulated by Big Tech, what happens to the Other? To the absent message? The dream—Thinking of You—stranger? Mystical experience, which Georges Bataille (following mystics like Angela of Foligno) sometimes relates to erotic experience, is cloudy and requires slanted points of entry, a negative theology, fuzzy and at times formless, risky.
“Formless” is a prose poem-like definition of a slippery term, part of a text that Georges Bataille wrote for the surrealist journal Documents in 1929. Philosophy, writes Bataille, seeks to “give a frock coat to what is.” A shape, form, name. However, to say the universe is formless “amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit.” Bataille is suspicious of mathematical frock coats and modernism’s affinity for categorizations and mastery. Instead of bringing what’s apparently low or formless into dominant economies to be circulated and subsumed, Bataille brings art to base materialism in a reversal echoing Nietzsche, who often associated art with animality and the body.
“Formless: A User’s Guide,” a 1996 exhibition in Paris curated by Rosalind Krauss, employed Bataille’s ideas about formlessness and included the work of Mike Kelley, Mel Bochner, and Cindy Sherman, among others. Moments of continuity or formlessness, slippages or materials that overflow utility or may defy categorization and deal with what’s uncanny, abject, ‘low,’ bodily, erotic.
Mel Bochner. Transparent and Opaque. 1968, printed 1998.
One of the pieces included in the show was Mel Bochner’s Transparent Opaque, a series of photographs arranged in a grid, each one displaying ambiguous goo or slime in a variety of colors. Vaseline spread across glass or plastic and lit by pink, purple, turquoise light and opaque substances resembling shaving cream, sensuous and hard to identify. In On Nietzsche, the third book in his Atheological Summa, a trilogy of mystical writings composed during the second world war, Bataille writes:
Sensuality is nothing without an equivocal shift—in which suddenly there is this glimpse of a demented ‘goo’ that, although normally escaping us, suddenly seems attainable. The ‘goo’ still gets away. But in the brief glimpse our hearts beat with deranged hopes. It’s such hopes as these that, jumbled all together and pushing forward, finally allow the surging forth of... Often, a deranged beyond lacerates us while we’re apparently bent on lasciviousness.
Erotic goo, unattainable but profoundly affecting, makes the heart beat with “deranged hope.” And in this brief and uncapturable glimpse, an encounter with an Other—Dream Stranger, digital, divine, or otherwise—formlessness ensues. One can’t capture the seepage, a deranged hope clouds the scene. His thought trails off after something—a space for something, surges forth, then picks up again.
In contrast to the “transparent communication,” uniform and flat, that Byung-Chul Han says we’re plagued by these days under digitized neoliberal capitalism, Bataille continues the above thought with an attempt to define an entirely different kind of communication, intimate and excessive, open but not exactly transparent: “The communication of two individuals occurs when they lose themselves in sweet, shared slime...” Selves get lost in a slime reminiscent of Mel Bochner’s gridded textures of colorful vaselines and creams. In an erotic and intimate communication, we can never really attain or grasp the Other, piece of art, text, atmosphere, on and on. We try, we slip.
On Nietzsche feels undigested and also resists digestion. A different, slower, and more divergent reading practice is required. Bataille writes from personal experience, at times diaristic and fragmentary. When I first opened the book, I expected to read about Nietzsche. Instead, On Nietzsche acts as a tilted guidebook filled with oblique and overgrown paths into Nietzsche via Bataille’s encounters with Christian and non-western mystical writings and Nietzsche’s work. Still, it slowly shows ways one might approach, read, assimilate, and leave undigested parts of any text.
In a way, On Nietzsche shows the dangers of thinking you’ve digested or fully assimilated...anything. Bataille attempted to save Nietzsche’s writing from posthumous fascist appropriations, showing how his work is resistant to easy subsumption into any political agenda or book. To leave certain parts undigested (opaque), to leave room for multiplicity and flux and bodily chaos of thought itself, is a kind of ethics. I’m thinking here about Simone Weil’s warnings against eating or consuming the object of one’s desire and Ingeborg Bachmann’s insistence that fascism begins in the relationships between people. About Bataille’s mystical wartime trilogy, Amy Hollywood writes: “These books contain ample quotations from Nietzsche’s texts and from those of the mystics—undigested hunks and fragments of these illusive writings...”
NOT DIGESTIBLE
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Kelly, Milke. Deodorized Central Mass with Satellites. 1991-1999.
Kelly, Milke. Deodorized Central Mass with Satellites. 1991-1999.In Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation, which employs poetic and associative logic against totalities and colonialism, a crucial part of Glissant’s concept of relation involves opacity.
If we examine the process of ‘understanding’ people and ideas from the perspective of Western thought, we discover that its basis is this requirement for transparency. In order to understand and thus accept you, I have to measure your solidity with the ideal scale providing me with grounds to make comparisons and, perhaps, judgements. I have to reduce.
Relation is mobile, pushing against fixity. Glissant reminds us that we can relate to a person without understanding or grasping them. He continues: “Agree not merely to the right to difference but, carrying this further, agree also to the right to opacity that is not enclosure within an impenetrable autarchy but subsistence within an irreducible singularity. Opacities can coexist and converge, weaving fabrics.” Against a closed loop of understanding, Glissant clamors for an opening that spills over as he illustrates these seepages in the text itself, linking-up poetry and relation through their weird weaves, loose threads and generative convergences which work to trouble reduction of place, person, idea.
Intimate communication or relation opens space for the other, erotic goo, intriguing though not exactly digestible. Always already overflowing itself in incalculable flows, hard to scroll over or forget and equally hard to store. Messages or Dream Strangers that resist legibility, opaque-shimmering thicknesses that stick to memory and arrive over and over in flashes. Clicks that may turn into punctures, thinking of you, a you that’s both here and not, an I that is also another, loosening the bones to gooey formlessness as it backlights another zone, perhaps pink and turquoise vaseline on glass, a grid of photographs, a deodorized mass.
WORKS CITED
Bataille, Georges. On Nietzsche, tr. Bruce Boone. St. Paul, MN: Paragon House, 1998, p.97-98.
Bataille, Georges. Visions of Excess, tr. Allan Stoekl. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1985, p. 31.
Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation, tr. Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1997, p. 189-190.
Han, Byung-Chul. Transparency Society, tr. Erik Butler. Stanford, CA: Stanford Briefs, 2015, p. vii.
Hollywood, Amy. Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002, p. 101.
Nietzsche, Frederich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, tr. Adrian Del Caro. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006, p 27.
Emmalea Russo is a writer and artist living at the Jersey shore. Her books are G (Futurepoem, 2018) and Wave Archive (Book*hug, 2019). Recent writing has appeared in Artforum, American Chordata, BOMB, The Brooklyn Rail, Granta, Hyperallergic, Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. She's pursuing a PhD in Philosophy and edits Asphalte Magazine.
For more of Emmalea’s work, go to https://emmalearusso.com/ and/or follow her on instagram at @emmalea.russo
For more of Emmalea’s work, go to https://emmalearusso.com/ and/or follow her on instagram at @emmalea.russo
September 25, 2021
THE DAZZLING
By EMMALEA RUSSO
“There is no speaking of it, nor name nor knowledge of it.
Darkness and light, error and truth—it is none of these.
-Pseudo-Dionysius, The Mystical Theology
“I am not a philosopher, but a saint, maybe a madman.”
– Georges Bataille, Method of Meditation
“But this night of mine can’t be killed by any sun.”
– Alejandra Pizarnik, “The Green Table”
Ingmar Bergman’s The Passion of Anna (1969) shows a disintegrating relationship between Anna (Liv Ullman) and Andreas (Max von Sydow) in disjointed associative leaps. The present fills with residues of a past catastrophe which haunts Anna as an ominous future horror hangs over the film like another film. Mind and world deteriorate in plays of light and darkness. The film opens as Andreas repairs his roof which has “long been in disrepair.” He pauses and squints into the bright sky which contains multiple suns. The bucket of cement falls to the ground.
It’s a question of proximity. Glimmering trash on the ground, uncomfortable close-ups, multiple suns, tiny transcendences under minimart lights. Proximity to sun, lamp, page, face, experience.
Is there a right light for writing? Direct experience? Receiving messages from the dead? Is the light which facilitated a work always the light it emits? Or is there a gap, a spillover, light or night that can’t be accounted for? How does the persistent light of our screens delete and mutate proximity and distance? What facilitates dazzlement, being so close, too close -- to sun, lamp, face, divine, other, ground?
In “The Night, The Poem” Alejandra Pizarnik writes: “In fact, I do not write: I widen a breach so that the messages of the dead can reach me at twilight.” Writing is the process of creating an opening for messages, an active receptivity that is also not writing.
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When does the writer/lover/filmmaker/mystic’s passage-making and desire for union tilt into madness? Ingmar Bergman wrote The Passion of Anna “in a white heat” aiming to “make a black-and-white film in color, with certain hues emphasized in a strictly defined color scale. It turned out to be difficult.” 
In an uncomfortable and hypnotic monologue half-way through the film, Anna tells Andreas about her former marriage, which she describes as a thrilling/dissolving oneness (similar to the way certain mystics speak of union with God) as her eyes gleam. Bergman makes faces into landscapes and here, Anna’s works like a dazzling sun we’re impossibly near.
The Mystical Theology, written by the 5th or 6th century pseudonymous mystic Pseudo-Dionysius and influential for Christian mystical traditions in the Middle Ages, speaks of the divine as beyond speech or description. A “brilliant darkness of a hidden silence” and a “darkness beyond intellect,” highlighting spiritual experience over understanding. The seven page text begins with a question: “What is the divine darkness?” Is this the night Pizarnik speaks of? The night of the poem? The “complete togetherness” that Anna recalls in the film?
In the trilogy of books written during World War II, Georges Bataille connects the writings of Nietzsche with those of the Christian mystic Angela of Foligno (1248-1309), whose bodily devotions included washing hands and feet of lepers and then drinking the water, stripping naked in front of the cross, convulsing, and meditating on portions of Christ’s crucified flesh. This unlikely connection, I think, has to do with unmediated experience. The I/eye of the philosopher, dazzled, might become the I/eye of mystic. In his book on Bataille, Rodolphe Gasché writes about the theorizing eye of the philosopher:
“Never looking up in order to avoid the danger of being dazzled, strips the perceived images of their materiality in order to perceive in them eternal forms and essences. But a look at the things themselves would dazzle his vision like a look at the sun, which still appears to the philosopher as the guarantee of every truth.”
In forsaking cool distance to look at things in themselves, philosophy risks a dazzlement which might swerve the old theory/experience binary. According to Angela of Foligno, the divine darkness shows the soul “nothing and everything at once.”
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The multiple suns at the start of The Passion of Anna divine the structure of the film. Just as the violence of the Vietnam War heightened on-set stress, interviews with the actors get interjected and trouble demarcations between reality/fiction, actor/character, nearness/distance. Liv Ullman says that while she sympathizes with her character’s need for truth, the quest has become dangerous. Not finding what she seeks, she takes “refuge in lies and imagination.”
In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche writes: “When after a forceful attempt to gaze at the sun we turn away blinded, we see dark-colored spots before our eyes, as a cure, as it were.” Later, in his introduction to Twilight of the Idols (dated September 30, 1888, a few months before his nervous collapse in Turin), Nietzsche writes that the book is a kind of sunspot, a place to rest. When is the darkness a restorative retreat? When does the retreat become a hideaway? When might the hideaway open into terror, deterioration?
Sunspot writing. Philosophy becomes poetry becomes autobiography becomes divine revelation becomes silence. Sunspot writing is perhaps performed in bursts (Nietzsche often paused to write aphorisms while walking) alternating between afternoon sun and dazzling darkness, writing and walking. Walking is sometimes writing. Writing is sometimes not writing.
I often photograph the ground, glimmers that catch my eye or that I might ordinarily pass over, usually something discarded or dropped and curiously lit by sun or streetlight. Over the years, I’ve amassed a glittering digital archive of trash.
Beyond what Nietzsche named “permanent daylight—the daylight of reason,” the dazzled one has a paradoxical relationship to light. According to Bataille, Nietzsche wrote from a night emerging from excesses of light, and perhaps went mad from it:
“The tragedy of Nietzsche is the tragedy of night emerging from excesses of light.
His eyes emboldened and wide open, like an eagle in flight: the sun of immorality and dazzling malice left him blinded.
It’s a dazzled man who speaks.
The most difficult thing.
Getting as far down as possible.
Down to where everything thrown to the ground is shattered. Your nose in a puddle of vomit.”
Light slips and splits. Things of this world, up-close, might unlock a sunspot, a place to write. Pseudo-Dionysius describes this divine darkness as higher than light. To be dazzled is to be so near to something (the sun, the divine, a lamp, a sidewalk, a text, a puddle) that it stuns and confuses. Dazzled knowledge is limit knowledge, perilous, often silent, hard to describe.
In “Sex, Night” Pizarnik writes, “Night opens itself only once. It’s enough. You see.” Then the self, like the sun in the film, multiplies: “Fear of being two in the mirror, and suddenly we’re four.” Often, one doesn't choose this dazzling darkness. It arrives through the breach in Pizarnik’s poem. It comes through poverty, illness, or other precarious situations which take a person out of/into the world in disquieting proximities to light, truth, self, other. I photographed dazzling ground in part because I frequently ended up there, having fallen during epileptic seizures, moments that felt mad, my eye/I dissolved. I have to write around these experiences. I can’t write from them. Still, maybe those falls and contortions are a kind of silent writing.
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Who gets to have distance? What (ir)rationality is inherent in collecting and organizing images and making narratives? Near the film’s end, Anna and Andreas communicate in a vacuum of inky darkness. There is always a remainder, a gap or an excess, dazzling or disorienting, between two people, between what happened and the story we tell, between the filmmaker’s vision and how we receive the film as viewers.
Georges Bataille’s brief essay “Rotten Sun” describes two suns, one productive and one combustive:
- The reasonable and elevated sun gives form to our days. Distant, it allows us to see.
- The rotten sun decomposes forms and melts Icarus’s waxen wings: “If on the other hand one obstinately focuses on it, a certain madness is implied, and the notion changes meaning because it is no longer production that appears in light, but refuse or combustion, adequately expressed by the horror emanating from a brilliant arc lamp.”
The sun, so often regarded in philosophy as an unwavering truth source, is also a perishable material. Blisters, headache, disorientation, nausea, and vomiting: symptoms of sun poisoning. Reaching a limit, the sun switches, it’s a dazzled man who speaks.
Up-close, we see other worlds, suns, selves born from rot. We encounter a bodily beyond engendered by proximal experience. Under what light and at what proximity to night, sun, sidewalk, does a person become a philosopher, a saint, a poet, reasonable, mad?
Alexander Irwin defines saint, in Saints of the Impossible: Bataille, Weil, and the Politics of the Sacred, in terms of corporeality and service:
“Saints are beings who, instead of trying to crystallize the abstract essence of courage or justice in yet another theory, enact courage and justice in real-life situations and inspire others to do likewise. Saints offer not airy discourse but their own flesh, a ‘saintly corporeality,’ risked in the service of the other.”
Currently, I’m sitting at my desk. The room is comfortably lit, and the blue light of the computer screen mixes with memories that return, words of various dazzled thinkers, and the film. It’s a question of proximity. I write around the dazzling, a moth circling a gas station light.
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Narrated by Bergman himself, we might also read the white heat of multiple suns at the film’s start as a distortion forecast. Productive and combustive suns hanging in one sky, hooking-up the film with the conditions under which it was made, theory with direct experience, an actor with her character.
Just as I begin to sink into the world of the film, an interview with one of the actors arrives to remind me that I’m in at least three worlds (with three suns?):
- diegetic world of the movie
- historical and temporal moment in which the film was made
- my own material reality as I watch
The sun and screen light the room.
After a heated argument, Andreas gets out of the car and begins to walk. Anna drives away. The camera moves closer to Andreas as he paces back and forth. Closer and closer, Andreas blurs into the environment as the film ends.
What’s lost to/revealed in the dazzling?
There is no speaking of it.
Weather says: chance of rain then maybe-sun. A neon reflection in smudged glass, a perfume ad, a bottle of soda, gas station lights in a puddle, paused film, a piece of fabric weathered from overuse or sun.
WORKS CITED
All screen grabs (taken by Emmalea Russo) are from Ingmar Bergman’s The Passion of Anna (1969). Source: criterionchannel.com
Angela of Foligno. The Complete Works. Trans. Paul Lachance. New York: Paulist Press, 1993.
Bataille, Georges. Guilty. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2011.
Bataille, Georges. On Nietzsche, tr. Bruce Boone. St. Paul, MN: Paragon House, 1994.
Bataille, Georges. The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge, tr. Michelle and Stuart Kendall. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001.
Bergman, Ingmar. Images: My Life in Film. New York: Arcade, 2017.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner. New York: Vintage Books, 1967.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ. London: Penguin, 1968.
Pizarnik, Alejandra. Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962-1972. New York: New Directions, 2016.
Pizarnik, Alejandra. The Galloping Hour: French Poems. New York: New DIrections, 2018.
Pseudo-Dionysius. The Complete Works. New York: Paulist Press, 1987.
Emmalea Russo is a writer and artist living at the Jersey shore. Her books are G (Futurepoem, 2018) and Wave Archive (Book*hug, 2019). Recent writing has appeared in Artforum, American Chordata, BOMB, The Brooklyn Rail, Granta, Hyperallergic, Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. She's pursuing a PhD in Philosophy and edits Asphalte Magazine.
For more of Emmalea’s work, go to https://emmalearusso.com/ and/or follow her on instagram at @emmalea.russo
For more of Emmalea’s work, go to https://emmalearusso.com/ and/or follow her on instagram at @emmalea.russo
More From Cloudbusting:
October 29, 2021
Derangement
Revolting Memories, Deranged Forms, and Lost Highways(s)
By EMMALEA RUSSO
“Night brings formal terrors: an obliteration of the grounding divisor of the horizon, a punctuated vision against an indifferent and unmarked field of duration, unmoored in time and space.” — Eugenie Brinkema, The Forms of the Affects
“We’ve met before, haven’t we?” – Mystery Man, Lost Highway (1997)
AN EXCHANGE
DETECTIVE: Do you own a video camera?
RENEE: No. Fred hates them.
FRED: I like to remember things my own way.
DETECTIVE: What do you mean by that?
FRED: How I remembered them. Not necessarily the way they happen.
Lost Highway (1997)
THE FORM OF THE HEADLIGHT
It begins and ends at night, David Bowie’s “I’m Deranged” playing over the Lost Highway, smudges of white headlights emblazoning the road in fast flickers. The yellow line of road disappears under whatever vehicle we’re inside of. Again and again. A mechanism pushes forward and meets itself, affixing the start to the finish. Almost. Lines fall fast out of frame and into pure night. We appear to be rushing forward. Towards what? Line. Line. Line. The film, a line deranging into an almost-circle, feels like headlights pushing through plastic, illuminating in fuzzy defusions what moves.
DERANGED
To derange is to disarrange. A line thrown into disorder, made to curve and bend into chaos. A Mobius strip, affixed to itself and infinitely looping, cut. The clear plastic curves of videotape wound into reels. When we are beside ourselves. When we split, then multiply. A phosphorescent strip between what happened and what’s recalled.
LOST HIGHWAY
The exchange about memory and video cameras happens near the beginning of David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997). Fred and Renee are a married couple who’ve been receiving anonymous surveillance videos of themselves and their home. Memory is what returns flecked with forgetting, falsities, and imagination. To watch the film is to read the textured topology of lost highways and how they move, what moves them: fast asphalt, slow red curtain, deliquescent static, bright blue light, silver gleam of intercom.
YELLOW LINES
At the start, someone is filming/watching Fred and Renee. Shots of the outside of their home give way to footage from the inside. Fred and Renee, disturbed, watch themselves sleeping from a bird’s eye view. Finally, the footage further invades, replacing or glitching Fred’s own head.
NOISE, STATIC, TRANSMISSION
Lost Highway is filled with technological mediums, recording devices, and bodies acting on each other. Like Francis Bacon’s paintings, where unseen forces stretch bodily forms to their bizarre limits – deform, dissolve, and spasm – Lost Highway reveals the deranging qualities of the medium we’re watching. As viewers, we’re always already on the lost highway.
Watching the film again, I’m struck by how much I’ve forgotten, by those parts I’ve remembered falsely or not at all, and by those elements which have stuck with me. Speaking about Lost Highway, David Lynch said “this is going to be a strange interview because I can’t remember so many things.”
A message delivered through a medium, disembodied, to layer a scene, not always sensical. At the start of the film, the first words we hear (“Dick Laurent is dead”) arrive through an intercom as Fred holds his finger on the LISTEN button. The film dilates the inter: existing between spasms, between transmission sent and message received, between experience and memory.
WAKING OUT OF THAT FORGETFULNESS
Composed and decomposed on videotape. In A Lover’s Discourse, Roland Barthes writes: “What does ‘thinking of you’ mean? It means: forgetting ‘you’ (without forgetting, life itself is not possible) and frequently waking out of that forgetfulness. Many things, by association, bring you back into my discourse. ‘Thinking of you’ means precisely this metonymy.”
If forgetting, as Barthes claims, makes life possible, what happens to life under instant digital recall, a phenomenon which Lost Highway calls toward. “The word digital points to the finger (digitus). Above all, the finger counts. Digital culture is based on the counting finger,” writes Byung-Chul Han in In the Swarm. But (human) memory cannot be counted or quantified. It involves the whole body and like Lynch’s film, it is filled with gaps, silences, and oblique on/off ramps.
Lost Highway gives us long unwieldy stretches of not-knowing. Are the terrifying turns that Fred’s life has taken (he doesn’t seem to remember killing his wife but the act is on videotape, for instance) a result of human or supernatural intervention? Memory, with its glitches and curtains mixes with memory (data storage, videotape) and a chaotic play of contiguous universes ensues.
SHORT LOOPS AND SPASMS
“The movement of translation occurs between two spasms,” wrote Gilles Deleuze in The Logic of Sensation about Francis Bacon’s paintings. Lost highways (surreal, spastic, textured, unruly, static-ridden) get truncated and paved over during times of algorithmic digital recall. In The Hours Have Lost Their Clock: The Politics of Nostalgia, Grafton Tanner writes about this quickening loop, which works to immediately petrify experience into technological memory: “Frozen into data, posts and content can be called up at whim, instead of merely forgotten. Before the age of Big Tech, nostalgic cycles were wider.”
At the interstice between experience and memory runs a deranged highway along which forms compose and decompose. As Fred stares at his prison cell door on death row, a burning cabin appears, then reconstitutes itself. A dazzling blue light appears, an intensity portalling Fred somewhere else as he rocks back and forth in pain. A stranger stands at the side of the road. The sequence acts like a Francis Bacon painting, a body becoming a series of forces morphing, escaping its edges.
DIVERGENCE, SPLITS, BOUNDARIES
The film splits. We enter the world of Pete and Alice, doubles of Fred and Renee. Eventually, near the end of a hallucinogenic love scene lit by car headlights, music mutates from angelic to suspenseful and the thin veil between seduction and horror breaks. Again, a switch. A world born from a broken-open instant, a blue light, the same note played on the same instrument in different weather.
We enter a dynamic sublime, blurs of sensation escaping frame and body. Here and elsewhere. Julia Kristeva, in The Powers of Horror: “Not at all short of but always with and through perception and words, the sublime is a something added that expands us, overstrains us, and causes us to be both here, as dejects, and there, as others and sparkling. A divergence, an impossible bounding. Everything missed, joy—fascination.”
BETWEEN
A divergence, an impossible bounding.
Here and there.
Composed and decomposed on videotape.
An uncanny residue, a line lit by a car we cannot see, moves between viewer and screen. In Cinema 2, Gilles Deleuze writes about interstitial moments in cinema – betweens which generate perceptual shifts, changes in how we see film and world: “Between two actions, between two affections, between two perceptions, between two visual images, between two sound images, between the sound and the visual: make the indiscernible, that is the frontier, visible.”
Interpretations of the film often revolve around the split between reality and dream, noting that Fred (Bill Pullman) enters an illusory space after his feelings of inadequacy and suspicion drive him to kill his wife. Zizek claims that the film is about “the enigma of feminine desire.” But there are also tunnels of visible yet indiscernible communications between viewer and film, bound to each other through plays of lost highways, surface tension, curtain, and static.
REVOLT AND STORAGE
In the blue-lit oneiric sequence between Fred’s prison cell and Pete, there’s revolt. A body in revolt: overturning, overthrowing and a body in revolt: turning, rolling back. A turn of the film, video, Mobius strip, road, body. Condensed pain moves across abstract frames. In Revolt, She Said, Julia Kristeva writes:
It is precisely a technocratic ideology that is supposed to abolish anxiety. But what I am saying is the opposite: anxiety, repulsion, nothingness are essential aspects of freedom. That’s what revolt is. When one abolishes revolt that is linked to anxiety and rejection, there is no reason to change. You store things and keep storing. It’s a banker’s idea, not an idea of a rebel, which spreads this technocratic ideology.
The hallucinatory flicker between scenes houses what cannot be stored, pointing us back to our own surroundings in the flat black silence framing an indiscernible blur, a body twisting in the corner of the frame. A form of revolt slips out from storage, interpretation, representation.
AN EXCHANGE
DETECTIVE: Do you own a video camera?
RENEE: No. Fred hates them.
FRED: I like to remember things my own way.
DETECTIVE: What do you mean by that?
FRED: How I remembered them. Not necessarily the way they happen.
Lost Highway (1997)
BETWEEN SPASMS
With its doubles, almosts, déjà vu, repetitions, curtains, holes, and loops, Lost Highway shows the distortive aspects of technological mediums as both destructive and fruitful. New mysteries and mysticisms emerge, more devices through which messages get delivered, distorted, broken open. Bookended by spasms, an ending which touches the beginning as it escapes, we return to the same road changed, deranged.
WORKS CITED
*All screenshots (from Lost Highway, dir. David Lynch, 1997) are by Emmalea Russo.
Barthes, Roland. A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, tr. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977, p. 157.
Brinkema, Eugenie. The Forms of the Affects. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014, p. 232.
Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time-Image, tr. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989, p. 180.
Han, Byung-Chul. In the Swarm: Digital Prospects, tr. Erik Butler. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2017.
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, tr. Leon Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.
Kristeva, Julia. Revolt, She Said, tr. Brian O’Keefe. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2002, pp. 101-2.
Kristeva, Julia. Tales of Love, tr. Leon Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987, p. 125.
Tanner, Grafton. The Hours Have Lost Their Clock: The Politics of Nostalgia. New York: Repeater, 2021.
Emmalea Russo is a writer and artist living at the Jersey shore. Her books are G(Futurepoem, 2018) and Wave Archive (Book*hug, 2019). Recent writing has appeared in Artforum, American Chordata, BOMB, The Brooklyn Rail, Granta, Hyperallergic, Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. She's pursuing a PhD in Philosophy and edits Asphalte Magazine.
For more of Emmalea’s work, go to https://emmalearusso.com/ and/or follow her on instagram at @emmalea.russo
For more of Emmalea’s work, go to https://emmalearusso.com/ and/or follow her on instagram at @emmalea.russo
More From Cloudbusting:
September 15th, 2021
Writing the Wound: The Production of the Real in S.M.H.’s CICATRIZATION
By LEONARD KLOSSNER
S.M.H.’s full length debut Cicatrization is a hypnotic and extreme work of fiction filled with equal parts beauty and agony. Leonard Klossner takes a deep dive into this pseudonymous work, released on Infinity Land Press in 2020.
Cicatrization does not reveal to us the sheer ugliness of its face right away, but grants us an odd respite before we will have suffered a moment of its insane barbarity. Instead, the text is prefaced by an interview of the author, S.M.H., by Martin Bladh, co-founder of the book’s publisher, Infinity Land Press. The author, asked if they believe writing to be an engagement which nears the violence of a criminal act “in the same way Jean Genet stated that his ‘impulse to murder was diverted into poetic impulses’,” S.M.H. responds that, for them, writing “is a sublimated impulse to commit anti-social violence against the whole of the civilized world,” and that the highest honor would be for someone having read their work to become inspired to murder “someone important.”
Cicatrization finds itself at home with Infinity Land Press among a host of titles that share a thematic thread of violence, pathological obsession, transgression, and mania. Both founders of the press, Martin Bladh and Karolina Urbaniak, are well-established artists in their own right, working across numerous mediums (their latest, The Torture of the 100 Pieces, consists of Urbaniak’s photographs of numerous wounds inflicted by Bladh upon his own body; an exhibition of a similar fixation Georges Bataille suffered over the photographs detailing the Chinese torture technique, ‘death by a thousand cuts.’). In addition, they have published a number of Antonin Artaud’s more obscure or then-unpublished texts, as well as works by Stephen Barber, Dennis Cooper, and Philip Best.
Any reader who might have hazarded through Pierre Guyotat’s radical and relentless Eden Eden Eden may be steeled against what awaits them within the space of Cicatrization, since both texts are seething with hallucinatory sprees of brutality. Both books share a similar mutant textuo-genetic code, but whereas Guyotat’s Eden maintains a uniform grammatical style throughout (consisting of an endless and unbroken sentence which spans its couple-hundred pages), there are a variety of mutations which pervert the monstrous body of Cicatrization. Some segments of Cicatrization contain some degree of proper punctuation, capitalization, and other conventions, but many more do away with convention entirely, refusing to spare the reader a single moment to catch their breath until the end, subjecting them until then to an onslaught as unrelenting as the sadistic acts that occur in the text.
Familiarity with Guyotat’s work may also help to clue the reader in to what is at stake in Cicatrization, or what is being written about: writing itself. This text is a tangle of dreams, a ransacking of the annals of the unconscious, a series of episodes of oneiric wish-fulfillment, an exorcism of rabid neuroses, or, to state the matter simply, the text is concerned above all with the production of the real; of real death, and from this understanding we may begin to explore the spaces of Cicatrization.
Collages by Karolina Urbaniak at Infinity Land.
However, it would be a mistake to center our consideration around negativity. Consider the wound: the stab, the tear, the gouge. Certainly such an injury subtracts its share of flesh from the surface, but in its place appears a gorgeous array of beads or streams of vital fluid, and, later, a scab or a scar which serves as somatic symbol both of the act(s) that produced the wound as well as the incredible complexity of the organism. Wounds so often amaze and astound their witnesses. For some, such a gruesome sight, along with the symphony of pain scored upon its infliction—a composition notated by the blade or some other tool of inscription—throws them towards or past certain neurological thresholds. A wound is an incredible phenomenon. So, too, is it something given, something gifted; something radically altered, startled from its lazy stasis.
With all of this said, we may finally ask: What does Cicatrization steal? What does it take? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Instead, the text is intensely, obsessively, and violently productive. Because a wound (upon the flesh or upon the psyche) produces a radical change upon and beneath the site of its surface. Because to murder is to produce a corpse. The gouge, the slit, the cut, then, are dignified as artistic gestures like the brush of bristles across a canvas that, on their own or in series, all serve to create. The canvas wears what strokes cover its once unblemished flesh like contusions. Because the painted canvas itself becomes a wound. And in this same way, through this subtraction of flesh and this spilling of substance, Cicatrization produces, creates, and brings to life, over and again, this real death.
Real. As real as Real. Because, S.M.H. writes, “The world is fiction / the plague that binds us to this dream,” a declaration which dissolves the difference between textuality and reality.
To appreciate this work for what it is, what it becomes, and for what it accomplishes—the invocation and the production of the real—we need to understand how the artifice of the text—the book (as material, as product), the binding, the pages—becomes the frame in which the real comes to constitute itself; a real that is astoundingly similar to this ‘real’ we know ourselves to inhabit, because what is our world, our perception, and our thoughts but fictive productions? This earth, beyond what science can tell us about its material and atmospheric contents, is a frame in which a real—our own personal real—constitutes itself, because the imaginary helps to fill in the gaps of what cannot be described, of what we cannot or do not know. Yes, life may be but a dream as we sang in childhood, but the world, too, is but a fiction, a “plague that binds us to this dream.”
And now, finally, we can proceed into the work and the world of Cicatrization.
Collages by Karolina Urbaniak at Infinity Land.
“Cult,” situated somewhere in the middle of the book, functions as Cicatrization’s manifesto. This story centers on a murder cult sheltering away from civilization in a fenced-off acreage built of tarps, “old crates, barrels, [and] chunks of wood scavenged from the desolation.”
The leader of the cult speaks: “I AM ON A JOURNEY. […] The blood is the door through which I have entered and through which we must all enter to meet the favor of our lord,” and there in the following line it is as if the text defines the ways in which his metaphors write this world as a (corpo)reality, in which it brings to life the bodies which suffer within it.
Humanity suffers agony and injuries—so often self-inflicted—which the landscape, watching on throughout all of human history, cannot help but inflict upon itself. And though the particularities of humanity’s barbarism may shock us, they must not sadden us. After all, there is freedom in death, because God lords above the cult’s devotees; the “killer and killed//both plague and cure//night and day// //both light and dark//murder and birth//blood and bone.”
If our world is “the plague that binds us to this dream,” it is we who have spread (or have always been?) the sickness. Because a plague that cannot spread is no plague at all. Because every sickness demands a means, a surface, a territory for transmission; a zone whose dimensions in and across space could perhaps comprise or constitute a body or a network of bodies. Our bodies. And what is each body, with all of its various parts, zones and regions, if not a global organism? And what is this world, with all of its various landscapes whose features assume the postures and particularities of a body in misery, if not a global body?
This world—Cicatrization makes this clear—inherits our deformities as well as our ugliness. It mimics (mocks?) our disabilities (the drainage arching like a tortured spine; the spines of stalks of grass bending “in quiet agony”). It clothes itself in garments like our own (the spread of sky wearing a “butcher’s apron burning raw and red and black with blood”). It imitates the stillness and the silence of our own death (“He raises his hands in address, raises his voice to the dead wind”). It reproduces the convulsions of our flesh when we are afraid (“The air raw, each grain of sand vibrating with terror”).
“Cult,” as auto-manifesto, characterizes the broader text’s morbid religious ideation. The cult leader’s address is a treatise on the ethics of murder, and naturally we see a correlation between murder and illumination that we will encounter again in "Trail": “Each sacrifice will illuminate the world in light,” the leader says. “We Will See All Eaten / Both Good and Evil, Death and Birth.” A total devourment, the swallowing of all human life. They offer the spirit of those they kill to God—“both eater and eaten”—and it is within His gaping, abyssal maw that salvation from this world will be found. But the text here plays a trick on us; a bit of a phonetic prank. Because of course, when we come to see all eaten, then surely We Will See All Eden.
It could be no other way.
Collages by Karolina Urbaniak at Infinity Land.
The book’s first entry, “Trail,” demonstrates a curatorial prescience, understanding that the reader, too, will come to walk this trail where they will be led, leashed, to witness the text’s first gruesome murder.
“The man walked into the woods. The noise soaked land buzzed brightly in the heat. The man walked with a boy. The boy was not his son. The boy was no relation. The boy walked in front. A white leash looped around his thin neck, stretching out like spit.”
Everywhere the text animates the inanimate and brings the lifeless to life and gives the bodiless a body, making metaphor material; the ropes of saliva made thick from fear, braided and suspended taut like leather wrapped around the captive’s neck. The grass is “beaten” as the man and boy walk, “[t]he spine of each stalk bent in quiet agony.” Words gurgle from the man’s throat.
Everything here is grotesque, and everywhere there is agony. The trees, too, are made miserable from the cruelty of man, “hanged” as they are “in low witness.” The meadow burns beneath the “fire of midday sun.” Meanwhile the child is being strangled: “Rope cutting deep into thin neck, marking strange runes into the softness of youth. The roughing rope leaving burn marks blotchy and cruel on the horror of flesh.” But this child will soon be free; “soon / there will be light / and it will shine through your eyes / and I will drink it like honey.”
Yes, there is freedom in death, and so too is there beauty within the body, with murder as the means of furnishing its treasures. Torture, agony, strangulation; these gestures proffer “[t]he platter of goods [God] has set inside of you. / The platter of ripe fruits pulsating in the heat of your wounds. / The pink fruit pulsating in the beat of your organs, stretching the web of your skin.” A gorgeous spread. A marvelous feast, like a perversion of Claude Monet's Flowers and Fruit; a cornucopia of strips of flesh and blood for a banquet.
How grotesque is this boy’s murder which at first blush seems so senseless. But what beauty grows by the light of God and blooms like flowers from the body born of this murder. Because it is death and only death which brings this text to life. Need death always be so cruel? Need murder be so selfish?
No, because we see that it is kindness which conditions this act when the man tells the frightened child, “I am sharing these things with you.” Never mind the white of the boy’s eyes “straining open, burning black as beetles in the sun” because this—his agony, his delirium—is but a momentary labor. Soon the preparation of the feast will be complete, and “soon / there will be light.”
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Collages by Karolina Urbaniak at Infinity Land.
Collages by Karolina Urbaniak at Infinity Land.The publisher, Infinity Land, characterizes itself as “a realm deeply steeped in pathological obsessions, extreme desires, and private aesthetic visions,” quoting the author Yukio Mishima as saying that “True beauty is something that attacks, overpowers robs, and finally destroys,” and, true to this obsessive pursuit of a beauty which destroys, a cat o’ nine tails awaits us on the otherwise sparse and dismal cover (as dismal as the material the cover encloses); this object of abject torture lying free from any hand—its tails of leather arranged and spaced decorously—invites us to wield the wood of its handle. Invites us to torture, to inflict what, according to its design, will become a constellation of wounds, but upon whose body but our own? To read Cicatrization is to engage in this ceremony of self-flagellation, this ritual act of bloodletting. Here’s the handle and here’s the whip, the cover seems to beckon. You know what to do.
Leonard Klossner:
Leonard Klossner has had fiction and poetry published in Expat Press, SELFFUCK and Ligeia, with work forthcoming from Fugitives & Futurists. He is one half of the editorial body of AGON, a literary, arts and theory journal.IG: @communicatingvessels
David Kuhnlein:
David Kuhnlein lives in Michigan. His critical writing is featured at 3:AM, Full Stop, Entropy, DIAGRAM, and others. He's online @princessbl00d.Collages by Karolina Urbaniak at Infinity Land.
More From Torment:
May 4, 2023
Intensive Maximalism: after Mike Kleine’s agbogbloshie
By PJ Lombardo
PJ Lombardo reviews agbogbloshie — the newest edition to Mike Kleine's experimental oeuvre, independently released in December of 2022.
Ekphrasis is creative intimacy. To love artworks, not as consumer objects, but as attributes of eternity: this is the task of ekphrastic poetics. In our time, both oversaturated & infused with scarcity, consumer desire gnaws through life & sails the scrap off without pause. Market-cynics claw to commodify every breath. Intimacy faces an existential dilemma. Mike Kleine wrote a book where something else is possible; the book’s called agbogbloshie, & the possibility is something like friendship (wrought inside music & turmoil).
Agbogbloshie is a place in Ghana. Tons of electronic waste arrive there all year (illegally). The logistical systems responsible are headquartered in so-called developed nations, which rely on punishingly cheap commodity flows to keep racing. This is the only possible result of extensive maximalism, or “first-world” consumer economics.
Extensive maximalism exists solely at the expense of a much lusher (& more livable & more thoroughly gorgeous) intensive maximalism. The result of meticulous creative determination, intensive maximalism is limitless magic, an excess of focus that discovers abundance anywhere, independent of quantitative consideration. Think: aurora borealis, basement punk shows, the shimmer of everyday love. “the palladium witch emerges from the debths of the lake. she is all rott’d out.//g’wain retches.///endgodtransmission//there is a[n] chemical stench in the outside breeze.” Psychedelia against psychosis. Cognizant, ferocious, this poetics works to explode sense-perception, dismissing clinical objectification in favor of an undying devotion to the mechanism of feeling.
Intensive maximalism is achieved through art-works & love-works, like friendship or ekphrasis, or any other form of intimacy. Today, intimacy exists in peril as the machinery of the west tightens its psychic vice. Set an eye steady enough & the connection is obvious (“what we’re left with is/this tinted mish-mash of/diluted roses and brown/golds”). Kleine’s agbogbloshie writes camaraderie against depletion. In the book, a band of e-waste surfers course through heaps of garbage in some curious quest for survival. The horizon gunks & curls & blurs. “the sudden sunn-/concentration of//hedonic space tone/assessment cycles,//pushed by scented water/vapours/brings/forth//the/hyposmia.” Immiseration is neither ignored nor conceived as totalizing. Life on Earth is still possible, against all these afflictions.
However oblique, agbogbloshie is a narrative work. Our voyagers sift through gullies of abject glimmer, where “solemn lakes” ripple with threat. Characters operate in sum & in fractures. Many appear but once, as dashes of action, while orcs flash in dark light, “and/oh, how the fires/burn bright.” These figures produce a monstrous unity that waltzes past the individual. Gusts of texture, voice & harmony, spackle readers lustrous. Kleine doubles this jaggedness with structure. His lineation is thorny, slant & precise. His stanza-alignment proves volatile sensitivity. With irrepressible style, Kleine contributes thoughtfully to the project of intensive maximalism. “we dredge thru a corridor dotted/with haptic sensors. o’neal/loses a leg and we toss/aeroplane fuselage down one/of the grottos - to taunt/the beast.” agbogbloshie throbs odd, too runny to capture, sliding, swelling across every page. Arrhythmic punctuation clips, crunches like footsteps through torrented labyrinths. Tons of e-waste bubble frankensteinian inside a spelunker’s star.
agbogbloshie is futurist, but not the way some readers might expect. Kleine’s futurity has nothing in common with the hollow daydreams of the so-called first-world. True futurism derives from spontaneity, volatility, presence. agbogbloshie rings from the vector of history dissolved against unbelieving eyes. Futurity is not fantasy: it is the pressure of today’s contradictions, bleating in your ear, right now. The future does not belong to VC-slurping Bay Area “neo-feudal” rubes or the carnival barkers of capitalist exhaustion. Futurity belongs only to those who can learn how to live in the drek, in all its tedium & tragedy & persistence.
Precedents for the text include Will Alexander, Rene Char, maybe even the Book of Psalms: upheaval-poetics, cut against the traffic of exploitation. Any attempt to circumvent profit-sociopathy requires visionary surplus. Therefore, the dissolution of one’s own world-image always involves intensive maximalism. Put more simply: the future is a poem that shreds itself. “i toss a synaptic jammer into/the next room/without/looking…” Characters frequently dispatch these “synaptic jammers,” “pop-smoke” canisters, various sense-bombs. Goo-stung syntax defies itself inside agbogbloshie’s hurricane face. Lines break on the syllable; sentences suspend themselves in ecstasy. “Ecstatic” & “ekphrastic” share the etymological root ek, meaning “outside.” Kleine’s ekphrasis is committed to an art-life larger than contemporary narcissism. Outside the citadel of self: outside the consumption of oneself-as-object: there dwells creative intimacy & the determination we have yet to find.
Throughout agbogbloshie, doom-rock bands like Have a Nice Life or Godspeed You! Black Emperor wave their golden hand. Kleine leaves some opacity here: readers might not recognize “theEternalWorm” or understand why there’s a second n in agbogbloshie’s “sunn.” But the references blend well. There’s a greater friendliness to this technique, meaning Kleine’s allusions don’t require foreknowledge. Instead, the references are bent to operate more like features of the world & less like nods from an insider. The sonic massivity of HaNL’s deathconcsiousness twinkles the panorama eerie, spacious, gloomy-soft. Ekphrasis is psychedelic, in that it permits an exogenous addition to the experience of both writer & reader. This psychedelia could also be called camaraderie.
“there is a war happening in the/desert right now, becauseofoil not in the/desert.” Despite all travails, our ekphrastic voyagers face expiry, as agbogbloshie barrels towards faceless disaster. A “corpo office tower” casts its pall from the west. “i thought there’d be more time,” a voice interjects. I did, too. What Kleine’s latest release left me with was a great sense of urgency. agbogbloshie is a sky-wrought bleat. Kleine’s concluding prayer is for human life to be “enshrined” in “golden bitumen,” but this prayer can’t be fulfilled from a distance. The shrine can only be built inside a poetics of unity, relentless in its pursuit of art-life communion, courageous enough to crash against the vampires.
agbogbloshie: Stick your face inside the dumpster until your eyes flush gold.
agbogbloshie: Paint yourself a bitumen love.
Sam Pink, regarding his own novel, The Garbage Times: “You are always the garbage-person to your own life…You’re either a garbage-person, or [just] complaining about the smell.” Although Pink & Kleine seem to be very different writers at a glance, agbogbloshie shares Pink’s viewpoint. Trash-denial is untenable. The only life worth living is a life that incorporates junk into its terrain. agbogbloshie proffers a way in: solidarity & strangeness, blaring from one speaker, ekphrastic love to beckon readers towards the melody of our shared debris.
PJ Lombardo:
PJ Lombardo is a writer from New Jersey. He co-edits GROTTO, a journal of grotesque-surrealist poetry. His work can be found in Mercury Firs, Works & Days, Lana Turner Journal, the Brooklyn Rail and elsewhere.
David Kuhnlein:
David Kuhnlein lives in Michigan. His critical writing is featured in 3:AM, Full Stop, DIAGRAM, and others. He's online @princessbl00d.
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January 19th, 2022
Alternate States of Burning: Place and Personhood in Meghan Lamb’s FAILURE TO THRIVE
By ALEXANDRINE OGUNDIMU
Alexandrine Ogundimu reviews Meghan Lamb's debut novel Failure to Thrive (Apocalypse Party, 2021).
The cover of Meghan Lamb’s Failure to Thrive features a red sign with a white X over it. Black text reads “CAUTION: UNSAFE TO FIRST RESPONDERS DO NOT ENTER OR OCCUPY.” There’s a way to read this as titillation, as if the reader is being welcomed into something forbidden, but there’s another reading won out by the text itself: The lives the reader is about to dive into contain hazards.
The novel opens not with a character, but with the description of a fire, one that has been burning beneath a town near where the main action of the book takes place for fifty years: “There is a whole world pouring from the vent, a world made of heat. Go in the winter, you will see the sharp change in the atmosphere. The snow just stops. The moss stays green. The air feels tropical. A gust of pale fog. A humid sulfur smell.”
Between and within chapters, the fire comes back to the fore, making its presence known, to the point where the effect is not only one of foreboding, but of familiarity. The reader comes to know the fire as surely as they come to know the characters of the novel, and in time there is a similarity between them: Each burns steadily, not waiting to be put out but rather living, as they do, with the particular circumstances of their existence, as inevitable and familiar as the fire burning in the coal mines nearby.
Failure to Thrive is organized into three novellas, all occurring within or around the coal country town adjacent to the ever-burning flame, broken up by interstitial and surreal chapters emphasizing the unreality and sickness of the land occupied by characters who necessarily intersect, though only briefly. This structure allows for close observation of people occupying very different bodies, roles, and consciousnesses, making it more of a survey bound together by the shared metaphor/location than living within a singular mind. It’s an organizing principle seen elsewhere, perhaps most famously by Jonathan Franzen in The Corrections, though Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburgh, OH also comes to mind, and here again there is a commensurate disorganization by dint of movement from one point of view to another. Lamb links these disparate perspectives through omniscient textual moments as we move from one to the other: Consciousness is briefly left, only to be dived back into a few pages later. It’s effective.
None of the characters are wealthy and the milieu of working class and semi-rural life gets a prominent second billing within the novel. It is often cold, characters are often concerned where their next meal will come from, the town is often described in terms that make the economic depression obvious. In the back there are photographs of locations within the novel, lending a kind of authenticity to the setting. It’s viscerally real and paralleled with the people who live within it.
Each section deals with disability or illness and caretaking, which is handled with a kind of raw, uncompromising respect that’s hard not to admire. If Of Mice and Men is the most obvious example of this kind of dynamic, Failure to Thrive is the exact opposite: All emphasis is placed on the disabled characters and their navigation of a world not designed for them, and any sense of wrongness comes not from the fires they must live with but with the world which refuses to make appropriate space for them.
The first section deals with Olivia, an ambiguously developmentally disabled woman (early in life doctors say she fails to thrive, thus the title), who is cared for by her mother Emily and abandoned by her father David. Her daily routine is disrupted when Emily does not get out of bed at her expected time, making it clear to the reader (but not Olivia, not at first) that something is wrong. From there the rest of the novella is told in flashback and forward, a stylistic choice which should feel tired but doesn’t. Lamb constantly moves point of view from Olivia’s, who sees the world very differently, to a more zoomed-out look at her parents’ lives, three perspectives so separate that the prose remains fresh through the movement.
Then there is Helen and her father. Helen cares for the aging and ailing man, blending his food into slurries thickened with powder so that he does not choke. He pines for an ice cream flavor that he has not been able to enjoy in years, Helen’s favorite, described by Lamb with unadorned but effective descriptive language: “She’d get the bittersweet: A perfect blend of plain vanilla mixed with tiny shreds of dark chocolate, the kind her mother used for baking. Every bite was true to its description – sweet and bitter – as she sat and licked and looked down at the green flecks in the tile floor.”
The minutiae of their days occupies this, the shortest section, and the balance Helen must and yet fails to draw between her own needs and her father’s. It’s as if she has been subsumed by him completely, which is treated as equal part tragedy and inevitability by the text.
The fire burns.
Finally there’s the story of Jack, a young, closeted gay man who suffers from a traumatic brain injury following a car accident. In his story there is the most struggle for normalcy and a different kind of pushback against the world he is forced to occupy: He doesn’t fit twice over and thus his effort made to nestle back in with his old high school friend group is doomed to fail. The theme of caretaking is pulled back a bit here, but still present, as Jack has been forced to return to his parents’ home following the accident. Again consciousness is an aesthetic consideration, as the prose reorganizes itself to better fit within the constraints of Jack’s condition:
“He gets confused, then. 1953 is...not today. Already happened. This fire...burned. Before. Today is after. Not today. Today is...He looks up, around him, at the streets he’s pedaled through and walked along so many times. He feels flushed. Embarrassed.”
Besides the melange of themes, it is perhaps the style of the prose which stands out the most within the novel. For the most part Lamb maintains a simplistic, effective minimalism, keeping to matter of fact reportage, but there are also typographical digressions contained within, formatting choices working with onomatopoeia to create an effect that threatens to become whimsical but instead feels more like a winding, luring invitation. These pages are more visual, more immediate than standard block paragraphs, but they come often and work towards a reading experience that is dynamic and changeable, and easy to fall into.
The immediacy of the writing in turn allows for both dips into human consciousness and embodiment of the town. The setting is itself an organism with a body, and its own consciousness finds its way into the text through the prose choices, as the reality of the injury that is the fire manifests through pure sound and typographical choices.
These choices also inform the immersion into the working class, itself suffering from sickness and disability just as some characters are, as reality is treated with blunt force while deeper truths are revealed through sound and shape of the text itself. This is particularly true with Olivia and Emily’s story, where the Marxist idea of alienation is present not only as human separation from the services Emily provides at her job but also in the way the burning coal town, embodied and disabled, is taken away from its original singular purpose.
Recurring story elements of family and caretaking, the return to and bond with parental units appearing in all three main sections, serve to further intensify the atmosphere. The poverty or near-poverty is generational, genetic, inherent to the space and eternal, cyclical, as the characters return home, one after the other, to be cared for by mothers who are intensely and eternally understanding.
The place of women in the novel is central, even in the more highly masculine third section which focuses on Jack and his male friends. Women are placed in the position of caretakers, if not literal mothers then functional ones, and the labor of women, for all the bluntness of prose, is undeniably treated with a surplus of style and sympathy. The depiction of caretaking never threatens to turn sentimental, rather it is the very stuff of the novel, swirled in with the themes of disability and illness.
The cumulative effect of the novel is sparse, quiet, unsettling comfort, where routine, sensibility, the body, and consciousness are given places to settle that are not ideal and yet the fit is perfect. Tone and typography bind together the disparate elements into a cogent, inhabitable world.
And perhaps the reader was already living in it before ever picking up the book.
The bleak, almost post-apocalyptic setting and themes of Failure to Thrive are naturally sympatico with the current state of pandemic horror. At time of writing the COVID-19 pandemic has been ongoing for 19 months here in the United States, counting from March when the first lockdowns hit, a nightmare for the working class and especially for the chronically ill and immunocompromised.
None of this is new. The working class of the United States has been squeezed for decades now, and if the tone of Failure to Thrive fits particularly well as a pandemic read, it’s because COVID-19 is a culmination of the pressures placed upon the working class. The same fire that burns at the heart of Failure to Thrive has been raging throughout the country since the beginning of the pandemic, only burning above ground instead of below.
If anything, that is the warning delivered by the cover, and the novel as a whole: The fire has already burnt everything up, over here. Enter, but be warned, there’s no redemption to be had, only the experience of observing the aftermath, made sublime by the aesthetics of the prose, the horror of living within fire and ashes. It’s a wonderful and terrible place to be.
Alexandrine Ogundimu:
Alexandrine Ogundimu is a Nigerian-American transgender writer from Indiana. Her debut novella Desperate is available now. Her fiction can be found at Maudlin House, Exposition Review, X-R-A-Y, and elsewhere. She received an MFA in Fiction at New York University and is pursuing a PhD in English at University of Illinois at Chicago. She runs the online literary magazine FILTH at filthlitmag.com, and can be found on Twitter @cross_radical.David Kuhnlein:
David Kuhnlein lives in Michigan. His critical writing is featured at 3:AM, Full Stop, Entropy, DIAGRAM, and others. He's online @princessbl00d.More From Torment:
June 11th, 2021
Dead to the World: On Bob Flanagan’s The Pain Journal
By ADAM MITTS
Bob Flanagan not only found pleasure in his pain but used his masochism to fuel his art. Adam Mitts revisits Bob’s final work of art, The Pain Journal, begun 408 days before his death in 1996, ending in tandem with Bob’s life.
photo by Sheree Rose
Bob Flanagan’s The Pain Journal, written while he was dying of cystic fibrosis at the age of 42, is many things, from a daily chronicle of the excruciating minutiae of chronic pain and terminal illness, to a bitter and often funny critique of end-of-life care, filled with subversive humor which disrupts the patient’s proscribed role as the one who patiently suffers. But what’s most interesting to me about Flanagan’s book is what it reveals about the relation of illness to labor, and the relation of the corpse to value—the valorization of the dying body. Flanagan’s is a dying which is relentlessly productive, in large part because the Journal’s form requires a daily writing habit, but also because of his financial needs and his work as an artist. But the value accruing in The Pain Journal as a commodity never arises from his labor alone. Flanagan is acutely aware that at least some of the value of his book springs from the inevitability of his death. As a result, Flanagan’s complaints about his bodily pain overlap with complaints about his writing, about its failure or impossibility under these conditions, the worsening conditions of a body suspended in a slow-motion animation of its own expiration, so that the pain of The Pain Journal is the pain of being in too much pain to articulate anything in language other than that: “I hate to be so monotonous but I’m still in awful pain” (157).
Pain used to be not only a source of pleasure for Flanagan, it was also the source of his livelihood, as someone who famously turned his masochism into performance art. However, it could be said that both his sexuality and his art had their source in his illness—Flanagan writes of dealing with the pain of childhood stomach aches by rubbing his penis on his sheets, for example, or how “when [he] was tied up as an infant in the hospital,” the mixture of his parents’ extra love and affection, and the painful medical treatments for his cystic fibrosis, made it so that “two contradictory feelings were fused together….the horrible things happening to me were made into something better; a sweetness is overlaid” (Supermasochist 12-13).
photo by Sheree Rose
One thing that Flanagan teaches us is that there are different levels of pain which are managed by different bodily techniques, and susceptible to variations in differing types of bodily energies. This is why, although his illness was arguably the psychological source of his masochism, none of his masochistic superpowers can hope to prepare him for the debilitating denouement of his illness. “I used to talk about using pain to reach an altered state: I’m high as a kite on a drug called pain,” Flanagan writes on September 19, 1995. “Well, this kite has had all the wind knocked of it” (Pain 122, italics original). At the time he wrote this journal entry, using drugs to reach an altered state was an abiding concern for Flanagan—in large part, because he felt doing so would improve the quality of his writing. His doctors, who Flanagan was convinced saw their terminally ill patient as some sort of junkie, refused to prescribe him a dosage which would dull his pain enough to allow him the psychic and energetic space necessary for aesthetic labor.
Two days later, he writes: “Missed a day of writing because I dropped off the edge of the world last night, exhausted” (123). Missing journal entries compound the sense of time running out, increasing in frequency as his illness intensifies. Meanwhile, Flanagan becomes increasingly distressed about the quality of what he has already produced. He stresses that he waits too long into the day to begin writing, when he only has energy to sleep or watch television (120). “So not try writing in the daylight hours, before I’m dead to the world?” Flanagan asks on July 23, 1995. “The question is, when am I not dead to the world?” (90). No matter when Flanagan tries writing, or how early in the day, pain and exhaustion block his creative faculties.
As Flanagan begins to question the aesthetic value of what he can produce under his current working conditions, he starts to question the project itself, “this stupid obligation to write this ‘pain’ article,” asking himself, “How come I’m still laboring over it?” (99). Flanagan’s reasons for continuing the project, in part, parody the publishing contract by making it replicate the masochistic one: “Discipline. The rules. Being a good boy. That’s why” (152). But more importantly, Flanagan pursues the project because he wants to do valuable creative work:
I need to be able to write great things again and be able to write them fast because, eventually, probably sooner than later, that’s all I’m going to have left is the writing and it damn well better be good (99-100).
As a result, Flanagan’s complaints about his pain and his writing begin to take on more radical dimensions. Bob Flanagan, self-proclaimed “disability poster-child from hell,” ends up arguing for the rights of people with disabilities to proper working conditions, but doing so in a characteristically perverse way. Refusing to be anesthetized into a passive “end of life,” Flanagan argues for quality of life, regardless of prognosis, and for access to conditions under which one can work when one is ill.
Much of the genius of The Pain Journal comes from how Flanagan exhausts the possibilities of the journal form. The daily, contractually obligated form of the journal replicates Flanagan’s lifelong themes of medicine and masochism in an aesthetically reinforced way, since the journal is also a serial, regular submission to a form of discomfort, one which eventually produces value the longer one patiently undergoes its temporal demands. However, the “monotonous complaint” also has a sense of urgency due to the temporal structure of the journal as a narrative form, since in The Pain Journal, the end of the book is already expected by the reader to be the death of the author.
Flanagan’s struggle with his doctors over painkillers isn’t only about drugs for Flanagan—it’s a struggle over working conditions and a conflict between two different regimes of value. In most instances where Flanagan mentions drugs, it’s so that he can “get some goddamn work done while I still have time to do it” (158). In making this argument, he frames his heavily medicalized life as a patient as a form of labor, and devalues longevity in favor of a pain treatment regimen which will capacitate aesthetic productivity:
Life is my full time job, and the pay stinks. I feel like a prisoner on the rock pile, pounding big rocks into small. Not only is there no pay, but I’m beginning to wonder what it’s all for, is it even worth it. Here’s where I think the advantages of IV pain meds at home would greatly outweigh the dangers. At the rate I’m going I’m at a much higher risk of saying fuck it all. I need some damitall spark to smooth out the rough edges so I can devote some time and energy to something else besides the constant bodily maintenance….[sic] (142)
To be clear, this “risk” which Flanagan figures as “Damitall,” a pun on the painkiller Demerol, is not expressing a preference for death over a painful life—rather, Flanagan is making a calculated decision to assume the risks of taking higher doses of opioids in the interests of decreasing his pain enough that he can perform aesthetic labor. Otherwise, what is the remuneration that Flanagan receives for the “full time job” of living with a terminal illness, where “nothing happens anymore but medical torture” (169)? What is the value produced by the medicalized torture of which Flanagan is “life tired” (122)? For the doctors, Flanagan’s longevity is valuable so long as he is a viable consumer; in contrast, Flanagan values his productivity, which means more control over the dosage and types of painkillers conducive to aesthetic labor.
Flanagan’s struggle with his doctors over painkillers isn’t only about access to drugs. It’s also about who gets to decide which forms of labor produce which forms of value from Flanagan’s dying body—whether he is profitable as a patient or an artist, and profitable to whom.
Bimbox zine cover, circa 1990s
What becomes truly life-sustaining for Bob Flanagan at the end of his life is not only the capacity to perform aesthetic work, but also the intrinsic provisionality and open-endedness to journal writing as a form of aesthetic labor. Much of the genius of The Pain Journal comes from how Flanagan exhausts the possibilities of the journal form. The journal is a form of aesthetic labor which makes practical sense for a person with a debilitating and painful illness. The “monotonous complaint,” as a literary device, uses repetition and seriality to produce a sense of the exhausting banality of chronic pain. Maurice Blanchot writes that creative work is
The exceptional moment when possibility becomes power, when the mind….becomes the certainty of a realized form, becomes this body which is form and this beautiful form which is a lovely body. The work is mind, and the mind is the passage, from the supreme indeterminacy to the determination of that extreme. This unique passage is real only in the work—in the work which is never real, never finished, since it is only the realization of that mind’s infiniteness (The Space of Literature, 88).
The provisionality of the journal, its openness to future entries and future revisions, is precisely this passage, this “lovely body” which Flanagan ingeniously collapses with his own through the temporal form of the journal as a narrative form and a form of labor—one entry a day, until there isn’t. While emotionally devastating for the reader, this provisionality was apparently life-sustaining for Flanagan. In the final entry of the journal, December 16, 1995, Flanagan writes about printing out the pages of The Pain Journal and reading them, and behind his usual self-deprecating anxiety over their contents, there is a legible sense of (albeit disavowed) pride at his handiwork:
I printed out the entire 1995 journal through October. 75 pages. There were some sparkling moments here and there—good writing I mean—but the latter months seem to have degenerated quite a bit. Too sick. Too distracted. But the journal was intended to be just a day to day record, a minimum of a paragraph a day, and never meant to be read unedited by anyone but me. It was a fluke that so many of the entries became exciting rants and observations that have lead to some good writing. I just hope I can sustain that voice to complete some sort of manuscript (italics mine). But in the meantime I’m going for a late night dip in the Dilaudid (172-173).
I would like to argue that this penultimate sentence, “I just hope I can sustain that voice to complete some sort of manuscript,” should be read in an expansive sense. This sentence makes legible an affective undercurrent of provisionality and open-endedness to the journal form, in particular, and aesthetic labor, in general, which sustains Flanagan through the project, and all his anxieties about its failure. This hope, of someday sustaining a voice he fears he doesn’t have, is what allows him to sustain the voice he has had all along.
Bob and Sheree’s wedding photo, 1995
Adam Mitts:
Adam Mitts is a poet from Michigan. They studied creative writing at Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti, and are currently a PhD candidate in poetics at the University at Buffalo.David Kuhnlein:
David Kuhnlein lives in Michigan. His critical writing is featured at 3:AM, Full Stop, Entropy, DIAGRAM, and others. He's online @princessbl00d.More From Torment
ARCHIVED ISSUES:
Web Columns︎
Every week TQR publishes a new segment from one of our rotating columns, created and edited by our contributing editors.
Show Abysmal
Benjamin ShearnShow Abysmal is a monthly column dedicated to publishing experiments in film criticism.
Torment
David KuhnleinDrawing inspiration from writers working at the intersection of illness and art, Torment is a review column that venerates pain and disease in literature.
Cloudbusting
Emmalea RussoNamed for Wilhelm Reich’s controversial cloudbuster, a machine which attempted to alter atmospheric energy, Cloudbusting is a column by Emmalea Russo exploring memory, desire, death, light, and energy under digitized late capitalism.
Shedding
Addison BaleShedding is an archival project of interviews, which trace the thoughts and imagery of under-recognized artists working today.
Rituals
Caitlyn TellaRituals is a column about contemporary performance practice and how it gives meaning to everyday life in a time of social isolation.
SHOW ABYSMAL
(There’s no abysmal like) Show Abysmal is a monthly column dedicated to publishing experiments in film criticism. The series is edited by Benjamin Shearn. For inquires, email Ben at ben@thequarterlessreview.com
July 8, 2022
BODY HORROR (WHAT ARE YOU AFRAID OF?)
by BENJAMIN SHEARNAt this time of publication, there's nothing more horrific than the unthinkable setbacks for women's rights rapidly tightening their grip on America's fragile legal architecture. Body Horror, as both a genre and a concept, has for decades offered a prophetic and unnerving double-edged blade of violence against women in film. More often than not it’s a transparent expression of mostly male filmmakers’ obsessive, conflicted and ultimately fearful relationship with female anatomy.
Underneath that fraught membrane, however, one can sense a feminine consciousness (sometimes intentionally, oftentimes accidentally) talking back - with yearning, sadness, defeat, rage and, inevitably, vengeance.
READ MORE...
September 23, 2020
A BLANK CHECK FOR UNCHECKED ADOLESCENCE
by BENJAMIN SHEARNI knew it was risky. And almost certainly... illegal? Echoes of a past scandal concerning Pee-Wee Herman and a movie theater and Florida rattled around somewhere in the muddle of memory.
And yet... I proceeded... slowly... outwardly covering my guilt with nonchalance. A tan windbreaker slipped off the back of my seat onto my lap - adjustments were made, both physical and psychological.
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August 14, 2020
ACTORS ARE IDOLS:JAMES SPADER
by AMANDA KRAMERI’m often shit on for my Hollywood People-Worshipping of white straight men. It’s wildly out of fashion, I guess, especially for a woman like me. You don’t know me, but you’ll have to trust that no one around me wants to hear about how much I adore this popular actor or that rich actor.
Anyway fuck fashion: I LOVE JAMES SPADER.
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July 15, 2020
WELCOME TO THE END OF OPINION
by BENJAMIN SHEARNThis moment, the moment you’re reading these words, right now, whenever that may be, is – and yes, this is quite official – the End of Opinion.
The commonplace qualitative model of judgement, that tedious vertical Good-Bad binary, is now as unimportant as your vague reasoning for why The Lobster just “didn’t work for you.”
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SHEDDING
Shedding is an archival project of interviews conducted by Addison Bale, which trace the thoughts and imagery of under-recognized artists working today. For inquiries email Addison: addison@thequarterlessreview.com
October 17, 2022
A Conversation with Chelsea G.
I'm always looking for texture. I go a lot to the pacas now and I'm always looking for silk and wool, which I can find in the five-peso piles. I always find it. And then collecting from friends or my grandmother who has given me so much material, so much material. She also works with textiles. She crochets more than anything now. But she used to work more with textiles, and just has boxes of things...
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May 27, 2022
Emailing Emna Zghal
Emna, Remember sharing poetry over lunches? It was a short-lived arrangement but you still managed to show me such beautiful work, reading segments from The Tree, by John Fowles, and translations of Borges. I have his poem you read to me, "Ars Poetica," saved in my notes and, if I remember correctly, you have that same poem pinned to your studio wall. Can you talk about your relationship to literature in your life and practice as a painter?
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Feb 25th, 2022
Kiko’s Practice One Year Later
On January 8th, 2021, my first segment for The Quarterless Review, “Kiko’s Jeepneys,” was published online. The article was a narrative account of my first conversations with Filipino painter, Kiko Bordeos, emphasizing his daily practice and the influences from life in the Philippines visible in his paintings.
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Nov 16th, 2021
Sculptural Autopsies with Yasue Maetake
[Pt. 2]
By ADDISON BALE
The truth is, I wanted to go to Japan for my upcoming show, but I found I couldn't, so I decided to invite my parents to come spend two months here this summer. During their stay, I have felt like I'm standing around like an idiot, moving at my middle-age speed like a turtle, facing a child and elderly parents whose company is like time-lapse video/film/montage?
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Aug 22nd, 2021
Sculptural Autopsies with Yasue Maetake [Pt. 1]
By ADDISON BALE
A broken-down car, palette-fulls of Benjamin Moore paints, scrap metal, spare ladders, rolling shelf units, panes of glass, a charbroil grill, green True Value bins, aluminum rods, a blue steel rolling staircase, chassis, wood palettes, filing cabinets, planters, spare fuel tanks, rust-covered wheelbarrows, wagons, trollies, a forklift, crutches and a walker, trash cans, piping...
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May 14th, 2021
A YEAR WITH WANG CHEN
By ADDISON BALE
Multidisciplinary artist, Wang Chen, has been a participant of the year-long Roswell Artist-in-Residence program in New Mexico since last June. Now, after 10 months of residency, their new video-piece, “In the Woods,” is nearly finished, and two exhibitions of their work are forthcoming.
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April 2nd, 2021
ON LOVE AND PRACTICE...
By ADDISON BALE
On the work of Spurge Carter
I met Spurge at his home studio where we talked for an hour and twenty minutes on record. As we dug into questions about how writing informs his practice and how his music bleeds into educational initiatives, he played guitar and even shared some songs in progress with me.
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Feburary 19th, 2021
RECORDINGS AND CONVERSATIONS...
By ADDISON BALE
On the work of Renata Pereira Lima
Renata, fresh off a flight from Mexico City, came out to Bushwick to meet me during my lunch break on a cold and cloudless autumn day. We sat down for a meal of Japanese curry, coffee, and chocolate chip cookies outside of a small restaurant and took off our masks.
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January 8th, 2021
KIKO’S JEEPNEYS
By ADDISON BALE
On the work of Kiko Bordeos
To write this article, I spent one night pretending to be like Kiko. I went home after work and relaxed and then wrote from 11pm until 2am— I say wrote, but it is happening now, I am writing now, at 12:43am and I know almost without a doubt that Kiko is also working at 12:43am, now 12:44, on a thursday night, painting.
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TORMENT
We do not only die, but die upon the rack, die by the TORMENT of sickness.-John Donne, Devotions
Torment draws inspiration through writers working at the intersection of pain, illness, and art. In the tradition of Sontag, Artaud, Genesis P-Orridge, and the like, Torment is a review column that venerates pain and disease in literature. Torment takes Novalis at his word, Diseases are the stimulus and the most interesting subject for our meditation and activity... Only, we know little the art of using them. Torment seeks to explore links between cutting edge medicine and streamline literature, and trace spikes in New Age occultism and idiopathic illness. We want reviews that begin to speak to these unspeakables. For inquiries email David: davidkuhnlein6@gmail.com.
May 4, 2023
Intensive Maximalism: after Mike Kleine’s agbogbloshie
By: PJ LOMBARDOEkphrasis is creative intimacy. To love artworks, not as consumer objects, but as attributes of eternity: this is the task of ekphrastic poetics. In our time, both oversaturated & infused with scarcity, consumer desire gnaws through life & sails the scrap off without pause. Market-cynics claw to commodify every breath. Intimacy faces an existential dilemma. Mike Kleine wrote a book where something else is possible; the book’s called agbogbloshie, & the possibility is something like friendship (wrought inside music & turmoil)...
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January 19, 2022
Alternate States of Burning: Place and Personhood in Meghan Lamb’s FAILURE TO THRIVE
By: ALEXANDRINE OGUNDIMUThe cover of Meghan Lamb’s Failure to Thrive features a red sign with a white X over it. Black text reads “CAUTION: UNSAFE TO FIRST RESPONDERS DO NOT ENTER OR OCCUPY.” There’s a way to read this as titillation, as if the reader is being welcomed into something forbidden, but there’s another reading won out by the text itself: The lives the reader is about to dive into contain hazards...
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September 20, 2021
WRITING THE WOUND: The Production of the Real in S.M.H.’s CICATRIZATION
By: LEONARD KLOSSNERCicatrization does not reveal to us the sheer ugliness of its face right away, but grants us an odd respite before we will have suffered a moment of its insane barbarity. Instead, the text is prefaced by an interview of the author, S.M.H., by Martin Bladh, co-founder of the book’s publisher, Infinity Land Press...
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June 11, 2021
DEAD TO THE WORLD: ON BOB FLANAGAN’S THE PAIN JOURNAL
By: ADAM MITTS“I hate to be so monotonous but I’m still in awful pain,” Bob Flanagan writes on the evening of November 10, 1995. His partner is gone, his lungs and stomach are “killing” and “hurting” him—he is dying: “Sometimes I think they’re missing something and I’m going to die earlier than I have to before they catch it.” The uncertainty and risks of both medicine and temporality are magnified by how the body spends itself in its few remaining days...
READ MORE
May 21st, 2021
Closing the Gap Between Dreams and Reality: On the Work of Ta-Nia
By CAITLYN TELLA
Caitlyn and theater-making duo Ta-Nia discuss embodiment, multimodality, and afrofuturism.
Dreams in Black Major at NYU Tisch / National Black Theatre. Photo Jeff Lawless.Dr. Barbara Ann Teer, the late, visionary founder of Harlem’s National Black Theatre, was committed to art that “emanates from an African world-view and is grounded in spiritual tradition,” a standard, she wrote, that inherently “removes the separation between audience and stage.” Ta-Nia, a theater-making duo in Brooklyn, whose formative collaboration, Dreams in Black Major, premiered at the National Black Theatre in 2019, excavate that separation in their practice-based research. If the proverbial stage entertains limitless fantasy and the audience sits in concrete reality, what lies between? Ta-Nia intricately perceive the possibilities of that synthesis to build a new space. In their words, “a blk space in an anti-blk society.”
To understand what I mean when I say that Ta-Nia intricately perceive the liminal, participate in The Map Project. It’s a digital tour through the capacity of your own imagination to envision utopia, guided by meditations, video art, and dozens of prompts written by Ta-Nia. It works by initiating participants into the wisdom tradition of their own sensory faculties and applying that wisdom to realize the Afro-future. Ta-Nia crafted the experience to collect written material for A Map to Nowhere (things are), a performance/ritual in development through Soho Rep’s Writer/Director Lab. Since August 2020, over 150 people have participated, with over 500 responses recorded. “We find it crucial for our projects to contain the DNA of our community,” they say.
Screenshots from The Map Project. Website designed by Talía Paulette Oliveras.
In Electric Arches by Eve L. Ewing, a poetry book that inspired A Map to Nowhere (things are), “The Device” tells the story of a new technology invented by “a hive mind of Black nerds” to communicate with and receive guidance from ancestors. Imagine the device through the aesthetic lens of Afrofuturism and you might picture a metallic, sleek, cosmic gadget. As it turns out, the device is “an inelegant hodgepodge, a reflection of the hands that made it.” One scientist's reflection: “It looked like in a hundred years it might be something you’d find at a yardsale. But of course...wouldn’t that be a success? Shouldn’t the device come to be so average and commonplace that it ceases to be magic and comes to be part of everyday life for regular black people all over the country?” This question expresses Mundane Afrofuturism, a tenet of Ta-Nia’s project.
Elucidated in Martine Syms’ manifesto, Mundane Afrofuturism is a framework for cultural production that combines the vision of Afrofuturism—–Black liberation–—with a critique of its spiritual bypasses. It applies the laws of physics (gravity) to Afrofuturism, and in doing so, roots the radical Black imagination on earth. “Outer space will not save us from injustice,” writes Syms, and “the most likely future is one in which we only have ourselves and this planet.” Sprawling mycelium networks, with their ancient abilities to nourish entire ecosystems and detoxify the environment, are, after all, mundane by definition. The Map Project and its spawn, A Map to Nowhere (things are), embody this type of technology to world-build.
Nia Farrell and Talía Paulette Oliveras, photo Bianca Rogoff
In early spring I corresponded with Ta-Nia on a shared doc about these influences over the course of several weeks. While they mainly wrote as a singular entity, they are, by the way, Talía Paulette Oliveras and Nia Farrell. “Nia,” writes Talía, “is a master of puns and poetics, a supernova gracing us with its brightness, an infectious joy embodied.” While “Talía,” writes Nia, “is the manifestation of dreams and a catalyst for the possibilities of this world, with a rose in one hand and a machete in the other.” Together, they alchemize a way of working and being otherwise inaccessible.
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Video stills from The Map Project designed by Ava Elizabeth Novak, concept by Ta-Nia.
CAITLYN
Can you talk a bit about how you’re translating The Map Project responses from the virtual realm to the performance of A Map to Nowhere (things are)?
TA-NIA
We worked with two incredible archivists, Jordan Powell and Nina Attinello, who helped us sort through all the website submissions and track recurring themes, repeated dreams, and striking imagery.
With those 50-something Google doc pages of responses, we’ll identify the quotes and visual language that we want to incorporate directly in the script. Sometimes we’ll put responses in conversation with one another by creating a poem of different dreams for a character to perform. And other times, the submissions, individually and collectively, influence the physical environment. Colors, sounds, and textures that people included in their dreams may find their way into our collective theatrical space. One of our hopes as creators is that a person who participated in The Map Project walks into the space and sees or experiences their dreams actualized.
CAITLYN
“I wanted a map / not to know / where things are / but to know / where I am” appears in all caps in Eve L. Ewing’s book, Electric Arches. This also reflects the title of your show. Ewing’s poetry takes many forms, including sestina, narrative prose, epistolary, five-act structure, and the “re-tellings” where she uses her own handwriting to redirect and transmute a traumatic narrative. Her writing also continually insists on joy and meaning, not as divine privileges or future states to inhabit, but as the basis of her own perceptions, all in the context of the status quo of anti-Black violence. There’s a lot more to say about it. How does this particular book influence your piece?
TA-NIA
You identified many of the reasons we fell in love with Eve L. Ewing’s writing and this collection of poems in particular. As our project evolved from an adaptation of the book to a conversation with the book to a piece that is inspired by the book, there are two elements of Ewing’s that we’ve clung to.
First, the re-tellings. The act of re-telling and transforming an inherited or lived narrative is a powerful one. These re-telling poems remind the reader of their agency and imagination—two essential components for future-building. In the way Ewing activated us as creators to re-tell our stories, we want to activate our characters and audience to do the same.
The other element of Ewing’s work that serves as an emotional undercurrent for our characters and the structure of the piece is her core question in “The Device,”––how can we as Black people be free in a world that does not love us? At its core, A Map To Nowhere (things are) is a ritual for the audience to ask and answer that question for themselves.
CAITLYN
Martine Syms writes that Mundane Afrofuturism recognizes “the sense that the rituals and inconsistencies of daily life are compelling, dynamic, and utterly strange.” How does this inform the work you do as theater-makers to “make blk spaces in an anti-blk society”?
NIA
I’m excited for what Talía thinks about this question! The way I understand this quote and its relationship to our work is that, in isolation, concepts of actualization and manifestation might appear to be nonsense. But I think rituals are only “utterly strange” if they don’t lead us to action. Dreams of liberation that only remain in the head, now that’s strange to me! But dreams that become a blueprint for the future we will coexist in, now that’s just practical. My Afro-future isn’t going to drop out of the sky, it must be rooted in deliberate and intentional acts of community building.
TALÍA
A big part of making blk spaces for me has to do with recognizing the ways blkness is inherently complex, multiple, dynamic, ephemeral, transformative and so on. The rituals and inconsistencies of daily life that Syms refers to feel intrinsic and synonymous to blkness—it almost makes me think that, in our work, the first step to making our spaces blk is by leaning into the mundane.
Video stills from The Map Project designed by Ava Elizabeth Novak, concept by Ta-Nia.
CAITLYN
Syms also writes “to burn this manifesto as soon as it gets boring.” What is your relationship to building upon the legacy of your mentors and predecessors while remaining true to your aims?
TA-NIA
We thank and honor the ancestors and community leaders and mentors who have guided us to this point. It is because of their work we stand on a solid foundation that we aim to only add to—whether that be continuing the work or finding new ways that lead us to the ultimate goal: the liberation of Blk people.
We love that last line of the manifesto; it keeps us accountable to our people who we wish to service. We like to think of burning not as destroying, but an act of creating something new. The volcano erupts to make an island. The fire rages to release seeds and forge a new path. We hope that when the flames come for our work, it follows in that tradition of burning in order to see what other form exists on the other side.
And if our rituals no longer respond to the needs of the community, or worse, work in antithesis to the needs of the community, for sure burn it down! We hope that the future ancestors rise from the ashes anew.
CAITLYN
How did working at the National Black Theatre influence your approach to producing theater?
TA-NIA
A shout out to the folks at National Black Theatre (NBT) who supported Dreams in Black Major: Sade Lythcott, Jonathan McCrory, Nabii Faison, Abisola Faison, Denzel Faison, Belynda Hardin, and Kiele Logan and the entire facilities team—we are in deep gratitude for the space you made for us to actualize our dreams. We hope we made Dr. Barbara Ann Teer proud.
The energy of NBT fundamentally changed our piece. We didn’t have to carry the baggage of our work in a traditionally white theatre institution. No, we walked into a Blk space and immediately felt closer to our dreams. There’s a reason why NBT is called “your home away from home.” It’s where Blk artists undergo a soul journey to tap into the soul of what we do and how we can share that with others. In every rehearsal room and theatrical space that we’ve worked in since NBT, we bring that soul with us.
CAITLYN
NBT was the first revenue-generating Black arts complex in the country, capable of subsidizing their own performances. What is your vision for producing models (economically speaking) that would best support your theatrical visions?
TA-NIA
We've been dreaming up ideas around this a lot recently! At the moment, we're very interested in reimagining currency in regard to theatrical experiences. For example, we're interested in ways we can share our work with flexible ticket models—those who have funds can purchase tickets and those who don't can offer something else in exchange whether that's offering a cooked meal, leading a workshop another day, etc. In this same vein, we're interested in creating a community space where we can share our work, engage with our respective community through events and workshops, offer a safe space to just have a cup of coffee, house a community garden.
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Dreams in Black Major will be live streamed at Theatretreffen's Stückemarkt in Berlin on May 22. In fall 2021, A Map to Nowhere (things are) will be presented as part of Soho Rep’s Writer/Director Lab. Follow The Map Project @amaptonowhere.
Ta-Nia:
We are Talia Paulette Oliveras and Nia Farrell, collectively Ta-Nia, a theatre-making duo committed to challenging the limits of theatre to create unapologetically Blk spaces of liberation. As creators and performers, we focus on developing new work that foregrounds identity, collectivity, and celebrations of dreams. Since graduating from NYU Tisch, our work has been presented in Ars Nova’s ANT Fest 2019 and will be in Theatretreffen’s Stückemarkt 2021 (Dreams in Blk Major). Currently, we are members of the Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab and finalists for SPACE on Ryder Farm’s Creative Residency 2020 (A Map To Nowhere things are). We are multi-hyphenate artists who apply our interdisciplinary nature to the art we create in both process and product. Talia has collaborated with Musical Theatre Factory, Big Green Theater, Theatre Mitu, JACK, Mabou Mines, The Public, and BAM. And Nia has collaborated with Theatre Mitu, National Black Theatre, The Public Theatre Mobile Unit, and New Ohio Theatre. Learn more at: ta-nia.comCaitlyn Tella:
Caitlyn Tella is a theater maker and poet originally from the Bay Area. Her chapbook, Sky Cracked Open the Proscenium Frame, is forthcoming from DoubleCross Press. caitlyntella.com
December 21, 2021
COMMITTING TO THE FAKE: An Interview with Anh Vo
By CAITLYN TELLA
Caitlyn and Anh Vo discuss psychotherapy, performance, transcendence, and familial ghosts.
Anh stewing on stage, Summer 2021. Video by Caitlyn Tella.I wanted to interview Anh Vo after watching this video of Red (For Communism). Performed at Judson Church in 2019, the dancer sails across the floor, skipping in clipped cadence, occasionally making perky, ceremonious leaps. I watched on my laptop, entranced by the lively near-precision of their steps and commitment to keep skipping for an annoyingly long time. As nothing new continues to happen, joy, set to communist revolutionary music, accumulates, and to my surprise, given the frequently bland conceit belying so much duration-as-content performance, so does a palpable lack of pretentiousness.
When the skipping ends, Anh jokes, “The white abstract part of the performance is over” and proceeds to attract an audience member to the open floor of Judson Church to play a little cross-examination game: “Have you ever been a communist party member?” “No.” ... "Have you ever been on the 23rd street of Manhattan?" “Yes.” “Are you aware the Communist Party USA headquarter is located at 235 West 23rd Street?” (Audience laughs), etc.
At the top of that performance the lights go out and a voiceover of Joseph McCarthy espouses evergreen American beliefs that communists have no freedom of thought, no freedom of expression. In the dark of this historical trace, I ponder the levels of self-denial I have achieved to manage to pay rent.
Anh at Herbert Von King Park in Brooklyn, where this interview was conducted. Photos by Caitlyn Tella.
The first time we talked, Anh told me they were dealing with the ghost of their grandfather: in psychotherapy four days a week and also with a shaman. Anh had experienced profound technical difficulties before performing BABYLIFT at Target Margin in February—a memory for no audience named after Operation BABYLIFT, the 1975 mass evacuation of children from South Vietnam to the United States that resulted in a plane crash killing 78 of them. After spilling coffee on their laptop the day before the show, Anh realized they needed professional, high-order guidance from a shaman before scheduling any further performances. “At least that’s how the message got translated into my consciousness,” they said.
Since then, I’ve seen Anh perform twice. In sweaty New York summer they stewed an aromatic soup on stage. Then, as if trapped in a spell, repeated an elegant loopy step, producing increasing sweat. In autumn at MOtiVE Brooklyn, I saw their latest iteration of Non-Binary Pussy, sexy propaganda fueled by Anh’s popstar persona, featuring video, intricate choreography and great raps like MY PUSSY: ZEN DANCE SLAPPING. YOUR PUSSY: BLAND STRESSED NAPPING.
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BABYLIFT at Target Margin Theater, 2021. Credit: Yekaterina Gyadu.
CAITLYN
What made you start working with ghosts in performance?
ANH
It was a very unconscious decision. I think people here have no relationship to death and in Vietnam there are many rituals around the dead and war. It felt culturally important.
I come from performance studies which theorizes this fake-real relationship—how the fake is always the real and the real is never truly real. So I decided to fake trying to conjure ghosts. I went into my memory of my father performing these traditions and just stayed with that memory. I didn't try to google it. I had no idea what I was doing. I was like, “am I offending ghosts right now?” And that’s the price I would have to pay.
CAITLYN
Did you have a sense of—oh maybe I’m on to something? How did you register a connection?
ANH
Things gained clarity over time. For BABYLIFT I did a five hour ritual before the performance, very rhythmical. And a lot of singing. That was the part where the ghost was there. My grandfather. I almost fainted. In Vietnam we usually call people who are susceptible to ghosts and haunting as having “weak aura.” People who are always pale and dizzy—fainting is one of the signs that the ghost incorporated into your body.
CAITLYN
When you were growing up were you interested in your ancestry?
ANH
Not really. That’s where the paradox is. I had to leave Vietnam to have some awareness of how important war is, for example. We never talked about war. Why would they talk about it? I know nothing of my mom’s life pre-1975. Or really, pre-1986 when capitalism was integrated. We just have an idea that there was a lot of suffering. Only when I left I felt the haunting of the war nagging at the present, informing why people are the way people are in Vietnam. But I have no investment in trying to find the truth of my family’s history. I think more of a unit where historical relations play out, where there’s this suffocation to death of a certain way of life, a certain possibility that could have gone somewhere else in history. Instead the U.S. suffocated it. Now here we are.
CAITLYN
So you’re exploring this undiscovered place that could have existed—the unknown.
ANH
I think so, and that’s why it’s so speculative. I don’t want to do an anthropological exercise of interviewing my parents. That’s not how the truth comes out. It comes out in random ways, so my sensibility now is to pay attention to how these historical traces emerge.
CAITLYN
Speaking of traces, you use a lot of repetition in your work. How do these things form?
ANH
I think it has to do with ritual. I’m drawn to repetition of very small movements. Committing to the repetition weakens your connection to this world and you transport somewhere else.
CAITLYN
Would you say it’s like a trance?
ANH
Very much like a trance. Like, transcendence. The shaman said, “I don’t know how dance works, but when I see you dance I see you leave your body.” And my analyst really dove into that. She’s like, “Hmmm, you know, a lot of people describe a traumatic experience in terms of leaving the body and watching it from above.” She connects so many things to me leaving my body. I have a very clear investment in transcendence. Devising techniques to transcend myself. I black out every time I perform.
CAITLYN
What’s your relationship to the audience in all that?
ANH
I’m really invested in asking, “Why are we watching these things? Why do you have to show it to somebody? Why are people watching me do this?”
BABYLIFT at Target Margin Theater, 2021. Credit: Yekaterina Gyadu.
CAITLYN
Sounds like those questions motivate you, but they could easily be—
ANH
Debilitating? The opposite, it’s very motivating. For me theater is a very colonial structure—the watching, the expectations. The audience stares, they sit in the dark, people sit in silence, as if they don’t exist. The invisible eye is so violent. Especially when it comes to me working with these Vietnamese materials, that anthropological gaze is so annoying to me. This curiosity of “art that is exotic.” Of course it’s subtle, but as a performer I feel it so clearly. That informs why I don’t let people sit and watch in peace. (Laughs) They have to be implicated in the work. I want to lean into the power dynamic, make it explicit.
CAITLYN
Do you think sexuality is part of how you do that too?
ANH
Oh yeah, 100%. The way I approach sex in my work is actually very psychoanalytic. Elusive, unreachable. In analysis, sex has a lot to do with repression, especially repression of infantile sexuality which is more sensational. They say that as an infant your body is an erogenous zone, open to inspiration, sexual possibilities, sexual potential. And then they say that as you grow up there’s discipline, punishment, shame coming in that force you to repress your infantile sexual surge. Of course you can never fully repress it, so it comes out—in symptoms, in dynamics.
CAITLYN
The humor in your work is also very unexpected and direct, it feels improvised.
ANH
Yeah, it just comes out. Usually the way I work—I don’t choreograph. I sit in the studio and develop what I call repertoire. I have a repertoire of movement, of narrative, of moments. That’s how I improvise. I’m much more interested in durational form where the repertoire can actually be responsive to the moment. Although I feel like with Non-Binary Pussy it’s going to be precise, it’s going to be like dancey dance. A lot of audience engagement too.
CAITLYN
Getting the audience to dance?
ANH
Paying them to. I have to have enough money first. (Laughs.) Paying people on the spot.
CAITLYN
Then they can feel like it was their autonomous choice.
ANH
I don’t think there’s autonomy in a performance space. I hope to create a communal space where people are not so fixated on this boundary of you and I. There are other models, more productive to risk taking and play.
CAITLYN
That’s your agenda.
ANH
It is. I use the word propaganda. I want to create a space where people feel compelled enough to play with me. I never just force, I draw them in—it’s a difficult task. You’re watching me, I’m giving you all of my existence right now, I’m asking a fragment of yours. Reciprocation. That’s why I hate “audience participation.” Asking the audience to volunteer and shit. Acting like you’re inconveniencing the audience, whereas it’s always the fucking audience that’s devouring you.
CAITLYN
That’s a good word.
ANH
They devour you with their gaze.
Film stills from a video version of Non-Binary Pussy by Anh Vo.
CAITLYN
What do you make of persona?
ANH
I definitely have characters, but not explicitly. Each character is a repertoire to me.
CAITLYN
Is it a defense mechanism against the audience’s gaze? (Laughs.) That was a very psychoanalytic way to put it.
ANH
(Laughs.) I think defense mechanism is part of it. A mask does that. It's an external thing that protects your inside but also manages to give you access to the inside you don’t know as well. Non-Binary Pussy is very clear pop star. I felt I needed to embody a charismatic revolutionary. I used to want to be a revolutionary leader, that’s where I draw from.
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ANHThis analysis process has been fucking me up.
CAITLYN
How long have you been doing it?
ANH
Nine months. I’d never done therapy before. Classic Scorpio. The first therapy I do has to be four times a week. I would never say “I work with trauma.” Of course I do, but the word is overused. The way people mobilize the word as some sort of description of a traumatic event doesn't get at the obliqueness of trauma—how it always shows up when you don’t expect it and how you never know what your real trauma is. That’s the point of trauma! It exceeds your comprehension. It comes out as repetition, as action. That’s something so radical about psychoanalysis—they don’t try to know. Of course the eventual goal is awareness of your patterns, transforming them to a point where it’s healthy in your life.
CAITLYN
Do you get the sense of your analyst as an audience, having control over you?
ANH
A performance space is very similar to what they call transference—the space between me and the analyst and what happens there. She’s not explicitly the audience, if anything she’s the performer. She’s fucking with me. I don’t know anything about her. The analyst has to push you beyond your boundaries and I get very frustrated. I feel very persecuted. That’s her word. A little bit violated. But it’s fundamental to the analysis process because you have to be pushed beyond your resistance, because you always resist their interpretation. That curious connecting of different events—I fuck with that. But sometimes she gives an interpretation and I am just like, “What the fuck.” But then I sit with it. And I feel like that’s how I work with audiences.
CAITLYN
It sounds like it acclimates you to not knowing yourself.
ANH
Yes, I talked with a college professor recently and she was saying a lot of psychoanalysis is about not trusting yourself. Learning to not trust yourself.
CAITLYN
That’s radical.
ANH
It’s really radical. To not trust yourself. (Laughs) Of course you cannot trust yourself! You cannot trust the stories you tell yourself about yourself.
BABYLIFT at Target Margin Theater, 2021. Credit: Yekaterina Gyadu.
CAITLYN
So what do you stand on?
ANH
Exactly—the standing on is always some sort of illusion, a coping thing, to help you move through life. I was very shocked hearing from my analyst that the club, which is a place I dearly love, is a space of mania for me. Shocked. Of course, all the fucked up kids turn to the club, turn to the night. It makes sense. People need that sort of escape, or manic transcendent euphoria, the ones that have been fucked up by society. That’s where I started dancing, really drunk with music. Being in a crowd. Blacking out.
CAITLYN
It’s very Dionysian.
ANH
Yeah yeah yeah. Very Dionysian. My work does strive for that place.
CAITLYN
If you didn’t have that outlet it would be a pathology.
ANH
For me, that’s where beauty is. I see her point. But I still believe in transcendence, I still believe in leaving my body. I definitely want to—I was going to say “do something” about this mania thing. But the whole point is if you do, you’re in the manic mode (Laughs.) I often try to do instead of feel. Which, yeah, in order to be a productive person you can’t feel too much.
Anh Vo:
Anh Vo is a Vietnamese choreographer, dancer, theorist, and activist. They create dances and produce texts about pornography and queer relations, about being and form, about identity and abstraction, about history and its colonial reality. Currently based in Brooklyn, they earn their degrees in Performance Studies from Brown University (BA) and New York University (MA).Their choreographic works have been presented nationally and internationally by Target Margin Theater, Dixon Place, MR @ Judson, Brown University, Production Workshop, Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo (Madrid), greenroom (Seoul), Montréal arts interculturels (Montréal), among others. Their artistic process has received support from Brooklyn Arts Council, Foundation of Contemporary Arts, Women and Performance, New York Live Arts, Leslie-Lohman Museum, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, Jonah Bokaer Arts Foundation, Tisch/Danspace, and the Performance Project Fellowship at University Settlement.
As a writer, they are the founder and editor of the performance theory blog CultPlastic, the Co-Editor of Critical Correspondence, and a frequent contributor to Anomaly. Their writings focus on experimental practices in contemporary dance and pornography. www.anhqvo.com
Caitlyn Tella:
Caitlyn Tella is a poet and performer based in New York. Her poetry appears in Fence, Witch Craft, Dirt Child, Nat. Brut and MARY: A Journal of New Writing. She has two chapbooks forthcoming, from Double Cross Press and from Mondo Bummer. www.caitlyntella.comMarch 26th, 2021
The Performative Self: On the Work of Leeny Sack
By CAITLYN TELLA
Caitlyn talks to Leeny Sack about spilling your guts, creativity as procrastination, therapy, and excavating intergenerational trauma through theater.
Leeny Sack in Our Lady of the Hidden Agenda. Photo: Jane BassukAll actors are terrified that they are bad actors, so they try hard to be truthful––a trap––because effortful verisimilitude reads as bad acting. The TikTok meme “What’s an acting performance that was so good you forgot it was acting?” highlights this phenomenon. Whether stitched with sincere, ironic, or correct answers to the question, the performance of the meme itself reveals the conflation of acting and psychological realism in cultural consciousness––good acting being the ability to conceal artifice, bad acting the failure to do so.
If good acting is marked by Oscars, then why do all Oscar clips scream: I’M ACTING? Instead of passing as straight (the literal jargon for this kind of performance in theater is “straight play”), “good acting” should be recognized as the highly stylized form it is: psychological realism. The cultural premium placed on this style and its codified gestures (think, STELLA! et al.), warps the perception of what emotional truth must look and sound like to be considered real and good.
When concepts of self hinge on psychological terms, “I” don’t get much leeway, and the question that performers are primed to ask—Who am I?—has only obvious (boring) answers. Antonin Artaud, a dramatic obsessed with liveness, wrote, “Psychology, which works relentlessly to reduce the unknown to the known, to the quotidian and the ordinary, is the cause of the theater’s abasement and its fearful loss of energy.”
For performing artist Leeny Sack, psychological realism couldn’t be further from the truth. Born in Brooklyn, Leeny dropped out of Julliard in 1971 to join The Performance Group, an experimental theater company led by Richard Schechner that focused on actors as sources of dramaturgy rather than interpreters of fictional characters. When the troupe eventually split and morphed into The Wooster Group, she developed a solo career. Her body of work has been mythologized under the title “The Performative Self.” It interrogates concepts of self, not by crafting chameleon personas nor by shedding masks to uncover the “real me,” but through ongoing engagement with performance as a consequence of living.
A couple years ago, afflicted by romance, I fell lifeless under the weight of fantasy. I’d known Leeny as a teacher and flew to see her in hopes she could help administer the performative like a medicine. I wanted to find a performance to free me from fantasy.
I recently spoke with Leeny again for the first time in a couple years. Here is our conversation about her work.
Leeny Sack as Kattrin in The Performance Group's production of Mother Courage and Her Children, directed by Richard Schechner. Photo: Clem Fiori, 1975
CAITLYN
You once told me that when you performed your underwear would get completely soaked because you were so aroused.
LEENY
I would get so wet. Because performing was such a full being engagement, everything was flowing. Eros. Life force.
CAITLYN
Have you experienced that life force in the past year?
LEENY
Maybe where I’ve experienced it most extraordinarily was with [my dog] Moose’s dying and death. The life force in the presence of death was astounding.
CAITLYN
How did you ritualize his passing?
LEENY
Some of the usual bells and whistles--literally, bells, candles. Prayers kept coming through. And this extraordinary tension between letting him go and holding him, and knowing I had to get out of the way to let him go. His body was here for almost 24 hours and I would touch him and feel the change in his body temperature, his literal dead body temperature, and watch and feel the--what do you call it when the body stiffens?
CAITLYN
Rigor mortis?
LEENY
I would watch the pain of the suffering, the illness, leave his face. It was an extraordinary, heightened time. After he died, and since, his spirit body has come many times. If I still had doubts about afterlife, I don't anymore. It's so palpable. A simultaneity of warm, loving presence. I don't have language for that.
Moose and Leeny at the Ithaca women’s march, 2017. Photo: Hayya Mintz
I read in Michelle Minnick’s work that your desire to be an actress when you were young was to become immortal so you wouldn't die an anonymous death--
LEENY
Very much in relation to the Holocaust. Yeah.
CAITLYN
What drives you as a performer now?
LEENY
Hm. The great and very challenging disentanglement from my conditioned ideas about “performing.” The last piece I made, Subtitles, Signage, Signifiers, and Cogitations, I spent most of the month leading up to it in panic and anxiety. And, “How can I get out of this?” That was my preparation. But I'm working differently, not so much detailed scoring and rehearsal. Mostly object work and writing. What it means to be finished is different now.
CAITLYN
My whole creative process has been procrastination, then I'll randomly sit down and do something very quickly. I pretend the procrastination is some kind of gestation.
LEENY
It is, it's an incubation state. And the stuff around it, even the word procrastinating, is somebody else's word, and entrains all the ideas of making work and who we should be and how one is supposed to work. The grip of those ideas has deeply lessened during this time. I told you about the mucus plug, right?
CAITLYN
You told me I need to unplug the mucus plug and connect my sexuality to the earth.
LEENY
It's interesting you remember it that way.
CAITLYN
What did you mean?
LEENY
For a number of years I’d been feeling there was something in the way of my full work. A friend had a baby and she was saying something about the mucus plug. When she said that phrase, “mucus plug” I thought, oh my God, that's it! Somewhere in my belief systems I thought the energy of creative movement moved up and out. I had it directionally off. It was about birthing it back into earth, not going up into the heavens. Since then, my “energetic mucus plug” has slowly begun to dissolve. What I have yearned for is more accessible to me and I'm more out of the way of it.
CAITLYN
Do you relate the mucus plug to confessional forms? Like, spilling your guts out onto the stage.
LEENY
“Spilling your guts out” is a very personal thing. You're talking about accessing and “expressing” something personal. I'm talking about being able to get out of the way of things that are coming through. Maybe those things come through the word “I”, but it transcends that. When performing has really worked for me, it's this strange paradoxical thing of--look at me not being me. Look at something coming through me.
Leeny Sack in The Survivor and the Translator, 1980. Photo: Stephen Siegel
CAITLYN
The theater company provides structure, and the director provides structure, and the character too, but when you left The Performance Group you didn’t have any of that. When you started working on The Survivor and the Translator, you were alone.
LEENY
Yeah. I started in a studio alone, naked with a ratty old flannel gray blanket. And I didn't have texts yet.
CAITLYN
Was your intention to make a performance about trauma?
LEENY
Yeah, very much. First I thought I would do a piece on women, madness, and God. Rather large. I thought, how have I encountered those? That brought me back to being a child of Holocaust survivors. And that's the subtitle of the piece “a solo theater work about not having experienced the Holocaust by a daughter of concentration camp survivors.”
CAITLYN
How did you go from lying in the unstructured darkness to--
LEENY
I was inviting in the world of the Holocaust. It was so dark. To open to the deep, inherited memory and the deepest imaginable--I thought, no, no, no, I'm not gonna get through this … well. So I shifted and, completely antithetical to all my training and all my practice till then, I wrote. There was a great typewriter store on the upper West side and when I decided that I needed a typewriter I went up there and as I was walking in Elie Weisel was walking out. I thought, “a sign!” I bought this wonderful little electric Olivetti. The typewriter gave me focus and I wrote for months, researching translation, thinking how am I going to tell this?
Leeny Sack in The Survivor and the Translator, 1980. Photo: Stephen Siegel
CAITLYN
In the performance, your body is a vessel for memories that go beyond your first-hand experience. You are also the translator of those memories, translating between languages, generations, cultures, from memory into performance itself. Your body contains many voices. At one point the Survivor’s voice screams in Polish as the translator continues to translate in English, calm, matter of fact, split-off.
LEENY
The stories were imparted to me in Polish, or sometimes in accented English, or not good English, and also in silence. So that’s how I told it. One day my grandmother came over and started talking, as she often did, about the camps and the war. I turned on my tape recorder and when I transcribed it I tried to translate it into correct English. I would call my mother and say, “How do you say this in English, exactly?” At some point in transcribing I thought––why don’t I just get it down roughly, and then I'll fix it later. So I started listening and transcribing literally--out of syntax, “uh,” “Hmm,” silence, circularity, memory lapses. When I looked at it, I saw that this was the writing I was trying to get at all these months that I couldn't quite get. The space between the words. The failures of language. I threw out most of the writing that I had and began working with that text.
CAITLYN
In Therapy as Performance you strip off another layer of character. In that piece you staged real therapy sessions with three different therapists in front of full audiences. That piece makes me think about the deceit of self-concepts, how even in therapy, with its premium on honesty, whenever you tell your story, it’s contrived, and how confining it feels to only have words to tell your story.
Therapy As Performance (2018) video still. Leeny Sack, Moose, Jeff Collins, LSW, Meditation Retreat Leader.
LEENY
One of the things I was thinking about over time was exactly what you're talking about. The role of the characters of ourselves. I made lists of what roles I’ve played in the theater, what roles I’ve played in life. They got more and more specific, so it wasn’t only “daughter,” it was “my mother's daughter.” I just kept adding to that list. It does go on.
CAITLYN
Can you talk more about “astrology as performance,” “genetics as performance,” “preparing to die as performance?”
LEENY
Nope.
CAITLYN
Why is it interesting to you to frame those things as performances?
LEENY
The blurring between art and life? It's not a blurring, it's actually very clarifying. As the astrologer Caroline Casey said, “If we don't ritualize, we pathologize.”
Leeny Sack:
Leeny Sack is an interdisciplinary performance artist, writer, postmodern ventriloquist, and originator of The Performative Self™. Her works on identity, including The Survivor and the Translator, Straight Man, PATIENT/ARTIST, and Therapy As Performance, are part of a 4-decade body of work addressing performance as medicine. She has performed extensively throughout the U.S., Europe, and in Asia at venues including the Venice Biennale, The Edinburgh Festival, The American Dance Festival, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the first World Gathering of Holocaust Survivors. She was original faculty of New York University’s Experimental Theatre Wing (ETW), faculty at Naropa University’s Theatre: Contemporary Performance program, and cofounder of Pangea Farm retreat center for contemplative and healing arts. Sack is a certified Master Teacher of Kinetic Awareness®, the somatic practice originated by choreographer and intermedia artist Elaine Summers. She currently resides and teaches in Ithaca, NY, where she frames her work as Counter Stage, an intermedia performance series that takes place on her kitchen counter.leenysack.com/Caitlyn Tella:
Caitlyn Tella is a theater maker and poet originally from the Bay Area. Her chapbook, Sky Cracked Open the Proscenium Frame, is forthcoming from DoubleCross Press. caitlyntella.comFebruary 12th, 2021
The Impossible Realm of Embodiment: On the Work of Haruna Lee
By CAITLYN TELLA
Haruna Lee speaks to making theater on Zoom and offers a writing exercise into psychic landscapesWhat makes “~*real*~” theater so thrilling is the sensational feedback loop between actors and audiences, woven into the fabric of shared space and time. Unaided by the literal porousness of space that transmits breath and laughter, theater on Zoom plays out more on a psychic plane, which, actually, has its own erotic merits. Like masturbating, actors can only imagine they are being seen.
As far as theater architecture goes, Zoom’s fourth wall collapses into the first, second, and third walls, creating a very flat earth experience for everyone involved. An intense suspension of disbelief is required to get into it. Or maybe it’s an engagement with belief––belief that this is, in fact, a gathering, that I’m not just alone with my laptop watching, through the window, actors, who are also alone, do their thing.
Playwright and director Haruna Lee, whose body of work in experimental theater spans a decade (and recently earned an Obie for the conception and writing of Suicide Forest), took this most rudimentary constraint on the art form as an opportunity to exploit the very core of live performance in Beyond the Wound is a Portal, a production they helmed as a visiting artist at Stanford last fall. In a feat of collaboration with seven student writer/performers, the choreographer Sarah Ashkin, and musical director Sheela Ramesh, the entirely original Zoom show, created remotely, found ways to, as Haruna said, “reach through the box within the box and touch each other.” In Emergent Strategy, a book Haruna cites as an influence, adrienne marie brown portends, “the sacred comes from limitations.”
Beyond the Wound is a Portal digital backdrop by scenic designer Carlo Maghirang, depicting an altar of ritual objects chosen by each performer. The show was produced by the Stanford Department of Theater & Performance Studies in Fall 2020.JULIANNA: What is there on the moon that you can’t find here?
DIANA: Space.
-Beyond the Wound is a Portal
Beyond the Wound is a Portal opens on a familiar grid of mini-prosceniums, each performer tucked into the box set of their own home. Alexa (all the actors play versions of themselves) welcomes the audience onto the Zoom platform, “a place that is nowhere and everywhere at once,” before each actor goes around *the circle* to share a recent dream and the name of the land they stand on. This paradox, where everywhereness (a gaping yet loaded void) intersects with the actors’ specific contexts on colonized ground, activates the non-linear journey ahead.
The tidy Zoom boxes dissolve. Glass breaks, and one of the actors, in simulated miniature, free falls in darkness, then through clouds of wisteria. Frames distort and cohere into a variety of potent, psychic landscapes throughout the show, technically composed by layers of live and pre-recorded action, as well as surrealistic 2D and 3D animations. The actors enter cabins, tunnels, clubs, and cosmos like lucid dreams and navigate their mysteries through song. Singing functions like a sensory faculty—–it heightens the actors’ perceptions of grief, longing, and bewilderment lodged in each environment.
A dollhouse full of inexplicable hedgehogs contains a claustrophobic mother-child relationship. 
The mother, played by Julianna Yonis.
Club Waxing Gibbous, 2024. Surrounded by flailing limbs and broken beats, performer Alexa Luckey wakes up in the terror of a memory that encases and exposes her.
Morgan, grieving his mother, becomes trapped inside the loneliness of tunnel vision. “I want to go back to feeling safe,” he begs a globular, oscillating oracle, before a vaguely familiar tune catches his attention.
“We all sing it to ourselves sometimes,” quips the oracle. This moment reminded me how pain can feel so alienating and spacious at once. The tunnel disintegrates and opens on a new portal: the cabin where Morgan finds a letter his mom wrote to him before he was born. He sings, “I wish that she could smile at me one last time / then I would know / and at last she could go.” His voice embodies a mix of self-declaration and keening. Throughout the show, singing seems to separate the actors from their pain by giving it its own voice. As a voyeur, this was soothing to experience.
Video and 3D Design by Matt Romein.
In Diana’s dreamscape, they are on a quest to live where pain has no lineage. They end up on the moon. There, a bunch of hedgehogs worry they will miss the earth. Even if they do, Diana says, “I don’t think the myth that would welcome me back [to earth] has been written yet.”
Structurally tied to the ever growing, ever shrinking moon cycle, the show has no resolution, no final healing touch, even as we return to the familiarity of the Zoom grid. Of course not. There is only process and possibility, and myths yet written. When it ended, I felt spacious, as if I’d just spent an hour lying on the earth, gazing into the night sky. The next evening, I met with Haruna on Zoom to talk about the show.
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CAITLYN
The show made me feel incredibly soft. When it was over I thought it was odd that I’d gotten totally immersed in a performance on Zoom. I know the show was originally going to be in-person...how did you make something so intimate online?
HARUNA
Yeah, I echo that there was something so tender and sweet about what came from that particular group of artists. I think there's something to the impossibility of having to create embodiment digitally. The fact that this group was game to move towards that, even though the impossibility was crystal clear, might've been what birthed the tenderness. Without a sense of care and lovingness, I just don't think it would have been possible to create a brand new show.
CAITLYN
The care was palpable. Also, watching it felt like a time capsule of early pandemic.
HARUNA
Yes, we played with that idea so much, so it’s amazing that you say that.
CAITLYN
What was the beginning of the pandemic like for you?
HARUNA
In the spring, summer, and fall of 2020, the grief was huge. I was thinking a lot about wounds. I had just had this show Suicide Forest that got cancelled midway through March. My mother was in that show with me, and the trauma of having to close it and having to make quick decisions with my mom about where her body should be, where would be most safe—–should she stay in New York? Do we send her back to Seattle? And slowly realizing the dissolution of the embodied arts culture as we know it... all of that was hitting us in the moment, and it felt like fresh wounds.
Haruna and their mom on their way to the last show of Suicide Forest before shutting down for the pandemic.CAITLYN
So how did you start working on the show? It was made from scratch, right?
HARUNA
Yeah. Creatively, our show started with adrienne marie brown's essay Dream Beyond the Wounds. In the essay, amb asks us to use our imagination as if it's medicine to dream beyond the space of just wounds. What are the possibilities when we do this? A lot of early writing prompts with the cast were based on imagining the landscape of a wound.
After writing, writing, writing—–scenes, monologues, songs—–we arrived at this place where we were like, how are we going to organize this? The cast was really drawn to the moon cycle as a structure for the piece itself. We started with the waxing gibbous and we ended on the new moon. And we eventually created this very ritualistic, abstract, imagistic dream logic piece.
CAITLYN
I kept thinking “beyond the womb is a portal” because there were a lot of mommy issues being explored.
HARUNA
I wasn't intending on bringing that energy into this work, but I think some of the cast members had read Suicide Forest and the idea of the monstrous mother, which is something I explore in that play, was really present. The hungry mother, the dark sides of mother, as well as the generous light sides of mother, were all at play.
I also picked up on the family relationships they were working through because they were no longer on campus. They were all back home in their childhood bedrooms. So, a lot of intergenerational workings seeped through, a lot of parent-child dynamics, and the residual pain from that. The death of family members was also present throughout the process.
CAITLYN
Yeah, it felt very courageous, and raw. I mean, the actors played themselves, well, versions of themselves. I thought it was interesting how it opened with that slightly awkward thing of going around a circle to introduce yourself. That threshold moment with a new group before you dig into the guts of whatever it is you’re about to do. I enjoyed watching the actors perform a kind of ease with discomfort in that scenario, or a mix of ease and discomfort.
HARUNA
There’s a sweetness there. Finding a common denominator felt really real in a time when things feel so fractured and people are carrying so much grief and stress and tension. The idea that we have to be productive, and not having space to release and let go. I felt the group working through the biggest, most human ideas we can all relate with. And that somehow created care, like, let's just care for everyone! Can we do that? Is that possible?
But something I learned is that community care can’t necessarily be a learning space. It has to be just plain care. Rest and play, not more work, not more constructive conversations on race and racial dynamics and how that plays out in this piece and all that.
Beyond the Wound is a Portal production still featuring (clockwise from top left) Emily Saletan, Alexa Luckey, Julianna Yonis, Morgan Gwilym Tso, Chloe Chow, Diana Khong, and Obed De la Cruz at center.
How do you work with images as a performance maker?
HARUNA
When I think images, I might actually mean landscapes. I think a location houses a collection of different images. In Suicide Forest, for example, I had just read Funnyhouse of a Negro by Adrienne Kennedy and was struck by the way she uses her own psychic space as the landscape of the play itself. I was really drawn to that as a prompt–—to find a dark psychic space that speaks to my Asian American identity. That led me to thinking about Aokigahara, which is ‘Suicide Forest’ at the base of Mount Fuji, and what a rep that place has from a Western viewpoint. I was interested in what would happen if that forest was actually full of possibility and love and reconnection with ghosts and mothers. Like, if it's actually an intergenerational space where the conversations that we could never have could happen. The first part of the play that takes place in the suicide forest is full of goats who are rock climbing!
CAITLYN
Oh! Maybe this is a good time to do a little writing exercise? I was hoping you could lead me through something you used in your rehearsal process to generate material.
HARUNA
Oh, yeah. I actually don't think I used this writing exercise for Beyond the Wound is a Portal, but it’s a writing ritual I return to all the time. I call it “The Cosmic Cellar.”
CAITLYN
When you go on these imaginary journeys, like in this writing prompt, do you fight with your brain about the images that come up?
HARUNA
Oh yeah, I think I do. I think I fight with my brain and play with it and sleep with it. That’s what's so beautiful about the image world—–it allows for so much messy simultaneity, and that's such a core of my… of me.
CAITLYN
Where does your life end and performance begin? Or maybe I mean, how do they overlap?
HARUNA
That is such a good question. Does my work create a shift in my lived reality? More and more I’m finding that's the case. That's what I'm getting off on in making art—seeing the ways the thing I make deeply impacts my lived experience and vice versa. My work continually moves towards a more relational, more community-based model. I just can't help it. I'm getting sucked into that.
My most recent collaborators are people I would want to be stranded on an island with. People I am so deeply inspired by and care about, their families and their livelihood. I’m grounding into how my sense of freedom and true, liberated self can be connected to somebody else's who is entirely their own human being. Really beautiful collaboration feels like a mirror of that, where we're allowing each other to be more free rather than less free.
CAITLYN
What processes or rituals have you been participating in lately?
HARUNA
Mmm, I think gathering is such an important ritual. This group came out of making Suicide Forest, which is the “Women-Trans-Femme-Non Binary Asian Diasporic Performance Makers Potluck.” Such a long title, but I feel with the first draft—just have all the words!
Women-Trans-Femme-Non Binary (WTFNB) Asian Diasporic Performance Makers Potluck (zoom version)
Throughout the year [this group] has been a touchstone for me—–the act of gathering and also [the fact that] within the group we’re actively coming up with rituals that help each other get through this time. We had one where we all, 30 or 40 folks, shared a word that describes something we're carrying in ourselves that we want to let go of. I wrote everyone’s words down on a piece of paper and went out to my yard and did a little burning ceremony with this piece of paper that had all of our words. As a group I think we realized like, “Oh, what that person needs to let go of is something I need to let go of too.”
Ritual objects Haruna keeps close.
CAITLYN
I think a lot more people have been dabbling in spiritual practices, like creating new solo rituals during quarantine. It's inspiring to hear you talk about a group ritual, a collective beholding. Having everyone there to watch makes it so powerful.
HARUNA
We really had to work up to that idea too. That group met a few times over the pandemic before we felt we could even go forward with this idea. We were like, “Wait, what would it mean for this group to perform this ritual over Zoom?” It didn't even cross our minds at first.
Beyond the Wound is a Portal production still.
Image created by Morgan Gwilym Tso.
Haruna Lee:
Haruna Lee (they/them) is a Taiwanese/Japanese/American theater maker, educator and community steward whose work is rooted in a liberation-based healing practice. They are committed to promoting arts activism and emergent strategies for the theater through ethical and process-based collaborations that challenge systems and legacies of power, while inviting the fullness of marginalized bodies and the complexity of lived experience to their practice. Recent plays include Suicide Forest published by 53rd State Press (Ma-Yi Theater Company and The Bushwick Starr), plural (love) (Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab; New Georges), and Memory Retrograde (UTR; Ars Nova; BAX). Lee is a recipient of an Obie Award for Playwriting and Conception of Suicide Forest, an FCA Grants to Artists Award, received the Mohr Visiting Artist Fellowship at Stanford University, a MacDowell Fellowship, the Map Fund Grant, Lotos Foundation Prize for Directing, and a New Dramatists Van Lier Fellowship. They were a member of the 2019 artEquity cohort, and are a co-founder and lead facilitator for the Women-Trans-Femme-Non Binary Asian Diasporic Performance Makers Potluck. They received their M.F.A. from Brooklyn College under the tutelage of Mac Wellman and Erin Courtney, and a B.F.A. from NYU Experimental Theater Wing. harunalee.comCaitlyn Tella:
Caitlyn Tella is a theater maker and poet originally from the Bay Area. Her chapbook, Sky Cracked Open the Proscenium Frame, is forthcoming from DoubleCross Press. caitlyntella.com
July 15, 2020
WELCOME TO THE END OF OPINION
By BENJAMIN SHEARNThis moment, the moment you’re reading these words, right now, whenever that may be, is – and yes, this is quite official – the End of Opinion.
The commonplace qualitative model of judgement, that tedious vertical Good-Bad binary, is now as unimportant as your vague reasoning for why The Lobster just “didn’t work for you.”
Hot takes are now hot trash. And yes, I completely understand how adrift you must feel.
Because without your arbitrary art rules, your peer-tested conjecture, your mountain of prop books and performative merch, without the abstract wreckage you refer to as your “taste”… why even watch a film anymore?
It’s an age old conundrum really: If a dude tees off on how Malick’s never been quite “grounded enough” and no one’s around to hear him, did he even ever see The Thin Red Line three times in theaters?
I remember in 2011 the New York Film Critics Circle hastily moved their awards date up to November, before many of the films in (supposed) contention had even been released.
Some film journalists saw this as typical east coast elitism, New York writers flexing intellectual precedence by forcing their way into the inaugural awards position.
That, to me, was not the issue.
The rosiest, most benevolent view of a film writer is one of pop-cultural archaeology. There’s an altruistic sense of responsibility to unearth and champion the work you believe in to your readership.
And by ranking, by saying “this is the best film of the year,” you boldly pronounce strongly held aesthetic values. You compel readers and peers to debate, to examine, to ponder the nature of what makes film a true and vital artform.
If this is the level of artistic zeal the New York Film Critics Circle felt for the cinema of 2011, well then, I thought to myself, have at it. Flood the digital tributaries with your simmering passion which could not possibly have waited another two weeks to boil over into public view…
… the day came. And the NYFCC proudly announced their pantheon of cinematic prestige:
Best Film… The Artist
Best Actor… Brad Pitt
Best Actress… Meryl Streep
Ooookay, so let me stop ya’ right there if I may.
And just allow me to pose a simple question: Why... did you even... bother?
Every year the top ten lists come out and every year they’re just a deck-shuffle of the same 25 films.
Film criticism, in the classic Kael-ian model, has become little more than a social media-damaged conformity.
And this has had a significant trickle-down effect on the amateur dialectic. My generation and younger are so addicted to bandwagon-ism that when they’re confronted with dissenting perspectives the result is akin to LIGHTS ON at the rave.
Opinion is the new religion.
Its institution is corporate interest. Its church is Twitter. Every service is an all-night open mic. And yet every guest preacher really just wants to prosthelytize that “Yep… Get Out ruled!”
‘Good’ and ‘Bad’ are suppressant words. And like Huxley’s soma the words are pills to anesthetize conversation to the transactional complexity of giving out doggie treats.
Rotten Tomatoes is our Golem, and it’s trampled our brains into a barren landscape of Netflix thumbnails. Existential obedience to the algorithmic order of Silicon Valley.
No more.
Consider this Luther’s parchment nailed to the Church door.
Consider this a liberation.
Consider the question “Hey, is Zardoz actually any good?” as a FULL ON ASSAULT on your philosophical freedoms!
And together we will usher in a messianic age of opinion-less analysis.
Think of yourself as an alien, or post-apocalyptic future human, and consider films not as fuel for simplistic assertions of identity but as odd, potentially profound artifacts. Each one holding an insight into both the intricacies of the medium and the humanity of the message.
Some initial steps in this glorious new freedom:
- Watch What Lies Beneath and resist the urge to rage on its contrivances, its chintzy Hitchockian cheap shots, its huffy celebrity performances. Instead meditate quietly on its prophecy of cell phone technology ruining the classic suspense film.
-
Watch every single James Spader movie in a row up to Crash and realize that it is a detailed chronology of the rise and fall of Yuppie Culture.
-
Watch Body Horror films not just for their goopy gory payoffs but as subconscious statements of Man’s irrational fear of the Female anatomy.
-
Watch Field of Dreams not as an uplifting balm of magical Americana, but as Baby Boomer apologist propaganda with Baseball nostalgia as its MAGA Trojan horse.
Look beyond the vanity of auteurs, the vagaries and vulgarities of corporate marketing, the academic tyranny of the so-called canon, and crucially understand that all hype is hypnosis.
See the forest through the trees, don’t just see The Tree of Wooden Clogs and proclaim how much you “dug” all the tree shots.
Films are complex documents of unintended spiritual, political, societal, and institutional significance, and the century-plus reign of Opinion has suppressed these hidden meanings.
This column is an act of anthropological radicalism, of ideological detective work. An attempt to re-contextualize all of cinema, freeing films as feeble fodder for your feed, and lifting them up as profound reflections of your humanity.
Welcome, friends, to the future. Where should we begin?
Benjamin Shearn is a film editor and writer. His last feature, Ladyworld, premiered at BFI London, Fantastic Fest, TIFF: Next Wave and was presented as part of the Frontieres Showcase at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival. Shearn’s work in narrative and documentary films has also been exhibited at ComicCon San Diego, the Louisiana Museum of Art in Copenhagen, la Gaîté lyrique in Paris, as well as official selections of the CPH:DOX, Melbourne International, Planete+Doc, TIFF After Dark, Court Metrage du Clermont, Chicago and Boston Underground Film Festivals, amongst others. For more of his work, go to benjaminshearn.com and/or follow his absurd Instagram account @actorsupset.
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July 8, 2022
BODY HORROR (WHAT ARE YOU AFRAID OF?)
By BENJAMIN SHEARNIt’s been nearly 50 years of analysis and argument since Laura Mulvey summoned the Male Gaze into cinema’s self reflective dialectic.
Has there been enough talk, however, on what gazes back?
Allow me an infantile thought experiment…
… an Alien, one of superior intelligence yet total ignorance of Earth’s anthropological eccentricities, makes its way down the research curriculum to films.
They’re told by an overzealous custodian (some crumbling Boomer still huffing on Hitchcock fumes, think Ben Mankiewicz) that these “moving pictures” are a near-mystical conjuring of our deepest truths. Miraculous machinery recording history, externalizing imagination.
Yes- it’s almost certain the custodian will hard-sell the filmmaker as a portrait artist of the human condition, thinking mostly of Mr. Smith going to Washington. He’ll be dead right, of course, but less so in the triumph of the human spirit and moreso in the sickening surplus of female punishment that’s as vivid and disturbing in cinema as it is in society.
At this time of publication, there's nothing more horrific than the unthinkable setbacks for women's rights rapidly tightening their grip on America's fragile legal architecture. Body Horror, as both a genre and a concept, has for decades offered a prophetic and unnerving double-edged blade of violence against women in film. More often than not it’s a transparent expression of mostly male filmmakers’ obsessive, conflicted and ultimately fearful relationship with female anatomy.
Underneath that fraught membrane, however, one can sense a feminine consciousness (sometimes intentionally, oftentimes accidentally) talking back - with yearning, sadness, defeat, rage and, inevitably, vengeance.
This short video essay, created with my eternal creative partner Amanda Kramer, is an attempt to harness that consciousness into a voice. It has very upsetting imagery from very famous films. Buyer beware.
Benjamin Shearn is a film editor and writer. His latest film Please Baby Please was the opening night selection of the 2022 Rotterdam Film Festival. It played as part of a retrospective on Shearn's work with filmmaker Amanda Kramer. His films have also been screened at SXSW, BFI London, Fantastic Fest, Sitges, Fantasia, Outfest, TIFF: Next Wave, ComicCon San Diego, the Louisiana Museum of Art in Copenhagen, la Gaîté lyrique Paris, CPH:DOX, Melbourne International, Planete+Doc, and the Frontieres Showcase at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival. For more of his work, go to benjaminshearn.com and/or follow his absurd Instagram account @actorsupset.
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August 14, 2020
ACTORS ARE IDOLS:JAMES SPADER
By AMANDA KRAMERI’m often shit on for my Hollywood People-Worshipping of white straight men. It’s wildly out of fashion, I guess, especially for a woman like me. You don’t know me, but you’ll have to trust that no one around me wants to hear about how much I adore this popular actor or that rich actor.
Anyway fuck fashion: I LOVE JAMES SPADER.
Thinking about James Spader makes me physically ill. It twists my insides. But one of my favorite things in the world to do is think about James Spader; his motivations, his movements, his vibe, his voice. I take pleasure in every single acting choice he’s ever made. Like when he leans on desks or leans on cars, always this effortless leaning, like he’s too chill to stand but too chic to sit. James Spader knows intrinsically the James Spader character. He’s never missed a Spader beat. God I love thinking about him.
Here is a brag, a swagger, a triumph: I happen to know someone (well) who knows James Spader (well). I love thinking about this. He has James Spader stories, personal ones and professional ones. He’ll tell me the stories sometimes if I ask - I do have to ask, and ask without too much excitement, and then I have to listen, also without too much excitement, or he may not tell me another one again. Have to keep it “cool,” have to keep my energy “low.” But in truth my soul is fed by these stories. In every single one James Spader does exactly what I want him to be doing. He’s acting exactly like James Spader, and there’s a joyousness (a jubilation) in the storyteller as well - here are two people (one, a brilliant decades-long television director/the other, me) in agreement that James Spader is a marvel, an actual treasure. We’re also in agreement that if Hollywood brings back Columbo, Hollywood would be fucking stupid as fuck not to get on their knees and happily hand the role to James Spader.
James Spader is an enduring icon who has given us the gift of his work.
James Spader should have played Patrick Bateman, not Christian Bale, and I stand by that one hundred percent and don’t care about any opposing opinions. I am right. James Spader is a flawless 80s demon, a uniquely dimensional Reaganite, the personification of charmed smarm, a performance artist whose art is a disappearing act. He has wholly disappeared inside the James Spader aesthetic, which is a frightening, libidinal, impish, formal, magnetic, untrustworthy (in)human masterpiece. James Spader doesn’t do anything unless he’s doing it masterfully. James Spader is a legendary weirdo. We are lucky to have moving images of him.
Can you imagine being David E. Kelley? I try to imagine it all of the time. It’s an overwhelming thought experiment and that’s before I let my mind wrap around marrying Michelle Pfeiffer. Imagine you’re David E. Kelley. You want to cast James Spader in a role on a television show called The Practice. Yet every person around you, all of the people who normally tell you you’re a goddamn TV genius, is looking at you like you're a diseased lunatic off the streets. "You can’t cast James Spader! He’s the single most sexually charged nefarious symbol of class, the most bizarre seductor in the business!” And you cast him anyway and you win awards and he wins awards and the Spader Legacy mutates and transforms and deepens and enriches all of America into the 21st century. And that’s what it’s like to be David E. Kelley, a very important piece of the James Spader puzzle.
And it’s a puzzle that is ever-rewarding as its pieces continue to interlock.
Please watch Mannequin. No matter how you feel about Kim Cattrall. You won’t BELIEVE the Spader look, and even if you remember it, you only vaguely remember it, and need to interact with it again. It is undeniably strange and wondrous.
Please watch Jack's Back. In this film James Spader plays a Spader medical student. He also plays a Spader medical student’s Spader criminal twin brother. Here every opportunity for classic Spaderism is mined: shirtlessness on white sheets, compelling male blondness, charismatic night sweats, balletically-timed one liners, levels of sinister secrecy, jocular affirmations of alt-heroics, a complex comfort in the leading man as stranger/danger. Ebert watched. He then compared James Spader to Jack Nicholson, another created persona, another example of exuberant, mythical villainy. I would agree with Ebert there, save for the fact that James Spader is much, much more allegorical and intriguing than Jack Nicholson. As we all know.
Please go to YouTube. Click on the video titled “James Spader,” wherein James Spader sit-leans next to a very tall leafy plant and discusses his film Pretty in Pink. He wears a leather jacket with shoulder pads. He has the presence of a god. He’s hilarious, suave, subtle, unfazed, alluring. If a man can be a pair of dark sunglasses attached to a slightly wrinkled linen blazer, then that man is James Spader. He is entirely meant to be James Spader. He has an impeccable vocabulary.
Some people don’t want to meet their heroes. That’s absolute bullshit. What the hell is wrong with those people, nothing makes sense about that. Nothing. I want to meet James Spader and I want to recount back to him every moment of his career, I want to say his best and most potent lines to his face, I want to make sure he understands fully that his decisions (all of his decisions) have been perfectly executed and brilliantly designed. And more than anything I want to let him know that he is meaningful, representational, and amazing. He amazes me. He is a maze. He is an amazement.
Follow Amanda:
Website: afilmbyamandakramer.comBio:
Kramer's short films BARK, INTERVENE, and SIN ULTRA have played at Fantastic Fest, Monster Fest, Final Frame, Court Metrange Festival, Chicago Underground Film Festival and Boston Underground Film Festival's Dispatches from the Underground. Her screenplays have been accepted into IFP’s Emerging Filmmakers program and Frontierés International Co-Production Market in Brussels. Kramer's music videos have premiered on Vogue, LA Record, Flaunt Magazine, and Complex.Her feature film PARIS WINDOW opened the Women Texas Film Festival and won the jury prize for Creative Vision at the DTLA Film Festival. Her feature film LADYWORLD was selected for the Frontierés Buyers Showcase at the Marche du Film at Cannes. The film had its US Premiere at Fantastic Fest ('18) and its International Premiere at London BFI Film Festival. LADYWORLD also showed at Denver International Film Festival, SF Indie Fest, TIFF Next Wave, Seoul International Women’s Film Festival, and Sydney Film Fest. Distributed by Cleopatra Entertainment, LADYWORLD had its theatrical and
streaming release in August 2019.
September 23, 2020
A BLANK CHECK FOR UNCHECKED ADOLESCENCE
By BENJAMIN SHEARNI knew it was risky. And almost certainly... illegal? Echoes of a past scandal concerning Pee-Wee Herman and a movie theater and Florida rattled around somewhere in the muddle of memory.
And yet... I proceeded... slowly... outwardly covering my guilt with nonchalance. A tan windbreaker slipped off the back of my seat onto my lap - adjustments were made, both physical and psychological.
I wish the fog of recollection would allow me to round up in my favor, and that I could tell you the theater was empty. Sadly, it’s all still imprinted on my cerebellum with the same finality of light on nitrate. Surrounded by strangers in a midwestern movie house, I pursued my compulsion well before reason and restraint dissuaded me.
The film was True Lies and I was masturbating to the scene where Jamie Lee Curtis dances a goofy lingerie striptease. The year was 1994 and I was 13 years old.
How and why I committed such brazen self-gratification could be attributable to youthful fatuity. But I’d never tried anything like that before, or since. Only in retrospect can a case be made that I was acting out as a so-called ‘product of the culture.’
Hollywood’s output that year was more directly catered to (and in praise of) the straight male adolescent psyche, than any other demographic. The movie capitalists had red-blooded American boys in their crosshairs, and I was both victor and victim of the spotlight.
The box office tea leaves could not have been more overt. What started with Big, continued with Home Alone, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Hook, Encino Man, T2, Bill and Ted and Wayne and Garth. Here, movies whose central figures were adolescent males (either literally, psychologically, or magically) were winning audiences with overwhelming fervor.
The Age of Boy was nigh and the mid-90s were to be its apotheosis era.
Boys saved baseball in Rookie of the Year, Angels in the Outfield and Little Big League.
They taught recalcitrant adults life lessons in North, The Client and The War.
They laid claim to the animal kingdom in The Jungle Book and The Lion King.
They revealed themselves as the inner-children of adults in Forrest Gump, Clerks, The Hudsucker Proxy, Reality Bites, Cabin Boy, Clifford, Crumb and of course the trifecta of Carrey - Ace Ventura, Dumb & Dumber and The Mask.
They even found time to free Tibet in Little Buddha.
But of all the boy-driven narratives Disney’s Blank Check, for me, held the most potent and indelible subtext. A film that offered up unapologetic adolescent wish fulfillment and was one of my key cinema enablers.
11-year-old Preston Waters, by virtue of a car-on-bike accident, is handed a blank check connected to a money laundering scam. He fills in one million, gets his backpack stuffed by a buffoon banker, then proceeds to spend and live unencumbered by the restrictions and prejudices of the adult world.
Blank Check attempts to establish a clear ‘money can’t buy everything’ theme, inasmuch as Preston’s family wrongly preaches the opposite. Middle-class Dad berates Preston for a lack of income, and his entrepreneurial brothers make known their capitalist-fascist beliefs with a perversion of the Golden Rule, chanting: “He who has the gold, makes the rules.”
Clearly, the screenwriters intended to affirm the original Golden Rule but end up reinforcing this false one. If they had succeeded in their intended thematic cohesion, I’m not sure it would have been as impactful on my licentious 13-year-old psyche.
Preston uses the cash to close on a small castle, and does so under a false name of a false idol; Mr. Mackintosh. He fills the house with unbridled childish Id; walls of TVs blasting video games in surround sound, a wilderness of giant inflatables and the ultimate male adolescent wet dream home addition; a built-in water slide.
Preston flaunts it with limos and wardrobe montages and even an improbably romantic dinner with a pretty bank teller (played by Karen Duffy, MTV’s “Duffy” at the time). The teller is, in reality, secretive Shay, an undercover FBI agent who sees Preston as a conduit to criminals.
Preston’s impish clash of naivete and burgeoning bravado thaw Shay’s crucial adult layers of professionalism and age-gap skepticism. In only a few encounters, this child empowered by bottomless wealth is seamingly the perfect man and he seamlessly charms Shay into an unlikely romantic co-lead.
And this is where any of Blank Check’s original altruistic sentiments fray irrevocably into an unregulated glorification of adolescent instincts.
In the film’s final act, Preston’s exposed as a fraud, broke, and in massive debt. All of which, naturally, are forgiven and absolved by quaint Disney logic. A series of jarring moral reversals then haphazardly appear. Preston experiences firsthand the cold isolation of wealth and even goes as far as to swear off money in the face of family reconciliation.
However, this turnaround is shoehorned in so suddenly it reeks suspiciously of a desperate hail mary for moral catharsis.
What Preston truly wants is plainly stated from the beginning; freedom and autonomy. He craves whatever force can transcend his child class and at the same time satiate his adolescent desires.
The eponymous Blank Check then takes on a symbolic prowess; Preston’s signature unlocks more than funds but an entire relativistic universe in which his basest intuitions are rewarded and worshipped.
All the adults of Blank Check are so passive and corrupt that Preston emerges as a God in a Godless world, self-generating all of his own moral quandaries and conclusions. Within this ethical vacuum Preston feels no pain, suffers no repercussions and is even decorated with the highest trophy of the gross straight male adolescent fantasy... the “babe.”
After all is revealed, Shay offers Preston both a statutory kiss and promise of future nooky once he’s of age or even ‘wink-wink’ before then.
With that, Blank Check accidentally offered my 1994 lizard brain a modern fable; the uncurbed ascendency of a boy king who discovers that his boyishness is fundamental to his power.
At the time Blank Check played like a fetish film for me. A revisionist myth that shifted away from adages of family, responsibility and morality, into an unambiguous exaltation of pubescent hedonism. Watching it tickled psychological pressure points with ASMR-like reward tingles, entwined with my subliminals, and endowed me with an overgrown sense of strut.
I felt as invincible as Preston, and that I lived in a world which would only ever cheer me on.
Of course, I wasn’t consciously aware of any of this as I was engaging in public self-abuse during a Schwarzenegger movie. Nor was I aware of the deep matrix of male privilege and empowerment driving all if not most of my instinctive actions.
Simultaneously I felt zero shameful misgivings or moral doubt. If I felt any fear it was only the fear of being caught. And not even from the potential for embarrassment. Only disciplinary repercussions. Even that fear was hypothetical at best. I felt more than safe that both True Lies and myself would reach denouement without incident.
If you’d ask me then, ‘why?’ I’d probably maneuver blame on to the power of runaway train hormones. Looking soberly back though, I see it as a sort of paradoxical and sad victory lap. A gestural attempt to reinforce the idea that my adolescent vigor was as powerful as a bag full of money...
Benjamin Shearn is a film editor and writer. His last feature, Ladyworld, premiered at BFI London, Fantastic Fest, TIFF: Next Wave and was presented as part of the Frontieres Showcase at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival. Shearn’s work in narrative and documentary films has also been exhibited at ComicCon San Diego, the Louisiana Museum of Art in Copenhagen, la Gaîté lyrique in Paris, as well as official selections of the CPH:DOX, Melbourne International, Planete+Doc, TIFF After Dark, Court Metrage du Clermont, Chicago and Boston Underground Film Festivals, amongst others. For more of his work, go to benjaminshearn.com and/or follow his absurd Instagram account @actorsupset.
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GAZA AID + RESOURCES
01. Palestine Children’s Relief Fund
02. Writers Against the War on Gaza
03. Stop Gaza Genocide: Ceasefire Now Public Toolkit
04. How to Call Your Reps to Demand Ceasefire on Palestine
05. Free Downloadable Protest Posters for Palestine
06. Medical Aid to Palestinians
More From This Issue...
“the world has a secret to tell me”
PROSE by:
HALLETA ALEMU
the world has a secret to tell me
I saw things. I held onto a tree and it became a boy I loved. I danced and I imagined him dancing with me. Of all the times I would have been alone, I started imagining someone else there. Not that I didn’t love my solitude, but how maybe it didn’t need to be unending. There could be pauses and lapses in its foray. I wanted someone there. That was the change. And when a want presents itself in this purely natural way, as if it were a memory cracking open from the future, I knew it was almost there. I didn’t have to will these images. I just went on living and my living introduced these stutters, these reality shifts. These moment memories would open and I would step inside.
Follow Halleta:
Instagram: @halleta
Bio:
Halleta Alemu is a writer and multimedia performance artist. You can find more of her writing on her substack Electric Blue, where she muses about the world and her relation to it. She's currently working on her first novel, Virtual Mercury, about a girl in her late twenties who is unable to have pleasurable penetrative sex.
More From This Issue...
“soluble heart”
POETRY by:
IVANNA BARANOVA
soluble heart
you mouth impossible
against anything untoward
our highest good
tossing thought fields to trash
call them
ego rejects, to inspire
I kneel for the thought
then the asterisk
harmonic cartography, apple of my eye
cinching the throat of my quiet highway
sometimes the body just wants rest
levity as future, optimism
I have seen your soluble heart replete
Follow Ivanna:
Instagram: @ivanna.jpg
Bio:
Ivanna Baranova is a writer, editor, teacher, and artist currently living in Los Angeles. She is the Creative Communications Coordinator at the Poetry Project and author of Continuum (2023) and Confirmation Bias (2019), both available from Metatron Press. Her work has appeared in Blush Lit, Cixous72, DIAGRAM, Newest York, and elsewhere.
More From This Issue...
“Double Parked”
FICTION by:
CHLOE WATLINGTON
Double Parked
Mary pulled her sedan up to The Prince, a cocktail lounge in Koreatown. You can’t get more west from Manhattan nor more crowded than this corner. She circled the block twice looking for parking and called the valet. No answer. Instead of circling again for a legal spot she decided to stay parked right where she was. Like an Uber. She put her hazards on, locking the already parked cars in their spot, and walked through the open lips of the brass and velvet archway, outpacing the hostess’ index finger in the air by pointing her own at our table and sitting down by the grand piano. Everyone looked at her. Her hand shook. Not because she was scared, she was proud of what she had done and made sure the whole table heard about it.
I turned towards Thomas, but when he said nice to meet you I told him we’d already met. He remembered and said, everything that happened in L.A. could be traced back to the downtown repertoire theater, a reference from the book he had recommended I read last time we met at a party. I had nothing to add about the theater even though I had read the whole book. Sometimes my mind drifts for pages on end and I miss stuff, plot twists, easter eggs, theaters, big stuff. Maybe I even misheard him. Thomas used to be a stand-up comedian, but he quit because he could never nail the capper––the last joke of the night which is the only joke anyone can remember. His cappers left the audience with nothing to remember, so no one came to his show more than once on purpose. He had just come from the memorial of one of those kids who always wanted to do it, who when he was young he would say he just didn’t want to live. The memorial was short. Few people cried. The death’s inevitability left little reason to linger. He only brought it up to explain his wool suit jacket. Then after all that he asked me how I’d been.
One of the three houses in my neighborhood that burned down this winter was Michael’s house. Michael kept to himself, so we knew very little about him except that he was always under the hood of the Dodge he never drove. He was the only one on the block who used a weed whacker on his little allotted rectangle of grass. The rest of us assumed our landlord refused upkeep on our rectangles because we always paid rent late and had unauthorized boyfriends coming and going, so that even though it would be nice to have some green grass or even some drought tolerant perennial that cost $12.99 at Home Depot and needed no irrigation, the kind of plant all the rich neighborhood landlords called succulents, we didn’t ask for shit. We were placeholders. Our landlord was just buying time renting to us before the people from the next neighborhood over, who had no idea what to do with their money but to pay extra rent to live near a bar that served drinks, but also had games, would start moving this way, renaming it The Corridor since we already shared a zip code with other neighborhood with barcades, and we would be pushed to the neighborhood to the east, for a small cash buyout, and once relocated out there we would ready ourselves for the neighborhood to our west to swallow our blocks in $12.99 succulents from Home Depot appreciated to $15.99 by then, and we would once again submit to movements east until we were retiring out by the fallowed meadows that line the 5, tended to no better than the rectangles, in an apartment complex thrown together out of a box and tossed onto one of the burned up Valencia orange orchards where we will sit bent at the elbows over our unfinished screenplay until you know what. Death.
Not Michael. His desire was bare. He wanted a home. A home to die in. One could guess that when the sheriff put that eviction notice on his door for everyone to see that he felt something not unlike shame for assuming a position of dignity in an undignified arrangement. Whatever it was, he rigged the apartment, wired the doorknob to the gas valve of his hot water heater to be the one who had the last say. When the landlord showed up with the sheriff to evict him, the door was deadbolted. They began drilling through the deadbolt and the house blew up. No one was sure, though they all made guesses, if he had meant to die in there but he did. His dog too. The sheriff and landlord only suffered minor burns. Someone tagged his charred house “Dang Cop Love” but because of the artist’s lack of punctuation it was hard to determine whether the inscription was because Michael had spared or harmed the sheriff.
Catherine refilled her glass to the top from the table’s bottle of wine and hit the call button to order another. She pulled herself back toward the wall of the booth. Maybe you should do that Thomas, she baited, since you don’t want to witness what’s ahead.
I finally got out of the booth to visit the wallpapered powder room at the back of the bar and figured it was more trouble to get back in the booth than to just leave out the front door. I got in my car and when I turned on the headlights, I saw another double-parked car just like Mary had done. She was already gone, left when one of her lovers got called back home. I started the ignition of my 2001 Kia Sorento. Had I left the bar too soon? Sometimes these days I leave parties too soon.
Everyone had gone to bed. The stillness brought to focus the strobing effect of the busted streetlight. And then, beneath the flicker, the red glow of yet another set of blinking hazard lights appeared. Then another. And within another block, another, two more blocks then another and another. I pulled over to look in the window to see if anyone was inside. No one was inside. I passed Michael’s old house, rolled down the window to hear a mockingbird mimick the sound a car makes when you lock it, as if to tease, “you won’t have this pleasure.” The mockingbird, whose species in previous generations, had mocked, in no particular order: scrub jays, the meow of a cougar, a child playing in the street, a bomb––original and the copy as in a video game, a UPS truck backing up, the conductor’s bell announcing the shift towards modernity, and of more recently the throaty caw of maroon parrots chasing each other out of the dry thickets of exhausted palm fronds and into the doomed and dirty sky. I circled a few more times. Then I felt ready. I slid into a parallel position, lined my car up alongside another, like we were walking hand in hand and turned off the ignition. I put my knees up on the bottom edge of the wheel and stared into my phone. The only text I received all night was a Telegram message from my drug dealer with an updated menu of the daily specials: Afghan Kush OG $40 eighths, $200 ounces; Punch Bars 225 mg/bar (9 doses) $30 each; XTC 180mg $20/each; Pregabalin Pfizer 30mg, and DMT vape pens––inquire about flavors.
DMT, the psychedelic drug with an authority on the opposite of life. One big hit simulates a near-death experience and can also have the long-term effect of ferrying habitual users into oceanic boundlessness. In this total dissolution of ego boundaries, users see almost every border—between life and fairy tale, mechanical and natural, doll and self—as permeable. And in this selfless space, those perpetually near-death DMT smokers often find coincidences where others would not. With the ego discarded, what remains is a metaphysical correspondence across these escaped borders that is expressed perfectly by spontaneous coincidences. Users almost unanimously report seeing angels. Coincidentally. After a lengthy review of the menu, I ordered nothing. There’s no way I could get any sleep wondering if every bang outside my window was the tow truck ramp descending beneath my bumper. I leave my car right where it is and head up through the gate.
*
There she is. One bright eye, one dented eye, both of which are staring at me like a trespasser and blocking my path to the apartment door. Most strays around here stay low and scurry away at the sight of me. Not this one. She’s got a gait like she just graduated from Bard college with an award for her honors thesis. “Meoooow,” she yells and lunges forward. When I see a cat, any cat, I think of fleas, long slash marks from claws rich with viruses like toxoplasmosis, but also other yet-to-be named viruses that one gets just by sniffing the dander of a cat. My friends, at times, while we drink wine at their house will say, look at her. Isn’t she so cute? And we all turn to look at the cat. It’s not doing anything! Across the room, too far away to see any of the markings of cuteness: sapphire eyes, extra-long whiskers, stretching legs, none of that, the cat is just a silhouette in a far off window, no cuter than a dollar store Halloween decoration. My analyst says my anger towards cats is teaching me something; she says I should get into the anger and figure out what that something is, some psychic material from my unconscious childhood carrying important messages.
This particular cat has slowly, perhaps through mind control, taken over my apartment building. Everyone in the building group chat is engaged in the chase to catch this stray using her first name to refer to her, June. The dented eye is infected, and they plan to treat her with antibiotics. They have set out traps for this purpose, carceral-looking things full of coupon newsletters and canned fish. I can sense that the other members of the group chat have noticed my lack of effort towards getting the cat into the cage. But I don’t believe she is helpless; stray cats don’t need vets, they survive by limping, one-eyed or not, through this warzone between the streets and death. But there she is, and tonight is different, tonight she is staring at me like she stares at the others, with need.
Back at The Prince, Thomas had told us that his ex-girlfriend’s parents still send him an ecard every holiday. Even on Valentine’s day. Then they sign it, we LUV u, even though he has never once written them back. Maybe what my analyst wants me to admit about cats is not the obvious other women or my mother but that I am jealous of the cat receiving an abundance of love which it will never return. Nor is there any expectation that June will ever give anything in return for the love she receives—she’s free and she doesn’t have to pay. Neither in money, nor love, nor any other things.
June jumps down one more level to join me. What if I did catch the cat tonight? For nothing. That’s the ending to a night worth experiencing twice. I get down on my knees and construct a net of compassion, cast low and gentle like reiki, kneeling, vibrating with care I stare into her eyes. The cat lowers too. To an uneasy hunch, at first, but then after a moment, the cat drops, reclines as if the concrete is a couch and I a television, and she flips to the docile position, belly up, full wingspan stretched out. I look around to see if anyone is watching.
I can see the flashing lights of my hazards against the gate. Dim but steady, a cautious orange from the blurring of yellow tail lights and red brake lights. All is calm. We are alone. A truck with a loose carburetor speeds past playing Red Hot Chili Peppers followed by a mini bike, but neither of these intrusive sounds can dislodge the connection between me and June. From where we lay the cage is only about 250 feet due south in the courtyard behind us.
Follow Chloe:
Instagram: @every.issue
Bio:
Chloe Watlington is working on a nonfiction novel about what happens after funerals.
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“Claude McKay is just as relevant as Kendrick Lamar or we are free to name the fallen”
POETRY by:
JEANETTA RICH
Claude McKay is just as relevant as Kendrick Lamar or we are free to name the fallen
However,if we die
hunted
and penned
to the ground
Let your fists
rise up
In Anger
In Protest
In One Last Attempt
to take control of your
body
That has been trampled over
You
have taken your last breath
It is still seen as resistance
So
they put another bullet into your
heart.
Praise
the blood that was shed over your white robe
and you ain't even got to heaven yet
Listen
to the sound of the wind
Seeping from the wound in your chest
Marvel
at it
let it take you over
Your eyes roll back
The last vision you get to see is rubber
Tire
Boot
Through the grit of your teeth
Saliva skipping
From your lips
Parted grace
Yes Sir
yessir
yessum
I can name the fallen
It's too hard to be a god
So we tried to be
kings
But
when fighting a revolution
thrones are useless
So we switched it up to podiums
[names of the fallen]
podiums are just as fatal as guns
so we switched it up to the
Streets
[names of the fallen]
The streets were watching
So we switched it up to
tables
break
bread
and name the fallen
[names of the fallen]
I could name the fallen
But everybody know the one in front of the gun lives forever
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“SOMETHING TO CONSIDER WITHOUT SADNESS” & “EXPOSURE THERAPY”
POETRY by:
EMILY SIMON
EXPOSURE THERAPY
I wanted to consult a palmist, then work backwards
towards something banal, less convicted
“Forget about the academy, let’s talk,” I said excitedly. “Here comes the future!”
The secret was always sitting back, devouring
crap culture in the nude
The other secret was light and shadow
I wanted to come back to art to take
excellent care of you
I wanted to show you my levity and strength
My sense-making practice
I was spinning in my therapist’s chair
thinking, “How can I breed this discomfort elsewhere?”
I wanted to recognize you like an uncanny poem
or a painting at the museum as it appreciates in value
My little genius, my special one
The sharpness of the scissor is only
as terrible as I imagine
SOMETHING TO CONSIDER WITHOUT SADNESS
It’s just like the movies: An old woman, lost in her nightdress, gestures toward the street. She is holding a TV remote. She doesn’t know where she lives. She doesn’t know any names or phone numbers. She’s telling stories about the old days. She doesn’t know she’s cold. Emergencies are bound to happen while we are having a moment together. It’s always just like the movies. A woman needs help.
Bio:
Emily Simon is a writer and teacher living in New York City. She is the author of In Many Ways (Winter Editions, 2023), and the chapbook Reign is Over (Choo Choo Press, 2021). Her poems have appeared in The Florida Review, Salt Hill, Some Kind of Opening, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of the Columbia University Writing Program in poetry.
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“WHEN I MEET GOD”
FICTION by:
SAM BERMAN
WHEN I MEET GOD
7:04AM: I’m dreaming about dreaming when Lucy wakes me with a big kiss on my nose, my cheeks, my chin too. Lucy’s walleyed and her tail cuts the sun that pours in from the window that faces the airport. 7:14AM: On the morning radio, while the coffee drips, a woman explains that “Identity is a billion-dollar industry.” And her voice is bad. Bruising. Insistent. It seems–to me–to be the kind of voice, one imagines, that hates its mother. And probably hates its father too. It’s dumb pudgy hard voice. Yes, I hate it. 7:55AM: Now, on my little radio, a flight-attendant-friendly voice (a much better voice) reports that a chess champion was found dead in the spray-painted part of the city last night. And, well, I think that sucks. Because beyond someone being dead, it reminds me the world can be fully unfair. And while I do know that the world is like that–unfair –I sometimes like to pretend that it isn’t. 8:20AM: My son comes down the hallway rubbing his eyes, his pecker. Like most mornings he’s ready for me to play cars with him. 8:31AM: We move to playing with trucks. 8:39AM: I suggest we play with the cars and trucks together, but my son doesn’t go for it. “They have different towing capacities,” he says. “They shouldn’t even be on the road together. They’re very different machines.” 8:40AM: “That’s okay,” I say. “That’s okay,” I repeat, worried about the way he thinks about the world. 8:47AM: I walk my son to the bus so he can go to his Lewis & Clark summer camp. This is an odd week, as in not an even week: it’s a Meriweather Lewis Week. He’s wearing the otter cap we made from waxpaper and there’s a yellow bath towel over his shoulders that I pinned up to look like a hunting frock. 8:50AM: This bus comes down the street. 8:51AM: The bus turns left with my son onboard and I’m alone on the street. 8:55AM: I walk with a hilarious slowness down the sunny sidewalk and think about the endocrinologist that won’t return my calls. 9:17AM: Back in bed, I watch a video on my cellphone of a horse in the Catskills that’s been struck by lightning, rendering him blind, and now the horse’s best friend is the farmer’s dog, who barks to tell the horse when he’s close to the waterspout or the food bucket. They are best friends 9:18AM: Overwhelmed by the connectedness and tenderness of all living creatures, I cry myself back to sleep. 11:19AM: Lucy wakes me from another perfect dream because it’s time for her walk. Her eyes admire separate walls as I pat her on the head and pull back the covers. “Good fucker,” I say. 11:33AM: Lucy walks me past the green yards of our very nice and clean neighborhood. Eventually she stops to do her business against a tree. Out of respect, I turn my attention towards a salmonberry bush, swaying stupid-style in the summer wind. 12:01PM: We walk All the way to a new school, I watch a construction crew jackhammer where a gym will be. 12:03PM: I hear these footsteps between the jackhammer and turn around to see a woman I can’t understand coming towards me in the parking lot. 12:04PM: “I won’t,” she says, her mouth foamy and wild, her forehead sweaty and her elbows bloody like she spent the morning falling down the big stairs at the big library. “The governor’s team came for my children and tried to make me write about it. But I won’t. I won’t write about it.” 12:05PM: “Okay,” I say, reaching for the keys in my vest and spiking them between my knuckles the way the self-defense instructor on Channel 7 had demonstrated a week prior. 12:07PM: The woman’s hair shakes as she drops her grocery bag and pulls out the only gun I’ve ever seen in real life. 12:08PM: A small and urgent thing occurs in my small and urgent life. 12:09PM: Two construction workers–one of which is waving a wrench over his head–run towards me screaming; Lucy runs towards the bright sun, barking; and the woman with frizzy hair and bloody elbows runs towards the tree line, away from the mess she’s made. 12:12PM: Lucy comes back and licks my face. The men have their shirts tied around my stomach. 12:13PM: I die, okay. Now: A piece of my soul refracts with unlimited grace towards the giant doors of a European-seeming soccer stadium; everything, of course, is built out of perfect white light. The walkways and parking spots are perfect white light. The turnstiles. The unbent umbrellas that rise from the heavenly hotdog stands. And like any good heaven: everything seems to be forgiven and handsome and walkable (with the exception of the running track which goes on for forever, but that appears to be by design–an architectural statement.) Hereafter: A small mother opens one of the giant doors of the stadium, but there’s no creeeeeeak sound. I smile at the boney angel, but my smile isn’t working quite right. Also: I can feel myself not being able to think as well as I could think in the moment before this thinking moment. (When I was still alive thinking was easier.) I think all the white light is getting to me, sadly. Sanding me down, sadly. Slowing me up as the hero dog I recognize from the cover of People magazine, Caine, has me follow him down the mezzanine. First: going here. Then: going there. We meet all the other boney angels. And then we walk sideways for a while, down another long hallway, before we take the short short elevator ride up to the door with the privacy glass. Knock. Knock. (I hear God shuffling before he says come in.) But then he says, “It’s open.” And we are in. We’re in. And his chair turns slowly as the hero dog trots out the room. And I. Me. Am with God in his all-white office. In the presence of God: I say, “I’m sorry for everything. Apologies for my narrow, wham-bam thoughts and my–my tailgating ways. I take it all back.” Then I do pray: to take back my divorce, oil, golden temples and my general use of money for fun. And–Oh! Oh yes! I certainly do regret the molar I crushed eating too hard. Or. I mean, yes, the tooth I broke of my sister’s, telling her an earth rock in 1988 was a moon rock. In a time before or after time: God is quiet. He’s too quiet. Then he does a small little smile and he tells me I’m fine. Actually, better than most. He makes me pinky promise to be a good girl. In the time before or after time (cont.): “Me be a good girl in the pavilion,” I tell God. “I will, I can, I promise.” With God at my side: We walk the stairs a bit. And talk. Well, I try and talk. I tell him about my beautiful son and dumb-eyed dog. He laughs and lets me change the color of the sky to make it the way I always wanted to make it. It’s all very nice as we get near the white white pool. Then he gets all quiet again. He gets slumpy. He does this whole slumpy God routine. “I love swimming,” he says, taking my hand, holding my hand. “…just sometimes I wish that I had someone fun to swim with, you know? A person that knows that knows how to have some fun. The kind of girl that knows we’re running out of the good times.” I shake my head like I understand what God’s talking about and then I tell him another awful story about my husband who never took my stomach issues seriously until something inside me exploded and I had to be driven to the hospital in an ambulance and the ambulance was being driven by a guy I went to high school with and who lied about sleeping my friend Veronica just because they used to both workout at the same Planet Fitness. “Interesting life you had,” says God. And I’m so embarrassed about how my brain is working slow, I just cover my eyes and collapse into one of the lounge chairs. “Oh no no no,” says God, wrapping his arm around me. “Don’t cry. Heaven is supposed to be fun.” “I know, I know, I just miss my son, I think.” I say. But now God is breathing hard against the crook of my neck, his dazzling white robe now split over my shoulder, the extra fabric hanging like pool towel. He is on top of me now. Top God. I wipe my tears away as he lowers himself down into my hand. With God in hand: I hear only deep breathes. Then. “Please. Just hold me for a minute,” says God, his penis laid simply in my hand. “Just please don’t let go. Please. Please. Please don’t let go for a while.”
Follow Sam:
Instagram: @sugarcainberman
Twitter: @taylorbabe411
Bio:
SAM BERMAN is a short story writer who lives in Chicago and works at Lake Front Medical with Nancy, Andrew, and Reuben. They are terrific coworkers. He has had work published in Maudlin House, Northwest Review, The Masters Review, D.F.L. Lit, Hobart, Illuminations, The Fourth River, and SmokeLong Quarterly, and recently won Forever Magazine’s Unconventional Love Stories Contest. His work was selected as runner-up in The Kenyon Review’s 2022 Nonfiction Competition as well as shortlisted for the 2022 Halifax Ranch Prize and the ILS Fiction Contest. He has forthcoming work in Expat Press and Rejection Letters, among others.
More From This Issue...
“A SELF IN THREE PARTS”
ESSAY by:
LILY MORRISON-BELL
A Self in Three Parts
1. Runaway (Gabriola Island, Canada)
I spend my days scrambling through forests and looking for fossilised jellyfish. I walk for hours towards the mountains on the horizon, but there is always an ocean between us. My nails are strong and naked and caked with earth, but no matter how much I surrender to the outside world all I can feel is the pulse of my Self. A union with what’s within telling me I need to get out.
The ferries have names like Shoal, Orca, Arbutus. I wonder what I’d be called if I were a ferry. Despite how connected I feel to my Self presently, I feel a complete dissociation from my name. Attaching to something so arbitrary as a four letter appellation seems somehow incongruent with this depth of selfhood I’m experiencing. This connection is ineffable, akin to an intuitive umbilical cord; the simple profundity of being who I am, where I am, when I am. Is that just presence? Or a result of presence? Philosophise as I might, the ferry horn is blowing and my arrival on the tiny island is imminent. Solitude, clean air. Old-growth trees and houses built of reclaimed materials. Artists and craftspeople and healers and lumberjacks. There are mountains on the horizon and a resounding stillness in my core, a silence that signals peace as opposed to loneliness.
I have come to be a healer’s apprentice for a year, an unexpected opportunity that presented itself at a time of real stagnation in life. I had felt like an old Yorkshire Tea bag left on the counter a few days too long, growing a crust-like skin onto its surface. The crust dissolved into the Pacific, and my leaves scattered themselves in the water as the ferry delivered me where I was going.
I don’t understand how the water is this glassy in the midst of a snow storm, but it contributes to the intriguing-yet-sinister magic of my arrival. I am both geographically remote, experiencing a profound disconnect to the external world, and yet deeply connected to my inner ocean. How do I reconcile these seemingly contradictory states of (dis)connection?
My “teacher” offers to collect me from the ferry and I gratefully accept. In the summer I had walked to the house from the harbour, through the woods and into a spell, but it is winter and the spell has come to get me. We hug and share conscious eye contact that makes me uncomfortable.
His eyes are piercing. The man standing before me looks like a goblin, which can sometimes be endearing. Keith Richards epitomises an endearing goblin, but this man is far from endearing. “Wow,” he says, licking his lips in a deliberately salacious manner, “aren’t you just yummy.” I stare at the 76-year-old, at once a ball of light and a dimmer to my own. I don’t know what to say and my body feels weird; she is calm, but she is rigid, as though shielding herself from him. The shield is brittle and he will try to break it. I can see it in his gaze. The creases around his eyes reveal decades of laughter and secrets that never want to be revealed.
That night something in my umbilical intuition will tell me to lock my bedroom door. I will be afraid that he will hear me turn the lock. I will continue to hold fear in my skin. My intuition will begin to shout and scream as the days go by, just as he does the night I run away.
2. Angelina (Los Angeles, California)
I am an ethnographer. Do I tell myself this to justify the $10 coffee and croissant and ritualised people-watching? The flaneur-ethnographer pipeline is well trodden, and at present I am in the trenches, aka MARU on Hillhurst in Los Feliz, LA.
I have recently acquired acrylic nails, but they are not part of a costume nor do they function as disguise. They are fodder for a different corner of my Self to feed off. Questionable Shrek-green acrylics and a purple notebook embossed with gold fairies is an odd combination that somehow draws people to me. Either that, or it’s an energy thing. In this state I feel like an all-seeing ‘I’(though not omniscient). A wallflower rather than a girl with a God-complex. I seek to understand those I don’t know in the hopes of piecing together the fragments of my Self I once knew as a whole. Do I feel guilty using them as research? Not really. My interest and subsequent engagement is totally sincere. Perhaps they find this arresting. Whatsmore, it is always them who offer up their Selves, never me coercing it out. In the sharing of their humanity they act as a mirror to my own.
“Would you believe me if I told you I was a felon who had been to prison three times?” I look up.
“Well, yeah, because you just told me so.”
There is a sincerity in his tone and eyes that signals truth-telling. Whatsmore, I don’t know why someone would joke about this in the first place. My right index finger tickles. The acrylics are awake, and listening.
“Now I love marine biology, man. I have a set-up in my house and I study the water composition of my son’s fish tank. I started noticing how different corals impacted how quickly the water needed changing. Life is crazy.”
I look at him with my ears. My vision and ability to listen have become one and I can do nothing but.
“What do you go by ‘round these parts?”
My insides flutter because I have always wanted to be asked my name in this way. It’s so… old Hollywood. Where better to be asked, then, than Hollywood itself? I want to hug his voice with its rasp and warmth and earnestness. You can tell by the way it carries he also has a great sense of humour. I give him my name but I keep my words to a minimum; my job here is not to take space but to hold it.
Hearing my Self say my name, I think back to the ferry last month when I couldn’t connect to anything so arbitrary, and I notice how being consecrated in an external reality is now thoroughly comforting. I hold onto his name. He must feel at ease because words stream from his mouth into the estuary between us, and just like the ocean I ferried across to return to my Self, this stranger and I are now traversing the waters of the collective conscious, on separate journeys but sharing this stretch. There is, of course, evident irony in his hobby being marine biology. We talk for a while, and I am grateful for his willingness to share his story. I don’t ask questions, but I listen to his answers. He speaks of curiosity and change and fish and family and driving buses and compassion. He laughs raspy laughs and welcomes me to his hometown. Then we say goodbye, forever.
That night I take to the stoop where my acrylics desperately morph into a grasp on my pen as I try to document the day. I look blankly at the page, unable to scribe the depth of human experience and connection I had felt. It was raw and pure and simple and complex and… human. The man who had opened himself to a total stranger and who had lived a life completely different to my own had not only strengthened my connection to the world around me. His words had stuck like glue that dripped down the walls inside me, making its way to the shards of my splintered self and sticking them back together, slowly.
3. Union (Mexico City, Mexico)
He made me cut off my acrylics. Ok, he didn’t make me, but the 43% of me that resents him tells me that he did.
He forced me into a state of dissociation, I argue, severing me from who I had been, who I was becoming!
That’s a bit dramatic. I wasn’t forced, and I didn’t dissociate. I went bouldering, and they were just acrylics. I wince at how submissive I become with the slightest hint of male acknowledgement. He had been the first person I met upon arrival in Mexico City. Casa de las Brujas. That was where we met; a verdant, turreted art-deco building where he lived and where I stayed for only one night. He saw me arrive with my worldly possessions and he laughed because I was staying on the fourth floor and there was no elevator. His eyes were curious. He offered to help me carry my bags upstairs. He then offered me psilocybin and chamomile tea. I said yes and wondered if he would become a friend or a lover.
Would I have reconsidered his bouldering invitation had I had the foresight to realise that it was also an invitation to denude my fingers, a part of my body that holds so much insecurity? They are small, too small, and look like what I imagine Keith Richards’ fingers would look like if he were smaller. But I can’t help thinking that the removal of my acrylics rendered me Keith Richards sans goblin fingers. And if the man didn’t have those, would he even be Keith Richards?
I did not get acrylics to become someone else. It was Los Angeles and I was a fresh cult-runaway drinking expensive coffees and meeting bizarre, brilliant characters. I got the acrylics to explore the parameters of my own selfhood. Acrylic me wouldn’t need to emphasise this - she would stand strong and long-fingered in self-assurance.
The expression ‘come out of your shell’ implies a state of self-actualisation, an emboldening of confidence, but the moment my nails were stripped of their toxic, plastic shell, I felt like I retreated into my own. All because of a rock-climbing invitation. It’s funny now I look at it, but I mourned something that evening, and it wasn’t just poorly applied fake nails. Maybe I hadn’t retreated into my shell so much as returned to a level of interiority that my nails had clawed their way out of. Green talons dug deep into the foundations of materiality and exteriority. The irony is, if I had kept them I wouldn’t have been able to grasp the rock-climbing holds, and I would much rather lose a nail than my grip.
That night as I went home and ate two-too-many tacos, I considered the implications of this loss. Was it really a loss, or was it heralding a return to parts of myself recently adrift? Was it a question of physicality or perspective? I can never un-live what I experienced with those nails. That time was something greater than I could’ve anticipated. It saw me run away from danger and who I thought I was becoming, to safety, California, community and Mexico. It marked a departure, a change, and an arrival at a new beginning. I wound up where I had wanted to be all along following only dreams and intuition, going to Brazilian psychedelic rock concerts with my 70-year-old landlord and being invited rock-climbing by a triple Leo with ocean eyes, and here I was thinking about the loss of my fake nails.
There is something deliciously ironic about meaningful, lasting impacts resulting from the addition of something totally unnatural. At some point in the past few months, the pieces of broken Self that had once felt so strong had gradually pieced together, and with that I had reestablished a connection to the world around me. Things had begun to align, within and with-out. The severing of my plastic talons marked the completion of this process. From a connection to Self but not the outside, to connecting with others but not myself, I had finally arrived at the point where the two meet. Maybe it’s in the totality of duality that we find union.
Bio:
Lily is a UK-born writer working between Montreal, London and Mexico City. She has a Substack called Mustard-Dijon which chronicles streams of consciousness-esque essays and occasional short-form fiction. She also writes reviews of contemporary art shows and odes to balconies. Find her here https://lilymustarddijon.substack.com/ .
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“I ARRIVED BLEEDING”
POETRY by:
MEGHANN BOLTZ
I ARRIVED BLEEDING
Left, choking
On feathers
On the gap
Between the teeth of
What I meant to say
& what I said
Said fuck me
When I meant
Love me, now
The angel is dead.
Follow Meghann:
Instagram: @meghann___boltz
Bio:
Meghann Boltz is the author of the chapbooks Cautionary Tale (b l u s h lit, 2021) and rebel/blonde (Bottlecap Press, 2018). Her work has recently appeared in Hot Pink Mag, Voicemail Poems, Witch Craft, Dream Boy Book Club and elsewhere. She is also the founder of the new micro press Ultra Violet, where her latest chapbook, True Romance, will be out in June. You can find her on instagram @meghann___boltz.
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EXCERPTS FROM “SELAH”
POETRY by:
ELEANOR TENNYSON
from ‘Selah’
(selāh) סֶֽלָה
A Hebrew word of unknown meaning at the end of verses in the Psalms: perhaps a musical direction,
but traditionally interpreted as a blessing meaning “forever”
Maybe the shape of my mouth is the word itself - I am looking for.
My body is a plum-sweet alphabet. It does this thing
like rapture, like I’m unsure and atlas.
I want to scream
eyes closed: this is me without
I lift my lips again to the black-smudgy wall
I am a dog with a human face
They had to use a machine to defrost my brain once they found me
under the bone-coloured sky
in the park, on the riverbank.
I couldn’t open my mouth, the first time.
The friends in my bed laugh
at the half-empty glasses and beer cans around us.
All I could say:
some hours, melodies.
His eyes were a sleepy-valium blue &
they rain inside me
I used to run into the streets with men three times my height
return in the morning, tapping the back-window:
to find dad spooning cereal into his mouth
he would not ask me where I’d been.
I am the daughter of people who cannot swim
I was patient
when I had you
I plucked majesty
from your karaoke song.
It was a strange pageant,
I want to live like common people
the mystery won’t leave me alone
I wanted to be a human
feeder.
On my knees
mouth open
all mouth, no arms.
Your lap
molten cushion.
Happy
hole,
like the movies
Up to the flumes of happiness, never been,
never been
Follow Eleanor:
Instagram: @eleanor_tennyson
Bio:
Eleanor is based in Brooklyn, New York. Originally from the U.K., her chapbook Selah is Forthcoming [Bottlecap Press, 2023], her work has been featured in Freedom Press, Yale's Architectural Broadsheet: Paprika, Spam and more. She is the author of The Hairy Manifesto, which she self-published with the support of Creative Scotland - it can be found at The Good Press. She is currently a poetry MFA candidate at Columbia University.
'Selah' is a long poem that is forthcoming from Eleanor Tennyson. Like a series of slides from a film reel, the poems of 'Selah' are the residue of the recent past. This therianthropic speaker does not remember the past alone. Since her past repeats itself constantly, the past thus evolves and creates something new at every moment. This is poetry on the forces of love and its fragments.
Header photography by Amanda Bylone (@brothbaby66)
Bio:
Amanda Bylone is an artist based out of Los Angeles, California originally from Atlantic City, New Jersey. While primarily an oil painter, her photographs focus on her Southern California surroundings and moments of spontaneity and beauty. Her official website is amandabylone.com.
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never beennever been
EXCERPTS FROM “THE REPRODUCTION SONNETS”
POETRY by:
PARKER MENZIMER
from ‘The Reproduction Sonnets’
Follow Parker:
Twitter: @aporiaenjoyer
Bio:
Parker Menzimer's chapbook The Links was published by 1080press in July 2022. His writing has appeared in Prelude, BOMB, Epiphany, and elsewhere. He earned an MFA at Brooklyn College, where he was the recipient of a Truman Capote Literary Trust Fellowship in 2020. He edits Topos Press and serves as Public Programs and Community Manager at the Poetry Society of America.
Header photography by Amanda Bylone (@brothbaby66)
Bio:
Amanda Bylone is an artist based out of Los Angeles, California originally from Atlantic City, New Jersey. While primarily an oil painter, her photographs focus on her Southern California surroundings and moments of spontaneity and beauty. Her official website is amandabylone.com.
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“THE NIGHT OF”
FICTION by:
MATTHEW COREY
The Night Of
It was humid out, she said.
I like it though, he said. I wasn’t complaining.
She kept her eyes on the road, but chanced a quick glance in his direction. He was still slumped in the passenger seat, knee up on the dashboard, right elbow resting on the door, his head leaning on his right hand fist. Despite the air-conditioning turned up, the window on that side was open a crack, just enough to make the maximum amount of noise as air passed in and out of it.
The radio was loud, louder than she liked, or would be comfortable driving with if she were on her own. He also picked the station – something to the left of most of the more popular stations. Sometimes it was talk radio—discussing local politics and news. Other times it was jazz; other times it was classical. With the noise of the wind, it was hard to tell which of the three they were getting this time. She knew better, though, than to ask him to close the window (fresh air was important), or turn up or off the radio. She didn’t want it turned up; she knew how he’d react if he knew she wanted it off.
They were on their way to his doctor’s appointment. She had a two-and-a-half-hour window off of work for it. A half-hour for the ride there, another for the ride back. If everything went smooth, and it took forty-five minutes as planned, wait included, they could stop at their favorite food truck on the way back.
It had all his favorite food, two fold-up chairs, and small table with a big, rainbow-striped umbrella in the center, now weighed down by two sandbags, since the wind picked it up once, and threw it on the two-laned highway, almost causing a massive six or seven car accident.
How was he doing? She wondered. She looked over again, trying to not to make it obvious. He had his dark shades on, and the baseball cap, too, pulled down over his head. Both could be said to be blocking the light, which could still feasibly be bothering him.
But ever since the night of, he’d gotten cagey about a lot of things and would suddenly snap at something little that was out of place and had been bothering him for a long time, though he hadn’t let on – a reoccurring noise in the room, sounds from a table or people around them in a restaurant, a car honking its horn in the street.
She listened to the car now---for anything like it. All she could hear was the wind from his window, static from the radio as they drove further away and lost the signal, and just the car itself, in good shape, running smooth against the road. She even allotted time for them to take the scenic route, instead of the shorter route through their town and the next, which would take less time, but had more lights, and more stops and starts.
The night of…she thought. She tried to brush it away as she focused on the road but there was so little traffic, so little of anything else to distract her that she couldn’t. Plus, maybe running it through her head one more time, she might see something different. Something else that spooked him about it that might help her understand how he was feeling a little bit more.
It was eight or nine pm. She should know by now since she filled out the police report. They finished dinner, she was washing dishes. He said he was going outside to get some air, maybe drop by the deli or the bar (but not the gas station; the only other thing in walking distance from where they lived). She took it to mean he was going out to smoke a cigarette. She was able to quit cold turkey; he was still prescribed a patch and was having issues. So long as it wasn’t around the house, it was fine by her. They were both young, both agreed to quit. He’d come around to it when he would.
The bar was infrequent. He might run into someone they knew there and stay for a drink or two. When he didn’t come back after the usual ten minutes, with something from the deli they already had in their cabinet (vegetable oil, rice, some outdated spice, etc.), she figured that’s what happened.
Fifteen turned to twenty minutes. Twenty to an hour. She finished dishes, the counter was spotless. It was when she was on a stool, cleaning cabinets, she realized she was worried. She called the deli. Closed. She called the bar. No answer. It just rang and rang. Probably some Kris Kristoferson song drowning it out entirely.
She didn’t want to go out. He had an independent streak. He didn’t like to be checked up on. But she went to the door, put on her coat hanging by it, and opened it to leave. When she did, she saw something at the end of their foot path, which finished at the sidewalk. It was low to the ground and moved in the mix of dark and lamplight from the street.
She walked closer to it, leaving the door open behind her, and felt her fears more and more confirmed as she got closer to him.
“What happened?” she asked, as she bent down, trying to touch him, take care of him, though she didn’t know where or how to begin.
“I think I…,” he said, or started to say. “I think I maybe passed out for a little.”
“A little?” she asked. “How long have you been out here?”
She got her arms around his shoulders, now that she could tell which side he was facing and got a look at his face in the half-light. It was bruised, she could see, and from the stains on the sidewalk and smudges around his mouth and cheek, she could tell he was bleeding.
“My God,” she said. She reached for her phone in her pocket, realized she left it on the counter in the kitchen while she was cleaning.
“We have to get you…” she said. She wasn’t sure. Could she leave him alone? Did this just happen? Was or were whoever did it still around? He kept trying to get up.
“Stop it,” she said. “You’re in no shape for that.” She took his jacket off, already pulled halfway down his arms, as if to hold them back., balled it up, and turned him on his back so he could lie down on it and use it as a pillow. She didn’t remember hearing that specifically somewhere but it just felt like the right thing to do. Only downside was seeing a dried line of blood coming down from what appeared to be his right ear. Maybe it was just from something else. Something inside her, though, said, that doesn’t look good.
“Wait here,” she said. “I’m going inside for just one second.” He was so dazed and confused, it didn’t seem to matter to him. She rushed up the path and ran into the house anyway, grabbing the phone off the counter, and did the sprint back, checking for her keys before closing the door this time behind her.
She called 9-1-1 on the way to him.
“Police or medical?” a woman’s voice answered on the other line.
“Both,” she said.
“Ma’am,” the woman said, “do you have a police emergency or a medical emergency?”
“My boyfriend’s just been jumped outside our home,” she said, “and he’s lying here, and he’s full of blood, and hardly conscious.”
“Is whoever attacked him still there as well?”
“Not that I can tell.”
“I’m sending an ambulance and patrol car. Do you need me to stay on the line?”
“If you don’t mind.”
The ambulance was there first. Police after. She could still see it all in front of her—the lights, the static from their radios; hear herself answer questions she barely had answers to. Did he owe anyone money? Made anyone angry in the last month or so? Buy drugs off the street? No, no, and no.
“Ange,” he said.
“What?” she asked, turning to him. It was the first thing he said to her in fifteen, twenty minutes.
“You’re speeding,” he said.
She was. Her knuckles were white gripping the steering wheel, too. She took a breath, loosened up, let her foot fall back from the gas pedal.
“Thanks,” she said.
“No problem,” he said. He barely moved from how he was sitting. “You can turn that off if you want,” he said, nodding towards the radio. “Can’t hear it with the window down, anyway.”
She chanced one more look to her right to see if she heard wrong. He just sat there, though, watching the road. She let her right hand go of the steering wheel and quickly turned the radio off, then resumed driving.
Bio:
Matthew Corey is a writer living in Ridgewood, New York. He goes back-and-forth between poetry and prose, and sometimes tries to accomplish both at once. He tries to find the contours in a story that more match experience itself, rather than the rigors of a traditional way of telling a tale. His work can be found in the Lascaux Review, Two Cities Review, and he was the winner of the 2019 Miriam Chaikin Writing Award for Poetry.
Header photography by Amanda Bylone (@brothbaby66)
Bio:
Amanda Bylone is an artist based out of Los Angeles, California originally from Atlantic City, New Jersey. While primarily an oil painter, her photographs focus on her Southern California surroundings and moments of spontaneity and beauty. Her official website is amandabylone.com.
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“CORONERS, OR CUSTODIANS” “11.16” & “12.8”
POETRY by:
AFOE
coroners, or custodians
working was so
opulent or populist
no one can decide which
I orchestrated my own
bloodshed in the
style of allegation
or bootleg salem
I can't decide witch
[I'm sorry] which
I was Dollar Store Dawson's
Creek downstream Jersey
Shore I was up
three fucks and down a
thousand days I was
juice on linoleum I was
shit on topsoil I was
a little left swipe
on her ordinary bruised thumb
I was everything
Jesus of Nazareth
could never be:
a psychedelic spring coronation
caked in sequoia ooze, or
a slobbering silo of cadaverous
[I'm sorry] cavernous torpedoes
aimed at ass play a
walking billboard with its
putrid guts splayed bright
and luminescent
just nothing left to sell
11.16
we the gas guzzlers
our heaters the crucified
I absolutely hate it, all of it
the searing windows
replacing eyes
i am sounds?
yes, I can hear me now
I rake the room's air
like a turn
style
I reason with the dark
cuneiforms in reeling
delight
one, two, twenty years
in exchange
for the peace and solitude
of those wheat field
and wicker basket values
the ones all the soviet texts
seem to turn to
in the end
12.8
and when I'm sparring
when I'm sexuality
when I'm imperfect daffodils
rufilin reason and storefront
sabotage
when I'm breaking the spirit
of daily insta nature reserve
inspo
when I'm skeletons
when I'm ladders when I'm
clinging to hell when the hello
is cerberus when the hug
is styx when I am love
in the deep recesses
of forget I am for
aging new sticks
for the campfire
for camp
and for fire
Bio:
Afoe writes poetry in Brooklyn.
Header photography by Amanda Bylone (@brothbaby66)
Bio:
Amanda Bylone is an artist based out of Los Angeles, California originally from Atlantic City, New Jersey. While primarily an oil painter, her photographs focus on her Southern California surroundings and moments of spontaneity and beauty. Her official website is amandabylone.com.
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“THE MEN I KNOW WHO EAT ALONE ARE MEN”& “THE BOOM OF THE FIREWORKS TURNS MY MOUTH INTO YOURS”
POETRY by:
CLARE MARIE SCHNEIDER
THE MEN I KNOW WHO EAT ALONE ARE MEN
When we first met I noticed a dark stain
And I knew you as perfect, sloppy too.
If you left me at sea I would find peace,
A new, wet ground that groans and rocks with me.
THE BOOM OF THE FIREWORKS TURNS MY MOUTH INTO YOURS
I joke I want to cut you open and get inside
but looking at the clouds reminds me I have no knife.
After two years with you,
I will move on or learn to pee standing up.
If there were stairs in this house, I would crawl up them to you
If I could make those webs I would.
With my arms around you, I was big and strong.
I paid for your ice cream. Took your temperature. Made you cry.
If I was a husband I would come home early on Sunday nights to make pasta,
On Tuesdays, I would be gone for at least a week,
I would love my children like they were my own.
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“OCTOBER”
POETRY by:
EMMA WINSOR WOOD
October
I am here. As if here. Writing a poem under conditions which are not
ameanable to it. As Bernadette Mayer advised. What if a conjunction
were a verb. I and you a something to keep you from something
something. You but me away. I so all alone in my room. Who is
the sad girl, Mommy? Meaning it stinks in here. Al alone. May be
he took his face off becuse he was mad about his face. Because
I don’t know why. I’m anding along when it starts raining so I
become an umbrella. Getting wet to keep myself dry. You for
me a lime yet it buts and so nor for and I and and but yet. So.
Follow Emma:
Website: www.emmawinsorwood.com
Bio:
Emma Winsor Wood is the author of The Real World (BlazeVOX, 2022), a poetry collection, and the translator of A Failed Performance (Plays Inverse, 2019). Her poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, ZYZZYVA, Fence, jubilat, DIAGRAM, The Colorado Review, and BOAAT, among others. She holds a PhD in Literature from the University of California Santa Cruz, and edits Stone Soup, the literary and art magazine for kids by kids.
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“SKETCHES IN THE GARDEN”
POETRY by:
HALEY JOY HARRIS
Follow Haley:
Instagram: @haleyj0yharris
Bio:
Haley Joy Harris is a writer from Los Angeles currently based in St Louis.
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“MEMORY TEETH”
PROSE by:
RACHEL KAHN
Memory Teeth
May 24 2022
She used to dream of a treasure boat. Ruby red eyes searching the blues, the sea wore emerald and sapphire. Slow waves grinding on untamed stone.
Time smoothes everything.
His work was only done when the whole ocean crust resembled a glossy acrylic nail. Dangerous rocks forced into polite submission, hanging from gold chains.
She longed to swim there. Touch the shimmering with wet fingers.
To live in the potential for memory is to open your mouth so wide all your teeth fall out. This allows for room to place small colorful gems.
A mouth full of treasure sparkles when you smile. Speech becomes Song.
Her mouth now music. Diamond notes performing a shining wet aria. The milkiness of before forgotten in the newly effervescent grin.
She thought of swallowing these little jewels, burying the fortune deeper, but then she would have no teeth and her smile would become lonely.
She wore necklaces and charm bracelets so she was always surrounded by friends. When she turned her head they giggled in her ear, sharing stories and secrets. Each charm, a special little secret.
When she placed them in her mouth she remembered.
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TRACE
HYBRID by:
OLGA MIKOLAIVNA
(trace)
to trace back a line in the sand. to follow a path of no return. to tread a path lightly. paths of the forest that she'd imagined in the pages of her journal.*
(trace)
a collapsable pizza box on the gingham dining room table in morning. empty
(trace)
piss smell in the tunnel of old town station between platforms. liminal
(trace)
a pile of dry kelp on the sand. browning
(trace)
a kitchen floor. mopped
(trace)
a pregnancy test discarded in the trash can. negative
(trace)
a shadow on a face
(trace)
perfume from previous person passing by
from old french tracier: look for, follow, pursue
(trace)
wrinkles & veins in a sagging arm
(trace)
a disemboweled payphone
(trace)
glistening water on a torso
(trace)
watermark of coffee on a white tank top
(trace)
a fly on a wall
(trace)
flying of a plane above as though a bird gathering dust
(trace)
car alarm activated in darkness of time
(trace)
buzzing of power lines in the marine layer
(trace)
a constant is a sound
loss means the inability to go backwards.how willful the streets were in the death of the afternoon.
(trace)
broken glass scattered on 30th and university
(trace)
reflection of lamp in the nighttime window
(trace)
a murmur
(trace)
petrichor
(trace)
verge of snowfall
(trace)
something about salt
(trace)
graphite marks on a white seminar table
(trace)
(trace)
shadow of trolley’s antennae against the surface of a wall
(trace)
стая голубей
(trace)
lifeguard station #33 “on duty.” closed
(trace)
gold kernels swirl in the ocean
(trace)
(trace)
i am unsettled
(trace)
coyote walking through normal heights in broad daylight
(trace)
something about loss.
(trace)
blue spots in gray morning sky
(trace)
highway like the ocean waling
(trace)
dream
(trace)
clothing on a bed
(trace)
*the italicized phrase in the opening passage is taken from cristina rivera garza
Follow Olga:
Instagram: @_dithryamb_
Website: olgamikolaivna.wordpress.com
Bio:
(b.1990) originally from kyiv, olga works in the (intersectional/textual) liminal space of photography, word, translation, and installation. her work is surrounded by, and surrounds, memory, dream spaces, inheritance, (dis)place, and the construction of language. she cofounded and co-curated desuetude press. she is currently a student in the creative writing mfa program at uc san diego.
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“BACH” & “A WAY IN”
POETRY by:
ZOE CONTROS KEARL
A WAY IN
paint peels from wood
siding after a long winter
both objective and sincere, try
to loosen a decades-long emphasis
on singular meaning
sweet voice
fanged only at the pauses
see: white rabbit’s foot
practice radical hospitality
see the sacred embedded
in the structures of nature
an ice storm caused
many trees to split
stainless blade engraved
close eyes bat lashes
blur against the pastoral
blur against the past
dust the piano
sweep sawdust
onto freshly fallen snow
pure un-pure feral
I’m a good man in a storm
BACH
What can you get in silence,
in silence you can be
totally with someone. Dead
or alive, I swear.
The work of touching
with compassion:
“to hear the cries of the wind,”
“audible, not audible.”
I apologized to someone
from forever ago. It was
very quiet, she was
very gracious.
I am thinking
of the well tempered clavier,
of an original fugue.
Trees,
trees alone.
If I could play the piano
I’d write a fugue for trees,
& for love—both alive
and dead.
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THE COMPUTER ROOM
FICTION by:
EMMA ENSLEY
The Computer Room
In real life, I’m eight and a half years old but on babynames.com/messageboards I’m closer to 31.
It’s summer and I spend my days at my best friend and next door neighbor’s house, upstairs in her computer room, surrounded by our sleeping bags. Her name is Liz.
I love the computer room at Liz’s, because I love the internet and playing games like The Sims. My family doesn’t have a computer yet. Some nights, we play The Sims until after midnight, because it’s summer and there’s nothing to wake up for.
Liz likes to kill her Sims with fireworks, but I like when mine fall in love and make a baby.
We keep the TV on TLC all day because we’ve decided we’re too old for Disney Channel but nothing else is interesting yet. Liz watches Trading Spaces, where two neighbors swap houses and redecorate a room in each other’s homes. She even tried to sign us up on tlc.com but they never wrote us back.
My favorite show is A Baby Story because I like the babies on the Sims so much. In every episode of A Baby Story, a couple is pregnant and then gives birth and then names the baby. I know all about giving birth from watching this show. I know about a c-section and an epidural. I know about breastfeeding. My mom didn’t tell me about any of it, but it was easy to figure out, from the show.
When a Sim gives birth, the computer screen zooms in on her, even if you were far away, doing something else with another Sim. She waves her hand around and makes a concerned expression. Then she kind of spins into a cloud of pixels and suddenly is holding a baby. You have to buy the baby a crib and stuff because if the Sim doesn’t have one, it’ll put the baby on the floor. And if you do that enough times, someone will come and take the baby away and then your Sim becomes depressed, which is really hard to come back from, without using a cheat code.
Liz uses cheat codes all the time, but I try to play Sims honestly.
After Liz shows me tlc.com, back from when we tried to sign up for Trading Spaces, I go back to look at A Baby Story. You can click on all the couples and see a photo of their baby now. Most of the babies are just a little bit older. Sitting up and stuff like that. I see one from an episode I just watched. The baby is named Mackenzie, which I think is just beautiful. I’ve never heard of anyone with such a pretty name.
I close out of tlc.com and return to Liz’s family’s search engine of choice, Yahoo. I type into the search bar, “baby names”, using just my index fingers and I learn that the name Mackenzie means “son of Kenneth”. Ew, Who is Kenneth?
My mom works all day in the summer which is why I spend so much time at Liz’s house. Liz has an older brother who’s home for summer too but he’s old enough to watch us. He doesn’t though, he just plays the Nintendo in his room.
While Liz makes frozen tater tots in the oven for our lunch, I look up more baby names.
My own name means “smart” which I like. Liz’s means “god’s promise” which makes me think about rainbows. I learned in Sunday school that those have the same meaning. God’s promise.
My Sim is pregnant again because I made her Woo-Hoo in the heart shaped hot tub 9 times in a row until her sleep bar was so low, she had to take a nap and missed her job at the newspaper.
“What are you gonna name it?” Liz asks me, hopping around on the couch behind the computer, holding a soda. A big plate of tater tots covered in ketchup sits on the carpet in front of her.
This question gives me an idea, because I now feel a responsibility in this choice. Now that I’m becoming somewhat of a name expert. I make an account on babynames.com. Momof4expecting. I act like I’m a Sim or maybe like I’m on TLC’s A Baby Story. Like I have a real big belly of my own.
Hello namers, I am a mom of 4 and I am pregnate again. I do not know if it’s a boy or a girl but we hope girl. The others are named Allie, Kayla, Lance (after Lance Bass) and Carly. What should I name the new baby?
I type all that out and read it back over to make sure I sound like a real adult woman who is responsible enough to have four children, a loving husband and a computer of her own. I hit send while Liz jumps around behind me, licking ketchup off her fingers.
Liz and I once pretended to be her brother on his ICQ messages. We sent the same message to his whole buddy list, just saying “hi wazzup”. Some people answered and we giggled about it but she got too nervous to keep it up.
“It’s dishonest.” She said which I thought was funny given how many cheat codes she uses.
I don’t know if he ever found out.
I print off lists of names in order of their popularity which is something I find on babynames.com and is something that fascinates me.
I think it’s fun to memorize them and it makes me feel “smart” like my own name implies. The #1 name in 1992, the year I was born, was Ashley. I know 6 of them. I’m #211 which makes me feel unique.
“Names are boring,” Liz says, picking up the throw pillows on the couch and tossing them to the side. “Can we play Trading Spaces again?”
We play Trading Spaces by having one of us cover our eyes while the other rearranges the computer room. Liz likes to print photos of the Backstreet Boys from Yahoo images and tape them on the walls.
“Surprise!” she says when I open my eyes, revealing a new photo of Nick Carter and a different arrangement of pillows. This time they were stacked one on top of the other in the middle of the couch.
“It’s beautiful!” I say, doing my best to act so surprised. “I love it in here.”
My Sim gets more and more pregnant, even though I am doing my best to not fast forward the time. Even when they’re all sleeping.
I log back into babynames.com to see what all the other mom’s think of my big naming dilemma.
AldermanFamily07 says “Hailey for a girl and Brice for a boy.”
JThomas80 says “5 kids wow! What are their middle names? Taylor seems like a good fit, either gender.”
I look up the meaning of Taylor which is “tailor” and feel disappointed.
Hailey seems like a good choice but is also the name of a girl who was in my class last year who I didn’t like very much. She was always the first one to get to the swings at recess and would sit in the middle swings, holding onto the ropes of the two on either side, saving them for her best friends. This never seemed very fair to me and also meant that I never got to go on the swings.
I couldn’t name my Sim baby after a person like that.
Momoftwinz says “I can’t believe you named your baby after Lance Bass.”
I tell Liz that I didn’t get very many good suggestions on the website and she says “move over.” I roll away from the keyboard and she takes my place, standing up in front of it with a wild look in her eyes.
She clicks, “new post” and from my account and types
Help urgent, in labor right now!!! Need a name right now!!!!! Nothing dumb
I gasp and then giggle as she hits send.
“Get off the internet, I need to call Cam!” Liz’s brother yells from down the hall.
“Who’s Cam?” I ask as I disconnect, clearing the phone lines.
Liz rolls her eyes. “My brother’s dumb friend.” She powers down the computer. “They started a dumb band together.”
“Liz!” He yells again.
“We’re offline!!!” She yells back, even louder. I wince.
Liz falls to the floor, dramatically, spreading her arms out like a snow angel. “I’m bored.”
Between TLC episodes, home improvements to the computer room and lengthy sessions of The Sims, Liz and I don’t usually have a lot of time for much else.
“Maybe I should go home.”
My mom has been out with her boyfriend the past two nights, so I haven’t slept in my own bed in days.
Liz sits up. “No!” She grabs my wrist. “We need to get back online and see if anyone has replied.” She grabs her jelly sandals from under the desk and starts slipping them on her feet.
“We’re in labor.”
I think about my Sim family, frozen somewhere in time. It really wasn’t urgent at all. The baby wasn’t growing without the computer on, plus we’d saved the game. Everything would be just as it was whenever Liz’s brother was off the phone and we could get back on.
Liz throws me my own shoes. “Let’s walk to the library.”
The library is just a couple of blocks from where Liz and I live. I used to go a lot as a younger kid, back when my mom didn’t work so much and didn’t have a boyfriend. She would take me and Liz to story time and let us each checkout a book. When the library got computers, my mom would take me with her to print out her resumes and look at her match.com profile. I loved to sit in her lap while she scrolled and scrolled.
Liz and I walk in. The library is dimly lit and smells old, but familiar.
“We need a computer.” Liz says confidently to the lady at the front desk with big gold glasses and a curly, too short, haircut.
“I’m sorry girls, the computers are only for 12 and up.” She tilts her chin down and looks at us over the top of her glasses. “Unless you have an adult with you.”
Liz frowns. “Well, you’re an adult, aren’t you?”
I wish the library was like the babynames.com website. Where I could be 31, if I needed to be.
“I’m sorry,” the woman says, turning around to put little white slips in some books. “Come back with a parent.”
Liz and I exchange disappointed glances.
“Do you have any books on baby names?” I ask, knowing that the books are for everyone, even if you’re only eight.
The librarian looks confused but starts typing into her monitor.
“Um, yes, I believe so.” Clack, clack, clack. “Aisle 7 in resources”
I check out two books and sit with Liz on the sidewalk, flipping through them.
“I want a name that means beautiful,” I say, turning the page. The book is old and rests precariously on my knobby knees. “Or loved.”
Sweat starts to bead around Liz’s forehead. She closes the book for me and says, “I’m hungry.” We fish around in our pockets for some change and decide to get Slurpee’s on the way home. The guy at the gas station on the corner is familiar with us and takes whatever change we have, usually. This is a benefit to being eight years old.
We slam the screen door to Liz’s house and kick off our shoes. Tired from the walk and the summer heat but beginning to feel the rush of sugar from the drinks.
Liz’s brother emerges from his room in basketball shorts and no shirt. He always looks like he just woke up.
“Your mom called,” he says to me, running his hand through his mess of hair. “She wants you to stay here again tonight.” I try and hide my disappointment.
“We can play the Sims,” Liz says, assuredly. She reaches for the book in my hand. “Let’s pick out the name. For the baby.”
Liz’s brother mutters something about us being “so weird” and retreats to his room. I’ve never seen the inside of his room, but I imagine that it’s dark and full of posters of the bands he likes. I’d guess that there are shirts in there, even though I have never seen them.
My Sim is going to give birth any moment and the moms on the babynames.com message boards still haven’t come up with anything good.
Liz and I sift through our replies, which are mostly just people expressing concern and wondering how we are able to use the internet while in labor.
The last reply is from DancerMom27 who says “I wonder if I’m too late. Have you considered Rose? Please let us know what you decide <3”
Rose.
I say it out loud. “Rose.”
It’s so simple. I know the meaning without even having to look it up. Allie, Kayla, Lance Jr., Carly and Rose.
My Sim lifts her hand up in the air, grabbing at her pixelated belly.
“It’s happening,” I whisper. Liz takes a sip of her Slurpee, sucking up mostly air and the last dribbles of cherry syrup. She runs over to the computer screen. A blue box pops up, pausing the game. Congrats! It’s a girl. I’m prompted to type in the name, so I carefully press the R, followed by the O. The S. The E. Baby Rose. I make a small vow in my mind to love and care for Rose, as best as I can. When my Sim makes enough money at the newspaper maybe Rose could even have her own room, away from all these siblings. I begin to understand why Liz uses cheat codes to get more money. I want to give Rose everything.
“She’s beautiful.” I say to Liz, even though all Sim babies look the same until they eventually morph into toddlers. My Sim is ecstatic. Her happiness levels are sky high, even though she hasn’t showered in a while and needs to eat lunch. She rocks Baby Rose in her arms as plus signs fly out from atop her head.
I make sure to save the game, just in case.
“Happy Birthday, Rose!” Liz says, springing up onto the couch with her empty Slurpee cup. She does one jump into the air and lands seated, crisscross style. “Do you want to watch a movie?”
I nod and head to the bathroom, full of Slurpee.
When I return to the computer room, flicking sink water off my hands, Liz is printing out pictures of roses to hang up on the wall.
Follow Emma:
Instagram: @emma_ensley
Twitter: @emmaensley
Bio:
Emma Ensley is a fiction writer, figurative painter and graphic designer in Asheville, North Carolina. She grew up in North Georgia and on the internet and considers both places equally influential to her work. She has had writing published in Joyland, Peach Mag and The Nervous Breakdown. She is currently working on a collection of short stories.
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INTERVIEW: NIK OCTOBER-CLYDESDALE
INTERVIEW by:
EJ KNEIFEL
i have known nik october-clydesdale online since ~2019. now, we live a three minute bike ride away. their street goes down a diagonal. the same objects can carry you through dimensions; their studio was made up of so much i had already seen. drawings and objects, the side of their dog’s eye. transport also holds true for nik’s practice. they are an illustrator, ceramicist; they make their one world (tiles, no carpet, a distant echo, a prompt for investigation; lines made strange, softness spiked, colours clanging softly). we get to traverse its axes while remaining inside it.
in nik’s home studio, we talked about accumulation, function, overlap, touch. the dog too; she toothed, she played.
︎︎︎
NIK : the more that i keep making objects, i’m like, there are so many objects.
EJ: in terms of storage?
N : storage, and just a spiritual burden. especially with ceramics, which are the most permanent thing. you’re taking something that was mined, that is still organic, and once you fire it, it becomes something completely different. it’s a chemical change, and it can’t be recycled anymore. i mean, you could crush it and it would become dirt, i guess. eventually. but yeah. every little ceramic experiment is pretty permanent.
E : how do these feel related to your illustration? do they feel like they’re of the same world and you’re bringing them out into the third dimension?
N :they do feel connected, but i think ceramics inform my drawing more: objects and interior spaces and stuff. i think drawing and illustrating feels a bit more casual. i think there’s a lot of gravity to making a physical thing.
E : i was gonna ask you about vessels. that’s how you world-build domestic spaces. there are always ceramics in the illustrations.
N : when i first started making ceramics, i was really obsessed with vases, because they sort of live in the space between functional and not-. you can get away with having something totally useless because it has a function that never really sees the light of day–unless you’re a person who has flowers regularly, which i’m not. i used to have dried flowers a lot, but then i’d bump into them, and pollen and flowers would get everywhere.
i think when you’re making something, you should want to touch it. and sometimes i succeed, and sometimes i fail, but
i think they’re like little people. they’re like little bodies. they create a mood that feels really resonant to me. it’s funny how you’re looking through these [drawings] and almost all of them have [gestures to vessels].
E : yeah! yeah it’s cool. and it is this dissonant bodily form. a fragile one too, i guess.
N : totally. this one is funny – this [drawing of an amphora] was initially a print that i ended up tattooing on my leg. and that [what ej is holding] is a picture of my tattoo.
E : i’ve been talking with my roommate jeff – he’s an architect and also an industrial designer – about this convergence in design where even if you were like, “i’m going to remake this tool,” there are certain things that would end up still happening. because you’d be like, “okay, it kind of needs to be this length because i need it to reach here,” and “there needs to be a hook on this corner,” or whatever. i guess i’m trying to say something about vases and hands. sometimes i’ll come across a moment where some thing will fit into another thing perfectly and they were never meant to do that but there’s a weird standardization of sizes just because we have generally the same proportions.
N : yes. totally. i was thinking the other day about how baudrillard said that personalization is parasitic. he’s very anti-consumerism, marxist; “objects have a function and should do that function. anything that you do to that object to make it different from the ideal form of the object is additive.” but i think it's still fun to consider; parasitic is such a fun word. i did for a while make little sculptures that were “find your own function.” i have one in the bathroom that sam keeps his toothbrush on [walks out].
E : [calling] is it the orb on the cup?
N : [returning, hands it to ej] no, that one’s downstairs; but that is one of them. this one is really dusty, but. yeah. he keeps his toothbrush on it.
E : how? just leaning?
N : just on it. and then the floss goes here. so i have a couple like this. and then i had this crisis where i felt like it was irresponsible of me to make an object and to say, “find your own function to this thing. i was like, “am i putting too much pressure on the person?” and then, “what if it doesn’t find a function, and then it’s just useless?”
what you were saying about things made for a universal purpose or universal hand, that’s part of what’s tricky about designing functional objects. because some people like to hold a handle with one finger, some people like to hold it with their whole hand, some people have to hold it with two hands. it feels almost impossible to strive for universality, which is hard. personally i have really bad hand joints and wrist joints so holding heavy cups is difficult.
E : let me see what else i have written.
N : i like your little drawings.
E : well these are yours! [laugh] i was just like, “if i think of nik’s work, what shapes?”
N : i love that. that’s one of my favourite little flowers to draw. i’m working on a little slab built mug that wraps up on itself. i’m cutting a little window in and putting a little illustration in the window. i guess this is somewhere where illustration and ceramics are entwining a little bit. i love the idea of portals or gates– [ej holds up notebook] did you? really?
E : i said “tell me about vessels, tell me about portals.”
N : wow. how did that word come to you?
E : i just felt, this has gotta be a word nik is working with.
N : that’s so fun. i love that. when i first started illustrating it was just sort of casual. So thinking about what i wanted to draw, i really like fantasy as a genre and i was thinking about what happens when i look at drawings i really like. and it’s a moment where you’re really being brought into the world of the drawing.
E : something that i really like about your work is that there’s the portal but you also really understand–the wayward traveler guy that you made–the ruggedness of the actual path. you’re thinking about how you traverse the portal. it has some materiality.
N : i’m glad that it feels that way for you. let me grab that little guy to touch him. [leaves, returns]
E : oh, i didn’t realize the traveler was so small! it’s like a lucky token. going back to the hand thing: it fits so perfectly in a hand.
N : that’s why i love figurines. it feels so nice to touch, and it brings you into their little world while you are touching them.
E : you also had the, it was more abstracted, but you had like a nativity scene piece.
N : oh yes, the three little figurines. where are those? they’re probably in the basement somewhere, bubble-wrapped. those were really fun to make too. there’s something about figurines for me they feel like an indulgence to make, because they feel so special to me and i don’t know if figurines are a thing that people have room for in their lives.
E : yeah, this [holding figurine] is really going away from the form/function overlap where you can get away with making vases or something. this is sheer play.
N : yeah. yeah. and it’s fine for me; i don’t make things to sell; i think there are a lot of ceramicists that don’t like selling things. it’s a weird relationship to figure out. so i want to make things i’m happy to keep forever. [pulling more over] i made this guy this ring stand guy for sam.
E : so beautiful. this is kind of a vase or vessel or looks like one.
N : totally. i like to make pieces like that. i was selling some stuff at an arts market in the spring, and there was this one little cup. someone came up to me and said, “oh this is for incense,” and i was like, “yeah!” and someone else said, “oh it’s an egg cup! wow, that’s a great egg cup!” and i was like, “absolutely.” it was very fun that everyone was so confident that they recognized it as fulfilling that function for them. that’s what it’s made for.
E : my psychology background– there’s a term for why you look at this [cup] and you’re like, “oh this, i’ll put liquid in it,” and you’re not like, “oh i’ll put this on my head.” it’s called functional fixedness. there are these thought games where they’ll give you a box of tacks and a candle and ask, “how do you attach this to the wall?” and the solution is that you have to tack the box to the wall.
N : did you ever watch whose line is it anyway? it’s an old improv comedy show my mom watched growing up. they’d just be given a box of objects and you’d have to come up with a new function for the object and try to sell it, which is pretty fun. so i’m just doing the same thing.
E : i really like to put my finger in [this divot].
N : functional fixedness, that’s got a nice little feel to it.
E : this is nice too. little bell.
N : yeah! I don’t know, you know, what that’s for. [laugh]
E : and i love the feeling of this sort of pointed– i’ve never seen this. it’s like bowser. i’m curious - do you sketch this before, or how does that happen?
N : some things i sketch before, and some things i’ll just flip through my sketchbook or an old sketchbook.
[flipping]
E : this is a classic too for you just a-
N : i love frames and windows-
E : window-
N : totally, and how if you draw them really simply it looks like it could be both.
E : can i ask about your relationship to touch?
N : when i first started working with ceramics i was a little worried that it wouldn’t be something i could do long term just because my hands are so janky. so every time that i made something it felt very important. so actually touching and forming the things. at first i wanted to express that through moulding things to the shape of my hands,things that followed the form of the body. and then i decided to get better at making ceramics, so i tried to make things that were smooth and flat. here’s some more little guys, if you want to fidget.
E : oh my gosh please. this is my heaven. if you're met with an object do you want to touch it? smell it?
N : oh i wanna hold it. it’s hard to imagine seeing something and not wanting to pick it up when you see it. i guess some people don’t feel that. it’s a little hard to imagine. how do you feel about vases? and vessels and things. i’m always curious because i feel like everyone feels similar to me. but i’m constantly learning that that isn’t the case.
E : i think accumulation stresses me out, so i’m not a big container person. because if i have a container, then i need more things to put into the container. i don’t know if i have good human vocabulary about this. but i put little things together. i have a corner of my room called “this is what a cow believes,” and it’s just a little plastic cow and behind it is an eryn lougheed tiny little postcard print. and there’s another corner of my room with rocks and sea glass lined up and, actually, another postcard behind the desk, and that’s called “rocks at the movies.” i feel like i’m more figurine is i guess my answer.
N : totally. that makes sense. i love the collections of objects; that’s something i think about a lot. putting things next to each other, labelling things, giving them some sort of invented context is extremely fun.
E : i feel like that’s what’s fun about fantasy imagery. it’s kind of loaded with narrative energy.
N : totally. it’s all very loaded. someone asked me why i draw swords a lot, which i don’t think is something i do as much anymore, but it’s just such an interesting image. i think for some people it really resonates and signals something shared, and then for some people it’s geek shit. or not as resonant. which is also fair.
E : do you know, i’m going to forget his real name, jean something, elderghoul?
N : yeah, i have a bunch of tattoos from him. this little guy, whom i love because he’s contained in a little box, is one of my favourites. it’s also an important spot. hands and wrists.
E : yeah. that’s kind of a sacred joint.
N : i like his work a lot. very high fantasy, very hard fantasy.
E : and i feel like you’re abstracted away from that pure [fantasy] – would you say so?
N : oh i totally agree, and that doesn’t feel totally like a choice. it’s like what i understand about fantasy sort of filtered through something. and maybe i wouldn't want to filter it if i could. and – not that i’m not trying; i’m constantly trying very hard – but there’s an element of not trying. i’m taking a painting class right now, and you have to look at references and do a certain amount of research. i think that that can be good, and sometimes i think i should do that and it might make my illustrations better. but i haven’t embraced it because it’s–i kind of can’t stand to do it.
E : i feel like, visually, the gesture to something is almost more important. like if you are working with the memory of a thing, you’ll make something that’s also more resonant with other people’s memory of it. i’m a big halloween person, and i’ve realized that if you’re going for crowd pleasing it’s better to go with what people associate with something rather than what’s most accurate.
N : i love thinking about that in the context of halloween. hinting at something rather than trying to emulate it exactly. it’s also interesting in regards to ceramics. i’ve been doing a lot of mould-making and slip casting. you keep making an echo of the thing, the model, the original version. there are subtle things on the surface that you don’t think will come out in the copies and then they’re there, so prominently.
N : oh i didn’t clock that this had a little– E :inlay, yeah. N : so nice. it’s really subtle. you could just paint it on, but the way light reflects off of it, you can tell that it’s in there. / i do have a stack, there are stacks everywhere, i need shelves, this is just -shhhhhh- a bunch of drawings and things E : i love this layering. it’s like (points to indented clay). N: oh that’s so interesting.
Follow EJ:
Instagram: @ejkneifel
Website: ejkneifel.com
Follow Nik:
Instagram: @nikoctober
Website: nikoctober.com
Bio:
EJ Kneifel is a friend of a friend, ekphrastic critic, columnist at In the Mood Magazine, reviews editor at the literary magazine The Ex-Puritan, author of the chapbook VIO-LETS (Anstruther Press 2023), co-creator of P8s, ORANGING, CATCH.
Nik October is a multidisciplinary artist based in Toronto. Their work is a collage of queer self portraits centred around collected, invented worlds, and the intimate separation of body and self.
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SLOW BURN SCRAMBLE
Poetry by:
TERRY NGUYEN
SLOW BURN SCRAMBLE
Slow burn love is for
lonely wives
and teenage virgins
I am too young
to slow dance in style
too feral to succumb
to third degree
yearns
The real tragedy is abstinence
I am in the mood for
fucking the enemy on
first debate
Patience is no virtue when
the house is on fire
I take my coffee steaming
black no sugar
A dollop of
desire
please
on two fluffy
eggs
silver hot
I like how Gordon Ramsey
scrambles
Quicksilver wrists and
good technique
High heat
Oil lusty
Do I have to spell it out for you?
Kiss me butter
Salt me soft
Whisk me wild
Fold a touch of intimacy
over and
over and
over
until tender
mounds form
Sprinkle chives
No creme fraiche
I substitute mine with desire
for you
taste like lemon
curd creamy
tart
rich but
not in that way
(just kidding)
My sunshine
silky in a jar
sweet riding bitter’s edge
a negotiation
on the tip of
the tongue
before curdling
Follow Terry:
Instagram: @nguyenterry
Twitter: @terryngtguyen
Bio:
Terry Nguyen is a journalist, writer, and poet from Garden Grove, California. Her work has been published in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Stanchion Zine, The Red Lemon Review, among others.More From This Issue...
IT’S CRAZY THAT LA EXISTS
Poetry by:
ARI LISNER
It’s crazy That LA exists
My community has two locations
LA is the inverse of my world
And I don’t know the characters
But everyone is talented
It’s performance of it
Everyone knows the issue with the wire
It’s crazy to watch poetry go down here
It’s always about the other kids
LA’s transmascs are all little paupers to me
And there you go
I’d be a great sound guy
Everyone else is just all about their concepts
Thank god for the inverse of things thank god for the sound guy thank god for the time is not happening all at the same time
It was so good to see Chariot out here
And that it feels like an arm’s full extension
I love everyone’s little mustache
How I think I just needed season 2
Or a plot shift
Poetry is what you do
As a minor flex
To your main flex
I’m bad at change and love when it slaps me
In the face
A revelation
Beautiful
Ugly
Dictotomy
This is so generative!
And it alerts me that I ought not to use three exclamation points
Because that’s your voice
Mine is just the debrief
But at least it’s not tacky
Do not fret
Tegan and Sara are coming back
In the nick of time
One of the themes is meditation here
We bring everything to the table
Every day exhausted
And it’s like
Exhausting
Elastic energy from having a shirt go inward
No tits
Gender is the worst word I never want to hear it again vertical stripes colored socks open button cargo pant disciple reference industry speak leave on a funny note it’s one way to go out
I was the Anna Wintour of poetry
Or so I thought
The thing is I never flee the scene
Little critic TITLE
I love audiobooks TITLE
Different phrases
Same things
Not worth trying to keep up with lexicon
It has a payoff
All these risks
I love the word these
All these rocks
Cape cod fetish here
Three exclamation points!!!
Cultural research
Someone explains the very premise and it feels like romantic lore to me that LA IS A PLACE
Built on dreams
It’s that
Feedback loop
No more talk of gender upon return
LA not ready for the one schtick pony ride
One schtick is better than one trick like it’s a little more complicated
The world is styling me a side character
How do I make the necessary choices that will differentiate me and boost me
To a position of forerunner
In a strictly aesthetic sense
Controllable
And capable of bopping me to the top
I’m always chasing
But nope
It ends somewhere
I couldn’t do Marcel the Shell With Shoes On
A24’s first kids movie
That you said you cried to
And I loved that indie shit
Follow Ari:
Instagram: @arisbarmitzvah
Bio:
Ari Lisner is a poet, journalist, and researcher whose writing captures queer intimacy against the backdrop of New York City. Their work has been featured in The Brooklyn Rail, The Quarterless Review, Peach, Triangle House, Wonder, GQ, Allure, and others. ONE SCHTICK PONY, their first chapbook, is forthcoming with Bullshit Lit in 2023. Ari is also the co-founder of the poetry press Touch Me New World and the host of the reading series IT'S A SIGN at KGB Bar. Find Ari on Instagram at @arisbarmitzvah.
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NEOPET
Poetry by:
SOPHIA LE FRAGA
NEOPET
Seven o’clock after work
Is a beautiful time.
Klaus chews his kibble
And sifts almost rhythmically
For his favorite brown balls.
The house feels so big
With my dog and future
Wife sitting in separate rooms.
Is it true that we never talked,
Like, out loud, until we had
Dogs to speak to?
Last week walking home
From the vet I heard the nurse
Greet two poodles:
Paul Hollywood and Mary Berry
The Great British Bake-Off hosts.
If we hadn’t arrived to
The vet when we did
Klausy probably wouldn’t
Have made it. Now
Watching him lick his paws
Sprawled across the sofa
“Neopet” is the sweetest
Word that comes to mind.
I miss AOL, BBM, MSN,
The three-letter acronyms
And the years that they stood for:
Quiet mornings waking up
To parents already at work,
Song-lyric away messages
And crushes I knew only
By their AIM handles
Pints of Ben & Jerry’s spent
Looking up Xanga backgrounds
And neon fonts.
If our dog had choked
While we were debating
Insurance carriers and wedding bands
What would we have done
With his kibble bowls?
Never have I ever
Had such a small thing
To be so scared to lose.
When you don’t want kids
It’s important to figure out
How you’re going to pass the time.
I get so fragile
When the clocks turn back.
There are tulips on the table
that aren’t tilting toward me.
Shut off the fire
While our neopet laps
The last bit of water
Out of his bowl.
Here are the three of us, changing.
We look so beautiful tonight
I want to turn this moment
Into a GIF that plays on loop
After each of us is gone.
Neopet, neopet, neopet.
Follow Sophia:
Instagram: @badideasophia
Bio:
Sophia Le Fraga’s text-based work considers how language evolves in digital spaces. She is the author of SNACKS, The Anti-Plays, literallydead, I RL, YOU RL, I DON'T WANT ANYTHING TO DO WITH THE INTERNET, and the artist book Other Titles by Sophia Le Fraga.Le Fraga has exhibited or performed at the MOCA, Los Angeles; MoMA PS1's "Greater New York," Camden Arts Center and PERFORMA15. Her work has been featured in Best American Experimental Writing, The Cut, BOMB Magazine, ELLE, VICE, Texte zur Kunst, and Dazed.More From This Issue...
My Healing Journey
Fiction by:
SERENA DEVI
I’m on a healing journey. Step one is I will force the world not to deny me. For a long time I thought there was a kind of woman who could just get away with taking, and she wasn’t me.
What I mean is, I have an inherently suspect look. I am not a small or delicate girl. Nobody notices me except to regard me with unease. Not like I get followed around stores or anything but the clerks try to be helpful because they assume someone like me doesn’t know what she’s looking for, and that’s the type of customer that can get hairy or second guess.
Puffy black jacket and legs like pins bobbling down Houston, facing me, menacing. When I met Suki she taught me how it was done.
The shopping district in the morning feels illegal already. Metal front buildings you feel the weight bearing down from. It’s like being in an engraving. It’s beautiful, and so apart from us.
We don’t have anything in common except that once I walked into Eliza’s housewarming party and somebody thrust a pinched-shut purple balloon into my hand and there she was, looking for somebody to have something in common with.
She has rich girl skin, shiny but specular, like it’s not slick to the touch. Can’t tell if her nails are glued on crooked or if her finger bones just grow that way. They’re always moving, you wouldn’t catch it unless you knew her well.
We meet for coffee and I dress loveable because I want her to love me. The drinks we order are sweet and barely caffeinated. She plucks at her paper straw. She is the most elegant person I’ve ever met.
Suki Suzuki has no parents and no real ID. She doesn’t vote. I think she’s from New England, somewhere doable by bus at least. She smells like a department store.
We’re huddling against the shelves of a clearance section and there’s a mural of all these dead starving women lined up and they’re staring us down. I can’t bear to look them in the eyes. Suki is toiling in the far corner, deft work. This is how it starts for me.
A standard haul in textures: resinous and pink with gold leaf flakes encased. Opalescent, smooth like stone. Frosty matte that catches upon grazing. Amber glass and cheap twine, miming old medicine bottles. Gauzy palm-sized bags with fraying pull-strings. Fake pearl. Fake painted metal. Waxy and camphorous, sinus-burning. Fake hair from Delancey. It’s a beautiful life scraping along from the speakers overhead.
We steal because we deserve nice things. She says the phrase even more than I do, girls like us, like us, like us, who live like we do, who come from where we come from. I have no idea where Suki is from and doubt she remembers a thing about me except that I’m characteristically along for the ride.
I grew up far from here, if you care to know. We used to go out into the woods and just scream. Nobody could hear. Like ahh.
With her I disavow my past selves, treat them unkindly even, drown them in the fountains. She laughs like she can’t believe something and I’m disarmed. She looks at me like she’s just waiting for me to lie to her. She always takes a beat to respond like we’re trying to stay in character and she’s thinking through a Suki phrasing.
“Money is so silly. The way it can come to us just because we act like it should.”
Suki talks like she turns tricks sometimes but I get the sense that if a man actually dangled cash in her face and told her to spin she wouldn’t know what to do with him.
Boys: Suki has dwindling patience, I gather. Women like her get treated like rare birds sometimes. She hates that shit! She has a low threshold from people who want her beneath them like that. Her aims are always undifferentiated, beside the point entirely. The logic of her desires null.
You don’t need men to like you to be a winner anyways. “Women like us learn how to be resourceful in ways that most people can’t imagine.”
Resentment, which I once thought was bad for me for some reason.
I learn that there are stores Suki can’t go into anymore. She waits outside for me when I pop in and do what she expects of me because she expects it. It’s breathlessly romantic, retreating into the cold air and her.
Suki doesn’t act so impressed with herself. She’s matter of fact, which beckons you to fill the gaps. Knowing her feels like it makes my brain grow a few sizes to hold all of her, stay alert.
She mentions that she used to have a cat. (Mentioned like maybe she had killed it.)
We meander the aisles of Makeup Store and she taps and chides at the tonics and salves, “Nice little things,” like she’s greeting children the only way she knows how, her put-on Mid-Atlantic.
We have to book it around the corner and down Broadway because for a second it looks like they decided to chase this time, and her hair looks like ribbons unraveling while she runs. Once we’re gone enough, I’m sick in the street.
It was remarkable how few people we had in common. Then I met someone who knew her from somewhere. Her rube sort-of ex had met Suki on a lesbian dating app looking, friendlessly, for somebody to housesit for her. So Suki with a different name applied hoping to make off with what she could and disappear again. She got bored of the place and the cat she was supposed to be feeding (ah) turned merciful and dipped. Too late for the cat though. And she did make off with some bathroom odds and ends and silverware. No stipend though so she came back and kicked the recycling bins over outside the building and screamed and ripped her hair out like a pissed kid.
Suki who was Suki when I met her. But now just seems sad.
Each clatter of plastic we finger and pocket must be intentional. Everything must scream, Welcome to our world. Each object builds up our pile, the overly furnished hovel our characters will retreat to at the end of the day. I doubt if she has space to sleep. I’m not allowed to see her apartment. I wait for her to ask if she can see mine but she never does.
I’m running out of shower space from all the scrubs and gels and oils I wind up with. Orange sludge creeps and coagulates along the bottom, absorbing all the stupid shit I let her convince me I am owed.
I’m in the dressing room beside her one time and nothing fits. Yeah it’s easier to layer under my own top, I tell her, it just doesn’t fit.
“YOU, the biggest size they make? Someone needs to exorcize the designer.”
She is a sadist and I am a masochist.
Suki’s so mean when she drinks, and we’re running out of places in the shopping district where she can drink. Weekdays it’s worse, and we have to walk even further out of the way to find somewhere that will still serve her. She burns bridges like it’s nothing and then what am I supposed to do about it? Walking starts to make her even meaner.
She’s drinking pink wine like it’s water today, to pace herself through the late afternoon. We stroll and stroll down the same streets and I wonder if she’s ever worried about being recognized by a cop or cashier or security guard.
Sometimes I just want a fucking change in scenery. Or for her to talk to me differently. The light shifts from golden to bruise-blue. My hands are cold and I want to go home, the thought never occurs to her.
The bender is often transcendent with us. The bender is the means by which we commune our true selves and I can suddenly stand her again. Our edges slumped against one another, then gone entirely. But it’s not transcendent at all this time, and hasn’t been for a while. She can’t hold her booze at all, especially not on an empty stomach. Anything unclear makes her maudlin:
There’s a part of me that I only meet when I’m wasted the part that feels pure unadulterated unabashed joy and like I’m a child but like I’m not going to get in trouble for feeling good and also I meet that part of me when I take other stuff too I guess and I wish it were me when I’m sober I so wish I could feel that way sober and I think it’s all because of my parents –
We realize she left her bag in the booth, and it’s probably gone by now. She’s sick in the sink like I was sick in the street. She’s so upset about it. It thrills me to see her look stupid with her mouth occupied. I’m suddenly so full of love for myself. What to do with all the spillover…
More From This Issue...
THERE IS NO COMFORT
Fiction by:
NATHAN STORMER
My grandma opened an email with the subject line, There is no comfort...VIEW IN BROWSER. It was addressed to “Jon.” The email said, Jon, there is no comfort like when you bundle home and auto for $89/month. Her son’s name was Jon, my father. I never knew him well. I’m still figuring things out. I moved in with my grandma to ease her passing. She’s terminal. I’m also kind of terminal. In a way. I don’t want to say that I wish I were also in the process of passing away, but watching surveillance footage of myself would suggest otherwise.
My grandma stares at the email trying to turn it into something else. She speaks the numbers to herself under her breath, looking for patterns. The numbers always mean something more. $89 a month. 8 + 9 + 12. Romans 8:9-12. She’s always been a pious woman, but I know the search for patterns is at least partly from the hydromorphone. Our apartment is decorated with tapestries embroidered with scripture. She writes her own small verses on scraps of paper and leaves them around the apartment: There is a design. Will you be part of God’s plan? There is no comfort in the realm of the flesh, but only the realm of the spirit. Any indication that her son may be living is an invitation for her divine authorship. When I try to explain the concept of a spam email to her, she scolds me for ignoring the plan, the design. She won’t admit what she knows to be true: that her son simply left her and the rest of us. She asks for her drink and I make it for her.
My father apparently disappeared when I was young and I’ve never gotten a straight answer from anyone about it. I was maybe four or five. We lived in a different city then. The smell of cigarettes on flannel or a foot with the second toe longer than the first didn’t even bring him to mind anymore. My grandma is someone who can’t, won’t, believe that my father doesn’t want to be found. I imagine his life in a million ways, but I imagine his death more clearly. Slow footsteps into a cold lake. Wet cement filling his throat, or something less exotic, like chemical love. The same after-work padded leather barstool for decades.
I walk my grandma into the bathroom, unbutton her dress from the back, help her ease into the bathtub, and pour lavender-scented epsom salts into the water. If I pour the salts in before she can be in the water, she makes me drain the tub and start over. Her skin is pale and taut, the full contour of her skull poking through her temples. The veins in her hands more like white canyons carved from riverflow.
She says, “Don’t scrub so hard.”
“There are more sores on your back,” I say.
“I don’t want to know, don’t scrub so hard,” she says.
“What’s the German word for a prison of one’s own making?” I ask.
She splashes water into my face. I pull her arm up to lightly scrub the sores forming around her ribs.
My grandma was born in Austria and shipped here when she and her twin sisters,triplets, were only ten. Their mother could afford one son and no daughters. My grandma doesn’t speak German much anymore, but uses some words as compounded catch-alls like fragments of her memory she plugs into the spaces of the world she cannot fit herself. Fleischgefängnis – flesh prison. She once told me a story about how her uncle would take her and her sisters into town for ice cream and leave them at the parlor to sneak off to a brothel in the apartment above the butcher shop. One day she asked her uncle where he’d gone, and his reply was, “das Fleischgefängnis.” Later, when her oncologist pointed to the black spots on the pale blue x-ray of her esophagus and spoke the words squamous cell carcinomas, she replied, “mein Fleischgefängnis.” The tumors in her throat are her Fleishgefängnis. The sores on her back are her Fleishgefängnis. Traffic. Her Medicaid. The hydromorphone tablets she drinks with her wine and orange juice. Her twin sisters. Her mother and her thick forearms. Her uncle and the late photo of him in his black uniform. She’s always blamed my mother for my father’s disappearance. She says people aren’t simply swallowed by holes that open in the Earth. There is always more life than any American wants to admit. Ask anyone whose city has been bombed to ashes, she says. My father is a memory for her and her alone. I’m just the hand that passes her her drinks, washes her body, balms her sores, and refills her prescriptions. She says I look like my mother. She says what a shame that is. She calls me Sheila’s son. She’s never liked my name. When I was born she told my parents that it is the name of liars and crooks.
I drive through traffic to refill my grandma’s prescription and then meet our landlord at the McDonald’s by the six-way intersection near our building. We always meet here before going into his apartment, because he’s paranoid and regularly brings a used cup inside to refill with Coke. We always end up sitting on his couch for hours, while his slurring becomes more pronounced. I get high with him. I get too high with him. And I hate him. But, it’s a small balm to get away from my body, my Fleischgefängnis. Our arrangement is a simple one: I give him some of grandma’s hydromorphone, he doesn’t raise our rent and lets me pay it in increments. “I know what it’s like to wait around for someone to die,” the landlord says, “but hey, here’s to hoping the old Nazi sticks around a bit longer.” He takes a pill down with a sip of his beer. The train passes by outside of his window. A white flag with a single blue W hangs on the wall. “I bet she was pretty good-looking when she was younger. If this was maybe ten years ago, maybe we could work something else out,” the landlord says, picking up his Playstation controller from the coffee table. I finish my beer. The landlord tells me that he’s going to sell the building. That I’d have to pay back all of the past-due rent if we wanted to renew the lease before the building sells and we’re forced to move in February when the new owners gut it into a single-family home.
My grandma is sitting in her chair using a stylus to play mahjong on her iPad. She hands it to me and asks if there’s a move I can see. I notice the profile thumbnail on the top right of the screen is a gray circle with the letter J centered. I tap it and see that my grandma had inputted the name “Jon” as her username when she downloaded the app. I stare at the cluster of little tiles printed with cherry blossoms and kanji script for a bit and tell her I don’t see any moves. I press my finger to the tile printed with a digital block of sable hash marks and suddenly the screen is overtaken by an ad for an app that teaches you German through word games. My father’s name in white against a red background, reading, Jon, unlock your new language. If there is a German word for a prison of one’s own making, my grandma never learned it.
I walk through the kitchen checking that the oven’s gas is turned off, checking the notifications on my phone to make sure she hasn’t charged my credit card for another online roulette game. I check that she hasn’t trapped the cat in the cabinet below the sink, or discovered that the jug of liquid bleach is just water. My grandma always said the love Americans have for their pets is one of their most violent tendencies. She says an American could watch a stranger’s child be caged, maimed, and dismembered on live television, but if someone should so much as strike a dog, murder is the only recourse.
“Motherfucker,” she says under her breath, tapping at her iPad.
I help her into her nightgown and plug in the air diffuser on her nightstand. I pull her quilt back and guide her body under the top sheet. I rub CBD-infused balm into her clavicle and around her throat. She coughs a bit. I make her mix of red wine and orange juice, 3:1, enough acid to irritate the sores in her throat in just the right way, and place two ice cubes in the glass with a plastic straw. I put a hydromorphone tablet on her tongue and put the straw to her mouth. She asks me for another tablet and I give it to her. She finishes her drink and asks for another tablet. I give it to her. I place the bottle on the table next to her bed.
“I want to tell you a story about my son,” she says. “I once caught him stealing a handful of hard candies from the grocer when he was a child. I found him in his room hiding the wrappers in a shoebox beneath his bed. He must’ve been pocketing the candy for months. We’re not thieves, I told him. I made him sit at the kitchen table and hold two phone books in each hand raised just above his shoulders, watching as his arms began to shake. Stringbeans. He was weak. He was so distractible. When I pulled him here or there back from his wandering, his arms would bruise from my grip. He bruised so very easily.” She doesn’t look at me, but closes her eyes comfortably. She says, “He was always going to do what he wanted. I don’t regret it. I should’ve been more like my mother. She would’ve done much worse.”
I turn off the light to her room and close her door slightly. I search through her contact book for her sisters’ phone numbers, but find none. My great aunt had paid off our back payments in rent before, but told me she would give us no more. The last time I saw my great-aunt Agota, she said, “When she dies, don’t call me.” I pour some of my grandma’s wine in a plastic cup and drink it on the couch while watching videos of tornadoes tearing through suburban homes in rural Illinois, Kansas, or Oklahoma. I wake in the night to the cat jumping onto my chest and I can’t fall back asleep. I grab my grandma’s ipad from the side table next to her chair to watch a movie on, but the screen is covered with post-it notes on which my grandma had written a full verse: Let me pass through your land. I will not pass through field or through vineyard; I will not even drink water from a well. I will go along the king’s highway, not turning to the right or left, until I pass through your territory.
I think of what she’d want someone to say at the moment of her death and I remember weeks before, when my grandma was perusing news articles on her iPad as I handed her her drink, she said, “Something incredible has happened.” She pointed to the article’s picture of an 8-foot-wide sinkhole that had opened in the middle of Western Ave., less than a mile from our building. There were no water lines, gas pipes, or half- eaten SUV’s peeking from the broken asphalt. Just a dark void in the center of the intersection. We both stared at the article’s photo for a bit before the tone in her voice changed and she looked up at me and said, “Nathan, there are signs from God everywhere.”
Follow Nathan:
Instagram: @nathan_stormer
Bio:
Nathan Stormer's work has appeared in TriQuarterly, Oyez Review, Another Chicago Magazine and elsewhere. He lives in Chicago.More From This Issue...
On Justice Thelot’s ‘Stonemilker’
Review by:
SARAH YANNI
Justice Thelot’s Stonemilker is a compelling debut poetry collection, published by Nueoi press, that cunningly traces grief, love, and isolation amidst a tech dystopia. Thelot’s book of poetry presents largely sparse, short stanzas situated among clouds of white space. The writing is for the most part continuous, without titles to break up each section into distinct bits or poems. Moving through this collection mimics the feeling of traveling through contemporary life, that is to say––language being somewhat connected, somewhat disconnected, a narrator plagued with thoughts and worries and observations, surprised by moments of joy, jarred and activated by reminders of the larger capitalistic forces at hand.
The book begins with a simple couplet: “With no phone / there’s no you” thus catapulting into a collection that looks head-on at technology’s unyielding hold on our lives. And a few pages later: “morning bus rides / dreaming of all the things / i could do / with a data plan.” I found myself profoundly affected by this, thinking about the purity of dreams, which feel as if they should be divorced from earthly things, perhaps something more primal or subconscious––capital T Truths about what we desire and yearn for. I found myself wondering––is it possible to even know these things about ourselves? To access them without operating through a lens of objects, tech, external validation, the interconnectedness that being on the internet has forced us into? To (not) answer my own question: I truly don’t know. Thelot’s text reminds us that capitalism has infiltrated even our dreamscapes.
“who in their right mind would purchase a condo?” Thelot’s writing on tech dystopia also moves into brilliant prose-ish text that dissects the absurdities of ownership and property through the shining example of the condo. He writes:
you can tell condos have become a commodity because every single
unit is the same. the same countertops, the same stove, the same
sink, the same shower, the same — you can customize your walls
with the art of your friend who insisted on being a painter which is
sad because they would have made a damn good financial analyst.
NEWS REPORT: big-headed doctor buys high-ceiling condo.
(only logical.)
how did we get here? cave, then hut, then condo?
The condo is a modern flattening of experience, a version of home that is simultaneously sterile and representative of a deeply uncomplex version of success. Yet:
the condo has everything to succeed. it provides us with the
proximity and shared spaces for communal living. but practically
it fails. we stay, doors locked, cloistered. a bunch of
tech-savvy nuns.
The condo, like phones, like the endless scroll, like these mega-companies that keep consolidating and forcing us into less and less options for where we give our money, creates further division and loneliness. We work and work to purchase a space that keeps us away from vibrant reality. We work and work to own an apartment that looks like a thousand other apartments. And of course the “we” here is not most of us––is not me, or probably you––as the idea of property ownership is so far away from the financial possibilities of my future. It is an unreachable goal, yet one that I can’t shake. I associate ownership with a proper version of adulthood and happiness. That is what the endless scroll tells me, and despite my “intelligence” or habit for critique, the scroll creeps into my head, shaping me in undeniable ways.
Even among the book’s apt takes on isolation, it also makes space for attempts at combatting such feelings. The narrator isn’t wholly passive or alone, and reaches out towards others. There is remembrance of family, of homes past, and an invocation to a repeated “you”––
i would become
the wind
blow leaves
until my lungs prune
to see you smile
And several pages later:
in the future
i am no longer
in love with you
The inclusion of such stanzas further grounded the collection in reality, poignantly conjuring the desire for an other that persists even in our highly disconnected capitalistic era. We try to measure progress, create control over the ways that things develop and happen for us, but love evades such controlled logic. Perhaps we are all this:
a romantic oracleI know that I am, or at least, that I am controlled by such forces––the tug and pull of romantic hope…and then also financial / ecological / political doom. It is both and. I know that I too am “hoarding clues / in search of the meaning of ‘us’.”
harrowed
by apocalyptic obsessions
The final sections of Stonemilker introduce titles and headings for the first time, delightfully playing with form and line breaks, leading the reader through a partially numbered list: miracle #1, miracle #3, miracle #6, miracle #8. The miracles take up themes of forgiveness and apology, suffering and the painful passages of time. These sections grapple so honestly with the dark side of what is being written about. Like yes, we have our punchy social critique and the communal musings on how fucked up Amazon is, but underneath that is often the presence of a heartbreaking sadness and loneliness. Regrets. A heaviness whose force grows stronger.
I love endings of books, of poems. Final lines can be so powerful. In my own writing, I find final lines to be so difficult, but when you craft a good one, it feels ecstatic. Thelot leaves the reader with a gorgeously pensive set of questions:
is it unjust
to beg
the eroded heart
once more
to ask
can we
again?
There is a sense of hope rendered in these lines, at least to me. As we suffer through so much increasing powerlessness, we wonder if it’s possible to try something new, try something else, or try again. There are so many things that we––you or I––cannot control, fix, or eradicate––but we can reach towards another and attempt to find connection, even as our hearts tell us that such things have the potential to increase our pain. It is not unjust to ask “can we again?” I think, perhaps, it is necessary.
Follow nueoi:
Instagram: @nueoi
Follow Sarah:
Instagram: @sssaritahh
About Justice:
Justice Thelot is a poet based in New York. His writing focuses on the consequences of technology, love and capitalism, and sometimes their intersection. His work has been published in literary journals in London, UK, Montreal and Toronto, Canada.About Sarah:
Sarah Yanni is a poet, writer, and researcher in Los Angeles. She has been recognized as a Finalist for BOMB Magazine’s Poetry Contest, the Andres Montoya Letras Latinas Poetry Prize, and others. She currently serves as Managing Editor of TQR.More From This Issue...
WHEN OUR DESIRES SHIFT, WE CALL IT RECOVERY
Poetry by:FRANCESCA KRITIKOS
WHEN OUR DESIRES SHIFT,
WE CALL IT RECOVERY
My sickness
isn’t worse
than anyone else’s
but I’m too dark
to turn blonde
There’s more shame
in asking for the thing you want
than there is in taking it
e.g. the way I used to
bleed
which was only by force
It’s true, once you fill a hole
its shape will change
to outsmart you
Now I’d rather have the sun
in my eyes
than yours on my back
I’d like to be
hard to find
in a wide open space
Follow Francesca:
Instagram: @fmkrit
Bio:
Francesca Kritikos is the author of the poetry collection Exercise in Desire (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press, 2022), which was selected as one of Bookshop.org’s Staff Picks. She also wrote the poetry chapbooks Animals Don’t Go To Hell (Bottlecap Press, 2021) and It Felt Like Worship (Sad Spell Press, 2017). Her works of poetry, autofiction and nonfiction have been published in English and Greek by ITERANT, Spectra, Wonder, Blush Lit, The London Magazine, Θράκα, Χάρτης and more.More From This Issue...
Truth Sonnet
Poetry by:
KATE GREENE
TRUTH SONNET
On the windowsill a drop of sky
Left by a friend a baby blue
Gem reflects the song of small birds incessant
All morning
The sore sun
Does its weeping thing
And I read you
Like these sheets with my body
These sheets that read my body
The tygers
And the wolves invited
Come right up to the glass
But do not break it
For love of money and meat
Do not break it
Neither do I tear at these sheets
Follow Kate:
Instagram:@kate_greene
Bio:
Kate Greene is the author of the memoir-in-essays ONCE UPON A TIME I LIVED ON MARS (St. Martin’s 2020) and co-author of the monograph REALITY MINING (MIT Press 2014). Born and raised in northeast Kansas, she currently lives in New York City. kategreene.net.More From This Issue...
HISTORY
Text & audio by:
SEOKYOUNG YANG
A note from the artist:
The audio incorporates both Korean (my mother tongue) and English (my second language) reading a poem that I originally wrote in Korean. As an Asian female queer artist, I locate myself in the margins, insisting on opacity and being unexplainable.
HISTORY
A woman sits at a cinema in Jongro
a familiar face emerges from a blue screen
Leslie Cheung embodies a queer Chinese opera singer
the woman fails at the interpretation
unversed in a Cultural Revolution
when we first talked about this film
you handed a woman a film critique book based on Chinese history
a warmth of emotion enables the present
maybe it is a gesture for the beginning of love
the act of giving your history to another
open the history book for a glimpse of a little scare:
Father hitting mother, fresh bladder that leaks, a cat swallowing pesticide, a hole in your grandmother’s tongue
the depth of the gaze is as deep as the abyss of revolution,
grayish blue dark circle is becoming more vivid
grandmother cannot see due to worsening glaucoma
a woman with a UTI struggles so she cannot even fall into sleep
after 319 days have passed, the familiar ending credit rolls upward
your mother tongue
the woman still cannot differentiate Cantonese and Mandarin
a custodian forces the woman to leave the theatre
Though the woman does not see her future
she leads the way to a soy sauce eggplant dish
holding your translucent hand
Follow Seokyoung:
Instagram: @dir.sk0
Bio:
Seokyoung Yang (she/they) is a filmmaker, poet, and curator who explores artistic experimentation. Born and raised in Korea, she investigates the correlation between language and diasporic identity. Her works have been screened at San Diego Aisan Film Festival, Seoul International Women’s Film Festival, Minsheng Art Museum, and Minnesota International Film Festival. She has previously worked for the Camden International Film Festival programming team.More From This Issue...
TWO POEMS
Poetry by:
ARI LISNER
PURPOSE FANTASY
I am carrying my dry cleaning in Manhattan like a poem
Not someone longing for a woman
When I swipe my Metrocard
I think to say a prayer
I will not let someone who has never ridden
Run me out
My body loves breakups
My heart does not
Still I do dream of myself there
Up on the 92nd Street Y podium
YOU CHERISH THE UNSPOKEN
My memory is purple: blue of the Maddog mixed
with vodka, mixed with red light of the Space Odyssey
sex motel room. When the jacuzzi got too steamy, we sat
on the tiles, pointing at the porn onscreen, listening
to music that moves from the bottom up. You refuse
the top down on principle.
In the morning, I am ringmastering my mad dash to McDonald’s
before the breakfast hours end. I want our teeth to sink into
sweet squishy egg blanketed in processed American. Back
in the city, the need for greens is mutually felt, so you
do the ordering: stewed vegetables, two salads, tzatziki.
I slump down low, reach out to touch the tips of your fingers,
watch you fl are up at others and dim comfortably back at me.
You cherish the unspoken. I want to name it so desperately.
Follow Ari:
Instagram: @arisbarmitzvah
Bio:
Ari Lisner is a poet, journalist, and researcher whose writing captures queer intimacy against the backdrop of New York City. Their work has been featured in Peach Mag, Triangle House, Wonder Press, GQ, Allure, and others. ONE SCHTICK PONY, their first chapbook, is forthcoming with Bullshit Lit in March 2023. They are also the co-founder of the poetry press Touch Me New World alongside Coco Gordon Moore and the host of the reading series It's A Sign at KGB Bar.More From This Issue...
FIRE ESCAPE
Poetry by:PETER COLE FRIEDMAN
FIRE ESCAPE
Dirty sky. The gravity of the symbol. Walking into a
room with complicated feelings, fumes. Sometimes
the audience throws roses, sometimes knives. I
wobble between terror and boredom. A little
haunted ferris wheel. I put a condom on my mirror,
try to muffle the feedback loop. My life is the butter
churn of the attention economy. I’m tired!
Membership auto renewed out of spite. Spider
slowly eats the light out with its silk. The inevitable
melts me back to childhood. Celluloid void
(flammable). I smell nail polish, struggle to say Lilly.
I chew on the strange feeling night once gave me.
Grieve old grief, the act of it. What’s the success rate
of a fire escape? In this fairytale, I simply simmer in
my own stew. More nostalgia monster than
cottagecore. Still in love with snow. I want to go
outside and devour particles. Wound infected to the
point of purple, a violet bud. I’ve been dying to tell
you things. Smell your neck. The sky, still there,
lowers like a hand flattening dough. I should just do
the things stuck inside of me, opines the cage. Let
this hummingbird go flashing through time. A child
looks down to admire their angels. How soon
they’ll melt.
room with complicated feelings, fumes. Sometimes
the audience throws roses, sometimes knives. I
wobble between terror and boredom. A little
haunted ferris wheel. I put a condom on my mirror,
try to muffle the feedback loop. My life is the butter
churn of the attention economy. I’m tired!
Membership auto renewed out of spite. Spider
slowly eats the light out with its silk. The inevitable
melts me back to childhood. Celluloid void
(flammable). I smell nail polish, struggle to say Lilly.
I chew on the strange feeling night once gave me.
Grieve old grief, the act of it. What’s the success rate
of a fire escape? In this fairytale, I simply simmer in
my own stew. More nostalgia monster than
cottagecore. Still in love with snow. I want to go
outside and devour particles. Wound infected to the
point of purple, a violet bud. I’ve been dying to tell
you things. Smell your neck. The sky, still there,
lowers like a hand flattening dough. I should just do
the things stuck inside of me, opines the cage. Let
this hummingbird go flashing through time. A child
looks down to admire their angels. How soon
they’ll melt.
Follow Peter:
Instagram: @petercolerfriedman
Website: petercolefriedman.com
Bio:
Peter Cole Friedman is a preschool teacher, artist, and poet living in Sunnyside, Queens. His poems have been in places like Berfrois, Big Lucks, and Deluge. He co-founded and edited glitterMOB (in its original iteration).More From This Issue...
TWO POEMS
Poetry by:LINDSAY DYE
THE GULF
If I clung to my mom in the ocean
It would be the closest we could beto the way it was
Inside of her body
Swallowed in salt
Hugging in the water is different than the air
Protected from the earth that I cannot see
don’t birth me
don’t birth me
don’t birth me
RIDING ORANGE
I was on top
I felt the color orangebeing inside the color orange
a block of orange
in a preschool classroom
to teach what the color orange is
a hot orange
made in photoshop
not like paint on a palette orange
the color orange outlined in a thick black line
I was breathing in
orange
alone
He was underneath me
breathless
orange in the shape of a fucking rectangle
Follow Lindsay:
Instagram: @dyelindsay
Bio:
Lindsay Dye is from Florida. Maybe that’s all you need to know. Dye is a sex worker and performance artist with an MFA in photography who now writes poetry, mostly about water, her mom, her exes, and synesthesia.More From This Issue...
T4T FANTASY
Poetry by:LILY LADY
T4T FANTASY
i often think about
cargo pants that unzip to become shorts
transitioning effortlessly
you can do whatever you want in this life
is there anything better
than a waffle at 2am
with crunchy peanut butter & honey drizzle?
the testosterone makes my face warm
glow from the light of the toaster oven
all i want
is a blowjob every night for the rest of my
Life
is that too much to ask?
are you there, God? it’s me, mark
my words mean nothing
sweating through the sheets i can’t believe
it’s not butter
Riley says what’s with the they them pronouns
caution do not enter
a locked door the west side pier
Tourmaline’s face
in the orange crush sunset
i don't believe in death
she says
my chest aches
i Want
to buy the Celtics
& move them to New York
my bag is full
of shoplifted granola bars
my therapist says it’s time to be more
sexually mature
on the A train
someone who was asleep until now
leans forward & throws up
it runs like melted strawberry shortcake
towards my feet
the train stops in between stations
Ladies and Gentlemen:
we are experiencing a momentary delay
i start throwing up, too
i’m an ~empath~
i have my mantra
in my notes app
with my other passwords
nothing is struck from the minutes
in the board meeting
i wear a cherry-patterned tank top
i pull my underwear to the side
for anyone
with a blue check
they’re boxers
did you expect lingerie?
the neon sign outside says
hurch of chrst
Amen
a meme / image description ::
a woman’s legs in two different shoes
the left foot in a diamond stiletto
the right foot in an air jordan high top
the caption ::
my 2 personalities
i drink a low sodium v8
on the phone with my Mother
she says something
about science and grammar
in Ulysses
James Joyce wrote
it is an age of exhausted whoredom
groping for its God
there’s a bitcoin ATM at the popeyes
Sam recommends a cup of chaga tea
a tincture of lemon balm, milk thistle
the weather’s nice today
i call my Mother back
i’m not screaming at you
i’m screaming with you
i take a personality quiz
turns out
i’ve tried a lot of foods from the early 2000s
more than most
meaning i’m adventurous, not afraid to march
to the beat of my own drum
my ears hurt
from the day rave
at the warehouse above the kindergarten
the ketamine is cut with meth
nothing bad happens in the daytime
in scary movies
i always get up to go to the bathroom
at the climax
& i never break a nail
because i never lift a finger
Amen.
Follow Lily:
Instagram: @ladylilz
Bio:
Lily Lady is a writer based in New York City. Their recent work is in b l u s h, PanPan Press and Bureau of Complaint. They run a free biweekly poetry workshop, which can be found at the instagram @_scribe_tribe.More From This Issue...
Excerpt from ‘VISIONS’
Fiction by:
MICHAEL NEWTON
I.
Jeannie is having feelings about the objects in the house again. She and Greg have talked about this many times. She agreed to try and dim her senses to the messages which the objects send her. He encouraged her to try living in the real world and stop talking to the chairs and the toothbrushes.
Jeannie didn’t ask for this power (her word), this unfortunate capacity (Greg’s words). They do both agree that life is easier when it stays dormant. Because Jeannie is, in every other way, an exemplary partner (Greg’s words). She keeps the home beautifully and raises the children to be upstanding citizens. She prefers to spend her days working in the garden, paying social visits, and taking care of the shopping. But, when the power comes over her with all the randomness and intensity of a migraine, she has no way to stop it. She retreats to her bedroom, darkened with the shades pulled down, and suffers the buffeting waves. Countless social engagements have been broken as a result of these episodes.
Last night, for instance, she had to flee right in the middle of a dinner party, running up the back steps from the kitchen while Greg floundered about in the living room trying to keep the guests supplied with cocktails. The roast she was braising, left to smoke in the oven, set off the fire alarm and everyone piled through the door to escape the piercing sounds and billowing smoke. Out on the sidewalk in front of the house, Greg tried to collect the glasses from everyone before they disbursed to their cars. Just a touch of the flu, he said as he made his rounds, speaking as lightly as he could. But he could see from their eyes glittering under the streetlight and their soft dark muttering that his guests were not convinced. Back inside, the children were frightened and it took him more than an hour to soothe them. When he finally went to see Jeannie in their room, she looked pale and thin on the bed, her hand flung up to her forehead.
What was it, he asked her.
The wardrobe in the guest bedroom, she whispered.
The one we just bought at the antique store, he asked.
Yes, she said. A woman owned it who for years would get drunk in front of its mirror and lament her life. All the time it was like a prisoner, soaking up the energy like a sponge. This evening it just released it all in a burst. It was horrible.
Do you want me to move it or something?
No, she whispered. It got it all out. It’s a good wardrobe. It wants to be here.
Oh, that’s nice, he said, and sat perched on the edge of the mattress gently running his hand through her hair. He could feel her frame shake as she cried.
I’m sorry I ruined the party, she said.
It’s ok, it’s ok, he said. Don’t worry. He assured her it was all alright, but deep in his chest he felt a knot of coiling tension.
She drifted off and her face looked lovely in its slumber. But he couldn’t fall asleep, and he was awake to watch the stripes of dawn appear through the shades.
He sat at the breakfast table while she made him eggs and poured him coffee. The children were happy to see her looking well again and she enveloped each of them in a loving hug. Their youngest was obsessed with the theme song to a tv show, and was voicing its melody tenuously. Jeannie joined her, and then the other child joined in as well, until the three of them were singing a rousing rendition. They mugged for him, dancing, and he smiled his approval. But the whole time he was looking over their heads at a row of appliances gathered on a high shelf, trying to figure out if any of them were talking to her, and if so what they might be saying. He thought for a second that he felt a glimmer of something from the blender. It was a relief to get out of the house. He felt a sense of freedom as he worked his car through the bumper-to-bumper commuter traffic.
Bio:
Michael Newton lives at the Jersey Shore and works as a bookseller at the Asbury Book Cooperative, in Asbury Park, where he runs the used book section and hosts the Crime Book Club. He is also a member of the editorial collective at Ugly Duckling Presse, where he helps manage the journal Second Factory, among other projects. He is also co-publisher of Asphalte Magazine, an online journal. An essay of his, on Tommy Lee Jones' face, is forthcoming from In The Mood magazine.More From This Issue...
Two Poems
Poetry by:
CARSON JORDAN
IF YOU SEE THIS BEAUTIFUL [REDACTED], PLEASE KILL IT
I stopped hearing god
after heartbreak
some red wing muse
to pine over
hate to admit
I’ve begged before
Say It Right
say it with flowers
say anything
I visit a club called heaven
where I am bored to tears
sober as the dishes
sober as silence
sober as feeling
do I not have nine lives
do I not have angels on my side
what if god wants me
to steal more, untiy
an earworm
I am your favorite song
so hold it like your breath
passing a cemetery
C U NEXT TUESDAY
riding holy I gloat
how eroded of you
to be so gorged on me
bereft of dignity
glory, to be a god on high
my little peach
there is a remedy
love on days off
glory, to be a rave in my mind
a steamy receiving
a sugar glass crack
a bevy of very good girls
and virile bad boys
god made my honky tonk angels
and I just licked the jelly jar clean
in high, in heaven
there is a place, pray
that I am forgiven and hot
Follow Carson:
Instagram: @cahhhhson
Bio:
Carson Jordan is a clown and poet living in Brooklyn, NY. Her first chapbook, Good For Her, was released by Dirt Child in April 2022.More From This Issue...
TWO POEMS
Poetry by:
SASHA LESHNER
Anima
I’ve been a thousand years asleep
inside the untied
anchor-patterned robe
my mother got me on
America Island
where I first slept off
a slight addiction
all castaway
all prince white garden
still
I would only regard
the oleanders
only so sated
a patient snake
cool
belly-down and
waiting
for what was bound
to happen
to give
the way a horse might rest
its head
in a rider’s hands
and just to stay
like this a little longer
let the horse be grey
and blind and
follow
where that leads the aching
animal inside me
I will get where I am going
when I feel thirst
Where You Will Wait For The Rest of Your Life
standing across the aisles
in the stadium of my heart
everyone is waiting for the drum
to play beloved
the sky is always bright there
that last light-before-dark
when the colder water
turns the wrists with blessings
the swallows kick
their used-up wings against
the skyline
and I am not broken-hearted
everyone I love is there
even the resurrections
they do not cry out
do not mind the spectacle
of my oars my armour
ringing toward the red
shore that I call heaven
that like anything forbidden
turns an unblurred face
on where the details fade
from this still life this
slow-moving crowd
now leaning like departure
like planetary revolution
approaching an ending
and turning around
Follow Sasha:
Instagram: @sasha.lesh
Bio:
Sasha Leshner is a poet and editor from Brooklyn New York. Her work is drawn from the intersections of art, memory, and the possibilities of their articulations. She has an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University and a BA from NYU. Her work has been published and is forthcoming from ExPat Press, (M)othertongues Magazine, Pour Vida Zine, west 10th magazine, 89+ and the luma foundation, and others. Her poems are dedicated to the beloveds who beat her to the next world.More From This Issue...
Stranded Prepositions
Poetry by:
SIMONE ZAPATA
Stranded Prepositions
Follow Simone:
Instagram: @_rebelgreen
Bio:
Simone Larson Zapata is a poet, printmaker, and educator from San José, CA. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from CalArts in 2021. Her current research draws on theories of cognitive linguistics to explore how grammar and punctuation establish relation between subjects on and off the page.More From This Issue...
Two Poems
Poetry by:
RACHEL STONE
F41.1
and what a marriage
we know nothing of it
bette midler tweeted this
after prince philip died
ridiculous thing to tweet
or think, maybe true that
we know nothing of it
allegedly, though I think
no marriage can exist
and leave no trace, see:
my love of dragging
myself on my knees,
wanting for a clasped
hand, a man who will
turn any knife
I hand him. we had it all
figured out. us four
on a boat, lashed
against the black, cold
sea. what a shock then
to find it written on me.
I placed a few lilac stalks
in a wine bottle, so beautiful
to watch them wilt and blow
weeks later scanned inside the
dark glass to find the stems
thick with mold, white and
woolen, fuzz of pale lanugo.
Complaint
between me and the reason I exist, there is a gun. if I am ever
happy to be alive, I must thank it. we know this rule: a third
act, and the one to do the acting. not me though. someone
has to go through the motions of a good life,
pulling corn silk from the drain. years later
she’s crying, calls me to say it
(if you didn’t pick up,
she says, who knows what might)
it’s wrong to make promises I don’t mean to keep
said chekhov and his gun was right
where he left it. on the phone
the feeling was less of fear but recognition:
here. here it is. it’s been here the whole time.
Follow Rachel:
Instagram: @stone_of_arc
Twitter: @stone_of_arc
Web: www.rachelstone.org/
Bio:
Rachel Stone is a writer and reporter from Chicago. Her work has been published in BOMB Magazine, the Brooklyn Rail, and other publications.More From This Issue...
Two Poems
Poetry by:
GRACE DOUGHERTY
BIRTHDAY WISH
I’d like to faint in traffic
Fashion a big scene
Accident ahead
Entirely predictable
Obit written by mine enemy
“The only appropriate way for her to go”
Creating a sizeable disaster
Peak victim masochist whatever
Dear family please cremate me
I don't wish to expire into the sediment
This isn’t a suicide note
Just a list of wishes
BRAIN ZAP
Hey I almost rear ended your Toyota
I was wondering what about me makes you
Want to get high?
Worst critic, best place
I am coming to terms with
Coming to terms with you
How much longer until I can say the word no
Without wincing
Breathing in unison felt like God
You ran yourself through me
There are splinters in my mouth
Got a ton of words for a ton of people
Everything I wish to unlock
I walk to you in a stupid way
Of course we’re here
Boring as ever
Sign release form for my whole life
Tell everyone
More From This Issue...
Working and Watching Woodpeckers Work
Fiction by:
NATHAN DRAGON
Juice
What-are-ya-gunna-do?
It is what it is.
Time to quit. Really gunna hafta.
Winners don’t quit but for this time.
Days spent drinking juice instead.
Healthy juice, he guesses, because that’s what it says in a way. The label says defense. Defense against what? He asks himself like he has the answer, and he does, he knows what it means. It’s for the immune system.
He thinks, typically, I am defensive.
What about an offense? Is there offense juice? A juice that powers the offense in the body. On the attack, but in a good way? He remembers watching basketball highlights, as a kid, top 10 plays on cable before breakfast.
This morning, he pours some juice, walks to the table, sneezes, tries to stifle it and spills some juice. And again a sneeze starts coming on, tries to stifle it, spills, sneezes, tries to stifle it, spills. Now the cup’s empty. Shit. Juice is kind of expensive.
Still, pours another cup of juice. Hopefully it doesn’t all spill.
Hopefully he doesn’t spill it all.
It’s actually a mug of juice, a tall cup, half full might've been easier to manage than a short and shallow mug overfilled. The nice brown cup he had from the place he used to work 6 or 7 years ago instead of the little orange mug a friend gave him around the same time.
Last month he quit everything, he went to meetings last week. And earlier this week there was a small fire.
He pauses.
He should clean up the juice.
He hates when everything’s sticky.
Good thing he’s wearing his house shoes.
Nothing worse than wet socks.
Working and Watching Woodpeckers Work
He thinks everyone knows that woodpeckers’ tongues internally wrap around their brains. It’s not cool to know this. It prevents brain damage.
They always sound like blue jays mixed with seagulls to him, maybe that’s wrong.
Seeing a woodpecker always makes him feel better. They make him feel lucky to see one.
At work he’s watching one.
Guy he’s working with asks what he’s looking at.
Tells the guy at work, look, a woodpecker. It’s either a downy woodpecker or a hairy woodpecker. I can’t tell. They almost look the same but one’s bigger — I forget which is which.
The guy at work says, where?
Right there.
That’s a woodpecker? That’s not what I pictured, the guy at work says. I pictured Woody the Woodpecker.
Yeah those ones, that kind lives around here too, they live around most of the country I think, he tells the guy at work. They’re called pileated woodpeckers. They get big, like a small hawk or something.
He likes this guy at work. This guy’s kind of down all the time, younger than him.
One day he asked the guy, Do you want my old guitar? It’s missing a string, probably works fine otherwise.
About Nathan:
Nathan Dragon's work's been in NOON Annual, New York Tyrant, Fence, and Hotel. Nathan co-runs the publishing project Blue Arrangements. And—he's recently finished writing a collection of stories.More From This Issue...
Two Poems
Poetry by:
COLE BEAUNE
the light
steps into itself
theory
forgets
––proof echoes
movements
,
orchestra
in ,
,,
,
:
learners
dogs at
night
Woods: Revolving Dream
fever
reflex
hours in-
to loose threads,
enveloped
c
o
l
o
r
s
spa-
a-
a-
a-
ces cast,
: opaque
before rot-iron
hidings
stop
in glassflesh
headtrails: i’ll understand
a pine furrow
where one ––if one
sinksing throat night, grass-footing
the long season
blotted ––coil
in watered-glimpse
About Cole:
Instagram: @col_bonBio:
Cole Beaune is a Canadian-American poet and editor living in Brooklyn, New York. His poems have been published in Issues Magazine, Former People, and forthcoming in The Vital Sparks, Dream Pop Journal, Blanket Swimming, and OF ZOOS. He is the poetry editor of Warm Milk Publishing, an in-print and online magazine dedicated to the publication of experimental and contemporary poetry/visual art from around the globe.More From This Issue...
Two Poems
Poetry by:
ABIGAIL SWOBODA
A shot clock to report
Awesome players should
all contribute Awesome
players
all contribute their time.
time.
time. Are you hooked
into
time.
next year?
Are you Awesome
hooked into
contribute time.
She doctored what
she could. Correct
doctored Correct geo
for use. Mon beau
next year?
Mon beau geo
Mon Awesome sapin.
Re-leap soft infusion
This tray is
missing.
This account should be
transparent.
This tray is transparent.
This account should be missing.
should be should be
is is
This
account transparent
is
tray missing
Phone Numbers Magic
Magic Magic Magic Magic Magic missing.
Magic creature survey.
creature account
transparent creature
survey. Show love
& cooking.
Follow Abigail:
Instagram: @honeymoonbeam
Twitter: @orbigail
Bio:
Abigail Swoboda is a poet, pre-K teacher, and practitioner of Pennsylvania Dutch Braucherei who lives in West Philly.More From This Issue...
Two Poems
Poetry by:
JED MUNSON
G-D
We get beat up.
the explicable, the explicable, then the. the prefecture, void
of harmony
We are not what I wasn’t
afraid of. Nor did that occur to you
just now: the back
door as an option.
He stayed up late looking: home
remedies for sKy-Attica
I tried unlocking
my jaw silently
from your name
came a syllable of stress,
then all this resting
Semblance of Rigor
I blame the powers of inference
for the trouble
back there. We’re sorting it out
behind the scenes while I announce that
there are thousands of ways
of thinking about something,
I just happen to choose the one
about thinking
about something
dear to the people
who aren’t thought about: fear
of money is branded
ideology, lazy
when fear of poverty is fear of people
finding out they’re people,
so poor.
I work that out for myself so I can justify
the drink it took, the week
it didn’t. No one thinks: but attention takes time
so why should I?
I think: no one thinks
about the people I know, no one prays
for the guy who observes that
no one prays for him
because everyone’s heard the song
and digs it.
I’m careful to assume the barrier
has a conclusion.
I keep watching old milk
spill, noting
its democratic urgency.
Bio:
Jed Munson is a Wisconsin-born, Korean American writer based in New York City. His chapbook, Newsflash Under Fire, Over the Shoulder, is forthcoming with Ugly Duckling Presse. Recent work can be found in Conjunctions and P-QUEUE.
More From This Issue...
Affirmation
Mixed media by:
SALLY DECKER
& collaborators BRIANA MARELA and CAROLINE PARTAMIAN
affirmation
: for voice and delay
,,,,
signal path : voice (v) —> delay (d) :
dry and delayed voice amplified and in center of stereo field
begin with
delay time : 0ms /
blend : 50% (or 12 o’clock on EHX analog delay pedal) /
feedback : 0% and will not change /
italics used to indicate suggestions for character, delivery, or intention of the voice
total duration should be at least six minutes
optional addition : video camera zoomed into face, eyes, or mouth of the performer and this image projected behind them
,,,,
devise a sentence, phrase, or small poem that feels affirming to you: affirming in that you feel a positive resonance inside yourself when you say it:
max five words, max two syllables per word, no more than one two-syllable word in the phrase :
,,,,
i
v : start speaking the phrase with a small pause in between each word and keep repeating
d: turn delay time up a small amount after each repetition of the spoken phrase. move at your own pace, but keep the movement of the delay time consistent once you’ve found a rhythm
exact / steady / searching:
ii
v : keep repeating the phrase with pauses. attempt to follow the rhythm and pacing of the delayed voice returning, especially as delayed signal separates more and more from the dry voice. words can become more sung rather than spoken if desired
d : after delay time is at ~275ms (12 o’clock), start to alternate moving the delay time knob and the blend knob, increasing the blend. adjustments to the blend knob can be in greater notches than the delay time movement
moving / playful / curious :
iii
v : keep repeating. stop when you have completed a full repetition of the phrase without any delayed signal
d : once delay time is 550ms (or all the way up on EHX pedal) and blend is 100%, start moving the blend down (moving slower than when you first increased the blend) until you reach 0%
lucid / intuitive / confident :
,,,,
![]()
Graphic score interpretation by Caroline Partamian.
Bio:
Sally Decker is a composer, performer, and writer based in Oakland, CA. Her work explores the subtle emotional body and sound as a vessel for practicing presence. Her approach to form and process is psychological and sensory, rooted in the intent of strengthening a reflective focus toward our internal intuitive worlds. Recent interests include feedback systems, the voice, and utilization of language in performance. Her full-length album In The Tender Dream was released in August 2020 on NNA Tapes. More info & work at www.sallydecker.net.More From This Issue...
Two Poems
Poetry by: RHIANNON MCGAVIN
The phone rings
like a flock of jays surprised
out of an evergreen & you become
a quilt of daylight on the same device
that hacks up spam & headlines. Now, my thumb-
print smudges your chin’s spectacle, your laugh
cups my ear through this hole in the fourth wall,
a magic lantern that spins code & flash
bringing you closer home with each pixel
to say good morning as if you’re right here,
golden hour in my hand til I hang
up no you hang up first, talking to air,
to you. Tuesday starts & the call goes blank.
When I press my fingers against the screen
it’s warm, but not as warm as you must be.
Long distance song
Follow Rhiannon:
Instagram: @rhiannonmcgavin
Bio:
Rhiannon McGavin has failed the driver’s license test three times so far. Her work has been published by The Believer, Teen Vogue, and more. She is the former Youth Poet Laureate of Los Angeles. Her books Branches and Grocery List Poems are both available from Not A Cult. As a 2023 Mitchell Scholar, she will be studying at Trinity College next year.More From This Issue...
Two Movie Poems
Poetry by:
CATHERINE BRESNER
The Unbelievable Truth
Hal Hartley, 1989, 90 mins
Audrey is alternately bored and terrified.
Audrey is alternately bored and terrified and her boyfriend disgusts her.
Audrey is in love with a man who just got out of prison for a double murder.
Audrey knows that we, as a human species, are close to fucking everything up with our bombs. She’s going to Harvard, maybe. Probably.
Audrey who is played by Adrienne Shelly has strawberry red hair and a pink mouth. Everyone wants to kiss it. Audrey is a flirt.
Adrienne Shelly who is not Audrey who is actually Adrienne Levine was an actress, director, and screenwriter and optimistic agnostic.
Adrienne Shelly committed suicide in her Greenwich Village studio on November 1, 2006.
Adrienne Shelly didn’t commit suicide, she was murdered in her New York studio on November 1, 2006, and it was made to look like a suicide.
Law & Order Episode 386 is a thinly veiled dramatization of Adrienne Shelly’s murder.
In Law & Order Episode 227, Adrienne Shelly plays Wendy, a former porn star who ends up going to jail for conspiracy to murder.
Adrienne Shelly’s directorial debut was for Waitress in 2007, starring Kerri Russell, and received a “90% Fresh” rating, according to Rotten Tomatoes.
Badlands
Terrence Malick, 1973, 95 mins
in one scene we are escaping from our daddies with their thick necks and long guns and curfews, we are on the soft soft lamb baby
in another the cows screaming in the feedlot, in another a dead catfish thrown into the vegetable garden, in another a felled tree in a brown riverbank
we're Sissy in her white short shorts and Martin in his cowboy boots and denim, we are all american apparel circa nineteen fifties in a town called Texas
in the days of happiness, a red balloon rose over the farm grasses into the strategic sky, higher and higher away from sharp rooftops
the imaginary felt more actual than the actual, we were kings and queens of grasshoppers, we gave names to all of the flowers we didn't already know
it was the time of quiet in the cathedral of the trees and we humped each other in hushed voices and stared at the soft clouds on our hard backs
we were killers and we burned for each other, everything existed to be touched
we rang the bell, didn't we didn’t we didn’t we didn’t
Follow Catherine:
Instagram: @catherineb817
Bio:
Catherine Bresner is the author of the chapbook The Merriam Webster Series; the artist book Everyday Eros (Mount Analogue 2017); and the empty season, which won the Diode Edition Book Prize in 2017. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in the VOLTA, b l u s h, Sixth Finch, Fonograf, Itinerant, The Offing, Heavy Feather Review, Gulf Coast, Passages North, Paperbag and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a Juniper Summer Institute fellowship and the 2019 Cadence Residency through the Northwest Film Forum. Currently, she is the publicist for Wave Books and lives in Brattleboro, VT.More From This Issue...
Two Poems
Poetry by:
CY MARCH
abalone castle
borned glimpse in the water
big iridescence gathering
at the beach i go inside it
how it feels
see myself in a new mirror
gleaned blue and white and pink
i make a movie in the castle
looking at myself looking
body spoold gleaming
shells buried in the yard
garden alphabet
i put my hands in the dirt
dig it out
the dark white spread of morning
columbine after it’s rained
the way it touches beside me
watching closer
big garden plume
the sloped gathering
my head thick with it
the unclean spelling of vegetables
More From This Issue...
Two Poems
Poetry and Audio by:
ZOE DARSEE
AGAIN I FOYER TOWARD WRITE COME, YOU MIGHT SAY
Rare children who develop an entire language of their own
Exceptional kids that grow whole tongues by themselves
Uncommon babies who originate complete dictionaries in isolation
Special youngsters that nurture all words the same
Remarkable minors who raise an exhaustive lyric on their lonesome
Outstanding juveniles that enhance lingo through the personal
Unparalleled adolescents who patch up great blankets of dialect
Bizarre offspring that scavenge an unbroken vocabulary from the dead
Notable sprouts who formulate ceaseless monologues of their individuality
Alternative, divisive progenies preparing to wed their textual companions
Prominent striplings that back talk a glossary to their teachers
Incomprehensible toddlers who mouth off the phrasebook of our ancestors
Self-made, singular infants flourishing in the garden of their own jargon
Funny kiddies prospering in a bed of declarative idioms
Outlandish spring chickens dancing through terms and propagandas
Full-feathered volunteers diving into the hell of a maxim
I desires be language as simple as necessary
THE TABLE, THE HAMMER, THE PSYCHIC
Usually he leans on the table enough to tip it. I’m studying. My computer! I swallow as I catch it, parallel it. She sees to the other side meanwhile like a voyeur while meaning nothing. In the loud evening, her twin has a spatula. He’s using it like a hammer, that’s evening. Fish! He’s flipping the table with his hammer, meanwhile the psychic locks eyes with the wall and goes a mean while beyond.
Follow Zoe:
Instagram: @katypablo_ & @tabloidpress
Bio:
Zoe Darsee (b. 1991) has spent most of her life between Texas and Berlin. In 2014, she co-founded TABLOID Press with poet and artist Nat Marcus. The publishing initiative is a social one; it aims to facilitate collaboration, to uphold the poetics of the local.
Her work, textual and vocal, has appeared in the archives of dittoditto, PRELUDE, KEITH LLC and TINGE Magazine, on Cashmere radio, TLTRPreß, and in collaboration with musicians Exael, GOD69 and DJ Paradise.
She is currently a candidate for the MFA in poetry at University of Notre Dame.
“CAMP” from DAUGHTERGOD
Poetry by:
LOUISE AKERS
1. Discretio spiritum:
it begins in air
vast air gold
air air
destitute of
light gold ending
like a sound and color
ripped through
air how I
grow arro
gant and swaggering
through gold and empty
invocations ad mea
perpetuum deducite
tempora
carmen
2. “Who am I? the Fawn
of God?”
3. I enter her somatic camp
a saint, and I’m looking for trouble,
asking for it. Every camp
we made that summer she, JOAN, soma, raged and endlessly we
anticipated our syncopation,
her parousia.
4. Camp: synced, stinking, and choleric...
Let’s get outta here! I said, JOAN, it’s perfectly possible
to enjoy something “ethically injurious...” Anyway, we’re in circulation with God; punishment and edifying sermons give way to reward and sexual emancipation. Now we are promised freedom
and promises of freedom.
And JOAN, in characteristically
inexorable purpose—the explosion of a lone water molecule—strikes, accuses me of lesbianism
and molesting her political
nursery. Jumps out of the moving car: somatic re-feminization.
JOAN! I call out,
your dreams are full of cells.
Camp, as if her amnion, as if the trouble we’re looking for constructs our bodies, tectonically.
Not hyperconsciousness, but ice cubes for water, the reopening of museums post-plague.
JOAN d’arc: the Biodrag Dimension, Radical Pragmatism, Synced (with me) and Clean as Camp Allows, Circulating God and Emancipating Michael, Looking for Trouble, Begging for War,
NEVER HAD NO MANDRAGORA!!!
Oh, Anglophiiiiile:
You have her ring!
JOAN, skywalker, cisMaid oversold
to justice, the Daughtergod—she
missed the stink even
forty times her sword.
5. JOAN, blonde like emmer,
like tact to polish catholic
reports. A thought event—a war event—is won
by shadowed order; emmer growing golden
over brick,
glass,
over our soft, squishy
corner.
6. JOAN’s “visits” are as revelatory as they’re
apprehensive, even a little
pornographic
for their transformation
of the private into the
spectacular, resisting
paraphrase through easy
opposition: one side:
apophasis of a ‘gender,’ the other: the gala of faith,
the final sync: ‘Theophany in Drag.’
Congratulations, JOAN, haec sancta!
Your wig’s cut short,
dazzling
while our scalps grow raw.
7. And what is a man,
looking the other way? Metaphysics? Certainly not
litigiousness. An admission
that god is in the body he
won’t look at?
Or, is that that JOAN was right? The dove was right? The fawn of god had never
faltered!
8. If a human man, looking away, with metaphysical intent, not smelling certain blood not
syncing not looking in the right
direction
blinks,
does that prove the Daughtergod’s
privacy is sacred?
An oriole, a spy, the hailing of the superhuman, JOAN, Brad Pitt of Byzantium, the songfast
pennant, oracular Bloom.
She presses that word we’re folded from
into the grooves, the angel, sister to/of
breath.
9. As a Saint, I am the daughter of genitives,
the crucifixion of accusatives, the abolition of the nominatives.
My offer is dative.
As a Saint, I am fake science. I am the decreation of enlightenment; I am its silly
convolutions.
As a Saint, I am in the business of good explanations, beautiful ones that make sounds like an
enlightened understanding
of real grace.
As a Saint, I am loyal.
I wish to make war. I am a prince, am humble and make no more war.
As a Saint, so much is at stake, and the consequence of waging war is to wage a war against
us.
As a Saint, the risk of waging war is spending it
without you.
As a Saint, no matter how many men you raise against us.
As a Saint, I love the insect, its larvae, as I love myself, my skinny dogs.
As a Saint, I had not wanted to besiege the town, I had not intended any canonballs to remove
any fucking faces.
As a Saint.
10. As a Saint, I was the nominative, the accusative, the vocative. I determined spirits as
genitives, I required datives, stunk with ablatives.
As a Saint, I wonder if you understand urgency:
JOAN, flame, self-touching
urgency, golden/
gold alike.
Bio:
Louise Akers is a poet living in Queens, NY. They earned their MFA from Brown University in May of 2018, and received the Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop Prize for Innovative Writing in 2017 and the Confrontation Poetry Prize in 2019. Their chapbook, Alien year, was selected by Brandon Shimoda for the 2020 Oversound Chapbook Prize. Akers’s work can be found in the Berkeley Poetry Review, MIDTERM, Bat City Review, Fugue Journal, Confrontation Magazine, bæst journal, and elsewhere.
More From This Issue...
Tragedy Reel
Interview with:
AARON POWELL
Interview with Aaron Powell of Fog Lake
Conducted by: Emily Costantino Fog Lake’s seventh album, Tragedy Reel, comes through as Aaron Powell’s most powerful and well-crafted album to date. Alongside the same haunted vocal layering, a new sonic field emerges within Tragedy Reel. A minimalism blotted with sparse percussion and looming Casio synths. A truly beautiful and urgent listen.
During the past month, Aaron and I went back and forth in a conversation about this latest release. Tragedy Reel was officially released on April 23rd through the independent label Orchid Tapes. Meeting Aaron, albeit virtually, it became clear that the control this album posits is in fact masterfully held by Aaron himself -- a thoughtful and prolific songwriter based out of Newfoundland, Canada. The interview that follows is a snapshot of a much longer dialouge, as we approached the subjects of craft, ritual, limitation and redemption -- coming to understand the motivations behind Aaron’s latest record.
Purchase Tragedy Reel or pre-order physical copies, here.
Stream the LP, here:
EMILY COSTANTINO:
What is it about Newfoundland do you think?
AARON POWELL:
At this point I’ve spent most of my life there, in Newfoundland, specifically in a small town sort of in the middle of nowhere. In a lot of ways I’ve wanted Fog Lake to sound like what living in rural Newfoundland feels like. Whether that is describing the dense backwoods, the ocean, or the silence and solitude of it all. I guess being out there can be so mind-numbingly boring at times that there really isn’t much else to do other than to get lost in your own mind.
EMILY:
I think many artists found themselves in the same situation this year, moving back to where they grew up, either temporarily or indefinitely. Although, most I know went ‘home’ and were somewhat crushed by the experience. You wrote an entire album...
ARRON:
This album came together much more effortlessly than my previous albums, thankfully. I had written and demoed a few songs in the summer of 2019, which was a very intense time in my life personally. Once that dust had finally settled for the most part, a few weeks back at home that following summer and I felt like it was the right time to revisit those songs and to build an album around them.
I genuinely struggle to find inspiration for writing songs when I’m anywhere other than Newfoundland. Growing up, there really wasn’t much else to do except work on creative things -- so it eventually became a refuge for me and an escape from the meaninglessness and alienation of it all.
EMILY:
It feels impossible to listen to Tragedy Reel and not feel paralyzed by its lyricism (in the best way possible). So many tracks I would replay after the first listen because the impressionistic quality warranted another go, sometimes several goes. Those spaces you create feel so... alive.
AARON:
It always remains a goal of mine to be cryptic in my lyricism, because I think all of my favorite songwriters have a way of making their music feel not completely aligned to their own lived experiences, so in that way the listener is able to reshape it to fit their own. I think if you get too specific in what you are trying to say, building that bridge between the songwriter and the listener becomes a lot more difficult.
EMILY:
Some songs tell what feels like a single story -- like “Latter Day Saint,” one of my favorite tracks on the album -- while others feel a bit more nonlinear. Was your lyrical practice any different this time around?
AARON:
Tragedy Reel is a lot more conceptual (at least on a narrative level) than my previous albums. It has more of a “beginning, middle and end” than other records I’ve done, much of those which I feel ended on cliffhangers, in terms of personal closure or catharsis at least. I’d like to think that it’s my first record which tells a more complete story of things I had only briefly touched upon in earlier works, but had still inspired them heavily. “Latter Day Saint” is the only song on the album to me that is mostly linear storywise while the other songs touch upon about a decade’s worth of significant personal events and the emotions surrounding them, almost like an attempt to write my own “coming-of-age” story perhaps.
EMILY:
I think as artists, we are often retelling the same stories. Trying to say it “better” or fully capture it with each iteration. And like you said about certain experiences, especially those centered around a trauma, they can feel almost impossible to put to words. I always wonder what happens once an artist feels a sense of completion with a certain story/ event that preoccupies them. Have you ever felt completion in this way around a major theme in your writing?
AARON:
I think with Tragedy Reel for the first time I felt like I had finished telling the story I had been loosely reflecting upon in previous releases. It’s a bit bothersome when certain muses and flames feel like they’re finally extinguished. But I also like that it opens a new door and gives me a massive opportunity to evolve sonically and lyrically, which I’m excited about. Even if some stories in my life come to an end, I can say with confidence that I’ll never feel like I’ve completed my artistic journey or like I’ve said everything I’d like to say.
EMILY:
Well, this album feels like a massive step forward on that journey. Especially it’s composition. I mean, sonically it separates itself from some of your previous records. How did that sound come about?
AARON:
My close friend and one of my favorite songwriters Kenny Boothby of the band Little Kid once told me that they always have a certain rule for each record they make, whether that be something like “no distortion” or “only songs in the key of A.” So I took a note from them, the same one which they applied on their album Flowers, that rule being “no electric guitars.” I guess that would make Tragedy Reel the most ‘folky’ album of mine, but I really don’t enjoy trying to categorize my own music too much.
EMILY:
I’m always interested in how taking something away or adding an arbitrary rule can suddenly become this generative experience. I think your choice to take some instruments away allowed for a certain felt spaciousness in the composition. Are there any other practices or rituals you engage in to keep working?
AARON:
I have some fun rituals and stuff I do for sure. Sometimes when I have a bad writer’s block I’ll literally take a whole day and try to write and record an entire album, at least 8 to 12 songs, and do it as stream-of-consciousness as possible. Then I’ll burn the songs off onto a CD and go for a drive late at night, listening to them for the first time. Of course all of the songs end up being half-baked and unfinished, but there’s always at least one or two songs that have a memorable hook, or a few bars of lyrics I really like. It’s a lot of fun. Some of my favorite songs I’ve ever written have come from that practice.
EMILY:
That’s really badass. Anything else...
AARON:
Sometimes I’ll find old archival footage on youtube, even old family video tapes and whatnot. I’ll project it onto a screen and put it on mute. Then I’ll try to write a song that captures the way those moving images make me feel. I find when I write music to images it really helps me focus and gives me a feeling to work off of.
EMILY:
Ahh, that makes a lot of sense. I mean, I read others online referring to the “harrowing nostalgia” of your work. There’s totally a cinematic quality to your writing. And Tragedy *Reel*… Not to be lame, but that title alone communicates so much.
AARON:
I always feel like I want to evoke the feeling one gets from watching old family videos or looking through a photo album. A lot of the drive I have to make music comes from how I feel that it’s detrimental for me mentally to create little time capsules that I can go back to, in order to compartmentalize intense or negative things I’ve felt or have had happen to me. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have a bad tendency to be melodramatic and romanticize my own struggles to the point where I imagine them in my head to be ‘Shakespearean’ in their scale of tragedy. Then, in moments of clarity I just laugh and realize how insignificant and trivial it is a lot of the time.
EMILY:
In the biography that I was sent for this album it described the album as a vehicle for ‘forgiveness’ and ‘repentance.’ I connected this to the process of catharsis you were describing, that creating this album was actively releasing you from something -- a feeling, or history. It reminds me that so much of what shapes our actions, and as artists our creative choices, are the bondages we are experiencing at that time, what we need to be set free from. If, as you said, there was some kind of starting point and end-point to this album, an arc of sorts, where did you end up? Were you set free? Or do you think the process of making art can even do this, actually set us free from a thing...
AARON:
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about this. When I’m in the midst of making something that I feel is deeply personal and important to me, it can feel like I’m doing something that’s going to have some kind of major impact on my life, like in the way people perceive me or the way I perceive myself. But then when everything’s said and done, I realize that music, while an extremely powerful thing, isn’t going to mend anything on it’s own. I almost feel cowardly hiding behind my songs sometimes. There’s one line in Leonard Cohen’s song “Bird on a Wire”: ”I swear by this song / and all I’ve done wrong / I will make it up to thee.” That one always gets me. Sometimes I genuinely feel like a song is going to right some kind of wrong, or set me free from some kind of psychological bondage, but in the end it’s only just a song.
…
Follow Aaron:
Instagram: @aaronfoglake
Twitter: @foglake
Bio:
Fog Lake is the solo project of Newfoundland, Canada artist Aaron Powell. Over the last ten years, his lo-fi recordings, described as “harrowing nostalgia,” have explored the dark valleys where everything has settled and must be understood.MORE FROM THIS ISSUE...
Decomposition in Three Acts
Poetry by:
JORDAN CHESNUT
Excerpts from:“Diary: A Decomposition in Three Acts”
These poems are excerpts from a longer manuscript which performs a decomposition of a family member's Civil War diary and includes characters, a dramatic preface, three acts with exposition, and footnotes. The slashes are the mycelium threads from an (ASCII) mushroom.
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These poems are excerpts from a longer manuscript which performs a decomposition of a family member's Civil War diary and includes characters, a dramatic preface, three acts with exposition, and footnotes. The slashes are the mycelium threads from an (ASCII) mushroom.
Follow Jordan:
Web: www.jordanchesnut.com
Instagram: @jordan.on.earth
Bio:
Jordan Chesnut (she, they) is the author of How Gross, My Seances (Plays Inverse, 2021), a psychodrama and verse play. The manuscript was shortlisted for the 2019 Tarpaulin Sky Book Award. Her creative writing has been featured in the Jacket2 "Extreme Texts" feature, Soft Surface, among others, and her critical essay-in-parts is published in The Adroit Journal. She leads a "Poetics of Queer Ecology" course through the Hyperlink Academy, a group for the experimental study of contemporary "eco-poetry" through animal justice, queer/feminist, and decolonial theory.
MORE FROM THIS ISSUE...
Selected Work
Audio, Drawing, and Poetry by:
DYLAN MARX
Dylan Marx’s work exists across multiple mediums, shapes, and forms, but it always carries a familiar sense of play and earnestness. That may be because his poems and songs often begin from the same place, and at some point, Dylan decides whether the poem would be better off sung or read. The drawings, too, mostly come from that same place––doodled into the margins of his notebook.
Both New Shorts and what's in a leaf's in a nail are part of one project, a book called where (we)re. The pieces traverse memory and place, humor and sadness, feeling both safe and full of surprise. Sometimes, the poems ask the reader questions, like “Have you ever listened to the sound of a rock scraped / against a tree trunk? There really is a lot there.” Sound is consistently important in the work––Dylan says music was the first medium he ever took seriously (beginning with piano lessons in his youth “with an incredible teacher named Miss Cynthia.”) Thus, it was imperative to include audio in this mini portfolio. I Fall Asleep at Operas comes from Romu Otsimine or Black Oil Sunflower for Wild Birds, a 9-track album that will be released this summer.
- Sarah Yanni, TQR
what's in a leaf's in a nail, pen and paper, 2020
New Shorts
I wrote you a letter on a train. It was cold, and everyone
was smoking. I lost the letter (something about warm
water)
Once I saw you twirl into the cafeteria and pop open an
umbrella. I was throwing pizzas in the oven, wearing a
yellow hat, refusing to smile.
Have you ever listened to the sound of a rock scraped
against a tree trunk? There really is a lot there
Picture this: shakespeare, a walkie talkie, the rolling stones,
street sharks
Buried beneath layers and layers of sand, dirt, and
dust is the peg used to hold together Guido de Arezzo’s
legendary monochord. Farther down, his bones.
There are too many cushions now, and a handful of rocks.
The blue of the sky is a bit off.
“You sharpen yourself as a weapon of God”
I go down the stairs, like a gazelle
Follow Dylan:
Web: www.dylanmarx.com
Instagram: @dylankurtmarx
Twitter: @Dylan_marx
Bio:
Dylan Marx is a musician, writer, and teacher. He works with new and old sounds. He plays music as Moths and as himself, often with dancers. He’s a founding member of The Infranational Society of the Nomadic City and It’s People and is finishing up his MFA at CalArts.
MORE FROM THIS ISSUE...
Two Poems
Poetry by:
PAIGE PARSONS
The Bridge
Each place, each place I’ve called home
is bisected in origin by water,
in time by roads and the bridges
carry me across each time,
home home not home.
I release the thought after moving it
from right brain to left and back.
The bridge might be a placebo or diversion.
We cross it in pleasure,
dreaming its collapse.
We cross it and drive up the hill,
past the house where it happened.
It happened / it is not happening,
it is not happening, not now.
Riveted to the empty
sound, I wait, listen.
Mute house.
We cross the state line and in Kansas,
it is Sunday,
and we have already not gone to church.
The bridge bows, and on it
I find a still, dead starling:
fresh red and almost with us.
Where death shouldn’t be,
in plain sight. We lose things
on the bridge.
We go down with it.
Hoarder
What I felt and what I was told to feel,
so what I learned: to fold up
the feeling, rearrange the room and hold
still. Now there is this stack,
disheveled, of true
and untrue things
presented at once.
Just tape them to the wall,
and look.
I forget where the bone broke
until it rains. It swells
like a used-up mattress
left out.
Nothing disappears.
Drawers and shelves fill
even as I clear room
after room.
You’ll keep your bones as long
as you can.
I take down the wall,
empty the drawers,
sort. Each thing saturated
in time. Narrow pathways
to move in the crowded room,
hauls to Goodwill.
I must find a place I can live
inside, and
I either put it in the landfill now or
someone else does when I’m gone.
Follow Paige:
Instagram: @paige.g.p
Bio:
Paige Parsons is from Mission Viejo, California and lives in Los Angeles. She writes, makes clothes and textiles, and is a member of Belladonna* Collaborative.
MORE FROM THIS ISSUE...
A Letter to Three Videos
Essay by:
DANIEL SPIELBERGER
A Letter To Three Videos; A Letter To Three Lies
A Letter To Three Videos; A Letter To Three Lies
When I feel particularly hopeless, I turn to three YouTube videos for inspiration — Lady Gaga’s “Marry The Night”, Susan Boyle’s Audition for Britain’s Got Talent, and the trailer for the 2015 film JOY.
ONE ︎:
Dear the music video for “Marry The Night” (“Marry The Night” by Lady Gaga),
It’s not that I’ve been dishonest, it’s just that I loathe reality.
You aren’t even my favorite song off Born This Way. That honor goes to “Government Hooker” – Put your hands on me, John F. Kennedy. But there’s an enthralling mania to your imagery. When I look at you I see myself flopping and succeeding and flopping and succeeding and struggling and sweating and dying and then living, but through the glorious lens of cinema.
Oh, (“Marry The Night” by Lady Gaga), you start off with the pop star being pushed around in a hospital bed. She’s in a white hospital gown complimented by high heels. She’s reciting an internal monologue about trauma and memory and the innate deception of retelling one’s story. It’s not that I’ve been dishonest, it’s just that I loathe reality. You follow the origins of Gaga. She gets dropped by her label and then claws her way back up from the precipice, donning a bedazzled denim jacket to dance rehearsal that preludes her comeback. You may say that I have lost everything, but I still have my bedazzler. There are dramatic montages of Gaga making herself vomit, laboring up a stairwell with a keyboard, and pushing herself to the limit at rehearsals, all for the sake of fame. The music video ends with a car explosion. Gaga steps into a limousine and the camera glances at her hand — Interscope Records, Hollywood, CA 4 PM. It cuts to red. Some Satanic imagery — Gaga in a red leather dress, her head is obscured by a blue sphere. She floats into the black abyss. An ominous, off-kilter score.
You were posted on YouTube on December 2, 2011. You topped off a year of demented excess — this was Gaga at her height of her prowess. She wanted to group herself within a pantheon of demigods — Michael Jackson, Prince, Madonna. But nothing is forever.
After you were posted, things started to go downhill for Gaga. She flew too close to the sun. Her Jeff Koons-themed dance album ARTPOP was messy and incoherent — pop culture was an art form, now art’s in pop culture in me. A media studies essay that should have languished in the drafts folder. But Born This Way was utopian Gaga. A pop star declaring that her journey to achieving fame and battling eating disorders and body image issues and assault and heartbreaks and breakups was indicative of anyone’s untapped potential. Crying in the hospital bed, Gaga whimpers — I’m going to be a star, you know why? Because I have nothing left to lose.
You, (“Marry the Night” by Lady Gaga), are a spiritual sibling of another iconic video — “Lady Gaga - Brave Speech Live At The Monster Ball Tour” — a clip of a monologue she gave a few years back at a sold out concert in Madison Square Garden.
I want to feel like my taste has changed. I want to have the confidence of knowing that all those things I found inspiring and moving and profound years ago, now seem trite and stupid. But that isn’t the case. There’s a part of me that will always need you (“Marry the Night” by Lady Gaga) and your spiritual sibling (“Brave Speech Live At The Monster Ball Tour”) to get me through a rough night.
Social media platforms are blanketed with similarly trite messages — frequently viral Tweets that remind me of all the people who became successful artists in their 40s and 50s and 60s, infographics telling me some version of just remember that you’re a goddamn superstar.
But (“Marry the Night” by Lady Gaga), there’s an integrity to your imagery. You weren’t made in some anesthetized content mill; a distant factory filled with creators crouched over their MacBooks, longing for an earthquake to wipe them the fuck out. No, you are glorious. Lady Gaga emptied her coffers for you. You are the most baroque testament to this lie. And that’s why I love you.
Just because something is a myth doesn’t mean it can’t impact us, shape us, and help us in tangible ways. Scanning through your comments, it seems as if many agree. A recurring theme from your fans is that this video has brought them hope during their worst moments of crisis.
Almost any pop music video on YouTube will have some fans in the comments section proclaiming that the bop is underrated or slept on or should have been a bigger hit. For instance, here is YouTube user Tristen Torres declaring that you’re a masterpiece:
I wish I could tell Tristan that I have always thought of you as a masterpiece. Maybe four years ago, when Tristan was rewatching you for the millionth time, I was drunk and high in bed and also consuming these very same pixels. I probably needed the late-night adrenaline boost. The thrill of Gaga stomping through New York City streets, exuding the ethereal aura of a star. Oh my dear, can you just imagine Tristan and I united in our loneliness, soaking in the soft glow of our laptops. Living for this lie. Living for you.
TWO ︎:
Dear Susan Boyle’s Audition (Susan Boyle – Britain’s Got Talent 2009 Episode 1 - Saturday 11th April | HD High Quality),
You showcase Susan Boyle, a middle-aged woman from the English countryside, auditioning for Britain’s Got Talent. Her hair is disheveled. She’s wearing a tacky dress that looks like it was made from old motel wallpaper. She seems worlds away from our understanding of a goddamn superstar. Simon Cowell is on the panel of judges. And he does a cheeky back and forth, asking Boyle about her aspirations — I am 47 and that’s just one side of me…. Okay, what’s the dream? — I am trying to be a professional singer. When he asks who she’d like to be as successful as, she says Elaine Page. The camera cuts to audience members rolling their eyes, mocking her and exchanging glances of disbelief. And then she opens her mouth and sings a pitch-perfect cover of “I Dreamed A Dream” from Les Miserables. The audience and judges are in shock. This random woman who moments ago seemed like a total joke turned out to be a goddamn superstar, bringing the house down with a transcendent performance.
When watching you, I become Susan Boyle. I am tone-deaf and can only do decent karaoke after a couple bottles of soju, but when watching you (Susan Boyle – Britain’s Got Talent 2009 Episode 1 - Saturday 11th April | HD High Quality), I have operatic range. Sending writing into the world, emailing editors and uploading PDFs to Submittable.com, I am a faceless void. The occasional response reminds me that I am far from Susan Boyle. Simon Cowells at literary magazines scowling at me, copy-and-pasting canned rejections — Thanks for thinking of us, now go back to the English countryside. I have yet to reach that triumphant crescendo.
But you, (Susan Boyle – Britain’s Got Talent 2009 Episode 1 - Saturday 11th April | HD High Quality), you remind me that there’s always the possibility to flip the script. Regardless of how many individuals mock you or doubt you or insult you, there’s always a chance to prove them wrong. The people who flock to you have an array of opinions:
Let me respond.
Lexie Jane Moore: What does this mean?
Brian Mullins: I also share this theory that Susan Boyle knew she
would bean icon. She knew that she was about to fuck up the world.
Darren: Yes, me too.
SilverSoul: Thanks for sharing that factoid.
meg: Part of me fears that I would have been one of the people
doubting and mocking Susan Boyle.
Oh, (Susan Boyle – Britain’s Got Talent 2009 Episode 1 - Saturday 11th April | HD High Quality), I love the lie you tell. That we can all be Susan Boyles. But maybe it’s not much of a lie at all. Our comebacks aren’t as grand. We won’t all make $40,000,000. Not all of our dreams will come true. But watching this video after facing endless rejection, it makes each rejection seem small and insignificant and mundane. Boos can quickly morph into cheers, squints of disgust transform into mouths gaping in admiration. None of that really matters. If Susan Boyle didn’t think of herself as Susan Boyle, she wouldn’t have thrown herself in the lion’s den. The only thing one has control over is their self-confidence. I guess I will be coming back to you for years to come.
THREE ︎:
Dear the trailer for JOY (JOY | Teaser Trailer [HD] | 20th Century FOX),
You are an emotional rollercoaster. You start off with Joy as a little girl, listening to her mom recite a speech that’s straight from a Sociology 101 textbook — Listen to me, I will tell you what’s going to come of you. You are going to grow up and be a strong, smart young woman. Go to school. Meet a fine young man. Have beautiful children of your own. And you’re going to build wonderful things and that is what’s going to happen you. A montage begins, scored by the choir portion of The Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” Jennifer Lawrence, working as a receptionist for an airline. A customer angrily throws a stack of files at her. Jennifer Lawrence, crying for some unknown reason. She’s about to give up all hope. Jennifer Lawrence, standing outside in the winter cold with a lover; gazing longingly at one another through falling flakes of snow. Jennifer Lawrence, crouched on her knees, working on a blue print for the Miracle Mop. And then the music stops; Jennifer Lawrence’s lush voice muses — Don’t ever think that the world owes you anything, because it doesn’t. The Rolling Stones’ song comes back in full force, powering through scenes of Jennifer Lawrence hustling, crying, screaming, and creating a mop empire. You made me really want to see the film. But it seems like JOY didn’t live up to your hype:
The truth is (JOY | Teaser Trailer [HD] | 20th Century FOX), I don’t even know how the movie ends. I assume that after the trials and tribulations of runaway success, Jennifer Lawrence has a humbling moment that reminds her that she has to stay grounded and honest. Shackled to puritanical morals. She is glory. I am sure that the story is rendered universal. It’s specific but relatable to a mass audience. Oh, (JOY | Teaser Trailer [HD] | 20th Century FOX), you really convey the stakes. You really make sure that anyone can feel like they are a Jennifer Lawrence, marching towards the American Dream.
I looked at your comments to see if anyone else also frequently returns to you for inspiration. But I can’t really find anything analogous to my own experience:
The world doesn’t owe me anything. It’s indifferent. It’s not kind. I am not special. I am not a goddamn superstar. All I can do is look at Jennifer Lawrence and long for that bravado. (JOY | Teaser Trailer [HD] | 20th Century FOX), I find the world you create so riveting. You make me envy her because everything is happening so fast. She cries and she suffers, but also within seconds, she’s ready to conquer.
(JOY | Teaser Trailer [HD] | 20th Century FOX), you make me think about moments from my childhood where I felt like a total outsider. I ping-ponged between various specialists who came up with highly professionalized ways to explain that I’m peculiar — Growth Hormone Deficiency, Nonverbal Learning Disorder, Minor ADHD. Offices adorned with fancy degrees. My little legs dangling off the armchair. Staring at a new bearded man with a folder filled with charts and recommendations and strategies.
In elementary school, before I got injected by growth hormone, I was much smaller than all of my classmates. I’d look up at these looming children. And though I grew and became perfectly normal and gained all the strategies to navigate a learning difference and succeed academically, I know that those years had made me think of myself as a perpetual underdog. I used to have this recurring nightmare in middle school — I am at some pool party and all my friends are in a Jacuzzi, laughing and smiling with a gaggle of bikini-wearing supermodels, and then as I try to approach them, I float away. The closer I try to get, the farther I drift off into the ether.
I can compile Pinterest boards of #inspo #hustle #workharder messages. Hope and pray that some arbitrary definition of success will cure me of all insecurities. Maybe unlock a new level and finally feel like a goddamn superstar. But there are always words and phrases that echo in the back of my head. Close my eyes and they all bounce back — failure, ugly, stop it, quit, give up, joke, unoriginal, quit, failure, ugly, stop it, quit, give up, joke, unoriginal, quit. failure, ugly, stop it, quit, give up, joke, unoriginal, quit, failure, ugly, stop it, quit, give up, joke, unoriginal, quit. failure, ugly, stop it, quit, give up.
The world doesn’t owe me anything. It’s not here to fulfil some meta-narrative that I have imposed onto it. And whatever I create probably will never have the tangible impact of the Miracle Mop. (JOY | Teaser Trailer [HD] | 20th Century FOX), you are my little secret. A safe space. You promote this fantasy that though the world might be indifferent, we can all achieve great things.
However, there’s power in insignificance. Waking up and staring at my reflection and not hearing a hurricane of insults and diagnoses. Just washing my face and thinking about what I’m going to eat for breakfast and write about and how whatever I put out to the world is more than enough because it comes from me and only me and no one, regardless of rejection or acceptance, can take that away. And even if I inch towards that small nirvana, I know that there will be times in the future where I will have to return to the three of you. Your lies are too tempting to ignore forever. Your function may change. But until you’re deleted, the impact is forever.
Best,
Daniel
P.S.
It’s not that I’ve been dishonest, it’s just that I loathe reality.
Follow Daniel:
Twitter: @quepaso_daniel
Instagram: @quepaso_daniel1993
Bio:
Daniel Spielberger is a writer based in Los Angeles. He's currently an MFA candidate at CalArts's Creative Writing Program.
The Gusseted Lady
Sculptural Poetry by:
KELLY HOFFER
“The Gusseted Lady” is a sculptural poem that takes the crease as its generating formal feature.
The piece’s accordion structure provides two different modes: folded and unfolded, dressed and undressed. With the pull of a thread, the diffuse composition compresses and nearly half of the poem’s language is hidden away in the poem’s creases, allowing a second, redacted poem to emerge in its place. In this compressed state, the folded poem becomes a wearable garment, mimicking the form of an Elizabethan ruff. When the ruff is worn, the viewer must draw intimately, perhaps even uncomfortably, close to the wearer in order to read the poem. Some of the “creased” language is still visible when the garment in its folded state, but to read all of the printed language the ruff must be taken off entirely—the subject must undress. Thus, the poem hides things within itself; it keeps secrets. To uncover those secrets, the reader must tread the tense line between intimacy and intrusion. Constructed out of stiff cardstock, the collar is uncomfortable to wear and difficult to move in. This material quality is fitting, as decadent constriction—the tension of being held in and held back even within an excess of ornamentation—is a central concern of the poem.
Follow Kelly:
Twitter: @kellyrosehoffer
Instagram: @kellyrosehoffer
Website: https://www.kellyrosehoffer.com/
Bio:
Kelly Hoffer (she/her) earned an MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her poetry manuscript Undershore was a finalist for the 2020 National Poetry Series. Her poems have appeared in Yalobusha Review, BathHouse Journal, Prelude online, The Bennington Review, and the inaugural issue of Second Factory from ugly duckling presse, among others. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Literatures in English at Cornell University. She lives in Ithaca, New York, within hearing distance of a waterfall.
Blue Green
Poetry and Audio by:
JON RUSEKI
Blue Green
the desperation
of thinking
period
when
making dumb faces
behind the glass
the
little fishey mind
begs in the
wee small
hours
what did you expect?
to fill a bucket
halfway
with dirty
fish tank water
place the fish
in the bucket
unplug all electrical
aquarium equipment
drain the tank
completely
take two cupfuls
of dirty gravel
and put it aside
i mean—
it’s the season
that
time of year
i’ve been
window shopping
sponsored ads
to furnish
the demands
of the fishey
the modern
mid-century
Scandinavian
furniture company
Article
sells
their Anton
button tufted sofa
with down-filled cushions
for $1149
i prefer it
in Arizona Turquoise
with Honey Walnut legs
here
in the brash
accumulating
marvel
of my fastidiousness
i imagine it’s
clean lines
perhaps accompanied
by the Noah
an armchair
also in Arizona Turquoise
prominently featured
in an open room
where
effortlessly cresting
over the lilt
of a distillate vape pen
from the recreational
dispensary
we might
extol the trashy
drifting whimsy
of our truest
abject inclinations
or
being in a state
of melancholic
ambivalence
i might
just let the fabric
occupy
the contours
of my
failing
imagination
the obvious
joy of this
complicated
by the fact
that the Sven
in Cascadia Blue and Mahogany
with cotton velvet upholstery
and Pirelli webbing
has a kind of opulence
that exceeds
its $1299 price tag
it is
their most popular sofa
there’s something
about that
seemingly
too easy
though it would also
look really good
and could accommodate
my fishey fish
just as well
my caprice
is what it is
the concern
always
having been
how to indulge
the debased
guppy
to school together
with a few larger
medium-sized
species
in a 29 gallon
tank
among the
green
purple
pink
blue
substrate & decorations
what’s pleasing
to your eye?
it can seem
so uncertain
i know
there’s a way
to amortize
my vacuous longing
and its
impossible density
but sometimes
it’s just
the nitrogen cycle
out in the open
where terms apply
it’s anyone’s guess
how it all fits together
honestly
i wouldn’t know
you got me
if I married rich
i would have
so much more
to say
metaphysics
would appear
to me
as lifelike
plastic
decor
projecting bubbles
into the water
the sky
would lower
their gown
i would
blush
a little
i dunno
it’s just
how
these unfinished
ecstasies are
the money’s sent
& the draft
is in shambles
the precept
being in the
throes
there’s a way
to get back there
anytime
but i’m not
entirely convinced
the sun
like a single
speck
of glitter
stuck
to your
screen
suggesting
a less
deterministic
world
those crystal flashes
like flakes
dropped
to the surface
sometimes
i think
i enjoy
their cruelty
more than anything
Follow Jon:
Web: blush-lit.com
Instagram: @jonruseski
Bio:
Jon Ruseski is the author of the chapbooks Sporting Life and Neon Clouds. He is co-editor and founder of b l u s h, an online poetry journal and publishing imprint. Recent work appears in BOMB, jubilat, and Prelude, among others.
Drawings and Paintings From Life
Visual Art by:
HEMALI VADALIA
Hemali Vadalia draws and paints the ordinary into visions evoking an ethereal, dreamy quality, still grounded in the postures and presence of the every day. With a primary use of oil on linen, Vadalia uncloaks the parts of daily life left unseen: the skeletal architecture of a body and the possibilities of emotional depth in stillness.
—Isabel Boutiette, TQR
Follow Hemali:
Web: www.hemalivadalia.com
Instagram: @hemalivadalia
Bio:
Hemali Vadalia is an Indian multidisciplinary artist currently living in Queens, NY. Her work explores the ideas of freedom, self-image, and belonging in the everyday lives of people. Currently, she is studying classical realism at the Grand Central Atelier. Vadalia has been published in the Wired Magazine, Bleacher Report, CreativeMornings, and WorkingNotWorking.
Cold Jumbles
Video, Printed Compostion and Ringtone by:
JINU HONG
Cold Jumbles
Jinu Hong’s latest work implores viewers to blur the boundaries between sound, text, language, and video. Cold Jumbles is presented in three fragmented parts, all of which isolate a distinct moment in Jinu’s creative process, while remaining cohesive in their sense of play and transformation; a quality present throughout the entire project.
Speaking to this process, Hong reflects: “I was curious about what it is like to have a spontaneous conversation with myself or to come across a moment of vocal connection with myself.” Jinu recorded daily sound journals which captured whatever random thoughts and words came to mind. The parts of thought that, in the rapid movement of life “would otherwise be lost.”
The sound journals were then transformed: “Sound and time [were] chunked into phrases, randomly scrambled, flattened, transcribed, and frozen into a musical score.” The composition’s final iteration plays from an object we can never quite divorce ourselves from: the cellphone. But Jinu replaces the phone’s often jarring and high-pitched reminders with the cool sounds of artfully-rendered piano––a reprieve we can all aspire to.
-- Sarah Yanni, TQR
Watch “Cold Jumbles,” in three parts:
Follow Jinu:
Website: jinuhong.com
Instagram:@jnchtkt
Vimeo: vimeo.com/jinuhong
Bio:
Jinu Hong is a graphic designer, video/image maker, and educator currently based in New York. As a graphic designer, he pushes back continuously to create the antithesis of the time where our daily experiences are framed into seamless and streamlined communication accomplished by the whole world view of engineers. He has been very much interested in physical intervention and connection taking place in the spur of the moment under certain instruction. He has also been exploring how graphic design physically and psychologically influences the way people interact with a place. He currently works independently with architects and artists on prints, videos, websites, and exhibitions. As well as working as a digital content manager at Center for Collaborative Arts and Media, he teaches at Parsons School of Design. He holds an MFA in Graphic Design from Yale University, US. 
Two Poems
Poetry and Audio by:
ABIGAIL STALLINGS
Poem
I’ve grown parts of me I shed
so many shitty people
look cool online
and in my room
I think grotesquely
textured thoughts
I am better than a house at almost everything
I am worse than most houses
light transposes crochet lace
to a dullish wall
the world has all this surface
still I can’t see my face
Tape Delay
I let go my lawn
the lines crossed overhead
they stitched me in my life for a while
I was on a first-name basis with the world
and you were on the phone
a downy splotch traveling
thru the nightly projection I thought
I never wanted these beige rooms
my bluish bedside on a dimmer
I disembark this air
for different air
Follow Abigail:
Web: www.abigailstallings.com
Instagram: @abigailstallings
Bio:
Abigail Stallings is a poet and visual artist. Her work can be found in Blush Lit, Hobart and on her Instagram.
BERGMENSCH
Short Film by:
JORDAN TETEWSKY & JOSHUA PIKOVSKY
On the night of a Sabbath dinner a young man takes a remarkable walk through the woods. Watch rising star Betsey Brown alongside former TQR contributor Hunter Zimny in this inventive, genre-defying short film. Bergmensch is the second project released from film-duo Jordan Tetewsky and Joshua Pikovsky, following their debut short, Bolue Vience, which premiered on No Budge in August and was co-written by the pair.
"Bergmensch rekindled for me memories of many a cozy family gathering. It also, while devoid of any genre trappings, felt like perhaps the most efficient and punchy little horror movie I'd ever seen... And now I am questioning whether family has been a nightmare all along."
--Andrew Bujalski, Director/Writer of Funny Ha Ha
Writer, Directors, Editors: Jordan Tetewsky and Joshua Pikovsky. Producers: Albee Delia, Mika Lungulov-Klotz, Galen Core. Cinematography: Max Bayarsky. Production Designer: Charlie Chaspooley Robinson. ACs: Alex Huggins, Grace Pendleton, John Clouse, Tara Forman. Gaffers: Conner Schuurmans, Alex Lu, Vuk Lungulov. Composer: Brendan Rooney. Casting: Jenny McCabe, Michele Mansoor. Cast: Betsey Brown, Hunter Zimny, Karen Burd, Peter Cole, Norman Stein, Mary Hronicek, Paul Kandarian, Irving Kohn, and Avram Tetewsky.
Bio:
Jordan Tetewsky and Joshua Pikovsky are a filmmaking duo. Their works explore immeasurable pain and incomprehensible agony, the anguish of the human condition, and the tragedy of man.
I Need A Friend
Music by:
COLIN MILLER
Colin Miller’s latest project, Hook, slated for release in March through Oof Records, will be his first release under this label, and yes, the EP is named after the 1991 movie starring Robin Williams. A movie which has always captivated and terrified Miller, especially the character Peter who could so easily “lose himself in an effort to displace painful memories”(Riot Act 2021). Warm, lo-fi and lyrically innocent, one might feel as they make their way through Miller’s new EP the felt impression of a VHS tape pressed into a TV set during late adolescence. A feeling made painful only through its distance, through the act of remembering it.
Earlier this month Colin released a single from the EP, “I Need a Friend,” alongside a grainy and equally heart-felt video for the track. The video captures a series of naive animations which overlay handheld shots and night vision close-ups, amid the rural landscape of Western North Carolina. We asked Colin about his process of writing the forthcoming EP, to which he responded with the story behind “I Need a Friend,” a song which came to him in a dream:
In early quarantine, we published a series of Colin’s graphic poetry, found here.
Earlier this month Colin released a single from the EP, “I Need a Friend,” alongside a grainy and equally heart-felt video for the track. The video captures a series of naive animations which overlay handheld shots and night vision close-ups, amid the rural landscape of Western North Carolina. We asked Colin about his process of writing the forthcoming EP, to which he responded with the story behind “I Need a Friend,” a song which came to him in a dream:
“In the early months of the pandemic I dreamt that I was telling someone how much I loved the southern songwriter Vic Chestnutt. The person responded “That’s wild, I’m going to be filming a livestream of him tonight. Do you want to come along?” This piqued my interest both because I would do anything to see him play live but specifically because Vic Chestnutt died in 2009.
Immediately after this, he got a call on his phone–unimportant detail but, to illustrate fully, he did have an old motorola razr, the red one–and the voice on the other end said Vic couldn’t play tonight. My dream-friend and I were both bummed at this, it’s not often you get to see a dead person play live–especially in a pandemic. We started comparing our favorite of Vic’s songs and figured out that we had the same favorite: “I Need a Friend”. We both half-sang the melody and talked about our favorite lines:
“Alone in my car the world feels so faa-har away”
Then I woke up...And I realized that this was not a real Vic Chestnutt song. I looked up “I Need a Friend” on my phone––nothing! So I sat up in bed, grabbed a guitar, sang and wrote what I could remember, filled in a few lyrical gaps with the first things that came to mind and in five minutes the song was as done as it is now.
Some songs come out of a few years of very slow, very patient, work ––tracking down the right lyrics, then chords, and then melody. Some have to be pushed into the deep end and after staying under the water a little too long they come up gasping for air and sea-ready. And then there is a small group of songs that fall out of the sky and, if you catch them, you find that somehow the work is already done. They are the most infuriating kind of song but, in a way, the most reassuring as well. “I Need a Friend” is one of those songs.”
In early quarantine, we published a series of Colin’s graphic poetry, found here.
--Emily Costantino, TQR
Listen to “I Need a Friend”:
︎ Watch “I Need a Friend”:
Follow Colin:
Instagram: @c_linmiller
Twitter: @c_linmiller_
Bio:
Colin Miller lives in Asheville, North Carolina. He makes records in a little house on a hill in the Haw Creek Valley. In addition to his own eponymous musical project, he contributes to several other musical groups including Cheap Studs, MJ Lenderman, Brucemont, and Zach Romeo.
Hyperlink Blues
Video and Intro by:
MARK HERNANDEZ
Hyperlink Blues: Computer Gardening is Natural Gardening
Here is the garden I tend to. While perched in my local community garden, watering and clipping, I reflect on the other spaces I have tended to and cultivated: from a discontinued web archive collecting images that contain a hue described as digitally-flattened-hyperlink-nature1 to my psychotherapy VR space, where I sit, still, in a digital copy of my favorite jacket2.
In this audiovisual collage, I consider what it means to tend-to, tend-with, and maybe even be tended-by. The term 'tend' comes from the Latin tendere, meaning to stretch or direct oneself; perhaps then to at-tend-to is an act of extending outwards in the vulnerable condition of being soft. Computer gardening is natural gardening, and a fruitful garden demands soft, continual tending.
Notes:
1 Hyperlink blue as a symbol for oxygen of the internet, green as a symbol for human and non-human fruitfulness; Tending as archiving as cultivating a relationship.
2 This experiment is part-two in a series called Hyperlink Blues. See Hyperlink Blues: Experiments in Virtual Psychotherapy on Dirt (2021).
Follow Mark:
Web: https://mark-hernandez.com
Instagram:@kelloggs.easterling
Bio:
Mark Anthony Hernandez Motaghy is an artist, architect, and organizer. They are a research candidate at MIT, investigating network infrastructures, informal economies, and the politics of care. Mark is one-half of the collaborative spatial practice If So Then.
Sounds like that pond is right here in the room
Audio and Poetry by:
ADRIENNE HERR
This new piece from Adrienne Herr, “Sounds like that pond is right here in the room,” arrives out of a procedural method Adrienne has been practicing within. To create this piece Adrienne read and recorded fragmented pieces of her writing, collaging the audio within an editing software. The final recording was then played back while she transcribed the layered audio into the resulting textual paragraph.
Through this act of transcription, the piece mediates the distance between the audial and textual domains of speech. The act of listening siphons the polyvocal, multitemporal recording into a single point in time. Giving a sense of linearity to the felt openness of the text. The writing almost begs to be redistributed as we imagine the many different iterations of this text the procedure could produce – different results based on what the ear picks up.
More of Adrienne’s experiments with documentation, sound, and poetry can be found on her website. Herr recently organized a sound poetry compilation, ”Thou who holds but owns not,“ organized on Bandcamp for TLTRPreß’s Juneteenth NAACP fundraising. Listen to the album, here.
- Emily Costantino
Sounds like that pond is right here in the room
Listen:
I can tell when I read it yeah what kind of distance from yourself you should keep yeah Jacky lived in Galveston I totally understand in her pots although underneath the leaves having read the sample in her bathroom each kind in a shell also that you say that now we played Jacky and this is too safe one might wonder what the first two days of life were like and more personal in a way how slowly we spent the night and time passed in these days like eternities she said it should be moving I thought Jacky was asleep thats also what I do beside me its an exciting way its kind of not how I think that are her and her property those crickets are making great sleep and thats humor I think she was 5 was killed by a container Jacky found out has got a jar is covered by and the way that she wants me is sort of the opposite of that keep moving spent the night it was deafening and yeah I think avoid to go by public transport kill a map is covered by a crosswalk will not be affected by a mall right here in the room manure it’s downright eerie and I feel really mutable in a lot of ways downright eerie light in the human soul right lonesome there wasn’t a human spit thunder reach hold crying to her over the video and she told me I needed twist ache peak slip hold glance doing something that I thought might kill a map covered by a crosswalk Yeah yeah that's what it is to shift weight from to know life again and to feel better like that meaning like you're normative about my work is the only work that I know there is not the right work I tell you not to worry to make physical things there was never any confirmed location our meeting is always by chance I think you to help me with this is the opposite of resigning into something that you're not attached to because it's exactly this attachment I wrote something down about being available we approaches thing the opposite of and alive never caught what I cannot ground in that kind of attention gives to the things that you’re writing about weight in rent of speak on know I would safely and every time we talk love the them the I respond to the always when in time there to perform that the now to end this emotionally I want we with work from world to feet difference why you say you don't want to work like you thought don't knew want need to believe in balance I have these communities standing that shoot like I think there is something important face by all about this directness and this availability shift this kind I took it used to things film me in any meanings part this? The to is to which was the we approaches thing and alive never caught cannot ground there to perform that the now to end this really personal about your dad and your mom and also its a little Jacky I had standing shoot shift this we got mired took it window used to things, film, me any meaning parts you and the world identifies what is outside of you and identifies you in turn I thought Jacky you in your experience or something like that one might wonder what the first two days said how I am those crickets its also like most relevant to you one does have to or perhaps might wonder that is how I call you who knows? laughs
Follow Adrienne:
Web: http://adriennes.site
Instagram: @adriennenicoleherr
Bio:
Adrienne Herr is an artist and writer drawing from documentary and experimental poetics. Her work is interdisciplinary and cross-form, often presented in multiple registers including audio, installation and participatory performance. Recent collaborations with Martin Kohout, Sanna Helena Berger, and Cecilie Nørgaard.Icon image is a film still by Mark Hernandez
I Look So Tired Vacating My Tomb
Audio and Poetry by:
STEVIE BELCHAK
Listen:
I Look So Tired Vacating My Tomb
a biorhythmic plume
in oversized
cotton
I rise
from the water
opposite
a livestream
watch a bead
of sweat
surface
refecting the severity
of this damage
the un
reality
of the birds
opening up
alone
we look into
our holes
sparks flying off
the netting of
our bodies
it is best
to write
this burning
down
for destruction
create
a sense
of ceremony
over
a cup of water
an open flame
stuffng paper
in my gums
so I can catch
on fire
I want to be
sulphuric
a high priestess
carrying a silencer
a ghost with
a mouth
full of
flaming arrows
divination here
being the routine
cleaning of our
light switches
creating an oval
around our limbs
with pine bark
extract
foraged
on Instagram
promo codes
we will add
to our carts
with intention
a way to better
our bodies’
range of washes
I look into
the direction
of my sofa’s
pebbled leather
moving soap
and water
with a forked wire
mud with
an extra-small
box cutter
to find
the unseen power
a cicada
burrowing
in my shin
I am happiest
when my thoughts are
made remote
muted
from others
my cells
scattering on
a high-touch
surface
paralyzed
by diazepam
thoughts of
cash bars
the growing space
inside me
each morning
I sit still
in my damp kidney
and fouler
feathers
a fragrant scent
I microbend for
the instructor
over video
I wish I could hold to
the pose
without effort
hold up
my ovaries
like milkweed
for the vultures
circling my limbs
in my head
I am plated
so beautifully
on aesthetically
pleasing gunmetal
stone fruit
and ancient grains
lining my intestines
this is operating
above ground
is how I bunch
under the weight
of my own talons
and your finer
aerosol
at least now
I can feel relevant
swiping right
after so much
mundanity
palpating
desert chalk and
picking over
finer bones
with aluminum
toothpicks
I’ve had
better days
oiling my heels
to go out
and hunt for men
and money
with my big
breasts inflated
it’s hard living
through this
enormity
of nothing
legs sanitized
between uses
amassing
an average
body
a polymer of red
worry
I teeth out
with future
expenses
extract
the dead
emotions
my one
resistance
scrolling
to feel
even less
Follow Stevie:
Web: steviebelchak.com
Instagram: @steviebelchak
Bio:
Stevie Belchak is a graduate of the English MFA for Poets & Writers at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. Her work can be found published in Peach, Feelings, Queen Mob's Teahouse, Pinwheel Journal, Hobart Pulp, Blush Lit, Third Coast, Dream Pop Press, Metatron's #MicroMeta series, and JetFuel Review.
Two Poems
Poetry by:
SENNAH YEE
Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)
I have a note in my phone from Sept 12, 2017 that simply says "the back of her ears make me hysterical." I knew those ears so well, but not much else - I never called her to turn around.
First Cow (2019)
I watch a lot of "silent" ASMR vlogs on YouTube. No talking. Just loud, crisp sounds of women doing housework. Chopping, cooking, cleaning - caring. It gives me shivers and warmth at the same time.
These vlogs can work as an anti-capitalist call to non-action. Many of them explicitly tell us in their captions to slow down and find joy in everyday moments, nature, food we nourish our bodies and our loved ones with. If we have the luxury to stop and soak our skin in it, survival can seem like an escape.
But unlike these vlogs, this movie reminded me that sometimes, maybe most times, surviving just isn't enough, even if we want it to be. Whether we're running uphill or lying down to rest, survival can seem like a trap.
Follow Sennah:
Web: www.sennahyee.com
Twitter: @sennahaha
Bio:
Sennah is from Toronto. She is the author of the poetry collection How Do I Look? (Metatron Press, 2017) and the children’s book My Day with Gong Gong (Annick Press, 2020). She is a poetry editor at Peach Mag, and the co-founder of In The Mood Magazine, a pop culture journal.
Two Poems
Poetry by:
CHARIOT WISH
THE OCEAN IS A MASSIVE SOUND
are you ever crouching
in a doorway
waiting
for some crooked version of god
are you ever shrouded
in the dark
of something burning
on fire
i took the staircase
into the open portion of sky
i did a beautiful secret
at the secret beach
over the ocean
i thought about
peeling the night back
exposing the raw air
on the other side
to wrap us all up in it
the deep cloth of night
we could wear it like a shirt
i thought about putting
my hand through the night
and grabbing it down
and wearing it like a shirt
i dont think it was ever quiet
but you have to really
put your ear up close
to hear it
clearly,
the stars
are crying in shame
is anyone listening
to this beautiful song
this moment?
It will be gone very soon
like magic.
im looking for someone
with a fairy tattoo
who has never seen me sleeping
and wears the night like shirt
diane
is dead
dirty sun weaver
beautiful anarchist
little silver earring
heart is an anagram for earth;
there is so much glittering
in the brightness of survival
a thousand summers over
i notice the goodness
beautiful day
sky drenched holy fullness
the beautiful + berserk day
angel pulsing pure sky
where the rain tumbles out
after the heat of the moment
a sort of belief crystalizes in my thought
that i could love you until the end of the world
our shared dream
this is my spring
grief pearled riding the train to manhattan
when david sat us down to give us his prayer
he said, “you remind me of my brother
who died of aids” there are coins falling
from the hole in the sky i can’t write enough
about heaven because i believe in it again
on friday there was something like shattered glass
the sun discoed from it out into the room
looking like the three pink rainbows when we win
this is my spring
everything becoming real
after a lifetime of splintered awareness
this long terrible year marked by love
heart is an anagram for earth
we have to act like this is where
the better world begins
this is my spring
energy energy energy
the earth becomes okay again
earth becomes new becomes
beauty becomes heart becomes
the old ancient timeless beauty
ring out america is dying america
is dead and dying america does not suffer
death no more pointless cruel american
death no sanctioned death no
death penalty no penalty
no prison no penalty no sick sad forms
of new death no twisted song of
expansion expansion expansion
the empire is over and is never built twice
this is my spring
time is going back
to her moon/sun song
the leaves wither, and drop
the flowers come back through
wet + ancient “april”
or whatever we call it now
after the heat of the moment
i want to take your hand and follow
from the edge of this
lifetime of mechanic death
into the day time and the night time
of my spring against the face of your palm
this is my spring
stepping into the future
of wild unleashing
Follow Chariot:
Instagram: @butterflybutterflysmileyfaceBio:
chariot wish is a poet and magician living in new york city. their email address is chariotbirthdaywish@gmail.com.
Three Poems
Poetry by:
MARISSA ZAPPAS
International Velvet
take me to a tea-warm moat coated in fallen wisteria
to broken shells in hell
to that light-scarred place only diamonds remember
and the dearth of my scaled flesh
do you remember you shot a seagull?
go home old man. go tire yourself
of the chew
*
oh Nina
furied are the flames of breath chamade
for the actress rage is salt
*
a man came along by chance
crumbs from a warm prayer
to understand incremental swallowing
take me to water
rub my eyes
those copper bugs to pills
Follow Marissa:
Web: www.marissazappas.com
Instgram: @marissazappas
Twitter: @marissazappas
Bio:
Marissa Zappas is a perfumer, poet and artist currently based in Brooklyn, NY.
Until We Meet Again at a Softer Place
Photo Essay by:
EVELYN HANG YIN
I was hiking deep in the Cascades when I stumbled upon what the locals called the "Chinese wall.” It was a hand stacked rock wall made of mining tailings, stretching as far as the eye could see.
I have since been going to places in rural parts of the West Coast in the United States, in search of stories from early Chinese immigrants.
One of them is Hanford, CA.
There used to be many more oak trees standing right next to this one. They are now dying, roots soaked in irrigation water during long summer days, quietly waiting for the moment to snap and fall.
Larry likes to say that even though he is Portuguese, this history is his history too. His grandma took pride in entering the Chinese stores in the 200-feet alley through their back doors.
Some people are gone; they left things in buildings. Some buildings are gone; they left memories in people.
Camille is one of the only Chinese Americans that never moved away. She once said to me: “We are saving this for you, the future. If we don’t save things, they will go away with us, and there aren’t many of us left.”
A Chinese family once lived on this empty lot on Shanghai St, between Cherry Ln and Lotus Ln. They left behind a jujube tree and an array of broken ceramic pieces.
For decades, Chinese people were not allowed to be laid to rest among other Americans.
A group of community members restored this cemetery in 2000, before which it was a field of weeds.
It is in the Chinese tradition that fallen leaves will return to their roots. Yet sometimes the withered leaves are blown away by a little breeze, swirling high up in the air before they land on the ground a few trees down.
The wind took us far away after all. Yet I’d like to believe that no matter what land they are on, the tree roots are all connected and constantly talking to each other. It is the same imaginary roots that bred us, fed us, and nurtured us to become you were and who I am today.
So long, my early friends.
Let us meet again soon at that softer place underground.
Follow Evelyn:
Instagram: @haannngggg
Web: evelynyin.com
Bio:
Evelyn Hang Yin is an interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker based in Los Angeles. Yin investigates how her experience moving between China and the U.S. informs her cultural identity, and is invested in issues of race, history, place/displacement, and collective memory.
Silkworm / Vegetation
Visual Art by:
MAYA MCGRORY
Poetry by:
SHANE LAVERS
“Silkworm” by Maya McGrory and Shane Lavers, 2020.
“Vegetation” by Maya McGrory and Shane Lavers, 2020.
Follow Maya:
Instagram: @dream__machine__
Bio:
Maya is a visual artist in :: Dream Machine :: and a musician as :: COLLE
:: Her projects touch on the subjects of family (belonging) &
understanding (learning/unlearning). Her friends think it’s obvious
she’s a Pisces based on her work. 
Follow Shane:
Instagram: @chanel_beads
Bio:
Shane
| aka Chanel Beads is a musician, visual artist and writer. Shane is
inspired by small moments of complete knowledge. Being struck with the
sense of estatic unity while walking down a sidewalk and how quickly
that feeling can stretch into mundanity.
Satisfactory/ Disturbance
Visual Poetry by:
SARAH R. STOCKTON
Follow Sarah:
Twitter: @stocktonianslipInstagram: @the_ereader_from_it_follows
Bio:
Sarah R. Stockton writes, teaches, and works in Los Angeles. She is an MFA candidate at CalArt
Two Poems
Poetry by:
ADDISON BALE
Man on Fire
At 6:08 am the call comes in
Is it air? I try to say something
As I read the words “man on fire”
As I use my mouth to say his name
As I want in my memory a memory of his
As I walk through green plots under spring blossoms
As the city walks away
As a witness sees the air
As I read again the words “man on fire”
As gasoline is spilt like holy water
And fires burned through saffron saris
Then burned through saffron robes,
Voiced the ash of humans
Still the husband beating through her heart
Still the gingko sheds its stinking leaves
As I picture the park all colored red
As I try to keep my eyelids open
As I push my fingers through the flame
As I press up against the thought of it
A burning lotus soothes itself
Wordless is the hot white finish
As the body literally becomes the air
Alice
The city’s curfew falls and we
hide. You, specifically, drinking beer in the
grass of the feral yard behind your place in
Crown Heights. We hear the
sound of the helicopter before we
see it and then it is above
us slow as a hammerhead shark in dark
water.
If the cops ever had reason to stop
you.
Free you speak an English
macerated in your Russian
lips. Dim the gaslight, words like
kettle. Fireworks have been a fixture of June
nights since George Floyd was
killed. This June, the Federal Agency for
Forestry in Russia announced 246 forest
fires on 140,073 hectares of tundra in
Siberia. You
pulling weeds in the feral grass behind your
place, filling your palms with sticky
flowers, one hand floating like a
god over the grass. Again, the
fireworks, closer than they’ve ever been
exploding over the
brownstones. Gray-black sky with
smoke like sutures blowing sideways
after the fireworks. On Al
Jazeera, video of the
heatwave in Siberia: The warmer
climate, says the journalist, has
created a surge of insects. This is not
dirt coated thick on the door, it’s
mosquitos.
A surge of crime, they say, is probably
subterfuge. Or just summer. We think there is a
plot on behalf of the police to funnel the
fireworks into Black communities.
Free you fingernail X’s into my
mosquito bites.
Pyrotechnics are cheap now because the Chinese
New Year was cancelled due to the
virus, as will be
Pride and the 4th, plus I have seen on
Instagram clips of men by unmarked SUVs
lighting roman candles on
NYCHA blocks and also men selling
chrysanthemums and liquor bottles.
Free you live in the USA unable to
leave
so you show me the photo of you as a little
girl on a blue bike in front of your
grandmother’s house in the Ural
Mountains and free you use your
unemployment checks to buy camping
gear for the Appalachian
Trail. If the cops ever had reason to stop
you.
How does this end for you?
Alice, If our home is murderous by
nature, if we come from nations of murder,
we are, therefore.
You left home at
sixteen and free you live in the
USA unable to leave. When does this
country become home?
If you say In spite of or
Painfully; if your family sells your grandmother’s
house in the Urals, the house you grew up in;
if the cops ever had reason to stop
you and you were deported; I see you
lose this country and when you do
some years go by and then you show yourself an
old photo from your life in Brooklyn and
you are in love with the woman you
became here.
From now on, you could be anywhere and the
colors of a neon storefront or
thunder alone, keeping you awake,
will remind you of the
fireworks tonight as we watch brilliant blue
peonies explode and disappear. Flying
fish jitter over the
rooftops like quick yellow drumsticks
breaking down the line.
Follow Addison:
Instagram: @dots_bodegaWeb: https://adi-bale.com
Bio:
Addison Bale is a writer and artist from NYC. His work has developed over the past few years through artist residencies and collaborations variously around Mexico City. Now back in New York, Addison is focusing on projects that bridge the gap between visual art and poetry, lingual barriers, and collaborative modes of making and sharing artwork. His recent poetry is focused on voicing witness to the active and political now.
Egg is The Father
Illustrations by:
JUSTIN PARKER
Justin Parker, Mixed pencil, Ink and Digital coloring, 2020.
Justin Parker, Mixed pencil, Ink and Digital coloring, 2020.
Justin Parker, Mixed pencil, Ink and Digital coloring, 2020.
Justin Parker, Mixed pencil, Ink and Digital coloring, 2020.
Justin Parker, Mixed pencil, Ink and Digital coloring, 2020.
Follow Justin:
Instagram: @Technically_DeadBio:
Justin Parker is a mixed media illustrator not currently based anywhere, but nevertheless accepting any and all commissions. Semi-classically and self trained, his work tends to be based in humor and light hearted social satire. Not currently showing in any physical galleries, follow Technically_Dead on Instagram for new artwork and email any inquiries or friendly conversation starters to technicallydead.illustration@gmail.com.
Two Poems
Poetry by:
GION DAVIS
Is this the happiest you’ve ever been?
like a whale I have spent most of my life holding my breath
snow slipping off the car
like a soft belly hanging over the waistband of a pair of jeans
or pearls of colloidal oatmeal on my fingers
us solemn rednecks with crooked smiles
horses with phone numbers
sharpied on their flanks
let loose and running from the flames
no one feels the same as anyone else but sometimes
driving around at night
watching a hundred different lit up doorways to a hundred different lives
you lean over to kiss me at a stoplight while Don Williams sings
I wouldn’t want to live if you didn’t love me
it’s here I think this shelter taken in the roof
of someone else’s mouth
breathing the deep exhaust of the night
dying isn’t only something that happens to other people
I remember waiting tables during brunch
it was snowing and a man was having a heart attack
we pretended it wasn’t happening while he was crying
and vomiting all over himself like a giant old child
and his wife held him until the paramedics arrived
I don’t know what happened to him
it doesn’t matter
I wish I could love you the way you want me to
smoothly without trying
it’s been one of those days or months or series of years
I whack open an apple exposing
a plush white worm now in two pieces and suddenly there it is:
the apple, the worm, the knife and I can’t tell which one I am
Follow Gion:
Instgram: @starkstateofmindBio:
Gion Davis is a poet from northern New Mexico where she grew up on a sheep ranch. Her poetry has been featured in Wax Nine Journal, The Vassar Review, Blush Literary Journal and others. She has received the Best New Poets of 2018 Prize selected by Ocean Vuong & her chapbook Love & Fear & Glamour was published in 2019. She is the editor of Rhinestone Magazine, a music magazine only on Instagram @rhinestonemagazine. She graduated with her MFA in Poetry from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst in 2019 and currently lives in Denver, Colorado. 
Development Yard
Prose Poetry by:
MATTHEW HODGES
Development Yard
Where was I going? In circles. I was going in circles, and everyone I knew was going in circles also. When the panic started I began carefully reconsidering myself. It felt like time was moving in such redundant shifts of epoch and tragedy, and I couldn’t tell if I was being hysterical or wise for noticing. I couldn’t be the stoic the moment required. But I had to do something. Then one day I was looking at my legs in the mirror, and it suddenly hit me – the track.
The high school track was under a hill a short walk from my apartment. 10 minutes, maybe. The hill was spotted with blue bonnets. The older women walked in the mornings. They wore sun faded sweat suits and moved in a sort of combustive way, arms bent, severe at the elbow propelling in little thrusts with their fists forward like mountaineers. There’s a determination about them I like. I’m at the track now as I write this. Sunday smells industrious and I’ll tell you some more about it.
This afternoon I saw a ten year old boy with what looked like a parachute strapped to his back sprint forty yards while his father or uncle filmed from lane 7.
I was worried I’d get in the shot. I was worried about the IRS. I was embracing repetition.
I make my rounds. I don’t even run. It’s not the speed or the endurance or the dopamine or the longevity that I’m after. It’s the reiteration of process. Articulating in body my worst habit of mind. I go in circles, and walk until I can’t continue. At pace I find my life pleasant, sometimes, as I’m doing now, writing in my notebook.
In the event of a return to industry, I’ll be ready, taut, calmer, tawny in shoulder, and so much better overall.
I pass the corduroy yellow belt of earth left by construction equipment. I watch clouds pass behind a tower crane. I hear welders in the development yard. I smell fresh earth.
I distrust bald men in trucks. The wide ones you see described in commercials as “Super Duty.” There’s something ominous, truly, about the mirrored sunglasses on the pig faced men who sit in their trucks in my neighborhood. I’m contingent on the cycles, I swear. We all know: you see a condo, you steal the wood. But that’s a nighttime thing. In day you shudder the thrum of an idling crew cab— the call of pink men as they instruct the day-laborers in garbled Spanish.
General Contractors.
Project Managers.
In the event of a return to industry, I’ll miss the old man with incredible strength. He’s wearing a tank top with tiny straps like a circus strongman or an 80’s movie lifeguard. Impossible. I see him bend to the kettlebell. Doesn’t gleam. His face contorts, like he was both within and above it.
Lift like this was the diving board era, friend!
guide the banks, one of the guards.
The more serious athletes pull resistance rope under the shade of the concession vendor’s roof. We all have our thing. Me, for instance, I oscillate between despair and joy. One example is, earlier, I was rounding a lap when I heard a rumble above the hill. A blue sports car was revving its engine. On the street in front of the projects. The tire squeals grew louder and plumes of smoke began to accumulate. I was bracing for it. Then—just then—the burnout. The blue car was gone.
Laughing kids ran through the cloud of smoke and spent asphalt. There was an aura of great joy. There were squeals of delight. As the plumes began to rise, as they dissipated, the form of a jumping girl appeared to me with her arms raised. I rubbed my eyes. Several children were clapping. It was marvelous. We should all be so lucky to appear, vertiginous, from the smoke, like some cult who’d forgotten every god but the sky.
Fool that I am, I sometimes pray. I’ll share one of the ones I’ve been trying:
Lord, grant me
the love of morning and
an energy that verdict is blue
blue light in the hallway
held blue light
Tomorrow’s another massive content offer
That night we sat in plastic chairs in front of our garden. We have a new garden. We have a modest backyard. A shotgun yard. I said, I’m worried about the IRS. She said, I don’t know how to say that moonlight is the surrogate’s reward for loyalty. I said, us. She said, the sun. Tomorrow’s an opportunity. What should we do?
What titans, We’ll shoplift!
But the next day we couldn’t because they closed all the box stores.
For a while we drove around aimlessly, discussing the panic, admiring the empty city. Eventually, we park at the mouth of a construction sight. Our mall’s a college and growing. Dirt caked in shoe. Our house is a holiday but it’s under threat. Slip between a fence. Compete to see who can skip rocks down the crevice. Doing pull ups on a bulldozer. Leaning in to take selfies on the grouser pad. I squat in the Slavic fashion. Her hand a peace sign under her right eye her left a peace sign to the air.
I’ve seen the industry.
It’s blue-blue. And it spills over everything.
Follow Matthew:
Instagram: @mhodgBio:
Matthew Hodges is a writer currently based in Texas. He is the co-author of Austerity Brunch (published by KEITH LLC, 2017) along with various pieces both online and in print. He releases audio work under the name Oil Company. Various mediums.
Black Yankees
Photography by:
NARAYAN FOREST LOCKETT
Black Yankees, 2017, digital, 10” x 8”.
Straw, 2020, digital, 16” x 20”.
Follow Narayan:
Instagram: @postfeminismWeb: https://cargocollective.com/nfl
Bio:
Narayan Forest Lockett’s documentary photography broadens the scope of the womanist perspective, through a lens of disciplic Catherine Opie art theory, best described as postfeminism. The hardcore artist practices emotive, abstract composition, translating photographs to the Krishnacore experience; spiritual devotion, mental clarity & physical fitness. NFL lives & works in his native New York. 
Final Confessions
Audio Poetry by:
SARAH YANNI
final confessions
for immigrant parents
you were taught the inexplicable
you were taught the crimson
myths, moral warnings
of snakes and women on an earth
far different from ours
you were taught one too many
you’re tired
of listening
so you pass them on
towards me
the inexplicable gives me vertigo
gives me a kink in my
neck and a panic
in my throat
a linen veil atop
your hair falls now onto
mine and I tumble
forward, performing
devout
hardwood creaks
sustained by shaking hands
we were all brought up on wonder
and the many ways an ache
can sit
and still, we are all parched
searching for droplets
of something to share
breaths of reason among
the madness and a way to make
time make sense
you find it in tradition the prayers which
fail to change
I sometimes find it in the wind
but mostly
in an instinct
leaning towards a feeling or the
punch of knowledge past
and if the time is right
we can find it
in a moonlit sky
the gaze of hopeful saplings,
intertwined, perhaps not
together but always
upwards
the night aglow with holy stars
Follow Sarah:
Twitter: @saritahyanniWeb: sarahsophiayanni.com
Bio:
Sarah Sophia Yanni is a writer and educator from the San Fernando Valley. A gemini and mixed race daughter of immigrants, she is continuously interested in the hybrid self. Her work has been published by DREGINALD, feelings, Rivulet, and others, and she was a finalist for Bomb Magazine’s 2020 Poetry Contest. She holds an MFA from CalArts.
Two Poems
Poetry by:
ZACH HALBERG
Magic flute
You know me
Full of light at the races
It’s time to come in from the pool
That’s not a new crisis anyway
Summoning thunder after lightning
What’s floating there in the drink
I carry it through the backyard
Like some of your charge might rub off
The object that’s trapped scattering light
It was all electronic anyway
I say I’ve never been so forgiving
But in this version something’s changed
Terrapin new
Dreamed big San Diego plane crash
Some kind of soft brag
Telling how you went out at midnight
Whatever this is practice?
We need more of it immediate regimen
Might even fix us in movies in magic
Still finding a new way
Done being hot too fancy I’m sorry
Alright we are two people at quartz dawn
Follow Zach:
Instagram: @big.zachyBio:
Zach Halberg is publisher at Newest York Arts Press, a non-profit organization supporting local arts and artists in New York City. His poetry has previously been published by Blush and Wonder at the links below.
Debunking the Welfare Queen
Poetry by:
JEANETTA RICH
Debunking the Welfare Queen
i wonder
if i can rename myself
without having to lie on my back
or
underfoot
if i can speak
and be spared from digits
slipping into
one of my orifices
my newest desire
may be
simply to stand at the square and stretch my shoulders
without looking up and squinting
gnashing teeth
or
clenching fists
evolution
has caused a tiny crater at the crown of my head
my forehead protrudes
i put on a wig to hide it
now it's a trend
i roll my eyes
i have trouble with my sight
not the irony of my wig
i smack my teeth
a few are missing because of the grinding at night
i try to smile but i don't want to scare anyone
i've never had a good night's sleep
i've always had to protect my head
so i was late for the interview
i didn't get the job
there's a sway in my walk
i'm not a lush
just lopsided
i have 16 degree scoliosis
you say not true because i have wide shoulders and muscular arms
you say i'm a liar
i am exhausted
explaining my disposition
therefore
i don't deserve work
i
carry groceries i
carry laundry
i
carry babies i
carry
sometimes not my own
and i have to
to remain resilient
Reluctantly,
I own the Original.
i only know Nina Simone ballads
when i was just a harmless thing
my mother armed me with resolve
gave me “Little Girl Blue”
she tried to save me from this life
but couldn't afford the piano lessons
a waste
because i have long
elegant fingers
Follow Jeanetta:
Instagram: @jeanettaprichBio:
Jeanetta Rich is a mother and poet. Her work focuses on the emotional lives of women who aren't equipped with voices because of their poverty and/or lack of education. In 2018 she was published in the anthology "Clark".
Green Thing: Solidarity
Dialogue between: GRACE HIGGINS BROWN &
DUNCAN HIGGINS
Green Thing: Solidarity
“Green thing,” a work which accumulated daily over the span of one week, is a negotiated, creative exchange between two artists, who are also daughter and father; actively engaging in a dialogue about Green Things. Through the exchange, both Higgins’ explore ”Greeness” in relation to how it manifests and develops symbolically, physically, historically, and its presentation within their own creative practices.
Green Thing was created while in residence at 2/42 Studios, in the Pipe Factory, Glasgow as part of their Remote Series. Solidarity is a sample of a longer work, which can be found here.
Duncan:
It could be argued that Solidarity is a tool for reducing inequality and social injustice in the world. To listen and be heard, as Levinas would have it, is not easy and as we see today it's absolutely clear this isn’t easy.
Dictionary definitions talk of two aspects of solidarity: the uniting of a group of people with a common purpose, and mutual-dependency (or interdependency) of people.
Is it the same as the ability to understand and share the feelings of another - empathy? As George Bernard Shaw pointed out:
“Do not do unto others as you would have them do unto you—they might have different tastes.”
I’ve always had a suspicion about the word ‘curiosity’ in this context, it’s a confusion between an active and passive inquiry, who is able or not, to be curious, is it an equal meeting point? So I can be curious about something, without the ‘something’ ever knowing or wanting to be made a curious something - says who?
Of course this is one of the ethical questions in green spaces, I think again of our conversation we had earlier about - object subject relationships - of Green space (we don’t mean green grass), as a potential site physically and conceptually for political - radical - possibilities - without being didactic.
If we assume the need to challenge prejudices and discover commonalities, on whose and what terms are the commonalities and who is in the driving seat?
Also my first encounter with the word ‘solidarity’ was in reference to Poland. Solidarity was founded on 31 August 1980, in Gdańsk, Poland, and gave rise to a broad, non-violent, anti-communist social movement that, at its height, claimed some 9.4 million members. It is considered to have contributed greatly to the fall of communism.
(Aha, thats a nice red)
When we started our dialogue, if I’m right, it was with the word generosity we were going to use, in terms of what can be shared and how a green space could be where this can take place? Again thinking of this both physically and conceptually - without being didactic. I like solidarity now.
So I feel a strong solidarity with you Grace, are we now Green Higgins Brown.
In relation to these thoughts and ideas I have a really strong connection with this place (image below), and the gap I’m working in now, its past and future. For 17 years I’ve been working with this image. It made me think today when I read Katharine Viner: There is a great quote in one of your (Naomi Klein) recent essays from a tech CEO, who says: “Humans are biohazards, machines are not.”, of how during the Soviet period humans could easily have been described and reduced to biohazards, it gave the word both a past and future meaning. How humans can be a biological substance that poses a threat to the health of living organisms, primarily humans. Today it's COV-19.
We now have in relation to COV-19 what Naomi Klein calls in a recent article, “touchless technology”, and how “the pre-existing agenda before Covid that imagined replacing so many of our personal bodily experiences by inserting technology in the middle of them.
So for the few spaces where tech is not already mediating our relationships, there was a plan – to replace in-person teaching with virtual learning, for instance, and in-person medicine with telehealth and in-person delivery with robots. All of this has been rebranded, post-Covid, as a touchless technology, as a way of replacing what has been diagnosed as the problem, which is the problem of touch. And yet, on a personal level, what we miss most is touch”.
Solidarity feels very haptic and the ideas we have been exploring together suggest the word solidarity was more an idea of people standing in things together and related very strongly to the green thoughts and work we have been making.
In relation to this Klein talks about the Green New Deal proposed by the Democrats in the US: “How do we slow down? This is what I am thinking a lot about. It feels like every time we slam our foot on the accelerator marked “business as usual” or “back to normal”, the virus surges back and says: “Slow down.” She then goes on to say: “I have a few ideas. One has to do with the softness that the pandemic has introduced into our culture. When you slow down, you can feel things; when you’re in that constant rat race, it doesn’t leave much time for empathy. From its very beginning, the virus has forced us to think about interdependencies and relationships. The first thing you are thinking about is: everything I touch, what has somebody else touched? The food I am eating, the package that was just delivered, the food on the shelves. These are connections that capitalism teaches us not to think about”.
This feels like a call for individual and collective solidarity as we are roaming in the gloaming*a kind of hazy, uncertain and to be, moment.
*Gloaming dates back to the 12th century, which is pretty old for a word still used and understood today. It has Middle English, Scots, and Old English roots in words such as glom and gloming which mean twilight and glowan which means to glow.
что делать
Haptic emotionally political green.
GRACE:
Solidarity means standing in things together, feeling things together, not flattening difference, green space allows this to happen more readily. Symbolically, I talk about standing in bodily fluids together because this is something that in one way or another, connects us all - corporeal, visceral empathy (it’s uncomfortable and it’s useful!).
The new generosity is generous in sharing infection, ‘bad’ things. People keep saying ‘the new normal’, familiarity is strangely mutable and quick to evolve, but feels like a big ask.
You touch me and I’ll touch you; reciprocity is extended as a gesture of threat; members, limbs, extremities. The extremity of extremities inched over the mark of what is ‘good’ and ‘bad’, what leads to a new kind of mortality and dissociation, self-loathing.
Familiarity is cyclical and repetitious - it is green and productive in the ability to redo but it isn’t necessarily helpful. Sometimes liminality should be abandoned. Spring always makes me feel sad - in line with this thought pattern maybe it’s a kind of grief. But this moment is carried by the overarching weight of starting again. Newness that is at once familiar and alien. Desirability - familiarity is reciprocal - I see these things in myself and it reflects back onto the object of whatever affection it is thrust upon. But there is desirability in the Other - perhaps this is in the jouissance felt in discovering something new but I also feel there is pleasure in redefining the other as something that can be understood, conquered, familiarised. To find the familiar in the alien and overcome that overwhelming sensation of unknown that causes so much fear and excitement.
Searching for familiarity can result in empathy, generosity, but it can also result in destructive assimilation. Colonialism rests partly on a kind of genocidal ‘familiarisation’ - the desire to assimilate the scary ‘Other’ that threatens your sense of secure identity - or to destroy it in the face of defiance. It is a balance of colonial ego. Greeness recognises a naive generosity towards one another in seeking the familiarity in the masses, those who inhabit those green public spaces that belong to us all (they don’t, they should, that’s the point) but harnesses the power of the other. It’s not about acting as one it’s about solidarity in difference. Intersectional politics isn’t about assimilation after all - a celebration of Otherness is necessary for political empowerment and just as green symbolises the essence of life force it is also the new colour of revolution. This is how we harness the abjection held within green for political gain.
Is it utterly naive to praise jollity amongst horror? Or is greeness the thing that is necessary to empower and disempower effectively and for productive social ends? (Here I’m trying to distinguish a stance against oppressive, dogmatic, hegemonic seriousness). You can laugh at the evils in the world and this is disempowering but sometimes there is good to be had in stopping for a somber moment. Power shouldn’t be trivialised although power itself can be found in acknowledging the ambivalence of continuation.
I don’t want the positive reversal of abjection as something weaponised against marginalised groups to something to arm oneself with to be included in society at large, to merely be enveloped in the sludge. (Look I love sludge and I know it’s maybe confusing because there seems to be this distinction of it either being ‘good’ or ‘bad’ abjection, but I don’t think abjection or grotesquerie is moral, merely weaponised as such by society, and here we try to fight back as double-agents, throwing up replicated-but-reversed tactics back at them). Green is not inclusion in a corrupt society it is generous push against this - generous in its upholding of solidarity between those who require it. Generosity can be extended by those who have greater privilege within capitalist consumerist systems by harnessing this as opportunity to enhance those without such access - this is where, as artists, we can play double-agent.
It’s true that the coexistence of laughter and tears is so near and the states are so similar.
Well, if you don’t laugh you’ll cry, eh!But I do think that laughter can become authoritarian. Distraction isn’t always the way. Maybe the freedom of laughter was never fully suspended? Clowning wisely is important to consider when undertaking anything to such effect.
We talked about Green being infectedshitbilepussviruspuke - it’s pointedly denied by our subconscious, “Othered” by us, because apparently we don’t want to associate with things which lead to the corpse, to death. They cross the boundary of living comfort. The female, the feminine is placed as the Other, with a big O by Lacan because the norm, the standard, the “control” human is male - so the female is then differentiated, it is alien and it is Other. So then interestingly it shares this realm with the abject. Perhaps the abject is exacerbated by the idea, the ideal, of “female” because the abject is female. So this would predicate that the moral idea of purity and cleanliness is enforced upon womankind not just for the standard arguments of male ownership and control (obvious) but because subconsciously, we fear the reconciliation of the female as innately abject. With the powers of life, death, bodily functions most harnessed by women, with men only relatively recently invited into the rituals of childbirth and so on, women have always had access to the power of renewal held the abject - death is natural after all, birth and death one and the same - but it has been subjugated as disgusting. Because they do not know, and this is threatening. Because it is always
He
Him
We share this kind of talk, experience, amongst ourselves (womxn) but it feels taboo to extend this sharing to males. To be honest, it feels taboo until that boundary is initially crossed - that is why strangely it feels like a politicised statement every time a woman chooses to “overshare” (as it is often said), but I think this is “sharing just enough” because when we don’t share these things we die.
Well, I was born green because I shat myself on the way out, and to be honest I’ve always been proud of that.
So if jouissance is demarcated as ‘Other’ also - by Lacan, somewhat more empoweringly by Kristeva, then let’s claim that and utilise it for radical gain.
This all underlines a distinction of the abject being present on parallel planes - just as we addressed the importance of symbolic and practical distinguishing - linguistic abjection, and abject experience. Linguistic abjection follows abject experience in its reflection of taboo - popularly it enshrines a kind of superstitious negativity in its aim to hide the true abjection of lived experience. Whereas abject experience just happens at a consistent level, fluctuated by health, circumstance, and choice, but it is there. So in this there is the ability to flip the negativity, harnessing the power of abject experience as something to be utilised, funnelled into our language as helpful, useful taboo. This is one way in which we can connect, as humans.
And then how do we reconcile this with the image of the father, the mother, and the growth of a human away from these polyphonic identities? (we’ve already talked about Lacan, so I don’t really want to dwell to be honest). Familiarity - family - is comfort for me where it is not for others; we are generous with family, we share, but many don’t stand in solidarity, that comes with a different understanding of the familial. There’s discomfort to be had in all of this too - for example this text. Are we crossing a boundary, a taboo? Because I’m going to write the word semen and my Dad is going to read it and I’m going to tell you that when we sat down for lunch to start talking about this work, about Green, one of the first things my Dad said to me is
Green smells like semen
And we laughed, we still laugh. Maybe you have synesthesia, Pah.
Duncan: Grace, It's called odor-color synesthesia, duh.
Follow Grace:
Instagram: @50ml_oh_de_toiletWeb: gracehigginsbrown.com
2/42 Studios: twofortytwostudios.com
Follow Duncan:
Instagram: @downonthefarmdhBio:
Grace and Duncan are both artists from Sheffield (UK), and Grace is now based in Glasgow (UK). They have known each other for approx. 25 years because they are father and daughter. They have been working collaboratively for probably more like 12 years.
Two Poems
Poetry by:
M. ELIZABETH SCOTT
BLUE DAHLIA
I hate the one who found it
a dirty sedative
a theft that is let, lot
And his heel
and the heel of the imprinted some
kind of destruction
over and over
Thrash like they do in the movies
yaw to stop the flux
of what is apricot
within me brazen
and in want of visitation
Something about the faint
surrender of his face, like a cannon
machine to clay
amid the filth of lowbrow sex
which used to cover me
And from every gaping aperture
a flinty excrescence rises
Behind the behind the desire
through trembling attire
the man stays
HALLUCINATRIX
Chased me down about a half-whip
pox of wanting you
The negative edge
I feel when you pluck out
the joy that only you and I
Once a salty interior, me and my sex
a smiling girlfriend
stealing small awards
But understand I was glass
cat-eyes, the gloss of my bare nod
– Your cheap face
some $20 of snake material
protruding like a testicle
Go pale and bend under, someday
you'll see – I am
The blank slate
upon which every man
Follow M. Elizabeth:
Instagram: @m.elizabeth.scottBio:
M. Elizabeth Scott is a poet, Western esotericist and Hermeticist based in Jersey City, NJ. She is the co-founder of experimental arts collective Cixous72 and its derivative imprint, 72 Press, established in 2015 to promote the innovative and eclectic works of emerging artists and writers. Her poetry and essays have been featured in Newest York, Shit Wonder, The Poetry Project, Refigural Magazine, and elsewhere. Recent presentations of her text have appeared at Printed Matter, McNally Jackson, Codex Books, and Montez Press Radio. She is currently an MFA candidate at Rutgers University in Newark, where she will be teaching creative writing.ourglass
Hourglass
Short Story by:ROB GOYANES
After graduating, I spent ten years working for various scumbags, morons, petty despots. A couple service industry gigs, intern at a PR firm, camming, some freelance production assistance. None of it really made any difference in my debt, financial or cosmic. But then a friend got me a job in the environmental resources department at city government. Everyone who worked there was a thousand years old. One of them was a lady named Linda Hoftstedt. She sat next to me. Every day I would spend the whole afternoon completely dissociating while staring at her poofy grey hair sticking above the cubicle wall. We eventually got to know each other. She was from a place called Woonsocket, Rhode Island, but had lived here for like 50 years. She was really easy to talk to and you could tell she actually cared about people. We became drinking buddies. By that I don’t mean we went to happy hour after work. No, no. Whenever we prepped our lunchtime rum and cokes—she pouring the flask, me on lookout—she would say in a high-volume whisper: “Remember Mercedes, a meal without a sweet is a story without a moral!” She didn’t know it but she was the closest thing I had to a best friend.
About a year after I started working there is when I started meeting with Arquímedes. His dumbass is always late, which is ironic because Arquímedes is always wearing that stupidass puka shell necklace. The one with the little hourglass. So I was standing there by the empty trellis, I think you know the one, and I lit my third cigarette. Smacked one of the stucco columns. I pictured the sun dappling me through the bougainvillea on the trellis, but there was no bougainvillea and there was no sun. Then I thought about the time when I was 10 or 11 and a jellyfish stung me a few blocks down. How, instead of pain, I felt like it gave me some kind of super power. I walked up to this little boy I didn’t know who was poking seaweed with a stick and asked him, “You wanna go behind the lifeguard tower?” How, in the middle of him peeing on my leg, he started crying.
By that point Arquímedes was a half hour late. I almost didn’t care; the skinny palms curved by wind and salt looked so good against that velvet sky! The knotted seagrapes, the pink promenade. The fine-ass Jamaican dude with like, a dozen abs rollerblading by. (I could tell he was Jamaican because he had this big Jamaican flag wrapped around his shoulders.) I almost hoped Arquímedes wouldn’t show, that’s how hard I was vibing. Some kids passed a bowl around in the alley of that condemned Art Deco chateau. Is that what you used to call it? A chateau? The stormwater pump was humming and its spray was balletic as fuck. I took out my phone and considered texting Arquímedes but instead I decided to scroll, then scroll some more.
His purple polo appeared in my peripheral. Tight grey sweatpants, Comme des Garçons, his beard a huge hornet’s nest of pubes. He’s got this silver cap on one of his canines that twinkles whenever he grins his gravelly “Oyeee?” Kisses me on the cheek. I simulate a smile. He looks me up and down and grunts approval, same as every time, and I harangue him for being a dog, a piece of shit. “Dis-cul-pame bay-bee.” I don’t hate him even though I want to.
We crossed the street for dinner at the restaurant attached to the hotel. The building used to be cake yellow with seafoam ziggurats along the edges. Now it was all white like every other building. We sat catty corner at a table on the patio and browsed the menus. I already knew what I wanted so I peeked over the hard plastic. His eyes were glassy, each nostril a rose of broken capillaries, big ass shit-grin. I went to high school with the puta. We never talked—he had his boujee clique, my tribe was the skaters stoned all the time. Senior year everyone talked about how his dad killed a horse.
Arquímedes’ family lived in Horse Country down in Kendall. Back then it was all huge estates and farmland. All the families were rich and had cooks. They made picadillo and fed it to the fat boys. They folded the fat boys’ laundry, tucked them into bed. Then they’d go to their closet-size quarters, clutch their rosaries and pray for their husbands, the tomato pickers and alpaca shavers. One of the rumors was that the horse his dad killed belonged to a neighbor who was his main competition in the chicken seed market. Another rumor was that it belonged to a mistress he was trying to send a message to. Everyone agreed on one detail: He’d killed it with his bare hands. How the fuck do you kill a horse with your bare hands?
All those years later I was sitting at my computer when the memory popped into my mind. It was so random. I googled “horse murder horse country miami” and was surprised to find a number of articles. Arquímedes’ grandfather was a pharma executive with a show horse named Fantasia. His son, Arquímedes’ father, was convicted of arranging the killing for insurance money. There was speculation about what really happened, since the payout was just a drop in their bucket. One blogger suspected that the grandfather, who’d gone senile, had actually ordered the killing. Supposedly the family had previously blackballed Arquímedes’ father (I forget why) and in exchange for taking the fall, he was allowed back in. I never asked Arquímedes about it. Soon after reading the articles is when I had the idea that would make us mucho fuckin’ dinero.
We ordered daiquiris. “Do you want the totopos? You want the totopos don’t you?” He’s so annoying. We sipped the daiquiris and snacked on the chips without saying much to each other. I watched him flip his hourglass, then locked eyes with the lemon wedge pinned to the sky. “Minuteglass,” he’d corrected me once. Gave me a sour look after I told him to shut the fuck up. I just can’t with him sometimes.
Another round of drinks and we were in his SUV. He was parked next to the library, under the lone lamp of the parking lot. Mom used to turn into there when she needed to get high. “Time for a pit stop,” she’d say. Do you remember that? To be honest I was glad when Arquímedes pulled out of there with a little screech. He drove slowly down a side street behind the Walgreens. Three parrots shifted on their perch, the fronds lightly rasping as they watched. “Where are you going?” I asked. He said he needed to see somebody.
Arquímedes parked and got out, walked through a gate, and disappeared. I put the window down because the car smelled like Cohibas and Axe Body Spray. The bouquet always gave me a shot of teenage nostalgia, that funny mix of nausea and longing. I lit a cigarette I didn’t want. Halfway through he was back.
“This lady is crazy. You text her what you want. You show up at her crib, she buzzes you in. It’s just you in this Florida room, right? The door that goes into the house—that shit is reinforced steel. And there’s lockers on one side? Like the small ones in middle school.”
“You’ve never met her?” I asked.
“Never. She gives you the code, you get your shit from one of the lockers.”
During our meetings Arquímedes was always telling me stories about buying or doing some research chemical, some of which I hadn’t touched since college, most of which I’d never even heard of. I never saw him balls-to-the-wall fucked up. Though I heard about it plenty.
He drove into another lot across the street, slowly through the flooded parts, and parked. He took out a small baggie filled with about a dozen capsules, cracked one open, sprinkled some lavender colored powder onto his studded tongue.
“Mercedes you wanna hit it?”
At first I declined. These days I’m more interested in your run-of-the-mill oblivion. But it was Saturday. So I tipped a tiny bit into my mouth. We sat and listened to the radio, a full 10 seconds of air horns.
Finally, down to business. He popped open the center console and pulled out a half-gallon Ziploc bag filled with white, white sand. As he handed it to me, he said, “This that good raw shit.”
I cupped its contents, feeling for softness and granularity. Cottony and uniform, as promised. I clicked on the light above and Arquímedes looked around nervously. I told him to relax and took a whiff from the bag. The sand was sweet, a little salty, a little musky.
“Well?”
“Looks pretty good,” I said, handing it back, cloaking my excitement. He threw it back in the console, switched off the light. We bumped fists, the signature of choice on our felonious contract, then stepped out into the hot winter night.
I hung out with guys like Arquímedes in college. I spent so many nights in dimly lit apartments, sitting Indian style on stained beige carpets, the TV on with nobody watching except for me and the other one or two girls. The boys were always gathered around the bong and scraping resin for their shitty spliffs. They’d have longwinded arguments about Žižek then smack each other in the nuts while doing a Cartman impression. Everyone was either secretly depressed and anxious or openly depressed and anxious. It was around the time when the end of the world became this tedious thing.
Bikini Bar was my kinda spot. One long bar, two poles at both ends. The poles were on small platforms. Their brass had gone patina about two feet up, the high water mark. The girls danced—you guessed it—in bikinis. The owners probably couldn’t afford whatever license you need for women to take all of their clothes off. It seemed like a pretty sad attempt at depraved fun. That’s why I liked it. Arquímedes and I took a seat in the middle of the bar closest to the bartender. She had this highlighter green baseball cap on. When she turned around to make our drinks, we saw her black thong pulled high above the waist of her white jeans. Arquímedes raised his eyebrows at it. She reminded me of me.
“Check this shit out,” Arquímedes said, chinning at the entrance. Six members of a mariachi spilled in, stoic and dignified, ready to let loose. Their outfits’ intricate embroidery and fraying cuffs, the silk red scarves, their air of post-gig glory—all of it made my heart swoon. I was definitely coming up on whatever it was I had taken earlier. My jaw tightened and slackened. The room tingled.
Arquímedes, wiping grease on his sweatpants, started telling me a story about a story. Before bed, his mom would tell him a version of The Sand Reckoner. In her version, Archimedes (the philosopher) was walking around in a swamp, whistling a tune and bounding over cypress knees, plucking tillandsia, when all of the sudden, Archimedes’ head started ringing. A bell struck by an idea. He realized he could figure out how many grains of sand it would take to fill the entire universe. So he went to the beach and started counting: one, two, three, four… He was still counting as little Arquímedes fell asleep, his mother tenderly placing a kiss on his brow.
My partner in crime’s eyes twinkled with love and inebriation.
“So it’s funny that you and I have been, uh, doing this thing, you know? The sand thing.” I shot him a muting glance, as if to say, not here, too public. I let some time pass, let the sentimentality sink in, then reminded him to message his guy in New Delhi. This would be the largest shipment we’d ever arranged. I wanted to make sure he did what he was supposed to do before he got too fucked up to do it right. I kept an eye on his crafting of the text till I was assured of its sober-seeming syntax. After the New Delhi guy got the go-ahead, he’d coordinate with whatever goons in whatever sand mafia to secure the delivery. As I stared into my empty shot glass, I imagined, or maybe hallucinated, a Rolodex of all the shady developers and contractors I knew. Who would bid the highest? I politely said to our bartender, “Another round, please.”
The period was barely on the sentence when, from the corner of my eye, I saw a man quickly approaching. In that split second I knew for sure that he was coming towards me specifically, and that it was not friendly. It’s funny—first the animal in you knows. Isn’t there something so pathetically human about a delayed response? That lapse between reality, perception, and interpretation sometimes feels like the only space I get to live in.
By the time I turned he was already yelling in my face. The words at first were just hot blasts of breath that stung my eyes. The only word I could make out was “phone.” His face was a mask of white, contorted. Maybe a Chad.
“Ya-rimmie-rack-my phone!”
“What? Excuse me?”
“Wooshook it!”
I scooted my chair back so I could stand up and gain some distance from this asshole. I didn’t feel too threatened, but I’d learned to not always trust that part of me. It was then I realized this guy was holding a pool cue. I shot a glance at Arquímedes. His mouth was an O of useless, crippled surprise. The dancer at the end had stopped her routine and her polka-dotted top was glowing. All six members of the mariachi were standing up from their stools.
Before I could respond, the bartender was up and over the bar, a flash of green and authority. “Not in MY FUCKING BAR.” The bouncer came up with stealth and speed from behind, a dark suit who moved with the grace of a dancer. In an instant Chad was on the floor, then out the door.
The bartender held my shoulders and asked if I was ok. All I could do was laugh. She explained that someone had been stealing phones at Bikini Bar a lot lately. He must’ve confused me with someone he suspected of stealing his. Or maybe he had some other shipwrecked thought in the churning seas of his brain.
“Dude. Where the fuck were you Arquímedes?”
“I… didn’t even understand. That was so crazy!”
I sat down. The bar eventually settled back into its normal rhythms. Arquímedes pointed to the door at the back of the bar and whispered to me,
“I hear dudes can get a HJ back there.”
“Shut the fuck up.”
“What?? You prolly could too!”
We settled up. On the way out, one of the mariachi guys gave me a head nod. I smoked a cigarette outside and texted Linda about what happened while Arquímedes stared at a tree. I decided the night was almost over.
On the Rocks was a bar that had no door. They closed for a single hour at 5 a.m. to clean the place up. El viejo would sit on a stool guarding the entrance like a gargoyle. The AC was broken that night, so it was especially humid inside. Sitting at the bar were some piercy-eyed Portuguese women, and a thruple of parrotheads in tie-dye. Everyone was dewy. Arquímedes went to order our drinks as penance while I found a table in the corner.
I sat down and looked at my phone. Linda had texted me back. She’d sent a link to some news story about a village on the coast of Russia called Shoyna. Shoyna, which meant “cemetery” in their local language, was a fishing community. At one point they had 1,500 people living there, a fleet of over 70 fishing vessels. Mostly mackerel, pollock, haddock. But now the whole village was just completely entombed in sand. Linda liked sharing weird sand stories with me. It was a nice respite from boring erosion reports and coordinating with dickheaded vendors.
Linda sent another text: “Crazy story! So sorry re ‘macho’ man. Was reading this when you sent. Plz try to enjoy the rest of your night <3.”
I sat there thinking about what led me to my life. I smiled as Arquímedes came back with two ridiculous looking beverages. Another song had come on the jukebox, a song I recognized.
“What?” he asked.
“Nothing, bro. Nothing.”
Follow Rob:
Instagram: @goyanesqueWeb: https://robgoyanes.com
Twitter: @robgoyanes
Bio:
Rob Goyanes was born in Brooksville, Florida, and raised in Miami. He lives in New York. "Hourglass" was made possible thanks to a commission by Misael Soto for their project "Sand: Amphitheater, Theater, Arena."
Two Poems
Poetry by:
IVANNA BARANOVA
outside the psychic shop
pacing can’t move me
at the speed you’re wanting words
i mouth a cue
you jump the turnstile
each time i speak a new payment
facefucking the final moments
of my lunch break
is the only profit
i could adore
transactions are unrelenting
i stare straight in the eyes of your collector
chugging grapefruit seltzer under rain
grief hits like a punch
enough with closed eyes
to call this Living
looking soft to march for the loosie shop
cop an afternoon seat on the downtown train
your artist wife will never feel peace
in your house she will always
want to be alone
hygiene
automatic
gentle intention
outbound phobias
evaporating
like
this-this-this
miss my soft soap fingers
miss my quarter xanax head
all my life
recall hand to mouth vitriol
as intuitive upheaval
i accept my ordinary physics
my oxygen scaffolding
my never get
enough
all longing is admissible
when refracted thru necessity
i’m not interested
in caring least
it’s me
pressing
green smiles
in ubiquity on every
airport bathroom screen
Follow Ivanna:
Instagram: @ivanna.jpg
Web: ivannabaranova.com
Twitter: @internetfantasy
Bio:
Ivanna Baranova is the author of CONFIRMATION BIAS (Metatron Press). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cosmonauts Avenue, Peach Mag, Newest York, The Poetry Project, and elsewhere. She lives between Brooklyn and Los Angeles.
The Bike Accident
Artwork by:
MEGAN DECINO
Megan DeCino, “The Bike Accident,” 9 X 12 inches, Acrylic on paper.
Megan DeCino, “Wow, that's weird I'm sorry I guess I just don't understand, my family is like, really well adjusted,” 18 x 24 inches, Arcylic on paper.
Megan DeCino, “Me Three,” 12 X 18 inches, Acrylic on paper.
Megan DeCino, “Sacha,” 9 X 12 inches, Arcylic on canvas.
Follow Megan:
Instagram: @megandecino
Bio:
Megan DeCino is an artist from Alaska. She will paint your portrait if you DM her.
For Jean & Anselm
Poetry and Music by:
JEREMIAH M. CARTER
Listen:
Vessel II (Sparks of the Sacred):
FOR JEAN & ANSELM
Oh Jean, my Jean...
Call him where he is
and where I am not
Streetwalker battlefield
Call him Lilith
Cathedral
Dropped in my grandmother’s
clothes
Where flame
and smoke, waltz
tip-toe
everlastingly
Where
you are sand
and he
is ashflower
ODE TO ANA
Ana,
granite under
the eye
torn edges take
the glance away
from those
hyaluronic lips
which are a lie
Follow Jeremiah:
Instagram: @necklaceoftears
Soundcloud: jeremiahcarter
Bandcamp: jeremiahmcarter.bandcamp.com
Bio:
Jeremiah M. Carter is an artist from Nashville, TN currently based out of Brooklyn, NY. Carter's current interest is the use of the written word to banish itself.
Essay Series by:
ADAM LEHRER
Adam Lehrer,”Society Eroding, Giftzwerg Descending,” 2020.
PART I: TROLLS OF MODERNISM
There is a German word, “Giftzwerg,” that most directly translates as “poisonous dwarf.” This enigmatic mythological being generally resides deep beneath the ground — that is, far outside normative society — and is adept at creative crafts such as metallurgy (an implicitly artistic being, if one ruthlessly difficult to be around). The Giftzwerg thrives as an oppositional force. Characterized as loud, rude, and uncommonly spiteful, the Giftzwerg disrupts the typical ebbs and flows of “the discourse.” The Giftzwerg is a sophisticated brand of what we in Western internet culture call “a troll.”
Normally, we are conditioned to hate and fear these trolls that interrupt our conversations and puncture our ideologies with their incessant online bullying, their memes, and their disdainful senses of humor. But dear reader, consider the roll of the troll as filtered through the fantastical lens of Giftzwerg: the Gitftzwerg troll is an artist, and these beings have long held a vital cultural function throughout political, sociological, and art history. You see, the discourse that comes to define our culture’s values and prevalently held truths isn’t always universally correct. An alternate position is a valuable one in a society that is so consistently wrong. So when this Giftzwerg, this troll, slithers into our discourses, we greet him with scorn and disgust. But the troll, boisterously defiant, throws a grenade into the culture. The grenade, the contrarian thought, rips a whole into the fabric of the symbolic order. Oh, how we fight the truth! “How dare you! you small spiteful little troll! How dare you show us that we might be wrong!”
The discourse needs its trolls. It needs these evil, small, hateful, contrarian men and women to disrupt our safe spaces with oppositional, incendiary theories. Newton: for every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction. The troll is the reaction. The reactionary? Not so much.
The Giftzwerg functions as an agent of chaos, an anarchic element that is vital to sorting truths from lies, and determining the value in misbegotten moral standards. We establish the taboos, the troll gleefully transgresses that taboo. We hate the troll, oh yes, we despise our culture’s Giftzwergs. But these beings elevate our subconscious repressions to the surface of our culture inevitably planting seeds that emerge as new discourses and new ideas. We are afraid, so deeply afraid, to challenge the prevailing ideas of our times, that we shrink. We shrink into cowardice. Shrink into clichéd theories and conceptions of culture and history. We conform, oh how we conform! The Giftzwerg laughs — with malicious glee — at our cowardice! We resist new ideas, but he forces us to consume and digest them.
The language of the Internet is a gothic language: “A language of the monstrous and the macabre,” writes author Laurence Scott in his book The Four-Dimensional: Ways of Being in the Digital World. With the Internet firmly established as the primary instrument for intellectual enrichment and human communication, it has also emerged as a contemporized iteration of the battleground of our most mythological and eternal ideological battles: chaos versus reason, conservation versus decadence, immorality versus morality. Our honored troll has its counterpart in another being aptly named after an iconic gothic fiend: the dreaded “grey vampire.” The late cultural theorist Mark Fisher wrote, “The dominant modes of subjectivity at the end of history/web 2.0 are that of the troll and of the grey vampire, the two faces of The Last Man.”
How to understand this conflict between the troll and the grey vampire? While both modes of being share a couple key similarities, they also wield major distinctions. You see, where as the troll defines itself in opposition to the prevailing norms and ideological hegemonies of social life, the grey vampire feeds off of the opposition and reinforces those political and cultural norms. You have all dealt with grey vampires before. Have you ever gotten into an insufferable twitter debate with a MSNBC watching liberal shill absolutely positive that Trump is some kind of Russian operative despite the Russiagate story having been discredited almost two years ago? Of course you have. You ended up in a circular argument with a grey vampire; be grateful that the encounter didn’t leave you idealistically exsanguinated.
The troll/grey vampire opposition is at the crux of the conflict between the alt-right and “Tumblr Feminists” as outlined by Angela Nagle in her incendiary Kill All Normies text. “But after crying wolf throughout these years, calling everyone from saccharine pop stars to Justin Trudeau a ‘white supremacist’ and everyone who wasn’t “With Her” a sexist, the real wolf eventually arrived, in the form of the openly white nationalist alt-right who hid among an online army of ironic in-jokey trolls,” writes Nagle. While the alt-right took on the cultural roles of online trolls, the “Tumblr feminists” embodied the grey vampire in its most toxic iteration. Both ideologies, while wildly out of step with the modes of thinking and being of the wider populations, equally feast upon the attention economy. Attention is that which feeds these mythological beasts, but they are ravenous and insatiable. A multi-course feast worthy of The Cook, The Thief, His Wife And Her Lover leaves their stomachs growling.
But while the-alt right became defined by a pure opposition — total transgression of cultural norms — the “Tumblr feminists” were propagating a more extreme version of an ideology that had already been dispersed throughout and co-opted by the corporate mainstream. The grey vampires as represented by “Tumblr feminists” here present as remarkably social beings: polite, kind, “understanding.” And yet, in their unearned moral certainty, they stop at nothing from enforcing bourgeois ideology and oppressive hegemonic norms. The cultural vampire, unlike the troll, is always sure that it is right. Whereas the trolls revel in their wrongness to express a singular alienation while seeking the “creation of an anarchic community out of the wreckage,” according to philosopher Nina Power, the cultural vampires attempt to coerce, shame, and “educate” their perceived ideological opponents into taking on the hegemonic cultural belief system (at the present, that system is “woke” neoliberalism).
I don’t mean to venerate alt-right trolls here, and clearly as a sub-culture it is prone to vicious displays of misogyny, racism, and anti-semitism and an almost sickening disregard for real human beings, but it is merely one kind of troll. The troll, unlike the grey vampire, does not claim moral authority or certitude. The troll seeks to push back against prevailing norms, right or wrong. As Mark Fisher says, “trolls are not limited to cyberspace. And of course, the elementary troll gesture is the disavowal of cyberspace itself.”
This, brothers and sisters, emphasizes the point that I am ultimately trying to make. An internet troll by definition is a rejection of the Internet, i.e. our prevailing cultural discourse machine, in and of itself. As Fisher points out, this is a historical stance. The Internet as cultural hegemony is a role that in the past has been filled by modernism, technology, science, technocracy. But the troll has always been there, exposing the hypocrisies within our culture and its institutions. The Gitzwerg: he who opposes, he who disobeys. What I am proposing is that the troll, when liberated from our narrow understanding of it as merely an online bully, is an art historical stance that has yielded some of our most radical cultural productions. In its bold defiance, the troll leaves room for an avant-garde elevation of idea and aesthetic that the grey vampire never could. This elevated troll is an artist, or a thinker, or a generator of the new. The poisonous dwarf is an agent of change. The troll is needed now more than ever.
What follows this essay is a series of imagined conversations with some of recent history’s — from modernism to liquid modernism — boldest, most liberated, and most radical Giftzwergs.
Adam Lehrer,”The Spectacle (Troll It),” 2020.TROLLS FROM RENAISSANCE TO EARLY 20TH CENTURY MODERNISM
Francois Rabelais
Rabelais the rebellious, how the French aristocracy despised you! What was it, like Francois, to be surrounded by such bone-headed vulgarians? You trolled the 16th Century French monastery from the inside. You exposed the absurdities and failures of quack physicians whom you worked alongside as a physician yourself. A monk. A doctor. And perhaps the world’s first great prose writer. A lacerating satirist of biting wit and profound cultural critique, hypocrisy was everywhere and you alone could see it. You alone could dissect it. You alone could expose it. You alone, Francois, could troll it.
The modernist 20th Century literary critic Mikhail Bahktin identified some of modernism’s most powerful modes of revolt in your work. The carnivalesque, Francois, you saw power in the strength of the crowd! THE DECADENCE OF THE CARNIVAL! The people were united in splendor and debauchery! Bound by their flouting of the authorities, by their excesses, their thirsts for life and freedom, Rabelais, you illustrated it beautifully!
Francois, I admire your ability to identify the strange and contradictory within your own epoch. I identify with it, actually. I live in liberal capitalism in the 21st Century, can you believe it? We are separated by centuries, and yet, we are one! Artists who can see! Artists who detect and resent flaws within our own societies. Artists who disdain the very times periods we were thrust into by no faults of our own! It’s not our faults!
Where I must live under the control of platform capitalism (sorry Francois, there’s just no way I can adequately explain to you the concept of cyberspace, should your ghost ever decide to haunt my dreams again, we can talk it out), you lived under the repressive dominion of the Church. But you flouted its authority, Francois! Your writing, so deliriously funny and brutally poignant that it was protected by a network of powerful patrons, punctured the projected image of the church that reverberated throughout society like the sun through the ozone. Guy Debord understood that the culture of the 20th Century was a spectacle, but your era was a spectacle too was it not? The church is nothing if not spectacular. Moreover, it’s vulgar. The sheer foppish pageantry of its rituals must have been enough to make you sick. Modernity, you anticipated it, you perhaps even created it. Modernity — a mode of transgression, an onslaught on normative values — is intertwined with trolls. Without trolls, no modernity. Without modernist intent, no trolls. You were one of the most mischievous trolls of all. Fearless, radical. Rebel Rabelais.
In the fourth book of your Gargantua anthology you tell the story of Master Villon. I love this story, it so illustrates your preternatural power to expose. To troll. Villon, your chosen protagonist, is like you, an artist with seismic ambition but still bound to the financing structures of the church. Such a drag! Villon wants to produce a play full of travesty and passion (much like your prose!) All he needs to complete his work of unparalleled creativity is a costume for one of the play’s primary characters, God Almighty. But a local sacristan responsible for financing Villon’s plays, insulted, rebukes Villon’s pleas for financing! Villon, bold and defiant as his creator, decides to take on the role of troll (of Giftzwerg even) by staging the play’s rehearsal just as the sacristan strolls by on his carriage. Villon stirs his cast into a decadent frenzy! The sacristan’s horse is startled, and drags that stingy sacristan across the lands! “Thus he was dragged about by the filly through the road, scratching his bare breech all the way.”
Villon was you, Francois. This story is the essence of your incisive trolling. "In his novel, and by means of his novel, Rabelais behaves exactly as did Villon....” wrote your most insightful critic Bahktin. “He uses the popular-festive system of images ... to inflict a severe punishment on his foe, the Gothic age." This is it, Francois! You were in awe of the capacity of the masses for chaos and decadence to undermine the rigidity of living through the repression of a Church dominated monarchy! The Renaissance was a time of artistic resurgence no doubt, but it could not contain your exuberance. It could not contain your genius. No, you ushered in modernism. You were its first troll, able to fracture the hegemony of the Church and the aristocracy that formed a disorienting labyrinth of power and dominance. Oh, if you only knew how many great historic trolls would later bask in your influence! Cervantes! Shakespeare! Joyce! Rejoice! Rejoice for all of them Francois! The giants of modernism. The grand trolls of literary history. They are your legacy! You are its progenitor.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich, you were right. God had died. He’s still dead. Dead as a fuckin doornail. But don’t worry, us 21st Century dullards have found plenty of things to replace him with: celebrity, outrage, and technology (a great artist of our time named Neil Gaiman made a book of illustrations and text entitled American Gods in which the gods of mysticism and folklore face off with the technological idols of the information age for a battle over the souls of mankind. It’s pretty good, I think you’d like it).
Friedrich, you would be shocked at how utterly controversial your thought remains to this very day. Since your death hundreds of years ago, thinkers and ideologues have attempted to co-opt and rebrand your philosophy to justify their political demands. “The Will to Power,” as you often refrained, was “beyond good and evil.” My god (dead as he is), the fortitude you possessed! The analytical prowess! You were as apolitical as a philosopher could be! You simply diagnosed the world as a fluid matrix of competing power centers. But it’s just such a potent phrase, “the will to power.” The political left embraced it, appropriating it into a Marxist theory of political change: “Seize the will to power, workers of the world! Rise up and take your rightful ownership over the means of production!” As an old fashioned communist myself, I’ve often considered how to liquidate your philosophy into my political theory of change, but alas, I believe that is to woefully miss the pint. Conversely, the 20th Century right wing also found your terminology, potent, Friedrich. The Nazis found your nomenclature very useful in justifying their creation of a white ethno-state (your sister didn’t help any, here, I truly hope you’ve had a chance to slag her off in the after life, she used you Friedrich, used you for power and clout, as we call it now).
But politics wasn’t really your domain, was it? No, you were merely an agitator! A troll! You were suspicious! Suspicious of the hierarchies and clichéd platitudes that had infected the theory of the 19th Century. Morality, you said, what does it even mean? How can such a complicated subject be derived solely from Judeo-Christian thought? Surely one could be moral and not be a Christian, and surely a Christian could be immoral?
What is so enduringly exciting about your philosophy, Friedrich, is that it is a Rorschach test. To read Nietzsche is to know thyself. Your theories are amorphous, applicable to any and all politics, all religions, all modes of thought! You lived in a world enduring rapid change. A new world needs new ideas, and you had ideas. So many ideas! How could theology continue to hold value over thought in a world in which god had died! In which god was pushed aside by machines! Industrialization demanded genealogical suspicion, a “hermeneutics of suspicion.” And you gave it to us, Friedrich. If only you had lived through the 20th Century to see what you’ve become! You are a god Friedrich! Immortalized by the thought and teachings of modernism’s greatest minds! Its greatest trolls! Foucault, Bataille, Adorno, Sartre, Cioran! Suspicious minds, brilliant minds!
I can’t even tell you how prophetic your analysis of slave morality has proven itself to be. Leftwing politics, which admittedly you were always suspicious of, has totally failed in galvanizing any kind of the broader class consciousness that your contemporary Karl Marx was hopeful could be attained as capitalism continued to immeserate its subjects. But class politics continues to fail, and today’s leftists are every bit as filthily capitalist as their right wing counterparts. The difference between the left and the right lies in a slave versus master morality, Friedrich.
Today’s right wingers are more than happy to protect a white, male oligarchic state. Instead, today’s left merely uses slave morality to secure “seats at the table” for people of more marginal identities in relation to race, gender, religion and orientation. They aren’t arguing for the abolition of the ruling class. No! They want to “diversify” the ruling class, weaponizing their cultural oppression to eviscerate their enemies all the way to the top. But I’m a socialist! I want the revolution to come from the abolition of the oligarchic state! And you know what they call me? These “leftists?” A “class reductionist!” And the craziest thing is that even with a diversified ruling class, people of all races and all genders are living in more poverty than at any point in human history! Slave morality has utterly neutralized the efforts towards real emancipation of working and poor people, mystifying the stakes of realpolitik! It’s a tragedy, Friedrich. A historically absurd tragedy.
A great French writer who lived a bit after you, named Camus, once wrote of you as “the only artist to have derived the extreme consequences of an aesthetics of the absurd.” I think he’s right, Friedrich, I really do. Industrialization ushered in an era of absurdism that has persisted to this day. A world of absurdity doesn’t always need philosophers. There are no easy answers living in absurdity, and philosophy just can’t always prove adequate. What an absurd world needs is humans who dare to think differently. Who dare to point at absurdities and say: “You fools, you are all absurd! Can you not see the absurdity of our ways of living and thinking?” Absurdity demands trolls. Absurdity demands ARTISTS! And your life gave birth to a new kind of thinker. The artist-philosopher, dissecting and contextualizing the absurdities of life and extracting great beauty from it. Your thought was beautiful, Friedrich, don’t let anyone take that away from you.
HP Lovecraft
HP, master of the macabre, progenitor of the CTHULU, demi-god of the cosmic horror, people these days can’t even appreciate the artful disdain in your work without harping on about your racism and your anti-semitism. Just yesterday I read a record review about this heavy metal band (to know what heavy metal is, you would have to know what rock n’ roll is, so let’s just say metal is to us here in the 21st Century what Wagner was to you in the 19th Century) called Providence. Providence named themselves after your home city, HP, they love you! They love you as much as I love you. And this critic, Kim Kelly, she’s rather obnoxious, HP, she all but denounced the band for loving your work.
But how could we not love your work, HP? You defined a cosmic horror for the 20th Century! In your work, horror isn’t a genre, it’s a philosophy! A philosophy of the unknown, of the “world without us” as one of our own 21st Century philosophers Eugene Thacker would call it. All that magnetic brilliance, but your antisemitism and racism are attributes a touch too shocking for most of what passes as the American left in 2020. Well, I’m a jew HP, and I love you. Even if you hate me, I love you. I love you because no one could materialize a language of hate and fear and disorienting unknowability like you. You are the almighty giftzwerg! A small, toxic dwarf, disdainful and suspicious of all that modernist progress that was meant to usher mankind into utopia. You were right. We aren’t living in utopia. In fact, Earth circa 2020 is a hellscape, HP. While there are men who have hundreds of billions of dollars, most citizens of the world have barely enough money saved to simply weather the next week. And what do today’s “progressives” do about it HP? They attempt to silence any and all who pose an alternative view.
HP, you mean-spirited bastard, for all these contemporary scolds that try to write your work off all together, there are plenty of others who twist themselves into pretzels to justify their love of your work DESPITE your bigotries. Victor Lavalle, for instance, he’s probably one of our most respected contemporary authors of the weird fiction that you pioneered, wrote a novella entitled The Ballad of Black Tom in 2016. The story is framed as a “woke” remake of one of your more flagrantly racist stories The Horror at Red Hook. But that story predates the Cthulu Mythos, HP, it’s not even part of your seminal body of work, and yet Lavalle uses it to rationalize his love of your prose against his distaste of your bigotries. But this is wrong, I think. Your disdain for progress, your distrust of modernism, and your HATE is inextricably linked to your art. This isn’t a case where one can simply separate art from the artist, because your art was inherently negative, and your negative outlook on humanity must be folded into that understanding.
I’m reminded of what a late-20th Century French philosopher named Julia Kristeva would say about the French writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Céline worked contemporaneously with you but found himself widely celebrated by the intellectual avant-garde, whereas you scribbled away on the fringes, publishing in pulp and sci-fi magazines. Despite that gap in initial acclaim between the two of you, and his interest in a hyper-realist abjection against yours in the unknown and that which is beyond knowledge, I believe you both shared an intense nihilism and malicious dismissal of humankind. Kristeva believed that efforts to isolate Céline’s stomach-churning antisemitism was to misunderstand the impact of his art as it overlooks the rage against the symbolic, or the ferocious anger at society in its totality, that is given language by your contemporary Céline’s antisemitism: “Anti-Semitism would be a die-hard secularism sweeping away, “ writes Kristeva. “Along with its number one enemy, religion, all its secondary representatives: abstraction, reason, and adulterated power, considered emasculating.”
I think Kristeva was right, HP. I do think Céline’s bigotries were inseparable from his art. How could one read prose so transcendentally negative and not consider his actual petty hatreds to be at least partly fueling that prose? Would it not be dishonest? I am honest, HP. It’s a virtue that I use to differentiate myself from the reactionaries and dullards I’m surrounded by in the 21st Century. And I am honest enough to admit that I love your work, not in spite of your racially driven grievances, but perhaps partly because of them. I find racism abhorrent of course, and that’s the dilemma you imbue in me as a reader: to be mesmerized by you is to be repulsed by you. I must acknowledge that your bigotries were connected to a broader world view that casts a cloud of ominous doubt upon all that we happily interpret as reality.
The Cthulu Myths. The Great Old Ones. These massive tentacled beasts that populated your literary universe suffused my childhood nightmares with enigma and an inescapable sense of my own impotence and ineffectuality in this world. My egocentric adolescence would be replaced with the dreadfully adult realization that I am nothing but a speck of dust. My society? Dust. It’s all dust. It’s all meaningless. And the more we learned about our galaxy through the rapid scientific progress of modernism, the more we learned that we. Are. Nothing.
Your beasts, your “Great Old Ones,” are the manifestations of all that is unknown. The closer we got to understanding the universe, you suggested, is the closer we came to knowing that we are constitutionally incapable of understanding our universe. Our universe is unknowable, a terrifyingly vast and empty void, and we are but a miniscule component of it. I imagine you looking upon your fellow 20th Century men with dismissal and contempt. While they stood in awe at the technological momentum of industrialization, Einstein’s theory of relativity, and Ford’s production line, you must have seen what the fall out of these would be, no? Did you know that these innovations would result in mass poverty, nuclear war and climate apocalypse? Maybe, maybe not. But you must have found these people to be fools considering what you came to believe would be science’s ultimate result: the realization that there is nothing. The universe is merely lawless chaos and and and all attempts to understand it are futile.
“We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of the infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far,” you once wrote in The Call of Cthulu. “The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”
To understand your remarkable powers of cosmically pessimist philosophy, we must interpret your art as inseparable from your worldview. We must accept that your hatred was not limited to those who looked or worshipped differently than you, but that those narrower grievances were merely aspects of a broader dogma of rejection. To love you is to love your hate. Without this hate, we reduce your work to what Georges Bataille would have called merely a “literary power.” But you are beyond literature. You are beyond humanity, even! You are Giftzwerg, the mighty troll who looked at Earth and saw nothing, an artist who forced us to confront our futility! Bless you HP! An author who concealed a pessimist philosophy to rival Schopenhauer and Cioran within the pages of low-brow sci-fi magazines, creating generations of trolls to come. Lovecraft, the crypto-philosopher. Bless you.
Adam Lehrer,”Lovecraft v Modernism,” 2020.
READ PART THREE:
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Contemporary Trolls
Contemporary TrollsFollow Adam:
Instagram: @adamlehreruptownWeb: www.adamlehrer.com
Bio:
Adam Lehrer is a writer and an artist living in New York. As a writer, Lehrer covers topics like contemporary art, horror fiction, arthouse and cult cinema, noise/experimental music, left left/Marxist politics. He has been published by Autre Magazine, The Quietus, Filthy Dreams, SSENSE, i-D, and more. As an artist, Lehrer works with collage, photography, and video montage and explores the hauntological nature of image production in digital media. His work is laced in the aesthetics of horror, cyberpunk, eroticism, and abjection.Essay Series by:
ADAM LEHRER
Adam Lehrer, ”the vampires are grey today,” c-prints and mixed media, 2020.
PART II: TROLLS OF POSTMODERNISM
Kathy AckerKathy, if you were still here, would you lie to me? Would you seduce me? Would you make me feel stupid? Would you emasculate me? Would you laugh at me, Kathy? Would you?
To read your work is to be equally mesmerized and stupefied. Your books fail to fit neatly within any aesthetic or literary category. While informed by poststructuralism and other modes of hyper-intellectual thought, they never cease to tap into something personal, primordial, brutal, and tethered to chaotic nature.
It’s all too easy to label your work “postmodernism” even if it is, in many ways, postmodern. By appropriating the texts of classic writers into your novels — Dickens, Hawthorne, Faulkner, Eliot, many more — you injected your work into a temporal loop with the history that preceded it. But I don’t think that this stylistic choice of yours was indicative of a tendency towards the “nostalgia mode” that Frederic Jameson warned against in his essays on postmodernism.
Instead, Kathy, what I think you were interested in was the construction of myth! You were fascinated by the image of the great writer, equal parts saint and devil. Noble and cruel. Artist and thinker! Rimbaud. Genet. Baudelaire! These writers aren’t just authors, they are myths! And a myth, like a story, must be told.
The late comparative mythology professor Joseph Campbell defined the myth as a story that emphasizes mankind’s search for meaning and connection to the mysterious and the eternal. By turning yourself into a cultural myth — the tattoo covered, nymphomaniac, transgressive author — you became a symbol of our quest to understand the society that we inhabit.
You, Kathy, became the myth through which we funneled our alienation. You embodied the post-punk refusal to be subsumed by the logic of the postmodern cultural marketplace. Your mythical presence in the discourse was a constant reminder that something was indeed rotten in Denmark; that lurking beneath the veneer of prosperity and upwards mobility was the reality that the postmodern political economy was built atop a network of exploitation, war, and death.
The myth of “Kathy Acker” and its projected image was an artful construction. “Kathy Acker” the writer —a work of art created by an artist named Kathy Acker — was like a concept. Kathy Acker” is the rebelliousness, disaffection, and disassociation of the postmodern intellectual! In the 1980s, cultures were no longer being formed out of communities. Cultures, according to Jameson, were now being shaped by the mass media. And the mass media needs an image.
And you cut one hell of a striking image, Kathy. There’s a photograph of you on a motorcycle. Your back is towards the camera, face in side profile. That massive koi fish tattoo drapes your back, which is rippled in the muscle that you achieved through your diligent weight training routine. Your hair is cut short, and bleached. This image is the full realization of the myth of “Kathy Acker.” And yes, Kathy, I know this photograph doesn’t necessarily reflect the totality of who you were, vulnerabilities and all, but I want to believe in it. I want to believe in the concept of you.
Art is about de-mystifying difficult truths, is it not? It helps us orient ourselves to this chaotic and unforgiving world. According to Hegel, the function of art is not just the creation of beauty, but the creation of a beauty that engenders a particularly sensuous form of self-understanding. And that’s what reading your work does to me Kathy; it allows me to disassociate from the systems I’m tethered to and to search within my psyche and beyond the material world.
The creation of “Kathy Acker,” Kathy, was an infallibly noble pursuit. But in that pursuit, purity can be a hindrance. And you were not pure, Kathy. You courted scandal. You entertained controversy. And you lied, Kathy, lied about who you were and lied about what you had done. Your work is a hallucinatory matrix of lies and truths, facts and fictions. And what is a myth, and what is art, if not a series of exaggerations and falsehoods that coalesce to reveal profundity?
Chris Kraus, one of our greatest writers now and a sexual competitor of yours then, wrote a biography on you, and it isn’t always flattering. But nevertheless, she lauds your devotion to the creation of myth and art: “Acker’s life was a fable, and to describe the confusion and love and conflicting agendas behind these memorials would be to sketch an apocryphal allegory of an artistic life in the 20th Century,” writes Kraus. “And like other lives, but unlike most fables, it was created through means both within and beyond her control.”
Your texts, Kathy, are oozing, amorphous, lysergic baths of acid that dissolve literary history and social critique into a primal scream of stream of consciousness, phantasmagoric musings. You were truly a reflection of the social conditions you inhabited, Kathy. Postmodernism devoured and regurgitated history, and so did you. Your work was about your obsessions, perversities, confusions, and the books that you ingested to make sense of it all. Like the logic of postmodernity itself, your work constantly looms with the threat of pandemonium. To be lost in your text is to be lost in an ordered chaos that could devolve into disarray at any moment.
Your two masterworks, Great Expectations (1983) and Blood and Guts in High School (1984), were both published inside a year. For that brief window of time, you had achieved a mastery over this amorphous prose, this “formless” (if I can use a Bataillean term) literature that you had pioneered. These texts are dripping with violence, sexual and otherwise, and death. They expose a rot beneath neoliberalism’s sanitized cosmetic veneer. Your art was a tool for puncturing ideological hegemony.
Great Expectations is a virtuosic work of literary cannibalism, Kathy. Your greatest work was written at the “End of History,” when liberal capitalism had utterly eroded the capacity for modernism or the creation of the new. You had the foresight to accept this, and in a sense you were liberated by it.
You took Dickens’ classic novel of the same name and freed it from the constraints of the canon and history. “I have no idea how to begin to forgive someone, much less my mother,” you wrote. “I have no idea where to begin: repression’s impossible because it’s stupid and I’m a materialist.” You had internalized the cynicism and nihilism of the postmodern generation, Kathy, but you remained remarkably self-aware. That is what makes you such a particularly engaging troll: you didn’t act like you were above us, but you made sincere efforts towards making us aware of what we had become.
Blood and Guts in High School chronicles incest, rape, the sex trade, and Jean Genet as your spiritual father. Genet’s genius was in his celebration of the decadent freaks at the fringes of society. But you seem to have recognized that decadence and degradation were no longer at the fringes of society; that they had been woven into the fabric of “normative culture.” Neoliberalism was the force that sought to conceal the degeneracy of the ruling class from the under classes, but you wouldn’t let them hide.
Blood and Guts in High School’s most unsettling gesture is its protagonist Janey’s utter indifference towards the rape and abuse she endures throughout the text. This indifference was your indifference. There is the vaguest sense of self-critique in it: even though depravity has been normalized doesn’t mean it’s normal. “The shit hits the fan and everything becomes chaos and wild again,” you wrote. “There are no more secrets.”
Too true Kathy. The mass media had rendered all of society’s dysfunction simultaneously hyper-visible and yet utterly dulled in affect. People seemed to know that the world was being built atop a cesspool of corruption, exploitation, and evil. But they didn’t care. And Kathy, I’m not even so sure that you cared. You were too caught up in your ambitions, your perverse and insatiable desires, and your masochistic fetishizations of your own ego to pay heed to the chaos happening outside your door.
The troll is inherently a force of mythology, and mythology is the space from which your work emanated. By mythologizing America, circa 1980s, you were able to contextually moralize the stakes of human suffering. Men were still murdered. Women were still raped. “Kathy Acker,” postmodern literary troll, was a force of de-mystification.
Adam Lehrer, “Pandrogyne in the Woods,” digital c-print, 2019.Genesis P-Orridge
It was just a couple months ago that you were still bound to your form. Your pandrogynic body. Your body was perhaps your greatest creative gesture. A sculpture in permanent process. The more you altered it, the closer it came to representing the essence that is you, Genesis. You were beyond the physical, which is perhaps why it feels so natural to converse with your ghost.
The further your gender distorted, the closer you came to attaining the status of the pandrogyne. The pandrogyne is your spirit. The body could never fully express the fluidity of the pandrogyne, leaving you in a permanent state of evolution.
I have no doubt, Genesis, that you were anything other than exuberant about your ability to shock and repulse the normies! The pandrogyne was a troll, indeed! Your aesthetic wasn’t targeted solely at the mainstream, but also at the ostensibly radical albeit functionally conservative art world.
I too despise the art world, full of petit bourgeois cowards who stand for nothing as it is. The art world is a more deeply institutionalized variant of the identiarian neoliberalism that permeates mainstream discourse: it must be exposed! This ideology, and the artists and thinkers that adhere to it, claims to build its thought upon a foundation of tolerance. But tolerance for what? Certainly not for thinking differently!
Your pandrogyny was an act of mysticism. You recognized society as a series of systems that limit the growth of human consciousness, by freeing your human form from its scientific limitations you freed your mind from the constraints of life in the late 20th Century.
Your heroes were the artists and thinkers who transcended the material and quested for the ethereal. Lovecraft. Aleister Crowley. The artist and mystic writer Austin Osman Spare. The psychologically fragmenting cut-up techniques of Burroughs and Gysin. Even your musical tastes were a touch unorthodox for an artist associated with the noise and industrial sub-undergrounds. You loved hippie shit! Hendrix! Zappa! The Doors!
These artists and musicians are connected by magic. They were either unconcerned or even violently opposed to orthodox intellectualism, critical standards, and institutional approval. All they were interested in was the transportation of the human psyche into a realm of the unknown, just like you Genesis!
Nothing is more subversive in postmodern society — a society bound to systems and simulacra —than magic. Magic happens beneath and above those systems. It courses through them. Art, like magic, should be treated as an immaterial force. You treated art like it was a force to be conjured and wielded.
There were very few precedents for the guerilla style theatrical performances of taboo flouting and transgression that was COUM Transmissions. Its concept came to you during a daydream, when the phrase “COUM Transmissions” was beamed mystically into your brain and repeated as a mantra. Was this even true, Gen? Or was it one of the many pieces of folklore you composed to bolster the cultural narrative of your work? With you, one can never tell where fact ends and fiction begins.
I love that COUM’s membership consisted of both artists/intellectuals and criminals, Gen. Never has there been such a profound confluence of both the high-brow and literary with the low-brow and the base! COUM was where you honed your persona as Manson-esque cultist guru, capable of magic and evil alike. Everyone from back then describes you as a manipulator, and I’m not here to excuse your misconduct but to acknowledge that your power to influence was inevitably tied into the force of your art.
After being brandished a “wrecker of western civilization,” by the media after COUM’s ICA exhibition Prostitution was perpertrated against the cultural elite, you courageously decided to disband COUM at the heights of its ascendancy! With the institutional apparatus around the art world as exposed as conservative and plagued by moral cowardice, it was time to infiltrate pop culture. “Suddenly we were performing at the big Institute of Contemporary Art, we’d done it!” you told artist Tony Oursler in his film Synesthesia “We were paid, just to be performance artists. That made me uncomfortable, because what we were interested in was reconstructing and deconstructing characters and targeting and infiltrating big institutions.”
It’s stunning to think that a time when bands like The Sex Pistols (Chuck Berry riffs sped up with really awesome clothes) were considered radical, Throbbing Gristle was in the culture pioneering the noise underground! You, Cosey, Sleazy and Chris Carter appropriated the noisy and avant-garde experimentation of Stockhausen, John Cage, and others, liberating atonal sound from the shackles of the academy, while freeing the “rock band” approach from sonic limitations of rock music.
In effect, you created industrial music, ultimately paving the path for decades of idiosyncratic musical geniuses: avant-garde and unclassifiable artists like Nurse With Wound and Current 93, 1980s power electronics groups like Whitehouse and Ramleh, 2000s noise bands like Wolf Eyes and Sightings, and even artists that broke through to the mainstream like Trent Reznor were influenced by what you, Cosey, Sleazy, and Carter created with Throbbing Gristle.
You performed with so much passion and intensity! Genesis, even Cosey conceded in her book that you were like an avant-garde rock god/dess, a decadent master of ceremonies: “SUBHUMANNNNNNNNN!!!!” you shrieked on stage night after night, rolling around the floor, disassociated from your body, and lost in the K-hole!
Throbbing Gristle dissolved, but you were far from done. You started Psychic TV, arguably foreseeing the acid house movement in the UK. You further immersed yourselves into the studies of mysticism and paganism by founding the “anti-cult” Thee Temple Ov Psychik Youth. What began as a Psychic TV fan club evolved into a commune of sorts, and Thee Temple would incorporate the theories of Burroughs, Crowley and Bataille into rituals of “chaos magic.”
You were pretty famous by that point Genesis, and mainstream society had you in its sights. The British government continuously tried to set you up for child pornography charges. Thee Temple got caught up in the “Satanic Panic” of the 1980s, and Scotland Yard launched an investigation into your occultist activities.
But these assaults on your freedom validated your entire artistic philosophy! You had started enough controversy to get them to engage with the SUBSTANCE of your ideas! You trolled them, and you won!
I imagine you lived in two zones, Gen: in your body, and in the cosmos. And your body was the portal through which you travelled. Your art brought you closer to the unknown. To a world beyond us. To the eternal. And knowing that you believed in this immaterial realm of pure light and consciousness, I am comforted. I’m comforted that your final and ultimate project has met its conclusion. Your death, agonizingly cancer-stricken as it was, allowed you to free your consciousness from its biological prison. You are with Lady Jaye now, two spirits as one, connected to all of nature and that which lies beyond. You are the grand troll in the sky, merged with the cosmos, your mischievous magic still reverberating throughout the physical realm that you left behind.
Pier Paolo Pasolini
Pier, you were no doubt fascinated and repulsed by power, and your work often sought to heroize the ordinary people amongst the Italian working class being crushed into condensed, lifefless flesh beneath those power structures. You were their champion, this I cannot deny! You were a moralist, and against my better judgement, so am I.
But I also relate to your contrarianism! Shocking an audience was, for you, nothing short of thrilling, an act of sorcery! Better than sex, better than politics even; film was a perfect vehicle for your art because of its largesse, and its absorption into popular discourse. A Pasolini film release was a mushroom cloud that would reverberate outwards and send a shockwave of outrage and paranoia throughout the culture. Shock was your joie de vivre Pier!
When your admirers boxed you into an aesthetic and ideological corner, you’d introduce an unforeseen anarchic element that further complicated the dialog that was solidifying around it. Your art was too infinite to be contained by criticism, and I imagine there were few things more offensive to you than a finite art, Pier.
You, Pier, were an apex troll. Handsome, with chiseled figures and the enviable physique of a 20-year-old gymnast. Openly gay, outwardly Marxist, and enthusiastically contrarian. You used art to assault the Italian aristocracy, its bourgeois sensibilities, and its tendency towards fascistic fetishizations. You used art to wage ideological war upon the philistines that couldn’t understand art beyond their own moral and ethical limitations. “To hell with your beliefs!” you declared. “Life is shocking, and horrific, and beautiful!” Bataille used the term “Acéphale” to describe a “headless” philosophy, or a philosophy that cannot be concluded, that continuously grows outward without forming a cohesive whole. Pier, your cinema was an acéphalic one.
I suspect you might take issue with the use of the term “troll” as a signifier of both you and your work, given your penchant for moralism, dignity, and sophistication. But that’s the point, Pier. In a culture in which values and traditions have been dissolved into the chaos of market discourse, nothing is more radical than he who is true to his principles. You were principled, Pier. Few artists and thinkers of your fame have ever adhered to an ethical dogma to the extent that you adhered to yours.
When I think of the courageously unpopular political and artistic stances you took throughout your life — stances that often put you at odds with both comrades and colleagues — I am emboldened. Your life, cut short as it was, offers me strength and fortitude to hold onto my ideological values regardless of the extent to which they alienate me from my ostensible allies.
The leftist working class movements of recent history, as you’d probably assume, were crushed. Crushed by capital, crushed by the media, and crushed by the contradictory tendencies of the contemporary left itself. Your class enemies then are the same ones we face today. The left has proven itself incapable of self-analysis. If you were still here, Pier, I can imagine you chuckling at the never-ending rollout of content-devoid slogans spewed into the discourse by the left: abolish the family, abolish the police, abolish joy and laughter. It sometimes appears that the contemporary left is more concerned with abolishing the institutions within capitalism that hold us together (family, community, religion) in this alienating political economy than abolishing capitalism itself. All that is solid continues to melt into air, Pier. The left is, perhaps more than ever, a petit bourgeois project that represents the material concerns of the petit bourgeoisie. All that is “left” is culture war.
My god, I think of the bravery and ideological consistency you displayed in the face of the Italian student riots of 1968, when leftoid university students waged a guerilla style campaign against the Roman police. Most left intellectuals offered full throated support of what they viewed as an uprising of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie. But these students were not the proletariat, you noticed, they were the children of the bourgeoisie.
You sent shockwaves through the intellectual left when you published the poem The PCI to Young People clarifying your stance on the conflict. “Obviously we are against the police as an institution,” you wrote, before ending with, “Do I have to take into consideration the possibility of fighting the Civil War on your side, setting aside my old idea of Revolution.” Your implication here is clear and brutal: during your revolution, the cops (the workers) would be revolting against the students. I wish the contemporary left could understand the world with this level of complexity and consistency.
But enough about politics! Let’s talk about your art! Your cinema! It is a cinema of life! Every film of yours is saturated with the bottomless contradictions and conflicting emotions and experiences of being a human being who is alive! You adopted a literary term “free indirect discourse,” a term that would be absorbed by Deleuze in his text Cinema! and described a way in which the director could create a story that was told from both the first and third-person, into your directorial sensibility. By allowing us to view your characters from both a voyeuristic gaze and through the eyes of the characters themselves, you produced a peculiarly intense connection between viewer and character.
Your films highlight these characters attempting to find freedom beyond the prison of systems and institutions. A turn towards the spiritual and the transcendental frees your characters from the modern. The dysfunctional bourgeois family in Teorema (arguably my favorite film of yours) is liberated from their passive, repressive existences through the unexplained appearance of a handsome stranger. The stranger, implied to be a mystical presence of some sort, allows the son to shed himself of the fear he felt as he felt his repressed homosexual desires bubbling to the surface, and the stranger instills in him passion and creativity by tenderly showing him a book of Francis Bacon paintings.
The stranger sleeps with the mother, freeing her from the sexual rigidity of her husband. The husband, inspired by the stranger, renounces his own business and bourgeois responsibilities, to go on a journey of self discovery and reflection. Your films suggest that modernity hasn’t solved any of the historical and ancient conflicts, but has instead made transcending those problems all but impossible. Without love, without family, without religion, where do we turn to? One must connect to a plane of spiritual awareness beyond the material to cope with the material, your films suggest.
And then there’s Saló, Pier, your final and arguably most incendiary work of cultural trolling. I have to hand it to you, to this day your last film is mentioned as one of the sickest and most disturbing works of cinema ever made. But true transgresion (true trolling) cannot be reducible to the mindless grotesquerie of de-intellectualized shlock. While Sade, your source material, emphasized the ideations of heinous sexual violence as activators of the absolute limits of human consciousness, you were interested in the material. In political economy. True transgression, like yours, confronts society with its own grotesquerie. It is the grotesque of the real!
What’s so striking to me about Saló now is the way in which it takes the viewer on a journey from victim to torturer (a journey mimicked by the child victims in the film, who form their own hierarchy of relations below their aristocratic fascist captors). Viewers of Saló are corrupted alongside the film’s characters. As a great filmmaker of the 21st Century named Catherine Breillat (surely an inheritor of your legacy of trolling, Pier) wrote in an essay about your film decades after your death: “Long after I first saw it, this film haunted me. I couldn’t rid my mind of the spectacle of torture, now a victim, then a torturer, what a hellish position, to have one foot on one bank of the Styx, the other across the water...”
Saló treats power as an amorphous, near mystical force that we are useless to resist. Before your death, you claimed that you didn’t just want Saló to be your last film, but the last film ever! You forecasted the end, Pier! A film for the end of history! Power, you saw, had taken on a life of its own, effectively neutralizing individual subjectivity. Saló then is like a document left to new species of intelligent life, a warning of what went wrong with mankind. “The images of Salò – revelatory of the structures of cruelty and of the sexual origins of human atrocities and massacres – would then form a kind of malign legacy, left for any non-human species which, at some point in the future, might want to look back upon the memories and obsessions of the human species,” writes visual studies theorist Stephen Barber.
Your brutal death — run over several times by your own car, testicles crushed by a lead pipe — martyred you as a righteous hero of the avant-garde and the communist left. I close my eyes, and I see you as you are being beaten into a bloody pulp by your vitriolically homophobic assailants, while looking at them with empathy and forgiveness. You didn’t see thugs, did you Pier? You saw young men, confused and angry, doing the bidding of an oppressive system. You saw humanity in its full scope: prone to violent destruction and still worthy of absolution. You have shown me that the troll need not be malicious. The troll can be an agent of purification. Through art, you sought spiritual freedom. Through your art, I seek moral guidance. The communist poet, the moralizing troll. Pasolini, may you live on.
Adam, Lehrer, “the lingering of blue beard,” c-prints and mixed media, 2020.
READ PART ONE:
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Trolls of Modernism
Trolls of ModernismREAD PART THREE:
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Contemporary Trolls
Contemporary TrollsFollow Adam:
Instagram: @adamlehreruptownWeb: www.adamlehrer.com
Bio:
Adam Lehrer is a writer and an artist living in New York. As a writer, Lehrer covers topics like contemporary art, horror fiction, arthouse and cult cinema, noise/experimental music, left left/Marxist politics. He has been published by Autre Magazine, The Quietus, Filthy Dreams, SSENSE, i-D, and more. As an artist, Lehrer works with collage, photography, and video montage and explores the hauntological nature of image production in digital media. His work is laced in the aesthetics of horror, cyberpunk, eroticism, and abjection.
A Theory of Falling To Earth
Film by: JONATHAN APREA
“I made this video thinking about poetry, which to me is ultimately a social medium, under the present circumstances of isolation, in which our social spheres are fragmented and where new experiences mostly cease to happen. In it I hoped to reflect a little on my feelings towards love poetry, specifically its plausible bankruptcy, using footage I took before March.” - Jonathan
Follow Jonathan:
Instagram: @veryverylightcombat
Web: jonathanaprea.com
Bio:
Jonathan Aprea lives in New York City. His poetry has appeared in Guernica, Newest York, the Atlas Review, and elsewhere. His chapbook Dyson Poems was published by Monster House Press in 2018.
Selected Work
Artwork by:
IRENA JUREK
SELECTED WORK
Irena’s three new pieces arrive out of her experience of isolation. Libidinal and playful, Irena’s recent work plays with texture, using unconventional materials like glitter mixed with bright acrylics. Irena’s approach to topics like sexual desire and gender often comes bound to a childlike mythos.
In “Red ride, Red Tide,” Irena offers an alternative to a classic children’s story. This type of storytelling is central to Irena’s work; she claims she refuses to create paintings that fail to tell a story, but instead desires to create “something that is tied to the connection of being alive in the physical world.”
While Irena spans mediums – painting, illustration, sculpture – the narrative at the heart of her work is one, that through a keen wit and controlled irreverence, continually defies convention.
Irena Jurek, “Wet n Wild,” 18 x 24 inches, Acrylic on panel, 2020.
Irena Jurek, “Bright-eyed and Bushy-tailed,” 30 x 24 inches, Acrylic and glitter on panel, 2020.
Irena Jurek, “Red ride, Red Tide,” Ink, acrylic, glitter on paper, 2020.
Follow Irena:
Instagram: @irenadegreat
Web: www.irenajurek.com
Blogspot: irenajurek.blogspot.com
Bio:
Irena Jurek was born in Krakow, Poland. She has had solo shows with David Shelton Gallery, Houston, TX, Romeo Gallery, NYC, Jeff Bailey Gallery in Hudson, New York, and with Zurcher Gallery, Paris. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at The Breeder, 0-0LA, MASS Gallery, Know More Games, 247365, Left Field, and others. She received her BFA in 2004 from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her MFA in 2008 from the Cranbrook Academy of Art, Michigan. She lives and works in New York.
Two Poems
Poetry and Audio by:
IVA MOORE
I Hate You Jackson Pollock
I hate you Jackson Pollock
I hate you like wall street
For being so bad with women
I’m a woman
But too abstractly to be bad with
O little lover with your little
Slice of anger
What is it like to be a man
Is it like spitting
Is it like spitting in a cup?
I am not trying to speak to sickness
I want to speak to you
You are so embodied and limp
Like a sandcastle
I will try to make this time important
Before I run my hip into it
I want to get into a vehicle
I want to get into a fight
Are you going to let me tell you
Which fighting to do
In a poem by a good poet
His mistress and wife are smiling
Three is an uncertain plot
We are going to have an affair
We are going to have it in the house
We should go into the house and have it
Follow Iva:
Instagram: @ivaellliott
Twitter: @ivvvvaelliott
Bio:
Iva Moore is a writer and editor in Kentucky. Her poems can be found online in Peach, Juked, and Likely Red
“Time Keeper”
Digital Collage by:
VIOLET TAMAYO
Violet Tamayo, “Time Keeper,” Digital collage, 2020.
Violet Tamayo, “Journal Entry #2,” Digital collage, 2020.
Violet Tamayo, “Journal Entry #3,” Digital collage, 2020.
Follow Violet:
Instagram: @violetayo
Web: www.violettamayo.com
Underbelly: www.the-underbelly.com
Bio:
Violet Tamayo is an artist + designer based in Brooklyn. Her focus right now is in collaborative making and mapping. She is interested in blurring the lines between maker and user.
Two Poems
Poetry and Audio by:ANJALI EMSELLEM
like a child you have reached your destination
this is easy
how it feels to race
the meditation
how your herons love
what you insist on for
freedom
i am my child, i desire
to find where I am most gentle
i all we until
free be will
there's a testament
in the nothing
you speak out of
underground is a shadow
to the sex of the first
born
my teenager is there,
coaching the king
to desire this prism,
this ring pop,
this disembodied sovereign,
to study how art stole gold
there is no defeat in time
six miles in to
the creature of this earth,
a lake,
a pendant in the blood,
i roll water on my knees
in every shower i am lucky
you were not the end,
that there was a water ahead, open
and flickering like an ultrasound,
i hold my hands out
and pray to fill with the fatigue
of wading in the center
of a sun spotted current
i wrote this poem on a lunch bag
as i arrived at the creature’s mouth,
in my delirium i face
a wind with no
dominion
Follow Anjali:
Instagram: @anjaliems
Atm Magazine: @atm.mag
Bio:
Anjali Emsellem is a poet and founding editor of ATM Magazine (atm-magazine.com), a publication focused on the intersections of language, the internet, and struggle. Anjali's poems consider what is animate, what is dying, and what has yet to be born.
The One Of Youngness
Poetry by:
MORGAN VO
[cold on the eyes]
THE ONE OF YOUNGNESS
for John Godfrey
Eyes in hand, to show the window world its sure, emphatic wear and tear. Turns that wean the young of oneness, where light collides with holes. The negative spaces edged by wiry hairs, where they go to rinse. Steady muscles handle the printing of more notches on sparks, more levers to rigs, become crystal knobs sufficient for turns. Passing in & out of breath, levitating up a down, to scruples. Magnetic gravity holds, pro the spread of adventitious roots. Sit to read a book for the good parts. But the good still keeps its missing best.
for John Godfrey
Eyes in hand, to show the window world its sure, emphatic wear and tear. Turns that wean the young of oneness, where light collides with holes. The negative spaces edged by wiry hairs, where they go to rinse. Steady muscles handle the printing of more notches on sparks, more levers to rigs, become crystal knobs sufficient for turns. Passing in & out of breath, levitating up a down, to scruples. Magnetic gravity holds, pro the spread of adventitious roots. Sit to read a book for the good parts. But the good still keeps its missing best.
[the pool-swishing arms]
TEAR COMPRESSION
“You don’t know what you’re saying,” she exclaimed.
“All the better,” she replied.
An unending universe came to their table to ask if they were okay on their drinks, or if they wouldn’t like to order appetizers before the rest of their party arrived.
“I think we’ll be fine,” she answered.
“Thank you,” she said.
She had a pale jade martini with salt around the rim, pierced by the olive more yellow than green. A plastic tea-light tilted back and forth in her fingers. She found the curves of its plastic flame were warm if she pressed enough, her fingertips could draw the warmth of its filament up through the whimsical surface. Using the tiny switch as an anchor-guide, her thumb could grip the tea-light with force enough to press the flame ever deeper into her fingers, until the warmth itself was deeper, more rewarding to feel.
She had a cheap beer with a brittle collar of gold foil. She made a practice of trying not to crinkle it, though would inevitably awaken as if from a trance, to find a rough misshapened ball, compressed from a tear she’d taken absent-mindedly. It was amazing that the mind could wander, and return.
Lady Gaga came over the sound system. They looked down at the granite table from their high leather stools. It shined but was almost phlegm in color, speckled with black chinks like a polished block of ambergris.
There was another universe across the way. The paper-white neck looked so large, choked as it was in a tight black collar, buttoned to the top. It spoke with a table and wrote orders with a pencil. They could not hear its sounds above the din.
“You don’t know what you’re saying,” she exclaimed.
“All the better,” she replied.
An unending universe came to their table to ask if they were okay on their drinks, or if they wouldn’t like to order appetizers before the rest of their party arrived.
“I think we’ll be fine,” she answered.
“Thank you,” she said.
She had a pale jade martini with salt around the rim, pierced by the olive more yellow than green. A plastic tea-light tilted back and forth in her fingers. She found the curves of its plastic flame were warm if she pressed enough, her fingertips could draw the warmth of its filament up through the whimsical surface. Using the tiny switch as an anchor-guide, her thumb could grip the tea-light with force enough to press the flame ever deeper into her fingers, until the warmth itself was deeper, more rewarding to feel.
She had a cheap beer with a brittle collar of gold foil. She made a practice of trying not to crinkle it, though would inevitably awaken as if from a trance, to find a rough misshapened ball, compressed from a tear she’d taken absent-mindedly. It was amazing that the mind could wander, and return.
Lady Gaga came over the sound system. They looked down at the granite table from their high leather stools. It shined but was almost phlegm in color, speckled with black chinks like a polished block of ambergris.
There was another universe across the way. The paper-white neck looked so large, choked as it was in a tight black collar, buttoned to the top. It spoke with a table and wrote orders with a pencil. They could not hear its sounds above the din.
Big Dog Daddy’s Prayer
Artwork by:
ALLIE LARKIN
“big dog daddy’s prayer,” collage, Allie Larkin, 2020.
“new age quilt,” monotype print, Allie Larkin, 2020.
“city limits,” monotype print, Allie Larkin, 2020.
Celebrity Rumors
Prose by:
KYLE KIRSHBOM
SELECTED RUMORS
rumor #1
robert downey sr. hated kids
rumor #5
buster keaton had one testicle
rumor #16
gucci mane’s depressed
rumor #32
arthur rimbaud wrote an unpublished novel that closely resembles the plot of brokeback
mountain
rumor #69
rene daumal french kissed his dead dog
rumor #79
marguerite duras killed her dentist for groping her
rumor #58
harvey keitel vapes
rumor #55
the insane clown posse met at the university of michigan where they recieved their phds in
music theory
rumor #89
debbie reynolds introduced three 6 mafia to lean
rumor #11
the three stooges knocked up the same girl
rumor #89
amiri baraka listened to cannibal corpse
rumor#46
bugs bunny was considered a communist traitor
rumor#97
alejandro jodorowsky voted for reagan
rumor #42
joe rogen’s parents abandoned him in a haunted house
rumor #20
billy joel is guilty of everything
rumor #56
ice-t once complained his coffee was too hot
rumor #47
hank williams recorded r&b songs
rumor #54
yukio mishima often had a stomach ulcers
rumor #57
jean baudrillard played with a yo-yo and encouraged his readers to find what makes them happy
Follow Kyle:
Instagram: kushbom420
Twitter: kushbom420
Bio:
kyle kirshbom lives in america
Mishima
Film and Sound Score by:
DAVID BERNABO
MISHIMA
Mishima was filmed last fall during a trip to Japan. I had been working on two feature-length documentaries, one about utopian communities and another about composer "Blue" Gene Tyranny. Both are talk-heavy, face-heavy, full of stories and jokes and histories. I love both projects, but wanted to break from that mode of working, to focus on image and sound again, to get lost in the details of a place, to create a bit of fiction. Also, I don't know what to do with myself if I'm not actively working on a project. And what better project than one that doubles as documentation of a vacation, something to jog the memory years from now. This work was filmed over three days--three days where I barely spoke a word except "arigato gozaimasu"--while walking in and around Mishima, a town in the eastern Shizuoka Prefecture. I used a cheaper digital camera that I've had for a while, because I didn't want to worry about it. I brought a few lenses but decided to embrace a plastic Holga lens designed for digital SLRs. Back at home in Pittsburgh, I constructed the sound score from field recordings that I made at the various sites near Mishima along with percussion and a modular synthesizer. An expanded version of the score is located here: ongoingbox.bandcamp.com. Thank you for watching!- David
Mishima (2020) from David Bernabo on Vimeo.
Follow David:
Instagram: @david.bernabo
Web: www.davidbernabo.info
Bandcamp: ongoingbox
Watch movies: here
Bio:
David Bernabo is a filmmaker, musician, dancer, visual artist, and writer, performing with the bands Watererer, Host Skull, Cowsboys, Gawdz, and How Things Are Made; devising dances with his variable dance company, MODULES; and often collaborating with Maree ReMalia | merrygogo. He curates and produces work for the Ongoing Box imprint and co-curates the Lightlab Performance Series with slowdanger.
David's films have screened at the On Art Film Festival, JFilm Festival, Re:NEW Festival, Afronaut(a) Film Club, the Foodable Film Festival, and on WQED’s Filmmakers Corner. His recent film, Moundsville, made with journalist John W. Miller, is now distributed through PBS/NETA.
David is currently working on a feature-length documentary about the composer "Blue" Gene Tyranny along with working on new records by Watererer and Host Skull.
Touch Piece
Performance and Poetry by:
GABRIELLE CIVIL
TOUCH PIECE
In the second segment of our Digital Performance Series we feature black feminist performance artist, poet, and writer Gabrielle Civil. Gabrielle’s 1-minute solo is set to the reading of her poem “Touch Piece.” The performance emerged from a quarantine Zoom dance experiment organized by Anya Cloud and Kristianne Salcines.
Touch Piece
for anya & kristiannein darkness, a bronze
hand erupts
a volcanic knee, a splay-
ed body, half submerged
still shocks us
keeps us
from turning away
*
a body trying to break
out break in break through
a body trying to break
out break in break through
a body trying to break
out break in break through
break out break in break through
*
walking across an overpass
lines of verse
shot through glass
etched into steel
suspended in air
a certain unlikeliness
my body,
striation
an epicenter of green
ache
and mystery
Follow Gabrielle:
Instagram: @gabrielle_civil
Web: gabriellecivilartist.com
Books:
EXPERIMENTS IN JOY
SWALLOW THE FISH
Experiments in Joy: a Workbook
Bio:
Gabrielle Civil is a black feminist performance artist, poet, and writer, originally from Detroit MI. She danced with Wild Beauty at Velocity in Seattle (2020) and has premiered fifty original performance art works around the world. Her performance memoirs include Swallow the Fish (2017), Experiments in Joy (2019) and the forthcoming (ghost gestures) (2020), which won the 2019 Gold Line Nonfiction Chapbook contest. A 2019 Rema Hort Mann LA Emerging Artist, she teaches creative writing and critical studies at the California Institute of the Arts. She came of age as an artist in Minneapolis and demands justice for George Floyd. The aim of her work is to open up space.
Four Poems
Poetry by:DAVE MORSE
Follow Dave:
Instagram: @better_read_than_dead_bkBio:
Dave Morse is a writer, musician, and bookseller living in Brooklyn, NY. His poems have appeared in the Brooklyn Rail, Cixous 72, Boog City, one full-length collection (published by Molasses Books, 2016) and a handful of chapbooks. His other projects include being Art Editor of The Poetry Project Newsletter, co-owner of the Brooklyn used bookstores Better Read than Dead and Book Row, half of the chapbook imprint IMP, and guitarist in punk bands Nandas and Terrorist.
What We Have Left
Prose by:GABRIELLE ASTRID
what we have left
1
you come from a family where the love is the same through the decades for better or for worse
2
your younger cousin visited from the philippines when you were fifteen and when you showed him the only three constellations you knew he blinked with wide eyes. a year later you learn that he bought a telescope and a guide to the stars “like you showed me”. you wondered if the big dipper and orion’s belt looked the same from across the world but you couldn’t go there to check. the next time you meet you’re twenty-four and he is taller than you and he shows you the comic he made after his dad passed away and you realize you have missed so much time. you look and the stars are the same.
3
through facebook messenger your aunt tells you to eat fruits and veggies and that you should freeze your food if you can’t eat it all. you try to talk about your emotions and she skips right over them in conversation — “prutas, anak” “yes, tita”. the first and last time you saw her cry of fatigue you were paralyzed because it reminded you of yourself. when you cut papayas in your small kitchen you think of her calloused hands cutting papayas in her small kitchen across the world and today that is enough to feel less alone.
servant
you fill a pail endlessly with water and you’re not sure where it all goes, when you first started there was a promise of gold but two and a half decades later you lift your hands up to the god of promises and he gently salivates onto you and says i hope this is enough
Follow Gabrielle:
Instagram: @gabrielleastrid
Bio:
Gabrielle Astrid is a Filipino/American artist currently living in Seattle. Her multidisciplinary, deeply sentimental work explores her observations and identities in the midst of diaspora.
Live Through This
Lyric Essay by:LAURA HENRIKSEN
Listen Along:
Live Through This
Raised from the dead only to
stall out in a rented Toyota halfway
to the meeting place. That’s how badly
I wanted to talk to you again. Forever
is as true a word as any for as long as it takes
to get it out of your pretty little leaf dry mouth
fresh from the seance with a whole new attitude.
We were raised on it, like processed meat
or the promise that you were either chosen
or not and you were not. And so I sealed
my fate with barretts and honey, my love
all in whispers. I was the candidate
and I hated it more than there is grace in
heaven and room in hell. We made it
out of tin foil and clay but we didn’t
get to keep it, the salvation we had hoped for.
O I’ll take flowers from someone
else’s grave and put them on yours
so I can start fights with your neighbors
even in death. I’ll paint my teeth and walk
the woods at night to scare or inspire
other people’s children. Everyone has to
live for something. Everyone has to serve
somebody’s feelings. For a long time I didn’t care
about freedom because I thought of it
only with men and war. Fine then,
I’ll be the wreck, as in ship, train, or woman
I’ll take the glory, I’ll call it love
and as such I’ll test it, carrying
mercury and fruit to my baby,
my sweet baby.
︎
In 2004, Spin Magazine put out a special issue to mark the 10 year anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s death. I read it in the back of biology, a class made both easy and embarrassing by the tired desperation with which our teacher longed for the approval of all these suburban-desert teenagers ignoring him, with our Big Gulps and flip phones. I remember I was wearing a t-shirt I had made for the occasion, recreating a picture I’d seen somewhere from a fan’s memorial gathering outside Cobain’s Seattle home the decade prior, wreathed in flowers and candles and other impermanent things by tradition collected and displayed to represent both the life burned out, lost, and the eternal love, transmitted back and forth across the veil, or perhaps only echoing in one direction, either telephone or radio, who can say.
I remember one particularly macabre part of the issue was an imagined timeline: what would have happened had Kurt Cobain lived? It was a baffling and unnecessary experiment, I mean the kind of thing we all think about all the time, the fantasy of what you would do together if your beloved were still alive and with you. But this was mean-spirited and glib in that music journalist man way, always couching adoration and desire in feigned indifference, as the writer imagined the decline in Cobain’s songwriting and beauty, his death only temporarily deferred. But the worst part, to me, was that one of the events on the imaginary timeline was the revelation that Kurt Cobain really did write Hole’s 1994 masterpiece, Live Through This, this journalist man’s fantasy confirmation of a rumor that had circulated since the album was released a week after Cobain’s death, based of course on the underlying assumption that Courtney Love couldn’t possibly have made something so perfect, not even with the songwriting help of guitarist Eric Erlandson. It had to be this tragic male visionary, or else all fantasies of order around art-making and genius and inspiration would crumble like dry cake by a blowing fan. This apocryphal legend is all the more annoying when you think about the goddamn ocean of wives writing their husbands’ songs, books, movies, dissertations, emails, whatever.
I say I’m a feminist, and then I spend a considerable amount of energy every day trying not to seem crazy or difficult or challenging, trying to contain myself and my feelings, which are voluminous, complex, and often kinda fucked up, as I imagine are yours as well. I think it’s this fear of taking up too much space, when the idea that space is limited instead of expansive, that like a liquid we need to fit the container instead of either making the container grow or become uncontainable, is just another scam like money, gender, and linear time. The only truth is death, and honestly I have my doubts about that shit too. Anyway, I think this is part of why I love Courtney Love so much, who always feels truly enormous, raising hell, throwing shoes at Madonna.
Live Through This, as you know, opens with “Violet,” a song Hole had been playing on tour since at least 1991, and the second track, first single, is “Miss World.” There was a certain amount of resentment and dismissal from fans of Hole’s, Kim Gordon-produced and noisier first album, Pretty On The Inside, but for my part, my pleasure is only ever heightened by the addition of a little pop melody. But I get it. Both songs and their music videos ask questions, or perhaps are questions about, women on display, spectacle and performance, authenticity and suffering and alienation. It’s all very 90s and also very eternal. Love sings, “Might last a day, mine is forever,” and she could be talking about trauma or haunting, both being haunted and doing the haunting, vengeful, merciless. The address of her lyrics is constantly shifting as the letters in the words shift slightly to change their meaning, as if we are all caught in a storm, here to rearrange. “I’ve made my bed, I’ll lie in it, I’ve made my bed, I’ll cry in it, I’ve made my bed, I’ll die in it,” she sings like some kind of psychic of the near future who knows what to expect, be it tears or death, and what does she do? She sings to you about it.
︎
Anyway, I meet a man,
we fall in love,
we spend our lives together in bliss,
breakfast in the morning, vacation
in the summer, songs at night,
tangerines, lace curtains, coronas,
I don’t know, pottery for sugar.
When I die he stands over my body
and finally removes the ribbon
I wore around my neck all these years,
and as my beautiful head rolls away he laughs.
Good morning, everything is forsaken
or nothing is. How can I enjoy the fruits
of my labor when my labor’s never over?
When she was never really here? Annie what
are you afraid of? But of course she won’t
tell me, porch statue from the road
to our love’s apocalyptic conclusion,
windchimes of another life, postcard,
derelict, how I’ve been living these days.
Then she called me when the party
was over and told me what she had
to say. If you love me diagnose me
with the vapors and let me go.
︎
Hélène Cixous says all writers want to die, they feel like dying, but this feeling is forbidden. She doesn’t mean something like suicide, she means instead something like getting to the unsayable thing that only the dead can say, the truth that can only be achieved in the final moment, like living as we have never lived before, completely consumed in the fire. So in writing we practice dying, we learn how to, like learning how to kiss at a sleepover, learning how to levitate at a sleepover, learning how to steal beer from the garage or liquor from the pantry at a sleepover, learning how to hide your fear at a sleepover.
I think about Lauryn Hill singing, “Killing Me Softly,” a classic in one of my favorite subgenres of songs about listening to songs and feeling desperation. I think the response elicited in the storyteller in “Killing Me Softly,” by the guitarist has to do with Cixous’s argument, following Kafka, that art should “be an axe for the frozen sea inside us,” should ruin our happiness, strike us like a blow, annihilate our world. The dying and killing in this song is from pleasure, sure, little death, strumming my pain, whatever, but also from recognition, from feeling recognized and so exposed to this unknown crowd, vulnerable the way bodies and identities are in fact always vulnerable to all manner of harm or even death, but now so aware of it, so heightened in its sensation. Killing me softly with his words, when she was just trying to have a nice night. I can imagine her, Lauryn, or the narrator of the story, or the songwriter, dumbstruck in the audience, trying so hard to hold it together, out there in public feeling like your whole body is one giant tongue, one enormous eye with an eyelash caught in it forever. That’s one way to feel alive. I mean, that’s one way to live.
The other great pillar, for me, of the subgenre is “Superstar” by The Carpenters, a song more beautiful than melted hard candy about bad love, or good love gone bad, or good love for bad men, men who may or may not be the devil, who may or may not be the better option sometimes, I am extremely not here to judge. The man in “Superstar,” just seems like a regular liar, so let’s not dwell on him here. Let’s dwell on the devil instead, a true demon lover, like the one in the traditional Scottish ballad “Daemon Lover” aka “The House Carpenter” aka “James Harris.” In this song, the Devil returns to a former lover who has moved on and is a married woman and mother now, but the Devil has ships full of treasure and she has a taste for the good life, so goes with him. The voyage is not long begun, when her regret for her lost child finds her, and perhaps in his jealousy or perhaps this was his plan all along. The Devil rips the ship in half, and as they are swirling in the watery abyss, she turns her eyes to the bright hill of heaven in the distance and another darker hill growing closer and the Devil says, “O that is the hill of hell, Where you and I shall be.” It’s like The Awakening all over again, the message being that any attempt at liberation, wild and poorly planned or the result of years of quiet fantasizing, only leads a woman to her punishing death. This is not so for the eponymous Delta Dawn of the song “Delta Dawn,” another, in my reading of the song, lover of the devil, but unapologetic, unrepentant, wandering the streets for him like a drunk apostle. Sure everyone in Brownsville may call her crazy, but she’ll be spitting on them from the devil’s sky mansion before this day is over. Like Courtney Love she inspires me.
︎
Sorry, we were talking about Hole. They wrote their own great and awful murder ballad, “Jennifer’s Body,” Courtney Love and Patty Schemel having come up with the idea on a trip to San Francisco in 1992. The song is so scary it’s hard to listen to, telling the story about a girl, Jennifer, just barely alive and then dead before the song is over, the limbs of her tortured body scattered across an unspecified location. In it, Love sings the damning line, “Kill the family, save the son,” which could be about how each member of a family, thinking of family both in terms of a financial arrangement made between adults and their children and also as a broader community, is disposable for the benefit of the “son,” “king,” “hero,” “cop,” whatever, just as each part of a woman’s body is disposable to his anger, pleasure, insecurity. Whatever.
Love’s lyric composition here, as elsewhere, shifts perspectives restlessly, narrator, murderer, perhaps Jennifer, and the person who finds her far too late to save her. This happens in other murder ballads, voices overflowing into one another, from one singer’s version to another’s, or all in the space of one performance or recording. I really like when, between versions of a song, certain narrative changes may occur, but the pronouns aren’t changed according to the singer to transmit a more heteronormative story, instead conveying how gender and desire and identity can all shift depending on the story you are currently telling yourself and your listening friends. Like, think about how Joan Baez sings “Banks of the Ohio,” a song about a man who asks his love to walk with him by the river, and then during this walk kills her because she refuses to be his bride. In the song, the speaker stabs her in the breast as she begs him, “my love, don't you murder me, I'm not prepared for eternity,” which is, in part, so effective because of the ambiguity around which eternity she fears, marriage or the grave, or both as they are now inseparable for her. Olivia Newton John also has a cover of the song, but of course she does change the pronouns, there’s this live performance of it on one of those 1970s music shows with a live audience of rhythmless, and also maybe soulless, white people swaying and mumbling as she sings, “I've killed the only man I love / He would not take me for his bride.” It’s truly so unsettling, this flat death, this feeling of no feeling, too empty to even echo or cast a shadow on the river.
Oscar Wilde has that line in “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” “Each man kills the thing he loves, yet each man does not die.” He doesn’t really mean some people are immortal, although of course the argument could be made about art’s immortality, he means some murders are not punished by the state, it all depends on who you are and who you love and who you kill.
The rumor more fucked than that Kurt Cobain wrote Live Through This, is that Courtney Love murdered him, according to some conspiratorial assholes because their relationship was ending, according to others because she thought it would boost her record sales. I mean I understand the feeling that death would be easier than to leave someone. And I understand not being able to accept that someone you believed in couldn’t live, needing to find a way out of that truth. I do. I’m ashamed to admit that the Laura who was reading Spin Magazine in biology indeed harbored these suspicions, could list out all the reasons why Cobain couldn’t have killed himself (the amount of heroin in his blood, the size of the gun), looking at that stupid picture of his dead foot through the doorframe, you know the one. It’s like believing Elvis isn’t dead. Some things at some times are too much to bear, and so we look for a way out, but there is no way out.
︎
Anyway, there I was, howling
through the Midwestern night,
death at my heels for the honest
world to see, my trunk full
of money, my empire crumbling
as it swelled around me like an
overwrought bridge. I killed
my baby and drank his blood
like wine. In service of what, I ask,
but I actually don’t give a fuck.
My message a useless warning,
forever delayed, arriving after
the event. Anyway, I plunged
into the darkness, I sent back
letters from hell, they read
like wind in a cave, assuming
anyone read them. What is it
good for if it’s no good for you?
I hurtled towards you my whole life
and then acted so casual about it
like if you want me I guess just
take all of me then, smiling like
an owl that flew to the moon once
and never told anyone about it.
If you carry all your secrets
to your grave you’ll be a tomb
inside a tomb, but hey if that’s
your plan don’t let me stop you.
︎
Simone Weil says love for the dead is a perfect love, because you can want nothing from them in the imagined fantasy future that ruins all chance for grace, you just want for them to have existed and they have. I wish my love were so pure, but I’m afraid I want a lot from the dead. First and most, I want them to tell me how the fuck to live. I want them to tell me why we do any of this. Cixous says that only at the moment of death can we really tell the truth, can we drop the artifice of the lies that made living possible, for love and cowardice. I mean it sounds awful but that’s the point.
In “Asking For It,” a brilliant song rejecting the argument that any behavior invites or gives permission to abuse, Love sings, “If you live through this with me I swear I would die for you.” The magic of the vow, what happens when you swear to something, turning words into action, into a spell for eternity, that’s one of my favorite parts of the language game we build our world with. But this particular vow, to die for another, is fundamentally different, a beginning and ending, a door we might knock on forever. What kind of love is that? Prince sang about it too, he said flat out he’s not your lover and he’s not your friend, but if you want him to he would die for you. It’s so casual, a strange tenderness, distant and intimate, an acknowledgement of the limitations, that you will never know me, and yet you will be a part of me, as I am for you. You will be part of how I think and act and everything I do. This willingness to die for another if they so desire it, to become a deeper alterity, something incomprehensible, an animal but not just any animal, a dove, what does it mean about how living is valued? Would I die for you? Of course, if you want me to, but is that such a sacrifice? Can a sacrifice be something you want to do? And now Prince really is dead, but Courtney Love survives, and we’re still here.
The other half of the line, which is also the name of the album, “live through this with me,” is so smart too, pointing as it does to the way living and dying don’t necessarily happen in that order, but are always more or less simultaneous, sometimes it feels like you’re living and other times it feels you’re dying, but really you are always doing both. I wake up in the morning and I know that today is another day where I just want to feel alive, which I do best in proximity to you, and to the dead, and to the impossible unknown of what awaits us, to the airplanes passing overhead at night, hot breath on a mirror, stolen time, brief freedom, and the music you loved as a teenager and only later realize you will love your whole life.
︎
I suggest we run away together, but I mean drive,
and also maybe I mean separately. I felt chased
both in nightmares and dreams, with my sister
I ate candy and talked about failure, with the devil
I went to the river, and then under the river, where
I found nothing and saw the wisdom. Everything
I had I gave it away, which was the easy part. I only
want what’s so mine it can never be taken
from me without there being none of me left
and also to either talk to you on the phone or
be in your town again. Lucinda, I think
looking for what we lost will be the best part.
Every time you cross my mind you become
more a part of me, buried deeper in this garden
or grave. We made the world together.
You, me, and this complex system of belief
rife with contradictions we don’t really mind,
we just live in it. Perhaps others will find it
this way after us, but in general we just let
the future be. Does the night really belong
to lovers? What do lovers want with property?
I mean I guess if lovers must own something,
let it be the night and not each other. Or maybe
it’s belonging as in home, as in an earthly and
timebound heaven. Or was it that lovers belong
to the night? That would be cool, let the night
have whatever it wants, let it be endless,
a hotel pool we never have to get out of,
a song the perfect length for every car ride,
a dream come true, the Ohio I imagine but
will never see, a heart that only breaks
and breaks and breaks.
Follow Laura:
Instagram: laura.henriksen
Bio:
Laura Henriksen is the author of October Poems (Gloss, 2019), Canadian Girlfriends (THERETHEN, 2019), Agata (Imp, 2017), and Fluid Arrangements (Planthouse Gallery, 2018) with Beka Goedde. Her writing can be found in The Brooklyn Rail, LitHub, P-Queue, Foundry, High Noon, and other places.
Why The Ice Cream Machine is Broken
Animation by:
EMILY PARWORTH
Black Creek
Poetry by:
JOSH BEANE
Black Creek I
My mother once
Spent three weeks in her
Sanctuary
And never once came down to the creek
Never twice swore an oath
And only 3 times drank water
Strong as the minnows
Swimmin and slitherin between her toes
A boy wading through handshakes
Black Creek III
You ever seen that dust carry a sound
Like the dull thud of a
Sledgehammer laying heavily a
Railroad cross tie longing to
Ferry both children or iron or
Linnens
And Mama with her steel wand ringing the triangle
Found no one come a calling
Cause we were swimming in Black Creek - that’s his name
I swear
One time Papa Doodle told a story about Black Creek
Because he liked to tell stories and dirty jokes
He say they called the swimmin hole
Forty Foot.
Because they dropped a 40ft pole down there and
Never found the end and
Maybe the bed ate that pole as we want to
Eat in beds
But anyway his buddy
Whats-his-name
Came up from Forty Foot with about 40 baby moccasins
Dangling from his tiny body
So they fished him out and spat names names at the water a little less
Lasting than
Black Creek
Black Creek V
Yesterwind felt like chasing that dog with
No tail
Her name was Lady
And she definitely had the mange
Tiddies done been used up cause she
Old
But I loved her as such so we’d still toss a tussle
And when she sat down to the water
We all listened
Like we was in private school
Black Creek VI
One time I about cut my thumb off in Dovesville
But if you’re askin round they call it
Doesville
Out there
I was whittlin a stick probably to make a sharper stick
Cause we all just achin to be a little
More sharp
But I damn sure about took that thumb off
And I damn sure made a mess of that kitchen
And Momma damn sure took me to the ER in that
Cheap one piece costume
Worn because boys like to play dress up too
And worn because it got so damn hot
In the summer
Follow Josh:
Instagram: @actual.watersBio:
I was born of a southern hairdresser who lost her mind after a third divorce, maybe because I was the only man who really loved her. She spent enough time talking for me to become a great listener. Both of my grandpas were truck drivers. One taught me dirty jokes too young, and the other couldn’t teach me to whistle. I’ve spent my life trying to figure out what city I belong to, and I’m still on the hunt, I think. I scowl when I’m thoughtful. I have a hard time finding a dog that doesn’t want to be best buddies. I fight myself to be productive. I read fantasy novels to escape. If given the option, I’d probably put an egg over every meal.
First Theme
Photography and Poem by:
EMILY MCHUGH
first theme
dusty firmament sowed light
on fragments of glass and sand.
lost insight!
oh, what depths are left for me here.
a torrid plane
amid thick fog,
or the quiet closing of a door
when silence is shattered.
shards of a memory repeating
a lifted gesture -
soft and heavy,
lethargy feels the same way.
︎︎
Emily McHugh, “Untitled,” Photograph, 2020.
Emily McHugh, “Untitled,” Photograph, 2020.
Emily McHugh, “Untitled,” Photograph, 2020.
Follow Emily:
Instagram: @emmmcqWeb: emmmcq.com
Bio:
Emily McHugh is an artist based in Worcester, Massachusetts. She works primarily with photography, printmaking, video, and poetry. Her poetry has been published by soft surface. Her work can be found at http://emmmcq.com.
Light Shines On a Book I Want to Read...
Three Poems by:
COCO GORDON MOORE
Listen:
LIGHT SHINES ON A BOOK I WANT TO READ. I READ A DIFFERENT BOOK
1.
when Hayley was ten or eleven
she got her heart x-rayed
the doctors didn’t see anything
(stupid doctors!)
some other doctors said Asthma
but it’s too dark in here for that
2.
when i was seventeen
a pediatrician gave me prozac
You were waiting
in the parking lot
to pick me up
(i think You had the mini van?
or maybe it was the prius...)
i’ll never forget
how funny
Your face looked.
3.
Hayley hated it
(You wore that hat
the entire time
You were fucking her)
You didn’t notice till afterwards
and it made her feel shitty.
4.
will You drop me off on the corner, please?
5.
(eyes shake entering rooms)
UNTITLED (LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT)
i keep trying to reconnect with my slutty high school self
but i think all the dick trauma has made this difficult.
i am so turned on by this wall
it drives me crazy
alone in this room
the stupid sea smiles
it was a while before i finally washed my sheets
i wish i could remember
the way
i used to smell
EAT THROUGH A SHUT DOOR TO FIND SOMEONE
i want my mom
i want my mom!
but here comes dad
with spider legs
and a spider
in his palm
inside my head
he sits on a soft green chair
he cries for himself
i look away
Follow Coco:
Instagram: cocogmBio:
Coco Gordon Moore is an artist and poet. She is the author of "A Sketch of Romance,” "Today I Hate The Sun" and "A Reading of The S.C.U.M. Manifesto".Last year (2019) she curated a group show at Reena Spaulings Fine Art Gallery to raise money and awareness for the Brooklyn Community Bail Fund. Her writing has been published in Apology Magazine and Shitwonder Magazine. 
Distrust of Groupthink
Love of Groupthink
Three Poems by:
ROSIE ROBERTS
Listen:
distrust of groupthink
love of groupthink
an exchange balanced on the sliver of life
given in between profit of profit we
collect to exchange contactless, but caress
nothing so easy as peeling an orange and
picking off all the pith and watching unbearable
unbearable saying success success success like
breaths no longer being taken is anything but
horror,
I cower. She’s cool honey, if only you could
see the like rolling in on the platform I. Morning
har, I don’t exist you are inside me disco dancing,
I hope you hope we currently in your roundness
I hope to find so much relief there but may have to
meet you alone. Just the two of us though so
no groupthink can interfere with that then
then it will come, but it will be good and coo.
They had no outside space and then the thought
wasn’t with them, there was no empathy for the
thought to appear for the group thinking -
could not understand not being the proprietor of
grass.
Instead could burrow deep the warren and nestle
there unperturbed, undisturbed by the unfurling
beast. I knew it a beast because it would look
itself in the mirror and say “I am flawless. I am
flawless” until everyone lost the will to say beast.
Listen:
and then you are both left dripping
standing holding hands
on a fine line then slap
a paintbrush dipped in
vermillion and vermillion
slaps into the side of the
first persons face then
smears then slaps into
the side of the second persons
face smears once more paint
in the orifices, left lug first
then mouth, nose, pores
Listen:
more
I had a hog once; she came when called
shout “hog!” and pause, when she comes
the hair is course, pushed backwards
and is amicable to the fingertip’s touch
If held, is a verb without a noun, then
no property is kept. Looking loosely
at you from the toilet seat, wondering
how much of my space would come back
Ferrograph ovd blinked amber from the
front of the bus, a man in a husky coat
leaves a half-filled latte in the aisle
When I left my hogs in your care, did you
masturbate while they were in the room?
Maybe you are lucky they don’t have lips
to speak. They always whispered: “more”
Follow Rosie:
Instagram: @rosie__robTwitter: @Rosie__Roberts
Vimeo: vimeo.com/rosieroberts
Map Magazine: mapmagazine.co.uk
Bio:
Rosie Roberts is an artist and writer from Glasgow interested in observing overlapping relations. She focusses on paratextual matter, for instance: live presence in tandem with an artwork, footnotes as evidence of time spent reading; cinematic experiences and entwined events or (auto)biographies. Her practice is interdisciplinary and her work hybrid in form. Rosie is currently Reviews Co-Editor at MAP magazine with artist Alison Scott and writing a rained through book of notes about Glasgow, titled 'portals' forthcoming with SPAM Press this year. 
Notes On Process
Artwork by:
WILLIAM GRAHAM
VISUAL JOURNALING
William Graham, “Entry from 3.1.20 (A cowboy looks away from prairie fires),” 2020.
William Graham, “Entry from 4.2.20 (Thinking about things growing and dying♾),” 2020.
William Graham, “Entry from 3.19.20 (Record of a dream I had),” 2020.
NOTES ON PROCESS
In the first segment of our series, Notes on Process, we spoke will painter and educator William Graham about his current approach to process, while quarantined in his home in Boone, NC. Since losing access to his painting studio, Will has been experimenting will a visual journal as a practice of working within constraint and connecting to his visual language:“It’s important for me, in painting and other things too, to work through my challenges externally. As a Studio Art major at Appalachian State in Boone, NC, I often found myself in front of the canvas, after a day or two of absence, feeling overwhelmed by the unfinished painting before me and unsure of where to start making my marks. To ease this tension, I began to pull out my journal and write for a bit before I started painting, to work out the thoughts and ideas I had about the piece.
Now, on days where I can’t make it to my studio space to paint —which these days is often— I try to find time to sit with my journal and create whether with words or images. Now, a daily practice of mine, it has become so much more than just a way to ease creative anxiety.
I look at visual journaling as a safe place to experiment creatively, a way to build up a visual language, and a way to center and touch base with myself. It’s a way of keeping in track with the roots of my inspiration and maintaining that inspiration, not as a thing that I stumble across sometimes, but as a thing that I intentionally engage with.
If you are curious about starting a visual journal, here are a few suggestions:
1. Make No Rules For Yourself
...or if you do change them often. Visual journals are not a space where you have to be “good” at art. Replace your rules with unfiltered and wild gut-impulse.
2. Visual Journaling Is A Practice, Not A Performance
...keep it that way. You’ll find some deep rich dirt in practicing often. When I’m performance minded I get burnt out easily. Practice practice practice. Do it for the love of it.
3. Shake Off The Dust
If you have a usual way of doing things try changing it up, getting lost in left field, losing yourself in something new for a while. Know that a visual journal is and should be a place where you can try new things.
4. But Also...
In all of this, use your journal as a way of connecting back to yourself. When you sit down to journal, take a moment to pause and breathe deeply one big breath, pay attention to it, listen to its texture, then begin. As a general and final note, be kind to yourself. Your journals not judging you, so quit that!
Much love to all,
William Graham “
Follow Will:
Instagram: good_will_hugging
Website: williamgraham.us
Bio:
Will is an artist and educator from Boone, NC.
ANOTHER SONG
Short Film and Q&A by:MATT D’ELIA
Starring:
CHARLIE as the dog
AMANDA KRAMER as voice of the dog
Edited by:
BENJAMIN SHEARN
ANOTHER SONG
Q&A With MATT D’ELIA
Conducted by: Jordan Alexander
Towing the tentative lines of close relationships can be difficult for all of us, especially during quarantine. However, navigating the companion-species dynamic can prove disastrous. This is where we find ourselves in the new short thriller, “Another Song,” from writer/director Matt D’Elia. Long time collaborator and pet, Charlie, takes on the meatier role as villain in this brief and tie-dyed genre exercise.
For those who listen to “Matt D’Elia Is Confused,” or follow his long-form comedy on instagram, this film will fall into a familiar comedy universe. The more menacing notes of this film, however, recall one of Matt’s previous works, “American Animal,” in which an iconoclastic protagonist tests the audience in a way similar to Charlie testing Matt in this most recent short.
(JA) How did you get into film?
(MD) I always knew I wanted to make movies. In my early teens I was already writing scripts and making little movies— terrible scripts and movies, but scripts and movies nonetheless. And always about very adult things, about which I knew nothing. Which I find interesting, because I am now an adult and I’m doing an interview about a short film I made starring me and a talking dog.
(JA) How was the experience of making “Another Song” different for you than films you’ve made in the past?
(MD) I was sort of ‘invited’ to make this one. Talkhouse asked me to be a part of their quarantine-inspired “Without Precedent Film Festival.” Which was very cool. But that alone made this a different experience right out of the gate. I had to come up with an idea that fit certain specific parameters, as opposed to what I usually do, which is just get excited about the best idea I have and do everything I can to get it all down as it comes to me.
(JA) I like that this short could only work with a dog as actor. No other animal (or person) could pull it off. And Charlie did a great job with his role. Do you think dogs are the animals most suited for cinema?
(MD) Dogs are BY FAR the most suited animals for cinema. Because I feel so strongly about this I’ve actually invented a kind of cinema called ‘Dog Cinema.’ All that happens in this kind of cinema is this: dogs are somewhere in each frame. But ONLY dogs. No humans. And that’s it. That’s ‘Dog Cinema.’ So technically, “Another Song” is not ‘Dog Cinema.’ But if anyone wants to see some ‘Dog Cinema’ classics, scroll back a little on my Instagram feed. They’re there. Charlie is in most of them. Perhaps they will inspire a whole new generation of ‘Dog Cinema’ innovators. I’m hopeful.
(JA) As ideas spring up and begin to resonate, it can be difficult deciding which idea fits into which structure. Feature film, short film, social media posts, etc. How do you know when an idea is the next short film, versus say a feature?
(MD) Oh this is an amazing question. I often see movies that make me think— “why is this a feature? This should be a short.” Or, “why is this a short? This needs to be a feature.” I do think features have a bit more leeway just because they have more time to work their strange magic— but every good short I’ve ever seen is more about an idea, or maybe a situation laced with a particular theme. Not a ‘story’ in the classic sense. The more you get into ‘storytelling’ with your short film, the more I am going to think— “why is this a short? This needs about 70 more minutes to work for me.” But then in reality I watch 0 more minutes because I’ve already stopped watching it. Shorts are harder, I honestly think that. A great short film is very rare— even more rare than a great feature. And those are very rare themselves.
(JA) In bigger cities, it can be easy to insulate yourself from people with opposing viewpoints, but on the “Matt D’Elia is Confused” podcast you do the opposite. What motivates you to keep an open dialogue with people who have contrary perspectives?
(MD) You’re very right. And there is nothing I like less than people who think things only because the people around them think those things. However, that doesn’t mean I prefer people who DON’T think things just because the people around them think those things. That’s just as stupid to me. There is a balance to it. The only way to keep yourself honest in this regard is to force yourself to encounter ideas you don’t usually encounter, and with an open mind. That’s more or less the guiding principle of the podcast. Also I just really love to disagree. It actually brings me joy to unpack other people’s beliefs and belief systems that I do not share.
(JA) When was the last time you had your view changed?
(MD) Just this week! I didn’t want to eat vegan croissants ever at any point in my life. I was adamantly against the idea of eating them. But a vegan croissant was put in front of me — and though I didn’t know it was a vegan croissant at the time, I ate it and loved it. So when the truth was revealed, I changed my mind. Now I love vegan croissants. But in general, I like changing my mind. Or, having my mind changed. I’ve actually always had trepidation about using that term’s usual phrasing… Did I really ‘change my mind’ about vegan croissants? Or were my feelings about vegan croissants changed by external forces? Probably the latter, right? But we still say “I changed my mind.” We are hopelessly self-obsessed. Anyway, now I love vegan croissants.
(JA) Your film, “American Animal,” feels incredibly relevant right now. The main character (Jimmy) is in this giant pre-grief stage and his bullshit detector is on 100 at all times. It’s amazing. In our current moment, at least in my own circle, everyone is grieving one form of loss or another, and each feels hyper-aware of the failures of late capitalism. How was the character of Jimmy initially received, and do you feel he's the hero we all deserve today?
(MD) I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately and you are the first person who has publicly asked me about it. So I’m very happy right now. I really want to stress that. But to answer your question— in the time since the film was released I think the questions it asks have only grown louder, at least to my ear. What are the consequences of the failures of late capitalism, what is the insidious appeal of this post-truth era we’ve found ourselves living in, as well as the more universal but finer grain stuff— like how exactly do we live in a world that no longer requires us to leave our homes? I actually see many of these themes playing out in the world more vividly today than I did then. So it does feel weirdly timely right now.
When the movie came out, almost everyone had one of three reactions to Jimmy: they either hated him, empathized with him, or felt like they knew someone just like him. The first two I expected but the latter surprised me. I don’t think I realized how many of these kinds of people actually existed in the real world. Because to me he was always more of a symbol than a person. An abstraction. Not a real human but a dramatic creation that embodied the rot and decay of late capitalism, specifically the American strain of it. As if that, whatever it should be called, had an id of its own. An animal side personified. Hence, the title.
(JA) Are there any films or albums inspiring you lately?
(MD) Yes! Aphex Twin’s most recent albums — “Cheetah” and “Computer Controlled Acoustic Instruments” in particular.
(JA) Which movie are you most embarrassed to admit you’ve never seen?
(MD) I don’t know if it’s embarrassing per se, but I’ve never seen a single STAR WARS film. Though I do take some pride in that. So as far as actually embarrassing- the other day I was looking at Tarkovsky’s filmography and wow I have only seen SOLARIS, ANDREI RUBLEV, and STALKER! Shame on me. Truly.
(JA) What’s next for you, or what was next for you before this all started?
(MD) I was set to shoot another feature this summer, starring my brother Chris and Suki Waterhouse and Heath Freeman. It’s this cursed project called “Powder Keg” that I’ve gotten set up many times just to see it fall apart again. It’s almost comical at this point. Right now, I have some writing assignments to keep me busy and sane, which is nice. But one thing is for sure— when this is all over, I’m making another movie. ASAP. Even if I have no money. Even if it’s just me and Charlie again. In fact, maybe I’ll adapt “Another Song” into a full length feature film and finally give Charlie the breakout role she has always deserved. She’s a really good actor, isn’t she?
Follow Matt:
Instagram: @mattdeliaTwitter: @mattdelia
Matt’s Podcast: Matt D’Elia is Confused
Watch American Animal: American Animal
Bio:
Matt D’Elia is an LA-based writer and director. His directorial debut, AMERICAN ANIMAL, which he also wrote and produced and starred in, premiered in competition at the 2012 SXSW Film Festival and was theatrically released in 2013. His follow up directorial effort, POWDER KEG, starring Chris D’Elia & Suki Waterhouse, was set for production this summer— but now, who the hell knows when he’ll be shooting it. In the meantime he continues to work as a writer for hire for various film and tv projects.
AND NOTHING BUT
Poetry by:BARRY SCHWABSKY
THREE POEMS
Barry Schwasbky has served as an art critic for The Nation and coeditor of international reviews for Artforum. As a poet, Barry has published several books of poetry including his 2015 Trembling Hand Equilibrium, published by Black Square Editions.In the first segment of TQR’s Digital Performance Series, Barry reads three poems from his forthcoming manuscript of poetry, tentatively titled, A Feeling of And. Syntactically experimental and refreshingly self-aware, Barry creates an economy of language, where each word carries its own material presence. With energetic certainty, Barry asserts in his poem LES Airshaft, “everything turns out perfect in the end.” A disillusioned optimism, truly resonate to our current condition.
And Nothing But
You can look in the mirror to practice crying
meanwhile words slip away
who could follow their braided repartee
each syllable a plan gone astray
last thought
best thought
next thought
do they realize they can see each other
the nights are getting longer
things it’s too early to tell
that infernal andante
the answer is never “never”
straying down dead end words
how do I look in this whisky
LES Airshaft
Good curtains make good neighbors
wherever there’s a pigeon on the loose
even with the monster of the week
everything turns out perfect in the end
full body, notes of dry fig and tobacco
the subtle caramel sweetness
of piled-up thoughts
seemingly shameless platonism exhibited here
but amiably peopled
and of fruit
in which mortality coils
waiting
waning
a young girl peeks at an old moon
and dreams of her all-nothingness
only love reminds you of love
Radio Free Love
For once the sounds moved toward us
we’d slipped them in
among memories hardly worth keeping
means-tested, addressing clouds
birds and the spirits of the dead
not to be discouraged
its feral form goes live before
your novelization of it gets written
that’s how the lightning starts
when the weather gets strange
with thunder you can’t hear
write it down now
before it takes off and our thoughts
self-interpenetrate
Follow Barry:
Instagram: @ mr_tranquil_tranquil_waters
Bio:
Barry Schwabsky is art critic for The Nation and co-editor of international reviews for Artforum. He has published three books of poetry--most recently, Trembling Hand Equilibrium (Black Square Editions, 2015). His new collection, A Feeling of And, will be published in 2021.
YELLOW SOCKS
Poetry by:
HAYDÉE TOUITOU
Featuring Photography by:
Marie Déhé
YELLOW SOCKS
Haydée hails from Paris, France where she is co-founder of the publication The Skirt Chronicles, a globally distributed printed journal that grants the same importance to photography as it does to the written word. In March of 2020, Haydée published a book of poems titled We Have Been Meaning To , which also features photography by Marie Déhé. In a continuation of that creative partnership, Haydée offers us two poems paired with a photograph by Marie. Listen:
1. A Pair Of New, Yellow, Socks Carefully Folded
What does it mean
For a pair of socks
To be
Carefully
Folded
I never know how to do that
How to fold my socks
I usually make some sort of ball
Out of them both
Maybe if they were yellow
And new
I would
Fold them
Carefully
2. Folding A Pair Of New, Yellow, Socks
Take one single new, yellow, sock
The toe part is in your left hand
The other part in your right hand
First you fold carefully
That single new, yellow, sock
Take the second sock
And repeat
This technique works
Whether you start
With the right sock
Or the left
Photo by Marie Déhé
Follow Haydée:
Instagram: @haydeetouitou
Website: www.haydeetouitou.com
Follow Marie:
Instagram: @mariedehe
Website: www.mariedehe.com
Bio:
Haydée Touitou began writing in 2014 when she started working for Apartamento magazine. First conducting interviews with cinema personalities like Wes Anderson, she quickly started experimenting with essays and non-fiction in general. Over the following years, she developped her portfolio in fiction and poetry by contributing regularly to publications like Kennedy magazine, Hearts magazine or hot hot hot. She is today one of the contributing editors of Apartamento magazine.
In 2017, Haydée co-founded The Skirt Chronicles, a publication founded by women which reflects a feminine voice yet does not exclude anyone from the conversation. As co-editor-in-chief, Haydée’s missions are to gather groundbreaking writers as well as taking care of the distribution of the magazine. In 2018, The Skirt Chronicles was awarded the Editor of the Year prize at the Stack Awards in London.
In March 2020, We Have Been Meaning To, a book of poetry and photographs with Marie Déhé, was published by Art Paper Editions
NO MEANIE WEENIES
Artwork by:
TIM CONTERIO
NO MEANIE WEENIES
Tim’s latest selection of drawings and multimedia collage offers a simple moral imperative: don’t be mean. Keeping in tradition with the overall sensibility of Tim’s work, No Meanie Weenies, is a skillfully naïve series that demonstrated the refined control Tim has over his style. Despite its playful tone, Tim’s work is artfully rebellious, a critique of power and institution. Unaffected and uncontrolled by the constraints of “formality.”
Tim Conterio, “death to capitalism,” 10x12 collage.
Tim Conterio, “Balloon Child,” drawing, 2020.
Tim Conterio, “cat poem,” drawing, 2020.
Tim Conterio, “No Meanie Weenies,” collage, 2020.
Tim Conterio, “Guava,” drawing, 2020.
Follow Tim:
Instagram: @timconterio
Bio:
Tim Conterio is just a guy. He draws little pictures and likes to rock and roll
Interview with Cinematographer Hunter Zimny
Conducted by Jordan Alexander
Hunter’s films illicit wonder, inviting the viewer into a discovery phase which feels strangely safe, like having a tough conversation with a close friend. Inspired by the personal nature of his work, we spoke with Hunter to learn a little more about his process and background.
(JA) Where did it begin for you?
(HZ) My father was a film editor throughout my childhood and my mother briefly worked in documentaries, that's how they met. Growing up I didn't have cable, but there were stacks of laser discs and VHS tapes always around. They would sit my brother and I down and show us age inappropriate films like Walkabout. Sunday nights we'd watch Ken Burns series and it felt like torture. I begged them for Power Rangers.
(JA) How did you break into the film industry?
(HZ) In my senior year of High School I was approached by Rachelle Michelle and Eleonore Hendricks to audition for an anti robo tripping commercial. They were street casting outside of LaGuardia High and I just happened to be walking down the block. In the audition I just ranted about my love for movies. Rachelle introduced me to Mike Bilandic who brought me on to shoot the "Cut Yo Dick Off" video for Hellaware, since Sean [Price Williams] was out of town. Eleonore connected me with Josh and Benny Safdie and I interned at Red Bucket Films for a few months. These experiences were precious. That chance encounter altered the course of my life and I'm incredibly grateful to them both.
(JA) Each of the three films (shown here) have their own varying relationship with sincerity. Is this a conscious theme within your work, or do you notice other themes driving your work?
(HZ) I'm interested in the balance of internal struggle with external appearances. How we desire to be seen by others and how we feel when we're alone. The intimacy of those brief private moments of self-realization through solitude. I'll always be interested in themes of isolation, how an environment shapes you, and the struggle to communicate.
(JA) Some of the films chosen were made early in your career. Has your relationship changed with these films, and in what ways did they inform your current practice?
(HZ) I see these older films as sketches for larger ideas.
(JA) In addition to writing/directing you’ve been working as a cinematographer lately, how do you adapt your approach to filmmaking when working solely with camera, as opposed to directing the material?
(HZ) I love working as a cinematographer. I feel like the hierarchical Hollywood system with its division of labor doesn't apply to these smaller independent films. The director and I are always discovering the film together. I'm more focused on harnessing the tone and feeling of a piece and creating shooting situations to facilitate unrestricted performances. I'm always thinking about the blocking and coverage. I love stealing unplanned shots in between setups. I try to keep my eyes peeled.
(JA) Do you go into each film with a distinct plan?
(HZ) My only plan is to stay honest and keep an open heart. I believe in taking the time to talk something out if it's not working. What's the point of making your day if you're not happy with the footage?
(JA) Which films or albums have been inspiring you lately?
(HZ) I've been listening to a lot of Harold Budd lately specifically Pavilion of Dreams and By the Dawns Early Light. I just started this fantastic book Lessons by Kiarostami, I highly recommend it.
(JA) What have you been working on recently / what’s next for you?
(HZ) I've got a few scripts collecting dust and I've been making diary films in meantime to keep sane. I miss working. Anyone in need of a cameraman hit me up at hzimny@gmail.com.
THREE SHORTS BY HUNTER:
PARAMUS, NEW JERSEY
STRANGER LOVE
What Are You Doing
Poetry by:MARIE LOPEZ
THREE POEMS
In the three poems from Marie Lopez we enter cycles of experience, drifting seamlessly between the tactile and non-sensory. The poems travel through stages all of their own, self-regulation, acceptance, always navigating a path back to the reader. It’s a moving poetics, filled with curiosity, leading us headlong through the moment and back to rest with a new direction.
Listen:
Listen:
Listen:
Follow Marie:
Instagram: @anna_quarina_
Bio:
Marie Lopez (b.1992) is an MFA candidate at The New School. She got into poetry after doing mostly visual art for most of her life because she knew that it would be a lucrative business move. She lives and works in New York, New York.
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Instagram: @anna_quarina_
Bio:
Marie Lopez (b.1992) is an MFA candidate at The New School. She got into poetry after doing mostly visual art for most of her life because she knew that it would be a lucrative business move. She lives and works in New York, New York.
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Leash Of Joy
Poetry by:
ZAN DE PARRY
THREE POEMS
Zan De Parry lives in Philadelphia, his recent chapbook HENNIE, “A Creation Story,” is available through TABLOID Productions. Within these three short poems, we come to terms with De Parry’s unified poetics – a poetics of austere and resonant diction, with language that remains in the readers mouth long after the words leave. The audio accompaniment is a performance within itself, and a necessary component to the discovery of Zan’s work.Listen:
LEASH OF JOY
I'm stressful today
Tripped over an erect mop
Cut my hand very bad
Literally shifted the whole meat
Ran around the kitchen
Pouring very precious blood
Stood at a threshold and
Ma, am I okay?
I'd come out to a sky
In a fur coat
Broken-in by a thin soul
Can you imagine?
Listen:
MY DOG
plump
long hair
fangs
short legs
highway (former name)
reversible
like the back of a heart
erroneous
insecure
crying regularly
me and my dog would eat grass together
lie back and think
a bus could take us between towns
through town
even between states
and we go to sleep
dream about tracks
Listen:
AMERICA
I like the light smell of deer
The sounds of singing
I don't like crowds or clusters
My favorite place on the bus
The middle door, ear
To the bus middle door glass
Flaggers, before raising it
Hold it and blow it
Armstrong blew his to the moon
Follow Zan:
Instagram: @keithllc
Soundcloud: @keithllc
Bio:
Zan de Parry lives in Philadelphia and has published the chapbooks Vibraphone (Brest Press), Hennie (Tabloid Presse), History, Memory, Love, America, Syllogism (Amateur Press) and co-wrote the full-length Austerity Brunch (Keith LLC) with Matthew Hodges. Other work can be found variously in print and online.
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Instagram: @keithllc
Soundcloud: @keithllc
Bio:
Zan de Parry lives in Philadelphia and has published the chapbooks Vibraphone (Brest Press), Hennie (Tabloid Presse), History, Memory, Love, America, Syllogism (Amateur Press) and co-wrote the full-length Austerity Brunch (Keith LLC) with Matthew Hodges. Other work can be found variously in print and online.
Touch My Eccentricities
Single by:
FIONA AND FRED
Fiona and Fred
Fiona and Fred are a Parisian-inspired synth-pop duo based in Brooklyn, NY, led by composer and guitarist Scott Fish and singer/songwriter Margaux Bouchegnies. Witty and libidinal, their latest single, Touch My Eccentricities, is a song that keeps in theme with the storyline of two lovers. Created within the constraints of the quar, Scott and Margaux recorded by way of Dropboxed files, laying down each part in their respective bedrooms.
Listen on Spotify:
Listen on Apple Music:
Follow Scott:
Instagram: @scottfishscottfish
Spotify: Scott Fish
Follow Margaux:
Instagram: @margauxtosleep
Spotify: Margaux
Bio:
Fiona and Fred are a Parisian-inspired synth-pop duo based in Brooklyn, NY, led by Scott Fish and Margaux Bouchegnies. 
Good Time Terrorism
Artwork by:MATTHEW REED
GOOD TIME TERRORISM
Matthew Reed’s creative reach is wide, having its start in early musical ventures like his experimental, trance projects, my bambi and Holy Wall. Matt’s latest series of work is a postmodern assemblage, mixing media and examining contemporary American values through a disruptive gaze and chilling sense of humor. A new American flag made of a crumpled dollar bill, an iPhone screen illuminated by the faint flow of a skeleton, GOOD TIME TERRORISM is a timely display of a culture set aflame. All the while, we’re forgiven for not taking it all so seriously.
Matthew Reed, “the 3 that shit in the sand,” 2020.
Matthew Reed,”peter and louise,” 2020.
Matthew Reed,”big frank,” 2020.
Matthew Reed,”new american flag,” 2020.
Follow Matt:
Instagram: @tvbeaches
Bandcamp: my bambi
Bandcamp: Holy Wall
Soundcloud: my bambi
Bio:
I don't have anything in confidence to share about the creative process, but I found these mantras help:
1) google image search helps with creative and emotional blockages.
2) laughter is #1.
3) beauty is also #1.
4) copy right laws are domestic terrorism.
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Instagram: @tvbeaches
Bandcamp: my bambi
Bandcamp: Holy Wall
Soundcloud: my bambi
Bio:
I don't have anything in confidence to share about the creative process, but I found these mantras help:
1) google image search helps with creative and emotional blockages.
2) laughter is #1.
3) beauty is also #1.
4) copy right laws are domestic terrorism.
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MAKE IT LAST FOREVER
Written and Directed by:
AMANDA KRAMER
Starring: Matt D’Elia
Music and Narration: Giulio Carmassi
Edited: Benjamin Shearn
MAKE IT LAST FOREVER
Q&A with AMANDA KRAMER
conducted by Jordan Alexander
If we stare at the insides of our apartments for long enough, we may begin to notice little changes: the way the sun hits the chair precisely at noon, the records seeming a little closer together, the pots and pans appearing sad all of a sudden. And our partner or roommates’ questions start to circle around us like metaphorical shouts from the void, “Where were you thinking of going?” A synth score descends to remind us, it’s probably all in our mind… we may be in day 71 of quarantine or we may be a character in one of Amanda Kramer’s slick, slithering chamber dramas (though chamber dramedy may be a more apt term).
Kramer’s latest short film “Make it Last Forever” is interactive, and perhaps better experienced than explained, so please enjoy this poignant check-in from a wonderful filmmaker with some de-evolving dances to divulge—a refreshingly bleak parallel to the persistent stream of self-help content circulating at the moment, and a welcome chance for us to dance ourselves unclean.
(JA) Your new film “Make it Last Forever” has beautifully subtle shifts of tone between the moments of euphoria and mild dread. What part of the experience of Quar has been bringing you highs, and what has been bringing you lows?
(AK) I was never a person who needed to be outside. I don't like shooting outside, I don't like writing scenes that take place outside. The outside has never held much interest for me unless it was a necessary part of the journey to get me to another inside. So I'm fine. I'm a writer and the quarantine is being that strong grip on my shoulder helping me to focus on script deadlines, on reading the entirety of the Richard Burton Diaries, on watching what I've always wanted to watch but missed because it didn't seem that important a viewing (going to try Jaws i think?), and on thinking. Thinking without interruption or distraction. I miss actors though, miss directing them, miss working with my crew, miss my dry cleaners. When I think about how long it'll be until I can take my dry cleaning in - an act that gives me endless pleasure - I'm forced to remember that wide sargasso between a life chosen inside and life forced inside.
(JA) During this time every artist is facing some form of limitations in their craft.
1.) How do the restrictions we’re experiencing currently under isolation compare to the limitations already inherent in independent filmmaking?
(AK) I prefer never to touch a camera, a lens, a light. I have a genius director of photography who does that for me/"with" me and now that we can't work together I'm left to my own shitty devices and this iphone. Which is a non-substitute for his discerning eye and tech. Now extend that depth of lacking outward to the rest of my incredible department heads. I'm also constrained to ask the man I live with to act for me, which he does with aplomb, thankfully, and to shoot whatever corner of my loft doesn't feel chaotically contemporary. Though I am working with a similar budget size...
2.) How did the present restrictions influence your conception of this film, and how did it shape the physical approach to its production?
(AK) Matt is the only actor I have physical access to. In the film, he is wearing the clothes In my closet. He is standing in front of the only wall unadorned in my home. I have every lamp shining on him. I'm filming him with my phone. I don't believe we need to see everyone's quarantine (I'm not a fan of watching actors at home, being real - I just want to watch them act), so I wasn't immediately inspired to make a film about my self-isolation. But i do love restrictions and thrive while creating inside a parenthesis (no cash, free locations, favors from friends). I was thinking about dance crazes of the twentieth century. Dances that became sexier as skirts get shorter, or dances that became popular because a new genre of music was introduced. What might the dance craze of this moment be? And from there it's just amusing myself.
(JA) Have you been engaging in any forms of escapism during this time? And if so, what has been your preferred method?
(AK) I write made-up bullshit for a living - I think I'm a consummate escapist. It's a life inside a mind for sure, with very few reality checks. But currently, deeper into that escape, I'm watching back-to-back-to-back De Palma.
(JA) What area of your life do you tend to mine for material the most?
(AK) Casual conversation can be accidental brilliance for dialogue. I love listening. But mostly I don't want to see myself onscreen, or anything that resembles me. I want opera, extremity, theatrical nonsense. The unknowable. So I buy art and photo books (a recent purchase is 700 nimes, the Catherine Opie photos of Liz Taylor's home) and imagine characters that might live in those spaces. I think about the ridiculous lives of certain women - Danielle Steel, Faye Dunaway, Tina Chow - and then recreate them as maniac protags I can torture and rip apart.
(JA) Which film have you seen the most?
(AK) Stardust Memmories, Woody Allen, 1980. Or Christian Slater's greatest, Kuffs. I've seen both over 50 times and could stand another 50 viewings, easy.
(JA) What album or film has inspired you lately?
(AK) Language "In the Lab" ep, from 1992. The 1986 Jobim Live concert in Montreal. The music videos of Rafaella Carra. Any Genevieve Bujold performance. Raising Cain. Chabrol's, Masques.
(JA) Tell us what’s next for you, or what was next for you before all of this began?
(AK) I was actually a week out from shooting a lunatic one-woman variety feature film with the incredible Sophie Van Haselberg, so hopefully I go right back into that. I also have a period film set to go into production when we're allowed to gather 50 people in a room together again. And I'm writing a deranged soapy thriller for the D'Elia brothers.
Follow Amanda:
Website: afilmbyamandakramer.comBio:
Kramer's short films BARK, INTERVENE, and SIN ULTRA have played at Fantastic Fest, Monster Fest, Final Frame, Court Metrange Festival, Chicago Underground Film Festival and Boston Underground Film Festival's Dispatches from the Underground. Her screenplays have been accepted into IFP’s Emerging Filmmakers program and Frontierés International Co-Production Market in Brussels. Kramer's music videos have premiered on Vogue, LA Record, Flaunt Magazine, and Complex.Her feature film PARIS WINDOW opened the Women Texas Film Festival and won the jury prize for Creative Vision at the DTLA Film Festival. Her feature film LADYWORLD was selected for the Frontierés Buyers Showcase at the Marche du Film at Cannes. The film had its US Premiere at Fantastic Fest ('18) and its International Premiere at London BFI Film Festival. LADYWORLD also showed at Denver International Film Festival, SF Indie Fest, TIFF Next Wave, Seoul International Women’s Film Festival, and Sydney Film Fest. Distributed by Cleopatra Entertainment, LADYWORLD had its theatrical and streaming release in August 2019.
De Fé
Photography by:
CANDELA PÉREZ
DE FÉ
Candela Pérez comes to us from Córdoba City, Argentina, where she lives alone and is in day 31 of her quarantine. With each day in isolation comes a different mood, Candela tells us –some days are blue and other days arrive lighter. Candela’s portfolio “De Fé,” reflects the solitude of her lonelier days.Using analog interventions and self-made filters to create distortion, Candela creates an atmosphere within each image. When asked how she approaches her process now, considering the limitation of space and subject present during quarantine, Candela responded:
“I try to portray a certain affect of closeness, by looking around and finding simple elements that can be turned into a given narrative. I tend to adapt to what’s near me and look at it as an observation with no “right” or “wrong” boundaries. My work will often address the same ideas, watching how they evolve with each iteration.”
Candela Pérez, “Untitled,” 2020.
Candela Pérez, “Untitled,” 2020.
Candela Pérez, “Untitled,” 2020.
Candela Pérez, “Untitled,” 2020.
Candela Pérez, “Untitled,” 2020.
Follow Candela:
Instagram:@svpersticion
Bio:
Candela Pérez is an Argentinian photographer based in Córdoba City. Candela likes to experiment with colors and lighting through home-made filters and analog interventions. Candela’s work seeks to become documentary, and is strongly influenced by music and the natural world.
How Are You
Three poems by:
JEN FISHER
THREE POEMS
Jen Fisher’s work extends beyond the page and onto the streets of New York City where she is a sidewalk book seller at Vortexity books, on Avenue A in East Village. She is one of those New York writers, whose work refuses to be weighed down by insularity, but is made in communion with others: connecting the streets of New York through trade, conversation and community. As New York remains “on pause,” Jen has also been sent indoors, where she has been writing poetry. Her recent poems, introspective and longing, reflect the new-found silence of her city.Listen:
How Are You
in the poor
I Knew You Like Their Smashed Color
Follow Jen:
Instagram: @vortexity_jen_fisher
Bio:
Jen Fisher was born in Florida 1981. Published in Brooklyn Rail, Newest York, Daggers Magazine, Heads, F magazine.
Photo by Tom Jarmusch:
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Instagram: @vortexity_jen_fisher
Bio:
Jen Fisher was born in Florida 1981. Published in Brooklyn Rail, Newest York, Daggers Magazine, Heads, F magazine.
Photo by Tom Jarmusch:
Hideout
Music and Graphic Poetry by:
COLIN MILLER
HIDEOUT
After establishing himself as an audio engineer, producing albums for bands like Indigo De Souza and MJ Lenderman from his studio in Asheville, NC, Colin began making his own music – releasing two singles in the past year that demonstrate his strong talent as a songwriter. Colin’s latest ambient album, Hideout, turns to sound for its profundity, creating a lo-fi aesthetic that fully captures whatever the “milieu” of this era will become. Though introspective, Hideout offers a spaciousness and levity of sound, often absent from instrumental titles. Paired with three graphic poems, Colin’s work carries a tenor of its own.
Listen to “Hideout”:
GRAPHIC POETRY
Colin Miller, “wasps,” 2020.
Colin Miller, “twister,” 2020.
Colin Miller, “Bogey,” 2020.
Follow Colin:
Instagram: @c_l_nm_ll_rBandCamp: colinmiller.bandcamp.com
Bio:
Colin Miller lives in Asheville, North Carolina. He makes records in a little house on a hill in Haw Creek Valley –– sometimes for himself, usually for others. In addition to his own eponymous musical project, he contributes to several other musical groups including Cheap Studs, MJ Lenderman, Brucemont, and Zach Romeo. Outside of music, Colin also writes poems and sketches on his phone, scours Goodwill bids for cheap tape machines, and watches a live stream of a train line in Norway as it barrels through the wilderness.
“BABY’S FIRST FAIRY
HOUSE”
INDIGO DE SOUZA
As a part of our weekly series “Creative Prompts,” we asked musician, Indigo De Souza, to create a series of prompts for artists looking for direction while indoors.
Email your responses to thequarterlessreview@gmail.com and Indigo will pick her favorite to be featured on our site the following week. Responses can be interpreted across all disciplines.
Email your responses to thequarterlessreview@gmail.com and Indigo will pick her favorite to be featured on our site the following week. Responses can be interpreted across all disciplines.
INDIGO’S RESPONSE:
When I was little, I had a super vivid imagination. I believed in a lot of things and was constantly in awe of the world around me. We didn't have any real technology in my household until I was in middle school, and I remember mostly playing with sticks and rocks and just making up stories in my mind. For the longest time I was convinced that there were fairies and demons that lived all around me in the forests. I figured they probably only came out in the open if there were no humans around. I used to spend hours trying to convince them that their secret was safe with me. They never revealed themselves, but I was always building little houses and boats for them anyway. Just in case. ;)
My imagination doesn't feel as active anymore.
I have a hard time thinking of things to draw and my songwriting often feels stilted, like I'm too focused on finishing the song before I've even started. Whatever that pure lightness and curiosity I once carried, It's harder to engage with it now. I have to find ways to jumpstart my creative brain and loosen the grips of my ever-intrusive heartbroken one.
Anyway, here is my prompt:
-
Make something you would have made when you were a child...
-
Or, make something that makes you FEEL like a child :)
Be fully engaged in the adventure of creating the thing, rather than focusing heavily on what the end result might be.
I made a Fairy House:
SELECTED WORKS
Photography by:
KARLY HARTZMAN
SINGLE-PANEL COMIC SERIES
Equally nostalgic as they are existential, Karly Hartzman’s single-panel comics are resonate to her work as songwriter and frontperson to the shoegaze collective, Wednesday. In everything Karly does there is a refined sentimentality – arresting, yet warm. In Karly’s comics, It’s what remains understated that has the most influence on the overall mood. The bare feet on the linoleum floor of the Walgreens. The tiny frown of her 11-year old portrait. Though, we can’t know the answer to the question posed in “Our Room,” anyone whose been in a relationship knows it’s not the answer that matters, but the overall weight of the experience of asking something to someone every day –of having been given that opportunity. It’s Karly’s abilty to amplify moments like these, that gives her work its beauty.
Karly Hartzman, “Walgreens,” 2020.
Karly Hartzman, “Grocery Store Police Man,” 2020.
Karly Hartzman, “Being Popular,” 2020.
Karly Hartzman, “Feline Aids,” 2020.
Karly Hartzman, “Sunburn,” 2020.
Karly Hartzman, “Our Room,” 2020.
Karly Hartzman, “Colin,” 2020. Polaroid.
Follow Karly:
Website:karlyhartzman.com
Instagram: @wednesday_gurl
Bandcamp:wednesdayband.bandcamp.com
Depop (for textile pieces): @karlyhartzman
Email:karlyhartzman1@gmail.com
Bio:
Karly Hartzman lives in Asheville, NC. She fronts a band called Wednesday so she can yell and play loud guitar. Recently her focus has been sewing messy clothing and textile pieces and drawing one panel comics. Going to college ruined photography for her, but she still likes to take polaroid photos. Her muse is her 75 year old landlord, Gary. She has a variety of zines available electronically on her website. She loves writing and receiving letters so if interested contact her directly to be pen pals!
UNTITLED QUARTINBE MOVIE
Written and Directed by: HARRISON ATKINS
Starring:
Harrison Artkins
Kati Skelton
Daniel Johnson
UNTITLED QUARTINBE MOVIE
Watch here:
Q&A with Harrison Atkins
conducted by Jordan Alexander
Harrison Atkin’s latest short film Untitled Quartinbe Movie, picks up where his previous work left off, situating us in the present communal feeling of informational uncertainty and personal malaise. Similar to his previous films, relationships and rationality offer no sure footing to the main character, resulting in a series of Kafka-esque scenarios to overcome, or possibly just get through. The accessibility of Harrison’s narratives invite the viewer to perceive a world that we both know, and are dually mystified by in the same beat. There are jokes in strange places—the dispersed six pack of Diet Sunkist cans in the fridge, did the director actually buy these for the movie or does he just like them?— a sincerity of the craft in the lighting and camera choices, and a remarkably odd feeling of warmth derived from each film’s resolution. It’s hard to explain, but it feels good to watch a Harrison Atkins movie, like finding yourself in a game you didn’t know you were playing. I wanted to learn a bit more about what drives the aesthetic wheels behind one of my favorite directors, so we sat down with some questions and answers.
How are you finding your quarantine?
It’s generally very serene. I just putter around my apartment all day. Intermittently, there are interludes of going insane. Generally I think everybody I know is getting increasingly nutball. All the psychic energy of “public life” is now being focused into online interactions, which I think is zany and (at the time of this writing) still kind of pleasantly novel.
What do you miss most about our pre-isolation world?
Recently I've been missing sitting on my friends’ couches.
And the least?
LA smog has disappeared. That's nice. It's pretty outside.
You didn’t have a crew obviously, so what part of making “untitled quartinbe movie” was the most challenging, or fun?
I truly had no desire to make it at first. My friend was putting on a festival of films made by filmmakers in this virus era and asked me to make a film out-of-competition. I agreed to make something but was feeling so anxious and depressed, I had absolutely no inspiration. Days later I took a walk and started having ideas for gags, so I just wrote them down while I was walking. Then I figured I might as well shoot em. I kept thinking about some quote — I have no memory of to whom it's attributed or whether this is even right, but the gist of it is something like, “If you have the ability to make comedy, you have the responsibility to.” Once I was filming myself in my apartment, it was actually quite fun and sort of escapist. Gave me something to concentrate on. I shot with my 5D and used a tape measure to estimate focus. Took sound on my phone, which is why it generally sounds sort of bad.
Your first feature length film, Lace Crater, is easy to love - a restrained horror comedy genre piece about a girl who has sex with a ghost and gets an STD.
A.) Is this an auto-biographical story?
Thank you! No, it’s not at all autobiographical in an objective way. But also probably all the movies are autobiographical.
B) Do you believe in the supernatural?
I think there’s more going on than meets the eye, but I don’t pretend to have a clue either way.
All of your films (that I’ve seen), play with vaguely surreal premises and contain evocative music cues, which act almost as their own characters within the story. I always think of the moment in Blissful Banquet, when the main character sits at his computer and this pulsing staticky alien sound arrives from somewhere. It’s a perfect sound in that it creates its own story twist.
That’s not a question it’s just an appreciation, the question is: do your film ideas ever begin with sounds?
I think generally the formal elements of film ideas occur to me sort of more holistically, but definitely I’ve had experiences of feeling particularly inspired by a piece of music — especially as a tonal reference point or to help kind of geolocate a vibe of a thing. But I think equally often there can be a sensation of a moment that feels like it doesn’t have clothes on or something, and then there’s like a process of clothing or costuming the moment in sound, to arrive at a tableau that feels adorned appropriately. I think the rubric there can be extremely subjective. But broadly speaking sound and sound design have always been truly vital components of the trip, for me. I think I’ve gone from being very maximalist with regard to sound design to now experimenting sometimes with a lighter or more stripped down approach.
What area of life do you mine your ideas from the most?
The sweet spot for me is usually more intuitive than intellectual. If an idea occurs to me, I try to just allow it to express itself without getting in my own way. I like to vibe out on operating in a way that is, increasingly, as automatic as possible. It’s like, you spend a lot of time honing your instincts and then when you’re working it’s just playtime.
If you were able to go back in time and meet your 12 year old self, what do you think he would say to you?
Do you know how to throw a boomerang??
And lastly, what’s next for you, or what was next for you before all this started?
I mean, you know, I don’t know. There are various things I've been working on. I have some movies of assorted sizes and scopes in various stages of “gonna make soon.” I just finished the 25th draft of a script that I really love. But otherwise I’m just trying to nurture relationships right now. Enjoying banal things. Experimenting with a different pace. I was thinking about starting an anonymous twitter account to argue with people but that seems like a bad idea. Like a lot of people, I’m feeling a lot of skepticism toward the cult of productivity this month.
Follow Harrison:
Website:www.harrisonatkins.comInstagram:@hhharkrr
Bio:
Harrison Atkins is an American independent filmmaker. His work has screened around the world at film festivals including TIFF,Sundance, SXSW, Berlin, Sitges, and many more.He edited MADELINE’S MADELINE (d. Josephine Decker), called “one of the boldest and most invigorating American films of the 21st century” by Indiewire and “an ecstatic, anguished, fiercely empathetic masterwork" by The New Yorker. It premiered at Sundance and was distributed by Oscilloscope in 2018.
His feature directorial debut LACE CRATER premiered at TIFF in 2015 and screened at numerous international film festivals before being distributed theatrically and on VOD in 2016. His short films including CHOCOLATE HEART, BLISSFUL BANQUET, and DOOR ON THE LEFT have screened all over the place and received online accolades like ‘Short Of The Week’ and ‘Vimeo Staff Pick.
He is the co-executive producer and editor of the Netflix original series EASY, directed by Joe Swanberg.
Carol Arranges the Bodies
Written by:
JACKIE BRAJE
THREE POEMS
Jackie Braje’s “Carol Arranges the Bodies,” is a part of a longer project she is working on, arising from an email exchange between her and her grandmother. The visual landscape Brajie creates, made knowable through her gentle diction and careful construction of color and sound, brings the reader inside. Being that, all three poems are thematically linked by a feeling of interiority. The interiority of self-reflection, or the interiority of being at home with the people who make it that way.
Carol Arranges the Bodies
Listen along here:
It is said a Mother and Daughter laid alone in front of a screen door, together, for cool air in the summer orchard of Cromwell, IN, but I doubt it, for the dog was also there, for the gladiolas were there, for the father loved the garden for having them, for the future was alone, there, and yet. And the gladiolas, they were there, in the garden—and the gray snake in the cherry tree— and the Mother would hoe the rows and the Daughter would drop the seeds behind her, and the big bearded iris. The green beans. Sweet corn. It was the Mother’s red baseball cap lost to the teeth of the Father’s bailer and it was the Mother’s rage, the Daughter’s broken pinkie. A first class seamstress was the Mother and their bodies there, by the screen door, were gorged in floral yellow and sun.1
John Wayne
I dream about your family, often.
Your mother is dousing the dining room
with kerosene for every witness and
your father is proud of me and your brother
is throwing his wineglass at the kitchen sink,
laughing at the impact and your sister,
she couldn’t be born, I am sorry to say.
Above our bed is a picture of John
Wayne on a California billboard
with daggers of palm fronds threatening
his face (these interest me the most
though I can’t dream about those).
Yes, and wasn’t it good? When he offered
to build his girl a house at the bend
in the river where the cottonwoods grow?
Living Room
What am I looking for?
Innumerable silver pools,
lacerated pools,
fish with their mirroring scales, pools;
I want to be all alone and
merged with you,
do you understand me?
I want to be a body
that isn’t my body
or your body
or anybody.
I found a dog
and called it bird
and you and I are the only
hands she’ll take the
bones from. Here are
all of us in these ill-fitting
forms: glue the feathers
to the bone for me and I
will do the same for her.
1 Carol Arranges the Bodies first appeared in print, published by the literary journal Ninth Letter.
Follow Jackie:
Website: https://www.jackiebraje.me/
Instagram: @jackiebraje
Bio:
Jackie Braje is a Brooklyn based poet. She is the Programs Director of The Poetry Society of New York, the co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of Milk Press, and a Poetry MFA candidate at Brooklyn College. Her work has appeared in The Minnesota Review, The Nottingham Review, Brooklyn Poets, Vagabond City, Waccamaw, Bridge Eight, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a 2019 Brooklyn Poets Fellowship and a 2020 Mineral School Artist Residency.
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Website: https://www.jackiebraje.me/
Instagram: @jackiebraje
Bio:
Jackie Braje is a Brooklyn based poet. She is the Programs Director of The Poetry Society of New York, the co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of Milk Press, and a Poetry MFA candidate at Brooklyn College. Her work has appeared in The Minnesota Review, The Nottingham Review, Brooklyn Poets, Vagabond City, Waccamaw, Bridge Eight, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a 2019 Brooklyn Poets Fellowship and a 2020 Mineral School Artist Residency.
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GOOD VIBES TONIGHT
Music and Illustrations by:
MJ LENDERMAN
GOOD VIBES TONIGHT
MJ, ”Jake,” Lenderman’s latest single “Good Vibes Tonight,” comes as a spirited companion piece to his most recent release, a three track EP titled “Lucky.” In Lucky, we witness similar songwriting and sensibility, where the overall sense of loneliness, its poetic overstatement and callback to country heartbreak, renders the introspective voice more universal. At times, we even smile at its severity, when he calls out “it never ends when you’re alone.”
Good Vibes Tonight, a single which Jake said was based on the illustration featured below, titled “On Top of The World,” takes itself less seriously, delivering a portrait of a person whose fleeting elation still feels somehow lonely. A result that is so specific to the storytelling of MJ Lenderman.
Listen to “Good Vibes Tongiht”:
SELECTED DRAWINGS
MJ Lenderman, “Most of The Time When People Say,” 2020.
Follow MJ:
Instagram: @douggy_lemzBand Camp: https://mjlenderman.bandcamp.com
Bio:
Michael Jordan “MJ” Lenderman is from Asheville, NC. He writes songs under his own name and is involved in various music outfits including Wednesday, Jail, Cheap Studs, and Slugly. Recently, Lenderman has attempted twice to write short fiction. Both attempts have been abandoned. In addition to music and words, Lenderman likes to draw pictures with pens or permanent markers. Above everything, MJ “Jake” Lenderman enjoys watching NBA Hardwood Classics on YouTube.
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CREATIVE PROMPTS
As a part of our weekly series “Creative Prompts,” we asked poet and illustrator, Aurora Bodenhamer, to create a series of prompts for artists looking for inspiration while indoors.
Email your responses to thequarterlessreview@gmail.com and Aurora will pick her favorite to be featured on our site the following week. Responses can be interpreted across all disciplines.
Email your responses to thequarterlessreview@gmail.com and Aurora will pick her favorite to be featured on our site the following week. Responses can be interpreted across all disciplines.
AURORA’S RESPONSE:
I’ve always enjoyed reading work that feels genuine or even ‘too personal’ - like peering into a diary or someone’s shitty tumblr from 2010. Recalling memories and rekindling the emotions that accompanied them in order to retell a story, is part of my process. I try to write from an emotion and most of the time it’s just general mania. I wrote these prompts to crawl back into my own memories. They also just entertain me.
-
God wants to know why you deserve to be in heaven - you only get 180 characters.
- You’re applying for a job at Pizza Hut.
- You have been given a small loan of 50 million dollars to open an amusement park. How did you pitch the park?
- You married your high school sweet heart and realized you made a mistake.
- You just found out you ate your twin in the womb. What do you think they would’ve been like if they were here today?
About the Project
TQR, or The Quarterless Review, began in March of 2020 as an attempt to provide a free digital space and weekly publication for artists to share, perform, and collaborate in repsponse to the mandated isolation and economic fallout of the pandemic.
In conversation with over 100 different artists and performers, spanning the length of 20 issues, our digital review has since evolved into a multifaceted digital journal and internet archive, working to amplify the work of emerging and experimental artists who take bold risks in form and challenge the boundaries of genre.
TQR has since moved from the digital sphere into print and in-person events, with live readings and performaces hosted in L.A, N.Y.C and Philly and our imprint, Tiding House, which publishes our bi-annual arts publication by the same name, books, and other printed ephemera.
With the help of our contributing editors, TQR is able to release columns that premiere on our site throughout the month, completely edited and directed by artists. If you are interested in collaborating with us as an editor, learn more here.
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We are currently closed for submissions. Please check back in Spring 2023 for more information.
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The Quarterless Review is interested in publishing art across all genres, including, but not limited to, poetry, short story, illustration, photography, visual art, music, video, conceptual art, cultural criticism, review, et al.
At TQR we are comitted to publishing diverse voices, amplifying emerging and experimental artists whose work may be considered “outsider,” or against convention.
We encourage you to submit multiple works at one time. If you are a writer, we ask you to attach an audio file of your submission being read aloud to accompany the text. For an example of this, look here.
Please notify us to withdrawl your submission, if your work becomes accepted for publication elsewhere.
To submit, email your submission to submissions@thequarterlessreview.com with the genre of your submission somewhere in the subject line. Alongside your work, please attach a brief artist bio (including information like your name, where you are located, what your focus is right now, where your work can be found etc.) and any associated handles/projects/websites you would like to promote.
If your work includes video or audio, we prefer to receive the raw audio/video files. If your work is already uploaded to a platform, we ask that you attach the embed links to your email. For more information about this, email Sarah at sarah@thequarterlessreview.com.
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Emily Costantino︎ emily@thequarterlessreview.com
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︎ isabel@thequarterlessreview.com
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Fiction Reader:
Ruby ZuckermanIntern:
Ivy LockhartContributing Editors:
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© THE QUARTERLESS REVIEW ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
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© THE QUARTERLESS REVIEW ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
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