Quick tune-up

How to reclaim your art practice from the wanderings of the evil eye…sharing in community to ward off further as It is Out on the Town right now:

Once you’ve gotten over your life as a Zucchini (inevitable passage point), listen to Frank Sinatra singing My Way about 500+ x a day. 

Bonus content: Three Coins in the Fountain (Dean Martin version, he needs redemption and calling on him can help do it!)

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Placeholder for future discussion of Howardena Pindell, Agent Orange, green juices at Gary Null's and car accidents. A Pindell I haven't forgotten, Songlines: Labyrinth (Versailles), from a 2018 show at Matthew Marks, Painting Now and Forever...

Reruns

After a little while, having turned in my thesis, writing feels good again, though it coincides with a wave of asphyxiation and despair surrounding my paintings and visual projects, very normal, and certainly helped by keeping the taxi light of language turned on. I am nonetheless as terrified as ever that it is the language light that people like me for, and that I will forever be catching up within the paintings themselves.

That said, my work is always and necessarily about potentials. In spiritual practice, potentials are both imperative (choose your own adventure) and misleading—once I trust and allow these to flower (knowing it is a choice, to allow), they often lead me skipping down the primrose path (borrowing from Mearsheimer on Ukraine...how cursed), to miss who people really are, seeing so very much who they could be, their full expanse. It is nice then, with people, to operate more from non-intervention. In art, though, at least the kind I do, you intervene, make things happen, produce. In that sense, potentials are ideal, they keep things rolling. Within the fixity of production, they enable the kind of perma-protean state I love. 

My truly favorite thing—a lot of people's favorite thing—is to move letters and lines and ideas around or across an open surface: a canvas, a digital page, in the realm of conversation, energetic propinquity, whatever. That is where I am at my best, most integrated. The serene agape of whittling a work down to a totalizing (totemic?) nub. Giacometti's ravenous thumbs, sculpting without end. 

So unsurprisingly I become agitated when, for reasons often celestial and providential, that surface grows musty or closed in, when a tenet of total freedom does not seem possible, or overwhelms while failing to lobotomize—as the way one ought to feel, for instance, during sex. Being in pursuit of that strain of half-liberated, half-lobotomized joy, downloaded from the skies in thanks, the lows are low and the highs high. Why not solve for the polarities within. Not that I even have a Big Joan and a little joan, per say. Too twentieth century! Today's splits are not spatial, but simultaneous. Repeating myself, on the same old tip, one walks about in equanimity, seemingly so neutral, with an inner life all the more congested. My Zoomer problem, and ours. How's that for vintage.

By spring—painting the outer in stripes starker and more vivid.

Rainbows

Rainbows are these days very important. It started about two weeks ago. Don’t yet ask me why, an early conjecture would be that some beyond are perhaps using them to communicate with us. Then there are the old symbolic meanings. What comes after the storm. An arc of hope with a fat hazy middle. Contours faint, usually we only get a glimmer. But now, a whole story. Of peaceability possible again, albeit somewhat at a distance. Auguring light. Leaving all shades of news aside, thinking instead of D. H. Lawrence, his first big novel, from 1915: unconceivable changes weathered, so much technological thrumping and still, the single human heart grows wild and through its reaches, generations go on…

Our spoons

Some questions. Is it that certain forms of socialization, concatenations of people, hello You meet You, no longer exist or that I and my fellows are at a remove from them. (Have I placed myself at a purposeful remove). What am I supposed to learn there. Old tweet of, who watches the watchers. Remembering Pigozzi from the papers of my childhood. Passive to everything. Taking it all in. Surely one day I would head to Ibitha…it all seemed familiar and aging I felt, Bah, who needs those games. Though as late as 2022 wondering why has Bob Colacello gone unadopted by the youth, but by the monied ones, yes already lest you forget, and in all other cases perhaps because of evils we’re not privy to. But Zoomers can sense things. Remembering the heroine in Barbara Comyns’ The Juniper Tree. Remembering Marianne, whose song “Morning Sun” I was dispatching to friends as usual in days prior.

To hold myself to

Haven’t worked for about a week over a month or so and maybe longer than that, in the proper way, I mean, with intention, writing yes but no not painting not the real stuff the stuff that matters and from which I endlessly run, procrastinate, redirect, inventing or rather asking the universe for filler tasks because I am terrified to get back on the bike and somehow Joan Mitchell is breaking my heart again, the fact of her, on top of which the displaced worry as to whether I have a heart worth breaking at all and when will it be for real though, falling in the rink Little Women style, with some non-imaginal non-lecherous authentic party. The Crown is coming up again so is Kimmy Schmidt and the Kino cigarettes song not yet feeling torturous but almost.

Manifold

Can’t stop thinking about the third secret of Fatima, so casually messianic though predating our full cognizance of that arc (ongoing) but to which everyone has, for the last few years, been unwittingly referring by ‘that secret third thing.’ The secret third thing being really…well, Russia, so the prophecy goes, and she is everywhere, in manifold private ways I need not explain, see for yourself, and in others that will soon perhaps become common conversation topics. Those steeped in US consciousness (retweets are not endorsements) think of Russia as the second thing (MAD, brinksmanship, proxy wars) and China as the since-awakened third, identifications that, real talk, already shifted years ago having been useful covers for a time in belying the true shallowness of oppositions, binaries pre-loaded. Such a switchover allowed the secret to begin to transcend material cording constraints and lend itself to subtler waves of emanation. And now it calls collect! A maypole, where networked axes triangulate at some tall yet half-hidden core. Meanwhile, listening to Kino and Shostakovich on loop.