Blue Christmas

The title of one of the most pleasurable Criterion Channel collections which are otherwise often subpar...I also like Noir in Color, but that's just me. Michelle (acupuncturist) said a few weeks ago that we are one month behind seasonally, so while it is in almost March that we are experiencing for the first time in this year's cycle the promised snowstorms of Februaries past I am feeling very holiday-style December internally, and thinking about her:

Emanuelle Devos as Faunia, girlfriend to the eldest son in A Christmas Tale (2008), or as the Criterion article accompanying the film puts it, "an outlier looking in".

sunshine when she’s gone

The sun can always come back out, trees can always at least be spoken to, or rather, coaxed into engagement, given that they have hollows instead of tongues. I took a photo this evening of a tree stationed along the border of Tompkins Sq park in the periwinkle dusk and called it a Lorax moment…I loved that book so much as a child, and I also understood from the start that the enmity and righteous negativity within it was not my own, and so I didn’t "eat" it, just as I didn’t need to eat the second bread I’ve made in two days, this morning—what matters more so is the process of creation, of fulfilling a task set before me by some other, inner voice. When I was a baby, instead of the Lorax, I ate Clifford. I nibbled at his big red blob. As I was baking earlier I was listening to the various songs I’ve been attached to lately, including the one below by Bill Withers, a former janitor who received the original Maurizio Cattelan Guggenheim toilet as a gift when this record went gold…the song is about the home we find within ourselves, it is clear from the male narrator’s perspective that his female partner represents home for him, and holds it in her person. He knows he doesn’t really know her, but more so her value in what it does for him…he misses her sun. I am touched, I guess, by him recognizing the eye-burning opacity of the feminine, and wanting more…wanting she who has left to return…and beam on, the way even Rupert Everett found Beatrice Dalle entrancing to go out with…or like a favorite short story of mine as a preteen, Cynthia Ozick’s The Pagan Rabbi, in which the organic entices the human into slipping away and merging with it...but just as you go forward, take care as to who is left when you’re gone.

A flat fact

Or a phrase that sticks out to me from the child robot’s search for the blue fairy in the Kubrick-Spielberg film A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001): she is valued as the one who can make him real. In traditional tellings and re-tellings of the Pinocchio story, the blue fairy figure is always available for access and guidance. But what if she instead were not on-call, but took off on her own mission? 

The child robot, stewarded here by Jude Law, can only conceive of such a rupture as a shattering of precious porcelain, as a cruel rejection of his post-human succession by a false goddess, her visage shown crumbling on a Coney Island pier towards the movie's end. But for the fairy, who is never false, but simply withholding—perhaps it is this cracking open of her template that allows her to be whole again, and freer, she who coaxes the immaterial into true Being. 

The Yeats verses cited in the clip below, spoken into miraculous neon presence by the quasi-humanoid sentient machine that the child robot is consulting—the look of which very nicely foreshadows Hito Steyerl’s Factory of the Sun project years later, and so much more—are meant to be eerie and hypnotic. The original poem speaks of faeries as stealing away children, when indeed that is only the human way of understanding amid human destruction how the technic has historically transgressed against the veils of the etheric…and what happens then!

Kinships

Busy day. Then saw the Miyoko Ito show at Matthew Marks, loved it so much I bought the catalogue...Miyoko Ito and Betty Blayton are great, I feel a warm kinship with their work. Like I am collecting a small family: a little fur family of metaphysical painters.

carbonation

 

waters

 

sorry

Is it true that love means never having to say you're sorry, the rather tragicomic line that anchors Ryan O'Neal and Ali McGraw's relationship in Love Story (1970), or was the film just written by a man? 

Once Upon a Time in

Hollywood (2019), a profoundly weird movie that I am finally watching on French Netflix via VPN, about which there is quite a lot to say but I am of course feeling lazy. My favorite bit so far, because naturally I have been dragging it out, jumping between distractions, kicking my heels in attentional mud, is the gossipy Steve McQueen (Damian Lewis) part at the Playboy Mansion early on, which serves as exposition for the Jay Sebring-Sharon Tate-Roman Polanski romantic trifecta, of which it is suggested that McQueen was jealous. The puppeteering irreality of how that jealousy is conveyed, and of how every historically extant character—other than the composite duo of Rick Dalton (DiCaprio) and his stuntman in Brad Pitt—is designed to be inhabited like a boardwalk peep cut-out, constitutes peak 2020s uncanny. Tarantino's film is arguably a first deepfake-era movie: a chronologically pre but spiritually post-TikTok farewell movie to a pre-TikTok period, echoed in the dream sequence of The Souvenir Part II and Honor Levy's videos projecting her face on actresses’ bodies…or how just now, when I saw some photographs of Paglia joining Andy Cohen on Watch What Happens Live, also from 2019, I reflexively presumed they were fabricated.

McQueen’s actual life story, his experiences as a sailor and being on a chain-gang and also working in a South American brothel all before age 25, reminds me of Sabbath’s sojourns in Sabbath’s Theater (1995) and of Lucy Santé saying in a recent interview: I am passionate about certain types of space-time conjunctions…Valparaíso, 1952; Dar es Salaam, 1966; Brooklyn, 1933; Tokyo, 1905. If I have the right research tools, and I can incorporate randomly found references, such as photographs, newspapers, theater programs, train schedules, telephone directories, then I can insert myself into that world and write about it. Or, like Tarantino, you can do all that research, to a high-gloss, sun-kissed tee, and then insert in "Rick Dalton", a mash-up protagonist through whose watering eyes you drill out space for your own point of view. Such is the difference in Santé's and Tarantino’s styles, or between critic and artist. Adventuring McQueen ended up on the ground in ‘69 Hollywood’s conjunction void, suffering for it with his special fable-esque swagger, a suffering that…in Santé's framework, can then go ignored, if the textural details of a moment alone stir the archivist’s enthusiasm. Instead, Tarantino homes in on McQueen's desperation.

Santé's methodology is, in an ambient sense, Tarantino’s, but their vectors of contrast are important. The director finds himself in his work not only by getting place right—through granularity as a mechanism of memory’s mediation—but by getting place supra-right, getting place under his thumb, his terms...he wrangles the confusion that bygone conjunctions leave in their trail (think Dimes Square) by channeling more perennial shades of human experience…we are meant to oo-ah how Brad Pitt’s brand of dog food has campy 70s specificity, but equally, to enjoy how his seasoned approach to dog training is atemporal. The developmental swing from what were then major to now minor convergences or pockets in the continuum, as Santé refers to them, is compelling fodder, the stuff of, yes, cinema history—in the case of Valparaíso, being one of the cities where Jean-Louis Trintignant’s reformed lothario in My Night at Maud’s (1969 again) sowed his oats, like McQueen or Roth's Sabbath. The same might very well be true of Tarantino’s Mansonite Los Angeles, which was imaged already as it was "happening"—by, say, Robert Altman. It’s just a matter of who was connecting the dots, who was holding down the fort…that might be the crux of the deepfake exercise, as a fundamental attenuation or valve-braking of perceptive control, as rewrite upon rewrites, where exaggeration (like those blur-fragments where the AI fries itself—where we see virtual materiality come through) is ultimately what gives away the truth. Theory of the glitch, Pierre Huyghe, etc. 

white tulips

Instead of daisies, this week we have white tulips, signifying purity and innocence, yes, but in greater relevance to my personal framework, forgiveness and also, new beginnings. On the drive downtown with my father and dog tonight, bookending our ride uptown on Friday, I did much forgiving from the quiet within, particularly a forgiving of my soul…for situations my soul asked to put me in, to learn something and that did not cause it suffering—for the soul feels no pain—but which abraded my ego or personality matrix, perhaps necessarily, but even so, its consequences warrant forgiving i.e. acknowledgment. My teacher says that spiritually "up-leveling" (*) or internal growth can seem easy until you reach a point where you are asked to forgive…that is where it gets real dicey. She spoke today about forgiveness as for-giving: meaning that we give back the energy of those who have "wronged us" for them…because we recognize their innate divinity and respect them too much not to return what is theirs, not to discern their dharma from our own…if we are skillful, we may do so directly but better yet, we pour this energy into the earth, which is asking to absorb it, towards healing (theirs and ours). When we give back to the earth the challenges of human existence, that is how the earth learns to create medicine for us and for those challenges…medicine that takes shape via plants and animals; flora, fauna, and criaturas in between. 

Such is the cyclical nature of forgiveness and blessing-recompense. Here we can recall a quote from Simone Weil's Gravity and Grace (1947) that I believe had been circulating widely a few months ago: It is impossible to forgive whoever has done us harm if that harm has lowered us. We have to think that it has not lowered us, but has revealed our true level. Does Weil mean that these situations of revelation do not warrant forgiveness, hence its impossibility? If so, then what she appears to be saying is that we cannot forgive when there is nowhere to give the energy back, having received it for and of ourselves. But might it not also be the case that the "true level" (*) that has been discovered through harm done unto us might also be our capacity for forgiveness—showing us that we are well capable of recognizing boundaries, detaching cords, purging what is not ours, at core. In this we may heed Marianne Williamson's famous (hilariously sincere?) words: Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. The tulips are white, clean, but not absorbent, they are saturated enough as is, and though I bought them with buds closed earlier this morning—on my table they now bloom as large as light itself.

Tartarus daily

When I shared my coffee grounds with a friend a week ago (I do this with friends almost every day) he said they looked like souls relegated to Tartarus: the straits of hell where human spirits are left…swimming? Constance Debré swims every day, I read in an excerpt of Love Me Tender, her newly translated book, where she writes about her sinewy back muscles, saying without saying it that swimming is a way to harden her heart, to brace her more feminine emotions that certain choices—good choices, in a sense—have also made near impossible to endure. When I swam every day, which was from this time last year through the past fall, I felt my back becoming whittled and more masc and like Constance I enjoyed the feeling...but also, my sinuses and auditory canals clogged up with chlorine, and my hearing deteriorated further, so I returned to daily yoga and let my outline soften once more. And what my friend called Tartarus in my coffee I tell him reminded me of my paintings, which are as Venusian (watery) as I am, this is how I describe them:

I typically begin a piece by delineating a structure, introducing "light" and "matter" through tonality and form to lend each composition an individuated meaning. I paint mood, but mood only as it can be pinned down, I paint the aspects of our inner lives that are willing to be mapped, to be shown expanding and contracting over a painting’s genesis. I am curious about how artworks, like people, become "themselves," how they attain actualization or embodiment, and so I chase down fleeting feelings and ephemeral experiences, aiming to make them physical fact. In painting I enter a trancelike state, deploying color, gesture, and cultural tokens to translate where I am in the middle of a maelstrom. I am, in Amy Sillman’s terms, a processual ‘draw-er’, building ineffably from inside out as movement and moment carry me forward.

the finish line is where

A lot happened today but also not really and furthermore I cannot quite tell you what the days are. All the signals have been mixed up, like timelines collapsing in on themselves. There are the movements of our swiftly tilting planet and then there is the internal metronome ticking on ahead and somewhere between them, the truth of their synthesis. 

My father was trying to talk to me about Nord Stream and the Sassoon Codex and would I wear an Apple Watch, subjects in which he assumed I would have a marginal interest but I really do not care. I’m afraid I’m too fixated on transformation and ascension to go beyond briefly acknowledging such passing episodes in regular life, even as I must observe their larger patterning—it is cultivating light in and of and through me that requires most of my focus now. And when he spurned the meditation I put on in the car driving uptown I was reminded to accept that this practice need not include anyone else…

I have not been feeling very social these past few days, or I am social only as it relates to my art, calling up friends, talking to people about it, trying to divine my ongoing and forthcoming concerns. On the phone with Rachel this afternoon I explain to her seven year-old baking buddy what it means to be dignified. I am thinking about the durational and sculptural impulses that have been running across my paintings, like strobes, I want to burst through the two dimensional. When he asked me what I was up to I told my dad I am doing a great deal of inner work, to which he replied, how do you know when you’re finished…

He was joking—laughing at the process itself, because it is so alien to his own and because he fully recognizes I never will be, that my nature is to be relentless, the same way I have difficulty stepping back from my terra-cotta maquettes even when my teacher has declared them ready for drying. There is always an elsewhere to reach in our art, and in consciousness, sometimes it is the elsewhere that is most familiar, and sometimes for that very reason it’s the hardest to detach from, suddenly returned again to this large, confusing Stratford-upon-Avon, world-upon-worlds.

song: Return Again (2005)

Mrs. dinosaur (Delphine)

In Stolen Kisses (1968), which doesn’t even read like a real movie but a caricature of one, or perhaps that is only because the present I am rewatching it in is one of constant caricature, Delphine Seyrig’s character is so plastic and feather-light, like an Estée Lauder perfume whose presence is heavy in concept, but in practice, filmy, odorless—sans charge. Delphine has her usual sparkle playing a slender, well-kept petite-bourgeois, a superior woman, the wife of a shoe store boss. Only she can save a movie in which Doinel somehow loses all his sex appeal, he is at that earnest age (20) when sensuality is often comically struck out of men, despite their pursuit of it; he is graceless, naive, floppy—even Leaud’s considerable charm, the foundation of his narrative, is waning. It wears his viewers down, whereas Delphine is able to breathe something back in.

my "core"

One thing about Leonora Carrington, according to her niece and to Katy Hessel, is that she really knew who she was, meaning she wholly occupied her core. One thing about me, according to a Celtic mystic I last saw several months ago, is that I am still working towards core-occupation. Chipping away at this "stumbling block"—which is only really an inframince—I am now, hopefully, nearly there. 

but i'm not above

kinda unhinged novelty performance if you consider expression, range of motion, context, etc. my teacher does say that love is also seeing where someone is at on the soul level, meaning from a neutral non-corded perspective, and walking away...because to give them more of your energy is not truly love if their system is not able to accommodate it. 

sculpture 3 (where trouble melts like lemon drops)

Insights from sculpture class, again:

- My teacher explains why it does not matter if our works are exact replicas of a model, in this case of Giacometti's Head-Skull (1934), tacitly evoking Benjamin as he maintains that it is capturing something of the essence of the original form that is the goal, because essence is why we still care about Praxiteles done a thousand times over, he says: when the germ is so potent, we can have copies of copies of copies, and the magnetism will still be there...what he is talking about, I quickly realize, is the special frequency of certain artistic energy signatures, templates whose resonances are enduring because they contain within them a spark of the total, the godly, the numinous, however you'd like to put it. As my other teacher (Maryam) said today, the reason we are often called to work with flowers and the natural world is because their templates cannot be corrupted by the human ego...and when we are unlearning ego encoding to serve as vessels for the divine, which isn't always simple or pretty, these organic templates help to guide us past the mental, into true knowing...into essence.

- Mulling over the thought that painting is a kind of ventriloquism, where the artist has something distinct to say and it is brought out of him through the conduit of materiality, technique—the doll's speech—to animate the doll, or the physical surface. Even as the painter might not know what the doll will say before word passes through him and out of her, he is still initiating an experience of digestive transference. Ironically, with sculpture, the doll figurine metaphor falls off because clay is already this deeply living thing—alive just as color is living but without necessarily requiring great animation, the way we stir pigment into oil into mass. How I work with clay is that I ask it what it needs from me. I listen to it breathe. I do talk to color while I'm painting to learn what to do next, but these conversations transpire entirely without thinking—in a very rapid pre-cognitive language. I barely "make" decisions about color so much as act upon them, which is a bit crude, I know. I would refine this method further yet the intuitive dimension is my scalpel and what I am refining. But I am also learning the language of clay and going slower now. 

Candy & Giacometti

Candy Darling (who should need no introduction) is known for saying on the verge of death, or at least not long before hers, something like: I’m so bored I could die…a sentiment later parroted by Kristen Johnson’s spot character Lexi in Sex and the City as she proclaims New York’s death, and falls out the window to meet her own. Candy is also known for saying—

You must always be yourself, no matter what the price. It is the highest form of morality.

I think that both those things combined are what the artist Alberto Giacometti is relaying in this hammy clip from Stanley Tucci’s Final Portrait (2017), which was also, perhaps, Armie Hammer’s near-final acting project:

Waiting

Crossing over into consciousness, I’m feeling fulcrum-y this morning or as I used to tell my parents, stretching from my crib: I’m waiting…I’m waiting for the sun to come UP!  

I wait for as long as it takes. Ain't no sunshine when...

It is not an understatement, I don't think, to say that Luca Guadagnino's sun-stained adolescent romance film Call Me By Your Name (2017) changed what cinema meant to my generation, or certainly to the "normal people" I went to high school with, introducing to them—and to the Reddit-brained—cinema consciousness, creating will-to-difference (in the end, also an exercise in conformity), where before there was mainly shame. Difference came in through the film's cautious, very diligent and stylized approach to emoting which complemented the migration of Tumblr screencap "aesthetics" to the more immediate pictorial hyperloop of Instagram, alongside the rise of niche streaming platforms like Filmstruck, and production studios like A24. (It paid off, too, in allowing Guadagnino to pursue current projects like setting an adaptation of William S. Burroughs' early novel Queer on stage instead of in a physical location, and with entirely non-cinematic references).

Rewatching the film recently, I follow Timothee Chalamet's child body and remember how it used to be my body and that his child's longing used to be my longing and because I have grown with this movie and seemingly it with me I feel less like Chalamet's Elio and more so like Oliver, Armie Hammer's character, nearing 24, doing battle with the world. What battles, anyhow? For the feminine side of duality represented in Elio, the battle resides in his waiting—like Penelope for Odysseus, or the princess who needs her knight to speak (that Elio’s parents seed as a symbolic device from Marguerite de Navarre's Heptameron), or Persephone anticipating her few days of freedom, or Eurydice lost to eternity. He waits for the sun—Oliver is glorious, tanned, beaming Apollo—to come up (and when he does, after they’ve slept together, I wanted to make sure that you’re still hard Elio tells him, in giving the briefest blowjob, a reversal of their waiting dynamic). 

Masha Tuptisyn writes about Call Me By Your Name as a film founded on anticipation, on hoping and desiring as active verbs that extend into time through the drumming fingers of the camera frame, the score, Chalamet's performance. Tupitsyn observes how Elio waits for Oliver with weltering eyes and a crumpled torso in a special, designated place, and that because he has a place to wait, he has a portal into another timescale, that of the story within a story, where his relationship with Oliver can be stretched past platonic bounds, where their script can be edited and re-edited as chronology is given over to the kairotic. This portal is opened through the upended "durability" (rather than, in Guadagnino's vocalization, "ephemerality") of the filmic material, through a "divine accident" (Orson Welles): an all-green still, a surreptitious lab "fuck-up" that marks the conclusion of Elio's grave wailing wait, prefiguring a turning point in the plot-line. 

Tupitsyn evokes how Guadagnino's film charmed viewers as a window onto that very thing in our culture that we are perhaps aware of being hammered out to an abstraction, but struggle to articulate: the slow, still beauty of Elio's singular longing is a state fundamentally antagonistic to a world of rapid, ceaseless gratification, distortion, and distraction. How long does this cinematic window last—only the length of the film? It is a window in real life, too. Strange how few people I knew in their forties who watched the movie "got" it, and yet they were the ones who witnessed, who had lived through, its (pre-AIDS) before. They told me they were disturbed by the folding limbs of Elio’s child and Oliver’s no longer child bodies, that the camera’s choreography did not shake them to core, but that maybe if they were my age it could have. It was almost a rebuke, their rejection of the window, of its light and all the textures that the light revels in. It is a film that retains much through the most minimal touch, whereas, outside of art, we are predisposed to say little with a lot.

My first round seeing Call Me By Your Name was with my friend Adrien at the Paris Theater, the year I was working in DC. I was back in town for the holidays, and afterwards we snuck into the bathrooms at The Plaza, full of tourists, and had Scandinavian coffees and complained about our parents. It was a Friday afternoon, almost Sun-down, the Sabbath hour. When I returned home to those parents for dinner, and crumpled my body on the floor as Elio did his, they could not understand my devastation, why I was still bawling…from only a movie…I thought it was a religious reaction, to some of the motifs in it I had not previously seen on film, or to the longing that it encapsulated…but more likely it was grief in the face of the window’s open and close—which is also, grief in the face of embodiment as severance from light-source, grief because it can be so hard to commingle in body when you are used to commingling in light: that is what Elio and Oliver began by doing—light is the delta of their synergy—and that was how I arrived in the world. And as a baby, I was always waiting for the sun to collect me, to come fetch me back into its orbit.

With this latest revisit, older, more attuned to light-work, I could not experience Call Me By Your Name in my body, it failed to linger like that, and in this, I felt relief, relief at having developed past the non-cosmic nuances of it: past the hemmed-in-ness of youthful want, past Elio's valences of appetite, though never past the landscape, the natural environment, the atmospheric elements that carry the film so—that help renew it into fresh being. In a sense, the movie is a dusty, wind-feathered tent for the soul, warm and well-pitched, with routes in from several sides (polyglot mélange that it is, audially), it is perfect in the way that an amuse-bouche is always perfect, meaning in a way it shyly regrets. Guadagnino's work invites a winding-back to longing that as it and its audience mature also facilitates a continuous goodbye-to-self, as a waiting place where we, too, might encounter our Olivers, not, as it was for Elio, our objects of lusted-after futures, but husks of persons, like grasses, now gone (Later! being his trademark—Apollonian—expression).

song: Falling From Grace, by The Gentle Waves (2000)

The Dreamer Archetype

 

Pére Seltzer

attending a magazine reading tonight where, as usual, people of all genders peddled their Girl Literature—their on-accident écriture feminine that more often than not elides the temporality of quantum in-betweenness that is responsible for the exigency of elliptical Girl Voice to begin with—I became resolved to compose something else. a something that would be, if not the Boy Literature of prior cusping points (like David Foster Wallace), way-station releases en route to, or in the shaky aftermath of, massive societal discord, than at least A literature of man, like Peter Selz's New Images, a literature from man's vast historical perspective, not quite The Kindly Ones but nonetheless: adult, non-embarrassing non-flimsy non-flighty panoptic mystical but also the strong and silent type the type with mettle a literature dulcet but firm. 

let's see how long that ambition lasts, how it will come to contradict itself.

mug diary

life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage is an Anaïs Nin quote I twirl 'round in my head from time to time after spending whole years, specifically 2015 to 2017, and also in 2018 and 2019, staring at it on a poster every week as a doctor injected gel through the nodes of my mesh qEEG cap...waiting for our sessions to begin. I would say I am only now consciously alighting on the courage Nin refers to, even as I do believe it has always been with me, part of my character, the very thing that helped me to endure those sessions; the poster was there to corroborate it. but in recent years, as I have come to define my makeup more deliberately, and qualities I once considered inherent seem increasingly controvertible, subject to choice, courage must be a stance of intention—a costume that I wear with purpose, in what is called "sacred adornment". 

Nin's courage is, like that of the performer Loie Fuller, a voluminous garment in which to dance towards freedom...with which to embrace the world. funny, too, because I have often confused the axiom of courage that Nin formulates here with another adage from her stereotypically more serious contemporary, Eleanor Roosevelt: the future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams. this quote emanates from the outer center of a pink mug I have had for ages, its surface so faded that the text has all but disappeared. my uncles Mark and Avi bought it for me when I couldn’t have been more than six years old and I remember its handle being uncomfortably large for my child hands. when I did resort to using it, I was compelled to ruminate a bit on potential dreams and fledgling beauty, and how a relation between them, according to Roosevelt, syllogistically guarantees futurity. 

Nin, by contrast, starts with the question of future, with the proportions of a life for which a person works, and then traces its source back to courage. courage spills from present over into future as, in Roosevelt's American tradition, dream becomes destination. I have a pack of First Lady playing cards focusing on her, while people are always telling me, like Emily of Emily in Paris, to read Nin's diaries; at this point, I've only read Collages (I think). Mark and Avi used to live in Gramercy Park but now they live in Fort Lauderdale, in a house by the beach with cold tile flooring and an Alexanduhh Kaldaah sculpture they commissioned for the pool deck from a guy in New Jersey. the first occasion—that I know of—when I received a message in a mug via coffee grounds was when I visited the then brand-new house. 

the message was inscribed in the Biblical script that filled my youth, abstracted to suggest not only letters from an arcane language but, according to one interpretation I was offered, a life of international travel as I was about to embark on, leaving for school in London. I would be migratory, like Anaïs Nin, like a bird, I would set up miniature pillars of stability, and then roam between their caverns. after moving from Havana to Paris to New York, from one husband to another, and back again, Nin finally decided to live and die in Silver Lake, Los Angeles, in a mauve-tinged cabin built for her by Eric Wright, Frank Lloyd's grandson and the step-sibling of her ultimate companion. now Eric's son resides there with his family. wherever I come to live, wherever I culminate or find a future, I hope it is expansive, right-sized and beautiful. and that later, where and when I find an end—though, as is the nature of this age, we might then be dealing with infinities—I hope to do so with courage and in dream.

picture: (top) my first set of revelatory coffee grounds; (bottom) from Emily in Paris season 3, as captured by my friend Patrick.

dawn's early light

balzac's body double

working on his statue of Honoré de Balzac, a scandalizing and drawn-out commission begun not long after the writer's death, the sculptor Auguste Rodin journeyed from his studio near Paris to Tours, Balzac's hometown, in search of body doubles for his subject, "sacred mirrors" in a physical sense. Rodin hoped to find models with jowly features, men who could literally flesh out a local "type", one that Balzac had depicted after his own image and also, as a novelist, sought to transcend—by reaching them, Rodin believed he would be able to conjure the man himself. 

such conduits for artistic transference included a conductor named Estager, of whom Rodin made the following bust in terracotta, on view at the Met. despite having a general awareness of Rodin’s work and his Balzac project, I encountered Estager's portrait specifically for the first time in this week's sculpture class. the bust is a finely rendered piece, rounded and recessed with precision. the texturized object is the result of Rodin taking a wet-cloth to the clay surface, rubbing the skin all-over after casting it from a life-mask. 

the sculpture also has an opening at the back, a hole set midway between Estager's occipital and parietal lobes, like a psychic door hollowed out for thought-form passage or an inversion of a tree's outer burl. who among us hasn't had that happen? as a study in "essence", my teacher thinks it an ideal example of what the medium can do, how sculpture can breathe with "all that is", as another teacher of mine might put it. I am inclined to think so, too.

hardly recognize me i'm so

time: that to which I used to be most attached, when, having lost so much time, I tried very hard to outrun it. that's probably also why, browsing around for art history books as a kid, I was immediately taken with the scholarship of Pam Lee, her prescient work on Chronophobia, fear of time, as a condition of postwar art in particular. I love Pat Steir's distinctions between kronos and kairos, born of the same era of thought and tantric practice, when time was the silent partner in hippiedom, which believed itself exempt from, or operating perpendicular to, its bylaws. we obviously have a contested and "multiplicitous" conception of time now, as any Urbanomics book will hand feed you and any Semiotext(e) work will skirt round saying altogether. Masha Tupitsyn, for example, has confronted the subject head on, meaning through films, meaning through images, which is how the French (Proust; Cinema, de notre temps; Stiegler, Bergson) have always mastered time, by canvassing its ceding to and from creation. there's the TimePassages astrology app and I like this song—"interpreted by Marlene Dietrich"—on the topic, too, which is about Pete Seeger, and today's dessicant-packed New York, and the world of the pre, and the reality of the post, about accepting time, warps and all. Marlene is rather duck-faced by that point (1972) but does emote a tender indignation. it's very human to see her like this, pure talking head, floating there, nearly shouting! when did time escape her grasp?

I’m nothing in between

That is all I have to say to anyone today! I’m feeling a bit like Jessica Williams in The Incredible Jessica James which does have a happy ending…but begins with a series of rejection envelopes…for now, though:

supermarché!

I didn't watch Noah Baumbach's White Noise (2022). My friend Max watched it and said it was a crude, disappointing perversion of de Lillo, and took down his Instagram Story showing the film's title reflected in the glint of his phone camera almost as soon as he put it up. Even though it was a weeknight, I told him he was our "Weekend Warrior": his efforts were heroic, in that because he watched the film, no one else has to.

"Like a good neighbor", though, meaning as insurance against, heaven forbid, complete critical surrender, I did read the Anthony Lane review of White Noise in the New Yorker, thinking as I always do when reading Lane about the time that, early in the MeToo era, he got in trouble for bemoaning Lola Kirke's baggy costumes in Gemini (2018)—which I can only imagine, having also not seen that movie, were distressing because she had for a co-star the never not immaculate Zoë Kravitz. Moreover, Gemini followed on the heels of Kirke's loose bravura arc over Mozart in the Jungle's final seasons. Lane must have been missing glammed-up, hirsute "Lola": it can hurt to see the voluptuous dampened. I looked to his write-up of White Noise for this same sort of mildewed meta-comedy. And delivering on that prospect, Lane remarks: because the film is so delightfully ridiculous, what Baumbach needs is a musical A-S-A-P. 

Which is how I discovered, basically on accident, that White Noise concludes with a dance number staged inside a suburban supermarket. Supermarket choreography has been an obsession of mine since I was a nine year old ballet student, when one day, my dance teacher neglected to bring in her usual records and instead played us tapes she had bought at a grocery store. Word of this "newfangled" supermarket music was quick to spread across her classes: it was something special and anomalous, a thrilling departure from our pianoforte monotony. I'm not sure that I ever knew or cared to know what kind of music it really was, only that it possessed a mythic charge, representing a release from muffling tradition into the pure freedom of pop commerce. It tendered the suggestion that, through a shared investment in sculpting meter into form, low American culture could merge frictionlessly with high European classical movement. In this it served the ontic purpose of validating our project as present-day dance students. 

And so, each spring when my teacher would collect ideas for an all-ages showcase, I would eagerly propose creating from the supermarket music a supermarket ballet: I pictured elaborate set designs and ensemble groupings, in the style of the Astaire and Rogers joints I was watching and would later discover in Busby Berkeley. My teacher rightfully dismissed the "supermarket ballet" as an impractical fantasy, for which one would need Baumbach's Netflix-level resources. But as a dream, it was deep-seated enough to never leave me, and everywhere I looked for it, I saw traces of its high and low odd coupling: in what was once the "most expensive photograph in the world", Andreas Gursky’s 99 Cent Diptychon (2001), and in sewn works by Tschabalala Self set in bodegas, on display in London and at MoMA PS1 (2017, 2019). A balletic take on the supermarket in life or in art, means an enchantment of the everyday, like any number of tales we construct around commodity-objects, as Roland Barthes explores in his essay collection, Mythologies (1957), bemoaning the availability of cherries all year-round, because where is the pleasure in too much plurality?

The supermarket, and its bodega, deli, and off-license iterations, are alternately intimate and impersonal microcosms of the globalized mass marketplace. As a metonym for an ever renewing capitalist system, the supermarket has been balletically thematized in pieces ranging from Lucy Sparrow’s 2016 felt sculpture reproductions of dry goods, installed in an adorable storefront simulation, to Gabriel Orozco’s Guggenheim commissioned Asterisms (2013), for which the artist collected and arranged the detritus of those goods, and that system, in aisle-like concatenations. I have trailed the genre across multiple countries and viewpoints, encompassing the literature of both supermarket patron in Updike’s short story A&P, assigned for English class my freshman year of high school, and supermarket employee, in Sayaka Murata’s popular Convenience Store Woman (2016), a copy of which I stumbled on while staying in a friend's attic guesthouse in rural Romania.

At university, I knew people who had worked at Tesco—where, the rumor went, everyone was always "fucking in the back rooms"—and people who owned stock in Tesco and people who stole from Tesco, too. With my gig of comically few hours a week pouring wine for graduate students, I was probably closer in an archetypal regard to the literary British loner with a supermarket side job from Claire Louise Bennett’s coming-of-age novel, Checkout 19 (2021). When stateside and low on cash, I am always quick to contemplate applying for a role at Trader Joe's—the ultimate smiley, Disney Institute of Customer Service supermarket—before remembering to what extent it would entail talking to strangers with unfeigned enthusiasm. It is the supermarket’s role as a forum for exchange and circulation between people that gives whatever in us hankers for balletic union a space to be poeticized, as in certain music videos, and movies that are virtually music videos, like that scene from American Honey (2016) when Sasha Lane and Shia LaBoeuf find "love in a hopeless place", or Timothee and Taylor’s copy your homework / change it a little version for their Bones and All (2022) meet-cute. If only NBC Superstore were so elegant.

The supermarket ballet's creative promise also impelled me to commit to personal cinematic memory the poster for the indie film Cashback (2006) showing a white woman, generic but for being bare-breasted, standing in a blurred-out grocery aisle holding a basket. This poster once hung enlarged at my local Blockbuster, as if to keep employees on their toes. The woman's imperial pout, her huntress-like visage, was how I pictured Lady Godiva, or the goddess Diana: standing strong in her shopper's privileges. My friend Lily plans to write an "ethnography of Whole Foods", traversing different locations. The downfall of a Midwest Bro complaining about South Bronx grocery options this past summer had an operatic element. And recently, an account I have followed for a while, @boywaif, tweeted: I had a french professor who once said if you just did something like going to the supermarket and experienced it fully without the goggles of habit and categories you would go crazy with pure sense and joy. I think about it all the time. In a way this is all for him. Now enshrined in the iFunny meme graveyard, boywaif's nod to supermarket jouissance is excerpted alongside another tweet from someone's timeline that advocates treating the world like you are a "benevolent alien". 

Those two tweets, Lily's ethnography, and that nude poster each affirm the supermarket's designation as a site for romancing the real. In 2019 and 2020, I drew up a script for a moving image performance piece taking a "humoresque" approach to the original supermarket ballet. @boywaif spoke to the supermarket's saturation with choice, the glory of its offerings unveiled in totality only once conventions have been shirked, when we are ready to be truly tantalized, surrendering to the zing of the plenty. Is DeLillo the prophet of dancing beside cans of Goya beans, jars of JIF and Bonne Maman jelly? Only in the sense of singing language. Through description, writers synthesize the fantastic and the familiar, so that in Baumbach's hands, a family trip to the store becomes a white bread riff on magical realism. In this ex-machina sequence, he coordinates a rhumba across the supermarket's lite-brite mirage of iconized suburbia. It's not what I would do, necessarily, with that same material, but as far as proof-of-concept...Last night was an Instagram Story.

picture: Julie Christie in a London supermarket, 1965. Stars—they're just like us!

lines

As I said to a friend this week, rather in jest: New York City is about being on an even playing field with someone until you’re on a line and they’re on the list, and while you’re still making chitchat they’ve suddenly been waved through an event's entrance. A group of us were standing in the cold for a project “drop”, and though we each had people inside to recruit as our champions, we were wondering whether to abandon the effort, or to what degree this party, of all other possible parties, would be worth the humiliations that preceded it. Such negotiations are common fare for your average townie evening—they are the pre and post-Covid escape-room cinchers, the fun is in their simulation of difficulty, be it getting in or getting out. 

Among what I remember best from Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life (2016), the Real Housewives Reunion in four parts of mother-daughter duo Lauren Graham's Lorelai and Alexis Bledel's Rory, released by Netflix a decade after the original show went off-air, is a gag about hordes of people in Manhattan standing on long lines for seemingly trivial reasons. These lines are explicitly commercial in nature; they are not breadlines or lines for visas and airport security, the kind of lines that are compulsory, charged with mortal anguish; they are lines for Supreme and Apple stores before the launch of a novelty product, or for the next hybrid pastry descended from the "cronut". The kick and kink of lines of this stripe is their very pointlessness. As Steven Philips-Horst has observed, lines in New York are self-selected competitions, and with their overall aura of randomness and interchangeability, their demand on the endurance of a consumer class who is elsewhere shielded from enduring is the only thing which is not vague about them, a basic device to sweeten the summit, the at-last culmination inWe did it. And, look at all those suckers, who didn't stick with the given rules, who lost out because they took back their time and resisted debasement.

Lorelai and Rory, who at their prime emblematize "chatterbox" femininity, known for a zingy, spring-step approach to sentence-finishing conversational intimacy, are aghast that anyone would be patient enough to spend their days waiting to do anything—let alone to acquire trend objects. Their parent-child dynamic was forged through a sui-generis appetite for food, music, film, books, TV, consumed at regular intervals and in huge quantities. Whole wheat against a backdrop of Bush era "post-historical" homogeneity, Lorelai's runaway single mom in perpetual rebellion from her patrician Connecticut family gave ingenue-nerd Rory a wealth of cultural knowledge from which she derives her adult identity: that of girl reporter, investigating the illicit or cheeky behaviors of the elites she grew up resenting and, with her grandparents, also being. So, as a unit, Lorelai and Rory are used to both "sore thumb" living and being indulged by elites and non-elites who treat them sympathetically; they have attained synergy in sticking out, or a momentum that is so codependent it later hampers their ability to live separately. 

When Rory interviews those tired folk for whom the ritual anticipation of a nothing-burger item is itself a main activity, she encounters a material hunger reminiscent of her family dynamic, alongside a groupthink from which she believes they are exempted. That is, until it seems that Lorelai has managed to skirt the laws of lining up and secure those hybrid pastries after all. Every lady has her tricks. If those Supreme or Apple or cronut lines are unifying phenomena, designed to induce conformity, if they are roll-calls for techies or foodies or hype-beasts or any type of person with spare time and change, in nightlife conformity resides in an extreme, honed uniqueness, or existence in surplus or excess of a mean. There are a few strains of luck that will help you bypass a line for a standards-having party: being rich (or rich enough), connected, powerful, beautiful, or else just different and discerning. Another friend and I were once let into a club, having been left to linger for an hour on the curb as people possessing the more obvious of the cited traits streamed in, solely because a host was quizzing our fellow “hoi-polloi” on where he might be from, and my friend told him the correct answer, having heard him mention it earlier, seemingly out of earshot. 

As a fixture of nightlife, lines offer a lesson in noticing and being noticed, and in the ways chance observation can congeal into temporary power. By daylight, this lesson is the same, only grubbier, because in nocturne life the gradations of status encoded in line etiquette are kept more ambiguous, open to haptic intervention. In non-wee hours, we are faced with tourist and residential tourist patronage, the Baedeker-esque beckoning of glossy venues and stores with a story. A Year in the Life coincided with the rise of the gig economy and pop-ups and umami tastebud frivolities that would be further entrenched by a post-covid TikTok-ification of the urban landscape, where any place can be a market, because someone is selling photographs of themselves in front of it. 

Lines are everywhere now for whatever is the latest thing to be had, and you can also pay people to wait in them on your behalf. The exception being contexts where, for better or worse, individuation is in practice, where the list that can't save you saves your experience from being one of flooding en-masse. Moreover—once you are in, is the outside not so easily forgotten?

picture: still from Christian Petzold's adaptation of the Anna Seghers novel, Transit (2018), set in a modern-day wartime.

Ming

Each of Ming Smith's photographs carries a special energy signature. Her images transfix: they are full of sound and light vibrating on the cusp of pure feeling. They have within their subtle makeup, among other things, ointment and resin and sandpaper. When more than one of the photographs inhabits a room, as in Smith's new MoMA "Projects" exhibition that opened today, the air becomes very dense, finely knit with alchemical play. The lifecycle of a Ming Smith image is freer than the fact of its "taking". Rather it's as if to get that shot in the dark, inside deep fission or balm or haze, she keeps the camera there in wait—subjects continue breathing—for us to visit with and for the photographed to stay in being.

on Janet Malcolm

As sometimes happens to the bushy ethnic female gone Manhattan metropole, in her way with prose Janet Malcolm was Presbyterian-lucid, like a softer (more big-hearted?) Gena Rowlands in Another Woman (1988). She was honest as steel and often similarly woolen—whereas I myself would rather watch Sandy Dennis flinch before making an incision, or Vivian Gornick’s wheels veer poetically off-rail with effortless, oil slick digressions, perfect punchlines to her adventures in rhetoric. 

Malcolm, on the other hand, was more constrained, as in, controlled. Whatever knowingness she shared with Joan Didion’s pipsqueak sangfroid quality was adulterated by a kind of librarian martyrdom. She wasn’t always starchy but once she landed on base camp Eileen Fisher, or began pairing 70s wire rim glasses with tweed blazers, it would take a certain shade of priest to envision her in the throes of desire. That her pet subjects were psychoanalysis, journalism, biography, photography, and people’s morals meant that Malcolm cared almost exclusively about what, in the twentieth century, were taken to be fertile practices, and she died in the early 2020s, just as that era was ending for real, its final bounty being harvested. 

As James Wood once put it, referring to her epic Plath-Hughes opus, Malcolm was the cat who licked clean the plate of a cultural milieu she barely outlived to inherit: an age that, by default, directed an amount of material and critical sway towards print magazines and midsize publishing houses that today seems not only baroque but chimerical. A childhood refugee from Nazism, Malcolm was inured, if not un-alert, to the cruelties of changing cultural winds, particularly in urban settings. Those things she did want to remember in their passing she would give clean definition, only to quietly create loopholes for more open understandings. There was always, in her work, a backdoor through which the dependably gimlet, cool-toned narrator might flee the heat of her own shadow, the too-muchness of staking one’s intellectual preoccupations.

Anyhow, I’ll leave Malcolm to the Boys. They need her most, having become far too Sabbatean.

it's serious! (yet another accidental Cookie Mueller tribute)

Girlfriend in a coma...I know, it's serious! (The Smiths, 1987)

+ 

A very serious cookie (Peek Freans advertisement, 1979)