Daphnis

Number one dad holiday mug. Friends who give us back to ourselves!

decision to leave (diet dew)

I am thinking about when Ram Dass had dessert. I am thinking about those things our teachers know without our telling. About a friend translating me live into Mandarin, and another friend: how extra that must have been. About those wishes sworn silently in hearts and great imperceptible voids. Especially cavernous in the cold moon thaw. There is nothing much to fill them. Yet. Waiting on the impossible. Open maps and gypsum minds. Tap tap hollow.

Are you empty or full. A question to ask always. 

Morningstar

This morning after one of those nights of half-sleep you could easily call fitful I woke up and thought, but indeed I am one of those princesses of 72nd St. Why should I always be denying / couching / on the run from that fact. Well but also, I am not. Many things like. It's difficult to explain the leaving amid the missing. 

Stupid space rocks

Fancy famous visiting artist (American, finally!) liked my stupid moldy bread space rocks, even took one with him. Told me about screen goo and his dead Philly psychic. A win for the week. 

Shirleys

Picking up The Great Fire again on plane and as always, when traveling (this time, to coincide with its accompanying a suddenly remembered writing piece), I feel the sudden loss of the early and interim years of young woman "development" on which the book comments. How they went by so quickly, and what did I do with them, and so much to do yet. One true perfect novel, perfect albeit of course pocked by its times. And with such face holes, a novel of “still…” By a Shirley to channel, mimic; a narration not conceived but induced. 

Bookmarking Ava’s Zen. She says: I think if you find yourself enjoying a moment, tell yourself “no teaching for the next hour.” You can then be student of the moment.

Smoke

More coffee photo thinking. To interpret and reinterpret. Reliance on external metrics. A friend searches for the word, Oracle, they say. Simple as that. I think this one is the individual and the unit. Or, with the suggestion of a smoke plume, one and then a few in mohawked succession, a journey by train. 

To see the world, however piecemeal, however hesitant, if only to understand in what are you participating. 

Andersson

Concerning Madeline Andersson’s film exhibition Degenerative Knowledge Production (Overgaden): if we are talking about ‘mind’ we are already behind. Or as my teacher said in a deleted tweet: The simulation is ending and an even more sinister one is beginning. Yet you have a powerful opportunity to exit altogether [sp.] Don't get distracted or you will miss the signs. The best anyone can do is help you find the door. But when it opens make sure you know what to do. Or as my friend said last night: too much thinking here (taps head), not enough here (heart)...

To be the lioness

Others seeking my approval for a change. Should I go on this date. Should the work be hung this way. Should I continue writing but that I contradict myself. Funny when it gets colder I can taste it more my happenstance companion at the specialty coffee Copenhagen cafe says regarding our fancy pour-overs. He doesn’t say this to me. I love all that transpires through approximations and speech across. Which is the fact of our times and loving this being what makes me an artist of them, I suppose. If that is enough. Since, some people say, it isn’t quite in the work. A matter of deduction, in all senses of the word. He is a regular there and can afford the coffee, in my case it’s merely that I can’t figure this currency out. And to not converge further. But he is correct, yes. However warm and rounded and smoothed I am in face and voice I do somehow try or naturally seem to maintain a cool so as to be more, sense more, eventually play and feel more. First equanimous. And then robust, that coffee term.

wordles

Things were happening out of order. For instance, a practicing of evil speech was preceded by its supposed effects of logistical disaster and emotional suffering. That is perhaps a retrograde's truer meaning—a going backwards that does not begin with but only ends in Word.

A Frequency Manifesto

In the near future's rejoinder to epochs past, history will be told in Hertz. 

We will measure all manner of events and actions, nouns and verbs, entities and objects, emotions and imaginings according to their corresponding audial emissions or frequencies, and other forms of resonance not always seen but felt. 

In daily life, we will look for tonal matches, complements and competing values at the inner and outer rings of things, through a comprehensive, sensorial awareness of the interplay between colors, words and waves of energy. This awareness will be referred to naturally and freely, as if there had never been another means of narrating cellularly networked connections among inhabitants of a living world. 

Those truths of existence which were once only implicit—that everything is energy, that, in a multidimensional weaving of timelines, strands appear and disappear and become integrated or understood based on vibrational encoding—will openly serve as the basis for new circumstances and ideas. This will be made possible by widespread cognizance of laws of signatures and One, but also, for example, through an immediate capacity for cymatic visualizations, advancing what Flusser described as our ocular image-screens and which serve as representations of existing meanings that can then be further cathected or activated via human attunement. 

(Human attunement refers to an organic trajectory in consciousness, not attained through the transmogrifications of the artificial and externally engineered, although that will be occurring simultaneously).

Images and text, symbols and signs: such civilizational master tools will be turned back on their wielders as dowsing devices geared in reverse. Alphabet is goddess is ____ [blank]. "Reading" for essence, essence being detected rather than "discovered," we animate with discerning fluency.

Notes

Attending countless art-adjacent talks relating to themes of care, interdependency, climate change, more-than-human experience, magic, alternative knowledges and practices of collectivity over recent years, I have often found myself disappointed by the alienation of what is said and spoken, encouraged and promoted, articulated with sophistication and varying levels of sincerity, through academic and material languages originating in traditions Western and non-Western, from concurrent and emphatically pivotal developments in contemporary mysticism and universal human consciousness that are transpiring in the invisible and etheric realms. 

That is a blanket statement, but it does seem to me that there is a preference in my professional circles, or at least in their adult versions, to engage with our moment solely by attending to its tertiary challenges (to ecology, the political economy) and mediating motifs (mechanisms of communication, rituals of presentism); to its overall and eschatologically depressive 'vibes'. To epistemically integrate the very real after-effects of solar flares, planetary transitions and epochal shifts is equated to the popularization of "astrology in an era of uncertainty," as in, interpretively reduced to 'woo for cope'. The turns and churns of these times thus become impossible to vocalize from a position of erudition, clarity and strength, that transcends -isms (doomer and otherwise) and buzzword cliches, that defies obligation to hermeneutical tidiness while nonetheless cohering with precision. Although of course such obstructions to eloquent expression do, like any, serve a metaphysically necessary purpose of dampening overwhelm in the face of too much "now".

And yet: there is no small number of colleagues with feet in both worlds. A weird one, but, McKenna's adage about strangeness was also Ralph Rugoff's. For those like myself who are on the younger end, discursive oppositions and supposed disciplinary disjunctions barely endure. In every Zoomer a spark of Giordano Bruno, to meet a paradigm of rapid absorption and assimilation. But information being "out there", and internalized "in here", is no guarantee of theoretical convergence. As ever, tracks run parallel without becoming perpendicular, in ways that (perhaps beneficially) foreclose a packaged avant-garde. For example, Ingo Niermann’s The Monadic Age, with its observational philosophy of a swing towards self-sustenance, self-sovereignty and micro-trend-based tribes, corresponds quite closely to the 2027 narrative arc, to the rise of 'rave' children prophesied by Ra Uru Hu through Human Design. Indeed, Niermann's volume and related 'Army of Love' project could be interpreted as that movement's academic apologia, if only we were not so bifurcated. 

That includes in how we tell our tales. Because what was once a drawn out indexical process of giving shape to story will become increasingly instantaneous, modes of documentation must reflect a growing frequency-reliant approach. 

PG

To practice, writing again. Remembering the book I found of Guston memories some years ago in Oslo, a book I did not buy and an experience I did not quite compute but that is circling back now with all things 2022. I don’t understand how the time is meted out (falsetto) but I do understand Guston and I do love him and wish perhaps that I was born not in mid morning but at night so I could be more nocturne than diurnal and paint on his clock, too. It’s silly to wish, I thought I was long past wishing until I wrote that out. Want is more like it and really in fact I don’t want, wouldn’t change a thing. The book was a paean collected from his friends and this morning accounting for the dregs of a water spill, necessary clearing spill upon my desk I found among survivors one of my little blue note cards, probably from late spring on which I had inscribed:

When you start working, everybody is in your studio—the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas—all are there. But as you continue painting, they start leaving, one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you’re lucky, even you leave.

John Cage to PG.

And beneath it:

Personal elaboration: first of all, not sure where “I” am always to begin with. And isn’t it, to be very old fashioned, a dialing of the radio…

Last year stranded me without Influence so I was forced to unlearn it or to be shaped by other things. I do think there are of course priors in the paintings but I am liking what Jeff Wall said in a recent recording: that all of art history is to be called upon at will simply as energies always contemporary, always alive and something from the past is as alive as its animated use value or currency of transformation in the now. This seems apt and always and I liked hearing it vocalized and I would like to enunciate that which fits the bill, comes to mind. 

Seasonal diet

McFlurry moment Ps & Qs. This week started off strong with one of those unexpectedly very good Sundays where I happened to prepare myself the whole morning for the evening’s conversations. I am thinking about vows. For instance in November 2022, watching Fanny and Alexander on a big comfy couch in the middle of Maryland hiding from everyone else I said to myself and on Twitter I would never again do a family Thanksgiving or a large family Thanksgiving the same way, in order to make that one more palatable, and the following year, pouf my grandfather is dead and we hold a funeral and a funereal catered meal at my cousins’ grandparents house. Presided over by a woman, their grandmother, who passed suddenly two weeks ago now and that’s that. I like to go to Germany on these occasions, it feels like the correct gesture of tonal shift. Ava says to meet the malaise by beading a friend a wooden bracelet and I think about the metaphor and I think over which friend. I make a new vow, not to be treated in certain ways any longer, not to be passive to things like ingroup behavior performed for my alienation and not to apologize for what is mine in all kindness, that is not a violation of someone else’s order, and is not equal to petty or attached. No mercy November being Xafya’s expression, an insistence: not be taken for granted and so on. Primary teachings as another social life cracks open. Giving thanks to you, my neighbor says, splitting the spliff. We could end there but more remains to be said and who am I to deny excess. It’s Christmas time and Whitney Houston time and Mad Men time again.

Anoretic

In painting we have both the glitch and the irreducible. For my last critique yesterday, I decided to become legible, briefly, and they liked it. They got it, perhaps too much, though, because by getting it they missed the point that the paintings are about "getting" or rather not getting it. Basically I gave too much carrot, I tell my friend who knows these things in the debrief after (carrots, by the way, are now being recalled for e-coli in the US, though we are not in the US, at least not physically speaking). It could be a trap the friend says, but a good trap. The music of the trap. That’s genre painting for you. In any case peaceability doesn't always feel good in the end. Meanwhile power outages and dropped objects, doors clashing and interpersonal clang. 

Might this be painting

Or, my painting versus writing dance. Dorothy Dandridge, in Carmen Jones, via Bizet: you go for me, and I'm taboo but if you're hard to get I go for you. Rachel Cusk (19:01) on a former classmate who was a virtuosic violinist and a terrible painter but was nonetheless determined to be one, forcing herself to become. Discipline, rigorous motivation shapes molten talent. And then what. First reaching into, then outstretching past, the present.

Argentine

Across the way from mine (departing) a flight to Buenos Aires. Walking down Manhattan Avenue with Max still, discussing Kai and co's gift of a green typewriter, to punch out Borges on (a through line cross Jeff Preiss at Anthology, Ava at the Steiner bookstore). And this on the mind, days back:

Compassion

For yourself, says the visiting artist, first time I have heard this in a while…I need to sit down to read properly and have not been able to. 

Twelve

Twelfth house hit by the solar eclipse this week, not to mention the intensive flares, and while mostly buffered in the momentum of renewal energies I am conscious it is confidence, that department’s most surface level (“extimate”) purview, where I will feel it most. Confidence in art, especially, deeper questions around hiding. Yesterday a friend said, unprompted, but as far as my predilection to hide, put more of you in your paintings, more also of your taste, and of course I ask what do you mean, I feel unsure of how to do so, and also wanting to do so, wanting to get better, grow up, get really good. Vedic astrologer Jesse says, until Sun years, until second half of Saturn return, you can try but you won’t really find success, outward mobility though by all means push through, work hard, etc. So much efforting. Wendy two years ago: too much efforting! Where’s the joy? In a seminar last week I described to someone, I forget who, the pound of flesh dynamic, that there is an aspect of this art that requires sacrifice, like Marlene this morning on the podcast talking about her dead partner’s Marsyas, so much processing in real time. At a talk last night droning on and zoning out I had to draw energy from future then double back, no more sinning against presence. But as my teacher says, I do want it all, I do want it to be magic all the time, to live in the frequency of a momentous, enriched now. How to get there, be there, on a Zoom with Bhanu Kapil of all people, I described this as horizon.

Friday night lights

Flipping through Ada Friedman’s binder at the Kunsthalle show, my binder I tell him, it had chosen me as its matron during a preview of the exhibition earlier that day, I say, responding to his note of nocturne assonance, our sudden arrival on the same flight path, and would it work now, and when it does, wondering why don’t we always conjunct, why rarely so, when it’s good it’s good and when it isn’t—a silent curtain. I bring up Didion and Warhol for Interview magazine (Why can’t it be magic all the time / What.) and he says something like, well that’s a Pandora’s box of a question, but Angels never really talk to one another, as in amongst themselves, and I give him the long look that, to an external party, perhaps even to this friend, might suggest doubt, skepticism, a clamming before full close, but of course really means retreat to an inner glee of seen-seen assent.

Tom the Curious

Another painting title placed here for safekeeping. Via: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lj4f-JUcaxs.

purple

Strolling through the zoo at night with a friend and they say, what’s the one oh Yes I love this film Purple Rose of Cairo. Further to this, rewatching Match Point before mountains.

Alright girlies

Lunar eclipse happening on 9/18...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uY8WhsVoZ5w

Andromeda

Head is above water I tell my father on the phone this line doubling as edge of burnout too early for what will be, I intend it to be, a high work threshold fall it keeps raining I haven't turned my closet over yet but yes basically winter, here in still questionmark Schweiz. so I have little to offer by way of comment, either cognitively vacating at weekends courtesy new neighbor's grassy cache which is becoming a belated substitute for new city, ou est chosen family fun, and otherwise, spreadables of studio time testing painting things and the editorial rest. writing in the anyhow, of rolling tootsie hills, the words Hejinianify in commitment to five minutes daily practice, let the dogs out, a bit ridiculous but how else. 

Absolutely bonkers channel

Amtrak selfie when I was 18 with big Bose headphones on, black work shirt and hair tied back, scrunched nose making a sour face as Beatrix Ruf  captioned in yellow Arial font does not compare...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ht39sFvJRAc

What to make of this other than, it was always the Wild West out there, sometimes it still can be.

we

The book of the prophets, not revelations…it’s the role and forced attenuation of prophecies heard, ignored, masticated and fulfilled that needs examination really, insofar as they weigh on our behaviors. Listening.

State

I have much work to do and yet there is a soul aspect in me that is so exhausted.

Shoeshine

After Cool Hand on the plane, De Sica film about money, broke me, albeit briefly, cracked heart open in this city (country?) of same and worse.

Once I find my formula

such recipes will have you choking on the asbestos of your own drywall drillslinger HomeEc ambitions til brittle powder and wrinkly duck tape become…the work. Sigh.

Skeet shooting

Suddenly a name. There is always a funny sort of mechanics at work. An accrual of value, boulder and moss. Stay out of it for the longest time, said someone to Jenny Saville, she says in a video I saw somewhere. That we have become subjects of the some, that plurality has skeeted (yes, deliberate shots at) specificity is probably the worst part. To lend aimless expense aim, I am striving to remember. And eventually, to be caught in slow motion. The sieve of, who rescues who, in the first place.

edge of

Not to belittle befores, or middles, or afters. But. Isn’t it funny how people at the edges of awakening—still shaded by dull grays, sharpening insight to the brightest finish available before totality takes over—term work that peels off from the wide spectrum on the other end ‘psychedelic’? In one sense, very accurate; and as reference, totally beside the point. 

Jette

The confusion of one place for another. Or rather a conflation with. I’ll be walking down one street and where I turn I’m at an intersection with friends in —. I’m by — all the time, I even saw the exact corner angle in an Instagram Story just yesterday. Another turn and I’m back in —, zipping through —, arranging flowers for...The last time I dissociated this hard it was out of grave necessity. Maybe it is now, too. The backdrops to these discursions are international, knowingly self-exoticizing—ostentatious even—but as template, a promontory lap, making a dentist mold of memory’s grooves, one of the most modern (modernist) experiences you can have.

prix garantie

Old sorrows her current ones even as the inner renovations bore deeper dug under the grass between stones exposed, etc. 

Broken English

Above all, I think, my work is to be (become?) lucent. And to model a ‘how to’. Bringing that state out in. I need to spend more time in listener mode for that but with speech often bottlenecked or in solitude, choked, in the rush of opportunity I go for flow. Who wouldn’t. My mother: you are very impatient about certain things and still you have infinite patience for others. She didn’t say “infinite,” maybe endless. She wouldn’t really say “still.” “Infinite” is mine, and “still” is a convention, like somehow, that everyone says here, that I thought was an ESL colloquialism until I saw Ian Penman using it in the Fassbinder book. So everyone needs a middle word. Yes a waiting for is part of all this. And what of those “things,” anyway? To forget and be easy. When a friend told me she wished she could live in some perma-stupefaction, what would that be like, I was stupefied. It’s been a long time since I tried to only be numbed out (back on that again now). As if knowing meanwhile that the Saturn that should someday, somehow leave me shining like a diamond requires a point where mouth meets tail, a place to mark in her being the path of revolution. 

Class dismissed

With certain possibilities for artmaking as 'downloading' taken less seriously in my current context, or at least strained at the tip of exposure, I feel lost in painterly practice, or in its total integration...lost in the things I can do with it, where to go, too many directions, unwilling to push further, unsure of how. To venture deep, to sustain physicality when not only taxed in time but concept, the principles of creation, where it comes from, for me, specifically, undermined at every turn by new flashes of ideation, and their ultimate fizzle into grave stolid anxious churning. Though this is quite common. One issue, the notion of producing something of consequence. Drop that, produce something for oneself. But the self of such a one demands consequence be a part of its formula, demands in the sense of emerging from a knowledge of, a baseline cognizance of what is entailed by introducing x or y variable, etc. The associative properties, imaging the associative mechanism without its content. Not wanting to image, at all. How to be smart (or smart enough) in my artwork. Is my artwork the place where I even want to be ‘smart’? Rather, the intelligence encases. The body instead conducts. I am missing streets, real, vivid streets, to walk through and take from.

about time

Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose, Sargent, 1885-6, needs no intro really, my favorite artwork about 'time'. Shooting for this strain of devotional. 

Continuing the thought

It would be braver of me to try to underdo it.

the mood

My trouble of too-much-ness or the feeling of too-much-ness; and in equal measure, a not enough: 

This perceived quality as yet, in art, writing—across all work/output, serves as convex mirror for the issue I have in my personal life which is the struggle to make an imprint at all, the struggle, either to incise self upon world-page, and in what vein, with which stories and faculties made operative, over-thinking—and/or to be okay with just being. Too many questions at once and a narrowing to one would cause…

There is an implication of short-circuiting. Of intentional self-sabotage, traps, but not trap-doors. And my teacher says, you are very good at these sleights-of-hand whereas I in turn say, but short-circuiting…isn’t that the condition of the world, and the need to imprint, isn’t that an obligation of those systems in which we partake, or as what we desist from, by choosing not to, confirmed via negation.

Moving out from the immediate and the private will. So fast. Too fast. Another sleight yet.  

To focus:

The work is not conveying all the things. To convey all the things is considered too much. Yet the work is not enough “too much,” it is too much not enough it is not doing what I want it to nor are others discerning what I want to do so in the end it is as irresolute as ever. 

My subject: 

My subject is the connections we make between things. This happens first as a trace layer. It is the implication of the incisive mark upon…Pentimenti, that signpost I have employed elsewhere in my writing and returns again and again, is useful here as an indication of anticipated interconnectedness: expectations of building upon. 

I really do believe that the very personal, very intimate practice of producing a mark, of making a gesture, of imagining within a field of space-time-production then induces outer effects, emanating and so the mark comes to play some larger role as trace of what culminated in…

Legibility or the capacity to understand this relational matrix, this movement between, becomes a subject due to the human preference for attachment (and in detachment, possible substitutes).

This is neither a new nor an old phenomenon, what is perhaps new or situationally trenchant is the need to contend with all, representationally, at once. Rather than gradually, in steps. A balance between strategy and unknowing. Gamification. A meet-the-world aspect was engaged with far greater aplomb by Mantegna, or miniaturists like Nainsukh. Incredulity and necessity in carving out for oneself the court painter position. Blah. My teacher saying I have too many questions, too many things I am attempting to address at once. Thus, always boxed into the register of the attempt. The "research".

Threefold. Why I do something for myself, what the historical or contextual implications are, and then what others receive or experience. I do believe that all these questions or trajectories are necessary to pursue and that they can elegantly align, in syncopation. Only it takes means, form, time.

Every painter thinks they are doing something more than what is there. Once over the hurdle of objecthood, thought becomes reality, not only through narration but by facilitating a site of alchemical encounter. Trite, and also a kernel:

For, such is the extent of, if not my ambition, at least a kind of purview. Or at least a thing to try.

I do feel behind. But not necessarily or only because of others. It is because I am always just behind myself.

It's not that we need more examples of Zoomer art stars. Or that I wish to be an art star.

What I wish is to have better, more expansive and sophisticated conversations on a consistent basis, which is what I assume are being had among those who are more adept at readily signifying their desire to be present in not this particular, but the, world. Dogwhistling in a melodic tune. Whereas I'm forever at fourteen percent opacity and fifty percent fill image, and does this have to change, or can this be understood as its own, special kind of dogwhistle. As another colleague puts it, accurately but in language I would not otherwise look to, I struggle with the ideological or identitarian commitments—i.e. the concentrated thematics—that are needed to, not only attain visibility in these efforts but to convey anything at all. Because to convey comes with dissatisfactions. The dissatisfaction with the suggestion of a wholeness. Aren't we schooled past an awareness of lacunae by now. The lacunae becoming applique, becoming print; it's an anniversary year for Marimekko.

(That line delivered as a sincere cross-metaphor. To be read adamantly not as a showing off but as a rare orchid technique. I've edited out subsequent orchid-related reflections).

What I know how to convey, and what I want to convey: 1 — Process (cliche). Rather, more so, its dissembling within assembly, my version prettier than that, for instance, of Barry Le Va. Using Le Va as a crutch, then Trockel, then someone weirder albeit the shade of weird that is Lynne Cooke's repertoire. 2 — Communication around the depth of and rigor with which, I do so. But at the same time, elegance, and modesty. And profundity in acumen, and beauty in the tied-bow sails. On the waters of...The Six of Swords. The always and beyond.

Therein, again, an aspect of too muchness, a wanting and a waiting without waiting around, but also without being found and finding for myself. 

I make these notes as a forest trail (in advanced of a next stage, a next stage being always teased and within it, you never hear from me, though that, too, I am reevaluating. Hopefully not so dark but with the correct gradation of feeling, yet surrendering a pre-conception of correctness). And as a precursor to future confessionals (accepting the confessional as a form).

Contesting the illustrative terms of "painting" or in their acceptance, deciding how to produce other resonances. Accepting not the inevitability of failure, for failure as a gimmick, or only as a gimmick (a utopian strategy), might be understood as conceited, too. A signature among a set of variables, cryptic and otherwise. That balance is the pursuit. Equilibrium and then some is the conversion of too-muchness into something temporarily, halfway, decent.

Halfway as medium. Or when they say, same pose, but with only 70 percent effort. Raising opacity, lessening strain. Surrender in one framework, "thinking without banisters" in others. Or, at minimum, a motion towards.

twint

I have not written in what feels like ages...or made anything substantive, either. Minor advances, certainly in a relational realm, but otherwise a numbing quiet, amid need to address item after item on the ever growing list. Homesick. Naturally a sense of loss that comes more so from disconnection with oneself. Forgetting the external. Setting strong boundaries again. Letting go of anger. Lane staying. Paying no mind. 

Does the Hawk fly?

The America of Silver Streak, Ishtar. Chris Kraus writing about Nicaragua. Then Fetch happened. Vivienne Westwood’s crown insignia. To live like Caroline Bessette, those small rectangular sunglass lenses, features so refined, psssstttt murder by attention, by thousand buzzing flies.

das Privileg

 

Virgo full moon

today, I choose abundance—says one and all. revisiting Passages (Ira Sachs), finishing Shirley Hazzard Transit of Venus after prolonging the experience for ages was so upsetting I actually felt motivated to do my taxes.

blooper

they should make a drink called "chassis", pronounced like Pastis. the kind of throwaway line that would have "done numbers" on wordcel twitter c. 2021. 

the meaning is in the middle

reads a cartoonish illustration of a man holding a scroll in Mary Douglas' Thinking in Circles (p. 35). juicing the animal. I remember an art class in the first days of fifth grade, embarking on what would be a yearlong project of producing our own dinosaurs from "scratch" (how else), with papier mâche, etc. the project was legendary among the students, who had grown up watching older classes divine their own variations, who had theirs all planned out, comparing what personal touches they would add, but completely new to me, a last minute transfer, as of a few weeks before the start of the school year. the teacher (thick curls, loudmouthed but in her way, very kind, a nicer Susie from Curb) asked us, where do we begin a sculpture, how do we build it out? silence, some errant guesses. with the dinosaur's torso, I said. I don't know where the answer came from, I was very shy, but: we start there, and only from that hard core can we append on its protruding legs and hands, a head. Steiner's threefold being and naturally, our dan tian. 

showing up with

There is grief in the now, and then there is pre-grieving the world. What’s funny is, showing up with the wrong one.

inferences

the "I am X, so ofc I am/do Y" (#ofcoursetrend) meme template suggests that normative statements of I AM inference have been cleaved apart by the broader erosion of whatever material/identity signifiers are represented in them and thus affect and action have to be deliberately conjoined, affirmative magic for last hurrah of certain attachment styles. i.e. liberation otw, and already present.

Meanwhile, picture x and y like solitary islands, two nips of Baked Alaska meringue (surely Jameson says this somewhere) and the swipe-scroll generation of content to lock in that paradigm as a gratuitous attempt at their bridging—Christ consciousness along the spine—see for reference, above, literal Christo's Floating Piers project at Lake Iseo, Italy 2016, except not really, because they were working with only one island there, trying with those two nodal points to duck-tape tack it, dial back to the mainland, whereas I prefer the model of shedding the very idea of "mainland," shedding the frame by framing to shed, by being content to circle the sentiment of desire-to-conjunct, but no we cannot always get what we want, so let that become the unifying form instead, and in the hot pink bush beaches, an indication of human imprint, human presence, as in the Biscayne Bay wrapping from 1983 (with Jeanne-Claude, maybe that's the difference), how were we less greedy then!

derivations

from the looks of me, and from my own language, people assume I meditate. people will assume a great many things, don’t we all. or we derive, and the nature of the derivation is what’s true, stuff the content. Again it becomes about the container, or the shell of the act that determines its direction, how hard it is to steer a drill, so you learn, once you turn it on. anyhow I wish I did, but instead it’s something less simple, less elegant, a cornucopia of tools and summoning the right one when, well, another healing process.

Basically, what it is, is that

I can't stop thinking about certain scenes, mainly the exterior shots of the small town, in Muriel, or the Time of Return (1963), first watched a few years back. In my memory, it's usually the Time of the Return, as if appending a bookmark to spatio-temperature changes it all. Street lamps, water, rounded shop windows, except it's cold. The potential for gambling with the ominous presence of the casino, to which Delphine, shown ugly, gauche, middle-aged, hanging on, almost English, a Natalia Ginzburg character, must be accompanied, and from which she is then steered away. She cannot help herself, it being there, just like people in Monaco are forbidden to run ragged at their places of employment. Her convertible domesticity, ye olde furniture shop. Her errant, mysterious son, lover. Lapsed, lopsided storytelling—people resented Resnais for this. More easily accepted: intergenerational affairs, mutual violences. Colonist comes home, to sad, pathetic home, poor effect. Awkwardnesses pluralized, spliced and spread among conversation's participants. All humming separately rewinding respective reels. I do not "like" this movie much, but I think it is somehow very important now, or will be.

laura o nausea

Tansy essence will spring me into action, here’s hoping. Along with some evidence of, already. Meanwhile, considering the foodstuffs of Repo Man, emphasis on stuff. Reminds me of, old enough to: SoftBank's Brandless…which I liked somehow, using bug-eat codes to paper-line the iron heart-rattle. Ahead of its time in a way, pre-figured Rx Bar proliferation, for instance, post Target generic, though that too has evolved, subscription model, Klarna economy, and they hired this person as a marketer, that was my original association. salut Kyle Chayka. handing these things over to memory in writing otherwise how else. Laura Owens in Arles, 2021, Fondation Van Gogh, kind of about the same thing. The respective weights of image individuated object subject whole ground surface identity name. Using my mini blue IKEA bag. Does it make a difference, what a difference a day.

our spoons

The Europeans except maybe the Southerners and those of the far North cannot possibly know, "mind cannot comprehend," can it, the true value of what it’s like to stake a soft, lugubrious long morning purely for oneself, reading caffe trinken etc. Unlike Tony Soprano in his bathrobe, emitting puffs of sigh. Rising early, and then left to the devices of. No care core passe even by current juncture yet with being as a reminder. They make a life from this, its specificity theirs, its peculiarity ours.

dry sherry

anecdotally, as supported by friends, the demons came out again with Pluto's transit last week. hooks shaved down to a millimeter, circulating Weyes Blood Andromeda alongside Elvis Costello's She. now, more settled in Aquarius, we can slough off sentences like: *nasal Harold Bloom voice* 

What I retained from olden days, "yesteryear," was a license and proximity to text I would not trade for the love of a cheerier God…

It's Capricorn, really, that is about hi-G God. Yet the Aquarian "Godhead" the gallery liaison on the train to Somerset over a year ago told me was being developed at MIT, still no trace of. Auspicious.

For the artist getting older being a business, so much depends on to what extent you do so offscreen. at the moment, screen worlds beckon back, hilariously. While at the same time, becoming addicted (demons, dependencies) to maximal library borrowing.

death in America

they say it's about taxes but isn't it more so about real estate, bound up in the former? (reading Nicotine, Nell Zink). frame tale malfunction...anyway, perhaps that's why the pain has to be exported out, then imported back in again. industrial-scale processing. no Beverly Hillbillies logic. here's what's really important:

perhaps someone can source for me this 90s sweatshirt 

(Gabriele Münter, Breakfast of Birds, from collection of NMWA, Washington DC)?

repurposing

below, an uncreative (collaged) writing exercise from a class last month. note its date of origin (5.12, a Tuesday, my unlucky Mars day, in the span of fifteen minutes, and I hadn't yet seen Poor Things), publication here (17.01), and context of Switzerland, though all source authors lived in NA:

HAHAHAHAHA JACK MY SWAG HAHAHAHAHA JACK MY SWAG

The world is wide, wide, wide, and I am young, young, young, and we’re all going to live forever!

For years I have been a prisoner of the Watchers. These great hypnotists have no idols, their magic is powerful and their appetite insatiable. They thrive on misery but have great delicacy in choosing their victims. They evoke compassion but have none themselves. They possess unlimited knowledge but have no understanding, and this gives them the power of the absolute, concentrated.

I wanted to slap one in the face. Instead, I slapped him with my thoughts.

But then again, we are just two lovers, holding hands and in a hurry to reach our car, our locked hands like a starfish leaping through the dark.

Facing us, in the distance, there is another group, a group called the Weavers. These are the ones I’m trying to join. I have to leave him to be with them. Their power, of course, is pure being pure color great happiness.

The chief element of happiness is this: to want to be what you are. For there is nothing either good or bad, only thinking makes it so.

There was a time that…It's difficult to explain, but I just somehow feel that I never really lived, really existed…in the sense that other people do. It drives me crazy. I was terribly aware of it all those nights waiting for you in the Ritz bar looking around at what seemed to be real grown-up lives. I just find everybody else's life surrounded by plate glass. I mean I'd like to break through it just once and actually touch…

Dissolving margins, where change is also loss. In that state of mind, all trace of feeling is banished. Or rather, the trace becomes All. I realized, in other words, that I was alone, and saw the gift and the burden of that state. And went on dancing in my grotesque disguise, but not before I told him: “I am lonely and miserable, but I am wearing my last skin. Since you are almost face to face with the Gods, the Gods do not abandon me.” In human language, this is called love.

Whenever I remain silent in a certain way, I don't love you, have you noticed that? Why does it seem like the only way to live is to disobey the gaze of de-potentiated love?

For every mistake we make in these dances must be turned into a question, otherwise they are fatal to our human condition. Writing becomes a co-morbidity of the dance. Some people write simply because they don’t know how to live in the moment and have to reconstruct it and live in it afterwards. i.e. she had lived her early years as though she were waiting for something she might, but never did, become.

All that remains of that minute, the desire, that waiting is time in all its purity, bone-white time. Waiting you can hear yourself living.

modern major general

my heart is a regular college of feelings (Grace Paley, 1959)

something I always wonder about: what kind, what genre of, how many nuances will I have to explain to the person I marry (and they to me), for instance, the histories of certain Upper West Side families? what will really matter, what will be interesting to us then, and when?

walking by wayside

plugging away. an intercession in momentum. marginalia like:

"reverse psychology," helper, fixer, pain-body flirtation programming must still be operative if I keep going for the parts of the canvas that say, no we don't need your attention right now.

And Giacometti Kunsthaus koan:

The corrective impulse in painting that keeps a hairy 

Hangdog line from being free

Is that the newly Swiss in me?

I have dignity, but not always rectitude. I like to laugh, I laugh a lot.

Ah but what is form but a bum wipe anyhow

or when Adele H gets her big ream of paper, and begins to bleat. 

as in, to never really think things of other things by composing deliberate "argument," but to wait for someone to say the right one, and in the half-pause, half-pounce of recognition, to confess, smarmy yes, that must be what I wanted to convey myself, but could not penetrate enough to get it out, 'til now, that is, in the conversion of inference to evidence, arriving at a stance, a cause. with word, image, to trade in pure impression; for all the mounting bifurcation, impression being our era's ars.

new moon in capricorn

Forget it

I can’t remember what my new ideas for the blog were. I would come back with ideas, I thought, and I did have them. Though of course they had been sprouting at odd moments, when I couldn't get them down in writing and not now, when I can. But in wait, I might as well talk about other things, for instance. 

I lost some paint tubes, expensive ones, walking around, and spent yesterday, the next morning—after a blood draw, always a pleasure (I mean it, really one of my favorite activities)—retracing my steps, going to all seven stores I had visited with the tubes in tow, of course to no avail, and finishing up that failed but not as miserable as I might have once let it be investigation with only a couple hours left before my flight, it occurred to me that a fine final act would be to see A Confucian Confusion (1994), playing uptown, I hadn’t gone to any of the retrospective screenings the previous week, though I find the works by Yang I have seen quite affecting: so the hesitancy was really only out of laze, conflated with insufficient desire. But now this was my last chance, also because seeing movies in New York is a different thing from doing so here (tertiary mediation again). I still wasn’t sold though, being generally discombobulated, texting my mother an update as if for approval (regressing…that’s when you know) but I got on the subway at 8th St anyway, where I listened in on a nurse confessing her complex politics to a could-be patient and read a disheartening email correspondence, also medical-related, over someone’s shoulder and after switching to the 1, got off one stop early, stupid, before the theatre, again, uncertain, and at a public transit choice point, too. These circumstances made necessary what is perhaps best publicized as an "experiment". I do these things often but when in a solid place that creates a clean (albeit internally messy) sense of juncture, I can actually remember them as adhering to a kind of procedure.  

Body fixed to the platform and face slightly pained, I began to run through the full film, drawing on snatches of dialogue and title cards and internet images and descriptors also pieced together from similar works and then my familiarity with the screening room itself, having been in its chairs often, not that they are so memorable but nonetheless remembering the texture of their armrests, deciding on, or peering into, the makeup of the audience, the whole endeavor, very novelistic—I raced through the experience sparing no detail, even, or I should say, crucially, covering the emotional valences of what it would feel like—yes, mainly conducting feeling—to be sat before a film's projection of moods and figures, women and men, all the way to its credit finish. And because I completed that experience in two, three minutes, because the movie was done in an extended breath, as if I was there and knew the extent of it, while knowing that I wasn’t and didn’t, but could have, and what would be the differences between the many possible versions, I transferred to the B and went back downtown, pleased with having only spent $2.90 for the day, on the metro ticket: the film was free. Not long after there was a derailment with that same train line that had deposited me at 59th deciding by trance and I was happy with my decision and with the chaotic means by which I had arrived again at some shade of method.