aids4lyfe

Back (I'm back)

2010-03-04T10:40:00.000-08:00

10.18.09

2010-02-26T21:45:00.000-08:00

me: david wojnarowicz has me thinking about my mortality so insanely

8 minutes

8:00 PM Joe: In what direction? Insane mortality can take you to a lot of places...

8:02 PM me: his ability to articulate how meaningful it all is and how conversely and simultaneously meaningless is pretty unbelivable

plus watching the progression from a cavalier highly sexualized young person to a dying individual is profound

8:03 PM your journals are important joe

i always thought they were over the top

but they're not

8:04 PM
Joe: ...which ones are you referring to? Over the top?

8:05 PM me: like, i always thought it was extreme how intent you were upon documenting your life through your journals

but it's not

Joe: I feel like I do a pretty pathetic job of actually writing in my journal - but in theory I think it's very, very important

8:10 PM me: there's this great passage in teh book where one of david's friends dies and after the memorial they go back to his house and david lies out all the photos of the man who dies on the floor and he's with kiki smith and they try to put on this albumand waltz to dance for the dead but david keeps tripping over her feet so they seperate for a second and then kiki puts her hands in the air and they start spinning and spinning and spinning

and laughing and falling

8:11 PM Joe: Is it making you want to write?

8:12 PM Edit the arc of your narrative?

me: of course

it makes me want to pin down experiences

and hold them to something

8:13 PM some plateau of meaning

and then at the same time just not hold anything to any idea of truth or sigifigance but just spin around alot and see what happens

8:14 PM it makes me feel alone

and it's good

2.15-2.22 (Various Excerpts from my CA Journal)

2010-02-24T23:17:00.000-08:00

It's really hot here and I'm scared I'm going to get fried alive. If my feet get sunburned it'll be bad.

I tried to eat an orange but it had too many seeds.

Sunday was Valentine's Day. I think I'm getting pretty good at exorcising drama from my life. Didn't call any of my ex's or any of the guys I'm currently fucking.

I guess if sex stops being about this mutual knowledge it becomes as perfunctory as procreation and that's boring.

I think my parents are shrinking. Which in and of itself is sort of strange.

Things I could do with my Life:

1. Become a Professor

2.Start a music publicity company

3. Organize Events

4. Move to the middle of nowhere and become a recluse

5.Do art advising

Day 2: 9:30am

Awaiting toothpaste. Didn't get too sunburned. Phone is perpetually dying. Managed to sneak around smoking cigs when I woke up. Took a shit and a shower. Sitting outside, super warm. I think my allergies are bothering me. Dreamt of y last night. Super weird. Maybe I'm dreaming of a domesticity I don't know how to access. I think I'll write alot today.

2.21

Kind of cold to write but I will. Sitting on the corner of 21st and Valencia in SF. It's raining, listening to Magnetic Fields. Have been trying to see Meg for 3 days, she's totally mia. I dunno, I don't want to care, but I do. Had a pretty nice day walking around. Didn't eat anything, wasn't really hungry. Went out for a super expensive dinner last night. Won't have any money when I get back.

Money and food are boring.

It's pretty moody here- cold and rainy. The city feels real but lacks. Can't explain it? I could but that's boring too. I bought Alaina an old man zine, spying on senior citizens or something.

Is my writing becoming akin to one long awful text message?

chrewths

2010-01-18T19:37:00.000-08:00

I read this thing L.A wrote the other day about how she's never content writing about anything but her own waxes and wanes. Which I felt pretty hard when I was reading it. I REALLY want to write about this Josh Smith show. And I REALLY want to write about alot of the music I've been listening to. And I REALLY want to write about how my great grandmother died.

But I can't. Or at least, I don't really want to. I guess it's just not really as interesting to me as the often morose, sometimes hilarious, always intense permutations of my own brain. Like the status of my period, and which guy I'm seeing, and how dirty my sheets are and what my cat's shit smells like, and how often I shit, who said what to who is often more facinating then the deconstruction of painting through repitition and forced deaestheticazation. Although I do like the show and Josh a lot. Possibly because I think he realizes that his body and life are greater than the sum of any number of paintings he could create.

Maybe I just took too much benadryl today and I can't think about anything. I ate some sweet potatoes. I'd like to think that the mundane details of my life would be eclipsed by some grand sweeping overarching concepts. Maybe I'm completely neurotic and anxious, true enough, but I think the option to let go of my ideas about what people should think about all day all night might be an altogether freeing one. Which is not to say I'm unintelligent- possibly self-indulgent, but more just interested in the "mundane" human functions of myself and those that surround me as an idea of life. Being alive doesn't have to involve a meta inquisition into other peoples thoughts and outputs- but can be the practice of involving yourself in the action of living to those that surround you.

I guess that's altogether meta in and of itself.

I'm losing my job. The gallery is closing. Maybe I'm completely numb right now but I really have little to say about that. I was ready. I will be ready?

9.5.09

2010-01-04T14:09:00.000-08:00

Maybe I'm not partaking in the right substances. I used to be pretty good at procuring a wide selection before I got old and pussied out. Maybe that's the key. Choose your outlets of asphyxiation wisely. The wrong ones will only serve to worsen your mood- and not dull the edges quite as potently as is necessary for long grey periods. I'm not even capable of black anymore. Ah, 24.

In actuality, I would like to start keeping time. Preserving the month of 17 when I ran on my dad's treadmill every night for an hour and a half and then chain smoked outside after my parents went to sleep. The afternoon I was 21 when I read Rules of Attraction straight thru because I was trying intently to figure out which character was my 40 year old bosses best friend. It was snowing. The weeks Joe and I were on Greyhound. The first cigarette I smoked with Jen. Two nights ago when I ate weed cornbread and went to Victor's at 3am.

These are some pretty disconnected periods of time to pinpoint. However, not all time is the same size. Most of it is shaped quite differently in fact. All of it should bear some sort of evidence but mostly it gets lost and untethered.

I would like to keep all this time in the same box I keep my substances and swallow them when I wanted to go back to these moments. Time is addictive and altogether holy.

This post, while vague, was written after reading about an upcoming show at Canada called Spaced Out/On Time. It opens the 11th.

Different Levels of Exhaustion

2009-12-16T12:02:00.000-08:00

1. I just ate lots of food and now my stomach is working to digest it and I'm pretty cold and drowsy. I'm sitting back and thinking about when I will shit.
2. I did lots of speed last night and the back of my eyes hurt because I had that kind of sleep that never comes.
3. I have not slept in over 3 days and my brain has gotten really loose and it's sort of weird and difficult to form sentences because I think about where the words should go alot. I am cold.
4. I took some sort of various substance to help me sleep valium tylenol pm xanax and now I am that hungover on sleep. My body feels so heavy.
5. I just woke up from a nap in the middle of the day in the sun and I feel really warm and I reach around for my cat and all my sheets are clean and there's a back facing my lips and I kiss some random area that is not an erogenous zone nor do I want it to be.

the winter of my lazy discontent

2009-11-12T19:38:00.000-08:00

I have been mildly discontented lately, or possibly just bored. most likely the latter, i'm sort of happy these days. maybe i'm just hungover. if you don't expect something big huge and exciting- well-

I don't know how I get bored- sometimes i just can't DO anything. So, I'm sitting at my desk and the breeze is passing through my window, tons of new yorkers and a tauba book and some acorns and a couple pens, a d.a.p catalogue, some cards meg sent me a while ago about aderall, a bard curatorial studies master's brochure, con ed bills i haven't paid for a while. everything's just Piling Up. sometimes i wish everything happens the way it does in cartoons- when you run, dust would kick up behind you, when you think something, a lightbulb appears over your head. small moments would become more interesting if they were accompanied by overt physical manifestations. my passport is there. i should use my passport in january. i should run away for a minute. a zine joe made this summer at the ben jones sunday school at deitch. when i move again i'll pack up the stuff up and it will arrange itself differently in a new location without my approval. i wonder when i'll stop moving for good.

music

2009-10-10T12:57:00.000-07:00

I rarely see bands I like. Because of this, I rarely write about music. Mostly, I'm watching other people watch themselves, trying to get free drinks, and when I had a boyfriend who booked shows, I was most definitely trying to get him to pay attention to me. Other things I do at shows: smoke cigarettes, look at merch (I don't do this frequently), think about snacks or deli sandwiches I could procure within a 3 block radius, text, talk to the door person. Sometimes, I am the door person but when you're the door person you have an entirely different set of considerations. So it goes.

When I look at art for my purposes, it's quick and analytical. Unless, you're at an opening which is the equivalant of a show. But it's different then too- an opening is like a big party at a store. Which I suppose is what show-going is like at bowery-esque places in the city, but I don't even think that either. The art and music world in new york have lines drawn down the center of urban social norms regardless of size or corporate ownership.

The experience of music needs to be mutually transformative. I'm going to understand your band more if the person next to me is feeling it harder. And I can see it on their face, in their body, out of their hands. If I'm watching my favourite artist produce their work next to three other people, the outpouring of expression by the bystanders can only be intellectual, not visceral. Fucking your girl versus saying I love you just ain't the same.

Meow meow meow- to crawl back around to the beginning of this arc of context, maybe my experiences are so noxiously bi-polar because I never see bands I like.

Last night, I went to see Thee Oh Sees at Death by Audio. They didn't play until 2:30 and I was really high and having a wonderful time. My friend Maya had just pinned a patch on my jacket that had multiple, powerful meanings, and my friend Ariel had just given me a really cold beer.

Mystical and utterly transformative, Thee Oh Sees at 3am on this past fall Friday are what I imagine the best sex I ever have will sound like.

10.5.09

2009-10-06T17:28:00.000-07:00

Today, I woke up and read David Wojnarowicz journals in bed. Took a shower drank hot water with lemon and met Olga for coffee outside. Walked back to my house and changed my clothes, met Alaina on the J train platform at Lorimer. Took it to Canal. Walked around looking for red reishi powder for about an hour. Many women kept trying to get us to get massages or handbags. We declined. Drank a tsing tao at one place, went to New Green Bo and got Ma Pao Tofu and Eggplant, another tsing tao. Full. Walked over to the Highline and sat over 10th ave for a little while. Walked back to the East Village, got on the L. Home.

"What will I think about all this scribble ten years, thirty years from now in the change of history, where will Jim or John or me in relation to all these activities? It's the starry mirror of the eyes slow revolution to the impossible or fictional future then reeling back again to the past. FZAMMM"- d.w

4.19.09

2009-08-29T22:13:00.000-07:00

Today was largely eventful and uneventful all the same. Tried to stay distracted. Success. Wanted to write before it got to late. Success.

Woke up, went to work. Left promptly to buy mirrors at this ridiculously small place in Hell's Kitchen. Very old timey.

Came back to the gallery, walked to lunch with Christopher. Pineapple Fried Rice with Tofu. We talked about his friend who expected too much of him. Total obligations, there are no obligations. Thought it was interesting that he brought this up today. This is making my hand hurt.

Lots of crates came. Met with the artist Paola and the fabricator Sam. Placed Paola's grid, it will go accross the center of the space on the street side.

Ran into Bailey as I was getting on the train with Andrea and James. Went to the Creek, got drunk. Home now.

9.9.07

2009-08-29T22:10:00.000-07:00

Doing my homework for the last time ever.

What if every person is a different version of the same idea?

12.27.08

2009-08-29T22:01:00.000-07:00

Technically, 12.27.08. 2:16am. Joe and I just got home from hanging out with Max at this kid's Scott's house on 21st and 2nd. He didn't care about his apartment and it was really gross. He had two cats. One of them jumped really high. I had a cider and a glass of wine and a Sparks. I feel sort of drunk. 2 cigarettes today.

Shoog is on my lap. I love having a cat so much and he finally started using his litter box.

Joe and I snorted a bunch of aderol together. It was fun.

On the way home, we started talking about commercial culture and the mind of the consumer, the drive of captilism, the psychology of the American brain. The pathos of economics. But when I hear myself say, "they" and "them, I wonder what I mean by that. Who indoctrinates and who is passive. Who stands idle while others take control? Where do I lie on the continum? Don't we all have entities who attempt to control our taste no matter how large or small?

The cat is tossing around his litter. I want to get him a glossy covered box. He's also trying to break into his food. Tricky little kitty.

fudz n artz n muzak

2009-07-18T12:00:00.000-07:00

Matt and Alex from the So So Glos and Julian from Fiasco, outside of Death by Audio in early July.

Abe Vigoda at Whitney Live in conjunction with the Dan Graham retrospective.

Food Party car via Thu Tran and friends at Deitch Studios.

Puppet from premiere of MGMT video, "Kids", at Deitch Studios June 20th.

Brown rice plus avocado plus satueed shitakes plus fresh ginger plus seaweed by me.

Insane Croatian lunch courtesy of Croatians.

Aftermath of corn salsa explosion.

Sacrosanct, Sushi and Sass

2009-06-15T10:59:00.000-07:00

Last night, I went an opening for a show called Sacrosanct, organized partially by Heather Jones and Santiago Moystyn. The show was at an abandoned church on 103rd and Lexington, and Nate Hill was there with his dog and bloody marys. Anyway, I really enjoyed Heather's work- a floating bed of sorts fabricated from used coffee and tea filters. It looked like this:

There was also a shelf with unicorns horns and a broken glass piece that I also found interesting. I think I just like shows in spaces with memory. Short on words. More photos:

Next, I went to check out my old friend Sara's new apartment on 103rd near the park and later we stepped out for sushi. Then, I went to see Jen's new apartment on 145th and St.Nicholas- went to this bar called St.Nick's which we were pretty sure must be featured in some sort of Euro guidebook to New York because drinks were 7 dollars and it was open mic night and French woman was getting her thing on much to the chagrin of the older patrons. Sleep.

It was nice to go uptown.

start of summer laze

2009-06-12T13:18:00.000-07:00

i'm pretty lazy. but i still go see art! i don't feel like writing about it though. maybe i'll add more photogs, maybe i won't. wait to see.

mark flood at zach feuer (this is the greenlit room in the back)- me likes. the rest of the show looks little like this.

sophie calle at paula cooper. (this is a video wall of different ladies reading a breakup letter from sophies x)
i love the paula cooper space on the southside of 22nd- arched ceilings a la big red barn. personally, i like sophie doing a bed-in better than the ladies, but that's just me.

i did not go see the picasso show at gagosian because larry wouldn't let me bring my iced coffee inside. tough titties.

3days&nights

2009-05-20T15:21:00.000-07:00

Last night Sarah was here and Meghan was in town from Austin with her boyfriend, we went to see Ear Pwr at DBA and then went to the Levee where I saw this woman Meredith who gave a talk about Mexico City at Silent Barn last year right before I went. She seemed really full of anger- I tried to be all zen and hippy with her but whatever- some people just like to be angry- myself included at various points on the trajectory. Before that, Sarah and I went and got sushi at Sunrise Mart on Broome, saw Todd and Federico, got posh drinks at the Hudson Hotel (i had a mango ginger margarita!), and then went and drank beer in Central Park with Luke while eating more sushi before going to BK. Sushi and drinks in the spring are A plus.

Today we went to Washington Square Park and before that sandwiches at this place I really love that Liza and I used to go to on 13th st- Te Adore.

Saturday night I went to see Dan Deacon at midnite with Lynas and Luke- it was Really Fun. All caps. Future Islands opened and everyone was drunk and slip sliding around by the end. Got home pretty late and woke up with Shoog-ala.

The night before that I went to a nice opening at the Boiler- Pierogi's new space on n.14th. Two real live camaros gradually crashing into each other and a corona bottle that endlessly breaks itself in slow motion and then re-constitutes itself at rapid speed.

I have an article in my friend Zara's zine, Taffy Hips- you can get them at Spoonbill and Sugartown on Bedford and at Desert Island on Metropolitan, get get it it...

Keep it happy keep it snappy.

2009-05-09T11:51:00.000-07:00

Friday night, I trotted around a bit. Left work around 7pm for my friend Anne's show at ATM gallery in Chelsea. Lots of mirrors and masks and also Tauba Auerbach-esque pattern paintings in the back room. Jerry and Roberta were there, the rain finally let up, Anne looked beautiful, and since the gallery is so far west, everyone was outside drinking bottled budweiser on the street.

Some of Anne's work looks like this:

Chris and Todd were there too, two JD art handlers- Chris had fashioned a belt buckle out of the Paola Pivi rhinestones, it was quite glamorous. Unfortunately, I had to leave very quickly.

Next, I went to the Jonathan Borofsky opening at Deitch. I was partially going to pick up a wall sign for artist who's been added to the show in Long Island City, and partially because I've been trying to go to every opening at the gallery just for sayings sake. Anyway, no one was there really by the time i got there, I said hi to all da ladies camped out behind the desk, picked up the sign, and learned something new about myself- according to JD, I look like a sumo wrestler with my hair in a ball on top of my head. Go check out the show? I dunno, not my favorite, but here's the poster:

Then, I went home and made dinner with lots of produce from Zabar's that I got last week on a trip to the Upper West Side. I sauteed shitakes with olive oil and salt, warmed leftover brown rice in the pan and then added a little bit of parmesan, all served over a bed of mixed greens dressed with balsamic vinegar- a warm/cold salad. I also two glasses of a really nice Sauvignon Blanc.

Then I went to see Alexis Gideon at Death by Audio- Edan's show. The last time I saw him was at Asterisk with Dan Deacon when I was 20. Anyway, I missed the whole thing because I was being Euro at home, but I saw some really nice projection he did on the back wall. I'm trying to figure out how to get some youtube of it on here.

Then finally, I went to Daddy's. Is that really where people hang out? I guess so. I saw: Julia, girl with an intense unibrow from VB64 who's been sending me serious stalker emails for the past three weeks in reference to 100 dollars she's owed from Vanessa's studio; Ellen, girl who lived in Greg and Pete's dorm at Umass- she sort of follows me throughout my life; Rachel, woman who runs Secret Project Robot; Mike O'Neil, girl who I worked with at Ghost Robot (so many robots in new york); and The Beets!
What a tangled web we weave.

Pennsylvania tomorrow for further dental damnation.

art farts

2009-05-07T13:42:00.000-07:00

I am currently employed by one of the largest galleries in New York. The art world has nice work if you can get it.

I suppose the reason I find my job quite interesting is largely due to the fact that the "chosen" people and objects of desire lie at the crux of many issues currently agitatating this big bad world I call home. Religion and economy, higher education and innate intelligence, memory and imagination, media and community, the familiar and the real, fate and chance, fabrication and mass production, value and money and beauty and intended de-aesthetization, sex and power, post-modernity and DIY, performance and depth, color and light. All the tangible stuff people shove in galleries and museums signifies absolutely everything fascinating about our world, and simultanously, means veritably nothing.

However, the concepts at hand become particularly poignant in our city of hustle as the art market is currently experiencing a 90 percent loss of confidence, with most major works currently valued at about a third of their pre-recession worth.

So to say that I'm lucky to be employed is the understatement of the year, and I try to be grateful each day I'm allowed to come to work and talk about massive installations that I've helped produce. Especially programming as absurd and arbitrary as the current show at JD's space in Long Island City where I spend my days and early evenings. It's a group show called "The Pig", and features artists Jim Drain, Paul Chan, Jeff Koons, Simon Martin, Paola Pivi and Gelatin, an Austrian collective. I'm only going to talk about the pieces I like because no one is forcing me to do otherwise. There are only so many times one can explain a steel grid covered in rhinestones that is the size of a movie screen to middle aged white women with Louis Vuitton bags who aren't going to buy anything anyway using words and phrases like- movement, forced navigation of the terrain, texture, organic yet hyper synthetic. Ok, it's actually really fun, but can become mildly nauseating at times.

There are two "moving sculptures" drive around the gallery for a quarter. One piece is covered in stuffed animals and the other is fashioned from aluminum and found wood, titled "Henry Moore for the Poor". Henry Moore was an English artist and sculptor mainly known for large-scale bronze casts. His amorphous yet feminine figures, generally bulbous in form, usually contain an aspect of hollow, negative space.

"Henry Moore for the Poor" is a non-sensical moving machine- I dare not write car because that would imply it moves forward and back upon command- that plays Disney music for its bemused guest. Just as Universal told me I could "ride the movies" at its amusement park in the previews for E.T, Gelatin instructs any proper art patron to "ride" Henry Moore. Or at least his aesthetic.

C'mon, it's summer- everyone's at Basel anyway.

2009-05-06T14:41:00.000-07:00

Today is Wednesday. The sun came out which was nice. I thought about Meg alot today- maybe this is because my boyfriend left me and I want someone to talk to who gets my insides. Or maybe because it felt like summer and I really wanted to drive around and eat sandwiches and be in Amherst.

But I was in New York, which was actually wonderfully great.

Sometimes I think New York hates me and wants me to live in a shithole, freeze my ass off, work for stupid people and get old and wrinkled faster. On days when it's raining and cabs spit on my calves, days when no one calls and I feel like everyone is wrapped up in their own mini city, days when somehow I've spent 60 dollars on seemingly nothing except 10 dollar packs of cigarettes, days when eveything smells and everyone seems sad. Days that would make anyone want to move to Kansas and cook hot dogs all day.

And then sometimes New York kisses me on my head and reminds me everything's going to be alright. It wraps its arms around my waist and asks me if I need anything, lies in my backyard and smokes cigarettes with me while drinking white wine and telling me there is nothing to fear but fear itself. It lets me know I'm special and that I'm going to figure everything out and that I am truly truly loved. New York buys me a drink and lets my train come just as I've stepped into the station, tells all the assholes to go fuck themselves. It plays me music and holds my hand and talks to me about grand adventures and future projects. It reminds me that everything is a construct and to grind my feet a little harder into it's pavement. New York stays up all night with me and screams loudly at me to engage with my work, to love deeply and absurdly, and to always stay the course.

Anyway. Meta.

My boyfriend's body haunts me. Most nights I wake up in the dead of sleep and expect his chest to be sidled next to mine, hand firmly placed in the small of my back. It's not. I turn over some more. Look out the window. Pet my cat.

So today, as on all other days for the past couple weeks, I try to get my body to develop new rhythms. It's not about my mind. My brain is too vast to focus on now- my body is manageable. sleep by myself, walk with your hands in your pockets to places you usually wouldn't go, stand up straight, legs together- no warm, wet anything.

stark, strong, bold, alone.

Alone I was as I walked into Zach Feuer in Chelsea this afternoon. Momus was wearing a ninja suit, beaming a clip light at a small woman named Aki Sasamoto. His voice is hypnotic as ever, even when he's not singing. He says all sorts of things to her, one anecdote about how he's convinced she contorts her face in her sleep especially for him because, subconsciously, she can feel his body and his eyes on hers and knows which expressions he thinks are beautiful. He also goes into the voice of an art critic while she rambles nonsense like a kindergardner, and recites songs by the Police while she flings potatoes attached to bungee cords against a collapsable wall.

Very romantic.

I adored it.

Sunday

2009-01-25T14:16:00.000-08:00

Today is Sunday.

I woke up around 11am with Joe.

Last night I went out for beer on St. Mark's with Luke and Maggie at a place called Je Bon. I had a shrimp tempura roll and we split 2 pitchers of Sapporo. I felt drunk. Walked to the Showpaper benefit at 92Y on Hudson. Max and some girl and Sean and Ariel and Jon Flores and Nicos and Bonnie and Jane were there.

This morning, the cat was running intently back and forth across the length of the apartment chasing plastic and his own poop. My roommate is away for the weekend so I walked more freely than usual around the apartment. I fed Shoog. I ate some quinoa. We didn't have any coffee so we made black tea. Thought about how the cheap weird teapot that I bought could be killing us with it's plastic handle. Joe made artichoke and garlic sausage with some eggs and gorgonzola on top. We ate off one plate. We went back into my bedroom and laid on the floor in the sun like cats. It was warm.

Took a shower, packed my computer and my toothbrush for my parents house. I have to go to the dentist tomorrow in Pennsylvania. Took a car to work, stopped for coffee on Vernon. Total $14 including a large coffee with soy.

When I turned off the alarm at Deitch, I could see a blurry rectangle of heat radiating from the top of the middle unit (1 of 3). Opened the street side garage doors first and then the waterside ones. I was nervous the locks would be frozen but they weren't. A lot of people have come into the gallery so far today. It's 5:30.

Linda Yablonsky came and talked on the phone really loudly for a while. She didn't look at anything and left after taking a few photos of the skyline.

A group of French people came in- a little girl and an old man among them.

A rabbi who had just married someone across the street came. He said the paintings were wonderfully apocolyptic. I told him they were made the year I was born.

2009-01-24T14:49:00.000-08:00

i am really really really really bored at work. joe says i should think of my time here as a sponsorship for my brain, but i can't help feeling like i'm on a cold airplane for six hours, 4 days a week. the walk could be done in my sleep. the clock gets watched, i pee, i eat somethings, read the new york times.

tell people about the paintings-

1. they were painted in 1985 in two days. they are not reproductions.
2. keith envisioned painting the ten commandments while dancing at paradise garage the night before he went to bordeaux for his first solo museum show. upon arriving in france, he asked for a bible and ordered 10 tablet shaped canvases that fit directly into large archways in the old wool factory where the show was being held.
3. they were made with acrylic and are kept rolled. they were re-stretched specifically for this show.
4. they are 26ft tall and 12ft wide.

above, is me diving in the air in front of the paintings. as you can see, they're quite large.

moving on. a photo of joe and me on my birthday. a nan goldin photo of arms.

(this post is not really directed that well. it's a product of boredom, not productivity, but maybe something new and exciting will arise from it).

Or maybe it'll allow me to sponsor my brain more effectively.

4.12.07

2008-09-01T22:06:00.001-07:00

11:53 PM me: that's the beauty of grapes megan

11:54 PM anything that round is meant to be problematized

they're not even that round though i guess

11:55 PM meg: youre nutter

11:57 PM so ive started sleeping in a silk dress

wicked funny

fades

2008-08-27T20:22:00.000-07:00

i am watching political commentary on msnbc because people who know how to make speeches lull me like songs and stories and knowing voices. they're not. but they sound the same.

last spring, my computer broke when i leaned over the keys with a glass of water in my hand. my body poured liquid and my new thing died.

things are things and i know what they mean. they're empty. but the words are not. documents i had written when i was leaving college and my friends and felt new and myself. photo projects. letters to boys and women.

no one inspires like previous selves.

i want 19 year old me- excited for moving and drugs and self anylysis. i want to ingest my ideas about when i thought that adolecence and all its annoyances and neurosis and fear were over.

i'm eating pot brownies from some girl who didn't know how to make butter. they're pure salt.

i don't want to be young. i want to talk to myself. i want to see progress. and it's lost in the water. i can't recollect anything. i want to read my thoughts.

i am pro-choice

2008-08-27T16:49:00.000-07:00

When you are a failed suicide everyone wants to ask you why but they don’t because asking why is socially a rude thing to do. Even the hungriest gossipmongers pocket their curiosities and pussyfoot, pussyfoot like toothless cougars. But when you are a failed suicide before you can leave the hospital you must tell why. It’s like a rule or something…

All the doctors in their well rehearsed concern ask you why and then take your why, your point, with all your poetic digressions, and enter the whole of it into the alliterative parade of helplessness and hopelessness.

“You were feeling helpless, right? And hopeless?”

And because the objective was not to land in a hospital you agree and admit,

“Yes, I felt helpless…and hopeless.”

This seems like a betrayal and it hurts. It hurts because it is false. It hurts because you allowed all the nuanced reasons surrounding your point to be shot, blown into a dusty summation made by a porcine doctor named Chloe. It hurts but you need to get out. First and foremost you need to get out. So, you recite the words Chloe, the good little mama bird, fed you. Again and again you hear your baby bird voice on repeat – helpless, hopeless, helpless, hopeless, helpless, hopeless.

There are many doctors.

The second doctor asks, “Why?” Sweat beads on her brow when she asks so exasperated, out of breath, bored by the question or the thought of listening to yet again another long tale of why woe is me when she in her infinite wisdom and sweat knew the answer before asking. She doesn’t even look at you. She keeps her head down at the papers on her desk. Her hand hovers over a box to check. Remember you want to get out. When you told Chloe why, all Chloe did was nod out the words helpless and hopeless, as if in confirmation, yes I agree she said, helpless, hopeless, even though you hadn’t mentioned anything of the sort. You swallowed those words helpless and hopeless because they were your ticket out and you knew this and you were proud to be so quick. You do not bore her, you tell the doctor with the sweaty brow, “I felt helpless and hopeless.” You say it without a stutter and feel like an actress, a great performer, look at me now! You think of that foolish girl from college who called her play absurdist, how you hated her for saying so because nonsensical does not mean absurdist. But what was happening now, this, this was absurdist. “I felt helpless and hopeless.” Such repetition. The sweaty doctor is appeased. She checks her box.

Then there is the third doctor, then the fourth, and the fifth and you see seven doctors of varied degrees, haircuts and ages and they all ask the same question and you tell all of them the same story of helplessness and hopelessness and you are believed. You are free. Freed! But really you’re only free because your insurance ran out.

You go home and when you get there your boyfriend is sleeping with an old girlfriend, so you envision her face on a platter without parsley and with great malice stab at her eyes with your fork. Her eyes pop like grapes spliced at the pupil but you end it here because you’ve dismissed her as pathetic, as a whore, as one to forget because she is not the point. And you fuck him a few more times because he is good and when he repents you dismiss him too, because he is not the point either.

One morning you wake up remembering the point and shiver in tears beneath your sheets. The point is frightening and has nothing to do with neither help nor hope. You shiver for an hour and your pillow is damp so you leave it for the shower and sit there in the porcelain scoop of the tub with the shower raining on you and you hold your knees and do not cry. You drink coffee and take speed because it is good and keeps you going.

You tell the point to the friend you never trusted and she looks at you cross-eyed. You tell your mother and she cries. You go to meetings and tell the point to strangers and they suggest you get a hobby, fill your time, maybe even volunteer, but these have to do with help, with hope, and help and hope are not the point. So, you go home to more shivers and lie in bed and feel like a two year old’s antipode tugging why not on a string.

peak oil

2008-08-17T23:23:00.000-07:00

when i call my boyfriend, he tells me about peak oil. i don't try to think about peak oil because i already feel apocalyptic as it is.
so, i'll put the quote he emailed me here so i don't have to think about it and you can all think about it and then forget about it and then it'll be over and none of us will ever think about it again until it's over.

"the mentioned agricultural crisis will only begin to impact us after 2020, and will not become critical until 2050." BUT this doesn't take into account Peak Oil, "which suggest for sustainability, global population will have to be reduced from the current 6.32 billion people42 to 2 billion-a reduction of 68% or over two-thirds. The end of this decade could see spiraling food prices without relief. And the coming decade could see massive starvation on a global level such as never experienced before by the human race."

nothing to speak of

2008-08-15T11:33:00.000-07:00

Last night I had this dream: I was trying to get on the MassPike because I had a hemorrhoid and needed to complete this 5K road race to prevent coastal flooding but the woman at the tollbooth wouldn’t let me enter unless she could crunkle up my CharlieCard. I screamed, “You bitch!” Then all these gay guys came about in tie-dye t-shirts, laughing, saying, “What’s the deal? What did you expect? That’s how things are done around here.” So I hijacked a bus heading to Spring Street and ended up at the harbor with this guy I kept calling Siskin who fed me green candies he kept in his pocket. I ran through a cemetery to win the race and everyone else drowned in a puddle. Victorious!

i'll be back soon meg. just in a stagnant period. bleeding heavily for you.

2008-08-11T19:32:00.000-07:00

a poem for aids

2008-08-11T13:59:00.000-07:00

2008-08-10T18:41:00.001-07:00

I am a dog.

last night i saw a movie

2008-08-05T17:30:00.000-07:00

To suck out the juice and reduce it to nothing and put it in a mish-mash of order, I’ll offer a useless film review about a Wild Turkey love affair starring this fast paced bald man "ahhing" and "uhhing" and "umming" his way through these wryly hysterical, seldom nonsensical, these forever mind blowing smart banters and quips that he spoke most likely drug riddled but not addled just riddled, never addled, just riddled. Drug riddled. A cigarette holder fixed to his lip. His outfits – fishing vest, Nixon mask, curly wig, a Vegas visor that I feel like calling a “bodega hat,” striped shirt, tinted glasses, blonde wig, grey wig, many Dad-goes-to-Hawaii button up t-shirts (flora not fauna theme here), baby blue powdered shorts cutting off at mid-thigh. At dusk, without a helmet, he speeds down Big Sur on his bike like a villain, a con, an Invincible, flirting with the eye-drying speed he shifts from first to second, from second to third and on up till he hits the edge facing the thing head on. Take me! he says. Take me! But it doesn’t, it won’t, so he will later with a gun. There is Chicago 1968 when he cries. Alongside nude women he types and the women stand about, prance about, their chaches all bush, so seventies, their tits amazing hanging down. And out come the guns to fire at wild boars, typewriters, trees, to fire inside the house and outside the house and sometimes at nothing at all. He is not Good Sally and the Activist team pulling in on their scholarship wagon, he’s not Baby Jane with daddy’s money either. He delivers punches with his balls intoxicated and his heart in flames and so sets politics on fire. In a Cadillac, with an attorney and a tape recorder he goes out looking for the American dream and is asked by a woman at a taco stand, “What is that? The American Dream?” She thinks it’s a nightclub, a psych ward. He eats speed, drops acid, snorts blow off knife blades (Knives out? Yes? Yes!), takes mescaline – two half doses thirty minutes apart, etc., etc. drug culture galore. Pours whiskey after whiskey like a southerner cradling sweet tea, makes me thirst for a soda pop, a whiskey soda pop. He divorces and remarries. Blows off his head with a gun. Ha-ha! Of course! Fire at nothing, fire at it all! Blasts out of a cannon. Fire work display. Ashes to ashes, ahh, what a rush. Life seems so glorious on film.

may

2008-08-03T22:42:00.000-07:00

We lounged about. In our rooms, in the lobby with the grand puzzle, in the big room at the end of the tiled hallway where Law & Order re-runs played out on a twenty inch beast that hummed through commercials and flickered during shows. In the bathroom with the spiders and sticky floor, where Charlotte a woman near forty liked to hide behind the toilet bowl and purr, liked flushing her pills down the drain. But never outside. We weren’t allowed outside. Only outside for cigarette breaks – four times a day, the first one at six a.m. Outside taunted us, it haunted me. It sat there poker faced behind five caged windows that lined a wall of the big room. Outside, a massive tree spurting off branches and roots, which rose through the dirt in knotted knolls up and over the cracked stone pathway leading to a rotting red park bench, passed on in its glory without us. It seemed to march. So deliberate, so callous, I thought I would drown. I wanted autumn, I wanted to rake, I wanted to cut my palms raking, I wanted to stick my hands in the soil and come out with a worm. Beyond the massive tree were more trees, a forest of trees. A drained moat. Two wire lawn chairs thrown together, side by side, one rusting at its feet. A ten foot high chain link fence. A trash barrel full of cigarette butts and small paper Dixie cups. A spider that would bite me while I smoked a Newport with a vainglorious heroin addict name Tricia, a bite that’d turn my left calf purple.

hm.

2008-07-27T16:12:00.001-07:00

i have no desire to say anything halfway preconceived or clever or full of contridiction. i turned 23 two days ago. it was very simple and i was upstate at this house. i went swimming and ate alot of exceptionally delcious food and played games in the woods.

aids4lyfe update

2008-07-13T21:21:00.000-07:00

megan took a brief hiatus from the world and dropped off the face of the earth. never fear, readers- she's alive, safe and sound, but has removed herself from the blogosphere. thus, i am left to fulfill the aids4lyfe prophecy dolo. we all die alone.

Things that have happened since April (the last time I posted):
-I moved out of my apartment on s.3rd street and in with my friend Bailey on Stanhope street. Bailey is kooky and lovely and acutely domestic. i love her.
-2.5 months later I moved in with my boyfriend, Joe. We live at the Silent Barn on Wyckoff Ave.
-A band called Teeth Mountain from Baltimore played at the house and a girl from the band, Kate, went outside and found a cat on the sidewalk. He was all white and had a blue bell. He his now mine and he is named Suge Knight.
-Joe and I went to Mexico City for eight days.
-I started managing the new Deitch space in Long Island City. It's at the end of 44th drive, right on the water. Mainly, I see alot of kayakers and people who work for Matthew Barney. It's sort of the best summer job ever.

I developed a keenness for suburban Queens and have picked out various blocks that I would like to sit on as an old woman with high socks and breasts that touch my knees.
-

2008-03-15T22:53:00.000-07:00

megan if we don't go now, it'll be too late.

the tangible vs. the real- a tricky EQUATION

2008-02-14T15:44:00.000-08:00

The equator is an imaginary line comparable to my childhood friends Sheila and Michelle. However, unlike them, the equator does hold some geographical properties. The latitude of the equator is, by definition, 0°. The length of Earth's equator is about 24,901.5 miles. In relation, the geographical mile is defined as one arc minute of the equator. I think all distance should be measured in time.
The Earth juts out slightly at the equator. It has an average diameter of 12,750 km, but at the equator the diameter is approximately 43 km greater. I learned much of this information from Wikipedia. I hope it is true.

Here are some photos of people at various points on the equator:

Check back for forthcoming entries on the prime meridian and arctic circle....wait in vain.

a cup of this, that too.

2008-02-12T20:18:00.000-08:00

On Sunday in the late afternoon, Joe and I set out for food near Silent Barn in Ridgewood. There's this place called Breakfast Lunch Dinner around six blocks from his house that I really like because the Matzoh Ball Soup is quite good- I'd venture to say some of best I've ever had.
Anyway, the wind pushed us there and I smoked a cigarette under the awning of my hood. Breakfast was over, lunch too, had to be dinner. There were maybe ten people in the whole place, including the employees. We sat in a booth behind an old man hooked up to a respirator that was placed on the floor beside him. It didn't block the aisle though. I faced him, Joe faced me. He sat at the table alone with napkins shoved into his shirt, unshaven, smiling.
We talked about trips and the night before and the idea that to rationalize something in our small lives is to actually ration it, to allocate parts, to divide and organize. Individual importance must be derived from order, from arrangement, from maintenance coupled with a drop of creation. Explanation falls behind proportionality. Do I ration parts of myself for a later date in order to interpret and conceptualize my current actions? This is muddled, I know.
I got the soup and toast with jam, Joe got various eggs and muffins and sausages. Coffee too. The man got mashed potatoes and peas and turkey, which he blended with a fork in order to properly swallow without choking. Plastic tubes in his nose. The waitress kept calling him Romeo and asking him if he was ever going to take her on a date, screaming to him that Valentine's Day was her birthday, screaming to no one in particular,
"Ok, it's time to do some real work now, real work, ok"
"Romeo, Romeo, more coffee?"
"Romeo, Romeo!" like he was asleep or dead or something.
The point of life is productivity not happiness. The point of life is productivity not happiness. The point of life is productivity not happiness?
He twirled his finger at me around his right temple, grinning, motioning her insanity. I started feeling water in my eyes, smiling back, looking down at my soup. A guy came in and asked the waitress for something to go, he milled around the front and looked down at the old man at the table.
"How you been, Joe?"

i don't know who reads this but

2008-02-07T19:18:00.000-08:00

person

2008-02-01T17:48:00.000-08:00

Last summer I met this boy outside of a show who said my name really long: wide a's, harsh b's. He drew marker tattoos all over my arms, with maps to his apartment, lists of nice bands, and diagrams of his brain- with the overused parts enlarged for effect. He told me he wanted to make me macaroni and cheese, like the real kind with the crust on top, so I gave him my phone number, drunk. In the morning, I woke up fuzzy. Not home. Not with him. The ink had become big blue amorphous gobs, muddled by sweat.
I met him that day in the afternoon after he had called me twice, and we smoked a joint by the water and then walked up to the northern tip of Greenpoint where there's this park I really like: all views, no people. He kept trying to kiss me, but I just wanted to say all the things I never say because clearly I would never ever voluntarily look this person in the eye again. The pity of my glazed over heart was no match for the conversational road less traveled- weird bodily function dilemmas and aspirational difficulties.
He had: really bad teeth, like all brown and small and yellow, and auburn hair and green skin. If you squinted, he kind of resembled a gnome or a junkie. But eyes wide- he was just a pathetic, strange looking kid. Nothing as I had remembered him through blurred vision, I thought he had been tall or something. He said he liked my eyes. I wish he said he liked how my face turns really red for no reason or that I had cellulite on my stomach or that my skin was really dry around my forehead. But people don't say those things.
Things he did say:
1. You're pretty (Like the eyes thing, generic, not endearing)
2. I hang out with Allen Ginsburg's son/grandson (I do not remember which).
3. I have seventeen tattoos (I did not verify this claim as I did not want to look at his body, it was gangly and disgusting, though he did have several, hasty demarcations on his forearms)
4. I grew up in New York.
5. I hate young, affluent, unwiedly, annoying people who move to Brooklyn (read- you know what)
2 and 3 were meant to impress, 4 and 5 to initiate self-loathing. Neither did either. I did not care. My apathy stemmed from ugly teeth and gross skin, not any notion of idealism. He said a bunch of other stuff about not having a job, various drugs he could procure in a half hours notice, and his dump of an apartment in Bushwick. Maybe I should have at least wanted to be friends with him.
He kept saying my name before every comment or anecdote he offered. GaaaaaaaaaBBy. GaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaBBBBBBBy
I hate the sound of my own name normally, but it's really a fucking nailsonchalkboard response when people I don't know say it commonly, like saying- hi, hello, like, yes, and, maybe, sure, please. Not the same. Gabby, try it out, roll it around in your mouth, gargle with it. But don’t regurgatate it back to me, jesus christ. Fucking swallow it up, guy, don't spit it out.

Test. I never tried to recall or learn his name. I remember this blankness making me so happy, giddy almost, at the time. And the very reason I kept the whole thing going- because I still didn't know what the hell he was called. I kept tossing around possible monikers in my head, smiling with delight, the endless possibility from such a simple thing. I thought of titles that could be chopped up eight different ways if necessary- Richard, Robert, Benjamin, Stephen. Not that they really could.
I wondered if he had been made fun of as a little kid by other little kids because of it, or if his mother or grandmother called him something different. Had he been named for someone who died? Did he have old jerseys from sports he used to play with the word etched in the back or front? Had he ever fucked someone so deep and so good and so hard that his name had sprung from her mouth again and again?
Around five in the afternoon, around the time I was supposed to go meet my friend to go to this show in this backyard, he went,
"So, my dad said, 'John, you've gone too far this time,"
I had been tuned out for good fifteen, twenty minutes, staring off into space, manic with myself for thinking him a Thomas this hour, and it hit me like a slap, like when someone tells you they're cheating, or that you're the part of their life that they hate, or that they don't love you. I reached up, I felt blood coming out of my nose and ears and mouth. john, john, john. So short and bland, like a stump or a chode, not even emblematic of something else. He kept talking. Lips moving, hands gesturing, feet walking. I lit a cigarette and told him I had to go. Pop.

stills

2008-01-27T23:17:00.000-08:00

james
gary, indiana
barr
joe
megan

poetic synaesthesia

2008-01-27T22:38:00.000-08:00

colorless green ideas sleep furiously

5.17.07

2008-01-21T17:07:00.000-08:00

I bought this notebook in a Greyhound station in Spokane Washington. joe and i are traveling cross country on the bus and we left Portland this morning. I feel good and bland and scared and happy. Fearful of my own brain and everything it may or may not contain. But moving is cathartic and i suppose it's time to start thinking again. Portland felt like a test. Stayed in a 24 hour coffee shop called the pharmacy near a park called Couch. Had dinner with a big tittied blond hip-hop business woman with a cross in her house the size of joe's suitcase, and another the size of a bike. went to a lame emo show at a posh bar. walked over a bridge, saw homeless people and cried. but that may have been the fight. maybe not. slept in the coffee shop. joe woke me at six. got six doughnuts at a place that will marry you. wondered if holy matrimony flavored with sacharine and starch tastes better in the end. they had vegan ones too. now, on a bus to moscow idaho by way of washington. woman's been yelling at her blond son behind me for the last forty or so minutes. she has: short shorts, rolls hanging over, gray skin. it's green here, so green. i want to put everything in my pocket. colors fade.

words. words. words

mmm..Rushdie

2008-01-20T15:18:00.000-08:00

Her father asked her what she wanted for her birthday. She looked at the driver and briefly wanted to be the kind of woman who could have asked him pornographic questions, right there in the elevator, within seconds of their first meeting; who could have talked dirty to this beautiful man, knowing that he would not have understood a word, that he would've smiled an employee's assenting smile without knowing what he was agreeing to. Did he take it in the ass? She wanted to see his smile. She didn't know what she wanted. She wanted to make documentary films.

I am Frank Zappa's illegitamate second cousin, once removed

2008-01-18T14:11:00.001-08:00

No lie-

My mother's first husband was Frank Zappa's cousin. They married in a Catholic church during the summer of 1973, the year she turned nineteen. Five months later, Eddy Colimore became a Jehovah's Witness in a ceremony not much different than the one that made them man and wife. Death do us part, no love and cherish. The marriage was promptly annulled.

The Rothko Chapel

2008-01-15T21:39:00.000-08:00

The Rothko Chapel in Houston, TX was commissioned by the Menil family in 1964, and erected seven years later, in 1971. The artist committed suicide in 1970, directly before its completion. The only light in the room comes from a small hole at the top of the dome shaped ceiling- a veritable sensory deprivation tank.

Sistas R Doin it Right

2008-01-13T19:16:00.000-08:00

M: i'm starting a blog
G: oh yeah??
M: yeah
G: we should start a blog together meg
M: i think it will be a good way to kill event/thoughts that dont matter
i'm down with a shared blog
G: excellent
M: how do we do it
G: it will be incentive to post
we need a name
M: yes we do
G: like aids4lyfe/sistas are doin it right
M: ha
G: something to that effect
M: i like that.
aids4lyfe
my idea for my blog was to write out things i wanted to die soo aids4lyfe would fit
G: things you wanted to di?
M: like thoughts and events that mean nothing but take up space in my head
like for instance i think fbook is a great way to kill these things
as soon as theyre on there, theyre dead
i'm hoping a blog will have the same effect
G: what are you trying to make room for?
M: new things to kill i suppose
or maybe clarity
maybe i'll get some clarity
G: clarity is good
M: yes i would like it
Sent at 6:58 PM on Sunday
Gabrielle: http://aids4lyfe.blogspot.com/
there ya go cossface