Teenager for Free By Michael Bible

January 6, 2016

Text by Michael Bible and Kelsey Bennett from a working manuscript called Big Naturals

Teenager for Free

Summer everywhere. The gymnasts tan beside the marathon. Lucy writhes in the backseat of her father’s Jaguar. Coach gets his hormone treatments early. Forcefield, book report, hourglass. Always remember this world owes you nothing. Oh, and homework can suck my dick.

Your Sister Was Wiccan Webcam Girl

Touchdown rainbow downward dog. Broken hoodie zipper. Skittles and blowjobs. Fourth of July. I was on the swim team, she played trumpet in the band. The fever was everywhere. Cadillacs and skulls on her avatar. Men with lubrication fumbling in the dark.

California Urgent Care Julias

The magazine cover is men on horseback late for a hanging. Their shadows make giant octopuses in the grass. The falconer's falcon flies to the sun and fire ants build a raft with their dead. Is it Julia C. or Julia S. that I’m in love with? All I can think about is my landlord’s ballet slippers. An article on how wild algorithms might explain away desperate love. I dream of listening to 8-tracks driving west on Sunset toward the sea.

What It’s Like to Be From Nowhere

At the parade the debutantes blow their best kisses to delinquents. The policemen don snuggies and paper crowns. God bless America, whatever the fuck. The Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders white water raft on a big screen. Feather boa, rain stick, back massagers are two for one. Donut trucks do donuts in the eye of a hurricane. The banana car drives off a cliff. You have that Sunday night feeling everyday of the week.

Neo Nazi Paparazzi

Adolf was a lightning rod salesman in a time of drought. A very big, surprising man on a tiny bike. You never know where the next blast will come, was his opener. It isn’t long until we’re invaded by beautiful light. Before you know it, strange atmospheric pressure. Wise up, son. It’s Christmas where you’re from.

Michael Bible is the author of the novel Sophia (Melville House). His work has been published in the Oxford American, Paris Review Daily and New York Tyrant. Kelsey Bennett is an artist and curator who has shown work in New York, LA, London and Miami. She has been featured in VICE and Interview. Bible and Bennett's collaboration Sorry Saints will be exhibited at New York's Spring Break Art Show. They live in NYC.

[POETRY] Pets Get Pets

December 2, 2015

PETS GET PETS

by Bud Smith, with illustrations by Michael Seymour Blake

Around here, everybody is alone. We get pets. The pets eat our loneliness. That’s all they do.

Other than eating loneliness, they just lay around the apartment, dreaming, Thinking and dreaming. Waiting for the perfect time.

The dreams lead the days down the conveyor belt.

The conveyor belt carries the dreams through an invisible wall that no one can cross. The invisible wall radiates loneliness. Our pets have to eat that for us. Or we die.

I’m a pet. I put on my shoes and my pants and I go outside the apartment and catch an underground train, and I go to a big metal building full of other pets. All of us, we’re pets to countless things.

Here’s a big one: our computers. The computers glow, and our fingers move on the keyboard and loneliness comes out of the screen like a electric dust attracted to us.

My dog, Dusty had to get another dog. A dog for her. Pet for a pet.

The apartment has four walls.

Dusty also has an invisible wall.

Where all her dreams are lead, by a conveyor belt of sleep, and waking, and drinking and drooling, eating, bathing, and all the other things us pets do.

It became too much. She was slobbering on the floor, barking at the closed window. But I trained her to use an iPad.

Now Dusty has a dog that lives in her mouth. A puppy. She got the puppy off of Craigslist in exchange for biting a man on the neck who likes that kind of thing

And now the puppy eats her loneliness.

The puppy living in Dusty’s mouth has pets too, two separate pets, tiny kittens that camp out in Dusty’s ears.

My computer screen releases a wall of electric dust and it sticks to every fine hair on my body.

That’s okay, the kittens living in Duty’s ears have pets too. They’re two Siamese cats, Error and Terror. They curl up and sleep on Dusty’s eyes.

Humming in unison.

Oh, one more thing, this computer might be a kind of conveyor belt.

Think I figured that out just now.

Bud Smith is the author of the novels F 250 and Tollbooth, the short story collection Or Something Like That and the poetry collection Everything Neon. He works heavy construction in NJ and lives in NYC where he has a car he parks on the street like that TV show Seinfeld.

Michael Seymour Blake is an art creator and admirer, person who says "hello puppy" in a weird voice whenever he sees a dog, and hypochondriac extraordinaire. He has lived in New York his whole life and has a love/hate relationship with it. He likes talking at length about movies, books, and comics, he also enjoys toys, food, and old stuff (but not old food). Email him at SeymourWBlake@gmail.com to talk about things.

[POETRY] Some Monsters I'm Friends With

November 18, 2015

Some Monsters I'm Friends With

by Bud Smith, with illustrations by Michael Seymour Blake

There was a werewolf who had a drinking problem. She wanted two things very badly, to kick the alcohol, which she felt slowly killing her; but also, to not do anything on a night with a full moon high in the sky, that'd cause her to kill anyone else.

It was a shame when her AA meeting fell on a full moon night, and she couldn't attend.

The other people at the meeting survived, but she began to drink again. She had nothing but the bottle.

There is a vampire who lives above me. Apartment 22. He came down through the ceiling in a green fog and spoke to me in Latin.

The fog hung over my TV and I was frozen.

Finally I said "I don't understand Latin."

And the vampire explained in plain English that he'd once fallen in love with a mermaid griffin and he wanted very badly to find her if there was a way.

I said, "Did you Facebook her?"

The vampire was embarrassed, he'd changed into a more humanistic form and opened his hands to reveal ten sharp spikes where fingers should be.

"It took me ten centuries to figure out how to use my computer and it seems I have forgotten my login password for the wifi."

There was an uncomfortable pause.

"You can use my wifi."

"What's the password?"

"BreakingBadToTheBone. Capital B breaking capital B bad capital T to capital T the Capital B bone ... All one word, got that? Hold on I'll just use my phone."

He sat on the couch next to me and I found her, easily enough, she lived in Dusseldorf.

In her AVI, I could see her eyes were filled with ultimate evil.

A true world destroyer.

The vampire who lives in apartment 22 said, "Where is Dusseldorf?"

"Lemme google map it ... You want directions by car, bus or ..."

"Do flights, you fool."

"Did you instant message her?"

"No."

"At least IM her, don't just show up like a creep."

There was a boy who had an alligator face. He wasn't always like that. He woke up that way one day.

And when he went to school, some of the other kids taunted him about it.

So he bit another kid on the face. Ripped apart the face.

Blood everywhere in the hall outside of the art room.

And that is why you never make fun of a boy with an alligator face unless you are quick like lightning.

I heard again about the alcoholic werewolf after her car accident.

She hit a child on a bicycle right on my street. The child lay bleeding in the street. The werewolf leapt out of her Pontiac that was hissing after the side of the church stopped its path.

The child would have died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.

but before she did

the werewolf got down on her knees, I saw it with my own eyes peeking out the curtains

and she bit down on the throat of the child, bit it hard, even more blood spilled on the road.

when the werewolf vanished into the woods

She was in the form of a girl I recognized from the bar, think her name is Bonnie ... but the EMTs when they arrived heard the wolf howling in the woods and they told the newspaper it sounded just like crying.

The vampire upstairs did not find love in Dusseldorf. He comes down through my ceiling and he is weeping too.

"What happened with the mermaid Frankenstein?" I ask.

"Don't ask!"

"Ok. I've got lady problems too. My girlfriend started dating my friend Paul instead."

"Help me and I'll kill Paul."

"No we don't have to do that. What happened with your mermaid?"

"She sent me an electronic telegram on the World Wide Web and when I clicked on the telegram it asked for my name, address and social security number ..."

"Oh no, you didn't enter that, did you?"

"Yes! Yes I did! Now my bank account is empty and I find out that my love in Dusseldorf is not who she say she is!"

"It's probably a hacker in Lithuania."

"I will go there and find them and you will come with me."

"I can't," I said, "I have this cat."

I pointed to the cat.

The vampire pointed at the cat too and the cat exploded in a whoosh of fur and bones.

"To Lithuania," he said.

The little girl from the car wreck wakes up in the morgue.

She is covered in blood but she had no wounds.

She is seven years old and her clothes have not been cut off.

She would not have been cold anyway.

She left the morgue.

She went out across the wet lawn.

Into the big moonlight.

Many miles away she could hear howling coming from the trees.

It was her new mother.

The child began to sprint towards her cries.

That's how Bonnie got that kid I see her with, she'll pretend she's the kids aunt, that she adopted her because her parents are meth heads but i know the truth, I have gotten tanked with Bonnie and she has told me all about it.

One last thing

The boy with the alligator face enters a pie eating contest.

And he wins.

No one wants to sit anywhere near him.

So he is the only one eating pie.

And at the end, the judges pass him his blue ribbon, tied to a long pole so the boy doesn't bit their hands off.

There's a prize, too.

His prize is, a kiss from the prettiest girl in town.

My ex girlfriend, Shannon.

[SHORT STORY] A Walk Around Town on a Chilly Evening

October 23, 2015

A Walk Around Town On a Chilly Evening

by Sasha Fletcher

After the sun set and the last of its heat dissipated from the baked bricks of the buildings lining what amounted to a boulevard, the cold winds started in from the North or the East or some other place full up with trouble and nonsense, and whistled their way through the town.

Outside the bar are several drunks drunk and lonely, their secrets spilling out their mouths and on down their shirtfronts, their bile spelling out a few choice phrases like WE FIND NEW WAYS TO DEFEAT OURSELVES BETTER THAN THE WORLD EVER COULD EVERY DAY and IF I KNEW BETTER HOW TO LIVE WITH MY LONELINESS THEN MAYBE YOU’D SPEAK TO ME AGAIN, OR AT LEAST COME HOME and I WOULD SAY I AM SORRY BUT THE WORD FOR WHAT I AM FEELING IS NOT A WORD, IT IS A FEELING, AND FURTHERMORE IF I BROACHED THE SUBJECT OF MYSELF TO YOU I’D BE A DEAD MAN AND A HALF and THIS WAS NOT WHAT I MEANT TO ACCOMPLISH and WHOOPS, GUESS I REALLY MADE A MESS HERE, HUH?

Such are the feelings we spill from time to time on the shoes of strangers, our sadness a thing we choose to choke or choke on as the moment dictates, and depending of course on the price of whisky, which at the moment is on sale, and the road to the bar is wide, roughly as wide as my weaknesses, which will swallow me whole, just you watch. But before that, let us hold our heads under the water until something magical happens. Let us hold hands and walk through the fire in the manner of people in nicer clothes that we can afford, and let us do it with the gusto and commitment that we would like to be better known for.

Outside all of this is the jail, in which several men are interred for inflicting their feelings on unsuspecting citizens with varying degrees of violence. ‘Tell us something!’ they call out to the Sheriff’s father. ‘Tell you what he?’ says to them. ‘Tell us something lovely and true and only a little vicious, just enough to draw some blood, to get the scent of living in the air.’ He says ‘Fine’ and reads them the letters he has written to the ghost he loves and when he is finished they say ‘And then what?’ and he says to them ‘And then nothing.’ He says ‘And then we keep living as best we can with our hearts on fire in a way that not even death will extinguish’, and this shuts them up for the night while they sit with their thoughts which have, it turns out, sincerely let them down.

Upstairs from the jail is the Sheriff’s father’s apartment, next to the sign that says JAIL, and notes are falling from the ceiling, and have been for years, and then the wind comes and scoops them up, because the wind is a fucking asshole, and romance does not always get to win, because if it did, well, what then?

What then? is a game the children are playing that they invented earlier wherein they reinvent the wheel and by the wheel we mean history.

What then is then everyone gets the ball scores in in a more timely fashion. What then is the double play and the complete game shutout and the invention of the ground rule double, which is a thing people have got some opinions on, but fuck their opinions, because the ground rule double is a law, and you’re just an opinion with a mouth. The town paper has got some things to say about the ground rule double, but is keeping them to itself. The town paper sits alone in the dark, writing editorial after editorial. The town paper thinks for a moment about what it might be like to date, to sit across a table from a body and to risk something of their feelings, or at least maybe to sit down to a meal, for once in its life. After thinking, the town paper writes an editorial, and after that the town paper writes another editorial. In the basement of the town paper, an idea, unspoken, rustles.

Up in her room is Meg who has stopped seeing Daniel, but is unsure if she wants to see Sam. Sam on his porch down the road is decidedly sure that he would like to see Meg if she would let him, while up in her room Meg thinks of how glad she is to know Sam, of the joy knowing him has brought to her life, and the ways in which their conversations have expanded the borders of her life to encompass things she had previously only dreamed of, but how that doesn’t mean she wants to marry the guy. Meg thinks of Sam and is, for a moment, overwhelmed by a rush of blood and warmth let loose by her heart. Meg thinks of Sam and of how much more glad she would be if he would just let things be. ‘Sam’ says Meg ‘I get it. There is such stuff in my heart that you could not get over if you tried, which who even knows if you have, but that doesn’t mean things between us would work.’ ‘In another world’ says Sam to Meg from his porch ‘Wanting would be enough.’ ‘In another world ‘says Meg to Sam from her upstairs in her room ‘I’d like that very much.’

Past them is the moon, which is, in its own way, another world beyond all of us, and below the moon is the barbershop. Outside the barbershop are a group of men with large ideas and new haircuts and nobody cares about those men and if they do care about them well then that’s their mistake, and not one which we are willing to indulge. Past the barbershop is the Jail, where the Sheriff sits with a pipe as the prisoners ask him questions to which he responds ‘Well, I reckon you’ll stay there until such time as you learn to not be a shit heel. No Tom, I don’t rightly reckon I know when that would be either. Dinner’s beans in a cup with some burnt ends. Well because it’s all I know to cook, or it’s ’cause I don’t rightly feel like expending the effort to make you more than that. Also you’re drunk Tom. You pissed in your gun and thought you’d be shooting piss in Bill’s ear instead of the shell in the chamber. Yes, Bill’s dead, with an ear full of piss, too. Yes, Tom, I reckon you’ll hang. Yes it was misleading earlier. No, I don’t feel too torn up about it. Well Tom, I have known love. Well I left that love, Tom. No, no it was just. Well, Tom, she was a witch, and I was greatly terrified of her femininity, and her power, and quite frankly I just felt like I was out of my depth. Do I regret it? Sure. Some days. I mean, who doesn’t have a few regrets? I’m sure you regret leaving Bill dead with an ear full of piss. But that don’t preclude an attempt at justice and whatever subsequent punishment is decided upon for the taking of a life unjustly, which, if you’ve been following along here, tends in this town to be a handing. Yes, Tom. I too weep at the sheer fucking impossibility of it all. Practically every night.’ And then they both weep at the sheer fucking impossibility of it all, because who wouldn’t? And anyway past the jail is, fittingly enough, the graveyard, which is not so much a yard as it is the plot of land at the bottom of a hill reached by a winding staircase at the top of which is the church.

Outside the church sits an old priest and a young priest. Earlier today the old priest and young priest woke up in their rooms and they yawned and stretched and the young priest worries a bit about sleep, which is not a thing he does well at all, and the old priest cataloged his dreams so as to better distinguish them from his visions and the young priest just assumed that whatever happened inside his head was the thing he was meant to think or see, but that he should, if he could, hold those thoughts up to what light of day there is so as to compare them to the wide world and better get a grip on what plans there are that exist for him, and after al that they got dressed and met downstairs.

‘Well’ said the young priest to the old priest ‘I guess we’d better open up.’ ‘That’ said the old priest ‘Would be the thing to do’, and so they went and they opened up the doors, and no one is there. ‘There’s nobody there’ said the young priest. ‘Seems as though nobody is in need of a church at this hour’ said the old priest. ‘Coffee?’ said the young priest. ‘Oh yes, please’ said the old priest, and they retire to the back, and prepare some coffee. ‘So last night’ said the young priest ‘Oh?’ said the old priest ‘Yeah’ said the young priest. ‘Were you going to tell me about last night?’ said the old priest and the young priest said ‘I wasn’t planning on it but I could if you’d like’, and then they both sat there with their coffee, and then someone stuck their head in and said ‘Hi Hello Can you help me?’ ‘How can we help?’ they said, and the person says ‘You can die’, and then like twenty people swarm the church, guns blazing, and the priests said together and in unison ‘We’d rather you didn’t do this. God loves you, and violence is not the answer’ and this statement got answered with more gunplay, and the young priest sighed and said to the old priest ‘OK so about my dream’ and the old priest said ‘Uh huh’ and then grabbed the nearest church-swarmer by the neck and removed their head from their body and gripped the spine with both hands and whipped it around, smashing a few heads together, while the young priest shot out the eyes of the church-swarmers and said ‘Last night I could have sworn there was a mountain walking around the desert’ and shoots out a few more eyes, which are the windows to the soul, and anyone that would visit such violence upon these men, well, their soul is fucked unto death probably, and the old priest said ‘Go on’ and the young priest said ‘I mean that wasn’t what happened, really. What happened was I was a much older man’ and the old priest says ‘Like me?’ and the young priest says ‘And I was standing on the roof of a house on top of a mountain that was roaming the desert carried along upon a series of tumbleweeds, and I was standing there with my daughter, in the dream I had a daughter’ and he shot four more people through the eyes while the old priest switched out his shattered-to-shit skull on the end of the spine of his church-swarmer basher for a fresh one from the neck of a real asshole-looking fella, and the young priest said ‘I don’t know how I knew she was my daughter, but I just did’ and the old priest said ‘The world’s funny like that’ and the young priest said ‘And anyway her name was America, and it wasn’t a symbol or anything it was just her name, America Resplendent Adams, and she and I were standing there, her mother had been dead a year that morning, we stood there, and we wept, and our tears formed a waterfall, and it flooded a town, a town by the sea, and the town was swept away, and America looked up at me, and she opened her mouth, and then I woke up.’ ‘Shit’ said the old priest, breathing slowly, and stacking the bodies into a sort of mountain. ‘Yeah, well’ said the young priest, panting from the exertion. ‘Guess we should bury them.’

And so anyway that’s why they’re here in the graveyard, where the old priest, sweating, mostly out of breath, and leaning against a tombstone on which they have inscribed HERE REST SEVERAL POOR DECISIONS, he says ‘I was in love with a ghost once’ and the young priest says ‘1) Who wasn’t and 2) We can talk about that later.’ The old priest says ‘What of America?’ and the young priest says ‘That isn’t funny’ The old priest says ‘America.’ The young priest says ‘You can be a real asshole sometimes, you know that?’ The old priest says ‘I worry that America has forgotten how to love’, says ‘Brother and sisters, we are gathered here today huddled up amongst the rocks and the hard places, begging the Lord up above for guidance, because that is all we are good for, is begging. Brothers and sisters I say unto you ‘Fuck your beggary’, for it will get you nowhere. Does the lord love you more when you cry out for him to fix things? When your child ceases not with its pleas and tears, does this inspire you to love the child more? or to strike it about the face and body with your hands or some other implement of tact? This is a question put to you out there in America where we no longer know what love means.’ The young priest says ‘That was a nice start but it gets a little aggressive towards the end there.’ The old priest says ‘People respond to aggression.’ The young priest says ‘Not well’ says ‘Recall earlier, if you will.’ The old priest says ‘I thought that went well’ and the young priest says nothing. He says ‘Once upon a time in the west I was tired, and after that I went to bed, and in the morning a whole bunch of jerks sat around worrying about everything except whether they were trying to be better, more decent people, who attempted more sincerely to connect to others around them, and really grow the kind of community that would make anyone proud.’ He says ‘Let’s change the subject.’ he says ‘Some people talk about the soul and where it resides. They say that the deepest part of you is in your head, or your heart, or your blood. ‘His blood is bad’ they’ll say. ‘His heart is cold.’ ‘He has got an evil turn of mind.’ ‘There is a darkness to him’ is what they’ll say. But the worst of us, what we leave behind, what heaven never wants, is our bones.’ He says ‘Fuck.’ He says ‘I don’t really know where I’m going with all this.’ He says ‘I am not really going anywhere with this.’ The old priest says to the young priest ‘Oh yes you are’ and the young priest says ‘And where might that be?’ and the old priest says ‘Straight to hell’ and then they both die laughing. Now they’re up in heaven, and there’s God, saying ‘Stop that’, and the old priest and the young priest say ‘Make us’, they say ‘We dare you.’ They say ‘We double dare you.’ They say ‘We double dare you and stamp it with a Presidential seal from the President of Loneliness, with whom we have got a real close and personal relationship.’ God says ‘You guys know the President of Loneliness?’ The old priest and the young priest say ‘Fuck yes we do!’ And God says ‘Dang.’ And the old priest and the young priest say ‘Tell us about it’, and so that is what God does. And, in the morning when the sun comes up, there they are, the old priest and the young priest, still dead as all creation, and loving every second of it.

SASHA FLETCHER is the author of It Is Going To Be a Good Year (Big Lucks Books, 2016), several chapbooks of poetry, and an out of print novella. He has recently finished a novel, from which this piece is excerpted from.

[SHORT STORIES] Selections from ECHO PARK by Ryan Ridge

October 2, 2015

Ryan Ridge's short short stories carry a sort of essence of the 21st century. His brief prose style parallels with our abrupt, social-media-driven way of communicating in the modern world. The following tales--centered around the recently gentrified community of Echo Park in Los Angeles--capture the dark tensions behind everything from climate change to Charlie Chaplin tramp stamps.

JACKSON BROWNE

I grew up reading Shakespeare and Mark Twain.
--Jackson Browne

He strums his Gibson guitar with an unregistered handgun in an alleyway at the Psychedelic Street Fair. The acoustics are astonishing. After the failure of the ‘60s came the disappointment of the ‘70s. Now every decade feels like the last. It’s a story older than prime real estate itself. In the Country Western sunshine our heartbeats beat in ¾ time as you waltz into an Albertson’s on Alvarado Street to buy a bag of avocados. Everything costs more in California. Nothing is sacred unless it’s potential for profitable media. Culture is to Capital today as Carnegie once was: nu steel… Out of work actors can’t catch a break so instead they fall into afternoon matinees: comedy, dramedy, urban tragedy. Most lives are silent films no one sees. He handguns his guitar in an alleyway at the Psychedelic Street Fair. His weapon of choice is A.) His voice, and B.) An acoustic piano dropped from a ballroom balcony in the rain, but it rarely ever rains anymore. “These minor chords sound exactly like the distance between us…” And the ocean? It belongs only to itself.

FIRE CONSUMES BUSINESSES NEAR FREEWAY

Fire consumes businesses near freeway the first Friday of every third month. The sign above tonight’s flaming building says: NEED CASH NOW. Now that the sign is on fire it’s no longer a sign. It is a smoldering metaphor. Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire (Yeats). The residents have gathered together this evening to watch the blaze. They swallow edible marijuana while sharing stories from the golden days of television. “There’s no business like unemployment.” The sign above the burning building is engulfed in flames. From our vantage point, the partially smoked sign says: - - - - - ASH NOW. From my perspective, there’s nothing wrong with this as a business model.

MODERN TIMES

I was determined to continue making silent films ... I was a pantomimist and in that medium I was unique and, without false modesty, a master.
--Chaplin

I met an aspiring comedian from Colorado at the marijuana dispensary. In the lobby she showed me her half-ironic Charlie Chaplin tattoo. It was a tramp stamp at the base of her spine featuring the Little Tramp’s face. We were intimate that night in her studio apartment in Echo Park and the entire ordeal was done in silence “in honor of Charlie’s legacy.” That’s what she said. We were high. The lights were on. Eventually I was behind her, looking down at Chaplin’s face looking up at me. When I pulled out I covered old Charlie’s eyes and then I cleaned him up with a sock. Afterward, I felt a strange kinship for all his films. I never saw that comedian or her tattoo again, but I’ve seen Modern Times at least a dozen times now. It’s my favorite film.

PILOTS

On the rooftop of a Hollywood hotel: the tourists eye the other tourists by the peanut-shaped pool. They’re drinking expensive rum drinks and oiling themselves down, reading books with titles like Alice in Chains Again and Cupids on Jet Skis. One woman whistles for the bartender. That’s me. Her drink isn’t going to refill itself. Her small son hunts insects in the faux grass with a magnifying glass. Our lifeguard is a licensed realtor, sells condos on the side in Silver Lake. Now the boy sees something beneath the magnifying glass and motions for me to look. So I look. Below the glass a black ant is smoldering to death in the magnified sunlight. The ant’s tiny antennae are smoking and this idiotic child is laughing. I deliver his mother her drink. “Some kid you’ve got there,” I say. “He’s a complete psychopath,” she says. “The world’s smallest CEO. He takes after his father. Rub some lotion on my back?” I oblige. “Thank you,” she says afterward. “Don’t mention it,” I say. “It’s my job.” “Well, you’re good at it,” she says. “Thanks,” I say, “But it’s not my real job. I’m an actor.” She cocks her head and says: “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you in anything. No, I remember faces and I don’t remember yours.” “I’ve mostly done pilots,” I say. “Pilots,” she says, winks: “I’ve done a few of those, too.”

THE GANGS OF ECHO PARK

The gangs have gone away. Priced out to Eagle Rock, El Sereno, and the innards of the Inland Empire. On weekends they return to their home turf in ancient Mercury’s and souped-up pickups. They do this as a way of reconnecting with their roots, staying true. And if it’s true what they say about place giving rise to spirit then the spirit of Echo Park is positively Western in an old Hollywood sense. Most Saturday nights culminate in a gunfight. Tonight is no exception. Shots ring out on Preston Avenue and echo on up to Avalon Street. Now a gangster is dead in a stairwell on Armitage. Tomorrow I will step under the police tape on my way to church. My church is a bar called the Gold Room on Sunset. You can get a PBR and shot of tequila for four bucks. The peanuts are free. I sit in a booth near the back, drinking and praying for work. I can’t tell if the drinking enhances the prayer or if the prayer improves the drink. Amen. Lord, hear our drinks.

EXTRAS

They give you fifty bucks a day to be an extra in the studio audience. The only prerequisite is that you are alive and then all you have to do is clap when they tell you to clap and laugh when they tell you to laugh. I was broke and needed cash fast for rent, which meant I was in the studio audience up in Century City. Ironically, it was a sitcom comedy that I’d auditioned for. I’d come close to getting one of the leads, but in the end they’d gone “a different direction.” Now the character I would’ve played was extolling brilliant life advice to his adopted daughter after she’d been booed off the stage at her student talent show. It was supposed to be one of those heartfelt moments where the audience says Awww and claps. All around me the crowd was awing and clapping, but I couldn’t contain myself: I was laughing. It was hilarious to me to think that had things gone a slightly different direction I’d have been down there on the stage making the big bucks and maybe that other hack actor would’ve been up here in the audience like myself, contemplating what might’ve been. Sure, I was laughing, but it wasn’t funny. And I was causing my own scene because I was supposed to be clapping. “Fucking A,” I said as I got up to leave. The man in the aisle seat glanced awkwardly at my crotch as I passed. “Excuse me,” I said. “Pardon me,” I said. “Sorry.” Yes, I left early, but they still gave me fifty bucks on the way out. I passed a line of extras waiting in the sun. Like most days, more had shown up than they needed.

OLD HOLLYWOOD

The United States is unusual among the industrial democracies in the rigidity of the system of ideological control––indoctrination, we might say––exercised through the mass media.
––Noam Chomsky

Originally the big film studios were located in Echo Park. It’s where they manufactured much of the American propaganda in the late 30s / early 40s. No one called it propaganda. During WWII the studios moved to Hollywood. Had they not, we’d have Echo Park to blame for our colossal misunderstanding of the world. We might say: I’m moving to Echo Park to make it. But I didn’t make it. I wanted to be an actor, to be a speck in the spectacle, but the further I got into the business, the more I mixed it with pleasure. It hurt. Then I woke up hung over one afternoon in my termite-infested apartment in Echo Park. I went to the balcony, took a few tokes from my e-cig, and I soaked it all in. Then I woke up again. My epiphany? I needed more epiphanies anyplace else.

GAME

The name of the game? Let’s call it “Termite Control.” It’s a game you––and by you I mean me––play at home periodically out of necessity that requires ridiculous amounts of concentration and fortitude where you spend hours on end staring at the hardwood floor in your apartment's living room, letting your eyes relax so you can see the floor: the whole floor, all of it, and you try and spot any sudden movement, and once you've seen some action, you go to the place and find the little hole in the hardwood where the termites are coming in from and you cover it with a piece of clear packaging tape. Sometimes this prevents the termites from entering the room for months. Other times, like now, they're back within minutes because they've found another access point. To wit: you've played this game nine times tonight and the night is still young. In terms of rules, there are no rules except for this: learn to lose. Learn to love to lose. There’s no winning this game (and it's a good life lesson!). Because when you move out come summer, someone, perhaps your slumlord, or maybe the slumlord's assistant, or the maybe even slumlord's cleaning crew, is going to wander in here and wonder why 2/3’s of the apartment's surface area is covered in clear packaging tape. “What’s going on here?” they might ask. Or: “Was he trying to pack the entire apartment?” And you'll have no answer to these questions because by then you'll be long, long gone.

CLIMATE CHANGE

California was behind me like a bad dream. I’d sold everything except for my motorcycle and a change of clothes. Now it was fall but it felt like spring. The seasons had turned strange. I was outside Houston, drinking with some old astronauts at the old astronaut bar. One guy had been to space. I asked him what he thought about climate change. He said, “I’ve been to space.” I said, “Yeah, what was that like?” He said, “It’s a lot like climate change. No one cares.”

Ryan Ridge is the author of the story collection Hunters & Gamblers, the poetry collection Ox, as well as the chapbooks Hey, It's America and 22nd Century Man. His latest book, American Homes, is out from the University of Michigan Press as part of their new 21st Century Prose series. His next collection, Camouflage Country, co-written with Mel Bosworth, is forthcoming from Queen's Ferry Press in December 2015. Past work can be found in NERVE, Fanzine, FLAUNT Magazine, and more. A former editor-in-chief of Faultline, he now edits Juked alongside his wife, Ashley Farmer. He is currently a visiting professor of creative writing at the University of Louisville. FOLLOW US ON INSTAGRAM: @AUTREMAGAZINE

Gender Tapes: Female Form and The New First Sex

September 28, 2015

*Screenshot from PENELOPEDIARY, 2014. Video. 5:05 by Victoria Campbell*

by Jill Di Donato

In 1974, artist Lynda Benglis appeared in Artforum posing nude with a gigantic dildo shooting out of her crotch. Her taut, tan oiled up body— with rhinestone-studded sunglasses that cleverly obscured her eyes— (viewers’ land on the plastic veiny member: a trophy, a fetish, an objectification of male virulence at a time when postmodernism and women’s lib was in full swing) offended hundreds of subscribers and art critics alike. Art historian Rosalind Krauss publically denounced the ad for Benglis’ upcoming show at the Paula Cooper Gallery, as “vulgar,” and accused the artist, known for her latex pour technique, of mocking the aims of women’s liberation.

Forty years later, Benglis’ photograph would hardly cause a stir (though it might be censored on Instagram). The notion of gender fluidity has entered the homes of millions of Americans—if not through art, through the narrative and visual delights of pop-culture. There is nary an American who hasn’t heard of how Caitlyn Jenner was born in the wrong body, however glazed over by Hollywood magic that story has been delivered. Still, the mass media attention over the former athletic demi-god and Kardashian patriarch forced people to turn on their TVs and let the narrative of gender transformation into their homes. The response? The conversation Jenner honed in on about gender appropriation and/or transformation is not, as Rosalind Krauss argued forty years ago, an assault against liberation—women’s or otherwise, but rather an endorsement of it.

But then again, we’re not talking about phallic aspirations. We’re talking about the inverted dildo. The sociologist in me will point out that the majority of sex reassignment surgeries are predominantly male to female. This more current data holds up to previous findings as reported in the 1994 DSM (IV) reporting that male to female sex reassignment surgeries are three times as common as female to male surgeries. Respectively, there is also a more documented historical background of male to female sex reassignment. These statistics interest me for many reasons, and though I posit socio-economic conditions play key factors, I’d like to imagine it’s the body electric of the female nude that draws men to want to become women.

Let’s imagine, for a moment, that the anxiety (a human condition often misread and incorrectly construed) women feel over their bodies is not forbidding jitters to conform to a hegemonic Aphrodite, but rather the reverberations of misunderstood pleasure. What a thought!

When it comes to cultural zeitgeist, transformation, specifically in the language of gender fluidity, will define the year 2015. Of course, the Greeks and Gloria Steinem were way ahead of us, but never has the ability to caterpillar from male to female (in a physiological as well as sociocultural sense) been as topical in the collective conscious as right now. In the halls of academia, I debate a sophomore in my writing class about whether or not “they” can be used as a singular pronoun (for people who identify as gender-fluid, the answer is yes she tells me). A trip to Gunnison Beach (it’s nude) shows me what post-op breasts look like on a recently transitioned female (waifish mosquito bites) and to be honest, I’ve seen dicks on the subway and dicks on Gansevoort Street; I’ve seen tits in strip clubs and in mainstream media, but never have I seen public nudity of the post-op trans community, in a state of such unencumbered nature, devoid of fetish. The crisp Atlantic waves crashed at the shore and the aura that unfolded as we sipped Modelo Especial Cheledas from 24 OZ cans was filled with joy.

About five years ago, I had the opportunity to speak with Gloria Steinem after a talk she gave at Baruch College. My Jewish godmother, Judi, a Second Waver who collaborated with Black Panthers and was part of a secret-op that uncovered data that showed male CUNY adjunct professors were paid more than their female counterparts—this resulted in a lawsuit spanning 20 years, but that ended with equal pay in the CUNY system—anyway, Judi, who’d been a part of this secret-op, brought me as her guest to a post-talk champagne lunch to meet Gloria. Well-coiffed, wearing false eyelashes and formfitting black, the Ms. who’s made millions off the syntax of feminism allowed me to ask her one question before she dug into her tuna tartar. As a young journalist—not nearly as well groomed as the legend who stood before me—I could only think of something that sounded like it came from a sociology class. But alas, it was my one question and I can’t ask for a do- over, so I’ll mine it because, wtf, it’s what I’ve got. I asked what she saw as the future of Fourth Wave Feminism. Considering my question for a moment, she ran her nails, almost talon-like, manicured with stiletto French white tips through her hair, and reminded me about Tiresias.

There's a Greek myth that goes like this: On a mountaintop in the Peloponnesus peninsula of Greece, a man, Tiresias happened upon a pair of copulating snakes. Fascinated by what he saw, he stayed on the mountaintop for hours, watching them. After a while, the snakes sensed his presence and attacked him. Tiresias killed the female snake with a powerful blow. For this act, the gods changed him into a woman. Tiresias became a priestess of Hera, living as a woman for seven years. During this time, she married and bore children. When one day she went walking on the mountaintop, she discovered another pair of copulating snakes. This time Tiresias killed the male, and the gods changed him back to a man.

Because Tiresias had lived both as a man and a woman, he could offer the gods unique insight. For this reason, he was called in by Zeus and Hera to settle an argument: who enjoys sex more, men or women? Tiresias replied that women receive the greater pleasure. "Of ten parts a man enjoys one only."

Though it might behoove me to go on about the tenfold pleasure of the female sex, I’m going to move away from this discovery. Ms. Steinem brought up the story of Tiresias as emblematic of the final frontier in the fight for equal rights between men and women. Feminisms—as the Third Wave taught us—allows (note my use of feminisms [plural] as a collective and thus singular noun) for intersectional points of view when it comes to dismantling the myriad deleterious effects of patriarchy. The one phenomenon millennials face that has eluded generations past, is the en masse fluidity in gender—both in representational forms, through such signifiers as art and language, but also through biology, as understood with sex reassignment surgeries.

Not one to pit substance against style—for me, such merging is an alchemy that keeps me sated in the bleakest emotional recessions—I’d like to start speculating just what about the female form is so aesthetically appealing. The form, and as such, I mean the female body—as spectacular and problematic it may be in modern culture—is an undeniable locus of power. So why then, does she remain the second sex?

In thinking about all this, the three to one male to female sex reassignment ratio really stuck with me. All this time I thought I’d been living as the second sex. Her power (the second sex has been established as female) is elusive, ephemeral, static, and oh so reliant on an X factor—that final ingredient that can, once-in-a-relished-while, turn superstructures on their heads.

That X factor a woman can possess that can make her Wonder Woman is what all ambitious women and sexually fluid men want, isn’t it?

It’s late August in Brooklyn. There’s a profusion of water bugs on the sidewalks. I don’t know why I’m calling them water bugs. They’re cockroaches—except they’re the gigantic kind, and they roam the avenues amongst Park Slope pedestrians getting gelato. It’s humid as fuck and I’m not going to lie, looking at the vile cockroaches scuttling along while I contemplate beauty gives me morbid curiosity. Yes, I’m musing from a point of privilege, and somehow, it’s necessary to disclose that when talking about issues like beauty and aesthetic experience, because people fighting for their lives don’t have the luxury to be so shallow. I pull out my phone and check Instagram. An advert for an art show opening tonight at Max Fish (the new Max Fish as 186 Ludlow became 120 Orchard) called Girls, Girls, Girls appears in my feed. Richard Kern, Alessandro Simonetti, Kareem Black, Ricky Powell and other photographers known for shooting hot chicks gets me to leave Brooklyn for the night, to go and interview dudes who shoot nudes and other stunning women in various states of power. I do want to figure this out: what’s so alluring about the female body?

“Is that a trick question?” Richard Kern says to me when I ask him that question. I make it to the city, to the new Max Fish, and it’s a crowded affair: skaters and the models who love them; artists and the models who love them; and wannabe models and the models who love them. Ooh, and people like me: oddballs who end up at places like these because we get high off second-hand adoration.

He’s serious, Kern is, and I’m nervous. Instagram, we agree early on in our chat, has “let loose a tidal wave of exhibitionism.” Still, there is a difference, we acknowledge, behind the 45 selfies it takes to get a decent booty-shot and the female nude shot by a professional photographer. “People don’t envy the female nude,” Kern tells me explicitly. “They envy the photographer taking her picture.” To clarify what at first seemed to me an amateur observation from an auteur who blurs the line between art and porn, Kern adds, “There’s a difference between a female nude and the female nude.” Oh, semantics, I think, sipping on a watered-down tequila. What’s that you say?

“There’s a difference between a [female] nude. She looks great sticking on your wall. But the [female] nude, she’s an actual person.”

“I take pictures of everybody. Men, women, dogs, fat chicks. I’m a sapiosexual,” Ricky Powell tells me, his hands, finding their way around my waist.

I don’t doubt it for a second. What’s kept Powell relevant all these years from the days when he shot Basquiat, Haring, supermodels and the Beastie Boys is his ability to jive with his environment. “The most important thing about a woman is her ability to project herself into the world.” And here, Powell picks up Kern’s comment about the female nude being a person as opposed to being an object.

Oh, but Third Wavers and my own anecdotal research as an “exotic dancer” taught me that a woman has the power within her to be both subject and object at once. False bifurcations like subject/object; Madonna/whore; sexy/smart have impacted gender discourse over the past 20 years leading us to a space where fluidity seems the natural progression. Is the dismantling of female/male next? One has got to wonder.

“I’m looking to have a conversation with my subjects,” photographer Kareem Black tells me. “There’s that dude photographer who all he wants to do is fuck [his model]. That’s not me. But the thing is within portraiture, the art of it, requires some flirtation.”

Ah, yes, of course there’s flirtation. To deny the sexual chemistry that helps get “I’s” dotted and “T’s” crossed within the art world and beyond is naïve. The coquettish smile of a woman holds within its toothy confines remarkable power. And the male photographer smiling back: is that with delight, curiosity, envy or a mash-up of all three not necessarily conflicting emotions?

The curator of the Girls, Girls Girls, photographer Brian Boulos says, “The female nude has been studied time and time again, and I don't think there's an answer to why people are fascinated by it; it's just human nature, to love the curves and the forms that women possess. I don't think I can think any deeper than that about it. I think part of the allure is that it's always so hidden, especially in America and many, many other countries.”

I’ve heard this before, the “hidden” power of the female sex. "On the female nude," Zach Hyman, a photographer who made a splash several years ago shooting nudes in public places, like the NYC subway and the Metropolitan Museum of Art explains, "the [female] genitalia is tucked away, but on the male nude, even if everything is else tight and taut, there's still that one part that's hanging out and is very exposed." What a wonderful metaphor for the way our culture views sexuality! Though we live in a super-sex-saturated society, when it comes down to it, sex is a very tender territory, and in many ways, we are still taught to tuck it away.

Which brings me back to transformation, a move to tuck inwards. The “tucked in” anatomy possessed by the female nude, whose power is subverted, exploited, and desired by a culture that institutionally promotes men over women and makes panty models angels with the power to fly remains a hot topic in the art world. While it’s no revelation that power is not static—this new very public discussion about male-to- female gender transitioning is an exciting progression in dismantling hegemonic ideas about gender and beauty (and because this is America, power). Aesthetics are crucial, and, as Susan Sontag would say, a cultural evaluation. The international proliferation of transgender art (programs like Rock Around Asia, a Bangkok based art gallery-museum and online showroom has an extensive collection of paintings of and by transgender artists) speaks to a new conversation about the body politic: one that is more fluid. This malleability translates into a larger discussion about beauty: namely that one can slip in and out of states of beauty at will. Once you see that beauty can be a choice, ugliness too becomes a choice. The agency here helps chip away at hegemonic beauty standards, so that eventually they will become less oppressive.

When I was a kid, my dad bought me a Transformer, one of the action figures from the comic about lonely yet adventurous shape-shifting robots. I used it (him?) to fuck my Barbie. It was more like fisting even though Barbie doesn’t have a vagina. The Transformer had a steel-like arm that extended up and down. At the tip was a claw. A basement flood drowned my Barbies. Before the flood, when I was a teenager, my dad moved out and took the Transformer with him. He’s gay, and came out to my mom—thus the new apartment a bus ride away where he kept immaculate parquet floors and the Transformer on his mantle, like a talisman.

“As a man,” begins photographer Alessandro Simonetti on the power of the female nude, “I believe it’s the form itself. The simplicity of shape is what makes it appealing.” When it comes to shooting women, Simonetti, who describes the majority of his work as very male-oriented (Jamaican horseracing, motorcycles, international basketball) shoots his “other half” jeweler, Jules Kim. He explains the process: “There’s no plan. She’s not a subject I picked. She picked me. It’s natural. I shoot Jules because I spend most of my time with her.”

*Portrait of Jules by Allessandro Simonetti*

One dilemma in the infinite—digital media has made it so— aggregation of female nudes in the art world is that the work of male artists is still valued over the work of female artists. One could say this is just another symptom of patriarchal capitalism and the gendered wage gap that our country stands behind. There’s also this disturbing discrepancy between the male artist who takes a picture of a beautiful woman and a beautiful female artist who uses her body as canvas. The latter is dismissed, the former an auteur. Says artist Leah Schrager who, with Jennifer Chan curated the online exhibit Body Anxiety, “My personal frustration is that the art world seems more likely to value women who are ‘made art’ over women who ‘make art.’” In Schrager’s essay, “The Female Painter,” which accompanies Body Anxiety, the artist talks about this notion of “Man Hands” as part of a larger social apparatus.

“If Man Hands touch a woman (i.e. place her in his art), she can become a valuable piece of art. But if Man Hands haven’t touched her (i.e. she places herself in her art), she can certainly be considered art, but her value is likely to be substantially less, and in the world of value (the world of art?), less and more are all.”

The mission of female-identified curated shows like Body Anxiety (which went live in January of 2015 but will remain online indefinitely) is to collect “female-empowering artworks in one single location” to push back against appropriation of the female nude by male artists. Artists included in this exhibition, like Ann Hirsch, Kate Durbin, Mary Bond and RaFia Santana explore performance and self-representation on the internet. Subject matter varies from to screen shots of professional amateur pornography (Ann Hirsch and Mary Bond) to an embodiment of Lana Del Rey by performance artist Georges Jacotey,, a male artist known for a mash-up of Vladimir Putin and gay porn. I guess I still come back to Schrager’s notion of “Man Hands,” which begs the question, at what point does representation become appropriation?

*What We Do Is Secret, 2015, gouache on c-prints by Erika Blair*

There’s so much at stake economically for the capitalization of femininity. The revenue for the cosmetic industry has steadily increased over the past decade and is estimated at over 64 billion dollars. Of that fortune, beauty manufacturers spent 2.2 billion dollars on advertising, primarily to millenials with smartphones.

What’s worse than these statistics is the self-loathing that accompanies failure to meet the standards of beauty endorsed by “Man Hands” and the corporate fashion-beauty industry that we all know exists, but still can make a woman feel ugly. That $64 billion is spent on pills and potions, creams and lotions, on cover-up and flaw-fixers to give the illusion that maybe she’s born with it. But what about those women who are not born with it? What about transgender women who rely on cosmetics—products and procedures—to build their identity? Is the spike in male-to-female sex reassignment the ultimate form of gender appropriation? And if it is, is this phenomenon something that thwarts female power or endorses it?

A friend of a friend is currently transitioning to become female. This person didn’t want to be identified and didn’t want to talk about the experience of transitioning but did offer one anecdote. She says that one of the most powerful memories is being a five-year-old at her mother’s beauty salon. Accompanying her mother to the salon was always a pleasurable experience—the very pills and potions creams and lotions that sometimes make me livid about the bodily manipulations I have to undergo in order to look up to par actually entranced this little girl trapped in a boy’s body. Then one day, she was told to sit in the stylist’s chair. She had long hair, you see, too long to start school with, for just as hegemonic beauty standards exist for women, so to do they exist for men. Snip, snip, snip. The loss of hair was a Biblical trauma for this little girl in a boy’s body.

I started out this essay with the idea that body anxiety women experience (the dread of a my thigh gap—is it widening? self-loathing at a wrinkle creeping from beneath my eye—couldn’t I have taken better precautions to prevent these burps of humanity?) might be a smokescreen for pleasure—a pleasure in our physical femininity social institutions would rather us not feel. Fear, you see is a more profitable motivator than pleasure—especially when it comes to women. But what about men who want to be women?

I’ve had a hard time standing in my own accomplishments. And like many of my lady friends, I see my flaws more so than my beauty. But there are days when I can appreciate my body because it’s mine and because it does things. Because it can look pretty, because it can struggle as opposed to suffer, because it can run a 5K and have multiple orgasms. I subscribe to fashion rags, teach at a college with the word fashion in its moniker, and have been known to enjoy a New York Fashion Week fete or two. If you scroll down my Instagram feed, you’ll find those sexy selfies I couldn’t help but indulge in when the app was new. Perhaps I don’t post such images anymore because I don’t want that sort of attention. “I watch so many girls doing all these sexy selfies as a way of self- promotion; I don’t know what they’re trying to do. They’re imitating [the male gaze] the style of someone like Richard Kern, who’s a good friend. He’s inundated with requests from women to take their clothes of for him and be shot by him,” this from one of the most respected, downtown chic fashion stylists (The Face, Armani Exchange, Vogue Japan) Heathermary Jackson. “I prefer selfies that are a little ugly when a woman is not scared to show herself looking rough.”

Jackson, who’s always had one foot in the fashion world, one foot in the art world, curated her first New York art show in 2013, and has turned that venture into an online showroom filled with art, music, and clothing called Brownstone Cowboys. So here is a woman curator and stylist, one who works in the fashion and art industries. I ask her what draws her to the female form. “I’m definitely drawn to an unusual face [favorites include models Lindsey Wixson, known for her front tooth gap and full pout and Stella Lucia whose angular face is defined by a strong jawline]. Because I like my styling to have a masculine edge— that’s my aesthetic—girls in men’s clothing, like big boot or something a little off, I prefer to work with models who are not stick-figures. I like the juxtaposition of making them look boyish with womanly curves.”

She reminds me of one thing that I’ve lost sight of in this inquiry, which is the easy subjectivity of it all. “Within the fashion-beauty industry there are two camps of people—those who like the BS girls and those who mix in transgender models,” says Jackson. “Thank goodness people like different things.”

I recently met up with an ex of mine. We hadn’t spoken in years. As we drank beer in a neighborhood dive, the vibe was filled with sexual tension, anger, and regret—much like the relationship itself. He’s an artist now and, unbeknownst to me, I appeared in one of his “video installations.” Apparently, he recorded footage over one of our sex tapes. At the opening of his art show, he tells me, there was a mix up and the tape continued to play. Let’s just say the crowd was treated to a double feature that night. I don’t know how much of me these strangers saw, if they thought our fucking was supposed to be art or a joke. I told a girlfriend about this. She was horrified. I have to admit, not only am I unashamed by this incident, I’m a bit turned on.

Jill Di Donato is the author of the novel Beautiful Garbage, about prostitution and the NYC 1980s art scene (She Writes Press, 2013). She writes about gender, culture, art, and style and had a sex column at the Huffington Post for five years. These days, she teaches writing at the Fashion Institute of Technology and lives in Brooklyn with her two pet snakes.

Summer is Over and We’re All Going to Die

September 23, 2015

By Chelsea Hogue

Editor’s note: We were going to publish this review while Conor Backman, Trudy Benson and Russel Tyler’s exhibition was still on view at Restrospective Gallery. But it felt too special to publish in the moment. It felt more right to publish this review, which is more of an ode to the end of a season, on the very last day of Summer. A day of lament, a day to say goodbye to warm weather and long days, a day to welcome the early chill of autumn. A day to say goodbye to blue and hello to amber.

It’s the morning of August 15th and I tell myself that I’ll prepare to see Connor Backman, Trudy Benson, and Russell Tyler’s work at an opening at Retrospective Gallery in Hudson, NY that night; and I do, sort of. Interviews, scattered bios; that’s it.

I’m also reading Jacques-Yves Cousteau’s account of his first forays in underwater exploration, The Silent World, and finding it difficult to do much else, other than read this book, which taps into something that feels entrenched especially in this season: a yen for the odyssey.

It’s summer, although we’re running out of it quickly; and many of us had made plans, or had been asked, and so we had considered: what will you do? And now we’ve reached the juncture one inevitably comes to after making plans: did we do it, or did we not?

We wait all winter for the great voyage and discovery, a day much like the one on which Cousteau discovered his insatiable appetite for life in the sea:

Cousteau writes: “Sometimes we are lucky enough to know that our lives have been changed, to discard the old, embrace the new, and run headlong down an immutable course. It happened to me at Le Mourillon on that summer’s day, when my eyes were opened on the sea,” wrote the Presidential Medal of Freedom-winning, French naval officer, explorer, conservationist, filmmaker, scientist, photographer, and author in The Silent World.

He was, by his rendering, inexorably drawn to the ocean; it was the haptic sensation of goggles meeting face, face immersed in the underwater world, and then he could, finally, see. What is Cousteau—and of course, I’ll ask: what are WE—looking for precisely? Is it the extra in the ordinary?

he ocean is, and has always been, the perfect receptacle for the gussied up dreams we have for our vacations, our experiences, and ourselves. Always home to myth, and anthropomorphosized as the capricious and arbitrary female: the sea is, has always been, so terribly enigmatic.

This has been said several times, so I’ll only say it once: poetry is thriving; lots of people are making music using instruments; and painting isn’t dead. However, it isn’t for a lack of reason that we’re constantly asked to reconsider the vitality of painting. After all, it is appearances, which we’re taught to initially distrust; and all images are inherently political—making a sharp-knifed place for all of our inmost skepticism. So when the question is posed, with one finger on the pulse: is painting dead?—perhaps it’s better phrased: what is it that we’re looking for in the first place?

Could it be true that we often look to materials and art, searching for a conduit through which we may find alternative and extended experiences?

Click here to discover your PaSsIoN, we’re often told, In 7 Easy Steps! Unlike Delacroix, a master in discovering the uncanny in the common: “Give me the mud of the streets,” he beckoned, “and if you will leave me also with power to surround it to my taste, I will make of it a woman’s flesh of delicious tint.”

Every day after school, my mother sat on top of the kitchen table, eating BBQ chips, and watching Oprah on a small TV my father had drilled into the side of a kitchen cabinet. Always stuck, always waiting for the opportune moment to find an initiative, she and Oprah called it an Aha! Moment. This is the summer that I’m going to relax. Some days, cross-legged in front of the screen, she would take notes. This is the summer that I’m going to lose weight. And on others, moved by the stories of other revelations, she would cry. This is the summer that I’m going to find myself. And sometimes she would tell me to sit down and watch, too; there was something being said that day that she thought I needed to hear.

I think we do often look to art for alternative experiences; but that doesn’t seem to be, not to me, how it all works. Rather, it’s our present experience, which is protracted and, at best, augmented. As John Dewey stated in one of his lectures on the philosophy of art at Harvard University in 1931, collected as essays in the book, Art as Experience:

“The scope of a work of art is measured by the number and variety of elements coming from past experiences that are organically absorbed into the perception had here and now.”

“I recently rediscovered the ‘orange peel map’, the homolosine projection, and started thinking about the relationship of cartography to representational painting,” Conor Backman said in a conversation with New American Paintings, referencing his works containing orange peels, peeled all in one piece. “Both have always dealt with the problem of first translating the round into the flat.”

Homolosine projections are equal area maps of the world, which distort ocean areas in order to minimize the distortion of the continents. Developed in 1923, the disappearing oceans of homolosine projections feel, eerily, prescient, considering that the oceans are, in terms of marine life, disappearing. Our oceans, as we know them, will be radically different by some year that some scientists project will be near 2035; the world is currently experiencing an expansion of marine dead zones because oxygen levels have become so low that life cannot survive.

The best-known dead zone is in the Gulf of Mexico; it’s about the size of Connecticut.

Backman’s preoccupation with translation and representation in cartography, and how this is conceptualized in painting feels like a finger on the right spot, one of a present pain: the fading pulse.

Scanning images from old shows and a couple of articles, here’s what I know of Trudy Benson’s paintings, pre-Retrospective show, according to the Internet: An engagement with density; big canvases with textural agility; the carpet in the Portland Airport; programmed painterly strokes; 80s sport aesthetics explodes and some of its juices are ingested by clip art; and these mixed up modes are subsumed by some German (likely), Abstract Expressionist (definitely). There’s a friction in Trudy Benson’s work and it’s formalism abutting the neoteric. I jot down a question: what do big paintings, made with pomp and tradition, but with the scaling factor of digitized culture, ask of me?

It is always all this old stuff, meeting all this new stuff, for the first time . When Cousteau met a party of Greek divers off the coast of Corsica, he was shocked to learn that they knew nothing of stage decompression, which requires that a diver ascending from great depths halt at ten feet below the surface for 9 minutes to pass off the accumulated nitrogen. So there stood Cousteau and his men, with newfangled aqualungs, wetsuits, masks, and deep-sea diving information, facing the Greeks—a group of men who had practically lived in the water, but still using the same methods of their ancient forbearers. After so many years of popping up to the surface like champagne corks from depths of one hundred and seventy feet or more the divers had suffered from numerous debilitating pressure strokes, which had crippled their able bodies. After each dive, the Greek men were paid for the jewelers’ red coral they were gathering in sacks tied to their sinewy necks; and, earnings in hand, they drug their twisted and knotted bodies to the bars and bistros where they spent it all on booze and dice. On land, these men were the crippled and infirm; however, in the underwater world, their bones and flesh became supple again. The cold jelly of dense water lubricated their joints and they could swim with great agility, like young, lithesome ballerinas. Cousteau and Trudy Benson, with an historical perception of the present, facing the almighty past.

Benson’s work is often compared to her husband’s, Russell Tyler—the same Tyler that she is coupled with for this show.

Tyler said of his work to Painter’s Table in 2013:

"I want [the paintings] to have an old, modernist feel, but also looking at abstraction, not from a Greenbergian perspective...but from a nostalgic perspective...it's adding a more personal perspective...the way we see an image is a little different than a generation before us...because of what media we grew up with.”

Antiquity: the old Beaux-Arts categories of painting and sculpting often want—or feel compelled—to address it. And it is true that we all must, at some point, contend with our ancestors, which seem to be on a shifting axis for Tyler. It was only a couple of years ago that Tyler was primarily painting scenes from dystopia—chaotic tree people in the middle of the sea, a re-rendering of a melting horseman, Frankensteined mash-ups of machines versus people. They were strange, massive, and goopy. Limbs and eyes drooling off the canvas. Almost everything on there looked like it would rather eat flesh than be flesh. Those paintings were offbeat, hard to place, and chancy.

Walking into Retrospective Gallery on the evening of August 15th, things are as they should be: the white walls are up, the art is hung. Benson and Tyler’s paintings were, for the most part, interspersed—a Benson, a Tyler, a Tyler, a Tyler, another Benson, etc; but, unfortunately, this layout seemed to favor Benson over Tyler, whose work was dwarfed—in size and scope—by his wife’s.

As the press release purports, Benson’s paintings in this show do depart from her previous digitally design compositions; and it seems that they have evolved.

The stateliest of which was a large canvas, Invisible Man, taking up the majority of the right-hand wall. Backgrounded by fleshy cubes, a skin cell schema, overlaid with geometric patterning in silver, yellow, and black and white, leaving the suggestion of natural imagery reined in by tight, geometric containers. One is being pressed into the other—a cookie cutter into supple, soft dough—but what is pressing upon this or that isn’t clear, which creates an exciting tension and sense of formal unity. In Art as Experience, John Dewey breaks down substance as form:

“[To have form] is a way of envisaging, of feeling, and of presenting experienced matter so that it most readily and effectively becomes material for the construction of adequate experience on the part of those less gifted than the original creator. Hence there can be no distinction drawn, save in reflection, between form and substance.”

Invisible Man is thickset, athletic, and exudes great control, like an Albert Oehlen sharpened by 210%. The other works mostly follow suit, mirroring what Benson does best.

Tyler’s work, unfortunately, doesn’t hold its shape, not completely, beside Benson’s heat. Where are the roiling lakes of fetid color wheel vomit? I asked myself. Instead, a heavy blue rectangle stacked over a yellow rectangle, also framed in blue—and here’s the cincher: a small diminutive splash of blue, in the bottom left corner of the yellow square. A painter’s commentary on painting; it seems quite self-conscious without being witty. Tyler’s lineage in these works appears to be so historically specific; I could draw his pseudo family tree: Some nearly replicas of Josef Albers, but lacking the spatial dynamism. There’s also hints of Ad Reinhardt and Hans Hoffman, etc. Is this a shift of Tyler, indicative of Jerry Saltz’s applauded/loathed, depending on your camp, article on M.F.A. Abstractions, in New York Magazine last summer?

“Going to galleries is becoming less like venturing into individual arks and more like going to chain stores where everything looks familiar.”

That being said, I did find more to admire in his gestural, impulsive works, those in which, “Tyler pushes the boundaries of confined space by allowing a certain cosmic wildness in which colors collide,” to quote from the press release. One canvas has a black background with cerulean, orange-red, peach detonations, hinting at a burst of impulsivity.

But perhaps my questions should turn back on me and I should be asked: what is it that I was looking for in the first place? Could it be that I’m lusting after an alternative experience, unable to see Delacroix’s “mud of the streets” transformed into “flesh of delicious tint,” my mind stuck in the overly romantic notion of Cousteau’s fuck-it-all, impetuous devotion to something wild and unknowable? Inner force of will and imagination vs. external catalyst and muse?

A couple of storefronts over, Conor Backman’s show, Late painter/new paint, inhabits Retrospective’s other enclave, with inhabit being the operative word here; these works are formally vital. Focusing on the familiar unifying themes of translation and that fading pulse, these pieces are collected under one thesis: Gustave Caillebotte’s 1877 painting Oarsmen Rowing on the Yerres—which Backman has repainted, repurposed, perverted, and abbreviated.

In the largest piece, Recreation and method of reconstruction, Backman has repainted Caillebotte’s work at its original scale from a compressed JPEG. That reproduction, broken into small squares, has been reconstructed into a disarray of painted pieces—Impressionism as pixilation—on top of a backdrop of default desktop blue, the composition hinting at the pastoral scene—boat, oars, water, illumined by brilliant sunshine—but revealing nothing more than fragments—and herein we find the burden of the translator, the problem of shifting modalities, interpreted for the wall. Desktop blue, we are reminded, is not simply the most whatever color of all; it isn’t a frictionless surface. Backman’s concerns are age-old: progression, what’s new and what’s worn, but under present consideration, these concerns are rendered fresh and delivered as a show that presents more problems than answers. It isn’t grand, nor is it flashy. It’s both historical and of its time.

In another work, the oarsmen from Caillebotte’s original painting have been clipped and superimposed onto an anachronistic suburban streetscape, no water in sight; the translator becomes the creator. It’s a good goal for an exhibition: when works are divergent, yet remain interstitial. Other pieces contain modified paint cans, filled with bold primary colors, inserted into paintings as false focal points. It’s both congruous and discombobulating; it reminds me of the plotline to a movie someone told me about several weeks ago. In the movie a woman has déjà vu constantly. That’s all I can remember.

I had not seen the original painting by Caillebotte, Oarsmen Rowing on the Yerres, in a few years, until this show. It’s a painting of two men in a boat, out on the water. They’re wearing white t-shirts, denim, fraying straw hats. We might call these men working class, laborers, shipbuilders; they are not summering in the Hamptons, out for a leisurely row, I do not believe. They are not hoping that their jaunt will rejuvenate or revive. They do not believe that their travel plans will change everything...

The vacation, the alternative experience—it’s similar to so many artists’ attempts to divorce an object or work from its preceding events. Backman seems to pick up on the simple truth: Form does not descend from without, as if it is some transcendent outer essence. It is a process of rethinking, of déjà vu. It’s in your own backyard. It has been all of this time. It is right outside of your door. The only difference: You don’t have a backyard, or a door, because you’re just renting somewhere that’s getting hotter and more expensive.

Holy Diver

You're the star of the masquerade

No need to look so afraid

Jump on the tiger

You can feel his heart but you know he's mean

Some light can never be seen

Holy Diver

You've been down too long in the midnight sea

Oh what's becoming of me

H O L Y D I V E R – lyrics by Jacques Cousteau

Chelsea Hogue is a writer and artist based in Massachusetts and New York. Her work has previously been published in The White Review and Entropy Mag. You can follow Chelsea on Twitter here: @Chelsea_Hogue. Follow Autre on Instagram: @AUTREMAGAZINE

[PART ONE] "Marfa"

August 4, 2015

Here in Marfa, Texas with Those Desert Eyes: THO

"Marfa"

by Luke B. Goebel

“In other words, we need the most powerful telescope, that of a polished utopian consciousness, in order to penetrate precisely the nearest nearness. Namely, the most immediate immediacy, in which the core of self-location and being-here still lies, in which at the same time the whole knot of the world-secret is to be found.” – Ernst Bloch

A once wildly innovative and forward pushing artist, Donald Judd, set the town of Marfa, TX as his private sarcophagus to house his lasting remains—his art—in two armory buildings. The armory buildings and most of the town are protected into perpetuity by immensely wealthy foundations controlled by his estate.

It strikes me as I drive through on this, my seventh visit (I want cred for being a repeat tourist?!!) that Marfa exists to be witnessed. We have, however, mistaken gawking and spectating for witnessing. We have mistaken gawking for experiencing life…maybe it was always like this this? Maybe we the dumb masses always gawked, commentated, but now, now, gawking has become mistaken for interaction.

Gawking is: post a photo of yourself in Marfa—identify with Marfa without investigation. Stay in a spendy hotel/rehabbed trailer boutique hotel. Take lots of selfies. Witnessing Marfa is perhaps viewing the art—thinking of yourself finding a cheap desolate desert landscape with water to inhabit and wondering how to be here now in the world creating something new—feeling the effects of minimalism and minimalist art, transcending and elevating your consciousness as you reflect, expand, open up, inspect yourself with your utopian telescope—whatever you find.

The gawk here is being confused with finding something new—something beyond now—when what is mostly being found and fetishized about Marfa is only beyond now—because it is so far behind now, it is nostalgia found.

Visitors come to Marfa, perhaps even have an art residency, and think they are discovering a new frontier, but they inhabit a space that has already been sealed. The town of Marfa as tourist spot offers us a unique insight into the new society of the spectacle.

Marfa, Texas offers all the sensations of being in a minimalist artists’ community, a vast liminal space seemingly removed from time—from the now hell of capitalism—(tho) it is a town that’s already past that moment of opportunity, which has been devoured by the professional art world, turned into a destination by commerce with all the tourist trap trappings—the hipster traps! Boutique hotels! Tasty snacks!

Once we engaged, in my lifetime, and sought, actively, the new frontiers, with our eyes dilated, our bodies in full movement (our self-conscious awareness of the effect of our every move, look, angle, still uncharted), our physical being-here-bodies in danger, now we come to spectate, snack, spend, and snapture.

Maybe this is the dominant cultural characteristic of the new now—the snacking, spectating, visiting done by professional-class hipsters who seemingly desperately want out of now, but continue to work in cities, paying exorbitantly climbing rents, fetishizing nostalgia for something before, something else, while remaining plugged into the urban capitalistic infrastructure that drives them to so eagerly embrace nostalgia, outsider culture, throwback and outlaw totems.

Collectively as a culture we read and write about and deride privilege, domination, murder, cops killing people of color, every injustice and atrocity—the news violence—but we remain in the systems that economically are built to support these cycles. What can be done?! What is Utopia?

It may or may not take some privilege to step out of the system, but it surely takes imagination and cooperation and a collective dream to strive for utopia! Marfa was a utopia, but it is an old version of utopia built by a very successful and wealthy man on he and his friends’ art being immortalized…Do we need a new utopia? Where can be the new utopia?

Marfa

Here in Marfa, Texas with those desert eyes. Heard of it? Marfa? Are you over it, yet, dear eye rolling reader? It's my seventh or eighth time. Give me a badge again. I’m the hipster queen! I'm here with my Colt .45 and four typewriters and all my records. No drugs. No booze. Sober. Bored. All that looms ahead of me (if you skim the magazine write-ups) is the Prada store installation. (The Prada art installation is a hermetically sealed fake Prada store replete with handbags and shoes and PRADA signage standing alone miles from town across the highway from railroad tracks, surrounded by tumble weeds—having no entrance.) OMG. Get it? Do you get it? Mock capitalism. Yolo! But is that enough? To mock and celebrate what consumes us?

In the art town of Marfa today as compared to Judd’s time, it strikes me that Prada is the example…Marfa (same number of letters as PRADA/two A’s/invert the Pr to Ma/ Rah to Ahr /Dah-Fah). It is a perfectly branded aesthetic tailored experience where everything feels just elegant, minimalist, clean... it’s art, real art, and nothing else…on the surface…capitalism and the world of 2015 seemingly just runs off and away like rain on a well lubricated surface—think condoms—but who uses them?!

Also, a dream does live, two open twin wide intersecting streets, side streets of dirt, the border a sniff away, free galleries, a tour each day of Judd’s art holdings, and for this one city, this town, this art paradisio, which only six years ago had houses for sale for 30K (when one could really join in and drop out and settle in) there is almost no 2015, no bullshit, no capitalism spectacle, no war, no torture, no professionalism, no workplace hell no NOW! This is the trick, I think perhaps which drove Judd to MARFA, and which has been enhanced and preserved in amber—it feels outside of “NOW”, outside of late stage capitalism… the town is now a sort of stage, a spectacle for spectator sport a la the art experience.

The hip art world of New York and LA have mixed into a curated art simulation in the expanse of a southwest Texas town which, where I stand, feels so decidedly not Texas, taken over, transformed, refashioned by Donald Judd, famed egomaniac, visionary minimalist, who passed by on railcar on his way to fight in the Korean War at 18, and wrote a postcard home, let’s speed this up (I’m saying this not Judd on his postcard), about the town, who later went to Columbia to study, yawn(me again), art and philosophy, yawn (me again), bought up town and wildly funded/sued for fellowships and made a legacy for himself, an entire village that stands as a museum. It’s just the land and him and his buddies, their work, and some new galleries. A Palm Springs without the irrigation or the shopping detractions, or anything around for hundreds of miles save some mountainous terrain and an eccentric camel safari far into the mountains toward Mexico. Also, an illuminating of the heavens at night with a phenomenon called The Marfa Lights, desert terrain, something outside of the typical hullabaloo of pure commerce.

CLICK HERE TO READ PART TWO....

Fiction writer Luke B. Goebel is armed with wit and dangerous. He also carries a colt 45 pistol but that's the least of your worries. With an insatiable appetite for the dark, mystical phenomena of the American West, Goebel's writing has found him living for stretches in Marfa, Texas; San Francisco; Portland, Oregon; and many more landscapes that nourish his writing. Last year Goebel published his first novel, entitled Fourteen Stories: None of Them Are Yours, which won the Ronald Sukenick Prize for Innovative Fiction.

[PART TWO] Marfa: A History Lesson

August 4, 2015

Here in Marfa, Texas with Those Desert Eyes: THO

"MARFA: A HISTORY LESSON"

by Luke B. Goebel

Marfa was established first as a water stop for trains heading to Galveston, Harrisburg, and San Antonio. It was named after a character in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, by a wife of a railroad executive who was reading the novel when she encountered the town.

The Marfa population used to be many times larger than it is today. In 1930 the town had 3,909 residents and in the 1940’s the US stationed its Chemical Warfare Brigades in Marfa. During World War II there was an Air Force training base, and also a prisoner camp. The artillery sheds that now house Judd’s famous boxes, which are beautiful polished steel objects that optically fascinate and trick the eyes of the viewer, once held Nazis—200 Nazi German prisoners writing, “God, get us out of here” into the walls, where Judd’s 100 cubes now live. Their Nazi handwriting still etched into the walls… One box for every two Nazis.

Donald Judd was born in Missouri. After the war, he went to College of William and Mary and then transferred to Columbia where he studied philosophy. He began his artistic practice as a painter, later shifting to sculpture, furniture, and medium-large scale installation works. In 1968 Judd, already well established as an artist associated with minimalism, bought a five story cast-iron building on Spring Street in Manhattan, which he made his residence and study. He renovated each floor and installed his own art and the art of others he admired.

By the early seventies, Judd began making trips to Baja California and was drawn once again to the clean, empty desert landscape. By 1971 he had rented a house in Marfa, and later bought a 60,000-acre piece of land.

In 1979, with help from the Dia Art Foundation (which he later sued), Judd acquired a roughly 340-acre plot of desert near Marfa, Texas including abandoned buildings of the former U.S. Army Fort D. A. Russell. Those Nazis Tho! The Chinati Foundation, owned by Judd, opened on the site in 1986 as a non-profit art foundation, dedicated to Judd and his contemporaries. This land still holds a permanent collection of large-scale works by Judd, sculptor John Chamberlain, and annoying light sculptor Dan Flavin. Judd's work in Marfa is housed in those two anal-retentively restored artillery sheds. His office downtown is kept just as he left it, with his will and estate being planned so that not even his pencil can be moved.

"...Truly it is a stumbling upon a Disneyland, save for Walt having said Disneyland is never to be finished and is always evolving, another secret to discover, another phase of techno-capitalism always in store and being effectuated, Marfa remains sealed against the sands of time, in the desert, windswept..."

All this information kills the dream. We go to Marfa to see the wide wide streets, the long arms of the railroad gates, the giant masonic white painted brick and raw brick buildings, the old marquis of the Stardust Motel, the gleaming sweeping minimalism, the Spanish style church, the old courthouse, and all the curated effects of parks alongside the railroad tracks, the Crowley theater, old homes and the vast white block of the Donald Judd Foundation Building with reflecting gold glass windows that when you stare into them on a sunny hot summer desert day make you feel like you could be the mirage.

Without knowing that the town’s effects are controlled by the planning of the Chinati Foundation, we think we have stumbled upon something new—a ruggedly beautiful landscape and a minimalist town, sparse, pristinely arranged buildings and dirt streets, all featuring gems of restaurants, food trucks, hotels, little ravaged deserted foundations of homes, squatters, train hoppers, galleries!

Maybe we go to feel nostalgic—maybe we go to see an aesthetic of minimalism and intentional interaction with the environment—maybe we go because they voted out the police and there’s dirt streets and art.

Did you hear they voted out the cops in Marfa, yadda yadda, yucca, desert beach roses in bloom. Maybe what Marfa really is is a time capsule. The nostalgia that is Marfa, where we go to exalt conceptual art and minimalism, where we feel there is NO 2015, where a nostalgia not only of aesthetic of town but of high art as it once was, is no accident. It is purposeful and planned worship, veneration, ache. This was a planned space Judd spent much of his life creating and setting into perpetuity.

While the art and hipster chic world flocks to Marfa to see something they think, feel, sense is at the final frontier of the West, yearning for something outside, forever WEST, out of reach, out of now, some creative spell, some great flocking, truly it is a stumbling upon a Disneyland, save for Walt having said Disneyland is never to be finished and is always evolving, another secret to discover, another phase of techno-capitalism always in store and being effectuated, Marfa remains sealed against the sands of time, in the desert, windswept, save for the galleries continuing to feature bigger names, the housing costs rising, the popularity increasing, and the streets opening to new hotels, new galleries, new arrivals from NYC and LA buying second and third homes in Marfa.

CLICK HERE TO READ PART 3...

Fiction writer Luke B. Goebel is armed with wit and dangerous. He also carries a colt 45 pistol but that's the least of your worries. With an insatiable appetite for the dark, mystical phenomena of the American West, Goebel's writing has found him living for stretches in Marfa, Texas; San Francisco; Portland, Oregon; and many more landscapes that nourish his writing. Last year Goebel published his first novel, entitled Fourteen Stories: None of Them Are Yours, which won the Ronald Sukenick Prize for Innovative Fiction.

[PART THREE] "Present"

August 4, 2015

Here in Marfa, Texas with Those Desert Eyes: THO

"PRESENT"

by Luke B. Goebel

I've been living in east Texas for five years and as bad as it is, Austin can kiss my camel toe (moose knuckle), as can Portland, Brooklyn, SF, everywhere you have to work to pay insane rents to go to work and afterwards buy drinks.

When I came to Texas, a friend told me about the Marfa lights—telling me how they are unexplainable, illegal to go near at risk of federal felony trespassing, how they blink colors as messages to one another. Later, I read the newsprint. El Cosmico. Yeah, yawn. Rent a trailer! How many hipsters does it take to screw in a hotel where James Dean made a movie, which would now be made by James Franco, please, please me, who hasn't?

New York Times me, hold, please, asshole. Rather: Instagram DM me. Fashion. Magazine aisle. Squats. Tho booty. Caitlyn Jenner who we love, rightly so, as she gives us some hope of our evolution as a society and for other reasons. But…she’s KardAsh. Empire. Gym body-ie me. Oh, but… Is this all too defeated?

I am in Marfa and again I am speculating—asking what in the Texas’ God’s name is happening with culture, cities, work, the climate, police murder of black people, war, Isis, global warming, and why is everyone just talking about Marfa the way they talk about Portland, Austin, etc.? Have you been to MARFA? Suck any part of anyone! Why is everyone talking like a valley girl hipster fetishizing the new hip locales? Where is the new imagination and drive to find and build something? Do we need to find something new—utopia? Why is everyone spectator-ing? Is this about Instagram?

Plus, there's a new story in Marfa. What? Why? There's a film festival this time. Ha ha ha ha. Make me choke laughing. Also, James Franco has a Malibu standing on end in a reflecting pool outside Marfa’s Contemporary Gallery, the gallery with its drool over nostalgia font, and okay it isn’t Franco’s sculpture, it’s someone else’s sculpture I thought was Franco’s, since Franco is doing vintage cars standing on end in pits like presidential monuments to the futility of the American movie and art dream—or are they someone else’s statues that he featured in his recent curating gig at Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, with his show: Rebel Without a Cause?

Do I have to make a hard-on dick joke about the cars standing on end in pits? Dick in pussy joke? Dick in ass? Do I have to admit I have a hard-on for James Franco? Who doesn’t? Oh, I don’t. Wait…okay, we all do! I am admitting that I am captivated by the spectacle, in love with a Malibu standing on end in a reflecting pool—but I keep humming the one word: NOSTALGIA.

I am drawn in by the expansive terrain of desert married with the horizon and the wide streets in MARFA that remind me of something beautiful and simply profound about childhood and art. Truth out in the desert teeters into establishment right to meaningless commerce again; I am teetering with Marfa, a place that offers the invigorating liminal dream state of being outside of NOW HELL and being a place that is rising in fame, and must therefore soon fall and be seen for what it is…nostalgia, art that is really fashion, art chic minimalism, art galleries that are old boy clubs for the establishment artists, as JUDD was, too—his funding came from Dia Art Foundation, which was leaked from an oil baroness.

Why

But, still, why are we drawn in? I wonder. Why do I keep coming back on every road trip through Texas? Back west in car, truck, RV, now in a Ford towing dolly with car, everything ~ my whole life ~ packed window to wall, nose to heel. Elbow to asshole. EXCUSE ME. I am a consumer paying 178 dollars to stay in a room that was the last room in town. I am complicit and I like the Malibu dick installation. Why? More so I feel an invocation in Marfa, a stepping out of time and society, out of the professional world—a call to make a utopia for myself and invite others to stay, both a physical place like an art colony and a utopia of how I live. My moments of peace in an otherwise tripped out, anxious, and too fast life, are moments of feeling, sensory experience, environment, dream, imagination, slow time spent with self and landscape. Marfa offers each visitor a checkpoint far different from the one waiting on the outskirts of town. Marfa allows each visitor to engage with minimalist art, architecture, and to enter a liminal space of wonder.

Before Marfa bloats, tho, and farts into a reproduction of itself as it's doing rapidly, it's still worth something as cultural moniker, and we will explore further, hold, let's build the elements, and see it a last time. I did insta the best salad of my life here today. And TMZ-me everything here looks like the 50's, 60’s, a few modernist pieces of cultural remains in a sea of minimalist white, and all is analog and real and and and the food truck music is so good being played through an eight track player with a tape cassette adapter with iPod run into the cassette adapter. I’m not being coy. It sounds really good. Also, also, everyone has such cool style rockabilly artist hairgrease skinny black jeans raybans and a dog. Motorcycles, panheads especially, tattoo sleeves, emblems.

I’m not kidding. We all eye each other at the food carts with contempt…we each want to be autonomous in OUR Marfa: We exist in the mirage of timeless throwback, sneaking our salad selfies for instagram and sniffing the nostalgia like hounds, spectating. We are on the artistic frontier! We imagine, and imagine moving into Marfa, working at or even, gasp, owning a food cart. Maybe we just see too many people on our screens—Instagram, Facefuck, and need to take a step into pure living—less people—and celebrate the sum effect of the industrial revolution and technical revolution by experiencing directly how vast we have become, more open, and feel more freedom, less rent, more life spent making a new world instead of slaving for the old ones! Maybe this is just me! A manifesto?

Playing Cowboy

After a food-cart lunch, I drive lost for two hours into the foothills of Mexico before I turn around. I have a gun and want to shoot it off to release my frustrations at being unable, after four years, to get out of Texas and now I am four hours lost still not on track to exit. I can’t go driving off into the cut to shoot with the Honda towing behind me dragging my piles full of teaching blazers, computer monitors, ties! Also, I have no ear protection. Fake ass cowboy!

There's a rock out here on highway 67 on the highway I took the wrong way down that looks like an elephant and is called Elephant Rock. There's a formation called Lincoln's profile. Looks like Abe lying on his back staring up into the chunky pixels of the bluest desert sky nothingness utopia death. The term utopia was invented by Thomas Mann. He combined two linguistic bits that together mean NO PLACE. Okay, I admit I want a NO PLACE. That Marfa was a no place, a dream, a vision, for an artist who found his space to carve out a new world, and I want too to find a place to drop out of cities, the hustle, the evils of our time. I want a place to slow down, unplug from devices, stop comparing myself to everyone, and have a more immediate engagement with time, space, and self. But I must not be the only one!

Why are we so nostalgic for the times before ours? Is this some deep psychic sense that we have no future, can have no dream, living in the current paradigm? Or is it how we identify with the outlaw totems of the past to make a stand now? We do yearn for the past, for physicality and aura of objects, for the sensation Marfa gives us of another time, a pre-global lockdown, a time before the planet seemed doomed, a time before and so on. Hold on!

I'm making notes speaking into my phone about to go through Federal checkpoint and hope they don't find my pistol.

I don't nice chat with the federales but my god that man had the cleanest whitest teeth I've ever seen. Beautiful Mexican-American I told how I ended up in goddamn nowhere and we laughed about it. At the end he asked me, “You are a U.S. citizen, right?” “Yes,” I tell him, “I am part of a U.S. that no longer exists and perhaps never existed.” I am part of the monster and the happiest times of my life I've spent driving through the deserts of the Southwest looking at the great feet of telephone poles and electric wire stretched across the great expanse.

If this next book of mine succeeds, it could very well lead to attacks at home, in the U.S., I dream, delusional. As I drive, I worry about it leading to domestic terrorism.

"I’m heading to write a book about destroying Los Angeles. About there being no place to go with art to compete with the world of violence but to finally call the game and blow it all up, domestic terrorist kids in America, blowing up the establishment to fill the game with magic. But why?"

I am interested in Marfa because, aside from the spiritual heritage of the land, and the unexplainable phenomenon of the Marfa lights (more on this later), the landscape, I want to find a plot of cheap desert to make art, drop out, leave the society that I can neither endorse nor want to afford—no, it isn’t that…I feel the effects of the current time making me feel something…what is it? BROKE! Hurried! Insecure! Lonely! I also feel the magic of something happening that I trust as a rapid evolution of a huge group of strange human beings who are radicalizing themselves out of old beliefs, trappings, and becoming increasingly psychedelic, free, and strange.

So, what does this all mean?

News

In Australia today children are joining ISIS from the Internet and attempting to blow things up. Last month in Texas Muslim extremists tried to shoot members of the Muhammad cartoon-drawing contest. My dog is sighing next to me.

Rocks

Rocks get named and renamed. A hundred two hundred two thousand years. Who had seen an elephant in the time of Apaches or Comanche? Abe Lincoln in Mexico!? You can see his goatee and nose. How long does a person get to be alive? Maybe I am just approaching middle age—feeling drawn to the Walden thing of Thoreau or the desert thing of Abbey, but I am feeling how soon the rocks are renamed, the life is over, the body is spent.

In creative writing classes I teach, or used to as I’m driving back to Portland, Oregon having quit the job in Texas, quit academia, quit GOD FORBID QUIT TENURE, early on students write very very short flash fictions that don't go anywhere; no one knows what to say anymore; there's a great crackling of silence across the wires of the dominant collective consciousness. Lots of talk and art about total apocalypse. Little vision for utopia—but on the sides, in the secret caverns, nuggets of wild genius abound! Actually I was non-renewed. Think: getting fired, with an extra year to work.

This reminds me of an installation I saw in Marfa today of record players that say now over and over. I pretend now that I’m not impressed but I was impressed until I thought of how much money is behind the exhibit, how much competition, the politics, the professionalism, the fact that the collective consciousness of now, to me, of condos and commercial spaces, is my enemy.

In Marfa, I’m struggling with a decision. I want my time free from high rent, from professional life, from Portland, Oregon, the city I am from and can’t afford as an artist. I have been planning to drop out and am heading with all my things to write my next book—to a cheap desert in California.

I’m heading to write a book about destroying Los Angeles. About there being no place to go with art to compete with the world of violence but to finally call the game and blow it all up, domestic terrorist kids in America, blowing up the establishment to fill the game with magic. But why? Have I gotten so far out, so bent, so warped? I want aura again. We all do. I want glamour. I want a world that looks like Marfa. I don’t want to see another Ikea as long as I fucking live! I sleep on an Ikea bed! Aghhhh. Actually, I gave it away. I have no bed! My next bed will be Ikea-free! Not Ikea! Probably USED! Hooray! I had a used bed in my early twenties in SF. It had a ghost of an old woman who would wake me up shaking me. I liked her. We slept together.

Turkish

I met a man with a green card and pink eye—a Turkish fellow—standing out front of the hotel I stayed last night where, yeah, yeah, James Dean made the movie GIANT. Hotel Paisano. Picture the film name in giant lights. When I told him about the job I just left,/been forced out of,/may still be hired back but don't know if I'd ever return, he said, “I would die for a job like that.” Die for a job.

The great depression is upon us only it's a depression of spirit and mind. I surely assured him he would die for a job like that as it would kill him in every way but in terms of the basic functioning of his body and brain. (They will, it turns out, offer the job back. In writing this essay I realize I have to refuse it and I do.)

It's not the teaching that would kill him. It's the forced removal of personalities, artists, and selfhood from the academic corporate hell administration take over. It's the same all over I hear. What do you do? How bad is it? In the academic and professional world today? It's another essay. But the suckers have smeared us all over. But have you been to Marfa? El Cosmico? Sorry Liz Lambert!

The Creeping Garden.

They are showing a film at 10 about microcosms of vegetal action! It's supposed to be the most!

CLICK HERE TO READ PART FOUR

[PART FOUR] "Marfa Lights"

August 4, 2015

Here in Marfa, Texas with Those Desert Eyes: THO

"MARFA LIGHTS"

by Luke B. Goebel

Four years ago or three I went and saw the Marfa lights with a woman whose heritage is predominantly Cherokee. I just ran into her in the street NOW: she's crying facing felony charges for assaulting a county sheriff (they do patrol through town), public drunkenness, and interfering with an officer’s duty.

She got arrested last night and when she wouldn’t let them remove her silver bracelet that is a religious totem, she pushed the officer away and kicked him and was beaten, charged with felony, treated the way people are treated now by police.

The Marfa lights are a phenomenon of lights that fly up into the sky at night outside Marfa, flying toward one another, stretching out in star shapes of golden light, then swimming together in the sky and separating again. No one knows what causes them—google it—there are lots of different ideas. She told me, as we saw them, that her ancestors and people have talked about them and known them since before Abe Lincoln’s nose. They say they are friendly, happy spirits.

She can't quit drinking when she touches it. I quit drinking thirteen years ago. I massage her in the street, talking, hugging her as she cried, sobbed really, one of the 224 locals; my fake emotional support animal gave her some support, and we tried to share what we know from our journeys, which wasn’t much. I mostly just listened to our sweet sweetheart darling who showed me the Marfa lights; we saw them like the Rolling Stones song NO SPARE PARTS in which Mick Jagger country drawls, "I saw the lights in Marfa, I guess it was a scenic route" though to me I always hear, “I guess they were a touch of Grace." Should the world be blown up, Honey?

I am thinking about the climate, California’s drought, the average rent in San Francisco. Is this justifiable yet? Think of that young man with his broken spine in Baltimore—Freddie Carlos Gray Jr. Ferguson. Staten Island. South Carolina. Politics.

A little white butterfly just flew across the desert road. Highway. I'm driving and dictating into my phone. I am spectating. Recording.

Leaf

A close friend of my sister and a man I've spent some time with is dying in a hospital in Portland, Oregon. He has been surviving blood cancer for 20 years. I am now passing a giant blimp. There is a sign out front NSA or TSA or DHS and it says something about radar surveillance. The man with blood cancer, Leaf, is about to die. He has a young son who is the kindest soul. Leaf has an open wound in his back that goes to his spine. Yesterday, the hospital tried to discharge him saying that his pain management had been achieved. Just throw him out dying in horrendous pain. They took him off his pain drugs. Subbed them out for cheaper shit. They hadn't given him morphine for two days even though he has a hook up in his arm for an IV because he couldn't get the pills (my phone autocorrects “pills” to “payments” adding its wisdom), down his throat. They've got him doped up on Ativan rather than morphine because it's cheaper and then they tried to send him home.

Out to the side of highway 90, I'm on the right one now, against a mountain side, leaving Marfa, I see a giant espresso cup. It's about 700 yards high. It's not there. A hallucination. I miss hallucinating. The sense you could die at any moment. Leave your body. The unfathomable lasting of each moment far too long at far too much. The brain at 9k rpms. The world needs giant modernist absurdist sculptures against the mountainside more than surveillance blimps. That sense of idealism and giant visionary dream that left the visible popular world long ago.

My sister and friends and my mother and her doctor husband get involved with Leaf’s case. They are able to make it so that he can stay, and eventually be brought to hospice Monday. It is Saturday. We have drones dropping bombs, which right or wrong, just shows that this world has gone insane. So, what does this have to do with Marfa? Have you been to Marfa? What do we like? What feels good?…Marfa looks like a utopia of vastness and imagination and non surveillance and artistic aesthetic—freedom. I do not feel free with a 401k, I have learned, over the past four years.

"At best, perhaps Marfa is a call to action. A reminder not to be only nostalgic, but that there are sacred spaces of landscape that remain....where we can go to roam with our imaginations and work as artists—where we can choose to try our hands and wills at utopia, which is no place, which must fail or fall, but before it does there is a special bond one can have with land and people."

Portland

When I get back to Portland the strangeness will be waiting. My sister, who is graduating from a conceptual art and design program where the graduates, all but her, go directly CHUTES AND LADDERS right into design and or marketing jobs…recently said to me, “I don’t think there’s ever been a place where people are on so many drugs so much of the time.” I am at a bar, no human eyes looking like eyes, the music louder than any human can speak, and I am suddenly the stranger seeing my face disintegrate in the mirror in pixels and visuals, being laughed at when I try to converse with a pair of swingers, poly people, who are high beyond conception, the entire town outside of my poles of grounding. I’m having flashbacks. There is something good happening in Portland amid the overcrowding, the invasion, the destruction of the old town I am from, and a leap being made…by many.

Portland is a strange diode culture that resists nothing, is nothing, fears nothing, welcomes nothing, is as far out in the realm of societal meaninglessness—departure from mores and the new world as anywhere I know. We see Mad Max.

I am an artist who can’t afford my hometown, can’t afford the cities where the hip are consuming, snacktating, and I furthermore see the trap. Too much professionalism, not enough telescoping of consciousness…Why don’t we all drop out, learn to live on less, earn less, live in towns where we populate the landscape and our lives with objects that have aura, where we can slow DOWN? The old Tune in, Turn on, Drop out…maybe it’s time? In cities or deserts.

As for me, in Portland my dog will roll in human shit, come into my family’s place with white carpets, and roll the shit into them. A meter person will give me a 140-dollar ticket for expired registration. I will feel like I’m in that song Ballad of a Thin Man, “Do you, MR JONES.” I will not be able to write, as I never can in Portland. I will spend a lot of time with Leaf and running errands for his stay in hospice. He will look like Jesus covered in tattoos, skinny to the point of extinction, with a halo screwed into his skull so he cannot move his neck or head.

Sitting there next to this friend with the halo screwed into his skull, a man who never took the bait, never bought into professionalism, never became a hipster professional, lived wildly and freely until his untimely end—a psychonaut beautiful soul without fear of not being hip for being sincere—who made a child—who lived on the earth—I have to ask, where is the next frontier?

I admit I am guilty of the spectator life. Visiting. I admit I fetishize old technology, use typewriters, have hundreds of records, only shoot revolvers, want objects that seem to have value, because we value them, because they seem to have aura. I admit I want to have autonomy among the landscape. That I love the desert! OMG, have you seen desert air and vastness? I have found my next place…but…so have others…and it’s the same place. It’s a desert town a lot like Marfa. Less staged…less protected by foundations…but right about to burst into legend…already bursting…30K a house. For me, it’s time to get in, get to work on my own art, and soon, soon, soon enough, it too will be overblown, blown up, on fire, over.

Marfa

At best, perhaps Marfa is a call to action. A reminder not to be only nostalgic, but that there are sacred spaces of landscape that remain, affordable, small scale, where we can go to roam with our imaginations and work as artists—where we can choose to try our hands and wills at utopia, which is no place, which must fail or fall, but before it does there is a special bond one can have with land and people—where we can choose at any time to vote out the cops, though border patrol will come through, or county sheriffs, but more importantly we shall identify with whatever emblems we want in the new world—but why not live them?

When the society we live in forces us backwards with our hearts, into nostalgia, let’s build new utopias with old objects, with new ideas, and escape the rat races of our parents, of the generations that have destroyed, and let’s unhinge our backs from the front that is ruining our entire selves. I want to let go—I want out—I am going, going, and I hope you will visit. Plans are being made.

We anxiously await the chance to invite you.

Let’s drop out! Whoopie!

“Throw roses into the abyss and say: 'here is my thanks to the monster who didn't succeed in swallowing me alive’.” — Friedrich Nietzsche

FIN

Read Artist Brad Phillips' Suicide Note

June 12, 2015

Tomorrow, Freddy Gallery in Baltimore will open "Problem Is You," a group exhibition featuring three artists: Aaron Carpenter, Philip Hinge, and the very much alive (but maybe not well) Brad Phillips. Instead of a traditional statement about the exhibition and the artists, the gallery offers a morbid, but brilliant, suicide note penned by Phillips, which probably sums up the exhibition more than any standard press release could. If you don't follow Phillips on Instagram, you should - it is an extenuation of the artist's unique practice that ranges from delicate near-photorealistic paintings to text based play-on-words to prose - his book Suicidal Realism is out now on the Swimmer's Group imprint. In the following suicide note, Brad Phillips offers his disdain for the mechanics of the art world and he narrates a spiritual journey of selfhood and artisthood in the midst of self doubt, depression and addition.

Suicide Note 2015

by BRAD PHILLIPS

It’s that time again. Because it could be that time again. And this always needs revising. Things change; new people have betrayed me, I love new people, I’ve betrayed new people. But a suicide note should traditionally always be about self hatred or aloof disenchantment with the experience of living.. Those people that write bitter blameful suicide notes don’t deserve the back-flip out of existence that suicide so beautifully offers us all.

In this iteration, I could for example, send out a fuck you to my ex wife in Vancouver Pat Cowan who never visited me in rehab and then kept the few objects that were precious to me ransom for three years hoping that one day I would twist myself into a gargoyle of apology that suited her own permanently scorned, emotionally static childlike blamelessness. But that’s not my style.

Love and money. In the last year I came to know a love I did not know existed. Unconditional. What you hear about in Helen Hunt movies. I met a woman, Lazara, who accepted me for who I was, who did not wish to change anything about me, and who let me be myself, which is not always a pleasant thing to endure. I have spent my life pretending I could change for people. I cannot change. Now the experience of being accepted as I truly am has opened up the world to me in a way I didn’t imagine possible. It’s truly beautiful. But that doesn’t mean I can continue to endure the world that she helped me expand. My being allowed to be myself is in some ways truly frightening. I always resented being asked to change this or that, but I also assumed those requests were fair, because I saw myself as a monstrous burden to those who loved me. That this woman, like some precious angel, is able to carry that weight – this in itself could be contorted, in the right mental state, as a new and different reason to end my life, because how could I let someone so brave and so kind endure so very much? Because I am far too much. I can barely lift my head, how she can carry all of me is unthinkable. I love this woman so much that it would just be another example of my own selfishness to let her take the blows my personality and instincts unknowingly reign down on her psyche, even if she is, of now, unaware of the assault.

2007 I had a solo show at Liste in Basel with a gallery in Switzerland I was working with. At the time I was with my aforementioned ex wife. I had had a very depressing year. Like the one before, like the one after, like this one, like the year of my birth. Being not that bright, I worked very hard on making the best paintings I could, and assumed that if this show went well, then the sun would shine down on me and my problems would be vanquished. Because I was naive then, at 33 I was painfully naive still. Hours before the fair even opened, my dealers told me that the esteemed Hauser and Wirth Gallery had bought my entire show. While other dealers were putting nails in the wall, my dealers put their feet on the desk. They called me ex wife and I into the booth and told me the news. I made something like seventy thousand Euros in fifteen minutes for a year’s worth of work. My ex wife beamed, my dealers beamed. I stood there like a man who had just been hung but the rope broke. I had no words. I went to the lounge and ordered a drink, my wife followed me, we went downstairs, and I buried my face in her breast and wept like an insane person. Because nothing had changed. I felt no better. I felt no accomplishment. I felt no pride or relief. What I felt was a terrifying sameness. And in that moment, I realized that art was not the thing that would fill the hole in me. And money was not it either. All the money did was give me more money to fill my body with drugs and alcohol. Which I did promptly, for three years and change, having shows here and there where my work suffered, until I ended up living with a psychopath and a single father, drinking every waking hour and wandering skid row puking on my shoes and scoring dope.

In 2012 I went to rehab. I was 38. I was naive at 38 in that I thought if I stopped being a drug addict and an alcoholic, I would feel better. I spent three months there and nine in a halfway house and moved back to Toronto to be near my family. It was a slow motion re-enactment of my sold out show five years before. I took the drugs and the alcohol away, and I felt no better. I just experienced the reality of my mind soberly. I had a minor nervous breakdown. What lives in me is a hole. I have spent my life trying to fill it. I don’t know if I was born with this hole inside of me, or if it was carved or shot or eaten out by experience. But what I do know is that I’ve tried to fill it with everything imaginable. Sex shoplifting art women booze heroin marijuana television reading writing meditating basketball Percocet Jim Beam Ativan Budweiser Philip Roth BDSM. But the hole is insatiable. What it wants to be filled with is the end of me. I am emotionally self anthropophagous. I eat away at myself until there is nothing left. And I’ve done such a good job of it, that now, at 41, crawling into bed feels like crawling into a foxhole, getting into the shower feels like moving a piano, and I’ve eaten away at the energy I need to continue.

Young people have faith in art. Some of them think it can make them money. It has become professionalized. Some of them will make money. I was one. But faith in something that the world doesn’t need is a dangerous thing to stake your life on. I have been known primarily for making paintings. For this last show in Baltimore there are no paintings. Because my paintings aren’t mine anymore, I make ‘Brad Phillipsy’ paintings. I make paintings that look like what I make, like what people have come to expect from me. I’ve started to making paintings the way people in pornography have sex. It looks real to the viewer, but there’s no sincerity in the movement. Scenes stop and start again. Dicks go limp, people cry, lights burn out. And that is where I’ve ended up. A burned out starlet from a small town with dreams of moving from the adult film world to television then to movies, living in a trailer behind a car dealership in San Luis Obispo.

If I die before he does, Aaron Carpenter is to execute my wishes. Which are few. Give it all away to the dwindling number of people I haven’t isolated. Apologize to everyone. Cut my arms and legs off and leave me in the forest.

Life is beautiful and this is true. But the greatest beauty in being alive is that we can stop the whole show in an instant if we choose to, and I’d rather exit now with some sense of empowerment than dwindle and shrink further into myself until my spine and my belly button kiss each other and I writhe on the ground like a sun bleached salamander.

I love everyone that ever touched me.

Brad Phillips, May 15, 2015

"Problem Is You," featuring Aaron Carpenter, Philip Hinge, and Brad Phillips will be on view from June 13 to July 11th, 2015 at Freddy Gallery, 510 W. Franklin Street. Click here to read our interview with Brad Phillips. Text by Brad Phillips.

The Agony and The Ecstasy of Richard Prince: Read the Artist's Own Words On His Inciting "New Portraits" Series

June 11, 2015

*Richard Prince, 1983. Photo: Peter Bellamy*

At this point, talking, criticizing, polemicizing or debating Richard Prince’s “New Portraits” series is akin to beating a dead horse. Enough already. Instead of beating the dead horse, why don’t we hear what the horse actually has to say before we deliver the final blow? Tonight, Prince is set to present a new round of his “New Portrait” series, which includes large-scale printouts on canvas of Instagram screengrabs with the artist’s comments below the photographs, which he calls “Psychic Jiu-Jitsu.” Mentioning the cost, the process, the debate, and who-said-what is irrelevant at this point, but after the opening tonight at Gagosian London, there will be a new mob of villagers at the digital gate armed with pitchforks in hand waiting to burn Prince at the stake. Just the same, there will be a new round of heretics praising him. Without veering too close to either side, I will say this: creating the “New Portrait” series is Richard Prince’s responsibility and duty as an artist. In the following essay, Prince describes in minute detail his process and evolution; from his early portraiture taken from publicity stills to his current Instagram portraits. Prince also describes his immense fascination with both current culture and subculture. You will also notice that Prince is incredibly intentional behind what he does – some artists spend 100 hours painting a portrait; Prince spends a hundred hours thinking about a portrait. What’s the difference? In the following text, Prince is also extremely candid: admitting to having a socially crippling stutter, to naively discovering social media through his daughter, and to scrolling through Instagram, which he calls a “bedroom magazine,” until the early hours of the morning. If you plan to visit “New Portraits” tonight on Davies Street, be sure to read this text before you make any conclusions, that is, if you haven't already.

New Portraits by Richard Prince

In 1984 I took some portraits.
The way I did it was different. The way had nothing to do with the tradition of portraiture.
If you wanted me to do your portrait, you would give me at least five photographs that had already been taken of yourself, that were in your possession (you owned them, they were yours), and more importantly . . . you were already happy with.
You give me the five you liked and I would pick the one I liked. I would rephotograph the one I liked and that would be your portrait. Simple. Direct. To the point . . .

Foolproof.

I started off doing friends. Peter Nadin. Anne Kennedy. Jeff Koons. Cookie Mueller. Gary Indiana. Colin de Land.
They didn’t have to sit for their portrait. They didn’t have to make an appointment and come over and sit in front of some cyclone or in front of a neutral background or on an artist’s stool. They didn’t have to show up at all. And they wouldn’t be disappointed with the result. How could they? It wasn’t like they were giving me photos of themselves that were embarrassing.

Social Science Fiction.

Another advantage was the “time line.” If you were in your sixties and you gave me a photograph that had been taken thirty years earlier, and that’s the one I chose, your portrait ended up in a kind of time machine. I couldn’t go forward, but I could go backward. Vanity. Most of the people I did liked the younger version of themselves. So the future didn’t really matter. Half of H. G. Wells was better than no half at all.

Who knew?

After friends, I did people I didn’t know.
I had access to Warner Bros. Records and their publicity files. The files were filled with 8 x 10 glossies of recording stars that they had under contract. How I had access is beside the point. It was a long time ago. Let’s just say an A&R guy gave me access, “permission.”
I spent time in their LA headquarters, Burbank, and went thru the metal cabinets and took the “publicities” I wanted, took them home, put them in front of my camera, and made a new photograph. The first one I did was Dee Dee Ramone.
I did Tina Weymouth, Tom Verlaine, Jonathan Richman, Laurie Anderson. I did the two girls from the B-52s.
Not knowing these people, having never met them, or talked to them, but still being able to do their portrait, excited me. Satisfaction. I spent weeks in the basement of Warner Bros. I thought I had an advantage. My method, if you could call it that, was far more flexible than the regular way portraits were taken. I didn’t need a studio. A darkroom. A receptionist. A calendar. Makeup. Stylists. I didn’t have to deal with agents or the “personality,” good or bad, of the sitter. My overhead was minimal and I could do the portrait all by myself.

By myself. That was the best.

Why I Go To The Movies Alone.

At first I thought this could be a business.
Up till then none of the art that I was making sold . . . or sold enough to make a living. I had just quit my job at Time Life the year before and was trying to make a go of it living near Venice Beach in LA . . . sharing a house with three roommates and living off the occasional sales that Hudson, my friend from Chicago, would make selling my “cartoon” drawings.
This idea of a “portrait business” made sense to me. Who wouldn’t want their portrait done this way?
I continued to do friends. Paula Greif. Dike Blair. Myer Viceman. I did everybody’s portrait for Wild History, a book that I put together for Tanam Press of downtown writing. The author’s portrait accompanied their contribution. Wharton Tiers. Spalding Gray. Tina L’Hotsky.
By the end of ’84 it was over.
I’m not sure if it was the lack of interest in me, or others. (My energy evaporated.) Maybe it was the inability to convince people to commit to a commission. It was a good idea, but after doing about forty of them, I put them in a drawer and moved on. Bored? Restless? I don’t know. Let’s just say it didn’t take off.

Leave it at that.

My cartoon drawings turned into jokes and the jokes started taking up everything. In the end, I think most people would rather have their portrait done by Robert Mapplethorpe.

Thirty years. Time passes.

The social network.

I looked over my daughter’s shoulder and saw that she was scrolling thru pictures on her phone. I asked her what she was looking at. “It’s my Tumblr.” “What’s a tumbler,” I asked.
That was . . . four years ago?
About three years ago I bought an iPhone. Someone had shown me the photographs you could take with the phone. I had given up taking pictures after they got rid of color slide film. I tried digital, but couldn’t make the adjustment. I never liked carrying a camera and was pretty much inkjetting and painting anyway . . . so the idea of using a big boxy camera with all its new whistles and bows wasn’t for me.

Enter the sandman.

The iPhone was just what I needed. I couldn’t believe how easy it was to point and shoot. You didn’t have to focus. You didn’t have to load film. You didn’t have to ASA. You didn’t have to set a speed. The clarity . . .

I could see for miles.

The photos you took were stored in the phone. And when you wanted to see them, they appeared on a grid. The best part, you could send a photo immediately to a friend, to an e-mail, to a printer . . . or, you could organize your photos, like my daughter had, and post them publicly or privately.

When worlds collide.

I asked my daughter more about Tumblr. Are those your photos? Where did you get that one? Did you need permission? How did you get that kind of crop? You can delete them? Really? What about these “followers.” Who are they? Are they people you know? What if you don’t want to share? How many of your friends have Tumblrs?

What’s yours is mine.

My daughter’s “grid” on Tumblr reminded me of my Gangs I did back in ’85 . . . where I organized a set of nine images on a single piece of photo paper and blew the paper up to 86 x 48. The gangs were a way to deal with marginal or subsets of lifestyles that I needed to see on a wall but not a whole wall. Each gang was its own exhibition. Girlfriends, Heavy Metal Bands, Giant Waves, Bigfoot Trucks, Sex, War, Cartoons, Lyrics . . . were all rephotographed with slide film, and when the slides returned, they were “deejayed” and moved around on a custom-made light box until the best nine made the cut. The “cut” was then taped together (the edges of the slide mounts were pushed up against each other and scotch-taped), the nine taped slides were sent to a lab where an 8 x 10 internegative was made, and from the internegative the final photo was blown up. I’ve probably lost you. Technical stuff . . . application and technique. Sometimes it’s better to leave the “background” out of it. Better to “take it for granted.” Why should I care how a photograph is made?

Only sometimes.

How was it called back then? Sampling?

Primitive now, but back then . . . a 50-inch photo drum was few and far between. The paper was 50 inches wide and came in a huge roll. If you wanted to, you could take a roll and roll it down the street, roll it down the sidewalk, roll it all the way down the West Side Highway.

Shakespeare’s in the alley?
No. Philip Roth is in the alley.
Joan Didion is in the alley.
Don DeLillo is in the alley.

What’s up pussycat?

There’s a lot of cats on Instagram. Food too.

And there’s tons of photos of people who take photographs of themselves. (Yes, I know the word.)

On the gram. I was just asked why I like Instagram. I said, “Because there’s rules. And if you break the rules, you get kicked off.”

I got to Instagram thru Twitter.
Twitter first.
I’m not sure when I first started tweeting, but I liked trying to fit a whole story into 140 characters.
I call it Birdtalk.
I used to Bird in the early ’90s for Purple magazine and birded in my first catalogue for Barbara Gladstone in ’87.
Short sentences that were funny, sweet, dumb, profound, absurd, stupid, jokey, Finnegans Wake meets MAD magazine meets ad copy for Calvin Klein. Think Dylan’s Tarantula. Then think some more and think Kathy Acker’s Tarantula.
Or, don’t think at all. I know I don’t.

Sometimes.

Sometimes I write down the first sentence that starts off my favorite novel.

Relative. I’m not much of a theory guy. But sometimes I think there was a reason why Einstein was a technical assistant in the Swiss patent office.

Let me fill your cup.

Twitter accepts photos, but is mainly text based. I like to combine the two and tweet both photo and text.

I called the photo/texts tweets I was posting . . . “The Family.”
I posted photos of my extended family . . . mother, brother, sister, nieces, cousins, uncles, aunts, in-laws, stepchildren, boy- and girlfriends. I would caption the photos with a short description of who, what, why . . . measuring my words so that they fit into the guidelines of the platform.
After posting the photo/text, I sent the information to my printer and ink jetted an 11 x 14 print of the marriage. I made thirty-eight “Family” tweets.

Distribution.

I placed each Family tweet in a plastic sleeve and pushpinned the sleeve to the wall. The wall was at Karma. I put all thirty-eight up. Salon style. It was Saturday. The doors opened at 12 pm. By 12:15 pm all thirty-seven were gone. One to a customer. I kept the one that had my father, mother, and sister in it. (My father and mother were naked, and my sister was sitting in between. My family wasn’t like yours. Hobnob doesn’t begin to describe them.) I sold the “family tweets” for $12 each. First come, first serve.

Well, well, well . . .
In ma ma ma my wheeeeeeeel house.
I used to stutter. By the ninth grade, the sparkle was in my eye. It got so bad, the impediment turned me into a clam. I slept all day, every day. I wouldn’t get up until Sunday. I waited for Bonanza to come on the TV. I loved the cowboy father and his three sons.

Two summers ago, my niece was working for me out on Long Island and she showed me how to screen save. I didn’t know about the option. What other options don’t I know about?

Screen Save.

This might be one of the best applications in an apparatus that I’ve ever encountered. All time. Hall of fame. First place. Just what I need. MORE photographs.

Pressing the two buttons on the phone and hearing the device grind its gears to make an exposure made me nervous. What did Harry Lime say in the movie The Third Man? “In three centuries of civilization what have the Swiss contributed to culture? The cuckoo clock.”

Hey kids . . . what time is it?

Now I have a theory.

I was beside myself.
Congratulations.

This past spring, and half the summer, the iPhone became my studio. I signed up for Instagram. I pushed things aside. I made room. It was easy. I ignored Tumblr, and Facebook had never interested me. But Instagram . . .

I started off being RichardPrince4.
I quickly recognized the device was a way to get the lead out. If Twitter was editorial . . . then Instagram was advertising.

A gazillion people.

Besides cats, dogs, and food, people put out photos of themselves and their friends all the time, every day, and, yes, some people put themselves out twice on Mondays. I started “following” people I knew, people I didn’t know, and people who knew each other. It was innocent. I was on the phone talking to Jessica Hart and had just looked at her “gram” feed before picking up the phone. I asked about a picture she posted of herself standing in front of a fireplace wearing what looked to be ski clothes and big fur boots. The post was in black and white, head to toe, full figure, and behind her, above the mantle, there was a portrait of Brigitte Bardot. I told her someone should make a portrait out of this photo. She said, “Why don’t you?”

Come to think of it.

I’m not sure if she knew about my Family Tweets. She might have. I think we even talked about them after she came to my studio for a visit. After I got off the phone, I thought about her suggestion: “Why don’t you?”

I went back to her feed and screen saved her “winter” photo. I sent the save to my computer, pressed “empty subject,” pressed “actual size,” and waited for it to appear in a doc, checked the margins and crop, clicked on the doc, and sent it to my printer. My inkjet printer printed out an 11 x 14 inch photo on paper . . . I took the photo out of the tray and put it on my desk.

Looking at Jessica’s feed reminded me of 1984. Except this time I had more than five photos to choose from. I went back to her feed a second time. I scrolled thru maybe a hundred photos she had posted and looked at all the ones that included her. The one in front of the fireplace was still the best.

Walk on.

Jessica had tons of followers. Thousands. And a lot of them had “commented” on what she posted. I read all the comments that had been posted under her fireplace photo. There was one comment I wish I could have gotten in my original screen save. When you screen save an Instagram image, you can get maybe three, four comments in the save if you include the person’s “profile” icon that appears on the upper left of the page. I decided early on I wanted the person’s icon to be part of the save. But what else could I save?

I went back to my desk and kept staring at the printout of Jessica. What do I do now?

I didn’t want to paint it.
I didn’t want to mark it.
I didn’t want to add a sticker.
Whatever I did, I wanted it to happen INSIDE and before the save. I wanted my contribution to be part of the “gram.” I didn’t want to do anything physical to the photograph after it was printed.

Five cents.

I went back to the comment.
I commented on Jessica’s photo in front of the fireplace, but my comment was one of hundreds and showed up outside, way down at the bottom . . . out of the frame.
If I wanted my comment to show up near her picture . . . how?

I got lucky.

"IG is a bedroom magazine....I can start out with someone I know and then check out who they follow or who’s following them, and the rabbit hole takes on an outer body experience where you suddenly look at the clock and it’s three in the morning. I end up on people’s grids that are so far removed from where I began, it feels psychedelic."

I’m terrible when it comes to the tech side of technology. But somehow I figured out how to hack into Jessica’s feed and swipe away all her comments and add my own so that it would appear under her post. The hack is pretty simple and anyone can do it. You hit the gray comment bar and pick a comment you don’t want and swipe with your finger to the left, and a red exclamation mark appears. You press on the exclamation mark and four things come onto the bottom of your screen.
1. Why are you reporting this comment?
2. Spam or Scam
3. Abusive Content
4. Cancel

To get rid of the comment, you click on Spam or Scam. It’s gone. Just like that I could control other people’s comments and Jessica’s own comments. And the comment that I added could now be near enough to Jessica’s photo that when I screen saved it, my comment would “show up.” Make sense? It’s about as good as I can do. What can I say? Einstein and cuckoo . . .

So now . . .

So now I was in.

Waiting to follow.

Richardprince4 would appear at the bottom of Jessica’s final portrait. My comment, whatever it would be, would always be the last comment. The last say so. Say so. That’s good. That could work. My “in” was what I ended up saying. And what I would say would be everything I ever knew . . . what I knew now and what I would know in the future.

Tell Me Everything.

Finnegans Wake meets MAD magazine.

Zoot Horn Rollo. You seem to be where I belong (emoji).

The first three portraits I did were of women I knew. Or almost knew. Jessica, I knew. Pam Anderson, I knew. Sky Ferreira? I didn’t know, but was following her and had been reading about her new album and seeing posters of her album broadsided on sheets of ply on the Bowery and on Lafayette near Bond. I wasn’t sure what I was doing or why I chose these three. I just had lunch with Pam and had seen Jessica in LA. Sky, I was following because she seemed interesting. There was nothing more. No attraction. No fan. No desire. No date. No wanting anything from her. And the pictures she posted were candid, boozy, and seemed to be letting the viewer in on some kind of backstage diary. She also had thousands of people following her, and I could tap into her followers and follow them. I can do that? I didn’t even know I could follow the followers. Like I said, the hardware was all new . . . and I was just getting started.

The shoreline is never the same. (Like it should be.)

When I first started getting rid of comments, I thought the person whose comments I was getting rid of might get pissed. “What happened to all my comments?” I found out quickly that “the getting rid of” only affected my feed. The deleted comments didn’t affect the followers’ feeds. Their comments were still there even though they were gone from mine. All that happened is that MY comment showed up below their photo. Was I allowed? Yes. I guess so. It’s hard to explain. But the process is open, and at the moment, it’s the way it works and anyone and everyone can do it.

The language I started using to make “comments” was based on Birdtalk. Non sequitur. Gobbledygook. Jokes. Oxymorons. “Psychic Jiu-Jitsu.”
Some of the language came directly from TV. If I’m selecting a photo of someone and adding a comment to their gram and an advertisement comes on . . . I use the language that I hear in the ad. Inferior language. It works. It sounds like it means something. What’s it mean? I don’t know. Does it have to mean anything at all? I think about James Joyce confessing to Nora Barnacle. I think about opening up to page 323 of Finnegans Wake. Then I think about notes and lyricism. Policy. Whisper. Murmurs. Mantra. Quotation. Advice.
Chamber Music.
Didn’t Duke Ellington say, “If it sounds good, it is good”? He did say that, didn’t he?

Who are these people?

Larry Clark, Diane Arbus, Robert Mapplethorpe take great portraits. I’ve watched Larry take photos and I don’t know how he does it. I wouldn’t know where to begin. I could never go up to a stranger and ask them if I could take their picture. I’ve done it maybe two or three times and didn’t enjoy it. That part of art is in Larry. It isn’t in me. I feel more comfortable in my bedroom looking thru Easyriders and pouring over pictures of “girlfriends” that are right there on the page. Page after page. Looking. Wondering. Anticipating. Hoping. What will be on the next page? Will I find a girlfriend that I really like? That’s my relationship with what’s out there. It’s as close as I want to get. That’s what’s in me.

IG is a bedroom magazine.

I can start out with someone I know and then check out who they follow or who’s following them, and the rabbit hole takes on an outer body experience where you suddenly look at the clock and it’s three in the morning. I end up on people’s grids that are so far removed from where I began, it feels psychedelic. Further. I’m on the bus. I feel like I’m part of Kesey’s merry tribe. I’m reminded of Timothy Leary’s journals, which I purchased years ago from John McWhinnie, and the concentration that came over me when I discovered his hand-drawn map of his escape from jail. How he literally shimmied on a wire that had been strung up from an outer utility building to the perimeter prison wall . . . and how I would trace with my finger his overland express to Tangier, where he hooked up with Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver and spent the next year seeking asylum in different parts of North Africa, ultimately ending up in Switzerland where his ex-wife ratted him out, and how fighting extradition took up the rest of his life. Wow, now it’s four in the morning.

Tune In, Turn On, Come Out.

“Trolling.”

If you say so.

I never thought about it that way. The word has been used to describe part of the process of making my new portraits. I guess so. It’s not like I’m on the back of a boat throwing out chum.

"We’re going to need a bigger boat."

Included.

Everyone is fair.

Game.

An even playing field.

“Outside my cabin door. Said the girl from the red river shore.”

Men. Women. Men and women. Men and men. Women and women. Blacks Whites Latinos Asian Arabs Jews Straights Gays Transgender. Tattoos and scars. Hairy.

I don’t really know the score.

The ones I adore.

I just know where I belong.

“Oh, there I go. From a man to a memory.”

How do I tell you who or why I pick? I can’t. It would be like telling you why I pick that joke. WHY THAT ONE? There’s thousands of jokes. I read them all. It takes days to read just one joke book. 101 of the World’s Funniest Jokes. Days. If I get one, find one, like one, out of the 101, it’s a good day.

People on IG lead me to other people. I spend hours surfing, saving, and deleting. Sometimes I look for photos that are straightforward portraits (or at least look straightforward). Other times I look for photos that would only appear, or better still . . . exist on IG. Photos that look the way they do because they’re on the gram. Selfies? Not really. Self-portraits. I’m not interested in abbreviation. I look for portraits that are upside down, sideways, at arm’s length, taken within the space that a body can hold a camera phone. What did de Kooning say? “When I spread my arms out, it’s all the space I need.”

At first I wasn’t sure how to print the portrait. I tried different surfaces, different papers. Presentation? Frame? Matt? Shadowbox? I tried them all. Finally this past spring my lab introduced me to a new canvas, one that was tightly wound, a surface with hardly any tooth. Smooth to the touch. Almost as if the canvas was photo paper. It was also brilliantly white. I don’t think it could be any whiter. And . . . the way the ink jetted into the canvas was a surprise. It fused in a way that made the image slightly out of focus. Just enough. The ink was IN and ON the canvas at the same time. When I first saw the final result, I didn’t really know what I was looking at. A photographic work or a work on canvas? The surprise was perfect. Perfect doesn’t come along very often. The color that had been transferred from the file of the computer to the jet, from jet to canvas, was intense, saturated, rich. If someone I followed had blue hair, their hair looked like it had been dyed directly onto the canvas. Dye job. Rinsed. Beauty salon. It was brilliant, great color. You might call it “vibrant.” The vibe between the image and the process was “sent away for,” seamless, effortless . . . all descriptions I used to use when I tried describing my early “pens, watches, and cowboys.” (Has it really been forty years?) The ingredients, the recipe, “the manufacture,” whatever you want to call it . . . was familiar but had changed into something I had never seen before. I wasn’t sure it even looked like art. And that was the best part. Not looking like art. The new portraits were in that gray area. Undefined. In-between. They had no history, no past, no name. A life of their own. They’ll learn. They’ll find their own way. I have no responsibility. They do. Friendly monsters.

Speak for yourself.

To fit in the world takes time.

For now, all I can say is . . . they’re the only thing I’ve ever done that has made me happy.

Richard Prince, "New Portraits," opens tonight at Gagosian London on Davies Street and runs until August 1, 2015. Intro text by Oliver Maxwell Kupper. New Portraits text by Richard Prince.

*RICHARD PRINCE, Untitled (portrait), 2015, inkjet on canvas, 65 3/4 × 48 3/4 inches (167 × 123.8 cm). Photo by Rob McKeever*

[Non-Fiction] Sexy Lexi and The San Fernando Valley Fuck Switch a.k.a. Less Than Shapiro

May 25, 2015

Sexi Lexi and the San Fernando Valley Fuck Switch a.k.a Less Than Shapiro

by Max Barrie

To my critics… I wish you all of you peace, love and anal leakage. But you’re not allowed to use my toilet. Try the Chevron on the corner you hush-hush cocksuckers.

Every word I type is true… I don’t do semi-fictional… I’m not James Frey. Everyone has their version of things and this is mine. The names are changed to protect the guilty, but that’s about as fictitious as I get. ALSO, I wish I knew as much about me as all of you do. If you have an opinion about my life or my recovery… if you think you know something OR see me as cookie cutter spoiled trash, I respect that. You’re not wrong, but that is simply your take. I’ll admit it stings a little when you flash your funhouse mirrors, then poke at me with your pedestrian solutions and tough love that I’m either too naive or too stubborn to adhere to. If it didn’t hurt I wouldn’t be writing this.

When I say ONE THING, different people hear different things. So just to go on record— I do not blame anyone for ME. I tell MY stories, I report MY news. I know us humans often look out the window instead of at our reflection because it sits better with our psyche… but believe me I spend plenty of time in the bathroom poking myself in the chest. There are certainly people I wouldn’t thank during my Oscar speech but that doesn’t mean I sit around all day pointing my dick at every cunt I see. I do believe that in this life there’s an ongoing “lack of insight” Bar-Mitzvah theme down every road I travel. But at the end of the day I know I’m a lottery winner and ultimately responsible for my actions… not my thoughts… my actions— and making my way in the world.

I am a fussy baby bitch that would be a blow up doll behind bars, but in front of my Macbook I’m anything but. I’m King Shit of Turd Island and I will take you apart piece by piece for peace. I will filet your nameless anus and cut off your anonymous tongue. I promise. Often in life I throw temper tantrums that nobody can hear… and if they do hear something, they think it’s the gardener and shut the window. So hear this. I want my turn on the seesaw, I want my twenty-percent-off coupon at Bed Bath and Beyond and I want a dirty girl with clear skin to fuck me gently. So if my writing cracks open that door, hand me a Bic Pen and a napkin.

But there’s more to my chicken scratch than desperately needing a voice or claiming a prize. Selfishly I scribble to keep my head from bursting like a water balloon. If I don’t constantly stay creative, you will inevitably find me at Ruth’s Chris on Beverly Drive, stuffing an entire ribeye into my body and spilling Heineken down my pants because it feels good. Writing for me is pushing a never-ending shit-log out of an infinite asshole. I keep it moving so I don’t get backed up.

If I write for other people, which I’ve tried before, I’m in a great deal of danger. I paint alone, I type alone and I’ll probably leave earth alone… unless it’s on Virgin Galactic. Speaking of saying goodbye— I also write to make sure there’s documentation of all this silliness because I’m gonna be dead very soon. I’ll be strolling down North Crescent to meet the vagina of my dreams… and before I reach the hotel entrance I’m gonna have a massive heart attack, hit my head on a wooden bench and bleed out on the pink walkway. Later that day I’ll be offered a book deal.

Ladies and Gentlemen… may I present: Sexy Lexi

The actual vagina of my dreams was and will probably always belong to Lexi Shapiro. I first heard her raspy voice on a three-way landline call when we were eleven years old. She was a friend of a friend of mine. He was a dick and his whole family were dildos, but at that age I would have followed him off the Malibu Pier because I thought he was cool. I forget exactly why he introduced me to Lexi… but my guess is he wanted to show me that even at that young age he was no stranger to strange. Soon the three of us met up at Century City— not the shopping mall, but the creepy complex across the street where the massive CAA building now shimmers.

Lexi looked like Claire Forlani before I had ever seen Claire Forlani. At eleven however, she was still quite subtle and wore thick glasses. There was really nothing super unique about her… another half-Jewish girl from The Valley with dirty blonde hair. Still, something happened when I first met her in person… those magnified peepers flipped a switch in my misshapen little mind. And I couldn’t explain it then and I can’t really articulate it now… but the process would be irreversible. To this day I regularly think about her.

It was like all of a sudden I had a purpose in life and it was to make Lexi love me. But how? At the time I had recently seen Disney’s Aladdin… but I didn’t know Robin Williams, nor did we have Fuckheimer genie money. I was also short and chubby with a puffy “butt cut—” as a result of Hebrew heritage and my 90’s Stussy image. Winning her heart would be no humble feat.

From sixth grade to age twenty-six any of my Lexi fairy tales would put you to sleep by 7:30pm. But I’ll give you a bit of background. Coincidently she and I ended up attending the same synagogue with our families, and sometimes we ate together… we spoke on the phone occasionally… we also kicked it at certain social gatherings. And even though I was a Beverly Hills boy and she was a Valley girl, she introduced me to Il Tramezzino on Canon… much like Lexi, their “chicken special” would change the game forever.

By the time we were fifteen her glasses came off… and her nose may have been adjusted. Either that or she and every third girl I knew were accidentally breaking their beaks over summer break. One night she wanted to see a chick flick at CityWalk. I was balls deep in the friend zone and I didn’t even know it. At the time I saw this as an opportunity, but feared my dick would explode and I would shit my pants before the movie started. How would I make her see me the way that I perceived her, as a portal to some sort of earthy paradise? It also didn’t help my case that I looked like the Jewish Eddie Munster.

I found my dad in his home office and begged and pleaded with him to get me a Town Car and a driver for the evening. In my mind the vehicle would serve two purposes. One— I would give this Toluca Lake Tootsie a taste of the good life… and two— it would prevent any parental figures from fucking up my chance of a first kiss. I was fifteen and would’ve easily picked making out over any amount of Apple stock. These days I don’t even like kissing… the tongues, the saliva, the bacteria… get away from me. If a mouth isn’t pristine, she might as well be wearing a Beekeeper’s mask during intercourse.

My father, bless his heart, eventually gave in and ordered the Town Car. Is it the right thing to do to get a ninth grader a car and driver for the evening? My guess is many would object… but I think in some bizarro way he empathized with how twisted up I was over this Lexi situation. And at that time I truly believed she was the answer to my cancer.

"Moaning and groaning in ecstasy… clearly this reaction was drug induced because anytime I had fooled around with women in the past, they usually reacted like my dog ate their homework. Of course I’m referring to the ladies that weren’t handing me an invoice after I ejaculated."

She did seem impressed by the chaffered car, but the flash didn’t aid my confidence. Never did, never will. And after sitting through a horrific Gwyneth Paltrow movie in Universal City, nothing magical happened on or off-screen. I remember her hugging me when the car dropped her at home… and I recall feeling sorrow and shame during the ride back to my Dad’s place. I even assumed the driver thought I was on the down-low.

So many similar stories. Some of them with Lexi, but also many of them with my imaginary girlfriend, Abigail. When Abby finally gave me head after senior prom, she wouldn’t even swallow my make-believe semen. My real date that night was supposedly a Seventeen model and treated me like I was contagious.

Years later

I was twenty-six years young when I had dinner with Lexi at a Greek restaurant on Larchmont. This evening would not end until sunrise. And there’s not much of a story to tell, but this night was quite significant for me. If you asked her today, I’m sure she wouldn’t even remember. I was sober, but she sure as hell wasn’t. Even five years later I believed that had this one adventure gone differently, life would’ve been kitten biscuits.

Before ye judge, no one was taken advantage of. I’m an asshole, but I’m not a fucking asshole.

Dinner eventually led us to a Hollywon’t night spot. I shelled out several hundred dollars for a fully loaded table, but I didn’t touch the poison on it… I was dry for some reason. I was the designated driver, but that couldn’t have been the reason. There was a Led Zeppelin cover band playing and I could feel my pulse in my eardrums. To this day whenever I hear “Whole Lotta Love” I have PTSD.

Lexi kept drinking booze at our table and taking frequent trips to the bathroom. I was so lost in my head that it didn’t occur to me until later that she was doing blow… a lot of it. She eventually revealed her voodoo vial of bright white, but I wasn’t having any. I heard my Step-Mother’s voice— “One sniff could be your last.” I did cocaine for the first time later that year with my buddy Blooper. I remember I pulled out a one-dollar bill and Bloop explained that higher currency was probably less contaminated— which actually made sense even though the product had just been up someone’s ass. Still, like Lexi and the “chicken special,” lines would become shape-shifters in my game.

After the nightclub, I could walk you through the night beat by beat. But I’d like to speed it up a tad because this isn’t MY magazine, it’s just MY column in someone else’s magazine… and I’m lucky to have it.

I ended up driving Lexi’s car because she was so toe-up. I didn’t realize until that evening how hard she liked to party. Booze and blow… then while we’re cruising down Wilshire Boulevard, she pops the glovebox and a giant honey jar of Kush falls into her lap. She can’t stop laughing… at this point I’m freaking out inside— convinced jail is just a BOOP-BOOP away. But I’m playing it cool or at least Larry David’s version of cool. Lexi soon wants to stop for rolling papers and also mentions that she wants to… fuck me in half. Huh? Can you not rinse but repeat that?

After fifteen long years the girl of my dreams who always looked at me like a My Buddy Doll, saw me the way I saw her… only it was through very thick beer goggles. We grabbed Zig-Zags at Rite-Aid and drove to The Valley, while she proceeded to get very stoned. At one point while I was driving she leaned over and stuck her tongue in my ear… I nearly drove into a mountain.

At the time I was renting a loft in Hancock Park, but I never bought furniture… don’t ask. I had this big empty apartment with a desk and a mattress on the floor. By now Lexi was so high and horny I could’ve fucked her in Griffith Park and told her it was the New Outdoor Marriott. But I didn’t do that. And I was too ashamed to bring her back to my place… so we headed toward her family’s home where she was staying.

The story doesn’t end there… who am I kidding, it basically does. Before we reached her destination she instructed me to pull over on a quiet street off of Beverly Glen. I did as I was told. Lexi crawled over into the driver’s seat and straddled me… we started kissing passionately and she looked like she was literally in heaven. Moaning and groaning in ecstasy… clearly this reaction was drug induced because anytime I had fooled around with women in the past, they usually reacted like my dog ate their homework. Of course I’m referring to the ladies that weren’t handing me an invoice after I ejaculated.

I started using my fingers on Lexi and she went wild… but when she pulled her panties further to the side and went for the yogurt gun, I stopped her. “We shouldn’t do this.” As I’m writing now I want to hop in Doc’s DeLorean, travel back in time and punch myself in the fucking eye! I suppose I didn’t want to take advantage of a drunk girl… and I didn’t want to cum inside her… and I didn’t want to get caught by the authorities… and what if she had HPV and I became a carrier?

I drove her home, parked her car and she gracefully stumbled toward her front door. She asked how I would get back? And like we were kids, I spun a story of a driver that would come pick me up. Lexi smiled and said goodnight. Walking up Ventura Boulevard before sunrise was beyond depressing… I eventually called a cab. On the ride back I felt what I can only describe as hollow torment.

In my youth I was spit on, hit with food, threatened, blackmailed, slapped, kicked, name-called, humiliated, overlooked, ignored, criticized, isolated and labeled learning disabled. I was not always, but often in the thick of it… and I’m NOT feeling sorry for myself you mummies! I want to try and understand how come after years of battle in Cost Angeles, I let Lexi Shapiro’s magical vagina literally slip through my fingers? Do I just “like the way it hurts” like Rihanna? I don’t think I’m a nice guy… well, nice-ish at times. Maybe unconsciously I knew that if I stuck it in I’d beat the game, then wake up only to relive this Lifemare all over?

I tried tirelessly, but Lexi wouldn’t see me again after that. She has since left Los Angeles and started a family.

Max Barrie is a writer and artist currently based in Los Angeles. The son of screenwriters, Michael Barrie and Sally Robinson, Max was born and raised in Beverly Hills, California. With acerbic wit and self deprecating humor, Max documents his life growing up in the shallow, superficial depths of Beverly Hills and the Hollywood machine. In his multiple part autobiographical series, entitled A Trendy Tragedy, Max will explore his bouts with addiction, prostitution and his search for identity in a landscape that is rife with temptation and false ideals.

FOLLOW AUTRE ON INSTAGRAM TO STAY IN TOUCH: @AUTREMAGAZINE

[NON FICTION] A Stab at Suicide—I’ve Always Got a Joker in my Deck

May 18, 2015

A Stab At Suicide—I've Always Got a Joker In My Deck

by Max Barrie

I’m not a danger to myself… but what if living is unnecessary?

Frankly, unless death resembles LAX, I’m a supporter. I DO worry about unnecessary suffering. But we live in such a toxic environment, how can poison possibly be avoided? On a planet where no one is safe, where no day is free, and enemies are at arms length. The food is processed, the air is polluted, the water contaminated.

I was born in August of ’82. It was at Cedars-Sinai and I came out SCREAMING! My theory is— as soon as the cold air hit me, I realized I had been evicted and hadn’t had time to get dressed. My unsolicited birth would soon become a metaphor for my FANCY FUCKED life— with which I was rarely impressed. And while breathing came highly recommended and everybody was doing it, I eventually concluded that a lot like college— life wasn’t for everybody.

A bipolar comedian that I worked for in 2006 said to me— “Max, I’ve always got a joker in my deck.” He attributed the quote to Hunter S. Thompson. What the expression meant was— I can exit the game at any time by offing myself. The saying made sense to me, so I had it tattooed on my left arm… which is now covered up by a scorpion. In 2009 I awoke to an early morning phone call from the comedian’s Uncle. He was sobbing and told me that my funny former employer, who’s career had stalled, was found hanging from a tree in a wooded area. I didn’t really know what to say or how to feel… I hung up uncomfortably numb and thought of a joker— a devilish little clown with a shit-eating grin. This was not my first experience with premature death, but it was the first time I knew someone who had intentionally cut things short. It would not be the last.

I never had access to a rocket, but my plan to leave earth had always been brewing. I obsessed over death as a child and ultimately in my late 20’s I would make half a dozen BOOZE-FUELED trips to The Cold Spring Bridge out in Santa Ynez. This was before the suicide barriers were installed. I had read that out of all the jumps off Cold Spring no one had survived. I would drive nearly two hours… from LA, down the 101 into Santa Barbara… then up into the mountains along Route 154. Honestly it’s a miracle that I didn’t crash, kill anyone, or get arrested during any of these grisly expeditions. I drove into the elevated darkness with one purpose each time… but once I arrived at the bridge I could never get out of my car. Truth is I was petrified.

By 2014 I BELIEVED my torture had at last outweighed my terror. I was again fresh out of sober living, now WORKING in drug treatment, and soon back on anything 80 proof with coke… and I don’t mean Classic. It didn’t take long for me to crumble… it never does once you add venom. After a couple weeks the word was out. My roommate wanted me gone, my family wouldn’t have me around, and I was back to lying and stealing. How many times could I keep dancing this jig? My feet were tired. What now, another treatment facility? Additional counseling? More mindless prayer with nudniks… fuck that shit. I thought— why not just quit while I’m behind?

So I “tried” to kill myself. And maybe I actually succeeded… maybe I’m dead right now and not really writing this? Wouldn’t surprise me if Beetlejuice walked in and asked to borrow some Scotch Tape. Anyway, when I awoke on April 9th of last year I snatched a bottle of vodka, stole a bottle of muscle relaxers, and gassed up my hybrid with a roll and a half of quarters. Then I drove to a place where lots of people go when they’ve given up all hope— The Valley.

I maneuvered my way down into Chatsworth, shut off my iPhone and parked my car in a low-key area. My windows were tinted. I climbed into the back seat and began drinking and popping pills…

Lights dim… 100…99…98…and frog thoughts…

Next thing I know I hear my roommate’s voice far off in the darkness: “Hey, where are ya buddy?” Then we’re abruptly both in his car driving fast on the freeway— a lit cigarette falls out of my mouth and burns a hole in my jeans… suddenly I’m in some emergency waiting room… my Dad enters and I have trouble walking… a nurse helps me, then comes the charcoal.

I don’t know how much vodka I drank and I’m not sure how many pills I took… but clearly it wasn’t enough to carry out my exit strategy. I’m convinced today that had I really wanted to die I would have swallowed every pill in that bottle and never turned my iPhone back on. Yup. At some point I don’t remember, I turned on my iPhone, answered it and explained to my roommate where I was.

My roommate was an 80’s James Spader asshole type, but I loved him in some bizarre non-homosexual us against the world way. After all this happened he stopped talking to me… and now it’s like he was never really there to begin with.

***

Many say life is bittersweet, and I can’t really argue with them. But from my perspective if someone barfs on my Bay Cities sandwich, I don’t ponder the unsullied tomato on the end. My lunch has been FUCKED and now I have to get back in line or walk over to Swingers— the most annoying restaurant in the history of food. That’s my take on life. If you talk to me about balance, I’ll tell you to shampoo my lunchbox. The bad stuff contaminates everything else and I’d like to speak to God’s supervisor, Mr. Davidson. On many occasions I see people trudging through everlasting slime… and I get why they want out and I believe it’s their right. Whether the problem’s terminal cancer or stale popcorn, who says you have to stick around? Life’s a gift, this bodysuit is mine, and that is fucking that.

"Mummies and dummies continue to fuck like there’s a pussy shortage and then reproduce like rats. There’s too many of us, there’s not enough resources, and global warming’s gonna melt all the ice by 2040. Death may actually be a much needed vacation."

Mummies and dummies continue to fuck like there’s a pussy shortage and then reproduce like rats. There’s too many of us, there’s not enough resources, and global warming’s gonna melt all the ice by 2040. Death may actually be a much needed vacation. I think most of us just have contempt prior to investigation. I’ll tell you what’s worse than death… yesterday I was in an Uber carpool with two Asian girls who couldn’t stop saying “LIKE…” gangsta rap was on the radio, and the driver only took streets where the magnified sun seared my skin off.

That said, and even though I happen to be pro-choice long after birth, I do have soul. It may be a warped black pretzel, but it’s still edible.

Here’s the BIG PROBLEM with killing yourself, unless you’re Kris Jenner. Kidding. But honestly, a stewardess who gobbled cocks in Calabasas and then sold her children for shekels?! We’re so gullible. The PROBLEM is when you take your own life, you’re also destroying other lives. And that will never be ok in my estimation. When I was drunk and high I used to wanna believe it was nobody’s problem but mine. But I often got behind the wheel… and I said regrettable things… and I didn’t show up for work… and I once pissed in someone’s dryer until it wasn’t a dryer anymore. When I was under the influence it quickly became everybody’s problem.

We often feel that we’re separate or different just in general, but it’s amplified when we’re depressed or ready to check out. Fortunately or unfortunately we’re not independent. Everyone’s a part of something more than their own ass. People are connected, lives are tied in with other lives. You’re a link… and it’s not polite to break the chain for selfish reasons.

That comedian who hung himself had a wife and three small boys at home. He had a sobbing Uncle who called me… he had other family and friends and people he worked with… he permanently and negatively affected other lives. We could even go a step further and discuss the ripple effect of that. It’s kind of like barfing on that Bay Cities sandwich.

I’ll end with this…

I never thought I gave a shit until I met Adam in treatment last year. We shared a room for thirty days and I fuckin’ hated him immediately. He walked loud, he talked loud, he left his shit everywhere. He was a spoiled cunt muscle who regularly begged me to write a screenplay with him, only he had no story. Adam had migrated from bumblefuck to Beverly Hills after college and basically struck gold… but then he lost everything… even his trophy wife. All day long this putz would talk about every cent he made and squandered, and in group he would explore his new life with, and I quote— “mediocre women.” He actually said this.

I complained to him and about him, I shit—talked him, I ignored him. In my eyes he was a spoiled child who’d run out of DoubleStuf Oreos— Mr. Veruca Salt. But sometimes he sat with me in front of the TV and talked about killing himself… and I still didn’t buy it. He just wanted sympathy, so once I said— “Ya know Adam, some people have to leave the party early.”

He checked out on a Friday after his thirty days were up, while I stayed on for an additional month. I remember he hugged me by the front door in the morning and grabbed his bags. He got in the backseat of a small Honda, but he had that Lincoln Town Car look in his eyes. I never saw him again.

Adam texted me the next day saying he was out with friends, but still complained about his horrible life. I think I told him to “hang in there” or some bullshit… then deleted the text. Then on Sunday Adam went to a shooting range, coincidently in The Valley… and he blew his head off.

When word got back, everyone in the treatment facility was visibly shaken. The patients, the doctors, the staff. I even saw some tears. I didn’t feel anything at first, but I did think about Adam’s parents back in the small town where he came from… as he was an only child. And while I wish I had been more compassionate and less judgmental during his life, I don’t take any responsibility for his death. Shit… maybe a little.

That first night after he died— when I got into bed and the lights went out, I was instantly flooded and overwhelmed with memories of Adam… one of him eating chocolate cake in the living room with his hands… he said to me: “This is the stuff that makes life worth living.” Then I thought of that joker— a devilish little clown with a shit-eating grin… and then a voice in my head told me I needed to live. These days I’m not so sure anymore.

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[NON-FICTION] Coals To Newcastle: Remembering Chris Burden

May 15, 2015

Coals To Newcastle: Remembering Chris Burden

by Bruce Licher

1978 was the year everything changed. The energy of punk rock had blown open the doors of creative expression for a new generation the year before, and now that was rapidly morphing into post-punk as more young people with other creative ideas wanted to join in and create some new noise. It was during that time that I found myself as an undergraduate in the Art Department at UCLA, discovering new sights and sounds and possibilities. I had spent my first 2 years at UCLA getting all my general ed requirements out of the way while I tried to figure out what it was I actually wanted to do with my life. After a year in the Design department I realized that it was more satisfying to be creative without having the end result distorted by other people’s ideas of what was best, so switched my major to Fine Art and found a new creative energy.

When it was announced that Chris Burden would be joining the UCLA Arts faculty to teach a class called “New Forms & Concepts,” it was as if someone had dropped a new color into the palette that we undergrads could now work with. Chris’ reputation preceded him such that some students couldn’t wait to take his class while others weren’t sure it was something they really wanted to be exposed to. Either way, none of us had any idea of what would actually happen in the class, and I was one of those who jumped in to find out that first term.

What I learned, and what I experienced with the other 20 or so students, completely turned my mind around to what was possible to do in the name of ART. In addition, the experience also pointed me in the direction I would take with my life. Not only did I realize through Chris Burden that anything was possible, that anything could be ART, but in that class I also met Brent Wilcox and Tim Quinn, two of the members of a fledgling avant garde musical group called NEEF. It wasn’t long before I joined NEEF on weekends to make noise in the art studios of Dickson Hall, where we recorded our debut 7” EP, pressing 163 copies because that was how many we got back from the pressing plant for the $40 that each of the 5 of us in the band contributed to press them up.

Making our own record was a kick, and I caught the record-making bug and decided to make my own record, signing up for an Independent Project course and asked Chris Burden if he would be my faculty adviser on the project. He of course said yes, and I was off to record a batch of noisy art rock pieces with Brent and a few other

friends. I pressed up 300 copies, silk-screening label art directly on the records, and included a photo postcard from an experimental industrial film I’d made in the UCLA Animation Department (the only film-making class a non-film major could take). When I’d completed the project I gave Chris a few copies of the record and he seemed pleased. Don’t know if he ever kept them, but “Project 197” (the course number) became the first release on my Independent Project Records label, and I was more than happy with the results.

Towards the end of that first class with Chris, I mentioned to him that if he ever needed an assistant on one of his performances I’d be interested in helping him with whatever he needed. Several weeks later he got back to me and said that he was planning a trip to Calexico to do a piece where he would fly a model airplane across the border into Mexico, with several “bombs” of marijuana attached under the wings. Would I be interested in going with him, to share the driving as well as help document the piece by photographing the action? Of course I jumped at the opportunity and said yes.

The plan was to drive to Calexico in the afternoon, check into a motel for the night, and the next morning we would drive to an inconspicuous place along the border where he would fly his rubber-band powered toy plane over the fence into Mexico. As with most of Chris’ early performances, there was an aura of danger involved, as not only was marijuana much more illegal than it is now, but to be caught doing something suspicious at the border would also have had consequences (though I can’t imagine being able to do what he did now in these days of border hysteria).

"As with most of Chris’ early performances, there was an aura of danger involved, as not only was marijuana much more illegal than it is now, but to be caught doing something suspicious at the border would also have had consequences."

I gave Chris my address, and on the designated day he and his girlfriend picked me up in his car. I tossed my overnight bag in the trunk and climbed into the back seat for the drive to Calexico. We arrived in the late afternoon, checking into a non-descript motel, and then Chris and I drove out of town on the road that paralleled the border on the US side, scoping out where he might do the piece the following morning. Calexico and Mexicali are kind of like one big city/town, divided by a fence down the middle. The only difference was that Mexicali (on the Mexican side) seemed to be about 5 times bigger than Calexico, as the barrios stretched for miles on the other side of the fence, where it was dusty open desert on the US side. This gave the location a somewhat surreal feeling, that there was a bustling city where people lived and carried on with their lives just past the fence, while on the US side it was a desolate and uninspiring desert.

After dinner Chris and I decided to cross the border and walk around Mexicali for the evening. Chris’ girlfriend stayed back at the motel to rest as it seemed that she was coming down with something. Mexicali seemed more colorful by far than Calexico, filled with life and small shops. I don’t remember us buying anything, but at one point when we were about to head back I stepped off a high curb into a pothole in the dark and twisted my ankle really bad. I was in serious pain as I hobbled back to the motel, Chris helping me to walk, as I could barely put any pressure on my foot. It didn’t seem that I had broken anything, so we got an ice pack at the motel and I did my best to get some sleep with my ankle throbbing in pain.

Morning arrived after a fitful sleep, and Chris knocked at my door at around 7 AM as we’d planned. It was raining pretty solidly, and had been for some time during the night. We had breakfast and discussed how this would affect the plan, finally deciding to wait awhile and see if it would stop. By this time Chris’ girlfriend had come down with some pretty serious flu symptoms, and I could barely walk. My ankle was swollen and I was still in a lot of pain, but I told him I was up for whatever he needed me to do, as long as I could physically do it.

As the rain began to lighten up we decided to check out of the motel and head out the road along the border in hopes that we could find a clear place for him to do the piece. We drove several miles to the area we had scoped out the night before, and pulled off the side of the road so Chris could see if this felt like the right place for him to do the piece. He wasn’t quite sure, so got back in to head down the road a bit further, only to find that we were now stuck in the mud by the side of the road. Two of us would have to push the car while the other steered it back onto the pavement, and as much as I would have been fine with standing in the mud and rain pushing the car back onto the highway, there was no way with my twisted ankle that I could physically do it.

So I ended up behind the wheel of the car while Chris and his very sick girlfriend got out and pushed. Fortunately it didn’t take much to get the car back on the road, and by this time the rain had tapered off to a light drizzle. At this point Chris decided to just do it here and now, so we parked the car part way on the road so we wouldn’t get stuck again and he opened the trunk to get out his planes. Chris had made several of the planes he planned to use, to make sure that if he had any problems with one plane that he’d have a backup to use. Chris handed me his camera and asked me to start taking pictures. I hobbled back a few feet and began shooting images of him preparing the first plane for flight. In the one photo that is often used to document the piece you can see the tracks in the mud from where we had to push the car to get it free. As I recall, Chris had to make several attempts, and to get close enough to the wall so that the rubber-band powered plane would make it over and into Mexico. He was finally successful, and I remember snapping one image of the plane flying over the wall, with houses in the background on the other side. As soon as the plane made it over the fence, Chris smiled and seemed very pleased, and we walked back to the car. On the drive back to town we wondered who would find the plane and it’s cargo, and what they would do with it.

I never saw all of the photos I shot of Chris that day, though there weren’t that many, as it was all done and over with rather quickly. I remember seeing a few of them that ended up being published in High Performance magazine, and then there’s the one image of Chris and his plane that is most often used as documentation for the piece. I wish I’d been able to shoot more images, but under the circumstances it’s rather amazing that we got as many as we did.

So thank you Chris, for offering a young undergrad the chance of a lifetime, to be there and to be a part of one of your unique creations. It was an experience that has stayed with me all these years in more ways than one, as I still occasionally need a chiropractor to help pull out the kinks in my right ankle. But I also thank you for coming to work at UCLA when you did, and for opening my eyes to possibilities I never would have otherwise encountered. You were by far the best teacher I ever had.

Bruce Licher is the founding member of the LA post-punk band Savage Republic and instrumental post-rock band Scenic. He is also the owner and founder of Independent Project Records and the associated graphic design firms Independent Project Press and Licher Art & Design.

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[NON-FICTION] Superficial Stockholm Syndrome… I was kidnapped, raised in Lost Angeles and bought into it

May 11, 2015

Superficial Stockholm Syndrome…I was kidnapped, raised in Lost Angeles and bought into it

by Max Barrie

One of my favorite Kanye West songs is “Can’t Tell Me Nothing.” And my favorite line is the first one— “I had a dream I could buy my way to heaven, when I awoke, I spent that on a necklace…” What I hear is— I’m sacrificing a bright future for material crap.

In LA especially, real money is regularly pissed away.

As far back as Henry Hill could remember, he always wanted to be a gangster. Well as far back as I can remember, I always wanted your approval. In grade school I longed for three things— a girlfriend, a growth spurt, and athletic prowess. Basically I just wanted to be loved… I saw those three things as ways in. Any love that did come my way was never enough or it wasn’t the right kind. Years later, a bottomless pit of need for booze, at that age it was rainbows I wanted to mainline.

The one person who loved me unconditionally was my doting obsessive compulsive grandmother, Miriam. I was the firstborn grandson and in her eyes I could do no wrong. In her company, I had the Midas touch and did whatever the hell I wanted— as long as I didn’t choke on it or drown in it. Conveniently, she also schooled me on the harmful nature of germs and dirt and instructed me on how to keep everything, including myself, spotless. To this day I have a bottle of rubbing alcohol by my nightstand. Hey, ya just never know.

My therapist often refers to the self-esteem movement of the 1980’s as being a colossal mistake. She says it was a time when many professionals instructed parents to give their children constant positive reinforcement no matter what— but this according to her, would unfortunately set up an unrealistic environment for kids that the real world would inevitably swallow.

I do not believe my parents, nor my Grandmother were briefed on this movement.

My Mom and Dad loved me, but were often busy and Miriam rarely left my side. I think she just happened to be a human version of a Care Bear and actually believed that I was going to somehow save the Jewish people in the 21st century. Up until her death in 2011 no one ever loved me as much as she did. Since the beginning I wanted my Grandmother’s love on tap, but that wasn’t possible. Like my therapist explains now, she was no match for the “real world” that eventually swallowed me whole. In the 80’s and 90’s, not only did I NOT receive this first class treatment in her absence, I often got the exact opposite.

$$$

Ok, lets fast-forward to high school… it was 1997 and I was even more lost in the sauce. Now remember where this story takes place… yep, Hollycould. And by the time I was fourteen years old I was convinced I had a few things figured out. Mastery never came to me socially, academically or athletically, but now I saw people around town and at school just like me… small people… goofy people… maybe unattractive or even mean people, and they were WINNING— like Charlie Sheen would so eloquently describe years later after a crack run.

High school for me is where things really shifted. Instead of just day-dreaming, I saw that attainable greatness was readily for sale. Shangri-La was all around me or so I thought. Good looks, brains or throwing a football didn’t necessarily get you access… we didn’t even have a football team in this private society. If you wanted to be known, fully equipped with acceptance in our viper’s nest— you needed a last name followed by a minimum of seven zeros. A BMW, drugs, and a large home were also quite helpful.

Now this isn’t new… this is textbook Scarface Machiavelli shit. Money equals power equals women equals “winner winner, Sheen dinner!” This formula has gone on everywhere, all over the place, since the beginning. So what makes tinseltown unlike an oil dynasty or the people who invented the vagina? LA is the epicenter of magic store horse shit… and everyone wants to know or wants to BELIEVE they know what’s happening on these insincere streets. If life’s looking sweet, people can dream… and if the forecast is doom and gloom— who doesn’t love dirty laundry?

"I almost drowned in SoCal’s sea of superficial diarrhea… and I’m not out of the deep doo yet. The fact that I haven’t blown my brains out— is well… not really that miraculous. I’m a big pink muffin and I’m afraid that if I make my exit too soon, I’ll just be shit out someplace worse… like Sylmar."

In my experience money in Hollywon’t is generally new, often flashy, and turns everyone into warped bloodthirsty vampires— just dying for a taste. What’s also different about LA is it brings the word “COLD” to a new level… and I don’t mean the weather. It’s like if COLD smoked crack with Charlie, hopped in a Tesla and shot down a crowded sidewalk on a Sunday afternoon. Los Angeles is THAT cold… and this lack of compassion and authenticity mostly stems from a desire to win a race that doesn’t really exist.

Am I even making sense at this point? Probably not. Starting out I was a nice kid who eventually became a product of his environment. The guys who drove Ferraris were dating supermodels with names like Elsaleena. And the poor bastard in the Camry was jerking-off a lot or hit the jackpot with some fatty ginger he met at Coffee Bean. I saw this bubblegum bullshit day after day after FUCKING day… and soon I started to resent my father for not owning more homes.

I’m not even sure I liked Ferraris at first, but I sure as hell started to. When I was fourteen, if I wasn’t watching “The Way We Were” with my Grandmother, I often felt lonely and out of place— especially in a crowd of my contemporaries. And all the dicks and cunts in the vicinity claimed that my salvation was at Nobu. “Maxie, honey baby— heaven awaits at that back table right next to David Duchovny." And these weren’t just my peers, these were their parents… pretty much everyone I knew.

I escaped or snapped out of “Superficial Stockholm syndrome” at around 30 years old… after sixteen long years in. As I’m typing this I feel like one of those former Scientology members from that HBO documentary. “Yes, LRH was my homie and I worshipped Xenu and 75 million years ago I battled aliens with John Travolta. Yes.” Sounds crazy, right? Rodeo Drive ain’t that different… it’s just tangible bullshit instead of fairytales. “No, Max you’re wrong! It’s Bvlgari, look at how it sparkles, this is the answer I’ve been waiting for.” We cling to exquisite nonsense because thats where we see a crowd and a fuss forming. And I am absolutely being judgmental, but I’m also empathetic because I ran with the affected herd for 16 fiscal years!

Five years ago I was walking around the Malibu Colony thinking God had officially made my dick look bigger. I was actually so stoned, I probably whipped it out and showed the natives. It was an afternoon on the 4th of July and I was drinking and smoking joints that I had meticulously laced with Xanax… next thing ya know it’s pitch dark and I’m being forcibly removed from this snooty settlement. And not one of my “friends” was anywhere in sight. I’m not blaming anyone, I made my bed… but when I phoned a buddy in a holidaze near PCH, I find out everyone’s partying at a nightclub fifteen miles away. With friends like these, who needs enemas?!

The next seventy-two hours were a nightmare. I had been humiliated, I was now isolated and melting into a Tempur-Pedic mattress at Mommy’s house. I could literally see toxic odors seeping out of my pores. This was not a unique tale in my travels, nor am I pointing the finger at this bizarre beach village. What I’m saying is this— wherever I went, there I was. The only place my cock ever grew was in my fucked delusional mind.

I don’t claim to be a teacher or a professor, and I fear that I come off like a self-proclaimed know-it-all in my prattling. I don’t believe I KNOW anything, I just pitch my version. I’m all for everybody doing whatever they want as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone. But my unsolicited advice would be make sure it’s YOU that really wants something and not just the general consensus.

I almost drowned in SoCal’s sea of superficial diarrhea… and I’m not out of the deep doo yet. The fact that I haven’t blown my brains out— is well… not really that miraculous. I’m a big pink muffin and I’m afraid that if I make my exit too soon, I’ll just be shit out someplace worse… like Sylmar. So it’s a combo of FEAR and some GOOD FORTUNE that’s kept me alive. The good fortune being a series of random events and chance encounters that we’ll discuss some other time. I don’t take credit for ninety percent of my pulse… but that doesn’t mean I’m thanking Xenu either. The truth is that I don’t know. All I can do is maintain my ten percent through continued self-examination, while remaining cautious, yet open.

What I’ve come to understand after being a Stepford Jew for 16 years is… we’re all struggling on this cruise ship together and we’re all headed to the same marina. Lets have a nice ride, shall we? If you’re on a WINNING streak after a crack binge with Charlie, MAYBE USE YOUR MONEY WISELY? Perhaps symbiotically improve your life while improving the lives of others? Don’t worry, if you do end up buying your way into heaven, I’m sure there’s a Westfield mall up there where you can purchase chinchilla bell bottoms.

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[Non-Fiction] Beauty and the Light-Switch are Thick As Thieves

April 27, 2015

Beauty and the Light-Switch are Thick As Thieves

by Max Barrie

Big fake tits and a peach scented ass turns me on. It always has…I’d like to think I’m better than that…that quick wit and kindness gets the blood pumping. But, no…not so much.

The first time I went to Midsummer Night’s Dream at The Playboy Mansion was in 2005. I was sober at the time, but just strolling around the property got me high. Girls in their underwear — all the blonde hair, the big boobs and the fun fruity smells. I was in heaven. Being invited there got me a little female attention that night…but I was (and am) a “nobody,” so ultimately the centerfolds and cyber girls made their way over to Bill Maher and Brett Ratner. Bastards.

It only takes a touch of bullshit to make most girls like you. In 2006 I fucked a Floridian waitress simply because she saw the zip code on my driver’s license…90210. The next day she told me she loved me, and I phoned my doctor for antibiotics because while I was riding her ass, I noticed she was coughing a lot.

Anyway, since childhood I had assumed Hefner was hiding all the answers behind those big black gates. Ol’ Dick Daddy had the keys to the kingdom and with them came the secret to happiness. Slowly I learned I couldn’t have been more wrong. The more often I went, my natural high wore off. By 2008, I was back on the sauce and The Playboy Mansion had (in my mind) become a haunted house with spooky pussy.

"Eventually, I ended up relapsing at a whorehouse in Nevada — drinking, drugging and charging five grand on my Bloomingdales Visa card."

The girls that I longed for were never interested in me, so I finally started drinking when I was 13 years old— held out as long as I could. I was small, I was shy, I was simply “friend material.” So I turned to the bottle for solace. There were other reasons why I started partying all by myself, but being denied vagina access topped the list.

I didn’t lose my virginity until I was nearly 20. I fucked my girlfriend on my father’s living-room sofa in Westwood. It was such a creepy little house, that was later bulldozed and built into a McMansion. This wild beauty who was willing to accept my average size penis had already been with TWELVE GUYS. Of course I lied and said that I too was very experienced. The sex was terrible. Using a condom made me imagine I was wearing a wetsuit in the shower…it was happening, but nothing was being accomplished. I knew I was inside her, but couldn’t really feel her sugar walls. Anyway, I ended up falling in love with this girl…but as perfect as she was, I couldn’t stay faithful and ultimately I couldn’t respect someone who accepted me. I’m truly sorry…her not being there today will forever be one of my deepest regrets.

$$$

In and out of “addiction recovery” since 1997, by 2002 I had started hanging out with a shady cast of characters in the twelve-step world. These fellas, although sober and many spoken for. introduced me to massage parlors and prostitution via the Internet.

Paranoid already, at first the possibility of being arrested kept me away from any illegal activities. But soon the itch needed to be scratched and I became a regular…justifying my bad behavior like any good sober alcoholic: “Well, hookers are better than drugs.” Better for me perhaps, but I’m not sure about these poor women. “Poor” is the wrong word. Sometimes I’d pay up to a thousand dollars an hour. I convinced myself they’d be blowing somebody and that because I wasn’t Don Simpson, everything was cool. They were usually high-class call girls and porn stars… and still on several occasions I couldn’t go through with it. Some ladies looked so far fucked that I couldn’t get too close. I would hand them the cash and get out of there. Does that mean I’m redeemable…? Certainly not, I’m just talking.

Eventually, I ended up relapsing at a whorehouse in Nevada — drinking, drugging and charging five grand on my Bloomingdales Visa card. The Madam asked me if I got discounts and points. Indeed I did. Anyway, the girls at this slutty sorority seemed to find me entertaining— probably because I was young and from Los Angeles. I also bought them pot, Jack In The Box, and forked over five grand… so there was that. And even though I was so high I was barely able to bang it out with one of ‘em, it was the most fulfilling and disturbing experience of my life. Fulfilling because of all the female attention… disturbing because it was a whorehouse in Nevada.

So many superficial stories — like the threesome I’ve never had or the woman with herpes who chased me around on her shag carpeting. But I told the editor I would limit this ride to four pages. Next time I promise to dig deeper. I’m not sure why I chose to recall these pink twisted memories… to me they’re entertaining… and perhaps significant?

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[Non-Fiction] Snow’s Tight and the Two Whores — Abandoned and Unfinished

April 25, 2015

Snow's Tight and the Two Whores – Abandoned and Unfinished

by Max Barrie

It’s very difficult for me to take credit for anything unless I royally fuck it up. I’m not special... but based on the feedback I’ve gotten over the years, I do believe I was BORN with a particular skill. And that is the ability to paint pictures with words. So when anyone speaks well of my writing I try to talk them out of it— explaining I have very little to do with my process, usually blaming genetics.

That said, my therapist is teaching me how to accept compliments and say... “thanks.” She wants me to understand that all of us are born with different abilities... and certainly how we nurture and use these skills is something to take credit for. My ego absolutely agrees... but I’m still digesting the idea. In the meantime I have no problem feeling directly responsible for anything awful.

The following whorey is true... however, names of people and places have been changed, and TWO crab magnets were combined into ONE to keep things moving.

IMPORTANT: Unless I’m attacked— I do not write to reopen wounds, hurt others or bring about trouble... I don’t have the right to reveal anyone’s story but my own. If you want gossip, I suggest ragmags in any CVS check-out line. If you press me for actual names or details, you’ll find I won’t be helpful.

I had been drinking and fooling around with an older woman who resembled a melting snowman. She smelled like an antique rug and would keep licking her palms before she stroked my cock. But even with a big buzz going her bushy beaver quickly tipped the scale and I became nauseated... so I made some excuse of why I couldn’t toss it in, then abruptly left her house.

When I arrived back at my apartment it was nearly two in the morning. I felt contaminated by the affair, but was too tired to shower. I would probably take more showers if they didn’t involve water... but with my OCD it often becomes Super Hole Sunday. I grabbed an old plate from the kitchen that once belonged to my grandmother. I took the plate into my bathroom and locked the door.

I began picking apart a rock of cocaine and then chopping it up with my driver’s license— making skinny lines on the plate. I loved lines. It changes with time— the monster inside... he has many faces and many forms. His hope is that one day I won’t recognize him and he’ll be set free. But in this moment we were thick as thieves and it was lines that got his furry penis hard.

SNORT! The tiny burn, the bitter taste, the drip, licking my fingers, rubbing my gums... the numbness sets in... the blood starts flowing... quickly. In a few minutes the world becomes a nice place to visit and I think I could one day outshine Jake Gyllenhaal if I really set my mind to it. Unfortunately I was too busy doing blow in my bathroom to achieve anything except that.

If you’ve snorted shit and also inhaled the real deal, then you know what a difference a grade makes. I’m no expert, but this had to be some Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah product. In a few hours I started texting my buddy Red who also happened to sell me this cocaine. I still had plenty left, but wanted more... just in case this cut went out of season.

Red had been awake for nearly three days smoking meth, and happily agreed to sell me more narcotics if I could pick him up in Bel-Air and drive him to a friend’s apartment by the beach. When I asked him why, he said— to hang out and get more high... he told me I could do the same. It sounded like a brilliant idea. It was 6:00am, although it seemed frightfully bright as I headed east down Sunset Boulevard in my hybrid. There was lots of texting and circling the rich twisted streets beyond the East Gate. The coke was well hidden, but I looked like a Jewish Looney Tune, and now feared being stopped by Bel-Air Patrol. Red’s brilliant plan was suddenly anything but.

At last I find him hiding out in the open? He hops in my car and we make our way back down to Sunset. I take a right and head west. Being awake for 72 hours and with his high fading, I occasionally had to wake Red from a coma-like-state for simple directions. My cocaine rush was still going strong and suddenly I realized I’d been licking my lips and chin for the past twenty minutes... it’s bizarre... and damp.

Janessa and I knew that any Magic 8-Ball would have predicted jail time. The medics worked on Red in the front seat of my car while she and I stood ten feet back on the sidewalk. Janessa looked away, cried druggie tears and squeezed me tightly... then asked — “Did we do the right thing?”

We eventually arrived at this generic apartment complex on the water... it was vast however, and Red couldn’t remember which unit belonged to his friend. We called, but there was no answer... so we walked up and down hallways looking like two lost druggies in search of a Panda Express. I had my drugs in a back pocket, but Red had a whole backpack full of tricks. I was beyond paranoid at this point and tried walking faster than him so it would appear we weren’t together. I’m guessing this wasn’t effective.

Eventually his friend answered her phone and we made our way to her apartment. We knocked, but no answer... we tried the door... it was open. It was clean and cozy inside, but I could sense trouble and was afraid to sit anywhere but in the living room. I settled on a sofa, relieved to no longer be pacing the hallways. A little black poodle came over to visit me and looked like it had questions. Soon Red walked out of a bedroom accompanied by Janessa...

If you’re reading this I’ll try not to bore you. When I was a kid I was diagnosed with many different disorders by a whole circus tent full of professional bozos. Looking back I believe most of these quacks were taking my parents and I for a long ride through The Bird Streets. The one diagnosis that may have been correct however was: attention deficit disorder... even now after even writing a few pages, I get restless and assume everybody else is just as bored as I am. Unfortunately, I can’t take ADD medication due to their addictive nature. The non-stimulant stimulants are horse shit.

I soon learned that Janessa liked to shoot drugs and whore out young women— one of whom was currently sleeping in her bedroom. Red needed rest and bunked up with the young strumpet I hadn’t yet seen. So I’m now left in the living room with this weathered woman and her curious poodle.

Janessa handed me a bottle of hard liquor, and a paper towel because I still couldn’t stop licking my lips. She also offered me a Zany bar which I pocketed— helps with the comedown from any speedy scenario. As she tried my cocaine, I looked her over. Blonde, busty, overweight... thirty-five going on fifty. Boffing’s on my brain, but my amplified fears quickly quieted my gossipy cock.

We watched Weekend At Bernie’s on TV... ironically a farce about a rich dead guy, presumably from drugs. Half-way through Janessa received a phone call from a john who was ready to party at 10:00am on a Tuesday— so she went to wake her sleeping beauty in the other room. In a daze, Red stumbled out— toying with his smartphone. The young brunette colored strumpet who follows is called Tobi, and barely acknowledges me.

Tobi starts off by talking about nothing and then continues on about absolutely nothing... all the while heating up her pookie. She takes a few heavy hits of crystal meth to start her day wrong, douses herself with pumpkin body spray, and leaves to go fuck a dick for a dollar.

Red then comes up with his second brilliant idea of the day— breakfast. We all agree that it’s some Einstein shit, but I’m currently the only one with a vehicle. Tobi has taken Janessa’s car. Why we didn’t think to call a cab or hoof it, I don’t remember. None of us were in any condition to get behind the wheel, but Janessa offered to pay for pancakes... and I started thinking that if I played nice and stuffed her with food, she could be stuffed with anything. I agreed to drive. Still a bit jittery, I popped that Xanax— Red grabbed his backpack and the three of us left.

All buckled up and ready to head out... Red and Janessa now make a “quick fix” their number one priority. They plead with me to give them a few minutes in the back seat. And although I objected to this, ultimately I didn’t know how to refuse them their good time. They got in back where the windows were tinted and I put the car in PARK. Janessa borrowed my phone charger to tie off and Red cooked the heroin in a spoon with a bit of bottled water... then prepared a shot. I had seen people inject drugs before, but this was too close for comfort, so I kept looking out the window. I prayed they wouldn’t miss their veins and bleed on the upholstery. He shot her up first, then took care of himself. As they finished, you could hear their voices soften. I was relieved it was over... but it wasn’t over.

Red sat shotgun and Janessa stayed in back— resting her head against the door and grinning like The Cheshire Cat in Blunderland. I started to drive. In a few blocks Red passed out and leaned on me. I assumed he was nodding out and pushed him away. He fell forward and his head smacked the glove compartment— at which time he started making a bizarre breathing sound. I was clueless, but Janessa knew... she started yelling his name and then SCREAMING his name and then panicking... he was overdosing.

My mind went blank for 3 seconds!

In the past because I had reacted to situations instead of acting in situations, I stirred up a lot of trouble. I wanted to think this through and respond appropriately... but analysis was not a luxury Red could afford. I quickly pulled off onto a side street, jumped out of the car and called 911. Not that it would help— I threw his backpack and any other goodies I found into my trunk. There was a sports bar across the way and people were starting to stare. The operator instructed me to check Red’s breathing and keep yelling his name! He was breathing, but I could tell his body was beginning to shut down.

Emergency vehicles and police soon showed... Janessa and I knew that any Magic 8-Ball would have predicted jail time. The medics worked on Red in the front seat of my car while she and I stood ten feet back on the sidewalk. Janessa looked away, cried druggie tears and squeezed me tightly... then asked— “Did we do the right thing?” After a minute or two, Red shot up like a rocket, eyes wide, almost as if he had emerged from the ocean. He was then taken to a local hospital in an ambulance.

There were no searches or arrests made, the car wasn’t even impounded. Did I have friends in high places besides Red and Janessa? I gave the authorities all my information, Janessa grabbed Red’s stuff and I dropped her outside the hospital.

In the middle of the night my phone woke me up. It was Red. He called to inform me that he had given the police false information at the hospital, and that Janessa had disappeared with his backpack.

I’m a bad apple with some edible parts.

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[REVIEW] Smokey, The Lost Great American Gay Pre-Punk Icons, Reissued

April 24, 2015

Get ready for Smokey: a band perhaps “so amazing that the only reason you haven’t heard of them is because they were faggots and they didn't give a fuck.” The truth of the matter is that there are a lot of bands that should have been, but never were, for whatever reason. Big Star was in that stratosphere – so were Rodriguez and, more fittingly, the all black proto-punk band Death. But what these bands did have going for them was the fact that they were straight – in a world where being gay was not only a sin, it was billboard poison. Smokey hardly stood a chance.

In 1973, John ‘Smokey’ Condon, a “bewitchingly beautiful Baltimore transplant” who used to party with John Waters, met budding record producer EJ Emmons. They both moved to Los Angeles around the same time – along with a lot of other creative outcasts who didn’t “fit in.” Strangely enough, they were introduced to each other by a rather “touchy-feely” road manager for the Doors. Together, they went on to produce five of the most criminally neglected singles of the decade, as well as a treasure trove of unreleased recordings.

Condon had marched in New York the night after the Stonewall Riots in 1969, and so by the time he and EJ created Smokey, they weren’t about to hold back. Released in 1974, the first single Leather b/w Miss Ray wasn’t just openly gay, it was exultantly, unapologetically gay, examining front-on the newly-liberated leather and drag scenes thriving in America’s urban areas. The single was shopped around to labels using Emmons’ industry contacts, but doors were regularly slammed on the duo. “We can’t put this out, it’s a fucking gay record, what’s the matter with you,” said one record exec, while adding “it’s really good though

Instead of retreating, Smokey rebelled and formed S&M Records, with a logo featuring a muscular arm encased in studded cuffs, and “S&M” tattooed on the bulging bicep. They went on to self- release five singles that span pre-punk, stoner jams, disco, synth-punk and more, all stamped with Smokey’s fearless candor. The 1976 single How Far Will You Go…? features guitar from EJ’s studio buddy James Williamson, fresh from his adventures recording Raw Power with Iggy & the Stooges in London with David Bowie.

There are numerous amazing tracks just as amazing. There is the 9-minute disco workout entitled Piss Slave, and two versions of Million Dollar Babies, an ode to New York’s notorious trucks where men would go late at night to trick. Other tracks include cameos by Randy Rhoads of Quiet Riot/Ozzy Osbourne and members of the Motels, King Crimson, David Bowie’s Tin Machine, Suburban Lawns and many others. Essentially, Smokey laid the groundwork for an entire generation of leather-clad rockers who would bend the context of popular music and their own sexuality.

Fortunately, Emmons has collaborated with Australian record outfit Chapter Music to present the first ever reissue of Smokey’s music. The compilation, entitled How Far Will You Go?, has been lovingly restored by Emmons from original master tapes, and even mastered for vinyl by Emmons on his own cutting lathe. There are also extensive liner notes with stories and lyrics – along with photos. The compilation is available for preorder now and you will receive a complimentary MP3 download of the title track. The full album will be available on June 23rd.

CATEGORIES: ART / CULTURE / MUSIC / FILM PROSE / DESIGN / FASHION

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@charli_xcx in @miumiu Who Is Charli XCX? for AUTRE Levity (preorder 🔗 in bio) In an in-depth, career spanning interview @hansulrichobrist goes back to Charli’s early days of releasing demos on Myspace, dropping out of art school, the power of collaboration, unfinished projects, creating the famous driving song for the Barbie movie, her advice for young artists, and her new album. But who is Charli XCX? We also asked her friends and collaborators, from @jtfirstman to @glennmartens to @carolineplz and more, to offer clues through quotes, tweets, and behind the scenes photos. Preord3r the issue now by clicking the 🔗 in bi0. All preord3rs come with a full digital preview delivered to your inbox immediately after checkout while you wait for the print edition to arrive. Photography @daveyadesida Styling @julieragolia Hair @MattBenns Makeup @rommynajor Stylist assistant Amy Bialek (@wearisamy) Design @martinmajor #charlixcx #brat #miumiu

🌎🌍🌏 EARTH DAY 🌏🌎🌍 Image of Earth Rise taken during lunar orbit, 1969. Published in our Biodiversity Issue (FW21) Earth Rise as Seen From Lunar Surface. This incredible image of the Earth rise was taken during lunar orbit by the Apollo 11 mission crew in July of 1969. The first manned lunar mission, Apollo 11 launched aboard a Saturn V launch vehicle from the Kennedy Space Center, Florida on July 16, 1969 and safely returned to Earth on July 24, 1969. The 3-man crew aboard the flight consisted of Neil A. Armstrong, commander; Michael Collins, Command Module pilot; and Edwin E. Aldrin Jr., Lunar Module pilot. courtesy NASA #earthday #earthrise #nasa

MAURIZIO CATTELAN for AUTRE LEVITY (SS24) - preorder 🔗 in bi0 - on the occasion of his inclusion in the Vatican’s Holy See Pavilion at the @venice.art.biennale and his first gallery exhibition in 20 years opening later this month at @gagosian in NYC, we speak to the legendary prankster artist about the power of Levity in art Artwork: Mother, 1999 portrait by Alberto Zanetti #mauriziocattelan #venicebiennale #holysee #vatican #pope

ADAM CURTIS AND NATALIE MERING (aka @weyesblood) IN CONVERSATION FOR AUTRE LEVITY (SS24 #18) 🔗 in bi0 For nearly forty years, the documentaries of elusive BBC journalist Adam Curtis have told us fascinating, complex stories about the disenchantment caused by the fables we tell ourselves to make sense of a violent and chaotic world. Last year, Curtis tapped into his vast trove of video archives to create the concert visuals for Weyes Blood (the moniker of critically recognized American musician Natalie Mering) to support her 2023 album And In The Darkness, Hearts Aglow. He also created the music video for the single, God Turn Me Into A Flower, a poignant track about the myth of Narcissus, but also our eternal fall into the black mirror of a technology-obsessed world. Preord3r the issue now by clicking the 🔗 in bi0. All preord3rs come with a full digital preview delivered to your inbox immediately after checkout while you wait for the print edition to arrive. Featured: trailer for ALL WATCHED OVER BY MACHINES OF LOVING GRACE (2011) #adamcurtis #nataliemering #weyesblood

OTIS HOUSTON JR. BY NICK SETHI. FROM FDR DRIVE TO…. Autre is thrilled to present its S/S24 LEVITY ISSUE Issue (preord3r 🔗 in biO), a 300+ page investigation into our zeitgeist of antigravity. Multiple days in the life of NYC legend Otis Houston Jr. - over 20 pages of pure joy by @sicknethi A self-taught artist and musician, Otis Houston Jr. began making work after taking an art class while incarcerated. Since 1997, he has maintained an ongoing presence under the Triborough Bridge on the FDR Drive in New York, where he stages impromptu performances and a site-specific installation of signage and sculpture. His exhibition, All Eyes On Who?, is on view now at @gordonrobichaux Preord3r the issue now by clicking the 🔗 in biO. All preord3rs come with a full digital preview delivered to your inbox immediately after checkout while you wait for the print edition to arrive (third week of April). Photographs by @sicknethi Essay by @taraanned #otishoustonjr #nyc #artist #fdrdrive

THE GREAT SPIRIT IS IN ALL THINGS. Autre is thrilled to present its S/S24 LEVITY ISSUE (preord3r 🔗 in biO), a 300+ page investigation into our zeitgeist of antigravity. Featuring our fifth cover, an original artwork by Jeffrey Gibson, the first Indigenous artist to be chosen for the United States Pavilion with a solo album exhibition at the 2024 Venice Biennale. Since the 1990s, Jeffrey Gibson has been weaving his own Native traditions and queer history with pop cultural references—particularly song titles, into kaleidoscopic textile works, paintings, videos, and performances. A member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and of Cherokee descent, he is the first Indigenous artist to represent the United States with a solo presentation at the Venice Biennale. His exhibition at the US Pavilion, the space in which to place me, takes its title from Oglala Lakota poet Layli Long Soldier’s poem e Sápa. In the following interview, Nellie Scott, the director of the Corita Art Center in Los Angeles, delves into Gibson’s history-mining practice. Preord3r the issue now by clicking the 🔗 in biO. All preord3rs come with a full digital preview delivered to your inbox immediately after checkout while you wait for the print edition to arrive (third week of April). #jeffreygibson #nativeamerican #indigenous #venicebiennale #venicebiennale2024

MICHELANGELO PISTOLETTO BY ALESSANDRO SARTORI. Autre is thrilled to present its S/S24 LEVITY ISSUE (preord3r 🔗 in biO), a 300+ page investigation into our zeitgeist of antigravity. Featuring our fourth cover, an in-depth profile on Arte Povera legend Michelangelo Pistoletto by Zegna artistic director @alessandrosartoriofficial with an interview by @danthawley . The legendary Italian artist discusses his life’s work from his foundation, Cittadellarte, in Biella—including the unique philosophical machinations behind his mirror paintings and the Third Paradise, a conceptual anchor for Pistoletto’s artworks and the marriage between nature and artifice, symbolized by an infinity logo. Preord3r the issue now by clicking the 🔗 in biO. All preord3rs come with a full digital preview delivered to your inbox immediately after checkout while you wait for the print edition to arrive (third week of April). Photography @alessandrosartoriofficial interview by @danthawley special thanks @luhringaugustine / @cittadellarte #michelangelopistoletto #pistoletto #italy #biella #zegna #alessandrosartori #danthawley

BOTTEGA VENETA… A LOVE STORY. Autre is thrilled to present its S/S24 LEVITY ISSUE Issue (preord3r 🔗in biO), a 300+ page investigation into our zeitgeist of antigravity. Featuring our third cover, a special collaboration with Bottega Veneta by @matthieu_blazy photography by @parker__woods Across 30 pages we cast our favorite friends, actors, models and artists in an expansive editorial featuring Bottega Veneta’s SS24 collection. In line with the issue’s theme, they interpret the new weightless energy of the iconic Italian fashion house. See Akon Adichol (cover), Matthew Modine, Kandis Williams, Karon Davis, Julie Mehretu, Clairo, and more. Preord3r the issue now by clicking the 🔗 in biO. All preord3rs come with a full digital preview delivered to your inbox immediately after checkout while you wait for the print edition to arrive (third week of April). Photography @parker__woods Styled by @julieragolia Casting @ben_grimes_casting Makeup @alliesmithmakeup Set design @ericmestman Assistant @wearisamy #bottegaveneta #matthieublazy #fashion

ROSE WYLIE BY JUERGEN TELLER. ⚡️Autre is thrilled to present its S/S24 LEVITY ISSUE (preord3r 🔗 in bi0), a 300+ page investigation into our zeitgeist of antigravity. Featuring almost ninety-year-old British painter Rose Wylie photographed by Juergen Teller. A nearly 40-page document of classic portraits. Interview by novelist and critic @jennifer_higgie. Preord3r the issue now by clicking the 🔗 in bi0. All preord3rs come with a full digital preview delivered to your inbox immediately after checkout while you wait for the print edition to arrive (third week of April). Photography Juergen Teller Creative Partner @doviledrizyte Special thanks @davidzwirner Postproduction: Lucas Rios Palazesi at Quickfix #rosewylie #juergenteller #magazine #issue #ss24

WHO IS CHARLI XCX? Autre is thrilled to present its S/S24 LEVITY ISSUE Issue (preord3r 🔗 in bi0), a 300+ page investigation into our zeitgeist of antigravity. Featuring genre defying pop phenom @charli_xcx on the occasion of her upcoming album BRAT. In an in-depth, career spanning interview @hansulrichobrist goes back to Charli’s early days of releasing demos on Myspace, dropping out of art school, the power of collaboration, unfinished projects, creating the famous driving song for the Barbie movie, her advice for young artists, and her new album. But who is Charli XCX? We also asked her friends and collaborators, from @jtfirstman to @glennmartens to @carolineplz and more, to offer clues through quotes, tweets, and behind the scenes photos. Preord3r the issue now by clicking the 🔗 in bi0. All preord3rs come with a full digital preview delivered to your inbox immediately after checkout while you wait for the print edition to arrive (third week of April). Photography @daveyadesida Styling @julieragolia Hair @MattBenns Makeup @rommynajor Stylist assistant Amy Bialek (@wearisamy) Design @martinmajor #charlixcx #autremagazine #levity #eclipse #light

Gaetano Pesce (1939–2024) “The time of copies is behind us. We are in a time of originals.” Very sad to hear the news of Pesce’s passing, a legendary architect and designer with a meteoric influence on design, both in practice and theory. He was featured in our Utopia issue (SS23) alongside other giants of the Italian Radical Design movement. His work was deeply political and revolutionary—even a simple chair was an act of resistance. Portraits by @noua_unu #gaetanopesce #design #architecture

April Fools! What we thought were a new pair of AirPods is actually an invite to @mschf ‘s upcoming exhibition at @perrotin LA. The logo with two bites out the apple should have given it away, even the receipt was convincing, and the AirPods are actually edible. @mschf Art 2 opens April 6th #mschf #bigredboots #airpods #edible #aprilfools

Scenes from SPLAT by Bobbi Salvör Menuez @hi_its_bobbi a one night only sensory play party in NYC. No cameras allowed - only a live feed titled macrophilic installation resembling a giant mouth titled I’m Big, You’re Small. See more on www.autre.love #bobbimenuez #play #party #installation #art

&hearts;️ to Mohammed Ahmed and @casamagazinesnyc happy retirement ! Thanks for the tremendous support over the years &hearts;️ seen here pictured with our first John Waters cover in 2019

#mohammedahmed #casamagazines

♥️ to Mohammed Ahmed and @casamagazinesnyc happy retirement ! Thanks for the tremendous support over the years ♥️ seen here pictured with our first John Waters cover in 2019 #mohammedahmed #casamagazines

Cola Boyy (1989–2024) "…my music is a tool of class struggle. Promoting the work that’s being done and making music for people to sing that not only reflects their lives but that encourages rebellion." Cola Boyy in conversation with @johncarrollkirby for AUTRE SS21. Deeply saddened to learn of the Oxnard-based musician’s death at 34. Photo by @teardrop_estates #colaboyy #oxnard