Triennial at the New Museum

I loved the Triennial at the New Museum. So far none of the reviews I've read have it right, especially the atrocious piece in the times, which reveals a perspective so woefully out of touch it is difficult to believe this is the paper of record. Conversely, perhaps this is exactly the kind of review one should expect from the paper of record.

To be clear I don't have it figured out either (yet), but I do think the show marks a huge step forward, and is one of the most successful conceptual-political-aesthetic-emerging-artists exhibition I've ever seen. The artists are a very diverse group--excellent, yes--and the art is challenging, fascinating, and beautiful. Much is devoted to internality-externality, the ephemera of contemporary society, and the bizarre melding of identities and conditions in constant turmoil and flux--some of the most interesting art throws this against a surreal-feeling totalitarian, static background. Collage unifies much of the work, and we as audience are brought into many of the pieces. I even enjoyed an animation piece from Oliver Laric.

It is difficult to know where the exhibition begins and ends, and how exactly to navigate the halls and galleries of the space. Impressive is a Josh Kline installation (FREEDOM) featuring an Obama-esque speaker in Zuccotti Park--this will leave you feeling uncertain, troubled, and perhaps, hopeful. Hopeful because you will exit the museum knowing you've experienced an exhibition full of the work of artists who know the deep melancholy of life today, who are suspicious of the dubious promises of a brighter future, and who are capable of expressing something of it in art.

You'll read about Juliana Huxtable in the coming weeks, as you very well should. She's the face of a trans world.  

They're onto something at the New Museum. 

Njideka Akunyili Crosby

Verena Dengler

a new vision of empathy, Antoine Catala

Overheard on the N

I've always thought of the N as something of a red-headed stepchild.  I boarded the train in question at 57th and 7th and discovered a veritable orchestra of delight, by which I mean an incredible stench of urine and decay coated a conspicuously empty car. In haste I jogged to the next car, which on first glance seemed clean and quiet. This would, of course, not last for very long.

The N reaches one arm into Astoria, and with other makes a periphrastic pilgrimage to Coney Island via Bay Ridge whilst straddling Manhattan, like the final moments in a game of twister before tangles of limbs tumble to the ground.

It was late at night when I found the N, or the N found me--whichever you prefer--on the unendurable Saturday last, the day that begun with snow and ended with rain and ice. I had had a long night out in Midtown, which was odd, and didn't have luck with a cab, so I decided to try my luck with the train.

The N is not one of the trains that will at times fill with the beautiful and the damned, as is notable with the F, which funnels these, the careless, and the pretty between Chelsea and the New Lower East Side.

On this occasion, on the other end of the car sat a shabby fat man in a half-doze stupor, his face obscured in the chic naivete of his garments. Soon would appear a female companion, draped in the eternal blue of the Indianapolis Colts. The two had a dispute, and he began to tell her in no uncertain terms that when he finds himself on the train, she needs to take care also to board the train, and that she really must be sure she is on the train sitting by his side. He repeated this over and over again, and it became clear he did not believe she was on the train, sitting by his side--in fact, he believed she was elsewhere, and up to no good. This continued for some time.

In a moment, the tone transformed from conciliatory to hostile. "You fat fuck," she said. "Yeah, fat fuck...big fuckin' moo moo. You're as big as the twin towers, fat fuck." A swarthy latin boarded the train and engaged the seat across the train from this couple.

"You're as big as the twin towers, you big fuckin' moo moo."

  

Ice Age

I've been busy. I met Liberia and Princess at Liberia's loft in Greenpoint, a quintessential borough-loft. Liberia threw a party on an enormous yacht this weekend, a rave, burning man style, madness! Especially as Manhattan has been surrounded by a sea of ice. Ice shelfs have been spotted floating down the Hudson + East River. Mastodons are reported in Queens. Dubious, the existence of a Northwest Passage. Princess told me about omf (our mutual friend, for future reference), shooting the video for Ferg while I leaned slow into some sizzurp I procured last week. Life is starting to move fast.  

Eric Holder dropped by Brooklyn's office the other day at work; she'd been drinking. These things happen. 

I met Chilena at Santina, a perfect restaurant situated in a little grotto underneath the end of the High Line at the north edge of the West Village, around the corner from the relocated Whitney. The food was phenomenal; when they can open the doors up with a breeze off the Hudson in the summer, the Whitney around the corner? It's like La Grenouille's downtown outpost.  

Thursday I had drinks at a small venue in the East Village with folklorist friends. Folklore is palatable to this generation, to people who are young, to the internet (memes, anyone?). Understand the culture you possess, be it hand clap games, stories, legends, foods, traditions...it's a beautiful thing to discover you're already part of something, and, you are. 

Tonight I hit Barclays to see Golden State. I hope they win it all. Steph Curry is illmatic.   

In 2015 watch for Cara Delevingne and A$AP Ferg...summer of the Dope Walk. Heard.

Friends visiting from LA this weekend.

Cambodia

As mentioned in an earlier installment, I love Cambodian Space Funk from the 60s and 70s. Often I imagine throwing a birthday party like so: red velvet cake and batik dress code, lots of cocaine, champagne, and oysters, and Lady Jane Fonda and Erykah Badu responsible for the music and keeping everyone under control. Wouldn't that be jolly?

There is a documentary at film forum on funk from Kampuch in April. Mark your calendars.

Friday night I went to an opening at Camille's store. Camille is a caricature of bourgeois social climbing vulgarity. Kim hates her, in fact when Kim saw the photos from the party I immediately received a "I can't believe you hung out with the user" text. Kim needs to cool it--Camille isn't all bad, and can be a delight when she isn't concerned with her social position or maneuvering into a position where she will in the future feel she has the ability to request a difficult and outrageous "favor" of a near stranger. 

Camille works at a store where it's unlikely you'll meet anyone worth knowing, although Friday you would've had the chance to meet China, Cash, and I. China put down the champagne and we reminisced about her recent fainting spells. You see, China used to drink, used to get down, but she's fallen out of it, the result being that she'll fall down on herself--collapse--in the middle of a bar or club. It's alarming, and ambulances have been called. I asked China if she had been to the doctor and she laughed. 

Kim and Brooklyn both forwarded me the same article in the New Yorker, the Michael Pollan piece on hallucinogens, and each in her own way is interested in having this trip treatment. I thought, "Please, let's just find some hallucinogens and champagne and spend the weekend at Charlus' in the Hamptons." But my great ideas fall on deaf ears when it comes to such things as therapy, and why? In fact for many years I have had this idea of Brooklyn and I being put in charge of a mental institution.  

China and Cash and I, however, have made a definite plan to have a bitch weekend--we refer to ourselves as "the bitches"--at Charlus to do just what I outlined above. I cannot wait until the weather improves as it is miserable in New York. 

An estranged friend and former roommate of mine has become semi-semi-semi-notorious. The other night he met Kanye and Jay, via the A$AP Crew (he's worked with Ferg in the past). The little fuck. Actually, I'm not Gore Vidal envious. 

After the opening, I went with Cash for a drink on Eighth Street. Afterward we went to an uneventful birthday party in $kid Row$, Lorimer stop. 

The next day, I saw Karl Lagerfeld/Rhianna/Erykah Badu at a party for the opening of the Fendi store on Madison Avenue. I could almost add an additional title to this journal relating to someday being invited to such an event. Of course afterward they all had dinner in the penthouse at One57.    

Angelica moves to New York tomorrow. Angelica is elegant, but has a tendency to drink and screech like her good friend Grace. Angelica is so much more attractive, so much more put together than Grace--ie., Angelica would never expose a bulbous, half-tattooed midriff (sorry Grace)--that when she does lose control it's amusing. She plans to live in Greenpoint or in my beautiful neighborhood, obviously the best choice in Brooklyn.

I highly recommend Jesús Rafael Soto at Galerie Perrotin on Madison/73rd. The exhibition closes on the fast approaching February 21st. These are unusual forms and arresting aesthetic endeavors.

Here is the first useful writing I've ever seen from the "Center" for "Fiction."
 
 

 
 


      

Useful Ignorance

"We have heard of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. It is said that knowledge is power, and the like. Methinks there is equal need of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Ignorance." 

                            Thoreau

New York Public Library, Midtown

Lower East Side

Detail, NYPL

Essex Street

Lunar New Year: Thursday February 19th
Year of the Goat

Shel Silverstein in the West Village, Washington Street

Over 70,000

Speed and the Sublime

When you race, he said, when you find the proper line through the curves, 'your consciousness is projected in front of you, the present is suspended, and it's like the dreams you had of flying when you were ten.'"

Masses, magazine of the worker

Communipaw, New Jersey, 1884, Thomas Moran 

The sublime (Lighthouse, 1879, Thomas Moran)

Liber Studiorum, 1812, J.M.W. Turner

"New York is still the best place for puppet talent."

Mental Noise and Bleak Skies

To tell you the truth, I feel perfectly fine while typing this. A little sentimental, to be honest, when I saw the news Jon Stewart may retire from The Daily Show, which feels like a piece of my childhood living on in the present.

I work a day job these days, and my life has changed. A part of me desires to transform myself into an automaton: to wake, work, exercise, fuck, sleep, repeat. To move with brutal vigor, to thrash about with precision. But it is difficult to forgo elegance. 

The dark of winter has begun to lift. I leave work at 5:30 and there is still light. The Bank of America tower, dare I say it, is thrilling, a shard that pierces the soft underbelly of dusk. The gentle blue of twilight has now replaced night, and the days grow longer. As with children, this happened overnight--the world does not equally and smoothly move, rather, its motion is jerky, like the growth spurts of children. 

For no reason in particular, I wandered the streets of the Lower West Side, full of gloomy musings and uncertain convictions. 

"In my dreams, I see shadows on the sidewalks..." 

Many people who are small pieces of me have begun to fade from this life:

a Hungarian Folklorist, a last vestige of an old world that faded away after the first world war  

a carpenter and artist, friend of Taj Mahal, who lived off the grid

a cantankerous Catalonian who couldn't stand the blues

a younger brother of my grandfather, who never could live up to the older brother he idolized, on whom the army experimented with lsd, who, alone and forgotten, lived out his days in a veteran's affairs hospital in Chillicothe, Ohio...

As have I myself begun to fade, my present looking at a distance ever further toward the present, a present which is the bright light on the horizon that indicates the disappearing sun...there are now many who live on only in my mind, in the minds of others, and I begin to feel the pressure that Proust must have felt, a pressure to imagine and construct a beautiful, immense architecture veiled in scaffolding, that builds itself again and again in the minds of readers, so that some of the dream of this life, this moment, may live on.

The new world grows up around the old, young grasses and daffodils shrouding the rusted idols which melt sadly into the soil. The future waits not for us to acquiesce to it, but streams through, steams on, blind, dumb, menacing.  

"Different cities follow one another on the same site and under the same name, born and dying without knowing one another, without communication among themselves..."

"The lake's surface was barely wrinkled; the copper reflection of the ancient palace of the Sung was shattered into sparkling glints like floating leaves."

   

  
I've quoted Modiano and Calvino; I'll quote Calvino once more, on why the construction of a certain city never seems to end: "so that its destruction cannot begin." The inhabitants of this city, if asked whether they fear that, once the scaffoldings are removed, the city may begin to crumble and fall to pieces, add, hastily, in a whisper, "not only the city."

That's New York. 

I'm reading Octavio Paz, his Laberinto de la soledad; last weekend I went to a factory party in the Bronx. No, it wasn't Warhol, no, not at all.

I think I may begin using drugs again. Thinking people use drugs, because they understand that addiction is impossible for them. Addiction is a condition--a disease--that will find an object and dig in its claws. It is a psychological disease born in the pain of life. 

Unusual experiences keep a person growing, changing--we must become children again to feel at least ephemeral carelessness and delight in life. Sometimes lately I take magnesium.



DAYBREAK    

Bebel Gilberto & Duke Ellington with His Orchestra
Donn Alan Pennebaker, 1953