Month: July 2009

an early drawing (maybe 1975?)

paper dolls to follow

Dream I go into a room where there are maybe five guys who look like figures from Aztec cartoon drawings. Some of them are maybe animals. Each one is bodypainted a different kind of metal: oxidize d copper, bronze, etc. Each one has some kind of magic jewelry that, when they put it on, acts as a torture device. Two of them argue about whether they have any volition or not about whether the jewelry will torture them. One says, I’ve been painting? eating? it all my life.

Lynn, you can just automatically take the dreams, you don’t have to even ask. Carte blanche.

Anyway I woke up to find I’d been clenching my teeth something awful.

He typed: “I’m in a relationship…
with everything.” It sounds so sweet,
but all human beings are in bondage:
to each other. Thinking (then)
makes me squirt on a parallel bee:
this lachrymal honey. Poems may be
the pimples of the mind – I am
the fuschia frosting of the voice ( I think),
and this is a cue to you to start paying
attention (to me) immediately! I retain water
as a swollen obduracy. The perfection
of wire fences and their pinkish insides.
Darling, when first we met, the lime
contention was an indignant sun. There is
pleasure all in and around me, knotted
through with infinity like a do-rag,
and I’m not hungry, or tired,
or lacking in entertainments, because
doing this entertains me. Even your
absence is amusing, a piquant musk
rubbed on the cusp of everything. I swear
undying love to the stripe on the street,
the dirty subway pole, the greek to-go cup,
the advertising insert, and of course
to homo erectus, aww yeah, his eager
condescension…

Something blurry in my imaginings today:
naked stork pictures, naked…
pictures, like I’m firing at my own sonar
echo in the dark. The naked metaphorical
clarity of gum wrappers… folded into tiny
dumb animals…so the rhapsodies now
turn inward, like condoms on ghosts.
Well, I had a yen for something in the dusky
confabulations of my anguished
iconicity, but that was pesky,
like all the inventive humans.
I love the beading on the edge of their
kameezes. You just bathe in the bitter
light. I notice that. I just notice that.
Everyone is “lumped in.” You have
preferences, although not for me. I
like tea. I am a syrupy pariah with
such. beautiful. ears, and I pull all this
together! Yeah, rhapsodic cows always
hold babies in the cool midnight
against a million telephones that
vibrate against a billion babies: this body
just SHIVERS with signification as a kind
of bugle… whither we are tending…
peach angel sleeves, and today I heart
the heat/ smearing neroli and civet
on meat.

A screw loose in the universal machinery:
like I care. Interpersonal machinery:
all the mean valentines! And you know
naked vultures have their own mean
valentines (I’m not soothed by this)
(or anything in the natural world).
Well, you have metallic emotions in
the listless absence. You battle
in buttery light, bite back as a
stone idol with a candy inside him
whereas I am a parasite who understands
“bell-like” perfection (bronze? plastic?),
and that’s OK, in the way that everyone
on this train actually has a crotch.
It’s (what’s?) a vapid campanula – with
an eye. I burble the already-learned
coyness. “Art is my life,” the identical
twins whisper to each other, stroking
(like foals) the pretty topiaries. Again.
And again.

that the New York Times this morning, instead of having “New York TImes” at the top of the front page, had “THROWS WHITE SPACE AWAY”

(take it, Lynn)

I went to the MoMA today to look at pictures by James Ensor. I had always loved his paintings of masks I’d seen in art history books, but I had no idea just how revolutionary an artist he was. The real revelation to me was his drawings: layered, intricate things that combine various styles of drawing (along a continuum from real to surreal) and disparate subjects on one plane, like exquisitely hand-rendered collages. One of my favorite drawings was this one:

I realize it’s almost impossible to get a sense from this poor-quality image of what the drawing is like, but you can see how the dark fabulous monsters contrast with the more peaceful everyday images done in fainter lines. The drawing is quite small, maybe, I don’t know, 5″ by 3″, so I had to get up very close to see it, and I almost fell in.

The mask paintings were more luscious, weird, and compelling even than I had imagined, very large and brilliantly colored and confrontational. I loved how in some of them the entire space of the canvas was crowded with images of false faces, interspersed with some ‘real’ ones.

Ensor loved crowds, and this strikes me as wonderfully Baudelairean. He had amazing patience in drawing them, and extraordinary imagination as well in making each figure in the crowd stranger than the next.

Plus, oh, did you know? He often depicted himself as a crossdresser! One self-portrait shows him in a perfectly feminine & ridiculous flowered hat.

Satire! Carnival! Ensor! Rescued by these images today from oh the bitterest and broodiest mood…