seen on the F / budding voyeurism pt. 1

Got off at Jay Street / Metrotech to transfer from A to F. One of those smooth switches without any lag time, a literal stepping-off-and-on, one movement, the doors to the second train even receiving me lovingly as if to say "do not worry no rush pick a seat we are only now closing." An entire empty row. I chose the spot closest the car doors, as I always do, and so I expected nothing out of this ride but sameness - me sitting with my forty-pound backpack slumped on my lap and listening to the sounds of people clicking their jaws and hushhushing their newborns.

But --

then I noticed the kid across from me, kid as in nineteen or twenty-year-old someone, his elbows barely on his knees as he leaned so severely into himself I though he might suffocate in his Michael Jordan track jacket. He wore red and black and jeans in a dark wash with ruddy Adidas, formerly white, now the color of casserole residue. Next, his hands...pause...counting scabs, bloody, barely formed, unclean, retroactively diagnose a fight an hour ago before even seeing. His face. Both his eyes closed. The muscles of the rightside of his jaw fluttered so I knew he wasn't just clenching. Stuck there for one or two tics, back to the hands that held one another achingly. There for three. Up to his head again, his curtained gaze downward, turned more slightly toward me, the brow fatter than blood-bellied leeches. So swollen. I don't ever remember having felt like that before. What was it?

Locked stare. It felt like this and corseted guts. So, no breath. In fact one long hold, as if that one breath wouldn't give way to another like it usually did. He wouldn't look up so our eyes wouldn't meet but I didn't need to see his pupils to know he was concussed. And when I realized I couldn't and wouldn't say a fucking word to him (crisis) I felt the faint of a thousand hunger pangs. And I heard music.

Our soundtrack was Joy Division. It was Sonic Youth and

A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling
My beautiful Annabel Lee;
So that her kinsmen came
And bore her away from me,
To shut her up in a sepulchre
In this kingdom by the sea.

"black mirror"

Somebody said to me yesterday or the day before something about loneliness. Or maybe dejection. Anyway it had been about that feeling of self-hatred when enveloped in one's own singularity, you-know-what-I-mean, when a shadow erases your face in the mirror, when you look down and your hand seems suspect as it interrupts the offwhite of the couch, my hand? you think, when did i do my nails coral, where's the remote?

Alberto Alcocer

So this someone asked me a question about life's unending depression. No - not seeming. Endless. Unremitting. Maybe he, or she, added a bit about having to go to parties alone, wearing his (or her?) best outfit and wondering what any of it meant, does anything mean anything to me anymore, looking at me and me suddenly blushing at the suggestion that I might have an answer. That I have the answer. You have to tell me, you need to know something, this boy-or-girl seemed to be saying, and did say almost too directly. Why, I thought? Why why why why why. Avoiding my own response I let my focus shift uncontrollably, first the drumline of "Black Wave / Bad Vibrations" so so simple, then I stayed there awhile. Then another swerving, that ass and those tits on a certain red-haired singer, and then another when I thought about bits of graffiti I faked having seen on the subway. Faked, to myself, not by myself. Fooling myself to fool someone else. You haven't told me yet. You're right, I haven't.

Deep breath in you still haven't out told me and then you proceed to say something like, "Look, I know everything there is to know about living in shit but I'm finding it hard to answer your questions because I don't live in shit anymore and, fuck." In out. "I don't live it in right now and I'd have to sit and think about everything really fucking hard, I'm going to do it, in reality I do it all the time subconsciously but that's one thing, and this is another, and what you're asking will take hours to explain, you don't understand this and won't even as I'm telling you that you don't, and my explanation won't help you to understand how."

You still haven't answered my question. What fucking question?

currently crushing:

polaroid project

James Lim for Vogue

Givenchy Fall 2011

Danielle Duella for Muse no. 23

Givenchy S/S 2011

Ben Toms for Dazed † Confused June 2011

Kacper Kasprzyk for i-D

Vogue March 2012

Pirelli calendar 2012

Saskia Saskia Saskia

(visit her blog - she's also an artist/photographer/aesthetician)

some things

(only a very few)


† model-dresser, no. 12
† a friend of ours has a film screening next weekend
† I've been enjoying no penny for them, one of my recent blog discoveries
† a horrible link, but Trockman's photos of Marya are spectral
† we want to visit Maimonide of Brooklyn and try their open-faced sandwiches
† this - girl you don't need Madonna
† and this - she's not real
† Moa Hedström in Bon International, also unreal

mucus take two

Today I spent forty minutes in the Health Center here at school - only forty, yes, from start to finish. Pittance. Even enjoyable. Did I truly leave so comforted? Even after the flu shot I'd neglected?

What might it look like, to combine all those collective hours waited-out in the waiting-rooms of doctors' offices? Even just one of yours plus mine and we'd look at the results and gasp uncannily to one another, saying, "No shit?"

It isn't that I avoid the doctor's on purpose. I wouldn't even say that I avoid visits at all, but I surely don't seek them out, nor have I ever, ever enjoyed them. Not alone. But this relationship between me and "my health," curious in its necessity and maddening, I can't say to ever have been anything but tense - again, not alone, although acute, peculiar, curioser.

Five or four years old, my body fetal atop a plain metal bench, makeshift cot no-good-for-children, one nurse cooing "Close your eyes, hurt a little," sting in the naked right half of my behind in a stiff c-curve. I cried for lack of lollipop, and because my bandage had nothing to say for itself, all peachy-brown, no Muppets, no Count.

A few years before then I'd be in the hospital for two flat weeks. Lactose intolerance and an unforseen allergy to penicillin - my parents recollected that, at that time, the only response my body gave to food and fluid was vomit, vomit, vomit - kept me there, hugging myself in a little tent with a dehumidifier and, I'm sure, a honey-yellow night light that I'm also sure I coveted. Upon arrival another nurse wiggled the IV needle into the only fat vein visible in my left hand. My response: wait for the nurse to leave, feel the empty space of the room, rip out the chord and let it leak as I run through to the end of the hall through one set of swinging doors. When the nurse caught me, my father told me once, I laughed. She laughed, too.

Seventeen, defensive stance on our side of the pitch. One grabbed arm pulled the wrong way from behind, a sickening twist (the knees are made for bending in certain, very specific, ways), click-click, down on the ground. Curses shitfuck. Fifteen minutes later and the trainer would say some things about your ACL. Three disgusting letters. A month later: hamstring graft, another plain bandage, throwup in one of mom's leftover Pretzel Time bags in the back of her business van - couch, delirium, pain, the Incredible Shrinking You.

Renfrew, and all those sessions in New Directions before (and after) and that fucking feeling of telling your childhood physician "Yes, I starve myself, take laxatives, I even found out about epsom, I'm checking myself into treatment, Philadelphia-will-you-please-pray-for-me, you make me feel so much better." His lament, upheaved smile, downright horror at this admission from this girl he used to pat on the head and laugh with. Renfrew and after Renfrew and so on.

What comes after is always best.

connexions

Whenever I think about who I was at Marietta, three of those four years spent as a closeted sick-girl, it follows that I think of who I wasn't amongst the people with whom I would have liked to have been something more - a Super me, a me of consequence and remembrance. The sort of "me" I've cultivated in recent, more deliberate (conscious), years.

"tanya coloring her hair" - Corinne Day

My thoughts on the subject were revved again this morning - a young-old friend contacted me and asked a question about something I'd said all those years ago. My immediate response: muted panic. I was sure I'd said this, even that I'd said it to him when and where he'd said it, but why had I forgotten, why did my memory hinge upon his inquiry? Yes I'm sure I said did as and was where you said I was but give me mo-ment, let me think about what I forgot and why I forgot it and why I feel like I actually did forget and why I don't feel like it never happened. It happened. We stood there, just. The characters you mention, I wish you recollected even just their faces, I so want to redraw the scene as my memory thinks it should look. How else am I to retrace my steps with the diligence required of my answer to your question? Instead of gazes I feel the almost cold fall air (you know the kind) and it's dinner time, I realize as I'm going on, perhaps past seven, it makes sense for some reason that it was a later evening. I had stopped because of you and them.

Or had we walked together? Where would we have met - the mall, D.B.R.C., maybe? All of my questions in the pursuit of an answer to yours. It matters to me. Maybe more the question than my answer because someone else has interrupted my past (it isn't idle you know) with a notion, maybe even a profitable lead, as to its rigidity and simultaneous openness and constancy. You asked and I couldn't only remember you, even if I can't remember anyone else; because I see myself again, those jeans and my moccasins with the red beading. I see myself again.

nancy boy

Prolonged illness had better just hurry and finish its business - I think this, did so all day yesterday as I sat in various spaces around the apartment moving from computer chair to couch to kitchen table, think it still as the pain leaves and only phlegm remains. A tongue of mucus.

The past week-and-a-half I've been sick but have continued to run, run as the hidden opening to my nostrils burned and it was that much more of an impossibility, breathing. Like vomit-acid clinging to the esophagus, climbing upward, palming the skull, a dreadful feeling of nerve endings fizzing and popping cut loose from one another. You've seen a downed telephone line. Those chords you aren't to touch that spout the golden electric pom-poms.

Yesterday was different, I did not go, I left my running shoes at the base of the window sill and fuck the aches, my legs and ass without muscle control and a head of cotton (can't hear nothing) (where'd my time go). I sat. I said that already, but I did. Body thanked me, still thanks me, even though I'll betray myself and go running soon because can't-not things-to-do, meeting Grace for lunch off the L at Lorimer and then Colson Whitehead, wherever you are, and Michael somewhere foreign.

Where's the god damned heat?

hardly slapstick

Moonbot Studios' "The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore"

"Silence is of the gods; only monkeys chatter." 

- Buster Keaton

best light

another shot by Tanya Dakin, who's convinced 

me that "no makeup" might never mean "plain"

-- and that it is not impossible to find my own

best light

In my quest to love myself, bodily and otherwise, I have found that in the past I refused the suggestions of others because my then-schema would only have allowed for them to be critical or unduly judgmental. Always on the defensive. My own thoughts were themselves over-filtered, in the way that dirt particles are made to separate from gold in sifters (only later it would be discovered that more than half of that "gold" was fool's gold). It now seems that I was afraid of so much about my own mind that I responded with an unremitting resistance to external ideas about myself, and even if a friend had intended to introduce "me" as a topic in our conversation in a minimal or harmless way I couldn't have helped but to assume the extremest of intentions - inwardly I scoffed, almost would always choke, and only at the mention of my self, which I exploded to mean various hypersensitive things: nerve damage, exercise obsession, eating deficiencies, etc. Certain, specific things that most of my friends would never have known enough to mention. Those that did had permission, but not really. Eggshells.

This deprecation went on before during and after Renfrew, though from different vantage points and with varying degrees of violence. I can't even say when I first began to think of myself as lesser. Maybe it was that first "polished" drawing of mine, dad's table saw, with the one leg longer and fatter than the other three, when I couldn't have been older than four or five; or I'm thinking of my mother pregnant with my sister, us at the glass door to our second home and watching dad out in the yard doing something manual, and my feeling of extreme smallness in the company of my three closest family members which also might have had something to do with my inability to really reach the door-handle and help my mother, with child, into the Ford. That afternoon she wore her brown, ankle-length fur coat. Her hair was as big as her glasses frames.

Either way I've found it impossible to say what it is that spurred my lifelong affair with perfectionism and resulting self loathing. When I realized I was sick I toyed with the possibility of my being bipolar (an excuse) or even just manic depressive (another excuse). Neither of these has proven to be the case but they still retain small bits of truth for me. This from a girl who used to regularly tuck her shirt into her brastrap, stand in front of full-length mirrors, and punch her ribs and stomach with such hard fists as to make herself wince and approach nausea. Circular motions, repeated, idiotic, so real. And I never thought doing this would fix anything about me. I distinctly remember thinking that it was one of several just punishments for the failure that was my life, re: my body, re: my slippery mind. One of several. You've heard before about people hurting themselves before anyone else could continue to hurt them without their permission. This applied to me, albeit partially.

The point is not to scare myself out of even wanting to remember that, before the last two happiest years of my life, I had lived twenty-two uncertain and sometimes horrible awful years without ever being able to know myself without a lingering hatred or misunderstanding. No, that can't be the point and it isn't. Very basically I have made the choice to investigate all twenty-four of those years, some of them more seriously than others, with the goal of finding answers to my questions and to continue fostering the curiosity about myself that, in my opinion, kept me from dying at the age of twenty-two.

something i've wanted to say

 Pseudophyseter

All dreams...serve the purpose of prolonging sleep instead of waking up. The dream is the guardian of sleep and not its disturber...Thus the wish to sleep (which the conscious ego is concentrated upon...) must in every case be reckoned as one of the motives for the formation of dreams, and every successful dream is a fulfillment of that wish. 

--- Freud, from The Interpretation of Dreams, 4:233-34 as modified by Cathy Caruth in Unclaimed Experience p.98

In Cathy Caruth's dissection of Freud's conclusions on sleep / dreams she necessarily deals with Jacques Lacan's response to this same originating psychoanalytic text; for Lacan speaks further of the human need for sleep and postures that it is not only, as Freud says, a continual wish for unconscious dreaming. For

(t)he question that arises, and which indeed all Freud's previous indications allow us here to reproduce, is -- What is it that wakes the sleeper? Is it not, in the dream, another reality? 

--- Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, again quoted by Caruth

Lacan diverts our course and instead leads us to ask not why one needs to sleep, nor even why we dream, but rather why must we ever awake? To think of this seriously means to begin to forget any barriers between conscious and unconscious thought. And what becomes of my ethical existence? Which reality more fully demands my allegiance? I might conclude that the body belongs in both hemispheres, that my feeling of my body as a sieve in dreams and as a skeleton in waking hours are both correct, that when I lose my "I" it makes sense that it would make sense to do so.

Is it that the wish for sleep fails if I survive my dreams? I have begun to feel that I might need to take responsibility for my dream-actions, especially if I am to believe that my "I" has a double-existence and that my eyes never really close, the shift of an eyelid giving way to an iris that contains the cosmos. And if I dream because of death, because my understanding of mortality founders in both realities (un-or-otherwise) and sets me to wishing to know utterly my own end and yours too, then I dream only of life - a sort of living death which gives all my existences purpose in the pursuit thereof.

Capreolus Polyceros

Hitler slept, too. He and Nietzsche dreamed and lived their deaths one thousand times over. In many ways I cry at the thought of Shakespeare in medias res, or of Benjamin's somnambulism which lead to his suicide (to lose in a game of one-upsmanship with the threat of premature physical death, when others want your life to stave off their own) or of Orwell (maybe he never slept), Plato's shadows, Galileo's galaxies (and not just the ones in his head).

Hitler slept, too...