5 books I read recently & loved: Candice Wuehle Monarch, Paul Cunningham Fall Garment, Derek McCormack Judy Blame’s Obituary: Writings on Fashion and Death, Alexandrine Ogundimu Agitation, Ted Rees Dog Day Economy

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‘In this riddled pageantric, insomniac, photographic, and university-infused world of eating disorders, triple suicides, astral projections, enigmatic bruises, uncontrollable impulses, Candice Wuehle’s poetic and narrative gaze on everything she Midas-touches is eyelined, eyeshadowed, polished, Norwegian lip-penciled, and loose powered with her devilishly inventive, singularly imaginative beauty and a devastating wry sense of humor. Her brilliance in Monarch will lacquer, enamel, and wax you and turn your mind inside out like a monarch butterfly macerated in emulsion.’ — Vi Khi Nao

‘A wise, unsettling, and multifaceted masterpiece, MONARCH succeeds on all levels — as a portrait of an endearingly dysfunctional family, as a shadow history of Y2K and the hidden power structure underlying and undermining contemporary life, and as a profound exploration of the extremely dicey prospect of being a self in a body in the world. Unless you’re hiding in an underground city or frozen in a kryokammer in the desert, you’ll want to run out and get this one right away!’ — David Leo Rice

‘This book is really quite sinister, and I mean that in the Latin sense–MONARCH takes the left-hand path through a chilling (and, if you’re honest with yourself, quite real) landscape as Jessica, a decommissioned MK Ultra-esque beauty queen traces back to her origins as such. Along the way, she has to tell the true from the false, which can be difficult when you have a closet full of alters and a lot of gruesome off-label memories.

‘Underneath it all is a question you can probably relate to even if you aren’t the progeny of a cryogenically preserved mother and a father who lectures on Boredom Studies: How do we know which of our reactions belong to us? How can we tell apart the conditioned self from the one we actually live with, especially when we’ve been trauma-trained into not looking too closely at certain facts? What happens when our frozen selves start to thaw?

‘If you’ve always been suspicious of the institutions of childhood, beauty, and sentimentality, this book is for you. If you crave a frosty narrative voice with the whip and torque of a bitchy gymnast, this book is for you. It will make you smarter. And it will also upset your schema for the world–but you’ll be glad, I promise.’ — Sarah Elaine Smith

 

CANDICE WUEHLE SITE
Candice Wuehle @ Twitter
Candice Wuehle @ Instagram
12 or 20 questions with Candice Wuehle
Buy ‘Monarch’

 

Candice Wuehle Monarch
Soft Skull Press

‘After waking up with a strange taste in her mouth and mysterious bruises, former child pageant star Jessica Clink unwittingly begins an investigation into a nefarious deep state underworld. Equipped with the eccentric education of her father, Dr. Clink (a professor of Boredom Studies and the founder of an elite study group known as the Devil’s Workshop), Jessica uncovers a disquieting connection between her former life as a beauty queen and an offshoot of Project MKUltra known as MONARCH.

‘As Jessica moves closer to the truth, she begins to suspect the involvement of everyone around her, including her own mother, Grethe (a Norwegian pageant queen turned occult American wellness guru for suburban housewives). With the help of Christine (her black-lipsticked riot grrrl babysitter and confidante), Jessica sets out to take down Project MONARCH. More importantly, she must discover if her first love, fellow teen queen Veronica Marshall, was genuine or yet another deep state plant.

‘Merging iconic true crime stories of the ’90s (Lorena Bobbitt, Nicole Brown Simpson, and JonBenét Ramsey) with theories of human consciousness, folklore, and a perennial cultural fixation with dead girls, MONARCH questions the shadow sides of self-concept: Who are you if you don’t know yourself?’ — Soft Skull

Excerpt

Adulthood, in my mind, wasn’t an age so much as a resume of achievements. Christine had some vital accomplishments: she had a boyfriend, she had ex-boyfriends, she had been to Europe, she wore a huge black cross studded with amethysts and skulls around her neck,
she lived in a studio apartment, she knew the name of the homeless man who sat in front of the Younkers department store downtown, and she had a job. This final detail was the highest expression of maturity. Christine was no longer a student. Her transactions resulted, unlike mine, in currency she converted to black lipstick, healing crystals, whatever.
—-Christine powdered her skin corpse-white, dyed her hair black as a wig, and made me her amanuensis for seances and other communications. I suspect we didn’t need the Unsolved Mysteries music and lights when Christine visited simply because her presence rendered
that particular mise-en-sc ne anachronistic. A ghost in the machine.
—-No, I’m kidding, of course: Dr. Clink’s students appeared on the first day of the semester with a digital understanding of this term; they thought it meant some unexplainable outside force had infiltrated and disrupted the institution. But soon they knew the phrase’s actual
meaning. The ghost in the machine is instead what animates the system. I mention this because Christine often illustrated this point to me: just as Descartes argued the spirit exists on an entirely separate plane than the body, so Christine existed on an entirely separate plane than the haunted house. Lace and lasers, united only by their liminality.
—-It’s pedestrian to point out that angels and ghosts are both messengers from another world, so I am grateful Christine taught me that there are earthly messengers as well.
—-“In the East,” she explained, “you don’t have to die to be a saint.” She spread a stack of tabloids and fashion magazines across my parent’s dining room table. “In the West, we call our saints ‘celebrities’ or ‘politicians.’”
—-She looked me straight in the eye. “We call them stars.” She removed a black marker and a pair of craft scissors from her backpack.
—-“But that’s all shit, Jessica. There’s no such thing as saints, just people who have something you don’t.”
—-We defaced the magazines: the bare abdomens were removed, the smiles were blacked out and replaced with fangs, headlines were erasured and the cosmos subverted. It was an origin story.
—-A photo of Lorena Bobbitt and her husband at their wedding was published in one of the magazines. He wore a navy military uniform; she bloomed out of a wedding dress of antebellum proportions.
—-Christine took the tip of a scissor to John Wayne Bobbitt’s face and, like a Christmas wrapper at a fancy department store, scraped the blade across the paper until it curled. She drew an ornate, oval frame around Lorena’s face so she looked a little like the ivory silhouette on a cameo brooch. Christine was an artist. She told me she shellacked the defaced magazines onto canvas and sold them to galleries.
—-A few years ago, I tried to look up some of Christine’s art on the Internet, but there was no record of her at all. It now occurs to me she could have been lying about the whole thing. But my parents trusted her to the point that in 1999 she was the one Dr. Clink called to see if she knew of any employer who might take me.
—-Christine and Dr. Clink had developed a sort of lopsided friendship by then. She said she and my father probably had known each other in another life.
—-“You mean like Buffy and Donald Sutherland?”
—-“Um,” Christine hesitated, “yeah, sort of like Buffy.”
—-“How did you know each other? Which century?”
—-She considered. “Sometime before Christ. I was probably an
oracle.”
—-This was an impressive answer.
—-Really, though, I think Christine won Dr. Clink’s favor by simply asking a lot of questions about his work. If her initial presence in our home had been as my babysitter and my mother’s confidant, she secured her place by becoming my father’s spectator. The avenue that led to my father’s heart was much brighter, straighter, and more boring than I had understood it to be as a child. He really just liked to talk about himself, and Christine listened. She even did her homework and showed up ready to brief him on pop culture that might pique his interest— Lorena Bobbitt, for example.
—-I stood in the hall outside my father’s office door in 1999 and listened to him tell all about how pathetic I had turned out to be: lethargic, aimless, bored. I doubt these qualities troubled Christine. As his coup de gr ce, he told her about the tanning beds.
—-(Did you know that Victorian socialites used to coat their skin in opium before bed and wash it off in the morning with ammonia to keep themselves translucent as a cadaver? Christine told me that.)
—-This was how I got a job managing the counter and working the darkroom at University Photography & Art Supply. Later, the conversation shifted to Christine and Dr. Clink’s favorite mutual topic: the most famous defense of a crime passionnel in legal history. Information obtained through eavesdropping is not admissible in most courts. For this reason, I won’t repeat what Dr. Clink relayed to Christine.
—-You are here to make a judgment.
—-My hope is that after you hear what I’ve done, you won’t forgive it. My hope is you’ll follow suit, with an officer at the elbow. For old times’ sake—it’s what Christine would do.

Extras

Candice Wuehle: The Continental Review

Demiurge by Candice Wuehle

 

 

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‘I feel like I have a deeply intimate understanding of my mortality (maybe it could be called a thanatopic intimacy) when it comes to our ailing, carved up planet. Lodged in the present, I feel like a Decadent in the same way some artists think of themselves as avant-garde. Not in the historical sense obviously. The ‘avant-garde’ is not necessarily a historically fixed phenomenon and I believe the same is true of Decadence. Ideologically, the Decadence of those arsenic-yellow 1890s feels reminiscent of the Graveyard Poets of the eighteenth century. I feel like all of these things – a Decadent, a Graveyard Poet, etc.

‘And what about the Gothic?

‘For instance, is Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray a Decadent novel or a Gothic novel? The distinction doesn’t really mater to me and I appreciate that the lines get blurred. I believe the Gothic is an ancestor of Decadence. Either way, excess lives on. Undead. Zombie-like.

‘I appreciate, most of all, that Decadence was not planned or born out of an institution. It came without instructions or a formal rubric. It was something viral, contagious.

‘You just wake up one day and suddenly – like it or not – you’re wearing a Mask.’ — Paul Cunningham

 

PAUL CUNNINGHAM SITE
Paul Cunningham @ Twitter
We are Decadent Again by Paul Cunningham
Paul Cunningham @ instagram
Buy ‘Fall Garment’

 

Paul Cunningham Fall Garment
Schism Press

‘Stitched together from a kaleidoscope of references/strands that are effervescent, baroque, Jurassic, bedazzled, and harrowing, Paul Cunningham’s Fall Garment is like the avant-garde runway fashions from Thom Browne (one of the book’s many inspirations), or like the beguiling pieces by the late great Alexander McQueen. It shows you something you never dreamed of before. And you don’t understand why you’re crying, but you are.’ — Kate Durbin

‘Fall Garment‘s linguistic decadence is undercut by grit, pollution, a leaning toward “the number of times you / desired pitch-black” when beauty’s resources are used up. In reading Cunningham’s singular voice, I’m seduced by a vatic tailor who cuts bolts from the cloth of queer experience, bedazzles them with glass to make them one-of-a-kind (i.e., not susceptible to capitalist greed), and gifts them to those he sees himself in. “A queer tucked in by flowers,” he sings to us about why the earth is sore. His luxuriation in language is a palliative to existential devastation.’ — Justin Wymer

Excerpts

lace georgette corset sob
slashed shoulder so elegant

last chance for handling money
in public, in concert optic bones grip

red carpet gowns surging amber
no placid meadow only scarred lips

black lace rips
as your selvage announces

flax flowers of the optic nerve,
a sliced chiffon eternity

*

Wearing golden plastic bodices, the models pissed over mirrors,
their golden puddle-faces gathered hungry butterflies

a butterfly hungry for our salty piss
a watercolor bleed

sodium is a matter of
life or death

sodium chlorate is an oxidizer
in the manufacture of dyes and explosives

the butterflies are but momentary blottings
piss explodes whoever the reflected face

when male butterflies “puddle”
it ensures reproductive success

in this story rainbows come
from the salt of the earth

*

The projector-sound of leather
always motorcycles my ears

While superb fragrance pours
on this leather night

On the runway a flexing penis
pumps a piss clatter of rain

Or was that the hot flashbulbs
in the exhausted meadow?

Anyway, winter will soon cover
this dead leafy aroma

But will it be able to mask
the scent of blood?

*

even a broken camera is not harmless
it harnesses the dark conduction of ghosts

the best doctors say stuff doctors say
and the list goes on and on

uneven ataxia
gynecomastia

a boy runs away from home
bruised and wandering satellite

into the clatter
of night

mother goes back-and-forth
maybe it was lavender

after surgery, you are asked
to pose for a photograph

knowing your insurance
will never cover

the number of times you
desired pitch-black

Extras

FALL GARMENT Official Trailer

FALL GARMENT Official Trailer #2

 

 

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‘In McCormack’s novels, both salvation and terror come at the hands of fiendish couturiers, where a ghoulish Nudie Cohn or a devilish Martin Margiela conjure up clothes that variously infect and kill their wearers, albeit after illuminating those lives first. His journalism is less extreme but still gravitates towards darker corners: Vera West, dresser of Hollywood’s early horror movies, and her untimely death; or perfume’s ‘animalistic scents, the basest base notes’. Though not chronological, Judy Blame’s Obituary begins with McCormack’s youth in Peterborough, ‘a cruel place’ that he fled ‘before finishing high school’. Yet, he says, he couldn’t stop writing about it. Like many authors, he has frequent touchstones, but these might be hauntings: after the show-cum-funeral that Jean-Paul Gaultier stages for his final couture presentation in 2020, McCormack asks: ‘Do styles ever die, or do they come back undead and undeader?’

‘McCormack is able to take fashion’s familiar figures down unexpected avenues or bring seemingly disparate ideas into fashion’s sphere. For McCormack and those he speaks to, fashion is deeply magnetic: he suggests of Acker, ‘the most spectacularly clad writer [he]’d ever seen’, who ‘created herself at least partly through clothing’, that her garments would even be able to summon her ghost. The force of the attraction is carried through sentences that feel like declarations of love. In its incessant desire, self-invention and self-interrogation – as well as its queerness and interest in transgression – McCormack’s writing has echoes of New Narrative: Writers Who Love Too Much, as the title of Bellamy and Kevin Killian’s 2017 anthology on the movement labelled them. It is all consuming: ‘What does it mean to have a favourite designer?’ he asks. ‘For me, it meant total devotion: I longed to disappear into Margiela’s clothes, to turn into a whim of his – to be blanked by a blank.’ …

‘Though he turns to fashion, apt as it is for such transformation, it is not, he stresses, there to save you. McCormack’s evocation of ‘moiré mémoires’ seems less a reference to the liquid shine of that luxury fabric than to how it is made: soft fibres crushed under immense rollers, spat out the other side, indelibly marked. Such is the fate of those who love fashion. Meanwhile, the medium itself thrives: ‘death is a form of fashion’ he ends the book. ‘It’s the last word.’’ — Sophie Tolhurst, Frieze

 

Derek McCormack @ Twitter
Derek McCormack by Jennifer Krasinski
DEREK MCCORMACK SPEAKS IN COMPLETE PARAGRAPHS
‘THE GAY FLOU’, by Derek McCormack
Buy ‘Judy Blame’s Obituary’

 

Derek McCormack Judy Blame’s Obituary: Writings on Fashion and Death
Pilot Press

‘Judy Blame’s Obituary contains twenty years’ worth of reminiscences, reviews of fashion shows and books, interviews with writers about fashion, and interviews with fashion designers about writing. He talks to Nicolas Ghesquière about perfume, and to Edmund White about which perfume he wore as a young fag in New York City. He inspects the clothes that Kathy Acker left behind when she died, and he summons the spirit of Margiela in a literary seance. He traces the history of sequins, then recounts the cursed story of Vera West, the costume designer who dressed the Bride of Frankenstein. These pieces were all previously published, some in Artforum, some in The Believer, and some in underground publications like Werewolf Express—what binds them together is a sense that though fashion victimizes us, this victimization is sometimes a sort of salvation.’ — Pilot Press

Excerpt

The Shit Necklace

SHIT.

Judy Blame is dead.

Blame was the best jeweler of the punk era.

Some of his jewelry was shit.

There’s a photo I love: Blame in a Blame, a necklace made of shit, a bib necklace featuring fake turds cascading down his chest.

This is what fashion calls a statement piece. What was the statement? That fashion is shit? That shit is fashion?

Who would say such a thing?

Le Shit?

The Shit?

What was that necklace called?

Fake shit is funny. It doesn’t look like shit. It looks like something that’s trying to look like shit.

Judy Blame’s necklace wasn’t jewelry. It was something that looked like joke jewelry. A fuck you to fakeness. A fuck you from fakeness.

Wasn’t that what punk was?

Whatever Judy Blame did—he made jewelry, yes, but he also styled shoots, singers, and fashion shows—was magic to me.

I’ve been a fan forever, since finding his work in the magazines that I memorized as a teenager: The Face, i-D, Blitz.

He was a punk, which is what I wanted to be. He was a jeweler, which I wanted to be.

He was a faggot.

I am a faggot too, though I think he was better at it.

I wanted to be his kind of punk, but had to settle for writing. I think of words as brooches pinned to paper. I think of sentences as shit necklaces.

There are fourteen turds in this sentence.

So this story’s for Judy.

In 1977, the year of the Silver Jubilee, the year the Sex Pistols got busted playing on a boat on the Thames, he was seventeen and squatting in London.

He wore the clothes that punks wore: He went down to Seditionaries and bought bondage pants.

He wore the jewelry that punks wore: safety pins, zippers, badges. He stuck them to his clothes. He stuck them to his body. He wrapped a zipper around his head. It made him look like he’d had a new brain put in.

Like Vivienne Westwood was his surgeon.

Punk created Judy Blame. He created punk, too.

He took its tropes and twisted them, then twisted them some more.

He screen-printed safety pins onto badges. He bound badges in tartan, and then speared them with safety pins.

He mudlarked.

It sounds scatological. It means he rummaged for treasures in riverbanks, especially the banks of the Thames. The treasures—bones, bottle caps, broken bits of crockery—he transformed into finery: bijoux de la boue.

Toys, charms, pinchbeck chains: He collected all sorts of crap. He combined it in beautiful objets that he wore when he went clubbing, or to tea. It didn’t matter what it was—a newspaper headdress, or cutlery tucked into a hatband, or a cap so encrusted with buttons and beads that it looks like memoryware—he looked brilliant, like nothing before him.

He looked like Judy Blame.

He made jewelry for himself to wear. He made it for his friends to wear. Sometimes he sold some.

In the mid-1980s, he co-founded House of Beauty and Culture alongside designer Christopher Nemeth and shoemaker John Moore and more.

It was a cult store: not easy to find, not easy to find open.

The people who went paid mind to what was in it.

Jean-Paul Gaultier came, as did his assistant, Martin Margiela.

Blame’s salvaged style—a brooch might be a high heel with a pin glued to it—would come to be called Deconstruction when Margiela developed it in his own classic collections.

With time, the whole fashion world would come calling on Blame. In 2005, Rei Kawakubo commissioned jewelry for the boys in Comme des Garçons’s Homme Plus collection; he came up with brooches of gold chain and fluorescent pink plastic soldiers. In the following decade came collaborations with Kim Jones at Louis Vuitton, Marc Jacobs, Paco Rabanne.

I don’t know why none of those designers did an edition of the shit necklace.

A few years ago, doctors discovered cancer in me. I had surgeries. I had therapies. I spent a lot of time in bed, and a lot of time shitting.

I did both at the same time sometimes.

Instagram was a wonderful waste of time. I followed Judy. He posted pictures of his work, pictures of his world, pictures that annoyed or amused him.

I posted a picture of him in his shit necklace. He liked it.

After my cancer, the necklace seemed—well, not serious, but more serious.

It was still funny, but also fearsome; still sickening, but also sickly.

The turds are mostly the same shape: swirly. They’re all different consistencies and colors—a brown, a yellow-brown, an orange-brown—that shit shouldn’t necessarily be.

The necklace is a symptom of something.

When I heard that Blame had died of cancer-related causes, another of his masterworks came to mind.

It’s a necklace made from chain, a set of brass knuckles, and a pair of plastic skeleton claws that seem to be grabbing at a cigarette that dangles between them.

Who turns a burning fag into a piece of a parure?

Jewelry is anything—this was part of his proposition. The other part was this: Everything is jewelry.

What does this mean?

It means the cigarette he smoked was jewelry; his lips wore it. The cigarette smoke was jewelry; his lungs wore it. The cancer was jewelry; his body wore it.

Is it too much to say that cancer’s something you wear?

I’ll say this: It wears you out.

Extras

William E. Jones and Derek McCormack in conversation

Dodie Bellamy & Derek McCormack (November 22, 2021)

 

 

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‘My father, in an ill-informed attempt to enforce heterosexuality, would show me music videos. Starting around when I was fourteen, we would sit together in silence and watch VH1. Mostly R&B and a little hip-hop. Suggestive videos featuring scantily clad dancers and a firm narrative of male-female desire.

‘He was, like most Nigerians, staunchly conservative. He believed in corporal punishment. His only concessions to middle-class American expectations were to apply force infrequently and to use an open hand in lieu of a switch.

‘My father, as he sipped glasses of brandy, one after another, killing the bottle slowly with modest pours so my mother and I wouldn’t notice, would postulate on the taxonomy of the faggot. Never the homosexual, mind you. Faggot.

‘To him, it was a result of poor breeding and excess masculine libido while isolated from women. That’s why priests fucked young boys, the pedophile being the cousin of the faggot. The faggot, and the lady faggot as well, represented perversion and rape, predators in gender-inappropriate clothing. They were the apotheosis of American decadence, and he was very proud that he wasn’t raising one.

‘It is difficult to pin down exactly what about homosexuality my father disapproved of. On some level it was clear that he found the act of gay sex revolting, but it’s unclear if he found the acts themselves or the actors more offensive. My father is a meticulous groomer who does not own a pair of blue jeans.’ — Alexandrine Ogundimu

 

alexandrine ogundimu site
Alexandrine Ogundimu @ Twitter
‘Wound’, by Alexandrine Ogundimu
Buy ‘Agitation’
Alexandrine Ogundimu @ goodreads

 

Alexandrine Ogundimu Agitation
Amphetamine Sulphate

“The reality of it was this: He had until the end of the week, the first of February, this Thursday which he could plainly see from today, being Sunday, to get the money together to pay overdue rent and not be evicted. This was money he didn’t have, because he had just enough to get some takeout and booze, but not enough to pay rent in the darkly booming city of Bloomington, Indiana.”

Excerpt

Extras

GLAMORAMA: A REVIEW

EMOJI FIDGET SPINNER

 

 

________________

‘Quilted fog in the valley makes less obsequious the remote road to peonage cluttered with boulders and gates perhaps overzealous in their multiplicity.

‘This is not to dismiss as docile the lifted pickups careening through the trenches, but instead to deduce that the big house is continuously the big house and to damn what charity arrives from it in a dream of blaze.

‘As an extension, it is still an economy, and to declaim otherwise is despotism lined with fat cash rolls sprayed with diesel, glutted on noisome delusions that also ripple through the fiberoptics of board rooms, as if a more nuanced view.

‘The mirror does not falter, as made explicit by the burgeoning parking lots of budget hotels, getting lit as fuck drinking the sick-hued hot tub water mixed with bourbon, the dumb strumming ricocheting deep towards dawn.

‘Bald eagles’ calls are not the long and splendid tones throated by red-tailed hawks, but pukey coughs evincing harsh malaise amidst the slack logic of perpetual soaring.’ — Ted Rees

 

TED REES SITE
Ted Rees @ instagram
Ted Rees @ goodreads
Ted Rees on Steve Abbott
Buy ‘Dog Day Economy’

 

Ted Rees Dog Day Economy
Roof Books

‘Vocabularies of decaying presence and economic despair tumble together in Ted Rees’s DOG DAY ECONOMY, enacting conflicts of late capitalism where the body is squandered in endless ramshackle systems of flow. This is exacting, spontaneous poetry of intimacy and distance, of longshots and dubious bodily substances. I am reminded of Saint-John Perse’s ANABASE, though of course Rees’s grandeur comes from the other end of the telescope: ‘Like we were riding through desert:/ polite way to say/we were seeing nought but mayhem/in each other’s viscera.’ The image can go anywhere, but where is it going? Collaging and repurposing gives these poems the external feeling of a sublimely blathering oracle, and by that I mean they hide and reveal fascinating predictions of our doom.’ — Robert Glück

Excerpt

from Economy, a Reshaped Spit

Guns have slipped back into holsters
and diplomats behind their desks,
leather fingers along leather
joy chamber scorching dangit,
it was God or a transformer exploding
just the initial stage peeking around corners
smiling Goofy voice repeated yelling
a single pop from below
pallets greasy with pheromones
reliable sources mossy or flexing
in sunlight VANDAL COWARD
INFORM RAT!

This mason jar of liquid LSD
waylaid in the hills
is one of the few slinks toward measure
of the hearts yet a fool scrapples
the whole deal. It’s this damn country.
Left at first fork, drag your peepers
ubiquitous as this cresting wind
FIVE VERBAL ASSAULTS
AGAINST FAMILY & FRIENDS
we are ever reliant on
the nocturnal luminosity of information
and its failures, yea the shimmy
of the clutch forever blowing abject
bubbles stored as thoughts at cellar rear.

*

To the ebb it’s wild
theses backstroke through rummy
of consumer choice,
winter fashion execution
grey referent making me wet
out the train window is the flair and mistake
of the season on the nod
bony lady stole his short
stuck it in toothless mouth
Your apprehension draws an image
beati qui lugent et cetera
it is a sensing toward sangfroid
and flow of loanwords,
cruel wind at our dumpers.

*

Balloons fell, glasses clinked,
street protests levelled a city
bang head for reverie or present
a tempting set of stropped
banter relationals imitative
of Coromandel screens,
shall I finger my scars more?
Do you hear the faucet of meaning?
The all-region DVD player quit its spin
and the monitor blued, we bounced.

*

Smirk, slurping justice
formless interior
the party that has been in the backyard the whole time
secret recipes for tatertot hotdish
blood Satan Satan not otherwise on ice.
You can’t beg for better words
thawing, disintegrating underfoot
yon silence of drawing.
What happened to plumbago
but sheen snapped
for materials reach outward
first: we drop buttonwood twigs
off one side of the bridge,
a shore hence recollection:
a gasp or serrefine
lead-up to yet more dismal bog.

Extras

Ted Rees Reading

Whenever We Feel Like It: Ted Rees

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. Two things: If you’re reading this in Paris, Zac Farley and I will be hosting a screening of PERMANENT GREEN LIGHT on this coming Saturday at 3 pm as the opening event of the Brigade Rouge, Poésie Noire Festival. Details here. If you’re reading this in London or thereabouts, Gisele Vienne’s and my (and KTL’s and Fujiko Nakaya’s) 2010 theater work THIS IS HOW YOU WILL DISAPPEAR is being performed on March 18 and 19 at Sadler Wells, and here’s where you can get more info and tickets. I think it’s one of our best works, and you might want to check it out. And, btw, I have no idea why the comments are all italicised today. I’ll try to see what’s going on. ** David, Hi. Oh, your presence here was a stint? Okay, well, it was a pleasure, and I hope everything goes really well with you, and, of course, please return anytime the mood strikes if it ever does. Btw, thanks for hooking me up with your porn work. Hot! xo. ** Maria, Isabella, Camila, Malaria, Gabriela, Snake! You’re welcome re: the balls, pal(s). ** Dominik, Hi!!!! Ah, thanks for solving that mystery. Huh. I don’t think I’ll ever get used to unrefrigerated milk. I don’t even like or drink milk. But I bought some Kraft Macaroni & Cheese at that American store, and it requires a bit of milk. I guess I can put the milk in the refrigerator for a spell before I pour it. Yeah, easy, never mind. I kind of tried to urge Elias into reforming Vår that time Zac and I hung out with him, but he was really grumpy about the idea, so I fear it’s a no-go. Ha ha, thank your love for me vis-a-vis his kind gift and exquisite taste! Love surgically removing Russell Brand’s vocal cords and making him have to mime anything he wants to say, G. ** David Ehrenstein, Little Richard for the win! ** _Black_Acrylic, I’ve heard of Buster Gonad. I should’ve put him in the post. It probably goes without saying that your new Play Therapy made the heels of my feet and my booty grow wings. Thank you, sonic maestro! Urgh, all the luck to your Leeds fellas. ** Ry Ry Rye / ANUSGRAZE, Hi. I like PJ Harvey, of course, like any solid-brained person must. Male Defence Facial: yeah, what a title. It sounds exciting. I had some kind of intense facial massage thing with leaves and mud and stuff at a spa in Japan once, and I did feel feel like I would imagine a TikTok cutie pie influencer boy does for a couple of days afterwards. Do you like writing lyrics, or maybe I mean is it more pleasurable than painful? Good luck conquering wordage. ** Misanthrope, Beats me about the italics thing. This blog is in one of its going haywire phases, god knows why. I’m not a masochist, but I have no problem imagining the headspace of someone would be into that, or, well, any fetish. Except maybe the currently very popular shoes and socks worshipping thing. Although, no, I guess I can imagine that too. It’s probably just like me with home haunts but with a boner aspect. I hope your Sat. and Sun. involved a reasonable amount of sat and sun. ** Tosh Berman, I trust both of your eyes are open again now. Yeah, Charley’s a super genius. If you ever meet him or wind up across a diner table from him or whatever, I highly recommend getting him to talk about how he thinks about his work. ** Bill, Hi. The Borges story we read was ‘Three Versions of Judas’. It was pretty great. Chilly, eh? Did it end up being too chilly? And, if so, did you max out the indoors? ** Colin Herd, Hi, Colin. I really want to see the ‘Jackass’ film. I need to get on that. I looked up and watched a few Muay Thai videos on YouTube, and, yeah, very interesting. The hard-fought precision is beautiful. Thank you for intro’ing me to it. Yes, Paris awaits! Maybe you could do a reading here? There are a couple of good series that seem to bring English language  poets over here regularly. There’s a big L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E festival thing coming up, for instance, and Bernstein and Andrews and all those dudes will be here for it. Later gator. ** Brandon, Hi, Brandon! I’m so happy you like ‘Your Blues’. That might be my all-time favorite album, if push came to shove. Not having more than enough cigarettes on hand to get me through the next 24 hours is one of my biggest panic attack instigators, so I hear you. Yeah, the big imminent thing for me is a Zoom with the producer of Zac’s and my new film where I hope we’ll hear that we have the money to make our film or are at least very close. What excitement is the beginning of your week holding out or already delivering? ** Conrad, Hi! Damn, this is the third time I’ve missed a Yves Tumor show in Paris. Fuck. Oh, I member that PGL event with the translators. You were there? That was goofy. Your Sonic Protest picks are pretty much exactly the same as mine. Huh. So I’ll see you! I haven’t read Antoine Volodin, but I’ve intended to. You recommend ‘Radiant Terminus’? I’ve been curious about his book ‘Minor Angels’. Anyway, I’ll pick up something by him. Thanks, pal! ** Corey Heiferman, That’s very true. I didn’t know that rubbing the Wall Street bull’s balls was thing, but of course it is. My weekend was full of odd bits of work and otherwise uneventful, but fine. That bookstore I went to the other week was cool. Tiny place, not a lot of stock, but nice as a kind of bastion of the transgressive, run by these adorable young goth guys. Congrats on the ensconcement in your new pad. And about the great underground cinema. Our great underground cinema, Le Clef, got raided by the police — it was a squat — last week and shut down, and we’re in mourning at the moment. ** Steve Erickson, We’re pretty spring-y here too. During the day anyway. I remember that Casio. A friend used to have one and made some cool, fun music using it. Curious to hear what you squeeze out of its database. I have no interest in the Kanye doc. He just makes me sort of nauseous. I hope ‘White Epilepsy’ is a help. ** Brian, Hey, Brian. Oh, okay, gotcha, about the script. That’s cool. I guess you’ll need to see the script before you land on an approach. I watched the first section of ‘Mishima’ and then I got interrupted by a long phone call, so I’ll watch the rest in the next day or so. I like it a lot so far. Where does your director live that fills you with such dread? Hopefully it’ll end up being a tolerable bore of a trip. This week … dinner tonight with a Parisian gallerist who showed some of my GIF works in his gallery, big meeting with the producer of Zac’s and my new film with hopefully great funding news, see some friends, see some films, finish the faux-rewrite of our script for the funding based on script revision thing, and like that there. How did your week start? You feeling more ready and raring to go now, I hope? ** Okay. Up above are five books I loved of late that I am placing before you with the thought that you might be interested in reading them. See you tomorrow.