* (restored)

____________
Roman Signer Room with Christ­mas Tree (2010)
A dec­o­rated tree, which runs on an engine, cre­at­ing its own orna­ments. It then spins at high speed causing the ornaments to fly away and destroy the walls.

 

_______________
Olaf Breuning Snow Drawing (2014)

 

______________

 

_____________
Charles Ray Shoe Tie (2012)

 

_______________
Great Sky Gifts Chirpee Singing Christmas Ornament (1976)
This vintage Christmas decoration plays a repeating chirping bird sound. Want to buy this?

 

_______________
Cameron Jamie & The Melvins Kranky Klaus (2003)
In the snowbound villages of central Austria on 6 December, villagers congregate in homes to await a visit by a benign St Nicholas bearing seasonal gifts. They are also waiting for the Krampus, strange mythical beasts with shaggy coats and serious attitude. As St Nicholas rewards the good, so the Krampus punish the bad. Kranky Klaus tracks a herd of Krampus as they work their way through the village mauling and menacing to the very limits of acceptable intimidation.

Watch it here

 

______________
Katie Paterson History of Darkness (2010-ongoing)
History of Darkness is an infinite slide archive; a life-long project, it will eventually contain hundreds upon thousands of images of darkness from different times/places in the history of the Universe, spanning billions of years. Each image handwritten with its distance from earth in light years, and arranged from one to infinity.

 

____________
Various Santa Claus (20??)

 

_____________
Keegan McHargue Boot (2010)

 

_____________
Jeffrey Mandel Elves (1989)
There’s ONE elf! Not only that, but they didn’t use a kid or dwarf wearing a suit, they go and make top and bottom halves. You would think it was done that way so the elf could have all sorts of neat facial expressions, but it can barely move. Kirsten, Amy, and Brooke have this weird ceremony in the woods and bring the elf back to life. Soon Santa’s little killer is knocking off bit part actors, including a department store Santa. Hot on the heels of that death toll are the Nazis though, grandfather’s old friends know the elf was resurrected and want to help it mate with Kirsten. Nazis created the elf, and a perfect virgin will give birth to Aryans after it lays her. Mike takes over as the department store Santa and has something for Kirsten. The girls have a sleepover in the department store where Kirsten works. Mike shows up, the Nazis show up, and of course the elf shows up. After that Mike rushes around learning about the Nazis’ secret elf program to save Kirsten.

 

______________
Gary Hume Back of a Snowman (2002)
The 10-foot-tall, half-ton, faceless snowman stands outdoors. Hume has described the snowman as “the perfect sculpture, viewable from all sides, immaculate from all angles.”

 

_____________
Ryoji Ikeda Spectra (2014)

 

_______________
Alan Sailer War on Christmas (2012)
First, you may have noticed I like color, maybe a little too much. The gelatin gives me another color to play with. Second, the gelatin acts as a flexible medium to absorb energy from the pellet and transmit it to the item (in this case Christmas bulbs). The result is a pattern as the bulb breaks into little pieces.

 

______________
Gregory Markopoulos Christmas USA (1949)
Christmas U.S.A is not a primarily erotic film, containing no nudity or even nods to the act of gay sex. Instead, the film is a narrative about the gay psyche, surviving, enduring and eventually defeating oppression by the America so lovingly elevated in Post War America. Markopoulo’s looks upon the familial unit with revulsion and fear. Mother is haggard, kid sister is suspicious, even Father with his newspaper looks to his shirtless son in fear. The boy of our narrative wanders a Kafka-esque homestead of conservatism, kept propped up by mothers domesticity and fathers glowering presence. His mere presence, glowing shirtless like a ivory Greek statue, makes the dark rooms glow with eerie brightness, as he rests his head between his masculine arms. He cannot be contained, a ceremony occurs beneath a bridge, perhaps a known cruising spot in our humble town, a clean cut boy holds a candle stick, walking towards another boy, his arms spread like Saint Sebastian, bowing to him.

 

___________
Ulver Christmas (2005)
We revelled in the freedom of not having to play by anyone’s rules, our own included. With the EPs and all the stuff we did before, we had rules. The Silence EPs had rules because they were all based on mishaps. That’s the whole concept of glitch music. It has to be based on sounds that aren’t intended, in a sense. We also had rules laid out for the soundtracks, naturally, so Blood Inside got a little out of control. We just went all over the whole spectrum.

 

________________
John Baldessari Christmas (1986)
Acrylic on two black and white photographs. Overall: 37 x 20 1/4 in. (94 x 51.5 cm.)

 

______________
The critic Claudio Malberti defined painter Luigi Beneficent style as ‘Realismo Estremo’ or ‘Extreme Realism’. Benedicenti replaces the fish and meat that used to decorate the dining rooms of the leisure class with contemporary Italian patisserie, ice cream and classy drinks.

 

______________
Mike Kelley Toy Santa Claus (1993)
Color Photograph 9 1.4 x 6 inches 1993 Limited Edition of 100 *Stamped ‘MK 1993’ en Verso Provenance: Ikon Ltd. Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

 

______________
America’s Tallest Singing Christmas Tree (2015)
High School Choir Performs as 67 Foot ‘Singing Christmas Tree’

 

_______________
Richard Billingham Fishtank (1998, excerpt)
A high-rise council flat in the Midlands at Christmas. The father, the mother, the brother. Some animals. The father drinks a lot, the brother plays around a bit, the mother holds everything together. The older brother films them with his handycam – closely, slowly, intently, recording whatever is going on.

 

______________
Adam Parker Smith Pump (2011)

 

_______________
John Armleder Untitled, 1985-2014 (2014)
Location: Neuretstrasse, at the edge of the forest behind The Alpina Gstaad

 

______________
Karen Kilimnik Switzerland, the Pink Panther & Peter Sellers & Boris & Natasha in Siberia (1991)
stuffed animals, fondue pot, toe shoes, pine bow, artificial snow, candy bars, pine cone with glitter, paper lace doily, bell, two drawings, mylar, cellophane, reindeer, masking tape and decals

 

______________
Tokujin Yoshioka The Snow (2010)
The material is feather, which I believe is the lightest material of the present day. The snowscape created with the feather would be more like the memory of snow lying with people rather than the actual snow.

 

______________
Per-Ingvar Tomren & Magne Steinsvoll O’Hellige Jul! (2013)
Coming from a group of enthusiastic Norwegian amateurs, O’Hellige Jul takes place in a small town the days before Christmas. Norway’s horror scene is still in its infancy, which means that mainstream movies play safe and independent movies are the ones pushing the envelope. No horror movies with two, three or four million dollars budgets have tried to be innovative in Norway so far, and O’Hellige Jul therefore joins the ranks of movies that are produced on shoestring budgets but still manages to go beyond most of what’s been seen before (FYI, a Norwegian shoestring budget could be 5 or 15.000 dollars, not the 300.000 dollars Americans call low budget).

 

_______________
Polly Apfelbaum The Dwarves w/o Snow White (1992)
Apfelbaum paints with dyes on rectangles of crushed velvet that are then folded, showing the underlying layers of colors, and placed on cardboard boxes. The boxes function as pedestals for the painted velvet.

 

______________
Unknown Godzilla Christmas Tree (2011)
Photos surfaced online last year of this huge Godzilla Christmas Tree in the Aqua City Odaiba shopping mall in Japan. There aren’t really any other details about the holiday display.

 

_____________
Paul McCarthy TRANS gum (2006)
TRANS gum is an edible image of Santa Claus individually hand silk-screened onto an eight-by-ten inch piece of chewing gum. The image is one of a special series of drawings by Paul McCarthy made specifically for the cover of TRANS> 8. By transforming the traditionally sanctified icon of a happy Santa Claus into a demented, sexual image—as seen in his video performances Tokyo Santa (1996) and Santa Chocolate Shop (1997)—Paul McCarthy examines the distressed state of the human psyche. Often staged as an act of violence and a perversion of certain behavioral patterns, his performances always combine such devices as irony, exaggeration, and the grotesque. Translated for the first time onto a pink, sugary, odoriferous, oversized stick of bubble gum.

 

_______________
Pierre Huyghe L’Expédition Scintillante (2002)
“Like a lot of people in my generation, I’m interested in the notion of the departure point- in something that is a potential scenario rather than a plan- but that’s a process of suspension. Still, I like the format of the parable and, as I was saying, it’s really a haiku: it’s a very short way to express something, more to do with a poem than a novel.” — Pierre Huyghe

 

_____________
bd594 Christmas Jumper (1998)
A video was posted by YouTube user bd594 from Toronto, Canada, over the weekend. Not only does the knit from Goodwill feature a festive tartan, it is adorned with a tinsel Christmas tree and is attached to a working toy train set which has also been decorated with cheap LED lights.

 

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_____________
Various Xmas Gifts (20??)

 

______________
Merry Xmas From 3D Porn Star Vivian Extreme

 

_________________
William O’Brien Untitled, 2020
‘In 1817 The Society of the Separatists of Zoar, or Zoarites, arrived in Ohio. Together 200 separatists emigrated from Württemberg, in southwestern Germany, fleeing religious oppression from the dominate Lutheran church. They wanted to practice a simpler form of Christianity based on the writings of Jakob Böhme, a unique Lutheran Protestant theologian, philosopher, and mystic. Böhme’s concerns concentrated on sin, evil and redemption, however breaking with church was his questioning of the Fall of Man, contending a condition of reaching God, was for man to first pass through hell. Divine life being dependent on time spent with shame.’

 

_________________
Françoise Sullivan Danse dans la neige (1948)
Danse dans la neige was conceived as one of a cycle of 4 dances themed for the seasons. L’Été (now lost) was shot on 16mm film by Françoise’s mother while on holiday in July,1947. A spur of the moment invitation from Jean-Paul Riopelle in 1948 sparked the improvisational performance the next day of Danse dans la neige. Danced and directed by Sullivan, recorded on film by Riopelle and on camera by Maurice Perron, only the photographs survive.

 

_______________
Carlos Aires Last Christmas I Gave You My Heart (2010)
Engraved kitchen knives

 

_______________
Shimabuku Christmas in the Southern Hemisphere, 10 May 1994 (1994)
‘One day, I thought that if I became Santa Claus in the warm season, I had to feelthat I was in some southern hemisphere country that had Christmas in the warm season. It was spring, and I became Santa Claus in the vacant lot near the ocean, through which the train passed. I was the Santa Claus whom you could glimpse at from thetrain window, but could not look back and gaze at. The glimpse of me was the event that would linger in your mind, because of its momentary impression. I thought it would be wonderful if someone from Latin America or Australia wason the train, and, catching a glimpse of me as Santa Claus, recalled Christmas at home in the warm season. I picked up the garbage in the vacant lot. This Santa Claus in the spring held the bags that were blue and filled with discarded things. Sometimes, I think about Colombus. He tried to reach India, then he discovered America. Where can my “Christmas in the Southern Hemisphere” reach?’

 

_______________
Philippe Parreno For Eleven Months of the Year its an Artwork and in December it’s Christmas (October) (2008)

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** _Black_Acrylic, Yum! Everyone, The new episode of Ben ‘_Black_Acrylic’ Robinson’s rafters-endangering, Cosmic Disco, Electro, Coldwave, et. al.-compacted Play Therapy podcast is the perfect way to rev up your weekend, and it’s here. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. The only Clooney directed film I’ve seen is ‘Confessions of a Dangerous Mind’, and I thought it was awkward and a waste of a great Charlie Kaufman script, but that ages ago, so I’ll try his latest. ** Misanthrope, Will the wonders of the online worlds never cease? $300 a week supplemental unemployment would be great if you’re homeless. Oh, I don’t know, the fuckers in charge will do what they’re going to do, and complaining from the peanut gallery doesn’t make the slightest difference obviously. Yes, brothels were just like small hotels with really tacky interior design. ** James, Well, thank you, sir. May your book have a glorious birth all around. Oops, I thought maybe you were being avant-garde there. I’ll try to find and snip the dash-y things. Bon weekend! ** Sypha, Yes, I saw your blurb somewhere. Am I wrong in thinking that was your debut as a blurbist? ** Bzzt, Hi, Q! I saw the ASAP review but not the Boston one. I’ll go find it, thank you! There was a quite negative review of the book somewhere, I think in the Iowa Review, but it didn’t bother me. I thought it was interesting. I feel pretty emotionally detached from WRONG’s reviews and stuff. I feel like that’s all for Diarmuid. It is kind of nice when the reviewers like the book’s main character though, ha ha. Sorry about your meh. It’s kind of a generally meh time. Oh, man, I hate writing personal statements. I’ve gotten so I refuse to do that unless it’s absolutely necessary. The task of hyping myself makes me go blank. I have to do that for the funding part of Zac’s and my films, but at least it’s about two of us, so I can pretend we’re some kind of third person who resembles a conjoined us. Thank you for writing about me in your statement. I hope my name doesn’t jinx you. Fingers stranglingly crossed that the programs recognise the boon for them that you offer. Great about the new story! And good luck in the basement. And I’m happy your love is going so well. That’s a biggie. I don’t really have any holiday plans. Everyone I know here has gone away for the holidays to see their folks and stuff. So I think I’ll just enjoy the Xmas decorations while they’re up and maybe buy another Buche and maybe give myself a Switch. How are you Xmas-ing? Have a very solid if not even transcendent weekend.** Jack Skelley, Mr. Skelley! Merry Xmas to you, maestro of the written word and old pal! Let’s Skype or Zoom or something if you’re up for it. It would be awesome to catch up face to face. ** Damien Ark, Hi, D. A little bird told me your Zoom event went very well. I was asleep at the time. But I’ll go see if it’s archived. ** Bill, Hi. Yep. I went to two of them: The Mineshaft, which was what one would expect, and Sewers of Paris because it was situated in the dead center of the old hustling strip in Hollywood, and my first boyfriend Julian was a hustler, as I know I’ve mentioned frequently, and I hung out with him frequently while he hustled, and Sewers of Paris let the hustlers (and me) come in out of the cold when it was cold. It was a nasty dive. But warm. But very smelly. German cakes! Do I even know what that would look like? Do they do a German equivalent of le Buche? I’ll google. ** Brian O’Connell, Hi Brian! Something weirder always takes weird things’ places eventually, I think? Or maybe just hope. I know, I know, I almost literally beat myself up at not knowing French and being such a Francophile. It’s moronic, but I just can’t seem to get fluent. I keep having this fantasy that I’ve secretly learned French really well and just have a mental block, and that one day someone is going to ask me complicated question in French and I will spontaneously answer them in perfect French to my astonishment. Brownies and ‘Salo’ are a most curious combination for all kinds of reasons that I don’t need to explain to you. That should enliven things. Thanks about my weekend. I’ll endeavour to make it count, and I predict yours will end in some variation on triumph. Was I right? ** Okay. This weekend I’ve restored an old, formerly dead Xmas show for you guys just to try to help get you in the spirit in my blog’s possibly inimitable style. See you on Monday.

 

***

This DC’s post is dedicated to my friend Elizabeth ‘Eris’ Aldrich

 

***

James Nulick’s prose in The Moon Down to Earth is extraordinary, once harsh and tender, flaying and consoling, yet also enlivened by wit and erudition. The results are deeply revealing of the body’s incantatory rhythms, the somatic thought-forms. In this manner he delves with his reader to the limit of his characters’ souls.
—Jonathan Lethem

James Nulick is among the best living prose stylists. At the very least, he absolutely destroys every other small press author at writing those labyrinthine heartbreak sentences.
—Christopher Zeischegg, author of The Magician

 

***

A note from James
Of all the books I have written, The Moon Down to Earth is my favorite. I really enjoyed the characters, especially the kids. I hope you do, too. Love, James

 

***

Elizabeth

BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE ALWAYS GET WHAT THEY WANT

Beautiful people always get what they want. Thin people always get what they want. I am neither thin nor beautiful. My only advan¬tage is my sex, but even my sex is invisible, because when people see me, they only see fat, a fat woman. She is a fat woman. She is a disgusting woman. She is lazy and unattractive, and in the way. The words are always the same, and possess the same intent, to make me invisible. But I am here, with your children, in my small office with your children. I spend time alone with them, likely more time than you do. I listen to them, document their lies, their becoming. The older children, the eleven and twelve year olds, are sexual animals brutally navigating the outer perimeters of the adult world. I hear the cruel jokes, observe the obscene gestures. I watch them twitch in their seats, their bodies hard and muscular, their small breasts cupped by unseen hands, a projector in the dark briefly illuminat¬ing furtive movement.

***

I catalog their desires, their fears. Who hovers over them at night? Who touches this boy, whispers lies to that girl? I gently place my hands on either side of their scalp and split their heads open, like a melon, to see what is inside. I am trusted, a paid professional, I possess the correct pieces of paper, the documents that proclaim I belong, and yet still I walk through the world as if there were not another soul in it, as if I alone survived a great cataclysm. I am here, and because I am invisible, I am free to document its lies, its iniq¬uities. I do this with the carefully scribbled notebooks of the car¬tographer, the human heart a map I have underscored many times yet still do not understand. Those who claim to understand it are liars. I smooth my dress, tamp my collar, put on a human face, and open the door. You do not see me but I am here, with your children.

***

I was born thirty years too late. My time is not my time, and I do not belong here. Mother says I have a 1940s sensibility, and I agree. She should know, she was born during that time, when World War II was winding down. The future had been upended, yet the State prospered, and in that prosperous time, a great many people were born. Mother is one of those people. I arrived in the great hereaf¬ter, a time of cocaine and selfishness. I prefer dresses, hats, modest makeup, a complete covering of the body. Too many are willing to divulge the secrets of the body too quickly. There is no mystery left in the world, just show and tell. Those who show the most get the most stars, the most clicks, the most votes. Some even vote for themselves. What the star-gatherers don’t realize is one becomes very old very quickly when one is chasing emptiness. When I was a teacher, before I became a counselor, I preferred the darkness of a classroom in early summer, when May is in full bloom, when the children have just a few weeks left of classes, and the clock is sitting at 3:15. I prefer solitude, and quiet, and people who do not tell me things upon first meeting them. Mother and I enjoy cards, double solitaire, our packs north and south of each other, across the dining room table, or on nights when mother is restless, thirty-one, though I am not competitive or a gambler by nature. Mother and I also like game shows, and singing contests, where the star-gathering is light¬hearted and artificial, and everyone on screen knows their bound¬aries and respects them.

***

Some would say I am exceedingly plain. Others, ugly. It must be a terrible burden to be beautiful, to have others look at you with only one thing in mind, yet it is what I have always wanted. We always want what we cannot have, at least that is the general consensus. I don’t believe it, though. Mother says if we can visualize it, it can be ours. To be a slab of meat on a hook, to be massaged and brushed and waited on like the special cattle in Japan. Secretly this is what every woman wants, to be waited on, to be a princess in her room, surrounded by beautiful things. I have friends who exist outside my door, real friends, and they all say the same thing. He swept me off my feet. He was so handsome, and he told me I was his princess. I got married in a white dress on the beach… But must a woman define herself by a man? If a younger woman is alone, a woman in her late twenties or early thirties, she is suspect, yet when a man in his thirties or forties is alone, he is called a bachelor, or restless, or on the market. It all comes back to being a piece of meat on a hook, which is what we all want, if we are honest with ourselves.

***

I am not a Beth, or a Liz, or the dreaded Lisa. I am Elizabeth. My last name, Salas, is a palindrome. It has a slightly satanic look to it, don’t you agree? I am the same today as I was yesterday, alone. I have mother, but Mother never wanted me. She has told me this on several occasions, usually while we’re arguing over some ridiculous small nothing. You’re just like your father, Elizabeth. I don’t want to watch this program, change it. You are so stubborn, Elizabeth. I’d tell you just wait, just wait until you have children of your own, but of course you won’t, what man in his right mind would have you? What man would want you? Your father was an idiot, he wanted children but he couldn’t even keep a steady job. You’re just like him. You want the child but you have to find a man first, my dear. I told him I didn’t want children but he didn’t believe me, as if not want¬ing children was somehow an ungodly thing. What kind of wom¬an doesn’t want children? She must be the devil! Your father was a fieldworker, and every time I look at you, I see him. You’re both so big and stupid. He’s probably dead now. Mother! Too dumb to stay alive. It’s the truth dear, and the sooner you accept it the better off you’ll be.

***

I am a counselor. I counsel children. Certification K-12, though my certificate is Elementary K-8. I hold a Master’s in counseling, spe¬cifically an MEd, a Master of Arts in Education, School Counseling, though for brevity, and to save parents the embarrassment of won¬dering what an MEd is, the North Hill District has placed the words MA, NCC (National Certified Counselor) behind my name on my business cards. I have a nameplate inlaid with my name, gold etched in black, attached by adhesive to a solid block of white marble, the shape of it resembling an expensive, dusty Toblerone, which I pur¬chased from House of Trophies shortly after I earned my Master’s, as a reward to myself for having survived two years of sustained misery. The name on my nameplate is simplified – Elizabeth Salas, MA, NCC. Titles don’t impress me, having earned one. At most they say you’ve spent many years ignoring the people around you. People most interested in titles are often the people who don’t have one.

***

I am a roving counselor, traveling between five schools. It didn’t use to be like this, when I first became a counselor, one could survive on an educator’s salary. That is all gone now, so many educators have second jobs. I have a small office in my primary location. My home school is Greenwood Meadows, nicknamed Ghetto Meadows by the students (and privately, the staff) because it is in an undesirable part of town, on the Northwestern edge of Río Seco, in a Hispanic neighborhood, the green grass of the school yard bleeding onto the cement slab of the veranda, and beyond the six foot tall chain link, which reminds me of a prison yard, the small tract houses of North Hill. The grass is greenest in winter, though it is always summer in my mind. There are also blacks and working-class whites, which is to say poor whites, and there are carports with dusty cars on blocks, their wheels and tires long removed, the fingers of hubs poking the darkness, the undercarriage of the vehicle sticky with spider webs. I live here and feel safe here, in North Hill. I travel to satellite schools during the workweek, to counsel children. I always feel like an intruder at the satellite schools, using an office that isn’t mine, talking with administrative staff who nod at me as if I were not in the room, just a phantom in an oversized dress. The teachers are the worst. They treat professional staff, counselors, speech therapists, as if they are underlings to be spat upon. Oddly, paraprofessionals are treated with more respect than licensed counselors. I’d walk into the teacher’s lounge and the old women would clam up, speaking in tongues about such and such, who was the dumbest child, how awfully young and ignorant Miss _______ was, how many pallets of _______ they bought at Costco the previous evening. How quickly the memory fades. I used to be one of you. Now that I’ve earned an MA in counseling they want nothing to do with me, the old women as cliquish now as they were when they were in high school a hun¬dred years ago.

***

I began in the classroom as a teacher, grade five, taught in the class¬room for seven years, earned a Master’s degree in counseling while teaching, including nights and weekends, which meant I didn’t have the nights or weekends other teachers did. I attended a real universi¬ty, most of my counseling studies performed at a satellite extension of the university here in Río Seco, the university two hours north of the city. It was real work, which took time away from my life, no online diploma mill fakery. I have been an elementary school coun¬selor for eleven years, and here I am, forty-three years old, single, living with Mother, and never having once felt the touch of a man. When I was a teacher I didn’t like a single minute of it. The children are animals, cataloging and giving voice to every fault. You’re so fat, Ms. Salas. Your fingers are so fat, Ms. Salas. Why do you have so many freckles, Ms. Salas –

***

It is during the early teens when children truly begin learning how to lie, holding things back, and always for their own preservation. It comes with the first blood ruining an innocent pair of panties, the first ejaculation in the privacy of a bedroom, hovering over an im¬age on a phone, forgetting how to walk. A girl forgets how to walk and she turns dark, has boys on her mind, and never again will she trust another woman, including her own mother. These are skin¬ny girls, of course. Even tomboys eventually get away with murder once their breasts push through their shirts, loud as Jacaranda in spring. But a fat girl, an ugly girl, a girl with heavy ugly eyeglasses and a wardrobe from Goodwill, they will forever be invisible. And yet women are still evil toward other women. There is no distinctive class, no sense of communalism, not even a reading club. I walk through a school hallway on my way to my small grey office and it’s as if I’m not there. Children scatter, grouped in clans and lost in their cell phones, and adults look to an invisible point on the hori¬zon, their lips pressed tightly against the natural urge to say hello.

***

I have very few friends, and they are only acquaintances, if I am honest with myself. There is Jeffrey at my home school, a wisp of a man who teaches fifth grade, and sometimes we have lunch to¬gether. I watch him as he straightens his tie, his eyes lost on a boy’s behind. He has a partner, an anonymous something lacking any distinctive facial features. He has short hair, I remember that, and talks about Manhattan as if he’s been there, but I know he’s a liar from Minneapolis. Other than Minneapolis and Río Seco, I doubt he’s been anywhere. I’ve met him a few times, have passed a pleas¬ant evening with him, but we sit across the dinner table from each other and commit to nothing. I don’t want another queer in my life, I want a man.

***

Mr. Goldhagen leans across the table, his voice a whisper. He speaks so low he’s difficult to understand. I nod my head in agreement, though his words weave in and out. I once had a student come into the classroom while I was reviewing afternoon lessons, they were at lunch, and in walks Marcus, who is, you know, a dumb sort of hand¬some. Mr. Goldhagen, my zipper’s stuck. I have to be good, I try to be good, but here I am fidgeting with this kid’s zipper, my knuckles brushing against his you know what, and I’m kind of getting excited by it, thinking if someone walks in right now… You’re so silly, Jef¬frey. I see the evil behind it because I am invisible, I do not figure into anyone’s calculations. Queers are no different than straights, some old straights want little girls and some old queers want little boys. Is there a real man out there who can love me?

***

I am less than nothing when the day is tallied and forgotten. There are others, a woman who teaches a fourth fifth combination class. We occasionally have lunch together. She is thin and unhappy, mar¬ried to an unpleasant man who is cheating on her. I don’t know what to do, Elizabeth, we’ve been together nine years, and I don’t want to lose Bill. Have you thought of counseling, I suggest. She shakes her head, thinking of the unpleasant drive home. I am se¬cretly happy knowing it is possible for a thin woman to experience unhappiness. I am pleasant, and I smile, knowing she will go home once again to a terrible man and I will go home to nothing, only Mother’s accusations and a cold laptop.

***

The small insults one suffers daily. The hangnails, the knees that no longer work properly, the gradual betrayal of your body, you need to lose weight, my doctor says, or both your knees will need to be replaced, him having said this before they were both replaced, the same soft flat black shoes I buy over and over again, the world’s largest ballerina, wondering just once what a pair of heels might feel like, younger teachers flitting to and fro on heels that betray the laws of physics, a child blatantly calling me fat. Why are you so fat, Ms. Salas? Stubbornly unmoving in his seat, dirty hands tucked under each armpit as a band of heat tightens around my head, a small tyrant in a district chair. Different people have different bod¬ies, Luis, surely you must know that by now? But why are you so fat, a smile pulling across his very white teeth, a blank screen on which girls see their reflection. His teeth nestled in the pink seat of his gums, a small tongue already capable of so much damage. I wonder at the skull beneath the cinnamon skin, so round, perfect, and white. We all have different bodies, Luis. You must learn to respect other people’s bodies. I place a hand on his knee and he pulls back, visibly startled, the fat woman daring to touch him. If you don’t learn how to respect other people’s bodies, you’ll end up alone. No I won’t. Someday someone beautiful will leave you – No they won’t – and I stop there, having moved into territory the Dis¬trict would never approve of, the child is protected by law against such behavior. Someday when you meet that special someone you should remember they deserve respect, just as you do. Maybe, he says, pulling his knee out from under my hand. He is handsome and he knows it, his only gift in a migrant trailer park life, his mother catering to him because of his looks, because he is her favorite, be¬cause of his perfect teeth, and already he is ruined…

 

Jace

MY BLOOD IS A SPIDER

All these people bouncing around, shepherding amoeba. There is a presence in my room. It hangs in the corner, observing everything, even the darkness. I’m usually not afraid. I brush it from the wall, it sticks to my fingers. I’m in a trance. When I move to another room, my blood moves with me, I carry it in my fingers, my legs, my heart. My feet are seventy inches from my head. When I touch a keyboard the blood in my fingertips kisses the plastic and music is made. The plastic rises to greet my fingers, as if it senses the blood below the surface, the music already there. I bend into the keyboards, the keys becoming more human than plastic. The music slowly chang¬es, takes on a less metallic quality. It possesses warmth that can’t be achieved without folding into the machine. Sometimes when I’m on the bed with Choco, my brindle pit, I stare at my toes, my socks off, and wonder how my toes got so far away from my head. Does the head need to be that far from the feet? Do people without legs think faster than people with them? Less travel time? Is the blood in my toes the same blood in my fingertips? Blood touches plastic to bend waves of music across the room. My body, a prison, ware¬housing thoughts best unspoken, emotions unfit for display, and the me-ness rushes into my body when I wake. If we wake someone abruptly in the night, someone sleeping next to us, how long does it take before they become them again? Is it dangerous, the moment they are becoming?

***

Reality is a video game created by your brain. The game is ON from the moment you wake up until the moment you go to sleep. At night the game goes into sleep mode. The cycle continues perpetually un¬til someone or something turns the power OFF. I gently remove my head from my body, bounce it from hand to hand, and pull back the supple Flesh. My thoughts, exposed. I move my head behind my back and slowly let it travel up the spine to the shoulder blades, two great peaks meet in the valley of desire. I see my body as Nicole sees my body, I move over curves known and unknown, seen from this angle, with my floating head, everything appears as delicate and smooth as mountains on Mars, turning over in bed, a nipple becomes Alba Mons, the depression of my sternum between two outcroppings, Tharsis. Choco lifts his head, tilts it at a slight an¬gle, wondering where I have gone, buffing my kneecap with his wet nose. I lay my skull to rest in my Lap, everything looks bigger down here, I conveyer-belt my head between my legs until it rolls to rest at my feet, Emerson’s wandering eyeball, wishing Mama were here with me. I miss Mama and Papa together, the old times. But she is only an exaggeration, a hallucination, yes? Mama wouldn’t recog¬nize me now, with my head off, lying in bed with Choco, Nicole tapping on her iPhone, where are you? Me ignoring the three dots, I’m busy. Enough of this nonsense, where is your head? I soccer-ball my head off a kneecap back onto my neck, where it quietly Ziplocs into place, order restored. My iPhone rests in the smooth valley of my sternum, Nicole’s fingers beating in time to my heartbeat, her heart a quasar in the darkness, a Morse code message only I know how to decode.

***

My blood is a spider, see it move from room to room? The beating in my ears is the ocean. Our blood contains the same elements as the ocean, we are tied, the moon, the ocean, the stars, my feet in my Vans, on this sidewalk, my butt on this seat, my shoes, on concrete, on the linoleum of the restaurant, connected with other people, my feet connected to the floor through one inch soles, and other peo¬ple, the floor, what if everyone had their shoes off? We didn’t used to be like this, everyone with their shoes on. I have a tattoo, a black spider, on the crook of my arm, the soft inside, and the spider be¬comes visible when my arm is down, not too big, maybe the size of a quarter, and some people have said why get a tattoo, no one can see it. People are ignorant, and I could live a thousand years and it wouldn’t change, we are not yet ready to flow freely into the imagination, Terence says, at least not as a group. We’re still too fo¬cused on sex and skin color, that’s what Andrés* says, and he’s right, humans still bickering over land, land that can’t be owned, yet we plant stakes in it. Only the individual can flow into the imagination, when it’s time, but have we learned anything when the time comes? What if we are unprepared? I also have a tattoo of a dagger on my left calf, a dagger that looks like an upside-down cross. Are you a Satanist? Javier asked. What of it? I said, which scared him. Or is it my hair he’s afraid of? I like BMX, and Death Cab, and Kendrick, and it throws him off. He doesn’t know how to classify me. When I look down on it, on the dagger, I see it right-side up, my eyes turn it upside down in my brain, and what we’re seeing isn’t real anyway, nothing beyond the skull is real. We’re always producing our own reality. People don’t like it when you don’t do what you’re supposed to. The world is a big place, and there isn’t enough love in it…

*Andrés – pronounced ON drace

 

 

Jace Tunes

1). U2 – Zooropa

2). N.E.R.D. – Lapdance

3). CLIPSE – Grinding

4). RADIOHEAD – Idioteque

5). DON CHERRY – Brown Rice

6). TALKING HEADS – Crosseyed and Painless

7). TOM TOM CLUB – Genius of Love

This song is for my homeslice BABY

8). SPYMOB – Half-Steering

 

JACE TV

These selections are {{{ stroboscopic }}} so please be careful

9). MARK BURNETT – Subrosa Griffin Line

10). THE NEPTUNES – The Eighth Planet

 

 

Death is not a frightful thing, it is freedom. Our death empties us into the imagination of the universe.

I LOVE YOU

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. Today the blog again puts on its red carpet drag in order to form the groundwork leading up to a dawning book, in this case the fine scribe James Nulick’s newborn novel ‘The Moon Down to Earth’, which enters the realm of availability as of today. Your task, should you choose to accept it, is to explore the related introduction put together by Mr. Nulick himself, and then, yeah, get your hands, etc. on the thing itself. Sound good? Thank you for entrusting your bells and whistles to this platform, James. ** _Black_Acrylic, I hope you’re still feeling right as rain this morning. ‘The Ripper’, eh? I don’t have Netflix, but there must be another way in. ** David Ehrenstein, I did look for stuff on LA’s Basic Plumbing, and there was nothing, zip. There doesn’t seem to be any big nostalgia about it which surprised me since everyone I knew who went to such places went there. ** Ian, Hi, Ian. Thanks, pal. I’m very glad you liked ‘Modern’ and ‘Berg’. Two highlights for sure. My pleasure re: the introductions. Yeah, I see that North America is pretty snowed in and frozen out atm. Or the eastern part at least. No such luck here. Do you not have any pals whose eyes you would entrust to check out the current state of your story and give you an objective read? Maybe you just need to turn away from it for a short time and refresh yourself somehow? I know I can get to points where I’m almost too locked into something I’m working on and get kind of too clogged up to see it straight. Be patient, man, you’ll get there, no doubt about it. ** Sypha, Ha ha, I can see you liking that sex club art. That’s interesting. That blue lion is very you. Somehow. ** Tosh Berman, Hi, Tosh. It’s true. How great it would be if one could walk by buildings and see what they’d been. Just recently I happened to look more closely at the facade of an outlet of The Gap that I walk by all the time only to finally notice a plaque indicating that what is now The Gap was once the place where the very first ever movie (by the Melies maybe?) was publicly screened for the very first time. ** Misanthrope, I have been to sex clubs, yes. Not for a long time and not as frequently as people probably assume I have. And I never had sex in them. Wait, unless brothels count. I did have sex in brothels in Amsterdam way back. But otherwise I never found them sexy. Or I didn’t find public sex sexy. I used to go mostly to observe and take notes. Mental notes. Yeah, I mean $600 is a ridiculous fucking pittance for what people have had to go through. I mean wtf. So the CT scan was like trying on a hat. Glad that’s now forgettable history. ** Steve Erickson, My mom used to go to Plato’s Retreat after, and I think during, my parents’ divorce. Mm, your snow storm. Saw pix. I’m holding out a very shy hope that we get at least one of them before winter exits. ** Brian O’Connell, Howdy Brian. Thanks. Yeah, I think few sex clubs will survive the pandemic. It took years for them to re-arise after the most hellish period of the AIDS crisis only to be smitten down by another enemy of the libidinous. In school I was fine with Math until it turned into Algebra and Geometry and worse even stuff. I would have to say French must be one of my tough spots too since I’ve lived here for ages and still only have a barely rudimentary understanding of it. It’s a wrap! Congratulations, sir! This calls for champagne or whatever your preferred inebriant may be. The miniature Buche turned out to be extremely disappointing in the looks department but it tasted swell. On to the next candidate. Happy Xmas-y Friday to you! ** Corey Heiferman, Hi. I used to see that ad on TV, and, yes, I think it was either extremely late at night or on a Public Access channel. Excellent that the excellent company made the excellent decision. Stability is no small help towards one’s creative aspect, so big up in theory. Well, I wrote the first draft of ‘TAP’ in one draft. I did fiddle with a lot though maybe less than I usually do. Thanks about it. If there’s ever a ‘Best of Dennis Cooper’ book ‘TAP’ should definitely be in it. It sounds like the best idea for you is to get back to Tel Aviv under the circumstances, yes, as internally complicated as that departure will surely be. Um, I’ve always felt I was a pretty picky reader. I do think whatever tolerance I may have once had for conventional, ‘literary’ fiction is completely gone. SciFi is one my hugest weak spots as a reader. Barely read any and never have felt a lot of inclination to for reasons unknown. I only really know the really obvious stuff: K. Dick, Gibson, Delany, Ballard, some of the Cyberpunk 80s stuff, … ** Right. Give yourselves over to Mr. Nulick’s novel’s pre-show please. Thanks. See you tomorrow.