Recently, I was speaking with my mom. She’s been struggling to finish a novel. She faults a mixture of perfectionism and the as-yet-arrived intuition of how to finish the book. I’m trying to embrace intuition.

But I value structure. Creativity flows. It requires points of connection to smoothly move.

I imagine the work as a glass vase held in the dark. The shape is filled with water, but the form is lost in darkness. You can feel that it twirls and twists, but cannot know the spirals. You sense the shape is littered with holes, but you can’t know how close the lips are to the water.

Your hands move around the shape, cautiously stumbling toward the shape you already hold.

When writing, I approach the process through conceptualizing the work as a whole. Put all the documents into one file and read. Gaining a sense of the shape of the writing requires fumbling through the ways you’re failing to express yourself.

It is falling down to learn to dance.

Practically, reading everything you’ve written together as it gestures toward the finished work gives you a better sense of what the work wants to be. The successful and failing forms sit side by side. Together, they clarify the spirit brought forth. You find the spirit through editing, through cutting, through reassessing what you think the whole shape is.

I value structure because of its illusory quality. A vague faith in the whole makes communion more satisfying. The shape is a projection of my desires embodied in the work. These desires are realized through the menial task of trial and error, repeated failing experiments.

When a plan goes completely wrong, you become acquainted with your creativity in stretching it to the point of what you are capable of doing in the moment. When I write a song, it becomes all the skill, inspirations, and performances I possess in that moment. Nothing more, nothing less.

In tracing the limit of creativity, I become aware of my intuition. I can better balance the water within the vase of unknown shape.

Review

Review

This set of text emerged from a conversation with Adonis (@mercurysymbol) concerning grief, experimental and rave music, and land. In assembling these texts, I’m interested in sharing authors concerned with the staging of empathy.

empathy is not given

we are not given to empathy

empathy is not a given

empathy is cultivated

like any skill

like any form of knowledge

empathy is hard won

These texts move through psychological, historical, and aesthetic underpinnings of empathy. Generally, the reading list moves through first a question of how empathy emerges and what historical conditions complicate empathy. Second, it situates empathy as an element with community formation, considering how communities emerging within settler colonial and racial capitalist contexts can extend empathy to those harmed by historical and present injustices. Finally, these texts consider the conflicts within empathy, the ways in which communities fail us, and artistic/philosophical project of living through these contradictions.

I have organized these texts as a syllabus with an intentional order. The readings are kept to be 50-75 pages a week to make it accessible for someone studying them on their own. I’d like to thank my professors Audra Simpson and Catherine Fennell for exposing me to many of these texts. If anyone pursues these readings and has any questions, feel free to email me.

Week 1

Judith Butler, Frames of War (“Introduction: Precarious Life” and “Grievable Life and Survivability, Vulnerability, Affect”)

Week 2

Sadiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother (“Prologue: The Path of Strangers”, “So Many Dungeons”, and “The Dead Book”)

Week 3

Hil Milatano, Trans Care

Week 4

Christina Sharpe, In the Wake (“The Wake”)

Week 5

Billy-Ray Belcourt, This Wound Is a World

Week 6

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, “Land as pedagogy: Nishnaabeg intelligence and rebellious transformation”

Joanne Barker, “Territory as Analytic: The Dispossession of Lenapehoking and the Subprime Crisis”

Week 7

Lauren Berland and Michael Warner, “Sex in Public”

Erin McElroy and Alex Werth, “Deracinated Dispossessions: On the Foreclosures of ‘Gentrification’ in Oakland, CA”

Week 8

Morgan Bassichis and Dean Space, “Queer politics and anti-blackness”

Jackie Wang, Carceral Capitalism (“‘Packing Guns Instead of Lunches’: Biopower and Juvenile Delinquency” including “Ripples in Time: An Update”)

Week 9

Ana María Ochoa Gautier, Aurality (“On Howls and Pitches”)

Sultana Isham, “Noise Is the N** of Sound” (suggested by Adonis)

Week 10

The Invisible Committee, Now (“Let’s Destitute the World”)

Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy (“Thought and Life”, “Art”, and “New Image of Thought”)

Week 11

Theo Montoya, ANHELL69 (2022)

David Farrow, “Feeling Pain/Making Kin in the Brooklyn Noise Music Scene”

pt 1 pt 2

For months, I’ve struggled to feel inspired. I looked to art, performance, and philosophy, but all stranded me in the distance between idea and action.

Review

Institutional Space/Public Space

Driving through the Rosebud Indian Reservation, Alice and I were struggling to get a clear signal.

A room full of ghosts

staring at the blood dried on my beige tote bag, left behind by the J train from myrtle-broadway, i finger my ear. The silent echo of the Dunkin’ Donuts’s web page reverberating within my mind. Cory Arcangel’s So shines a good deed in a weary world (dunkindonuts.com) screened at a gallery occupying a former Dunkin’ Donuts in the financial district. Composed of shots of the artist browsing the Dunkin’ Donuts website, the company’s vine and youtube channels, unaccompanied by a soundtrack beyond the diegetic sounds of these sites, the piece left me cackling in the hallowed out backroom. Next to Krispy Kreme donut boxes, I watched 30 minutes of Rob Gronkowsky answering questions about his favorite donut, the endless scroll of topping options, the silent dance of plastic coffee cups, and the triumph of one man’s culinary concoction over false claims to the donut throne.

Over the past month, I’ve been thinking back to Michael Warner and the late Lauren Berlant’s essay “Sex in Public.” One of the central questions of the essay is how intimate spaces ground community within particular property relations. The club, the public park, the subway, the sex shop—any space unfolds a particular set of intimacies, allowing certain forms of closeness to flourish and others to perish. The relation between intimacy and space is a political question as policy, the economy, and the police shape which intimate spaces are able to exist, particularly in cities where property values are exceedingly high.

what is a scene?

january is the warmest month

heat eminating from the exploding birds in my back garden

one day, the cigarette ash lingering between the miss-matched pebbles, inside the pet cemetery where he buried the pigeon who died on the fire escape, but only after the momentous blizzard bled out into a slurry of mud and piss, was a fire finally lit.

another day, the cigarette butt blossoming within the windswept sand, where their body became a shield from the gusts gnawing at her slight frame, before the chocolate truffles were tucked away between plastic wrapped delicacies and glass tubes, they kissed before christ.

august is the coldest month

i wait to warm up

I heard ray, the building manager of my old apartment on 13th street, squeaking out the speakers. new years eve, i’d been tasked with opening the show and decided to do something more ambient than my usual performance. my patience for soft sound disappeared as I found opportunity in absence. pivoting, I began adding compression and distortion to the dreamy synth loops, layering 808s under skittering insects, and pulling stray field recordings from my computer.

From Rapid City to Missoula

Rapid city, South Dakota

11:11 pm

Driving back from Sally O’Mallie’s Pub and Casino, the weight of our decision to drive thousands of miles fell heavy on us. The early mourning enthusiasm accompanying our departure from Rochester, Minnesota had dissipated. In its place hung the smell of cows and manure, the open sky untouched by city lights, and the dread of another 9 hour drive.

Earlier in the day, passing the frozen Minnesota fields, the wind gathered snow into streams that flowed across the highway. The continuous gusts intensified the white river, obfuscating the road entirely. It was beautiful and threatening. An alien ground emerging from the asphalt. We drove suspended yet fixed to the ground, relying on the unchanging straight line of the road.

Alice gazed out the window. She remarked on the beauty of the windmills that populated the landscape. Their tenacious rotation the elevated compliment to what flowed beneath us. The windmills offered a welcome break from the icy fields. A verticality that dwarfed the grain silos and barns. Soon enough, there would only be the horizon slipping into darkness, a flat drive for hour and hours.

Some of our listening:

Sun Ra - Sleeping Beauty

Albert Ayler - Love Cry

XTC - Black Sea

Minutemen - Double Nickels on the Dime

New Order - Power, Corruption & Lies

Lucretia Dalt - ¡Ay!

TrueAnon - Bush Did 9/11 (part 1)

last christmas before our divorced sorority christianity between triffles and the holiday after i lost my license still don’t have a credit card we fell asleep in my absent grandparents’ twin bed why do you make me feel like it was a mistake to love you? when you snapped about the return date i left unspecified. a year later carving holiday designs into my damaged sexuality publicly on the northeast corridor i closed the door. tofurky daze mom needs space dad’s from outer space emotional management left me with the bill principle debt: fascist fiancés hollywood dreams cleaning cost for piss-stained floors hugging pillows under gnawing green snow shaped dollar slices thirty dollar tickets to half-baked ambition. now i need to pay. last christmas last thanksgiving last holiday i think i need some space

I lost my mind a bit this year. not that that is an unusual occurrence. everyone lost their mind a bit in 2020. 2021 embodied the reverberations of collective destabilization. this year, my off-kilter mental state started with a strike. my co-workers and I had been striking for ten weeks, reaching an agreement with our employer only after a nerve-wracking winter filled with insults and threats. the strike was a heartening display of a solidarity; it demonstrated material webs of support that subsist social and professional life.

march 2021 i’m selling my bedframe on craigslist. a buyer offers to mail me a check to pay for the movers. I accept. bounced checks, scams averted by cash app, my bedframe thrown out on the street.

maybe i’m too trusting, gullible, or naïve. but, in the moment, I just wanted to believe it would be that easy to get rid of the bedframe. but instead i abandoned it on 9th street, with whatever other objects i refused to carry to 13th.

a year later, much of what I did carry filled the 13th. i regret leaving behind a lamp from when i was a child, but it had been reduced to a broken pole connecting a colorful trio of bulbous lights. on 9th, still standing, it slanted over the steeped floor.