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A lot lately has reminded me of this crucial transition time in my life, when I moved from Kansas City to San Francisco in the summer of 1998. I’ve been spreading this anecdote around a little bit and thought I’d share it as a COMMENT before some general encouragement and niceties for the weekend.

The anecdote I told was about going to an art opening at Southern Exposure which I remembered going down right off the boat, but doing a little research it looks like it was actually 2000. So perhaps I have less excuse for my naïveté and rustic unrefinement, having lived in the big city for two years.

In any case, the show prominently featured works by local artist Keith Boadwee, paintings and video from his Squirt Painting series. The paintings in Squirt Painting were made by the artist applying tempera paint enemas to himself and splatter shitting on canvases. The video portrayed the process. I had never seen anything like it, and the residual excitement and intrigue of that work is instantly revocable it turns out.

I’ve followed Boadwee’s work sporadically since then, and was excited therefore to see the images in last night’s opening of Jigsawmentallama at David Cunningham Projects. The two large photographs depicted two operations by Boadwee on his own eyes. One (I stupidly didn’t write down the title), which also is the image on the show’s press materials, shows Boadwee pressing juicy blackberries into his eyes, the dark juice running down his face like tears…tears of blood! I take it that to some extent the image means to evoke the most famous auto-eye-gouger in literature, Oedipus the King. But the “fruit” replacing the eyes is perhaps the queering of that figure, which is of course for our time the symbol of heteronormativity and thus its discontents.

The other image, “Lemons,” repeats the notes of fruit and the eyes, although finally they are extremely different in tone. “Lemons” shows Boadwee squeezing two halves of a lemon into his eyes, the lemon juice this time running from his eyes like tears, with his mouth distorted into a grotesque scream of pain. What I mean by a difference in “tone” is that “Lemons” is like a rarefied masochistic performance whose document is one of unmasked event, whereas the blackberry piece, for me anyway, because it doesn’t show the full face or fingers or room, is more of an uncanny drama or icon than document.

As is clear already, other people have sophisticated ways to describe these things. I’m still sort of that rustic clown with a knapsack and a dream.

Meanwhile, the Boadwee pieces are only part of the reason why I highly encourage a visit to David Cunningham Projects to see the show. There are wonderful images by Margaret Tedesco, videos by a number of artists, a very spooky and outrageous installation by Sonja Nilsson, and works by a new favorite of mine Anne McGuire. Her “When I Became A Monster,” from 1996, feels especially relevant as me evolve towards cyborgs in a post-Sasha Fierce world. And the small pieces on the wall, that feel serial, such as “Impossible Historical Romances” (Abe Lincoln and Queen Elizabeth II in this case), really would look wonderful on the walls of my bedroom if you feel me, gentle readers.

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Somewhere Kierkegaard is writing about drama and in a short chapter with the head “What it means to die,” he writes, “I know that the tragic hero dies in the fifth act of the drama, and that death here has an infinite significance in pathos; but that when a bartender dies, death does not have this significance.”

The injustice encoded in this cleft has always been with me since I first read this passage 8 or 9 years ago, that is, it’s felt like a competent summation.

A bartender of course can mean the world to anybody, far more than imagined or real heroes. I don’t mean to be totally sentimental here. I’m not rewriting “A Clean, Well-Lit Place” or whatever. How about a general call for revision of the term “heroism”?

My friends in Kansas City and expats too are mourning the very sudden and untimely death of Anne Winter. Anne was a critical figure in the local music world in many capacities: as a D.J., as a promoter, as the owner of the used record store that mattered, and finally as a person. Gosh, even as a sort of model to some extent.

Now, the sentimental alarms are going off all over, but the record store she owned wasn’t just a record store. As a high schooler living in the rural land adjacent to a metropolitan area going to that record store was totally affirmative. A diaspora of freaks from rural lands, suburbs, and in the city itself gathered there to not only be turned on to records, zines, shows, people, but to affirm possibilities, to affirm modalities, sexualities, politics undreamt of in the rigorously conventional hinterlands. Anne’s presence there was sort of like a friend of one’s older sister, who knew about everything that had ever been cool and instead of fetishizing her treasure wanted to tell the world. Doing some math, when I was 17, Anne would have been my age, 31. I probably saw her almost every day, as I loitered not buying anything in her shop after high school. That’s sort of what I meant by “model.” It’s simple to say, but the idea that someone can own a record store as their JOB, can stay punk into their 30’s, can fight the jadedness of withstanding waves of identical freaks from the hinterlands…that meant an enormous amount to me at the time, and means something to my life now, and to the artistic communities I participate in now. She was a real hero—and she will be awfully missed.

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Note of the day from Fernand Braudel’s Capitalism and Material Life. Forks weren’t commonly used in Europe until the early 16th century. Before that you would just dig into the meat with your hands. “Meat” itself could refer to a platter of heaping animals, piled rather indiscriminately on top of each other and into which one’s rich guests would rip into with their fingers.

Contemporary table setting made its way of course into paintings of historic meals, and no meal was more relevant to fin de siècle Europe than that last one Jesus had. Jacopo Bassano’s 1599 The Last Supper then is comment-able for its rendering of forks and common knives on the dinner table.

Oh, also everybody shared goblets and passed them around and you had to bring your own knife for dinner. All of the above applies only to the very privileged. Otherwise you just put your mandibles into a steaming bowl of wheat and slurped.

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Watched Drag Me To Hell (2009, dir. Sam Raimi). I haven’t seen a horror movie proper in a long time, and this was pretty great. It owes a lot finally to The Exorcist, especially in its sense that economic exploitation of an other returns to the suburban bourgeoisie as part of a system utterly incongruous to that culture’s value. This is epitomized in the scene in which Christine (Alison Lohman) goes into the psychic, all the while mocked by her Freudian boyfriend Clay (Justin Long).

Christine, representing a bank and coveting a promotion which she believes will redeem her in the eyes of Clay’s parents (who view her as a bumbling rustic), shows her “toughness” by rejecting an old Romany woman’s entreaties for credit extension. Oops! By literally depriving the old woman of her property and forcing her relocation (along with suggestions she find a nursing home or live with her granddaughter), Christine is going to be forced off of her property (earth) and relocated (to hell, the analogue to the nursing home and granddaughter).

While there is no literal assocation of money and shit, there is a strong dialectic of money and excreta. By withholding a "gift" (itself in Freud an image of money) (and "gift" according to the terms of usury capital), she is given a "Curse" in the form of vomit, nosebleeds, regurgitated embalming fluid and projectile vomited maggots and worms. Money figures heavily as a leitmotif in the film—it’s finally decisive in the film’s climax. Highly recommended.

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Jethro Tull, not just the name of possibly the band-I'd-like-to-listen-to-basically-the-least. Huh. Who knew?

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Hey ya'll! It's obvious that the blog is on a kind of a hiatus. What is happening meanwhile is that TALKING POINTS are on a monthlong vacation over at the POETRY PROJECT blog! Check it.

Meanwhile, sporadic comments are possible. This one is just to think together about the year in jams--it's October 1, and we're in those last legs. At this point, I'm tossing out almost everything that happened in the winter with the exception of "Blame It", which still matters for our culture. If anything seems missing here, please let me know, but as far as I can tell, here are the strong likely candidates for JOTY short list:

Jamie Foxx, "Blame It"
Keri Hilson ft. Ne-Yo and Kanye West, "Knock You Down"
Young Money, "Every Girl"
Mariah Carey, "Obsessed"
Mario ft. Gucci Mane and Sean Garrett, "Break Up"
Drake, "Best I Ever Had"

I'm truly undecided about one point: should "Run This Town" be on this list? discuss.