I.
He was brighter then me. Around the time he was in middle school, he must have watched a video store worth of tapes all on his own alone, volume turned down all the way, permanently grounded in bedroom of lapsed summer night tv tube glare, all lights off, easy to tell the night was night. This accidentally taught a sort of second soft serve skill, or no, it was more of a detachment really, an aptitude for rending situations less without relying upon narrative driven dialogue. Even though the movie plots were phony, the exercise of reading people was still effective. Later on, it seemed he didn't so much pay attention to what people said really, than more paid attention to how they said it, which would provide useful in navigating the turgid outside world, and especially in the maquillage of with-it it girls.
He lay in bed and listened to the same song off his digital clock radio. They played a song called "Tessa" every three hours. The lyrics went, "You may be queen of the underground now, queen of the underground, but your instincts betray yourself, and what you so chose, will only morph you mortal like the rest of them, ordinary like all the rest of them, about ten years from now. . ."
Our bantling youth knew moments of despair cosseted in the buffer before real life started. The other thing was always being unfairly grounded, and it was about going about it all alone, and maybe it was practicing solo while still angry at your mother, when the cool kids got to spend free wasting time away right after school, and with more propinquity to the quit everything for vortex girls of it all. And as to being grounded: have you ever lived with someone (like, say, a parent), who was perpetrator playing victim, to which such they as victim, atmosphere preemptive stake on, blindsiding you like vehicle not meant for skatepark - they, establishing against all your otherwise innocent-for-now guard down passivity, as their questionable victimhood being constantly self affirmed, well now established and settled, as constant false status quo, curing and mobbing and fragging like street 'thane, in a way that you as child, were just ill-equipped to guard yourself against, as it was just so impossible to confront it all proper or address it all adequately, because you were on your own, against your parents, and with no one on your side, and so insufficient are your responses for any heat of the moment confrontation (and even if your responses were sufficient arguments, you still would never win or ever get credit), and you can't explain it, or put it to words, and you have no other choice but to live with it in all your knowing dumbness?
But he shifted and shifted himself when cinched by such slippery scene, letting it all variegate comfortably inside him in such subtle, invisible way. Anthony. Towards the end of any potentially specious interaction, when a situation would play itself to inevitable head, he would unexpectedly frontside pressure flip pushback with surprising, unexpected degree of resolve, which he intoned he would then now need, and then to negotiate in a furrow, the situation back accordingly, catching the other off balance (you can see this general attitude in his intro in I.E.) You never let your guard down. It still could be exhausting. And when one got good at this, when one was well adept at this, people tended to just treat one very differently though, or just plum loose their tongue all together - maybe you weren't worth the trouble anyways now, and they could just as well switch stance their harnessing their manipulation drives, their abuse exhaust onto someone else (ethics grounded in no ethics are not ethical to the no ethics not possessed). It was precisely this skill set that he employed to get on Alien Work though, and to say the absolute very least, it would take more than just top regional tech formalist excellence to get on (you just ask Emmers).
Anthony said one time against my skepticism, that astrology contains clues. And it wasn't so mysterious - throughout the ages people simply recorded the traits of people born to each month, and these recorded traits were passed down, and new ones were observed and added, and re-written, and confirmed and corroborated with new generation's traits, and they were cross checked against each other, then sticking into data bases involving the earth's position to stars. It wasn't a big deal, sure there were inconsistencies, irregularities; contradiction was there just like anything, but it would be foolish to simply wholesale repudiate it just because you had no room in your craw to give it the time. Skeptics never payed attention, never looked for the correlatives, the connections, the strange patterns, the corpse in the mirror, so they would never discover helpful consistencies within the paradox of contradiction of the dimension we found ourselves locked in. And I had never heard anyone explain it like that, like Anthony did, and it certainly prompted my reconsideration.
But you see, I was right there, I was like there all along when Colby Carter Hokus part came out. There, in the glare of gale and in my dark shadowless room. The (post)punk song in the part promised a rich future social life, or maybe not promised, but at least alluded to one. It even promised that if there was a better place, I would be equipped to integrate myself and handle it (which is not necessarily the case). I could imagine some vague idea of small college town ideal, with plenty of girls to go around, and shows and desirable architecture and small quaint coffee shops and bars, and bulletin boards containing somewhat intelligently designed flyers, vast with some definite collective sense of local flavor. Just experiencing, knowing this Colby Carter part, being familiar with it, I thought it should open up boulevards to unveil a richer, more interesting and relentlessly captivating world to me. I thought if I studied beauty, had beauty pat down, knew beauty, it would eventually attract itself to me, all to sail blow my way, but that's not exactly how the world turns. That's not exactly how the beef gets braised so to speak, not exactly how the pickle gets jarred. . .
Skateboarding owes me a living, Anthony's cri de coeur.
Skateboarding owes. Yeah, how so old horse?
Well, look at all the yahoos just fleecing from it all now. P-Rod and Spanish Mike are Trump and Steve Bannon to the most formal and official North American Regional Alliance of Skateboard Equipment Manufacturers and Retailers, I should say. Their working ethos behind the scenes is 'Best company wins'. Like Trump liquidating agencies of the government, P-Rod and 'Spanish' sought to overturn and overthrow, undercut local shops, by launching a failed direct mail order subscription apparatus featuring a buffet of ripped off lets-cover-all-bases-by-hi-jacking-everyone's-aesthetic. Shops being the last bastion for any semblance of a subcultural coming together. If Spanish Mike gets to buy a house from undercutting shops, whilst also trashing my metaphorical beach with telemarketer's depth of sentiment & empty neoconservative postmodernism, so I should say, then skateboarding owes me. I'll wear the shirts, employ me to infuse that abstract quality of that essential nameless and ethereal thing that board companies once a long, long, long time ago embodied, in a way nothing else ever did or ever has since, not like I would now, though. We are living in zombie time now, Zombie Girl, Zombie Stereo, Zombie Toy Machine. You actually need people like cardinal in slate mine 15 year old artist prodigy Ethan Fowler to come along and inspire greater depth. Am I making this up??
Anthony also said, that now practically every board co employs postmodernism, and that it wasn't all the same. It was important to deconstruct each variety and reveal what they actually really meant or alluded to or signaled - sure, it was all pastiche, but within that pastiche, developed or devolved into a symbolic order, an unconscious that must be unmasked. There is a difference between the postmodern images of cheap Miami Sound Machine neon night rider arcade of April and John Carpenter Grindhouse California is dying dystopian sour kitsch noir of HOCKEY, that which articulate or allude or embody very different things, despite looking same to untrained eye. But now for the most part in skateboarding and especially culture writ large, that untrained tin eyed has final Dyrdekian West Elm sway.
I was out tagging with Cheeks, the day we went to Anthony's apartment off 13th and Broadway, cattywampus from where the old Union Cafe moved to. This was well after Anthony went electric in what was the overstuffed bazaar of that Ty Evans project - I immediately even sensed Anthony was barely on Alien Work, which at the time had fully descended now into the alt-right version, the real version of Alien Work. (Milo Yiannopoulous in 2015 took to wearing the spectrum Alien Work tee in TMZ, the conspicuous co-opting of the Alien Work brainwash graphic by white nationalists in Charlottesville at University of Virginia in 2017. The ill housed, ill advised Info Wars collaboration and partnership, which Carter and Hill would both show to became all but consumed in.)
His apartment was real posh though, real port side out. It didn't even look like it would be his flat, I was immediately surprised with the level of cultivation and means required to maintain such a place and especially for his age. Then I remembered his only job he ever had was protech, with Anthony there was never lost time.
The rows of windows from the building across looked Dorris Day virgin NY quaint, frozen like the background of a stage or television soap machine. Besides the plush stuffed alien teddy bear sitting there fluttering in the corner on the floor (170$ off the Work site, but you know Anthony got it by incidence - Alien Work actually paid Anthony to let them ship the alien bear all the way to his apartment from Xenia). The apartment otherwise looked like he was house sitting for some architect in their forties, but and yet, it was all his.
Anthony displayed a mid to late period Ron Davis cut out, which was behind glass in a white frame in the entry hallway, and which at the time, I wasn't necessarily familiar with say, Davis, particularly, or his oeuvre or like manouvre, really. On the side of the frame there was a small Sotheby's sticker dot placed stuck for storage that had not been removed, which had pen penned hand writing written on it, as if marked at the butcher's for the supermarket.
You had a sense that despite it being a frightfully fabulous apartment to say, entertain for dinner parties, or for accommodating a weekly group playing gin, or bridge or hearts say, Anthony was actually recluse, I bet he probably never had anyone over besides his cleaning service.
Seth, you could tell, was caught up in the immediate stun of situation of just arriving to Anthony's apartment, Seth, uncharacteristically failed to introduce me, like right when we came in, even though Seth is otherwise usually a total sweetheart and good about these things. I remained muted witness, Anthony didn't acknowledge me crossing the border of the threshold.
Seth and Anthony were monopolizing the scene of conversation there, and this dynamic always exhausted me. I was reminded that maybe part of my problem was, I simply walked through life only mostly talking to accessible agreeable people, because it seemed whenever we were interrupted in conversation, they always easily so allowed the cut off our convo and annoyingly and unjustly, dumbly always gave the stranger their unearned attention. I noticed when others would not acknowledge when it was I who was standing around, especially in work situations, and it would make me think I needed to cultivate an association with the inaccessible. It was the same with teams, I finally got on a team, but the team, you know, my team now, made it also all seemingly open to practically anyone who came waltzing upon our scene, but then again, maybe such could be said for most board co-s. Skater-run was always yokels anyways.
I stepped forward out of the entry hall and was immediately drawn to the curved at the ends Norwegian bookshelf bulwarked against the wall in the living room. Titles, casually, though defiantly, existed without my familiarity,
Peter Burger's Theory of the Avant-Garde
Jo Applin, Eccentric Objects: Rethinking Sculpture in 1960's America
Lucy Lippard, Overlay
Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Gerhard Richter, 18 Oktober 1977
Percy Wyndam Lewis, Taar
Andre Breton, Nadja
What are you some kind of anthropologist, Anthony speaking for the first time now, with a benighted placidity, interrupting me grazing the spines.
I actually didn't at the time know what an anthropologist actually was, but I knew quite well, cottered onto what the statement had meant, what purpose it had now served. Simply who was I to leer in and sift information from the shelves in this private residence? And I wasn't even scrutinizing them, I was just curious, curious that's all - though, somehow you got the feeling Anthony would be more offended by harmlesss curiosity about him, than if I was actually scrutinizing him.
For your want, I'll let you borrow Sublime Object, just say the word, junior. Thierry de Duve's Echo's of the Readymade, a Critique of Pure Modernism?, Anthony dryly cutting, or was he telling a joke mostly for the sake of his own entertainment now? Could he not quite just help himself to wryly suffer upon a heel now.
Sensing disstress, Cheeks offers helpfully, Hey Anthony, Alain is artist.
Oh, or is he, Anthony, in a kind of authoritative cynical gaminess, defiant against how he would look from the point of view of the judgmental pedestrian who's idea about aesthetics were predictably underdeveloped and prone to the same, usual, everyman misguided attitudes and attributes.
Oh, well, everyone is an artist these days, shall I say. So, what, like, do we do?
He, animation, Cheeks answers for me, answering innocently in good faith, as if legitimizing my practice just by his mentioning of it.
Animation . . . What, like William Kentridge? Anthony chortling through his throat with Yoda-like Spaceballs cackle.
The apartment was silent, and you could only hear the traffic insecting outside. It apparent A., realizing he had let himself go too far again this time, leers hastily for recuperation,
What is the, um . . . basis of your . . . um, Anthony now showing forced tenuous interest now, as to make up for his snarpy.
Looking at Cheeks, Cheeks tilts his head, signaling to answer.
I have characters, characters I've developed. Like puppets! Puppets, well, they started off as puppets, puppets, mock ups I do or like did, like the characters I've . . . created . . . I used to do like little shows, little shows or like, puppet theatre back home, but now I'm learning how to scan them in and render them digitals, create my own original stories.
Looning up on claw, a babbling brook bubbling in place to nowhere became I. Because I was so felt put upon the spot, so mired in misguided sense of trying to explain my uncooked, defrosted animation projects as accurately as possible to Pappalardo, at the cost of any baseline walking around self respect anyone else would otherwise hold in front of strangers in this city. But I just continued yammering on, fully aware of how insipid I sounded and now looked in Anthony's cynical Dylanesque (Bob, not Reider) sub zero blue eye impaling stare, which he couldn't be bothered even now to pretend to hide. I still felt I needed Anthony's approval though, even though I immediately didn't like him in person. I knew how preposterous and insipid I now signaled, but it was like, it was as if, or, no, was it like, I was willingly letting myself get pushed by the gale of offstage stage fright of all my worst instincts? My nervous nonce stupidity tricked me up now and again, by just saying: Hey!, broadcast it all about anyways, against all your best interests now and right now, even though you can tell how naïve you sound out loud from someone's. People are just afraid of socials because they feared their unconscious drives wire trip to uncontrollable reactions or blathering or even recalcitrant recitations, and so is why people fully invested in making a living off arts and crafts tended so to be neurotic.
Ah, well, that's . . . fascinating, Anthony shifting with a now cautious innocence, handling what I said as if it was a delicate situation to be dealt with with appropriate trepidation. At eye value, such could be interpreted as his way of exercising noblesse diplomacy. But after pondering this episode over over the years, replaying this incident to myself, I now know that that cautious innocent trepidation was really Anthony's way of shielding himself from becoming secondhand embarrassed by me and by what I was saying. It was also Anthony's way of looking, seeming better, more polite than he actually was.
Not even reading the situation, still going with the pull of my thoughts, at the Academy of Art I'm taking a digital rendering workshop, am making these paintbucket tool landscapes.
Seth, get me out of this, Anthony's patience finally exhausted.
Seth said nothing and he and Anthony went into what seemed like a bedroom, closed the door curtly behind them, while I stood in front of the bookcase.
I stood there in place for however fast or however slow minutes spend in apartment on weekday in New York, self conscious now, as if it would even be out of line to veer further into the living room, even though I was invisible on the other side. I could hear Seth and Anthony now talking emphatically on the other side of the door jammed.
The front door to the apartment key jiggers open, vein in the day's vapor, a striking stately nightingale in her early twenties with skin the color of the best side of town, blows in like a downy tuff, immediately looks direly startled at me here now, though it's quite immediately apparent that she's startled now to an overblown extent, as if dehydrated for six days, five nights of anteater moon.
Hullo, lamely waving, to which elicits no response from her.
She, Woolite rain. She had eugenics blond hair, scowled at me with her eyes scornfully, as if I was an illegal alien or refuge accompanied by illegitimate toddler who set up camping tents in her living room or in her family office parlor. She had on a non-work Esprit blue blazer with brass buttons, a pair of Diagram jeans, even though Diagram jeans had long long ago gone out of popularity, but I instantly intoned this, now, as fashion forward gesture by her - old old Diagram had a wash like effect, but hers now were reprised and befitted stark starched dark uniform blue, as if cut right from the roll they came from, almost, but not quite looking like blue khaki. Surely, she was not wearing Altamont.
Anthony! Anthony!, she belted in no general direction.
The door to the bedroom abruptly opens, Anthony comes out holding a small MOMA Moleskin that you could tell he had been writing in. He closes the door behind him.
Sweetheart, sweetheart, dear, you're rather early for the Frick I might say,
Whatever annoyance she walked into the apartment already with, was only all but compounded by my presence there now.
Pappalardo, not missing beat to Dibbs, Dear, I'm afraid today I am not exactly in nop notch form, yes. Been feeling a bit toule découpé since the morning, you know. You have met my good friend . . .
Anthony turning to me, Friend, what's your name?
Alain . . .
Alain, Alain, yes. Sweetheart, Dear, have you met my good friend Alain, yes.
Here, this depressingly ideal of understated deceivingly plain, proportion Mary Jane faced raven of city star better than you metropolitan ideal embodiment (like Penelope in Trading Places), and Anthony just handling her with the same 20th century fin de siècle sprezzatura precision, the very same deftness he employed on the HATE Park side ledges in Philly.
She, not exactly gay with laughter, though I was certainly real impressed with how Anthony now tap danced around her, his sort of display in handling such damsel of such stark skyscraper white snake stakes in such fashion, (No wonder I still sought his approval despite his condescension!) - performative, like he was doing a demo a bit for me now, such stunt surely more dangerous than switch flipping into the city of brotherly hypocrisy waterless fountain. Anthony shuttled like a centipede. I got a keen sense that I was heretofore witnessing an unexpected, sight unseen by me, though was familiar despite this seeing it the first time, version of another side Classic Pappalardo now.
You're just here a smigen early that's all. Look Seth's here. I'm with Seth! He's giving me the info on Witlock, as if telling her this should naturally appease her.
I don't care if you two of you are looking at the Shroud of Turin in there, she, one step ahead of Anthony's pack of lies the entire time.
Okay, okay, sure, sure, no, they are leaving very soon Dear . . .
II.
A couple of years after I first met Anthony he started making these small teeny tiny tea tables out of blind white formica. He'd always said Fred Sandback. Sandback, it was like he was indicting himself, implicating his work, just by always verbally shelving it beside Sandback. In such respects, in such regards, each interaction with Anthony seemed rehearsed and transactional, always on the prowl to dispatch his pitch - that's how the NY scene was back then - small, though unequivocally engaged. Anthony, unprecipitated by no one, shoe horning the ad hoc unsolicited self critique of his own work, inserting what became his mantra always into the convo casually, "Yeah, I know, I know, my work, too redolent, Sandback ", but Anthony, still all the while, still brazenly never quitting making work showing affinities with, well, Fred Sandback? As if Anthony, only to then become associated with him by sheer will of verbal repetition targeted at his audience (which actually, worked like a song). Each table he built circled itself into the carousel of postminimalist museological symbolic order, each embossed on the top with a number generated through some seemingly random parameters with which Anthony staked out each series. These numbers could be anything from, the dimensions of the parameters of the gallery where they were to be exhibited, days of the year they were made and assigned to where they fell into numerical ascension on the calendar, or maybe numbers randomly generated by something like the I-Ching or thrown dice cycles or from proteins or menstrual cycles. The numbers were also written by Anthony with felt tip pen on tablet paper and then physically sent off to a mill in China, and embossed on some kind of impossible to get paper, with the specified font he had had designed, and the outsourced works on paper were either displayed in an editioned binder on pedestal or matted and framed behind glare-proof plexi. At best, the works could be interpreted as solemn, elegiac, commemorative form. Not at all subjective expression though, more that the universe just generated this object naturally on its own accord, like a stone or a shadow upon thicket (or blackbox in Kubrick's 2001). Looking at the tables this way at best, could intimate, instigate a real spell of existential vertigo, though. They were (post)conceptualist remediation, a direct vestige of death of author function, decried by say, Foucault, and Roland Barthes a little after the middle of the twentieth century, and the work of this nature, is where they fell into the trans-historical chronology of western mark making morphology into now Specific Object, now upheld by (and fetishized) only but by a micro cluster vanguard of a very few, wildly magnanimous and enthusiastic and influential small and extremely dedicated network of galleries, gallerists, curators, independent curators and kunsthalles, and eventually trickling into museums in North America, Western Europe, Eastern Bloc, Scanadanavia, and eventually always-late-to-the-game Italy. If you were to look at what was going on in the late nineties in New York gallery sphere, Anthony's approach starting out was actually about twenty five to thirty years behind the times, as opposed to au courant already rising lumenaries, Iza Genzken, Jackie Winsor, Rachel Harrison, Arthur Kessler (this, though, something Pappalardo was actually quite also keenly aware of - think about it: it would be like Anthony skating like Tony Alva and trying to audition for a part in Photosynthesis). But still, Anthony, without a tightrope (or the means of MA training or fellowship program to scaffold his dry, as about as flavorful as eucharist wafer tiny tables, that only functioned as dialogic exercise speaking only to other objects of the past produced in the wake of the penultimate end of postwar hi-modernism) pulled off integrating himself into the early 00's Chelsea gallery scene nonetheless, maybe going to Postmasters two or three times too too much a month, but enough to gain the attention span of the enthusiastic and devoted and hard nose cannot-be-fooled-by-gimmicks-or-pyrotechnics audience, who were very much invested in this specific type of work, who actually payed hard attention, as so to on the upside, allow for their impassioned and thoughtful feedback for Anthony, and as for him to now shift and develop his practice accordingly into a significant, and dare I say, more, never-been-done-dynamic-way (the importance of such audience engagement and feedback cannot be overstated in developing one's practice, and this was a significant reason New York was Capital - that extremely rare degree of essential audience engagement). Yeah, with Anthony's formica tables, Sol Lewitt immediately comes to mind, is the obvious connection, the grandfather, and then of course the mother was Mary Kelly, whom I quite actually do often associate Anthony with, and also, there were works in the vein of say, Jutta Koether, Cheyney Thompson, or obviously Stephen Prina, the external computer hardware apparatus application of say, Wade Guyton now, and even far back as the self reflexive, registered linguistic application and museological time and cultural intertextuality of Lothar Baumgarten - early Lothar Baumgarten, that is! These things take time. It wasn't like how, like when, Anthony was abducted by Alien Work, he fell right in line, right into the chronology of a post World Industries Southern California West Coast tech formalism, though only then, with Anthony, and with skateboarding now, it was at the end of the nineties, on a then now brutal and barbaric decaying and grim grack East Coast streetscape, Brooklyn Banks set for extinction. It was precisely that same au courant awareness and of the time instincts though, with which he eventually made his slow but firm ascent into eventually showing work at Reena Spaulings Gallery (totally by surprise and out of nowhere). Anthony, then just now frequently seen on the streets in SoHo or Chelsea running with, always seen in the wild with Aria Dean, as if Aria, was now a surrogate for Dill (and actually, Aria was the new Dill, more Dill than Dill now). For the exhibition "Pedestals, Bias-cut/Robert Macaire/Chronochromes" at Galerie Daniel Buchholz Berlin in 2004 (which, I'm almost sure Aria may have had a hand in impossibly getting Anthony lined in on) - Pappalardo's real breakout piece - embossed Chinese ragpaper with the almost endless, too long to be able to write out url to the website of the piece, with the site housing a spreadsheet document of information concerning global shipping container routes, but here, with the "homemade" font he had designed, applied in through being "hacked" into the excel spreadsheet on the site or should I say, this now site-as-sculpture - a vast and flat towering network veritable information sculpture (even more expansive than a Serra!) now spanning the length of the entire internet wired globe shoe.
strings on a lute
plectrum in a box
shelves diagonal
only for looks
in front of unsuspecting
Miami Sound Machine jungle jangle garbage can mix elixir
As ancient lakes rain with storms from today
III.
Anthony stood by himself in front of the Brooklyn Museum, not smoking, just waiting, greets me, You're late. He was wearing a wrinkled oxford stripped button up, that reminded me of a Daniel Buren flag, top two buttons not in use.
I wasn't late, and I could have very well pointed out the time, but to do so would have been to miss the point entirely, in a way that only makes sense if you've had enough experience with Anthony.
Is, is the line for tickets long? To which Anthony responds to me by gruffly, shoving me a ticket, saying nothing. Usually one would feel like VIP when handed a free ticket to museum, but only with Anthony, such would not be the case as with him now, I'm in trouble with him a head of time, broken some unsaid social convention even before I arrived.
It's so disorienting being out here in Brooklyn, I mean really, I must say, it's giving me an earache, Anthony lightening up, now proffering optimistically.
Oh, come now, it's not so bad.
Not so bad? No, really, I feel like I'm in Oklahoma, it's not so bad. I could never date a girl who lives in BK. With, what begins with staying the night at her flat out here, and before you know it, you're downloading The Weekend ringtone onto your telephone . . .
Ok, ok, ok, it is that bad, but same could be said for Manhattan also.
Yeah, well, that's why I never, . . .why I never, like, you know, leave my neighborhood, my block, leave my apartment.
But you're here now, realizing again how I find myself having to take an otherwise uncharacteristic for me antagonistic attitude with him.
While turned to the side looking up at the banner hanging from the facade: Virgil Abloh: Figures of Speech.
Ay yes, I know, please do not remind me, dear.
The foyer is lurching with crowds of people inside now specifically to see the Victor Abloh show, and now I realize what exactly precipitated Anthony's impatience.
I've never in my life seen this many people here, they must be raffling off a pair of Air Jordans later, Anthony stating as plain as day, in a way I can't quite tell if he is being facetious or serious. He was always like this.
Rows of stantions rail-rowed people waiting to get in. I was wearing a fresh out the box pair of tan "1992" Half Cab pros, and since I was wearing them for the very first time, they were by now just unnecessarily hot and scoring shoelace marks on the tops of my feet, strangling my feet no matter how much I loosened them up on the subway: these were the pro replicas - with a crunch foam "pop cush" footbed, though I wish I just had had the plain originals, like Anthony that first time I met him in his apartment with Cheeks (though Anthony's were the original 1992's with the white Half Cab tag and not the black re-issue tag like mine, that pair of originals he had on, which I spent years thinking about, all but reminding me the confounding gift of the grab greater means Paps always possessed.)
We won't have to wait, we've got green tickets, boletos verdas as they would say in Mexico Citodad, I think, ah perhaps, maybe, yes . . .
On a flatscreen installed next to the vinyl lettering wall at the front of the exhibition announcing the show, the show's curator Antwan Sargent, was leering in the screen, now on the screen unintentional automatic caricature of himself in the heart of the immediate spectacle of the accompanying supplemental media of the show, and it's the first thing you see: him off the bat, wearing luxury martin-like (martin as in marshen alien) cartoon self parodying square sunglasses, the type that unconscious to the wearer, says I dare you to try and take me even the slightest bit seriously. The volume had been disabled, you couldn't hear what he was saying, though you know he was talking about something.
Inside the feeding frenzy of Figures of Speech, we gallery shuffled past a long, unfinished wooden table displaying pairs and pairs Nike, the most exalted looked like a Pippi Longstocking, a Punky Brewster took sewing scissors, cut off pieces and Edward Scissorhands'd them back brusquely onto different spots - faux functional postmodern printed word text onto the baked clear vulc, and then thick, colored extra superfluous plastic orange Black and Decker security zip tie attached, like they came from a bin at a flagship outlet.
Shoes for you, of all expiring Oldsmobile regency of the plush land they would be mowing over carpeting. We, children of Spencer's Gift ank, they designed the Lincon Continental dashboard for us and them, to drive us to hotel airport for smoking Parliments in a room on Monclair. And what a terrible invention was the telephone because now you see exactly where people end. And all I ask, all I want, is is just to be drunk off the possibility of lust fullfilled.
What we were looking at now, though, was Abloh's 3% hack rule (take something and manipulate it by 3% to create something new) and I couldn't help thinking how such rule of thumb, such methodology would cause the culture to feast upon itself, and even more so than it already has, imagine to such pluralist hell of catastrophic degree if an entire generation adhered to this!
As if Abloh was the first to combine Deconstruction and Fashion, we seen this fashion before though done to death, Dreis van Noten, Ann Demeulemeester, Martin Margiela in the early 90's, visible seams, the linings, rough edges, whatever, Anthony edges on,
As if to say the future is now and is designing Big Mac boxes, and this is not an exaggeration, the museum struggles for primacy now more than ever, but maybe, I think, its a shift, a shift, that, that, demands a . . . reconsideration, or no no, it's like even an opportunity for whatever once constituted avant-guardism to wain only to be but debased by a public now affirming this baroque fashion industry utilitarian not art conscious art and design in an historical amenesia, which also functions as entertainment. I mean, avant-guarde, if such a coterie is even available or is known now, or even exists now. There was a fabricated black broken gas station sign that somehow looked Kaws like, but that doesn't exactly make one Ed Ruscha (but you could see this is precisely where the greater public would be lulled into thinking this exhibition as art). Maybe a granular reconnection of art and life has occurred here, but here, under the explicit, unabashed terms of a decadent Hunger Games gentry culture industry, like, the fashion industry really, a shallow, hallow, reflection to capture the imagination inside the like, like lupen petit bourgeois of strip center sheds, drowning and choked by the superficiality of technology produced new materials, user generated graphics of Kanye Coors Light goatee - you can tell a lot about a man by their facial hail.
The brittle, but convincing to an ocean of people twee hop image, the bear outfit mascot, pre-jail Cosby Show, It's a Different World, College Dropout millennial affirmative, but worse because it's by a Gen X'er, that would only then descend, and even betray the light weight of itself, to only but inevitably advance into hippopotamus surgery hips lipshitz, decadent neofuturist nu right leaning libertarian preper compound avec personal Peloton tank . . . Abloh is hardly Guy Debord.
Abloh didn't know Guy Debord from Guy Mariano . . .
Well, people apparently believe there must be something avant-guard about un-ironically mixing gospel, religious music to postmodern post-hip hop. Does the direct messenger of God also get bestowed permission to rap about being a "cockstar" unironically? Really, it is that preposterous . . .
A group of Asian students with tote bags, and gift shop plastic bags with graphics commemorating the exhibit, and nylon windtunnel pants, the in-the-ultimate-now tech post post raver clunkers, aren't looking where they are going, one bumps into both me and Anthony, says nothing, and keeps to scuttling forward does he like he's lost, in the immediate hustle clamor of the gallery.
Tis tosh, Abloh is hardly Rimbaudian Rebel offering the saving grace of like, some, like radical, like subjectivity in an administered word, but rather he's just some lightweight technician garage door opener salesman working in tandem with global luxury brand to give off some equally normie just-add-gradient-field to everything, version of neofuturist "street wear" fauxvant-garde for lupen proletariat, this, that of, at the expense of, any cultural import street wear must once have ever had had, and think about it, remember . . . Anthony riffing, talking a bit too loud as for perhaps others in the gallery can hear him pontificate.
Yeah totally, like where where YOU when Snuff came out, with zero irony.
Smoking coke is just a skater thing, a portal, if you never vapourized baby teeth, don't even pretend to know what you're talking about it front of me,
Right, yeah, right, well, like I saw, I saw, this in his New Yorker profile, his New Yorker profile, it was, was there's a scene, something like, where he unearths an old Alphnumeric tee from somewhere as if, like, as if, he's some kind of archeologist, some kind of archeologist of the beaumonde. Alphanupes was so short lived anyways and not to say, limited conceptually to instant obsolescence almost. They had the Alphanumeric logo and their only other, other graphic was a line of every number typed out and then that's it. Give him his sticker star.
Well, no, give him his own retrospective . . .
Me and Pappalardo, Pops and I, arrived at a constructed Rem Koolhaus designed house in the middle of the gigantic gallery. What was exhibited as social space to ostensibly activate visitors, more reeked of materialist production glut, if anything. A sign of activities advertised "drink and draw" on the activities schedule, as if anything great had ever been created while drunk. As two white columns that were of the gallery's original architecture, clunkily pierced the porch of the house on the frontside, as to say there's simply no better way to design this shedhouse-in-a-gallery around these permanent structural elements (despite the room being monstrously large to work around) and the columns porking through the floor and roof in a sorry, this is just as good as it gets folks presentation, despite being a show about innovative applied design. And as if a pine shed in a gallery had already not been exhausted to rhinoceros tears in the last forty or so years of post minimalist practice. Even Dave Hickey went on a tirade about how many endless variations of pine sheds he's been subjected through throughout his years. It's as if to give a show of utilitarian art of displays or clothes racks and merchandising of luxury products some kind of heft of relational imperative. But to then just-add-water (water, being a house now) as ad hoc meta social space in a museum (which, a museum in and of itself is already a social space), to activate a lumpen proletariat who would rather be in traffic line for a dunk raffle.
This is giving me a headache, I'm pretty much ready to go, Pappalardo plys.
But going to shows you hate usually cheers you up . . .
I know, I know, I also just mostly want a cigarette, with wincing face as if he was homeless, looking away as if for something supposedly off in the distance.
I'm too exhausted too actually, though not really physically. Go figure from seeing a show about the graphic designer for a Trump supporting rapper, the designer for said rapper, I mean really, like that said rapper, then trying to rap and run onto the ticket to sift votes from the opposition. Anyways, you want to go, go get a beer . . .
No, no I just want to go back to my apartment.
Well, if I lived at your apartment, I woulda never want to leave either I suppose.
What do you mean by that?
Uh, nothing, I mean, I was just, your apartment, your apartment, it's swankier than Swankfunk.
What do you mean, my apartment in Swank, I mean -like- where I'm at, now?
What, are you still there still?
Still what, what are you even talking about, Alain?
I've only been to your place once, remember that, that one time, there was a girl who showed up. That girl.
What time? What that girl?
That girl. There was a girl, a girl there, the girl, the girl, you know . . .
No, no I, don't, old yearling . . .
She looked like a diplomat's wife, she looked like Lucy Ives, no not Lucy Ives . . .
A diplomats young wife? But, that could be anyone . . .
She seemed really bewilderingly stuck up I might add, just ruddde, despised me at first sight. Talking to her was like trying to pass a border guard.
And again, Alain, in regards to despising you, that could be but any girl. You need give me more.
She looked like, you know, proud Dutch heroine, who had a low tolerance for any slight disruption of the natural rhythms of her mind. She had a short bowl cut but with ropey blond hair weighed down like by metal sinkers.
Sveltlana!
That's her name? That sounds right! That sounds right, even though, even though, I've absolutely no basis for such reasoning her name. I remember though, she said something about like not caring if you were looking at the Shroud of Turin in the bedroom.
Sveltlana, Anthony low with a relieved, optimistically strained, but accepting bewilderment. Thinking back later though, I realized that he must have known I was talking about Sveltlana right from the mitt, it was just to the degree of intensity that which mere mention of her name brought about in A, which may have, that may very well have, been embarrassing for him, similar in the way a puppy crush is embarrassing when you're little and people know, but also different, and that which, that what, insisted upon itself he had had to be cajoled into remembering her out loud now.
Yeah, what was with her. What was her,
We were, were, well, are no longer, I mean, nevermind, its been a while. She's dead now actually.
What, she's . . .
The quelching water tower in the background peacefully marked the armory maze from far away, and it made me feel present inside the day, in the now, comfortable and situated in the languid bustle parameter of Brooklyn, in a way it never could have been possible in the late nineties. Young people were out and about, but I could see the city was really, was actually choreographing their actions. A large, giant student heroically carried a giant blank canvas down the sidewalk, and I could see in him, in his self, regarding a satisfaction towards his inevitable supposed mastery of materials, (and then later inevitable mastery of audience), but really, I could just see it was really the city that was commanding his actions, telling him what to do, the city telling him what to do as far back as before he even moved here. The city telling him what to do through a movie he saw as a child. It was a matter of his desires aligning with the city function. The city needed an art student to complete the school's enrollment quota, the student's roommate needed a roommate to offset rental costs. A bored and semi interested girl at the Uni would need someone (him) to spend time out with a couple of nights next September or October to distract her from herself, until she got bored or bumped into someone better, or bumped into someone not necessarily better but with whom he'd be replaced with anyways, or just moved away. The thing I miss most about college is everyone was living in the space between checking out the rental and returning it - like being locked in a safe unaccountability, a campus bulletin board decorating permissive freedom. I think everyone could sense this about everyone, but no one ever vocalized it, and they probably just thought about it abstractly and in minuscule fits and shards of flashes, as if not to ever make itself known on the outside. The day was passing, as we kept walking away from the Brooklyn Mausoluem, Anthony handed me a cigarette without me asking.
A tall, lanky, student with long hair, John Lennon eyeglasses, Nero jawbone facial hair that looked like a thick helmet chinstrap, was playing fiddle by himself in the park, and it felt unsatisfying, not good enough: music was more complicated than just being happy with whatever the self anointed decided to play in public, especially when they music in a historical vacuum - like it's Back to the Future IV. He didn't have a stand, was just free balling on the fiddle in the park and you know he'd be getting encouragement from practically each every pedestrian who walked past him, and it reminded me, just as hot as NY thinks it is, the pedestrian's automatic appreciation for anything live and music dynamic could very well be seen anywhere in America.
Pops shifted into the easy going approachable version of himself, wiping his eye with the same hand that was holding cigarette,
What can I say. Like, her internal chemistry, like, rhythms of all the like, the cycles that she was made up of were too, almost too, calibrated, too true - the lesser world made her just simply nauseated, more than anyone else I ever knew, even more susceptible to the blinding, blanching radiation of irregularities the land is plagued with. But as you know, we, you and me, are more like, just, inoculated, we're more inoculated against this broken world because we are children of a lesser god, children of a lesser god, we're animals used to ticks living on us.
I mean, I actually, like, kind of believe that. I saw her only for seconds, years ago, but I never forgot about her. I weirdly never forgot her. Actually, I thought about her every now and then, for like years, like since the day I saw her at your apartment.
Yeah, join the club. The fan club. Like, you know how there's like the Joy Luck Club, well, this is the Sveltlana NO LUCK club, hers, anything but lucky. And you kind of didn't even have to tell me, because I practically already knew. And you know what? I knew not necessarily because you gave me any indication, I just knew because I more know Sveltana, how the world reacts to her. Anyways, that wasn't my apartment, that was her place.
Oh, I assumed it was yours, the Alien Works live-sized stuffed alien bear was just . . . yours.
It mine. No, wait, what am I saying, that was actually hers, no, that was hers, and actually, you know what? Orange County, OC Dill gave to her -
Dill? Well, I thought about her, so strange all these years actually.
Yeah, that's like the seventh time you said that. You should see who she ended up with after me, though. This Wally Walrus techno libertarian anarchist who looked like her younger brother, while also looking like her father.
How did she pass away.
She didn't pass away, she died.
How did she?
Aneurism.
I'm sorry.
I'm not.
What a thing to say, coach,
Well, Lana, not exactly Cordelia to Lear, Sveltlana was never happy, she was never, just never, well never happy, and it simply made her hard as bridge bolts. It was her fault she was unhappy, though, it really was. Everything good in the world, wanting to make itself to her. There's the Voltaire line about, about choosing to be happy, like that that being your most important decision dude, the most important decision you make. As smart as Sveltlana was, this was, was like, wherein her limit like, you know, like doth lie and all. And you could just tell, you could really see it, this world, just seemed just so lousy to her, that's all. You could see it, like, if you were looking at her from the side, glancing at her looking at something. I mean, I could at least. I mean - no one, nothing, like noth-ing ever impressed her. Like nothing. No one. Nothing ever seemed excellent to her, like, ever, or rarely She said my Photosynthesis part was short - I was like, yeah but, that's the thing, so was Gino's in Trilogy! I liked that! Then she's beaming on Tim's part, was paying closer attention to Tim and it was so thoughtless, so rude of her. The Amazon National Geographic store music. And, I'm not saying I demand, like demand, I like need this attention, praise, you know?, but you know, if like, I was watching her, watching HER video part, you know I'm dare not going to start prancing emphasis of say another girl's part, like another girl on her team, you know. Watching some girl on her team. Hey, who's that?! Hey babe, what's herrr name? I really like how she skates! But that's how she is. Or was. That's how Sveltlana was. That's how girls are though, not all, but a significant portion, or I'm just saying it's common, right? Anyways, Sveltlana would like read philosophy, like text, ya know, and then just say, yeah, I already thought that by myself, on my own in third grade. She told me, like in third grade, like, and on her own, she like realized that some sentences, no matter how many times you read them over and over, you would never figure out exactly what they mean without outside context clues from someone else outside the text. Little prissy Sveltlana, in third grade and she's thinking, coming up with Derrida! Derrida, I mean Derrida for Christsakes. I mean really, really there was no one smarter than her, you know, to the extreme of like, there was no, there was just no, like mystery WITH anything in this world, there was no mystery about people to her, that's what it was, no mystery ever in the air. I knew her better than anyone. I KNEW HER BETTER THAN THE GUY SHE MARRIED . . .
Her Wally Walrus brother dad Husband, who's apparently, in the end, more impressive than your Photosynthesis part.
Yeah, no, he's husband. Get this though, listen to this. Is, I was still on Alien Work post Children of Mars pre Intaglio era. I was making 10K a month on Photosynthesis everslicks and then some, and more. I've found myself poster child for the most vanguard board-co in the history of the Western culture and the world over, even though Photosynthesis would really not articulate itself as succinctly as say, Time Code, Memory Screen, 411 Industry Profile, Mars Children, Intaglio. Still though, Mike Hill called me Elliot, like, Mike Hill actually called me Elliot, because in some hard to articulate way, I reminded him, kind of like reminded him of like, you know, Elliot from that show E.T.. Colin McKay was actually the like Cloak & Dagger era Henry Thomas of skateboarding, in an off shot way, I apparently embodied Elliot from E.T. also, like to Mike Hill. Like E.T.. You know ALF? Anyways, team mates are getting on Quick, you remember that one surf brand Quicksilver? Idiot Dill, Ski-pro O'Connor, and even Danny Beachouse Flannnel Garcia. I was made a generous offer to get on Quick, but refused. Like, I'll pay that 4k a month out myself, out of my own pocket, just to get the privilege to embody the purity of such a beyond wonderful, once in an existence board company, unmarred by Quick stickers. Though Sveltlana didn't quite exactly see it that way. I mean, at first she did, she had the best taste ever basically too, really was the smartest person in New York easy, but she would never just let it go. Just like let it go Sveltlana, I mean for the love of Christ, can you just this once? You know what I mean? No, and like, I said, she got it, she did understand it also - The Sovereign Sect. She got it, the whole Dogma 95 Gummo Alien Work psychic blender television thing, she really did appreciate all that. I like to think she was attracted to me at first, because, like, it seemed like I was born to you know, embody this sublime expression of the earth, by like being this natural fit, the spiritual avatar on this team. But, I think she just needed, she just needed someone to bully, some place for her anger to be misdirected at, like because of the you know, the insufficient city New York was, or you know is, an insufficient world the world was, her poor rich miserable family. And she just would never let it go. When are you going to sign on Quick. I told you I'm not. You said you were going to get on Quick, but you still never had, you lied to me. I told you I am never riding for Quicksilver. Then she started hanging out with Spinades Dill, and this was around the time of Intaglio. Or no, she was already hanging out with Dill, when, then, she started bugging me to get on Quick now. It's like she was jealous of me now, wanted to bring me down to Dill's level by me getting on Quick, all the while also bizarrely out of no where, becoming buddies with Jason. Also, Dill had a shoe on Vita, which was also Quicksilver. I just had Workshop, which was if you think about it, just proper being only Alien, and I was like, keeping it correct, and don't get me wrong, Sveltlana was smart enough to see that me refusing to get on Quick was actually pretty proper and like, integrity, you know, but at the same time she penalized me because it was just something she could invent to penalize me for, even though I'm otherwise a pretty decent boyfriend, and she gets real verbally abusive, she gets like real out of line, saying inappropriate not in her place things to say, like I'm poor, I'm a little man, just talking shit about my mom, always hanging out with everyone and anyone, like RIGHT in my face or completely without me, this including team riders, which are basically my coworkers. Then Intaglio drops. Intaglio drops, and watch how insipid, how insipid Dill's part is and like compare it to mine. His corny two Fork songs, Broadway Dill, his Tony Alva hair, having to go all the way to corny Barca, getting corny Barcelona clips, all which that have nothing to do at all with the conceptualization and articulation of the Sovereign Sect tout court! And then look at my all only EAST COAST part, my part, sprinkled with OHIO clips!!! So who was right all along??"Yeah look, look at Dill's part, there's ya boy OC Dill!' And she wouldn't say anything, just sat there rabid in the glare of the video dvd menu loop fumming, totally one upped, and it was all her fault and she knew it because this was all drama she went out of her way to stir up because she couldn't make herself happy, control her emotions, was pretty, was bored, whatever, and she revolted, was now a demon, a total hellion's child and would like go out noticeably all the time now, not come home like in my FACE as a form of retaliation retribution, staying out late every time now and now always going out without me, attending midnight orgies for all I know. To make a long story less long, I'm pretty sure she hooks up with Dill, I'm pretty sure, but not certain, but I don't have the stomach to find out for sure by now and so I put a torch up to Alien Works, burned the entire pine shed down. Like, Fuck You Bed Bath and Beyond Dyrdek. And then so, I life boat onto fedora twee Chocolate and it's all Sveltlana's fault.
Then what happened?
What do you mean then what happened . . .
Is that, was your break . . .
I don't know, but it ended up with her being with Walrus, that's for damn sure, Wally Walrus, fed with pablum, and then eventually getting an aneurysm in Bern.
Burn?
Switzerland.
Sveltlana went to Cal Arts, she went to Cal Arts, but she still called it Chouinard, she'd always say Shuynard.
That's just how she was. Chouinard. Made, I wished I went there also, and or, like with her. I wished I could be like her. But she was also immature. Look, it's like, like when courting a girl, the court, the spark, the, like, whatever, when you're courting a girl, they put you through probes, small probes, like they give you a hard time, and it's like a test, a test, a test, that you as a man are to keep a good attitude and take it like a good sport, because the world is full of abusive men, and this is ostensibly how they weed them out right?, and it seems this constantly-giving-you-shit tendency was as natural as a watering flower, a checks and balances of selection of nature. So you, like a good boy, like a good guy, take it. But then it becomes almost like investing in her debt. Or even, do you ever find yourself willingly acquiescing to making concessions from the abuse of someone else before you? I'm sorry I'm this way, but my last boyfriend was real abusive. Oh okay, no problem! Ill let you be disrespectful and mean when you need an airshaft for your emotional sewage then! She's, she, talks noise to you in front of your friends, more so maybe because she feels insecure because she doesn't know them and she tries to talk noise even with your friends towards you or implicates them with her as a way of finding common ground solidarity between them even if just subtly, and then it becomes comfortable for her to do so and then later, permanent. She talks noise, soft bullies you in front of her friends even. Her family. Talks noise to you in front of your mom, as like, a way of, like bonding-with-your-mom. So then it turns into you become complicit in your own degradation, for the sake of being a good sport. She talks noise about you to the new guy she meets. You could stand up for yourself, but she'll cause whirligig trouble to assert and not budge, give up her power, oh, no, no, certainly not that, though some other guy could react the same way as you, and he gets quite a different response from her, a pass, a better response from her, because of reasons really, really just out of your control, but though maybe not out of his. He could be dummmer than you, and his reaction to her, could be a function of his dumbness and he could get further than you, by virtue of the steeliness of his dumb lug insensitivity. Most women allow themselves to become colonized by emotionally immature, and dominant men, who they in the background in their head know they are actually better than. Most, not all, but most, can't stomach being with their equal, its an epidemic. An unexceptional man, doing exceptional things goes further than an exceptional man doing exceptional things, because then he's exceptional and now a threat somehow, despite him otherwise considering you one or of the same team, and not competition. The unexceptional man who does exceptional things, thinks he's better, believes he's better, than the exceptional loser suitor. And that, that's, that was Wally Walrus. The kid with all the toys, he gets Sveltlana, because ever since he was a fat kid he knew the world was his right. And also, also, he like, even appreciates her less, less than me, and in less sophisticated ways he appreciates her. The fascism of beauty that enables it's own inconsistencies. The fascism of beauty that acts against it's own best interests for the sake of abating, satisfying immediate desires with compromising it's own fleeting standards. And that's a tragedy and yes, its unfair, despite nothing in this world except your instincts ever telling you the world or love was supposed be fair, romance love would be yours. But that's what did it for me anyways, that's why I had snapped. It was knowing, knowing he did not appreciated her like I did, I mean I just knew this, this is where I snapped, I just totally snapped, lost myself and said deport Alien Work.
Pines upon park sighed over on the lazy slope of the sweet of croft around McCaren. Anthony just walked up like nothing, looked at the kids jumping around a chewed up and barfed out by Gothzilla postmodern landscape of street spot mimicking parkspot mimicking real street spot, the kid's mis-engineering their tricks despite their many, too many, never ending purposeful attempts.
Anthony took out a cigarette, in a way that very indirectly highlighted his keenly frugal nature, despite it was inhaling unsatisfying toxic drugs that really weren't worth it, but which gave you something to be used to doing, instead of doing nothing, and that doing something instead of nothing, went a long way.
There were no skaters, just kids with skateboards.
Isn't this great, Anthony genuinely affirms, as if in true egalitarian spirit, and saying this to this, didn't make sense, but even such was a pattern for him, his contradiction of himself added to the veil he carried around.
Anthony marvels, And now how can we know the dancer from the dance?
But what it was, was, was Anthony was the last tech skater. Not the last skater who would ever skate tech formalist, but the last relevant fin de siècle (end of century) up and comer, and just think, the last, if only but a sliver away in difference from the tech gnar bombast of someone like, say, have-it-all-ways Appleyard. I mean, who was, what am was, more relevant than Pappalardo from '99 - '01?? Tech Gnar happened, Keenan Milton died on coke in a swimming pool at a party, and then a kid coming along (P-Rod) out Kostening Koston, obliterating and flattening out tech standards, like say making a switch krooks or switch back lip on a hand rail being given, rather than high standard bearer of tech. I think of what Bob Dylan said about going electric and leaving folk: disavowing folk music was too perfect, like growing bored from the garden of Eden, he naturally had to leave. I think tech was the opposite: unsustainable, it became a straight jacket and Anthony went out the other way, Anthony turning to minimalist. It was the beginning of what we now see with HOCKEY, and HOCKEY skater paratactical approach to the streets - no tricks, no routines, no choreographed lines, almost, like the apocalypse of skateboarding -there's no time to learn tricks, but only ride and confront and run away from the unsustainable dystopian riven land. The thing is though, being minimalist was unsustainable in it's own way also, to the point of Anthony's practice dwindling, getting much, much reduced down until his practice ceased to exist all together.
1) Early this morning I had two separate dreams about X, which in typical fashion, revolved as it always does in every dream about her - around the impossibility of never being with her due to hers, in the dream, passive I'll-still-just-be-friends-with-you-disinterest. The guy (who's name I won't mention), who at one point she was once going to marry in real life, was there in the dream also, which in real life he actually looked a bit like Arthur Miller (in real life, she looked, had a baleful stare almost like Elizabeth Murray). The dream was in a version of the real life old Luke's Hamburgers next to the Galleria, which at one point closed down and turned into a Zone D' Erotica which it all but remained for years and years. But in the dream, the Luke's burger hut building was instead some business vaguely related to an advanced culture industry maybe, the function of the building was actually associated with some notion of some vanguard hipness, and he and X were there maybe as practitioners or patrons, or they were just around, but I may have been in charge of the place somehow. It wasn't the overt theme of the dream, but it was as if I were a captain or school teacher and you see the student girl you want, pick a guy who's an underling or prole, and they casually exist defiant against your hard wrought stature, and as so it happens against you, almost in a passive couple way. Maybe in the dream it wasn't really like that, and thinking about it today, I've attached this interpretation onto it. Maybe they were really just there in the dream and that's all. I met her an embarrassingly long time ago, and the night I met her I had a variation of this futility dream (this was in the eighties). Her birthday is the same date of the title of the suite of Gerhard Richter's Beider Meinhof works, which I frequently come across at work.
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