At the time we were filming for the promo, I was going through some difficult things in my personal life. Shiva had left, and I met Abagail St. Claire at a party at what seemed like an otherwise fully operational Chinese restaurant in the financial district in New York. Abagail was of course more of an addict than I was, but I may have been in good faith only vaguely aware of it by then. Her father, an emissary of foreign services, had committed suicide, and she had a very difficult stepfather, who worked for the Federal Reserve Board, I think. Anyways, Abagail had gone to highschool with Rosario Dawson, who was married to Brian Lotti, and Gale was then now living in New York, doing a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology at CUNY, Gale studying favelas and the poor people at the margins of urban centers. Eventually, she got involved in activities of the May of '68 like resistance going down downtown, then she drop dropped out, came to live with me in Pasadena. But things were tough with her, and I was in a bad state—smoking legion and just trying to get things wrapped up for this once in five years absolutely cannot miss the train promo, work assignment—trying to scuttle clips all about L.A. When you're young, you think you can stay up all night and live that continuous large life, where spell of night bleeds into daytime hard reality and you know never stops. But it's the spec getting you through monocle of dream like day, and it can all get pretty bizarre. I was exhausted, and in the course of filming for the video, there had been a couple of real disasters. Winters, my pal at Treacle, ran an article about the PJ Ladd situation (the recluse and maybe slightly insane JD Salinger equivalent of skateboarding, having a crack up and converting to Muslim) and Ladd filed suit—against Winters, against me, because I was quoted extensively in the article. During all of this, I now then had to go into depositions—it was a fraught lawsuit to begin with, and Rick jumped in to pay for my defense. He paid for it all up front and it had been a whole gruelling ordeal, and then finally, when the case got to trial, it was all thrown out, but had already cost a good amount of money grip by then. To get Rick back for some of it, I sold the Jim Houser painting that Angel Nieves from Kids and Infamous gifted me for my thirtieth birthday. Abagail moved to Baltimore and then to DC, for a fellowship for a leftist think tank and then I went to New York before the promo dropped, and by this time I was sick at heart. When I landed in LA, I was going through the airport to the baggage claim, and by then my body just seized and locked up. I looked at my wrist watch and an hour had passed for what seemed like minutes, and when I checked my clock again, I saw that another hour had passed. I knew something was wrong. I called an artist friend of mine, who may have lived kind of near LAX, and then I called Mike Judd. Mike had actually been pro once or like, been pro, but had recently cancelled himself into preemptive self retirement. Anyways, Mike become a paramedic at the old UCLA Medical Center building, that was now Cedars Sin in Sinai Sinai. At the hospital, I was given some medicine, could have slept for a thousand years. This was like right when the tour was to resume for the promo release also—events we were duly expected to attend. Carroll, I heard, was appalled. Rick asked if I would be up for a little email interview while I was resting at Cedars, and I like, was real thankful to have such little grist thrown my way. Carroll was calling me to quit though, and I said, I said, I'll tell you what, I'm going to write out a resignation, but show it to the team and see what they think, if they back me, tear it up, if they don't, well then, you can have it. But Mike didn't even try and he just accepted it! Way after all this went down, I learned his mother had gone nuts, and insanity was a familiar thing in his life—anything psychiatric frightened Carroll.
Before Abagail decamped to Baltimore, the current of tenuous ramping wave gave way to vague but persistent evacuative air. On the last week, one night, Gail surprised me in the kitchen, which was strange, because I could or thought I could internally sense her presence here, or anywhere. Abagail's robe hair slicked back, smelling like bead moisturizer and her lily white skin shimmered in the cheap light in my kitchen, Abagail's pale skin was exactly what they made all the segregated buildings in our land for. There was no way she was going to just fritter her best years away with me in Pasadena.
How long you really intend to do this. Gail putting it squarely between us now.
Do like what.
Acting like you're Rob Stewart at Barney's Beanery in seventy five.
I got clips, stating such fact stoically, with a misguided confidence apparent to any observer, darting around the kitchen, as if looking for something. I'm not exactly worried about—
Oh, I know, you're not worried.
Abagail down shifed to exercising tenuously patient voice, which affected me none or less, or not this time,
How many hours on average do you spend on patching clips.
That's not, I mean, you know that's not an entirely fair— and you know, you like even know— I mean, I've surfed, like always surfed, or I've like since—
With bumbling cadence, unable to complete my thought with cast iron resolve required for Abagail's line of questioning now, It would be heretofore impossible by now even to like, you know, even to try, even try to just—
No, I know, you've said that before. You have to live that life, right. But tell me, just give me an average, how many hours in a week do you spend training your jumps, twenty, thirty hours.
Yeah, more like multiply that by eight days a week, Tanto! Lamely and in futility, trying to sound like the sixth member of Fearfaint, which to Gail only now sounds behind the times, though she can in no way fathom the imprintur our once obscure and rich subculture and its import once contained and projected onto a land theretofore once otherwise dominated by heavy metal—she like didn't know, and for now she definitely didn't care.
Already, and by now, looped the noose Adagail is extending, which I'm doing a real fine job setting myself up to hang now on, I mean, anyways, anyways I mean it's all, c'mon you know that, that, it's connected, there's no way you could possibly—
Like going all the way out to Dublin's to meet up with Monty.
Yeah, like going all the way out to Dublin's to meet up with Monty, exactly, like that. Monty, yeah, Monty, Christ, Abagail, can even hear yourself now. I can't believe you're even bringing that up.
I completed the thought too late to drive the idea home. I mean,Abagail, he was, was, even was about to like abandon, you know it would have been catastrophic if he would have bowed out now, in the middle of the, I mean you know—I had to stay up all night just to,
Abagail gains a footing and re-establishes herself, as if her life of otherwise perpetual false starts, should now be so well organized now that she's scrutinizing my life. Well, anyways, let's say you work fifty, no, how about sixty hours a week . . .
Ok, sixty hours—minimum . . .
Sixty hours. And if you added all your pay stubs coming in . . .
That calculation Abagail was wanting me to approximate was not too terribly difficult to come by, because that required adding up two, three numbers in my head. Jot numbers out now on the pad for old Abagail. She's playing it like, sitting down at the table like she was actually trying to help me out, like when you finish your homework and you have to give it to your mother to check. Abagail, using one of her pens from regal toffee purse pierced with extravagant heirloom. I probably shouldn't have, no, I know I shouldn't have even entertained her this far down the line of her vertiginous and immediate questioning, and it was just so inappropriate, and honestly, I don't even know why I even put down my earnings for her now. It was certainly none of her business and of course, as usual, she was being completely out of line. Abagail, always so out of pocket. I pretty much knew she was already leaving, and now she had just blindsided me with this, but I still wrote down the numbers on the pad, which if you think about it, the fact that I went along with something so futile, that I well should not have indulged in, maybe was more proof in her case against me. But also, I know for sure, if I was some helpless fuck up, not even pro tech, you know she would have probably stayed to try to save them— or no, I know she would have—but my success and innovation in this discursive field of teleological progression documentation of craft movements in the format of burgeoning independent video production at the end of the twentieth century, naturally always seemed to be, for no reason I could think of, tainting turn off to her and honestly, I just don't know why, but it surely always did. (I was raised under the false notion success is automatically attractive to women.) Think about it: I had beyond Doctor of Philosophy in like real life applied physics, Doctor Philosophy unused city architectural micro structures, Doctorate costuming and cute street outfits. And think about it, I mean just the hours alone I spent quest shopping, I mean the thrift stores, the pilgrimage to NY just to go to Jimmy Webb's . . .
Abagail finished her simple math, like she wasn't a recent drop out herself, as if buttressed by what little formal education she had had.
So even before taxes, divided by the hours a week you spend, you make as much as a soda jerk, or no, no, Jamie, you now would make more money working at a revival house.
Well, some of those, a lot of those hours are helping Glen configure for the flow squad tracking edit lists, which isn't technically my job, so—
Right, flow edits, which you certainly don't, don't even have to do. Why don't, do you even—
Because it's team collective—effort okay? I can hear myself out loud and it doesn't sound quite convincing, especially considering I am, have been perpetually trash talking the team to her ever since we met.
Titular, like titular participation in the like, the like fabric of brand identity, okay?? Giving Abs a preview of a looming senile future condition I surely will possess one day.
Also, also. Abagail listen. Listen, helping edit the flow kids lets me get, do practice. I get—I do do it because I get to practice edit, or edit tone!, that's all, and you know, like you know the mood for a video is, should be—the mood is, or not like the mood, like the style, like style, or it's like the style and besides, besides, you know this, or you should know this at least, is, is I'm just saying, and all I'm saying is, was that invention, inventing, or like inventing is, is—or editing is, if you think about it, is, like, the, editing— trick, and not to mention, not to mention, on the fly, and right on the fly, you know that, like what—like we said Vasari said—that he said, and so now, and now so what, so what with the flow kids, or that the flow kids are even, it's just not like, it's not like, no one, or no one listens, or just one thing is being, is saying, all I said is, is even doing this, is all, and then what, what it's, it like doesn't, or, no, it won't, isn't suppose to—I mean, I'm just saying it helps, it helps okay, to realize, just to realize that it helps if you just know or I'm saying—that. Decorating my part? Decorating my part you say?! I mean you of all people, now even you now say that, or that you could ever, but I mean think about it because—
Jamie, my cleaning woman in San Rafael takes home better wages than you.
I am laboring my vocation Abagail, there is nothing wrong with a man labouring his vocation.
Last night I dreamed a bomb drone droned near my head and right as it exploded in the dim whirling firmament, I could feel my cerebellum, the back of my brain, throbbing and vibrating as first register that the explosion was about to detonate and my brain busted, and I died, and I instantly turned to ghost. And you could only want to be sunset vape elf that she dragged on blown pulled between whistling shaped mouth's punctum, only shaken then ruthlessly to be exhaled out of her mouth and disappear. You could only want to be Tony Magnusson Excel spreadsheet wearing black leather Al Jourgenson cowboy hat, runneled electric electrons off the sifted cents, stolen off physical monies falling through sieve of grid of spreadsheet of team rider monthly, Evol everslick residual deck bank, and everslicks were unnecessary to deck a bank. You could only want her caught in the tangle womble of rampling mirror there in the beachhouse on perfectly godless lowercase tuesday at 1:51 pm in Galveston, and you can only now be so brusque, and you can only be all like fuck you too dude, and all of you, so inchoate in the dells of atrophy, and with no proof of purchase whatsoever, all ever ringing that her image had ever been, was, in fact, like had ever been minted there and then skulked into the train of the mirror. And when the object falls out of view inside the reflection of the mirror, it is no longer inside the mirror.
I never smoked base anywhere else besides Galveston's. But Jeanne said it wends differently here. The first thing I noticed distilling smoke through the beaker bubbler apparatus, the non-marijuana catheter glass toy was, was that it looked scientific respectable and safe sanitized, self justifying, if only by virtue of it existing and being manufactured by human hands in the reassuring ultra-economic capitalism realism mode cradle and, but, and, or, the first thing, the very first thing I noticed, was, was just the physical process, the process which actually had nothing to do with the effects of drug seizing the body, but it was just this kind of superficial, satisfying physical feeling of actually vapourizing and burning and balefully sucking the ghost of crack stone through glass straw. I thought, the actual physical process of doing that, was, in itself, so satisfying, in and of itself.
Basing in Galveston is like, was like being dead child star Guy Mariano—Guy, who is, who was, before he passed, that is, not literally, but actually, actually was the Michael Jackson of skateboarding. The big Jeff Koons white and gold lined porcelain pedestal sculpture of Mouse Guy, tribute—which was elevated off white giant vitrine. The Koons Guy sculpture was made, fabricated, in like nine nine, but I didn't actually see it at SF MOMA until '01. Stoned alone linden walking floor 3 galleries before they closed free Thursdays late, and the galleries, so innocent and accessible for you staring there vacant in the Megalopolitan development of early city evening's promise (conjuring all the black and white possibilities of George Gershwin's Woody Allen Manhattan bombast megapolis, mirth mad city tragic with all its cares), and the Guy sculpture was so just unexpected, and how had I not even heard about the sculpture, and I really should have known about it, I should have, and no one I knew or knew knew about it even at FTC, and I was bracingly just so shell shocked into reality seeing it, or not shocked into new reality, more like dumped out of claustrophobic water slide tunnel tube by corpse and cliffs and the shallow roves, into what may have been similar to what the surrealists may have called the Uncanny. But I think this was reality closer to how reality really was though, or this version at least here (Norman Maileresque, Central Park apartment ruling class witchcraft) when the reality I was otherwise stepped in, now seemed so Sunday Sallie newspaper insert inert pedestrian defused, and my life I can tell is or was that the much more now so predicated on all my ignorance, or the limits of my bewildering, embarrassing modest genealogy and origins. The Koons sculpture of Guy was like reality saying back to me, 'Life has always been, is still much smarter and richer than you will ever be or know—of course I told Koons to make the Guy sculpture—before you even knew what it was, what an enigma of idea something like that that that could ever be.' Guy's gold jaundiced spike eyes frozen projecting something diffuse, something unsettling, something like ancient Grecian or Greco, and was, was, or must have been eternally connected, connected to something, some essential existential condition, just from how the bent furrows on his face radiated frozen saint expression.
The Koons Guy sculpture wept blood when closed down and Danny Minnick painted all of Instagram. The porcelain Jeff Koons Guy Mariano sculpture is greater, more corrupt than you, just like the world is greater and smarter and more corrupt that you—and what that was was, that is, is the hidden wisdom, the secret history of New York. And anyone who knew this, anyone who accepted this, and then anyone who moved forward informed, was 'enlightened' and could be so set to advance accordingly, but, and here's the secret, they were not, they weren't never going to like enlighten you or even tell you about it, because you have to only cotton to it yourself, discovering it on your own is how you become illuminated, and besides, nothing in New York is or should ever be free and Chloe Sevigny is the Illuminati. Once you achieved such enlightenment in en why, you moved up a peg, now with withholding what you now knew, but also, good or bad, you were also permanently divorced from your now mere mortal family forever back home left in sallow provinces and things will never be the same, and now you too were implicated in all the all city korrupt, you now can express and contribute smaller manifold disfunction of your own too, this, while hypnotized by all the too typical seductive peals, and completely unoriginal treacle of luxury, purchase of cynical disco pizzazz Times Square, blighted like sphinx cursed by Thebes, and the expensive cheap car hoopla fat of dashboard of awkward GM design that mocked the super rich accidentally.
Because, we are all children of a lesser god, and that is what glazing crack in Galveston has shown me. That, that the cocaine is pure, that there is a feeling of just, like, like purity, of like feeling an almost unnatural feeling of resolve just the whole way before down, in a way that we well never did, do not deserve, and, if you think about it, such a complete feeling we were never going to deserve, illustrated by how our bodies become racked and havoked by utilizing what is otherwise the heartening benefits of all the nose cake.
There has got to be a way a cut chemist can manipulate the chewy chew pasty paste powder so that there are no adverse effects, and so that you can say, one day seek purchase of milky stones at Whole Foods. There has got to be a way to improve upon crack cocaine because dude, why couldn't there ever be?
But it's the Catholic guilt gulling scientists, the Catholic guilt (and aren't scientists mandated to sign a head of time NDA's not to believe in god after all?). But the Catholic guilt don't, doesn't, won't never ever gonna even allow for chemist techs to fix drugs or fix any drugs for that matter, or even, and just think about it, imagine like inventing better, more complete, more better clean drugs, because why?, bc they think we don't deserve to feel complete, that's why—and what's even worse than that, that is, is, is because, I know for certain, they all believe even wanting to feel better is a sin. And that's why religion is worse than cheap street drugs—at least base you can taste, at least base is fungible, gives a tangible, actual, real life high, that people otherwise kid themselves into thinking that's what grasping-for-crumbs-prayer offers. We must find the right combination of chemistries. and now our only hope for one day over the counter no side effects heroin, will be for AI to just figure it out and gin up for us later.
It was January and rainy in Galveston. We were on the sea wall walk and the sky was dark, and dark grey clouds sealed us inside a small case sky dome and it was heavenly not to have to have seen the sun for once and it felt safe and I felt contented in mid day like I never do. The sky voided out by the dark always made it feel like New Years Day (not to sound cliche, but the U2 song 'New Years Day' reverberated in my head—the day felt like that song). And when this happened, it seemed to be an illustration, that timeless ness, like the Bermuda Triangle of it all, was as much as a physical destination as an actual time in time—that the end of time was near or off or located at the end of land and this was the only thing that made such definite sense here in Galveston.
Earlier watching a VHS Sleepless in Seattle morning on Saturday day, we were both off. The comforting exhaust of cooking eggs earlier remained, Jeanne's still hair wet slick back, Jeanne smoking on the couch in a way that gives her a constructive air and Galveston Saturday stretches ripe with its promise. There was still a slight tugging of uneasiness there though, a chattering restlessness that never ceased, beckoning the need of getting up and doing something, or going out somewhere doing what, I do not know (this feeling, only quellable, only quashable, only resolvable by alcohol—that's why we drink), but it was, or Jeanne then was like,
Nora Efron's pathetic. Every character, every line of dialogue in this is just simply infected with her voice. Even Tom Hank's annoying son's little girlfriend has Efron's voice: H and B, Hi and Bye.
Yeah, I do still like this movie, though—it's just like pure American. The notion of like Zenith of America, Zenith of America is Pacific Northwest you know, I mean it isn't Galveston Texas, that's for sure. And then there's just Meg Ryan's all American Baltimore family, and of course archetypal Bill Pulman, otherwise a Norman Rockwell perfect fit. The notion of like classic America brought to the in the then now, pitch of Contemporaneity. There's even a tineey postmodern flourish undermining the entire narrative of Sleepless in Seattle, but also complementing the movie, expressed through the babysitter. She's there, but completely hollowed out—the scene when they are outside looking for his son, she calls out his name audaciously, exactly like it's a line in a script and the way its edited and comes off like it's a scene of a scene being filmed. So, a scene of a scene, cancels itself out and it is now just a naked non-narrative camera shot. That one shot of them looking for the son near the end, is the glitch in the movie, the edge of Sleepless in Seattle, in the small crisis before the movie ends.
Jeanne, her voice was deep, I could sense something was wrong, watched the rest in silence.
Later we drove to the sea wall, and there was no one out. Jeanne parked in the parking lot of a godless convenience store gas station right across the street from the wall. It was understood the small lot was for customers only, but Jeanne didn't care.
I'm incapable of overlooking reality, Jeanne seething, said out loud and to no one, aggressively crossing 61st against the spare traffic, swimming in the rain.
Foam heads blown loosened in the roaring sea and billow on billow collapsed into the purple uninhabitable mud of the beach spanning the entire sea wall. A barge miles away chaperoned us alone there.
A skipping fish fluttered in the raining ocean, while we were getting coked off on beer on sea wall.
Look, skippy fish,
Ever since Jeanne said the thing about Nora Efron, her mood had become increasingly hostile. I was dancing around it, but she became just more and more sore as hell. But then all I said was, it seemed stupid to go to church in Galveston, seeing it was on the edge of oblivion. Going to church at the beach was like watching a kissing video, while there was burlesque going on on the other side of the door.
Jocking Jeanne hard to counter from her mood since this morning, wound sifted salted so sour.
No, totally, I mean I prayed only out of superstition. Everything I was saying now was to accommodate how I knew she felt, bringing whatever topic came up in our now increasingly spare conversation. I was saying things, expressing attitudes I knew for sure how she already felt, but this forced her to even be contrarian now with everything I brought up, Jeanne refusing.
Jeanne took her anger and channeled it into statement,
Like, like what, what happens, when you pray, what happens say when all the bad people pray for bad things? Or, or is there a pecking order for prayers? The Janine impossibly straight black hair strand kept getting winded into her mouth, and she would pull it out with her thin white girl pencil pusher fingers.
I—I mean, you or like you . . . I don't you . . . NO, no, it's not that, it's not that at all even, I mean, don't get it wrong, is just like, reminds me of PIL lyric.
Jeanne vituperative, seething, Which—what no lyrics. . .
From the first, that one first one, or you know, one album they like did, they had . . .
What the one with,
NO, NO, something like, no, it was, or went like, it went that lyric, a sons of a bitch asks for forgiveness the second before they like die, and the line goes, or the line is is something, something 'now another sod in heaven'. Like, because they are instantly forgiven. What it's about, another tosser lands in heaven . . .
Oh, I see . . .
So, if you're a terrible person and ask forgiveness the final minute you die, but then what about the people who were decent the whole time?? Huh? I mean what happens then?
No, no, yeah. I mean, yes, that's way too, that's way too . . . that would be too democratic. Jeanne snapping into her considered practicality.
And god's not democratic.
Jeanne loosens. No no, for goodness sakes no, no, there's nothing, there's simply no reason why, ever to believe such — I mean not a stitch of empirical detail or evidence anywhere on this damn earth that, that would make—LEAD anyone to even believe god would just be democratic. But then at the end of the bible they jotted some rules out that would make her come off democratic, rules that have actually still yet to be proven, to be able to be proven from actual application in this dimension.
I carefully purpose with over performative delicacy: But what, when everyone prays, is it like, like each prayer is sent to a sorting post office in the sky, and the prayer postmaster sorts them out according to priority then, I recon.
Me continuing in a reaching pontification, A new good prayer, bumps all the old bad prayers back to the end of cue, that's what actually happens—the bible says explicitly, it also says, it helps to know what to pray for . . .
Insider trading, Jeanne gruffs.
Or no, the bible says wait to pray for the right thing at just the right time, like for more expediency. Is expediency a Hebrew word? I think—
So instant karma is not gonna get you after all?
No,what, no, are you kidding? Because, I mean, ya know, all the karma also must be sorted by priority somehow before it's dispatched into the wind also, so . . . If karma wasn't sorted by the post office in heaven, karmas would collide against each other when they are dispatched against each other playing out in real time . . . It would be like everyone in a stadium watching a basketball game, all coming down now to the court to play in the game and everyone gets a ball and everyone is shooting, and someone must keep score somehow, but it's impossible. God, the wind is supposed to, is able to keep track of all this??
Expressing defiance to religious made Jeanne loosen up, she was fine by now, as she pulled on her beer and looked out a mile wide where the land drips down.
John Lennon such a nonce . . . I relish in confirming bc I know Jeanne loves talking about how much she hates the Beatles.
Oh, no, totally, John Lennon was a total idiot, I mean everyone knows that, or actually, no, no they don't actually and, or, quite the opposite, really . . .
Hell, how does their little Christmas jingle go? Love is all you need?
Right, right. Which is technically incorrect. Even love needs more than just like, pure love in itself to flourish. Maybe change it to 'Love is all you need, and also a certain set of situational circumstance and conditions so that it can reinforce itself and exist, and not immediately go away, which it actually tends to do all the time—is all you need.'
The next day after slurping hubbas, when immutable thoughts felt strained yet amplified, mundane, but bombastic, as if transmitted at a distance from where they usually generated and meandered through around in tha dome.
But alas, Galveston wants to drown down into its dirty undrinkable sea, Janine's shard stare has become so increasingly sharpened still though, so used to me now, by exactly the type of familiarity which breeds exactly that of contempt, by people (us) who live full time, at what is otherwise a small vacation rental, which can, or which must breed analysis of rose as sentimental and deep as despair.
It's despairing, how's it so despairing even. When I first started at the telemarketing office, I had grand aspirations that which, and that what, I had had no hesitation in all but bandying about—two hundred cold calls a day, I said, and a call never ends until I have heard four "No's" already. But now I've been demoted to commission, though it is a soft sort serve of demotion—Larry understands the near impossible, limited success that which the field can yield and Larry's a pretty okay guy anyways, so he never minds when I show up at the office whenever now and try to scare up a telephone solicit or two.
Jeanne had a perspective that seemed so to accept metaphor to be absolutely real sometimes, and her situation, Gene's situation really, had been just so deleterious from the museum she had recently left, and that's precisely what spurred her to Galveston now, Jeanne towing the past town like pinnacle frail.
And as if you could only want—a scion had seized the museum outright, her museum, the museum Jeanne worked at, which was occupied by a not so original disfunction, and set up to ripen into further cascade of guile mismanagement and Gene had overseen the massive construction project for their main building. The architect had had sway, some full, unchecked carte blanche with the board, for designing a bawdy, really bawdy and chichi, monstrously gigantic building, only all out in plain site self serving to the architect firm's ambitions and all delusions designing it, and to which the museum didn't itself even have enough holdings in it's collection to fill the too many galleries and massive hallways and freakish carilion rotundas. What was once an efficient and modestly run small museum, had been groomed to become industrial complex, now with a platoon of guards needing to be hired and payrolled, operating expenses plunging up to higher depths, and once novelty of the new building wears, they could now then barely score a thousand visitors in a week, and now Jeanne was now working the Rail here in Galveston, malting hubbas here with me.
And how the world has only but too few slots for those to ascend, slots all but seized up by bad and audacious players. With the architectural firm at Jeanne's old museum sure this, and then also the board at Jeanne's old museum, and, or, but, even in my case, you could even say the same with old Carroll. I mean, sure it was astounding, astonishing really that Carroll be the Steve Jobs of craft riders writ large—he was lucky, and think about it, real lucky there too, and certainly, certainly lucky enough to actually have his hard work encouraged to flourish, or, and especially, to flourish and holistically develop, to be ushered into the world in a diffuse atmosphere of high activity and audience engagement, in an epoch yet to be flooded with avalanche of new practitioners and then for Carroll set ripe for innovation: as in mercurial SF, the Marxist presupposition—the subject can only be as advanced as the object. Life wasn't fair, but it's in its unfairness, in struggle, where we may find maybe profound meaning, perhaps, but I don't know. But Carroll, I mean c'mon. If that success wasn't enough (which, Carroll is never happy, and we all very well know for certain his success will never be enough,). The tidy profit from a Cy Gavin painting that fell into his hands, that someone he knew just had to get rid of, was sold to Carroll for $6,000, then sold the next year or so for the tidy sum of $125,000. He once took an obscure, rare, and uncatalogued Jane Freilicher tapestry and sold it to the Museum of Modern Art for $15,000. But there had been more to that incident. One day, at Girl, I saw Carroll chatting up with Mike Homer from NO Gallery. Carroll asked Homer of the two Freilicher pieces he had had, to judge which one was better, as if it was implied that that was the one he was going to sell to MoMA. Only later I learned the rejected work, was the one he actually sold to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Then I overheard Carroll instructing his secretary to make sure that Emmerich at Tibor De Nagy Gallery in New York to invoice him for just the one Freilicher, and he kept the good one and used the $15,000 paid by the museum to now buy a handsome but low price Leon Polk Smith. The Smith he purchased for $15,000, was eventually sold for $125,000. So for an original investment in the Freilicher of $3,000, he gained $137,000 in a period of less than ten years, and that's not even counting the sale of the Gavin! And it is from such deals, the Oscar Meyer Weiner mobile finance capital bloat of Lakai set for the strangulation and suffocation of future Girl Skateboards coming to be.
In 2019, Jeanne will organize some small exhibition of Johns drawings and prints at Craig Starr, which its focus had little to do thematically with Johns' actual technical draftsmanship. The exhibition was called, was titled something like, Hidden Tableau: Maybe She Is, Maybe She's Not. She said she may have met Starr on a larkspur downtown though, didn't have the faintest inkling as to Craig even being such a well respected and venerated gallerist in the city.
Apparently she told him a casual joke, which went far and wide and spurred Starr to open up his archive of Jasper Johns drawings.
How many curators, ok, how many curators does it take to screw in a light bulb.
I don't know, he he, just how many.
I'm not sure, but let's organize another Rachel Whiteread exhibition.
Though by now, the visual fine art sphere had been well divvied, and divided, gobbled up, carved out by academic superstars, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Williams, whatever, and Jeanne lacked sufficient credentials AND training, parlour tricks which scholars employed in using in bulldozing you with an avalanche of research writing for you to try and untangle and then you quickly give up on and instantly forget what it was what it said and then they, the writing writer organizer remains volantly reinforced buttressed, more secure in their captain's fedora Admiral position. But with Jeanne you got the feeling, or no, you knew she simply had had to and actually did take a different, unconventional approach, she really was terribly bright—her deadpan intellect usually tends to eat up anyone in the room.
I can imagine, Jeanne wending about on a tour in a gallery, years later, way after, years after evacuating Galveston.
With Johns, you never know what you are in for, but at the same time you pretty much always know what you can expect. But the thing about Johns is, is that it's all just hokum, X-ray specs, a forefinger concealing bent thumb to look broken from hand, and all this, explicitly so. Stacking three descending in size, paintings of American flags on top of eachother, is never going to make the painting of a flag any more of a flag, despite what the logic of what 'Three Flags' from 1958 would want us to believe. A painting of a target is not a target at all, and in fact, it's even less useful than a real sign. It's even less useful than a real sign, because it is just a damn painting, afterall. Everything Johns does, has the quality of being a geode with water stuck inside—except there is no water inside, and the geode may not even be real, either. Dripping paper in encaustic on newspaper may have a visual appeal, but that doesn't, will never make the painting any more real. And if the painting does actually kind of look aesthetically appealing and pleasing, with Johns, that's all just kind of besides the fuckin' point right?, as any beauty expressed through John's operations is just simply only incidental, because in the end, it's all just in the service of conjuring the illusory, very tenuous status of the impossible proposition of the beclouded, signal or tenuous sign. And that's also a new attitude about painting in general. You can never paint a letter in the alphabet, it will always be just a painting, you have to write the alphabet for it to be a real live letter.
The title to the exhibition was a reference to some Indy Rock band, I never heard of, Helmet, or no Pavement. It was Pavement. Pavement, a five piece hard blues band gizzard shad of rich kids who all came from the small city of Modesto, California (the lead singer and rhythm guitarist Stephen Malkmus, was the son of the actress Judith Light, from the television sitcom from the nineties, Who's the Boss?). The five original founding members of Pavement all collectively wrote the songs ringing out of bare human emotion, but containing impossible, indecipherable, vehemently poststructuralist lyrics, one would be a fool to try to data mine meaning out from: the first and only critical theory band. Yeah, although you could say, all bands are 'postmodern' — Pavement was the only one actually deliberately, explicitly so, (Pavement, overtly biting the Fall on Pavement's first album on Drag City, Piss Christ) and they were all too aware of their own postmodernity, because I promise you, Faster Pussycat, probably never did, did not for once consider or take Fredrick Jameson into account when they wrote the lyrics down to House of Pain.
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Jeanne's contribution to the field though, the epistemological discovery Jeanne made, was, was Pavement was unconsciously, or maybe just a little consciously, expressing the epistemological leap Jasper Johns mediated through his signal paintings, drawings, prints and sculptures all along, as if both Johns and Mark Ibold went trippple dogg downing on committing to and staking out the most veracity off their each respective field of effects, as even is/was possible or at least, cynically acceptable. And with Craig, Starr must not have cared where Jeanne went or went not to school, because she made a connection, a very essential yet undiscovered connexion that had been otherwise staring at Western world this entire time, and no one even, least not from an Ivy Major was capable of making, to where now she on her own, organized an exhibition of on loan prints and drawings, where none were technically for sale.
Untitled from 1963, was a medium scale drawing, of charcoal, collage, paint and graphite on paper (42 1/2 x 76.3 cm). It had come out of a Castelli show in 1963, and it was also included his '65 solo exhibition at Pasadena Art Museum (now Norton Simon), and was once owned by slime ball Warhol hoarder/price manipulator fixer Tico Mugrabi, but Jeanne apparently was able to secure the short term loan by an anonymous collector. What appealed to her about this drawing, was the all American line, like deconstructed schematic composition and rendering, which combined with the ironic Coke A Cola label collage element, made it seem to signal or connect with some Derridean consciousness shared of Pave lyrics, album cover (Westing ((By Musket and Sextant)), Drag City, April 1993) and Pavement's affinity for some quaint. amorphous sleepy college town all American petit bourgeois sensibility. There was a Pavement bootleg called 'Appetite for Deconstruction' and this she said immediately made her think of Untitled from 1963. Jasper John's Untitled from 1963, also been written about in Artforum by Peter Plagens, October '69.
Jeanne goes on to say,
There's a bourgeois, understated elegant affinity Malkmus and Jasper share the same. With Jasper though, because of the tenuous existential status his works seem to hang onto by bare semantic thread of marrow, which is actually just pure art academia gimmick and hoopla (but in the best sense), small real life personal details of John's, take on heightened significance now, as if what he does or what he doesn't say, or how spare and sparse his posh studio looks, or a seaweed salad he may have had for lunch, even the dark navy Brook Brothers sweater he is wearing, the aura around him, the four word answers/statements he gives, all take on an outsized significance, which exists outside of the work, but is also now annexed in a real peculiar way, though not immediately obvious, but because these details relay and relate, they may now somehow be contained inside the work as well, because how it now becomes weeded by signal close association—the Derridean notion of protean ontological status of the object, and such fragile designations of hymen inner/outer culture/nature object/artwork etc. are festering characteristics of postmodernism, and thus remind us about the slipperiness and instability of the sinuous outer world.
And nihilist waves sizzle until wearing themselves out by the time they reach the flackering sand here in Galveston, I am in Galveston now. Rode my bike through rain like moving through an atmosphere of Secondal to get all the way out back to Terra Mar. Riding the wet silty crater lane beach house gravel street up to Jeanne's, I put bike in the incidentally quaint old ground level first story garage, then walking up the steps into the den-house, I immediately can tell, I knew right away, I sensed Jeanne slipped, scuttled whoever she was with inside now, I walk in and it was real obvious she ushered them now right though and into her small bedroom, when they had just now been smoking in the small living room, like right when she must have heard me bump down up the stairs. And I know, I have been talking her up this entire time, and blowing her horn, and god, I do admire her so, but I knew, I just knew, or I sensed immediately, she bought some loser back home from the bar with her now—it was a matter of time, and they were now smoking base without me, now in her locked bedroom. And I suspect it would seem she has great taste by say, her past vocation, or like how I was telling you about her curating that Pavement Jasper Johns show at Craig Starr and all, but aside from that, Jeanne really did have the worst taste in everything, and everything else practically. It's this bewildering type of aggressive, and hostile and very attractive bitchy physiognomy architype, where the face so plain Jane sharp seems like it shouldn't be too impossible to get, but is impossible to get face, a face like that to go with attitude (a deceptively plain but alluring bitchy face, that can get away with anything ((fashion wise)), and also look real good with short Japanime like greasy black hair). But there's the attractive girl archetype, but who also seemingly has go-out-of-their-way to have bad taste in anything and anything within their control, to where they seem to have some unconscious, even pathological drive to latch onto only the ugly things, all the ugly things, and that definitely includes physically and emotionally and aesthetically muscular, dumpy, normie, vehemently non-hipster randos. As intelligent and smart as Jeanne is, I truly wonder if she even has or had any capacity for any self awareness (I mean, I'm sure she did to some extent, but also, I'm really not sure). She's the type to take a road trip to visit some dangerous to the world, dangerous to himself, fuck up in prison or, no, she's the type who would marry some Greek Chad who's stuck in jail for the next ten years—or some UAE Chad who doesn't know who the band Television is. It's as if Jeanne operates subconsciously, if embracing ugly things was a flex, and it was just so par and part and parcel a part of her. There was nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing you could do to really ever get her attention or gain her interest—you could have sold out Webster Hall, and while you are out on stage singing, you desperately rush the set to be over, because you know just she's chatting up with the most mismatched, and almost unbelievable looser object of her interest now. At first, who she would talk about, or brag about, or say who she slept with, which would never not be bewildering and shocking, and then just simply depressing, and, honestly, if you think about it, it probably zapped minutes from my life span just hearing about all the wrong guys who got all the right Jeanne. But then once you've seen this, once you've identified it, it becomes pretty typical and now seems to be such a cliche. Jeanne, patron saint of fuckups. Florence Nightingale effect. Loves' life giving vulgarity and open air freakshow now, Jeanne flexing sexual muscle of power, like she was some heterosexual female Tom of Finland now practically. Maybe she's mercy from god, to all the losers in the world. But that's kinda being generous and unrealistically romantic—she really did just have the worst taste in people, and well also in everything. She straight up hung out with perpetually in crisis victims of themselves and riff raff, and surely put herself in danger with the abusive characters and places she orbited around. Jeanne also had a terrible aesthetic sense in clothes, but it was confusing because she could get away with and sometimes looked ravishing wearing trash—she was pure Indy girl tout court too though, but then she would come back from Sandollar with Russian mother normie track pants, kind of cheap Nike form fitting jogging sports clothes still with the tags that could have originally come from Marshall's, normie clothes that went tragically against her precious heart breaking Indy physiognomy (like Penelope Cruz at the end of Blow, even though Penelope Cruz is about as Indy as Janet Jackson). When she would go to thirft stores, she bought junk and garbage en masse, un filtered, but at first it seemed the beauty innate in her, could only see the possibility of things not so obvious to us mere mortals, and you naturally assumed she could flip and bounce it into fashion forward innovation, but then you realize she is basically a hot trash possum. She pillories ugly or kitschy bric brac from the Sanddollar also, which in a refined interior would add a bit of eclecticism, but then she would keep junking more and more fake plants, random ugly framed decor paintings, the mushroom ottoman, disgusting arts and craft home made stocking troll dolls that had been abandoned at Goodwill and rescued by Jeanne, and she would just plop it all back to the beach house, now cultivating unbelievable cluttered hoarded meth bedroom also. And I was wrong, or no, I was misguided, when I was originally intrigued she had a sparse bathroom—I spoke too soon. It's just that she had abandoned her life and started again with nothing in Galves. As love is first of all a lesson in utility, she's really the type who, when you went out with her, she gets too drunk and suddenly leaves unannounced with some Turkish slimeball in Ferrari polo, Fendi cologne sunglasses with mismatched Asian shoulder sleeves tattooed inches past short shirt sleeve, and the sight was heartbreaking, or if not immediately heartbreaking in a going-with-it-no-big-deal-immediacy you do just to go through it, there would be a deferred traumatic pain when you later thought and dwelled on it, and I'm nervous just typing this out, and through Jeanne, through Jeanne, as cinema is cruel like a miracle, the world reflects itself through her, as being the impossible place it is. It's also like Jeanne flexed her Indy Queen autonomy, by being with aggressively ordinary men—a kind of soft 'fuck all yall' flourish. Her equivalent match would be an actual challenge to her, a threat even, and being seen in public with a guy wearing a football jersey, to her, you could tell to her was the ultimate avant-guard move. And there's nothing, and I mean nothing, you could ever do to get her to like you, except reject her maybe, which was impossible or out of the question. Or you could tactically reject her, but then it was then over for good, for real and there is no going back. And who she associates with, almost comically goes preposterously against and is practically an insult to all the standards you have kept for yourself your entire life—women use nominal determinism to choose their mate. Think about someone extraordinary like Andrew Reynolds being a single father. Anyone that tells you, that you can attract women through things you do, is a fool. The world has its own plans past your little land grab patch of self determinism. I can just see it, Jeanne's going to get pregnant, the guy is going to abandon her and her future daughter, and then he'll probably just die of covid or something like that. Brokerage of desire is kind of so futile anyways, and it was too hard to reassemble myself after such annihilation. But now she brought someone to the beach house for the first time, and I can smell the devilish base coming through the gap at the bottom of the door and I wasn't in love with Jeanne, but I'm reeling, expiring like all the stale uneaten potato chips at the bottom of all the bags of the island, and I don't know why, now I have a voracious amount of now socially induced hierarchy lovesickness trellising my stomach, unrolling flutters clearing, and it's just real stupid, real stupid of me, and now I want to smoke so bad and this was, that was, the exact moment where, precisely the very moment I became addict.
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