The Magic City

We begin below a threaded white American flag

Were the standard a bit lower, I could’ve felt it’s tip on my way into the next room. And so would everyone else in the course of three months, until the collection of finger tip oils leave the corner brown.

This is important. I feel beautiful. I am watching people write as they hear the lecture. I see their faces react, their pens follow.

No idea where to begin. Other than the mild discomfort of writing in a public place. My birthday is in two days. I’ve given it so little thought—and this is a testament to how detached and delirious I have become. Myself consciousness now borders on paranoia and psychosis. I read online that amphetamines can trigger a permanent psychosis in people with schizoid personalities. My psychiatrist light heartedly agrees I’m probably a schizoid. “You are probably on the schizoid spectrum, but it’s just a personality type, it’s not a disorder.”

Richard Haden tells me I am an idiot savant. Yesterday he compared me to Forrest Gump, then quickly followed up to say he was just giving me a hard time. It’s affectionate or something. But it fills me with anticipation for the moment I reveal to these people the true nature of my personality. I am not autistic. I am capable of more than anyone realizes. On april 25th I will give an artist talk along with other artists from the show at MOCA. I have already began to imagine all the ways I could present myself. I could begin with a poem. I could read from the book of art babel. I could reveal myself as a fascist, hell bent on indoctrinating my audience. I’d have them all wear paper hats like mine, citing that King Nimrod who built the tower of Babel was the first king to wear a crown to symbolize his greatness. I could read to them about my travels in Miami. I could tell them about my unending loneliness in pursuit of beauty.

But I digress. It’s Easter Sunday. My birthday is on the 7th. No idea what to do. No idea who I want to be around. Who I want to see. I could play age of empires with my dad and Rodrigo. I could walk my dog. I could go to Lagniappe with a group of friends. Tomorrow I will read poetry at the Churchills open mic. The gallery is moving locations. The rent is too much. Last night I heard my art world friends discussing the tribulations and gossip of the galleries and empowered individuals. I can help these people. Goldman can die in a fire. Lehman can die in a fire. Braman can die in a fire. Alex can die in a fire. What are people in these terms, but abstractions? How can I think of Braman in a way that speaks to his humanity and not to his corporate signage? He is an old man. He is a sick old man with a wife and children, and no matter how much he makes in this world, he cannot take it with him into nothingness. Maybe he is in rebellion of this fact, and now he wants his name to live on, maybe he is in denial of death all together, or maybe he is allocating his passion into leaving security and wealth to his family. Braman cannot stop working, expanding, because the fear does not stop. He has seen too many good friends die, too many family squabbles over estates. Where will he dispose? Where will they hide his tomb. In the structure of his surname and the backs of automobiles, immortalized with industrial adhesives to the walls of a culturally stunted, modern day Atlantis.

This is a magic city, this is the land of giants, the vacation home of contemporary myth. How do you speak to power? From a cosmic tether, with your physical self and  reputable made-up life equally irrelevant, anchored to the truth. To death.

I can see the ceiling. I can see the ceiling-fans blowing in the reflection of my pen’s clip. When I talk to people, I feel like I am walking from a century of dreams. How do you speak to the myth of power but with a grander myth? Perseus cut off Medusa’s head.

–

I’d like to submit a proposal to Dimensions Variable. An installation of grand ambition and scale. Unknown nature.

Options:

Dirigibles

Arduino RC zeppelin controlled by levers in a room.

Analogue string marionette zeppelin

Remember to think beautiful thoughts. Wake up in an early way, still asleep with a pen in hand, and recall the ghosts of summer and see they’ve followed. Morning ghosts leave due on the grass. They leave sprinklers on at the hooves of street lamps. In air that still, you could hear the moon, the twitching of stars, highways whale calling into the night’s end.

When we are young, waiting for buses and cold leather seats, it gets lonely and peaceful. Now it doesn’t get peaceful. It’s a humid trudge. A background honk. The afternoon a, a sun, no one to speak to, sweat, mosquitoes, oily skin. Hatred, Cubans, coworkers, strangers, nobodies. There is no mystery The whales have stopped singing. The night no longer familiar and qiuet. I should not look to the past, to nostalgia, but these days I have no other means of finding beauty. All I have for the present is this resentment of all the idiots who think they are close to me, that they are capable of assuming, or telling me anything.

I hate nearly everyone I know in Miami. This city deserves global warming. I hate tasteless wealthy Latin people. I hate their makeup. I hate their requests. I hope to leave.

But what should I do with myself at this very moment? Build a puppet? A bird? A person?

I am currently grasping at the tails of memories of days when I felt some kind of happiness and thoughts were crisp. The light and clear air. Maybe I should do more exercise. I feel like I am in a dream. And I am trying to wake up. No matter who I tell, no one will believe. I behold this world of faces, this maze of strangers.

People discussing sold property. Land in china, planning new fancy retail locations. One on one business meetings at the hip deli that sound like hollywood dramas, everyone lost in the day dream of a life in the sun, a day dream of our own lives. I sit still enough to hear my own thoughts. I feel like I can hear everything. How much do you want, seven fifty, sound bites that are part of a symphony of mysteries and transactions. A chorus that charms fleshling high rises up from their sandy urns. How do I re-inspire myself into this narrative. Re-place. Re-dream the sun beams of yesterday’s variable [unknown]. I will build a bird for my mother.

I feel as though I must seduce the rich. I see too many connections in unrelated happenings, as though I want Francesca is a nice name. I wonder what she wants. I want all the nouns and objects to be friends married to divinity. All things compared to all other things, a map of heaven. I like dogs, they make me smile. I think its time I fix my brief case.

I love the sun, I love the wind, and the subtle recounting of numbers, lost in the wind, the trickling of new customers. I feel as though I must rewrite the 12 step program.

Remember:

*-Get industrial shelves to store artwork at gallery

Zeitgeist-spirit of a time/age

• Dominant school of thought

I need an institution to be sane. Without the purpose giving powers of an institution, one’s choice to be in a particular place, event, or city become the object of scrutiny. Bakehouse makes me nostalgic for art school. We must begin with drowsy eyes in the morning.

Nature/Urbaness

Looking for Loneliness

Plastic on plastic, the absence of people

Plant a tree in a painting.

On works in an exhibition at Emerson Dorsch

For some reason I am fascinated by the use of wood more so than the rest of the pieces. Even the bench I am sitting on—I just want to know who made it. What kind of wood, what their shop looks like.

The wood piece has four holes in it, probably done with a forstener bit, kind of like the holes made in doors for the knobs. The room fills with strangers, and like the plastic layer that obscures the content of these works, my thoughts begin to blur. The air conditioner sends periodic gusts of wind that knock my napkin off the bench whenever I take a sip of wine.

There is a man with two small dogs on a leash—not Rottweiler’s.

`I try to estimate by mere glances who is entitled, who is a regular human being, who are the kind elderly couples.

Two works just in front of me. Both with circular compartments and pious undertones, candle holders scatter plotted on the yellow to the left.

–Now I can’t see, too many people. On the right, the circle is a negative space, a square white wood-looking box with flowing patterns around an orange emptiness, a figure in the middle. Now the strange people have encircled me. I must go.

I write for myself. You have to start somewhere. On the opposite wall there is another wood piece. More circles, either a large bit or routed, a lighter colored, Higher quality wood, with part of a circle compassed in on its center. It’s a vertical rectangle. These are facts and characteristics. And yet what does this mean? What is most remarkable about it, and how are we meant to extract this? Be curious! Perhaps it’s a code? Four holes, then three on the left. Four then four on the right. It could mean nothing. It could build on a narrative that I have no means of knowing. The numbers, 133, and 119, on the top and bottom in white, printed lettering. There is an oval at the center, overtop the partially drawn circle. The wood surface may be a found object. Maybe he didn’t make the holes. Maybe this object is the physical manifestation of something without any direct logic or plan. Maybe it’s the pure interaction between artist and object.

Actually, it kind of looks like a domino. You can try peering into its holes, and attain a sense of its depth, but they retain the blur of the plastic. If there is a code, we are not meant to decipher it.

The next piece to the right looks a lot like someone broke an egg. I am suddenly hungry.

Misplaced on the metro mover, staring at tracks running perpendicular to the omni-line. The train tracks converge. I’m on my way to eat a belated birthday brunch with my family. I love my dog Galileo more than anyone or anything. I see the big things and the small things. I am awake and in a dream, between worlds, between homes, in the course of a sentence, awaiting my own judgment.

Today will be sacrificed in the name of poetry, and for what I truly desire. Poetry on a train, thoughts in the shower.

3PQ – Concrete

It’s hard to confess about the innermost feelings of solid concrete cubes. So when you happen to meet one, how would you get to know them? Simply by speaking their language. A pick axe says hello, a corner off the top replies, good morning sir, how do you do? Until we skip the hold-and-swing small-talk, and the true conversation jack-hammers on.

Concrete cube, do you have dreams? Do you get lonely?

I don’t know. If I were

wholly broken, down to my finest hour

a dust mound and

a black flag mounted

Try your hardest, but not too hard.

Is Art the art of seducing the rich

Seduce the rich.

Seduce the rich

In the haze of withdrawal, unmedicated stupor

an abdicated day after another

I can see clearly. Hatred is a stillness like winter frost. My disdain has sewn itself into the fabric of space and time. Into the sweat of my pajamas. On a scale of one to the ceiling, I dreamt of u-boats making wakes along the coast of a 1940’s peer. Young kids out on dates at the soda shop.

I was one of them.. My best friend kept hogging my girl’s attention. I grew jealous and indifferent.

I left the soda shop, to lose myself in the salty wake of u boats as they searched for a new loch ness monster.

There’s a darkness for your legs, frantic like a spider’s before it drowns. The monster was a misunderstood humpback whale. I long for nothing but sleep and dreams. To die by the simple act of never moving, never getting up. Painless and sublime and beneath me, enough empty space to supply the monsters of my imagination.

And yet I still get out of bed, because there was once a dream that was Rome. I must wake up and fight the battles of our time. I have to kill the rich and powerful. I have to seduce those among them who are bored enough to listen and toss morsels of wealth in my general direction.

But the damage is done. Maybe I will find peace at home.

I don’t need bridges to wealthy patrons. I need a new pillow, a fluffy blanket and a new sketchbook, and then I will sleep more while the forces of evil slowly transform the swamp into a commercial hub, and the commercial hub back into a swamp.

I cannot pretend to give a shit. Move a museum, move millions. Sing me a lullaby, because I can no longer pretend.

I have decided to move away, by the fall I will be gone. First I will stop by home. My dad’s house, I will be there for a time with my dad and my dog, walking by the lake. Yet I’ve not decided. Nothing, not that I am ashamed.