Andrew Durbin - Mature Themes

3. Marionette carved from the salvaged timber of Hollywood patios and trellises, from memories of Del Monte, from disco ember’s cocaine glow, from shredded Archie comics and fat Elvis funk fantasies: Terius Youngdell Nash knows how to string out an American dream, soul-sadness submerged, but never auto-tuned past auto-wreck, ignition. Rockets rolling somewhere over gravity’s rainbow, because music becomes our only memory when we can’t look back at Mississippi John Hurt’s home in the Delta blues as we contrail above Embarcadero. Whereas Max Martin’s genius is pure pop explosion, here today and gone tomorrow like a coalition of the willing. Funny enough, this entire passage might have been cribbed from a Pitchfork music review, in the guise of a grim-faced hipster homage to American Gothic: stick it to ‘em, etc etc etc. ((“—For all flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass. The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away… / “—Or I guess the grass is itself a child…))

4. Joke written on the back of an airplane napkin: “—The oldest man with a Bieber tattoo is named Catullus #63, the parable of Attis and Cybele.” Neither smile nor grimace: partial facial paralysis, singing to himself as he looks out the window. The fellow seated next to him’s engrossed in an episode of Saved By the Bell . The tattoo above his own heart reads: Buddy Holly.

— posted 04/08/2013 at 19:50 by >

I am at the Frieze Art Fair

on May 18, 2013, and it’s

raining on the inflatable

Paul McCarthy sculpture

of Jeff Koons’s balloon dog.

I’m looking at a painting

by Monica Majoli,

at complex forms rendered

shadow in the geometry

of available flesh,

dissolution of youth in the dark,

this opening in me like a wound

without recourse to a mend

is totally Frieze.

Frieze is like those jobs

that say you’ll be compensated

commensurate with experience.

How many times have I read that

as “commiserate,” thinking

we might “weigh in”

together to express sympathy

for my having to beg you

to pay me a living wage, itself a term

so vexed in its little assertion

of a metaphysics of cash

it hurls me further

into whatever anally tiny

rabbit hole I’ve already found myself

crawling down, toward

a demon rabbit with a Koch brother’s face.

The number of times reverses me

into ecstasies, crucified on the cross

of precarious employment

but in so less royally

a martyrdom I am rent

anonymous by it.

Frieze is kind of like that,

except it’s about buying art,

which I can’t do.

And writing about it

is much worse,

so I’ve been reading

Bruce Hainley to get away

from “the process” of doing so.

Bruce is the LA-based art critic

and poet who writes

about artists that a lot of us

don’t pay much attention to,

like Lee Lozano. She

was so pissed off

at the art world

she threw it away,

left New York after a dispute

over her rent with her landlord

in a final piece called Dropout .

She more or less spent the rest of her life

living a single, continuous performance

as someone totally outside

of the art world, reclaiming

the space that surrounds it,

redoubled in sequestration

of the suburbs where how many of us originate,

her the suburbs of Texas, me

the suburbs of Florida, Monica Majoli

the generalized suburb of Los Angeles.

I’m reading Bruce’s writing in Pep Talk ,

a small art mag produced somewhere,

I can’t tell where from its website,

but probably LA,

where everything cool

comes from to die back east.

Ben Fama lent it to me

one afternoon after I quoted this from a blogpost of Bruce’s in an email to him: “I like pros, especially when it comes to tennis and rent boys”—and here I’m really wondering if the pun on prose consolidates Bruce’s feeling toward it versus poetry under the sign of sex, which Bruce sometimes pays for, in order to direct us toward the pleasure of its use-function when monetized, a pleasure seldom associated with poetry, and one that might lead to the company of more pros. He continues: “If I can get a twofer, and the trick looks like Rafael Nadal, I’m in heaven.”

I’m in heaven

when I google image search Rafael Nadal

and find him radiating solar joy

on the home page of the New York Times ,

having just advanced in some open

I’ve already forgotten the name of,

proving to us

that the champions

of the world

still wear jockey shorts.

I might collapse in a heap

he’s so hot. Bruce

has been everywhere

in my life recently. Last night,

I went to a party

and ran into Alan Gilbert.

We discussed Bruce’s

really great new piece

on Monica Majoli in Artforum .

Bruce starts with this description

of Michael Jackson, whose death

spiked such an inarticulate

slush of feeling,

of feeling so sick to my

stomach when a friend

called me to tell me the news

while I was walking down Magazine Street

in New Orleans,

I almost threw up

and had to sit down. Bruce writes: “Forgoing outright atrocity, of which there is so much — too much — right now, aren’t the ‘life,’ ‘body,’ and ‘face’ of Michael Jackson in the running for some of the most abstract events of the last century? (I use the tweezers of scare quotes to approach each of those precarious terms because I’m not certain I could handle them at all otherwise.) ‘His’ face and its occlusion, in the final years, when any nose he had was entirely prosthetic (not to mention the permanent eyeliner and chemical bleaching), became a brutal inversion of all the solar joy he beamed as a young performer — that is, when his face appeared at all, since he was prone to wearing what appeared to be a niqab, ‘transgendering’ his complicated presence as much as cloaking it. I’m bringing up Jackson’s ‘desire,’ every bit as abstract as it was intractable, because his ‘desire’ strikes me as even more elusive and imponderable, although many during his lifetime supposed they understood what he repressed or compensated for, even if a fundamental component of whatever his desire might have been remained the sense that he seemed constitutionally uncoupled (and uncouplable).” Wow, right?

Monica’s work is really great.

In particular this crucifixion-like

scene of a BDSM orgy

in which one subject

is hung up on a cross of boys

who pleasure him:

one boy is half burying

his face in Christ’s ass

while another boy has the tip

of Christ’s cock dipped in his mouth.

I guess I like Monica’s painting

for the ecstasy in which Christ finds himself

nailed to a cross by bodies who crave him,

subjugating fear, this physical imposition

of desire that restrains him

and through which he finds himself

desirable. S/M frees you

to a sex without romance,

formats desire on these

interpersonal axes that belie

the fantasy that drives it,

allowing our interactions

to match a preset system

of behaviors we are already aware of

and introducing within its grid

a notational set of inputs

that activate certain desired

outputs. Nothing is veiled

in order to forefront

the point of the act

in the first place,

and from this the world’s

primal motion is set onward—