Because it's helpful, I'll think of it as Saturn's last gasp in Virgo and, as Erika said tonight at Alli's impromptu, I'm just going to hold the fuck on til it's over. That's what getting older gets you. The knowledge, if not the belief, that you live through practically everything. I "believe" in astrology, the way I "believe" in, what? astrology.

In other news, my recentest pop addiction. On repeat play for the last two days. Who knew Suzi Quatro? I didn't. She's so damn cute, and sings this song as though suffering's cute too. It is, kind of. Watch your own sometime, and look how you can care for yourself in it. A cut pet whose paw you sew to.

SWEET BELIEVER EXIT @ 2ND FLOOR PROJECTS

top : John deFazio, Cloned Dogs, Siegfried & Roy, 2007; glazed ceramic.
bottom : Daniel Minnick, Chief Imitation, 2009; (detail) photobooth photograph

SWEET BELIEVER EXIT: John DeFazio and Daniel Minnick

A knock-out honor to have been invited to write a text for Margaret Tedesco's incredible 2nd Floor Projects, and a knock-down drag-out fight with self to have actually gotten it done "on time". But I did! And it's a crazy freaking piece of writing, so please do try to acquire it. Margaret commissions a text for each exhibition, and produces the result in spectacularly beautiful editions of 100.

AND, there's always a reading to close the exhibition. So, on Sunday, November 1, at 5pm, Brandon Brown will join me, and we'll read from our collaborative work-in-progress IT'S A FICTION!, with, we think, a little help from the marvelous Lindsey Boldt.

On the subject of the text: Daniel Minnick stages detailed, costumed performances in photobooths, and John DeFazio makes ceramic objects, in this case, elaborate ceramic bongs and, as seen above, freakish panting hybrid Siamese cloned ceramic pets [and pets and pets and pets]. Both artists' work have qualities of psychedelic, kaleidescopic, grotesque kitsch. In addition to these chewy, hyper-natural pop distortions, I was especially interested in the opposition of duration in the fabrication of the objects. IE, the instant flash in the photobooth with its single-positive produced by the machine, vs the hundreds of hours of hand-casting, hand-carving, firing, painting, firing, glazing, re-glazing, decaling, & re-firing the ceramics require. I found myself not sleeping for several weeks while writing this, inducing a frantic, half-hallucinatory, internal state-of-war, and producing a work in three parts, with three adjacencies, & three mad stabs at duration. One for John, one for Danny, and one for me. It's called THREE-WAY. (I'm not saying it's good. I'm just saying.)

You can acquire the "broadside" (it's 8 pages) for $10 (+ $1 s/h) from Margaret, go to the website, or email: 2ndfloorprojects [at] earthlink [dot] net.

Here's the project page.

And here's the front page (RSS it; her exhibitions are excellent).

Hope to see you at the reading.

In last night's dream, Alli & I were in conflict.
There was the appearance of a formula around which our argument circulated; it was this:



x [ or else = or ≠ ]



Cute cues, but it was a bad dream.

I made it three and a half months into my year-long moratorium on book-buying, but I'm afraid I'm about to fold. Fuck.

Attuned heart hears tone.

October 2007

"When I feel down," she says,

"For some time, I conceived of gardens of “tendre” which mix writing and photography with real spaces: the path of reconciliation, the tree of shame, the herbs of confidences, the turtle of longevity, the spider of scandal, the route of chance, the maple of dispute, the copse of indiscretion, the timber trees of hope, the oak of kisses, the poppies of confession, the rabbit of fortune, the branches of forgetfulness, the junction of uncertainties, the forest of hesitations, the lake of temptation, the plains of fatigue, the lime tree of rest, the mountain of assiduousness, the passageway of pain, the intersection of ambition, the ramble of emotion, the slope of forgetfulness, the mound of despair…"

Per Anne Boyer on Facebook, MY post "being paid in jouissance" reading dreams: I was in a bath house very like (or it was) the Gellert baths in Budapest, where Sarah Jessica Parker---in one of those wraparound string bikinis we used to wear in the 80s---was teaching water dancing to a fleet of current and former starlets, including a dramatically aged and peeling Sophia Loren, with Catherine Deneuve just behind, all of the aging stars accusing SJP of knowing as well as they do the beneficial powers of Retin-A; I was in a narrow hotel room in the mountains, lying on a shag rug by the sliding glass doors waiting for my ex-husband to come up the wrought-iron stairs; my ex-husband had a tan; the ice in the paper cup of water on the hotel kitchen sink was still ice three days later; from the narrow narrow bathroom I tried to make or receive a telephone call from the Italian or Iranian gangster or banker next door; a murder was being plotted or discovered; the menu was hand-corrected and a political call-to-action; the assistant director of development and I had a strange exchange related to both my ex-husband and the gangster, in the doorway of the hotel room, near the bathroom, but I can't remember what was said; I looked over the balcony to the parking lot below; I put the butter in the freezer (wait, that was just now); this is only a third of it, I don't recall the order of events, obviously it doesn't matter. I woke up with what might be a cold, but also, I woke up and my apartment was very cold. First cold morning of fall.

Lygia Clark, Dialogue of Hands

or more properly translated is probably 'Hand Dialogue'