Faucet Repair

How The West Was One—the tug of what could exist or the tree branch hallucination above the active hurricane. Slices of life in the circle island petri dishes, but they’re contained by the canvas like an epitaph on a tombstone due to a constant barrage of reminders everydayeverydayeverydayeveryday; I was reading about the beginnings of the Portuguese Empire in the 15th century and then it went 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21 in my head and here I am for my dash showing my ass to the world in oil.

Or my passport’s Great Golden Seal forking over $100m in fresh tank ammunition to Israel without congressional review as the death toll in Gaza nears twenty thousand. This just after vetoing the UN’s ceasefire resolution. What color is the tie at the party again? Journalists targeted on a quiet hill—Issam Abdallah’s blackened camera, Al Jazeera’s burning vehicle.

Or an embrace. Of the subconscious, of the baring impulse, towards trust in background updates and shadow syntheses and how “Any thought could be the beginning of / The brand new tangled web you’re spinning / Anyone could be a brand new love.” Maybe a blonde occipital blip on a lavender-gray day.

Or Mom and Dad’s documentary on medical aid in dying, the public service of seeing it all go down in real time. Over many dinners we’ve discussed our hemisphere’s enduring phobia of the cosmic seasons. So there it is stripping us down to our structure.

Or our constructed chapters as records to revisit while we can. All hits no skips, even the duds.

I'm telling myself the story of my life Stranger than song or fiction We start with the joyful mysteries Before the appearance of ether Trying to capture the elusive The farm where the crippled horses heal The woods where autumn is reversed And the longing for bliss in the arms Of some beloved from the past

Second Coming

“He became a truck driver for Heartland Freighters after the war,” Mary said, splitting her microwave enchilada down the middle with the side of her fork. “Drove the rest of his life. That’s how his face became a half moon.” She pointed to her favorite portrait of him, propped upright at the end of the table where he had eaten her dinners for half a century. “I used to tease him that I was the only one who could see his dark side.”

Blake kept his eyes lowered while he poked at sticky remnants of melted cheese. By now, however, Mary knew better than to take offense at his indifference—this was her fourth consecutive summer hosting college baseball players for the local scout team, (her daughter had suggested it after her husband passed), and she had learned that the arrangement was like fostering pit bulls: the amount of attention she received from these young men was usually correlated to their appetites.

“You may be dismissed, darling,” Mary said, acknowledging Blake’s empty plate. “Are you sure?” he said, rising from his chair before the end of the question to grab his luggage. “Yes dear. Leave it there, I’ll wash up,” she said. “Okay, thank you,” he said, his heavy feet debossing tufted carpet as he made his way across the living room toward the bedroom Mary had readied for his arrival. As he passed the fireplace, she saw him double take in the direction of an old picture on the mantel of her posing next to her longtime pastor.

Dropping his bags and closing the door behind him, Blake deflated onto the room’s lone twin bed with a sigh, the bedsprings moaning under his weight, and in doing so noticed an antique bedside table next to the headboard. Inside its top drawer he found a glossy nest of 5x7 inch photos, one of which caught his eye—a young woman in a yellow bikini, in repose on a beach with her back to the camera, head turned slightly so that her profile was concealed but for the tip of her nose by long strands of wet hair.

“Blake? Are you decent?” he heard Mary suddenly call from outside the bedroom door. Startled, he threw the photo back in the drawer and slammed it shut.

“Uh, what?” he blurted, unfamiliar with the expression.

She glanced at the photo from the mantel, now cradled in her hands. “Never mind darling,” she answered, “I’ll come back once you’ve had some time.” It wasn’t too late, and there were dirty dishes in the kitchen she could take care of until he was ready for the story.

(From 21 July 2023)

Hitched to the rattling bumper of McDonald & Giles’s “Suite in C” at Equipment Room, I felt that thin band of warm silence hugging the music for the first time in ages. Deep listening is sacred to ears numbed by urban dissonance, and it re-tuned my antenna for the rest of my nomadic month. To tweaking SEPTA-sapiens recognizing one of their own aloud, to the STM assistant coating my bus in just enough French to catch it, to my name blooming from a 2:00am tongue—such frequencies are vital. But on more than one couch surfed, I was warned of those ducking them. An old friend on a new acquaintance: “He didn’t seem to register any of my answers.” This sounded like a mirror to our modern deficit (or how being heard=being seen), and later made a sponge propped on palms between long glasses of wine feel like love. It probably was.

After reconnecting with Ria through her new Substack, I found myself reminiscing on her Instagram profile and tapped on an image I remembered her posting. Turns out it was from 2018 and I had commented “ey cool” on it. Pretty innocuous, sure, but seeing my name attached to a version of myself that I don’t remember sent a bit of a shiver down my spine.

I’ve been thinking about this phenomenon a lot this week as I’ve been battling through my annual immune system failure—lots of time to ruminate when you’re stuck horizontal. Mostly about how I really don’t feel like I was conscious in the years before I committed to my art practice.

Kali and I talked about something similar on the phone the other day after he mentioned that he was working through some postpartum gloom while polishing his first album. I empathized with reference to my experience of making paintings. There’s not a more womblike state of mind than when your train is latched to the tracks of a project and you’re picking up speed—the hours of the day become sacred. The morning shower might bring clarity to color, the journal might grab a few sound bites from the bus to the studio, the friend-recommended album might throw you a new tone, a face in the bar might send your imagination cycling into a white picket future.

I’m currently reading Dylan’s Chronicles. There’s a bit where he talks about starting out in coffee houses with thousands of other folk hopefuls having just moved to New York. He explains the importance of getting the song across rather than yourself, which for me is a big part of what makes the whole creative process so cathartic. As an idea appears, it ideally separates itself from the ego and floats in the brain with a postcard from the ether. And it becomes our job as artists to welcome it, bring it offerings, distract it, and sometimes ignore it as we attempt to teach it how to exist on Earth. A mode of gathering and giving, inhaling and exhaling that has nothing and everything to do with us.

So when it’s time to let it run free, gray skies are only natural. Being in service of the work means an attention to detail, to energy, to love, to life itself. The few times that I’ve been able to revisit a painting after a significant amount of time, (which is rare since I’ve only been doing this for a little while), the flood of past sensations that arrives is almost unbearably dense. But they’re there in luminous high-definition. It’s a mirror to a mirror, a self-reflexive miracle. Something to remind me that I was and will be as alive as I am today.

Scott Walker’s “The Girls From The Streets” has flooded my daily course through wintering London in a radioactive blacklight this month. Alchemizing with the finger-freezing temperatures to illuminate steaming beacons of human collision around the city: buses, pubs, tube trains, Tescos. Pheromonal mirages.

My addiction to the palpable tension between empathy and self-preserving survival instincts in these spaces is nothing new, but as I soak in it longer and longer each day, I’m discovering how malleable it is. How much softer its edges can become. I think it’s the orchestral chorus that brought blues and reds, purples and pinks.

There’s a dull but prickly guilt that accompanies such an intense sonderlust, which the song’s impish angle amplified in me at first. But it slowly revealed an obvious freedom in stomping where I had been tiptoeing. It wasn’t hiding the fangs in its smile or encrypting its urges. It just ripped down the road with a big mirror on its back and dared me to follow.

So I did, and walls began to dissolve. My sketchbook replaced my camera and my pencil became a magnet. For flattered excitement or mild discomfort and all walks of laughter. For oblivious engines or eye daggers. Or in the case of a fishbowled conversation that screeched into my view from the Lillie Road curb, for a glance that pierced the glass and recognized itself before gliding back into the current.

[TW: violent imagery]

(From 9 October 23)

Sifting through headlines on the escalation of the Israel-Gaza conflict has sent me down deep. I know that one inevitably runs into distressing footage when trying to keep up to date with cataclysmic events like this via the internet, but some of the imagery I've come across has been singed into my mind all day.

In one Independent article I was reading about how Hamas ducked Israeli intelligence to launch their initial attack, a video embedded in the text that was deemed “unauthenticated but plausible-looking” showed an apparently captive woman being yanked out of the trunk of a Jeep being driven by militants in the middle of a Gaza street.

As she unfolds from the rear of the car, hands bound behind her back, an armed man drags her by the hair to the side of the vehicle and shoves her back inside through a passenger door. It's extremely difficult to stomach all of the visual information conveyed in those few seconds where she's visible to the camera. Her face is panic-stricken, blood snakes down the back of one of her arms, her hands and bare feet are stained red, and the seat of her pants looks soiled with either blood, feces, or both. Multiple men pile into the car after her once she's pushed in, and that's the last time she's visible in the video.

There was a time, maybe three or four years ago (my dark ages), when I used to seek out this kind of visual trauma. Borderline snuff in the deepest recesses of NSFW Reddit, that sort of thing. My chemically confused brain's twisted logic reasoned that continued exposure to this sort of stimuli would make me a warrior in the face of life's most brutal truths. The King of the Desensitized.

What it actually did, however, was scar me in a way that still stings when I read news centered on violence and death, of which there is obviously quite a bit each day no matter where I look.

I'm not mentioning this in an attempt to recuse myself from actively engaging with what is going on in the Middle East right now, but rather to note that the once-familiar feeling is back. The inescapable undertow of all that races through my head after witnessing brutality. How numbing it must be to feel your fate land in the sinister hands of evil (a hostage pleading as she's whisked away from the Supernova music festival on a motorbike). How many milliseconds you have in your bedroom to comprehend what is happening before Nothing (rockets hitting an apartment building in Gaza). Or how exactly it is that at the end of this sentence I will close my laptop, brush my teeth, and slip under my freshly cleaned sheets to try to get some sleep.

A bag of marshmallows, Benton clouds, Tooker's Repose (embossing on heavy cream paper, 1976), glowing white linen curtains in my room gently billowing (acid memory), running and jumping off the top of a giant sugary dune at White Sands, the sun searing my glasses while lying supine on Santa Monica Beach, the Meuniers' boat at high speed (mixed with Chaos in the CBD), the special trick sound effect in the original Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, a Q-tip swirled around the ear canal, a tongue swirled around the ear canal, a bar of dove soap, soft-close toilet seats, h hunt's Playing Piano For Dad, rocking Tessa to sleep as a newborn, gesso, Titanium White, the first snowfall of the year on Loftus Road last December (muffled evening, so quiet), Smartfood white cheddar popcorn, the smell of a Major League baseball, Wes's first BMW, Wes's second BMW, “To send a little money home / From here to the moon,” Wallace and Gromit: A Grand Day Out, North light, honeysuckle vines, a box of hot Krispy Kreme glazed donuts fresh off the belt, Spanky, the idea of Rick Rubin, a long hug, The White Album, Dad's Strat, Mom playing “Für Elise” on the Steinway in the living room while I'm in bed, Dad's pastel drawing of a Calla lily, staring at the stars with “Homeless” from a jacuzzi in Joshua Tree on mushrooms, getting a hot stone massage high (weed memory), meeting the white wizard after a great workout, asking for help, a fat stack of 8x11 printer paper.

I usually start by cleaning my room. Vacuum the carpet if it needs it, put any stray clothes away, make my bed. Then I prop open a window, dim the lights, and burn some incense. Right now I have a bundle of Black Coconut sticks from an Ethiopian goods stall in Shepherd's Bush Market.

I then sit on the edge of my bed, palms on my knees, feet flat on the floor, comfortable but solid posture. For the past year or so, I was in the habit of starting my routine with a head to toe body scan, but recently that began to feel a bit hollow and rushed, so now I go directly into a simple breathing pattern. This is really just an inhale/exhale rhythm in small increments—”box breathing,” I think it’s called. In two seconds, hold two seconds, out two seconds, rest two seconds. In three seconds, hold three seconds, out three seconds, rest three seconds, etc.

Then I have a few checkpoints that help me drop the anchor: smooth my brow if it's scrunched (I like to imagine my skin like a baby's), loosen my jaw, and relax my tongue. Basically checking that all of the controls in the cockpit are functioning properly before takeoff. From there, it's a drift into my mind guided by the ambient sounds around me. I try to hear them in a detached way that bypasses my brain's desire to immediately label them, but I can almost always recall what I’ve heard hours later regardless. This morning was the swelling Doppler roars of a few planes, lots of delicate bird chirps, pop music from passing cars, front gates squeaking open, and some distant dialogue between what seemed like a mother and her young children getting ready to leave their home.

During particularly deep meditations, this mode of listening leads to a gentle toggle between two states. The first state is the aforementioned active listening combined with attention turned towards my breath. When the sounds, my breathing, and sometimes even my pulse all harmonize, it's like a cold freshwater river calmly flowing through a lush forest (coupled with the unshakeable sensation that my hands have become massive, for some reason). But this pleasure inevitably gets interrupted by the second state, which I envision as a conveyor belt of sequential thoughts. Sometimes these thoughts are related to topical anxieties but can often be quite abstract. This morning, I remember thinking of a stick insect, a lemon bar, and a past sexual experience before toggling back to the first state. The strange paradox of this practice for me is that when I'm really tapped in, I can let go of the thoughts on the conveyor belt almost as soon as they materialize, and yet the imagery associated with them frequently returns when I open my eyes. There are even some scenes that have shown up as nearly fully-formed painting ideas that have gone right to my sketchbook.

Fischl said “I paint to tell myself about myself.” Athena and I talked about that idea recently—about coming to the canvas or the stage as a one to one melding with the work through a natural movement inward. Where intensity of focus flows with an ease fueled by your molten center, your uninhibited truth. I adored how she spoke about her commitment to embodying the complex emotional pulse of Suddenly, Shockwave Delay for her performance in Istanbul last week. She reminded me that the choice is essentially binary; will you or won't you?

Which reminds me, I front squatted like a million kilos this morning at Redline. I think it was the first time I had lifted relatively heavy since, I don't know, 2016? An endorphin fountain at the end of that workout. Was smiling at babies and offering to buy random people coffees.

Then paint paint paint paint paint paint paint and a wet walk home around 17:00. At one point I was drafting a couple who were holding hands through Chelsea Harbour. A man, beard, probably thirties, tight blue jeans, gray vest over blue flannel. A woman, long amber hair whipping in the wind, probably thirties, tight blue jeans, black puffer jacket. There weren't any other humans on the horizon ahead of them. While I couldn't hear their conversation (Music For Psychedelic Therapy in my ears), they probably thought they were alone, because the man abruptly stopped at a roundabout and gave the woman's left asscheek an extended five-finger squeeze. She reacted like a dog forced through a garden hose rinse.

Feels like the right time to turn on the faucet as I remember yesterday's boots stomping through Chelsea Harbor to the beat of the gurgling bass in “Fly” by Low. Accelerated past a mother pushing her baby in a stroller, baby's cries punctuating each loop of “fly-eye-eye-eyeee.” I liked that groove, fly to cry to fly to cry to fly to cry. That little potato will want his wings one day.

Then tonight, after six hours tending the bar and a McDonald's double cheeseburger (with sweet curry sauce, thank you Calvin), the choral kaleidoscope of Sufjan's “Now That I'm Older” weaved a helix as I sat on the night bus and watched the reflection of a woman's fingers dance in BSL to her friend on FaceTime.

How about Golden chain? The title is from “Spinning Away” by Eno and Cale:

Up on a hill, as the day dissolves With my pencil turning moments into line High above in the violet sky A silent silver plane, it draws a golden chain

Maybe a descent into the world these kids are being handed? Both a radioactive dumpster fire and an incomprehensibly vast petri dish of regenerating sublimity. Have also been thinking about children as vessels for truth. My niece at the full family dinner table: “Daddy made mommy cry.” If she didn't say it, nobody else would have. When, why, and how do we learn to plug those interjections?

A new painting is based on a little girl I was sitting next to on a bench outside of a coffee shop the other day. She was turned away from the harsh morning light, carefully dipping her pinky finger through wooden slats into the long shadow it threw next to her. That nanosecond before the first foray into darkness deserves a long freeze. When flailing one's arms while yodeling to the hydraulic hiss of the bus doors first attaches itself to the sting of annoyed glares. Or, (back to Golden chain), when one can fling open a burning portal to the heavens in the middle of the night on an international red eye because its pull is just too magnetic to resist.