My Love,
It’s past the point of no return. I should have never watched I Love Dick. Fuck, I never should have read I love Dick! You’re on my mind all the time now, consuming, confusing, captivating. It’s almost gross. Art is the antidote, the damp rag to clean up the sloppy mess of pleasure.
I talked to an interview subject today for that TV show thing I’m casting. She thinks we should have respect for the office of the presidency, if not the man himself. I think he shouldn’t have assaulted women. I’m so full of rage sometimes it makes me crazy. It’s rage I’m afraid to share with you, to let loose, because I wonder if it would obliterate and disgust you. I have only ever seen it reflected back at me in the performed rage of certain drag performers from behind makeup. Honestly, sometimes I could burn down a whole fucking city block I’m so angry. Maybe that’s why I like this neighborhood here in Cleveland actually—it’s got a rich history of arson.
More later…
It’s later. I woke up to Rihanna’s Love on the Brain and stared into space. Love wastes so much time. I feel it slipping away. I guess that’s one of the things about intimacy, when it’s being built it appears as wasted time with no determinable results. I’ve always prosthelitized the benefits of this quality of time but living it is different, far more anxiety-producing. Are you receding from me? Your last letter seemed far away…
Rihanna kept singing about work. Last night I went to a gallery opening at a place called the Muted Horn owned and operated by Kelley O’Brien and her partner AJ. We walked in and were greeted with three solitary candles on two folding tables filled with food. Kelley’s relationship to the work she curates seems both etiological and ancillary (in the best way)—she makes food for every opening which corresponds to the contents of the show. So, in this case the show by Kara Gut negotiated the world of video games and gamers—their culture, aesthetic and patriarchal (I’d say homosocial) gestures. Kelly recreated food from videos games for the dinner and , I’ve gotta say, it was some of the best nondigital chicken I’ve ever had.
After eating, Kelley handed me a pair of wireless headphones to wear down into the gallery. Soothing digital beats filled my ears. Walking into the gallery I experienced the sensation I get when i’m at home on my computer—unselfconscious, relaxed but uncomfortable. I was drawn immediately to the screen showing video footage of games and cosplay aficionados—slicing through TVs, creating swords from video games. Their behavior seemed almost farcical or sweet in the gallery context, . I couldn’t help but think of that guy I dated said he liked to think of the world as a game, how it made the most sense to him. I told you about him—the one who slept with somebody else on my birthday. I have to say that permanently left a bad taste in my mouth for gamer culture. In this video I finally felt permission to laugh at these phallic swords and comic displays of white male aggression. Laughing at men who aren’t trying to be funny hasn’t gone well historically for me, so to be able to do it in the confines of a gallery, and in the company of other men (gallery visitors) released a bit of cultural anxiety for me.
Sam, who was there too, was drawn to the painting—Iron Swords/Glass Sword which, once I took the headphones off, I too observed. The side by side swords hovered in a colossal under-painted blackness—one was curvier and more shapely than the other. The implied bodies grasping them obscured by paint. “It’s got a gender thing going on, “ said Sam. And all of a sudden I saw it and wondered about the utility of male and female once again. That gender baseline that I always seem to stumble back to, or get pushed up against. Every time I hear or write “male/female” in that proximity it’s like somebody has ripped off a too small bandaid off the raw flesh of a wound that won’t heal. But that’s my shit.
Saw this band the other night at Pat’s in the Flats—that’s this bar to end all dive bars. They were called Scotch the Filmmaker. It was the first show if their tour and one of their lead singer had a luminous voice and was a fan of Call Your Girlfriend. She covered that Rihanna song and we said goodbye saying, “see you on the internet boo.”
I miss you. I love you. I hate the internet. How are you?
Love,
K
Swimming in circles in a band t shirt:
