Blood (2024)
Inkjet and Watercolor on Hanji Paper.
♥ ♥ ♥

Thought about blood while walking home today. Not so much the liquid, but its relation to metaphor: the bleeding edge, the bleed of the page, how text bleeds, how text made with ink bleed through one page into the next if there's too much of it. but even more so about how life bleeds, how the things created in one container of memory move to change the self, and the inevitability of separate tracks of thought and method working their way to influence different things made in different places.

i was walking home from getting an ice cream sandwich at the deli w/ M, which we were doing after getting mexican food w/ J & E (E didn't get anything, i split tacos al pastor w/ J, M got a quesadilla, i don't think anyone got anything to drink, J also got a bag of chips, can't remember what kind), which we were doing after DJing. the way that we're DJ'ing now has gotten so deconstructed that it's not even about DJ'ing to play songs so much as DJ'ing to resequence and create new sounds. A loop of a bass drum turned into a wave of sound with how short the sequence, loop rolls, phasers, echos, crush, etc. maximizing the number of effects applied to a song. makes me think of Rave and Goetz's writing, and how far we are from the practice of DJing described in that book, in a World where you could only spin vinyls you had in your collection. i took two videos because we didn't record the set.

today was a strange day. i got a couple parking tickets back in march so i wanted to stack some supplementary bread to offset the costs and signed up for a medical survey thru craigslist. finally made it uptown for it where psychiatry people asked me about my drug use and mental health history and had me play puzzle games for 4 hours. i got 60 in cash, a metrocard w/ 2 rides, a slice of pizza, a kind bar, and a few cups of water for doing this. i also had to pee in a cup. it was weird though, reminded me of how much i hate medical institutions, foucault prison shit blah blah blah, but really the voice and disposition of the PA asking me questions about my life. Facetimed T later and he agreed about how much that type of person sucks. I walked around the UES for a while after. Went into a goodwill and put on a pinstriped armani blazer that was 30 dollars which I didn't get because I didn't want to spend money on clothes but then in genius fashion, went into a french cafe and sat down and ordered a 24 dollar "salade" and a 7 dollar cappuccino. I scribbled in my notebook while sitting in their outdoor dining area, about watching a taxi that was broken down in the middle of 2nd ave and the driver standing behind it, waving cars past while yelling into his phone that he was between 88th street and 89th street, wishing I could smoke a cigarette. I thought about how it could've been a frank o'hara poems decades ago and how the world is different now and later I was walking on 86th street towards the train and saw the marquee of a theater below an apartment building and though about frankie cosmos. While still at the table I thought and wrote about the idea of "rendering", like rendering fat while cooking, but also rendering in blender, but also rendering reality.

In The Museum of Innocence, Pamuk wrote: "The foundation of the world is love. The foundation of love is the love we feel for God". He nestled it into the dialogue of a driver. In another world, the driver-turned-traffic-conductor on 2nd avenue was turkish, but he was clearly a Jew. One time I got an uber from my aunt's place in the san jose suburbs to the BART station and the driver was from turkey. I talked to him about Istanbul and about New York City. He said he used to live there too and asked me my favorite part. I said brighton beach and he agreed. "Beautiful women," he said and I nodded, "only 50 dollars for the night of your life". I didn't expect this turn, but it made sense that a turkish cabman was fucking Slavic whores smuggled into the country. Now there's a lot of russians in Istanbul, they've left because of the war. My friend tells me it's fucking the rent up. I think of Eumaeus, and how I walked underneath Butt Bridge in Dublin, how the cabman's shelter is long gone, how it's a different bridge now than what used to be there. everything changes. there are so many Worlds

I got back to the city yesterday morning. caught up w/ S via facetime and then hung out w/ Z later. both were nice conversations, where we reflected on recent things. on my end, there was H&A's wedding this weekend. Made plans to go back to the noguchi museum this week with Z. Need to get something nice for H&A, as a belated wedding gift, but I'm glad it's late, I don't think I would've got the right thing, or been able to write the right letters to them before the wedding. It was a really beautiful thing to witness and even more special to be a part of. Everything was always running late and that was fine, encouraged even, Time was moving different. On the flight there, I read Baudelaire's Salon of 1846. he talked about a lot of different shit; I was more interested in the form of the work than how he arrived at the ideas within, but he wrote it when he was 25, trying to outdo Diderot. The French do this thing where they just make shit up and it becomes canon — the parts that stuck w/ me the most were about painters "unlearning" (the) past(s), portraiture as either history or fiction, landscapes of fantasy, and how for "men of letters" there is no such thing as Sunday.

"Men of letters" is such a funny term because we are all men of letters now. Men of letters, men of images, men of sounds, men of emojis, men of media.