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

I don't really understand how the world works, G said, in between a bite of steak. R had been talking about how the mafia was buying up restaurants in Bilbao, turning them into secret chains, the corporate consolidation of our daily lives. She was an old woman now, about 70, and so much had changed. She grew up in a village without electricity in the Basque country, before leaving to work as an au pair in Paris, Rome, and London. When she returned, she started a bar with a friend. It was a feminist bar that had a strong connection to the movement at the time, where the most beautiful lesbians in all of Iberia would travel to, to organize of course. It went underwater, as did much of Bilbao, when the floods came, but after that R moved into a new world, that of fashion. She started her first boutique and her notoriety around the region grew once again. She occupied places in worlds. And then she grew old.

R worried about the declining birth rate in Europe. They want to replace the youth with machines, she said, and the idea of African immigrants becoming the new youth did not give her any more sleep. She had children of her own - her daughter was to take over the boutique, and she refused to give out hope for the future, for her grandchildren, because she believed the bad people ruining the world would be the first to die, their souls rotten. She spoke in this low hush, you had to lean in ever so close to hear her. They wanted to get rid of bullfighting, they found it cruel, but it was part of the culture, the heritage, so many words had come from it. G's uncle used to be a bullfighting critic, he'd write stories in the weekly paper, and G said it was as though reading another language, the piece so enveloped in its specific jargon. A torero of renown shops at R's boutique now and he's graced the cover of Vanity Fair Spain, but both institutions are propped up shells of what they once were.

The boutique is a wide and long room. Walk through it, past every tube LED beaming brightness below, and you reach the back, which opens up into a massive cavern of Chinese antiques. Porcelain plates, wooden horses, furniture of all kinds, find the staircase and then in the floor below are so many magazines and catalogs that have never been scanned. Purple Magazines from the 90s, with advertisements in them for galleries and publications. Names that are huge now - Luc Tuymans, Jutta Koether, Martin Kippenberger, Felix Guattari, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Rainald Goetz - but they hadn't been historicized yet, not when these things were printed, they were still becoming.

"The point is that this is gossip about formalized gossip that provoked a network of extended gossiping across time and space. Irit Rogoff has written that gossip is a form of testimony that is ‘invariably located in the present.’ It externalizes and makes ‘overt its relations to subjectivity, voyeuristic pleasure and the communicative circularity of story-telling’... Rogoff notes that gossip ‘is not fictional, but both as oral and written form, it embodies the fictional [and] impels plot’. Gossip, she says, bears ‘a multiple burden.’ Because it is ‘unauthored, untraceable and unfixed in historical time’, it can be read as a phantasmic projection of various desires by its audiences onto cultural narratives which it thus shapes..."

The dinner started, concluded, and continued, as did the viewing of several catalogs of early Yohji Yamamoto, mid-2000s Balenciaga, and Junya Watanabe. It was a goldmine of uncirculated images. But now his eyes burned with sleep as he returned back to the world of screens, longing to continue to turn pages in that cavern of pages until he had committed every photograph, every binding, every typeface into memory. He texted S an update, along with a picture of an advertisement for TZK Vol. 2 No. 7, which turned into a conversation about NFT's, cuckcore, the fellaverse, Amalia Ulman, Adam22, and Elon. It's hard to be interested in any of this, S replied, which was true in some ways, on the outside it appeared to be a schizophrenic tangle of associations, a map of chaosmosis, but in a concurrent convo, T was talking glizzy's, how they were "in" according to some, but how that it had already been written. T asked for permission to leak writing, but it was unneccessary, there was a way in which the words would find their way where they should belong, and if they wouldn't, then they wouldn't... It's a great place to start a rumor, in writing, because it takes the ephemeral and unfixed and gives it form.

See E's blog about Nate Freeman's farts and the behind-the-scenes of "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown". Or that J was in Zurich as the same time as D (whose name J2 uses to attend guest-listed events) who was there with his girlfriend X who went to college with Y who used to date Z who was in a sextape/art porno with ABC and it begins like Whitten's Greek Alphabet Paintings in Beacon, there was so much other gossip, much of it unsubstantiated, floating in the air, and this was how Herbert had to write about Stanley Brouwn. Because Brouwn fought an impossibility to prove an impossibility, every tiny sliver became so monumental, like Trisha Donnelly's voice, like Trisha Donnelly's face. A voweled artist was pregnant with a married man's child - that was last year and there's been no word of a child but she has a new boyfriend now. Not that it's anyone's business, but it's everyone's Business. There is so much work to be done. Bilbao had become a beautiful place, but it used to be rugged, industrial, disgusting. It needed a dream to become what it is now, a dream that enveloped everybody. And it was decided: they would build like the Basques, they would create a gossip factory.

First came the blogs, tumbling intrigue like dominoes as they spread via text and word of mouth, and then came the passwords, which loosely guarded some of the secrets. But this wasn't enough, new walls to the fortress had to be erected, the data being trafficked was so valuable in the eyes of gallerists, scenesters, and the oh so coveted youth who had yet to discover this underground, yet to be historicized thing, because there wasn't yet a thing to be discovered, but in time, in due time, Palmyra was not built in a day and its rubble still remains. A backend system was put into place, passwords that couldn't be hacked or guessed, but needed to be traded, leveraged, exchanged. They commodified their lives walking around with their pants around their ankles, and the emperor's new clothes were so desirable: there were all the most coveted archive pieces of course, but also what the newest Hararjuku girls had - VeniceW, fresh from the latest NewJeans video, Kiko Kostadinov, Enfantes Riches Deprimes – and it was smuggled in between bricks on a container ship. They moved everything as they pleased with their connections in Rotterdam, Baltimore, Cape Town, Singapore, dodging Customs, Border Patrol, and every other 3 lettered agency, not to mention Interpol. Baselitz said "Don't cover your modesty" and things could only balloon in proportion, like Kobayashi's stomach after swallowing glizzy's by the dozen.

They had plotted an end-point: a proprietary E-Reader, manufactured in Shenzhen but with laborers imported from across the globe. Isabelle Graw was smuggled down the Rhine from Basel, lured by promises of an antediluvian chamber that promised to reverse age. She didn't care about her beauty, but she wanted to escape the suck and fuck that had become Städelschule, every ad placement required more time on her knees as she wondered why she didn't contort the world in such a way that Jörg Immendorff invented "Oda Jaune" for her instead. Now she could change things, instead of writing toilet paper, she could write fortunes. Christopher Williams crawled into the container while it docked in Cologne, having agreed to do the product photography. And it continued, a container on a ship, migrating around the world haphazardly - a drunk skipper later and there they were in Miami. John Kelsey walked aboard, flush with a red noise and stuffed with satchels of... he had forgotten his baseball hat in the confusion and collapse, and it was as though he'd lost all purpose and sought to recompense this with chemical speed. It didn't matter, among the din of whispers in the container, attempting to segregate the circuits of secrets from prying ears, as he tried to talk to Isabelle about the Bernadette Corporation Supreme resale prices, but the bits kept getting stolen, recirculated, so much data bouncing around this storage container moving from ocean to ocean, still yet to reach Shenzhen.

And yet when it did, it did not leave the port. R was crucial in this step. She knew the Chinese were working with "the mafia" to buy up every business that existed, not just in Bilbao, but in Frankfurt, London, San Francisco, everywhere where there was a loophole in legislation, and that means everywhere where "democracy" claims to exist, because with democracy comes lawyers and with lawyers comes loopholes. And so she met with the Triads and in her hushed whisper negotiated her terms. The container got lost in the stacks, and with it so much gossip, which needs air to survive but was instead submersibled. The E-Reader was shipped to basements across the world, waiting to be discovered. Its e-ink had never been seen before, a screen devoid of color, yet able to re-present Jutta Koether and Cy Twombly in a new form of writing, through a new type of codec file. PDF's, EPUB's, DJVU's, none of them worked, this was something different.

The e-readers were distributed around the world. When they were touched, they would mechanically reproduce themselves, and when they fell on unfamiliar eyes they would translate themselves. Every gallerina, whether she/they worked in Hong Kong or Seoul, Hamburg or Shanghai, Harare or Santiago, lost themselves in the endless scroll of gossip, regardless of tongue. And they spread upwards and outwards, to the curators, programmers, and publicists, but also to the DJ's, club kids, drug addicts, and scenesters, you could plug it into a CDJ and make the most beautiful mix, you could rip that battery out and extract the most powerful speedball from its acid, you could smash the screen against your face and the shards would kiss your face, steal a little blood, then return to being one, waiting to grant the bliss of addiction to their next pair of eyes.

The Triads didn't trust R, they knew she was plotting something, her wizened gaze meeting their beady low Chinese eyes. You should be with Chris Tucker, she said. They were so high. 什麼?? mumbled back the Chinamen. Made a bitch. Get on her knees. Look at me. When she suckin. Eyes low. Like I'm Chinese, I should be with Chris Tucker. She whispered with the coldest authority, punctuating every syllable. Then she contined: That nigga don't want smoke, he second-hand puffin. I get a nigga whacked. Just one hand gesture.

In the haze of the Chinese smoke the world was changing. R knew she would die soon, but it didn't matter. She believed in the world, and she believed that death would come righteously. When we dined, she asked me if I was religious, and if my religion permitted drinking. In between bites of steak, I sipped a Rioja, because God willed it as such. In the smoke she finished, and she did not stutter: Bitch. I'm so solid. Cut my wrist. And you gon see conc—. Bitch. I'm so solid. Cut my wrist. And you gon see concrete.