“Katy, Katy,” [REDACTED] said. She looked at each of us, moving her eyes from face to face, but said nothing. Her current boyfriend moved forward to block our host from getting any closer.
“Hey, man,” he said, “I, like, really need you to step the fuck back.”
“No, no, I understand,” he said, “I just don’t see why you have to leave. I am happy to apologize. I am sorry.”
“Sorry won’t cut it, asshole,” Katy said. I stared at her neck in the streetlight to see if I could finally make out the heads of the flamingos wrapped into the collar, but I still couldn’t see any of them. Our host tried to approach Katy and the current boyfriend, but the current boyfriend stepped up and pushed him back.
“Man, I told you to step back,” he said.
From around the corner, a Bentley pulled up and stopped at the entrance to the building. A driver stepped out and opened the door for them. She frowned at us before entering the car. I watched her slide into the heavenly seclusion of its leather interior. The driver shut the door. [REDACTED] began to knock on the window. The driver immediately yanked him back by his shoulder. “Touch my car again, buddy, and I’ll break your fucking hand.”
“OK, OK,” he said, and stepped back, putting his hands in his pockets.
The driver nodded and got into the car. They drove off.
Katy’s sudden absence felt oceanic. But when I looked at it, at the vacant, shadowy 72nd Street, I saw nothing, neither the other dinner guests nor the car as it began to turn onto Lexington. I saw nothing that would allow me to define “ocean,” as in the biological and ecological contingency that has come to mean “ocean,” let alone “absence.” This, like other things, was OK, even a little nice. Prism is itself an ocean of feeling. Its waves quiver under a moon the shape of Katy’s transformative, prismatic face ebbing in the dark, haloed in blue.
Your ocean is flowing toward me, Katy, I thought, as I stood under the canopy of a palm tree at the empty shore, which wasn’t so much a palm as it was a pun on the fist unballed before a reader who began to trace its creases. He ran his fingers along the groove of my palm, searching the revelatory lines that have crossed one another to locate the coordinates of some future rapidly becoming present.
I asked him what it meant, but he just shook his head.
I looked at him and tried to understand what this might mean, but he didn’t seem to know. He sat at his desk and sighed, looked at his computer screen, and transferred information he located in several databases into a few Excel spreadsheets open on his desktop in preparation for an extended memo due at the end of the week. His chair squeaked and he wrote a Post-it note to remind himself to tell head of operations that he needs a new chair. He occasionally looked at the clock near his outgoing mailbox. As always, he felt “stretched thin.”
He often wondered if his coworkers were as bored as he always was. He doesn’t have an office window to look out of but he frequently likes to pause in his day to imagine what is outside the building: the parking lot, the road that leads out of Virginia and back to D.C. He finds this life theoretically beautiful though in practice he could see himself doing other work. That other work remains unknown in its details to him but he thinks about what it could be fairly often. It would be something practical but beautiful.
Whenever the song “Dark Horse” plays on his iPod shuffle, the reader thinks about suggesting that title as a name for a program the office—or rather, the complex of agencies collated into what he refers to as “the office”—is developing. The song, like the other songs on the album, reminds the reader of a time he had dinner with a high school girlfriend’s parents, the night of a significant local football game. Her father was an intolerant man who, after 9/11, found a vital resource for his hatred in the internet. Her father peddled in conspiracies related to the complicity of the Bush Administration in designing and executing the attacks, which he cryptically referred to as “the Opening.” He would often begin sentences: “Before the Opening” or “After the Opening.” The Opening, as he described it to the reader, was the event that both admitted the veracity of the lie and the falsity of the truth simultaneously; that is, the Opening articulated two points about reality, holographic in its lush, simulated surfaces: one, that the perceivable conditions of life in the United States were lies that covered up the generators of those conditions and, two, the lies pre empted what created them and so remain the primary “reality” (and not, as shadier conspiracies might have it, the reverse). He liked to say that facts were useless things. What matters is the dream that gives those facts a purpose, a life.
After that dinner, the Opening became a frequent reference point for the reader as he left his hometown, attended Georgetown, and began to work in the DC metropolitan area. He often thought about its merits and debated it with himself privately. Soon the reader began to feel the Opening everywhere, at every instance, whether he was at work or at the gym or having a drink or listening to Prism, which he gradually discovered (as he discovered with many, many things) was based on this exact twinned point. Perry puts it more simply, the reader thinks, in arguing that the fantasy that renders the present experiential does not conceal a “deeper,” more “true” reality. Rather, it is fantasy that allows reality to spread.
He leaned back in his chair. It squeaked under his weight.
“Dark Horse” evokes the early Sunday hours at the height of the American weekend, the last minutes before sunrise, when you either choose among the dazed remnants of the night or go home alone. Also, the highly organized systems of information management that cache, tag, and categorize both the metadata of these remnants (text message: “hi what r u doing rite now its late i know”; recorded as “Message containing no flagged content sent at 3:02:42AM 11/08/13 from Maison O, 98 Kenmare Street, New York, New York 10012) and the remnants themselves (recorded as: ANDREW SCOTT DURBIN, resident of 855 Park Place, Brooklyn, New York 11216; born 09/28/89; profile clear of flagged content. SEE MORE). The cover of Perry’s Prism features a photograph of the artist taken by Ryan McGinley, whose terrible work effaces the marks of aging and those that differentiate youthful bodies by reducing them to a blur, blotched in the sunlit fields or the caves out west, flakes of flesh tones in which only the vaguest outline of a thin college student emerges, naked, unseduced by the camera itself but in love with the audience at the other end of the process that manufactures his image. People stare at them in the gallery or scrolling through a blog on their iPhone, the faces staring back, sometimes very clear, sometimes still blurrier, prismatic, triangulated as viewer, model, and the networks of distribution for which Ryan McGinley serves as a conduit for an idea of beauty not exactly universal as it strives toward a uniqueness defined by the unexpected intensity of the sight of someone’s sharp pelvis or high cheekbones but getting there. They are strange, even ugly in McGinley’s photographs, and yet this doesn’t deprive them of their magnetism. The three of us—model, Ryan, and I—begin to organize into a record of taste to be graphed by agencies more or less invisible to us. I text my friend “hi what r u doing rite now its late i know” and even though I am certain no response will come I go deep and send it again. The impulse is, itself, based on a belief in the dark horse: that a thing probably won’t happen leads me to think that it must. In [REDACTED]’s apartment, everything darkened as we resumed our places at the table. In the candlelight, I stared at the cover of Katy’s new album, narrowing in on the little A in Katy shaped like a triangle, a prism, over Ryan McGinley’s sun-drenched image of her as she catches the light, and it became easy to see in it another prism, lying in repose among the sunflowers, the quartz pyramid through which light becomes a rainbow or in other iterations, rectangular or cubic or pentagonal or, finally, the hexagonal crystal, in which I see myself telling Katy to back up a step, please, Katy, can someone get her some makeup please? and raise the silvery cloth up to your lips before the green screen where my assistants later overlay the field that seems real but probably isn’t, or back of
that, another prism that spins in a nest of light, tagging content endlessly, storing that content into the plural databases where I take residence among the machines who read me, who render me legible in various other systems languages, flagging “bomb,” for example, like, Katy Perry is the bomb, Katy, you’re the bomb, as the prism spins in my hand and I bring it close to speak into it, pressing it to my lips, under a prismatic sunset a gradient of red like the stroked, reddish brown hair of a horse moving across a field, the field where the sunflowers do not wilt under the hand of Ryan McGinley’s assistants, the horse moving quickly through it, running up and turning back at the electrified fence over and over again in a game it plays with the only environment it knows. I raise my phone to take a picture. I hold it close, tap the screen to focus the image, but the horse moves too quickly and I only manage to snap a photo of a blur. I post it to Instagram anyway, marking for friends and the servers mainlined to the various agencies that might take note that, somewhere, I saw a horse, and that that horse was moving fast.
SIR DRONE
Raymond Pettibon writes on Twitter: “Art will recover from its low self-esteem vis-à-vis other ‘disciplines’ when artists are recruited by the CIA—as they were in the 50’s(smile).” For a second I wonder if the parenthetical smile suggests Pettibon has secret information about artist spies or if he himself was an artist spy in the 1950s, but since he was born in 1957, I credit the tweet to the usual spooky disposition of his Twitter, where he often writes conspiratorially about GG Allin, sports, punk rock, art, violence, and politics, using a prose style notable for its confusing grammar, atypical punctuation, and eccentric choices in spelling— especially in his use of the letter Y, which manifests virally where it never belongs, populating words with an extra vowel/consonant that often confuses their sense-meaning. His father wrote spy novels and writing—a fundamental component to his work—“came natural” to him, as the Los Angeles Times wrote about the 33 year-old Pettibon in 1991. They described him as having a boxer’s nose, and if I were to describe him now I’d say the same thing. We both live in New York and sometimes I think I might run into him. I went to his 2013 show at David Zwirner in Chelsea with my friend Ed several weeks after it opened and impossibly expected him to be there, but of course there was no way he’d be at the gallery on that day—or on any day, for that matter. I can’t really place why seeing his work imposes his presence or the possibility of his presence on me. I suppose it’s the largeness of his personality, in his art and on Twitter, that makes me think he lives in every space where you find him, Y-like—edged with the sense that he could be there just as easily as he could not be there. Pettibon, in portraits of him then and now, looks a little wrecked by whatever world he does occupy, dreamless on the green lawns of a vague yesterday or, since he lives in New York, cast in the shadowy Real of the monumental skyline, each platform of being-there more confused than the next in the poignancy of its crumbling under certain inescapable brutalities like those he illustrates. In Pettibon’s drawings, there is defeat with no recourse to recovery of self-esteem. At his David Zwirner show, I thought about how his art stretches bodies thin, into a vocabulary of bodies that exposes an emotional interior usually secluded in the flesh, itself (the bodied body) a dominant narrative through which we discover their point, which is: we try to destroy ourselves but survive, as always, flatlined then brought back only to be measured for life by an entirely different system of measurement than one previously known. Like his Twitter, like the trippier poetry of a language constantly on the verge of discovering at its heart a vulnerability so substantial as to be meaningless, his art attempts to recover its low self-esteem vis-à-vis an engagement with fragility—with fragile bodies. Also with language itself, which stretches along the paper in Pettibon’s slanted sprawl, corrupted by misplaced Y’s, like in the line “WHAT WE CANN NOYT STOYP TO ILLUSTRATE WE MUST PASS OVER IN IGNORANCE,” a misquote of Wittgenstein, written in blue watercolor on toilet paper and pinned to the wall at David Zwirner. On the other side of the room, Ed looked at a large wave under which Pettibon had written: “TO BE WIPED OFF THE FACE OF THE EARTH—NOT WITHOUT A PICTURE FIRST.” Two men lose their surfboards in the midst of the huge curve, and though they’ve been flattened into a stasis indispensible from the work’s effect I thought Ed seemed a little dizzy from the hugeness of the drawing and the feeling of it crashing down on him. Or perhaps, after a night out, I felt a little dizzy in the midst of so many uncrashed waves and when I looked at Ed I thought he must have felt small, like I felt small, under that frozen wave. It’s like wandering out into the ocean, to the point where the waves are so large that you have to duck down into the water to withstand their arrival at shore. Otherwise you’re knocked back with a mouthful of salt water. I recently read in a science magazine that the world transformed by inhospitable shifts in climate will be taken over by jellyfish, which is the most adept of any of us at handling an ocean at higher temperatures and decreased salinization. One night at the beach in southern California, I discovered in the waves this other, future ocean captive within the one at present, glittery in the vacuum of its false glamour, suggesting in the cloud of bright jellyfish glowing at the crest of each wave a coming world hallucinogenic in its gelatinous light, droning at sea, curtained in my presence by a diffuse electric air. It was unremarkable by nature, a zone relinquishing its hold on actual space, curtailed by boundaries that self-effaced, a residual empire of presence that wandered away, dissipating, but not without leaving behind the possibility of later return—as the whole world. I felt taxed of the energy to place myself within it, like thinking California might be different from any other place not-California, blasted into the continent, woods and oceans, resorts and plazas. In other works of Pettibon’s, Y’s rise into the language to interrupt meaning: increasing redundancy where it might be reduced, all over the walls and in the drawings, to a terse language that spells out hardship. Life fucks with people on a basic, immaterial level, leveling charges against them that float dreamily over or under the subject. A man running away: “I THOUGHT CALIFORNIA WOULD BE DIFFERENT.” A man stabbing another: “YOUR GIRLFRIEND CALLED ME CHICKEN.” A man and woman kissing: “I DON’T LOVE YOU ANYMORE.” A cat that has killed a rat: “I HAVE KILLED HIM FOR YOU, AND I’VE BROUGHT HIM TO YOU AS A REMINDER OF OUR OWN INEVITABLE SLIP INTO THE GREAT NOTHING.” Sobered by language, they hunch over or hold on to the most straightforward things, the things most immediately and obviously present, even if present things never settle down. A basketball player holds a gun and a ball: “DO YOU MIND IF I DUNK?” The white gallery, at one moment, became a lilac cube with me at its center, draped in the sleepier gradient of a late Saturday afternoon in fall. I imagined the basketball player standing beside me, loading the gun. A few nights later, Ed WeTransferred me Sir Drone, one of four of Pettibon’s VHS tapes he made in the 1990s, a film that stars Mike Kelley as a would-be punk rocker named Jinx trying to start a band called the Droners with his friend Dwayne. I WeTransferred the file to Zachary four days later while he was at work. Rather, I forwarded the WeTransfer Ed sent me to Zachary and asked him if that worked and it did. In her poem “Orange Roses,” Lucy says that she lent Zachary—the same Zachary—a book that she doesn’t expect to get back, though he returns it a month later. I am thrilled that I can lend him something and never worry about its return since its life in the cloud totally absolves us of all the guilty lender/borrower feeling of when should I ask for it back? when should I give it back? economy that’s totally a drag. It’s the same drag Jinx and Dwayne feel as they try to start a band and learn the complex vocabulary of punk rock, a visual and linguistic system that requires a certain aping with confidence, borrowing from it here and there, unsure of what, and how, to give back. I feel that. Friendship gets meted out in blood: Jinx and Dwayne give each other prison tattoos and generally bromance like men in that kind of love. They also struggle to erase whatever residual uncool defines their read of one another, like hippiness (bell bottoms are torn) and
surfing (a swastika’d surfboard is threatened to be sold). Mike Kelley seems to feel it in his bad acting, which rises Y-like to a reality unexpected but obviously the only one we could have in the videotape, now a digital file, playing on my VLC app. It’s the reality pressurized as a matter of active endurance rather than passive enjoyment. Performance excites it all back to life. It’s a good movie but so what. When I watched it, Sir Drone was like a caption, only it captioned me: I THOUGHT THIS WOULD BE DIFFERENT. But how? Better? I guess in 2013 the title Sir Drone reminded me of the semisecret paramilitary US drone campaigns in Yemen and Pakistan. Or, combined with that, Stevie Wonder’s “Sir Duke.” Perhaps “Sir Duke” plays in the command center that signals a drone to strike a bus. I tried to imagine what it would be like if the Droners covered “Sir Duke.” It might sound better than the original, which, to be heretically frank, is a little too cute in its uppercase imperative to enjoy, solidified to a taffy-like mask stretched over my face, my face which at the Pettibon show felt masked as I stared at his drawings. Outside the gallery, the sky went dark. I parted with Ed and walked south, down into the Village, to wander around alone. The Chelsea streets were cold, cast partially in the purple light of a Porsche with LED Underbody lights installed to its bottom frame that I passed below 14th. A few wasted bros gathered on 9th Avenue to admire the car, which seemed more like an illustration of a car than an actual one. I was impressed by the unchallenged brightness that swamped us, a little unworldly in its puce spray across the sidewalk, just north of the Standard Hotel, where some high-net worth individuals congregated near the entrance, among them maybe even the owner of the Porsche. It sat in the street like a big, luxurious coffin. I thought about the funeral photos of GG Allin, whose brittle looks seemed to have been drawn Pettibonesque onto his putty-like head, looks I think will never belong in New York again, lying in repose the last American saint whose darkened jockstrap, stained by profuse sweat, shined a light into a life indifferent to the death that it knew would follow it, living forever in gin-tinged waves the same black-and-white of the photographs that documented him onstage. He would destroy this car, I thought, do whatever he could to wreck it: piss on the Italian leather seats, smash the windows, rip the steering wheel out and hurl it through the front window of the Le Pain Quotidien nearby. I wish I could have picked Allin up and placed him in the Porsche. In the few photographs of his dead body, he’s mostly unclothed. His head is slumped forward with his eyes reduced to awkward, forced slits. In these images, he is too clean, brushed up to look more substantial than his rushed, sketched-in presence must have been in person. The images betray him. Reveler in blood and shit, piss and cum, he might release it all into the Porsche, instruct us to fuck it up. Liberate yourself by hurling excrement at what ought to be covered in shit anyway. Punch the dashboard until it cracks, throw whatever is in the glove box out the passenger-side window. Tear out the rearview mirror. Smash the satellite radio. Pull the seat forward and start the engine. Wreck it into what comes next.
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