Monumental Publication Reissue

I've printed a new run of my book to commemorate a new professional setback!

Museum Putty is a compendium of lowlife odes to high institutions, David Byrne/Cindy Sherman erotic speculation, true tales of pain from Chicago's MCA and other instructive texts.





Please send 5 digital American dollar bills for the symbolic partial ownership of this important piece of literature to my Venmo account:
extremeappearances@gmail.com

Thank you and have a nice day.

Detention

In April I had the opportunity to stage a solo show at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis.
Detention explored my complicated relationship to art education as a student and teacher.
This piece of writing functioned as my artist statement.

Nobody told me I’d be the next Basquiat,
the next YBA,
the new Jeanette Hayes
smearing authenticity
and hip acumen across
any given art forum.
Teachers never told me I’d be a
bad boy impresario
ashing cigs in the paté,
smug in shades.
But nobody told me I’d be at the beckon call
of a dozen little children
pasting tissue paper onto
cardboard tacos,
streaks of Elmer’s glue across my thighs
when I show up to the grant application office
in the eleventh hour.
In Senior Seminar on
Practical Concerns
they should say
“Beware of your talents,”
instead of reading aloud from
The Hydrogen Jukebox,
underclassmen feeding back
with beatnik snaps,
outsider poses ossifying.
Maybe that’s the implicit lesson,
the unspoken compact,
the vulgar picture you have to paint yourself:
reallocating resources,
smuggling creative labor into your dayjob,
appropriating the services
of your vibrant young students
as I make my money
teaching art
while it takes away from
my time to make it,
spinning a cautionary tale
about contradiction
as it envelopes me.
In detention,
where I know I am
because I’m bad,
I crack a book:
a little “Skepticism About”
nestled inside
“The Power of Art.”

Suburban Bathroom Ghost

I have been watching tv at my parents' house, wearing my dead aunt’s sweatshirt while my dead aunt’s car gets fixed so I can drive it away. Am i dead? I haven’t spoken out loud all day and I feel unsure, only having left a trail of likes online, a little ectoplasmic dribble, a bit of snail-like ooze.
Do i cast a shadow? Am I a vapor?
I check the hallway bathroom to confirm.
Bathroom decor: There’s a lopsided vitrine, a ceramic that looks like a cut paper bag on top of the toilet tank, hollow face illuminated by the white tile. It has a twisted little smile.
How did it die?
On the garage wall by the beer fridge there’s a grisly miniature Jesus on a cross, bloody lines on skin tone, chiseled muscled wood.
The ghost bag is full of air and I'm full of beer.

Object Identification

Static electricity runs through the brush.
The shower is fucked.
The feckless mesh basket that shields the sink from debris is an affront.
The box of maxi pads is shredded.
The clothes are in a trunk. People wear the clothes when they wake up. Some clothes are in a pile. The pile is walking up the wall.
The brush is orange rubber with white tines on a cream colored plastic handle.
It looks like it has been sitting in the sun.
The bathroom looks dusty in the sun.
The brush gets stuck in our hero’s hair when she runs it though.
She watches it hang there in the mirror.
The mirror is not a window.
It is flecked with toothpaste spattered during an active session of brushing.
Women are messy.
Men are messy.
The roommates are resentful.
Our hero cleans the bathroom on her knees.
She is not effective.
Her hand is not a mop.
She wishes for efficiency.
She envies the objects.
If she was the best at a single thing would she do it all the time?
Nothing is ever easy.
Every sentence is overly ornate.
A sponge is expected to scrub.
Sometimes it is a raft.

****
This piece was inspired by the documentary I Married the Eiffel Tower and every bathroom I've ever shared.

Yoko's proclivities

Of course the Yokos had their supporters. Wingnuts and cutters and sensationalists would wait at the stage door to thrust albums into their hands. A contingent of would-be groupies stared at them with sharky eyes.
Most nights Yoko would prefer to retire to her room to watch Tom and Jerry and eat spaghetti till she passed out. But sometimes she'd single out a broken-looking boy with a cross bite or a stutter or endearingly bad posture huddled behind the frontline of fans and take him home. She'd usually ask him if he wanted to play ping pong.
The Yokos had a well-loved ping pong table in their middle room, littered with cigarette bits and beer can rings. Touring bands' bags and beds were below it for weeks at a time, and many a musician was lulled to sleep by the tock of the ball across the table, it's soundless snare in the plastic net, the silent beat in a rhythmic phrase.
The game got hypnotic as the night wore on, it's spectators staring, yawning, slipping closer to the floor.
On a couple occasions, if the other Yokos were making out or playing Truth or Dare in their shared bedroom, she'd get a cheap motel room for her and the boy, and press the rubber keychain hard into his palm. The next morning they'd get Bloody Mary's at the adjacent old man bar, laugh and compare rugburns.

Yoko's Momentum

Yoko hadn't been privy to the most recent bit of band gossip. She'd had to read it online. She opened her browser to find a provocative exchange between her bandmates splayed across Facebook. They were sick of her shit and auditioning other Yokos to play bass. She plead her case in the selfsame thread in the plainest language she could muster:
"W. T. F."
Despite her chronic tardiness, Yoko clung to the structure of their bi-weekly rehearsals. Though she'd no-call no-show in favor of cleaning obscure corners of her kitchen, wiping ashy fingerprints off the periphery of the light switch, crawling into cabinets to polish the greasy film off neglected pots, she needed this. She needed to play shows, gathered momentum from every terse exchange with a teenage misogynist in the crowd, thrived in opposition to the most retarded heckles. Puffed up, sweat dotting her polyester, she'd punch a tambourine and imagine it was a war pig's heart.

Yoko's Phone

A little ditty facilitated by my new writing group/favorite thing(?), Hoes Before Prose (working title).

Yoko is rooting around under the pink ruffle of her four poster bed with the canopy. She knows the other Yokos tried to call her cuz she didn't come to band practice, laid around, got high and ate peanut butter and marshmallow sandwiches on enriched white bread. But she couldn't move, she was paralyzed by her own breath, her poofy black hair spread across the pillow when a fly alighted on her chest. It circled her nipple, perched on top of a silver button on her army drab oxford shirt, buzzed faintly, rubbed its legs together, probably threw up. She imagined that it threw up.



The other Yokos would be tuning their drums, cracking open beers, energy building into a wave they didn't want to break, not now, not like this, blue balls when they didn't get to play.

Performance

I recently had a job interview for a position teaching art at a summer camp. -ed.

I'm writing a lesson plan for my eight year olds. Today we'll be discussing transgressive performance art. We'll begin by watching Paul McCarthy duct tape hotdogs onto his body. I'll point out the way he gags and sputters on mustard and we'll note the neat stripes of red that appear on his body when he rips off the tape, and yes, how he does look like a hotdog himself, covered with those condiments! Do we think this choice was intentional?
Then on the chalkboard we'll make a list of body fluids.
Does anybody need to use the bathroom?
Then I'll bring out the costume trunk and we'll see where it goes from there. One girl with sticky hands will probably pick out a Sleeping Beauty nightgown and run her hands across the slick, fire retardant fabric. And I'll say "Madison, what can we pair with the princess dress that says something about hollow traditional American values?"
She'll hesitate and glance at her shiny little shoes, then she'll look back up and mumble "crown of thorns."

The Taco Bell Jar

The first similarity I noticed was the typography—tall, narrow seventies letters with curlicuing flourishes at their otherwise hard edges. Davida font against a flat colored background. The second similarity that struck me was the shame.
I’ve always had a weakness for wordplay. I explained to my co-worker that if I ever got married I’d want to have an Otis Wedding.
“It would be on the dock of the bay,” I gushed, “and the procession would enter to a chorus of whistlers who’d move from Motown tunes to more complicated baroque arrangements.”
“You want one if the most significant events in your life to be based on a weak pun?” He asked.
“Yes,” I gurgled, tears forming in my eyes as I clasped my hands across my heart. “I do.”
So when I divined the similarities between the classic cover of Sylvia Plath’s proto-feminist novel The Bell Jar and the old Taco Bell logo, and I realized they were unified by the best kind of pun—one that marries high and low culture—I was beyond inspired. I realized immediately that I must do a performance.
I’m moved and impressed by the old school strain of performance art that hinges on acts of endurance. In 1974, Marina Abramovic wrote these instructions for a performance called Freeing the Voice:
“I lie on the floor with my head tilted backwards.
I scream until I lose my voice.”
My deep-seeded authority problems, bolstered through years of exposure to punk rock and Catholic education, have rendered me hopelessly irreverent, so I also think this classic type of art performance is a fair target for parody. I’d sit at Taco Bell, in its gaudy plastic “dining room” where no one besides the staff spends more than twenty minutes and read The Bell Jar from cover to cover in one sitting, and I’d make a video of the whole thing.




I pulled into the Taco Bell parking lot on Saturday night as dusk fell. I was already violating one of my personal life rules: Only eat Taco Bell under cloak of night. Why? Because of shame. I was uncomfortably aware of my body, clad in a peach cashmere sweater and pencil skirt borrowed from a friend’s vintage store. I also, as a rule, don’t wear peach, but I was committed to approaching shame from all sides, and the element of costume took me out of myself. I smoothed my hair into a makeshift French twist, and with paperback under my arm entered the taco complex.
I ordered some hot garbage from the helpful young man behind the register and slid into a hard plastic booth, trying to make myself comfortable. I was in it for the long haul. And, as it turned out, this franchise was a hot spot for loitering. A crew of college-age Dungeons and Dragons players and a boisterous group of transients rounded out the dining room crowd. Their conversations provided the ambient soundtrack that I’d alternately eavesdrop on and try to ignore over the course of my sitting.
The Bell Jar, Chapter One: Sensitive young writer Esther Greenwood has been offered a dream job doing temporary writing for a women’s magazine, but her experiences in the big city lead to her psychological unraveling. Esther spends most of chapter one getting drunk:
“I began to think vodka was my drink at last…It went straight down into my stomach like a sword swallowers’ sword and made me feel powerful and godlike” (10).
This plot element underscores another one of my personal roles I was breaking in the service of this performance: Never eat Taco Bell sober. Heretoforth, I’d only ever experienced the Crispy Potato Soft Taco, the Cheesy Bean and Rice Burrito through an alcoholic fog. Sobriety did the food no favors, but Fire Sauce did, so I smothered my bean blobs with it, trying to be conscientious of my borrowed cashmere.
“I knew something was wrong with me that summer, because all I could think about was the Rosenbergs and how stupid I’d been to buy all those uncomfortable, expensive clothes, hanging limp as fish in my closet…” (1).
One Doritos Tacos Loco down, one chapter under my belt.
A half hour into my performance, the conversation between the transient-types at the table next to me got a little louder and harder to ignore. As I ran my eyes across Plath’s hefty metaphors, attempting to absorb their content, I simultaneously absorbed the details of some drifter drama.
“She’s beautiful!” a craggy man behind me hollered to his companions about some unsuspecting diner. “Too bad she’s not twenty years older! Shit, another seven!”
Here the rattle of his plastic dice across the tabletop entwined with Plath’s narrative like a thorny bramble. I took a pull from a massive cup of Baja Blast and worked on comprehending.
Esther spends Chapter 3 of The Bell Jar feeling like the black sheep at an upscale banquet for the journalist girls sharing her ranks. She watches a centerpiece of marzipan fruits melt as she shovels avocado, crab salad, and caviar in to her mouth. She sips an unadorned glass of vodka and entertains herself by lying to strangers.
I was lying to strangers too! I nibbled at my taco in a mannered way, fingering my out-of-place pearl necklace. I was also freezing. Taco Bell seemed to maintain a chilly temperature to discourage this type of long-term stay. It also neglected to provide electrical outlets for weirdos making videos. I thought when I was here, I was family. Or is that the Fazoli’s slogan?
The Taco Bell slogan emblazoned on my giant cup was “Live Mas.” This is a fittingly clunky juxtaposition of English and conversational Spanish, and there’s probably a suicide joke teed up there, but I’ll avoid it. Despite Plath’s morbid reputation garnered from her grim poetic imagery and dramatic death, The Bell Jar is a book that feels very alive. Esther feels everything strongly, and the book is dense with raw, sensory experiences that she is ill-equipped to process. Maybe amidst the Taco Bell crowd, my transient tablemates were the ones who were truly alive. Maybe they were the real endurance artists. All I can say for sure, is that one hour into my reading they drove me out. The reviews of girls’ bodies and the rattle of the incessant dice became more than I could withstand, and I broke from my prim pastel character to fling the book across the booth.
“I can’t fucking deal!” I announced to the camera, then laughed and laughed like Marina Abramovic never would.

Lazer/Leisure

Writing inspired by the art of Kyle Herrington...



Hypnotized by the big gummy zinnias adorning my new flip flops, I trip on a pile of trash at the edge of my green lawn. A tumbleweed of duct tape-- scuzzy. A clump of adhesives, caulk and hot glue aping a moon rock. The rubber nugget would be weird enough but there's something larger: An affront! FUCK hanging in space, hot red letters that come up to my trachea. Holy paraphenalia, not wine and wafers but a cantaloupe-colored tray skinned with sacraments. Silver shake, tin crumbles in a ziplock bag. I dump mulch on top of the whole thing. Stay out of my yard!
Later I'm sunbathing with a refelctive board, splayed on a striped vinyl deck chair, feeling very much like a piece of bacon, when a red rock from nowhere smashes the vessel of Tang at my elbow. Can't I lay around the patio for one day without saying the word Postmodern? I unstick myself from my seat and toss the thing over the fence, sigh and re-apply tanning oil. I imagine myself as a girl pharoah with a rammekin of glitter, pencilling on hot red eyebrows. I cross my flip flops and rseume my ritual.

Domestic Partner Ship

L mentioned an exercise-- let's write to un-ruin the front room. In the thick of it on inflexible furniture. One piece harvested from a diner and the others look like school bus. Orange pleather, yellow pleather, what could possibly go wrong? Dry rinds, a rat's nest. Urine-scented wood shavings to sink into. And a faux Persian rug, dirt ground on. Doog has a rag of a real one, hand woven, a scrap of magic.
The wall's haunted by a butcher paper flip-off, party decor. I can remember what everyone signed. "Smoke my piss, bro." "More time to play sax." Dark colored art- oily scenes-- from someone else's house. And of course a procession from Catherine's room. Her crap like Spiral Jetty, beckoning it into entropy, clumps of clothes reclaiming the structure I try to impose. The love seats at right angles, this too will go astray, wreck the wall, extract chipped fragments.
I think we already smeared some sage on the place. What other exorcism is required? We're on a hill, We watched Halloween and the windows turned suspiscious, assuming now they go two ways. There's also that skeleton on the porch, somewhat more sinister. Maybe it's the thing bringing the Macabre. Legos from different sets, an interrupting Tinker Toy. Dolls of different scales getting married on the floor.

Green Glaze

Sick and sweet in the city. Wandering, words winding in on themselves, collapsed creative veins. Stop at a corned beef restaurant with mirrored walls and gold garlands reflecting my ratty hair. Wood studded with head shots of C-List celebrities. Morgan Fairchild's looping scrawl. Slutty handwriting. Ladies in green fringe with whiskey sours.
I run into Stephanie and Gunner going to watch the ice skaters. A glass castle on Market Street and trees clad in black leather holsters. Fake snow like the dry flakes on my donut. We pick through the frosting-smeared trash and get sticky hands.
Maybe I'll steal the plastic peace sign earrings at the cheap corner boutique, buy a pint of pissy bear. Green glass, cloudy piss. Sit at the Oyster House on the long leather booths. Directionless, I turn to absurdity.

Games We Can Play

1. Blurb Generator
I met a gentleman last night whose gay porn novel, Backwoods, featured some heavy-hitting blurbs on the back-- from no less than the likes of Dennis Cooper and Kevin Killian. I was impressed. Blurbs are one of my favorite formats to read and shouldn't be left in the hands of laymen.
This includes band blurbs. Bloomington show flyers are notoriously plastered with some cringe-inducing sonic descriptors. It's a shame that terms like "epic," "blackened," and "blistering" get so overused when this could be a chance for the town's aspiring word nerds (your humble narrator) to step up and offer some more inspired interpretations.
This is why I have created the Band Blurb Generator.
Show promoters who are unsure of how to sum up the sounds on their bill can look no further. Take one word from each column. Mix and match!
This thing could definitely be expanded.Consider creating a band to fill the genre you've just created. Build your culture, up the punks, etc.

2. Twilight Telephone
In Twilight Telephone I describe what I understand to be the plot of Twilight (violent vampire sex, unlikely gestation periods, something with werewolves) as it was told to me by my friend Catherine, who has seen the movie, to somebody else who is unfamiliar with the movie/series. Then they have to repeat the plot to the first person (ex. Catherine) or somebody who IS familiar with Twilight.
Then we all have a laugh about how this distorted recap is still not as fucking nuts as the original article.

3. Mating Failure
This is the one where I retroactively use context clues to come to the conclusion that the rando I gave my number to is in a pretty seriously relationship. Examples: Rando and girlfriend making plans together, kissing.

Play smart, play safe,
Love,
Erin

Abject Snacks

I get a $2 eggroll and sit outside with it somewhere in the strip. As I peel back the silver wrapper around it the tinfoil seems to hiss:
"Kill yourself."

I eat the thing.
Now its evil is inside me.

I wander around the oriental grocery. A display of flocked orange ponies flick their feathery eyelashes away. But the vacant plastic face of a five foot Hello Kitty meets me head on and whispers:
"You should be dead."

I scan my brain, rerunning my malformed morning routine. Did i take my medication today? How long has it been since I popped one of those tiny chalky chunks out of its foil-backed case?

The medication came a month overdue and in sketchy packaging, covered with a million stamps. The mailman explained that en route from India, my name had been erroneously written in the area reserved for a return address. As he handed it to me, I made a mental list of potential enemies, half-expecting to find a disembodied finger wrapped inside. I could be the butt of some horrible prank. I was relieve to find the drugs factory-sealed, probably not containing anthrax.

The root of my unhappiness is chemical, but it's definitely exacerbated by the material world. The way I keep spending money makes me hate myself.

But Abject Snacks will make me rich. Abject Snacks will be the name of my anti-foodie food blog. There, I'll document the over-salted, hot sauce drenched concoctions that happen at the end of most of my nights. I'll sell a series of cookbooks enumerating the ill-begotten secret ingredients that make the meals. I'll plaster it with filtered pix of cold fries and curry sauce from the refrigerator's depths. Sprouted grain toast from the roommate's secret stash. A squiggle of gourmet mustard.

Abject Snacks will make my problems go away.

Anxiety Cut-Up (with Anna Kavan)

I'm in residence in Pittsburgh at the Cyber Punk Apocalypse, indulging my whims. Today I attempted a Burroughs-style cut-up with an existential excerpt from my journal and a selection from "Ice," by Anna Kavan, a bleak surrealist novel I'm currently reading. I took the liberty of changing some tenses and inserting punctuation.

***

Knowing that there's just no good reason, the wearer's head was uncovered: her bright hair shimmered though thoughts all march toward the same destination. She had come too far and must hurry back. By night in the dark forest, fear was the climate she lived in, and metaphysical matters- psychic energy and the 9000 days she'd been alive--hurried on as fast as she could.

If she has ever known kindness to fall down, evolutionarily unwriting once became really frightened, terrified of being overtaken like silver fire, chain breaking prevented menace. The crowding trees unnerved her, of non-control in the universe. She said eleven Hail Mary's a day--glimmering in the forest. She feels better.

For your occupation of Planet Earth, for the fjord, failed to see it, lost her bearings and self. I shouldn't be alive. It's a dangerous hole, shutting her in. It was late, after sun, or it's an experiment. It would have been different.

After completing this task, nothing will happen, which always seemed full of obsession, anxiety, and "vibes." Something else from thought patterns. I think I try to prevent myselves into black walls, set. She said if she was nervous the conjecture is that in the deepening dusk every horror could be expected.

Liquid Compass (WIP)

My joke at work is to stonily insist that I not be addressed with metaphors.

Only staggering literality for me, thank you! I've already asked you once nicely.

But in actuality I can't ignore certain symbols.

The last time he and I hang out is near the causey way at Lake Monroe, while exploring an abandoned waterslide; in a liquid, transitional space, now choked with foliage. That day, we trip through the woods, examining the remains of the Zoom Flume. I slip down the fiberglass incline and land with my boots planted in a leaf-clogged depository.

We wander around a now-rotted geodesic dome home overlooking the lake, festooned with shitty spraypaint. It's another unabashed bummer symbol, this broken utopian structure, bleakly scrawled with Juggalo bon mots. In a somewhat accusatory tone, he asks me How's my eyesight? How bout my internal compass? And has this been an average week for me?

He's referring to heavy drinking in Halloween costumes. This after I'd escorted him through his first drunken hook-up. Am I tugging this kid down a mucky ravine?

It is a relief, in a way, that he is leaving, before he finds out that I am not always nice. He's already learned today that I can not climb a tree. This hasn't been an average week; I haven't picked up a pen. I want to draw with people, to strike a balance between art making and social, to channel a solid engagement with something bigger and longer than myself. But part of me is required to court oblivion, occasionally in costume. Part of me invites in the unwelcome guest, the liquid variable, the destabilizing factor to flood where boredom might root.


(Work in progress, possibly to appear as a longer piece in the print edition of Glob, my anti-blog, forthcoming in early 2013.)

Fake Jail

My head's been scattered this past week. It's been too gorgeous out to think-- the peak of fall is somehow rendering me impotent. There's no way to ignore it and just no good way to drink it in. Stare at a tree all day? We watch the season's progress from the jail-like basement window at Soma. Our fave leaves have alreadt burnt out and fallen. They were electric red!

I imagine asking Liza to switch rooms so I can write from somewhere a little more miserable and evocative. My room's better, really. The south side of the house is lit by the morning sun and my closets are so big that Drekka could play in them (which might happen next month). There are bars on her window and a subtle Victorian print (like texture on a roll of paper towels) on the walls. I'd imagine I was Oscar Wilde, imprisoned for buggery. Oh, how the desperate romance would propell me! I might even don a ball and chain. Anything to distract me from the goddamn trees.

Resident

I am stoked to announce that I've been selected as the December Writer-in-Residence at the Cyberpunk Apocalypse cooperative in Pittsburgh! I blogged briefly about their Mr. God's Galloping Mountain Variety Show as one of my audiovisual highlights of 2011. Glob speed the plow!

Has No Boble

I stumbled upon "Has No Boble" while walking the railroad tracks of near east Indianapolis a couple years ago. Little did I know, this scrawl has been appearing across the city (and outside its limits) with subtle variations and impressive regularity.
My friend Paul Christian has been documenting the cryptic public writings of this seemingly local hobo poet for some time.
Check em out here.
(Not to be missed are his exhaustive Tom-J-Lael files, but far more has been written about that man/myth/legend.)

I'm intrigued by the minor star status (in certain communities) of local graffiti weirdos.
I'm not interested in over-analysis or artsploitation, I'm just genuinely fascinated by people's compulsions to make a distinctive mark on their environment.
The "Has no Boble" photograph on my refrigerator has provoked more comment than almost any other object in my house (and the walls are pretty plastered).
If you have similar stories/documents, feel free to post links.

Dreamscape Analysis

Coat in color for increased visibility. Covered in stuffed animals. Playhouse looks amidst bricks. Make it stand out. Mark a trauma.
Where did something really awful happen?
Where did I fall off my bike?
Strategic trash re-structuring. Foam coating and rain-battered bears.
Human hair walls and the uncanny.
Saying the word "anxiety" might even make your heart race.
Lost time, lost looking.