Mature Themes (7 page)

RE: “SMILE
ON A JET”

1. PVG to SFO, Shanghaied to Old Gold Mountain; youtube tutorial, how to dye your faded bluejean sunsets to black (3 sages grimace/smile at the industrial dust cloud banding across the Pacific, radioactive isotopes of the visual-virtual's uncontrollable fission). Amazing that Americans can obtain so much mass, approximate stuff of two or three people in Beijing. Meanwhile political prisoners have been harvested for organs, transhipment via former soviet republics into wealthy diabetics and career alcoholics: because nickelodeon's green goo is people, appropriated lyrics of mourning (napalm girl, coal miner's daughter).

2. The fortune-cookie reads: “—Never mistake a killer for a koan.” Language lesson on the back: “Sociopathic: without any empathy. SEE: Henry Miller as a boy, deliberately farting at the funerary casket of another child, to express his contempt for both friendship and sorrow; SEE ALSO, Marquis de Sade, violently abusing a prostitute. Note: Critics tend to confuse sociopathy with a purported,”—absolute freedom of artistic/spiritual vision,” because they themselves fear empathy as the taint of influence and/or restricted, unreflective thinking. Above all else, the critic desires to appear sophisticated, savvy, and in on the joke. The pure sociopath desires to tell a joke that ends in the death of the entire world external to himself/herself. Lucky lottery numbers: “Un Coup de Dés / enfants ont cassé les carreaux.” ((Justine Redwood Bieber exclaims as (s/he) falls: “—for nowadays the world is lit by lightning. Blow out your candles, California, and so say goodbye ... ”))

3. Marionette carved from the salvaged timber of Hollywood patios and trellises, from memories of Del Monte, from disco ember's cocaine glow, from shredded
Archie
comics and fat Elvis funk fantasies: Terius Youngdell Nash knows how to string out an American dream, soul-sadness submerged, but never auto-tuned past auto-wreck, ignition. Rockets rolling somewhere over gravity's rainbow, because music becomes our only memory when we can't look back at Mississippi John Hurt's home in the Delta blues as we contrail above Embarcadero. Whereas Max Martin's genius is pure pop explosion, here today and gone tomorrow like a coalition of the willing. Funny enough, this entire passage might have been cribbed from a Pitchfork music review, in the guise of a grim-faced hipster homage to American Gothic: stick it to ‘em, etc etc etc. ((“—For all flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass. The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away ... / “—Or I guess the grass is itself a child ... ))

4. Joke written on the back of an airplane napkin: “—The oldest man with a Bieber tattoo is named Catullus #63, the parable of Attis and Cybele.” Neither smile nor grimace: partial facial paralysis, singing to himself as he looks out the window. The fellow seated next to him's engrossed in an episode of
Saved By the Bell
. The tattoo above his own heart reads: Buddy Holly.

— posted 04/08/2013 at 19:50 by >

MONICA MAJOLI

one afternoon after I quoted this from a blogpost of Bruce's in an email to him: “I like pros, especially when it comes to tennis and rent boys”—and here I'm really wondering if the pun on prose consolidates Bruce's feeling toward it versus poetry under the sign of sex, which Bruce sometimes pays for, in order to direct us toward the pleasure of its use-function when monetized, a pleasure seldom associated with poetry, and one that might lead to the company of more pros. He continues: “If I can get a twofer, and the trick looks like Rafael Nadal, I'm in heaven.”

and had to sit down. Bruce writes: “Forgoing outright atrocity, of which there is so much—too much—right now, aren't the ‘life,' ‘body,' and ‘face' of Michael Jackson in the running for some of the most abstract events of the last century? (I use the tweezers of scare quotes to approach each of those precarious terms because I'm not certain I could handle them at all otherwise.) ‘His' face and its occlusion, in the final years, when any nose he had was entirely prosthetic (not to mention the permanent eyeliner and chemical bleaching), became a brutal inversion of all the solar joy he beamed as a young performer—that is, when his face appeared at all, since he was prone to wearing what appeared to be a niqab, ‘transgendering' his complicated presence as much as cloaking it. I'm bringing up Jackson's ‘desire,' every bit as abstract as it was intractable, because his ‘desire' strikes me as even more elusive and imponderable, although many during his lifetime supposed they understood what he repressed or compensated for, even if a fundamental component of whatever his desire might have been remained the sense that he seemed constitutionally uncoupled (and uncouplable).” Wow, right?

Flow my tears, the painter said. Or, as Majoli once wrote, “I only paint actual experiences, not fantasies. Within that I elaborate and alter things in the environment, but the activities and the rooms and objects in the interiors are ‘factual.' So in this way I view the paintings as documentary, as a way for me to memorialize events and relationships. The male sex scenes began when a close friend of mine started to go to underground pissparties and became increasingly involved with S/M sex. I had always been fascinated by his anonymous encounters with men. I envied the nonverbal quality and the absolute sexual abandon of his experiences. AIDS confused all this—and I began to wonder about this decision to pursue this despite the consequences. I understood his desire to ‘connect' through sex regardless of the cost. I viewed these paintings as religious, although I still can't explain this. As I continued to paint I slowly realized that I was identifying, uncomfortably so, with the masochist in the composition. I switched reluctantly to images of myself when I fell deeply in love with a woman and felt compelled to paint her after our relationship ended. These autobiographical paintings all involve dildos. Right now, I'm working on a round painting in which I'm fucking myself with one dildo while sucking on a double-headed dildo. The feeling I want to express is of a huge emptiness and isolation. I haven't figured out why dildos are the central ‘props' in those paintings. I think it has to do with this false tool—that the mind wants to make real. Using a fake device to try to communicate with a lover or comfort oneself—so in a way this communication or connection is ultimately doomed. The body fragments are self-portraits that I began when I first painted the scenes. In this way I felt it was like a conversation between the intimacy of the details and the voyeuristic, removed quality of the scenes. I feel that both bodies of work concern the same issues—the body fragments address mortality and vulnerability more directly. I chose parts of the body that seemed particularly fragile. The parts are either cut or in a state of exposure to describe the perils of love and simultaneously, the compulsion to love.”