panopticon

Brea Souders, Rosie

More here - it’s all fantastic.

Adam and Eve

I wanted to punch her right in the mouth and that’s the truth.

After all, we had gotten from the station of the flickering glances
to the station of the hungry mouths,
from the shoreline of skirts and faded jeans
to the ocean of unencumbered skin,
from the perilous mountaintop of the apartment steps
to the sanctified valley of the bed—

the candle fluttering upon the dresser top, its little yellow blade
sending up its whiff of waxy smoke,
and I could smell her readiness
like a dank cloud above a field,

when at the crucial moment, the all-important moment,
the moment standing at attention,

she held her milk white hand agitatedly
over the entrance to her body and said No,

and my brain burst into flame.

If I couldn’t sink myself in her like a dark spur
or dissolve into her like a clod thrown in a river,

can I go all the way in the saying, and say
I wanted to punch her right in the face?
Am I allowed to say that,
that I wanted to punch her right in her soft face?

Or is the saying just another instance of rapaciousness,
just another way of doing what I wanted then,
by saying it?

Is a man just an animal, and is a woman not an animal?
Is the name of the animal power?
Is it true that the man wishes to see the woman
hurt with her own pleasure

and the woman wishes to see the expression on the man’s face
of someone falling from great height,
that the woman thrills with the power of her weakness
and the man is astonished by the weakness of his power?

Is the sexual chase a hunt where the animal inside
drags the human down
into a jungle made of vowels,
hormonal undergrowth of sweat and hair,

or is this an obsolte idea
lodged like a fossil
in the brain of the ape
who lives inside the man?

Can the fossile be surgically removed
or dissolved, or redesigned
so the man can be a human being, like a woman?

Does the woman see the man as a house
where she might live in safety,
and does the man see the woman as a door
through which he might escape
the hated prison of himself,

and when the door is locked,
does he hate the door instead?
Does he learn to hate all doors?

I’ve seen rain turn into snow then back to rain,
and I’ve seen making love turn into fucking
then back to making love,
and no one covered up their faces out of shame,
no one rose and walked into the lonely maw of night.

But where was there, in fact, to go?
Are some things better left unsaid?
Shall I tell you her name?
Can I say it again,
that I wanted to punch her right in the face?

Until we say the truth, there can be no tenderness.
As long as there is desire, we will not be safe.


- Tony Hoagland

Chimamanda Adichie: The Danger of a Single Story

Jason Lazarus, End of summer lover (the plant on her windowsill), 2008, archival inkjet print, 16x20”

the 50 most powerful women in the new york art world

One, Two


Shadow if nearby a horse
Horse if sensing the shadow of a whip
Whip if charcoal black
Charcoal if drawing of a dog
Dog if testing a flame on the edge of a field
Flame if casting a shadow at dawn
Kitchen if welcoming bees
Bee & Ant being sick together in one story
Ox Ox Ox Ox Ox Ox Ox
Moonlight if amped up, if within striking distance
Mountains up close, in the distance, with or without clouds, mist or fog, snow tipped
Rivers if darkened by shadows mountains cast
Heart if castaway to travel far so as to be with another heart, soon, sorry, sad
Beggar if sitting on a sidewalk with cardboard & begging bowl, unmistaken
Tiger if symbol of power
Teeth if bared
Gnat if everywhere
Hen if dim and pecking without end
Star if nameless, star if in twilight
Sheep if by two, sheep if by night
Boat if situated two lengths down from a hill top
Cart if ambling ox ox ox ox ox ox ox ox to the sea
Ant & Bee being sick together in one bed
Pot if fit with a broken lid
Swan if swimming with me & my skiff
Sparrow if that is what you like to call me
Umbrella if we stand together
Straw if darker where my sweat settled into it
Rags if you like the sound of ripping
Fish if fish not fowl maybe fair
Bridge if agreeing to be all it can be
Bowl if fine with fitting an owl in it
Blossoms if they bite you

-Dara Weir

Viviane Sassen, Parasomnia, 2010, c-print.

i would like for myself nearly everything on this page

Juergen Teller, from “Zwei Schauferle mit Klob und eine Kinderportion Schnitzel mit Pommes Frites”

I Love New York
It’s a State of Mind


Love. Charred beef. Dangerous oysters. Cheap green wine. Buckets of ice. Ankle socks. The parade of tiny bodies in tiny clothes. Afternoons of drifting across the boroughs in search of a tiny poke of titillation. Crossing the bridges backwards and forwards with no destination in mind. Three in the afternoon on a  Monday in Central Park, shorts and sandals, your favorite tunes, the arts section of the paper and a mild hangover. The birds are cooing songs in Khmer or an equally beautiful language and the outrageous sun is slowly drilling a hole in your cranium. Nowhere to go, no expectations, future earnings: uncertain. In a city that spends most of the year working itself to death, the best way to celebrate summer in New York is to be unemployed.

These days Manhattan’s become an island of millionaires and four hundred dollars will buy you a few ounces of Kobe beef, but back then life was easier. When summer came, we were giddy with the possibilities of goofing off, celebrating the best gift a New Yorker can give oneself: the gift of not caring.

We didn’t care. We fell out of bed around noon, dusted ourselves off and made very tentative plans. “I’ll see you maybe around, five, um, in Williamsburg, somewhere, but later, with that guy who’s visiting from…” With friends you could fall into a kind of summertime drawl, not too bright, not too introspective. One day after falling asleep on some kind of giant red brick by the West Side Highway, the Statue of Liberty baking feverishly in the distance, I woke up and said to my unemployed companion, “Wubbuduh?” which I think meant, “What’s become of us?” And he said something noncommital that sounded like, “Muhuum.” And off we went to get some beer and a plate of salt-baked chicken, completely in agreement with one another. 

Then it got even better. Even though we were broke, someone’s rich uncle usually keeled over from the heat - et voila -  a rooftop with a magnificent view opened up for the rest of us. There’s nothing more delicious than a pretty bad hamburger served fifteen stories in the sky by someone you love like a brother. There’s sweat on you, sweat on the bottle of Gewurztraminer, but the wine tastes like sugar spun off a waterfall and sometimes a gust comes over the Hudson River, sweeping chickpea and grilled lamb smells past the miniaturized tenements of the West Village and the glassy edifices of Midtown, making you feel more fresh and young and human than ever.

At these rooftop parties - these events seemed to come together and fall apart with no discernable warning - people appraised each other like raw meat. Everybody looked good, and if they didn’t look good they at least knew how to flirt (back then people still got their conversation from good books and films) and pretty soon you wouldn’t mind if the person you were talking to had a missing set of teeth or a red neck or a third leg; you’d just say, “The hell with it.” And so you set off arm-in-arm, on these ridiculously long walks with this person you just met, who was appealing in some vague way and usually more than a little bit tipsy and lonely to boot. You’d walk from a party on West 10th Street, down the pin-striped canyons of the Financial District, under the lattice sweep of the Brooklyn Bridge, and over to a neighborhood you never heard of. Nowadays you know every last bit of real estate in the five boroughs, but back then a place in the lower reaches of Brooklyn like Red Hook might as well have been Patagonia.

You might end up in some sleazy maritime bar with your new friend, eating dubious clams and drinking beer into which you’d awkwardly bleed a slice of lime, and you’d listen to them talk about themselves, and you’d start to realize, slowly, just how flawed and unhappy they seemed, while at the same time also noticing how tanned and lightly covered their bodies were, how a current of warmth spread out from their center, how enticingly they dabbed at a bead of sweat with a crummy bar napkin. There’s a kind of reproductive hope in the summertime that turns an oversized mole or tentanus shot gone wrong into a revelation. And all of a sudden you felt happy and tired, exhilarated and confused. You didn’t know what to do, and often you just ended up doing what came naturally on some ridiculous futon in some ridiculous apartment with the sun refusing to come down from the sky and the heat steady and ever-present, like a third person in the room.

It’s all behind me now. These days I work like a pack mule and the summers bleed into the springs and autumns and winters and whatever new seasons global warming will soon send our way. But I still feel a shiver of excitement when I think of a summer full of lazy fun. I want to devolve from the adult world of responsibility and health care premiums and pension plans and just pick up the phone on some scorching Tuesday afternoon and say, “Hey, man.” “Whuh?” “You wanna see a movie?” “What time is it?” “Two o’clock” “Already?” “Yeah.” “Which movie?” “I dunno.” “That one with the guy who does stuff?” “With that girl?” “Yeah.” “Okay.” “Let’s get a drink first.” “Yeah.” “And stop by C’s house.” “Muhuum.” “Are you hungry?” “Uh-huh.” “Yeah, me too.” “Let’s get something.”

Yes let’s. I want to eat a street knish with such ravenous hunger that I bite my fingers and have to stop in my tracks and look up. Where am I? What is this place? Did I get off at the wrong subway stop? Should I buy one of those live chickens that guy is selling from the back of his truck? Is it almost my birthday? Did I once fall in love on this very street corner in the middle of a heat wave? Was this where I was first handed an arepa stuffed with chicken-avocado salad and hot sauce and was told: “You know, I think you might like this.” Is there a municipal office where these summertime memories are stored and tagged and a gentle counselor reminds us once more how we used to be and what we may still become?


- Gary Shteyngart