a disquieted moan

Toyin Ojih Odutola - A Countervailing Theory. These shoddy images I took two weeks ago visiting the Hirschorn with Doyun. We had been walking around the National Mall and popping into museums and made it with about 50 minutes to spend between here and the Laurie Anderson retrospective. Honestly, we went to Laurie first and spent too long with her - I need to return for more time with these large chalk and charcoal drawings. They make me want to sing and cry they are so beautiful - 40 drawings in all, depicting a speculative prehistoric narrative of a gender-segregated society in which the Eshu (female warriors) and Koba (male servants) genders may not consort, but two individuals choose to anyway. I love to see the strokes of narration, the graphic-novel style panels at this size, and the dark, overworked musculature turning the figures in heavy patterns. When I was in art school, narrative work was very out of fashion, and identity based work was only beginning to re-popularize. I remember this floor of Hirschorn being endless re-curations of modernist sculpture an only mainstream international rockstars like Ai Wei Wei. This story is told panel by panel in the round walkabout of the inter hall, and the darkness is accompanied by an eerie soundscape. Countervailance, to my knowledge, is the idea in a [political] environment in which more than one power is capable of emerging, one can emerge to counter another with equal force. This explains the fictive of the described matriarchy, and speaks to my own interest in the possibilities of speculative mythology. The point is neither the truth or the best alternative, simply that there could be one with matching sway. What felt ironic (or at least, hard to read as intentional) is that even in the spotlight of this Nigerian artist’s black drawings about a Black people, the museum couldn’t get the lighting right. Standing facing them head on, the glare from the spotlights on the shiny graphite and velvety charcoals washed the paper images out of comprehension. Only approaching them at a deep angle kept the composition intact and the expressions readable. It’s not the right kind of poetics, but it is a little funny. 

and here I am, age 29, COVID-positive, in the new year of 2022. This could very well be the last photobooth photo I take on this laptop that I’ve used for the last 12 years - in this app that has truly held the chore of being the proxy to my leonine archiving. I feel like I look old here, but not in a bad way. Just grown. I’m going to make the government buy me a new computer this year (they do owe me, after all.) I’m going to start a graduate program in a month - I applied, was accepted, got a scholarship and decided to go in December. Em texted me the two days ago while she was thinking about privacy (she’s so hard to catch these days, squirreled away from the world and only drinking it in small dribbles that her constitution can handle). She said  l love the snow. Abby and I have been discussing privacy and embarrassment in our sister think thank. Do you remember when J’s girlfriend threw her back out and was screaming in the living room?  and I do remember - I fed that girl percs I had done my own squirreling with after the recently reblogged knee surgery. She wailed for days without moving. Getting The Virus in the pandemic refuses you privacy - or at least it refuses me privacy. I text my clients, my housemate, my partner and my other date, my housemate’s girlfriend, my business partner and the other artist who works with us. It’s not that big I swear! but it feels big because I am so held. The last person I call is Will, the cis man (my same age) I slept with last week. When we met up, I told him “I haven’t fucked a [cis] man in almost a decade” which is true, and it made it very terrifying but in a sort of boring way. I didn’t tell him the last time was something particularly violent. He was polite and quite good at fucking, which surprised me. Is it fair to think of someone as a proxy route to yourself? The moment of fucking that marks a period in time I have been working very hard to access; the lesbian way I am turned on by my own nails on flesh, my own hair splayed on the pillow, the way my body succeeds at reception (a rare feat in this lifetime so far), the joy of my hand inside a sphincter. Me and my housemate have been calling this period “the re-humanization of man” for us, two square and salted dykes.  It’s certainly very passe’ and un-edgy of us, but that is the joy of no longer being the youngest water-treading generation - nothing feels bespoke any longer.  On my most euphoric day this week (and year so far) I walk in the snow with her and read deep into the cold afternoon with a steamed coffee and T Fleischmann’s autotheory. T, also known as Clutch, is weary and older than me but has fucked in the same barns and even in my friend’s truckbed (with said friend). She writes beautifully about things that have been very important to me, too: Felix Gonzalex-Torres, ida, access to sex. My favorite line so far: because there are no limits to how much we can give each other, when we recognize that none of this was ever ours to give, and as we give each other the world. and I realize, now primed for poetic resonance, that Jose Esteban Munoz also passed during the last venus-in-retrograde-in-capricorn, which is a paltry thing to say about a monumental absence. Still, from everything I know about him, and FGT as well, they fought for their want of the world. After Munoz died, I’m told it was parties for months, and it was very clear to his loved ones that of course, pleasure in this moment was necessary, and right.  I wonder how many other people broke  curses this winter.

a sketchbook comic from early quarantime. today i am listening to Critical Resistance’s Webinar “Making Abolition Irresistible” I don’t know when was the last time I posted an original drawing to tumblr, certainly not to this account.

as far as this handle is a township whose inhabitants left for the big city of instagram (find my tattoo work and some drawings over @ghostnests) - my side acct is a small village of plodding recluses who want attention from long dead ghosts. 

wow remember that one time @charlinebataille sent me a compliment? what a fucking star / tattoo icon who i wanna now trade with some day. time + the internet is weird as fuck.

These would be in a punk house oracle.

does everyone like how this now - 4-year-old drawing, reblabbed by this popular blag,  features my last flip phone prominently ~~