The 20th Century is Still Blowing Smoke Up My Ass
shrooms • SXSW • Arshile Gorky's buttholes • The Bomb • illness
I’m coming down from several weeks of back-to-back work, writing in bed just like Edith Wharton, only no pages to let fall to the floor and no maid to pick them up. I used to dream of having a schedule like this; periods of intense work followed by lots of downtime. I often forget that the downtime is not a given. Here is a text exchange I had with my boyfriend last night:
I’ve also canceled my mushroom coffee subscriptions; mycelium has much to teach us, but not after being pulverized and trapped in a bag. Nour Mobarak is the only artist doing interesting things with mushrooms. They’re in the wider public consciousness, in a bit of a stupid way. Here is a poem I wrote for the Earthshaker exhibition at Del Vaz projects that opened last month:
Earth LLC is well making its way down the marketing funnel. Last year at SXSW Comedy Shane Mauss was giving out corporate-sponsored psilocybin gummies in the green room at Esther’s Follies. Whatever happened with weed seems to be happening with mushrooms: they’re now xanthan-gummed, hermetically-sealed, and slapped with friendly focus-grouped graphics; ready to be consumed, but more importantly to be taxed. I don’t assign moral valence to chemicals, but I do find drugs lacking culturally. Essays by bourgeois media types about chemically expanding their consciousness and then returning to the home office to type it out might be more symptom than cause, but the thing I like least about them is the satisfied sketching of minor countercultural characters they encounter along the way. The drugs may dissolve the ego but the writing always puts it all back together. I popped the gummy right before my return flight to LA, thinking it would be harmless as a bolus of melatonin. I ended up with the worst trip of my life while sweating bullets through security at Austin-Bergstom International Airport. I got so paranoid I FaceTime’d my boyfriend and tried narrate my way through the terminal, naming shops like Amy’s Ice Creams and Barton Springs Express as a tether to reality. Going on a little mind journey is one thing, being on the journey unwillingly engenders a particularly voluptuous contempt toward one’s fellow man. Especially in an airport. “Just remember” my boyfriend said, “everyone is looking at you. At they can all tell.”
This year was my third doing SXSW Comedy and I feel the ground shifting. There were rumors that this would be the last year, and as much as the comics like to snicker at the whole thing it’s one of my best gigs I do and the most intense concentration of comic-to-comic intimacy I get to experience. The speakeasy in Esther’s Follies always has hot trays of adequate food, piles of snacks, fruit, a photo booth with Mindy Tucker, and an open bar. Entry is via a the little enamel pin that gets handed out to comedians upon arrival. Speaking of arrival, here is my airport driver Henry, along with some Henry-approved marginalia:
Night one I was to play Tulsi Gabbard in James Adomian’s spoof show that was an “audit” of the festival. He hosted as Elon Musk and everyone else had to play someone from Trump’s cabinet. Anthony walked into the speakeasy looking ten years younger than he did the year before and everyone noticed. Comedians usually don’t enter the elysium of health without hitting a wall, or a bottom, which is just a wall turned on its side. I don’t drink or do drugs (on purpose anyway) but I’m not sober and this is hard for people to understand, especially when I order my biannual cocktail or dinner wine. Parties are great, but at events like this people aren’t partying so much as choreographing social media vignettes and wandering around with wet play-doh complexions while clutching logo’d sugar-bombs, so I find myself hanging out with the sober by default. This includes Eddie Pepitone and Todd Glass so I’m not mad about it. Anthony is in his fifties but suddenly had Henry-level clearness of skin, and Henry-level brightness of eyes. He was smaller, peppier, and possibly even had more hair than he did in previous years, when he played a convincing Trump without the aid of cosmetics. When asked what brought on all these new habits of lifting weights and eating his veggies he replied, “pre-cancerous cells in my colon” and everyone coo’d gravely.
“I’m fine now, everything’s okay, but soon as I got the news—tsssp!” He sucked in a bit of air. That soft, reverse-zipping noise that is the universal sign for something is fucked, something has to change.
God is dead—tsssp!
My life didn’t turn out the way I thought it would—tsssp!
I don’t love you anymore—tsssp!
Then he went off to get ready to play RFK for the show, spraying his hair white and splotching his face with melasmic dots of brown makeup to better mimic our Secretary of Health and Human Services. Here is a picture from the show, Tulsi getting artificially inseminated in the butt:
Saturday was my day off so I walked to the Blanton Museum near the Texas capitol. Art is still the organizing principle of my leisure time on the road. I walked the two and half miles to the museum in intermittent gusts of sideways drizzle. This part of Austin is ugly in the way all stretches of space between cultural centers tend to be taken over by concrete. I was looking forward to looking at art but the landscape getting there was depressing me. Art, like religion, like relationships, has a way of making people wonder if they are really in love, or just fooling themselves. I had one ex who always tried to get me to admit that I didn’t loooooove art the way he does. It’s okay to admit you’re just not really into this stuff, he said. His career was going bad on all levels and I think he was projecting his professional surrender onto me. I wasn’t trying to trick anyone but I was also unsure of what it was I that actually cared about. I know many painters (mostly men) who sleep illegally in their drafty bug-infested studios, warmed only by the promise of another group show. I’ve known exploited gallery workers (mostly women) who call me crying because they can’t make rent yet balk at the idea of looking for a job outside of the art world. The abstraction of belonging at the expense of material condition was odd to me, but I hadn’t been baptized in the font of cultural caché at any formative age. I was baptized in the Pacific Ocean in the name of Jesus Christ, definitely a more questionable relationship. I wanted the caché, but not knowing its proper value qua caché, I needed my relationship to these things, call them art, to make my life better in a quantifiable way. I took an outsider position, at first because that was the only one available, then it became a posture. Now I simply have less time because the locus of my creative life has shifted, but I am washed in it. I am replenished by shit made in the twentieth century. Like the dumb fish in David Foster Wallace’s “This is Water” I have to say out loud “this is modernity” otherwise I don’t know how any of us will get past it.
I sheepishly honed in on the pinched cluster of lines at the center of this Gorky painting. It’s definitely a butthole I thought, though it might be crass to see it that way, until I read on the wall label that Gorky had undergone surgery for rectal cancer the year before. The text gingerly referred to the buttholes as “veiled anatomical forms” that appeared across much of his work from this time up until his death two years later. Suddenly the whole painting read as a tangle of confused intestines. I would wonder if this was a conscious form for Gorky, but as an artist constituted of similarly confused intestines, I know it doesn’t matter. Comedy to me is just images and laughs, and I have often given more than I know of myself without knowing it.
Here are pictures of me at different comedy shows getting choked by a Sexy Jesus Christ and disemboweling a body pillow, respectively. Would you believe that at the time, I thought they were just funny ideas having nothing to do with my religious upbringing nor my colon cancer?
They are just funny ideas. It’s nice to know that I can give myself over to the work without making the work about me. In the moment, no one cares what a chokeholding sexy jesus means, but it’s fun to watch him. Only one person has ever asked me if that pillow bit I’ve been doing for eight years has anything to do with my colon cancer, and it was surprise even to me to hear that connection. As an art critic my job is to bring meaning to things, but as an artist I refuse to analyze or even question my impulses. Meaning comes later whether we like it or not. It emerges organically in hindsight, like a spore, as the weight of time compacts itself around our former activities.
In his book The Songlines, Bruce Chatwin recalls being in London in 1970, listening to a lecture by Arthur Koestler on the madness of the human species. Koestler believed that the splitting of the atom “had been a total transformation of the structure of human consciousness,” much like Barbara Tuchman believed that The Plague of the 14th century was the birth of the modern mind, because the survivors left in its wake could no longer brook the concept of a loving God. “After finding themselves neither destroyed nor improved, they could discover no Divine purpose in the pain they had suffered.”
Gorky’s insides turned against him the year after the Trinity Test in the United States. Rates for colon cancer among young people have been going steadily up since 1990s. I found no meaning in the removal of my large intestine at the time. Twelve years on I do wonder what it has meant not just for my physical digestion but how I process experience writ large, if we’re all twisted up over some kind of split consciousness and some of us are sick with trying to put it all back together. Serotonin is our feel-good mood-regulating neurotransmitter and ninety-five percent of it is stored in the colon. I learned this five years after mine was already excised and disposed of, having been “riddled with tumors” as the pathology report read. I think about this whenever burst into tears at a tiny injustice or my nervous system spikes at my loved ones’ arbitrary inconsistencies. I once called another ex, a very sweet one who stewarded me through my illness. We hadn’t spoken in several years but I was overcome with the need to apologize, or at least explain, the disaster of my personality in the wake of our calamitous century.
They took all my serotonin! I cried—tsssp!