six things
Hello friends.
I’ve been working on this email off and on for a little while now. It’s kind of all over the place and I guess that’s okay. I am making myself finish this now and send it so that it doesn’t continue to sit. So, here’s some stuff. It’s okay if you can’t read all of this in one go, it’s kinda long. Back in the day, I prolly would’ve made a zine out of it.
You all prolly already know this, but trans people are truly amazing and the world is made infinitely better with them in it and thriving.
Keep loving, keep fighting and free Palestine!
Keith
1.
This administrative coup that is happening within the federal government is terrifying, overwhelming, and insanely fast. It truly feels definitively outside the realm of me having any power to affect any aspect of it at the level needed to stop it. We are being flooded with cruelty and violence. It feels stifling and catastrophic. Which it is and which I suppose is some of the intent behind it. Sapping energy and resolve and hope and all that. While expected and not surprising, it is disappointing to watch how fast societal institutions capitulate to the whims of authoritarianism.
In the face of all that, what I can do is small and interpersonal. At the risk of being corny here are some vows that I’m taking to heart. Some are from my brain, most are cobbled from others. Sarah Kendzior and John Porcellino and buddhism are the sources that I definitely remember cribbing.
I vow to be kind. To not accept brutality and cruelty as normal. To protect the vulnerable and encourage the afraid. To provide comfort and support to my friends when they need it. To make art and share art. To be be weird and be seen being weird. To zazen for the sake of zazen. To seek clarity, understanding, and peace, so that my actions can come from a place of true compassion. To use my imagination and continue to dream beautiful futures.
2.
When I was young I was filled with all the punk rock ecstatic manic fearless energy that comes with being a young person with artistic inclinations. I was going to make art no matter what and I was gonna share it no matter what and I was going to have boundless enthusiasm for it whether it was warranted or not. I did it because I felt it and because it felt good to do so. It also felt crucial and necessary.
Capitalism has a way of beating that energy and joy out of people. My own mind/body also worked against me throughout my twenties and thirties to grind it down and create massive internal drama, stress, anxiety, and doubt as to why I should make anything. Why bother? Who am I making this for? The world doesn’t need it. I don’t need to be taking up space that other people need. It’s selfish if I make things only for me, only for the sake of making things. Lots of heavy handed negative thoughts. They have not gone away much at all.
However, I am trying to accept those thoughts and move forward with making art anyways because it feels good and crucial to do so. When I make things and work on my creative things I feel better and I feel like I’ve accomplished something. I am throwing myself into making art and being okay with that. I am in the supremely fortunate position to have the time and capacity to make the art I want to make right now. That could disappear at any time, so I might as well make art while I can.
Some things that I have decided to spend my time working on are collages, block prints, photographs, and poetry (making music is a persistent constant in the background). I recently came up with an idea that can incorporate all of those things plus book binding, which I also enjoy. The book making conundrum is that it feels wasteful to make a blank book.
It’s probably all of my years making zines, but it seems like such a waste of paper to not fill it with art to share. This only applies to me and my own weird internal logic.
My plan is to make small quarter sized zines that are like 20 pages each and filled with either photos, block prints, poems, collages, or some combination of all of them. Then, when I have like eight of them finished I can bind them into a book.
3.
I continue to go to this monthly poetry workshop and I continue to find value in it. It is nice to talk with other people about their poetry and be around other people who make things and share them. While I haven’t been able to motivate myself to write much of anything since the end of October, I did work on editing and revising a long prose poem thing that I made over the course of a few years and released as a zine a while ago.
It was a slow motion accumulation of very short observations presented as statements/paragraphs/words that all began with “you are.” It was originally pretty long. Pages and pages long, spanning three years. I spent a month editing and chopping things until I was happy with the much reduced version. This is what I shared at the January poetry workshop.
you are coming / going
1
You are –
a woman on bicycle fierce with yelling - use a fucking turn signal
a blown out tire
a broken bicycle chain in intersection
bike treads frozen in mud
You are –
young men in barber chairs on Friday night
mist rain at rush hour
smoke from burning wood
chilled bones in fall dark
2
You are –
falling asleep while meditating in a corner at work
two cups of coffee and four to go
the crawling chaos of papers enveloping desks
You are –
the daily fight to stay on top of dishes
the inevitable accumulation of detritus on counters
hands digging food from drain to let the water out
3
You are –
the soft wall of fat that rings abdomen
tiny scabs on scalp picked daily
grit and blood beneath fingernail
You are –
crooked glasses and a marvel of hair in need of cutting
the translucent nature of skin
old flesh, some days
4
You are –
chronic with nervous anxiety
the brain demanding complete control over body
the body refusing to comply
5
You are –
a crane rising up from summer trees
the sudden plunge of fall into fall
a wind of leaves strewn across autumn cement
the morning sun and two hundred pigeons perched on power lines
You are –
waking to maggots in trashcan
vomit haloed by rock salt
the creeping vine coiling up cables behind the tv
the unknown hard thing that brushes feet while floating in ocean
6
You are –
the long sadness
a wind of words
a song anchored temporally, spatially, and emotionally
the smell of rain, cigarettes and peppermint gum
music listened to with body, organs, and memory
7
You are –
a collection of time
the hideous growth of the world
the shit of life
not an island, but something worse
You are –
the filth of time
the horror of living
a disaster of typography
an encryption to be opened at a later date
8
You are –
the confluence of liberation strategies
the beauty of overlapping networks
creating art outside capitalist systems
You are –
forty one grains of rice on the floor of the elevator
the heat death of the universe
4.
I am really trying to make an effort to go outside and exist in the world. To see people in person and do things in groups. And I am trying to do them regularly and repeatedly so that I can meet people and build community and not feel isolated and alone. This doesn’t come easy or naturally to me. I have always tended towards introversion (or have told myself that story repeatedly) and forcing myself to go out and be social is challenging and feels stressful. I have to psych myself up to go out and do things. Generally once I’m doing the thing I feel better about it all.
The poetry workshop was the first thing I did with that intention. The most recent thing I did was to go to a volunteer meetup at LaBagh Woods Forest Preserve which is near my home in Chicago. I spent a few hours on a cold Sunday morning cutting buckthorn and throwing it into a fire. There were like sixty other people there and I spoke with a few of them a little. It was fulfilling to do something tangible. Manual labor not tied to wages and in service of something I value. I am hoping that after doing these things a few times I’ll start to get to know some of the other people. Even if not, it’s nice to be among people who give a shit about nature and the world in general and that particular patch of nature in Chicago.
5.
Some things that I have enjoyed recently.
This album is truly my favorite record in recent history. The past few years at least. It fuses a few amazing bands into a new thing. I love their voice. I love their scream. I love the bass. I love the sound of it all. For whatever reason this one has legit moved me to tears a few times now. Such is my emotional state.
Consider the Rooster - Oliver Baez Bendorf
Gentlewomen and Desiring Map – Megan Kaminski
Under the Eye of the Big Bird – Hiromi Kawakami
Remaking Society – Murray Bookchin
Bíiluukaa – Wendy Red Star
Masahisa Fukase – Tomo Kosuga and Simon Baker
Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography – Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Wendy Ewald, Susan Meseilas, Leigh Raiford, Laura Wexler
6.
Thank you for reading all this and arriving at the end, I appreciate it! What have you been enjoying lately? How are you coping and surviving? I am always happy to hear from you. Communicating is the number one reason this newsletter thing exists.