Torey Akers and I have a show at Well Well Projects in N Portland. It opens next Saturday June 6th from 5-8 PM. Can you come?

I talked with friend and collaborator Ash Yang-Thompson in advance of the show. Here’s her excellent edit of our convo, “Sex and Art are Acts of God.”

It has been a long couple of months in the studio. I’m looking forward to celebrating with everyone who can make it out bodily or in spirit on June 6th. Hope everyone is having a good-enough spring <3

Initial Magazine, a project I started with spritely chaos demon + smart gal Martha Daghlian last year, represents another insistent return to the analog world. We use a printer in town, we don’t sell issues online, and we don’t use pre-made templates. We stock at local spots: Lost Avenue Books, Mother Foucault’s, Word Virus, Powell’s, and Nationale, who will host our next launch party.

Come hang out, pick up an issue, check out Amy Bay’s work in the gallery, meet the contributors, and make a new pal. This party won’t have a formal reading because we don’t want people to have to do more stuff!! We do enough!! Hope to see you there.

xo

Jaydra

PS. Initial won’t have a website, but we are starting a Ghost so that writers can have accessible online evidence of their work. I’ll be importing my list from Substack over there, so watch out for that email. Of course, feel free to unsubscribe if you aren’t interested in getting those emails.

I’ve received a belated discount code: use CRINGE-5 for a $5 ticket. See you there or elsewhere soon. xoxo

On Saturday Feb 21, Ash Yang-Thompson and I will be revisiting our collaborative study of Abject Expressionism with another performance-talk, this time through PAM CUT at Tomorrow Theater here in Portland. It will be on similar subject matter: aggressive vulnerability, authenticity, power, and the politics of autobiographical art-making. We’ll share excerpts from our published work as well as art and writing from others that exemplifies our ideas.

Here’s what’s new and different:

• A functioning audio visual system! We will have slides to show with more art and video, and they will definitely work this time

• Big fancy theater with more + more comfortable seating

• Alex will play a (mostly) improvised ambient sound work for the duration of the talk, not just before and after, providing a nice musical backdrop for our yapping

• More critical-theoretical stuff from me, and more examples of Ash’s video, visual, and performance work, which is to say less off-the-cuff shit talking. There will be more defined and refined contributions from each of us (studied but not stuffy)

• Last time was more what-this-is, this time is more why-this-matters to us as artists and political actors

You’ll notice the title on the website is CRINGE, which is mostly my fault. I thought Abstract Expressionism might scare people in this venue’s primary audience away and that the term cringe captured something of the essence of our thought-project. In one circle of hell, you write ad copy. We made the title more accessible, but the content is still really thoughtful, weird, and, we hope, compelling. I learned some cool stuff researching for this talk, and I am looking forward to sharing it <3

Hope to see you there and elsewhere. Your support means the world!

Jaydra

Below is an excerpt from the essay I wrote for Initial, the magazine of Portland-focused arts writing I started with pal Martha. Here is us with the print proof:

We are super excited about the writing and art in issue 1 and hope to see you at the launch party this Friday at 7pm at Mother Foucault’s. In addition to a generally convivial atmosphere replete with off-brand seltzer and the bottle of pre-mixed Negroni my neighbor gave me as a housewarming gift, we’ll have some short readings and talks from contributors. At a typewriter table, you’ll be able to respond to work in the issue (and potentially appear in the next one!). We will also have a piñata you can beat the shit out of in the back garden, which supports Virtua Gallery and a local piñata maker whose store burned down and whose son was kidnapped by ICE. What will be inside? What other grim surprises await at the party? Time will tell!

Initial will have a website, but we hope the magazine will be a tool to further connect the local arts community. To that end, attending an event or visiting a stockist (MF’s, Nationale, others TBD) in person to purchase will be strongly encouraged for those who are able. Formal information about ways for out-of-towners to purchase the mag are forthcoming, but for now you can Venmo me with your preferred shipping name and address in the comment field. Issues are $10-20 pay what you can. Media mail postage is, what, $1.50?

Here’s some of what I wrote for the mag on the occasion of the opening of the Rothko Pavilion at the Portland Art Museum. “What is the fucking deal with this guy?” I dared to ask. “Why is everyone so obsessed with his boring old paintings?” Thank you as always for reading <3

It is midnight and I am rotting on the couch in my boyfriend A’s studio apartment. He asks me what I wrote about today. I say Rothko. A is tired. His blue eyes are pink. And yet he launches into a litany on Rothko and his Chapel, a room that I sat in a room and read about all day.

The Chapel, whose design Rothko based on Roman Catholic architecture and the spiritual experiences he had in Italy, was one of his last big projects. For the interior of the space, the artist painted fourteen huge panels a deep purple-black. These are hung in triptychs or singly on each of the eight walls of the octagonal interior. In the center is a cluster of darkly-stained wood benches. Seated there, the viewer finds herself surrounded by darkness, save the light leaking in around the black octagon that covers the chapel’s skylight.

The panels in the Chapel are the fullest expression of Rothko’s signature style. They are color fields, the name given to his large scale, abstract paintings of blurry-edged rectangles painted in bold hues. He built them from dozens of layers of color on color using acrylics and oils or with pigment bound in animal glue or egg. This is how the color fields got their particular sheen and glow.

A likes the paintings. They speak to him. A’s first love is music, the ultimate abstract form, he says, but he loves any abstraction because it doesn’t tell him what to think or feel, what a work means, or how to respond. Less is more. I’ve always found that same space vacuous.

Rothko designed the Chapel during the years immediately preceding his suicide. As he aged, he became increasingly interested in the spiritual and in how he could use his work to foment ecstatic emotional experience, not through confrontations with mortality, but by creating contemplative spaces. He thought of his color field paintings as environments unto themselves. Placing them inside a larger environment of his own design was the natural extension of this ethic.

A wants to know if I have heard the composition that Morton Feldman created for a performance there in 1971. I haven’t. I put it on my research list.

Some think the blackness of Rothko’s chapel work signifies existential depression, as if someone who makes dark work must be moving toward the no-space of self-annihilation. Other critics note he made work outside his chapel panels during this time, some of which was bright-hued. I don’t know why anyone is talking about any of it. I find Rothko’s work—an oeuvre that has been remarked upon almost endlessly and sold for some of the highest prices in recorded art history—to be pretty unremarkable. I don’t like it.

The critic Andrea Long Chu has said that she knows she’s done a thorough job when, despite whatever disdain she reserves for the work, she develops an intimacy with the subject of her scrutiny, even a friendliness. Fine, I think. I will learn about Rothko.

Rothko was born in the early 1900s in Russia, now Latvia. His family immigrated to Portland when he was ten. Everything I read indicates that Rothko pretty much hated it here. His dad died shortly after the family came to Oregon. He missed Russia. He didn’t fit in particularly well with his family. It was all kind of depressing.

Rothko attended Lincoln High School in Portland, but that’s about as long as he lasted. At 17, he went to Yale for two years on a scholarship, dropping out when his funding was not renewed. Then came New York, where he began to make artwork in earnest. He never came back to Portland. And yet we don’t seem to mind stamping his name on things anyway, things like the Rothko Pavilion at the newly renovated Portland Art Museum.

As part of its grand reopening, PAM is currently showing some of Rothko’s early work, which he created while apprenticing under Milton Avery. One of the early paintings is a beach scene featuring four sunbathers, three of whom are apparently nude. It’s figurative and representational. It has lines. It has a fucking sailboat. It’s a world away from the big color blocks of his later career, a few of which hang on the opposite wall.

For the next ten years, Rothko made weird, ugly figurative work that I find charming. A few examples are shown next to the early realistic ones. The colors are muddled, the perspectives are off, and most of them look vaguely unfinished. I can feel him groping for portrait skills and failing. I love to watch him fail how I fail. It’s endearing. From these, he drifted toward surrealism (PAM has a couple of these, too) before he settled into abstraction.

It’s ok for small cities to want heroes (less ok to adopt their intellectual property in contexts that run antithetical to the artist’s intentions, but I digress.). Does ours have to be him?

In an address at the Pratt Institute in 1958, after he had been making color fields for quite some time, Rothko offered a “recipe of a work of art—its ingredients—how to make it—the formula:

• There must be a clear preoccupation with death—intimations of mortality ... Tragic art, romantic art, etc., deals with the knowledge of death.

• Sensuality. Our basis of being concrete about the world. It is a lustful relationship with things that exist.

• Tension. Either conflict or curbed desire.

• Irony, This is a modern ingredient—the self-effacement and examination by which a man for an instant can go on to something else.

• Wit and play ... for the human element.

• The ephemeral and chance ... for the human element.

• Hope. 10% to make the tragic concept more endurable.”

I look at a red and green painting of his from this era and measure it against these principles. The painting looks like rectangles. I struggle to locate wit or lust. Maybe there is some tension between the colors. I want to be generous. I hate feeling so stupid. Was it made according to this recipe? Is this what he was really about?

Elsewhere, Rothko described art as an adventure into a mysterious world. “I am not an abstractionist,” he insisted. “I am not interested in the relationships of color or form or anything else. I am interested only in expressing basic human emotions—tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on…The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them.” He was concerned with creating space, we might say now, space for the experience of a feeling, his work a temple for a nondenominational affective fervor.

This fall, Christie’s will auction one of Rothko’s works, No. 31 (Yellow Stripe) (1958). Their appraiser estimates its value at around $50 million. The painting has a cantaloupe orange color field above a crimson one. Both float on a field of candlelight yellow. It measures 6 by 7 feet. When I look at it on my screen, I see some surprising patches of light in the middle of the big swatches of orange and red. Oh, I think, that’s interesting. But I quickly realize these are a feature of the broken screen on my laptop and not evidence of the artist’s fugitive hand.

In one of the documentaries I watch about Rothko, his son cautions against taking everything his father said too seriously.

While A cooks us breakfast every morning, my work is to read something aloud. I sit behind him in a desk chair and read to his back while he cracks the eggs and dresses the toast. For the first few months of our courtship, our morning book was Alice Notley’s Early Work. I don’t quite get Notley, but A loves her. He lives for abstraction and poetics. In fact, he would prefer that everything remain just beyond sense. One day, while I cook dinner, I ask A to read Notley aloud to me. I want to know how it feels. He begins. From this vantage point, the experience is beautiful.

Months later, it is night and the lights are off and I say the words I love you for the first time into A’s ear. I say it to the white triangle of his back. A turns around and kisses me. I love you, he says. He says my name. The next day, we fuck in the gray-white rectangle of the bed in the early afternoon. Our mouths are wet. I cry out. He does. I hold his hands above his head, but it is not about control.

When I leave A’s that evening, I put on Feldman’s Rothko Chapel. The music is spare and resonant. Soaring, open-mouthed tones sung by a single voice, piano sections like meditation bells, soft violin, the sound of blue ribbons unspooling across the avenue as I drive with my windows down past girls working the corners and the fast food signs clicking on and off in the dark. The piece was performed with the musicians lining the walls of the chapel, with the audience in the center. Like Rothko’s paintings behind them, its purpose was total engulfment in an atmosphere of spiritual transcendence. I feel exhausted, almost stoned. I am engulfed in the transcendent relief of having released the truth into A’s ear. I can feel my atomic fabric fraying, but it doesn’t hurt. It feels good.

Otto von Guericke, the 17th century inventor of the vacuum pump, was obsessed with the potential of empty space. Here is a section of his Ode to Nothing:

Nothing contains all things. It is more precious than gold, without beginning and end…comparable to the heavens, higher than the stars, more powerful than a stroke of lightning, perfect and blessed in every way. Nothing always inspires. Where Nothing is, there ceases the jurisdiction of all kings. Nothing is without any mischief. According to Job the earth is suspended over Nothing. Nothing is outside the world. Nothing is everywhere. They say the vacuum is Nothing; and they say that imaginary space—and space itself—is Nothing.

The tricky thing about space is that it is a nothing that is a something. And because he saw his paintings as spatial—not a picture of objects or even shapes in a space, but space itself, imageless and without line or form, not empty exactly, but not full of any thing either—I can’t understand Rothko without it. Describing his Seagram murals, a set of red-heavy color field works commissioned by the Four Seasons restaurant in Manhattan, he said, “They are not pictures. I have made a Place,” suggesting that he was simultaneously a painter and an architect, one whose primary creative concern was space.

I am surprised to find that classical architecture had no use for such nothing-concepts as space. In first century BC Rome, Vitruvius’s seminal Ten Books of Architecture, discussed “architectural orders, mythical and historical precedent, proportion, symmetry, geometry, building location, building materials, and even the damaging effects of moon rays,” but not space.

The term did not enter the lexicon of Western art or architecture until much later, in the early 1900s, when Cubists adopted it as a way to promote their abstract representations of shapes in space and their understanding of the dimensions that governed them. With that, the argument about what exactly space is expanded beyond the disciplines of science and philosophy into art and design.

In 1917, Charles-Édouard Le Corbusier, a Swiss architect, and the painter Amédée Ozenfant developed a new school of painting in response to Cubism, which they thought was decorative trash. They called it Purism, and their objective was the representation of rudimentary forms with no ornamentation. In their manifesto, a brief theory of space appears as part of the Composition section. “A painting should not be a fragment….Therefore we think of the painting not as a surface but as a space,” they say. This was their attempt to make what they painted even more real.

The art critic and painter James Hyde calls this logic “a strategy to make a painting’s composition architectonically whole,” a thought that I can barely get my head around, but which seems to mean that a painting should be understood as a room in its own complete universe—not a window into that room, but the room—or even a universe unto itself. It should stand on its own: complete, whole.

By the 1940s, Le Corbusier had returned to the study of architecture, about which he wrote that “the release of esthetic emotion is a special function of space.” This is almost exactly the way Rothko later talks about his colors. Put another way, the abstract painter Frank Stella says that “the aim of art is to create space—space that is not compromised by decoration or illustration, space in which the subjects of painting can live.”

Rothko even wrote an essay called “Space,” in which he asserts that “Space, therefore, is the chief plastic manifestation of the artist’s attitude toward reality.” He meant you can tell a lot about an artist by how he creates space in his work, to which I might reply, “Okay.”

Hyde connects these three painters as a trinity who hitched the art-historical concept of space to spirituality and religion. “For Le Corbusier,” Hyde writes, “‘ineffable space’ is a sacred union between ‘deserving’ followers and the master artist. With Rothko and Stella, it can be noted that space is an essential link from their painting to religious art, if not religion itself.”

In the morning, A and I are reading a new collection of poems, Black Zodiac by Charles Wright. When I arrive at Rothko among the lines, I nearly drop the book. I am shocked to see his name yet again. Rothko is everywhere lately. It is as if he is communicable, even sexually transmitted.

The poem reads, “Lonesomeness. Morandi. Cézanne, it’s all about lonesomeness. And Rothko. Especially Rothko. / Separation from what heals us / beyond painting, beyond art… Two tone fields, horizon a line between abysses, / Generally white, always speechless. / Rothko could choose either one to disappear into. And did.”

To read the rest (or turn the page to something you like better), pick up a copy of the magazine. Hope to see you soon.

Martha Daghlian and I have started a magazine! Of art criticism! For Portland of all places! As we wrote for our gr*nt applications:

Initial is a magazine of art criticism focused on Portland galleries, artists, and venues, publishing a website and quarterly print issue. Stewarded by co-editors Jaydra Johnson and Martha Daghlian, Initial is a space for in-depth and experimental arts writing, supporting the creative development of new critics as well as experienced writers wishing to expand their practices beyond the scope of our current local media landscape. Our goal is to grow and connect the community while providing experience, by-lines, and income. We are a space for less-conventional art criticism—critical personal essays, in-depth trend reports, intimate interviews, ekphrastic prose-poetry, and other hybrid or experimental forms. Our stylistic ethos is one of felt impression and thoughtful analysis over jargon or soundbites.

Please come to the launch party if you are in town! If you can’t make it, we’re planning to have the website go live the day after. We’ll also sell issues in as many local shops as will carry us.

If you’d like to write or submit art for the next issue, please email me at jaydranicole at gmail. See you there!

Thanks so much to all who came out for Abject Expressionism! I loved (hated) reading unedited, in-process work, talking with Ash () and abusing the audience. Alex did a superb job with the music. Shout out to person who wore the #1 Incel mitt and, really, to everyone for your tolerance. I have another event coming up that I want to share in case you haven’t had enough for some reason: a reading and talk on Fri Dec 5 at 7PM at Up Up Books.

After an opening reading by Jessica Pedrosa, who wrote a fantastic book about her aunt’s time as the bassist for the punk band Germs, I’ll give a talk (with slides!) about challenging, experimental work and why I think it’s important to support stuff we understand or like as much as stuff we don’t.

The plan is to do this by talking through the choices I made while crafting Low. I’ve done quite a few interviews about my life as it appears in the book as well as its content more generally, but I haven’t spoken much about its evolution as a research-based, multidisciplinary project that uses text as its primary medium. The talk will include images of the art that inspired the essays, collages, and performance art instructions in the book.

I will also read the last essay in Low, “The Art of War,” an eleven-page paragraph of anarchic, braided data sets, art history, the literal Pl*dge of All*giance, and my own nervy, heartbroken thoughts as I commute through New York City. It takes 25 minutes to read through.

This will be the first—and likely the only—time I ever read it aloud (I refuse to excerpt it, so it’s hard to use for traditional readings). The event is free with the option to support my nonprofit publisher, Fonograf, in their Give Guide campaign so that they can keep putting out weird shit like Low. Would love to see you there <3

Next Sat Nov 8, Ash and I will be at Mother Foucault’s Bookshop for our event on Abject Expressionism. We’ll read selected passages from our ongoing collaboration (preview a recent entry from me below) as well as our respective books Low and Still Worm. We’ll also chat about what abject expressionism means to us, show you some art, and have a little Q&A. Special guest Alex Reed Wilson will play a noise set to open and close the event. Come!

My friend took me along on a small, private tour of a show called “Louise Bourgeois: Freud’s Daughter” at the Jewish Museum in New York. A case near the entrance contained small sculptures and works on paper. A flaccid uncircumcised penis, a grimacing uterus, a giant clitoris pressed into clay like a fossil, piles of cast viscera: they were repulsive. They were abject. They were gorgeous.

At the center of the exhibition sat Passage Dangereux, a series of small rooms enclosed in chain link fencing, like a dog run, filled with old school therapist office furniture that was surrounded by floating chairs, mirrors, and sculptures of rubber, glass, and bone. It was a nightmare of vulnerability.

“Where I do not attack, I do not feel myself alive,” Bourgeois wrote on a sheet of loose leaf paper.

In another room hung Janus Fleuri, a bronze form that mimics a woman’s fleshy, organ-filled pelvis. Its name refers to the Roman god Janus with his dueling heads, keeper of gates, doorways, beginnings and ends. A cunt is a beginning and an ending. A mouth is the twin of the anus. Gates and doorways, body as building or landscape, an enterable entity. The sculpture spun revealing a back the same as its front.

Afterward, the young museum docent invited us out to a cafe where she ordered bottles of wine for the table that each cost more than I earned in a week as an adjunct professor. I tried to enjoy myself, but the whole time, I was terrified I’d be asked to split the bill.

Today I strap myself to abjection in romance. A drives my body to an edge.

“All day, I thought about fucking you,” A tells me. He describes his daydream simply, with formal precision. Then his tongue is in my mouth. My pants come off. I pull up his shirt and press against him. The shirt bunches under his armpits. My legs open in his hand. It happens just as he imagined. He told me the truth. The result was satisfaction.

I used to delude myself that I was communicating telepathically with my lovers. I thought I could transmit something to them with my body. If I was a gate, a doorway, an enterable entity, my own Janus Fleuri spinning from the ceiling in the bedroom, I could have intimacy. I didn’t know that physical abjection was insufficient. I had to go further. With A, I experiment with vulnerability while clothed, verbal disclosure, telling him what I think and feel. It is sometimes a nightmare, but it’s the only way to get what I want. He knows this. I am his apprentice.

A carved jack-o-lantern burns on the porch with a wincing visage—holes in a gutted vessel abjected in the spirit of celebration.

For the past couple of months, I’ve been writing my second book in a daily practice with genius artist Ash Yang-Thompson. As a public extension of that collaboration, we are doing an event at Mother Foucault’s Bookshop in a couple of weeks. We’ll be talking about the feminine abject (being a loser bitch), interviewing each other, subjecting the audience to noise, and reading excerpts from our books. If you’re around Portland, I would love to see you there.

Here are a couple of updates about what I am working on and where you can find me this month. Eternally grateful for your eyes and time.

xoxo

For all six of my fans in the great state of New York, I am going on a little book tour there the last week of March. Very much looking forward to reading with friends Torey (excellent book about TikTok here), Chae (arresting poems about mothers and tongues here), and Caits (v cool substack here).

The inimitable Louise Akers (intelligent hybrid poems here) has also asked me to read at NYU Thursday March 27th at 6:30 :)

I loved doing these podcast interviews. Both of the hosts were brilliant. Pick your poison!

Textual Healing with Mallory Smart

Creative Nonfiction Podcast with Brendan O’Meara

My March column with Variable West is up on the site. Here is one of my picks for this month:

Agnès Varda Film Festival
Clinton Street Theater, Portland, OR

On a recent snowy weekend, I watched Agnès Varda’s documentary The Gleaners and I (2000) as research for a piece I’m working on about Glean, Portland’s artist residency at the dump. The film is about, well, gleaners—these ones scour France’s rural backroads and cosmopolitan thoroughfares for usable remnants, mostly food, but also household appliances, art supplies, and other materials of daily living.

What struck me most about the film was its effortless juxtaposition of trash-rummaging and fine art. Besides women in rubber boots stooped to gather heart-shaped potatoes after the harvest, Varda visits a few living artist-gleaners and several famous paintings—The Gleaners by Jean-François Millet and The Gleaner by Jules Breton are given significant art-critical treatment.

It is a film of unabashed imperfection. Its crown jewel is “The Dance of the Lens Cap,” a minute or three of throwaway footage caught by accident, overdubbed with upbeat jazz and Varda’s intelligent, charming narration. The film is mostly interviews with gleaners themselves, but Varda makes appearances in such reflective interludes, where she discusses film as self-portrait along with other philosophical concerns.

As part of their Women in Film series this month, the beloved Clinton Street Theater will show The Gleaners and I in addition to five other films by the great French auteur. (The whole festival is advertised with an old-fashioned telephone-pole poster campaign, which Varda would undoubtedly love). If garbage isn’t your thing, check out the other titles. You might like La Pointe Courte, a “graceful, penetrating study of a marriage on the rocks,” or Jacquot of Nantes,“Varda’s tender evocation of the childhood of her husband, Jacques Demy—a dream project that she realized for him when he became too ill to direct it himself.”

Reflection: Which remnants are worth holding onto?

You can sign up to receive that column via email and read about the rest of my March picks here.

Anyway, here are some shows that made me think this month. I love you. Thank you for reading.

Personality Test, Jacob Winans, $5000, Letras: Noise Potluck / Casserole Party
Virtua Gallery (Lloyd Center Mall), Portland, OR
Tuesday, February 11, 6-9PM

The world needs oddballs. What would we do without people who rent space in an abandoned shopping mall to start an art gallery, or who organize events that mash together such strange companions as a noise show and casserole cookoff?

An ingenious group of Portland eccentrics have blessed us with a chance at this exact experience. There is a mystery cost to the event, but “IF YOU WANT TO PARTICIPATE IN THE CASSEROLE COOKOFF, BRING A CASSEROLE OR SIDE DISH /HOT DISH AND GET INTO THE SHOW FOR FREE!” Get your Pyrex out, everybody.

The world is becoming increasingly homogenized through globalization and the reign of, like, three billionaire oligarchs. This idea is cliched by now. But I think it needs to be said, over and over, so that we do not fall asleep to the hum of Chipotle’s lobby music.

As an art critic, I give a lot of grace to work that is strange yet unsuccessful. The casseroles might not be very good—someone’s nostalgic midwestern cream-of-mushroom mush, no doubt some diabolical vegan concoction—but I’d rather eat this shit than fill up on some bland, ad-copy version of dinner. Similarly, noise music can be a mess that’s hard to interact with and enjoy. Disquieting, uncomfortable experience is something we should all strive to incorporate more in our diets. Maybe it can help us fall in love again with the disorder of being human and fight with renewed vigor against the tyranny of a clean, corporate existence.

Reflection: How can discomfort inspire resistance?

Brief Encounters: Queer Instant Photography
Carnation Contemporary, Portland OR
February 1 – February 28, 2025

Polaroids—whose birth democratized photography as much as 35mm point-and-shoots and later, our phones—are this group show’s primary concern. These relatively inexpensive, instant pictures freed the amateur photographer from the prying eyes of developing services and the labor of the darkroom, affording the maker more easeful control over content and audience. The most interesting art is often made extra-institutionally, and this collection of works, made possible by the wonders of instant film, is no exception.

These pictures feature, well, a lot of gay sex, transgressive imagery that wouldn’t make it into many museum exhibitions or blue chip galleries these days, where buttholes and feet pics are considered declassé. By inserting profane subjects into a formal gallery space via an informal medium, these artists buck this high art sensibility to publicize the private (and much-reviled) reality of queer intimacy.

Some of the show’s themes: the grid and its disruption, the polaroid as a preamble and not a conclusion, shame and its opposite, freedom, love, power, trash. Here you will see polaroids bedazzled with stick-on rhinestones or brushed with paint, manipulated in dozens of ways. On one wall, a series of sultry pictures disappear under their needlepoint copies. Over there, the white box becomes permeable, is destroyed and turned into an abstract collage. The one sculpture—a dildo-and-Polaroid mobile—spins jauntily in the corner. It’s a show of charming surprises, certainly not the same old thing. Some would call it unprofessional. I call it art.

Reflection: Can subversive art survive the institution?

Read about the rest of my picks or subscribe here.

Some exciting news to share: for the next six months, I will be a Cliff Notes columnist for Variable West, a really cool independent art magazine. I’ll be covering Oregon. If you’d like to receive that column by email, you can sign up here.

It’s hard to express what a gift this column is, particularly without resorting to cliche. It’s one more thing that I can’t believe is happening—the realization of a dream I didn’t even know I could have.

Weekly or monthly deadlines push me to live in a different way, one that’s more curious and purposeful, one that promises achievement through incremental gains, daily discipline, real practice. That’s what this Substack was once for—working toward a second book paragraph by paragraph. I lost my way. This column is a tether. It’s good to be back.

I’ll be sharing extended versions of my column here (the Cliff Notes limit is roughly 200 words lmao) along with work that doesn’t make it to publication. Here is some. I hope you enjoy.

xoxo

Jaydra

Blue Sky Gallery

Photographs - “Our Town After Dark” by Ford Gilbreath

Jan 9 - Feb 1, 2025

People are nowhere to be seen in these images. There are only lights and signs: 7Up, Town of Garfield Resident Use Only, American Legion Hall, HIGH VOLTAGE, the American flag. Signs, signification, significance. I wrote that down while I was in the gallery. These symbols add up to something, denote safety and space, control access, delimit boundaries, offer definition or identification. Is a picture a sign? I wondered. These certainly signified something of myself to me. They felt familiar, like family.

I usually don’t care for photo as a medium, and at first glance, I didn’t care for these either. I was walking briskly past them toward another exhibition at Nine Gallery, housed in a rear room of the space. But a small, flat-fronted house set back from the street caught my eye. It posed dumbly in its flat yard, covered in snow, one large living room window aglow. I saw a an empty intersection, the vast expanse of a dead Main Street. A floodlight on some property. A dying town, some might think, except people still live there; life is transpiring. Not that you can tell.

So much emptiness in these pictures—a torrential loneliness fell upon me for the duration of my looking. The space is like a breath you can’t let out. It presses against everything. Maybe that’s the only thing preventing some of these structures from falling apart.

But many do fall apart. One decays in the woods. Potholes form. Puddles fill them. Gravel scatters. The roof of a mobile home can only hang on so long. Steel. Paint peel. Plywood. Boat on a trailer in a yard. Silo. Dumpster. The riparian zone between asphalt and a ditch. My hometown was just like this.

Photos tend to leave me grasping for something real—texture, dimensionality, some materials. What were these but materials? Couldn’t I feel them?

I don’t think you need to see yourself in art to understand it. Comprehension isn’t the point, and no two people apprehend identically. It’s more about an experience. You open all the holes in your spirit and let the thing through. I try to communicate this to my students: When you read, you don’t need to understand every word and sentence. It’s more about the impression, the taste the words leave in your mouth.

I was deeply moved as a child by books I did not understand, and today I enjoy all kinds of art that’s got nothing to do with me, that I can’t figure out. Nevertheless, it meant something to encounter these photographs that day. It felt significant. I understood them. They flung me back to a place where I never want to be but somehow always am: home.

Gallery notes:

• Torrential loneliness

• Corrugated

• Fenced

• Riparian zone between pavement and grass

• Light but no people

• Pasture

• Machines

• Dumpsters

• Signs, signification, significance

• Photographs capture light

• Typos in the plain-language wall text, mentions “odd mix” of artificial vs natural light, “sad to see the vulnerability of our infrastructure.”

It’s been a wild fall + winter with the release of Low, starting my new teaching job, and celebrating the launch of my friend Torey Akers’ book Revolutionary Algorithms in New York. I’ve had the chance to do lots of readings and interviews. Much yapping! Fun! Recently, I talked with Tyler, a wonderful person and great poet, from Another Fu*king Writing Podcast. We discussed writing (duh), the carceral state, and the importance of remaining delusional. You can listen to our chat on Apple, Spotify, or elsewhere.

With all of the above, it’s been months since I put out anything fresh here, so I have decided to pause paid subscriptions. If you were a paid supporter (thank you!), you will receive a refund shortly for any remaining time on your subscription. I will still share new work as often as possible, but it doesn’t feel right to collect compensation when I am not delivering anything for you to enjoy. If you would like to continue to support my work, you can pick up a copy of my book, request it be carried at your local library or bookstore, or invite me to do a reading.

My new job provides financial stability that I haven’t had for years, and I am grateful for that. I teach dual-credit, college-level English courses in a public high school. My load is about 120 kids, and I am responsible for prepping curriculum for 3 different courses, one of which is a remedial reading program that I run. I also grade work for these 120 kids weekly, communicate with families and support staff, and advise a club. Needless to say, most of my creative energy and time is spent on that venture. My writing will need to take place in the summer when I am free from that responsibility. In the meantime, I’ll be sharing news about what’s going on with Low, short drafts, and love notes.

Thank you for reading, as always.

Sam Dingman, the host of the show, wrote this intro:

Writer Jaydra Johnson was raised in a series of small towns in Oregon.

Her world, she says, was a far cry from the artisanal coffee shops and farm-to-table restaurants of Portland, the city many people imagine when they think of her state. Her community was characterized by things like motorsports, hunting, and the Baptist Church — which meant that there was a term she often heard used to describe people who lived where she lived: “white trash.”

Growing up, Johnson watched friends and family endure cycles of eviction, starvation, abuse, and incarceration, and resolved to move as far away from her upbringing as possible.

But as she recently wrote about in a new book, which was recently excerpted on Lithub, ultimately, she circled back. And as an adult, she says she has a much different relationship with the phrase “white trash.”

Listen here.

Today was the official publication day for my first book, Low: Notes on Art and Trash, an art-critical memoir about growing up white trash, making art from nothing, and finding beauty in low places. If you’d like to get a copy of the book, it’s 40% off this week with code johnson at Fonograf Editions.

I’m feeling humbled and grateful. There is an I who wrote this, but it’s the product of so many people’s love and labor. They wrote it, too.

To celebrate the launch, I wanted to share some of the Q&A I did for The Seminary Co-Op bookstore in Chicago.

Thank you for this book!

How did you decide upon the structure of the book, with its mix of shorter and longer essays, and visual art interspersed?

The book was more experimental in earlier stages of writing. For one of my MFA workshops, I turned in a 20-page zine that included collages along with photos I had taken of garbage around my neighborhood. It had a cento, a few different statistical charts, some instructions for how to build a landfill, and other short anecdotes and meditations. The feedback was that it was interesting, but that it was overall too experimental to be effective. 

As far as making the work more legible, I often need a form to start with—like a crown of sonnets or a letter or something with numbered sections—to organize the work and get it off the ground. I relied on this strategy while drafting Low. I pushed toward longer, more narrative pieces as the book progressed. Sometimes I edited the formal scaffolding out later, and sometimes I kept it. 

Pretty late in the game, one of my advisors, Mychal Denzel Smith, suggested I look at Hanif Abdurraqib’s Little Devil in America: Notes on Black Performance. Abdurraqib did brilliant work with form in that book, and I basically used his exact structure in terms of having longer essays (some of them in a form such as a crown) punctuated by shorter creative pieces. 

For a long time, I didn’t think the collages would appear in the book, even though that was my original vision going back to the zine. I didn’t think they would be acceptable to an agent or publisher. They were just something I was noodling around with on the side. But when I saw the Fonograf call for manuscripts, I put the collages back in because the post said something to the effect of “send us your weirdest.” So I did.

What was your process like? Did one come first, the art or the writing?

I wrote the bulk of the book while I was in New York working on my MFA at Hunter. I originally proposed a project that was more journalistic. I wanted to take reporting trips to sites where people were interfacing with garbage. I was particularly interested in what creative things people were doing with trash and in what misconceptions—about both poor people and the trash they lived with—might be challenged. COVID hit the spring before I started at Hunter, so traveling and doing up-close interviews was no longer an option. I began looking at a lot of art and online images as well as watching documentaries so that I could write more vividly about these trash-strewn spaces. 

When I stalled out, I would make the trash collages. My thinking was that while I manipulated actual garbage, my subconscious would be working on the words. After a while of, like, photocopying trash in my apartment, or photographing my favorite trash piles in the neighborhood, I would run out of art ideas and go back to the writing.

Your references are numerous—the Cops reality show, Emma Goldman’s activism, Ukeles's work ballets, and Agematsu’s trash sculptures to name a few—how did you decide what would be in the world of the book, and what, if anything, would not?

Cultural emblems like Cops are a quick way to evoke certain stereotyped images that do a lot of work. Readers from a wide range of class backgrounds are familiar with them. On the other hand, I wanted to highlight lesser-known trash-related material, so I kept that in mind. I was looking for compelling narratives and objects that could illustrate my theses. 

There is a part of me that loves learning and constructing surprising connections among disparate references. It’s an alternative form of collage to me. Another part of me doesn’t think my ideas and experience are enough on their own. It’s like I need all these references to corroborate my testimony. 

When people find out you’re interested in something, they love to send you  recommendations. I think it’s the same way grandmas end up with a big collection of pig figurines or Russian nesting dolls. Much of what is included in the book came to me in this way. My only rubric at first was that the reference was about garbage or being poor, preferably both. Of course, I cut things eventually. I kept what I found. 

I also think it’s important to say that in the time between Hunter and getting the acceptance from Fonograf, I didn’t yet know the book was about art. I was shopping the manuscript around as a more traditional essay collection with the title Other People’s Toilets, after the book’s second essay. Once I knew I would submit to the Fonograf call and possibly be read by Maggie Nelson, I added an essay I wrote later (about TLC, now removed again) and started to rethink the title and concept. It was then that I realized every essay was about art in some way, whether literary or musical or visual. I added in a few more of the rituals to play up the performance art element and put the collages in, then gave it the new title, Low: Notes on Art and Trash. I think having that second unifying theme was crucial to the success of the work since, as you said, the references are so numerous.

How did discovering punk change your life and how you’d think of trash?

When I discovered punk, it was a relief. I realized it could be cool to be a reject. You could have a party about it. The punks were saying all the things I was thinking about war, inequality, capitalism, belonging, love... That was really when my political consciousness took off. I was also into the aesthetics of dressing in rags and shaving your hair off in ugly ways. Because I always felt too poor and too weird looking to be acceptable to other people, it was revolutionary to find a world where those qualities were revered. I was still trash, but what the subculture and the music articulated for me was that to be trash was to be a saboteur and a provocateur. It was to live as an agent against the state and all its oppressive machinations. It was about freedom. 

Is there a piece in Low that surprised or challenged you more than the others?

I wrote “Art Under Duress” while I was sick with COVID in a stupid AirBnB in LA. That essay had been brewing inside me for a year, and I was surprised that it came out under those circumstances, but I guess it also makes perfect sense in that I was confined and isolated and in a really dark place emotionally. I had been planning to write some more for the book and felt moved to make something of my mandatory quarantine. I pretended I was at a residency. The way that it came out shocked me because it was so different from the early idea. 

“The Art of War” was challenging because it arrived to me over one weekend, and the structure resisted editing. Many people told me to change that piece, to make it more narrative or break it up into sections. I spent many hours trying to edit it to be more accessible, even though I didn’t want to. I ultimately found a way to make it a little more narrative and to be honest I regret that.

The book touches on many kinds of work, including teaching, cleaning, and art-making. What did you learn from these forms of labor?

Oh gosh, everything. Because the work I’ve done is undervalued, I’ve had to develop my own metrics and my own why. I feel lucky to have met the people who have labored alongside me because they’ve had astonishing stories. That includes my students, who are doing an incredible amount of unpaid labor. My co-laborers inspire me with the ways they resist the violence of the institution and band together to survive. Public school teachers are scary good at this. We do some of the most inspiring organizing I’ve witnessed. 

Each form of labor has informed my political perspective. In my head, I am always writing a version of Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Erenreich. Narrating my life as if I were a character or profile subject has helped me get through a lot of difficult labor and make meaning of it. Not to be overly earnest, my work has shown me the strength of the human spirit and taught me how I want to live. 

You also consider depressing spaces—prison cells, mental health hospital rooms, stark rental apartments—where do you see these spaces overlapping and diverging, aesthetically or otherwise?

I am super interested in the aesthetics of these environments, which are engineered to control and manage the underclasses. When you’re poor, a lot of what you’re interacting with every day is ugly and drab. Art is seen as a luxury, and you can’t afford it. You don’t deserve it. You wouldn’t know how to appreciate it.  Something as simple as a nice color of paint on the walls is considered too nice. The public schools I went to and now work in are hideous. All these environments look so similar: housing projects, public schools, prisons, the DSNY garages, public hospitals. Now you see it in how every overpriced post-gentrification apartment is gray on gray on gray. I think it’s one more way to keep people in their place. Just as the majority of our interpersonal communication is nonverbal, these visual environments signal a lot to us about what and who a space is for.

What do you hope readers will take away from Low?

I’ve always kind of felt—and I think a lot of people feel this way—-that the world is totally upside down. The more I call things to question, the better I feel. I would really love it if Low encouraged people to reflect on concepts like value and taste. Like, go out and poke around in the trash. See who is coming to collect your cans and maybe talk to them. Turn the world upside down. Look for art in low places. There is so much beauty in ugliness. 

If you’d like, you can read the full interview here. I get into reading recommendations and what I am working on now.

If you’d like to get a copy of the book, it’s 40% off this week with code johnson at Fonograf Editions.

Express that your work draws on memoir and art criticism, that it uses art as a prism through which to refract your experience, to draw out its colors into neat, organized arcs.  

Delight in the fact that your publisher has gifted you the services of a publicist, a person who will help you market and sell your book. Over email, he mentions the copy you wrote to accompany the book in press materials. He would like to know if you have considered that it sucks. You have considered it. The publicist would like to discuss or think about discussing revising your awful copy. So that people will know what the book is about.

When you say the book is about growing up white trash, the asker usually stares at you blankly. They are afraid, perhaps, to acknowledge that they know this term. In the past, they may have used it in an unflattering way. Or maybe it is, to them, a slur too terrible to mention. You smile at their flat faces, then soothe them by saying you are complicating the insult, suffusing it with endearment. “Oh,” they reply. “Okay.”

If you really don’t want to talk about it, say it is a book of experimental art criticism. It contains performance art instructions that ask the reader to enact the ideas presented in the essays through a physical interaction with trash. These are called rituals. There are also some of your collages in it. Say the book contains several very long essays about some art you find interesting, chiefly because of its relationship to garbage.

Another way to explain what a book is about is to say what it’s not. Your book is not a best-selling novel. You are not Sally Rooney or Jonathan Franzen, nor will you ever be. 

The asker will sometimes offer a title to test their understanding of what the book is about. A few will ask if it is like J.D. Vance’s memoir Hillbilly Elegy. Even though both books have poor people in them, they really have nothing in common.

Another thing the book is not: a memoir. 

The publicist insists that you call the book a memoir. When you edit your promotional copy, he needs you to summarize the book’s narrative arc. He wants adjectives. You do not think the book has a narrative arc because it is not a narrative, but rather a collection of ideas, anecdotes, and observations. The essays are rangy, thoughtful, and inventive. You are defying conventional categorizations. You are troubling binaries such as high art and low. You edit the copy and send it back to the publicist.

The publicist does not like your adjectives. He likes powerful. He likes redemptive and bracing. He adds coming-of-age and situates the story, such as it is, in the post-Reagan era. You’ve conceded that calling the book a memoir is probably the best way to explain it and, hopefully, sell it. He likes the way you’ve summarized the arc, thanks.

In fact, you have much in common with JD Vance, if not his dreadful book. The two of you were born four years apart in similar circumstances of, if not poverty, unremitting precarity. Your mothers and grandmothers share some important qualities. You both did well in school, attended state universities, and left home to pursue advanced degrees in prestigious programs. You wrote books about your upbringing. But the similarities end where your respective books begin. You and Vance are both troubled by the conditions of the poor, but for very different reasons. His derision is aimed at the trash classes themselves. Yours is aimed somewhere else. 

“In particular, I’d like to avoid mention of Reagan and the phrase coming-of-age,” you write to the publicist. Express gratitude for his help with explaining what the book is about.

Your book is not an elegy, quite the opposite. Or if it is an elegy for something, that something is not hillbillies, who are alive and (mostly) well and making interesting art. Unlike certain vice presidential candidates. 

It is hard to explain what a book is about because books contain entire worlds inside them. “There is another world. It is in this one.” - W.B. Yeats. You’ve never read Yeats, but a colleague kept this quote on the wall in her classroom. You both taught 10th grade English. That’s in the book, too: teaching English.

While helping you revise your terrible copy, the publicist wrote that your book is “An indispensable meditation on poverty and art, and a compelling corrective to conventional memoirs about overcoming disadvantage.” You couldn’t have said it better yourself. In fact, you didn’t.

Speaking of adjectives, certain vice presidential candidates wrote memoirs that are ugly in every sense: artless, cruel, unforgiving. But, you must admit, the book has a clear narrative arc. It has focus. 

It used to go like this: “The book is about trash.” What do you mean? “I don’t know yet.”

You ask one of your smartest friends, one who is familiar with your work, what your book is about. You take notes when she answers. You copy her words verbatim. You try them on later and they fit like someone else’s shirt.

Vance’s book is a rags-to-riches story. Yours is more like rags-to-, well, better-rags.

Take a call from the publicist while you are at the park. You are supposed to be feeding the hungry. Instead you talk for forty-five minutes about selling your book. From a bench, you watch your friends slice donated bagels and pour iced coffee into plastic cups. “I’d rather not do readings. Nobody likes them, and my friends can only take so much.” Say that. Fine, he says. He’d like to know what you think about creating some video content and whether you are open to getting on TikTok. He will send you a standard Q&A. One of the questions will surely be: What is your book about? “It’s worth putting time into thinking about this,” he says. 

The book is a memoir in that parts of your life are in it.

Thank you as always for reading! Although my awful promotional copy has not yet been updated, you can preorder the book here and decide for yourself what it is about.

It was Saturday then Saturday night, and I was going to Chinatown to go to a show headlined by one of my favorite New York punk bands, L.O.T.I.O.N. Multinational Corporation (that’s legacy of terror in occupied nations not some fucking moisturizer).

L.O.T.I.O.N. is kind of a concept band, something I'm not normally into. They’re very militaristic but in an anti-military way, if that makes sense. Soldiers for peace, soldiers against surveillance and mind control, “W.A.R. in the digital realm,” “Is your cpu trying to kill you?” that sort of stuff. Sub Pop calls them industrial cyberpunk with notes of hardcore and EBM (whatever that is). They use recorded electronics and live instruments, lots of green lights, when they’re available. Everybody dances. It looks like you would imagine punks dancing, lots of flailing and jumping and head thrashing.

Their song “Every Last One” is about decapitating various people, heads of state and the like. “The only good cop is a dead cop,” is its ending refrain. They offer a dream that “when the band brings out the bagpipes” to perform the “last rites” for all these headless henchmen rotting like meat in the streets, there will be “no flowers, just urination.”

The crowd outside could be heard from down the block. I saw the swarming mass as pixels of white twirling in utter blackness, white t-shirts against black jackets black pants black hair black night on a dark block in downtown manhattan. 

A young man with a red manicured mohawk complimented my haircut. Nice Chelsea. This buoyed me. I opened the unmarked glass door of what looked like an apartment building. The stairs were that stainless steel stuff they use to make cargo boxes for the back of your Ford F-150, painted Soviet gray—another unmarked, not-locked door led to these. I climbed them fourfivesix flights, maybe seven for heaven, I wasn’t counting, following the dim suggestion of guitars and drums played over amplifiers. 

Music pooled on the landing. I rounded a corner and gave ten dollars to a teenage girl with lots of black makeup. A girl next to her with purple hair put a green band around my wrist.

It was hot and wet where the music was—an open room with wood floors and open garbage cans. Pipes painted white and red veined the ceiling (a sign: respect the space! no climbing the pipes, etc.). The windows all had glass in them, none of it broken, and the whole place was lit with a floor lamp someone had no doubt found on the street. I stepped in and in a minute sweat dripped down the crack of my ass on the back and from my forehead to my mustache on the front. My hair curled in the sopping heat. 

The first band was young and Latino, from Compton, I think. The singer did that growl screaming where you aren’t supposed to understand any of the words. They also did that thing where they switch time signatures a bunch. I hate that. Kids—they look like kids to me, under 25 is what I mean—sat or stood on top of ladders and chairs and whatever they could find along the edges and pumped their fists. The older people sat in the back by the merch tables or stood close to the single working fan. Moshers moshed in the middle. The wall of sound mashed me against the humidity and the bodies, the prevailing feeling was of pressing. It was ok. When the bassist broke a string I went outside to breathe. 

I sat on the concrete lip of an elevated basketball court. Soon I found out that this was where people came to piss and throw up. The three pissers I didn't mind so much but the splat splat of the first barfer got me to move along quick. At my new leaning spot, I watched as two passers-by in short silky dresses with fresh blow-outs approached one of the alone people who generously explained what was going on here with all these ugly degenerates. One said she lived nearby. The punk invited her to come to a show here whenever she wanted. I smiled. 

Ascending the stairs after the breaks in the cold air of the dark was tough, walking up into the wet hot again, the heat. My head hurt. I paused on a landing til I heard the electric eel swim into my ear, then up the stairs I went with the throng.

L.O.T.I.O.N. was up. It was middle for me, a row back from the spinning scrum of the slam clan. The singer, also a visual artist, by the way, called New York one of the last bastions of humanity. He said thank you, being here means so much to us. He meant this shitty venue, and the city, and the world.

It was as good as I remember. Drum machines and nasty riffs. Balletic colliders. Someone’s spit water hit my cheek. A plastic cup clonked the top of my head and the sound let me know I was empty of whatever I'd been full of when I came in, worries and ego, namely.

A giant, damp-shirted man careened toward me. I was caught from behind, thrust forward. The air between all my atoms exploded. The word rhapsodic glinted off someone’s silver tooth.

We coalesced into something. I lost track of my consciousness, somewhere between falling and leaping. I didn't fall, but I shoved and stumbled and danced and threw my fist through the clouds. The rain poured on all of us, thunder and screams, we were winning something that couldn’t be won. It was then that I knew god loved us. 

In the end, I could have shaken myself like a dog and flung sweat a few feet in any direction. Before walking to the train, I squatted to pee next to a woman in that corner spot I mentioned, the piss and puke zone by the basketball court. She appreciated my form. Our pee ran on the pavement around our shoes. She apologized for her nakedness. I thought she was pretty. We let it all go and for a moment we were beautiful and free in a concrete world that hated us, mostly, but that we were brave enough to love and live in, alive as we’d been in a while, alive as fuck. No flowers, just urination.

I’m still working on this now very long piece about Gee Vaucher and radical art-making and why we should bother with difficult art. Here’s some more of it. Thank you x one million to those who have pre-ordered my book or thought about it. I’m beyond lucky.

Thinking of you xoxoxo

Jaydra

Eventually, I will stop waiting. I will start to write and make art. I will even begin to talk about it. When people ask what kind of art I make, I will be ashamed to answer “collage” and offer qualifications. “Not like you’d make in the mental hospital,” I will joke, lying. Collage will never have garnered the same respect as painting or sculpture, whether among laypeople or in the arts. I will have taken it up because of my love for the aesthetics of punk and DIY that Vaucher helped to establish. But more than that, it will be because I lack skill in any visual medium. I will resort to the life of a scavenger—picking up images others have created and rearranging them into scenes that approximate something I am struggling to say.

My work will appear in magazines. I will write about prison abolition and climate change, school reform and mutual aid. The work will be ethically sound but artless. It will be shallow, direct, and didactic. In many cases, I will sell out. I will say yes when I mean no, will write things I don’t really believe because I fear having work pulled prior to publication. I will extract metaphors and replace them with nut grafs. I will cash my little checks. 

But slowly, I will abandon literalism. I will begin to make art of my life. After an important Supreme Court ruling is overturned, I will write about having my insides evacuated without sufficient anesthesia. I will smear one wall of the Internet with my uterine lining. During the writing of that piece, I will be more artistically intentional than ever before. I will defend my choices to the editors and prevail. The experience of publishing something both creative and subversive will be sublime.

Still, I will regret it. I will know I did it mostly because I wanted the byline, not because I felt compelled to confront the public with my experience. I won’t believe that storytelling, even when it is coming from a margin, in and of itself qualifies as political action, not necessarily. There will need to be something more behind it. But what? A clearer target, perhaps. Some formal revolution, a conceptual underpinning that operates alongside the story to electrify it. A disruption. I will wrestle with this daily. 

The check will come. I will have sold my story for $50. After that, I will stop trying to write for publications.  

Vaucher will have had a similar trajectory, though hers much more successful than my own, and rightly so, considering her talent. After art school, she will have been a freelance illustrator, working for the likes of such behemoths the Times and New York Magazine. The income from these commissions will have funded International Anthem, a “nihilist newspaper for the living” that she will start as an outlet for work that is too radical for mainstream publication, Education being one example. As Crass coalesces across the ocean, Vaucher will publish some of the band members’ work alongside her own in her paper. Shortly, she will grow disillusioned with the scene in New York and will return home to Dial House where she will turn her attention to the band and communal, extra-institutional living. She will practice her freedom.

I will work on my manuscript. When it is nearly finished, I will try to get an agent. Rejection will dog me. At the time, I will not see this as lucky, but later I will see that I was being protected. My work would likely have withered with a publishing conglomerate.

One agent will mention that the manuscript occupies a nowhere space between narrative and experiment. She will say it needs to be more strange or less, that it feels unsure of itself. I will know she is right, about the book and about me. It will be clear that if I want to say what I am really thinking, I will have to be more peripheral. If I am to make real work that approaches the radicalism to which I aspire, I will need to turn back to face myself rather than trying to chase mainstream clout and its fantastic money. 

I will attempt to trouble the concept of trash. With each word, I will negotiate my integrity. People will be curious about my upbringing. I will know that suffering can easily become pornography. Some things I will not give away so easily. The truth will remain elusive, but it will emerge sometimes like the scream of cicadas, gruesome and deafening. I will rub my life with sandpaper. I will cut it into pieces and paste it back together in paragraphs laced with references to artwork I didn’t make. A narrative will form and inside it a politic, and inside that a poetics. 

The critic Stevphen Shukaitis will write that “Vaucher has constantly refused to make any compromises in her work in order to make it more acceptable to the demands of corporatized cultural production… she has shown that it is precisely through working outside the music business, outside the gallery system, that it is possible to make something truly wonderful without having to compromise.” 

It will not be customary to include collage inside of an essay collection, but I will do it anyway. I will insert more strangeness and remove what I’d put in at the direction of earlier readers who only wanted me to win. They will not know I am a born-and-bred loser. I will know my place with increasing confidence and with a shit-eating grin plastered across my face. A small publisher will hold an open call. I will submit this thing I have made. Months later, I will find out that the book will be published. I will tattoo the word trash across my stomach.

I will have dreamt of this. I will still dream it.

I haven’t felt like writing! Anything! So I haven’t. There are a lot of writers who adhere to a hardcore daily schedule, ass to chair at 6 am and no moving until the noon, or whatever. I’ve experimented with forcing myself to write every day, but that’s never worked for me for an extended period of time. I’m not lazy or dumb, and neither are you (probably!) if you aren’t making work every day. I’m tired and uninspired. Forcing myself to write 300 words of tortured drivel when I feel like this would make as much sense as taking viagra for a sinus infection.

Instead, when I can’t write, I use other parts of myself and wait for the words to come. Here’s some stuff that’s been working lately.

1. Go support other people’s creative stuff

This month, I went to the Old Art Show, put on by Grapefruits at Mother Foucault’s Books. To be in the show, work had to be old—more than a decade, I think—which is a fun premise. It was a very charming event! A few friends had pieces up. I met Martha who does Grapefruits and makes such cool work. Inspiring, plus I got invited to another art opening while I was there.

Going to art things basically counts as writing because my subconscious is being stuffed with weird visual information. This is in addition to the actual art, which is often good enough that I want to write about it. I start to feel some positive pressure to make work so that I have something to talk to all those hot, interesting people about. So vain! But it works for me. Art things can also be a good place to talk about work I’m struggling with. People are generally nice and like to fix other people’s problems.

Two Saturdays ago, my mom came to town, and I brought her with me to the art opening I was invited to at Mother Foucault’s. Above is the invite and below is a pic of us hanging out there. This is a sick project by pals of the newsletter Sarah and Steve, who curate and host shows in their garage gallery. Mom was vaping a pink Elf Bar in the alley, which I thought was sick as hell. Cuz like, does your mom hit the Elf Bar at an art opening? Didn’t think so!

Seriously though, supporting other people’s work feels good! Besides the obvious benefits of being in a creative community and getting new ideas, I think there’s some karmic thing where if I am showing up for other people’s work, my work shows up for me.

2. Read

I’ve been so into this shit, you guys. It’s urgent, violent, concrete, strange. It’s emboldening me to write like I have an actual circulatory system! She makes writing look fun, which is a good delusion to slip into every once in a while. I ordered her other book on ebay.

3. Hang with my fuckin’ friends

I’m not a religious person, but I believe in a god-something and I have experienced that while I am busy helping other people or having a nice time, the universe sometimes solves problems for me. I think there was a Christian cult that sprang up around this idea in the heyday of chain emails (The Golden Key), but I’m just saying that worrying or beating myself up doesn’t help me make more work. A better use of my time is hanging with my fuckin’ friends. Here is Emily as I was leaving her house recently. She was very encouraging as always and let me borrow books, including the one above.

4. Watch deplorable trash television

I will not disclose what I have been watching, but I will say that eventually I feel so gross about the amount of bad tv I am consuming that I will simply do something else. Maybe writing, for example.