Men!

???

I chose to be earnest. I chose to write such that my feelings were specific, dynamic, and clear. I decided to write about love such that it sounded appealing. I decided to do this because, upon seeing the lineup for this reading about “modern dating” that I was invited to participate in, I sensed that it might be giving Dimes Square.

I have lived and/or worked in Lower Manhattan, including at a magazine with offices next to Dimes, for going on ten years. Despite this, I have avoided, largely, I think, that Dimes Square. I do not like podcasts where people just vibe.

The reading (called Oomf: Boys’ Turn) featured nine male or male-adjacent writers; I requested to go third. It was at a gallery in a walkup on East Broadway. From the second floor landing I could smell sour cigarette smoke. Two more flights to go.

The gallery walls featured only sticky notes and paint-stained screws. First, someone read about alien pussy, then someone read about anal pus. I read about, if not collectivity, co-existence. (Cruising, group therapy, protest.)

Throughout each reading, men harassed the readers and each other, made fart noises with their mouths, yelled or at least talked. Someone said “faggot” (not me, surprisingly). Someone said “gay marriage is capitalist” (not me, surprisingly). Someone said, several times, “Fuck [a certain online magazine]!” Someone said, “Finally!” when the reader following me finished and I turned to the heckler—he had Weird Al hair and acetate glasses taped together on one side—and asked why he was here if he didn’t want to hear, you know, literature. “Because I’m friends with [the host],” he said. I asked if he thought harassing the performers whom the host had chosen made him a good friend. “I’m a dickhead,” he offered as explanation for his adolescent insecurity. Our conversation cycled through cynical tautologies till he put his hands on my shoulder and visions of violence flared in my mind and R— asked that I get his crutches so we could leave.

“That must’ve been disorienting after Straight Girls,” T— texted when I relayed the events of the night to her, and she reminded me that the “humiliation ritual” and not knowing how to act IRL so acting like an online troll was the “scene’s” whole thing.

Straight Girls was the reading I’d gone to Wednesday at KGB. Riley Mac and Montana James Thomas organize the series. I’d gone to see Whitney Mallett read. She discussed haircuts in one piece, then, in the next, the uses of gossip, how people wish to be seen in association with others. Scenes.

Sunday was W—’s birthday. We went to see Narcissister’s Voyage into Infinity at NYU Skirball, a “feminist response to Peter Fischli and David Weiss’s iconic video The Way Things Go.” We walked into a theater with a curtainless stage. On it: palettes and ladders and ropes and pulleys and… We walked into a Rube Goldberg machine, a theater of anticipation, an array of objects provisional both in nature (Home Depot buckets, 2-by-4s) and in space-time (pull that lever!).

She crawled out of a little raised hutch. So did she. And then she. The three silent performers—wearing frilly dresses and expressionless, doll-like masks—put the machine-sculpture-set to work. Then they worked instead—dancing with balloons, spinning tires, arranging buckets—is this work? No this is play. No this is play-acting. No this is work, the work of being on stage, I assume everyone’s getting paid… She and she and she became machine, became form, turned kinetic sculpture. She and she bound her body to the inversion table, she flew through the air on the swing, she shot pyrotechnics from her lower body.

Standing ovation.

Snow blurred Greenwich Village. We forget to wait for F—, who chased us down wearing a black balaclava over his face. I told B— about how I’d watched Matthew Barney’s Drawing Restraint 9 the other night, and felt there was a kind of resonance between it and Voyage into Infinity: How gesture and task get crystalized into form. How bodies repeat, distinguish themselves, and merge. How, by focusing on movements or objects derived from labor or of ritual, those movements and objects can be defamiliarized into sculpture; the art reveals the aesthetic and gestural language comprising our realities. Background ceases. Björk and Barney mutilate themselves in swampy goo, annihilating any distinction between them in species or subjecthood or sex. Mucosal oblivion. True love. And what of the whale? Reduced to spine and also cubes.

Or perhaps there’s something else at play: B— said he went to an artist talk of Barney’s the other day and it struck him that the artist’s oeuvre was a series of high-budget Rube Goldberg concept-machines contrived as excuses for him to put things up his butt without it seeming gay.