Tag: therapy

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Typing at Cosi. Quiet strolling through Brooklyn has given way to the crush of post-work Union Square. Their coffee is never as good as I remember it. Spent a little time in Forbidden Planet, which has greatly expanded their independent/zine comic section. I’m struck by how much intriguing self published stuff there is out there right now.Didn’t buy a whole lot however, given what my finances are like and also the fact that while I want to support their efforts I’d also like to direct some money to smaller stores like Bergen Street Comics which provide more direct support to the artists.

I also spent the earlier part of today adding some things to the WordPress blog including this scan and a couple of links. Of special note is the one to the blog of the Annandale Dream Gazette, an enterprise initiated by poet Lynn Behrendt. Lynn and I were roommates for a couple of years while I was a Bard, and the gazette has an illustrious list of dreamer/contributers.

Because it’s a Monday afternoon and because I’m in Union Square, it’s hard not to fall into my reflexive, post therapy frame of mind. After all, I spent some ten years coming to weekly sessions in this neighborhood. I wonder what my therapist would say if I was telling him about my current situation and frame of mind. Probably something about the extent to which I castigate myself. Ugh, this chair is very stingy with the back support. And now I have a hankering for some fruit. Maybe it’s time to head off to the greenmarket.

See how avoidance works?

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…about not posting enough. The past week has provided two states of being: feeling ill, thus too limp to reflect and type or doing stuff, in which case there is no time to type. The result? A week slips by with nothing. So now finally some time is wrested from the job, which allows for a quick update. here’s some of what’s been happening:
1. I’ve attended three plays Lee Bruer’s new production of “A Doll’s House”, Cabaret, Wonderful Town. All through the great graciousness of my friends who offered me tickets.
2. I’ve spent weekend in bed convulsed by coughing to the extent that I thought I had ripped a muscle.
3. I haven’t played any Pikmin.
4. I purchased two bookshelves at Crate and Barrel.
5. I watched the people’s court.
6. I compiled a list of people I needed to contact, calls I needed to return, projects I needed to nudge forward…and despaired.
7. I had a number of exchanges and attempted to apologize for my boorish behavior.
8. I organized a still life of t-shirts and ribbons in the back room of my gallery so that it could be photographed for an ad in artforum.
9. I’ve eaten BBQ ribs on several occasions.
10. I’ve drawn.
11. I’ve spoken to my therapist about submissiveness.
12. A friend graciously came by and fixed the desktop machine, if by “fix” one means walking me though another clean install.
13. The buzzing, counfounding strains of NPR have woken me every morning, and the self reflexiveness of Adult Swim has droned me to sleep each night.
14. I’ve fretted about my filing system, and the extreme amout of facial hair left around my wash basin.
15. My family hasn’t called, nor have I called them.
16. I have found myself unable to decide between a dead or fake christmas tree.

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…therapy, and before tonight’s “Slidefest” an event which I had to curate this week because I had kept putting it off. Thank goodness I know some very patient artists who consented to come and present work tonight. Otherwise things would be looking pretty pathetic. In the 45 minutes of downtime, I’ve knocked out a drawing of a sinister stuffed rabbit for a benefit action that someone approached me about yesterday. They’re supposed to come pick it up any minute. I truly have to stop saying yes to everything because I can feel myself becoming more and more stressed out. The back twinges, acid reflux, and little bouts of binge spending like the one I just went on at the Strand and where I purchased:

A Taschen Book on Velasquez
Another Taschen book (icons series) on Indian Street Graphics
Waiting for Food #3, an R.Crumb placemat drawing collection
Drawing in England from Hilliard to Hogarth
The Acme Novelty Date Book, a collection of Chris Ware’s notebook sketches
America’s First Dynasty – The Adamses 1735-1918

Then I went by Barnes and Noble on Union Square, because I had a real hankering for The Education of Henry Adams, and also my friend Carl Frano might be working there. He was, and on the way out I saw that Amphigorey Also had been marked down to $10 so of course I had to pick that up too.

Meanwhile I sit at home and come to tears over the boxes of books in my apartment and how I can’t get way from them.

Well I have a long history of self medicating through shopping, and the ostensible justification for this particular binge was that I had just deposited a wholly unexpected check from my NY gallery. All of these images feed the work in some way, or would if I gave myself the time to do it. Sitting with the pencils in hand to make this benefit drawing felt very, very good. and it’s always reassuring to see that “I’ve still got it” hand/eye wise. But sometimes it’s thin broth.

Much of therapy was spent talking about the trip to SF and I found myself trying to articulate what I’m feeling about LJ right now, its odd mixes of intimacy and self presentation, especially when the mix includes real world contact.

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There is no emoticon for the exasperation I am feeling!
Once again the desk top machine is on the fritz, and the second I thought I knew what to do about it, things got worse. Now windows is giving me another of those incomprehensible error messages and I’m typing this on the laptop, which is oh so cute but oh so outdated. After discussing with my shrink the way all of this was related to some of my problematic sexual boundries (don’t ask), I decided to not spend the day freaked out about it but rather to go see the Boucher drawing show at the Frick. Of course this was interesting, even though it confirmed my distaste for Boucher, who seems incapable of rendering a face that contains any emotion beyond a simpering bovine lust. This was made all the more glaring by the inclusion in the show of several drawings where he displays a crisp, lively eye in the depiction of things like chickens and courtyards. When he attempts to be serious everything devolves into mush, dough-like anatomy whipped into furious “s” shaped compsitions. The drawing show is downstairs at the Frick and upstairs, as part of the permanent collection is a Boucher room with allegories of the arts and sciences enacted by putti, and it is clearly the ideological forerunner of the muppet babies.
The rest of the Frick was a joy, the paintings hung with little or no explanitory text, which makes it much easier to treat each one as a discovery. Today I felt good about Reynolds over Gainsbourough, and Velasquez over El Greco. It was startling to see the Franz Hals portraits of anxious burghers echoed in the portrait of Washington that faces down his British contemporaries in the ajoining room.

Does sneering at a centuries old frenchman make me feel better about my technological ineptitude? Sadly no.

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Past the burnout of the past couple of days. Overslept this morning, but that left me in a much better mood than previously. Obviously I needed it. There are still many things to take care of on the rapidly-approaching horizon, but at least my conciousness doesn’t seem as sporadic as yesterday. One thing I forgot to mention about the trip to the Tang was the presence of one quite beautiful man who was a friend of one of the Tang education coordinators and who stuck around after the whole thing. We were introduced and I made some fumbling joke. He was around my height and seemed to be a pacific islander, with long salt and pepper hair and a pointed goatee. He teaches at the university in Schenectady. I’m remembering an open smile and the dry warmth of his handshake, but off course his name flew out of my head the moment it was told me. My particular curse – I can remember the jingles from every commecial I heard at age 4 but never anyone’s name.
All of this is to say I was a bit smitten. Rare indeed.
This is another of those “I’m at work and I don’t wanna be” LJ posts. There’s lots of other things I need to finish, pieces that need making, rooms that need cleaning, people that need contacting. But the fact is I almost get more of that stuff done here. And now once again I’m frightened by the messages on my phone, so much so that I won’t pick them up. An absurtity, which has gotten me into bad situations with those around me and hurt people I haven’t wanted to hurt. Time after time I’ve tried to talk through these scenarios with my therapist, yet I lapse into the same behavior. Last week for the first time he suggested medication, which left me both shocked (usually not his route at all) and a little thrilled (is my dowdy, garden variety neurosis blooming into a glamourous anxiety disorder?).
I am reading W.G.Seybold’s book “The Rings of Saturn”. It is stunning: the overall structure is a solitary walking tour through the east of England, but each chapter mimicks the sensation of walking; spare insiscive descriptions of the landscape give way to chains of association that become historical and autobigraphical essays. The erudition is never forced, and exists in conjuction with sensitive observations of people and places. This is the kind of book I wish I could write, and indeed it’s given me some ideas for my endlessly projected, endlessly delayed Jack Smith/Ray Johnson/Cockettes/et al book. When I type those words I feel that everything I’m doing right now is wrong, and that there’s a much more important task calling me