Horse Cuisine
and ugly sweaters with no apparent irony
His italics hardened and curled like rusted hooks. Her parentheses prodded and pierced like sharpened sticks.
The mother stood at the end of her driveway, yelling at her daughter in the driver’s seat of a car on the opposite side of the street. At the mother’s feet, a hose emptied water from their pool. The mother was angry for being stood up by the cable company. Her daughter only exacerbated that anger in a way I couldn’t make out, deploying mid- and high-tier swear words in her direction. The daughter gave as well as she got. Their anger went together like the flour and yeast of an undulating, moldy loaf of bread that so spanned the width of the road that I could only slice it down the middle. But having done so, the loaf fused back together as if I was not there, witnessing a level of mother-daughter relations always hinted at but was certainly never meant to see.
“A swarm of flies has nothing to say.”
“Have you tried listening?”
Stella Donnelly sings “You wear me out/Like you wear that Southern Cross tattoo” in the chorus of “Tricks.” Such regionally specific lyrics give me the excitement of peering into an eccentric neighbor’s window at night. Even as what I see in that window leaves certain ambiguities unanswered. Does the man debase the national symbol like he debases his soon-to-be ex-girlfriend? Or is the national symbol the flaw that allows her to see all the rest? Her new songs see her coming to terms with the idea that emotions can exist beyond the Antipodes.
I eat this horse tartare hoping to receive the horse’s nightmares.
Anal Cunt’s Everyone Should Be Killed is a foul orchid of an album title. It festers and gnarls in the hothouse, unaddressed and unanswered. Yet its putrescence makes it impossible to ignore. The more you ignore it, the more validation it commands and the more exciting it is to encounter by chance. Shrugging it off like Jim from The Office is not an endorsement but neither is it absolution from complicity. It succeeds where all of Damien Hirst’s sharks have failed.
He raised the idea of a magazine that makes use of rather than reproduces sadomasochistic methods.
I have an aura that is closer to an intruder than a participant. Like an ultra-niche, unpolished, volatile band from out of town, wearing ugly sweaters with no apparent irony, earning the disgust of the clientele of the DIY space, yet not escaping the keen eye of a fellow artist eager to make an example of me. When rising, I am the cautionary tale of indiscipline and wasted potential. Having risen, and having been beaten out of several fellowships, I am the pure distillation of freedom and integrity. In either case I am never to be handled without gloves while I churn out seven-inch after seven-inch, with titles like Schizoprosody and Misogyny is Legal, by all appearances none the wiser.
He signed the card “Yours always in emotional instability,” as if that was supposed to clarify something.
I never miss a new season of Couples Therapy, hoping to see someone I once knew and who thoroughly deserves to be there. I want to relish in the spectacle of “bad” things happening to “good” people. But every season ends in dejection. These are not the “good” people to whom I want “bad” things to happen. I don’t like a show that makes me confront how I am the problem. But confront I must. I resolve to meet and fall out with more telegenic people.
