TEETH OF TOOTH

Moved to California about a year and half ago, for all the right reasons: Love, newness, freshness, and a dash of what-the-hell adventure. While some of those things didn’t turn out as was hoped and planned (you’ll never guess which), what this not-working-out afforded was the rare chance to reconfigure and redirect ideas about happiness and how (and when) (and if) to exercise ambition. And, after some time spent staring at walls, the chance to reconfigure and redirect those things sans reference.* Without objects and people and people-as-objects de-magnetizing the (peripatetic) north. So basically: Purely, wholly, and terrifyingly of me, this happiness.

Into the Kunst, god knows, but not without trouble in committing to the werk, particularly the affective labor sort. The worst and therefore most mature realization to be had is simply that enduring pain is what pain is - and that thinking and feeling your way out of it is meaningful toil. While it never becomes easier to bear this work at the outset, the time spent beating yourself up and romanticizing your own masochism does get remarkably shorter with age. I’m choosing to believe that regret is something you can only have time for in your twenties, when you’re obnoxious silly enough to believe that you’ve missed out on the best parts of life, because you didn’t take the time to x and so y. Which is and remains completely whack. 

The 2009 of myself would have spoken about none of this “working on myself” business without some sort of acerbic, elaborately carved frontispiece, leaving myself unimpeachable with regard to tone and earnestness. I am happy to say that I believe I have finally lost the ability to couch things thus, and am flying high and free with no regard for my own perceptive comfort. It is thrilling to see these last tendrils of masochism put to such good use.  And here we are back at Kunst. Delicious, purposeful, all-hands-on-deck Kunst. And in the meantime, or as a means to, or because it is of meaning, I’m going back to New York to work here. 

*propers to JR

hey everyone. massive news. i’m working on some big things. these things are approximately larger than an average size, but if you’re asking me to take a wide-angle, its possible my own fervor creates a myopia unable to estimate the real yardage. if you were going to take a block-sized view, i suppose if pressed to, i’d imagine these things to be pretty small, all things considered. oh but they’ve got shape, these things which i’ve been, shall we say, involved in. i’ve really been speculating how to approximately convey their size, lest you think they aren’t important, or worse, in case you think they’re just too freakishly outsized for their time and place.

i guess you could also say they’re running down the middle of the road. and actually coming upon the fork in that road where it splits - infamy on our left now, and obscurity on our right. the things might actually just be forging a tepid path of status quo, now that i really think about it. whats important is maybe, in the end, only that they’re absolutely of a moment. these things, they’re signifying something really quite revolutionary. personally. not to others, maybe, who can take the long view. o! to have such perspective! us, we’re now both far too inside of the freshness and i don’t know about you, but its just making me feel so terribly excited, the crispiness of these things.   

i wanted to tell you about them, and i’m glad i got to, in my own way.  and the best part, between us right now, is the delicious possibility that we might be thinking the very same thing. now. and now. although while we were trying to link up, just there, trying to guess what the other person was guessing,  i just got very sad thinking about how, once i told you everything about them, the thrill of possibility we’ve both managed to engender in you at present will, necessarily, dull a bit. i was thinking perhaps it would be best, between us, for you to just pause here.

to think of it as simply anything new and exciting, insofar as you might center the anticipation inside of yourself, projecting your own big things and weighty contemporary moment. and really, here, so cold and impersonally, it doesnt really serve us to be bothered with the matter of what that is. it is either obnoxious to point it out so definitively or folly. perhaps you and i will have a moment in which we can really admit that we hardly care enough to hear the particulars, that it is enough that we will potentially have something to talk about at some point in the future. and in this way, my gift to you and your gift to me will be to cultivate some mystery, as we mutually dangle each other over the edge of wondering what any of this might mean.