I was not a good international worker yesterday. I didn’t strike, generally, instead I showed up for work and walked past the mini protests at Bryant Park in the morning. I did however put some of my ill-gotten earnings to use in support of a good cause, heading downtown in the evening to help celebrate the book release of all-American Kate Bornstein, who inhabited (rather than occupied) Dixon Place, making it glow with grace, and truth, and gathered well wishers.

It was an evening of rock and roll in the best sense, and it sent me back to my San Francisco days. You hear what you need to hear, if you’re lucky. And these days, it seems like I need to hear about fearlessness, about leaping past boundaries, and about putting in the work. I’ve been in fear for much of the past year, I think, at least fear about my public life. I want to plow that under, and recapture some joyousness. Kate and all the people who celebrated her last night gave me that. Gratitude to all of them for that.

You should buy her new book, if possible from Bluestockings.

Back to trying: trying to keep track of spending, trying to keep track of calories, trying to keep track of emails and other things, and trying to gain momentum.

Trying to post here. Trying to be self forgiving. Trying to manage technology without being a greedy chump.

Trying to clean the house the dog the floor the clothes the walls the sheets the hard drives the inbox. And don’t forget to scrub the soul.

And yet: there’s season one of Alf available for free viewing on Amazon.

Trying.

I took myself over to the Armory Art Fair and its tiny twin Volta yesterday. I’ve been curmudgeonly about fairs for quite a while, so generally I don’t go. They are a business that seems to succeed despite the fact that almost nobody I know enjoys them: artists are either pissed that they aren’t included or frustrated with the look of the booth when they are, dealers find them expensive and time consuming, and critics see them as a place where commerce trumps ideas. As for the people that the really seem to be tailored for, collectors, I can’t tell you what they think.

I remember when the Armory got its start as the Gramercy Art Fair a weekend event crammed into the Gramercy Hotel. The first time around it was real event, a group of young art dealers, staking a claim to attention in a forum born of necessity: it was a lot cheaper to take over the hotel than it was to revnt any of New York’s other exposition venues. Dealers set up work in hotel rooms and since the bar for entry was lower, the work was wilder.

The Gramercy’s success led to a rash of other hotel fairs around the world, as well as ensuring that the days at the Gramercy itself were numbered. The law of New York cultural life took over: if one year 200 people think something is fun to do and they talk about it, the next year 200 of their friends will want to do it too. Quickly the numbers became unmanageable for hotel hallways and rooms and voila, here we are with an event that is almost as big as the boat shows that my parents used to take me to when I was kid.

With a few differences. The most amusing one is this: the first rule of socializing in art circles is that you must play it cool at all costs. You don’t want to appear too interested: if you’re a shopper, dealers will smell blood in the water and and buttonhole you. If you’re a dealer, an artist may start bending your ear in an attempt to get you to look at their work, potentially making you miss that maybe-a-little-interested collector whose purchase could ensure that you don’t have to ship so much heavy art home. If you’re an artist you want it to appear that you aren’t too busy tallying up the successes and failures of your peers. Above all, there is a common belief in cultural circles that everyone smells better with a little spritz of hauteur. New Yorkers love the aloof.

Combine all of this, and what you get is the experience I had yesterday: thousands of people shoved into a hastily thrown up favela of white cubelets sparingly crammed with merch. Each box represented a gallery where the proprietor sat on a self-furnished chair (or you can rent them from the venue at a ludicrous amount) poking at an iPad and waiting for marks. In the barely passable corridors, people who had paid thirty dollars to get in the door tried to meet or avoid each other’s eyes and at the same time did their best while pressed up against each other to look like they actually had someplace more important to be, something better to do and that they had just happened to find themselves there in a pier at the outer edge of Manhattan in the midst of a flash mob. It would be like cruising, except nobody gets off, and the brutal “last call, it’s time to get your ass home” lighting is always on.

I leave it to you to attempt to imagine what any of this has to do with the encounter that we call art. It’s a cliche` to decry the market’s influence on art. But this is weird even as a market: can you name a single other trade show where the participants spend most their time pretending to have only the barest stake in the product?

So, why did I go? I was handed a free ticket, and a good friend who has a booth there is having his birthday, I stopped in to dispense good wishes, and then figure I’d make my way through all three venues. Out of some two hundred-odd exhibitors, there were about five things that made me take a second look, or make to note for further research. I can’t quite decide if 2.5 is a heartening or depressing percentage. I shot a bunch of pictures, however and I’ll put some up in the coming days.

Ominously warm here in New York today. After all of the crush and tumble of the past few weeks (months really), a regular day on the job seems like a sinful luxury, one that I extended by skipping any social events (tonight is Pleasure Salon), picking up a couple of comic books and heading home to eat falafel and snuggle with Lehigh.

Once home of course I ran up against the fact that the apartment is strewn with half finished projects and that dirty clothes definitely outnumber the clean ones. Luckily, even though I have a house guest today, she is a casual one who has seen the house in as bad if not worse state. I did manage to get some of the rougher edges tidied.

I’m finally getting around to editing some of the many pictures I took on my trip to India a month ago. My head spins to think how recently I was there. Maybe that’s all that’s going on right now: I’ve been taking in so many experiences that I can barely chew, much the less swallow them. So, little bits, let the fragments come out and don’t worry too much about the meaning of them all. Yes, a picture of an elephant on the street in India is overwhelmingly exoticizing. At the same time, hey, we drove past elephants on the street in India. My experience there was confounding and and past any ability to condense it into a simple summation. I’m still waiting to see how the new possibilities that I encountered there will play out.

I can’t believe that it’s been over two months since I last posted here. A ton has happened in that time, but the impulse to write about it has been utterly gone.
The difference today is that there have been a number of bits of good news, events that have been affirming inside and out, which have served to remind me that we share our experiences not only for ourselves but also for others.

Yesterday in particular I had the great good fortune to talk to a group of students at my alma mater and current employer, Bard College. I did a presentation to a group of young curators about a zine I put out with a friend of mine d-l alvarez, in 1991. Titled Brains, The Journal of Egghead sexuality, it was a one-off item that I had a fondness for but which i wasn’t thinking much about until a student came to do a bunch of research on some other projects of mine (it already feels odd to type that phrase) and discovered the box that held the archive and the incomplete second issue. After about a year, that second issue has now been printed, and there is a beautiful new publication that is a response to the earlier material.

Going up to talk about Brains turned into a talk about the queer zine scene in San Francisco, Bears, asking for what you want, the relationships between artists and curators, and a couple of my own curatorial projects. A number of times I was challenged by excellent questions, and it was remarkable to see the ways that these really casual impulses from decades ago can spawn activity and thought from a whole range of people. On the train home I had a searching conversation with the person who had made the response volume, and he made me really think about the reasons I teach, the current place of artists, and my own queer identifications.

One of the great gifts we can give each other is the gift of regard and recognition, not is the award show sense of accolades, but in the sense of seeing and acknowledging what we see in each other. The people I sat with yesterday, who were willing to listen to me drone on, reminded me of the value of each spark we throw off, of each moment of honest play that we engage in. It’s easy to let the creative impulse get lost behind fogs of ill-considered rhetoric, to forget to play direct and to play hard, to ask for what we want with honesty. Yesterday I was reminded that that’s what I want to continue to do.

Ran by the office today to take care of a few things before the NYE celebration. I have to confess that I am glad that the year has come to a close. While not tragic, much of this year has felt to me like I had hold of the wrong end of a racing lion.

My hopes for the next year: more contemplation, more connection. some time of deep stillness. I’ve been feeding of of manic energy for too long.

I woke twice during the night. Both times I was dreaming dreaming about being behind the wheel of a car driving very slowly into a steadily worsening situation. “A slow-motion nightmare?” I asked myself as panic forced my eyes open.

When I woke for real, the morning sky was wintery for the first time in months. I’m in bed now trying to collect myself for a quick trip into town to take care of some business.

Spent the afternoon at hipster central: The Brooklyn Comic Art and Graphics show and while it wasn’t the transcendent experience it was last year, I still managed to have a good time before the agoraphobia kicked in and I had to beat a retreat to greater Williamsburg and from thence to home.

It’s funny, but many of the new alterna comics are starting to blur together or me, and while I feel like there’s been a quiet revolution in graphic and visual arts over the last ten years, right now it feels becalmed, with the same parameters being trod over again and again. Something needs to shift, and I’m not sure what it is.

Don’t quite know why I’m feeling as rushed and crushed as I am these days. This semester has tumbled by at work, and I feel like I can barely get my head around the very fact of 2011 itself, now that it is crumbling into dust around me.

All in all I feel like I’ve become someone that things happen to rather than someone who makes things (like their own life) happen. A self-spectator. There’s something comforting about this, like the sense that it’s ok to let it all slip by. That’s one of the things that’s so seductive about depression: if you can convince yourself of the ineffectiveness of your own actions, you’re absolving yourself in advance from any bad thing that happens to you.