NIGHT SWEATS

If you believe in ghosts, take this at face value | If you don't believe in ghosts, decipher the metaphor for me (please)

Aloha Hostel, Berlin, deserves a positive review on hostelbookers.com save for the debatably German debatably female ghost that's kept me awake for two nights straight -- I think she has long hair, and I think she died by stomach trauma because she won't stop churning mine.

Sleep paralysis is my family's affliction, we are a sensitive bunch.

This is when I wish the ol' garlic trick were true, or maybe a cross on the headboard and a silver chain 'round the neck. But only superstitions can be dispelled with more superstitions, and my night sweats tormenter is very real, and very annoying.

Welcome to Berlin, besides her I love it.

continuums

The moment after I'm here (here is Paris, is lunch in my temp apartment, is a window wracked with rain), then I'm there, and there's nothing to hold onto except maybe the ghost of an image. I think this all started ten days ago when I turned 22.

(Photo from weekend at La Baule, Brittany, France)

Good night, Boston, Good bye

My youth art projects in skyward sparks: Tiger, he burned up through and through, I believe, I mean four years of waiting does expedite release

Thanks, dad, for helping me set him free; and tonight, when I, too, ascend, the glistening of steel wings in the clouds -- that's both of us waving goodbye.

Good Morning, New York, Good Bye

6 AM in Greenpoint a walk good bye

Interrupting the flesh

I've reached a point, I think, where I've mastered painterly "tricks" (how specific they are to my five-year-old-and-counting brushes remains to be seen, when I purchase myself a new set this summer...) and with that has returned a sort of amateurish phobia: that a signature style has developed into a stylistic dependence.

I drafted a manifesto once that outlined vague "rules" in painting, such as: do not use white pigment until the final layer (--I've since X'd out this one--); when blending turns to unconscious muddy-ing, hit it strike it and drip it (the gung-ho enthusiasm can take a back seat but I'll still share a ride with it); etc.

The manifesto served its purpose, but has become historical -- because I've moved on from essential rules, and believe more in a dynamic system: if I do this, then I need to do that (for example, if I use bright colors, then I should thin them out). And in a moment when you take your circulating system and drive a dagger right into its flesh, it hopefully can adapt, first by absorbing the shock, then assimilating it into a new web of functions. The hardest part is thrusting the dagger, and the second hardest part is sticking out the recovery.

vegan seepage

A silk-thin-skinned man sporting a sugary ensemble of peachy pinks and baby blues (fanny pack, visor, socks) assumes the role of MTA poetic missionary on slow Sunday afternoons, and last week as my train car approached 1st avenue he let out a, "Ladies and Gentlemen! We are approaching 1st avenue, enjoy your vegan blueberry cheesecake because your loved ones secretly hate the stench of meat that -- well, for some of you, anyway -- seeps out of those enlarged pores USE-SPF-AND-SAVE-YOUR-SKIN-LADIES-AND-GENTLEMEN!"

And for a second there, as the train steadied itself into a slow stop, were smiles and giggles and dead eyes that came alive.

I'm an uptown boy! Wednesday 6/16 opening

Just two of us this time (me + Leah Dixon) popping up for a night in a high rise apartment on the Upper East Side. Come join us for art, absinthe I mean champagne I mean wine yeah (no, I didn't say a thing, shhh) and secure a few positive points for your very own quality of life index.

Details for those who are blind to all but text:

THROUGH AND THROUGH

Winston Chmielinski and Leah Dixon

Cocktails: June 16 6-9

220 E. 72nd Street
Suite 14A

low-budget Narnia for little wasp children

I decided to scatter my trinkets in a public place frequented by little wasp children because I know how exciting "the discovery" can be as a kid... And I like to imagine stretched-face mothers scanning the hills and triangulating trees for kidnappers, 'cause only freaks leave frogs and conch shells and pewter people and troglodytes on the ground, right?












(... all the while avoiding poison ivy 'cause that shit's bad news)

car crash coincidence

Coincidence, a search for meaning, I'll tell you what I found.

Yesterday morning at breakfast I explained to my parents why I was throwing away grade school art projects (a fiery orange paper-mâché tiger, a Harry Potter puppet): "If I rid myself of personal ephemera, then when (if) I die you won't feel compelled to contain the memory of me in things, like a shrine."

They were confused, me talking about death over scrambled eggs, though I often speak detachedly and they're starting to take it upon themselves to infuse my words post-dialogue with emotion. They paint me pretty.

Anyway, I left a couple hours later on a kid's size bike (I'm 6'2"), redoubled immediately to switch from a handbag to a backpack, then glided down Pond St. to the rotary crossing, saw an opening in the traffic, crossed, wrongly gauged my speed (bike was in a high gear), didn't look to the left, went went straight straight rolling sluggishly and BEEP and BRAKE and FLIP head over handlebars right where the silver car going about 40 MPH had just barely brushed by my front tire. Hip knee ankle hit hard on the pavement, but I sprung up grabbed my bike and jumped onto the grassy knoll in between two opposite lanes of traffic; a few cars stopped rolled down windows and asked if I was OK, my seizing ankle shook "No" but I smiled "Yes" and off the world went.

Consider the post on Thursday (Boston, wipeout whiteout), the picture from that post, the next-morning conversation, the upcoming month of life changes (I'm done with school, I'm archiving the strewn around tangled past into bullet-point lists in Helvetica partitioned to the E: drive, I'm moving to Berlin, etc.) and any shock at the unexpected will quickly be absorbed by the plush padding of expectation.

It all fits; in retrospect I could've predicted it; I'm shaken humbled razed to the ground when I think how everything would've changed had I been hit -- and I was so fucking close to being hit. Another definition of Coincidence: justification for being stupid... I should steer clear of that ... And instead see myself sitting in front of my computer, typing this, with just a faint throbbing in my hip and a kink in my ankle, as pure luck, another chance to make the most of what I have, now, and to wait for the walk sign and look both ways the next time I try to cut my journey-time by a few minutes.

Fuck. I'm alive.

Boston, wipeout whiteout

My friend Jordan asked me whether it's better to lose everything in a fire or throw it away. I said I don't know, but that what I'm doing now -- purging my cream-carpeted doll-filled room of its lingering adolescence -- feels good. I'm lucky to be able to say good-bye, actually to make a week of saying good-bye, before I fly away on another six-month transplantation.

Dusty room, dusty paintings, dusty mind. I'd like to rip out the carpeting, throw away the furniture, and paint it all white; but I'll probably just donate books dolls and clothing and then buy some coconut ice cream and vegan cookies and play Wii for the rest of my time here. I hear Super Mario Galaxy 2 is mind blowing fun.

documentation, that's all

Drawing out, sinking in process

Four Days Photo Forays

Two Iphone photos abutted

evokes a day's proceedings

Imagine a little Winston in the Invisible Inbetween!

MEN!

JD Samson and the rest of the MEN crew (Michael O'Neill, Ginger Brooks Takahashi + Emily Roysdon) were in my living room I mean at PS122 performing "Who Am I to Feel So Free" roped to one another like leashed Afterschool Program children.
I took a video, and because I took a video I didn't get up and dance -- though I found my movement doppelganger in that girl whose arms flail straight up into somekindaawesome routine at 2:04.

pink beads of sweat at Pretty Young Things

Body heat makes a hot sticky mess out of cotton candy.

I also noticed the setting of the sun because the space at 833 Broadway is naturally so well-lit; that and the room cooled down a bit, and the whites in my painting turned to yellows and blues.

They [the crowd] went through so much rosé -- I stuck to my Perrier, because my head's been hurting lately and I have pine-nut-mouth (everything tastes bitter for ten days after consuming a certain type of pine-nut, google it).

Skipping the after party because I need to decompress, and these bondage straps on my new Yohji pants are at risk of catching on drunken feet and chair legs.

Check it out tomorrow (10 AM - 6 PM), it'll be much more conducive to the viewing of art.

Love!

Vaginal Davis Speaks from the Diaphragm

Vaginal Davis takes us to a heaven or to a hell or to some place in-between (a living room under the sea?) where boys and girls in undies sit on faces and get whipped and licked (whipped as in whipped cream) while she, all smiles, talks freely with her friends -- the creative elite -- in person and over Skype.

Now that the exterior of PS122 has shed its scaffolding, which in some ways served to justify the melange of performance art and heart-to-heart within, the intersection of East 9th Street and 1st Avenue has become possibly the greatest site (at least for the remaining week of Speaking from the Diaphragm) of generational, sexual, emotional, racial, artistic, etc. etc. crossroads.

I feel like the luckiest kid alive that I've been able to help Vaginal with preparations for the show; she is hands down the most positive, loving being in this hemisphere, a veritable fountain of youth from where energy (of the natural kind, though of a magnitude that seems wholly supernatural) flows endlessly and indiscriminately.

I'm riding the Vaginal wave!

And tomorrow I'll be performing as one of the Chat Roulette boys, so please find yourself a ticket and strut along over here. I promise it will be a night to remember, not because I'm back in tightie-whities but because Vaginal only doles out the unforgettable.