Anyone know where my installation’s supposed to go?”

“Seth might.”

“Which one’s Seth? Hi. Are you Seth? Are you Seth?”

“Seth’s in the bathtub.”

“Installing his piece.”

“It’s about Dylan Thomas.”

“Who used to live here.”

This is three o’clock on a Friday afternoon in Suite 1024 of the Hotel Chelsea which is an old red-brick on 23rd with iron balustrade and high school hallways and hostel firedoors and long-stay resident artists and layers and layers of paint that remind you, as does everyone you talk to, that the hotel has seen layers and layers of artso: Janis Joplin, Bob Dylan, Robert Mapplethorpe, a bevy of Andy Warhol girls, Sid Vicious, Arthur C. Clarke, Patti Smith, Leonard Cohen. Dylan Thomas. Suite 1024 is currently layered matte red, and serving at trim, a dozen late-twenty-somethings prepping for the DeSiRe exhibition, a showing of 25 emergent New-York based artists. Tonight, the suite will buzz with the artists, their plus-two’s, and supposedly, apparently, theoretically, hopefully, a press contingent. Tomorrow, all the friends and curious eyes 25 emergent artists can Facebook invite. But now, four hours before the big unveil, they work in quiet pre-show fremitus, everyone just trying to get their installations installed, everyone asking for Seth Embry.

Paul Baribeau covering Leonard Cohen’s Chelsea Hotel #2:

Who is not in the bathtub. Embry, the show’s ombudsman-omegaman, is in the reception room and the bedroom and the bedroom closets and the bathroom and the kitchenette. Black t-shirt with white horizontal stripes. Jean shorts rolled up above the knees. Arms akimbo. A quiet voice and a wry smile that hangs just very slightly at the side of his mouth. Seth Embry, by day a store designer, is in the bedroom where two women are arranging their clothing line on the bed, an assortment of animal fur and transparent lace. Nearby, a water jug sits on the nightstand. In it, something that looks very much like a bull penis. It is a turkey neck but it still looks like a bull penis even after you’ve been told. The dresser has been repurposed: two face molds sit atop, crying nail tears while plaster body parts scrabble their way out of the drawers. One of the women places on the pillow a plaster sculpture of a hand fingering the spread lips of a vulva, hesitates, repositions it.

Seth Embry, who on Facebook lists his UF ’04 college majors as Architecture, German, and Avant-Garde Partytime, is in each bedroom closet, overseeing hands ropebound downward in prayer and gothic bodypart miniatures in formaldehyde jars.

Seth Embry is in the reception room with a woman in army fatigues and biceps and triceps to match who is leaning over the coffeetable fitting footlong glass eyelets together. “They’re like, giant needles,” she is saying to an artist who calls himself Luke Harms, who is watching, grinning, a small duffle bag in one hand. Inside the bag, waiting for the right moment to emerge: polymer clay monster golem figurines. With his other hand, Harms polishes a small hexagonal showcase. Nothing like sebum to shine up an exhibit.

Seth Embry is at the corner table discussing a dinner scene installation with artist Sara Jackson. “It has a story behind it,” beams Jackson, hands hugging her sheer black dress. The scene consists of two candleholders which are plaster mutant-robot hand candleholders complete with eggshell skin, plus two soup bowls filled with hardened resin and chicken feet frozen in time. Jackson overturns a water goblet to complete the scene. During the course of the next two nights Jackson will tell the story of the mutant-robot uprising to varying degrees of detail, but now she tells Seth only the thirty-second version. The robot-factory workers, in the middle of chicken foot dinner, realize the robots are rebelling and rush out of the room. As we look at the upturned scene, the realization manifests: we are the mutant robots.

Seth Embry is rolling up the floor rug. On the floor, photographer Elizabeth Raab peels plastic backing off frames for two large portraits of large women, one in samurai garb, the other costumed as a medieval brunehilde. Both women’s gargantuan breasts spill out of their clothing in epic white voluptuousness. “These are big women…beautiful big women,” explains Raab. “So it takes a little Photoshop to get their skin like that.”

Seth Embry is answering a knock at the door. In the doorway, a huge canvas just barely covered by a queen-sized bedsheet. Eyes akimbo, Seth takes in the giant veiled canvas. Somewhere behind it, in dark jeans, flannel, and boots, is the artist.

“Hey! Nick Courage!”

“Hey! Seth Embry!”

“Okay! Let’s see it.” Nick Courage’s canvas will be the largest of the exhibit and as such, it gets one of the few nails in the hotel wall. Most of the other “flat media” will be arranged on chairs, the couch, the floor.

Courage steps into the suite. Undresses the canvas. On it, in heavily textured acrylic, is a cartoon-style girl with cat whiskers sipping a juice bottle through a crinkle straw against a black background with the words “hyper-chouette” rainbowing out from cartoon cat-girl’s head. Nick and Seth heft the canvas to the wall, trying to maneuver around the couch until someone says it’d be a lot simpler if someone moved the couch, which someone does, and Nick and Seth work on getting the canvas balanced on the existing nail. It slips to the right. To the left. Refuses to be still.

“This is rather inexplicable,” says Seth, as they slide the canvas back and forth along the wall. They take the canvas back down, think.

“Mind if I veil the canvas?” says Nick. Sara Jackson is still standing by her mutant-robot scene. Luke Harms still hasn’t unzipped the golem bag. Elizabeth Raab isn’t quite looking at anyone. The artists talk as they work, but they don’t talk about art. If I didn’t know better, I’d say they were intentionally avoiding it. In a few hours, the artists will shift into show-mode: Be witty! Be sharp! Be weird! Be interesting! Sara Jackson will tell the five-minute version of the mutant robot uprising. Elizabeth Raab won’t talk about photoshopping obese beauty; she’ll explain the anti-heteronormative stance of her photographic aesthetic. Courage’s canvases will be unabashedly unveiled. Everyone will be taking photo and video and wallowing in historicity. But right now, even though it is a roomful of artists, there are no egos on display, you don’t hear the “Well, I went to art school, so–” or “That’s a nice hobby. For you” or the feigned interest and feinted compliments that you’ll hear plenty during the show. In fact, very little of anything feels artso. In this moment, the artist is simply a technician.

Seth Embry is looking down at Nick, who is bent over the floor, pounding wire higher into the “hyper-chouette” frame. Hammer blows echo along the wood floor.

“Um, Nick.” The corner of Seth’s mouth is concerned. “We have to be extremely careful here about…It’s just the noise is…I don’t want to–”

“Oh, sure. Right. What if I wrap the hammer in like, flannel?”

A sudden crash of glass. Seth whips around. The woman in army fatigues leans over the coffee table, wincing. “Glass on glass has a tendency to be problematic.”

Seth says nothing. The corner of his mouth tightens uncomfortably. “Okay. I’m gonna work on my installation. God. I haven’t eaten anything all day.”

“Are you Seth?”

Seth turns around. A woman—mid 40s, the oldest artist in the show—is facing Embry. Is in Embry’s face. She wears a loose fitting, well-worn black dress. No bra. She has an imperious mien. She wants to know who’s in charge. Apparently there has been some mix up. There had been emails that clearly stated she was in the exhibit but this is news to Seth. Seth looks happy to accommodate, less happy about how he’s being spoken to.

“So can I set up my exhibit?”

“The thing is—”

“It goes in the toilet.” And it really does. Feathers. Lining the toilet bowl. And a handwritten sign: “Guys – Please sit to pee – do not lift the rim – Thanks –” This is the only part of the installation visible to the naked eye. “You’re supposed to pee on the feathers,” she explains. Tomorrow, the toilet bowl will be a mix of urine and toilet paper and feathers. It will be an easy installation to dispose.

“The problem is,” Seth begins, quietly reasserting his role, “my installation goes in the tub and I’m gonna to have to get all up in there to put it together and you probably don’t want me climbing all over what you’re doing.”

Embry’s exhibit is a canvas painted in geometric whites and blacks. That goes in the tub. Thick black yarn spiders out from the vents and to the floor, taped with electricians’ tape. It is intended evoke the ghost of Dylan Thomas, who died while a resident at the Chelsea, whose presence, Embry explains, still lingers in the walls and pipes. The artist with the toilet installation has no choice but to wait.

Which in the end isn’t a problem. In the end, with time to spare, the artists’ exhibits have come together. In the end, the cat-girl is staying put on the wall, big beautiful brunehilde is framed, the fingerbanged vulva is properly positioned, the golem figurines are in their hand-shined case, the feathers are in the toilet, the mutant robot uprising is complete, and Dylan Thomas wafts from the vents. There’s even a time for a beer run.

All that’s left, now, is the show.

(Chicken Feet photo by Lauren Jacobs)

• Group Show w/ Courage @ Chelsea Hotel
• AMR Podcast #30 – Be Your Own Tony Robbins
• Film: Just One Thing (A Brooklyn Short)

• Art News: Anticipating Desire
• AMR Podcast #33 – “Leadership, Finally,” Says My Corpse
• AMR Podcast #32 – The Rule Against Quoting Joan Didion

Click here to listen to AMR Podcast #33 – “Leadership, Finally,” Says My Corpse

• AMR Podcast #28 – Zombie Contingency Plan
• AMR Podcast #32 – The Rule Against Quoting Joan Didion
• AMR Podcast #31 – Repeat Twice for Full Effect (NSFW-ish)

Click here to listen to AMR Podcast #32 – The Rule Against Quoting Joan Didion

• RT: first twitter-based poetry book on sale now!
• Tweet, Tweet: a mysticotelegraphic fistbump panegyric to the american open road odyssey
• AMR Podcast #30 – Be Your Own Tony Robbins

Click here to listen to AMR podcast #31 – Repeat Twice for Full Effect (NSFW-ish)

• AMR Podcast #33 – “Leadership, Finally,” Says My Corpse
• AMR Podcast #32 – The Rule Against Quoting Joan Didion
• AMR Podcast #30 – Be Your Own Tony Robbins

Click here to listen to AMR Podcast #30 – Be Your Own Tony Robbins

• AMR Podcast #32 – The Rule Against Quoting Joan Didion
• Art News: Anticipating Desire
• AMR Podcast #33 – “Leadership, Finally,” Says My Corpse

Click here for AMR podcast #29 – Mark Fullmer Grows in Brooklyn

Jacques Lacan in One Minute, by Mark Fullmer:

• AMR Podcast #32 – The Rule Against Quoting Joan Didion
• AMR Podcast #30 – Be Your Own Tony Robbins
• AMR Music Month: Beijing Welcomes You

Context: A couple weeks back, as I sat transcribing the lyrics for “Beijing Huan Ying Ni,” my mp3 player got stuck on “Bleeker Street,” a Simon & Garf. number from their pre folk-rock phase (and did you know folk-rock wasn’t even really their idea?). Well techically, I got my mp3 player stuck on it, but the point is I found a new appreciation for the song’s simple intricacy. The counterpoint melodies weaving back and forth above and below each other. The subdominant-to-mediant suspensions. Funny how it doesn’t sound nearly as nice when you put it into technical terms. Anyway. I figured I could write something like that. So I did, recorded it, listened to it, and promptly concluded that I liked the original song far better. Thus this cover, born’d.

• Art News: Anticipating Desire
• Film: Just One Thing (A Brooklyn Short)
• AMR Podcast #33 – “Leadership, Finally,” Says My Corpse

Context:
I’ll be leaving for China in June for 2 years to serve in the Peace Corps. So. There you go.

The song title translates as “Beijing welcomes you,” and I think this is sort of the Chinese equivalent of “It’s a Small World.” It was composed for the 2008 Olympics and famously sung by 100 of China’s biggest celebrities, including Wang Lee Hom, Zhou Bichang, Karen Mok, Jang Nara, Li Yuchun, Zhang Zilin and yes, Jackie Chan. Apparently everyone in China knows it. It’s a catchy tune and good Mandarin practice, and I like to think of the lyrics as a good omen for my journey.

Lyrics (Transcribed):

• AMR Podcast #29 – Mark Fullmer Grows in Brooklyn
• Art News: Anticipating Desire
• Film: Just One Thing (A Brooklyn Short)

Context:
The musical inspiration for “Po. Man’s Blues” came mostly from The Beatles’ “Dizzy Miss Lizzy”, with a dash of Sammy Davis Jr’s version of “Have a Little Talk with Myself”. Personally, the most enjoyable part of recording the thing was laying down the bass line. I would’ve thrown in a few rockabilly screams but I really didn’t want to concern my landlord who was next door painting. The lyrics began with trying to figure out how to avoid a mess of tired similes and the concept just got worse from there:

I’ve got another tired simile
It’s like a barren tree
I’ve got another tired simile
It’s like a dried up sea
Oh why, oh why can’t somebody put me out of my misery

Why doesn’t nothing rhyme with orange,
The closest I’ve come is ‘Mormons’
Why doesn’t nothing rhyme with orange
The next closest word is porridge
Oh my, oh my it’s like tryin to rhyme the color purple

I need one more line for my stanza
It’s bout an alien extravaganza
I need one more line for my stanza
…
Oh why, oh why …

I’ve got too many frickin syllables
To make my poem chug along
I’ve got too many frickin syllables
What I need to say is just to long
Well my words are too big because I’ve got to much to say
Something’s got to give I guess I should write an essay
Oh my, oh my I’ve got too many fricking syllables

I’ve got the po man’s blues
My poetry is blue
I’ve got the po man’s blues
I’m done for through and through
Oh my oh my oh my I’ve got the po man’s blues

• AMR Music Month: “The Crusades” (Dalai Lama via David Lynch)
• Art News: Anticipating Desire
• Film: Just One Thing (A Brooklyn Short)

Context:
Ever since I was a kid, I always wondered what a David Lynch film about the Dalai Lama would be like. This is my musical realisation of that film.

I suppose the composition also has a personal meaning, as it imbricates three spiritualities I’ve dabbled with (in?) over the years.

The texts:
“Nam myoho renge kyoho” — Nichiren

“Door of my heart open wide I keep for thee” — Paramahansa Yogananda

“Dona nobis pacem” — Latin liturgy

• AMR Music Month: “Po’ Man’s Blues”
• Art News: Anticipating Desire
• Film: Just One Thing (A Brooklyn Short)

Context:

Back when I was in grad school–near the end, clearly, when all of us second-years were a bit slap happy from postcolonial hybridity and the fictive imago–a murder of us flocked to our T.A. offices in a solemn effort to compile the most heady canon ever conceived by literary scholars. Hours we should have been scanning Pope and Donne and performing dizzingly rhizomatic readings of Irish brothel music we gave up to ProQuest, to WorldCat, even to the lofty MLA Bibliography–all for this very list.

We called it “Acadaemia’s Sexiest Theorists.”

We never really finished the thing–an impossible task?–but the person I personally put at the top inspired this song.

• AMR Podcast #29 – Mark Fullmer Grows in Brooklyn
• Art News: Anticipating Desire
• Film: Just One Thing (A Brooklyn Short)

This one’s a laffer for all you pre-Valentine’s day <3 birds, lyrics after the jump:

Click to hear “My love,” by Mark Fullmer

Quick Housekeeping: All you folks participating in AMR music month, send me your mp3s! I just remedied my own recording situation so will start posting Courage tracks over the weekend, but so far Mark’s leading the convoy. Or, you know, whatever.

Context:

“I hadn’t at all expected to get to my second song on the list this soon, but after I got home from this Thai cafe I found myself playing around with ye ol’ guitar of yore and, well, this is what came out. I originally wrote the lyrics as a poem, back in those highfalutin grad school days. I sent it out to the literati, the intelligentsia, the hoi AND the poloi. One friend, a girl, a grad school buddy who shall remain nameless, wrote back something like “Please don’t send me stuff like this again. Ever.” So now I find myself putting it to music. Anyway. The chorus came first (from a tidbit I was humming on the way home today) and the verses followed pretty intuitively. -M”

Lyrics:

My love, my love, my love, my love
My love, my love, my love, my love

My love, you are like a lovely flower,
Whose fragrance lasts until it wilts
And turns all yellow and dry
And bugs devour it, slowly.

My love, you are like Spring showers,
Dropping in just when things are looking up,
Wetting all over the place,
Causing worms to surface
And car accidents.

My love, you are like the summer sun,
Which feels good when it first touches me,
But soon, if I’m around for more than
Fifteen minutes without sunscreen,
Turns my skin pink and raw and rashy,
And poses the danger of melanoma.

My love, you are like the autumn leaves,
Which, as Time passes,
Sag and shrivel and fall, barren,
To the ground, for me to rake
Into black plastic trash bags, again and again.

My love, you are like the winter wind,
From which my appendages turn blue
And painful, and get frostbite,
And fall from my body with a tinkle.

My love, you are like a letter,
Which I send to the electric company,
Explaining why I was late for last months’ bill
And surely you must have no heart if you turn the
Electricity off on a guy because his girlfriend
Spent the money on tampons.

My love, you are like a melody
Which the Bush administration blasted
For a week straight through monstrous
Stereospeakers outside Manuel Noriega’s compound
Until he gave up, defeated, sleepless, insane.

My love, you are like a broken toaster oven.
My love, you are like a gangrenous pustule.
My love, you are like Love.

• AMR Music Month, Track 1
• RT: first twitter-based poetry book on sale now!
• AMR Podcast #32 – The Rule Against Quoting Joan Didion

The first installment of AMR Music Month, an updated version of the cover song you may remember resonating so profoundly with me in a previous post. Without repeating myself, this version – this version is darker and more hopeful, which seems like an impossibility, but never underestimate escape. It’s also more of a palimpsest. There’s some Plath, I think some Hemingway (?), an unmistakable Ginsberg. Definitely, in any case, a textured yearning, an almost – appropriately – ecclesiastical meditation reverberating with best-of-Tarantino atmosphere. For completists, the spoken word bit at the end is from a poem in Mr. Feather’s Flies Again, “PhDville burnt down”.

Liner notes, care of Mark: “This was put down over three states — the guitar and main vocals in CA, the poetry additions and harmonies in AZ, the final mastering in NM (one time zone closer to Brooklyn).”

Addenda: Mark is currently making his way eastward from California en route, ultimately, to China for two years. The catalyst in the crucible of this particular cover, I think. Relatedly: Last night, before Mark sent this on, I was watching a BBC documentary on China and thinking vaguely about Mark’s future life there. Today an editor friend sent me a picture of one of our authors with Quincy Jones’ daughter – whats-her-name – and my immediate Rorschach reaction to their admittedly impressive foreheads was “the limestone mountains of Hunan” and, of course, Mark among them.

Which feels reflected here, everything all together – the tension between self-mythology and mounting history, the impossible abnegation of a primetime oversoul that recognizes itself in world wonders and facebook doppelganger shots. Sort of the opposite, really, of the solipsistic original (in the player at right as “younger”).

Also see: Mark’s take on MarkFullmer.com

Related:

Friend of a Friend Interview: Mark Fullmer

“The Right Shadow Spoke”: A Facebook App Novel Shout-out

Tweet, Tweet: A mysticotelegraphic fistbump panegyric to the American open road odyssey

• AMR Music Month – “My Love”
• mr. feathers flies again (2006)
• RT: first twitter-based poetry book on sale now!

I work in publishing where we’re always talking about harnessing “New Media” and a nowhere lit. e-zine just became a major player because they tweeted a short story – badly. This is pretty much the most fun thing I’ve seen in a while, and the least specious re: actually utilizing new media (not counting “Mr. Plimpton’s Revenge: A Google Maps Essay”).

But unlike “Plimp’s Revenge” this is a whole novel: serialized and super-fun – launched on David Lynch’s birthday, 1337 (pronounced: “leet”, for I guess my octogenarian demo) has a sort of William Gibson down the rabbit hole meets Cory Doctorow in Little Brother feel to it. I hope you give it a chance, because I <3 this stuff. And while you're at it, check out the context, both wiki – linked – and “developer website“, which is extensive and more Hackers than Hackers. This, folks, is Mark Fullmer Overdrive.

• AMR Podcast #32 – The Rule Against Quoting Joan Didion
• AMR Podcast #29 – Mark Fullmer Grows in Brooklyn
• AMR on Facebook [Update]