New York Onanism in Three Parts

"Central Park"

Fall is the preferred season of New Yorkers. I conducted an informal survey of locals who wagged their middle digits to appropriate their answers. I stepped out into the breach of footpaths and saw the latticework of trees with branches waving the tresses of their dying adornments which were going malbec in the cold.

Fall is decay and we love our decay. We are here for it; we corroborate in a yearly plot against sunlight because we are ready to deprive ourselves of the false and imprecise beatitudes, the valhalla mechanisms that divert us from the subterfuge.

"Portrait of Asian Photographer"

We can both see beauty and mock it simultaneously, we are walking gumchewers, text-fingered acrobats, we are the blase caricatures offered in service of our own onanism.

Here is our climax, here we deny ourselves everything, the comfort of extended space, the sweaters of solvency, the omniscience of man, the omnipotence of deity, we are the ascetics of Western excess until we aren't.

"New York Philharmonic"

And when we aren't. Here is us coming. Here is us at our zenith, red-faced flushed, hands gripping bed sheets, the soiling of puritanical success, our white picket fences are metal gates awash in semen. We carry through music, we have moments of silences, we mourn noise when its gone, we split the boughs, the clicking of our urgencies collide in the most emptying ways. We carry through music in high places.

"Push-Ups, Post-Philharmonic Subway Ride"

We carry through music underground. Strangers grunt in effect of strength, every remarkable attribute of the individual, within a block, can be outshown, measureless talent can be made impotent, stellar beauty can be made inconsequential, towers of strength humble in the most venal of collapses.

"Broken Social Scene at Brooklyn Masonic Temple"

We carry music through our temples and fixtures. We crowd a small home and build an altar, we tarry along the bar lines and swell in speaker, we shrink in apertures, we blink in flashes, we blur into focus, we deny-deny-deny so that we may come and spill ourselves like paint sprayed across tile, a steeple into irked firmament, we deny so that we may come and spill ourselves.

"Krishnas in Crocs, Post-Masonic Temple Subway Ride"

We crowd a small home and build an altar. We twist out of our denial and decay into the fuses to enkindle an unmet boundary, a mortality taunting us, we seek to make immortals mortal, to sever the continuum, to burnish the structure with our imprint, to be scaffolds which appear on the blocks here in a sudden moment and stay until wrenched like wishbones and then flexed -- off into different hauntings.