Read Online Mature Themes by Andrew Durbin - Free Book Online

drawing and the feeling of it crashing down on him. Or perhaps, after a night out, I felt a little dizzy in the midst of so many uncrashed waves and when I looked at Ed I thought he must have felt small, like I felt small, under that frozen wave. It’s like wandering out into the ocean, to the point where the waves are so large that you have to duck down into the water to withstand their arrival at shore. Otherwise you’re knocked back with a mouthful of salt water. I recently read in a science magazine that the world transformed by inhospitable shifts in climate will be taken over by jellyfish, which is the most adept of any of us at handling an ocean at higher temperatures and decreased salinization. One night at the beach in southern California, I discovered in the waves this other, future ocean captive within the one at present, glittery in the vacuum of its false glamour, suggesting in the cloud of bright jellyfish glowing at the crest of each wave a coming world hallucinogenic in its gelatinous light, droning at sea, curtained in my presence by a diffuse electric air. It was unremarkable by nature, a zone relinquishing its hold on actual space, curtailed by boundaries that self-effaced, a residual empire of presence that wandered away, dissipating, but not without leaving behind the possibility of later return—as the whole world. I felt taxed of the energy to place myself within it, like thinking California might be different from any other place not-California, blasted into the continent, woods and oceans, resorts and plazas. In other works of Pettibon’s, Y’s rise into the language to interrupt meaning: increasing redundancy where it might be reduced, all over the walls and in the drawings, to a terse language that spells out hardship. Life fucks with people on a basic, immaterial level, leveling charges against them that float dreamily over or under the subject. A man running away: “I THOUGHT CALIFORNIA WOULD BE DIFFERENT.” A man stabbing another: “YOUR GIRLFRIEND CALLED ME CHICKEN.” A man and woman kissing: “I DON’T LOVE YOU ANYMORE.” A cat that has killed a rat: “I HAVE KILLED HIM FOR YOU, AND I’VE BROUGHT HIM TO YOU AS A REMINDER OF OUR OWN INEVITABLE SLIP INTO THE GREAT NOTHING.” Sobered by language, they hunch over or hold on to the most straightforward things, the things most immediately and obviously present, even if present things never settle down. A basketball player holds a gun and a ball: “DO YOU MIND IF I DUNK?” The white gallery, at one moment, became a lilac cube with me at its center, draped in the sleepier gradient of a late Saturday afternoon in fall. I imagined the basketball player standing beside me, loading the gun. A few nights later, Ed WeTransferred me Sir Drone , one of four of Pettibon’s VHS tapes he made in the 1990s, a film that stars Mike Kelley as a would-be punk rocker named Jinx trying to start a band called the Droners with his friend Dwayne. I WeTransferred the file to Zachary four days later while he was at work. Rather, I forwarded the WeTransfer Ed sent me to Zachary and asked him if that worked and it did. In her poem “Orange Roses,” Lucy says that she lent Zachary—the same Zachary—a book that she doesn’t expect to get back, though he returns it a month later. I am thrilled that I can lend him something and never worry about its return since its life in the cloud totally absolves us of all the guilty lender/borrower feeling of when should I ask for it back? when should I give it back? economy that’s totally a drag. It’s the same drag Jinx and Dwayne feel as they try to start a band and learn the complex vocabulary of punk rock, a visual and linguistic system that requires a certain aping with confidence, borrowing from it here and there, unsure of what, and how, to give back. I feel that. Friendship gets meted out in blood: Jinx and Dwayne give each other