I’m beginning to remember how to live seasonally. Summer is funny — occluded. A few days in a row I took the train to Brighton Beach and its waveless waters. Swimming I imagine the runoff, the strains of pollutants wound together in this invisible porous carrier. I keep my lips tightly closed. The heat makes everything bleed into everything else. The world is pungent. After swimming, I eat an Uzbek dumpling near two Russian men listening to songs on their cellphone and drinking vodka in plastic cups. This city impresses me with its inconsistencies. 

A stranger says that the summation of a memory and the construction of an imagined image are the same physical process in the brain. Then he projects me into all of his memories of direct actions resisting the 2012 University of California tuition hikes. Your face, he says, it is in the tents, it's on the picket line, it's driving the bus for jail support. We talk about Joshua Clover and Angie makes a case for pure commitment to revolutionary struggle in defiance of tempering realities. Then she shifts gears, and says, don’t hate me but poetry needs to be subjected to market forces.

I just finished reading Joseph Conrad’s 1907 novel “The Secret Agent,” which tells the story of a young man who incessantly fantasizes about blowing up the Greenwich Observatory, to which 98% of public clocks in the UK were once standardized, and thus “explode time”. If you’ve been feeling like a loser lately, Terrence tells me, you should listen to The Blueprint by Jay Z. 

I talk to Kevin and he tells me that it’s hopefulness we’re suffering from. Tess teaches me about acoustic palimpsests. I confess a fear of discontinuity in the dark of the woods. That’s what we’re losing, Kevin is insisting: the future as a time that hasn't happened yet. 

“Ted was always rushing into the hotel with some raw, bemused young man, demanding that we should jointly 'take him on.' We always did. During those two years, he rescued a dozen butterflies, all of whom had an amused and affectionate respect for him. He was collectively in love with them. He changed their lives. After the war, in England, he kept in touch, made them study, directed them into the Labour Party — by then he was no longer a communist; he saw to it that they did not, as he put it, hibernate.”

— The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing

At the N+1 party I get the sense that everyone has slept together, a tense drunk-too-early feeling alighted. This is later confirmed. As I drank to match the disjointed unease I became imbricated with a group of Italians who switched rapidly between their native language and English, pronounced with a British accent. After we separate they'll send me photographs of the doorframes of their next four parties. Find us, I read it with the accent. 

I tell someone really beautiful that I used to be married and she shrieks: “chic, chic,” jumping up and down and then, “a divorce”. It reminds me of a passage from Orhan Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence, where his morose protagonist drinks spritz after spritz at a social club on the Bosphorus, ashing cigarettes into the silk table cloth.  

During my three years in the Bay Area I enjoyed a comfortable remove. Now in New York, I’m in the algorithm — subjected to my own homophilic fields. I’m routed through the city against my will, surprised to find myself with the same people, at the same bars, weekend after weekend. 

Margaret Kilgallen Series: Part 3

For a little while in college I was sleeping with a graduate student who was obsessed with graffiti. I think he works for Ted Talks now. He had a biblical name, which I liked, and the most muscular body I’ve ever seen up close, which I found disturbing. 

He was smart, and he’d go on and on about the subterranean potential of illicit mark-making to rethink boundary in an urban landscape. I wanted to get it, I really did, but my mind always flashed to a YouTube video of 12-year-old Harmony Korine skateboarding near the Villancourt fountain, skinning his knee while friends scratched their names into glass windows. “Yeah, isn’t it just like, boy stuff?” The graduate student would respond to my doubts with a dismay abutting pity. 

I must be partially drawn to Margaret Kilgallen because she was inside and outside of that world. A part, but set off, much like the traveling musicians, train-riders and outsider artists she admired. Surveying the edge of a scene. Brave enough for sincerity.

Margaret Kilgallen in Tokyo, at the opening of “Do Drop In/Not Here Please” (2000). Photos by Cheryl Dunn

Inspired by her neighborhood in San Francisco, a center for mural painting and hand-lettering, Kilgallen often painted outside. She biked everywhere, worked at the public library and refused to use even the simplest technology in her practice, insisting instead on the formal residue of a person’s hand evident in their work.

“I like things that are handmade,” Kilgallen said in an Art21 interview, “That’s where the beauty is.”

In a stylized serif font “slow as molasses” arcs over a laconic woman with downcast eyes that — though rendered in Margaret Kilgallen’s graphic style — afford a wounding realism. Painted directly on the gallery wall, this piece from Kilgallen’s contribution to “Widely Unknown,” a show at Deitch Gallery, mimics her style of painting outdoors, on public walls. I don't think it should be called graffiti. 

Margaret Kilgallen's outdoor paintings help us think about recuperation. About the gap between how San Francisco looked through Kilgallen’s eyes and what technological progressives imagined it would be — her's grafted over. It could be called nostalgia, but I can't stop returning to this gesture of refusal. Her insistence on a fundamentally different way of interacting with public space, one that engages the physical as a site of open, active contention against the coming tide of similitude, the digital's dislocation. 

Seven years ago I gave my 1991 Honda Civic to a fashion student named Axel. Recently repainted.