MARCH 2024
claiming baggage thoughts on hospitality

compelling care immaculate bedside manner
the attic door left ajar the moths the bats all free
a shaft of day beating through
the pine more polished seeming brighter
crevices of dust cease their collection
smirking peach cobbler satisfied sitter
the butter melting creeping onto walls
into rotund dimples the bastion of privilege
clover shoved so far up my ass that I’m breathing lucky charms

It was spring for a second, there. And even though the tapping against the greyscale window is the torture of icy rain thrust forward by the whipping wind, just the taste of sun on the skin is enough to obliterate the delusion of eternal winter. The clock moves back, as it always does, and then there’s the craving for the supple sunsets of summer that soak into the concrete and the glass and somehow reinvigorate the landscape as if the monoliths of contemporary society are drinking the sky through a bendy straw. Even though I’m still rolling out of bed an hour or two after I had secretly hoped I would spring to life with conviction, the promise of momentum mutilates my face so that I’m grinning like a goofy puppy, knowing that my hunger for the day will materialize as the tulips do when numb fingers and woolen socks become a faint memory of life zooming past. But like, it’s about time—shaking off the duvet feathers that are gummed to my brain feels so damn good—and I don’t even need the Adderall ;)

I feel weird about how this is kinda becoming a food blog, but I guess that’s the exemplary pedigree of the place from which I’ve sprung, the justification of my artist life by subscribing to the romance of so many New York wannabes who are now glittering it-kids at galleries and theatres and Loewe fashion shows. My dad told me that I should always have a job on the side and because I never got the love I wanted from him, I’m still doing what he said I should lmfao. I think that would be an easy way of side-stepping accountability and traipsing around as the victim of some ill-fated childhood even though I had a playstation and an ipod. No, the tea is that I never really felt welcomed or a sense of belonging as a child, like some wayward stranger who needs to hitch a ride from the desolate, gravelly side-of-the-road, and I grappled ferociously with a sense of belonging that has shaded the corners of my life for as long as I can remember. And like any good meat-and-potatoes kid, I thought it would be possible to bridge that gap by providing others with an undying servitude I recognized was so vacant for me; that it would, like some investment banker dividends, come back to me like a well-calculated investment. But I see now that the reason that feeling was barely there for me was because there is an urgent lack of hospitality, an irreparable schism between wanting and receiving, that renders spaces impotent, violent. Sorry woke-sters !!! I’m not really getting the embodied feeling of identity politics painting spaces for queers as ‘safer’… we’re still tethered to the machine of progress, we’re still Futurists— only the paintings are more brightly-coloured and Rihanna is in them.  Real care has been lost in linguistics and individualism and the dream of something beyond ourselves that is achieved by barrelling forward at breakneck speed, shattering and tearing and annihilating the stakes of what it means to be like really fucking vulnerable and give what you’re asking for. Instead, we destroy the flowerbeds of coddled seedlings and wonder why we’re being berated when what we really want are tender kisses, we’ve adopted the language of the consumer but kept the soul of a poem-loving softy. Math not mathing !!!

I had some Chenin with friends (affluence boooots) and we got to talking about restaurants and I surprised myself by babbling on about the crisis of hospitality and my natural affinity to being a restaurant professional because there is potency in the experience of being a guest that excites me. I think that because dining is expensive, guests tend to carry with them an energy of entitlement and selective amnesia for the labour and conceptual rigor that pertains to making food, but also the work to make someone feel comfortable in a space that fulfills the real, real human need of sustenance under the auspices of contemporary capitalism. Even asking for others to feel comfortable in your own home is a gigantic task—imagine in a restaurant where you’re fully beefing with the owners because they see it as a business and you’re all like ~~it’s an experience~~? Maybe I’m stay-at-home-mom pilled, but has the notion of reciprocal comfort across spaces, and attention to the ways care differs across bodies, become a bygone pleasure that died with my great grandmother? It doesn’t make sense to be sitting in any space thinking that you’re going to be cared for if you’re not caring for those around you. Yeah, I know we’re all walking around with a fleet of baggage that makes us hostile and insecure and suspicious of good intentions, but criticism can be a love language that is often disguised as contempt. For me, I wonder about the volcano erupting inside that needs to cum magma all over to feel seen. sweetie, we see that ur a volcano and its okay !!!  If you’re holding people’s humanity against them when you feel inconvenienced, that’s low-key controlling behaviour and an unsustainable recipe for lasting resentment.

When was the last time you cared for no reason? it’s sexy. 

I also want to put an asterix here because I know I have feet of clay and venomous words sometimes, too. And that I have the joy of a partner who fills me up with so much love that I just want to bottle all the excess and give it away to passers-by, just so that they can glean a morsel of what I have. That I spend my nights explaining dishes, clearing tables, pouring wine, being attentive, bending over backward. When my best friends come to my house, there is a clean toilet and a hunk of prime beef and an immaculate curatorial attention paid to their experience. It’s not that I’m asking you to meet me there, it’s that I want everyone to be cared for. It’s glitching the system in a radical way that doesn’t wear the mask of rah-rah activism. It can be subtle and gentle and personal and worn just in time for spring. 

with love and a handful of wine glasses,

logi
xo

OCTOBER 2023
mutual care thoughts on enacting change

the destruction of disorder
reordering cleaning up
a large broom a large dustpan
a feast somewhere beyond the rain
wafting smells of butter piping hot potatoes
mistaken for steaming rain
illuminated by sun

hi again ;) It’s not that I ever left but writing for pleasure has almost felt like a dangerous act considering everything all the time. I’m post-dinner stuffed with the mounting realities of how untenable this life has become; and sometimes I think of the detritus and death and shit that probably covered everything in like the Middle Ages and how everything is ‘tucked away’ or anesthetized now as if it doesn’t exist or exists better. It’s clear to all of us that its simply not the case: atrocity and disease are still the physical-metaphorical-embodied realities of human existence and somehow the code hasn’t been cracked, we haven’t hacked the mainframe of the fallacy of contemporary life.

The skies are darkening and the leaves are pooling in the pavement holes and I’ve been up nights crying at the complex situation I find myself in and I wonder if you’re there, too? I am striving to find the softness of love and the potential for healing but I’m coming up short and I’m foaming at the mouth for anything I can blame. This was taught to me before I knew the potency of language and the potential for heartbreak and yet I persist in my programming. feet of clay alert !!! I guess I’m used to showing up for real for real when it’s not even asked of me because I feel like we deserve that, us humans. And I want a little bit of that back, you know? Show, don’t tell (pours one out for the theatre girls). I am making a backbreaking effort to understand that I am allowed to ask for care, not because I’m committed to showing it to others, but just because. Like, how have I never thought I deserved that? Rofl, tbh. I guess the demons are still there and they have this freaky way of following me and they’re here reminding me how much I’ve changed but how much I’m holding onto. Like how I could hurt so much because I am purportedly more stable or able to deal better? I don’t want to be reminded how hard it is to be me, I just want to be me without the noise of others’ trying to appease their unknowingness.

In my idea of a care-centric universe, tables are opened and food is prepared and conversations are had and hospitality is offered. It’s a mutual care system and it’s been so poorly maintained as such in the “western world” because restaurants are hostile and expensive and going home for the holidays is a turbulent psyco-drama fuelled by lost love and dysfunctional family histories. So when we go to the grocery store and spend a whole paycheque on basically nothing it transforms the communal what’s-mine-is-yours act of sharing into resource hoarding. And if something as simple as cooking for others is politicized through the jagged sieve of capitalist ethics it makes sense that there are no windows in our silos; we’ve gotta take care of us first.

If you know me, you know my table is always open and you’re probably gonna eat some dope food and drink wine that tastes like crispy raspberries. But I’ve been prioritizing the seats at my table to those who have complicated and prolific ties to the middle east and the conflict-war-genocide-geopolitics that have been going on for centuries, aggravated again by the bloodhungry. Gabriela and I have been colliding our multilayered POVs over chicken pot pie and stuffed pasta shells and scallops with artichokes, yet the situation eludes us; how can the succulent smells of privilege waft in front of us while thousands lose, while those close to us call us on the carpet to pick a side or post an infographic, while we’re watching a heinous play from the plush seats of our well-fed high horses? It’s not that we don’t spend our time in a chamber of moderately concerning depression or triple check the news we consume, it’s that we’re trying to find the balance of a mutual care system that provides justice and comfort for all humans in a whirlpool of violence enacted across all bodies.  The algorithm excels at consistency but sometimes we wake up angry or we wake up with snow white’s bluebirds and where does all of it go? I feel like too-dry dough crumbling at any opportunity to stand firm in my ability to enact fundamental change.

I’ve become really scared of virtue signalling and the tendrils of its insidiousness and the way we can lay claim to looking away by not pointing to what we wished we could change. I’ve spent all this time being a curatorial bitch and then the social elides with the aesthetic and I’m left reeling from my vapid identity expression. Really I just want to run as far away from the torpor of Farmville by creating a glossy image that helps me rest better at night because at last !!! I’ve escaped the clutches of tractors and pitchforks and I have ~social capital~ now. Am I a slacktivist????

I want self-love first. Then I want to give it to others; radically.

sad but hopeful,

logi
xo

JULY 2023
toxic generosity thoughts on giving and taking

the horse is right there
waiting for you to get in the saddle
chewing on grass and gleaming in the pink sun of the early morning

patiently waiting for you to roll around in the mud
and the dandelion pollen and the shit left by other horses
climb back up !!!

I think I’m still fixated on this idea of a horse being the ultimate symbol of a better life, how they trot off into the sunset and bring you somewhere better. Like the minute the horse disappears over the hill and out of the frame, they’re somehow moving away from where they were and never to return.

I worked with Jill after some profound stuff happened in my personal life and I was worried that I might slip back into a state of shivery dissonance and blow the whole thing up. It didn’t help that I read her work and felt massively unequipped to meet her genius. But we sat on the rubbery floors of the studio theatre and she knit a complicated web of support and imagination that fostered my belief in myself and art and what being trusted in collaboration is like. And while the work required the physical presence of a horse, its tangibility fostering the unfolding narrative, its allegorical raison d’être filled us all up beyond the confines of the theatre and globbed onto what was lurking beyond. In the fables of yore, the horse is a device for riding off into the sunset, a better life beyond the vanishing horizon, but Jill knew better than to pedestalize anything and instead ripped holes in the fallacy to reveal the deeper need to believe in something beyond our physical selves.

Some of us were born into families where moral suppositions took precedent over identifying and fulfilling our basic personal needs, to the point where even knowing what you needed was a foreign body attempting to penetrate the carefully anesthetized ecosystem of ‘right’ and ‘wrong.’ Spoiler: I’m no exception !!! What quelled my anxiety of being a faggot was being in service to the needs of others, to the point that I began to hurt people when I couldn’t show up for them in the way I had always vowed I would. That hurts though, doesn’t it? When you learn to rely on someone and they pull away because they were just looking for the validation of saving the day and not invested in your own personal well-being?

There’s been a lot of buzzing going on in my brain about consideration and sharing space in conversation. I feel like I’ve been on the end of situations that centre around repeating the same old mistakes, reinforcing a relationship pattern by lending an ear, but I’m like lowkey wondering when the conversation will shift to reflect all the bodies in the space. why you not ask about me????? It’s the cross-section of our realities, an interest in mutual care, that I open and expand and collaborate to strengthen the connective tissue of human relation.

I guess what I’m trying to grapple with are the costumes and the residues that accumulate onto the concept of generosity and my whacked-out brain is finding revelation in every corner I peek. It’s easy to say don’t give to get but, particularly in the stages of late capitalism and the boomers screaming at us that we’re some sort of human-turned-emotional-leech generation(Z), the divisibility between the two modalities seems like some sort of paradox. Beyond the validation and the ego and doing the ‘right’ thing, what does the giver really get? And, do those who find themselves continually receiving carry the burden of their dependence? While I’m lying there in (incessant) meditation asking for the capacities of allowing, I can’t help but wonder who is going to balance this cosmic deliverance by having to give again?

Sara says that we deep feelers need to be more bad [...] that being bad can look like resisting the mistaken belief that we need to justify or absolve instead of feel the thing. And I feel like that totally slaps because for me, not laying out the crystal and the porcelain and rubbing callouses with pillowy-soft aesop is like some sort of bad boy thing that I’ll be punished for or I won’t be seen as perfect or considerate. Perfection is so lonely; when no one has anything to reproach you for and you’re collecting all this data of what you perceive people need, you get watered down and forget that you’re a beautiful, complicated matrix of wants and needs and sometimes that shit is going to be messy, it’s going to feel like you’re being bad. Go off, Sara !!!

For now, I’m going to champion the horse for its capacity to modulate between beast and beacon, just like me and you.

perpetually over-thinking,

logi
xo

JUNE 2023
replenishing the vessel thoughts on romance

grey violet light the phosphorescent sky
creased canvas cotton from the rain
carrying a few bundles of leeks
some herbs kept together with twine
soaking wet
through the thistle-thick field

the glass in his hands resplendent
brings to his lips to drink the wine

This project is called recline because I think it’s compelling to imagine lying back in a chair and just letting things happen for a little while. I like to dream of this as a practice, the hyperbolic refusal to assign finality to an ever-changing exploration of creative energy.

I’m surprised by how hugely vulnerable it is to put your thoughts into words and then here—so there’s that. There’s also the deep internal programming/paradigm of appearing smart and poised so that this has some sort of deeper meaning or an impact on my future as a creative or whatever. So that’s me acknowledging that this is weird but also humbled by your presence here, taking out the tablecloth and laying treats before you, feasting on this moment together. My desire for this space is for illegible feeling to give way to form equally incomplete, grappling and not making sense sometimes, indulging in the busted half-thoughts about how we connect with each other. I’m down for sharing this space as an opening toward being that forgoes gaining anything beyond just an impetus to think and be and writhe. I’m not making this for a publication deal and I’m not trying to speak from a pedestal. I’m basically still a baby and I just want to try and understand.

I’ve been thinking about the ease with which the moment slips by and returns as an apparition, a wishing, how time spent in hopeful anticipation of another ‘now’ is squandered gratitude. And maybe this lies couched in the earmarked pages of the occult literature dotted through my home and brain and body, but there’s something to grasp onto in the simplest terms of being present. The enmeshment of our anxieties into our being and sensing the everyday coddles a desire for another place maybe, where we won’t be fettered by the weight of ourselves, or a hypothetical (and fundamentally impossible) cartwheel into a future where we can be thankful those days are behind us and cheers! to the things that we learned. But maybe learning (I’m into destabilizing the contemporary education complex) could smoothen the staccato of the disembodied process of nowness, could bend the exhausting reminder to return to now when you’re already investing in then. Why are we always trying to get back to now when we’re already there ??? Max called it salt in the wound: the process of taking accountability for our behaviour in space and our ability to be with each other and say ~hey lets both come here with our capacities to be caring humans~ But I think we could agree that conceptual walls transport us away from here and leave us floating in the endless potentials of our imagined, desired, other-than selves. Escapism slaps!

It's kind of freaky to think about creativity as a form of escapism because for me it’s such an integral part of keeping the lifeblood pumping.  The stream has been a little dry lately in the sense that I’m not producing a project or developing a practice that has a kinetic-becoming-actual energy. The winds are blowing me into incubation and contemplation and the excess of feelings that have always come with getting involved in making and doing—resentment, feeling not enough, spread so thin you could snap, longing for a restful end—are so potently misaligned that it’s disorienting to think that what you love so much is driven by feelings of unworthiness. I’m addicted to seeing myself as a person who doesn’t achieve what they envision, a victim to all these fake-ass roadblocks to being fulfilled. It’s giving mommy issues !!! But if the intergenerational trauma is real then this pause for thought seems like a potential salve to a long-opened wound given to me before I knew it was infected. It’s hard to remember that momentum is not an always-already steadily climbing phenomenon but stops and starts and leaves messy entrails of tire tracks all over the sun-soaked asphalt. I wonder who else is grappling with reorganizing their attachment to their creative practice and whether those feelings of inadequacy have long-term effects, who else is screaming for their turn at lobotomization? I’m here if you wanna talk <3

There’s a consensus that things are getting a little too real, that maybe all the access we have to information and the covert performance of interconnection is a powder keg. It’s like being alive fell to the bottom of a constructed hierarchy of contemporary life and things like property and equity and access are what have graciously allowed our survivance and for that, we must be dutiful. So, it’s not that much of a stretch to hope for history repeating itself (doesn’t it always?) and something like a return to Romanticism befalls us. It’s facile to position the turn of the 19th century as a flouncy-sleeved rendezvous in the whippoorwills for late-night Dionysian tendencies, but it does sounds awfully luscious to evade the barrage of atrocious, panic-inducing realities of what it means to simply survive. The sensual, embodied truth of our need for pleasure, indulgence, nourishment, beauty, relaxation, ease; the opportunity to bask in the potential for creativity to be a vital nutrient rather than an appendage to those who have positioned culture as an industry. I know there’s some side eye too because what, are we going to ignore the mounting political tensions and socio-cultural blunders of our flawed present by aestheticizing and poeticizing?

I know love is waiting around all sorts of corners and when it finds us, I think it challenges us to take pause and collect what we bring and sort through it carefully. When we can leave what doesn’t belong to us alone and nurture the honeyed joys of who we are and how we light up the damn room it’s addictive !!! My eyes are supple and my kinks are massaged and my body finds calm. I take pause for the vines growing on old brick, and the peeling vinyl off bygone shop windows, and water-stained paper because I wonder what they were when they were something else and if they would ask me the same.

This week we see the most sunlight than any other time of the year
get it shawty !!!

fumbling but loving it,

logi
xo