die edelfäule

I am a person who is jazzed about her friends. With a chest-bursting sense of pride, I’ll sometimes regard them for a moment objectively and think, who could be so lucky as to know so many talented and interesting people? ME, THAT’S WHO! And part of this “excited about my pals” mentality leads me to almost constantly seek connections and similarities between them, matching interests and experiences and subconsciously ever trying to somehow knit my stellar social group in onto itself. Which sometimes is a poor idea. But other times it works.

Lately I have been thinking incessantly about one of the only people I knew when I moved to New York, and that is Ben Hemmendinger, an artist who was at Cooper Union at the time we made acquaintanceship. It so happened that I was typing out the entirety of James Thurber’s The Thirteen Clocks on one of my blogs, ‘The Theraflu Addict’s Literary Journal’ (later bullied offline thanks to a shitty webhost [ipowerweb: FUK U~!] and the crazed legal threats of the guy who writes those Roy Orbison Wrapped in Clingfilm stories, who has no clue what links actually are, and destroyed for me the hilarity of his work by revealing himself as a crank instead of the comedic genius I’d envisioned). And it also happened that Ben had ALREADY DONE THIS. Typed out The Thirteen Clocks, I mean, not shut down a website through hooting and waving his cantankerously wizened arms in the air. Oh what a sight it would be if he were to do such a thing. So in our duplicated efforts, combining the atypical pursuits of 1. typing out an entire book 2. typing out a book by James Thurber, it was clear that other forces were at work. Were I not a gay, this would absolutely be the beginnings of the story we’d tell our grandchildren, correct? So Ben and I became friends and I remember the first thing of his I saw was this video which I am now posting when I get through rambling because it is fantastic.

So then recently, moving to Maine, I met Nicole Duennebier through a superior-in-her-own-right lady, Allison—who had favorably reviewed my portfolio (and general personhood) at MECA. At some point it occurred to me that Nicole does extremely wonderful work. I mean, I tend to love the things my friends create, because I tend to be friends with people whose ideas and aesthetic sensibilities make sense to me. Everyone does that. Unless they are stupid, I guess. So loving their work is sort of natural and I usually feel a bit biased and don’t hasten to talk them up. Because if they are good and I talk them up, I’ll seem like some starfucking douchebag whose fav thing is to go around talking about all the kewl celebs she’s bffs with. And if they are not so great and I talk them up, I’ll seem like some pathetic deluded soul whose entire integrity as a person with taste/values is being consciously compromised out of a sense of loyalty that isn’t even actually that helpful. As that smokescreen of disingenuous flattery is not a ‘friend thing to do’, in fact.

So anyway Nicole’s work centers on rot and decay and how it can be very visually pleasing, not grossout art but using very traditional sort of styles to produce these dark, lush paintings of quivering mold cakes, lacy moth rot, and cordyceps (a parasitic fungi that attacks insects, fills the bug’s entire body cavity, kills it, and then sprouts a delicate fingerlike growth out of the host’s crown, a growth whose colors and pattern are unique to the host it has just killed).

At some point I tried to describe Ben’s video to her, realizing that she’d like it but at a loss as to where to locate it, but the effect was obviously irreproducible, verbally. And I felt that dull ring of unrealized confluence echo in my head whenever I was looking at her work.

But Ben got in touch! And sent me a link to his video where it is hosted on the Oakroom Artists website. I saw that Vimeo had gotten more awesome since it launched and, not ever having my own videos to share, decided to leverage Ben’s work to fulfill my dream of uploading something.

And now I am going to go to a dance party where I am bringing mixes from Terry Diabolik, DJ Matthew Africa, and Robot Blair. In exchange I demand SIMPLY THE GLORIOUS COMPANY OF THE UNFATHOMABLY COOL PEOPLE I KEEP HANGING OUT WITH.

(Edelfäule is a German term meaning “noble rot”. It referrs to botrytis cinerea, the beneficial mold responsible for the trockenbeernauslese wines. Have you ever had a trock? That science will blow the top off your fuckin thought sock.)