Letter 8. To His Beloved Self, the Author Dedicates These Verses

‘If you want—I’ll rage from meat—and, like the sky changing its tones—if you want—I’ll be irreproachable, tender, not a man, but—a cloud in trousers!’

Dear Julien, what I really want to write about is Mayakovsky's selected poems. But you’ve been torturing me for the last 6 months, to explain why is it so important to write about him. I’m really bad with this, so I feel compulsion to tell you about the weather first. It feels like an idiotic choice that’s ruining all the coherence, but I’m using the weather as I guess a sound that marks a pause or hesitation in speech, sort of like a filler if you like.

This morning I woke up and outside it was brilliantly cold and clear. I’ve been chasing and missing the desert sun wrapped around the puddle of the dog’s pee and you….

I grew up in Bukhara. Was it the hot climate perhaps that ‘stoned’ my moments of the internal protest into some kind of quiet misunderstanding? It was literally impossible to have any say in the family by the dinner table, at the backyard playing hopscotch and never getting the fancy stone to throw alongside the greed towards the ‘sky’. But I was only 8 back then, so let’s not criticize the patriarchal repression of Uzbekistan.

Then we moved to this place.

I always knew it’s hard to show up on the first day at a new school. Any first day is awful apart from the one which is actually in fact the first: 1st of September -you are 6-7 years of age and both of your parents stop by the market to get some red carnations. My dad believed that teachers loved the red carnations, but I think it was only him.

When one of them is missing, according to the nuclear family troubleshooting manual, you move to some place like Moscow to join the rest of your lovely and very extended family, and somebody or a few people look at you like ‘ Where does it come from, this silly and

queer

Geographical discovery?’

Kids are worried about pneumonia. Apparently, I remind them of Japanese people and apparently all Japanese have pneumonia. Angry bollocks.

I changed the school.

‘If you wish, I’ll rage on raw meat like a vandal.’

And then Julien, I was almost euphoric to get home and revisit in circles those constructed lines. Was it a whirlpool-like mantra, an exit door, you'll ask me? Well, not necessarily. (again this overly complicated extra glazed romantic bollocks coming from you. If you were a painter you’d probably use buckets of those dammar sticky varnish, cause this is exactly what kind of questions you are obsessed about!) But...anyway, no not necessarily...

Sometimes they’ll look like music notes and I’m not saying it because I’ll be collaborating alongside your orchestra next week. I don't know if that was your shoes rubbing against the over ‘naphthalene’ floor of the Academy or your proudly banging against your chest ID card that you definitely were wearing on purpose that day, but by your first glance I thought you questioned my knowledge on Cage - and I know Cage, in fact very well and... and I know the others! But anyway Mayakovsky's lyrics look like meat. And the sensation of the breakthrough from the viscous stereotypical habitat is so tender.

In today's time when we dressed in all that is humane and we rose above anything that is superhuman, when the new ideas attract animosity - the small person, the one that is afraid of otherness was squealing at the classroom corner. The novelty it seemed was growing so rapidly in front of this small person, all of his existing values, trivial buttery hoarding values were suddenly put in danger.

Julien, I never liked singing the national hymn.

The squealing voices were saying -

Mercy! This novelty is tactless!

Mercy! This evolution is barbaric!

And all I wanted to say Julien , - evolution comes without a knock . It simply doesn’t care if you are ready for it.

In his sister’s questionnaire everyone would write :

Favourite flower - violet, - he’d always wrote:

Rhododendron.

Everyone wrote:

- Favourite writer - Bobarikin, -whilst he wrote, - Oscar Wilde.

For everyone the favourite dish was:

- Ice cream, - he insisted, - Canender, - and only at night in a cold unnerving self realization he remembered - it was Camembert!

Then I heard, he ran ‘softly’ bashing at every laughing corner in the dark to rip out that embarrassment so no one would notice.

But back to the superhuman - I would like to quote this, hold on!

‘sickening,

by what Goliaths was I conceived,

so giant

and so useless?’

Here, this is an evolution!

After, the brows were dyed black and I went to Art school.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u06DpcFXc4U

______________________________________________________

Dear Julien,

I'm terribly sorry for getting back so late, but isn't it kind of given that artists paint to revolutionize their micro worlds? Like say the sky is always blue. So artists can be sucked up through the ‘Henry the Hoover’ tunnel into the utopia?

I couldn’t help but notice a really annoying voice at the David Zwirner gallery on Saturday whilst writing to you. Getting distracted...Anyway here it is, I just need to spell it out and get over it, but stay on the line! I'm just gonna give another round for Neo Rauch and then get some cake or something. Currently at Marcel Dzama and Raymond Pettibon show.

Still can’t focus on writing to you.

______________________

Hopscotch never fancy

But I was only

8 back then

First first of age

the car

people

Pneumonia

You Remind me of

Japanese

The rest - Angry bollocks.

Classroom

existing Calendar

“Started”

I was the guy’s painter from

Off sombrero

Proper Mexican

You Are Britain don't you ?

Claiming it quite

Profoundly

circling

Making it tight and amplified

Painting central

They Are pictures

Don’t think I'm

finally ethnicity NOT interested

Certain of those kind

how exposed

Something is

pointing at the mushroom cloud

wasn't intentional.

Repeated it because i liked

Those kind of sexual

things.

And creating

Already

nut

but at the same time it looked kind of sexual.

______________________

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