zaksmith

Contents:
1-My Paintings (TemperSawaCharlieRavenAdriaVoltaireSean)
2-BERLIN, TORONTO, CANDY BARS, ROME, HOME, CONFUSION, SEX, BAD COPS
3-Frequently Asked Questions

1-- My Paintings


(print available in the SG store)

(print available in the SG store)





2-BERLIN, TORONTO, CANDY BARS, ROME, HOME, CONFUSION, SEX, BAD COPS

The Last Conversation I Had In Berlin:

"Boys are so exhausting."
"What do you mean?"
"Well I just fucked those two guys at once a couple hours ago, and now I should probably fuck you, and then I've got to go fuck my ex tonight to keep him happy."
"You need to get some sleep_I release you from your obligation_I'm gonna check my mail. I'll wake you up before I leave."


The Main Things I Will Remember About Canada:

-Right after I got to the sci-fi convention and said "Oh god, I hope nobody recognizes me" some random person yelled "Hey, aren't you Zak Smith?"

-They have cinnamon Kit Kat there, and it's really good.


Rome, 2006, With Albertine and Daria

It's like champagne or Christmas music, bells opening into a tune with the notes just slightly blurred by the technology and a separate low sound at the bottom which ignores the rhythm, it's Albertine's cell phone.

Who is causing this absolutely 21st century sound? Who calls Albertine's cell phone?

Some stripper or Italian hip hop guy? Another photographer or someone's mother? A model or the Queen of Grindcore? El Jacketo Bianco, Phantom of the Evening? Or some Suicide Girl?

Are you confused? I was. Constantly. People don't explain things in Rome. They lived with the Latin Mass for over a thousand years. Explaining things is not part of the culture.

What person from anywhere in the world with anything they need done anywhere is calling the girl who goes anywhere to take the prettiest pictures of all the girls and is my friend Albertine also?

I don't know. I don't care. My "I don't care" policy is in full effect. I guess I'm on vacation.

She looks at the cell phone and makes a 21st century face: the face you make when you look at your caller ID and then you look up at the person you are next to which indicates--like a diver about to drop over the side_Ok, now I have to do this.

On her dashboard, Albertine has an airplane, some sort of Spitfire but with sharpened wings and Italian markings.

She's offered to just fucking give it to me more than once but then what would I play with in my passenger seat while Albertine is on her cell phone?

So I spin the prop on the plastic plane while the 21st century speaks in a language I can't understand, driving through Rome.

Rome, at least, is immediately graspable, for it is old school.

TV has not lied to you about Rome, it is a pile of mad stereotypes and if the Italian American Anti-Defamation League ever got hold of Rome it'd drive it out to the causeway and fill it with lead. For example:

Right off the bus I see a guy chasing his track-suited pickpocket through six lanes of rattling traffic and I stand on the corner of the Via Enrico Di Nicola and the Via Marsala with my bag, looking entirely like a hooker.

In the car now with the two sisters and one is on the phone (apparently there is some law here: you are only allowed to drive if at least one person in the car is on the phone) No we donnawant Chinese food! (They are all fucked up! They want chinese!) (Well tell them we don't want chinese!) (Our friends want Chinese food, they are all fucked up.)(I know, you said that in English)

The traffic is obscene, loud, circular and incomprehensible, as is whatever they're saying on the phone.

(I do not know how you spell that curse in the Godfather movies_vafanculo or whatever_but it is an actual thing Italians say and it is very easy for an american monoglot to pick out of a conversation.)

(I much prefer this recent discovery, however: when things go awry, they say "Porco dio!"_which means exactly what you think it means.)

Then to the restaurant and they are nice enough to give me their pathetic english menu (instead of "spaghetti" it says "spaghetti"_the only real difference is it says "with" instead of "con" and it has almost nothing on it).

Bella! Bella! Wine! Pasta! Coffee! Then they take me down the street to the junkie bar then meet some stripper pal, get in the car, drive eight feet at top speed, park half on the sidewalk with the lights blinking and go into another bar, drink another coffee) then back in the car.

(they give me my coffee "american style" which means twice as much as them which is still like a spoonfull_maybe if they drank more at once they wouldn't have to go into a different coffee bar every ten minutes, maybe if they drank coffee in the amount suggested by the size of the coffee cups, the economy would collapse, I do not know these things. I am in Rome, I don't know.)

Off to the overcrowded alt-hip-hop show with no air conditioning where I drop my camera and fuck it all up. There are no people, just pillars of sweat with hands in the air.

They tell me the guy's real good, but I am a skeptic: how hard can it be to rap in a language where everything rhymes with everything else?

I run into a random fan of my porno movies. We discuss one of my co-stars: "I LOVE her-I love-a her FAT POOSY!"

That transcription is totally inadequate and possibly insulting but it is no easy thing to express the enthusiasm Italian people can communicate with only a few words, even in languages not their own.

It's like words are greased dogs, which they grab and lift and show to you, grinning. Look, look, here is what I'm saying, get it?

Anyway, you could tell he really liked this girl's fat pussy.

He is excited to tell everyone at the office he met me.

(I am excited to tell all of you that I met him.)

Then off to the strip club which is called New York, and has a mural across the front approximately depicting the view from my roof.

The club looks just like New York only it is much smaller and it's all inside and half the inhabitants are Italian strippers.

One of them is really happy to see me and, over the course of the next few days keeps acting really happy to see me and I have no idea why.

At one point I'm on the computer in her kitchen and she bites my arm. I don't know, man. I think she's just Italian.

This is the main theme of my time in Rome: I have no idea what's going on.

At one point I am presented with a warm, asymmetrical, goldfish-colored object.

"What is it?"

"Eat it, it's Italian."

I figure I'll take one bite and just see, but it's steaming inside and the fresh cheese spills spiderwebby all out and it starts to fall apart and you have no choice but to eat the whole thing because it is on you.

The "Just eat it, it's Italian" situation will be repeated in every imaginable circumstance during that long weekend, in and out of the gastronomic context. You are presented with some unknowable thing, you try it, trying it gets you in too deep to escape, you have no choice but to finish it. In the end, you're lucky if there's anyone around who speaks enough English to tell you what you just did.

The days evaporate in a haze of cancelled plans, mall errands, and food comas, the dogs sleep on top of people sleeping on a red couch, while the illegible nights consist of trips of vague duration to obscure locales to meet unknown people for unspeakable purposes, in coked-up traffic threaded through ancient ruins and broken bridges and there's techno music all the time.

You end up on a street holding a plastic cup full of wine listening to somebody's extended dance mix of "Rock The Casbah". What the hell is going on?

Don't worry about it, trust Albertine. 600 Suicide Girls can't be wrong. Trust Albertine. Like doing the Mass in Latin. Just trust us, it'll be ok.


US Customs, JFK Airport, 10 am:

"No bags?"
"No, just this."
"You were in Europe for eight days and you didn't bring no clothes, no luggage no..."
"I got one pair of pants which I'm wearing, a bunch of clothes and a camera and it's all in here. Apparently the other guy thought this was suspicious so he sent me over to you. You wanna see my clothes?"
"No...you live where?"
"Brooklyn."
"What do you do for a living?"
"I'm a painter."
"See you later."


Cell Call That Got A Lot Of Attention On The A-Train From The Airport

..."Yeah, it was fun--I actually just found out I have to go back in a month 'cause I got two movies in the Berlin Porn Festival."
"That's so cool...So, I wanted to tell you, we got the go-ahead from Adam and Eve to do this really extreme violent porno."
"I am so very proud of you."
"Yeah, and we want you to do this scene where you do me while I'm suspended."
"Rock."
"So you're ok with that?"
"Yeah, hey, I mean, if I can't do that then what am I good for, right?"
"Awesome!"
"Yeah, the only thing is like, you won't be able to move that much with like all those fleshhooks through your back, right? So it'd be nice if somebody else was there to kind of..."
"So we'll make it a threesome."
"Excellent."


Home Again Jiggity-Jig

The first thing you see when you enter the EU through Dublin is Reagan, two Kennedys, James Joyce (or someone wearing his glasses) and a bunch of other famous Irish-Americans, the first thing you see when you enter the US is the longest customs/immigration lines you've yet encountered and CNN on a big screen.

So you feel it all instantly--because US international airports do not partake in the same narcotized, hazy-morning elevator-music bureaucratic reality as every other entry point to the industrialized world.

You hit the ground in America and you remember, oh yeah, you are coming back to the war.

The war has become less an ongoing event (I mean, come on, no-one in charge on either side actually wants it to end) and more just a condition. It is like the sun in Rome or the fog in London, the war is the weather.

(So it's no wonder that, lately, it is also true that the weather is at war.)

Some war fell in Florida recently, in the form of cops that laugh:

See the laughing cops.

The beginning of the video is dull and maybe even you think, hey, maybe it's not even real, it's all blurry and they just say she got shot in the face.

But then comes the bit where you see the whole riot squad laughing about it and then applauding.

And then the apology where the spokesman apologizes, none-too-articulately, for "those remarks".

Fuck "those remarks", man--this isn't about Hey some redneck cop shot somebody he shouldn't have and then somebody said something they shouldn't have, this is about: Pretty much every cop on the riot squad of a major American city either thought that shooting a totally innocent, harmless middle-aged woman in her fucking face was funny or was afraid of what would happen to them if they didn't pretend to think it was funny.

This well-documented fact leads to only two possible conclusions:

A)The Miami police force goes to unusual lengths to screen out mentally healthy applicants.

or

B)The idea that inflicting unprompted brutality against some mommish citizen for peacefully opposing one of the least popular wars in recorded history is a cool thing to do is so common among the type of person that would apply to be a cop in Miami that no such screening process is necessary.

If A, then Miami is seriously one corrupt city, and corrupt in a weird way: corrupt not out of a desire for political power or money, like people are usually corrupt, but corrupt like a 6-year-old that sets cats on fire. In other words, the cops are not just ignorant or stupid, but actually the kind of giggling sociopath hoodlum army that the Joker or Clarence Boddicker from Robocop puts together in order to rain pointless mayhem down on the city.

Which sounds paranoid. I mean, really, who believes that? So then B.

If B, then these cops have wives and children and neighbors and they eat dinner in the backyard on nice Florida days with these neighbors and say "Duuude, Davis shot some bitch dressed like Hillary Clinton in the fuckin' face today for no reason and it was fuckin' awesome! Haw haw haw!"

And the backyard shakes with laughter because in this wrong place this is obviously a funny thing and if the other neighbors are mowing their lawns and hear the laughing they lean over the fence and they hear about this and they too think this is funny.

And then there is one neighborhood for every handful of these dozens of cops and there are whole moms and dads and kids who all think it is normal to be a maggot and that's already hundreds of people and there are a roughly equivalent number in every city that roughly matches the socioeconomic profile of Miami and there are at least as many who are also like that but didn't pass their cop test or just aren't cops for some other reason and there are thousands then at the least and probably more because otherwise how could this all have seemed so ordinary to them_to laugh at sadistic cowardice.

And, if then, then what? Then there are many very real Hells in America and Fascism sleeps next to us, and anyone who would say that's paranoid has the burden of proof on them.

I do not think I am making too much of a big deal about this laughter.

The laughing is, in a way, kind of worse than the shooting. The shooter could've been scared, impulsive, a bad shot or just a lone sick fuck, but the laughing crowd is entirely different.

If they had all fired, you might've believed they were all just acting in the heat of the moment or were all scared or were all confused or just following orders. Real excuses can be made for real actions.

But this was later, and this was in a quiet, sunny place and everyone had digested the event and seen it on TV. The laughing is not itself a crime, but laughing, like crying, is involuntary and honest, and it tells you, more than words, what someone thinks.

And what they think is something that only the worst kind of person could think: What a worthy thing it is to hide, armed, among an armed crowd and anonymously damage someone defenseless for the crime of politely but publicly being unlike me.

There is no value system popular in Florida in the 21st century that could possible exonerate the laughing cops. Their only defense is strictly legal, and shaky: despite being evil, they are not brave enough to have yet committed evil, and therefore aren't criminals.

If they are innocent, it is only because they are cowards as well_more cowardly than anyone they've ever arrested. More cowardly than people who actually had the courage to do a terrible thing, rather than just sit in a soft corner and crave it.

Pigs are fat and funny and give us tasty sausages. They are not pigs_call them maggots, they feed on wounds.


3--Frequently Asked Questions
spoilerized to save space