FROM PRABUDDHA DASGUPTA’s portfolio Longing in THE SPRING 2012 ISSUE OF THE PARIS REVIEW.

I don’t love being stoned, but I love being stoned in museums. Cannabis makes me quiet and uncertain, or chatty and self-conscious, which winds back to quiet and uncertain. Alone in a museum, however, the mind’s defenselessness—what divides me from all other objects is, it turns out, as sturdy as a sheet of wet tissue paper—no longer seems dangerous. I drift from room to room, pleased to dissolve into the art.

So, I took a low-dose edible upon arriving at the Museum of Modern Art on a September afternoon two years ago. I was there on assignment to write a poem about a piece in the permanent collection; I’d chosen a collotype by Eadweard Muybridge. As it wasn’t on display, I had an appointment in the photography department. A curator ushered me into a large room, all beige and white. In the center of the room stood a large table and a single chair, angled toward the window, which took up almost the entirety of one wall and looked out onto West Fifty-Third Street. The collotype, sleeved in plastic, lay waiting on the table. Woman Dancing (Fancy), one plate from Muybridge’s massive Animal Locomotion project, shows a woman in diaphanous white twirling across a black background.  For an hour I took notes sober, and then, after my thoughts went wispy, for an hour stoned. Across the street, grass sprang from low gray clouds. A roof garden. A pleasant vacancy resolved: done here. I would wander the galleries, I decided, until the edible wore off.

Down a flight of stairs, through an archway, I saw black rotary telephones arranged on plinths. The gallery wasn’t crowded; people moved through it like migrating animals, undistracted from loftier destinations. “Dial-A-Poem,” the wall text, blown up, sans serif, read. I lifted a receiver, thinking of my grandmother, who taught me to dial on her rotary phone. I’d loved the swing and catch, how you had to wait for each electrical pulse to send. It made a game of communication. In 1968, the artist and poet John Giorno created Dial-A-Poem, catchily and accurately named: call a telephone number and listen to a poem read by its author. Giorno got some of the best minds of his generation to contribute: John Ashbery, Diane di Prima, Amiri Baraka … the famous names roll on and on. This room reincarnated a MoMA exhibit, phones randomizing through two hundred poems, from decades earlier. Giorno died in 2019. Now, in my ear, he theatrically elongated an introduction: “Diiiiiaaaaal a Poooome‚” “poem” converted to defiant monosyllable, and “Baaaaarbaraaaa Guest.” Then a woman’s tailored voice took control. People used to apply more drama to enunciation: they both sounded like minor characters in All About Eve or The Philadelphia Story. “Door bells,” Barbara Guest said, divorcing the compound with a pause. Read More

Photograph by Mariana Enriquez.

Carhué Cemetery
Buenos Aires Province, Argentina, 2009

The concrete Christ designed by Francisco Salamone, severe like all his works are, emerged some time ago from the ultrasalty waters of the flooded Epecuén Lagoon. Now people leave offerings to it, partly in thanksgiving that the flood didn’t reach the town of Carhué, partly to pray that the town of Villa Epecuén will once again become the successful tourist resort that it was for decades, before it turned into the ruin it is today, a town haunted by trees so dry and salt-coated they look like they’re made of ash. White trees, ghost trees, triffid trees with their roots exposed, trees that look like spiders on an endless march.

I remember photographs of that Christ on the cross. The water had risen to cover his feet, and all around him were dead, half-submerged trees. The trees are still there, but the crucifix was moved a few meters closer to the city; it’s now on a wooden platform that you access by a ladder from the beach in front of the lake. Read More

Photograph by David Blakeman.

It was about an hour before rider check-in when I realized I didn’t have a cup. This was a problem because my old buddy Joshua was fond of telling me about how he had watched a hoof strike between his legs and seen the fate of countless future generations pass before his eyes. My wife was already worried about the microplastics in my balls, so I knew I had to take precautions. The problem was that my mom had somehow forgotten to save my old jockstrap from high school.

“We could stop by Dick’s,” my sister suggested. “So you can protect your nuts.”

But we were already several weeks deep into the local Little League season, and Dick’s was fresh out. We headed instead to the Walmart off the 101 and Frank Lloyd Wright Boulevard. The sun hung high on a late winter afternoon in Phoenix.

“You know, you had an uncle who was a bull rider,” my mom said, staring out the windshield.

Nobody knew why I was doing this, so there was a felt need to make sense of things.

“Which side?”

“My mom’s side.”

“Her father’s side were all rodeo clowns,” my dad said.

“Doesn’t make a difference,” my sister said flatly. She looked out at the blue glow of the McDowells, still wet from the weekend rain. “Mom’s adopted. You don’t have any of those excuses in you.” Read More

Screenshot from the trailer for Paper Moon (1973).

The other night, Richard and I watched Paper Moon (1973) on Kanopy, directed by Peter Bogdanovich. The film is brilliantly shot, written, directed, and, most transportingly, acted—by Tatum O’Neal and her father, Ryan O’Neal.

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