Howl! Happening: Lydia Lunch, So Real It Hurts by Modern IDENTITY Inc.

Howl! Happening

An Arturo Vega Project

Howl! A/P/E LYDIA LUNCH - So Real It Hurts

LYDIA LUNCH - So Real It Hurts

The War Is Never Over You Are Not Safe in Your Own Home Selections from the Lydia Lunch Archive

Published on the occasion of the exhibition May 8, 2015â&#x20AC;&#x201C;June 5, 2015 at Howl! Happening an Arturo Vega Project in association with Some Serious Business Inc.

Howl! A/P/E Volume 1, No. 2

Lydia Lunch is passionate, confrontational and bold. Whether she’s attacking the patriarchy and its pornographic warmongering, turning the sexual into the political or whispering a love song to the brokenhearted, her fierce energy and rapid-fire delivery testify to her warrior nature. She has released too many musical projects to tally, been on tour for decades, published dozens of articles and half a dozen books, and simply refuses to shut up. Brooklyn’s Akashic Books published her recent anthology Will Work for Drugs as well as her outrageous memoir of sexual insanity, Paradoxia: A Predator’s Diary, which has been translated into seven languages. Ms. Lunch contributed to The Heroin Chronicles, an anthology edited by Jerry Stahl (Akashic, 2013) and wrote the introduction to Jonathan Shaw’s Narcisa (Harper Perennial, 2015). In 2009, Lydia unleashed Big Sexy Noise, her unpredictable return to hard rock, featuring longtime collaborators Terry Edwards and James Johnston of Gallon Drunk, and her acclaimed band RETROVIRUS performs with raw, blistering intensity on brand-new renditions of material from Lydia’s entire, legendary musical career, from Teenage Jesus to 13.13, 8-Eyed Spy, Shotgun Wedding and much more. The band’s second recording, Urge to Kill (Widowspeak Productions), was released in 2015, as was Conspiracy of Women (Other People), a vinyl reissue of an early spoken-word performance by Lydia, on DJ Nicholas Jaar’s label. In 2012 Rizzoli released her cookbook The Need To Feed, proving that in the right hands, even food can be a dangerous thing. 4

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A Lydia Lunch Reader

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Thurston Moore Lydia Lunch No Wave Now

Carlo McCormick On the Art of Lydia Lunch

Michelle Grabner

Lydia Lunch and Large Picture Philosophy

Lydia Lunch

Lydia Lunch Summer of My Disconnect

Jack Sargeant Fight Club for Fucking

Barbara Kruger Paradoxia Review

Lydia Lunch

Dust and Shadows

Death Defied by a Thousand Cuts An excerpt from Will Work for Drugs

Juan Azulay

Jerry Stahl

Ephemera

Tanya Pearson

Practice the Pathos

Lydia Lunch

Ghosts of Spain Monologue

More than Just a Footnote

43 Lydia

Lunch

Why Was I Born an American?

So Real It Hurts

Photograph from the series The War Is Never Over

No Equivalent 16" x 21.5" photographic print

LYDIA LUNCH

Thurston Moore

I distinctly remember walking along 13th Street in the East Village with Lydia Lunch in the 1980s, after she had returned from one of her restless travels investigating the outlier pathology of late-20th-century psychosis, when she eagerly confided to me her epiphany of a strategy to disarm the prevalence of fear, hate and oppression in Amerikkka and beyond: kindness. Flood them with kindness. Saturate and devastate the evil tick of greed, thought control and emotional fascism with what her enlightened consciousness and wisdom, both intellectual and physical, have naturally informed her to do: Love them all. Teach them love. Spread love. Share love. Free love. Love for sale. Love-itis. Love bites. Kill â&#x20AC;&#x2122;em with kindness and love. The war pigs cannot escape the heart of Lydia Lunch. As an artist defined by the soul-eyes of the innocent, who populate her charged and layered collages, and whom she is in reflective honor to, she has only one mission: to slay the bastards with kindness, with love, with a tongue-lashing they will never forget. Lydia Lunch and the love she nurtures like a neutron bomb are the heat-seeking weapon this wound-up world is begging for. I assure you, when she goes off, you will never know what hit you. So Real It Hurts

Lydia Lunch No Wave Now I hit Manhattan as a teen terror in 1976, inspired by the manic ravings of Lester Bangs in Cream magazine, the Velvet Underground’s sarcastic wit, the glamour of the New York Dolls’ first album and the poetic scat of “Piss Factory,” by Patti Smith. I snuck out my bedroom window, jumped on a Greyhound bus and crash-landed in a bigger ghetto than the one I had just escaped from. But with 200 bucks in my back pocket and a notebook full of misanthropic rantings, sporting a baby face which belied a hustler’s instinct and a killer urge to destroy everything that had inspired me, I didn’t give a flying fuck if the Bowery smelled like dogshit. I wasn’t expecting the toilets at CBGB to be the bookend to Duchamp’s urinals, but then maybe 1977 had more in common with 1917 than anyone would have imagined. New York City during the late 1970s and early ’80s was a beautifully ravaged slag, impoverished and neglected after suffering from decades of abuse and battery. She stank of sex, drugs and aerosol paint. Her breath hung heavy, sweetly tubercular, sticky and viscous. She leaked from every pore like a sexy corpse unable to give up the ghost. A succubus that fed on new meat and fresh blood, who in turn suckled on her like greedy parasites 8

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alchemizing her putrefaction into a breeding ground of intoxicating fauna. A contaminated nursery overrun with toxic belladonna, a deadly nightshade whose blossoms mocked death by embracing a life which defied death, which in turn mocked everything else. Long before family-friendly gentrification and capitalgain criminality whitewashed all of New York City’s kaleidoscopic perversions in order to make it safe for anyone who could afford the ridiculous rents charged for shoe-box-size apartments, the Lower East Side played crash pad, shooting gallery and bordello to dozens of artschool dropouts, avant-noise musicians, radical poets, no-budget filmmakers and flyon-the-wall photographers who all lived in glorious squalor in cheap tenement flats spitting distance from each other’s front window. A drug-fueled, no-holds-barred, blood-soaked pornucopia of art terrorists documenting their personal descent into the bowels of an inferno in a city which felt like the lunatics had taken over the asylum. Creativity acts as a rogue virus spontaneously combusting, splattering the brain matter of its host carriers across a finite terrain for a fleeting amount of time, forever staining the landscape. Hippie radicals flocked to Haight-Ashbury during the Summer of Love seeking revolution before the acid wore off. Heavyweight

Southern African Americans migrated north looking for paid work and ended up singing the blues in Chicago in the 1940s. The devil hollered when he caught his “Great Balls of Fire” in Memphis in the 1950s. The scandalous theatrics and outrageous decadence of the Weimar Republic in the 1920s— fostering both an uprise in prostitution and performance art—made the Golden Age of Hollywood in the Dirty ’30s seem quaint by comparison. The boisterous orgy that had begun in Andy Warhol’s Factory in the Swinging ’60s had become a bloated Technicolor corpse kicked to the curb by the gutter punks and no-wave nihilists of the late 1970s, whose idea of a good time was defined by how much noise they could make, how much art they could create and how much trouble they could cause before the cops arrived to close down the after-party. Like the anti-art invasion of dada and the surrealist pranksters who shadowed them and had a blast while pissing all over everybody’s expectations of what art was, no wave was a collective bowel-cleansing caterwaul which spat forth a collective of extreme artists who defied category, despised convention, defiled the audience and refused to compromise, and who have consequently influenced and informed pop culture as well as mainstream media ever since. It’s only a movement in retrospect. Post–Alan Vega’s pre-punk two-piece,

appropriately named Suicide, and before pop-punk-grunge Sonic Youth, New York City was the devil’s dirty litter box. No wave was the bastard offspring of Taxi Driver, Times Square, Son of Sam, the blackout of ’77, the dud of the Summer of Love, the hate-fuck of Charles Manson, the hell of the Vietnam War, Kent State and the Kennedy assassinations. It was a mad collective of deathdefiant miscreants desperate to rebel against the apathetic complacency of a zombie nation dumbed down by sitcoms, disco, fast food and professional wrestling. Yes, we were angry, ugly, snotty and loud. We used music and art as a battering ram and a form of psychic self-defense against our own naturally violent tendencies, an extreme reaction against everything the 1960s had promised but failed to deliver. A mania that shot through the night skies of a decade riddled with all the failures and frustrations that had come before it. But beneath the scowls of derision, the antagonism and acrimony, the beautifully hideous harangues and the nearly unbearable shrill of that grotesque soundtrack, we were howling with delight, laughing like lunatics at the brink of the apocalypse in a madhouse the size of all New York City, thrilled to be rubbing up against the freaks and outcasts who somehow, for some reason, had all decided to run to land’s end and scream their bloody heads off. So Real It Hurts

Photograph from the series The War Is Never Over

Blow Me Away 40” x 30” photographic print

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Carlo McCormick On the Art of Lydia Lunch Certain emotions, by virtue of their extreme nature, seem more real than others, quantifiably truer, as if by dint of their psychological weight. Compared with the certainty of anger, our very notion of happiness is deemed elusive and immeasurable, something we expect and accept to be fleeting. Even the most rapturous of our positive feelings are somehow doubtable, as if, in a constant state, they would be more unendurable than suffering. For surely, infinite joy borders madness or stupidity, contentment becomes complacency, and eternal love is a panacea of delusion and need that will hardly suffice against the inevitable pain of loss and mortality. Lydia Lunch has invested something more than a third of a century now in a creative career that has not only consistently eschewed society’s emotional ideals as a damnable consensual sham but gone further than that of almost any other artist of her time to plumb, probe and provoke the darkest regions of the psyche for the truths beyond the lies with which we comfort ourselves. That she has been able all this time to embrace the excesses of misery and misanthropy as a kind of ecstatic sublime—affording hope, dignity and even beauty to the most debased topography of despair—is a testament to the consequence of her craft and the righteousness of her vision.

To point out that Lydia has long borne a mighty burden of violent rage with a grace, good humor and satisfaction that have made her one of the happiest people I know, or that her highly personalized imprecations of rigorous nihilism may assault the folly of optimism while maintaining an abiding positivity, is almost beside the point. These are contradictions embedded in her impossibly complex character. Lydia Lunch has been a true personality in every sense of the word for even longer than I’ve known her, but as compelling a story as this may be, she is much more than a persona: she is an artist, a poet, a philosopher and a provocateur of the highest order. Because she has manifested a migratory practice, transitioning between music, spoken word, performance art, film, theater, writing and visual art with relative ease and epic restlessness, never abandoning a medium because of fatigue or failure but constantly redirecting her attentions to find the form best suited to the purpose at hand, Lunch is the consummate hyphenate artist. The commonality of all these incarnations is Lydia herself, and perhaps because hers is an overtly personal mode of expression, it is easy to think it’s all about her. It is not, it’s about the art, and even more damnably, it is about all of us, implicated and complicit in the horror she So Real It Hurts

invokes. Stepping forward now as a visual artist with her show So Real It Hurts, Lunch reminds us that a heightened awareness of pain and reality has been a leitmotif throughout her oeuvre. She reworks this concern in pictorial terms with a narrative sense that’s consistent with the kind of brutal storytelling we associate with her lyrics and spoken-word work. Looking at something with the contemplative gaze of art appreciation— instead of listening to the furious real-time pace of her performance work—changes the terms of engagement. Remarkably, within the passive politesse of a whitecube gallery space, there is no loss of that perilous aggression that so defines her seminal nowave music (including her band Teenage Jesus and the Jerks and her solo triumph Queen of Siam) of the mesmeric transgressions of her public readings or of the spectacular cruelty of her theater collaborations with the late, great Emilio Cubeiro. Instead, the focus has shifted from that sanctioned dramatic space where a narrator relays her experience to a more visceral confrontation that demands the viewer to bear witness. The scenarios Lunch invokes have always involved her audiences in dire situations that through their very urgency seem inescapable. Now, through the mediums of photography and installation, she creates a highly aesthetic zone of atrocity that is morally difficult to walk away 12

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from. Her art lies still, playing dead to haunt us all the more, titled with reminders of the fears we all live with (You Are Not Safe in Your Own Home) and the incessant perpetration of bloody conflict and societal strife (The War Is Never Over). Lunch, with her formative memories of her father’s wretched sadism and the community-razing race riots that erupted in her hometown in upstate New York, continues to register the apocalyptic dimensions of the human condition in its most internalized form, but with a vigor that is externalized—a malediction against the paternalist politics and sexuality that prosecute their reign of victimization throughout the world and down the centuries. This is the frisson that animates her work: that hallucinatory disjunction between self and society, witness and participant. Dwelling in the realm of the senses, Lydia Lunch makes us feel her art, but she does so in a highly intellectualized way that forces us to think about it as well. She has told me that for her, “pleasure is the ultimate rebellion.” Her work is a macabre dance with malevolence that moves us deeper into the pain toward that sweet spot in the heart of darkness where body and mind shudder with animal understanding of a truth that is proto-logical and beyond meaning.

Photograph from the series The War Is Never Over

Home Is Where It Hurts the Most 24" x 14" photographic print

So Real It Hurts

Photograph from the series The War Is Never Over

Retribution 30" x 20" photographic print

LYDIA LUNCH

Michelle Grabner Lydia Lunch and Large Picture Philosophy What do you do if you’re one fucking person? Just a small individual whose message has never and will never be popular? We should try to speak some universal truth whether it’s personal/ obsession/frustration/experience or from the larger picture. What can one do? Why don’t I just give up and shut up and go smell the fucking flowers before they’re all dead? All I can do is try to find various formats to express the things, the ills that obsess me, hoping that others will either find release in my voice or will acknowledge that there’s some truth in this. “We Talked to Lydia Lunch and She Didn’t Seem to Like Us Very Much,” Interview with Brad Cohan, Vice (2013)

I personally would like to tear down the INS or the IRS or the Sony Corporation, brick by fucking brick, to erase them hard drive by hard drive. But I’m not able to, you see? The systems that we have created or that have been created at us are far too huge, powerful, and unresponsive to be resisted by direct attack. And these systems are getting bigger and more centralized all the time; note the unification of the European currencies, for example, or the way the United Nations seeks to act as a world government, to the reach of the Nike Corporation around the world and its ever-growing implication in economic exploitation, or the vicious monopoly of bad software achieved by Bill Gates. Crispin Sartwell, How to Escape (2014)

In the chapter “Philosophy of Punk” in a collection of essays titled How to Escape, the philosopher Crispin Sartwell laments his inability to take on the relentless grip of the INS, the IRS and Sony. His jeremiad was written in 2014. Lunch has been addressing Sartwell’s question all of her adult life. Recently in an interview for Vice, she unflinchingly states that “We should try to speak some universal truth” when rhetorically asking herself, “What do you do if you’re one fucking person? Just a small individual whose message has never and will never be popular?”1 Yes, Lydia Lunch is a brilliant “polymath autodidactic.” She came to the cultural fore figuring prominently and powerfully in New York City in the mid- to late seventies when “everyone was exchanging fluids.”2 She believed, and still believes, in big ideas. This is why to this day she is culturally risky; in the face of the So Real It Hurts

tentative, the uncertain and the unguaranteed, she perennially articulates a baseline and compels us to see a “larger picture.” Lunch has always manifested extreme emotions in her work. Unmistakably, there are clear antiauthoritarian threads that connect her to the American individualist tradition: Emerson, Thoreau, Abbie Hoffman, Noam Chomsky. “I remain stubbornly independent, and have no restrictions on what I do placed upon me anyone or anything,” she says.3 Lunch’s embrace of truth, including the formal abstraction of rhythm, is a way through relativism’s ever-prevalent nihilism. Lunch shaped and was shaped in an era of thought when it seemed ridiculous to even attempt to delineate truths. This was a time when Richard Rorty would tell his philosophical protégés in the academy that “It was ridiculous or impossible to try to describe reality outside of our linguistic practices, to describe it as it would be if it were not being described.”4 “Again, it’s like my political speeches: using the language or the statistics of the enemy. Using aggressive, macho stance to complain against aggressive, macho stance as part of my contrarian spin around.”5 This speaks to the heart of Lunch’s philosophic activity. She is facile in deploying the syntax necessary for change. Ideally, philosophy “mustn’t ignore the problems posed by life as we live it.”6 Yet that is often not the case with the disciple. It sometimes takes an artist to illuminate difficult questions, and in the case of Lunch, someone to illuminate the truths as well. As an artist, Lunch has made many bold confessions in her life, but one of her most affecting statements is: “It’s always been important (for me, at least) to shit in the face of history. Because history has shat all over us, so I figure it’s fair game to give it back.”7 Here again, she underscores her belief in large pictures and big ideas. After all, history is one of the grand cultural schemes constructed by humanity. Lunch is demanding that artists be responsible and responsive to context. Of her spoken-word work, she says that it is her duty to “express the dilemmas that many of us live under.”8 “That’s why I tend to still, thirty years after I began spoken word, slam down these political tirades which attempt to articulate and outline some of the greater issues that we all know exist. We’re all aware of these things and frustrated by them, and they surround us in this bombast.”9 16

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Lunch has generated a seemingly endless array of sage insights and acute observations over the years. I am thankful that her fan base has felt a need to return to the oracle on a regular basis, providing the public with a trove of practical and philosophical acumen. Her practice is reflexive, and her ability to navigate systems of belief for the greatest political effect is as impacting as the art she has produced. It should be no surprise then that Lunch is currently attuned to articulating the perils of our attention economy. “I think people are mobbed with a huge bombardment of distractions,”10 she says. “I think that’s a real threat. I think it’s a danger. It’s a tool to keep people away from real protest or taking action because of the way they feel. Our time is stolen. So much of our daily life is stolen. People have to really be conscious of that.”11 Attention, as she suggests, is most insidious when meaning gives way to information and erodes our ability to determine value. In other words, “our distractability seems to indicate that we are agnostic on the question of what is worth paying attention to.”12 Another big, unwieldy cultural thesis noticed and shrewdly addressed by Lunch. Lunch continues to be a lot of things. Some of us need her to be the “bitch” of no wave, or a radical feminist, or a political poet. As a public figure, she understands this. I, however, need her to continue to weigh in on big, even clichéd ideas, and to continue to articulate and model a moral relationship to the world, to art and to history. Lunch has earned the freedom, the privilege and the responsibility to activate universal truths: right and wrong, left and right, ugly and beautiful. They are her baseline, and she reminds all of us that they should be ours, too. FOOTNOTES 1 “We Talked to Lydia Lunch and She Didn’t Seem to Like Us Very Much,” Interview with Brad Cohan, Vice, May 29, 2013. 2Lydia Lunch interviews by V. Vale (San Francisco: RE/Search 2013), p. 50. 3Crispin Sartwell, “Philosophy Returns to the Real World,” The New York Times, April 13, 2015. 4Ibid. 5RE/Search, p.76 6Jürgen Habermas, “Philosopher, Poet and Friend,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, June 11, 2007 7RE/Search, p. 54. 8Ibid. 9Interview with Jason Gross, Perfect Sound Forever, October 1997. 10Ibid. 11Matthew Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head, (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), p.5.

So Real It Hurts

Photograph from the series The War Is Never Over

Casualty 40" x 26.6" photographic print

LYDIA LUNCH

Lydia Lunch Dust and Shadows WHAT WOULD YOU SAY TO SOMEBODY WHO ONLY HAS 30 DAYS TO LIVE? WHAT COULD YOU SAY? THAT IN THIS LAND OF ILLUSIONS WE ARE JUST TRANSITIONAL CREATURES PEEPING TOMS AT THE KEYHOLE OF ALL ETERNITY THAT THE PAST IS ONLY THE PRESENT CLOAKED BY INVISIBILITY AND THE FUTURE IS A MURMUR OF A MEMORY WE WILL NEVER POSSESS THE GREAT MYSTERY IS NOT THAT WE WERE THROWN DOWN HERE AT RANDOM BETWEEN THE PROFUSION OF MATTER AND THAT OF THE STARS BUT THAT FROM OUR FLESHY PRISON WE HAVE CREATED IMAGES POWERFUL ENOUGH TO DENY OUR NOTHINGNESS WE HAVE FORCED OUR WORDS INTO THE MOUTH OF THE UNIVERSE A GIANT BLACK HOLE TURNED INSIDE OUT TALES FULL OF SOUND AND FURY MADNESS AND LUST SIGNIFYING WHAT? SIGNIFYING WHAT? WE INHABITT AN INSIGNIFICANT PLANET ORBITING A MINOR STAR ... LOST IN A GALAXY TUCKED AWAY IN A FORGOTTEN CORNER OF AN UNFATHOMABLE EXPANSE WE COME SPINNING OUT OF NOTHINGNESS SCATTERING STARS HOPING THAT ONE DAY - ONE DAY OVER THE DISTANT HORIZON LIES AN INCREDIBLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING OF BEING WITHOUT BEING WHERE EVERYTHING FALLS AWAY JUST FALLS AWAY DISSOLVES INTO SUBATOMIC PARTICLES WHERE SIGHT AND SOUND ARE REPLACED WITH A COMPREHENSION OF MATTER BEYOND HUMAN UNDERSTANDING WE’RE JUST DUST AND SHADOW DEATH IS JUST THE SHADOW DEATH IS JUST THE SHADOW WHAT DO YOU SAY TO SOMEBODY THAT ONLY HAS 30 HOURS TO LIVE? THAT I WON’T FORGET I WON’T FORGET I WON’T FORGET YOU I WON’T FORGET DO YOU REMEMBER - CAN YOU REMEMBER HOW MUCH BEAUTY WE POSSESSED? IT ALMOST FUCKING DESTROYED US WE WANTED IT ALL WE WENT FOR IT BABY THAT’S RIGHT IT DIDN’T MATTER WE WENT FOR IT WE KNEW WHAT THE SCORE WAS IN THE END WE FOUGHT . . . WE FOUGHT YEAH OK WITH EVERY FIBER IN OUR SOUL WE BATTLED THE BATTLES RAGED THERE WASN’T A FUCKING DAY THAT WE WEREN’T IN BATTLE MODE So Real It Hurts

WE KNEW WHO THE ENEMY WAS - YOU GOT TO KNOW WHO THE ENEMY IS - IN THE END THE ENEMY IS ALWAYS GOING TO WIN IN THE END THE ENEMY IS JUST DEATH ITS FUCKING SELF IT’S JUST BEEN ONE LONG DEATHTRIP IT’S ALWAYS BEEN ONE LONG DEATHTRIP AFTER ALL IN THE END THAT’S WHAT WE’RE FIGHTING AGAINST IT’S A BATTLE TO THE BITTER END AGAINST THE KILLING MACHINE AND THEIR MERCHANTS OF DEATH YOU’VE GOT TO FIGHT FOR YOUR LIFE YOU’VE GOT TO FIGHT TO CONTROL YOUR DEATH A FIGHT TO THE BITTER END YOU’VE GOT TO FIGHT AGAINST THE SPIRITUALLY BEREFT AND THEIR SOUL KILLING BULLSHIT IT’S IN THE AIR THEY’VE POISONED EVERYTHING THEY’VE POISONED EVERYTHING THEY’VE POISONED THE WATER ALL THE FOOD THEY’VE POISONED YOU THEY’VE POISONED YOU WHAT DO YOU SAY TO SOMEBODY THAT ONLY HAS 30 SECONDS TO LIVE? THAT YOU WIN YOU WILL BE KING FOR YOURS IS THE POWER AND THE GLORY THIS IS YOUR STORY YOU WILL BE WEARING A CROWN OF INVISIBILITY AND NOTHING CAN STOP YOU NOW YOU’RE FREE YOU’RE FREE THIS IS THE MOMENT YOU’VE BEEN WAITING FOR YOUR WHOLE LIFE YOU CAN JUST RIDE OFF INTO THE SUNSET NOW BOTH BARRELS BLAZING JUST LAUGHING LIKE A LUNATIC LEAVING EVERYONE AND EVERYTHING ELSE BEHIND IN THE DUST WE’RE JUST DUST AND SHADOW DEATH IS JUST THE SHADOW DEATH IS JUST THE SHADOW DON’T BE AFRAID THERE’S NOTHING TO BE AFRAID OF ANYMORE YOU’RE FREE BABY I’M RIGHT HERE I’M RIGHT HERE TAKE MY HAND TAKE MY HAND I WON’T FORGET YOU YOU’RE NOT GOING TO FADE AWAY YOU’RE GOING TO EXPLODE YOU’RE GOING TO TRANSFORM YOU’RE GOING TO BE LIKE A DARK KNIGHT JUST RIDING INTO THE ENDLESS NIGHT

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DON’T FEAR THE NIGHT DON’T FEAR THE NIGHT EMBRACE IT THE ENDLESS NIGHT THAT DEEP BLACK VELVET CARESS JUST GO . . . YOU WANT TO GO INTO THE LIGHT BABY GO INTO THE LIGHT GO INTO THE LIGHT YOU JUST GOT TO LET GO YOU’VE GOT TO LET GO YOU’VE GOT TO GO WITH IT BABY I’M RIGHT HERE DON’T FIGHT IT ANYMORE THERE’S NOTHING LEFT TO FIGHT YOU WIN YOU WIN YOU WILL BE KING YOU WILL BE KING FOR YOURS IS THE POWER AND THE GLORY AND THIS IS YOUR STORY AND YOU’RE GOING TO BE WEARING A CROWN OF INVISIBILITY WE MANAGED TO FORCE OUR WORDS INTO THE MOUTH OF THE UNIVERSE TALES OF SOUND AND FURY MADNESS AND LUST AND YOU KNOW WHAT IT SIGNIFIED IT MEANT EVERYTHING IT MEANT EVERYTHING TO US YOU MEAN EVERYTHING TO ME DON’T BE AFRAID I’M RIGHT HERE I’M RIGHT HERE WE’RE JUST DUST AND SHADOW DEATH IS JUST THE SHADOW DEATH IS JUST THE SHADOW DEATH IS JUST THE SHADOW THAT FOLLOWS THE BODY WE COME SPINNING OUT OF NOTHINGNESS SCATTERING STARS I WON’T FORGET YOU I WON’T FORGET YOU I WON’T FORGET

So Real It Hurts

Photograph from the series The War Is Never Over

Chemical Imbalance 20" x 13.33" photographic print

LYDIA LUNCH

Juan Azulay Practice the Pathos Consider being given the chance to go a millisecond back to that throwaway instant before the sledgehammer of time bumped you into the armpit of oblivion. It is dark, black, with no shining light . . . but you would hear Lydia Lunch’s laugh. That laugh that contains a brand of real that most of us spend our lives trying to avoid—an irreducible act of war on individuals like us who try so desperately to hold our precarious ideas and bodies together, soiling ourselves in the futility of a redemption that will never come. Lydia Lunch’s So Real It Hurts reeks of pathos. The practice of pathos (or is it the pathos of practice?) supersedes the binary logic of the creator-destructor to present the artist-of-reality in all the latitude our globalized warfare permits, as if recursively inseminated by a tireless Antonin Artaud, fueled by the wicked jetlag of time-travel. At the climax, we hear the converging hammer-laughter of Artaud-Lunch, pointing the way to the proverbial cross. What is perhaps most surprising in Lunch’s work is the elusive line she walks between the scavenging con artist and the spearhead, the point of contact with intensity that defines the artistic act. In doing so, she decimates the role of the artist. The evidence of this is a prolifically compulsive career defined by her horizontal trans-genre movement, her multigenerational collaborations/confrontations and, more than anything else, her making the fearlessness of being at the epicenter of intensity the very definition of the practice. The photographs for The War Is Never Over conjure obsessions with the idea of the body held captive in a world where limits have been shattered and transgression is the ultimate act of rebellion: you hurt me, I laugh; you rape me, I fuck you. I conquer your thoughts with the body you are transgressing while you do it. I win, I come, I laugh. The installation You Are Not Safe in Your Own Home brings us the forensics of desire, where we are confronted with the idea that if our intimate environments looked like the limits of our sexualized imagination, no one would be spared. One could write a thesis about this type of architecture. Ultimately, Lydia Lunch immerses us in her body-world, where she is urging us to not soil ourselves in the fear that redemption will not come, prodding us to laugh with her, into the very possession of our limits—so that although we will never own them, we can rather allow ourselves to be owned by them. This is the act of rebellion that we are being shown. So Real It Hurts

Photograph from the series The War Is Never Over

My Amerikkka 20â&#x20AC;? x 21.56" photographic print

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Lydia Lunch Ghosts of Spain This is for the ghosts of Guernica, Belchite, Badajoz El Mazuco, Jarama, Monte Pelato Cape Palos, Mataró This is for the dead and dying This is for the war-torn and battle-fatigued For the widows and orphans of warriors This is for the warriors This is for the warriors Who were willing to die for their beliefs Who were willing to die Because they believed It is better to die Fighting for freedom Than to live a life enslaved by lies This is for those who believe And you better believe You better believe in ghosts Because soon enough you too will become a ghost This is for the ghosts of Fallujah, Anbar Provence, Abu Ghraib, Baquba, Guantanamo, Gaza, Beirut, Baghdad, Kabul, Kandahar, Jalalabad, Islamabad, Kathmandu, Mogadishu, Darfur, Sierra Leone This is for the freedom fighters, the insurgents, the rebels and rabble-rousers and for every individual who revolts against tyranny and oppression This is for the martyrs Mohammad Mosaddeq, Salvador Allende, Oscar Romero, Theo van Gogh, Federico Garcia Lorca, Pasolini, Bruno Schulz, Madalyn Murray O’Hair This is for the wounded and traumatized, for the survivors, for those suffering post-traumatic stress syndrome, for those that choose to survive, and strive to overcome the roadblocks and landmines, the pitfalls and setbacks, the negativity of a world which forces you to fight tooth and nail, forces you into battle mode on a daily basis just so you can maintain a tenuous grip on your own sanity, after a lifetime of the enemy’s torture, humiliation and brainwashing This is for the ghosts of Brooklyn, the Bronx, Detroit, Watts, Inglewood, Oakland, St. Louis, New Orleans, Memphis, Trenton, Youngstown, Cleveland, Camden, Baltimore, Newark, Little Rock, Tulsa, Baton Rouge, for the ghosts who were invisible in life, born into a war zone of poverty, desperation and neglect in a country which glamorizes violence, worships serial killers, threatens by massacre and then arrogantly brags about gangbanging the world This is for the lovers of forgetfulness Who turn a blind eye to all those Who have been murdered fighting someone else’s battles This is for your ghost This is for my ghost So Real It Hurts

Photograph from the series The War Is Never Over

Let Me Dream of Other Things 17" x 21.5" photographic print

LYDIA LUNCH

Lydia Lunch Summer of My Disconnect From the LP A Fistful of Desert Blues with Cypress Grove

So you got a new job Draining bottles at the bar That’s the best that you could do Since they repossessed your car Please don’t ask me where I went To you it wouldn’t make much sense Another funeral of a friend Now a picture’s all that’s left On the dresser near your bed Another town another song Another man has come and gone Please don’t ask me what I did I’m not the one who should confess Don’t lay roses at his grave Cause I’m the one that got away Drive a thousand sunburned miles To just avoid another trial The hell that I been through Don’t you think I know confinement? Can’t believe they’d understand Why I still remain defiant The fall it hit so hard But the winter was worse Spring did little to relieve my hurt It all washed away With the tears that I spent This is the summer of my disconnect So Real It Hurts

From the installation You Are Not Safe in Your Own Home Photograph by Marc Viaplana

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Jack Sargeant Fight Club for Fucking Imagine a fight club for fucking. An atmosphere that stinks of wet sex. A room that is littered with the detritus of need, soiled by the stigma of black lust. This is the raw wound of a need that is greater than romantic love, but lacking the self-identified discourse of the victim. Lunchâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s bed is covered in stained sheets. Blood. Dirt. And yellowing dry shots of cum. Sleep never happened here. This is not a bedroom that allows for quasi-shocked titillation, no condom packets here. This is fucking where safety is not on the agenda, bodily fluids are exchanged and blood is shed. Next to the bed a black-and-white television plays a loop of homemade porn, but never to the visual climax of male ejaculation, the evidence that completes and closes most video pornography. Instead the action loops into an endless parade of female masturbatory copulation. The video has been cropped in order to deny identity to the male combatant and in essence demote him to the rank of everyman. A brutal lesson elevated to Theater of Cruelty, whereby the artist as predator is immersing herself in momentary oblivion, entering animal brain, eradicating individuality to taste the infinite. Desire here is articulated not just through the moans of female sexual pleasure accompanying the video, but also through the black-and-white image of the male object pinned to the wall. His violence is directed everywhere, especially at his own fleshy cage, his muscular body is brutally dissected, skin cut away to exorcise and exercise his pain. This is a torso that bares 200 self-inflicted scars. Like the wounds gouged into his chest, this installation exists to remind the audience of mortality and desire. Lust is reworked as the twisted convulsions of the slow suicide, because every act is racing toward that ultimate end. The ultimate fuck. A violent collision of damaged body parts and tortured emotions battling against each other in the condensed space of a finite time. So Real It Hurts

Barbara Kruger Paradoxia: A Predator’s Diary Artforum, March 1998 The artist/musician Lydia Lunch has always obsessively searched for the love that’s never lost and the pain that’s always found. From the music of Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, EightEyed Spy, and Queen of Siam, to her fiery anticorporate polemics, to her textual, filmic, and musical collaborations with Richard Kern, Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth, Exene Cervenka of X, and Auntie Christ, her work has been about the relentlessness of that quest. Lunch is into transgression big-time, but with the understanding that the T word is not only a threat, but a lifestyle, a fashion statement, and a time killer. A time killer because sometimes everydayness just seems so, oh I don’t know, tiring. So why not shake things up with a mess of setups, crises, and entrapments rife with enough complicated choreographies to spell trouble for even the most hyperactive drama queen?

The book’s picaresque adventures sample with a vengeance any desire or taboo that fits its never lovesick but always sex-crazed agenda.

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But the various cities, bodies, drugs and hairdos are merely backdrops for the central figure of Lunch as impressario: the embellisher of her own dreams of way-badness. All the threat, fear, and intimidation seem to handily coalesce into a well-turnedout challenge which dances perilously close to the unbecoming bummer of bitterness. Instead, what emerges is a kind of righteous, almost critical reading of just how fucked-up this world really is. Paradoxia reveals that Lunch is at her best when she’s at her worst. She tells us “I’d stalk bars, clubs, bookstores, public parks and the emergency room. Seeking in lost men a place to lose myself. Searching for a pocket of weakness. Looking for the ‘sweet spot,’ a small tear in the psychic fabric to feast upon. To hide inside. A place to disappear in, manifesting myself in a multiplicity of personalities which all shared the same goal. To trick the next john into relinquishing his moral, financial, spiritual or physical guard, so that no matter what the outcome, I won. I got what I wanted. Whether it was money, conversation, drama or sex.” So Paradoxia is about winning. Because that means that someone else is losing. Both man-hating and male-defined, Lunch is powered by a kind of brutally articulate vanity that saves her from the demons she’s drawn to and gives voice to her sometimes scary, frequently funny, always canny, never sentimental siren song.

This operatic constancy of searching and destroying, this perpetual libidinal tension, suggests the state defined by Krafft-Ebing as paradoxia. So it seems appropriate that Lunch has chosen this diagnosis as the title of her new book, Paradoxia: A Predator’s Diary, which is a sexcapade, a position paper, a rant, and a travelogue, all dressed up in melodramatically diaristic form. Beginning by declaring “No names have been changed to protect the innocent. They’re all fucking guilty,” Paradoxia is bursting with the well-worn dualisms of guilt, innocence, good and evil: the same binary setups that mark almost all of culture’s conventional scenarios. If Lunch’s story never quite breaks with those categories, she’s certainly hell-bent on embodying the stereotypes of rebellion from convention.

Boomeranging between ironic asides and head-on confrontations with the demons who fucked with her as a girl and now channel through her as a woman, Paradoxia incessantly morphs from elegant passages into raw, expository descriptions of the desperation, cruelty, narcissism, and lust that make for just another day.

Photograph from the series The War Is Never Over

Double-Barreled 21.5" x 18" photographic print

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Lydia Lunch Death Defied by a Thousand Cuts from Will Work for Drugs I was born surrounded by Death. My mother miscarried before me, after me and I was born choking the life out of my dead twin. When I was six my grandmother, a cruel Sicilian witch, died in bed while sleeping next to me. For years afterwards I was chased through the basement by her evil apparition’s heinous cackle. My mother was surrounded by Death too. Eleven brothers and sisters, only three of whom lived to see adulthood. Pneumonia, tuberculosis, cancer, diabetes. Stroke. A sick brood indeed. Rotten fruit doesn’t fall far from the tree. I spent my formative years in the town where future Hillside Strangler Kenneth Bianchi conducted his first experiments in lust killings. Month after month the lurid details of his latest victim, always a preadolescent girl my age, would be splashed across the evening news or the front page of the daily paper, grid marking the map of bodies I was convinced I was next to join. Years later I survived Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker, by three blocks. Although at the time, in the advanced stages of a sick addiction to adrenaline and the endless possibility of Death’s black magnetism, I felt as if I had already spent many a new moon subjugated to the crazed killer’s unique charisma. Ricky never knew me, but I felt as if we were dating. By nature I am death-defiant. I have survived illnesses which have killed lesser mortals. Burst appendix, engorged lymph nodes, and an undetected and unwanted ectopic pregnancy, which exploded, filling my body with poisoned blood. Septicemia. E. coli. I woke up while being butchered on an operating table, the surgeon’s vicious scalpel like a rotary saw slicing me open when the anesthetic wore off. I came to surrounded by blinding white light, which was in fact, no not the light, but the fluorescent overheads, which I seemed to float eye-level with in a semi-coma of indescribable pain . . . silently screeching and beseeching every god, goddess and demon that I thought worthy of summoning, as I begged for Death, begged for relief, begged to be set free from what I assumed was Hell’s ultimate punishment: eternal, unceasing, unrelenting physical pain. I have been stabbed in the gut an eighth of an inch short of pancreatic poisoning. I have been forced into the desert by a Manson wannabe whose idea of True Romance was blood stains in the sun-bleached sand. I have been smashed in the head with a Heineken bottle with such brute force it broke. I spent a charming weekend with a 32

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drifter who was arrested three days later and charged with cannibalism. I have been held hostage in snowy woods by a Dennis Hopper look-alike holding a sawed-off shotgun to my left temple, demanding to be told horrible fairy tales detailing a dozen ways in which I would murder my sisters. I’ve been on two transatlantic flights which were stalled on European runways for hours while bomb-sniffing dogs were sent through the luggage hold to retrieve deadly explosives. And that was in the early 1980s. I taunted Death, and Death taunted back. But like a lover who sweet-talks you with endless promises of fantastic potential but always comes up short in the pants, you eventually grow bored with possibility. And the attraction you once swooned with now sours and leaves you cold. Besides, Death is forever. Life, no matter how much you torture yourself or allow others to pick up the pillory and nail you to a post, is goddamn short. Shit . . . sea turtles live longer. I’m grateful for every minute I’m still alive. I’ve been granted numerous stays of execution. I courted Death who always wins in the end, but truly I wanted LIFE. I wanted TO LIVE. In the Extreme. I wanted experiences, which would force me to truly appreciate everything. I wanted to take nothing for granted. A friend once said “Shut the fuck up. You’ve got it made . . . you’ve had everything you ever wanted. All the sex you could stomach, all the drugs you could consume, cool friends who worshiped you. What more do you want?” And that’s just it. I WANT MORE. MORE OF EVERYTHING. MORE SEX, MORE DRUGS, MORE GUNS. MORE MONEY. I want to glut on everything this bastard planet has to offer before the Prince of Thieves sneaks in to hostage me back to Death’s Other Kingdom, and you better believe I WON’T GO QUIETLY. I WILL DIE AS I HAVE LIVED, KICKING AND SCREAMING WILDLY AGAINST THE VOID. To create is in a sense to cheat Death. To leave a skid mark. To shit in the face of history. To confront mortality with a middle finger raised in the air, knowing full well that Death will eventually dispose of this body, but it will not be able to completely bury all the incriminating evidence that this art terrorist plans to leave behind.

So Real It Hurts

Photograph from the series The War Is Never Over

When Words Fail 27.717" x 30" photographic print

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Jerry Stahl

So real it hurts… There are no better words to describe Lydia Lunch’s lifelong full-frontal assault on our collective psyche than the title of her new exhibit. Ms. Lunch’s titles have always done double duty. Not just as names, but as brief, savage dispatches from the far fronts of contemporary hell she’s made her own since bursting like a bomb full of toxic mayo up the flaccid ass of the art world as No-Wave Tormentor of Souls in the 1970s. It would be hard to find two more-perfect encapsulations of the end times we inhabit than the names of the other exhibits included here: You Are Not Safe in Your Own Home and The War Is Never Over. Finally, the world may have caught up to what Lydia Lunch has been doing all along. She’s never been out to shock—she’s been out to document. Like all great artists, she is equal parts reporter and visionary. Because all our nightmares are headlines now. Hence the images of children with syringes, women in cages, crazed boys armed to their rotten teeth in nameless jungles . . . Welcome to another day in the 21st century. Lydia Lunch traffics in the reality behind the reality.Think of the situationists, or Henry Miller, or Duchamp’s final masterpiece, Étant donnés. Like Duchamp, Lunch has created that secret, erotoviolent universe peeped through the keyhole to which she alone holds the key. Call it a work of necessary voyeurism. Lunch has made it her job to reanimate a world gone numb. Prepare to be awakened. So Real It Hurts

Letter from Mike Gira and poster from the Lydia Lunch Archive 36

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So Real It Hurts

Poem by Thurston Moore and ephemera from the Lydia Lunch Archive 38

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So Real It Hurts

Tanya Pearson More than Just a Footnote I can’t talk about Lydia Lunch without referring to my embarrassingly uncool teenage introduction to her work. I’d like to fabricate a romantic comingof-age story about how I heard Teenage Jesus and the Jerks as a precocious five-year-old with impeccable taste—how it resonated with me on a soulful level, inciting an immediate disavowal of all of my pop records, my Madonna obsession and my propensity for writing songs with titles like “Fun” and “Good Times, Come On” on a Casio keyboard. The truth is, I quit saxophone and the school band and started playing guitar at 13. I listened to Nirvana and to whoever influenced Kurt Cobain, information that was readily available in magazines like Rolling Stone, Spin and Sassy. Kurt Cobain really liked this band called Sonic Youth, so I had my mom take me to Strawberries, where I bought Screaming Fields of Sonic Love. Even that is totally uncool because it’s a greatesthits record. I got home, sat down with my guitar, made myself a Kahlua-and-milk, and quickly deemed the CD unlistenable except for “Death Valley ’69,” featuring a guest appearance by some girl named Lydia Lunch. I’d sip on warm, half-assed white Russians and listen to that on repeat. It took another year or two for my Sonic Youth appreciation to truly blossom. 40

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What did not immediately infuriate me as a teenager and probably should have was that Strawberries didn’t have any Teenage Jesus records—or any Lydia Lunch records at all. The rock history books that I gluttonously inhaled in hopes of finding kindred spirits or any women who spoke my language and contributed in some way to music, culture and subculture were completely devoid of women, aside from the usual figureheads. I just accepted what was offered journalistically and worked with that until the dawning of the age of America Online. Basking in the warmth of dial-up Internet, I discovered, among other things, Lydia’s Queen of Siam album, the transgressive art film Fingered and her 1990 spoken-word piece “Conspiracy of Women.” I had missed much of her immense artistic output as a result of being born a little too late but also due to the irresponsibility of predominantly male rock-and-roll scholars, punk historians and cultural critics, who left her out of their boring and repetitive popular narrative. I started the Women of Rock Oral History Project at Smith College in December 2014 and Lydia was my first interview. This terrified me but also set a precedent that attracted other female artists who were honored to have their

interviews included alongside hers. I remember sending a proposal to the publicist of a potential interviewee who replied, “Wait, Lydia Lunch is really doing this?” Lydia and I met at a club in Providence, Rhode Island, where she was performing with Weasel Walter. The first thing she did was hug and thank me. After the performance, she talked with every single person waiting in line prepared to bare their soul, confess their devotion and snap a photo in the dark. The following day, as Lydia patiently dealt with my need for a linear chronology, I had this epiphany that I was in the presence of both a personal idol and cultural icon whose full history I’d never known. Sure, I knew her discography, filmography and biography, but her motives and perspective are the things that get left out when men are given the sole privilege of documenting history —when punk rock retrospectively ingests no wave or music history is reduced to style and popularity. I’m sick of reading about what self-appointed tastemakers think about the no-wave movement or Lydia Lunch or anything really, because all of that information is superfluous and one-sided. Lydia has made a career out of confronting her demons and interrogating her motives. Her artistic output covers various mediums and remains relevant

because it’s the truth and because, well, the state of the world unfortunately hasn’t changed that much. Lydia Lunch deserves to be more than a footnote in rock journalism, history and scholarship. Her work deals with darkness and she has situated herself there for decades, speaking to and for the outcasts, the marginalized, the rejects. We have an obligation to follow her into the darkness. Acknowledgments in the form of reissued records, films and career retrospectives like the Howl! Arts Project are a step in the right direction. I think the act of being a woman making art is a feminist act and should be regarded as such in popular culture and in academia. It’s not about fame. It’s about being aware of whose shoulders we’re standing on and constructing a new narrative and a more-inclusive history. Lydia is the great cattle prod—shocking, blunt and brutally motivating. I can only hope to return the favor by creating a space for her invaluable contribution to literature, music and art, and most important, by making it accessible to girls and women like me, desperate for representations of themselves as they sit alone in their rooms, searching for kindred spirits and coming up shorthanded.

So Real It Hurts

Photograph from the series The War Is Never Over

Daddy Loves Me Too Much 30" x 20.25" photographic print

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Lydia Lunch Why Was I Born An American?

excerpt from Conspiracy of Women (C.O.W.), 1990 Why, why, why, why was I born an American? And not what would better suit me if you’re lookin’ really good: a Palestinian, a Pakistani, Syrian, Lebanese, Turkish, Filipino, Japanese, Chinese, Puerto Rican, an Afro-Cuban American, or even better yet, my favorite of all, a Colombian. Yeah. Why wasn’t I born a Colombian? A Colombian with big, big, big, big, big, big, big balls, yeah. And maybe a quarter kilo of coke. Yeah. Because then I could better understand the need to pilfer, to pillage, to plunder, to rape, to rape, rape, rape, rape, rape, rape, rape, rape like wild, wild, wild Indians high, high, high, high, high, high, high, high up in those mountains. Yeah. Immaculate camouflage. Creases down the front. Cap. Bayonet. Submachine gun on tripod. Little square prayer rug that every hour on the hour I would get down on and I’d get down on my hands and knees and I would pray to the gods of war, yeah. I’d pray to the gods of war. I’d pray to the gods that gave me war. The gods that gave me something to do, somewhere to go on a weekend, something to live and die for. And you know how I feel about God. I hate God. I hate God. I hate God because God was the first cop. God was the first cock. God was the first big-dicked, lowdown, good-for-nothing motherfucker that subjected me to this life sentence in the first place, where I’ve been trying to escape for the last ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, sixty years of my rotten, stinkin’ life. But I know there is no escape. But that doesn’t stop man. That doesn’t stop man from playing God. That doesn’t stop man from playin’ God. And God had all the fun because he could penalize, he could punish, he could destroy, he could mutilate, he could eliminate, annihilate, he could destroy the world. And man, just like the dinosaur, with which he has so much in common, will also become extinct. Because all of man’s useless, stupid, warmongering, greedy, blood-lusty, corrupt ideas are also now extinct. Oh, I pity the fools. I pity those poor, reckless fanatics lost in that time without limits, that limbo, that world without end. But night after night, I’m still on my hands and knees and I’m still prayin’ and when I’m down there I pray for one thing: boys. Boys. I pray for boys that don’t know any better, that don’t know any different. I pray for boys that don’t know any better than gettin’ those eighteen bullet holes blown in their bellies when they travel in those squads of fifteen- to twenty-year-olds; whose sole job, whose only job, whose only job that I can respect is to execute the executioners, is to kill the killers, is to eliminate the judges, the juries, the cops, the chiefs, the kings. Hey baby, the King is dead, long live the Queen. The King is dead, long live the Queen.

So Real It Hurts

And night after night when I’m down there, and night after night I’m just prayin’ for a new sinister nuisance, which becomes my national obsession. Night after night I’m prayin’ for another night of death on Blood Boulevard. Oh, yes! I wanna take ’em all with me. I wanna embrace them all in the fold, in the family, in the clan, in the tribe, my man, I wanna say: oh Manuel, oh Ronnie, oh George, oh Margaret, you can come too. Come with me, baby. Come with me and be here with me. You just hop on that helicopter and you get down there and you go to Bogotá, you go to Bolivia, you go to Nicaragua, you go to San Salvador, Beirut, Beijing, Brooklyn, Brighton, Belfast. You go where they know that the price they put on human life is death. The price they put on human life is death. And all the wailin’ in the world that I’m gonna do ain’t gonna save your ass, it ain’t gonna save my ass, and it ain’t gonna shut me up either. That’s right. I know, I recognize, and I’m ready every minute. I know that the cost of living is hand-to-hand combat fought tooth and nail. Hey, it’s a mantra, repeat after me: life is cheap, but death is free. Life is cheap, but death is freedom. Oh, baptisimal in blood! Baptismal in blood! Baptismal in blood! Oh, death wears the proof of a crown from the kings. I am free. I recognized a long time ago that the horizon has finally disappeared. It’s been replaced with leper colonies. The illusion of freedom is finally gone. That’s right. Slavery is freedom, embrace it. Slavery is freedom. Slavery is freedom. War is peace. War is peace. But peace, it’s just not profitable. So ladies, I’m gonna appeal to you one more time. Because I know you wanna rise up in business. I know you wanna readdress the imbalance of power. So ladies, get your goddamn gun. Just get your fuckin’ gun. Get your Uzi, get your AK, get your 9mm, get your small pistol, your handgun, your .45, your .33, just get your goddamn gun. Because there’s a rumor going on, you see, that the war has just begun. That the war is never over. That the war is neverending. And you must know that better than me, that the war is just an orgy of drunken hooligans, who in order to pump up, who in order to pump up that last fading trickle of their waning sexuality, they gotta pick up those bombs, they gotta pick up those bricks, they gotta pick up those bullets so that they can better penetrate the flesh of my flesh, the breast of my breast, the breath of my breath. I mean if you wanna get down to brass tacks and you wanna know all about it and you just wanna understand it, then you’ll know the death of another living being—it just doesn’t mean anything to me. I mean, it just doesn’t mean anything to me. I mean, it just doesn’t mean anything to men. The death of another living being doesn’t mean anything to men, because men are so fuckin’ afraid to die that they have to kill everything in sight. Yeah. Men are so afraid to die that they have to kill everything in sight. Because if you can’t beat ’em, kill ’em. If you can’t kill ’em, fuck ’em. If you can’t fuck ’em, kill ’em. If you can’t do it good, do it hard. Yeah. [Audience member: “Lydia, I love you.”] Yeah, I love myself too. 44

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Photograph from the series The War Is Never Over

Collateral Damage 40" x 20" photographic print

So Real It Hurts

Lydia Lunch, So Real It Hurts Howl! Happening, an Arturo Vega Project in association with Some Serious Business May 8–June 5, 2015

Events and Editions: No Wave Now: Moderator Weasel Walter and panelists Carlo McCormick, Kembra Pfahler, Bibbe Hansen, Lydia, and Bob Bert on the relevance and rawness of no wave now. (Sunday, May 17, 2015)

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission of Howl! A/P/E.

Lydia Lunch “Conspiracy of Women” (C.O.W., 1990) performance (Friday, June 5, 2015)

Howl! Happening and Never Records release eight one-of-a-kind vinyl records of previously unpublished spoken-word performances.

Essays © Akashic Books, 2009, Excerpt from Will Work for Drugs © Artforum, March 1998, “Paradoxia: A Predator’s Diary,” by Barbara Kruger © 2015 Juan Azulay © 2015 Michelle Grabner © 2015 Carlo McCormick © 2015 Thurston Moore © 2015 Tanya Pearson © 2015 Jack Sargeant © 2015 Jerry Stahl All other text © Lydia Lunch

HOWL! COMMUNITY Arturo Vega Foundation Lalo Quiñones Jane Friedman Donovan Welsh BG Hacker BOARD OF ADVISORS Curt Hoppe Marc H. Miller Dan Cameron Carlo McCormick James Rubio Anthony Cardillo Debora Tripodi Lisa Brownlee Howl! Board of Directors Bob Perl, President Bob Holman, Vice President BG Hacker, Treasurer Nathaniel Siegel, Secretary Brian (Hattie Hathaway) Butterick Riki Colon Jane Friedman Chi Chi Valenti Marguerite Van Cook, President Emeritus Archive Manager: Mikhail Torich

ISBN: 978-0-9961917-1-5

Editors: Susan Martin and Ted Riederer Copy Editor: Mike DeCapite Design: Jeff Streeper, Modern IDENTITY Lydia Lunch thanks Susan Martin, Jane Friedman, Weasel Walter, Ted Riederer, Bob Bert, Sadie, Elise Passavant, Jasmine Hirst, Carol Martinez, Sebastien Greppo, Eva Lucien, all the incredible artists who contributed their brilliant words to this volume, Material for the Arts, David and Geoffrey at Print Space Incorporated and Shayni Rae and Kevn Kinney for their generous support, tremendous hospitality and endless inspiration. Howl! Happening, an Arturo Vega Project 6 East 1st St. New York, New York 10003 www.HowlArts.org 917 475 1294 Some Serious Business Inc. 505 685 4664

The Arturo Vega Project: Jane Friedman

Howl! Happening takes its name from the unpredictable, free-form happenings of the ’60s and ’70s, where active participation of the audience blurred the boundary between the art and the viewer. More to be experienced than described, Happening will curate exhibitions and stage live events that combine elements of art, poetry, music, dance, vaudeville, and theater—a cultural stew that defies easy definition. For more than a decade, Howl! Festival has been an annual community event —a free summer happening in and around Tompkins Square Park, dedicated to celebrating the past and future of contemporary culture in the East Village and on the Lower East Side. The history and contemporary culture of the East Village are still being written. The mix of rock and roll, social justice, art and performance, community activism, gay rights and culture, immigrants, fashion, and nightlife is even more relevant now. While gentrification continues apace and money is king, Howl! Happening declares itself a spontaneous autonomous zone: a place where people simultaneously experience and become the work of art. As Alan Kaprow, the father of the happening, said: “The line between art and life should be kept as fluid and indistinct as possible.” LYDIA LUNCH - So Real It Hurts

EXHIBIT / PERFORMANCE / INSTALLATION AT HOWL! HAPPENING

Lust is reworked as the twisted convulsions of the slow suicide, because every act is racing towards that ultimate end. The ultimate fuck. A violent collision of damaged body parts and tortured emotions battling against each other in the condensed space of a finite time. —Jack Sargeant on You Are Not Safe in Your Own Home

Love them all. Teach them love. Spread love. Share love. Free love. Love for sale. Love-itis. Love bites. Kill ’em with kindness and love. The war pigs cannot escape the heart of Lydia Lunch. —Thurston Moore

HOWL! HAPPENING 6 EAST 1ST STREET, NEW YORK CITY HOWL A/P/E

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