songs of shame
Dash Snow is dead.
After a brief period of reflection I’m fairly confident in asserting that his actual death means little to me; however, the fact that he is now dead functions as a challenge to the part of life caught up in urgency, the part of life that is fleeting. It’s startling, really, how someone such as Dash could directly attack my every day sense of comfort, perhaps because I knew so little of him as a him, and his art as anything other than its existence as such. But his death has done just that and I am left wondering, why?
I think it is prudent to refer to recent piece in the New York Times that featured an anecdote by Mr. Ryan McGinley in which he recounted a seemingly typical night with Dash that involved blowing lines off toilet seats and taking bumps off fists – manic nights only afforded to those who fail to recognize or wistfully refuse to be burdened by future considerations, that is to say, it all comes off as horribly romantic. As do the memories of Dash’s ex wife, Ms. Agathe Snow, who recalled the opening of the Nest installation that was abruptly followed by the disappearance of a few days and ultimately ended with a reappearance of self in Berlin. Even the three day bender that allowed Dash to cease to just weeks before Dash was to turn 28, which is a fortunate outcome if one seeks to place Dash among a pantheon of other artists who expired during the 27th year, is steeped in instant nostalgia. Of course, there is a clear difference between those other artists who died at 27 and Dash insofar as their deaths serve as either a cautionary tail or a means to inflate their aura whereas Dash’s death is a direct confrontation of my current self for although he is of a much different ilk or stock than I, he does belong to the same generation. Therefore his death serves not as a malleable smoke screen but as a question of whether I should be more familiar with toilet seats and whether my unassuming view of the cleaning products that rest beneath the kitchen sink is fundamentally flawed.
Perhaps, but really, the answer is one to be found out later rather than one that can be known right now. As for the now, gaps left by a lack of a particular form of recklessness absent from my character must be filled in different manners, by different and more mundane, or at least socially acceptable, substances, and constant go-ing. A certain self-acceptance must be found in even the sterile set piece of showering in Songs of Shame while barreling down the highway without worry on a day when the sky is dotted by Cumulus.
Songs of Shame is out now on Woodsist.
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tonight:
