So this change of locale brought me to a particularly odd nodal point in one Thomas Hoving. Thomas Hoving was the former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art affectionately known as the Met by more cultured personages than myself. Hoving isn’t someone I’d particularly search out as a fascinating topic of discussion. Hoving isn’t a dragon or a fucking unicorn. Hoving didn’t openly use psychedelic drugs. Hoving doesn’t wax poetic about whiskey or craft beer. Hoving doesn’t make loud, abrasive music. Hoving certainly doesn’t hold a spray can effectively, at least not within my current level of familiarity with the man and his legacy.

But Thomas Hoving apparently did a whole slew of things within his lifetime that the arts community respected enough to write a particularly engaging article in Art Forum. And seeing as how I was a captive audience nursing two types of head wounds (a punch to the jaw from an errant mosher and a blow to the liver) I was all eyes. And so I cupped my head in my hands and began reading the story of Hoving, who at exactly my age of thirty six had become the director of the Met bringing a sense of showmanship that would be both ridiculed and respected by New York and beyond.

I imagine Hoving as being some sort of Indiana Jones of the art world though thats probably the most gutteral way to refer to him. The man was obsessed with finding art attested by his mantra “When I see something I want, I do everything I can to get it.” Clearly, this is a man that does not fuck around; the gears grinding behind the sinuses operating with otaku-like fervor. Its that instinct that you come to respect over the course of the ten or so odd minutes it takes for me to ingest and reflect. Here is a guy that sees an object come into being and immediately recognizes its autonomy and metaphysical sentience, right?

Which leads Hoving to the rather dicey matter of the Bury Saint Edmund’s Cross also knows as the Cloisters Cross. In Hoving’s 1981 tell all some twenty years after being aquired with Hoving’s aid for the Met he describes it as follows:

“The inscriptions on it are so hate filled and yet its such a masterwork. Its as if Hitler and Michaelangelo collaborated to make a masterpiece.”

Its about here where either the caffeine is starting to settle in or Art Forum just turned into the printed media I should have stolen from my ex before vacating our mutual agreement of cohabitation. Because clearly, this Hoving character is someone that should’ve been physically on my radar. Its not that I idolize the above statement. I’m clearly the most apologetic white male I know. But it blows the mind that this man facilitated the purchase of an object based on artisan merit alone. And then hid the rather sickening nature of its true meaning lost upon those not hip to the lingo of the 12th century monastics, which have the museum and art community backpedalling to this day.

In true Guattarian form, the object and the artist were at a standoff between master and servant. Here was a piece of craft that was given the chance to be respected on its own autonomy, free of the ideology and hate inscribed by the creator and their Creator who art in Heaven. Hallowed be thine name. Therein lies the maverick nature of Hoving which admittedly could have been construed as a tad bit reckless and nieve. An article of transgression far more radioactive than Serrano’s Piss Christ, the Cloisters Cross goes beyond questioning the desperate idiocy of religion. And the curator makes this statement by standing behind it and selecting it and willing into being the funds and stage to make it possible.

Its there where you wonder why the fuck it took you this long to come across this guy who began to subvert and revolutionize an institution at an age where you piss away your PBR night by night in dirty loft bathrooms. Why hasn’t this guy popped up on the facebook feed of your four hundred and forty three friend collection (surely four hundred and fifty by now?) Why wasn’t a scandal of this magnitude lodged deep in your consciousness as much as Serrano’s aforementioned work that motivated Jesse Helms and crew? Could it be a testament to the genius of Hoving, the once proclaimed PT Barnum of New York Art? That Hoving knew what real art was and did his best to represent it in its true light.

Those musings are left to more informed journalists of highly lauded arts magazines and not to street level hip hop emcees who find it painfully hipsterish to be reading a token copy of said magazine in public. If there is any message within the story of Bury Saint Edmunds for myself, its not for me to ramble on about any more than I have already. I am already at risk for sounded far too smart and informed for my own good on the internet. I’m sure the next time I’m sitting at the bar this meditation will come in handy wafting off the whiskey vampires and waves of herpes perched on my peripherary.

And to think, I’m only on page forty six.

Thomas Hoving’s book “King of the Confessors” is available on Amazon.

You can subscribe to art forum at a special discounted rate of 46$ for a year subscription online here.

Whether or not this is the official soundtrack for urban longing depends on your points of references I guess. Taking time into consideration, we can reference Matthew Fuller’s classic lists as used in his excellent analysis of UK pirate radio in the nineties. Four decades of RNB. Turntables or tape decks. Pitch Control. At a bare minimum both have similarities in terms of what might be best described as a music called ‘drag.’ Drag is far from having a wide cultural effect at least for now. But it exists in its own temporal warp acted upon by the here and now to be something wholly different. Though its impossible to imagine it without the events that transpired prior. Just as breakbeat, jungle and dubstep utilized the same alchemical elements to create a lifestyle that lasted arguably at least ten years in terms of validity, drag could certainly plausibly follow suit.

Then again you’d have to have to imagine what a party would be like centered around four hours of rhythm and blues weighted down to a deliberate and prodding pace. I’d imagine it might it might appeal to a room full of heroin addicts staring at the ceiling watching their lives melt and nod away. And that might be the most romantic way to describe it. Which brings me to potentially a nightmarish conclusion that drag music is the living embodiment of existential acceptance and/or the discerning junkie jams of choice.

By stripping and burning away the sheen and the production what is left is a shambling ghost rife with ugly nostalgia and rotting memories. Its indescribably hurt filled and mournful. It’s the bare trudge and the bitter playback of words and lyrics twisted by format and the hand behind the controls. Whether “Freak to you” now sounds like the plea of a starving timber wolf panting for some sort of warm flesh in the midst of the tundra or “Easy Street” is now reimagined as spat through clenched teeth watching your retirement fade away in the vapor is generally left up to the listener.

It’s always been the defense of mine when speaking about recontextualization; copyright and sampling that rules are often way too idealistic and opportunistic in nature. In these pocket autonomous zones that have warped into existence causing rifts in space and time, they’ve always started out basic and feral. And it’s on that cusp where fetishists and bored debutantes might collide. After all they may as well be one and the same. It’s interesting to note that dance music has always been the most resistant to this autonomy. A subculture baked and cooked into the brains of over a decade of listeners who may or may not have had their first psychedelic or narcotic experience in a dirty warehouse in the pitch black. Listening to the bare minimum of a drum machine and a Roland 303 cycling the same pattern over and over affected by oscillation and black market pharmaceuticals. Rooted in the authortative and draconian systematic of beats per minute and fragilely held together solely by that measure of time. And might I add, marginalized by such math, galvanizing its population into genres, cliques, and crews.

With rave nostalgia in full swing and internet groups reminiscing about the ‘where are they nows’, it seems like as good a time as any to come to grips with what happened in your own way. Some people want to relive the past by attending various revivals and staring at photographs of moments that now so very warped and faded in memory. They want to sit back and tell stories of how great it was. I can tell you stories. You’ve heard them all before. They are all mostly bad. They are all mostly idiotic. They are all mostly things I do not wish to relive unless they are morbidly amusing.

But they sound like this if I were to transcribe them to audio. The promise of escape from the inescapable. Trapped in sewage and sludge, fighting for a reason to keep breathing. A six am after party cross legged on the floor shifted in and out between waking and dream state like windshield wipers silently scraping across your eyelids. Moments passing like bad frame rates, jittering and wrapped in cellophane, moderately aware that your vision is now completely peripheral. Staring down the barrel of a long dark tunnel and stumbling around in a puddle of mud, shit, and collapsed bodies undulating on themselves. Telling myself, these are so the times of my life. That’s what the commercial says. This is what I want to be. I’m going to be a dj. I’m going to make money following my dreams and paint by numbers, one 32 count intro and one 64 count breakdown at a time.

That to me is the essence of drag city. The ecstasy hangover of a decade taken and personified in a genre. A cracked out sunday and a fried eagle mind. Who does it cater to, quite possibly a select few. But more importantly, its what it inspires and the synchronicity that speaks from out the void using puppet language to mouth clarity into seemingly shallow words.

Things die. Things can be reborn. They can never be the same as what they were and there is a solace to that. To see things grow old and wither away hanging onto to some semblance of sediment. A family, a dream, an old photo, a favorite song, and a memory. A list acted upon by human hands always has a completely unexpected outcome. Or at least it should. If it doesn’t then maybe the formula needs to be rethought and the tougher questions need to be answered. Like what the hell are you doing holding on to those things in the first place.

I’m sure one day, we can lay the groundwork to bring to you the ultimate slow music party. And people will come from far and wide to sit cross legged on the floor wrapped in a large blanket until five in the morning. And we will decree the rise and the fall and mark the years on the calendar. We will publish ourselves a coffee table retrospective that will litter the condos of well to do graphic designers and college professors. And we’ll occasionally over a moderately expensive bottle of red wine and an exotic epicurean delight wax poetic wafting the glass in swirls in the air.

You know, quite unlike the nineties. Somehow now I’m ok with that if it happens. Because this time, its about more of what I want than what I can get or where I can fit. Until then, we have a little party going on here and we are at full capacity.

entro mc “drag city (demo)”

You can follow Brendan Telzrow to learn more about drag on twitter here