Nora Riggs
& Rochele Gomez
Green Leaves, Pink Light

July 4 , 2020 – July 26, 2020

It Loved to Happen by Itza Vilaboy

ARIES Dear Ram-kins, you’re a big-hearted warrior with a hefty to-do list, but please slow down under these stars. Learn to pronounce names you can’t pronounce as if, I don’t know, without any effort. Let’s not confuse ‘easy’ with ‘effort’. If you do not pronounce the name correctly, ask for help. Otherwise, for being so concerned with appearances, you’re going to look like someone that does not care to know how to pronounce the name in the first place, so you leave it to others to do it for you. While we’re at it. Sure, yes. Read “White Fragility” and “White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America'' but be advised not to re-center whiteness in the process. Here’s more. Check out “Reading is Only a Step on the Path to Anti-Racism'' by Nicole A. Cooke (Publishers Weekly, June 19, 2020) but also Octavia E. Butler and N.K. Jemisin and Tochi Onyebuchi and Kathryn Yusoff’s “A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None” and “AZTLÁN: Essays on the Chicano Homeland” and “AND: Phenomenology of the End” (but watch out for that guy, “Bifo”, he’s liable to invite you to Oaxaca to be his nurse, lover, translator, and cook if you’re not careful) and then reflect on that shit for a bit. The ability to see things that haven’t yet happened can satisfy that hunger for history, origins, and provenance.

TAURUS Dear Bull. Pause. You’re not lazy. But are you still going to Interpol shows? Ferdinand, there’s a bee, there’s George W. S. Trow: “The transactions of the American marketplace are often criticized, but almost always what is addressed is the question of fairness. What if this were abandoned, perhaps only for a moment, and another question were asked: ‘Does this transaction add to my dignity or detract from it?’ Or a still simpler question: ‘Does this transaction exist?’ When people are involved in transactions that do not exist, it is not only their common sense that is put in danger but also their imagination. Indeed, imagination faces the larger danger, because in such a transaction common sense is ignored but the imagination is misused and debased.”

GEMINI Twin-star, we’ll keep this short and sweet. Do everything in your power to refrain from issuing an ultimatum this month, or like, ever. No one is falling for this language of “self-care” if the outcome results in silencing and canceling a person out. No.

CANCER I know. I would have liked to have dropped acid with Foucault in Death Valley on that one “unforgettable evening” in Death Valley back in 1975. Just thinking of all those pink hues drives me wild. But we weren’t invited, and well yeah, we would not have been invited in the first place. Yeah, I hate being left out, too. FOMO is the worst. But we do have each other, and we have this , also something of a tab in itself: “‘Michel,” I asked, ‘in your life was there a specific event--say, something like Rousseau on the road to Vincennes, or St. Paul on his way to Damascus, even Buddha under the Bodhi tree--that afforded you the crucial insight that would determine the direction of your work?’

‘Yes!’ he responded. ‘When I enrolled at the École normale the headmaster demanded to learn if there was anything unusual about me. When I informed him of my homosexuality, he replied with horrified expression that such behavior was not normal and certainly unacceptable to the reputation of the school. He then had me confined, for my own good, he said. He told me that I must be reformed, that I would be confined, examined, and treated by an array of authorities--doctors, teachers, psychologist, psychiatrists, etc. At this instant I recognized in a flash how the system works. I perceived the fundamental impulse of our society: normalization .’ ‘Had you fallen in love with another man by then?’ ‘I first fell in love with a man when I was sixteen. Since that time I have always moved from love to knowledge to truth .’When Michael walked to the car to get some more tapes, Foucault remarked, “Michael is wonderful. He is a wizard. He is always conjuring up something for us.’”

LEO LEO x 5. It’s no cliché to say your smile can light up a room. It reconfigures the pattern of the entire place, it is its lyric. It does. So I can’t wait to meet up with you later in the week (observing all the social-distance protocols, of course) to talk some serious shit about ourselves, between ourselves. We can slow things down in between things, make them super-flat. Tear things up in the service of something more unknowable. Come on--a couple of mezcalitos will do it. Don’t forget to bring your copy of “The Beast & the Sovereign” vol I to book club. Lipstick. Did you pick up smoking cigarettes again? I don’t blame you. Fuck

VIRGO Sciatica, heel spurs, premature balding, gout, corns, bunions, constipation, pus, amnesia, migraine, impotence, vertigo, high blood pressure, a bleeding cuticle, incontinence, abortion, astigmatism--nothing gets in your way when you want to get something done, and you want to get it done well, but right now, we’re working from home. We’re supposed to stay at home. What did you forget? Please check p 55 in “Tell Me How it Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions” by Valeria Luiselli.

LIBRA Read Raymond Roussel’s “Locus Solus” (1914). Just read it. You’re only checking yourself out in the mirror anyway.

SCORPIO Did you get the copy of “High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies” (2019) by Erik Davis I sent you last month? And ? After over 100 days in quarantine, I am officially referring to David Bowie as “David”--casually and maddeningly. We’re finally on a first name basis. Finally.

SAGITTARIUS I’m with Kristen Gallerneaux on this one: “What if you could eat a radio station? A battery, transistor, condenser, coil, oscillator, and diaphragm--all crammed into the space of a capsule about an inch long and a half-inch in diameter. These components make up the ‘world’s smallest FM radio broadcast station.’” Let’s get that playlist together.

CAPRICORN Camille Claudel was a fucking genius and don’t you ever forget it, buddy.

AQUARIUS You’re one of the zodiacs beloved oddballs. Was Magritte an Aquarius? I don’t know. Who cares. But dude in some comments [on the imagination] I read somewhere it records him as saying, “Female underwear, for instance, proved very difficult to show in any unexpected light.” Fair enough.

PISCES Pisces. Pisces. Pisces. Where do you go? I don’t blame you for being such a sleepy-head. Your head is filled with dreams. And nightmares. If you’re going to approach your dream-nightmares like a mechanic and you go in for a tuneup on the regular by dreaming about Robert Smith circa Boys Don’t Cry--it’s ok. Recall that one time you delivered banh mi sandwiches to Keanu Reeves and a group of women at his house. What is going on under that hood of yours anyway? Remembrance of pleasures past? Interiors composed, cropped, and clipped charged with supercommodity residue and feelings? Recycling of 90s icons? In the diorama of your dreams, it’s hard to resist being fascinated by things you know you know are fake. Robert Smith and Keanu Reeves are the street lamps of your lonely city-mind. Time is sticky like pink chewing gum and you got it in your hair. The incongruous arrangements, the visiting hours of time, and the perfect presentation of fictions are part of a much broader pleasure-seeking campaign of the eye. Wait until spring, Bandini.