Digging through the dozens of cardboard boxes in the back closet of the bookstore, I came upon two oversized folders containing portraits of US presidents. I researched what the folder might fetch on the market and it didn’t come to too much. Joe decided to keep one and gave me the other.

The folder was published to commemorate the bicentennial. There are thirty-seven sheets starting with Washington, ending with Nixon. Kind of like baseball cards but the size of a small poster. The backs contain a bunch of the president’s stats. I have no idea what the practical purpose of this set was. Did the publishers imagine patriotic families gathering in suburban living rooms to take turns reciting highlights from their favorite executive’s career? It’s the kind of thing that has “collectible” printed on the cover, ensuring it never will be.

My first and only thought after taking the presidents home is to cut up and deface them. Though nothing I can do to their stillborn visages can match the feeling of dread I have before having at them with the Exacto, glue, and markers. It’s a real rogues’ gallery. Maybe it’s only the perspective from the present-day quagmire but I have trouble imagining that anyone looking at this collection of mugs would feel anything but disgust and revulsion. It’s a real parade of creeps.

I know a bit about a few of them; less about others. A few times I’ve read from the stat sheets on the back but nothing of what I learned there informed what I’ve done to their faces once I flipped them back over.

I rarely respond to political art. It usually has a short shelf life and only resonates, if at all, in its own moment. I’m not thinking of what I’m doing to the presidents as particularly political. It’s more about meditating on an empire as it circles the drain. Coming upon this folder feels a little like that scene in Planet of the Apes where they pass the head of the Statue of Liberty, toppled over and buried on the beach.

I’ve done seven and have thirty to go. I’m thinking of putting them all up in a row in the window cases at the Rainbo Club in September. It is the two-hundred-and-a-halfth anniversary of this thing this year.

Not much to celebrate but I keep making more things to put up on walls anyway.

I wrote about Abel Ferrara’s memoir and rewatching a bunch of his movies.

A couple weeks left to catch my Firecat show.