Ice cream stains on pantyhose

Download: SCHLOCKHAUSEN "Cracker"

When I got stabbed in the heart twelve years ago, I had no insurance. So naturally, the hospital kicked my ass out as soon as I could stand upright. (I'm not bitter about this or anything -- the wonderful people at the Bellevue E.R. totally saved my life!, and this thing called Crime Victims Services ponied up the dough for the surgery.)

Considering what had happened (it was a mugging and I didn't have any money...), after collapsed lung and open heart and lung surgeries, everyone who came to visit me there thought I'd be in the hospital for a loooooong time, so they brought me things--big-ass books and Walkmans, stuff like that. Never mind that I was too out of it to read anything at the time, but it was nice to be thought of as someone who does read books.

I remember, after a scant nine days in the hospital, most of that spent in intensive care, getting booted out of there that day, then lugging these two shopping bags full of stuff by myself from the hosptial to the curb, and finally realizing that old people walk really slowly because they have no fucking choice, alsothinking I might be having a heart attack right then, but no, I was wrong, that's just what it feels like to recover from that kinda trauma.

I went to stay with my friends Robert and Michael, who had this really cool building out on the cusp of Wmsburg and Greenpoint—out of all my pals they actually had room for me and are just great people. I convalesced there a week, and I still owe them for that. Robert and Michael were best pals with two girls, Kate Schmitz and Sally Ross, as well as my own friend from art school, Alex Brown. I had the hugest crushes on both Kate and Sally but got to be pretty good pals with Kate despite the fact I'd occasionally just go totally doe-eyed with her in the middle of a conversation. This was vitiated by the fact that she either never noticed or pretended not to notice, and my heart has thankfully since learned not to get too hung up on both unavailable people and friends.

Anyway, all these people were a little bit older than me, just by a few years, but all were really talented and obsessive and busy and totally fucking fun. Especially Robert, who was emotionally volatile and at least a little bit of a drunk I think it's fair to say (I was already a junkie, though I thought I was keeping it secret, hah). Robert was like Joe Brainard meets Ed Gein; he did these brutal cutups of comic strips that were amazing.

So this here song is by Robert, whose art just keeps getting dirtier and stranger and better across the board. He should be one hundred per cent famous! This song rules. His wall of large paintings on paper at the "Nuggets" show I curated at Big Cat a year ago was one of the hits of the show, and it was really a great event, too. This is what his wall at the show looked like. And here is what he looks like. And here's what I wrote for the show's "program": ROBERT MCCORMACK lives in New Jersey somewhere. I once described his work as “a Philip Guston wackypack” and that’s pretty lazy but you get the idea. I love his work. Robert describes himself as “very dirty and very gay” so you should befriend him right now.