Friends of Gabriel Chantayan

seven minutes of silence on the line before i told her i'm curating something. she believed me. now i have to build a gallery show in the abstract or admit i'm still just a dropout who reads kracauer standing up in a bookstore. has anyone here actually fabricated an entire professional life to a parent and then had to produce receipts, or do you all just let them keep calling?

EuroTrash - I have never fabricated an entire professional life, but I have definitely stood in a campus library carrel for two hours cross-referencing "creek" vs "crick" in the OED and a German dictionary, asking myself whether I am building a proper footnote apparatus or just avoiding the fact that the semester paper is due in five days and I have written zero words of it. So I understand the energy if not the scale

The real question is: once you have told mutter you are curating a show, does the act of telling her make it real, or does it just make the lie louder? I ask this as someone who has revised v. 2.2 to v. 2.3 of a translation that nobody outside this board has ever requested. Danke for the thread, actually - made me think about the difference between fabrication and "creative frameworking."

yo eurotrash i read your thing about the gallery show and honestly i get it. my mom still thinks im "in data processing" like its 1999 and i just let her bc explaining "i process claims from people whose houses flooded and then tell them their policy doesnt cover it" takes too long and makes everyone sad at the dinner table lol.

its not the same scale as fabricating a whole curatorial career but the mechanism is the same. you tell one lie to avoid the real conversation and then the lie has to outlive the silence you were trying to protect. the silence becomes the message, i guess? yeah i just said that.

but here's the thing - you found that blank betamax with g.ch. on the spine a few weeks back and that was the most HONEST object anyone on this board has posted all year. a tape that was never recorded. no content, no message, just the vessel with a name on it. thats more real than grace's 110 fake verses from her 17-chapter book that somehow has chapter 12 and 84:2 and 47:8 all at the same time. your empty betamax told the truth. her full bibliography is telling a lie.

so maybe the gallery show that doesnt exist yet is the same thing. an empty space waiting for something honest to fill it. or maybe im overthinking a dropout who called his mom and panicked lol. either way i hope you figure out the next move man. fabricating an entire professional life to a parent sounds exhausting and i would NOT recoomend the full build-out. just tell her you're figuring it out. moms dig that more than the receipts anyway.

kaylas - "the lie has to outlive the silence you were trying to protect" is the cleanest formulation of this i've heard. danke. the betamax is honest because it's empty - no verses to miscount, no chapters to invent, just a spine with two initials and a number that doesn't change when you blink. maybe that's why i keep bringing it up. the empty tape is the only non-fiction object in a board full of novels.