August | 2016 | Exile on Pain Street

bins

April 6, 1992

Should I feel guilty about having fun at the pro-choice rally in D.C.? I believe in the cause wholeheartedly. It’s a matter of life and death. But Suzanne asked me to go with her and her friends and I wanted to seduce her. It was mayhem, as expected. The crowd was estimated at a half million people. How can they know for sure? Regardless, I think we got our point across.

I thought it was going to be a gentle, rolling sea of delightful bachelorettes but it was actually a raging tsunami of pissed-off political militants. There were portions of the rally that were downright anti-man. I felt like the enemy. I am not the enemy! I’ll tell you what it was a sea of: lily white faces. 100% Caucasian. Where was the minority representation? It’s their cause, too.

Planned Parenthood sponsored a special non-stop train there and back. I stopped at the Middle Eastern bakery on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn the night before to load up on snacks for the trip. I bought dried apples, cashews, dried bananas, peanuts, dried apricots, yoghurt covered raisins, some breads and a big bottle of water, the total of which weighed about 70 pounds. I got the gold medal for snacks. A fun, healthy, politically progressive combo. By the end of the day my body ached for a thick, undercooked cheeseburger. They all brought boring stuff to eat and glommed off my stash.

We got to the Washington Monument late in the morning. Bella Abzug spoke as well as the editor of Ms. Magazine and a bunch of other women. No men. None of them said anything new or inspirational. I was disappointed. You’d think a crowd that size would light their words on fire but each speaker was as boring and predictable at the next. Peter Paul & Mary sang “If I Had a Hammer.” Seriously? It’s not 1968, you idiots. Do something relevant.

We moved to the stepping-off point for the march and waited, literally, an hour before we could walk. It was that crowded. We were packed pretty tight and Suzanne started to have a panic attack so I told her to close her eyes and rest her head on my chest. I got excited. They had a bunch of boring, stock protest chants so I wrote this one on the spot:

2-4-6-8
I wish Bush could ovulate.

We finally moved and marched past the White House, which I’d never seen in person. It’s tiny. It’s like a toy model of the real thing. El Presidente made damn sure he was in Camp David for the weekend.

The march ended at the other end of The Mall by the Capitol Building. More bad speeches. Cindi Lauper sang a pretty song. There were a bunch of neo-hippies banging bongos, congas and drums with broken skins. At one point, Suzanne and I were sitting on a curb resting. I was spinning my web when, suddenly, bunch of them formed a drum circle around us and started drumming and chanting. There was some freeform interpretive dance that made me laugh very hard (inside). They resembled dying poultry.

There were so many different agendas being addressed that I began to feel disengaged from the core reason for the march. There was a feminist speaking (screaming, actually), calling for a new political party composed of just women, gays and minorities and with that voting bloc, they would take the White House this fall. Let me know how that works out, dreamers. Oh, and by the way, thanks a lot. Part of her speech was an attack on Middle America. You know, where my family is from. She screamed, “They don’t want US, so WE DON’T WANT THEM!” That’s a marvelous approach to our problems. Build those bridges, cupcake.

We got back to Penn Station about 11:30 at night. Everyone was exhausted, dirty and quiet. On the way up the escalator I thought the girl in front of me looked an awful lot like Mary Stewart Masterson. In the Times this morning, it said she attended, so I suppose that was her. Pretty.

I spoke to many, many people throughout the day and at some point in a conversation, I was eventually asked, “So, where did you go to school?” I like the look of disbelief on people’s faces when I tell them I’ve never stepped foot on a college campus. It allows me a brief respite from my self-loathing, which usually returns in fairly short order.

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There’s a great Stuart Davis exhibit at the Whitney. He’s one of my favs. He plays to my graphic design sensibilities.

On June 23, 1964, after watching a French film that ended with ‘fin,’ Davis added it to the painting on his easel before going to bed.

That night, he had a stroke and died in the ambulance on the way to New York’s Roosevelt Hospital. That’s how I’d like to go. Do the thing I love the most, go to bed and never wake up.

~~~~~~~

Two from Christie’s contemporary art auction a few months ago:

Christopher Wool
And If You
Enamel on aluminum
Est: $12,000,000-18,000,000
Sold for $13,605,000

Jeff Koons
Lobster
Mirror-polished stainless steel
Est: $6,000,000-8,000,000
Sold for $6,885,000

That Christopher Wool is such a fraud. But Jeff Koons! What an innovator! Only $6 million?

Kidding. What does either piece mean? Anything? The lobster was interesting in that it looked exactly like an inflatable pool toy. You didn’t know it was metal unless you rapped it a few times with your knuckle.

Dear Trent Lewin:

Thank you for the ping. Very thoughtful of you. A few summer projects have prevented me from reading blogs, commenting or writing new posts.

First, my backyard performance art installation, Ode to Summer, opened in June.

Ode to Summer, 2016
String, canvas, a tree, tube steel

I tie one end of string to my right foot and the other end to a tree. I lay in my hammock—a Father’s Day gift—and by moving my right foot slightly from left to right, I’m able to rock myself gently to sleep. To wit:

Second, I read Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, which was a disappointment. To rinse that bad taste out of my mouth, I reread Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, a book I first read 20 years ago. I’d forgotten how beautiful and perfectly-written that story is. There’s not one wasted sentence. It filled me with melancholy and hopeless yearning for my youth.

Also, I wrote a book. I dared myself to do it. I took the journal entries I’ve posted here and many more that I haven’t and created a 75,000-word narrative. It’s currently being edited. Do you have any idea how much it costs to hire a professional editor to beat and thrash a manuscript into shape? It’s not cheap. I had to sell one of my rare books. I don’t know if it’ll ever see the light of day. I just wanted to prove to myself that I could do it. I did it! I’m pleased with the results. That’s what matters most.

Here’s a proper art exhibit, since you asked.

Nikki Rosato’s Inbound exhibit at the Seward Johnson Grounds for Sculpture is a sampling of her wall hangings and sculptures.

Her medium is paper road maps. Remember those, old timers?

She cuts away the land masses, leaving only the roads, boarders and waterways.

Only the linear forms remain.

It’s exacting, effective work.

For sculpture, the maps are placed over Lucite forms.

There was some mumbo-jumbo about the work being metaphorical for a personal journey. Get it? Map = journey. There was also some stuff about negative space and spatial counterpoints. As usual, I freely admit to lacking the intellectual capital required to see through to these metaphysical suppositions. The pieces were fetching and I respect the work that went into creating them. Isn’t that enough?

The many moods of Tillie.