I am deep within another move, the second in six months. It has everything to do with strategic foreclosure, that inevitable game theory of the economic times we are in. I am tired of being like General Motors, even after General Motors called it quits on being like General Motors. This means an upgrade to our current apartment, because it is raining everywhere, economically, and I had the misfortune of renting a pleasant little shithole that was about to go into receivership. Seriously, the last damned day of mounting shelves, and notices ring on every apartment door, like Martin Luthers bring notice that, yes, I will have to muster my resources and move again. I just needed some rest first. This is a much smaller mass extinction than the last one, because the asteroid has already hit, and most of the items are extinction-resistant at this point. Notable exceptions are some of my old art, however, which it turns out I was saving mostly so that there would be some record of its existence-an archaeology of my former self.
This is an oil painting, about 24 by 36 inches, I painted in high school. It was probably 1986 and I was probably 17 at the time. I really should have ventilated that workspace better. I was really into linseed oil medium washes at the time, and most of it is so thick with dried medium that it looks translucent. The best part, a rare bit of luck at getting facial features to show some life and emotion, is actually not layered at all. I had a huge crush on Lilly Fu, a girl from my art class at Skyline College, and dated her once. It was a strange, transcultural affair. The next one employs similar techniques, but is smaller. It reeks of personal symbolism, the snakes representing that fundamental aspect of my soul that El Camino High School could not touch, and sentimentally invoking my long employment at H. Plath and Sons nursery.
They were never framed, but they have been displayed in many places. The House I grew up in. My dorm room. Maybe at least one apartment in Los Angeles. The Old House. This place. They came back to me after having somehow been stored in boxes at my parent's house....I think the reason they survived is because they never made the cut to be in the apartment I shared with my later-to-be-exwife in Hancock Park, which is where my contiguous stretch of years as a real adult, independent of moving back to the parents house, begins. If it seems they reek of sexual frustration it is because they do. Until recently, as in, within the last year or two, all of my art rand writing reeked of unfulfilled sexual desire.
The next one has an oil base, but it is really a mixed media collage. The underpainting, in lipstick pink, was a paint-over of something I hated. I have no idea what it was, but it probably was a work of representational art with a female nude in it because i have always done a lot of those, and when my weaknesses at figure drawing get to me I plunge into abstracts. The ammonoid is in melted crayon, the ghostrider comic was truly terrible to read, and for a while a letter to my ex-wife from out mutual friend and her lover, Elvia Lahman (who does not facebook, i would love to get back in contact with her because she has become a semifamous rockabilly mid-century retro enthusiast), was attached because it got stuck in the drying paint. I really don't know how it trotted around with me as far as it did, but I remember it blowing off the wall of our old house at every opportunity. There are so many I never photographed, and so many more to share, but it is more worthwhile to note that i seem to remember my life in episodes and thinking about one or the other falls in and out of favor. Now, I am more curious than ever about certain times and places spent with my brother and his friends, in the city and at Dennys, for which I have scarcely a photograph to mark, because my propensity to photograph comes and goes as well. It is a little like Bolsheviks after the Russian Revolution throwing away icons and looking for their true history in peasant art.
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