There’s a small-print-short-blurb in this week’s New Yorker about a middle aged artist I never heard of, some guy celebrating a retrospective in a swank gallery in the West Village.
As a person with a creative temperament, it’s disappointing to see someone celebrating a retro while I still seek a spective.
I wear butt lifting pantyhose and dime-store reading glasses. My creative output is limited to a few pithy editorials and a smattering of fluff features in regional and trade magazines.
I don’t bother to read the rest of that New Yorker review, instead I flip the page noisily, landing on a sidebar about someone with more mainstream recognition—Marianne Faithful. The singer’s voice, according to this Oracle of All Things Artsy, is “entirely busted”—another peer whose potential has been played out.
Why bother hashing out conflict on canvas or computer when the other golden oldies are exhibiting their laurels or rolling joints with them?
This question was meant to evoke pity, not a rational response. The shirttail relative I was talking at didn’t miss a bite. Ham sandwich in hand, he pulled out a slim green paperback called The Thirty Six Dramatic Situations and flopped it onto his kitchen table.
So it’s either been said, it’s too late to say it, or it’s boring.
A lot of fruit rots, overripe and uneaten, falling to rejoin the mush of the collective unconscious, and annoyingly enough, sometimes a stranger picks up the seed that was allowed to whither, plants it in his own shit, and it smells good!
I figured sooner or later my true talent would reveal itself, like a shiny new car behind a curtain in a game show. To this point, no one has even yelled “Come on down!”
At least the curse of perpetual potential has kept me looking about a decade younger than my peers: perhaps compensation for lack of a body of work is a good body.
An early journallist filled his mouth with red fruit, pressed his hand against the cave and spat out the juice. When he took away his stained hand, his story remained. Centuries later, four fingers, opposing thumb, cave wall, story told.
In the next ten weeks I am going to force some juice from drying fruit. Roll, squeeze, and spit. Don’t be alarmed if you see middle aged Montanan wandering the City with one hand in her pocket and a little red goo at the corners of her mouth.