The Victim's Famous Ride

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Dizzy Gillespie plays Swing Low Sweet Cadillac, like it's the very first time I've heard it, I was in school, visiting an old friend. Sitting in her dining room we listened to the whole album, talking about little family stuffs. Later on, I found myself copy of the album at the Jazz Record Mart. Where I also bought some Mingus or Sun Ra. I probably spent all of my money for a whole week on these, but I had this sweet Dizzy Gillespie now. I had it and I would hear it in my kitchen. I don't listen as much as I did. I have more music now, but I also have less quiet inside of me.

Behind the house, writing before opening the gallery on Saturdays, there's an artist. In the morning, they often have coffee and cigarettes here. Sometimes they share breakfast with a partner, another artist or someone named Katt. They're neighbors. They like to talk about the scale of elephant jokes and the slow tease of perfect coffee makes them giggle. At night they will night they drank martinis and read from the dictionary together. Together they fight Fascism, with pencil drawings and dust.

I don't keep a place for listening or thinking anymore. When I can, I sit at a folding table in our bedroom and I write jingles or play magnificently long games of boredom. While jingles can be groovy, my jingles are inherently acultural. They're not worthy of song or presentation and the games that I play often have their own song stuff attached to them. I remember painting two paintings years after the gallery started. The gallery was the catalyst for transforming my once active practice of making paintings into something more subjective and nearer to the realm of obliteration. Both of the paintings were the size of squares. They had wood substrates and for mark making, I used leftover house paint from maintaining the gallery.

At the time, the back bedroom on the first floor was my office. In it, I had a desk and some metal shelves. There was also a round kitchen table and some folding chairs where visitors could sit and drink beer with me. On Saturday, if I wasn't too hungover, I listened to CD's with Van Halen, Dusty Springfield and episodes of radio serials or recordings of Beat Poets talking about jazz-music. I appreciated the pointless exercise of making these mixes, trying to be absurd. I thought I had this enormous appreciation of the absurd, as if I could see how it entangled or groped most everything for good or for ill. Saturday afternoons spent in the gallery were such a fiction. The story of them was slow and dirgy.

Hope you still have old computer or backups. And remember that untested backup is same as no backups at all..