Boxes, Day 3

I love the smell of cardboard in the morning. Which I said first thing this morning and cracked the four of us up, D, A, Tom and Tom. The second unit is huge, filling most of the middle of the main gallery, twenty-one feet wide, at the widest point, and more than twenty feet deep, more than twenty feet tall in the center, tapering down in both directions. Maybe 300 boxes. Each horizontal section, which would be called a 'bent' in barn or house construction is six inches apart and completely free-standing. Various arrangements of columns and lintels, so there are all sorts of voids and nooks. There are benches inside, so you can sit and contemplate the space. A very fine installation. The other five artists will be displayed mostly on the walls encircling. D on the road next week collecting some of the other art, but a Cincy artist is bringing her piece in next Tuesday, Nicky, and it's a revolving light inside a model of a house, casting shadows on the walls, and, as it happens, on some of the white boxes. Anthony is doing plaster casts of fake architectural detail, and rubbings of the joints at the corners of some log cabins. Some great photos of structures, I don't remember his name; some fine semi-abstract paintings of parts of structures, very much like recent work of Glenn and Linda's younger daughter. Both of these groups of paintings I saw within a couple of weeks, which strikes me as odd, as though it were a new vein to be examined. Some cast glass houses, or pieces of houses. I think that's everyone. The main gallery, except for the perfect installation, looks like a bomb went off, all the other space is clogged with debris, almost a show in itself, what it takes to install a show. I've got two days to clean up before we have the official opening of the photo show upstairs, then install the other components of the big show. Then get in some firewood and start preparing for winter, and, oh god, do something with the driveway. A big fall fund-raiser, then Thanksgiving with the girls in Florida, where I'll do all the cooking, and we'll have baby back ribs on the day itself, with some fine sides: butter beans, a perfect slaw, Potatoes Diane (the most sinful side I know), and garlic bread. I feel like I'm booked too far out, but then it will be winter, and no one demands too much of me, because they know they couldn't live this life. Don't want to, don't need to, don't want it thrown in their face that they might should. We're running out of water because you flush your shit down the drain. That's not a question, it's statement of fact. This all comes up because the other Tom's son is living Costa Rica and we're talking, at lunch, about shit-manipulation, about it generally. I mean this sincerely, genuine conversation is the, what? the actual genuine base? I think I'd fall back here and at least look around. What one person calls art, another calls the Anti-Christ. My job is just to mediate. This is a four-hundred level  curse, course, what were we talking about?