Last Day

Edvard Munch's painting "The Scream" is crayon (and casein) on cardboard. Not exactly an archival medium. When D and I were matting and framing some pieces for the fund-raiser, a print and a watercolor, both of which needed to be suspended on the inside of the matt, we used archival matt board, archival Japanese tape which needs to be moistened, and, as everyone I've ever seen do this, instead of using distilled water, we used archival spit. I've got to go to town tomorrow, pick up a few things for the trip, vitamin water, power bars, some trail mix, a couple of books on CDs, a big bag of dog food (B said he'd feed the dog), and some foodstuffs for the house, so there'll be something here when the girls and I get back. Sunday I need to fill all the stations of the cross with firewood and kindling. Out of here at eight on Monday morning. Someone else will have to clean the museum on Tuesday, after several weekend functions. I cleaned up the kitchen again today, set up tables and chairs. Almost all I did this week was clean the kitchen (a food event every day) and move tables and chairs around. Yesterday I felt poorly, my feet hurt and I was tired, last night I crashed early and slept like a log, this morning I was a new man. I look forward to being away for a week, no concerns but my family and a change of scenery. Route 17, from Savannah, Georgia, to Jacksonville is one of my favorite roads, across the marshes, with that fecund tidewater smell and a hundred hole-in-the-wall diners that all serve great crab and fried perch meals. Eating my way down the Georgia littoral. I can talk the talk, and my accent changes, when I cross the line into the deep south; I often just take something, on the tines of fork, back into the kitchen, and ask the cook how he'd done that. They're always completely open and unpretentious, it's the peanut oil, or the cornmeal in the batter, or something he'd learned from his mother. In Bosch's "Garden of Earthly Delights" in the right hand panel, "Hell", there is an ultra-modern iceboat, skating on thin ice; I was examining a very good reproduction of that painting, today, with a magnifying glass, and found a thousand details I had missed. Another one, I'm far from my sources here, but I it was "Lady With An Ermine" I think it's Michelangelo, her right hand, stroking the ermine is incredible. The fingers. The implied mobility. I looked at that hand for half an hour. The painting as a whole is almost frightening, her expression and that fucking ermine, but her right hand, nearly centered in the painting, is a thing of consummate beauty. It's the best hand I ever saw. Bumps a Sargent hand, I saw in Naples, Florida, into second place. Better than God and Adam reaching across the gulf of that ceiling. This is now my benchmark hand, the hand for the ages. I find her, actually, kind of sinister, and that goddamn ermine with his black-hole eyes scares me to death, but her right hand is a thing of beauty. I'm not a romantic, as anyone who knows me would verify. So what is being said, that I respond to so strongly? Certainly those fingers, he probably didn't mean anything, just drawing some fingers. But they look like they mean something. The Smothers Brothers did a routine that always cracked me up, where confusion reached a terminal mass, the particulars escape me, something about how they had interrupted something that was said. Artist talk a lot. Confusion Metal to Tommy Smothers. He stands alone. Fuck, I lost the thread.