Waiting for Art

I do it all. It's not a matter of choice. Just that it falls on me to haul the garbage and scrub the toilets. Otherwise it won't get done. I don't even mind, it's just a job, after all, and hauling shit is something I understand. Most of yesterday spent cleaning, then setting up for the German Sister City. Got home to a cold house without electricity, started a fire, and bundled-up on the sofa with Otto Rank's "Art And Artists" until the house was warm enough and the stove hot enough to roast some root vegetables and fry a small steak. The right place at the right time: at Kroger I happened to be in the meat section, when one of the meat department people came out of the back with a cart of meat to be remaindered and in it were three bacon wrapped filets. I bought them all ($3 each), froze two and ate the third. Wish I'd gotten a bottle of wine, it was a great meal. There have been a couple of frosts in the bottoms and the parsnips and turnips have started converting starch to sugar and are fantastic. Texas toast, and the sauce. Slept like the dead until about four-thirty, when I had my recurring dream about being on a very rickety set of scaffolding, and had to get up, smoke a cigaret and have a scant shot of whiskey to settle my nerves. Finally got back to sleep and then was almost late for work; D was late and it all worked out. The ladies arrived to decorate the tables for the event, and they did a very nice job, a lovely set-up, dinner for a hundred, wine and beer in the back hall. The place will be a mess tomorrow, but I'm not going back in until Tuesday. When I really need to get right on hanging the print show because it opens on Thursday. We were given a painting by Guayasamin, we have the provenance and it's appraised at 25K, for the big fund-raiser auction. On canvas, but it was rolled up, needed to be re-stretched and framed. D spent half a day and $7 building the stretcher and frame. I don't like the painting but it looks a thousand times better than it used to. It'll probably sell for less than a thousand and if it does I'll buy it, and resell to a dealer in South America. I actually know enough about the art world, to turn a profit on it, which is weird and scary and a bit embarrassing. I'm Mister Green to most of the people I know, my carbon foot-print is very small, I actually disappear into the background. I have emission allotments I could sell. I choose not to, because I think of it as my stairway to heaven. Play a few notes in G, it's always the blues, nothing tugs at your heart-strings so strong. My next project, beyond the book I'm writing for Diana, is setting some of Walt Whitman to music. Not songs exactly. I'll probably have to do them, because I know the way they sound in my head. I can hear them. TR will do the music, with Zach hammering pots and pans in the background. The elevator guys call the control room, up on the roof, the penthouse, because they're above everyone else, and they have a certain power, I just think of it as the elevator room, but they call it the penthouse, and that's fine, it's good to have a name.