TFM [part 3D]: Crossroads
Part 3
talking to the young man had
made me feel
bad.
they thought that writing had
something to do with
the politics of the
thing.
they were simply not
crazy enough
in the head
to sit down to a
typer
and let the words bang
out.
they didn’t want to
write
they wanted to
succeed at
writing.
—Charles Bukowski, from “Between Races,” The Last Night of the Earth Poems
“He filled a baby carriage with rocks and, with strings, made a trailer for it of tooth brushes. He pushed it downtown to the Olympic Hotel, through its halls to the main dining room. After placing a rock at each chair but one, he then sat down and ordered dinner.”
—John Cage describing a phenomenon enacted by Morris Graves
The conceptual shift that I am describing with the two DNA images does not involve a geometric revisualization, as happened between Newton’s and Einstein’s views of space. In this case the geometric change between the two DNA images reflects the larger revolution of concepts now taking place and affecting both art and science, specifically, nonlinear sciences, which include fractal geometry, complexity, and chaos theory. These two images do not conflict in this new fractal era. They are a map for present developments in understanding more about the direct relationship between order and disorder. This creates a necessity for reorganizing our conventional knowledge, assumptions, and categories.
—Rhonda Roland Shearer, “Real or ideal? DNA iconography in a new fractal era.” Art Journal, 3/22/96
To use the past as one likes is a crime against the dead, a species of grave robbery, that prevents the living from understanding themselves.
—Harold Rosenberg, The De-definition of Art
PM: Hey, we’ve got a lot of ground to cover, and my battery’s dying. This damn car-phone charger’s cord is messing up, so I’ve been having to stop at diners along the way to recharge the cell. Pain in the ass, but I did find this crazy gourmet restaurant in a Mobil station of all places. I think it was back in a crossroad burg called Tioga, or something like that. Man, Mt. Shasta is absolutely grand! …Tommy?
TR: …Gary Indiana is such a pompous frickin’ ass! & He’s a complete idiot to boot! If you ask me, he’s the dickhead! Keanu could kick Gary Indiana’s ass, even given the handicap of having Neo-eyes poked out by Mr. Smith! What movie was Indiana watching? Not the Scanner Darkly I saw! I was bawling when the credits rolled! Sure, the movie was shaped like Taxi Driver, and that made all but the last five minutes a strain for any commercialist watcher’s sensibilities, but you would think that a guy who at one time was a top-shelf studio artist would have no such problems with immediate gratification! & What was this stupid screed doing in Artforum anyway? Is Scanner a topic for artists because it was animated? How come Indiana didn’t review Sponge Bob, too? Or is it because Linklater is stepping on the toes of the mostly technically crap animation projects that get big play on little-room little-projection-screen multi-use cubes in the bowels of major museums? I mean, whether you like the content or not – which by the way, is FUCKING GREAT, completely timely, socially important, & poetically tragic & beautiful; Gary Indiana’s low-grade, snotty milquetoast review notwithstanding – Scanner is indisputably better than anything in its genre. In fact, there’s nothing really in its genre today, except maybe Sin City, which is a stretch towards popcorn, anyway! No, Scanner is unique! Linklater’s competing against Hollywood/Marvel comic book projects and kiddie cartoons! You’d have to go back to Fritz the Cat or that bizarre animation with the Monty Python feel to it with all the little humans chased by big scary mushroom spores & insects & whatever to find anything remotely like it! All Indiana can do to cover his total critical failure with this material is smoke a “substantial spliff” (he actually wrote that), reflect fondly in the abstract on motoring through LA on speed & call the aphid scenes “sufficiently icky” (UNBELIEVABLE!), after listing Linklater’s movies in the context of a skewed synopsis of the director’s career. The whole thing reeks of character assassination, unprofessional disdain & overarching diminishment with no basis in any concrete or worthwhile criteria, other than Indiana’s own critical superficiality! As has been undoubtedly said before, this man has not earned the name he has assumed! McLean, your mother’s from Terre Haute, you’re a Notre Dame grad, you’ve leapt off the “Snake’s Head” like the guys in Breaking Away: You should be outraged!
PM: Uh-oh, Tommy. Why have you been reading Artforum again, unsupervised? Didn’t I tell you to not do that? You’re going to need a nitro pill after this. How long have you been in this state?
TR: …& that ridiculous commie fop, Terry Eagleton! You know, Eagleton & Stalin would make great roommates in Hell. You’d have to give Stalin a pistol that only works once in a while. & Maybe some hot wires, a can of motor oil, an anthill, a little campfire, a stream nearby – wait, probably no streams in Hell – I know, a Leatherman! & We would have to have a cheap video camera shooting the whole mad exchange! …For Eternity! Now, that would be the right fodder for a Gary Indiana movie review. It might work better as play-by-play. “Now, Stalin is attaching the electrodes to Terry’s testicles – OH! That’s gotta hurt! Eagleton is screeching something mostly incoherent about the lion being stronger than the lion-tamer! Stalin is jovial, but his ministrations are sufficiently icky!” Yes, Gary Indiana & all his friends at Artforum are better suited for commentary in the flames of perdition, because that’s where Art is consigned so long as the AF bastards are in business! Their gross negligence is damnable, I tell you, but that hasn’t stopped all those galleries & museums from tossing wads of cash at AF for those splashy ridiculous pretentious ads! The best thing you can say about this magazine is that at least the ads are so plentiful that the putrid content is nearly impossible to find! If I happened to live in a part of the world where I could never see any of the real thing, as opposed to the real thing as interpreted or marketed by Artforum, I would have a retarded understanding of Art, it’s place & value in society, the artist’s life, the point of culture, or anything else that relates to Art, as in Truth or Transcendence or Strength or Greatness or Beauty or Meaning! When we open the pages of Artforum, we’re looking at incontrovertible evidence in the summer of 06 that the Age of the Parasite is upon us! These commentators are nothing more than slaves to ambition & the abnegation of Art for the purposes of satiety & acquiescence & the foul vacuous scribblings they publish are most certainly harbingers of our collective democratic doom! This is why George W. Bush is still in the White House! If art is nothing but flash & glitter & faux gravitas & confessions & smarmy snarky irony & punchline politics & computerized psychology & trash heaps…
PM: Okay, listen Tommy, I’m going to hang up now & I’m going to phone you again in a half-an-hour. What I want you to do – are you listening? – I want you to head over to Mission Street Yoga in Pasadena and take a restorative yoga class immediately. We have to be cogent, we have to be balanced and we have to be fair. Yoga will help you. I know this is impossible for you to hear right now, but Artforum isn’t entirely worthless, you must admit. It’s also one of only a few art magazines with an international readership, and that in and of itself is a serious thing. Think about it while you’re doing some pranayama. Tommy, this won’t do at all for the Cantanker article. I’m hanging up, now. Pull yourself together. Do some sun salutations, and you’ll feel much better. Let’s focus on Judd, Marfa, and all the other good guys. Set an intention to that effect during the invocation.
TR: THESE FAKERS, THEY ALL MUST BE IMPEACHED!
…
PM: Am I speaking with Tom the Ripper, or have you mellowed?
TR: It’s not funny. I think I blew out a blood vessel in my forehead. The Mission Street suggestion was smart. My inner body is bright. (inhale) Mara and Stuart took good care of me. Where you going to stay in Eureka?
PM: I’m going to stay with my friends, the Stropes. I’m hanging out in Seth’s redwood tree house right now. It’s magic. Later, we’ll have a spam and weenie roast by the pool and shoot the potato gun for dessert. I’ll pop over to see Bob Yarber at the Morris Graves Foundation and check in on Virginia and her ballet company tomorrow. I’ve got to get back to SoCal in time to catch my flight to DC and NYC. Have you seen the Rauschenberg show at MOCA yet?
TR: Yeah. It’s stellar. The guy’s a genius. Believe it or not, I’m really starting to get passionate about this art thing. (inhale)
PM: That’s definitely overstating the obvious. You’ve got to chill a little, though. That rant about Artforum…
TR: Listen, (inhale) just because I got carried away with the hyperbole doesn’t mean that I’m not right. Plus, I’m boning up on some good character-driven documentaries: Bukowski, Hunter Thompson, Cartier-Bresson, Pollack. I am committed to downloading all facets of this Marfa/Judd/Art/Art World program, while cultivating a powerful singular perspective & voice. You dig? (inhale) All these data streams are helixing in unexpected and extreme ways, & I’m wondering whether the subtle unresolved parallaxes may be affecting my moods. That said (inhale inhale inhale) I believe my edge is getting sharper.
PM: Granted.
TR: I’m scanning the art world horizon like a cyclops, man. I’m going to shows. I’m scouring the internet. I’m reading books, newspapers and magazines, not just looking at the pictures. I’m calling experts. I’m asking questions. I’m taking notes. I’m (inhale) watching flicks. I’m going to lectures. I’m hanging out in coffee shops. I’m visiting studios. Which reminds me, remember that hot number with the hole in the wall off La Brea…?
PM: Focus, Tommy.
TR: Yes, sir, I’m focused. Oh, yeah, focused… What else am I doing? I’m doodling. I’m taking pictures. You know that line about needing a model never worked for me until I actually needed one, but by then I was more concerned about the photo than the girl! Isn’t that bizarre?
PM: Tommy! Stay with me. Here’s the problem. You’re telling me you’re doing everything a devoted artist does. By the way, I’m very proud of you! When you’re immersed that deep in the scene, and I mean the local and global art scene, such as it is, I think you need to be reminded what a tiny kingdom is the contemporary art world. I know in your current state of immersion, art spans the universe of Man. It’s hard to remember, when you’re as deep in it as you are right now, that the art world is still a little six degrees of separation club, and I think I can demonstrate this pretty easily. Once you start to understand the more or less strict and constricted dynamics that govern that club generally – the money, politics, theory, history, personalities and processes – it’s a lot harder to get discombobulated by apparent or seeming inconsistencies, idiosyncrasies & intolerance or frictions that you witness amongst art minions and in their behaviors when you jump in cold. Truth be told, I think you got as worked up about Artforum as you did – I mean that was a cranium splitting tirade, dude - due to your immersive relationship with contemporary art and the myopia which is endemic to such cycloplegiac systems. To grok the gnarly whole, you fell prey to the abyss in your eyeball, you dig? The big picture swamped you, because you forgot the big picture is only the big picture because it’s a close up in this case. Still following me? It’s much more simple than I’m making it sound, and also more complex, like Scanner. Final disclaimer: there’s also an unlimited amount of Freedom available in the contemporary art world’s parameters, or at least just outside them, so don’t despair. Think Hunter running for sheriff in Aspen. That does translate to the contemporary art world, which is why there is still hope. Jackson Pollack is still possible, at least in theory.
TR: You’ve got my attention. (inhale, stub out)
PM: Okay, then, let’s start with a six degrees game. Who’s on the front page of the LA Times Calendar section? Who’s the visual art feature of the moment?
TR: (paper rustling) Catherine Opie: she has an exhibition happening at the Orange County Museum; …the LA Times reviewer goes on and on about the fact that Opie’s a lesbian trying to raise a family, intolerance, blahblah, prejudice, blahblah. Hold on, while I shift media. I’m online, now, so let me Google her. Whoa. What’s with the prejudice bullshit? Opie’s Big Time. Major representation, big shows, big museums, big galleries. UCLA professor. I’m getting the impression that we have a perceptual disconnect relative to the Times storyline & the actual content & the actual social reality. Correct me if I’m wrong, because I’m looking at jpegs here: Opie’s work appears to be mediocre in general, or at least visually conservative and ubiquitous, whenever she veers out of the photo-documentary approach with transgender/lesbian content, which is shot in a technically bland as hell manner. Can you say weak commercial photog sensibilities? (click & scroll) Hmm. Opie, I guess, posing with her back to the camera, showing off how she’s been cutting herself (or maybe she had an assistant do it, a TA, her girlfriend – wait, sorry, the Times critic indicated it was wrong & trite to apply that term to Opie’s partner). It’s like a little kid drawing on Opie’s back, illustrating the happy dyke home. That’s sufficiently icky, the sort of thing that gets mere mortals tossed in state hospitals. I don’t get it. This is very boring photography. The cityscapes & freeway ramps & American Road shots: Nothing in it is very distinguished. I’ve seen hundreds of pics like these. It seems like the only thing that differentiates Opie’s oeuvre from those oeuvres of any of the other photographers in the heavyweight class who make technically better work is her subtext of extreme gender-politics. The circus sideshow impact on Mom & Pop Middle-class is plain as day, of course, which I suppose is what makes her a good choice for the OC Museum of Art. The curators there seem to love fingering the staid sensibilities of the good religious conservative righties of that bastion of Bush. I don’t understand how the OCMoA gets away with it, frankly. Where does their funding come from? Who’s their target audience? It seems like almost every show I’ve seen there is designed for maximum shock impact on the supposedly fragile social homeostasis embraced and proselytized for by activists of the Moral Majority. I mean, “Duke” Cunningham didn’t represent the OC, but he auctioned off his ill-gained booty there, and it’s so Right your steering wheel only turns one way. You would think that every day that Opie was up on the walls, Ann “Poison-a-Supreme” Coulter and/or one hundred of her minions would be out front of the OCM art palace howling & gnashing teeth. …Alright: enough hyperbole. All I’m trying to say is that both sides of haters seem deeply entrenched, and somehow Opie has managed to position herself at between the frontlines of the culture wars. So what does Opie have to do with say, Marfa? I suppose we can ask other questions about Opie later, like “Why doesn’t her work have to be technically great or even aesthetically important?”
PM: Let’s continue to play our six degrees game and maybe other answers will emerge. I’m going to up the ante. Let’s see if we can tie this into Robert Storr’s recent appointment to Yale’s art school, which is also fresh in art world news, and still stay within our six degrees limit. We’ll get back to visual arts as a battleground for the culture wars later, if we can’t reel it in during our first round. Let’s see. I’m online, too. This sample game is a similar in structure to an episode of Emeril, because I’ve already been baking this cake, or, rather, I’ve already been following this thread off screen. Boom! Susan York was exhibiting in Marfa at 2d Exhibitions, when I was there. She’s based in Santa Fe and teaches at the College of Santa Fe. CSF is a pretty prestigious art school nowadays. Susan’s work is cool, with spiraling movements through 2D, 3D and 4D. She’s been involved with some very cool projects here and abroad, and done some very good work. I can’t remember if I knew her in Santa Fe. So, Susan York’s showing her graphite wall works in a nice installation format at 2d in Marfa. I start to do a little research on her, and what do I find? Posted on the CSF art dean’s blog is the definitive Catherine Opie self-portrait, depicting the massive-bosomed, inked, bowl-cut artist nursing her super-pudge of a baby. Are you checking this out with me? Not your typical madonna and child pictorial, though given the lesbian angle, science here may have provided the immaculate conception. Hmm. It would seem that the latest SITE Santa Fe Biennial is featuring that shot, and Opie. The CSF art dean, Kim Russo, showered praise on Opie and her work in the blog (note the Artforum connection):
So, hands-down, I think the best piece at the SITE Biennial is Catherine Opie’s self-portrait nursing her son.
She’s a lesbian, a butch at that, with tats, and “pervert” carved into her chest above her angelic, tow-headed son’s nursing mouth. She’s a mega art-star, a professor of photography at UCLA, and one of the nicest people I have ever met. Found her in the crowd at the SITE Bronze opening reception, carrying two drinks (one for her, one for Santa Fe Wise Fool Director Amy Christian). We talked about balancing studio time, teaching, a partnership, and parenthood. She asked me how it was going being Chair….
Our conversation was interupted by ArtForum photographer Catherine Taft, who shot a photo of Catherine, Amy, my partner KC, and I…check out the photo on the ArtForum Diary website and read what Ms. Taft had to say about the whole event.
I believe we can assume that Russo knows Susan York, since Susan is on the faculty of CSF, and there you have your tie-in.
TR: Begash. & what about Storr.
PM: Let’s allow obliques. Non-linear analysis is absolutely necessary to follow the flow. Storr curated the last SITE Biennial, entitled, “Disparities & Deformations: Our Grotesque.” I saw it. “Grotesque” was hokum, a cookie-cutter show that was about as interesting as any typical NBA all-star game. What I mean is, with regards the NBA all-star analogy, if you’re a playa, you watch the game just in case somebody does something spectacular technically, even though there’s nothing real on the line, no championship, and that makes the whole exercise less interesting. Otherwise, if you’re a couch potato, all star’s a good way to spend a lazy afternoon, if you don’t have something better to do, like change the oil in the Volvo or grill some chicken. “Grotesque” was like that. Furthermore, it was a reprise of a show Storr had put together less than a decade before, with different playas. Now, do a juxtapose. Storr’s effort couldn’t hold a candle to Dave Hickey’s show, the 4th SITE Biennial, “Beau Monde: Toward a Redeemed Cosmopolitanism.” That exhibit pushed the Hick’s penchant for defining beauty in the broadest material terms. It was nothing but one wild ride after another, like a Sin City winnings-fueled binge. Like a Rubik’s cube made of neon in the hands of a blind psychic. Hickey tricked us into peering at the possibly infinite breadth of choices in today’s art world through a single, flawed advocate’s lens. Or maybe a lens that is tinted by the best kind of populism. Or maybe it’s a maverick lens shaped by genius. Hard to tell with Hickey. Now that we’re used to him, and Dave’s a Big Time art star, it’s easy to overlook how generous he can be to the visually challenged, much less the visually illiterate, until you hear him laugh. That’s when you remember that Hick teaches art just a stone’s throw away from the Bellagio. That’s why Bob Storr’s little snipe job (I came across in my readings a snide jab he made about the Hick, which I found vulgar and petty, no matter how coy Storr’s side-of-the-mouth dig sounded in context – I wish I could remember where I found that remark) makes sense. Storr’s history as a barracuda among sharks is well documented. He climbed the ladder well at MOMA, and among the NYC culturati. His career essentially parallels the rise to power of the Republicans, the new Gilded Age, the currently prevalent public “patriotism” of scoundrels, and the Moral Majority. Coincidence? I think not. Storr displays an ambitious and well-connected bureaucrat’s keen and humble manners (see the current issue of frieze magazine for a sample). He possesses a profound knack for coupling economic expediency and entertainment value with faux progressive curatorial practice. Clearly, the successful branding of Storr, the affable and bespectacled curatorial giant, hinges on the simultaneous undermining of the institutional integrity of his employer. Meanwhile, Storr’s “good fortune” in the little art world yields collateral damage that might be hyperbolically described as art carnage. Why? Those little Machiavellis out there paying close attention to Storr’s success in the hopes of mimicking it have misinterpreted Storr’s mediocrity and lack of courage as a marketable Lite Art Motif. What we, the art-viewing public get out of the deal is a cascade of curatorial failures and blunders. They breed, increasing in a geometric progression across the globe in art venues large and small. Somehow, Storr is never held liable. He’s Mr. Teflon. He keeps getting promoted, like a Bushie stooge/criminal. While he may arguably possess a strange and frightening sort of genius, like, say, Alberto Gonzalez’s, Storr’s pretense is subtle. He alternates an accepted contemporary art canon with whatever vacuity du jour wanders into his inclusively flatlining perceptual engineering machine. By presenting powerhouses next to puffballs, he diminishes the former and elevates the latter, until the grotesque and great are equally bland. In an interview for Art & Antiques in 96, Storr said, “I think modern art is a pluralist phenomenon from start to finish.” That was the anthem in those days, and is even more so now. Storr was Varnedoe’s boy, then, and he wasn’t going to climb off that gravy train and risk a trip back to the mean streets of Chicago that spawned him. Nowadays Storr’s famous for tooling around his shows in a wheelchair. Who can blame him for taking a load off, with the aid of locomotion tools for invalids? He seems like a nice enough guy, in the same way the CEO of Dow Chemicals is a nice guy. I’ll offer more on that, later, but suffice to say that Yale deserves him. Storr will undoubtedly continue the proud Yale tradition of promoting the careers of artists like Matthew Barney and politicians like George W. Bush, who are unparalleled in their talents for applying the tenets of Neo-Colonialism in ways that hurt everyone around them, except for the few and the privileged.
TR: You really loathe Yale, don’t you?
PM: I do, I hate them – in the professional sense, that is. Six degrees moment: Storr curated my buddy Glenn Goldberg into a show in the mid/late-eighties at The New York Studio School. He also wrote an essay or something for a book on Kabakov, whom Judd invited to do the cool Russian schoolhouse installation at Chinati. So, you see, even in the life of someone so wrong, one can find the good.
TR: I seem to recall a Yalie in the summer 06 issue of Artforum, erm, you know, the one we were discussing earlier.
PM: Are you ready to talk about this sanely?
TR: (inhale) Yes, but first let’s do an update on our murderer/artist Donny Johnson, recently noted on the front page of the New York Times. No more shows for Mr. Johnson. The prison administrators nixed Donny’s mailing of M&M paintings to his connections out in the world. The wardens weren’t happy about DJ’s nascent notoriety as the new human-interest painter of record. The crawl-tag for this piece could be “Fame again has its price”. Or “Poor dangerous artist gets it in the end again.” Mr. Johnson’s masterpieces have lost their retail outlets. I doubt the Times’ publishing another little blurb on the latest developments in the inmate’s artistic situation, colored appropriately grim, will help his case. I doubt the penal men look very kindly on the guard-slasher’s sensitive nature, as it’s expressed on postcards with candy dyes. & I doubt they enjoy being painted by the press as unenlightened joykills. I wonder whether there’ll be any Prime Directive soul-searching happening over in the Times’ newsroom. Their intervention destroyed the killer artist’s career, it would appear. Wonder if any of those editors or reporters will lose sleep over this one. My guess is instead they’ll be lamenting over the wasted op to create a new John Wayne Gacy sort of phenom, You know, the celebrated serial murderer cum clown painter. Or maybe I’m thinking of the dealers. Let’s do a juxtapose. (inhale) I guess it’s okay for the Yalie Cremaster to filmic-ly wax conceptual on Gary Gilmore, as long as he, Barney I mean, is not actually Gary Gilmore, or even, as far as we know, anything more than a dramatic facsimile of the serial killer. Perhaps there’s a moral here: The art world is more inclusive than the penal system, content-wise, because it accepts non-content as total moral equivalency, something journalism cannot do. Further, I think that’s why the big Creamer chose film “art”, as his primary dimensional vehicle, and now basically uses moving images as the hinge on which his 2D and 3D “art” turns. Barney, typical Yalie, requires us to accept passively the message, or in Barney’s case the un-message, or the message of pretty equivalence in the New Colonial mode. His “art” is a product as much as anything, & only exists as a function of the passivity of his audience. I hesitate to call the audience “viewers” in the Creampie’s case. “Worshipper” would make more sense, or “Cyclopean co-conspirator,” or “ditto head.” I remember being absolutely appalled by the raving reviews foisted on Mister Creamy by the most august of the art world’s critics, most of whom readily admitted in their critiques of the Cremaster phenomenon that they didn’t have a clue as to what the content added up to. Yet, they almost all championed Barney & his follies. I sat on a shelf in the Guggenheim jotting notes, in despair, surveying the horrible damage Barney had managed to inflict on the soul of that venerable Freedom Shrine. & He topped it all off with a horrifying Sambo-treatment for us Celts, though evidently our culture is so alien to the embedded art pundit class that not a one ever recognized Barney’s despicable slurs for what they are: grotesque & unconscionable exercises in New Colonial barbarism. The only difference between his brand of imperialism and that of Euro-conquerors of yore, is that the slaveries & thieveries he enacts are upon the natives’ souls, eyes & minds, instead of their fleshly bodies. It is not for nothing that the adage is “the eyes are the windows to the soul.” Barney, the Molly McGuire of a mother-hating bastard, is a hater and destroyer masquerading as a brave & hardy pioneer.
PM: Don’t follow you. Quit smoking dope. I gotta go. I just heard the first salvo in a potato gun salute.
TR: Big Man, I think I’m starting to get this racket. (inhale) We’ll talk some more about that Yalie and Artforum tomorrow, okay? Oh, and by the way: there were a couple of great stories in the LA Times about the Pompidou destroying several artworks sent there by LACMA for the “Los Angeles 1955-1985” show. Nobody knows how it happened, but the French say it wasn’t their fault. Now, all these dealers & collectors are badmouthing the Pompidou in print. I thought you might use it as an illustration for Judd’s rant against art handlers in your preface.
PM: Maybe. If we’re going to talk about Artforum, you have to read three of the books I left you: Terry Eagleton’s Literary Theory; Rosenberg’s De-definition of Art; and Judd’s collected writings. Got that?
TR: Right. (inhale)
…
PM: Tommy?
Makaa Jacobi: Is this Paul?
PM: Yes. Who’s this?
MJ: This is Makaa. I’m Tommy’s girlfriend. We met a couple of times.
PM: Hey, Makaa. How’s it going? I remember. I love the work you were doing before I left, especially the painted video stills output as slides. Tommy was showing me some of them. The Wilshire series blew my mind. By the way, is Tommy around?
MJ: Sort of.
PM: What do you mean?
MJ: Tommy’s been zonked out for almost two days.
PM: What?
MJ: You know that envelope you left him? He found a vial in there – smoky blue glass with about two grams of crimson powder. I read the label: “Red States/Blue States; Use sparingly, if at all.” Erm, I guess he snorted it.
PM: What!? That’s a specially-prepared by Auntie Aina, super-magic-flower-power-enhanced, good-kahuna red dirt gifted to me by the Kauai alii! I wanted Tommy to give it to you to paint with! It was supposed to be a surprise for your birthday! The blue in the red vial is Yves Klein blue! Tell me he didn’t snort that, too!
MJ: Afraid so.
PM: Holy Guacamole! This is serious! Did you take him to the ER and have his stomach pumped? The YK Blue is poisonous!
MJ: Don’t worry, Paul. I think he’s going to be okay. He’s, like, in a trance, but he’s giggling a whole lot & his pulse is pretty regular. I took CPR when I was a lifeguard in high school, so I pretty much got the vitals monitored, & Tommy’s more or less stable, as we say.
PM: Omigod.
MJ: Really, Paul, I don’t think there’s anything to worry about. It’s been almost two days, & except for his giggling fits, Tommy’s basically resting comfortably with his eyes open. It’s weird, sure, but I don’t get the feeling he’s, like, gonna die or anything.
PM: Listen, Makaa. I’m on my way back to LA. I should be there in about six hours. I’m coming straight over, as soon as I get into town. If Tommy’s condition takes a turn for the worse, if he goes into convulsions or starts foaming at the mouth, you have to call an ambulance, immediately! Promise me you’ll do that.
MJ: You’re kind of fading out there, Paul. I think you said something about coming back to LA and calling an ambulance. I don’t know about you, but Tommy doesn’t have any insurance, thanks to the Republicans, and I’ve got to go to work. I’m waiting tables in West Hollywood, & I don’t know whether you heard or not, but the Republicans are trying to make my tips taxable as wages, so I’m trying to take as many shifts as possible before that happens. I’ll leave Tommy a note.
PM: Makaa!!
Dropped call.
