A NEW AND DIFFERENT WORLD

18. A NEW AND DIFFERENT WORLD:

If there were ever a brain-spot for tracing delusions I’d have been covered with them - easy to see and simple to find - as after a few years I was simply dog-crazed with the usual battery of events and situations but all compounded by my intense desire to keep going and the ephemeral sensation of success and achievement that kept passing through me like a cloud-mist over and over and I was sometimes elated and other times just drawn and quartered to death but I remained with it at whatever cost : painting gallery walls for twenty-five dollar days when I could – the same crisp but flat white paint almost gesso-like which went into the cover-up of anything beneath it the same scant but totally distant skinny girls behind the front desks of a hundred galleries one alike to the other so that anyone coming in immediately felt as if they were already in an alien place where they didn’t belong or that they’d entered the central headquarters of some bizarre cult of ‘we’re certainly too good for you’ aliens and these girls remained that way forever - most exquisite in their designer tight outfits and blossoming-beautiful too but seditiously dangerous in their manners (always making me think some ‘I wouldn’t want to be the one to fuck her’ but knowing I ‘would’ if I had to) and in these places I always seemed incorrect in whatever assumption I made – because they weren’t certainly about ART at all even though that’s what supposedly hung on the walls – they were instead about money and valuation and profit and gain and insider status and all the rest be damned - these people inhabited a small little club of coterie of wealth which had spread its dastardly and sticky fingers all over the ‘art-world’ as they declaimed it for their purposes of lucre and if they’d not imprimatured it yet well then it didn’t exist - but if it suddenly did and they had why then it could soon be worth a cool million so ‘stand by’ and all that - ‘but first please repaint these white walls white again’ and that sort of thing rang like a Sousaphone inside my head because I knew THAT wasn’t the New York City I’d sought to inhabit even though it probably had always been like that too - even in the gay 1890’s and all that gilded age stuff with pearls and jewels pouring off wealthy people in their gardens and drawing rooms of facetious value while an entirely NEW and DIFFERENT world – unbeknownst to them – was about to come crashing down on them and NO ONE knew a thing (as an aside for partially that reason I always got a kick out of an old film called ‘The Magnificent Ambersons’ precisely because it sets up an old world still bumbling in the face of its own creation of the new world about to subsume and smother it - all grace and gentility soon to be gone) so while I stayed there and walked all those incredible streets just looking for rhymes in the cast-offs and magic in the misery I found it was actually always there – just had to be located – and it all became my sole reason of staying and doing : study work art paint structure light form texture density photography storyline and all the rest : I was always able to love it and stay atop it so that MISERY and squalor meant nothing SEX and sensuality meant nothing and DEATH and venom too could simply be passed over and as to invite my fear away I took on roles all my own and played them well : in that I dwarfed the midgets (at least some form of achievement) and I towered over the giants too (a more stunning achievement to be sure).