It’s been a long time since I posted something new here. To the few dozen maniacs who pay to access this blog, I’m sorry. I’m a perfectionist with a self-punishing work ethic, so if I can’t come up with something polished, long, and well-edited, I figure it’s better not to post at all. This probably isn’t true. So I’m going to be less precious, right here, right now, as Jesus Jones sang in 1991, and just write about what I’ve been doing lately.

Like a lot of people, it seems, I’ve been obsessively following the trial of Lindsay Clancy, the former nurse on trial for killing her three young children—a crime she doesn’t deny committing. Today the jury begins deliberating. Her defense argues that she was temporarily insane as a result of postpartum psychosis, which she unsuccessfully sought treatment for. Unsuccessfully because doctors only thought to bombard her with psych meds, then, when she said they weren’t working—that if anything, they were making her feel worse—bombarded her with more.

Her trial interests me because, for the last two and a half years, I’ve been writing and editing an article about benzodiazepines—about my experience with Klonopin, about being rapidly tapered off Klonopin, and about what appears to be a hidden global pharmacological epidemic that, while less sexy (if that’s the word) than the opioid crisis, is similarly far-reaching and devastating for people who simply follow their doctor’s advice. It’s being published in The Believer this October. Nothing is more dangerously underemphasized than the destruction psych meds can wreak. Lindsay Clancy’s defense team seems to understand this, but instead—mistakenly, I think—is focusing on other aspects of America’s profoundly broken healthcare system.

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I DON’T WANT TO BE A BRAND

“So, tell me what it is that you do?”

I wasn’t expecting this to be first question Chad¹ asked me yesterday. He’d messaged me on Instagram three days earlier, from the account of the vague fashion brand/app/lifestyle enterprise he apparently ran, or co-ran, wanting to ‘hop on a call’ because he ‘loved’ my stuff, thought it was ‘sick’ and was interested in ‘exploring ways we could collaborate’.

The only thing worse than talking about Instagram is talking about your own Instagram, especially if you have what others perceive to be a ‘significant number of followers’, because, to my mind at least, you seem to be enamoured of yourself, and if I feel anything about myself, it’s definitely not enamoured. But when you do have an Instagram like mine, with say 47k odd followers, you often find in the ‘message request’ section of your DMs, requests from sketchy accounts inviting you to collaborate on a post, to become a ‘brand ambassador’ for their sunglasses, or nootropic, or limited edition Indonesian ethical coffee beans. Ninety-nine out of a hundred times, these are just scams, bots, or people attempting to hack your account. As a result, I delete these messages without opening them. I’m capable of being many things, but one thing I can’t be is conned, or hustled, or taken advantage of.

Chad wrote me from the account of a place with a name very much like VNAT. The profile of VNAT said that it was an E-commerce website, and ‘your ultimate fashion source, delivering you the most exclusive brands, people and products daily’. I saw that four people that I follow followed VNAT, including one person that I knew somewhat, who I’ll call Penelope. So I wrote Penelope, I said “hey Penelope, this place wrote me, and shit like this is usually a scam, but I saw you follow them, and they’ve got 208k followers. Ordinarily I’d just delete the message, but the art market is in the toilet, and I want to be open-minded, who knows, it might actually be real. What’s your experience with them?”

Penelope told me that VNAT was indeed real, and that she’d had a conversation with them, and it seemed promising but then fizzled out. She’d spoken to an actual person, and they hadn’t asked for her social security number, or date of birth. So I wrote Chad back, and said “Sure bud, what do you wanna talk about and when?” Chad said he ‘loved’ my brand, asked for my number and a good time to ‘link up’. I told Chad I didn’t think of myself as a ‘brand’, and wasn’t sure what he meant. He said ‘lol’. We made a date for yesterday.

Yesterday at 4PM, I was in my studio, eating some chicken and rice I’d just reheated in the microwave. I clicked the Google Meet link Chad had texted me and waited. I was in a bad mood, as is often the case when it’s 4PM. I was not thrilled to be ‘linking’ with Chad, and had zero expectations that it might amount to something. If anything, I was irritated that I’d soon have to listen to someone describe my ‘brand’, which is a term I find nauseating, and that I resent. If I am indeed a brand, or have one, it happened without my consent.

Chad appeared on my screen at 4:06, and I had to cover my face so as not to give away my shock. He looked all of nineteen years old, and was clearly in a hotel room in Santa Monica. Chad—and I had a feeling this might be true from his name—looked exactly like the kind of guy that called me ‘fag’ in high school, and pushed me into lockers. I could see that he was still dealing with some adolescent acne, and that he could kick my ass if we ever met. I was waiting for him to ask me about my paintings, or my writing, when he opened with that line from above,

“So, tell me what it is that you do?”

I immediately understood that each second I spent speaking to Chad would be forever lost to me. I thought of the things I could be doing instead, and felt deeply sad. I could be with my wife, Cristine, talking about movies while one of us washed the dishes and the other scrolled on our phone. I could be sitting on my kitchen floor with a piece of fishing line tied to a feather, watching our cat Cherry play out her instinctive, primal need to be a hunter, then reward herself by eating kibble. I could be watching Seinfeld, or Cheers, or Forensic Files, my heating pad cranked to max underneath my upper back, which often hurts from stress and the physical labour of painting. I could be making notes about an idea I’ve had—that started as a joke—for a sitcom about the daily lives of people working at a farmer’s market in Bangor, Maine. I could be editing Patrick’s short story, or reading Gideon’s article, or texting Tao, or meditating.

I realized I hadn’t answered Chad, and that he was patiently waiting.

“Dude I don’t understand. Why did you want to talk? I make paintings. I write.”

Chad told me ‘his people’ said my ‘brand was sick’. I didn’t like that. He started to ask me how I became an artist, and where my ideas came from. This conversation. He asked me where I ‘featured’ my paintings, and if they were ‘one-offs’ and if I did commissions. I tried to calculate the difficulty level in explaining to Chad the way the art world worked. It was much, much different than whatever he imagined, and even more boring. I realized that Chad likely only experienced art, and the art world—whatever that is—through Instagram, or TikTok. I thought it was possible that Chad might’ve only experienced all of culture through his phone, and understood that we were wholly different people, from different worlds and different times, speaking different languages, and that the difficulty level was off the charts. That if we tried to understand each other it might take hours, even days, and that either my brain or Chad’s might actually break.

Over the next five minutes I came to understand that Chad ran an app that provided services for subscribers. It curated ‘sick’ content by ‘sick artists’ with ‘sick brands’, and connected them to online shops. I asked Chad just what it was he thought he could do for me. Chad said he could help me get exposure. I told Chad I was already exposed, over-exposed, that exposure was only my problem in that I didn’t want any, but now it was too late.

“What do you mean bro?” Chad asked.

“Chad,” I said, “I wish I didn’t have to be on Instagram. I wish I didn’t have an online store. I wish I didn’t have to be exposed. I wish my wife and I could spend half the year in the city, and half the year upstate, and that we could just focus on our work and not be bothered.”

I saw Chad was starting to break down a bit. It was like I’d told him it was pointless to go to the gym, and that money makes me people sick, not happy. The call would have to end soon. I tried to explain how pretentious and rarefied the art world was, and that if I worked with an app like his, I’d lose credibility. He said he understood, but that someone like KAWS has a ‘booming online store’ where he makes ‘crazy bank’ but that he’s still taken seriously in the art world. I started to say “Chad, bro, people here make fun…” but then remembered that I don’t give a shit about low or high art, or that some people like things I think are corny. If Chad liked KAWS, I didn’t want to make Chad feel bad. I like Normal Rockwell, and I like bad television. Distinctions in culture tend to be more divisive than strictly taxonomic. It’s not my business what people like, or do, I thought.

But then I realized it is my business what I do, and what I like, and I didn’t like being on the call with Chad anymore, so I said it was time to go. The last thing Chad said to me was,

“Well, if it doesn’t work out that’s no big deal. I just want to say what an honour it was to talk to you. You’re a legend.”

I didn’t mention to Chad that he’d opened the call by telling me he didn’t know what I do. For one, he was clearly just a young, natural salesman. Secondly, I’m not even sure what it is that I do.

In 2025, having tens of thousands of followers on social media makes one a legend. Why those people follow you appears to be irrelevant.

Today Chad followed me on Instagram from his personal account. In one post he’s at the airport, flexing in a video while wearing enormous grey sweatpants, his arms covered in small, shitty tattoos that look exactly like some of the small, shitty twenty-year-old-plus tattoos on my own arms.

There’s no nice tidy ending to this piece of writing, because this shit never ends.

Last week I saw my therapist virtually, as I sometimes do. I did my routine for forty-five minutes, trying out some new material at the end. Just before our time ran out, he said something I’ve been unable to stop thinking about, which I’ll paraphrase:

“Before we end for today, there’s something I need to talk to you about.”

This immediately put me on edge. Things that “need to be talked about" are never good, and usually involve there being something wrong with me. In less than a tenth of a second, I'd imagined him firing me as a client, announcing his retirement to play seniors' rugby in New Zealand (he's my age and athletically built), or delivering some unknown, much worse third thing. As is almost always the case, I was wrong.

“It’s about last week,” he continued, “when we had our session here in the office. I walked you out, then came back to the office and saw that something had fallen out of my pocket and was resting on my chair. Something that was evidence of my life outside of therapy. I don’t know if you saw it, but if you did, I wanted you to know that we can talk about it.”

I hadn’t seen anything on my therapist’s chair during our session. Nothing that revealed anything about his life outside of therapy. I told him so, which I now regret.

“No, man,” I said (unable to not call men “man,” no matter their position), “I didn’t see anything.”

“Okay,” he said, appearing neither relieved nor surprised—not appearing, in any way, different. “Then I’ll see you next week.”

“Wait,” I said. “What was it?”

We had only a minute or two left. Through the glare on my phone’s screen I saw him smile slightly.

“It’s not important.”

But clearly it was important, or would’ve been had I seen it. I felt confused.

“What was it?” I went on. “A bag of heroin? A badge? Are you a cop?”

This made him laugh, which made sense. Suggesting he was a cop or a dope fiend—I mean, I was just kidding, right? I think I was. But then, I don’t know myself too well, which is why I’m in therapy.

“No,” he said, “I’m not a cop. Don’t worry.”

“Wait. Why aren’t you also reassuring me that you’re not a junkie?”

He laughed again. He often laughed during our sessions, which was something I liked about him. He was easy-going, affable, didn’t take things too seriously.

“But really, that’s our time. See you next week?

The whoosh of his video dissolving ended the call.

My therapist has a name that I can’t use, because doctor-patient confidentiality cuts both ways, so I’ll call him Roger Federer.

I’ve been in therapy for most of my adult life, and my therapists have always been women. Because my own father was untrustworthy to an absurd degree, I’ve never felt comfortable with male therapists. Pretty basic of me, I know, but what can you do? But while I’ve been in therapy for most of my adult life, I’ve never found therapy helpful—not until recently that is, when I began seeing Roger Federer, a man with secrets spilling from his pants pockets. Over the last two years and change he’s really helped me become less insane—and to say I was insane is no exaggeration—so I don’t want anything to compromise our relationship.

My exchange with Roger Federer was, to my mind, absolutely nuts, and I had to tell people about it. I told my wife. I told a few friends. Some of them got it, some of them didn’t. Some thought the mystery surrounding what had fallen from his pocket was the most intriguing part. Like me, they found the not-knowing maddening. But one friend understood what the real issue was. It wasn’t what the unknown object meant about Roger Federer; it was his refusal to disclose what that object was. The issue wasn’t that my therapist had a life outside of therapy—I’m not stupid, I know he doesn’t live in his office, powering himself down at night then powering himself back up in the morning in time to see his first client. The issue wasn’t even that Roger Federer might be a junkie, or a cop, or any number of other things defined by what he kept in his pockets. The issue—the problem—was that he created a mystery then refused to solve it, like some sadistic, withholding Sherlock Holmes at a dinner party with a dead guest, eight suspects, and no catharsis.

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Tracy said capitalism was like anal sex — hostile, unnatural, pleasurable for men at women’s expense.

She said that and a whole lot else, like “whenever we’re around my mom I feel like I’m suffocating” and “your brother talks way too much about wanting to see Winona Ryder’s tits.”

I wasn’t listening. I know that now. I should’ve been. And especially to that comment about Winona, who, it was true, my brother Colin desperately wanted to see nude. Maybe if I’d been listening I’d have known when to shut up, and what to keep to myself.

When I was nineteen I slept with a woman I met in a bar in Vancouver. She’d just wrapped a day of shooting on The X-Files. Esther — I think her name was — had been an extra in some scene where Mulder chastised Scully for being too rational. I hoped to meet and sleep with many women as I got older, but women had different plans. My experiences have been few, which might be why I couldn’t shut up about that one from so long ago.

Thirty years later, Tracy and I, married for almost two decades, were lying in bed watching old episodes of The X-Files. She loved the show, but I’d never seen it. It took me much longer than Tracy to grow out of my pretentious artist phase. I agreed to watch it reluctantly, then discovered, as has always been the case, that my wife knew better than me. It’s a great show. One day I’ll be able to watch it again.

It was Season 1, Episode 10, “Fallen Angel.” Mulder and Scully were walking through a hallway at the FBI headquarters in Quantico on their way to be upbraided by Chief McGrath when I saw her, and just blurted it out.

“I fucked that girl when I lived in Vancouver!”

These are things you keep to yourself. That was what Tracy’s face said, and I knew she was right. We didn’t talk about it, but the bell couldn’t be unrung. During the next commercial break Tracy said she found the episode boring. I suggested we skip to the next one, but she was tired and went to bed early.

I loved Tracy in a real corny way. I love her that way still. We met at CalArts when we were both grad students. On the night of our third date, both of my parents were killed in a car accident. Tracy spoke to people at the funeral when I couldn’t, then invited me to spend the summer in Georgia with her family. We were married that August and haven’t been apart for more than a week since. Until now.

During the weeks following “Fallen Angel,” whenever we watched television, Tracy would ask if I’d fucked anyone on screen, just like you’d expect. No, I’d say, I didn’t fuck The Nanny, and no, I didn’t fuck Carla — or Diane, or Rebecca, or Lilith — on Cheers. I’d asked for it, really.

The truth — and I’m pretty sure Tracy knew it — was that beyond her and Esther in Vancouver, you could count the number of women I’d had sex with on two hands and still have fingers to spare. I’ve been married to Tracy long enough not to be an idiot about certain things. It wasn’t that Esther was an actor that bothered her. She was an extra with a non-speaking role. It was — I think at least, I could be wrong, and often am — that Esther was nineteen on The X-Files, while Tracy, like me, was forty-nine in our bedroom. In an explanation I was smart enough not to vocalize, I told Tracy that it wasn’t like I thought nineteen-year-olds were hot, television had just rendered Esther permanently young.

“I bet you wish you could fuck her again,” Tracy said one night, during an argument about something else. This was the first real thing she’d said about it. I didn’t wish that. From what I could remember, the sex had been unremarkable — probably because I’d been involved. If I wished for anything, it was to be the age I was when “Fallen Angel” was shot. Tracy and I were both experiencing the humiliation of aging, and seeing Esther on screen likely reminded me of a time before knee pain, ear hair, and unforgiving mirrors.

“I don’t wish that at all,” I said, and reached for her hand, which she pulled away. The next day it was forgotten. We had sex, which was very good, despite my being involved.

I could always be myself around Tracy, which speaks to her tolerance for bad comedy, bad style, and bad taste. When she wasn’t around I felt awful, uncomfortable in my skin, like something was chasing me. Each time I heard her entering our apartment my shoulders dropped and my breathing slowed down. Maybe that was unhealthy, or felt to her like pressure. If I get the chance I’ll ask.

Months passed and Tracy stopped poking me about who on television I might’ve fucked. We’d abandoned The X-Files and were deep into the third season of The Sopranos, a show I’d also resisted watching initially, suspicious of its popularity. We were watching Season 5, Episode 2, “Rat Pack,” holding hands, our dog Fuckface asleep at our feet. During a commercial break Tracy hit mute, then turned to face me.

“I’m in love with Christopher,” she said, then looked away.

Christopher Moltisanti, played by Michael Imperioli, was a degenerate heroin addict, a violent criminal, and worst of all, short. But he had aspirations to something larger than mob life — he wanted to make movies. I almost threw up in my mouth. I knew not to say anything negative, not after the whole Esther affair. I would’ve preferred she’d fucked Imperioli. Being in love with his character I couldn’t wrap my head around.

“In love with him?” I said, unable to not sound baffled.

“In love with him,” she said, this time looking me right in the eyes.

And then I did it, I laughed. It was beyond my control. The next part wasn’t though.

I remember that every day.

“If you’ve gotta be in love with anyone on The Sopranos,” I said, “it should be Tony. He’s complicated. Christopher is so fucking obvious. What are you, some kind of Adriana?”

We fought that night. The following morning I woke up in an empty bed. There wasn’t a note, but I knew she only had one place she could go — her mother’s, which, considering that being around her made Tracy feel like she was “suffocating” helped me realize how serious things were.

I really didn’t get it. I’d fucked a girl decades earlier and was dumb enough to bring it to my wife’s attention. She was in love with a fictional character on television. The two weren’t the same.

It would soon make sense. I went to our computer to see if Tracy had emailed me. Our browser was open to IMDb. She’d seen me searching for other shows Esther had worked on.

Two men, both in their early fifties, strike up a conversation on the subway and become friends. They meet for coffee. They play table tennis. They commiserate about their arthritis, their thinning hair, their bad knees, bad backs, and bad luck.

If you saw them on television—one of them played by Albert Brooks, in a movie from 1979—you’d think they were adorable. But in real life, in 2026, they’re mostly pitiful, and you’d be wise to look away.

I met Joel on the F train, three Tuesdays ago. I’d just seen my rheumatologist. He’d just seen his daughter, who said she’d prefer not to see him again. An insane person was asking Joel an insane question, which he escaped by pretending to be in conversation with me.

“I think,” he said, turning suddenly in my direction, “you have every right to ask people to remove their shoes when they enter your home.”

It was such a strange move—talking to a stranger about domestic etiquette to avoid a subway lunatic—that I couldn’t help admiring him. And it worked. The nutjob moved down the subway car, harassing other people. Joel looked at me.

“Sorry,” he said, “I panicked.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “You know it’s weird. I always feel like I can’t ask guests to take their shoes off in my apartment, then I resent them. I hate that I can’t be assertive.”

“Oh man,” he said. “I get it. But your apartment, your rules. Nobody would be offended.”

He was right. I never felt offended when someone asked me to take off my shoes in their apartment.

“I’m Brad,” I said. “You wanna get a coffee sometime?”

I was humiliated by the words leaving my mouth. My friendship situation was bleak. I rarely saw anyone beside my wife.

“That sounds nice,“ Joel said. “That sounds real nice.”

It turned out we were both getting off at West 4th. Over lunch at the Waverly Diner we reassured each other that we were both happily married—to women. This was just a friendship thing. Nothing else. That was three weeks ago, on a Tuesday.

On our last ‘date’ Joel and I went to Wu’s Wonton, then took a constitutional along the East River while we digested, like two old men. I said I’d seen scenes like this in movies—usually Italian ones. Joel said it reminded him of a Saul Bellow novel, though he couldn’t remember which. We were self-aware about our nascent friendship, which made it slightly less pitiful. By poking fun at ourselves we avoided discussing how we were both isolated, friendless, with wives who urged us to “go out and meet men” our own age.

Joel was vague about what he did for a living and I didn’t pry. Whatever it was, I assumed it embarrassed him. It didn’t matter to me. We shared the same taste in movies, and we both loved ‘90s NBA basketball. He had helpful insights about marriage and health, and our conversations were always stimulating. “A man isn’t what he does for a living,” Joel once said. I thought that was wise.

It was during our constitutional that Joel advised me to write this. I told him I’d been asked to contribute something to the inaugural issue of some new art/writing magazine. This happens from time to time. Usually I decline, mostly because I’ve run out of ideas. That, and I’m tired. But it’s important for people like me—old, with careers situated mostly in the past—to stay “relevant” and associate professionally with young people whenever we can.

I didn’t have any ideas for short stories, I told Joel. Making up a scenario, an environment, inserting people with distinct appearances and personalities, forcing them to interact—it was so much work. And essays, expressing your opinion, arguing your position, ugh. I’m only really qualified to write about mental illness and maybe late nineteenth-century painting—but then only in France, Belgium, and parts of Switzerland. Considering the genocides, the tech horrors, and what appear to be the first weeks of World War Three, it might seem slightly obscene to publish a defense of the overlooked Belgian painter Gustave Van de Woestijne.

“Well,” Joel said, smiling, “what could you write that wouldn’t feel like work? What’s the one thing you never have the chance to write about?”

He was so kind, so gentle with me. He really seemed to care that I was happy. I didn’t remember male friends from my past giving me that impression. There was one thing I’d wanted to write for months, but nobody would publish it, because it wasn’t a story, or an essay, or even interesting writing. I told my new friend.

“You know by now,” I said, “that I’m always hustling to make money. Editing something for one person and writing something for someone else, always for very little money. I never have time to paint anymore, and I rarely have time to write my own shit. I work on painting Mondays, I try to work on this novel I’ve been writing on Fridays—every other day is just grinding, errands, doctor’s appointments. Capitalism is unrelenting. The endless work involved in keeping food in my fridge and a roof over my head means that my writing career and my art career—if they can still be called careers—never get my full attention. It’s maddening. I know that if I could devote all of my time to either art or writing I’d be able to make some real money, and I wouldn’t need to be doing all this other work that eats away at my time.”

Joel nodded, and smiled warmly.

“So what do you want to write?”

“I want to write a plea. Nobody publishes pleas. I want to say ‘Hey, my name’s Brad and…

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NUMBER 1, STORMY MONDAY

I have a friend who watches every movie I recommend. This is one of the reasons I love him.

Of all the things in God’s perfect, shiny kingdom, I love movies and television most—particularly those made in America. By the time I turned fifty, I was certain I’d seen almost every one worth seeing. Turns out I was wrong.

Lately I’ve been scraping the internet for things to watch. I’ll visit the Wikipedia page of a movie I thought was shot beautifully, click on the cinematographer’s name, then watch other films he’s worked on. This is how I found Stormy Monday—Mike Figgis’s first feature—which is now one of my all-time favourite movies. My friend agrees that it’s perfect.

There’s been a resurgence of interest in, and appreciation for, 1990s erotic thrillers. Released in 1988, Stormy Monday could easily be mistaken for a precursor to Basic Instinct, Wild Things, or The Last Seduction. The poster promises a "sultry romantic thriller." But while it’s a thriller, and romantic as fuck, it’s not at all sultry. This is what makes it interesting.

The film is set in economically depressed Newcastle, a city I’ve never given much thought to that looks pretty fucking cool. Sting plays Mr. Finney, a suave-ass jazz club owner who’s got a wife at home but is in demand with the local ladies. One of the first scenes involves Brendan, played by Sean Bean—an Irishman who’s just arrived in town and is looking for work—literally bumping into Kate—played by Melanie Griffith—at a mall. Later on the two cross paths when Bean orders dinner at the restaurant she’s waiting tables at. Their chemistry is evident, Bean slips Griffith his number when he pays the bill, and the two arrange to go on a date.

Melanie Griffith is amazing in this film. Kate’s an American waiting tables at Weegees’s, a bar restaurant with huge prints by the famous crime photographer on the walls. But she also works in quasi-sex worker capacity for her ex-boyfriend, Francis Cosmo, played by Tommy Lee Jones, an American corporate fixer slash mobster who’s attempting to buy up properties in downtown Newcastle, including the Key Club, owned by Sting, who remains the last holdout. Cosmo wants Kate to honeypot local politicians and club owners into cooperating. Kate wants to be free of Cosmo, her job at Weegee’s—which involves a shitty boss—and start fresh with Brendan. Brendan, who found work at Sting’s Key Club cleaning bathrooms and babysitting visiting musicians, just wants Kate and to be free of whatever he was escaping by moving to Newcastle.

The details aren’t that important. I also don’t want to ruin the movie for anyone else. Like any good neo-noir, Stormy Monday contains a crime, a love triangle, a beautiful woman, an evil man, and a white knight.

I’ve never seen Dune or Quadrophenia. Sting, it turns out, is a good actor. But the star of Stormy Monday is Melanie Griffith. She plays both innocent and jaded perfectly. It’s hard not to be captivated by her giant 80s hair and her soft, high voice. The scenes involving Griffith and Bean are unspeakably tender. And unlike 90s erotic thrillers, there’s essentially no sex. Some teenage boy in a video store in 1989 might’ve rented the movie hoping to see Griffith naked, but the only nudity is Sean Bean’s toned, pale ass.

Mike Figgis is most famous for Leaving Las Vegas, a film starring Nicholas Cage about an alcoholic screenwriter that for some reason I’ve never seen. I looked Figgis up after watching Stormy Monday and learned that he’s a big jazz fan. Me too. One of the nice touches throughout the film involves the Krakow Jazz Ensemble, a free jazz group booked to play at the Key Club. They’re visiting Newcastle during “America Week,” a week-long celebration of visiting American business interests tied to Francis Cosmo’s redevelopment push. The band appears throughout the film—on local radio, at the club, and in various transitional scenes. Early on, they break into spontaneous improvisation while waiting at the airport for their ride. Later—after the band booked for a formal “America Week” event is killed in a traffic accident—they perform a discordant, Coltrane-esque version of the American national anthem, until they’re told to shut the fuck up. Sting’s Mr. Finney—resistant to Cosmo’s enticements to buy his club—pointedly enjoys how much the Americans dislike the Polish band’s music. Cosmo comes off as a heartless brute who mistreats women and thinks money can solve any problem. Members of the Krakow Jazz Ensemble are portrayed as gentle creative spirits, more concerned with community and ideas than with success. Through long takes of musicians playing obscure, mostly unpopular music, Figgis effectively protests American expansionism. I found that interesting.

The most beautiful thing about Stormy Monday is how fucking beautiful it is. Every shot is painterly, and many reminded me of William Eggleston, who himself is very painterly. Wikipedia told me that Stormy Monday was shot by Roger Deakins, who apparently is “regarded as one of the greatest and most influential cinematographers in cinema history.” I can believe it. Deakins shot No Country for Old Men and Fargo, too pretty good-looking films. He also shot Sicario, which has a beautiful scene involving an assassination attempt at the US/Mexico border. There’s some stuff with greens and reds that my friend picked up, that flew right over my head. Colour used symbolically, stuff like that. This movie looks so good you want to eat it, and that’s not something I feel too often.

Overall, I can’t recommend this movie enough. It’s rocketed into my top three films of all time, jockeying for space with The Conversation and another overlooked film, David Mamet’s directorial debut, House of Games.

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In 1999 I was working at Symcor Services—today just called Symcor—a ‘financial services’ company housed in a disgustingly overlit building on Front Street, in Toronto. My official title was ‘fraud investigator’, which sounds fancier than it was. In reality I was just another dipshit temp with an endlessly extended contract that kept me employed but exempt from health insurance and a decent wage. My job was to uncover instances of people defrauding their banks through various schemes. One of these involved depositing an empty envelope into an ATM while claiming it contained a cheque. I was begrudgingly good at my job, but enthusiastic about the methods for bank fraud I was learning.

This was my last straight job.

Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? premiered in 1999 and quickly became popular. I worked the night shift—7PM to 3AM. Ninety percent of my co-workers were Filipino, which meant that by the time I finished work I’d been force-fed a shit ton of pan de coco by women who thought—not incorrectly—that I was too thin. I shared my cubicle cluster with Carmelita and Rosaflor, both inveterate gamblers who named the office pool they ran Who Wants to Be Hundrednaire? I put in five bucks every night, but never once won.

Symcor had an arcade in the basement next to the cafeteria. This is where I spent most of my time, spending basically what I was earning on NBA Jam and Street Fighter. My boss, Andrew, had bullied me during high school. He seemed bummed to recognize on my first day. I wasn’t sure if it was because he felt guilty, or whether he was disappointed Symcor had no lockers to shove me into. Any fear I had about being caught spending my shifts playing video games evaporated when I realized he was my competition for high score on NBA Jam. I was surprised he’d entered his actual name, ANDREWRICH. I just entered ASSBOY.

Y2K was a big deal at Symcor, which ran entirely on computers. I was 25 that year, so not smart, but I was smart enough to recognize that the Y2K fear was silly. We had a million contingencies in place should something drastic happen, including hundreds of candles—oddly rose-scented—that were stinking up the office supplies storage room. At 11:55 on December 31st, while everyone sat anxiously at their desks, I prepared to leave work early. I had viable excuses ready, but figured that once midnight passed uneventfully the office would collapse into an orgy of relief, and Andrew would be in the parking lot smoking a joint—just like he was in high school—unconcerned with checking attendance.

I snuck out without being noticed. Minutes later, out on Front Street, fuck all happened. The lights stayed on. Traffic lights turned red, yellow, and green. The streetcar made its turn onto York Street smoothly. Back inside Symcor, Carmelita would be calling out the night’s numbers, and the winner of the pot would again be Filipino. All was right in the world. I began the five block walk to the bus stop on Spadina. This part of Toronto was dead during weeknights, but busy on weekends when suits from the suburbs came into the city to go clubbing. December 31st was a Friday, so asshats in Axe body spray were jockeying for parking spots while yelling ‘fag’ at any man holding a book. I’d learned to leave my books in my desk.

Once I reached Simcoe Street, the noise died down. Condominiums were being built on the north and south sides of Front Street. The block was all portable toilets and construction materials. Walking toward Spadina, I heard what sounded like mumbling behind me.

I turned around. A black 1985 Chevrolet Monte Carlo without its headlights on was right behind me, moving as slowly as I was walking. A woman’s head was halfway out the window, trying to get my attention.

“Hey mister,” she said, her eyes bulging, pupils like black saucers. “Come here, we need some help.”

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OVERRATED - LUCIAN FREUD

Someone younger than me might say ‘shots fired’. No, not Lucian!

Yes, Lucian.

While I’m dumb, I’m not so dumb as to claim Freud isn’t a great painter. A quick glance at his body of work makes it clear he knew his way around a paintbrush/palette/easel. So glance…

But technical virtuosity isn’t enough. And technical virtuosity in service of egomaniacal cruelty is detestable, and if Freud was anything, it was egomaniacally cruel.

I don’t ordinarily condemn art because it’s been made by a problematic artist. You run the risk of living a life devoid of art with that attitude, since no one’s morally perfect. There isn’t a Francis Bacon painting or a Patricia Highsmith book I don’t love, and they each drove lovers to suicide, which seems objectively problematic. But Freud’s paintings are so clearly fuelled by his loathsome character defects, it’s impossible to forget who made them, which is what I do when looking at Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, or reading Deep Water.

In 1978 Lucian Freud painted a portrait of Rose Boyt, nude, legs spread, very L’origine du monde by Courbet. Boyt was 18, and also Freud’s daughter, one of 14 acknowledged children conceived by one wife and 12 mistresses. Boyt said she was ‘shocked’ when she saw the painting, which is one of countless reasons not to reproduce it here. If Freud was some lunatic naturist it might feel less obscene, but he wasn’t. He also wasn’t an artist documenting his children naked when they happened to be naked—as children—like Sally Mann did, to the objection of many. Freud was a notorious lothario, and as Boyt revealed in a memoir, unspeakably cruel. After she became uninteresting as a subject, Boyt was relegated to scrubbing her father’s studio floor while quasi-aristocrats like Andrew Parker Bowles sat for their portraits. In his depictions of women older than 18, Freud is unrelentingly realist in his efforts to depict each and every flaw associated with the aging human body. Never admiring, only condemning—this is Freud’s vibe as a portraitist. If he celebrates nature, he celebrates its ‘obscenity' and ‘unspeakable cruelty’, to paraphrase Werner Herzog.

Freud had his subjects sit endlessly while he painted them. He famously had his mother sit for 4000 hours, then showed her this:

Call me crazy, but you could get the same results working from a photograph. Or if not from a photograph, then while your subject sat for a max of three days. There’s something terribly cruel about asking your mother to sit and be stared at for hundreds of hours toward the end of her life. If you love someone and know that they don’t have long to live, wouldn’t you rather they be doing something they enjoy? And Freud was rich, he could’ve given his mother 4000 hours of beach time in Barbados instead. I don’t think this is admirable, or a sign that Freud is a serious painter, tackling ‘serious subjects’. I think it’s pretentious, and evidence of someone with serious control issues.

Freud is overrated—unrelated to being a bad father, son, and husband—for purely technical reasons. He can paint the shit out of an expanse of flesh, but so can that one person in any graduate art school program. There was a Lucian Freud when I went to art school in 1993. His name was Alex, and, coincidentally, he was also a pretentious dick who told his girlfriends what books they should read—something I can easily imagine Freud doing. Technical virtuosity makes one a great craftsperson, not a great artist. Freud’s early paintings—portraits of figure’s with oversized eyes and haunted expressions—are far more interesting than paintings like Benefits Supervisor Resting, which, obscenely, sold at Christie’s for $56.16 million in 2015.

But the early work still isn’t that interesting, it’s just less hostile and self-righteous than his ‘mature’ work. The work Freud is best known for isn’t interesting conceptually, and materially, it’s no different than paintings sitting in racks in art schools throughout the world. If Freud wasn’t the grandson of Sigmund Freud, I doubt he’d have become as famous as he did. Without his sex-obsessed grandfather, Lucian Freud’s just another run of the mill painter, good with a brush, bad with ideas—so therefore bad as an artist.

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Earlier this year I was asked to write about the late photographer Sarah Charlesworth for Aperture Magazine. I was surprised, because I don’t think of myself as a photography guy—as much as I absolutely love photography. Then I remembered that I take photos myself, and I’ve published more photography than painting books, so it shouldn’t have shocked me. I thought it might’ve been because Charlesworth occasionally made images of Buddha, and I’ve been known to praise him occasionally.

I’m in Saluda, North Carolina right now, in a home belonging to my ultra-generous friend Verne Dawson. The landscape is overwhelmingly beautiful, full of kudzu so lush it’s pornographic. When I’m here, I understand why cameras were invented. Sadly, they’re incapable of truly capturing scenes like the one outside my window, which I find constantly disappointing. Put the camera down, I tell myself, you’re not gonna get what you want. Verne, who I’ve never seen take a photograph, has clearly accepted that just looking is the smartest thing one can do. But I’m stubborn, stupid, hopeful. I keep trying, keep failing. I mention this because Sarah Charlesworth rarely sought to depict the world with her camera. She knew it was pointless. Instead she made pictures about pictures, as many artists from her scene did. Her early death impacted her recognition. She should be more widely known. Here’s what I wrote, and here’s where I am.

Sarah Charlesworth should be here now, to see how the witchy power of images has cursed America. She might know what to do about it.

Born in New Jersey in 1947, Charlesworth died, far too young, of a brain aneurysm in Connecticut at the age of sixty-six. Among the many contributions she left behind is Academy of Secrets (1989). In this series, Charlesworth excised images from educational and art history books—spoons, clocks, antlers, hearts, lotus flowers—photographed them on a white board, and intensified the colors in the darkroom. Stripped of context, floating in saturated fields of pigment, these objects become empty talismans, begging to be assigned meaning.

Charlesworth was a central figure in that loosely knit group of artists that came to be known as the Pictures Generation. Her mentors included Joseph Kosuth and Douglas Huebler, whose 1978 artist book Secrets—a gripping compilation of nearly two thousand anonymously written secrets—made an impression. She appreciated the rigor of those artists, but challenged the Conceptual art movement’s academic stuffiness by treating images, not language, as the primary sites where meaning, authority, and ideology are produced. At a time when American culture was increasingly governed by mass media, Charlesworth understood that photographs were not to be trusted. They were not documents neutrally reproducing reality, but components of a system through which narratives of power and victimhood are manufactured and circulated. She emphasized beauty in an art world drowning in wall texts, index cards, instructions, and Formica—but with the awareness that every rose has a thorn sharp enough to slice you open. The “secret,” for Charlesworth, is not buried inside the image; it emerges in the act of looking—in the viewer’s need to stabilize what resists explanation.

One of art’s most profound qualities is its ability to describe things for which language is utterly inadequate. That feeling in your stomach as a child when you briefly lost your mother in the grocery store, a broken heart, a frightening diagnosis. Impossible to write accurately, but somehow a Munch painting or a crushed car by John Chamberlain says it perfectly. This is clearly magical, and “magic” was a word Charlesworth used often. In her Polaroids she makes it clear that artists and illusionists share similar powers. Who else can freeze flowers in mid-air, or liberate a pair of eyes from its face? A good artist, like a good magician, imitates God.

Seeking to understand what photography does instead of what photography shows, Charlesworth used her camera, her X-Acto knives, and her impeccable sense of composition to explore the spooky power of an image to convey discrete, often contradictory meanings, while masquerading as objective truth.

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I wrote this article in 2019, when legislators in the US were attempting to repeal Roe V. Wade. I didn’t imagine that things would change for the worse, but they have. Georgia State Representative Dar’shun Kendrick, who I interviewed, seemed to know what was on the horizon. The Playboy website has been cannibalized, and this article is no longer online.

Early into my sexual life as a man, I realized I was at an impasse.

In my late teens I began to memorize the Woody Allen litany of cliches employed to keep women seeking a “serious commitment” at bay. I used the two most popular to great success right into my late : “How could you possibly bring a child into this horrible world?” and the classic, “Having a child is so selfish.”

Decades later and a much different man, in less than 15 minutes I eliminated multiple potential problems for my wife Cristine and myself, allowing us more personal, cultural and sexual freedom.

In just 15 minutes, any cisgender man, resolute in his beliefs and free of fear and ego, can help unburden his wife or girlfriend, if just in one simple way.

Before we met in person, Cristine told me she’d also known from a young age that she didn’t want children. It was a sign of our compatibility, and part of why we’re now happily married. In hindsight, I realize than an unconscious (sexist) part of my brain wasn’t certain she could make that promise to herself, or to me. She was 29 and I was 40. Despite Cristine’s unwavering allergy to dishonesty, a prehistoric part of myself suspected that she, like all women (I imagined), might later change her mind. I assumed the cliche myth of her biological clock would manifest and our relationship would collapse - that while I remained steadfast in my desire to remain childless, my wife, powerless against nature, would inevitably surrender to instinct.

As has been the case so often in my life, I was wrong. My wrongness was, looking back, predicated on fundamentally sexist assumptions.

Five years into our marriage, after a conversation initiated by Cristine one day in late 2018, I decided to have a vasectomy. My wife and I really like having sex, and the procedure would mean that, fertility aside, we could have sex on the subway or in an Olive Garden bathroom more easily. I asked her if she was certain a half dozen times, reminding her of the finality of the procedure. (While vasectomies can be reversed, those procedures are unreliable and expensive. She also knew that once snipped I’d never reattach.) Each time she reassured me as one does a toddler who’s dropped his teddy bear.

Eight days after a referral from my GP, I had a consultation at the premier snip house in town, literally named the Toronto Vasectomy Clinic. (It’s ultra-specialized name put to bed any worries I had about the procedure. You don’t quibble over cuts of meat when you’re at “The Butcher.”) I went in to be decommissioned five days after my consultation: two weeks from doc to chop shop. The only thing I needed to bring was a jockstrap. I was to wear it the following week should there be mild aching.

The waiting room was full of women, most holding young children. Their faces projected a combination of relief and joy.

My doctor used what’s called the “no needle, no scalpel” technique. While a scalpel if often employed to cut the skin of the scrotum, revealing the vas deferens, i.e the tubes to be reckoned with, I instead had a hole poked in that most unseemly of body parts with a hemostat, an instrument with a tiny tip the penetrates the skin, through which the vas deferens are pulled out, snipped, cauterized and reinserted with no need for stitches. A local anesthetic from a brightly coloured bottle was sprayed on my scrotum. I remained fully awake, maintaining surprisingly good banter with the woman sparing the world my genetic legacy.

At home, I couldn’t even find the wound.

Cristine and I never used birth control because she (and of course I) didn’t want to. She didn’t want to because the side effects she’d experienced with the Pill—which are typical, not rare—made it more harmful than helpful. The anxiety alone associated with unrolling the pharmacists’s scroll of potential complications would shake anyone up. (The text accompanying a pack of condoms only explains how to put them on. Any other text assures the wearer they’re “ribbed for her pleasure.”)

So began the dice rolling. We reverse engineered a fertility app, finding out which days we were unlikely to get pregnant, and took advantage of that window. Women tend to dislike condoms as much as men; what’s different is that men aren’t encouraged or pressured by partners to try one of many potentially dangerous options, because really, there are no other options for men right now. If men had to experience a tenth of the suffering women do in dealing with childbirth or contraception, lord knows scientists would be working around the clock.

According to the Centre for Young Women’s Health, the failure rate for condoms is 18 out of 100 (although most authorities on that subject add that condoms are around 98 percent effective when used properly). The birth control pill rate is around half that, at nine (or one for “perfect use”). The same source situates the birth control as the most popular female contraceptive in North America, with IUDs a close second. Anecdotal information suggests otherwise. Most of my wife’s friends eschew the Pill, one reason being that, with an IUD, no daily awareness is required. It’s replaced every three to 12 years, sometimes with painful consequences.

Earlier this year I put a call out to my Instagram followers, seeking other men’s vasectomy stories. I quickly learned from their replies that, at least today, the IUD is in style, and that a significant number of men have had vasectomies because their their partners, sisters or friends had suffered one of the many under-reported and shocking traumas associated with intrauterine devices. When I first began researching this article, search results for IUDs were mostly about their efficacy, with a noticeable number of pages devoted to new revelations about extreme side effects. Googling IUDs today, the first two pages are devoted almost entirely to ads from law offices soliciting people to join class action lawsuits. The most stunning side effects reported were of device dislocation, meaning that the IUD had migrated outside of the uterus. (I’ve only had a condom migrate off of me, creating scared looks on two faces and once a trip to the drug store for a morning after pill.) There have been reports of other side effects far more serious than those reported by manufacturers in the informational sheets that accompany their products.

Among the many contraception options for women, those with the lowest failure rates—the IUD, at roughly one in 100 times, and the Pill—have the worst side effects, ranging from vaginal dryness to “mood changes.” As you go down the list, the failure rates increase, and the side effects diminish. For women, birth control becomes mostly side effect free once you reach the cervical cap, which fails about 17 to 20 out of 100 times. The next least efficacious option is the male condom, which again, fails up to 18 times.

The failure rate of vasectomies? 0.15 percent. Not one out of 100. 0.5 out of 100. And this minuscule number is attributed to surgical, not user error. The two main risks involved with the vasectomy option are that the vas deferens may reattach (one in 1000), leading to unwanted pregnancy, and what’s called “post-vasectomy pain syndrome.” One to two percent will suffer with this disorder. The overwhelmingly reliable side effects: your partner stops worrying about babies and unwanted symptoms, and you can be more sexually spontaneous.

After the procedure, my balls ached for a few weeks. Mildly. After 20 ejaculations to clear motile sperm from my system I was good to go. And then I went.

The men I talked to claimed to have had vasectomies to wipe kids off the table, to alleviate their partner’s responsibility or side effects from other methods, and to foster equality. Not one man I asked expressed the slightest regret. One reported that in telling his male friends about his vasectomy, their most common response was, “But it’s reversible, right?” That question seems to reflect a fear that men might distance themselves from their “natural” virile state through the procedure. Some men seem to unconsciously equate an inability to knock up women with a decline in their sexual prowess.

Possessing mild libido paranoia myself, I’d asked my consulting doctor if my testosterone count would change, or if sex would be any different. He said sex would be different only in that I would likely have it more often. Time has proven this to be true.

The man with bros requiring reassurance said he simply told them the choice had no bearing on his virility, and that “the only thing which can’t be reversed his having a child.”

I asked each man if he felt his vasectomy was a feminist gesture. Each replied that no, it felt like male empowerment combined with empathy, and that framing it as feminist would imply they’d taken on an uncomfortable burden instead. They simply wanted to transfer responsibility to themselves, end their partner’s exposure to dangerous side effects and, fundamentally, prevent the creation of children, as even the most effective female contraceptive fails almost six times more than a vasectomy.

In describing how they wanted to “balance the scales,” they were demonstrating an awareness of the inequity that dominates the birth control landscape, and in doing so revealed themselves and their vasectomies to be feminist by default.

I pitched this article the same month that politicians in Alabama and Georgia began their attempts to implement unbelievable, violently anti-female abortion laws. That’s when I discovered the Testicular Bill of Rights, proposed by Georgia State Representative Dar’shun Kendrick in response to an an early version of the anti-abortion bill HB 481 (aka the Fetal Heartbeat Bill) that’s currently criminalizing abortion clinics and dehumanizing women across the South. Kendrick’s bill is composed of five legislative proposals (italics mine):

1. Men would require permission from their sexual partners before they were able to obtain Viagra or any other erectile dysfunction medication.

2. Vasectomy procedures would be banned, with the punitive measure for doctors the same as those in HB 481, which would imprison abortion doctors.

3. Men who have sex without condoms would be charged with aggravated sexual assault.

4. DNA testing would be required once women were 6 weeks and 1 day pregnant. The determined father of the child would then be required to immediately begin making child support payments, as Georgia law states that after 6 weeks and a day, an embryo becomes a human life.

5. 24 hours waiting periods would be implemented before men could purchase porn or sex toys in the state of Georgia.

Speaking with me over email the last month, Rep. Kendrick explained the bill’s inspiration:

“When HB 481 was proposed, I thought ‘How can we change the narrative to get people to think about how women feel about their bodies being the topic of discussion?’ So I asked for a few suggestions on social media and one early morning (I am a super early riser) I said, ‘Let me just post this to get people talking and thinking.’ I never expected it to blow up like it did. Never.”

Did people think it was real?

“Some did,” Rep. Kendrick told me. “Mostly men.”

Kendrick knows firsthand the double standard of contraception in America. She once lost two weeks of her own birth control pills and when she asked her pharmacy for refills, they refused. Even if refilled, her insurance company wouldn’t have paid for it. As she said,

“Now how does this make sense when men can go anywhere at anytime and buy condoms?”

To Kendrick’s surprise, the child-support section of her bill appeared, in slightly altered form, in the draft of HB 481 signed into law back in May.

“Someone thought my crazy idea was actual a good idea,” she said. “Go figure.”

She predicted her bill would make its way through the court system until,

“Surprise surprise, it will be struck down in federal court, as it violates Roe V. Wade.”

But then challenging Roe V. Wade seemed to be one of HB 481’s roles from the beginning.

Kendrick hadn’t expected her proposal to receive as much attention as it has, but the Testicular Bill of Rights has already done what she intended. Hopefully it will continue to show men what Draconian bullshit women deal with when it comes to reproductive rights.

I told Rep. Kendrick that I’d had a vasectomy, to which she replied “God bless you.” While nice to hear, ideally my decision wouldn’t be blessworthy. In the face of a system that increasingly polices women’s bodies, vasectomies are more than considerate procedures. What they represent is something urgently needed; active empathy for women and the nightmarish scenarios they’re forced to contend with.

Fear not men, you can still bust nuts all over the place. You’ll also, however, be forestalling abortions that could send your partner or her doctor to prison.

Thirty minutes from the waiting room to the bedroom. I can give you my doctor’s number.

HOW TO MAKE YOUR LIFE SMALLER AND SMALLER

A full, rich life is much harder to destroy than a small, isolated one. If you’re looking to really fuck things up, you need to shrink your experience of the world.

Offered a promotion? Decline it. Climbing the ladder at work is cliché. Interesting people choose to slide down instead.

Friends have a tendency to text and call, inviting you out, checking to see how you’re doing. It’s important to ignore them. Trevor’s having a bachelor party, Claire’s got an art opening. So what? You’ve got beer in your apartment, and Hulu’s running a Frasier marathon. Some of your older friends will be hard to shake. They’ll keep calling. They might leave messages saying they’re worried about you. Stay strong. Do not reply. That’ll only provide a crack for the outside world to seep through. Eventually they’ll give up. After all, you haven’t been fun to hang out with lately.

HOW TO LOSE INTEREST IN EVERYTHING THAT ONCE MATTERED

It used to drive your girlfriend crazy that you were so focused on rock climbing, or worse, reading books. “I wanna have sex!” she’d say, so you’d begrudgingly put down your copy of War and Peace and unzip your pants. Well, she’s gone now, and nobody’s watching you read that book you barely understand. The performance is over. Pick up your phone, you know you want to. Open Candy Crush. Do not try to control how long you play, like all those idiots out there.

The world is designed to pull you away from what matters, to thrust you into an infinite clusterfuck of doomscrolling, and advertising consumption. Let go, enjoy plummeting into mental degradation. Isn’t it a relief to surrender to your dopamine addiction?

Did you ever actually use those muscles you built in the gym? Did you lift a car off a kid? Exercise is honestly pretty corny. You can give that up too. And why pay therapists two hundred bucks an hour when you no longer have friends or partners to interact with in a healthy way? Use that money to subscribe to porn sites, or try something new, like crystal meth.

HOW TO HAVE HORRIBLE BOUNDARIES

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I’d planned to post something about 1977 over the last few weeks as part of a serialized, year-by-year autobiography. It didn’t happen. Nagging deadlines pulled my attention away from Substack, as did endlessly dispiriting drama related to the publication of a novel I wrote in 2022 and 2023, a novel that would’ve already been published by Tyrant Books were Tyrant Books’ owner and editor Giancarlo DiTrapano still alive. Five years after his death, Gian’s absence is annoying as it relates to my work, unacceptable and heartbreaking as it relates to my life, friendship, a sense of family, connection—all the Big & Poetic stuff.

So while trying to bite my tongue as it lives inside my typing fingers, and not rage at people in emails for not being Gian, I sought comfort in the droning music of La Monte Young, and in the cheerfully mantric compositions of Steve Reich, particularly this one, for marimba. Then, because I have ADD, or ADHD, or because I’m avoiding editing a six-thousand-word essay about benzodiazepine withdrawal, I googled La Monte Young, and Steve Reich, and discovered they’re both still alive, and quite old.

They’re not the only ones.

Put everything down, Brad. You can edit that later—you still have two days. Look into it further, do more googling. These are things I told myself. After taking my suggestions I learned that a disproportionate number of so-called minimalist composers are very old, and still with us.

La Monte Young, who looks like a shamanic hitman under contract to the Hells Angels, is 90 years old. Steve Reich, who wore logo-free baseball hats long before Succession’s 'quiet billionaire’ style became mainstream, is 89. Terry Riley, the caucasian Sun Ra, is 90. Philip Glass, who snapped at me in 2005 when he thought—mistakenly—I was cutting in front of him at Hunan Village, is 89, and on the younger side, Meredith Monk—who looks how you want your therapist to look—is 83.

Is their music helping them live longer than most people? I asked myself this question. Is this just selection bias? Who cares, but maybe. 83 might not be that old, sure, but 90 is, and it’s definitely remarkable that each time I googled a key figure in minimalist music, they were still alive—and if not 90, pushing 90. If it’s the music, then what about it? Did these musicians, by freeing themselves from the oppressive, time-bound world of rhythm, discover the secret to a longer life? Rock and roll, with its reliance on 4/4 time, mimics the mathematics of a day on Earth. The sun goes up and the sun goes down. Songs, like lives, have clear beginnings and clear endings. Songs by La Monte Young and Terry Riley don’t sound like songs by Aerosmith or Jimi Hendrix. Beginnings and endings aren’t clear. Metrically, they don’t remind you of a day on Earth. By focusing their lives on music not tied to the gravebound structure of both rock and roll and nature, these musicians might’ve accidentally postponed their own deaths.

This is all bullshit. Minimalist music isn’t divorced from rhythm. If anything, songs by Philip Glass and Steve Reich are unrelentingly rhythmic. I just stumbled upon a handful of octogenarian musicians one night while procrastinating and procrastinated further by developing this theory, which is in no way scientific. My real theory about aging is much different, and totally scientific.

MOBSTER LONGEVITY

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I’m not going write the titles down, because some of them feel corny to me now. If they don’t feel corny, then I’ll cop to them. This painting is 18 x 24 inches. It’s from a photograph I took in a cabin in the mountains in British Columbia, where I lived at the time. It has a title, but I sure don’t like that title today.

I really like this painting. I made a second version that I showed in Switzerland a year or two later. This version didn’t sell. It hung in my kitchen for a while, then I traded it for a leather ottoman.

This painting was small. Maybe 11 x 14 inches. One night I stuck my camera out the window of that same cabin in the mountains, and pressed the shutter. It was pitch black out. When I got the film developed I saw this moth dead center in the middle of the photo. There it is, I paint from my photographs. No, I can’t just create realistic depictions of the world from my imagination like some psycho.

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*The title was Charlie’s idea. I still don’t know what it means.

MONEY CUBICLE’S THE BEAST

Everyone complains about art fairs. Everyone goes to art fairs. Everyone says how awful they are. Everyone posts pictures from art fairs. Here’s a photograph; Miami, London, my fresh gear, now Basel, Madrid, oh these two always travel together and they look so great, New York, and New York again…

They are “killing art.”

I began showing my work regularly right around the time that fairs began to proliferate. At first they were not an issue, and I was able to mount exhibitions within the context of the gallery as well as have my works shown individually at the fair. The combined sales of these venues, with the latter feeling like an afterthought, was enough to sustain my practice. However, over time, the fairs grew, multiplied, and fanned out, becoming something completely different and powerful. It used to be that September in New York was the ideal month for a show. Over the years, September has become a problem because people are recovering from summer spending at Art Basel. October is maybe okay. November is no good because people are preparing to spend their money at Art Basel Miami and NADA in December. December is no good by default. The first three months of the New Year are now also blown because collectors are overspent from the December fairs, or waiting for The Armory or Frieze or Art Basel again in the spring. And of course the summer is traditionally still for vacation, childbirth, or rehab.

The dealers I’ve worked with have bemoaned the fairs unanimously. They’re expensive and make art look like cartons of cereal. At the same time they have no choice but to do them. They are like Boxing Day sale week for mall stores. It is not news to the people within art’s industrial complex that collectors essentially do not buy from gallery shows anymore. Still, it should be publically noted that the quiet contemplation of a single artist’s work within the white cube has been vanquished, and not by institutional critique, the eclipse of modernist aesthetics, or the actions and attitudes of artists who moved outside of the gallery to make their work, but by laziness and money. Mostly money, and money’s laziness.

By seeing every artist’s work in a small, carpeted booth in a shabby convention centre, with a lot of noise and no personal space, art has become utterly dehumanized. This is a bad time for art and for (most) artists. A very large percentage, a dominant percentage, of what gets shown, photographed, and collected is forgettable. However, this is nothing new, and to some extent, the work that eventually doesn’t hold up, draws our attention to what does. As in any other industry, we need exposure to poor product succeeding in order to see and recognize what the strengths are in the work that holds up.

For example, everyone is familiar with the work of Van Gogh and Monet, but few people are aware of the vast number of successful artists working and showing concurrent to them, outside of art historians and serious collectors. This vetting has been ongoing for every decade of the nineteenth and twentieth century—do the research, and you will be surrounded by a vast landscape of the forgotten present. The difference in this moment is that it all is happening so publicly, so instantaneously, so that the placement of “then” and “now” can transpire in a month’s time, sometimes even in a week, and at the fair, within a day.

That’s so last Saturday.

People talk about art fairs as being easier, mostly for collectors. However, art is not supposed to be easy, is it? Good art especially is notoriously difficult, correct? Could “Spiritual America” have hung in an art fair? Exactly. However, many young artists that are making a name for themselves in this new climate owe much of their success—as well as the form, scale, and content of their work—to a global circuit of VIP art fair makers and goers; their parties, tastes, and lifestyles. The privileged privileging the young artist, and the young artists offering a palatable product in return.

The idea that art fairs make art easier for collectors is based on a trio of assumptions. The first assumption is that these fairs are important and organized by serious, well informed, art educated professionals. The second is that, as a by-product of the first, only the very best galleries in the world are permitted to participate in these fairs. Third, this must mean that the most cutting edge, important and serious artists are to be seen at every booth. These assumptions may or may not be true. But what this triad does is create a sense of ease in the heart and wallet of the collector, who may not be as confident or prescient as say Herb and Dorothy Vogel, who bought difficult art, and kept it under paper in their ceiling so sunlight would not damage the work.

The Fair allows people who want to own art to actually enact the cliché of buying work that matches the sofa. If you have enough money and space, collectors today can walk around Art Basel, picking out things that they find pleasant, that function as ornament, but also must be loaded with meaning. Works from prestigious fairs are triply pre-vouched, and coming with a whispered promise of future wealth. There is nothing inherently wrong in buying work because it looks good, or buying work as an investment, in fact they are traditional reasons for doing so. There is little to nothing about the pandemic of art fairs that is harmful to collectors in any way whatsoever. The harm is always inflicted on artists, and on art.

Less than a handful of Canadian art galleries participate in the major art fairs. A booth at Frieze—if you are fortunate enough to be accepted—costs in the neighbourhood of nineteen thousand dollars. Further, you’ll need to rent lights, walls, chairs, desks, and in some cases, wireless access. All this, before shipping, travel, paying staff, and lodging. The director of a Canadian gallery that participates in these fairs described them to me simply as advertising. Traditionally, advertising can be bought with money, but in art it needs to be bought with money and prestige. In short, you are to consider yourself lucky to be able to advertise. Of course the elite stable of pedigree galleries, like Hauser and Wirth, Gagosian, Zwirner, and so on, can easily do this in any fair in the world, but for the mid-level and younger galleries, participation in art fairs is simply a way to keep their one living hand above the quicksand; a very costly gesture to ensure that people know you are still relevant, still alive.

People claim to want something to change, they just don’t want to have to be involved. The art world right now is a glamorous limb-strewn car crash on the highway; everyone slows down, appalled, taking photos, whispering and getting off. Perhaps there’s no need to burn down the art fair–if they follow Newton’s law of motion they’ll ultimately slow to a halt, encumbered by their own enormity. For example, Art Forum Berlin, once desirable and taken seriously, has disappeared. Art Chicago is gone. At one point there were perhaps a dozen fairs orbiting around Art Basel in Miami, and that number has diminished. Eventually people run out of money, their tolerance for suffering is fatigued. The artists who did well have stopped doing well, or stopped making work. Certain galleries may have realized the futility of participating and returned to the thing they initially were drawn to – running a gallery. There is something to be said for spurning the upper echelons of success and settling for being a regional player. With any frenzy, exhaustion always follows.

According to Artvista, there are 106 contemporary art fairs this year, an astonishing figure if you consider that these are only for contemporary art. Now consider the number of galleries required to facilitate this many fairs (210 at The Armoury, 305 at Basel, 215 at ARCO) and from there, the number of artists required to facilitate all these gallery rosters starts to reach into the thousands. The final tally is startling, but math does not offer us a true sense of what’s at stake—you need to physically stroll the aisles of any major fair to get a real sense what out of control looks like, sounds like, and spiritually feels like. A friend recently returned extremely depressed from a fair that he was included in, which makes perfect sense, because never before have artists been exposed to this much art commerce in one place, and never have they had to face the reality that what they made—not matter how considered, theorized, or politicised—was nothing more then an exotic purchase for the novice collector or a speculative purchase for the professional collector.

Artists cannot keep up production to match the number of fairs; galleries cannot keep up financially to participate. The heavy hitters will always be able to send out interns and employees all over the globe to maintain a presence within the circuit. It’s an endurance game. To open and maintain a gallery, for someone not born with money, already requires endurance. If Art Basel is the ocean, and Larry Gagosian is the gigantic whale leisurely following the current, then all these smaller galleries and fairs that swim along, eating the scraps, happy to accept the benefits of being cheaper and more accessible than Gagosian, will die from exhaustion. They necessarily have a shorter life span.

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MOVIES

The first movie I remember seeing was Clash of the Titans in 1981 when I was 7 years old. I recently tried watching it again. It didn’t do it for me. These movies do it for me on repeated viewings.

THE CONVERSATION (1974)

Picking a favourite movie—or even your five favourite movies—is difficult. They change. You change. While other movies at the top of my list come and go, The Conversation consistently remains my number one. Maybe it’s because it came out the year I was born, and I somehow associate it with the beautiful experience of being granted a human life.

Francis Ford Coppola has occasionally blown it, but he didn’t blow it here. Gene Hackman is perfect as Harry Caul, the moral, romantically unhappy surveillance expert. He plays saxophone, which is charming, and I once read that Coppola included the church confessional scene because confession is a kind of surveillance too—an invasion of privacy pitched as spiritual intimacy.

John Cazale is great here, just as he is a year later in Dog Day Afternoon. Sadly, he died of cancer not long after. Every time I watch the film I’m surprised to see Cindy Williams outside the context of Laverne & Shirley. Paranoia, surveillance, obsession with craft, perfectionism—The Conversation has it all.

GLASS CHIN (2014)

Glass Chin is a neo-noir film about a boxer—Bud Gordon, played by Corey Stoll—being pressured to throw a fight. Bud’s girlfriend is a Buddhist, as is the film’s writer and director Noah Buschel, who was once a contributing editor at Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. Billy Crudup steals every scene he’s in as some kind of crime boss-slash-entrepreneur-slash-Warhol appreciator named JJ. Crudup can currently be seen chewing up the scenery in The Morning Show, which was good early on, but for the last two seasons has resembled a telenovela about Good Morning America. There’s a scene in Glass Chin involving music blaring in an empty parked car at night that really affects me, that feels violent despite the absence of violence. Yul Vazquez—who robbed Kramer of an armoire in Seinfeld—is also very charismatic as an intimidating, culturally savvy debt collector. I can’t articulate why I like this movie so much, but I like this movie so much.

BEAU TRAVAIL (1999)

This movie is just ridiculously, almost irritatingly beautiful. Galoup—played by Denis Lavant—a retired military officer, chills in retirement in Marseille, reflecting on his past. He remembers his time in Djibouti, living out the plot of Billy Budd. A young soldier named Sentain joins his division. He’s younger, taller, and better-looking, so Galoup vows to ruin his life. We all remember Billy Budd, don’t we? There’s hardly a line of dialogue in the whole film. All the men are gorgeous. It often looks like promotional video for a non-existent Andorran or Cape Verdean fashion label. Galoup keeps fucking with Sentain, we care or don’t care, and each scene is more beautiful than the last. Oh, you’ve never seen a post-apocalyptic, off-Earth looking salt flat, like the one near Lake Assal? I hadn’t either, not until I watched this movie, and the scene depicting objects caked in thick, dry salt blew my mind. I won’t ruin it by describing final scene, which made me feel like someone had reached inside my chest, squeezed my heart, then blown a fat line of cocaine up my nose.

ROMANCING THE STONE (1984)

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To paraphrase Sam Kriss, if you like Jackson Pollock, you’re wrong.

People who say ‘my kid could do that’ are also wrong. But that’s not the point. I’ve spent my entire adult life around painters more talented than me. They’re my friends, the people I got drunk with, and when I need an intelligent opinion they’re who I go to. About painting, that is—not anything else. Painters are notoriously dumb, sensual people, ill-equipped to manage their own lives. But the good ones can be relied on for their taste in painting, and I’ve never heard one praise Jackson Pollock. No friend counts him among their favourite artists. He just doesn’t come up, in much the same way Sam Harris wouldn’t come up in a conversation between Schopenhauer and Socrates.

Pollock did one important thing only—he liberated the canvas from the paintbrush. But the paintings he made as a result are unremarkable in every way, and mostly unpleasant to look at. It’s normal to dislike Pollock because you’ve been inundated by design inspired by his paintings. Ugly sweatpants bearing Pollocky drips, laptop cases, cheap plastic cups, sunglass frames. But that’s not his fault and it can’t be held against him. It’s not surprising though. I’ve never seen a Swatch patterned like a Barnett Newman, or a Rothko. That’s likely because their paintings transcended design, where Pollock’s did not. He’s a designer who developed a technique—admittedly a radical one—but the only people who seem to have adopted it are senior high school students, who use it unsparingly in art class.

Pollock was corny with the drinking and drunk driving and the way he died. He lived like Caravaggio when he was more of a depressive Thomas Kinkade. None of that matters. The paintings are just forgettable, and that’s the one thing good art can’t be. His wife, Lee Krasner, was the better artist—a not unusual situation, but that’s a whole other thing.

UNDERRATED - PAUL FEELEY

When I say Paul Feeley is underrated, I don’t mean he should be top-rated like Francis Bacon, Munch, and Louise Bourgeois, but he still deserves more eyeballs than he’s currently getting.

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Despite what the experts say about baby brains, this is where memory begins for me: faint impressions of the world I was witnessing while held by some relative or family friend who’d been warned to “be careful with his head.”

I was two years old. It was a world of verticals. Men’s shirts—including my father’s—were always unbuttoned, exposing strips of chest hair often punctuated by gold medallions or multiple gold chains. I think my dad might’ve worn a Star of David, despite being inescapably Scottish. My mother’s bright red hair was long and straight, reaching below her waist, swaying through my field of vision. Through our windows I saw other red brick buildings, other babies in strollers, other homes with other families doing other things. The sound of dishes being washed was probably as unpleasant to me as the sound of my screeching was to my parents. Even now imagining the sensory overload I must’ve felt, I feel slightly sweaty and nervous. I think we had a dog, a boxer, but I might’ve just seen one on television and not understood that the world inside the box in our living room wasn’t part of the world we lived in.

The sound of Teddy Pendergrass, Marvin Gaye, and The Commodores—achingly romantic, horny, although I wouldn’t have picked that up. My parents listened to a lot of R&B. North America was practically infected with horniness in 1976; post-Pill and pre-AIDS, herpes was the worst-case scenario. Pathologically unhorny, there was ABBA, and Dancing Queen, which I can hear while seeing my parents stockinged feet dancing in our kitchen.

Grandparents came to visit and squeezed me. Everyone smoked cigarettes, and everyone drank beer in stubby bottles. Because I grew up in Canada, everyone also criticized America, where I now live. Nixon “the crook” was gone, replaced by Ford “the dipshit,” who lost to Carter “the moron.” But I would’ve heard only sounds implying those words; all conversation was lost on me. I found it hilarious to shit in my diaper, but other times I found it terrifying, so I squealed until some bright object in my field of vision became more important.

I had two grandfathers. One—my father’s father—was comically short, and kept an empty bottle, a funnel, and a rubber hose in the backseat of his car in case he had to urinate while driving. Bright white hair protruded from both of his ears like the working ends of paintbrushes. He’d once studied painting with Harold Town and kept nude paintings of my grandmother in the basement, away from prying eyes. Thank you grandpa. The other—my mother’s father—was tall, and apparently had a lovely Scottish accent which I never heard because he’d lost his larynx to cancer and spoke through a hole in his throat with a vibrating beige device. When he lost his larynx he somehow also lost his sense of smell. My uncle apparently used to gift him women’s perfume in men’s cologne bottles as a joke.

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Having a human body

In Hinduism, it’s said that there are three things more valuable than anything else: rebirth in a human body, the desire to know God and the company of a holy person. I definitely have the first, feel confident I have the second, and am working on the third.

In December of 2023 I was my most ripped self, after having gone to the gym five to seven times a week over the previous twelve months. I used to be a scrawny, pitiful man, weak of body and spirit. I am six feet two inches tall, and have, at times, weighed as little as one-hundred and forty pounds. Not anymore. Today I weigh one-hundred and sixty-seven pounds and feel fantastic, or as close to fantastic as someone still weak of spirit can feel. I’m working on getting ripped, spirit-wise, but for now, I’m happy about the body I’ve built. I have muscle I’ll likely never use, and enjoy the way it looks in the mirror, often while feeling ashamed I enjoy it. Mark Twain said that “vanity is insanity.” Get me my straightjacket.

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Honesty

I’m not actually six foot two. I’m six foot one and one half inch. Honesty, not distance from floor to crown, is the measure of a man.

No one is more honest than a child, thus the cliche that “children can be cruel.”

Two weeks ago I was in California with my sister-in-law, her husband and their two children, aged seven and nine. Child A and Child B were both lovely to be around, were funny and sweet and endearing. Toward the end of my visit the seven year old, Child A, told my wife—by way of a small hand slicing a shape in the air—that I’d become fat. Imagine someone drawing the letter L, an L whose bottom, instead of being a flat horizontal line, looks more like a pear laying on its side. I knew I’d gained weight—was even proud of it, often announcing to no one the number between my feet on the scale—but assumed it was all muscle. Wrong. Once again, Brad was wrong. Brad was someone new now, he was Fat Brad. Fat Brad had no idea he’d become ‘skinny fat’, that he’d come to embody countless ‘skinny guy pot belly’ JPEGs, all of which redirect users to diet and exercise websites promising to help men of a certain age become their best selves.

I’m happy Child A was so brutally honest. I’m happy I was able to take in this revelation about myself with equanimity, not hostility and bitterness. In sharing this information I’m attempting to pay tribute to Child A, without whom, in 2024, I might be Fatter Brad.

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Sleep

Pop sociologist Malcolm Gladwell claims that ten thousand hours spent doing anything renders one an expert. Assuming eight hours of rest each night, this means that before their fourth birthday, a child is an expert in sleep.

If I, on average, have slept eight hours each night since birth, today I have an astonishing one-hundred and forty-six thousand hours of sleep under my belt. Strangely, and possibly as a refutation to Gladwell’s thesis, I have no idea what I’m doing when I close my eyes, and feel very amateurish when unconscious.

I have far more than ten thousand hours of experience looking at and making paintings. Knowing what I know about the medium can feel like torture. The corniest cliche in art is that we all long to unlearn what we’ve learned, striving to once again paint like children. Picasso, that jackass, is the source of this insipid idea, one that’s led artists to believe they must first be able to paint like Van Eyck before they can allow themselves to paint like Congo, the famous English chimpanzee and abstractionist.

‘Professional’ artists long to paint like children because children paint free of ambition, or in pursuit of money. The suffering which accompanies art making is primarily rooted in the suffering that comes from being engaged in business. Anyone can paint like Congo if they like, there aren’t actually rules about learning a skill then abandoning it. But to paint like Congo or like a child, one has to forget the stress of being an adult, or a non-chimpanzee.

Sleep, the last area of uncompensated activity in the human experience. Because I’ve never been paid to sleep, never had my sleep reviewed or compared to the sleep of others, I can rest with the same nonchalance I had when I was twelve years or six months old. Expertise is exhausting, restrictive and pleasure-killing. Maybe I do have specialized knowledge about how to rest, and maybe I’m an expert at snoring with my eyes shut, but because it blissfully happens while I’m unconscious, I only suffer the pain of being a talented sleeper in my dreams.

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Mystery

Understanding is overrated. I have no idea how matches work. Each time I light one I feel like I’m witnessing a miracle. Every day I engage in numerous activities—or interact with numerous objects—that I find mysterious. I could solve certain mysteries—like the mystery of the match—simply by educating myself, but then my world would make sense, A would lead to B, and that sounds boring.

Who are these mysterious people I see when I leave my apartment? Celebrity Skin magazine was first published in 1986, devoting each of its glossy pages to photographs of celebrities in the nude. Now defunct, it lives online as various websites, each demonstrating an admirable work ethic when it comes to tracking down stills of actors both famous and obscure without their clothes on. Naomi Watts and Michael Fassbender? Yes, obviously. But also, Adam Richards, who played Cop #3 in Police Academy 4, and Lisa Lipton, who had non-speaking roles in two episodes of late nineties Law & Order. Where are the people hunting down these images and uploading them to shitty, nonprofit websites pro bono? I’ve been in many cities in many countries. I’ve walked idly down a street smoking a cigarette or heading to eat breakfast and glanced briefly at the curtained windows of nondescript apartments. Was the webmaster of videocelebs.net working in that dimly lit apartment in Frankfurt? Was an intern at nudography.com taking a nap above that bookstore in Houston?

Aldrich Ames is currently in prison in Indiana after having been convicted of espionage in 1993. I live in New York, as did Ames at one point while spying for the Soviet Union. He used to contact his handler by making a mark on a certain mailbox with white chalk. This image obsesses me. Who was walking behind Ames and saw him do this, unaware of what it meant? What did they think? Are people all around me communicating with shadowy figures by leaving cryptic messages on mundane objects? My downstairs neighbour often whistles the same note for an unusually long time. Who is he contacting? Why does that older woman at the gym stack her clothes next to the chest press machine, then wipe it down exactly three times before using it? Am I the only person in this city not doing something mysterious and important?

Nude celebrities and espionage barely scratch the surface. Somewhere a man is flattening juice boxes and adding them to an enormous collection he’s been working on for decades. Why? Somewhere a dog is learning to flush the toilet. Somewhere, right now, someone’s writing something in their diary. It means everything to them but nothing to me. What does it mean to everyone else?

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Character Actors

Andre Braugher died on December 11th, 2023. You might not know him, but you know him. Between 1993 and 1999 he played grumpy detective Frank Pembleton on Homicide: Life on the Streets. Between 1989 and 2011 he also played that guy in countless movies and television shows.

“I know that guy,” you might’ve said to yourself, unable to place him. Braugher often played cops, particularly moody, quasi-philosophical cops. He also played lawyers, and once, on an episode of Kojak, a mugger. You’ve probably seen Andre Braugher and actors like him more than you’ve seen Brad Pitt or Meryl Streep, but you haven’t known their names, and you’ve rarely, if ever, seen them on red carpets or magazine covers.

For the almost half century I’ve been alive I’ve been obsessed with television and movies. I watch reruns of Cheers feeling as familiar with Woody, Sam and Diane as I am with my cousins, my close friends and my grandmother. When I feel depressed, Jessica Fletcher—the irritatingly nosy mystery novelist cum detective from Murder, She Wrote—is there, never nagging or tired of my bullshit. Forever reliable, characters in media remain what I need them to be on repeated viewings. In 2023 I came to realize that the people who make these movies and shows so comforting aren’t the stars but the supporting actors, whose faces I’ve seen migrate from show to show, movie to movie, their names unknown to me, but their effect comforting. If movies and television are a body—Tom Hanks the head, Demi Moore the arms and Morgan Freeman the feet—it’s these unsung players, forever working in the shadows, who generate each successive heartbeat.

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The one thing I’m not good at is explaining why a painting works. Some people ascribe mystical qualities to art. Not me, but only because I’ve never felt something mystical, not because I’m against the idea. There definitely is something beyond language and reason that makes a painting stand out; I’m just not sure what it is. Vague and remote emotional qualities may be involved. Maybe it’s better not to investigate it. Here are three paintings I think are perfect, accompanied by my weak attempts to explain why.

Albert York, Landscape with Trees and Snake, 1980

Almost all of Albert York’s paintings look this way. Perfect, square, green you could eat with a spoon, or rub all over your body.

This painting looks like it was made either in an hour or over the course of months. Both options are admirable. York is the classic ‘painter’s painter’. I love him to death and I don’t really identify as a painter myself. Sometimes you’ll see people trying to paint like York, naively thinking it must be easy, but they never pull it off. Well one person does, Seth Becker, like in this painting, called Factory Fire, which is just 12 x 12 inches.

I think you need to be in a certain place psychologically to make paintings as beautiful and simple as York’s. He famously once told an interviewer, “I think we live in a Paradise. This is the Garden of Eden.” When you approach life from that perspective, you’re probably far more inclined to create something transcendent. At least that’s my take.

Number 2…

Édouard Manet, Bob, 1876

C’mon, do I even need to explain? Obviously, I’m not being controversial when I say Manet was a brilliant painter, maybe one of the all-time top five with a brush. It’s not just that this looks exactly like a fucking little dog named Bob, it’s that you can tell Bob was Manet’s dog, and that he loved him to death. Whenever I see this painting I wanna reach in and pet Bob, knowing he’ll probably bite my finger, and I won’t be able to get mad at him because he’s so cute.

I have a cat named Cherry that I’d take a bullet for, or worse—a machete. I tried painting her once and it didn’t work out, largely because I wasn’t imbued with the same God-given talent Manet was. There’s nothing worse than trying to paint someone or something you love, and having it turn out not to resemble them at all. I know this painting of Bob looks more like him than any photograph could. And Manet painted some other dogs equally well, with cute names like Tama and Souki.

I had to stop writing this to go play with Cherry, that’s how much this painting of Bob moves me.

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Tala Madani, Nature Nurture, 2019

Almost every painting by Tala Madani is a perfect painting, and belongs on this list. But the works in her ‘Shit Moms’ series are particularly compelling. Mirthe Berentsen describes the series best:

“The paintings…show a female character covered in feces who leaves traces everywhere she goes while caring for her increasingly brown, besmeared children.”

On a purely technical level, Madani paints with outrageous confidence and speed in a way I truly envy. Her colors are sickening and perfect, diarrhea and cotton candy together at last. I don’t know what it’s like to be a mother, but I’ve spent my life around mothers, and the impression I get is that Madani portrays the experience perfectly. The unrelentingness, the constant self-doubt and anxiety, realizing you’ve exited a certain cultivated world and reentered a primitive one, forever cleaning up and making messes.

Smeared with shit, becoming shit oneself, forever shitty, smelly, exhausted—my experience with capitalism and the endless search for money feels somewhat relatable, but I know balancing motherhood on top of it all is a million times shittier, and more difficult.

Visually, Nature Nurture is perfect, and it’s funny—something sadly lacking from contemporary art, and contemporary life. Tala Madani is the best painter on the planet. If you don’t believe me, take a look at these:

This painting is called Shitty de Milo! Come on! So good.

Until next time…