from PICC (A Poet in Center City): #14

One branch I've got going which many of my friends don't notice is an interest in modern and post-modern art. By this time, I'm fascinated by post-modernity generally, and I learn the charmed names— Warhol, Nauman, Koons. Nauman, especially, attracts me— the West Coast, stalagmite creepiness of his early video work (product, I can't help but believe, of high marijuana intake), matched with a penchant for absurdism, balance out the direct and uncompromising brutishness of the East Coast life I'm leading. My nightly routine, when I get home from Barnes & Noble (where both I and Lisa work as booksellers) and when I happen to be alone, involves a pile of post-modern art books and approximately two bowls of weed. If I like Basquiat's playfulness, I'm repulsed by the vacuity of Jeff Koons; if Paul McCarthy is a bit too Willy Wonka, Ed Ruscha's sense of language, space, and minimalism in two dimensions gets under my skin. New York art, I learn, likes to stay on the surface, with big, bold gestures about the guts it takes to take up space in the world. The sense of spirituality is just about raw courage, raw guts. When Warhol, for instance, means it, that’s what you get. Because PMA is a short walk from Logan Square, I am there often, gawking at the Great Stair Hall, and Diana, trying to decide how much of the past centuries work I can assimilate (like Rubens’ Prometheus), and not just settle for what’s there that everybody knows. Including, it turns out, the famous Nauman neon “The true artist…,” which I’ve been vibing the right way at home. There's no one to talk with about visual art yet; but a young lady named Trish Webber works with me at B & N, and I have my eyes on her. There’s a high and mightiness to Ms. Webber against post-modernity, which is very crisp. Trish likes the Renaissance and is a student of Renaissance Humanism. The first few months I know Trish Webber, and am informed of her association with PAFA, she’s terse, slightly defensive when I define myself to her as an artist. It is by no means love at first sight. Even if, in the parlance of those times, she’s a Gwyneth and a half. Once, in the summer of 2000, I called her randomly. I don’t even remember how I got her number. She was still with John from Media, another aesthete, who I grew to like very much. The phone call, however, tanked fast. For Trish, I later learned, there was a version of Pride and Prejudice playing itself out. John wasn’t directly competitive with her the way I was. Still, in 2000 that’s in the background. Conversely, it’s taken for granted by me by 2000 that visual art for me is both an interest and an issue. When I walk around Center City stoned, I try to imagine what life would look like through a painter's eyes— West Philly, especially, is oddly picturesque, and many of the houses (half-dilapidated though they might be) are exquisite, as is all the architecture in Philly. I can still walk around with a good clean buzz on; if there is any danger, I don't notice it. For Bill and Pete (who, together, prefer the spaciness of semi-primitive, semi-formal art, somewhere between New York and Philly) and I, this is what everything reduces to— a buzz. We move forward on waves from the buildings.