The Days Run Away

Like Wild Horses Over The Hills

As I’ve gotten older— my brain processes time differently. And when I’m doing that thing, trying to catch my own mental tail— I often google image John Divola’s Dogs Chasing My Car in the Desert. Scroll through my iphone, regardless of the day or month, a safari tab will be open to these pictures. I think about them constantly. I wish I had a framed grid of six hanging on my wall.

“…two vectors and velocities, a dog and car and seeing that a camera will never capture reality and a dog will never catch a car, evidence of devotion to a hopeless enterprise.”

A hopeless enterprise. Kinda like trying to process the idea of time. That it’s unpausable.

The concept of time and my struggle with trying to comprehend how fast it’s streaking by— reminds me of John Chamberlain pictures. I first saw them back in 2019 at Paris Photo. Chamberlain is more known for his large Duchamp like car sculptures. If you’re in LA there’s one at Just One Eye.

I’m always pretty excited to find out an artist not known for photography takes pictures. Ed Ruscha, Christopher Wool and Ellsworth Kelly also come to mind.

Chamberlain thought of his photographs as “self-portraits of the nervous system”. To me they’re like the blur of a life. Is that too on the nose?

Chamberlain led me to a Richard Misrach picture from his show at Fraenkel. At 62x82in it’s a crazy huge print. Visualize it that big. Hanging in your home. Staring at it might feel like standing in front of a window. Instead of a photograph.

“…this would never happen if we lived by the sea” is a lyric from a Billy Bragg song I like, “Must I Paint You A Picture”.

The Misrach print brought me to Bragg. Made me think of regret. And how for whatever reason— we’re drawn to bodies of water. How they trigger self reflection.

You see the current ebb— like how life dips and peaks in front of you. The vastness of the ocean. Finiteness of your lifespan. Maybe like me, you thought about a life working on the farout barge. Or one drastically different from your own.

The Misrach print reminded me of my friend Christian Filardo’s picture below. The soft brown headliner and sun visor. The cracked mirror and yearbook-like photograph tucked inside it. Not sure there’s a better visual metaphor for time passing.

Speaking of time passing— I heard Richard Hell (70) read new poems at White Columns a few weeks ago. Or was it months ago? He’s got a new book out with Christopher Wool. It’s called, What Just Happened?

He said he woke up one morning— couldn’t remember the name of his dog. “That’s it, dementia!” People laughed. “oh wait, I never had a dog.” I laughed.

Hell was in the original line up of Television with Tom Verlaine, who died in January. A “brief illness,” the NYT said. Why don’t they tell us how people die now? We’d like to know. We’re all thinking of how much time we have left. How our parents, friends, partners will die. Because we’re trying to prevent it. I know we can’t. It won’t matter— but we still would like to know.

I thought about “Days” by Television. You’ve probably heard, “Marquee Moon”. The cover art reminded me of Christian’s picture. And of course days— and the measurement of time. Ok, so you’re following? There’s a thruline theme here.

The Richard Misrach picture also made me think about this Annabell Häfner chalk painting I saw online somewhere? The floor made me think of a big body of water.

The Häfner painting reminded me of a waiting room. Having sat in quite a few recently I thought about the dozens of people sitting around me. At the check in I overheard them say their birthdays. 5/25/1948, 12/1/1978, 9/22/1981. To confirm their identities. I thought about what each person’s life might have been like. Why they were there? I remembered a scene I love from The Departed.

Häfner made me think of a Caroline Walker painting. Which strangely had me thinking of the bathhouse scene in Eastern Promises. Google it, we’re getting too far out there now.

The bathhouse is an age old destination for reflection. Not sure there’s a nicer place to be with someone I love— to talk, think, relax, cold plunge, sweat.

The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over The Hills is a poem and title of a book by Bukowski. I pick it up— put it back down, probably weekly. I read excerpts I like. Skip over the parts I’d rather forget.

“and the moon and the stars and the world”

The Bukowski line reminds me of this Lawrence Weiner piece. It’s from 1988. But was up in the lobby of MoMA in 2008. A difficult year in America. People lost their homes— economy crashed. Lots of blame and anger permeated for several years after.

I thought about the Lawrence Weiner piece recently when I saw this Fairfield Porter in person last week. It’s a print from 1974. I know— not worth as much, ok. But I like it more than most of his paintings.

All of the above brought me to Garry Winogrand. I remembered seeing his doc, All Things Are Photographable at Film Forum. He left thousands of rolls of film undeveloped. In boxes and drawers. Winogrand said, he’d “just assume not exist”. I think about all the unseen pictures and him saying this often.

Like taking a Mount Everest amount of iphone pictures— never looking at them again. Baby pics, food pics, vacation, friends and lovers, furniture, cars, birthdays, screen grabs of clothes, receipts, memes and text conversations.

Losing track and shoving things into drawers had me digging through my phone for this Jim Goldberg picture I saw at Paris Photo at Casemore’s booth. Maybe four or five years ago. A time capsule.

The idea of a time capsule led me back to when I saw Nicholas Nixon’s installation. In 2016, I drove up from LA to see the newly redesigned reopened SFMoMA.

Nixon took a portrait of his wife and three sisters every year for 40 years. Seeing it in person and in its entirety— I watched the Brown sisters age in front of me. In just minutes. Their entire adult lives for us to unravel and personalize.

Hard not to think of Boyhood. And how Richard Linklater filmed Ethan Hawke, Patricia Arquette and Ellar Coltrane over the course of 18 years.

I ran into Daniel Arnold at The Armory show. We talked about success and failure.

How it can make a person ugly. The chase of it. That the universe doesn’t care all that much. “Everybody is just another you,” he said to me. I’ve had a hard time letting go of that thought. Daniel told me taking pictures was almost a compulsion.

You can see that in his work of New York. Frenetic, introspective, vibrant, humorous. People lost in their small battles. Garry Winogrand always makes me think about Daniel. And when I think about Daniel— a picture he took of a diner usually surfaces.

Daniel’s picture made me think of Alex Dimitrov’s poem, Out Of Some Other Paradise.

…What can be said about what we do to each other.

The last several years society has felt frayed at the edges. And the Dimitrov verse is often bouncing around in my head. When something in the news horrifies us all.

I thought about the Dimitrov line throughout Oppenheimer. Saw it recently. We dropped th atom bomb 78 years ago, August 6th 1945. Have you seen Bruce Conner’s 1976 Crossroads? I watched it at the Whitney in 2017.

I used a few stills I took of the film in a zine I made. This isn’t one, but it’s my picture and it reminds me of Crossroads.

When I was looking through the zine I found this. It’s a phrase I heard Lawrence Weiner say in an interview. I wrote it down on a xerox machete I made of the zine.

You are in the stream of life whether you like it or not. And I’m in it. The stream of life. As are you. All the decisions we make or choose not to make. The stream of life is happening either way.

I thought of Oppenheimer again. He was Jewish— driven to make the bomb to stop the Nazi’s. But wasn’t able to use it against them. In the film, he reads Krishna in Sanskrit.

Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds. It follows him throughout the movie and his life. According to Stephen Thompson, Hinduism has a non-linear concept of time. The great god is not only involved in creation but also dissolution. And that “death” translates as “world-destroying time.”

Time. We Live Behind The Moon Sometimes.

Something my old friend Christian Andwander mentioned to me at Takahachi. On Avenue A. An Austrian saying. How we remember— usually not how it was. I’ve made two zines about this idea. The one I linked a few sentences above. And Vapors.

We misremember. And alter memories to fit our own narrative. Just slightly most of the time. Guilty. We all do it. To make ourselves feel better. Or worse. Easier to feel worse. Comfortable in the dark. Harder to fight.

The last two Another Newsletter posts featured a “Something I’d like to Buy” section. Continuing that and in line with today’s theme, if I could afford it, I’d buy a Felix Gonzalez Torres “Untitled” (Perfect Lovers).

Gonzalez-Torres left it open for interpretation. It’s been shown around the world. The MoMA owns the one above. When exhibited both are set to the same time. Over the course of the show, one might fall out of sync. Or even stop working. Should either occur one or both clocks must be deinstalled, repaired, reinstalled, reset to be in sync. Theoretically so the piece can last forever.

To me, “Untitled” is about mortality, love, loss, being flexible, fixable. Because life is long. Or short. Depending on who you’re with.