nearly two years ago i bought enough electronic stuff to catch me up on two decades worth of electronicity.  back then the only person i knew online was ted.  i still know ted (although he’s been scarce lately..ted?) but now i know all you other guys too.  meanwhile, back then in december 2004, when there was still a new orleans to go to and the killer tsunami was horrifying enough, but still on the other side of the world, i posted some nostalgia, sprung full-formed from my art school experience, asking where are they now.

well, d, my art school roommate found me online, as i’ve mentioned here before, and we are reconnected.  she made me contact my old painting teacher, whom actually i’d been meaning to call for several years, someday, ever since i found out he’s been in gainesville (!) for awhile. and he sent me to his show in sarasota in september, where i discovered he’d been an even greater influence on my work than somehow i ever knew.  he doesn’t remember any of us now, of course, but then that few years in the early 80s, when he was the age i am now, are but a blip in his long career.  we were also disciples at the time of our master class theory teacher, struggling to make heads, and tails, out of what was having its first 15 minutes of fame, and later became infamous: foucault and then postmodernism (and what led me, a decade later, to waste many more years in fruitless pursuit of the history of philosophy.)

arnold mesches, c. 2004 (in his 80s, yeah, right.)
germano, c. 2004 (loooong sans ponytail)

and then all that caused her to attend, a month or so ago, an LA art show of otis alumni. where she signed me up for the alumni bulletin (whoever heard of such a thing, in art school?) and there were our old friends, when i had friends, whom i loved more than i can ever say.  blonde w. is actually standing between me and d. in the old picture from 1981 or whenever it was.  sarah perry (as a public personality, she gets her real name :) seems to be the only one from our whole class who became a working artist, as far as i have found; n. was the class president, as i remember.  i also remember him once drunkenly bellowing “sarah! sarah!,” a la the french lieutenant’s woman, at a show of sarah’s (she’d built a human-sized nest out of palm leaves and perched it on a scaffolding in the gallery; somewhere i have a picture of me sitting in it, i’m gonna have to dig that out as well as the old sony walkman tape--it was sarah who first grokked to sony walkmans--of n doggedly trying to pin down germano in his public lecture, which i later transcribed as some sort of performance piece, n trying so hard to figure it all out....) sarah was just One Of Us, then, although one of the best of us.  but we were all the best of us, then. 

i also remember a march down wilshire blvd. in front of our apartment, d’s and mine. we lived in an old 1920s LA raymond chandler building near macarthur park (where someone’d left a cake out in the rain a decade or two earlier) which even had a ghost ballroom on top of it that we used to break into, although just to be there and certainly not to destroy. i remember the layers and layers of old wallpaper up there, and the amazing light (and i certainly hope her kids are not old enough to read this!)

the bryson (ballroom on that doubled, top floor)

macarthur park (1979 postcard sent to mom)

remember marches?  they were passe even then.  we all watched this particular march from our balcony until it felt just too uncomfortable, n munching asparagus and yelling out “We’re with you! We’re with you!” at the marchers way down below chanting “no guns, no war, u.s. out of el salvador...” The sixties it wasn’t, and in a minute or two it would become the 80s in all its “glory” (sniff) but still, standing on that balcony with the asparagus and the elevated perspective, it already felt so Not Right.  (i also remember j once stealing n’s keys at a party; j’s not found yet, i don’t believe.)

all those things i’ve just shown you weren’t lost, of course, they were right there on the web all along, and dutifully i’d been keeping track of them, trying for some clue.  the same month i posted my first nostalgic plea, i also attended art basel-miami, after all, and again last year.  and i just recently decided not to attend this year’s, which is taking place right now.  one or both of the abovepictured gentlemen may well be down in south beach right now, schmoozing.

no instead, now, folks, please, i’d like to show you something much more important.

i’d like you to meet meet some of my family, found again after a quarter of a century:

e., w., d. and s. (not sarah,) c. 1981

w., sarah, d. and n., fall 2006