Dear Clint,
I looked up the artists you’d mentioned. Looked them right up on the googletron. I looked up the painting that you said was your favorite (maybe of all time) by Bochner called the Theory of Painting. I guess it’s funny. It was made in 69.
I googled the names of those artists, and hit ‘images’ and couldn’t tell if I’d done something wrong; misspelled something, or something. Sylvia Mangold yielded many pictures of wooden floors.
I went for a walk. After going to Florida for four days to witness and attend the funeral of my grandfather-in-law I had $160 cash burning a hole in my pocket from the money dad gave me for the reimbursement for renting a car. I went to go get some shoes, I thought, but tried on a few pairs and decided not to. I was going for a pair of ‘old people shoes’, I called them. My friend said my aesthetic is “norm core”, to which I told another friend. Other friend said with exception of my not wearing New Balance sneakers, so I went to go get a pair of those. I tried on the white, with a big navy N on the side, then asked for the black on black, then went back to the white pair, but they didn’t fit as I thought they would. I wanted support. They were the classic New balance sneaker, but I didn’t feel the rumored support. I asked for better arch support, and was offered a different pair, tried them on, liked them, but didn’t like the price and left with reaffirmed loyalty for my old kicks.
On the walk home, I remembered this time when I was in fourth or fifth grade. K-Swiss shoes were going around and my dad and I went to the mall to get a pair, and I got black ones, but the fashion was white ones. I don’t know how it happened, but it all happened so quick. We left with a pair of black K-Swiss shoes and I felt strange; like the option of not caring was before me, and the bargain that I’d made to not care was in motion as we were leaving the mall parking lot. Something separated from something else and that was important because it wasn’t the shoes; it was the “inflection point”, as one of my professors says; the distance between perceived reality and reality.
When searching up a painter on google, it would make sense to go to ‘images’, but not in the case of some of the painters that taught at Yale in the 90’s- for those, you go to Wikipedia; to find out why and how come they’re important.
(zing!)
Like the black K-Swiss shoes, it doesn’t matter that much the K-Swiss manufactured them.
Like myself, it’s not as important that I’ve got backlogs of great or good ideas.
Like the Yale painting department, not enough painting.
White K-Swiss’s, actual paintings, actual paintings.
