Above, the old Food Emporium (a grocery store) downstairs, its shelves emptied and abandoned at the end of April, but the check-out terminals still glowing — something that I didn’t notice when I took the photograph. I never set foot in the store after Fairway opened across the street, about two years ago. The Food Emporium was overpriced and spottily stocked: I could never be sure that I’d be able to find most of what I needed.

Why are the lights on (not to mention the terminals)? I have taken to avoiding this side of Second Avenue, because the walkway between the building and the hopper from which the great blocks of blasted rock are dumped into trucks is uncomfortably narrow. (That’s what finally put the Food Emporium branch out of business.) The other day, though, I wanted to stay in the shade, and I was surprised by this view. If I don’t miss shopping at the Food Emporium, I miss the check-out ladies. One of them was always very sweet to me, while another — a very short Asian woman bearing a resemblance, I thought, to Yoko Ono — did her job as if in a fit of distraction: she was efficient enough, but without paying attention to what she was doing, or where she was doing it.

Presumably, a new tenant for the space will not appear until after the construction stops, sometime late next year. I always wonder if I will live to see the end of the mess into which our quartier has been plunged.

***

Kathleen is on her way to Maine, for her annual junket, a reunion with the cmp counselors she worked with nearly forty years ago; two of them have cottages on Thomas Pond, not far from the summer camp. We had a cottage up there, too, for a while, and I often wish that it was the only house that we ever bought. But not so much, since we rediscovered Fire Island. We’re going out to Ocean Beach for a week this year, just a week, but that’s enough after what has been a year that was unsettled from the moment we returned from Fire Island last September.

I am really hoping that the agitation and uncertainty that marked the past school year will have climaxed in Kathleen’s moment of fame on Tuesday. It is very agreeable to read about yourself (or a loved one) without having the slightest reservation about the report. I know from experience that the pleasure is also very, very rare.

In any case, I’ll be alone for a couple of days — the better part of a week. At the moment, I’m grateful: I need some time by myself. And the blue room needs me to itself. Now that the chair has arrived, it is time to clear the piles of books that give the blue room its overwhelmed look. The only way to tackle the problem is to hang out in here and meditate while listening to operas or watching movies. I need a few hours of aimlessly standing around, appearing to do nothing, and then finally bursting through my impatience to do something. I wonder what it would be like to live a life in which such fits of reorganization were unnecessary.

***

When I read Sanford Schwartz’s favorable review in the NYRB, I decided to read Eric Fischl’s Bad Boy, an autobiography written with Michael Stone. It is one of the most useful books of art criticism that I’ve ever read, because Fischl is not only thoughtful, intelligent, and reasonably worldly, but committed to a tradition of artwork that was strained to the snapping point by modernism and its aftermath. For all the transgressiveness of his early-Eighties work, he is a true keeper of the flame.

Eric Fischl is my age, give or take a few months, and, like me, he grew up in an aspirational suburb of New York City — Port Washington and Sands Point, on Long Island, in his case. At every stage in his book, I could ask myself what I was doing then — how, in short, I was dealing with things at the same age. When Fischl achieved his first real fame, in the early Eighties, I was a law school graduate struggling to find a place on Wall Street — I never did — while having my first real taste of life in Manhattan, something that I had wanted all my life, and still want, much more than fame. I remember being disturbed and somewhat repelled by Fischl’s paintings — the few that I saw, anyway — because they  captured suburban malaise so precisely, and I wanted to put the suburbs behind me. I especially wanted to avoid the dodgy moral climate of the American dream. It is only now, in fact, that I’m comfortable considering it at all, and the real draw of Fischl’s book wasn’t his reputation as an artist but his background, so much like my own, leading as it did to a similar search for foundations upon which to build a good life.

Fischl writes about the early days of a celebrity art market with ingenuous frankness that comports with what one remembers of the buzz.

But the glamour and excitement came with costs. Two years before, I was living on $1,000 a month. Now it had risen to several times that. I’d discovered I could defray some expenses by swapping my work — sketches and preliminary paintings — and the art world, suddenly flush, underwrote a portion of my social life. What’s more, having worked to support myself with my teens, I was judicious with money. But now I was taking taxis instead of the subway, drinking wine instead of beer, fine wine rather than screwtop or Gallo. I had started out working just enough so I could focus on my painting without feeling I had to make work to support a lifestyle. Twelve thousand a year had seemed plenty. What surprised me was how fast you grew into living on more. What had once seemed a fortune to me because something I could easily spend in a year.

That certainly sounds familiar. But it was clear that the downtown art scene was not a world that Kathleen and I were ever going to move in, and we more or less stopped paying attention to contemporary art. It wasn’t our taste, anyway; we liked older things. And although I was familiar with a great deal of art, old and new, and knew its history fairly well, I didn’t understand much about painting and sculpture. It was just there, and I had not begun to ask why. I did not begin to ask why until I began wanting to write about what I saw at museums here, or one of my earlier sites. Writing forced me to think. Writing every day forces me to think a lot — even if I always end the day in a heap of questions.

It was neat to feel so completely simpatico with Fischl’s reservations about conceptual art and his total contempt for the empty trifles of Koons and Hirst.

As it happens, I’m going to the Museum this afternoon, to meet up with Ms NOLA and her fiancé, Messir di T. In Bad Boy, Mike Nichols is quoted as having donated Fischl’s portrait of him to the Museum, and I wonder if it’s on exhibit anywhere. (It may well be one of those testamentary donations that will take effect when the writer/director dies.) That would be nice to see — nothing suburban about it, I expect.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Friday, July 5th, 2013 at 11:15 am.