BLINKY THINGS

Something in the middle of the night reminded me of the fragrance of a pipe tobacco long gone. It was a product available in Berkeley decades ago at a tobacconist that my friends did not patronize, so over a period of one or two months I bought all that they had, enjoyed it at the time, and now I miss it. A precursor to Frog Morton, which came out years later, which I think was and is vastly overrated. And that brought back memories of opening a fresh tin of Balkan Sobranie when I was a teenager, and how richly divine that seemed back then. So good with a cup of tea! So redolent of sunlight and the smoothness of certain oil paints adding a dark luster to a landscape I was doing at the time, not yet aware of the disappointment I would feel days later when looking at the results.
No longer enamoured of the newness and my cleverness.

There are several good reasons why I'm not sad at no longer having any of those early paintings. Upon sober review weeks or months later they were garbage.

There were foghorns all night. They woke me up.


"FOG IN THE CHANNEL, CONTINENT ISOLATED"


That headline expresses British insularity. And it's probably apocryphal. But it just as well might apply to pretty much everything I painted or drew many years ago, which now I would probably look at with distaste. Much the same distaste that some friends had for certain tobaccos which I still think were actually pretty darn good.

And it's probably just as well that none of the poetry I wrote then survives.

Like many teenagers I often thought 'gosh I'm so clever!'

In hindsight that may have been an overestimation.

Same goes for a lot of my paintings from my early twenties, most of which did not survive a basement flooding in the storage space one winter. It was several years after that before I started painting again. Garbage, garbage, garbage, garbage.

One coworker from the old toy company has 'screaming man and fish' (which he thought was the coolest thing he had ever seen), and another has the giant spider transporting the five Pandawa heroes from the Mahabharata, a wayang kulit influenced painting, which she thought was perfect for the kids' room. I'm still chuffed as topsy that they liked them.

My apartment mate particularly like a crab I did three years ago.
She has a framed copy of it in her room.
Meh, okay then.



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