Thursday, November 20, 2008

Absalon

I showed up earlier than my host. Everywhere there were canvases: draped over a bed, splayed across tables, floors, walls. Sloshes of color, occasional nude photos. And then I noticed the view: Half-height windows to the ceiling on a corner looking out over Central Park and the city to the left and right and ahead from the 31st floor.

“Do you mind if we play the video again?”

Across from the black leather couches on which we sunk was a flat-screen showing a naked woman doing a kind of gymnastic dance, creating art as her body hit the paper with paint. (Yes.)

“No, go ahead,” I said. There were two guys, both middle-aged-ish, one heavily haired and bearded. Suited.

“It’s called ‘movement art.’ ”

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I see that. She’s…moving. And making...art.”

One of the men laughed, one pretended not to hear me. Or did not hear me.

The evening wore better than this though, as I wandered through the “salon” to which I’d been invited. During formal introductions I learned that among the comic illustrators, sex bloggers, and one city planner was one right-wing bigwig for a former (still) bigwig in government. When I talked near him later, I found him to be shouty and spitty. Not about politics, just in general. Shouty. And spitty.

I was at some point in the thrall of a short young man with misanthropic tendencies. We spoke a lot about Jews, about being Jewish, about many things Jewy. And then there was this:

“I had surgery while awake recently.”

“What?” he leapt.

“I had a tumor removed from…here,” I told him as I touched the spot.

“I just got a boner,” he said.

We laughed and laughed and laughed.

Later he made a gas chamber joke. Which left me floored and breathless and for some reason led me to hug him. The irreverence was charming and disgusting at once.

In retrospect, I only remember one piece of art from all the crammed canvases. A terrible tiny painting of a monkey across from the toilet. It had a red background. Awful.

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