housekeeping and telling her how they’d most likely be lighting her on fire to get rid of her if they were home in Ahmadabad.
The place was beginning to fill up, the kids straying in in groups of five or six, all looking like refugees from art college, except for one table where they had brush cuts and two of them wore camouflage fatigues.
The girl in the sari went on talking about her life going to shit. Some days he hated being the kindly gramps, but it could be useful. He showed her the photograph of Lee Borowsky, and when she didn’t recognize it, it was time to move on.
He bought an overpriced Italian cookie at the counter and a woman almost his own age sought him out.
“Are you here to show?” she asked. She clutched a copy of Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge and wore a denim miniskirt that looked out of place, or out of time.
“Not this time,” he said.
“I just love narrative evening. I’m not a big fan of the abstract videos.”
“Me, too,” he said.
“There’s supposed to be one tonight on religion. I love things of the spirit.” She said it with the kind of intensity that made you wonder if she’d just had her medication adjusted. “I used to think we were into the Last Days, but I’m not a Christian anymore. Not since the solstice.”
“That’s interesting.”
She leaned into him, and he noticed she had a faint unpleasant aroma. She whispered: “I know it sounds crazy, but I’m getting into a new religion that’s based on the random exchange of apparel.”
She held a fist secretively between them and opened it up as if to offer a counterfeit Rolex. It was a pair of black panties.
“Trade me a sock,” she insisted.
“I’m sorry, I’m an agnostic,” he said.
She made a soft baaaing noise and blinked several times, and he wondered if he was beginning to have trouble with reality again. He hadn’t had anything stronger than coffee in over a year. He got her to look at Lee’s photograph, but it meant nothing to her and then, luckily, a heavyset man with a bad complexion whistled for attention as the lights came down and the show began without preface. He found a folding chair against the wall.
Like most projection videos, the picture was not very good. A small group near him cheered good-naturedly at the title, which was Art Show, and then he saw a slow dolly around a sculptural form that appeared to be in a museum. It was squat and bronze and for a moment he thought it was a big scarab and then it was just a flattened blob of metal with what might have been a seam around the middle. The camera retreated toward a wall and a bell rang on the soundtrack. Suddenly the light changed and there were people wandering past the blob.
They hummed and frowned and scowled as the scene jumped from one set of gawkers to the next. Soon the groups were explaining the sculpture to one another.
“… dismantling the naturalist traditions…”
“… makes the space it inhabits vibrate with light…”
“… a new dynamic relationship between object and observer …”
“… questions the enigma of visibility itself…”
When the audience had all had just about enough of stuff like that, the gallery cleared out and stayed empty until a couple of flower children wandered in and patted the sculpture familiarly. They were about to wander off when the boy did a take and broke into a grin: “Ellie, look, it’s two turtles fucking.”
The coffeehouse erupted in cheers and Jack Liffey found himself smiling.
The second short was about a Chicano boy who looked about nine and was being ordered around by an abusive and alcoholic father, then ignored by his mother and taunted by older siblings. This one was hard for Jack Liffey to watch—any abuse of children really pulled his chain—but he stayed with it. The boy’s stoicism went on and on and eventually you started hearing a strange noise under everything else. At first you guessed a train in the distance, or a car hammering over a wood
The place was beginning to fill up, the kids straying in in groups of five or six, all looking like refugees from art college, except for one table where they had brush cuts and two of them wore camouflage fatigues.
The girl in the sari went on talking about her life going to shit. Some days he hated being the kindly gramps, but it could be useful. He showed her the photograph of Lee Borowsky, and when she didn’t recognize it, it was time to move on.
He bought an overpriced Italian cookie at the counter and a woman almost his own age sought him out.
“Are you here to show?” she asked. She clutched a copy of Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge and wore a denim miniskirt that looked out of place, or out of time.
“Not this time,” he said.
“I just love narrative evening. I’m not a big fan of the abstract videos.”
“Me, too,” he said.
“There’s supposed to be one tonight on religion. I love things of the spirit.” She said it with the kind of intensity that made you wonder if she’d just had her medication adjusted. “I used to think we were into the Last Days, but I’m not a Christian anymore. Not since the solstice.”
“That’s interesting.”
She leaned into him, and he noticed she had a faint unpleasant aroma. She whispered: “I know it sounds crazy, but I’m getting into a new religion that’s based on the random exchange of apparel.”
She held a fist secretively between them and opened it up as if to offer a counterfeit Rolex. It was a pair of black panties.
“Trade me a sock,” she insisted.
“I’m sorry, I’m an agnostic,” he said.
She made a soft baaaing noise and blinked several times, and he wondered if he was beginning to have trouble with reality again. He hadn’t had anything stronger than coffee in over a year. He got her to look at Lee’s photograph, but it meant nothing to her and then, luckily, a heavyset man with a bad complexion whistled for attention as the lights came down and the show began without preface. He found a folding chair against the wall.
Like most projection videos, the picture was not very good. A small group near him cheered good-naturedly at the title, which was Art Show, and then he saw a slow dolly around a sculptural form that appeared to be in a museum. It was squat and bronze and for a moment he thought it was a big scarab and then it was just a flattened blob of metal with what might have been a seam around the middle. The camera retreated toward a wall and a bell rang on the soundtrack. Suddenly the light changed and there were people wandering past the blob.
They hummed and frowned and scowled as the scene jumped from one set of gawkers to the next. Soon the groups were explaining the sculpture to one another.
“… dismantling the naturalist traditions…”
“… makes the space it inhabits vibrate with light…”
“… a new dynamic relationship between object and observer …”
“… questions the enigma of visibility itself…”
When the audience had all had just about enough of stuff like that, the gallery cleared out and stayed empty until a couple of flower children wandered in and patted the sculpture familiarly. They were about to wander off when the boy did a take and broke into a grin: “Ellie, look, it’s two turtles fucking.”
The coffeehouse erupted in cheers and Jack Liffey found himself smiling.
The second short was about a Chicano boy who looked about nine and was being ordered around by an abusive and alcoholic father, then ignored by his mother and taunted by older siblings. This one was hard for Jack Liffey to watch—any abuse of children really pulled his chain—but he stayed with it. The boy’s stoicism went on and on and eventually you started hearing a strange noise under everything else. At first you guessed a train in the distance, or a car hammering over a wood
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