It’s good to get back to ripping up old papers. The support for this one is an old manila envelope of my father’s. It’s from his teaching days, but in recent years, it held a working manuscript for Soviet Stamps. I dumped those pages out because I liked the envelope with its notes and numbers. I’ll use the pages later maybe.

I bike to Compound Yellow to listen to Bill and Cooper doing their new thing. The room in which they play——upstairs from a gallery, in a converted out building——feels like a kids’ art classroom. There are blackboards, musical instruments, and bins full of various art & craft materials. Rows of mismatched chairs have been set out in the middle. Cooper turns off most of the lights before they play.

I help carry gear out to the car afterwards, then sit talking to Laura, who runs the place, and a couple of her friends. One of them saw me sketching and guessed who I was. He’d read one of the cab books. I tell them about the bar book and they both buy a copy.

I send Laura a scan of my sketch the next day and ask how far her gallery’s booked in advance. I need to find some place to host a show all these damn collages. Maybe her place is it.

This one started from a colored-pencil phrase I found in another folder. A bunch of prep sketches to illustrate some poems by a former friend back in the early 90s. Nothing came of it, but I kept the drawings.

Evidently, they were fated to be cut up and reused thirty years later.