I go to the museum every few weeks. Sometimes there’s a specific show to see; other times it’s just because. This is one of those. I don’t know what I’m looking for.

I get a coffee in the weird little pocket cafe on the second level of the Modern wing. It’s situated in a pass-through between the new and old buildings and all but three or four tables are in a dark hallway. I keep peeking around the corner, then pounce when one of the ones in the light opens up.

I spend a bunch of time with Robert Rauschenberg’s Short Circuit. It’s one of his 50s combines, made in the small window when he was one of the best painters going. I think back to the awful freshman art history survey lecture in which the teacher introduced him and Jasper Johns as “those two gay artists”. It was the last one I attended. Spent the rest of the semester antagonizing the poor grad student running my discussion section.

Since getting into collage a few years ago, things like Short Circuit are newly resonant. Art will change with you that way. It’s why a visit to the museum can feel new even when you’re looking at things you’ve seen a thousand times before.

Brice Marden’s Study for the Muses is a long-time favorite. I go up to the wall-label and am surprised to see no death-date. I text Frank to double-check and he confirms Marden’s passing. Yet here in this room he’s alive and well. (He’s dead on the museum’s website; maybe their printer is out of paper.)

I follow the pink, green, and blue vine lines from the edges of the painting into the middle and still can’t tell the moment they go from flat to volumetric. By bunching them along the borders, Marden makes a kind of ornamental window frame, sort of Deco in its gently expanding curves. But in the middle, the continuation of those same strands become plant-like. They form a kind of fence, through which you can see echoes of other lianas in the beige areas in between.

I don’t know that it’s truly possible to make a completely abstract picture. Even something absolutist, like an Ad Reinhardt monochrome, can’t help but suggest physical space. Or maybe it’s that I can’t conceive of anything but seen reality, no matter what I’m looking at.

I’m writing this the morning of my fifty-fourth birthday. I lopped off my beard a few days ago, leaving a dumb handlebar mustache. I saw a photo of myself a decade ago with one and wanted to see if I could still pull it off. The jury’s still out. All I know is that in a few weeks I’ll get tired of shaving and grow the beard back.

It doesn’t mean much but even a silly change like this underlines the passage of time.

I was a guest on the Virtual Memories Show and you can go on a short video tour of my artwork currently up at the bookstore.

There are now digital versions of some zines/chapbooks up on my site. Most of these are long out of print and unlikely to be reprinted anytime soon.