Faucet Repair

30 June 2025

A song came together this weekend and so did its cover art: a pink dinosaur in a motion-blurred field of green and blue caught between destruction and desperation, its arms reaching toward a shape broken in half. Yena said the song flows like a river, and I think attaching this image to it is related to what I have been feeling from that CAConrad piece I mentioned in my last post here. A simultaneous lament and battle cry emerging from a current. Which could also describe the text I read in the second half of the song: an excerpt from an interview with a Chicago janitor named Eric Hoellen that appears in Working (1974) by Studs Terkel:

I make a pretty good buck. I figure if I do my work and do it honestly I should be entitled to whatever I make. For high-rise buildings, head man makes a thousand dollars a month and his apartment. You never heard of that stuff before. I've turned down high rises by the dozens. I can make more money on the side on walkup buildings.

Most tenants, I get along with 'em. The bad part about a tenant, they have no respect for your hours. Maybe my day starts when their day starts, but they want something done when they come home. My day is ending too. They'll call up and some will be sarcastic about it. “You have to come here when I'm home.” That's not true. They can leave me the key, so I can do it on my own time. Some people don't trust you. If I'm gonna steal something, I'm not gonna steal from somebody I know, especially when they know I'm in there. If they can't trust me, I don't want to be around 'em.

They come home maybe around seven and you're sitting down to supper and they'll call. “I got a stopped up toilet. It was stopped up yesterday.” I'll say, “Why didn't you call me? I could have had it fixed today while you were at work.” “Well, I didn't have my key.” Sometimes you get in a mood and you say, “Suffer then.” (Laughs.) If I'm eating, I finish eating, then I go. But if it's a broken pipe and it's running into somebody else's apartment, you get on your high horse and you're over there right away.

Phone calls always go to your wife, and a lot of people are very rude. They figure your wife works. My wife is not on the payroll. They call her up and chew her out about something, “When will he get here?” She's just there, and she's being nice enough to take my calls for me. A lot of the janitors now are getting machines to take their calls. They'll call you up and the machine says, “Leave your message.” They'll say something silly and hang up. They'll see you on the street and tell you about it. They don't like an answering service. They want to make contact right there.

My wife gets tired of the calls. It's a pain in the neck. My mother lives with us since my dad passed away. She takes my calls for me. She's used to it. She's been doing it so long. She lets 'em talk if they have a complaint. She just lets 'em talk. (Laughs.) Some of 'em will demand. I just tell 'em, “I think you're very unreasonable. I'll see you in the morning.” If they keep arguing, I just politely say, “That's it.” And I hang up on 'em.

You just don't let it get the best of you. We've had janitors hang themselves. Since I've been out here, three hung themselves. They let it get the best of 'em. I asked this one guy, “Eddie, what on earth is wrong?”

He's up there fixing lights in this high rise and he's shaking all over. “These people are driving me crazy,” he says. I read about this guy, Red, he blowed his brains out. People drive 'em batty. They want this, they want that. You let it build up inside—the heck with it. you do the best you can. If they don't like it...

You gotta watch. We have a business agent in the area and, oh man, there's too many guys lookin' for work. These people coming from Europe, Yugoslavs and Croatians. We're talking about young guys, thirty years old, twenty-five. They're nice guys. They talk broken, but you get to know 'em. They bowl with us and learn as quick as they can. A lot less young native-born are in it now. They'll take a job like a helper until they can find something better. A helper makes $640 a month, five-day week.

Back in the forties a janitor was a sort of low-class job. Nobody wanted it. But during the Depression, janitors were working. They had a place to live and they had food on the table. It was steady work. They had a few clothes on their back. Other people didn't.


28 June 2025

Holding this one particular CAConrad poem from Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return. All of the works in that collection are untitled, and the form of each one is inextricably linked to its essence, so I can't really reproduce it here faithfully. But it's the one that begins: “what would it take to / kill the imagination”—those first two lines form the top of a characteristically sculptural word shape that descends into a point marked by the word “vigor,” the whole thing balancing on the bottom two lines: “we were going to be okay / we just did not know it at the time.”

Anyway, it's the opposite of motion sickness. Motion ecstasy. That sort of feeling animates the journey from top to bottom, and I get the embodied sense of passing through a threshold, a simultaneous awareness of vitality and decay. Near its middle there's a sort of axis at: “blood I / love you / your force / the force / of blood,” a solid inflection or reflection point in the tumbling flow forward. Something about preservation and choice in relation to the inevitable and fully felt.


26 June 2025

Living room: fleshy, pure, elemental—I wonder if it even reads as erotic. In my head indebted to Lois Dodd, the window separating the viewer from but also connecting them to looming nature. Also feels related to the relationship between memory and architecture; Christian Hawkey pointed to that idea in Mamma Andersson's work, has remained with me since. Certainly there is a link between the interiority of a room and the tactile interiority created by bodies fusing. Thinking about the curtains too; their function expanded beyond cover to structure, their cloudlike softness supporting the figures. But all of it suspended in the sky with the trees.


24 June 2025

A small reflection on Beth's work in Sight-read at A.P.T., as it's really sticking with me. The first thing that comes to mind is meeting and departing the surface—I'm struck by how subtly but powerfully the work holds moments in the tension between that feeling of arrival and departure. How there are spots of saturated boldness or accumulation or density that still seem just on the verge of escape or begin to disintegrate through proximate duplication/repetition. I think that relates to surprise, which I don't sense all that often through paint but certainly did in her work. I'm thinking of one moment in a particular piece (the name alludes me at the moment without the show checklist in front of me, note to amend this bit) where the sheer quality of the paper and the white wall it was mounted on combined to essentially camouflage two amoeba-like white forms oozing into the composition from the top right and bottom right corners. The effect was surprising both optically and conceptually, a collision introduced in an area I initially read as an open valve. In this way I was continually reminded of water; of how its surface can glint into obscuring flatness or become a translucent container for what moves underneath. And how there is a rhythm to water even when it is still, something natural and cyclical yet elusive and unpredictable.


22 June 2025

To compound: rigor and surrender, emotion and information.


20 June 2025

Considering my view of solitude at 32. Corners at 90s birthday parties and sitting behind those holding controllers and silent in a choir on stage and omniscient atop a slide as everyone else scatters back to class at the sound of the bell. Or on a mound. Making a conscious choice to embrace that vantage since it doesn't seem to be going anywhere no matter how far I think it may recede. Felt like that granted some permissions to access a deeper sea where the sediment of those solitary memories can mix with the formal stuff I'm pursuing; that morphology I mentioned. A place where I can declutter reality into something shaped more like the jelly of years.


18 June 2025

Shower head: thinking about shapes and forms warping and changing in the life of a painting; realizing how important it is becoming to follow my own morphology, how I don't care anymore about whether forms attach themselves to premeditated content. Fluidity of form feels like it is leading to exciting angles on familiar motifs, or actually just that recurring forms are becoming the motifs themselves. The red stream of the shower began as another blanket, or, more accurately, a kind of a blanket/floor hybrid encroaching on a figure in a corner of a room. But that wasn't working, so I painted the figure out in a blob of beige, which led to the oblong oval shape that I thought might become a kind of Charles Blackman-style mirror until I rotated the panel and clocked how the blanket lines flowed from it like a shower head. That also set up an interesting interaction with the edge of the panel, a place to squeeze in the figure in a way I probably wouldn't think to otherwise. Everything in flux always until it's not.


16 June 2025

Carol Rhodes at Alison Jacques: Found her statement on addressing “peripheral land” pretty fascinating, how focusing on traditionally unseen/ignored/“un-aestheticised” places opened a channel to a new way of seeing for her. Gave the feeling that she was the only one in the world inhabiting that space. Maybe she was. But I think I'm most interested in the mechanics of the periphery, the tangibility of how she worked with it (and how I might work with it). Her drawings and ephemera especially offered a glimpse into how the consistent accrual of source material orbiting her preferred vantage point informed a modular vocabulary with a degree of malleability, decontextualizing imagery anchors just a notch further than the paint would do naturally. Focused, intentional, pure painting toward a clear vision.


14 June 2025

Two Sisters (1991) by Caroline Leaf: forms comprised of light, shadow, and scratched (film) marks assembling and disassembling. Color feels liable to swallow the scene at any moment after that wonderful establishing swimming shot—simply body and blue, the wake implied only by a line lassoing the figure's head. A generative approach that expands panoramically once the story moves inside the house on the island: the figures aren't of or in an environment, they are the environment. Those base elements distort depth and activate the edges of the frame into malleable terrain where the scene is the subject and vice versa; negative space as fertile ground...


12 June 2025

Orbiting some fresh formal problems/propositions in a new one today. There's an arm coming from a mass of blue-green reaching up to grab a black line that hangs in a sequence of other black lines descending from beyond the top edge. All of the lines stop before reaching the bottom edge except one that stretches the length of the panel, a lone interrupter of flattened space. Forrest Bess comes to mind, horizon implied. There's something there to be brought forward and back or hidden behind forms like an elusive bigfoot in the woods. It's just that the tone of the thing feels portentous. It can maybe be saved with some levity...