Carpool

I love carpooling. We will for sure need to be doing more of it asap.

I had occasion to carpool with Shelley Spector the other day on our way to RAIR, which if I haven’t gone on and on with you about yet, please don’t take my word for it: go find out more about them. I was only driving us up to the recycling plant because in an open cc’ed email of RAIR artists attending a reunion, I’d offered to carpool if anyone wanted to be spared the drive from South Philly. She was the only one who took me up.

Carpools and hitchhikes are such a fine way to get to know someone. I picked up a hitchhiker in Diamond Bar once. A guy who unfortunately when I think about it now, resembled the Unabomber and was walking briskly in the night on a road with no storefronts. I’m not sure what I was thinking but I did pull over to ask if he needed a ride and I gave it to him—to Brea, a few miles over a canyon road. Obviously nothing untoward happened on this ride, but I was so happy to go out of my way, to stay on the road at night with someone who wasn’t even going in the right direction. The hypnosis of a cruising vehicle can get you to a quick intimacy. I wonder what he’s up to now.

Shelley and I talked about the grace of being in commune with likeminded people. We’ve paired up in the car to be efficient, but we met through an artists residency which by definition would have a resonating connection. We were hearing about each others’ practices for the first time on this drive. She said what she likes about being with RAIR folks is how much more quickly people get what she’s about.

“I found myself repeating the same thing a thousand times,” she said about a kind of gallery professionalism where the opposite was true.

Tell me about it. I blathered about how working in publishing meant telling a shorter punchier version of a richer literature, over and over. You become lauded for being able to tell the story so well, but it can’t be better than The Story you’re selling. It’s awful. Everyone just needs to read the book. And anyway, I explained, I struggled so much with balancing my dream of becoming a published writer, with the secure job on the back end of all things publishing-related that made it seem impossible to simultaneously write a book. We agree that things have changed for the better.

“All of the parts of the industry need to be doing OK for any of it to work,” she said. The editors, publicists, curators and directors need to be held just like the artists and writers, the talent.

I tell her that I’m also a musician. Mostly a drummer. She says “a drummer-writer! That’s unusual!” I am caught off guard by how flattered I am by this comment. She asks if I use a typewriter, because it seems like the most percussive way to write. I totally get what she means, but I tell her that no, instead I think what I do—write longhand, pen to paper—is the much more percussive way to write because it involves specific gestures of the hand, of the fingertips specifically, across a wide plane, like a drum head.

I don’t know what butthole I pulled that out of but I like the way it sounds and I’m going to tell this anecdote to others, I can already tell. There is indeed a benefit to halving the distance to understanding a craftwork or an identity. I want to carpool more, I’ve decided. Perhaps I’ll pick up a hitchhiker or check the various bulletins between us to make sure we aren’t accidentally taking the same long trip alone.