Old joke: A guy is walking through Central Park when he spots a hot-dog stand operated by a Buddhist monk. He knows he’s a Buddhist from the saffron-colored robes and shaved head. He goes up to the cart and says, “Make me one with everything.”
The vendor hands him a dog on a bun with sauerkraut, mustard, onions, chili, relish. The works.
The guy hands him a twenty-dollar bill. The monk takes it.
There’s an awkward pause of a minute or so. And then the guy asks, “What about change?”
The monk says, “Change must come from within.”
I throw this at you, even as you may be groaning, because I have been thinking about the changes I’ve experienced in my relatively long and so far unspectacular time on the planet. Some change, it seems to me, does come from within. And some is imposed. And some is a curiously perfect shitstorm of both.
I moved to Taos, NM, from New York City about fifteen years ago because the kind of life I was living in Manhattan had clearly become unsustainable. I was steadily employed, writing mostly for ARTnews and The Wall Street Journal, but it was not enough to get by on, especially after my ex-husband went bankrupt and my alimony disappeared. Especially not when the rent on my modest one-bedroom apartment was due to go up $500 a month. I felt like I had to choose between decamping to 400 square feet in Bushwick or moving someplace farther afield, like Taos, where my ex had settled and with whom I remained on friendly terms. I’d visited a few times; it seemed daunting but livable.
In retrospect, I’m rather amazed at the life I lived in New York from ca. 1993 to 2011. I had the chance to view some of the most extraordinary art of our times or any other; to talk with artists, dealers, curators, critics, and scholars; to get a real feel for how the business side of the art world works. It was a busy, but not, alas, a very lucrative life.
After I moved to New Mexico in 2011, to a three-bedroom house at half my Manhattan rent, I was able to keep up some part of that involvement because many of my stories for ARTnews were reporting gigs that required only a phone and a tape recorder; the Journal in those days had the funds to send me hither and yon and so flew me to Los Angeles, St. Louis, Chicago, Milwaukee, and (wow!) Wausau, WI. But never to Venice for a biennale, dammit all. The ARTnews gig, which included reviewing gallery shows in Santa Fe (at a time when Santa Fe had some interesting dealers), dried up when the magazine was sold in 2016 and virtually all the contributing editors were shaved off the masthead, far more easily than the Trump name was removed from the Kennedy Center.
Most of you know the rest: six years of keeping Vasari21 afloat, nearly three years running the Wright Contemporary, and writing, writing, writing, including this Substack and my forthcoming volume of short stories, Bad Romance.
But something’s gotta give.
Especially because of the f&#king long Covid, which leaves me so exhausted I struggle to work for three or four hours a day. I hate to admit that I have a “chronic illness” because “chronic” always attaches to bad things: chronic pain, chronic nag, chronic cough, and on and on. But it sort of looks that way, and I may have to get used to this condition for the rest of my life. Possibly it’s not long Covid at all but a heart problem, and I’m looking into that, or it could be that whatever ails me may respond to GLP1 drugs, and I’m on those….or as the ladies sang in West Side Story: “It must be the heat/Or some rare disease/Or too much to eat/Or maybe it’s fleas.”
For sure it’s not too much to eat because I’ve lost six pounds. Fleas are a remote possibility, though, because somehow a dead rodent ended up on my porch a couple of days ago.
But to get back to the subject of change. Some of it, as the hot-dog vendor suggested, must surely come from within, from long-buried chthonic impulses that need to push their way out like the slimy beasts in Alien.
Decades ago, when I was in my twenties and thirties, I wanted to write fiction, but never thought I was very good at it and so drifted into magazine work of one sort or another. Then in 2019 I got the bug again and churned out two or three short stories, sent them immediately to The New Yorker (which never responded! Can you believe it??!) and turned to other things, like keeping Vasari21 afloat and running the Wright. After I closed the gallery, the bug resurfaced, and in about eight months I wrote several more stories and sent them off to a competition held by Press53, a respected small publisher in North Carolina.
As I have posted here, I won the contest and the book will be published in early 2027. These past few days I have spent much of my time searching for cover possibilities. I turned up the above in a search of Eric Fischl’s memorable “Klefeld Project,” but Eric says it’s not his. So through Facebook I discovered the artist is Nigel van Wieck, and I am hoping to hear back about rights and permissions and suchlike.
This is a very long preamble to my announcement that I am taking a break from Vasari21Redux for the foreseeable future. I have too many other projects I want to pursue—including a memoir and more stories—and I simply don’t have to time or energy to write this Substack once a week. But you will, for sure, be hearing from me when I have a bone to pick or an announcement to make. And I always welcome your contributions, if you have an essay you’d like to publish (I can’t pay a dime, but the editing is free, and so is the exposure to a smart and responsive audience).
So adieu for now, dear readers. I have enjoyed your company so much these last few years. And I hope to connect with you again!
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