“I call and leave a message because I just don’t want to see her tonight. There are nights like that, when I don’t want to see her—partly because I am who I am and partly because she is who she is. Lately it’s been more because she is who she is than because I am who I am, but I can’t tell her that. . . .” Excerpt from I LEAVE A MESSAGE

   “I’m having trouble exercising. I’ve been doing sit-ups, push-ups, and deep knee bends for some time now, but lately I find myself being lured away from my regimen by the pleasures of the bottle. Is this a sign that I’ve started to concede something? As I have fewer and fewer days left to me the idea of seizing them has gotten more attractive. If no one comes to the end wishing they’d spent more time at the office, neither do they come to it wishing they’d done one more set of jumping jacks.” Excerpt from TWENTY-EIGHT DAYS
 
   “First find a painter. It’s not as easy as you might think. Ask your artist friends if they know anyone. They won’t be offended that you haven’t asked them—they are abstractionists and performance whatnots and clearly dozens of isms beyond this sort of thing. Be persistent. Eventually someone will admit to knowing someone who will admit to knowing someone who will admit to knowing a figurative painter. Get this painter’s name. Talk to him. His political opinions will be appalling—the neanderthalic excrescencies of talk-radio—but his artistic judgments astute. Visit his new show.” Excerpt from HOW TO HAVE YOUR PORTRAIT PAINTED

Miscellany


From IT'S ALL ABOUT YOU JEFFREY (Personal Essay) 

   “I had dinner the other night with some people I think I will leave nameless because there is a chance I will be eating with them again sometime in the future and if I was unable to deny that the following paragraphs were about them it could be—well, you know, awkward. It was pretty much the sort of dinner you would expect from the sort of people these were—that is, it was gourmetish but not formal. I don’t remember exactly what we had—which worries me a little, given the amount of time we spent discussing the arcanum of its preparation—but I do remember its’ being very good. It was a nice evening, as these sort of evenings go, but for one small thing. His name was Jeffrey. 
   Jeffrey was our host and hostess’s four-year-old son, a generic sort of kid with a big head of curly blonde hair. As we guests met and mingled and had a drink in the living room before dinner, Jeffrey was allowed—in fact, encouraged—to run around among us like some sort of free-range chicken.”

From STRANGE BUT TRUE (Art Review) 

   “Blue. Purple. Red. Red (again). White. In Sean Cain’s dreams everyone wears a bandanna. Well, not everyone—but almost everyone. It’s a compositional device that is also, in part, an iconographic tease. 
   A painter of perplexing allegorical images, Cain focuses primarily on the solitary figure in enigmatic isolation. A subdued surrealist—a descendent of Rene Magritte—he relies on the clarity and order of a neo-classical style to accentuate the mystery inherent in his pictures. Like Magritte, he is a philosophical painter who restrains the fantasy element in his work. But unlike Magritte—where it can be argued the intellectual reward precedes the visual—Cain serves up, first and foremost, a generous helping of good old-fashioned pictorial pleasure. 
   In his third solo show at the Laura Russo Gallery, Cain gives us yet another impressive collection of beautifully drawn figures. Oddly posed, and dressed with a casualness that stands in marked contrast to the formality of their stylistic presentation, Cain’s characters seem captured in the middle of some obscure private drama. Both the poignancy and primacy of their solitude is emphasized by a looming relationship to a vast, long-shot landscape.”


             WHITWORD
                      by
                K. B. Dixon

Whitword is, of course, a poet.
It shows in his carefully crafted snarl,
The quality of the Scotch he drinks,
And the shameful way he treats his wife.
His hair is a poet’s hair;
It is long and lank,
And when he wakes in the morning
It hangs in front of his face like a cheap curtain.

A bony boulevardier,
He is a digger for truffles.
He sniffs at the base of a moldy conscience
Looking for a significant moment 
To shellac with sentiment
And set in the window to dry-- 
A succulent moment that will carry his name
On a silver serving tray
To poetry’s prestigious table of contents.
 
How much room is there in the little magazines
For another piece of the Frosty northeast
With its snowy woods and mapleleafs?
The quarterly silos are full of nature poems
And there is talk of a deal with the Russians:
Surplus Staffords for Yevteshenkos.

Whitword is a poet.
He ruts at the root of his family tree.
How much room is there in the little magazines
For another piece about a darling daughter,
Her creamy innocence and her deadly dimples?
The quarterly day-care centers are full
With the creamily innocent and deadly dimpled
Of a middle-aged Ivy League.

How much room is there
For another pie-shaped piece of public agony?
A well-combed depression,
All its gray fur in place,
So nice to rub up against.
His heroic intransigence—
The cabbage smell of his most prized and sour thoughts
Turned into stony stanzas on the hollowness of CPA’s.

Whitword is a poet.
He sips his thick black coffee
And greets the dumpy destiny that is his subject
As if it were an aunt from Iowa.
It is hugged and kissed on a powdery cheek:
The fickleness of inspiration.

Whitword is a poet.
He teases this nothingness for meaning,
And when it laughs (chuckles, really)
He snaps its picture
And sends it over to Dr. So & So,
Chairman this year of the English Department,
Who with his ballpoint wand
Signs off on it;
And fickleness becomes—
For better, not for worse—
What it always was:
A stipend,
A thing of beauty and a joy for nine months.