Garbo’s Journal

Began as a sort of “see, I’m thinking” kind of journal, Garbo soon realized that ‘thinking about his own thoughts’ really wasn't worth remembering. A lot of self-pity and self- indulgence embarrassed him weeks later.

His “notes” as he called them evolved into a catechism of things he read that he wanted to remember. He once told me that the stacks of copybooks represented the sum total of everything he ever read that was worth remembering.

One day in 2010 six tears before his death (typo, but tears is better than years) while he nodded off I copied out one page of his ‘ notes’:

12/23/09

Bonobo (genetic difference than Chimp. We and Chimp got the war gene)

2/10

Aristarchos of Samos (216 BC) calculated that the Earth revolves around the sun and the illusion of the movement of the stars is due to to the Earth’s rotation—pre-dates Copernicus by 2,000 years.

3/10 To be ahead of the curve means… they can’t see you.

4/10 “ current food production requires 16 calories of input to yield 1 calorie of grain and 70 calories of input to yield 1 calorie of meat.”

4/10 plasma= 4^th state of matter: electronically charged gas…. Makes up 99 % of the Universe (IONIZED ATOMS)

5/10 to look upon the face of rapture…

5/10 (my joke):

Did you hear the one about the horney Paleontologist….. He was reduced to dating fossils.

5/10

350,000 kinds of beetles make up 1/6 % of the total number of species on Earth.

Garbo Vents

Garbo was venting one day in class. Someone had brought in a reproduction of what the author of the accompanying article called “the next Basquiat”. This character had just landed a solo shot in the Whitney. The hounds were on the scent.

Garbo banged his fist on the desk

“Look” he said, “During the protest period around the middle of the Viet Nam War. The students mobilized to protest the draft, the war and the establishment. Swept up in the iconoclastic energy was “Don’t trust anyone over thirty and by extension “don’t trust the old icons”. I was a grad student at the time and leaflets were being passed around the art classes. I spoke with a friend of mine at Harvard who said the leaflets were there too. So this was no local movement these guys were of Bolshevik proportions and Nazi zeal. The pamphlet said we had all been brainwashed by a corrupt system of aesthetics that came to claim that a value system of appreciation that conformed to certain ideals of beauty had bankrupt the single artist who might choose another mode of self expression a priori. We all thought Rembrandt was good because we had been told so. The Louvre and the Met were simply protecting their interests.

At the forefront to this attack was a guy (charismatic: aren’t they all?) named Allen Kaprov who began on a soapbox and ended up charging large fees for his blaspheme. He had two mutually exclusive axioms that no one seemed to notice. ‘Non Art is more Art than Art Art’ and Art is best served spontaneously … he called this ‘a Happening’. “

Garbo paused to light up a Clove Cigarette and finished his tirade. “The point is this: the generation of students that burned their draft cards and toilet papered the dean’s office. That generation has become the curators and art dealers of our time. They fought for the right to exhibit their feces and that right has become contemporary taste that eschews quality and skill as priorities in order to call for innovation and self- expression. “’

“After all it takes a degree of ‘culture and connoisseurship to discern quality and skill from the marks of one’s buttocks pressed vigorously on a wet canvas. Especially if that smear fetches a handsome price a next years auction. For now the Philistines are winning.”