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.”

Some of Janos Garbo's paintings have recently surfaced. Several have brought huge auction prices.

The above 2010 painting titled 'Flanders' brought a phenomenal $750,000 for the exceptional work that combines wit and irony to his now famous 'Museum Suite' series. Years after his death the art world has reconsidered the USA/Hungarian, who has managed to bring connoisseurship and eclecticism back into acceptance if not appreciation.

A receitly uncovered blog site has uncovered images of some unknown masterpieces: http://wwwdvortcsakinthestudioblogs.blogspot.com/2010/04/recent-paintings.html

Professor Peter Langerhans ‘The Final Report’

To: Probation Service Board

Restricted Incarceration Division

From: Doctor Ephram Srtook PHD Psychiatry

Harvard Clinical

Dear Sirs:

After three months evaluative council and exhaustive interviews with the subject using various subliminal techniques, the staff of Harvard Clinical of which I am Chief Interrogator, has offered this final report on the matter of the State of California vs. Peter Langerhans: to wit:

The subject seems to have mental and physical capacity within normal range of his age group. He is alert and capable of general responses to questions pertaining to his youth and years as Professor of Art History at The University of California. There is a threshold in his neurological reflexes past which an alternative reality (somewhat hallucinatory) that re-directs his limbic cortex (that is to say) his cognitive memory, onto a landscape of his own imagination. This is a landscape that attempts to re-create the years of his love and study of Baroque Art into a self-delusional tapestry of treachery and corruption into which he instills himself as a lone voice of reason amid a background of the machinations of war and the politics of the Renaissance. His frustrations as a result of being ignored (his fiction) create a violence hitherto unimagined in the ostensible measured behavior of the Professor.

The trigger that fires him into his alternative state (his causa sui reality) revolves around a relationship with one of his students, a Janos Garbo who attended his classes in 1956-57. A relationship that terminated with a minor wound to the students thigh from some sort of writing instrument inflicted by the Professor entering, for the first time, into his strange new world of deranged betrayal and Baroque imagery. Think for a moment of the image of the Beheading of John the Baptist painted by Caravaggio that now illuminates and informs a now paranoid mind.

We have a term for this type of schizoid personality, “Pseudo neural psychosis”,a pathological breakdown of certain neural transmitters through an irreversible atrophy of synaptic response in the lower limbic cortex as to render the subject incapable of differentiating his own from consensus reality.

Our conclusions hope to impose a de-criminalization overlay to the matter. We are of the opinion that Peter Langerhans acted without willful intent or knowledge of its consequences during the actions and consequences of his attack on the Judge.

Grumpy

Sometimes things have to be said.

Disinformation permeates what we have held to be reality to such a degree that one’s choice of fiction determines how one lives.

Integrity absent… your choice of news determines your ‘Reality’.

The person you trusted to be looking out for your interest has just accepted substantial remuneration for services rendered in a matter in opposition to yours. And this is a man you voted for because he promised to be on your side.

Mostly ignored is how government really works.

Our American government represents the most responsive, most compassionate government that money can buy. Come on guys, when Obama looked like a possible winner, GM, Westinghouse, Bank of America climbed on board. Big money poured into a campaign that had been financed by the lower middle class, dollar by dollar.

As it did before 2009, lobby money rules! MultiGlobal Corporations have democracy in a strangle hold.

Guess who made out during the big financial crisis? Ruben, Paulson, Gietner, Somers (the happy boys of Goldman-Sachs} Check their net worth before and after.

Guess what else? War is big business. As long as there is profit there will be more of it!

Real Democracy is about people who debate issues in order to arrive at a consensus. When was the last time your voice was heard by anyone who could make a difference.

My aphorism for the 21^st century” WHERE THERE IS OPPORTUNITY, THERE IS GRAFT.

Most of my friends are artists and we have long understood that the quality of our product is of no interest to those who act as ‘middlemen’ Quality has no bearing on what is promoted. There are many more artists than outlets. Middlemen can pick and choose what is shown and given status by superficial appraisal by “the validators”

The contemporary validator is not a connoisseur. A connoisseur is someone who has a background in looking and remembering. This is someone who could walk into a room full of Cézannes and have a reasonable notion which one was the superior. And could tell you why. This is a person who could look at a specific work of art and judge it by it’s own merit.

Who are the validators? Curators, writers, high-end collectors who collaborate with dealers to drive up prices with chandelier bids at auctions and other collusions.

These are newcomers to the world of art. Their education has more to do with Harvard business school than to the research at the Fogg.

Dying breed, the connoisseur. Dying breed the rich connoisseur, Dying breed, the rich connoisseur who finds interest in collecting.

If a High-end dealer, a writer, and a museum get together on a product (Artist), sales and assured fame are a given. Usually for short term. Turn- over is a necessary element in the profit scheme.

No matter what they say, the big world of corporate takeover of governments and the smaller world of Art takeover by business has one thing in common.

Janos’ Mother

Moments before dying the nurse gave her a dose of morphine to ease the transition. Janos stood by, holding her hand as the drug loosened the vestige of tension that held her frail flesh.

Her eyes met his and a tiny flicker of a smile came across her lips. The wrinkled hand withdrew from his, lifted above her chest came down with force on her heart. Twice and then again. “Stop” she commanded.

Rosalie Emanualina Vallone

As the youngest girl in a strict Sicilian family of five boys and three girls it was her charge to attend to her mother stricken with iron deficiency anemia and bed ridden. Rose was 13 when her mother died. Now she would attend the meals and care of her father and siblings. Their combined employment and income was sufficient to sustain the basic necessities of a large home in South Buffalo.

By 1935 the older brothers and one sister had married. Papa Vallone sold the house and bought a smaller one in the ‘suburbs’. The patriarch retired in 1937 and died soon after from a stroke while walking to get cigarettes. Brother Bernie took charge of the family. Rose got a job jerking sodas at a drug store chain and met her future husband who delivered ice cream on Tuesdays and Fridays.

For Janos, the only child of a Sicilian mother, whose life had centered on caring for others, unconditional love, was inevitable. Showered with affection from Rose, the boy was raised with a mother’s love and a father’s indifference.

Although her formal education ended in the sixth grade, she felt that the boy she called Gianni had a spark of something that needed to be recorded. On pink paper she typed a rudimentary biography that was found among her belongings after she died. They are included here intact. without edit or changes of any kind:

1940

One year old. Tho he couldn’t understand ,we would sit by the hours reading nursery ryhams. Come bed time as long as I would sing 3 songs, “ School days, Rock-a-by-baby, and than hum The Skater’s Waltz, He would go to sleep. At birth he wieghd 9 lbs. Height 27in. That’s apretty big baby for little me, So at one year old he was a big baby to hold.To top it off a livelyr baby There was none. He always wanted to dance There I was with Gianni bouncing up and down, up and down.

1940

At the age of 2 Gianni was the center of attraction for his brilliance and personality He carried a tune perfect, and knew the words to several songs, such as Chatanooga Chu-Chu. No baby talk for him, every word as clear as a bell.

1941

At the age of three his talent for music was improving. As long as he had the radio going and a ball in his hand he was happy. He could spell his name and reciet avery nursery rhym in the book. His favorit being “Taffy was a Welchmen”

1942

At the age of 4 he lived on La Force PL. the street his dad was born on. This was a tough year for Gianni. He got all of his chield hood sicknesses such as Mumps,meazels chickin pox And to top it off His tonsils were removed. Than he developed cronic appendicts.Dr.said he may outgrow them.

1943

Gianni started school in Sept. of this year. Lindberg Elementry School. Living on Nassau in Kenmore, N.Y. His playmate and school chum was Wilma?? His first day of school was a happy day for him. In fact I felt a little hurt because most of the kids were crying because their mothers left them. But not Gianni. He happily waved and said “ By momie see you later” and turned to one of the little girls to comfort her.

1944

Five years old, in first grade. His pal at the time was uncle John D. What times they had together. Gianni turned out to be a very poor eater. I had all I could do to get him to drink milk. His favorit lunch was creamed eggs on toast He was a great companion to me. He would wipe the dishes and together we would sing. His harmoney was perfect. He got pnumonia this year and was a very sick boy.

1945

Six years old and full of vim and viger. Good at his school work. Reading fairly well. Reading Comic’s was his favorit pass time. His hight was 53 in. and weighed 53 lbs. Getting better looking every year.

1946

Seven years old. We moved to Californi9a. A lot of changes for Gianni. He enterd 3^rd grade at Willard School, in San Gabriel he got his first byke. And He was getting aquainted with new friends. He liked California right from the start. It took him a year to get himself in cerculation and adjusted.

1947

At 8 years old and in the 4^th.Grade He made the Pee Wee base ball team. Of course he sat on the bench for several months. However he was so very happy thinking some day he would be on the field playing. He never failed attending a game, wether it was a practice or a real one.

Some tips

To my faithful readers (all six) and to the wayward fish that might find themselves caught in the net… I offer an explanation to the origin and nature to “My Blogg”.

My talented and wonderful daughter, “Wine and Words”, having enjoyed the world of blogging offered to set up a blogg site for me. Whereupon, I thought to myself “yes… now I can post new paintings since my web site operator is no longer able to post new work”.

Instead I found myself entering into a semi fictitious semi-autobiographical novel that pretends to be a blogg.

One may start from blogg #1 January 2010 titled “Paris in ‘63” or work backwards from here. It doesn’t matter as long as you keep in mind that all the pieces are part of a whole and that different characters are recalling past events concerning a painter named Garbo or are characters that are being asked about certain events that relate to Garbo.

A novel in the form of a blogg is a novel idea.