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John Marron “Six Smokers” ink on paper, $111.00

John Marron “Six Smokers” ink on paper,  $111.00

I had a hippy dentist in Berkeley who had a gigantic see through aquarium & was extremely liberal with laughing gas ( nitrous oxide, HNo2) & gorgeous assistants who cracked wise & ran marathons. Outside his panoramic corner officewindows, in the wind, “6” palms 80-90 feet high, in the air against the smoggy Oakland hills, swayed their explosive carmen miranda coiffures back & forth like metronomes. During the 1978 quakes, from their scalp roots, they evicted a dozen squawk-squat of parrots & budgies permanently.Cruising the MOMA legacy photo galleries in 1968, a royal appeared. Irving Penn. His 4”x 6” closeup of “ Fag Ends”, imaginally from a tiny WWII tin of Lucky Strikes, …battered, bent, grimy, charcoal etched, the paper so porous, speck-le-dotted with age & bronze bleed, torn, spewing fne rolled up by hand tortured tobacco bits. Like babies, unsaddled or corpses of old tzadiks, yearning to be lit up by a surviving G.I. Powerful!  Never forget them.Bamboo growing in parallelles, of DNA! Smokestacks of Charles Scheeler. Killer transparent viral cylinders! An NBA team in need of a super sub? Cancer stubs yearning to breathe free? Being an asthmatic all my life, almost dying twice, what you inhale IS what you get! Smoking Dominican  semi-churchill hand-rolled by a Cuban family in Perth Amboy, IS a guilty pleasure, tho, I must say, on the other butthandcheek, holding a W. Virginian tobacco farmer, 25 year old boy-man, in my arms in the chemo suite, as he expired from N4 Stage lung cancer, at the Johns Hopkins Cancer Insti-tute Hospital in Baltimore in 1969, not so much….

Skills

Posted on

April 3, 2017

Skills

Posted on

April 3, 2017