PICASSO & HIS COLLECTION
August 24th 2008 23:44
Everyone seems to be humming that I Kissed a Girl song By Kate Perry. A man was singing it as he walked into a store. His little daughter was singing it as she followed him into the store. I was humming it as I watched them both walk in.
Devon and I went to the Gallery of Modern Art to see Picasso’s collection of art. We dressed up in thick rimmed glasses, berets, striped shirts and bright red scarves to look like cultured Europeans. We put long pipes between our lips and planned to put on strong British accents and loudly say completely wrong information about each painting. When we got there, everyone was dressed like us. They spoke how we were planning to speak. The joke died.
From his photos as a young adult, Picasso looked like a well built, angry looking sort of person. His hair was neat and his eyes were wide - they collected and they grasped and the tightened muscles around them wrinkled and buckled to force the world into him. Picasso had a posse of talented artists, such as Renoir and the poet Apollinaire, who, according to one of the blurbs, coined the term “surrealism.” Picasso and his painter friends would often give each other paintings as gifts. They’d draw caricatures on tablecloths and have a bit of a laugh, all the while the world thinking, Your work, no matter good or how shit, will be worth millions. You will live forever.
I wonder if Picasso ever predicted that someone would blog about him one day, that some stupid bastard of a kid wearing a beret and puffing from a non-lit pipe would be looking at his collection of art and thinking of how he could put all his thoughts into words, upload all those words online for a bunch of other strangers to read. Picasso probably did predict all of that. Picasso knew everything. He was pretty much a wizard. He was pretty much Nostradamus.
You get all these scholars describing Picasso’s passion, describing his life and motives, but in the end they are all just assumptions. I can’t help but wonder: what the hell was he really thinking about when he was painting, when he was kissing Olga, when he was kissing Marie, when Carlos killed himself, when the fumes filled the room, when the lint floated and vanished, when he was staring past the camera with those wide eyes? We do things and explain what we are doing and even when we believe our explanations there's still some force out there or within us that can smell through all our bullshit. I wonder when that force will emerge.
Vicki didn’t know who Picasso was. I didn’t really mind that she didn’t know who he was.
“Here,” she told me, handing me a laptop.
My laptop died the other day. I couldn’t afford to repair it and I couldn’t afford a new one, so I’d go to the library and write.
Vicki smiled. “Now I know you don’t like it when people buy you things, so I stole it for you.” She giggled. “I stole it from my sister’s office.”
The laptop was nice. There was a lot of animal porn and spyware in it but it was nice. It was faster than my last laptop. I went home and wrote a short story about a man with wide eyes who died for his shadow.
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Comment by Always Eighteen
Always Eighteen
But I do like those damn eyes