Painting Performance and Live Auction, Saturday, March 24, 6-9PM
You have a beautiful childhood in Mexico City. You meet the girl. Life is perfect.
She moves to Manhattan and you follow her. Every day you go to work and wear elegant suits. You walk down Madison Avenue. Living large! In Manhattan! With the girl. Who could have expected this?
Some time passes, eight or nine months. You and the girl decide to call it quits. She leaves you with the apartment, the rent is high. You spend time in the bathroom. Trash starts to collect on the floor. You notice how dirty the streets are. You notice the soles of your shoes. Your job is boring. Your friends are superficial and never answer their phones. It’s lonely here.
You go to the dry cleaner to pick up a few things. It’s your favorite dress shirts, some Polos, a pair of designer jeans. They’re pressed, smashed into a filmy saran wrap. Somewhere on the plastic are printed the words We Love Our Customers. You stop and think to yourself: do these guys love me? You notice the care tag on your jeans. You’re reading this now, you’re ready for love. But your clothes tell another story.
There are thirteen hundred dry cleaning shops in the city, give or take. We’re blessed in New York, lots of cleaners everywhere. There’s good, bad, cheap, everything. I have a decent one right downstairs from where I live. But you? You, of course, prefer the best.
Take a wedding dress for instance. Like everything else it needs to be cleaned before storage—but who would you trust with such a thing? Like a tail, it could be very long, especially delicate, studded with jewels and built from exotic hand-sewn fabrics and materials. It might even be white. But that didn’t stop her from having the time of her life when she put it on. Wear it to the beach, you told her. Wear it on the grass. Climb into that honeymoon limousine.
The point is to live with it like you’ve got the perfect place to take it when all is done, when everyone heads home. There’s always a point like that. But maybe you want it a little less prosaic. In that case, may I suggest something? Clear your mind and try to imagine the present moment is past, just a memory. Open your eyes to that memory, walk right in to it. Let that hindsight move you. That wisdom, that editorial vision!
- Bosko Blagojevic
Los Angeles, 2012