The Foundation: 024
"I'm drinking whiskey 'til it's dawn"
In court this week, a young woman testified about how the shooting death of her brother affected her family. She was in high school at the time of her brother’s death in December of 2022. She seemed nervous; the judge asked her to slow down. But about half through she took a breath, turned to the judge to ask if she could adjust her chair. She lifted the chair and turned it just a touch, toward her brother’s killer, set down the chair with a slight thud, and directed the rest of her statement toward him.
I went to Rainbo Club to see paintings by Dmitry Samarov. It was my first time in this bar. I didn’t know what to expect, but it felt like a place where if I were still drinking I would have spent some time, like I missed out on tipsy social encounters not of “youth” but of early adulthood. I felt nostalgia. I wished I had found this place ten years ago. And then onset of nervous energy. I spent my 20s and early 30s taking in a very specific part of the city’s culture instead of visiting museums and music venues and places like Rainbo Club that have outlived versions of their neighborhoods, and by their tenure, have a story to tell and exist as something more than how we know them today.
By that choice, by that trade of nights and weekends with friends for nights and weekends working, I have, whatever it is I have, with my work. My understanding of the city reflects this choice. Some days an asset, some days adrift.
I’d been within a block or two surrounding for shootings maybe a dozen times, and a lot more within six or eight blocks because there’s so much history there, so many motherlands, so many early blocks and things slow but never really die. For me formative moments, flat crime scenes when I still only saw tape and lights and didn’t have an appreciation for the decades of grievance driving some of the conflicts but where I can remember bits of deeper understanding. Conflicts, some of them date back to before my parents were born.
There are different ways to learn a city as a young adult, to not just live somewhere but to know it in your bones. Work was my way, though it felt always more than that, I still feel called to trauma work. Art is another way. I don’t know that I’d do it different. I know that I think about doing things different now, with the benefit of hindsight. Not all work, but work touched everything, still does, so there’s no divorcing that from the next. This series of thoughts I try not to spend too much time with, because I have the life I have and there’s no do-overs. But there’s also no more youth, there are few firsts anymore and it doesn’t feel like life is as open or possible as it once felt. I don’t feel optimism, I don’t feel excitement or anticipation. The general pleasant anxiety that comes with not knowing where a night with friends will lead or end or who you may encounter when you set out with a small group. I feel different things now. Purpose. Discipline, exhaustion; protective, curious, guarded. But that other phase is done.
I don’t think I ever noticed the Rainbo Club sign there. (This is a fun oral history of the place.) If I saw a picture I might be able to place the intersection, because I realized recently I’m just not scanning the environment for bar signs, but eventually it all gets committed to some form of memory. In quieter moments sure, trying to take it all in with a soft look. Then it’s just lodged there and one day I’ll see someone’s photo and it’s “Oh I went to a robbery shooting here,” or a friend will show me the façade of some building and I think, that must be near … whatever.
Samarov has paintings showing at the bar, Sunday was the opening. The one painting of his I own feels like how the city feels to me, I bought it probably ten years ago now. (Many of his paintings feel this way. It’s a strange and sometimes unsettling to have someone’s art feel intertwined with memory that I’m certain is just mine but I have to think it’s because he has in his own way sustained attention to the city; you could argue, or I’d argue anyway, that’s a form of showing affection, and it then appears in his art.)
The work looks at home here. I didn’t notice at first, his paintings, they’re so woven into the feel of the place that some look like the view out a dusty window into the neighborhood. But it also could have been that I was nervous somewhere new.
Reading
Who does God love the most?
Intimacy These Days
The Stolen Child
Pictures and Blather
Listening
Whiskey