Ted, Ted, Ted

Mary and Diogenes are just back in New York from Taiwan, where Diogenes picked up a prize in the Taipei print and drawing biennial. Now he is clearing out his studio on Lexington and 103rd for a push to finish new material for a show in San Francisco in the spring. I went with them to the studio last night, every step bringing back things I’d forgotten or just not thought about for years. East Harlem looks tighter, a little more gentrified, a little less chaotic. Giuliani’s police terror strategy has quieted the streets as designed, but not that many yuppies are confident venturing into this neighborhood, the place even the Alphabet City developers were afraid to touch ten years ago. I remember being stitched up by an intern at Mount Sinai hospital nearby after a skating accident in the Park on my way home from work one night. The intern asked where I lived, checking for a concussion I suppose, and when I pointed east she looked surprised and said, “I didn’t know anybody lived over there.” I did not have a comeback to that, and I still don’t.At his studio on 106th and Lexington, Diogenes laid out some of his newer drawings and prints on the floor and I stood on a chair to look at them from an adequate distance. Diogenes always seems to want me to see what he’s been up to, and I always end up loving what he is doing. Lately he has taken a sharp turn away from the dark, foreboding, highly tactile stuff he was doing when I met him, in favor of a more explicitly representational thing with a lot of very accessible icons and totems held up at an almost ironic distance, with surfaces playing a smaller role than drawn images, at least to my eye. The two silkscreen prints I liked the best turned out to be the ones he’d planned to give me. This wasn’t the first time that’s happened. I remember seeing a show of his somewhere on the Upper West Side around 1990. I looked around for a while, and then when I had determined my favorite I looked at the tag to see the title, and it said, “Euphoria. Collection of Ted Kuster.” After that we took a stroll down to 3d Ave., where I used to live. We could see Christmas tree lights in the window of my old apartment. It’s nice to know someone is living there. I hope they kept the loft I built out of stolen police barricades, and I hope they figured out a better way to cover up that three-inch knothole in the kitchen floor that was the roaches’ foyer. I stayed in that tunnel-like apartment for five years, only half the amount of time I’ve lived in San Francisco, but they were big years and I get a lot of pleasure out of thinking about them now.