Keep All Your Friends

Marc Camille Chaimowicz loved ellipses. The artist, who passed away in May, used them liberally in his correspondences. Ellipses ornamented his artwork titles and gave rhythm to his published writing.

A couple of weeks ago, as the news spread that the New York novelist Paul Auster had died, a black-and-white photo of him circulated on social media. It shows Auster in his early twenties, wavy hair swept back, dark crew-neck sweater. He looks off to one side, his fingers outstretched towards something out of frame. He is strikingly handsome, like a French movie star of a bygone era; a young Jean Marais, an Alain Delon.

A couple of weeks ago, Rebekah Weikel of Interlude Docs, an online collection of writing dedicated to all things vanished, invited a few of her contributors to submit songs for a playlist on the theme of ‘love lost.’ I chose three songs.

I first saw Miyoko Ito’s paintings in 2018, in a small show at Artists Space in New York organized by Jordan Stein. I knew nothing about the artist. I’d seen one painting on an email press release and had the caveman thought that I liked the colours and shapes and that I would enjoy seeing more of them because they suited my mood that day. I couldn’t pin down what Ito’s paintings reminded me of. The sensation of looking at them was like reaching for a word I knew but couldn’t remember.

Aki Kaurasmäki’s Fallen Leaves is best summed up by John Waters in his list of favourite movies from 2023 for Vulture: “An alcoholic factory worker and a lonely supermarket clerk meet by chance and struggle to fall in love. It’s drab, it’s short, it’s beautiful, and it lacks nothing. Just call it Unmagnificent Obsession.” Kaurasmäki has perfected drab, short, beautiful, and lacks nothing across forty-plus years of bittersweet and luminous cinema.

Jonathan Lethem is the only novelist I can think of—although I could, erroneously, imagine others—who cites among his influences both Philip K. Dick and Barbara Pym. These names may seem at odds. Dick wrote science-fiction about paranoia and technology. Pym, mid-century comedies about the British middle-classes. But Pym was a secret modernist, and you could argue that Dick’s dystopias are satires of social anxiety.

Les Curieux hide above the tympanum of the Last Judgement, at the Abbey of Sainte-Foye in Conques, France. They were carved in the twelfth century, a later addition to the ninth-century church. Fourteen of them peek from behind the outer rim of the tympanum arch, folding it back like paper, or pushing their faces through the blonde stone as if it were a strip of ribbon.

One of the many things I admired about the musician Scott Walker was that he reportedly kept his phone disconnected, apart from an hour or two on Wednesday afternoons when he would put it back on the hook. If you wanted to speak with him, this was your only window. Oh to be so famous that I could become a hermit. Apologies for dribbing and drabbing Keep All Your Friends for the past couple of months. (If you haven’t noticed the lag, your life is full and rich.) I’ve been away.

Friends have heard this story a few times. Back in ancient history, Frieze commissioned an interview with the veteran US performance artist Carolee Schneemann. She was in the UK for an exhibition of her work at Cornerhouse in Manchester, her first show in the country for some time.

In my childhood home there is a chunk of carved stone dating from the 12th century. It depicts Eve and the Serpent in the Garden of Eden, divided by the Tree of Knowledge. Eve is crouched behind the tree and appears to grip its trunk in fear. The Serpent, coiled as if ready to strike, glares directly at the viewer. The scene is chiselled from coarse, tan-coloured sandstone, letterbox in shape and remarkably heavy. The back of it is worn shapeless, but the carved face is beautifully preserved.