Self-portrait of Francis Bacon. Found June 30, 2008 Christie’s catalog of Francis Bacon’s “Three Studies for a Self-Portrait.” Discovered 2/9/24, Beverly Hills Library.

Yesterday, we stopped by the Beverly Hills Library, my lifelong haven to art books to check out their music section. @california.eating and I seem to have a new hobby of exhaustively looking through what music books are in the space to sort through who we should feature for Music Book Club. The browsing and subsequent conversations are wonderful and remind me of the decades of dusty crate digging I did around the world building my collection. Assembling a collection is like building a three dimension tapestry woven by a myriad of people. While the output of its endeavors are important, perhaps the joy to me is the long process of curating it and taking the time to be open to the possibilities of what fits into the theme of a music book club. There are memoirs, biographies, criticisms, ethnographies, surveys of formats. Could there be a show on music ephemera? Yes. The expanse of what this can be are large and it’s so exciting to stretch these ideas. At the library bookstore, there weren’t many music books to look at, but there were plenty of food and art books and I temporarily got lost in the art catalog section.

In a time before social media, when museums, galleries and auction houses were not easily searchable online, I learned about contemporary art from the catalogues I found for a dollar or two at the Friends of the Beverly Hills Library bookstore. It was routine to see lush expensively printed catalogs of art on coffee tables. I never had money to buy all the art books I wanted, but catalogs were basically free. Learning about art by just browsing catalogs was how I hacked my access to contemporary art knowledge. This is where my art education began on open afternoons of underemployment before my career in tech started, when I was an EA or a student teacher or just picked up djs and drove them around the city. The bookstore, plopped halfway in the city between Santa Monica and Hollywood was a great haven to kill time instead of going home for an hour or two. I would bury myself in the shelves and leave with full arms, buying catalogs around scenes and time periods of interest, often around photography and painting. Then I’d take them home and put them bedside to look through before I fell asleep.

There was an earthquake yesterday when my parents were visiting. We all stood frozen in the living room of my house perplexed as the cabinet shook but no books fell off the shelf. Otis meowed out the window. I used to like to joke that our books would kill us when the big one came. But nothing moved yesterday.

Of all the objects that both my parents and I collect, the one in common we have is books. There are books in all our rooms, in our garages. We are addicted to buying and reading books. I like to say my mother never read a book she didn’t want to keep afterwards. There are literally thousands of books between our homes and now I’m bringing in new music ones. But with so much distraction, it takes deep effort to sit down, concentrate and simply read. And ultimately who cares about owning books, if you don’t talk about them? 

After the earthquake, I went out to meet Tamara to do just that and came across this Bacon catalog. I have many hobbies and Francis Bacon is one of them, so like the collector I am I grabbed the catalog, bought it and now it sits next to me in bed ready to hit me on the head the next time the earth shakes.

(Original IG post above)

Amended below.

There’s something constricting about writing to caption. You are often forced to condense thought into easy consumption. It’s a good practice, but nonetheless unsatisfying as often thoughts are more complex than the size of a caption. The above, more or less, I wrote in one setting on my sofa, typing on my phone. But it is not the essay I intended to write, just the one that fit within the moment.

Is posting the same essay in different versions on two different platforms an example of mixed media? I vote yes.