Today is December 1, 2024. Today is World AIDS Day. It is 4 years to day since I first took a group through a daily painting practice. It is 3 years to the day that I awoke at dawn in Miami and discovered the Sho Shibuya Today show at the beach. It is 2 years to day since I shared it with others at the entrance of Untitled Miami during one of the most joyous days of life. It is a year to the day that I painted in blue and green spray paint in my garden on the Friday after Thanksgiving and awaited going to Art Basel Miami at dawn the next day. Today is December 1st again. I am in Los Angeles. I awoke and cleaned my studio. I removed a large painting that had been gathering dust in the corner for almost 10 years, a framed nature piece that had been part of the as is sale of our house and took it outside. I let it sit outside for a few minutes, then walked back into my studio and returned with 3 cans of spray paint. I proceeded to spray paint over it. The act felt liberating. It took me almost an hour and in between alternating colors, I sat on a plastic folding chair in my backyard, pausing in pleasure. I thought about finding thrift store paintings and making groups of people paint over them. It seemed like an appropriate thought to have on this day, a small, new idea that may or may not occur. Then as the paint dripped down the canvas to make its own marks, I went back inside the house and read more, “Didion & Babitz.”

I’ve been alternating between listening to the audiobook and reading the hardcover of Lili Anolik’s “Didion & Babitz,” driving slowly through the LA canyons to savor the familiar stories of two of my favorite local writers. Absorbing these stories alone in these different modes has made the Thanksgiving weekend pleasurable, a weekend that normally feels too short, but this year feels exceptionally long. In between passages, I am bombarded with Black Friday and now Cyber Monday texts and emails, every single vendor or person I know with a small business selling at discount. I endlessly scroll through my emails searching for non-consumption content to pepper the processing of story. I find myself searching on eBay for books and ephemera from characters in the Anolik book; a book of Julian Wasser monographs, Earl McGrath’s wife’s photography of the 70s. I read Wikipedia biographies. It’s been one of those long LA weekends.

Yesterday I drove to Beverly Hills to check out a Beverly Hills Bohemian Estate sale. The location wasn’t released until morning, but when I saw it, smack dap in the middle of the flats, down the block from a high school friend of mine who passed a few years ago as well, in her 40s, I felt the need to go. My friend and I had lost touch in college, after I had visited her at school, our sophomore year. No fight had occurred, just a realization that we lived in two different worlds, hers truly privileged, mine struggling privileged, and that we were uninterested in our perspective lives. I had been thinking about her and I wanted to drive by a space where we had shared many good times.

I really needed nothing from this bohemian estate sale, but I was curious. After a few days of family meals, I yearned for some quiet time in an old house, looking at objects in silence. I wondered if I could find an entry point into processing what happened at the end of last year, when I wasn’t helping others paint and barely completing my daily painting practice. During this time, I had taken up the months long task of taking down my mentor’s 5500 square foot Beverly Hills house, from Warhol on the wall to underwear in the drawer and everything else in between, including 50 years of papers, many of them written by myself. I don’t think many people have this almost absurdist life experience, to review and contemplate their own work life, by going through someone else’s archive that you had helped build. But I was fortunate to do so, and I was lucky to have the time after work, on weekends and then after I was part of a mass layoff, during the days. It turned out to be a deeply painful experience and even though almost a year has transpired, I still find myself stopping and breaking down writing this paragraph, recounting a zoomed out version of this story.

Before my mentor passed, I had promised her that I would never let strangers come into her house and pick through her drawers searching for deals. “No lookie-loos!” I could hear her state. It was a promise I would keep, at great expense of time, money and mental health. Instead, yesterday I went through a stranger’s house and witnessed a version of that promise as if I had broken it. Dozens of people from all ages had driven into town and invaded the rundown mansion, already sold and probably about to get gut renovated. I lingered in the sunken living room with its array of Italian mid-century lighting, much of it probably imported by my mentor’s husband in the 1960s. I was in a set of my series. I could smell the tuberose perfume and spilled Aquavit baked into the tiled floor. In a brief moment alone, I closed my eyes and imagined the hum of a party inside. I gazed through the floor to ceiling glass and took a photo of the serene Japanese-like pool. I thought about Eve and Joan. I wondered if they had ever been here, at a party, and what they thought of this place with all this stuff. I walked around the property, up and down the winding architectural stairs, and found a clear lucite ruler on a table for $4, probably the cheapest item in the house and one of the only useful objects. I bought it in cash and happy, escaped down the driveway, past the off duty Beverly Hills cop, jumped into my car, cruised past my 1990s friend’s house, slowing down to notice it looked the same. I wondered how many other people live amongst the ghosts of their own lives. I turned the audiobook back on to hear more stories about Eve and Jim Morrison. “Break on through to the other side,” I hummed in my head as I sped home through the Valley, parked by a Studio City mini mall that offered everything a native could desire: Hair & Wigs, Jamaican food, Smokes, Pho, Discount Cleaning and Shoe Repair and shot a photo of the sign.

Today is December 1, 2024.

Listening as usual to another wonderful Theo mix while writing this.

Michaelangelo Matos · BC001 – Theo Parrish on NTS Radio, April 2021-June 2022