PRESS

During the summer months I see my folks more than I do the rest of the year. They stay at Wolf Lake, which is only about 10 minutes away. So some mornings it's not unusual to see them pull in around 10 or so to check in on what I'm up to. One recent morning they swung by on the way over to Paradise Pond to see the work my brother Bird was doing on Milaywer's place. The pond is getting a new spillway system so I warned my parents that the first road was torn up and they'd be better off taking the middle road. This information immediately sent my old man into a shitfit. His eyes narrowed. He stared at the ground, teeth clenched and spit out the words like a piece of bad meat. "The middle road?"
"Yeah." I said, wondering where this big concern was coming from. "You take the middle road, through the gate....." He cut me off. "What gate?" I tried to be patient. "There's a gate." I said slowly. My mother rolled her eyes. "Then you bear left...." "LEFT!" he snarled. You'd think I'd just told him to shinny up a tree and grab the rope ladder. By the time he left I was a nervous wreck. If there's one thing my old man does not like in his golden years, it's a change in plans.

The only concrete artworld thing I got out of my week long show in NYC was a nice piece in ARTNET online magazine , written by Carlo McCormick. In fact it was so nice I sent it to my parents. "Can you open your email?" I asked the old man over the phone. "I don't know." he growled. "I'll try." An hour later he called back. "OK. I got your email now where am I supposed to click?" Now I must admit, I'm almost as lame when it comes to computers, but I do know how to click on a link. Patiently I explained to him to look for the underlined jumble of words with McCormick somewhere. "OH! I SEE IT!" he shouted. "OK" I said and hung up.
Another 20 minutes went by before he called back. "That was a very nice article that Carlo wrote." he said obviously proud of being able to find the damn thing. He then explained to me how he had figured out how to print it up and only screwed up 4 or 5 pages before he got it almost perfect. Then he continued to gush over how good a writer Carlo was and when he was done, he asked in all seriousness, "What does Carlo do?" Now that's why I do what I do.