Rothko's Rolodex

I’m using Scrivener to plow through the manuscript, nip, tuck, and write (a lot) anew. Decades ago, and I’m talking almost half a century, you’d write on a typewriter, use scissors, and rearrange. Crumple into balls everything you didn’t want, and straight to the garbage. People used Dictaphones. Legal pads were for drafting, for some (they still are). The paper-cutting blades were X-Acto only.

A Pulitzer Prize-winning poet I studied under praised the noise of typing. The clicking, the whooshes, the clangs. With your fingers, you committed each letter in ink from a ribbon, branded the onionskin or corrasable bond. Beneath your hands, the words came to life, and each slap of the return meant another sentence lived.

This poet compared the typewriter to the computer or word processor then taking hold. To paraphrase him, this was the Newport Folk Festival of office equipment. You’ve gone electric, just like Dylan. You’re writing on a flat, plastic keyboard; your words blink onto a screen in seconds of silent disconnect. Everything is plugged into something called a surge protector. This was bad. This was the opposite of life.

I miss the old typewriter shops in Manhattan. One in particular, on Sixth Avenue in the Flower District, one block up from Billy’s Topless.

Stevie lived nearby. Jane sometimes popped in there for ribbons and correction tape for her Smith Corona Intrepid.

Sometimes you write and people emerge from your fingertips. That’s the best part of it, for me. You type on a keyboard, and then boom, hello: seeds, memories, mementos of real people as they really were, start sprouting thin green curlicues. They enter the keyboard and shape shift, transmigrate. They are characters now.

Lars is busy. His latest project is part performance art. The working title is FOOTPRINTS. He goes to nail salons throughout San Diego, asks for the manager, and tries to explain, quickly and clearly, what he wants to do. What he wants them to do. He has a laminated card in Vietnamese in case of language barrier.

Here is a plastic placemat with raised edges. I have five of them. What I would like is for each of you to please put the placemat on the floor when you’re doing a pedicure. When you do the calluses, when the dead skin falls off, please let it fall on the placement. When you’re done with the customer, please bring the mat to me.

I will be in the back, where I have $100.00 in cash in an envelope for you. I’ll take care of the skin on the placement. You just have to bring me the mat.

And he does take it from there. He photographs the skin on the mat with his Hasselblad 503CX. The skin, waterlogged, in shreds and sometimes a slurry, can look like the Milky Way on the mat’s black background. With a tongue depressor, he then gets the skin into a glass baby food jar. Each pedicure has its own jar. Rosalie kept a ton of them in the garage, their labels soaked off, to sort beads for an eventual beading project she would one day try.

He’s going to incorporate the skin-filled jars themselves in the work. Include the workers too. He’s not sure how. The nail shops all keep a shrine to Buddha, with flowers, fruit, electric candles. Perhaps he’ll shoot those. Rosalie said he’d look like a racist. He also thinks of the jade bangles and pendants the nail techs wear, for protection and good luck. Maybe the jade. He could print it huge, luminous, on industrial-sized glass sheets.

First, there’s the skin to organize. He wants to print on gelatin silver.