Nadja Gropius lorded over her assistants as they hung a new show in her ghetto-chic Chelsea gallery. A nasal dealer with an affectation of old world gentility, her gallery's latest show 'HARELIP,' featured portraits of children, severely deformed by cleft lips, but adorned with high-end accessories.
Distracted by her team, Nadja didn't bother to look at Dorian as she talked, let alone the samples he’d brought by.
"It's not that the work is poorly conceived or badly executed, Dorian. It's just not..." Nadja paused pensively, as much for effect as vocabuleric struggle, "...relevant."
The sterile gallery air repulsed Dorian.
"You know," Nadja continued, "it just isn't pertinent to what's happening in downtown New York now. This scene at this time. The cultural moving zeitgeist of our urbanity--"
"Yeah, but..."
"And the production. The production, Dorian. I'm talking about the wow factor here. Everything you do these days is so... well I'm not going to say naive."
Nadja shifted her attention back to her assistants.
"Renée, that one, left wall. Next to the brown boy with the Ray-Bans."
Brown boy?
"I've got new work, stuff you haven't seen."
He felt physically smaller each time his mouth opened.
"Dorian, really. We haven't made money off your art in three years. It's like throwing cash into an incinerator. If you want to show, you have to become relevant again."
"Well, what is relevant?"
He’d actually asked the question. That mercurial fairy who held the last sprinkle of Dorian's artistic credibility was hemorrhaging crimson acrylic. And they both knew it.
"Look around you, sweetie," Nadja said through her nostrils.
Dorian forced himself to take in the congenital deformity staring back at him. Mangled lips and teeth. Prada handbags and Cartier earrings. A pang of first-world remorse hit. He averted his gaze, flushed with annoyance. He’d be damned before being manipulated by this course artistic subterfuge.
Witness to Dorian's entire mental arc, Nadja smiled like a proud mother at a christening. This pissed him off all the more.
"These paintings conjure an immediate, palpable reaction, you see. Look at them. Desire mixed with repulsion."
"That’s mostly the way I feel about my life."
Nadja's smile grew even larger, "Exactly."
Dorian found himself even more repulsed sitting at the long wooden table of Barrio Chino that night, surrounded by a little Tinder biscuit of a model and her posse of designers, finance racketeers, indie-rock-waiters, restaurateurs, and furniture-crafting-leather-working-steam-punkers-who-not-so-occasionally-worked-as-bar-backs. He dutifully posed as the phones flashed, cataloguing the non-event for all of digital eternity.
"You tried the tasting menu at Eat/Drink yet? Kumamoto oysters with Key-lime gelée. Coooome on. You have to trek to Boerum Hill, but trust me, okay?"
"I heard the Iranian caviar with gold leaf flakes is to die for."
Dorian shoved down another taco al pastor into the angry hole above his chin.
Eventually everyone got blatto enough on habanero cocktails that Dorian could finally give up faking a smile.
Desire mixed with repulsion. Nadja had really jammed her stiletto right in the sphincter on that one.
Begging off an invite to the newly converted jack-shack parlor in China Town, that was now "the trendiest underground club in the city, EV-ER," Dorian found himself alone in his robe and boxers, crouched in his empty bathtub as the wee hours drew on.
He held his legs to his chest, a state of deepest concentration, the cool ancient porcelain numbing the bottoms of his feet.
Desire. Repulsion.
Desire. Repulsion.
Repulsion. Repulsion.
Just a few short years ago his entire focus, his very reason for being, was to exude art through his hands. Canvas after canvas effortlessly filled in marathon sessions. Marijuana, PBR and Oreos his only sustenance for the sleepless bacchanals. Since his first visit to a modern art museum, before he could even properly pull his dong, his life's ambition was to express himself in pigment particles suspended in drying oil. Before the industry pillaged his soul.
Publicity, promotion, marketing, exposure. Signing with his first primary dealer. His first five thousand dollar sale. Then a ten. Group shows turning to solo expositions. Sold out receptions. Inclusion in prestigious private collections. Gallerists, dealers, curators, all wanting a piece of the ascending artist who was more willing than ever to pull down his pants and bend.
The art star on the rise.
And then of course, the inevitable fall. From peak demand, with back-to-back solo shows and his first foray into the secondary market, with a canvas on Christie's block. When he'd heard the news from Nadja he was so thrilled to be in the game, he'd painted a week straight without sleep. But from the first to final bid, his moment on the block lasted just thirty eight seconds, and his lot didn't even meet the seller's minimum at $18,000. "Bought in" by the house--it was the kiss of death. His prices immediately dropped fifty percent, and within a month, no one was buying anything at all.
Paint. The word sounded strange now. It evoked the painful future he most likely faced, cracking Benjamin Moore in lavish Upper East Side apartments and filling walls with egg shell latex. That was unless he got his fucking act together and made something. Something meaningful. Something so prescient, so repulsively desired, the likes of Nadja Gropius and her snobling ilk would kill to hang.
But why would Dorian possibly want another go-round in that spirit crushing coral? What was it about his makeup that forced him to vomit up works of art in the name of self-expression?
His father had been perfectly content sowing leather onto steering wheels in an Ohio auto plant--sure his hands had eventually given out, but his union earnings had scored a twenty-three foot cuddy cab fishing boat for his troubles. Why did Dorian constantly have to jam the spin cycle on his own misery? It was an unanswerable question; a paradoxical Zen koan which literally stopped his mind in its tracks.
He was suddenly aware of the passage of air in through his nostrils, expanding his belly and blowing back out onto the stubble of his upper lip. His sea of anger began to evaporate. Dorian's faculties dilated outward. He was aware for the first time the stillness of the room.
Dorian abruptly jumped from the tub and sailed out his apartment door.
He flew down the stairs barefoot, his bathrobe trailing. He spun round corners, using the banister for leverage, descending as quickly as gravity would allow.
Catching his breath, his dirty feet back on the rough wood of his apartment, Dorian found himself standing before a colorful abstract canvas nailed to his wall. Overcoming hesitation, he pushed a sheet of sandpaper against the stretched cotton, leveling painstaking hours of carefully placed brushstrokes. Decimating subtle variations in shade and color. Dorian splattered rubbing alcohol, wiped away what was left of the work with paper towels. He coated the canvas with acrylic gesso. Examined the pilfered photo in his hand for reference. Then finally, Dorian began to paint. Red sky and clouds in the upper right hand corner. A photorealistic ornate railing in the left. The corrugated grey top of a tenement.
Then a dark figure emerged in the canvas center: staring skittishly through bloodshot eyes, a leering smile on his face, bare chested at the end of a long summer day in the Lower East Side.
Rube peered out at the living room.
Dorian took a step back, his own face filled with an unmistakable mix of desire and repulsion.
CHAPTER 02
CHAPTER 03
CHAPTER 04
CHAPTER 05
CHAPTER 06
CHAPTER 07
CHAPTER 08
CHAPTER 09
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
UPDATE: LOOKING FORWARD - CHAPTER 14
BEHIND THE KEYBOARD
There’s something strangely offputting and at the same time pleasing about having a bathtub in your apartment kitchen. I still remember the day I saw it when my friend “Nurse” Carla (as all of us in the neighborhood affectionately referred to her) showed me the apartment I would be sub-leasing from her. “There’s nothing like sitting in your kitchen bath in the middle of the afternoon with a cup of tea,” she’d said. And it was true. Many strange fond memories of that bath remain. An ex-girlfriend sleeping in it when we fought. Early morning freezing cold hand showers in the badly heated tenement. My now beautiful wife lounging in the late evenings.
YASHICA 124-G MEDIUM FORMAT 2009
Before hitting the Lower East Side in the late afternoon.
YASHICA 124-G MEDIUM FORMAT 2009
When I wasn’t in the bath at home, I spent a ton of time painting in my tenement apartment to get inside Dorian’s head. It wasn’t till my nostrils were filled with the sharp fragrance of turpentine and varnish that I truly understood who and what he was.
ACRYLIC ON CANVAS 10″ x 20″ 2009
I was never very good, but I enjoyed it, and I can’t think of a more meditative way to get into a character’s state of mind.
Yours In The Chain,
Doug Karr
SPECIAL THANKS to my wife @zenmommas for years of support during the writing process, @ericvancewalton for his trailblazing, inspired collaboration and incredible guidance, @andrarchy for his mind blowing insight and friendship, @bakerchristopher for being an inspiration as a human artist and bro, @complexring for his brilliance and enthusiasm, Masie Cochran, Taylor Rankin and @elenamoore for their skillful help in editing the manuscript, and to @opheliafu for the fantastic illustrations she created exclusively for the novel's launch on Steemit and to Elena Megalos for her wonderful character illustrations. I’d also like to thank Eddie Boyce, Jamie Proctor, Katie Mustard, Alan Cumming, Danai Gurira, Stephan Nowecki, Ron Simons, Dave Scott, Alden Karr, Missy Chimovitz, my dad Andy Karr and late mother Wendy, and everyone else who helped lead me to this moment.
I am a Brooklyn based writer, film & commercial director, and crypto-enthusiast, my projects include @HardFork-series an upcoming narrative crypto-noir and my novel Dwelling will soon be premiering exclusively on Steemit, and you can check out more of my work at dougkarr.com, piefacepictures.com, and www.imdb.com/name/nm1512347
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