Curtains for the Editor
It’s been three decades since I went pro behind a news desk (yes, this year marks my 30th anniversary) and I’m still hustling the escape velocity to jump into a bigger pond. I’m not even a big fish. I’ve been here so long, I’ve evolved into a fucking Jesus Lizard.
Memory: When I was the arts editor of the Petaluma Argus-Courier I had my own desk and a half wall behind on which there was a corkboard. This was in the 90s when stationers started reproducing tawdry pulp fiction imagery as pop-art postcards and other ephemera, so when my pal Abe spied a postcard rendition of Thomas Polsky’s Curtains for the Editor, he sent it to me.
On one side was a sporting goad to complete my first novel and on the other the image of a slain newspaper editor sprawled over a sheaf of paper, scaled such that the victim appeared miniture.
Naturally, I pinned it to my half-wall gallery, which included a copy of the Fluxus “Total Art Match-Box” (“Use these matches to destroy all art…”) and other ephemera bef…
