Well, I just finished this portrait of my Raleigh born&raised friend, David Anderson….along with Laura Argiri’s best-cat-ever (at least in my opinion), Christabel. I lived with Laura for seven years in Durham. Occasionally, visiting folks would say “Oh, that cat just LOVES you!”, and either Laura or I would reply “Not exactly…she just thinks that David’s the best toy her mommy ever brought home to her.” That was one smart cat, to say the least.
I’ve been good friends with David for twenty years or more, having met him (he was a fairly recent Duke grad at the time, and I was flailing away at a dissertation for Duke’s English Department) at the window of an Indian Take-Out (as we all do from time to time, right?). He left very shortly afterwards to enter gradskool at UCLA, where he arrived just in time to go through the Rodney King riots (suffice it to say that his apartment wasn’t exactly in the “best” part of town) and that year’s earthquake.
Wer’e both from quite similar family/Southern backgrounds, and at the time we were both terribly keen (or at least initially so) over
the most politically-correct, NEW & EXCITING trends in Literary Criticism (!). We spent the next six or so years expasperatedly telephoning each other (from North Carolina to California). At one point, we were both going crazy with irritation….he had a demanding professor who was a former male model (the Marlborough man, to be precise) who’d established himself as a “Queer Theory Scholar” (only to discover that he ACTUALLY “Self-identified” as a “Native American Scholar”), and I was having to deal with an obese, Jewish, presumably heterosexual (or so one might have assumed; she was, after all, married to a man) woman who “Self-Identified” (oooh!) as a gay man. She once spent half an hour upbraiding me on my reading of “Brideshead Revisited”, and she subsequently savaged (and I mean SAVAGED, with what seemed a very personal vengeance) the paper I wrote on it…..which is why I don’t at all flinch when mentioning that she was a fat, jewish, heterosexual, yankee, American female from the working classes…and yet she was going to tell a gay man who’d actually gone to Oxford (that would be me) what “it” REALLY was all about? (Just for the record?….I wouldn’t have spent any time considering the matter of her being fat or jewish or female or whatever if she hadn’t constantly declared these immediately obvious facts. At a certain point, this skinny, gay, blonde Episcopalian boy found himself thinking “Okay, I GET it, Lady…whatever the point of ‘it’ would be….”).
the most politically-correct, NEW & EXCITING trends in Literary Criticism (!). We spent the next six or so years expasperatedly telephoning each other (from North Carolina to California). At one point, we were both going crazy with irritation….he had a demanding professor who was a former male model (the Marlborough man, to be precise) who’d established himself as a “Queer Theory Scholar” (only to discover that he ACTUALLY “Self-identified” as a “Native American Scholar”), and I was having to deal with an obese, Jewish, presumably heterosexual (or so one might have assumed; she was, after all, married to a man) woman who “Self-Identified” (oooh!) as a gay man. She once spent half an hour upbraiding me on my reading of “Brideshead Revisited”, and she subsequently savaged (and I mean SAVAGED, with what seemed a very personal vengeance) the paper I wrote on it…..which is why I don’t at all flinch when mentioning that she was a fat, jewish, heterosexual, yankee, American female from the working classes…and yet she was going to tell a gay man who’d actually gone to Oxford (that would be me) what “it” REALLY was all about? (Just for the record?….I wouldn’t have spent any time considering the matter of her being fat or jewish or female or whatever if she hadn’t constantly declared these immediately obvious facts. At a certain point, this skinny, gay, blonde Episcopalian boy found himself thinking “Okay, I GET it, Lady…whatever the point of ‘it’ would be….”).
It was all very tiresome and extremely irritating and, finally, just silly….but those days are, I’m glad to say, long gone. These days, I don’t have to deal much with “Identity Politics”.
In any case, this is David & Christabel.
“David Anderson & Christabel”
12″x11″
oil pencil, drybrush, and pastel pencil
2013