New Year's Eve

Sadly, I won’t be able to party tonight as much as I love to party.

I really don’t know what to do with myself. It’s rained all day in San Francisco and I haven’t left the house, nor have I wanted to leave the house. I have a 3-banger head cold in which the upper register of John Coltrane’s soprano saxophone circa 1966 is playing a battle of the bands with an old recording of Art Tatum Live at the Shrine Auditorium in 1949.

 Having nothing to do is usually my forte, but this was an extreme case of having nothing to do. I was caught somewhere between the first airing of re-runs of the Andy Griffith Show on TVLAND, featuring the finest ensemble cast in television history, and the ABC evening news with David Muir. I tried to take a nap, I really did, but the house down the street was having band practice, and the boys were hitting the same chord over and over as loud as they could. I love these guys, I really do, I’m happy for them that they’re playing music, music makes a better world, and they didn’t know I had a head cold. I didn’t have the energy to get out of bed and tell them that I was trying to sleep.

So, sleepless I got out of bed. It’s still raining when I get out of bed. It now appears it will rain forever in San Francisco. I watch the little raindrops bounce off the back-deck. It seems they’re happy, at least they look that way, bouncy, bouncy. Is it really true that no two raindrops look the alike, or is that only true in the case of snow?

My sister-in-law has just texted me a picture of two bottles of wine, a red and a white, and asks me which one she should drink tonight. They’re both good bottles, one Italian and one French.  I recommend the white, as the darker alcohols tend to promote liver cancer, as proven by the deaths of many musicians and writers who, had they stuck to vodka or gin instead of scotch and bourbon, might have lived longer lives.

It turns out Art Tatum is buried at Forest Lawn in Los Angeles, as is my father. Tatum is said to have drunk two quarts of whisky a day and a case of Pabst Blue Ribbon. I don’t think my father, a Christian Scientist, drank at all.

The phone rings. I answer. It’s an editor in New York. I’m offered the cover of ARTFORUM if I can come up with a design in fifteen minutes.

Proposed cover ARTFORUM magazine, December 31, 2022. Photo by author. All rights reserved.