Basquiat and the Boys
Evan Christopher, Tin’s godfather, composed songs as interpretations of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s paintings on display at the Ogden Museum for Prospect 3. We went to the Ogden last night to hear Evan and his band play and we were treated to one after another phenomenal arrangement. The night provided a good bridge to Tin’s nascent interest in both music and art – he told me later he expected to have his own gallery where he would throw big parties. And he expected to live alone.
I, on the other hand, am giving a nod to big parties and have opted to not hold my annual Hanukkah party but instead to have intimate gatherings as they occur during the next few weeks. Some times you have to mix it up and change your tune to figure out what works for you in any given time frame. Doing the same old thing just isn’t fun after a while.
We just passed the five year mark – exactly five years from the day I met Tin – December 7, 2009. We celebrated with our family birthday gathering and we sat around and shared memories of celebrations past. I get a good feeling from knowing the family we have cobbled together has developed tentacles into a shared history.
And at the same time, through this lens of warm and fuzzy, I stared at Basquiat’s photograph outside the exhibit, he was so young, so talented and full of life and dead at age 27 from a heroin overdose. Minutes later, I watched Evan putting together his interpretation of Basquiat’s interpretation of his life and all its noise while all the while Tin made crowns on the 2nd floor and although I know it is the extreme sensitivity to life that causes artists to create masterpieces and that anger fuels beauty and sadness overlays joyous strokes and notes, I still wondered if being alive and being awake and being present isn’t just about the hardest thing in the world to be for boys.
