Artist Q Diaries
DAY 3 - CANDIDATE Q. The End of The Beginning...
A bit late to the gate but turns out Q.’s flare for making pictures means he’s on his way to Cooper Union, or should’a been. Had this thing about wheat pasting characters who worked in the neighbourhood. Chef Louis from the diner, Diego who sold books on the sidewalk, mad Harley who wheeled four dogs about in her customised shopping cart… Everyone loved ‘em, the paste ups. Until someone didn’t. Pushed him down some basement stairs, broke his leg in three places. Missed the interview for college, of course. Didn’t try again.
“War in its essence is another form of capitalism. Wars make people rich – and they make a lot of people poor, and they take a lot of people’s lives away from them. So much of the war that is happening is the attempt by one group to snatch the resources of another group.”
– Bell Hooks
DAY 2 - CANDIDATE Q. The End of The Beginning...
Just him and ma these days sharing a room in Chicago. This is during Mayor Daley’s time. Place was pretty grim but the people, the street got together, they organised. Q’s ma is one of the women saying to district officials that their kids needed a playground. Mayor must’ve thought that dangerous ‘cos the next day they heard their street was gonna be tore down. Called it urban renewal.
“Less comic-book aberration, more an embodiment of many of the broader, intertwined attitudes undermining truth today, from the merging of news and politics with entertainment, to the toxic polarisation that’s overtaken American politics, to growing populist contempt for expertise” – Michiko Kakutani
DAY 1 - CANDIDATE Q. The End of The Beginning...
Sitting on the stoop, sunlight dappling through the trees, warming his face, boy didn’t see it coming. Just felt the heft o’ that fat roll o’ comics Jed’d set alight to and hit him square in the face. Too shocked to make a noise, eyes burning, nose a bloody mess and tears, and the sticky remains of that fine pink bubble he’d just been quietly proud of. Ma and grandpa saw it all, couldn’t say nothing o’ course.
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e. the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e. the standards of thought) no longer exist.” – Hannah Arendt
