Night Train Remembering Storm King

NYC >>>> DC and also a special offer and some pictures

Foraged finds at Storm King, Photograph by Jess Glass

I’m on the night train from New York to DC and its empty enough that you can stretch out and watch New Jersey, Pittsburgh flash sparks of the lights at the edge of cities spark away behind you white and yellow and orange and the train throws out the old fashioned whistle out in front like would a cow ever wander onto the track or is it because it helps the people in their beds sleep and that sound from the trainwhistle blowing seems to flow back over all of the cars and further back behind us out into the velvet black of the towns stretching out into the middle of America where maybe the undecided live. Inside its too bright to see outside except for lights and my car is practically empty and in the black mirror of the train window beside me I can see a few seats down reflected a guy with a plaid shirt over a Hawaiian shirt with a blonde mustache a floppy safari hat intent on his phone and I am listening to music and writing to you stretching out over two grey pleather seats and if I close my eyes I am remember back a few weekends. The Hudson Valley with its antique dealers that sell mid-century Parisian sanitary workers chore jackets faded thickcotton blue with patches everywhere for some obscene amount of money the sidewalk outside of my literary agent house with the crab apple tree cut into a kind of arched bower the sun all golden, the moss room we visited up the hill past the traffic jam Melissa’s moving sheets of paper crumpled stiff with silty watery happenings almost like tin sculptures and the map that shone through when you hold it up to light all in that little white cube of a studio but it made me feel like I was looking down from some floating height over her work. I cooked 3 different foods in the dark on the hibachi out back with her cowboy photographer husband who the next morning I talked about tools with but in a new strange way and there in the backyard he was more guarding the fire and mostly silently watching me like who is this guy and why is he cooking that cabbage and how will we know if it is burning and then back in the kitchen the famous Canadian writer of graphic novels now in a writers room in LA somewhat thwarted by the famous old white guy actor who keeps having new ideas in the middle of night that make the plot have to be rewritten I think it was about the early life of Godzilla but she was happily helping make a kind of brown butter and fresh ginger sauce for the meat and the purple cabbage which I don’t think I cooked quite enough but still it was delicious and it was dark and it had been a long day and then the most of a bottle of tall cold white wine that mike left me with before he left and he explained about the taste and I pictured a little town over the hills outside of Rome with a special name I’ve forgotten. O all the people that came to the feast and all the people that helped me make that workshop into a workshop. There was grass that went purple at the top like it had been dip dyed the girl with the serious ruddy face who called pokeberries pokey berry and kept asking for more and her grownup assistants did not mind that they were slightly toxic she was so exacting and the view out over the hills and the big industrial painted sculptures seemingly dropped by aliens from the sky and the delicate wings of something that was not quite butterfly or moth but iridescent and speckled and Heidi’s lavender jumpsuit with the borrowed hat and my pants weren’t quite fitting my belt and my superfans came too and that family at the end from Germany that translated all the more obscure ingredients and the woman had been using my Make Ink book with students back in Germany and how nervous I got the night before. Nervous knowing there would probably be hundreds of kids and I was so tired with all the other things going on in my life. But then how everything came together weird and wild choreography of kids with handfuls of black walnuts and acorns and goldenrod and knapweed purple and yellow in dance and the way they carefully peeled the purple petals off and the head curator Hannah working the sky-blue camping stove and seeing the cube of alum from the East Indian grocery make the yellow go bright on paper and drinking a can of coke down in a single gulp with lunch like I needed that sugar immediately. There were puffy white clouds in the almost comically blue sky and it was dreamy and there was a photographer named Jess that the Storm King people brought from New Jersey there and the whole time I felt like she wasn’t even there and I was kind of irritated in the back of mind like why isn’t she taking pictures of the amazing things that I am seeing and all the incredible finds and the artwork strung up on a makeshift clothesline art gallery and the way the sign dripped with my own black ink in a wizardly way and after at the signing table it was so calm and easy. And of course, I was wrong about the photographer who maybe because she does a lot of weddings which must demand beautiful and surprising images that are both real and romanticized, person and place and the whole situation moving really fast and even without the wedding skills also she is a total pro and artist at her job and I probably should have known that the Storm King would pick someone amazing and that her inconspicuousness means that she was seeing and being inside of moments that I was only feeling but could not see. And the photographs are perfect. They say it all. They make this long introduction feel unnecessary. But it’s been so long since I wrote you and I wanted to connect from inside the night car to Washington DC to you. And so I write.

More photos from Jess Glass she is amazing you should hire her for your event. This is just a screen shot I am going to send more when I get a moment.

This week only: Would you consider becoming a subscriber? Almost always I send you them on Fridays for reading on the weekend. Always I am putting my all into thinking and practicing the outter limits of place-based colour with you. And mostly these newsletters are edited and carefully thought out although sometimes they get a little stream of consciousness especially when I am on a train and as much as possible I try to offer paying subscribers special things and a bit of a forum for natural inky discoveries and admittedly I have been a bit remiss in the tips, tricks and recipes department but I have not forgotten this idea of a kind of group colour school that we are all involved in and also your $7 a month goes a good cause of supporting my bigger plan of creating a colour revolution and you get access to the full community. And also, tonight I am offering a night train special offer to join the worldwide community: If you are already a colour-lab member I totally appreciate your support. And if you are broke but kind of love this scene, I hope you will consider the special offer or just help spread the word.

Also, if you are a member or becoming a member I will send you the amazing set up pictures from the Storm King event but it might be on Monday because my train is just arriving and its a mistyrainy night I need to sleep before tomorrow’s wild inkings at the Smithsonian.