Or Beckett manuscripts would come in from France, as coolly clean and perfect as an Ingres portrait. Those years I played second base for a Max's Kansas City softball team that on any given Sunday morning contained alumni either of Black Mountain College or the second generation of New York School of painters. Again generous availability was the hallmark. My friend Archie Rand, the painter, remembers spending a teenaged day sitting underneath Cecil Taylor's piano, listening to him practice and compose. The painters if anything were even more forthcoming with their company.
Painters are convivial by nature.
When they leave their studios after a day's work they don't bring their colors, brushes, and canvas with them-at least not in the way at least that writers find themselves cursed with lugging around their more clinging, portable medium of words. A painter not painting is someone blessedly escaped. But it's also true that in those years money had just started to warp the art world. The celebs seemed to prompt some of the artists toward a certain desperation to catch the golden ring also. Add to it the so-so quality of the art at the time and commodification seemed fairly inevitable.