Andrew S. Guthrie was born in New York City, lived for most of his life in Boston, Massachusetts, moved to Hong Kong in 2005. His artist edition “Broken Records: 1960 -1969” was collected by The Brooklyn Museum of Art in 2010 and his cultural history Paul’s Records was released through Blacksmith Books in October 2015.
Artwork: From “In The Beginning” Series by A. Marinazzo
Leftover
I was the one who buzzed around the periphery. I owned the periphery. No one else would touch it. I enjoyed it there, displacing pangs of jealousy, deferring to lesser-knowns, ignoring the competition. I was in and out before you knew it. I thought about all the feet that have touched the sidewalk, wondering if every spot touched by a toe. When the walls come tumbling down, when the nests have finally been blown from the branches, I will still fit between the cracks, utterly indifferent to where I appear in the credits.
My role is only be elucidated once history is complete, when all the shreds of information have been gathered up from the curbs, from the cornerstones, from the forests. It might as well have been made up rather than “rediscovered”, that tantalizing shift in so-called understanding. Every day, for half a year, at the same appointed increment of immeasurable time, I walked by a specific location for a purpose that was, years after the fact, only deduced by a dissertation that gathered dust until the clock, once again, started ticking.
Who cares? Exactly. No one is quite sure what “wasting time” entails, or if one pursuit pays off more than another. If the headline of the tabloid was all you had to go by, the outcome appears stupid or stupendous; the brilliant aphorism. It was better not to name it, because while the product, like any other product, sat on the shelf, it was bereft of marketing; a package fallen by the wayside, rendered in old-timey black and white.
You know that chemical imbalance that fools you into thinking you are in control? It’s just a matter of staring off into the distance without realizing you are doing any such thing, the way the formidable bulk of a mare sleeps while standing up. It’s something you can’t conceive because it has nothing to do with you: a blank. It’s beyond boring because it has no duration. It’s useless until you take it away. And then the whole thing collapses.
Let’s leave at that. The rest stop next to the highway that no one rushes to, rushing by; some drought-inflected scrub, a jack-knife-gouged picnic table. A momentary harbor. The backpack that got left behind.
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By In Parentheses in IP Volume 7
32 pages, published 1/15/2022
By In Parentheses in IP Volume 7
32 pages, published 1/15/2022
in parentheses 