Sleeping with Rothko
From The Dishwasher Dialogues
By: Gregory Light and Rafael Mahdavi - Jun 22, 2025
BEING and NOTHINGNESS
Rafael: I had brought a second-hand portable Olivetti typewriter with me from New York. Later, my children used to bang away at it; it was a good toy. An incredible little machine. No upkeep, all I needed to buy once in a long while was a black ribbon for it. Only years later did I appreciate its innovative design. The top came off easily when I needed to scrub clean the letter spokes. It weighed little, and it never let me down, year after year. All this to say that I used it nearly every night after work at the bar. I was a hunt-and-peck typist. I never learned to type fast, the way my children can, their fingers race along their computer keyboards now. My fingers could never keep up with my ideas, but that didn’t matter, I wanted the barebones on paper. I would correct and retype later.
Greg: Like you I was a two-finger typist, but I got quite fast. I could generally keep up with my thoughts. Or very possibly my thoughts were remarkably slow. More ominously, it might be the case that my fingers trained my thoughts to slow down. I like to think this provided more careful consideration of the material before their appearance on the page, but most likely it meant I lost sundry passages of pure brilliance in the sluggish passage of my fingers. Or was it always pure merde? (I hesitate to write that word in English. The truth is a brutal companion.)
Rafael: There were no printers then. To type a final, clean, and edited copy was slow for me, and if I made a mistake, I had to white it out with Tippex, a white fast-drying liquid. And copies? There was carbon paper for that, a sheet of carbon paper between two sheets, and you had to hit the keys hard to make sure the writing appeared on the second sheet.
Greg: Tippex and carbon paper were the greatest technological innovations for a generation of writers. In the U.S. Tippex was called White-out or even better Liquid Paper. It did what it said, whited out errors and mistakes, and left a liquid blank space on which to try again. The amount of that liquid I slopped onto the page was staggering. It was the beginning (and the genius) of the word processor revolution in a tiny bottle. I also fell in love with the type-writer ribbons that had a white-out band on the ribbon. You could backspace and hit the upper part of the ribbon for all those smaller mistakes.
Rafael: What did I write? Poetry. And ideas about painting and sculpture. About art in general. I had a few books on the floor by my bed, maybe four or five. I knew I could always take my writing with me if I had to leave Paris in a hurry. Well, that’s not quite true. When I had left the U.S. after art school, I had left in a hurry because I had been drafted. And I did leave everything behind, paintings, sculpture, and writings too—–and even my car.
Greg: Even your car? I can understand you abandoning your thoughts, passion and creative work to the capricious violence of the military police, but your car? Passion and art are expendable. But, again, your car? That sounds unforgivable.
Rafael: But what a car! A Buick Dynamic 88. I bought it for a hundred dollars second-hand in 1967. Power windows, power this and that, and when the speedometer got past 55 mph the Stars and Stripes appeared!
Greg: The Stars and Stripes appeared!? Where? On Fifth Avenue during a substance inspired tequila night?
Rafael: The American flag on the speedometer.
Greg: The last patriotic gasp?
Rafael: So, yeah, leaving in a hurry was a possibility that remained in the back of my mind for many years.
Greg: Until the night the Tricolor suddenly appeared driving along the Rue de Réaumur?
Rafael: That was my world, my view until I had children. I could leave the books behind, much of what I had read was in my head and transportable. Or forgotten too. And the painting? Roll them up and leave them with a friend or in a dumpster.
Greg: Unencumbered living was a goal to be applauded. When I finally left my chambre de bonne after four years of pure living, I remember being extremely proud that I was able to carry all my possessions in my arms. I had packed them all, everything, into four or five empty wine boxes: clothes, books, memorabilia, and my writing. I couldn’t hold them for very long. Maybe a minute. But I could hold them.
Rafael: My writing was not all in my head, and I kept what I wrote in big, fat envelopes. One of the most important aspects of writing was that I could do it and go it alone, it wasn’t teamwork, and I could do it anywhere, and most vital of all––it was cheap. In the worst of cases, all I needed was a ballpoint pen and some paper, even a pencil would do. I can’t paint anywhere. There’s too much gear. Painting at a basic level, contrary to what most people think, is not cheap. Just walk into any art supply store. Check out the prices of the brushes, the canvas, the tubes of paint. Some of those items cost as much as a pair of shoes, a good pair of shoes, mind you. It’s getting to be a rich man’s profession.
Greg: The basics for writing are cheaper. I could hold them all and my five-box life in my arms at the same time. But then it would all simply be an exercise in self-entertainment or personal therapy. Somewhere along the line writing requires others. Readers for a start. Even if they are imagined. Then publishers would be a nice touch. Again, even if that is self-publishing.
Rafael: In art schools nowadays, in the U.S. at least, it seems most kids who go into fine arts––as opposed to computer graphics and what have you––do art as some kind of therapy. Painting as therapy is ridiculous.
Greg: Except for those whose lives depend on it.
Rafael: Antidepressants work better.
Greg: I hesitate to comment.
Rafael: Da Vinci was doing therapy? Oh yeah, he was painting the Mona Lisa for therapy? Because he was gay? No, he was doing a job. Like making a pair of shoes.
Greg: I will say that the art world frequently looks like a scam promising authentic experience, meaning or self-truth through tools simply meant for going about one’s trade. We debated these ideas all over town—Le Paradis Mandarin near the Odeon, and in the Chez Haynes kitchen more than once. I think we came to a partial truce in Le Trafalgar. We both felt that there was an imposter lurking at the heart of the myth that sells Art and Literature as something more than they are.
Rafael: Scam is a pretty good word, for this feeling of being taken for an art ride with all the verbiage and linguistic pyrotechnics. What one longs for in great art and literature is silence.
Greg: Is silence not a form of therapy? But we were sceptical to say the least. Scathing is a better word. One night at a party in Bentley’s studio, laughing it up on wine and weed, we dreamt up our own grand therapy parody. We merged the ‘authenticity’ of the animal world with fashionable therapy crusades of the day, including Primal Scream and Erhard Seminars Training (EST), an expensive self-help rip-off scheme then scamming the civilized world.
Greg: In our sendup, people came to a retreat to discover the true animal at the core of their being, learned the animal’s distinctive call or sound, then would join everyone else to shout out the different roars and snarls, and howls in the ‘the barnyard’ after which they would be freed of their demons or find their angels. We called it Lambs of Light which gave it an added spiritual twist. During the party I dished out animal identities to countless people and a hilarious ruckus of sounds erupted in the corner. It swelled quickly and crazily. My main memory is of Bruce eagerly asking me to identify his ‘core’ animal. I thought for a moment, then told him he was an aardvark. ‘An aardvark. Great’, he replied. Then he considered it for a few seconds and asked, ‘What does an Aardvark sound like?’ I said I had no idea. He was clearly high. We all were. He spent most of the party asking people if they knew what an Aardvark sounded like. We had no smart phones to consult back then. I sometimes worry that many at the party felt the parody was more than just a parody. That art is more than just art. And this when, as you say, art is no more than crafting a fine pair of shoes in a workman’s smock or a shabby suit.
Rafael: When I look at photographs of poor artists in the Paris of the early 20th century, I can’t help but ask myself who was paying for the smart suits and starched collars?
Greg: I still look at photos of those young artists and writers in the 20s, 30s,40s, even the 50s with envy. They had a stylish, cool look. I am sure many were patching together their clothes on the cheap just as we did. But they had better fashion norms. We were products of the 60s culture of “liberation”. It played havoc with our wardrobe and hair. On the one hand I didn’t have to worry about my look, but on the other hand, I looked like someone who didn’t worry about how he looked. Like someone who was wildly pursuing the call of the aardvark.
NEXT WEEK: IN PARIS WITH GINSBERG, CAGE AND CUNNINGHAM