Sugar Shack, JMN, photo.
Mimsy and Chance Lafarge went to Cloudburst for the weekend to celebrate their tenth anniversary. Drove up in two cars with Dandi and Mitch Oddbocker and Shay and Rafe Bickford. Planned to split up on Saturday so Mimsy, Dandi, and Shay could do girl stuff, and Chance, Mitch, and Rafe could do guy stuff. They’d all meet back at the hotel for beers before dinner.
On Sunday the guys would play golf. The girls would shop and go to a club called The Stirrup to see the male strippers. They’d all meet back at the hotel for beers before dinner.
Friday night Mimsy gets a call from the Finger Hut back home. Her youngest son Cisco, it turns out, has phoned in an order for sixteen deluxe pork finger baskets. It was to feed the junior varsity, he told them. Mimsy said, “You didn’t fill the order, did you?” Posie the manager said, “Yes, I did, but the credit card number Cisco gave me is invalid.”
Mimsy said a cuss word to herself, she told me, wondering why they didn’t run the dang card before they cooked the food. Anyway, she paid with her card, then called Shyanne to go pick up her brother’s food and tell the team to eat it on the patio, not inside.
Well, Shyanne drove into town and got the food, but bless her heart, she didn’t close the tailgate of her doolie before she drove back. All those dinners blew out on the highway without her knowing it. For near a hundred dollars nobody but the varmints got fed.
Mimsy and Chance read Cisco the riot act when they got back. The “credit card number” he gave the Finger Hut was the serial number on his Gameboy, which happens to have sixteen digits. Cisco claimed it had been Rodeo Peavey’s idea, as if that mattered. These young’uns! If they had half a brain between ’em they’d be dangerous.
(Stag Country, Copyright (c) 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)
EthicalDative 
The Road of Paint: Zadie Smith, “Henry Taylor’s Promiscuous Painting,” New Yorker, July 30, 2018 issue
Henry Taylor “Cicely and Miles Visit the Obamas,” from 2017, shows Taylor’s spatial, tonal genius. Courtesy the artist and Blum & Poe
[Henry Taylor’s paintings are transfixing for me. I’m infinity shy of his league as a painter, but I was touched by the “road of chaos… road of paint” phrase that Zadie Smith uses to name the path that Taylor has taken. (This wonderful article has also brought me my first encounter with the adverbialization of “synecdoche.”) For me, trying to paint is as necessary as it is fraught with anguish. I’m guessing crochet might be more relaxing!]
Horses, in Taylor’s work, appear sometimes as a symbol of freedom and power and sometimes as an expression of the opposite: power restrained, power trapped and fenced in.
…
The artist who once, back at Camarillo State Mental Hospital, painted a suffering patient synecdochically, with a screaming mouth for a head, could have easily become a commercial artist, using the part to represent the whole, pitching and selling on either side of the horizontal line that bisects so many of his canvases. He could have been a maker of icons and iconography, like Warhol, who made a Campbell’s soup can a metaphor for capitalism and made repetition itself a metaphor for fame. Instead, Taylor has chosen the road of chaos—that is, the road of paint.
Henry Taylor “Man on Horseback in Naples, TX,” from 2015. Courtesy the artist and Blum & Poe
Henry Taylor “Screaming Head,” from 1990. Courtesy the artist and Blum & Poe
(Zadie Smith, “Henry Taylor’s Promiscuous Painting,” New Yorker, July 30, 2018 issue)
Copyright (c) 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.