Joe Brainard

from I Remember

I remember little records with big holes (45’s) and being able to carry a whole stack of them between thumb and forefinger.

I remember chipped beef and gravy on toast.

I remember, in Boston, figuring out that a street with lots of antique shops might be good for cruising, and so I did a lot of walking up and down it (“window shopping”), but, as I was afraid to look at anybody, I didn’t do too well. (The understatement of the year.) So home I’d go with my “handy work”; often aided by men’s wear ads in back issues of Playboy magazine. Which was no easy feat, considering how carefully men’s fashion photos avoid any hint of a body underneath. (Underwear ads the most infuriating of all.) However, they did slip up now and then. Like once I remember a very sexy two-page bathing suit spread that got a lot of use. And (in reference to “no easy feat”) that was long before it ever occurred to me that a little soap and water, or Vaseline, or something, might help.

I remember (early New York City days) seeing a man close off one side of his nostrils with a finger, while blowing snot out of the other nostril onto the street. (Shocking.)

I remember seeing an old lady pee in a subway car recently and it wasn’t shocking at all, I’m sorry to say. One does learn to draw blanks: a compliment to nothing.

I remember French bikinis.

I remember DDT.

Every new item forces a slight adjustment of our established sympathies, a little up or a little down. Cultural boilerplate alternates with the most extraordinary confidences and intimacies, so that we can no longer tell what’s what. How odd that Vaseline, the waste byproduct of oil rigs, has become synonymous with all kinds of sex. Much of “I Remember” Iremember, since it provides a cultural highlight reel, from chipped beef to DDT; and yet the details accumulate into a picture of the completely unique soul Joe Brainard seems to have been.

Joe Brainard’s “Untitled (Bicycle Ace),”