I will love Lyndsey Scott even more next year

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

Yeah, that's the way to end a novel. And for me, the way to get ready to begin a new year is to look back on old ones.

I'll look back two years ago, to New Year's Day 2007, when I was enjoying a holiday to revel in a batch of artwork recently sent to me by a new friend - the one and only Lyndsey Scott - whom I admire and enjoy so very, very much.

At the time I would have told you I don't like or read blogs, mostly because I dislike so much the ugly word "blog," sort of "blob" but only uglier. So not reading or keeping a blog, I wrote a fake press release and sent that to my friends with scanned images of the art.

It went like this.

Jan 1, 2007

On a glowing New Year's Day in the Meramec Highlands of Eastern Missouri, The Skuntry Museum, Library & Beer Cellar began to curate a major gift from the artist Lyndsey Scott, currently of the suburban prairie sprawl of Rantoul, Illinois.

The gift was a bundled assemblage of assemblages, drawings, translations, maps, and meditations. It arrived some time ago via U.S. Mail but is only gradually entering into curated status because of its wealth of detail and its arrival in the busy period just before the holidays.

"Not to demean in any way the value of contributing to the museum or Lyndsey's sincerity in doing go, but we seem to have benefited from a slow day at her father's legal office in Rantoul," said Chris King, museum curator, noting one piece in particular, "Secretary Booty," a contemporary American medicine bag consisting of two paper napkins fastened together to enclose a selection of as yet unknown gifts from the desk drawers of secretaries in the office of Mr. Scott, Esquire.

The curator also spent part of the morning patching together a song using for its lyrics bits of images from a homemade book by Lyndsey included in the bag of goodies.

"It felt inevitable that I would create something in call and response to Lyndsey's gift, because her gift was consciously referential, at points, to a book of my poetry I had sent her, along with a check and our thanks for contributing to the Blind Cat Black art invitational," King said. "And it was indeed an auspicious pleasure to begin a new year in the throes of collective creativity."

Now that Three Fried Men is a working group again, we'll have to do something with the song I wrote using only Lyndsey's images, "Come as a child": for it's a poetry score!

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Lyndsey Scott at The Skuntry Museum: selected works (above)

> Assemblage with Bob Reuter (detail)
> Female figure
> Contemporary aboriginal map
> Lotus figures on rice paper (detail)