No. 152: White Dwarf. Christmas was always so overwhelming it made him feel small. It wasn't the grandeur of the longago Jesus babe in its humble manger. It was the accelerating flurry, the feral grabbing, the Holly Jolly Christmas ringing porously through the loudspeakers in every store--even his groceteria. At Christmas, he refused all invitations to parties, dinners, gatherings. He wasn't a snob. It was just that everything made him so goddam sad. Christmas day he would be reading Ralph Waldo Emerson's little book "Nature" (1836)--as he had done each Christmas day for as long as he could remember. Emerson insisted that man ought to live in an original, nourishing relation to the universe. But that seemed an increasingly inexplicable ideal "Man is the dwarf of himself," Emerson had written, sounding a bit like the Nietzsche to come. Man is "disunited with himself . . . is a god in ruins." His reading would require the support of a heavy glass of Black Bush.
No. 151. Thunderball. Sometimes the car--his modified 1948 Jaquar XK-120--is real to him. Sometimes it's as much a sweet fabrication as it is a hectic memory. He is certain that he owned it once and drove it with mad precision all through Europe. But sometimes it is no more substantial to him than a cloud bank.
No.149. CAR-ving. Last week, he had carved a vintage speedster from plaster and it had pleased him greatly--mostly because it took him back to the wondrous Popular Mechanics magazines of his childhood. This week, he hacked out another plaster car model. This time he was thinking about the General Motors "Dream Machines" of the 1950s, conceived under the supervision of designer Harley Earl, the Cecil B. De Mille of GM car design. As design historian Stephen Bayley writes in his amusing book, Harley Earl and the Dream Machine (Knopf, 1983), "Earl conducted the design process with a mixture of discretion, emotional violence and bizarrerie." One of Earl's design innovations was the use of clay to make models (before him, car models had been made of wood). The clay modeling made for more fluidity and complexity of contour in the proposed automobiles--resulting, almost inevitably in features like wraparound windshields and absurdly towering tail-fins, taken to airplane heights for example, in the 1951 Le Sabre (the flower on GM's buttonhole during what Bayley calls "the golden age of gorp"). His own Dream Car carving came to nothing. Initially he was going for morphological extravagance. As he worked, however, he got interested in the essential properties of car-ness, and ended by producing a sort of ur-car that sat heavily on his plinth and looked like a fat potato with eyes.
No. 148. Speedster. He enjoyed taking breaks from the demands of his epic constructions. A couple of days ago, he sculpted a 1920s racing car from plaster and yesterday he gave it three coats of heavy, midnight blue lacquer. His vintage speedster, which was of his own design, reminded him nevertheless of the photos he had seen as a child of Sir Malcolm Campbell's Blue Bird, which set the land speed record in February of 1927 by attaining an average speed, over two runs, of 174 miles per hour. Sir Malcolm had been one of his childhood heroes.
No. 147. The Slab. Yesterday afternoon, an 18-wheeler huffed hugely into his sculpture-yard and offloaded this prodigious tablet, this horizontal stele of a sculpture--actually, more a faceted crystal than anything as blunt as a slab. It was huge and looked as soft as cheese or salt-water toffee. It was a gift--an extraordinary gift--from the Fredericton, New Brunswick-based artist, Robin Peck--who, in his estimation, was indisputably the finest sculptor in the country. How to repay such kindness? A more difficult and far-reaching question would be how to acknowledge and repay such sustained morphological and metaphysical virtuosity?
No. 146. Measure for Measure. He loved measure and measurement, the idea if it, the doing of it, just the possibility of it. When T.S. Eliot's self-pitying homunculus, J. Alfred Prufrock, complains that he has "measured out his life with coffee spoons," he doesn't get much sympathy from him. He can see JAP's regretting the coffee-spoons business, but the measuring of a life, well that seems all to the good! Know thyself, inch-by-inch, for real accuracy and insight. Waiting to be measured for a coffin is waiting too long.. Remember how, when you were a child, your parents used to measure you and mark your current height on the wall? Well let's have more of that! In his studio, he had a big collection of rulers, meter-sticks, tape-measures and other monitors of shape, direction and duration.. He played among them, like a kid at a playground.
No. 145. Trackless Wastes. After side-trackimg himself for months, he was visited this past week by an inescapable urge to return to the construction of his gleaming, beckoning, exquisitely visionary Art Railroad--upon which he had already lavished vast amounts of time and money. As a way of easing himself back into the project, he built a 1/4 scale model of an British-style double-ended caboose, which he saw as a potential office car, a place for storing his documents., a rolling file cabinet. His wife, Althea--who was frequently alarmed at the cost of her husband's personal railroad in hours and dollars spent--was upset at what she saw as a useless model, an object, however attractive, that was not at all practical. He couldn't make her understand its meaning as a talismanic, edge-of-the-wedge, return to full-scale construction. No matter how he argued the point, Althea continued to think it frivolous.
No.144. Recollected Fire.
"Fire, that striking immediate object...." (Gaston Bachelard, The Psychoanalyis of Fire, Boston: Beacon Press, 1964, p.2)
Yesterday afternoon, he painted a fire. It hadn't been in his mind to do so, but the decision came upon him with an urgent, almost corrosive ferocity as the result of his reading a passage in artist Lynne Wynick's brilliant new book, Edge. "There was a blacksmith at the foot of our garden in Llysfaen, Wales, 1955," she writes. "The flickering light from his forge, late in the evening, would send shadowy pictures onto my bedroom wall." It made him remember something he'd always enjoyed forgetting: that twelve years before Lynne's flickering forge, in the summer of 1944, he was awakened, in a creepy little house on the north-east corner of Princess Street and Division street in Kingston, Ontario, by images of flames dancing up his bedroom walls. They were the reflections of a huge, raging fire greedily consuming Anderson's grocery store right across the intersection, on the south-west corner of Princess Street and Division Street. There were no sirens, there was no ruckus. Just quiet crackling. The fire must have been suddenly new. He thought their house was burning down.
No. 143. The Rising Sun Sculpture. He filled his studio with what he regarded as astral clutter. The only still point in the heap of construction was an over-arching plywood sun. He labeled it with a poem, taken from a suite he had written last year called Voyages to the Moon.
A Rind of Light
a dish of island
sweetly circular
three hundred yards thick
turns the tables
as
a mountain
tectonic of labour
swings ever nearer
142. Votivity. His search for the elemental--and the therapeutically guileless--had led him first to sculpt a rabbit. He was grateful for the peace the little bronze creature had brought him and, as a result, he then wanted to mold a genuinely votive object, as an expression of the indebtedness he felt. The result was an exceedingly raw, rather primitive figure, an ur-man lying on his back, legs drawn up--a figure half in the throes of birth and half given over to the rigidity of death.
No.141. Rabbit Transit. All he wanted was a little serenity, and while making the conch shell had failed him in that regard, he decided to attempt an almost aggressively innocent sculpture--of a rabbit. He modeled the creature in clay and cast it in bronze. It was about a foot high. He was delighted that the rabbit finally gave him the almost childlike joy he had been seeking, mostly in vain. Althea (his wife) liked it too--and she was quite a severe critic..
No.140. Inside the Box. Everyday thinking about originality would have us believe that all conceptual freshness lay, like pumpkins in a field, somewhere outside the box, the box representing, presumably, home to the limited, manacled mind, immobilized by its own conventionality. But for him, the terrain outside the box, where all daring thinkers supposedly wandered in their quests for newness, was merely a raw, unformed realm and essentially barren. He felt certain that the best, most productive thinking happened Inside the Box, where ideas grew and flourished on the plangent whispers of what had gone before. Culture, he felt, was a continuum, not an aimless and distracting stroll in the woods. And besides, his box--which he had built himself-- was still, to some extent, open, slotted, ventilated. He could always take a fragrant kind of inspiration from the world outside, from the controlled breezes wafting through his floor-to-ceiling fenestration arrangements. People could think outside-the-box if they wanted to, but for him, that endless starting over, always setting back your conceptual clock, always waiting for the key of inspiration to turn and fire up the ignition of newness, was too iffy for him, too much like wishful thinking He preferred his wood-clad silences. His wooden box was, in fact, a little like a sauna. Or one of Wilhelm Reich orgone accumulators. But it wasn't sealed tightly enough for either of those. He found it to be, nevertheless, an entirely delightful cerebral concentrator.
No. 139. His Master's Voice. He wanted to listen to something that wasn't music and wasn't other people, and so he built himself a big conch shell from chicken wire and plaster of Paris. When it was dry and he had sanded it smooth, he sat expectantly beside the shell, hoping to listen to the distant, booming organ-voice of the sea. In fact, all he could hear was the whistling and hissing in his ears of the Tinnitus that plagued him every minute of every day... His shell sounded like cars passing by on a wet street.
No.138. Wedding Boots. Having had nothing whatsoever to do for a few moments last Thursday afternoon, he leafed through a few olfactorily oppressive pages of Fashion magazine and, dizzy from the combined fragrances secreted therein, found himself absurdly smitten by this gigantic pair of mirrored boots resting, constellation-like, on one of the magazine's perfumed pages. Two good friends were going to be married in a few weeks, and now he desperately wanted to give them each a pair of these evanescent Wedding Boots as a present. Seven League Boots for Honeymooners. The only difficulty was, he had no idea at all how to go about making them. What he needed was a celestial cobbler..
No. 136: Reviving the Red Rooster. It was probably his rereading last week of Paul Theroux's hugely enjoyable 1988 book, Riding the Red Rooster:Through China by Train, that got him thinking again about his own Art Train project--which had got a bit sidetracked over the past few months. Theroux, whose one-year journey, took him through Mongolia, Xinjiang, Manchuria and Tibet, clearly knew where he was going and what he was doing. As for his own sense of well-being in art, he needed to get back to his trains, He felt his life had too little direction lately. No clear destination. He was definitely off the rails. He wanted to get back on track.
No. 135. Call me Cordless. He was working diligently yesterday afternoon when his least favourite person, art critic Donald Bracelet, barged into his studio unannounced and clearly overexcited: he had brought his newly acquired 1937 Cord automobile to show him. This was surprising in at least two ways. First, he hadn't talked to Bracelet for more than a year, having had little respect for the kind of guff he wrote. Second, art critics couldn't afford classic automobiles. Most of them couldn't afford dinner. So what was this visit about? The wondrous aesthetics of the venerable Cord? Probably not. It was more likely just to show off. "How can you afford a 1937 Cord?" I asked the hitherto impecunious art critic. He looked momentarily abashed--but only momentarily. "Grandfather Bracelet died," he told me. "The Cord had belonged to him." I tried to fight down my envy which was rising volcanically in my gorge. "With great cars comes great responsibility," I said, as solemnly as I could. He scowled at me--as only an art critic can scowl..
No. 134: Plumbob Down. At first he reveled in the infallible vertical truth of his big cast iron plumbob. But it wasn't long before its unfailing rectitude began to make him restless ("mankind cannot bear too much reality," as T.S. Eliot had once reminded us). Sometimes, it's correctness began to seem almost smug. He knew mere objects couldn't express superiority, but he felt this quietly self-sufficient plumbob somehow did. So he took it down. As it lay now on his studio floor, he began to feel that while the ballistic plumbob itself was a bit oppressive, he really loved its hanger and the way it had been so carefully wrapped with hemp rope. The thing was no longer a plumbob now, but a freestanding two-part sculpture, with one heavy, dense part and one evanescent part. The wrapped hanger reminded him of the work of sculptor Kai Chan, and so, in his mind, he dedicated that part of the piece to him.
#133: Flowerbob. His cast iron plumbob did an admirable job of showing him what was vertical, what was really on the up and up, and he appreciated it. But there were times when the huge, hulking thing struck him as a little severe. He still wanted a reliable, unfailing truth device, but he fancied it in more lyrical terms. To that end, he laboriously carved a big, wooden tulip-plumbob, which, when it swung to and fro in his studio, seemed to scatter benediction as well as the gravity news.
No. 132. A Moral Machine He had asked a friend to forge him a big iron pendulum. As extravagant as this sounds, it seemed a matter of some urgency to him. He had become so suffused with half-truths, media evasion, bureau-speak, cultural waste and cruelty in high places that it was all making him ill. He had more than his fill lately of what playwright Tennessee Williams used to refer to (as often as he could) as "the powerful smell of mendacity." The pendulum was a glorious corrective to all that. It always told the truth. It always showed you what was truly vertical--and, in an age of poisonous ambiguity like ours, that was a lot to know.
No.132. Blues in the Day. He hadn't totally forsaken his Art Train, though the ambitious project was rather in abeyance. Much of it, his locomotive and several luxurious appointed coaches, sat waiting on a siding. Yesterday, in a railroad reverie, made up of equal parts of regret and remorse, he began carving a chunky reminder-train out of a beautiful length of soft white pine. He hoped it might carry him back, talismanically, to the first hectic joy of his now almost abandoned undertaking.
No, 131. The Big Blow. His presentation of two identical fans in potential confrontation (see Tabletop Studio #130--Fandom) was enough to bring email prompts from alert friends and colleagues, all crying "Newton!" to him and muttering about actions and equal and opposite reactions. But these comments, clearly well-meant, were for him wide of the mark. Here, when the two fans were switched on, there was neither action nor reaction. There was, however, a beautiful mistral symmetry, the splendor of two electro-zephyrs whirring at each other, equal in power and force--a vectoral standoff. He stood watching the the two fans, transfixed by the beauty of their blades now gone to ghostly, angelic, virtual discs. He longed to throw himself between them, wondering whether he'd be blown about like an eddying scrap of paper in a gutter, or whether he'd be pressed into a wholeness hitherto unimaginable.
No. 130. FANDOM. Lately, he had grown interested in modalities of interference, of experiments in sell-cancellation. At one time he was going to hire two giant spotlights and place them facing one another, throwing the full klieg-power of their focused beams directly at one another It seemed to him there'd be a delicious futility to such an engagement. Now he was going to try this same oppositional, standoff idea to two identical fans. He would stand precisely between them and find out something about the sensation of being held, squeezed between two equal and opposite blasts of breeze. He wondered if indeed he'd feel anything at all?
No.129. The Green Fuse. The poem by Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) had stayed with him all week. It was the first stanza in particular that he enjoyed so deeply, albeit in his despairing way. There was much in the poem he cherished::the phrase "my green age" for example (though he was no longer in it, chronologically speaking) and "wintry fever" especially (he was deeply into that, no mistake about it)
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever
Inevitably, he wanted to act the poem out, build on it,. theatricalize it. So he commissioned a gigantic green vase from a amiable ceramicist he knew, hired a comely model and quickly arranged a little tableau in which the vase was the green fuse through which the "force" (nature rampant)_would drive the flower. The model would be the flower.
No. 128. Peas and Thank You. He was so fucking tired, and there was a lot worse in his heart than the "damp drizzly November" that had entered the soul of Melville's Ishmael, his favourite character in literature. He wanted to paint--sort of--but despised everything he deemed worthy of the act. Then he noticed the fresh peas in the kitchen, They gleamed and beckoned like jade. Afterwards--inevitably--he felt betrayed by his own guilelessness..
No. 126: Beautiful Losers. He had three not unattractive female friends--Abigail Crunch, a cultural critic for a small local newspaper, Gwendolyn Witt, a playwright, and Noreen Nosegay, who sometimes wrote poems. One day he made the lighthearted mistake of referring to them as his beautiful Muses, whereupon they insisted on mounting a beauty contest--vaguely derived from the famous Olympian Judgement of Paris, where the goddess-contestants were Aphrodite, Hera and Athena. He knew it would all come to no good--though he took some comfort in the knowledge that whatever his choice, it would be unlikely to result in anything so dire as the Trojan War.
No. 125: The Shift. He had been longing to paint clear and clean, but don't want to make monochromes--like Claude Tousignant, who was one of his heroes--or stripes, like those of the late Guido Molinari. who was another of his heroes. A couple of days ago--in the course of the same day, fortuitously--he became excited, first, by the shifting stripe pattern on the end of a box of tissues (the stripes were meant to be truly vertical, but had been given a wrenching by the way the box had been folded and glued). Then, a few hours later, he saw this photograph--while browsing through an old New Yorker magazine from August 24, 2014--of "the remains of a house," which featured the same shift as the tissue box. Now he saw how he could paint his stripes, giving them the same deviated shift: not just as decorative composition, but rather as a subtle symbol for the times being so "out of joint" as they clearly were. He was even contemplating building the shifted-chimney structure as a brick sculpture--a companion piece to his shifted stripe works. He'd exhibit them together.
No. 123. The Emptiness of the Long-Distance Painter. So long had he sojourned in the realms of Malevich, Mondrian, Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt, Agnes Martin and, lately, Canadian painters Guido Molinari and Claude Tousignant, that he had come to a point of absolute evacuation. He was sitting for hours, gazing at a blank canvas and finding it to be unneedful of anything from from him. This, despite a clamorous, carping visit from three watchful muses, whose upbraiding of him was clearly coming to nothing.
No. 121. Cynar. All week he'd been working at his stylized artichoke. It was made of wood covered thinly with plaster and then cloaked up in so much resin it was almost slippery to the touch. Although he greatly enjoyed the bitter Italian liqueur, Cynar, the origins of the piece actually lay in his enchantment with the ancient Greek story of a girl from the island of Zinari who, inadvertently awakening the libidinous appetites of the insatiable Zeus, was carried her off to his airy Olympian boudoir as a plaything during times of his wife Hera's absences. The girl's name was Cynara. As the story goes, poor Cynara grew homesick for her family and, ignoring the high honour Zeus had seemingly bestowed upon her, fled back to her parents. Zeus was predictably angry and turned Cynara into a perennial thistle--the artichoke.
No.120. A Personal Architekton. There were times when the complexity of his life--a complexity he knew we all shared, albeit unwillingly--approached the realm of the unremittingly trivial. At times like these--which seemed more frequent lately--his hunger for solidity, for the elemental, became urgent and thus impossible to deny. During one of these bouts of need for the peace of the irreducible, he fetched a book about Kazimir Malevich from his library, and set about to construct his own version of one of Malevich's Architektons (1925-27)--nearly sculptural architectural models or, contrariwise, architectural models that were essentially sculpture. Malevich had made his out of plaster. He made this one out of wood, painted flat white. He had loved building it. The time of its making was the only stillness afforded him. As soon as the piece was completed, however, it was hurled into the hopper that democratically ingested everything else in the universe. What he needed--but couldn't attain--was a perpetual steadiness. And he had no idea where to find it.
No. 119: Two Vowels. Sometimes he forgot how engaged he had always been by poetry--or at least by language-at-the-end-of-its-tether. In a series of large paintings about poetry, about language-in-extremis, he had attempted to break down language into its components: parts of speech, syllables, phonemes, individual letters, solitary sounds, even punctuation marks. Remembering a poem he had once written in which he proposed that "horses were consonants while cows were vowels" was enough to lead him to paint vowels this week--or at least their imagined shape (this particular painting was called "Two Vowels"). A companion painting about consonants was to follow shortly.
No. 117: Apelles. It was Easter, the Festival of Regeneration, and he needed to paint an egg. An egg was the essential symbol of new life in the offing. He was thinking, too. of old Apelles, the virtuoso painter of ancient Greece. Apelles could draw a perfect egg in one stroke before you could blink an eye. He also pondered the intimidating brilliance of the venerable Constantin Brancusi: all those egg-shaped heads and bodies.
No.116. Wolf on the Tracks. There were times--and they were on the increase--when he began to suspect that his vision of an Agit-Prop Art Train were grandiose, narcissistic and, worst of all, childish. This growing restlessness of his was sadly but profoundly deepened by repeated visits to his studio by his least favourite art critic, Wolf Blitzen. Blitzen always succeeded in reducing his beloved railway dream to the product of some overexcited little boys' playtime, recalibrating his exquisitely designed railway cars into clumsy toy wagons, and making him feel like a clown in the process. Clearly, Wolf had to go. But how was he going to manage that? .
No. 115. The Basket of Fruit. A friend of his, a painter living in the countryside not far from his studio, had suddenly begun to make shaped canvases. Abstract shaped canvases. He thought they were really exquisite. He loved the idea of shapedness, and wanted to try his hand at it, but since he'd never painted an entirely non-representational canvas in his life, he decided he'd have a go at making shaped still life paintings. His first was a big basket of fruit--in grisaille.
No. 114. Craneman. Excited by his impassioned pursuit of the Art Train vision--perhaps over-excited--he decided to construct an image, a walk-in metaphor, for his creative euphoria. He would employ the crane that had lifted his locomotive high into the air. This time it would lift him. He loved the idea. The action would exemplify euphoria, ascension, rising above oneself. Problem-solving. His wife, Althea, however, thought it was a pretty silly idea. And dangerous too.
No. 113. Airship of State. He thought about his Art Train all the time except for last week when, in an unforeseen deviation from it--engendered by his watching too much Donald Trump on YouTube--he picked up a rusty, oddly futuristic, metal push-prop toy airplane he found on the sidewalk. and carved a large Styrofoam replica of it (despite his loathing for Styrofoam) in his studio. He was careful to reproduce, as well as he could, the airplane's rusty, pitted surfaces, and its aura of failed and crumbling design aspiration. The plane has a gruesome butterscotchy tone--like Trump's creaturely hair--and seemed to speak sadly, frighteningly, of aggression-gone-awry, of a festering vision turned inward, of the futility of living in a politically bankrupt, moronically material world. .
No. 112. The Locomotive of Damocles. It was a photograph of a hitherto unrealized work by Jeff Koons—a steam locomotive suspended from a crane over a busy intersection—that led him to use a rented crane to haul a derelict engine up into the air next to his studio. He saw the pendant locomotive as a symbol both of his Art Train obsession and the oppression he felt at the hands of his own enthusiasm. He remembered reading about how one of his heroes, Vladimir Mayakovsky, had once given a poetry reading while standing beneath an inverted grand piano dangling just inches over his head. This kind of theatricalized pseudo-anxiety appealed to him greatly. From now on—if he could afford to rent the crane—he would deliver all of his lectures and press conferences under this black cloud of a steam engine.
No. 110. Making Tracks. He painted when he could, but he was occupied most of the time with the development of his personal agitprop Art Train--by which he was going to take his work to the far corners of the world, to wherever there were railroad tracks. The task was Herculean, and he often grew weary in the face of his own ambitions. Tracks, real and imaginary--which would carry his own Twenty-First Century Limited--stretched out in every direction from where he stood, heading off towards an unknowable future.
No.109. Weighty Matters. As his commitment to (obsession with) his Art Train idea deepened, each decision seemed weightier than the one before. For days now he had been pondering the all-important choice of the appropriate locomotive. Having finally decided an a likely model, he constructed it in miniature in his studio. It was a splendid, hearty-enough little engine, and yet something about it remained unsatisfying.
No. 107. The Club Car. He grew prouder of his Art Train with every passing month, and the closer her came to reconstructing it and refurbishing it to his satisfaction, the more eager he grew to light out for parts unknown. This afternoon, he was extolling the delights--the delights to come--of the Club Car he had recently purchased from a collector. It was in terrible shape, but, as he explained to his friend, he would soon have it fully restored. Its interior was to be finished in mahogany, with fine brass fittings and soft, deep leather chairs. There would be a bar, a galley, a media centre and a small but distinguished library. He modeled it, he went on to explain, on the Club Cars he loved in some of his favourite films--in Vincente Minelli's The Band Wagon, in Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train, and in Michael Curtiz's White Christmas.
No. 106. Riding the Green Rooster. He and a handful of diligent friends continued to work on his personal, agit-prop Art Train--upon which it was his intention to travel the world, like a missionary for himself. It had taken months, but they were now almost finished with the caboose. It was his favourite piece of rolling stock. They had carefully maintained (and even exaggerated) the car's vintage, slightly battered look on the outside, but the interior had been impeccably designed as a rolling studio, replete with effective lighting, work tables, cupboards for supplies, a year's supply of paints and canvas, a sink, a washroom, a well-stocked bar, his computer, and a provisional, rather ad hoc bed for momentary visitations of happy exhaustion.
No.105. Highballing. As he grew older, his childhood obsession with trains reasserted itself. This past week, the week of his birthday, he decided to assemble a comfortable if not luxurious train, and set off for the unknown (if he could find it). Each piece of rolling stock was being crafted to his needs. This little luggage car was constructed to hold his art supplies and a small galley-like kitchen. He had hired a photographer to document his entire romance-of-the-rails, and this was the first session. He sat atop the little utility car like a king in his throne-room.
No. 104: Agitprop. Because he very much admired the thrilling Agitprop trains screaming around Russia bringing the good news to the masses during the 1917 revolution, he decided to build one for himself--to set off down the screeching tracks of the future. His train had come exactly a century after those of Lenin and Trotsky. He brought it flowers and wished it well.
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