As a teenager I read several books by Alexander King, and they were a huge influence on my tender psyche. His memoirs formed my concept of what an artist is, and made me decide to grow up to be one. Sure, he was a heroin addict. But he was also the first one to confirm every one of the sneaking suspicions about the world which had been developing in my subconscious. And I wanted to make for myself a life that I could look back on with as much pleasure as King looked back on his.

It’s possible that Acid Heroes could have pretty much the same effect, and ruin a whole new generation of kids. Ruin them, that is, for the purposes of the military-industrial-religious-educational complex.

It’s okay to laugh ruefully at your old hippie self from the pinnacle of middle age, but to totally renounce that earlier, crazier self, as so many have done, is despicable. Ace Backwords has neatly avoided this possibility by remaining crazy, and also by pouring out for our delectation the results of years of psychedelically abetted thought processes.

Ace has been a fixture of Berkeley’s Telegraph Avenue scene for yonks. He used to publish Twisted Image, one of the zine era’s most widely-circulated publications. Cartoonist, musician, and writer, his mission has been to collect and present the art and music of street people. He’s published two other books, Twisted Image and Surviving on the Streets, both from the late lamented Loompanics Unlimited.

Acid Heroes is a druggy book with an anti-drug message; a detailed analysis of the downside of the counterculture which went on to become, in many negative ways, the culture. More than a memoir, it’s almost like being there – too much for comfort, maybe.

Geniuses, who often violate the rules of established society, certainly come to suffer for these deviations in various cruel ways but they are, at least, sustained in their travails by the glory of their brilliant accomplishments.
Alexander King

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This weird book was suppressed for many years, not without reason. Plenty of explicit sex, it goes without saying. But the really disturbing part is the beginning, perhaps the most venomous, hate-filled, manic-depressive, pathological piece of literature in circulation. It’s a book that can actually make you want to commit suicide.

Oddly, author Ben Hecht is famous for writing, among other things, screwball comedies such as His Girl Friday and Some Like it Hot. In fact, he received screen credit in 70 movies. Director John Huston admired his work ethic, saying,

Ben Hecht wrote pictures for a flat fee, with incredible speed, sometimes completing an entire script in three or four days. When he started to work, he didn’t stop, other than to eat and sleep sparingly, until it was finished.

Hecht wrote some film scripts under other names because of a spot of political trouble he got into in the late Forties, early Fifties. J Edgar Hoover called him a “fellow traveler,” in other words, a Communist sympathizer. He was boycotted by the Brits for being a right-wing Zionist.

Good grief, Hecht wrote 35 books including The Sensualists and A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago (a collection of his newspaper columns.) Fantazius Mallare came out in 1922, apparently in a limited edition destined for a small circle of friends. Legend says, and I see no reason to doubt it, that most of the copies were destroyed by the authorities.

Before ever hearing of Fantazius Mallare, I’d stayed with a friend whose wall held a poster depicting a man who appears to be in sexual congress with a tree. Yes, it was the Sixties. But see, that’s the thing. This artwork from back in the Twenties made a resurgence. Illustrator Wallace Smith, who like Hecht was also a newspaperman and a screenwriter, was recognized and remembered. That’s a beautiful thing. Because when alive, he did jail time for this drawing.

I’m all in favor of people telling what books influenced them the most, especially if they are specific about why and how. In my case, one Ur-book towers above all the rest.

My grandmother’s books were kept in low, open shelves, within the reach of a crawling or toddling kid. I was allowed to take the books out and look at them. Most had no pictures, although the paper coverings were interesting. But this one was my favorite. So unlike the pastel or primary hues of kiddie picture books, its pages held the first real art in my life.

It was the early 1950s, and we didn’t have television. Visually speaking, the world was pretty dull. A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago had been published in 1922, and I was ready to discover it.

I absorbed Herman Rosse’s stylized, realistic, stark, beautiful, bizarre pen and ink drawings, and wondered what these pictures were about. In order to find out, I had equip myself to read the words of Ben Hecht that told the stories. Along with learning to read, there were many delayed-reaction side effects in my psyche and behavior on account of this book.

Over the turbulent years, when I thought about it at all, the memory was an intense one. I looked it up once, but it was way beyond my starving artist budget. I thought about it again when I saw 365 Views of Mt. Fuji, the collaborative marvel by Linda and Todd Shimoda. I was like, “Where have I seen it before, this literary/pictorial synergy, this perfect fusion of art with text?” Of course. The Ben Hecht book with the black and white pictures.

I told the Shimodas about this insight, and they bought a copy, and saw what I meant. A few more years went by. Online, I found a cheap battered copy of the 5th printing (1927) and finally acquired my own 1001 Afternoons (without a dust jacket, sad to say). But who cares about that? My interest was, to put it bluntly – did the book still hold up? OMG yes.

Rosse was head of the School of Design at the Chicago Art Institute, and an art director in Hollywood, where he designed the sets for Dracula, Frankenstein and Murders in the Rue Morgue in the early Thirties.

Revisiting Rosse’s illustrations, after 50 years, I realized many things. It was because of this influence that I recognized the quality of a friend’s work when we were in junior high school. And indeed today that precocious student is an esteemed artist back East, with one of his works hanging in Buffalo’s Albright-Knox gallery. In the Sixties, I vibed to Aubrey Beardsley because of Herman Rosse. His work in
A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago so informed my taste that I was always looking for its equivalent, for Salon: A Journal of Aesthetics. I sprang at the opportunity to publish work by such artists as Musicmaster, and Billy Mavreas, and a whole bunch of other really great ones.

One thing I realized as an adult is, how clever Rosse was in meeting the challenge of illustrating stories when mostly constrained to vertical strips. Working with these uncommon dimensions, the height so much greater than the width, the artist is both stretched and confined.

When I was a kid we lived in Niagara Falls, NY, and my dad worked in a factory. Sometimes we went to pick him up, out on that long, long road lined with factories and the occasional ancient, desolate, falling-down house that wasn’t in their way yet. The factories were enormous, dirty and stinking industrial plants that produced chemicals as both product and by-product.

Thanks to Herman Rosse’s artwork, I saw them differently. At night they were fairy palaces dotted with lights and jets of flame. When I was older and taking the bus to Buffalo, twenty miles away, the incredible evening beauty of some industrial areas made indelible mental snapshots I can still call to mind. The ability to see things in certain ways, I trace directly back to this piece of art, right here.

Today, a 1922 first edition of A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago goes for a $1000 or so, but I’m pretty sure what my Grandma had was the book club edition. (Pause for research.) Uh-oh, it seems there was no book club edition. Wonder what ever happened to Grandma’s books?
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Fantazius Mallare

A cultural critic named David Toop once said, “What’s utterly now will soon be thoroughly then; once it becomes then, it might as well be paleolithic….” That’s what this book is all about – the ephemeral nature of “what’s happening now.” Generation Ecch! is written by Jason Cohen and Michael Krugman and illustrated by the brilliant comix artist Evan Dorkin. It’s funny as hell.

The whole generation, created as a marketing strategy, was big news for a long time, leading to such heinous faux pas as the New York Times printing a “Lexicon of Grunge”, which purported to give outsiders the key to insider lingo. It turned out to be a hoax, much as I often suspected back in the Sixties that the journalistic revelations of lists of hip drug terms were a put-on, my favorite being “mohaski” for marijuana – uh-huh.

The text begins with a long examination of all the names that have been given to “Generation X.” They examine Ecch’s taste in comics, and its preference in so-called literature, the “MTVesque brand of fiction” that spawned Fast Sofa, Less Than Zero and of course Generation X. Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights Big City comes in for a big chunk of criticism, not least for the unparalledly annoying device of narration in the second person. The exuberant hatchet job culminates in a parody called Ecch-topia.

Cohen and Krugman have not a single kind word to say for MTV’s “mockudramedy,” The Real World. Its clones, Beverly Hills 90210 and Melrose Place are also savaged. Why waste hours and hours watching the vapid things when you can just read this chapter?

The authors give Ecch-deity Quentin Tarentino a verbal beating equalled only by the recent Baffler articles by Gary Groth and Ray Carney. They take apart John Hughes and The Breakfast Club in irresistibly hilarious style, reserving particularly merciless ridicule for Judd Nelson’s “transparent bid to get his nostrils nominated for an Academy Award.” Fast Times at Ridgemont High is analyzed as the prototypical Ecch movie. Pretty in Pink and Reality Bites are slandered- “Why create a character when you can just saddle someone with a job at the Gap, a Charlie’s Angels lunchbox, and a list of the sixty-six different men she’s slept with?” The holy of holies, My Own Private Idaho, is savaged, followed by an examination of the reasons for such pathetic excuses for heroes as River Phoenix.

There are some disrespectful observations about the fashion for hemp, and a comment on Newsweek’s concern with the fact that not only grunge kids but regular straight-looking teenagers buy clothes and accessories with pot leaves on them. “The nation is concerned about these clean-cut youngsters: pot T-shirts are gateway fashion, leading eventually to suit jackets emblazoned with syringes.”

The authors joyfully deconstruct Kurt Cobain, “the very manifestation of all that is ecch.” “If Kurt could see the canonization that accompanied his demise it would kill him. Again.” They take us on a tour of Lollapalooza which is characterized as “ridiculous.” The Deadhead phenomenon comes in for even worse. “The keyboard seat in the GD is perhaps the most dangerous job in showbiz. Three, count ‘em, three Grateful Dead ivory ticklers have kicked the bucket over the group’s twenty-odd years, yet both drummers live on and on…and on and on and on and on….”

There is a very disrespectful examination of Antioch College’s verbal consent policy in regard to sexual activity. They take on the silliness of most of the doings “online” and of the rave movement. “Pearl Jam is the one band that exemplifies all aspects of the Ecch world: the sappy liberal politics, the sad victim mentality and the classic rock meets grunge sound. Oh yeah, and they’re from Seattle.”

Unlike the perpetrators of too many of the zines that show up in the mail, the authors of Generation Ecch are literate, widely read, very smart, and conscious of the existence of other values and other world-views than the narrow spectrum embraced by the rest of what they call the “rebel without a clue” generation. They even know about stuff like the Living Theater and Judith Malina before she was Grandma Addams. Their lively, funny, irreverent approach is reminiscent of Tom Wolfe’s incisive takes on cultural phenomena, and there isn’t a dull sentence to be found. “If a modern-day Allen Ginsberg were to write a Howl for the age of Ecch, the minute he saw the best minds of the generation he’d drop the poesy and go into the schmatte business.”

First published in Scene, July 1996

Note: the work of Evan Dorkin appeared several times in Salon: A Journal of Aesthetics.

Inspired by the movie Rubber Tramps, 9 t-shirt designs.

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This is an unabashed paean to one of my major culture heroes, Ace Backwords. I’ve gone on record calling him a genius more than once, and when everybody else reaches the same conclusion I’ll be already there, reclining in a hammock, sipping lemonade and grinning “I told you so.”

If music were the only thing Backwords had going for him, he’d still rank as an artist. If cartooning were the only art he practiced, he’d still be from the very top shelf. If he never did anything but write prose, he’d still be great. And if community building were the only thing he’d ever undertaken, he’d still be a star. Put it all together, and what we have here is one brilliant sumbitch with a roster of accomplishments anyone could be proud of. Especially taking into account that the guy has been on the streets for pretty much all of his creative career.

Ace Backwords went from “soft li’l suburban pup” to bum (his word) so long ago that “homeless” wasn’t yet part of the consensus vocabulary. His book, Surviving on the Streets, describes the lifestyle of a displaced and disenfranchised soul who feels like “an actor in the wrong movie” when confronted by the exigencies of contemporary American life. His purpose is not to romanticize the street life, nor to minimize the hardships and horrors, but to testify that wealth and security are not the ultimate goods of life. It may not happen this year or this decade, but at some point in the future Surviving on the Streets will be recognized as a seminal work in the areas of sociology, philosophy, psychology, pop culture, urban studies, you name it.

That doesn’t sound so crazy when you consider prolific author Colin Wilson, whose breakthrough book, The Outsider, was written in the British Museum’s reading room by a man who slept in a park. It’s enough to make you wonder how many of the aging ragamuffins hanging around the public library are undiscovered philosophers. There are some remarkable people living in squats, in alleys and sheds, and under highways. Bringing their stories to light is one of the things Backwords does. For many years he’s been the guiding spirit behind the Telegraph Avenue calendar, and he oversaw the making of a CD of street musicians’ work. He’s written a number of profiles of individual homeless folk, and the cartoons have helped raise consciousness and awareness.

Loompanics, publisher of Surviving on the Streets, also brought out Twisted Image a few years back: a collection of Backwords comic strips, most of which first appeared in his own indie publication, also called Twisted Image. For years his comics ran in Maximum Rock’N'Roll and High Times as well as in countless zines, including mine. As an editor (Salon: A Journal of Aesthetics) my appetite for his stuff was insatiable. Whatever theme issue I dreamed up, he had material to fit, and I was honored to showcase it. Even better, Ace Backwords sometimes made it known that he liked something I wrote. It knocked me out! A good word from that direction meant more to me than selling a hundred copies. Not exactly the accepted recipe for success – but I’ve always been funny that way.

Being a humorist is no joke – especially for the few who do a really spectacular job of using comics as a medium for social commentary. Not only must you draw well enough so the targets of your satire can be recognized, you must also make a point and, of course, be funny. T. S. Eliot said that when one is forced to write within a certain framework, the imagination is stretches to its limits and produces its richest ideas. Nowhere is that more true than in the cartoonist’s art. It requires great ingenuity and mental agility to take the immense, intractable stupidity of humankind and break it down into four-panel increments.

The thing is, no matter how thickly he lays on the sarcasm and the cynicism, everything radiates from a center of deep primal innocence, a dyed-in-the-wool decency that’s impossible to disguise. There’s an extraordinary level of empathy, hypersensitivity to hypocrisy, and a finely-tuned bullshit detector. Ace Backwords is not only a maestro of irony but the king of cognitive dissonance. One of his favorite targets is the person capable of believing two mutually contradictory things at the same time. It’s a trait he never ceases to be amazed by – even in himself.

And then there’s the music: hundreds of songs. The ones I’m most familiar with are on a tape of nine songs, made last year, called Really Stoned: The Jann Wenner Experience. Made on a 4-track, the album has plenty of heart, plenty of attitude, painful honesty, and honest pain. Like Jerry Jeff Walker says, “A man can’t lie when he tries to sing, it betrays him every time.” In fact this material reminds be of some Jerry Jeff Walker tunes on Hill Country Rain, and of some Edgar Winter numbers on Not a Kid Anymore. I don’t want to use a corny word like “mature,” but there’s the same kind of vibe – the unpretentious voice of a former wild child who eventually got his shit together.

I’m a sucker for lovely, melodic songs – Billy Vera’s “At This Moment,” George Michael’s “One More Try,” Robbie Robertson’s “Broken Arrow.” In other words, I love a good ballad, and “Where Ya’ Going?” definitely is one. My musical vocabulary is inadequate but I find, for instance, the plangent one-note-at-a-time accompaniment strangely affecting. The song “You Know We Will Miss You When You’re Gone” makes me smile because a reference in the lyrics takes me back to what someone once said of me: “Your problem is, you’re always lookin’ for the fuckin’ Great Beyond.”

I read a memoir once by a Russian woman who happened to learn the prisoners’ tapping code, never dreaming that one day she would be in solitary confinement with the tapping code her only lifeline to sanity. This is why it’s good to have a book that aims to help you “prepare for a camping trip that could last for the rest of your life.” If I wind up homeless, I’ll be equipped with the insights and precepts of somebody with true street cred. Surviving on the Streets is packed with practical advice on self-defense; how to use time to your advantage; what you really need and what will only weigh you down; and the identity of your best ally. And how to feed yourself – that chapter is the biggest eye-opener in the whole book.

There’s no fat here. Each line is vital, and every now and then one comes along that shines with gemlike purity. “Your relationship with Nature is akin to a relationship with a demanding dominatrix; if you learn to please Her, she will reward you extravagantly.” Never pious or shrill, Backwords is both tough and fair, and he says the things that need to be said. It is his hope “that the homeless activists’ appeals for help on behalf of the homeless will be balanced with equal appeals for the homeless to get off their asses and start helping themselves.” And he’s the man to lead the way, showing how to not only survive but thrive – how to “skate through the urban landscape, basically doing whatever the fuck you please.”

One of the downsides is being unable to escape from people. When it comes to that impulse, I’m a sister under the skin. Merely to be left the hell alone is one of the hardest things for a person in any social class to accomplish. Backwords says he’s always been a private person “…but when you’re on the streets, you live in public, 24 hours a day…your true self comes tumbling out, in all its glory and hideousness, simply because it’s just too much effort to maintain the act all the time.”

If you lack a permanent address, you will frequently be in dialog with peace officers, who often seem to give more attention to the homeless than to higher-priority offenders. “It’s a running joke on the street scene that maybe we should start killing people so then the cops would leave us alone.” The best relationship to have with the authorities is none. But if you must encounter them, the book contains helpful hints that could save your life.

The best relationship to have with housed people is, don’t go out of your way to piss them off. And give yourself a pat on the back for your contributions to society. “The nocturnal life…can be seen as a public service that we perform to help alleviate the crowdedness of city life. We’ve volunteered to go on the night shift….” Another valuable service performed by street people is to utilize some of the amazing amount of stuff that gets thrown out by this wasteful society, thus reducing its collective guilt for squandering the earth’s resources.

Relating to other street people is what you’ll do most of, and a lot of that relating consists of hassles. In some ways the street tribe is like a big, dysfunctional family. Some are out there because they’re crazy, others because it’s the only way they know of staying sane. Many, says Backwords, “find a sense of community and belonging on the streets that they’ve found nowhere else,” which is a damn sad commentary on life in these United States. Among the homeless are vulnerable victims and violent predators, and a vast majority who just get along the best way they can. A friend who lived in Oakland once told me the public demeanor to strive for is one that subtly broadcasts the message “Don’t fuck with me – because I just might be crazier than you.” Backwords endorses this tactic of looking preventively formidable – up to a point. Look dangerous, okay. Actually be dangerous, no. He did, in his youth, experiment with carrying a very sharp knife, but when it ended up being used against him, he gave up on weapons.

As a homeless person, you want to watch out for con artists – but they’re easy to spot, because if they really possessed any expertise in their chosen field of hustling, “they’d be in the Senate attaching their parasitic tentacles to the public trough.” The analysis of the Asshole Syndrome alone is worth the price of the book. The upshot is, Plan A would always be to – walk away. “It’s a big world after all, and the whole point is to occupy a part of it that doesn’t include The Asshole.” But sometimes walking away doesn’t work. You’ve got to have a straight talk with yourself and mentally define where you want to draw the line. And be prepared to hold the line.

The same advice goes for love. As in every stratum of society, a romantic relationship can turn out to be far more trouble than it’s worth. “You very well may meet some beautiful, alluring siren and wonder to yourself what this beautiful person is doing on the streets. Sooner or later you will find out.”

Ace Backwords takes a jaundiced view of the Sixties era, all its various revolutions, and its legacy. “It cracks me up when I hear these so-called ’60s icons congratulating themselves for the greatness of the ’60s….Virtually every aspect of American life has gotten worse since the ’60s. Much worse.” He looks at the basic philosophy of every brand of counterculture from then until now, and finds them all inadequate, especially the concept that alienation from society is a badge of honor. “Can anyone explain the universal scorn I keep hearing being heaped on “yuppies” these days? It just means you’re young, you live in the city, and you’ve got a fucking job.”

Drugs? Don’t get him started. The Backwords Theory of Drug Rotation is classic. In fact there’s a lot of funny stuff in here, like the amusing riddle:
“What does the street person do when he gets sick?”
“He dies.”

Backwords reflects extensively on a subject that also occupies my thoughts: materialism. Having stuff, and the stuff you then need to store and maintain your stuff, and how many hours of precious life you want to give up to income-producing activity in order to continue storing and maintaining your stuff and getting more stuff. Backwords describes the process of paring down consumerism to the minimalist nub, where the only things purchased are socks and underwear.

I’ve been on both sides of the economic fence so many times – okay, never actually on the street. But when things get too comfortable I always find a way to cut my income. I’ve had long periods of voluntary poverty, and some spells of a bit more poverty than I had volunteered for. Interspersed with these have been more prosperous eras. (I define prosperous as being able to have a tooth fixed instead of pulled.) I’ve drawn some lines. This sounds like a ludicrous problem in our era of casual dress, but it used to be an issue: high heel shoes. There came a time when I decided to never again take a job where I had to wear high heel shoes. And I never did. And I grok the anecdote where Backwords passes a street crew and imagines a worker thinking “Man, this job might suck, but at least I’m not sleeping in the dirt like THAT poor slob!” And Backwords is thinking, “Man, sleeping in the dirt might suck, but at least I’m not standing in the middle of the street, holding up a stop sign, and listening to jack-hammers all day long like THAT poor slob!” Or wearing high heels.

I adulate Ace Backwords because he’ll say anything. I don’t mean, like, say “shit” in church, or some trivial jive like that. Here’s a writer who will reveal the bottommost layers of his psyche – like Yeats said, “the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.” And who will speak for viewpoints guaranteed to reduce a Berkeley liberal to tears of incoherent rage. Such as alleviating homelessness by reducing immigration. He also has plenty to say about the utter stupidity of clean needle programs.

Backwords quotes Dylan: “To live outside the law, you must be honest.” He also quashes any myth about the supposed nobility of the non-materialistic lifestyle, “Fact is, most of us street people are just as greedy as your average Wall Street junk bond crook. We’re just not as good at it.”

On the street, I probably wouldn’t last a week. But in previous lives, who knows? I think there was a time when I spoke Rommany and never spent a night beneath a roof. I think in other existences I was a wandering mendicant monk in India; a naked aborigine in Australia’s outback. And life was good. Without sugarcoating the reality of homelessness, Backwords reminds us that, like any other condition of life, homelessness can have its spiritual aspects. But you have to work at it. “It is all too easy for your very soul to be twisted like a pretzel into a grotesque thing in this world of gargoyles.”

A truly remarkable thing is, all his wisdom for living on the streets also applies to those of us who are snugly housed. Here’s my favorite line: “You’ll know when you hit on The Truth, for it will soothe your soul, it will get you ALL THE WAY OFF, while Pollyanna wishful thinking will only cock-tease you to distraction. Let that be your guide.”

And in the writings of Ace Backwords, I feel that sensation again and again of having hit on The Truth. Here’s an example, from one his interviews. “I feel confident that the homeless and the ‘downtrodden’ don’t necessarily suffer one iota more than the rich and affluent. In fact, in many key aspects, the rich may suffer more.”

To me, hearing that is like a cool drink of water in the desert. I know it’s true. I’ve known some miserable rich people. And some beatific paupers. Which doesn’t mean I’m in favor of children starving or any nonsense like that. It’s just the way things are, here on planet Earth, notwithstanding any amount of PC nanny-state propaganda, and it’s a helpful precept to keep in mind. For anybody.

Call me a cultist, a fanatic, whatever: Ace Backwords is the best, and you heard it here first.

Newest book: Acid Heroes

Ace on the homeless situation
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Ace’s blog

I love it when stuff like this happens!

I don’t remember how I met Manuel Samaniego – probably he was working on an outdoor mural – but it was in 1977 or ‘78, in Pomona, California. A couple of times I visited his studio, a huge space over an empty store in the ghost mall.

The art blew me away! So strong, vibrant, imaginative, intelligent and trippy! I thought, “If this guy doesn’t make it, there is no justice in the world.” And as we know, there is very little justice in the world – which is what we had been discussing. A friend of his had been killed by the police in front of thirty spectators. A close relative had been in serious trouble due to mistaken identity – a car’s identity, to be precise, because it was the same color as a car the cops were looking for. Other visitors stopped by the studio and told similar stories. I remember feeling a guilty unease, because it had been a long while since I’d been politically active in any meaningful way.

I moved away and years went by – almost 30 of them. “What ever happened to this guy?” was a question that crossed my mind more than once. From time to time I’d look at my photo album and there would be the pictures Samaniego had let me take with my little Instamatic, because I couldn’t afford to buy any art. If I’d been an heiress, I would have stripped those walls and left not a single painting on the premises.

Eventually, and later than everybody else, I joined the webiverse and gained the ability to look for people and information. But still, somehow, it wasn’t until today, when a piece of paper slid out of a file folder, that I actually got around to looking up Manuel Samaniego. And there he is, at Buddha Belly Studio – still painting, still showing his art, still keeping the faith. The discovery that this wonderful talent hasn’t been crushed by the years and the world, just made my day. In fact it feels like Christmas, such a gift it is to know Samaniego is still out there doing it. The picture on this page (with permission) is typical of the ones that blew me away.

Manuel Samaniego is still painting, and I’m still not an heiress. But if any heir or heiress reads this, I say to you: buy this man’s work.