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Maximalism and psychedelics
The Ojai Studio Artists studio tour is this weekend (I’ll be open Oct 12 & 13 - closed Saturday). Please come! It’s a super fun weekend and a great opportunity to see art in the places its made - 60+ artists are participating this year, painters and sculptors and printmakers and ceramicists and all manner of visionary and lovely-human artmakers.
I’m hustling to finish up a 16 foot-long landscape that will go off to a private collection in Ventura in a week or two - it’s the biggest picture I’ve ever made, close to a mural in size but filled with tiny details and patterns. Excited to show it off semi-publicly before it goes off to its new happy home.
I can’t help it - I’m a maximalist. As you’ll see this weekend, my studio is crammed to the ceiling with pictures and journals and art books and a collection of stuffed chickens. My pictures are packed with brushmarks and scratches and drips and starburst orchards and big bulbous clouds and curvy roads and boxy little houses. And of course, lots and lots of color.
A few times I’ve tried to get serious and limit my palette to tasteful creams and beiges and big empty fields of nice muted tones but it’s no use - once I get going, the colors take over and all the spaces scream out to be filled up.
When people walk in, nine times out of ten they stop, take it in and say some variation of: “Wow: so much.”
At this point they either scrunch up their face and make a quick exit (their expression reading oh-so-clearly: NOT FOR ME), or start wandering around letting all this stuff do what it does to me. I love the feeling of super-saturation and world-building, the dreamy calm I felt as a kid drawing imaginary maps or the engrossed concentration I felt clicking together whole cities with multicolored Legos with my kids when they were little.
Every once in a while, someone comes in and looks around and says with a conspiratorial wink, “Hey man - mushrooms? Or ayahuasca?”
I get it - there’s definitely a psychedelic, head-shop energy in my work. I’m not all that interested in physical reality. I play with perspective and point of view, filling a single image with multiple vantage points and sources of light. There’s a reason a series of mine is called the Big Weirdies.
The truth is I’m not into psychedelics. No shade to those who are. I’ve read the Michael Pollan books and have nothing but respect for those exploring deep reaches of consciousness with whatever tools make that possible.
But the truth is none of my pictures were created with chemical assistance. Anything more than a few milligrams of cannabis makes me anxious - every sentence ends with some variation of: “Do you like me?”
After looking over the Big Weirdies at a recent show, a friend said with a wink-wink laugh, “I’ll have what he’s having.”
He’s welcome to it! What I’m having is fun.
Art and ancestors and that feeling of “this is IT”
Written for a monograph to accompany exhibit showing at Sullivan Goss Gallery in Santa Barbara, through May 22: “Betty Lane and Christopher Noxon: From One Generation to the Next”:
—-
Betty Lane is my favorite artist. Of course she is - my whole idea of what an artist is and does was formed growing up looking at her pictures and visiting her little A-frame house in the woods of Cape Cod. She was witchy, stylish, a near-mythic figure representative of worlds far removed from where I grew up in sunny, showbiz-adjacent LA. She played viola in a classical quartet, wore necklaces fashioned from eucalyptus pods and sent my sister Marti and me rambling, weirdly adult letters in a scrawl that only my dad could decipher.
And she’s the main reason I make art today.
How that happened is complicated - I came to painting in midlife, twenty-odd years after she died, and when I think back over our times together I can only remember once when she directly encouraged me. When I was seven or eight I made what I called a “busy picture,” with jagged orange mountains and a spotted green sky and the remainder of the page jigsawed with trees and bushes and roads and horses and, curiously, an entire city with skyscrapers the same scale as the bushes.
I remember her seeing it and grinning, clasping her hands in front of her face, heavy rings clanking together. Then she put my busy picture in a frame and hung it up in her house, right alongside the “real art.” (It’s not lost on me that the work I’m doing today looks an awful like that busy picture - so much for growing up!)
My memories of her will always be tied up in that house. You entered from the basement, where she did most of her work. Bits of colored glass hung in the window. A stuffed dinosaur sat on the chair for models. Everywhere there were paintings, stack upon stack, many on both sides of a single sheet of particle board.
Upstairs, the wooden skeleton of a pterodactyl spun slowly over a rollout desk stuffed with letters and postcards. Shelf tops were crammed with a crazy assortment of stuff—a chunk of mosaic, a swath of fishing net, a patchwork pillow, a model of a double decker bus, the inner workings of a music box. She didn’t keep these things as ornaments—she seemed to carry on a relationship with even the littlest of objects, and most gave her real pleasure. A few did not—I remember a compact disc by Bobby McFerrin had been marked with a piece of masking tape, printed with the words, “No! No!” (“Don’t Worry Be Happy” was not Grandbetty’s jam).
By the time I moved to the Cape in 1992, Betty had stopped making art. Her hands jittered, she said. She was past 80, rail thin and fiercely independent. She still tore around in her little Accord, a string of fading yarn tied to the antenna, a sticker for Michael Dukakis’ failed presidential bid on the bumper. She walked with a stoop and had a hard time getting up from a chair, but her eyesight was perfect—she took great pleasure playing a video of her cataract operation. “My eye!” she giggled, pointing at the television picture of a quivering pink glob.
I visited her on my days off work. She always made a fuss at first, shuffling around the house fetching things. A peanut butter jar filled with old raisins. A ceramic dish filled with unsalted peanuts. Cold white wine in a shrimp cocktail glass. We would talk local politics, the new New Yorker, the threat of snow.
She died a few years after I’d moved away. My father Nick and his wife Nicky helped organize an exhibit at the Cape Cod Museum of Fine Arts; family flew in for the show. In the following years Nick took on the job of sorting through her art, diaries and ephemera, assembling a biography made up mostly of her extraordinary diary entries and promoting her work in ways she was either too proud or shy to do herself.
It’s moving to think of my dad poring over all this material, filling stacks of legal pads with notes on her paintings and chapters of her life, including a frank, brutal account of her pregnancy, the chilly and mostly distant relationship with Nick’s father and various tortured, passionate love affairs (with a Jewish divorcé named Harry, a family friend and a man only identified as “Mr X.”)
I began looking after Betty’s paintings and papers a few years ago shortly after a big shift in my own life. I had recently moved out of LA to the small mountain town of Ojai and was dealing with the aftermath of a divorce and the sudden death of my eldest son.
Grieving is exhausting and infuriating - the feelings rage, the voices in your head run on repeat and everything seems to hit a dead end (he’s gone, she’s gone, they’re gone, you’ll be dead soon too…). While I had no formal training, I took up painting, holing up in a studio tucked in a grove of olive trees. Art offered an escape from the doom loop, a place where I didn’t really know who was doing the work, where the best I could do was get out of the way and let whatever needed to come arrive. I painted to get lost, to lose myself, to connect with something bigger and beyond me.
And Betty was my teacher. Early on I did a series of pictures modeled on hers, pairing portraits she’d done of subjects from the 60s and 70s beside pictures of my Ojai friends and neighbors and looking at Betty’s landscapes of Canada and Cape Cod while working on my own pictures of the landforms and skies I saw on walks near my new home.
As inspiring as her work was, Betty’s a tough teacher. She went through so many stages, so many modes, from gloomy surrealism to moddish satire. She was obviously a modern artist, but she wasn’t interested in categories like surreal, expressionist, primitive, writing at one point that “the more I work the less important style seems, the less essential. One is either good, and has it, or one hasn’t. Style is only the means.”
That’s a tough lesson for someone starting out - either you’re good or you’re not. But elsewhere in the diaries I found more encouraging ideas. In 1942 Betty was living in rural Canada, raising my dad and occasionally venturing out into the countryside to paint. She described a trip into the sand dunes of southeast Ontario:
There is a beautiful Petrified Forest of dead and somewhat submerged cedar trees. I walked towards this in pure delight feeling that indefinable, this-is-it feeling….I have been here before. There it is, clean and dead and still there, and one cannot not paint it.
That’s how it is - you see something, some particular combination of things, some brilliant scene of light or color or form and you feel deep down in your bones: one cannot not paint it. What Betty is describing - the this is it feeling - is the mysterious act of art, the verb not the noun, the aligning of an interior unknowingness and an external sensory reality, the transcendent sense of YESness, or order and harmony and congruence: THIS IS IT.
I struggle with the words to describe how good it feels to have my first real show alongside Betty, how it connects me to her and my dad and also Charlie, whose presence and absence was such a powerful force in the creation of these pictures. I don’t understand how these static, two-dimensional rectangular depictions have this power, a kind of mysterious charge that electrifies the connective threads between the here and there, the living and the dead, the seen and unseen, the known and not.
Back in 1936, Betty wrote the following in her diary:
“I am no intellectual and no genius, but I am capable of experience, and I am still discovering things which make me feel alive, so that you others may shout your heads off about this theory and that. With me, life is going on, and nothing else matters.”
That’s why Betty painted, and I why I do too.
But what does it MEAN?
A confession: I’m at a loss when it comes to art talk. Which is weird - I spent a career working as a journalist and author and while I only started painting seriously three years ago, I feel like I shouldn’t have any problem putting my work in words, or appreciating and fully comprehending writing about art.
Nope. I get clammy and tongue-tied describing why I paint what I paint, where it “comes from,” and what I love in the work of artists I revere. Meanwhile most writing about art leaves me baffled and confused and vaguely annoyed.
During a recent trip to a contemporary art museum, for example, my daughter and I entered an entirely empty room with only a faint scent of… what? Was it air freshener? A wall label had a long paragraph that ended with this sentence:
“With its invisibility, this sculpture of odors lacks materiality and captures the nature of the painting to convey an olfactory memory.”
Leaving aside my feelings about this particular piece – which, with its “invisibility” and “lack of materiality,” hit me like the height of fancy-pants hokum – I was stuck by this peak example of offputting, gobbledegook art talk. Maybe, as my artist friends tell me, it’s a coded language used by gallerists and dealers to justify value for the highfalutin academic crowd.
Or maybe it’s just like my daughter put it: “Word salad.”
Of course there’s a lot of great writing about art - I’ve loved discovering Jerry Saltz, the former long haul truck driver now chief critic at New York Magazine (Recent Tweet: “Do not ask what a work of art means. Ask what a work of art does to you. Art is not a thing, or a noun. Art is a verb. Art is something that does something to you.”) And a few months ago I was fortunate enough to be reviewed by the art critic for the LA Weekly, who wrote that my “riotously chromatic, time- and space-bending canvases seek the energy of the landscape’s wild places, infused with the pluripotentiality of the mind’s eye… Noxon’s investigations in form and color mirror the adventures unfolding in his consciousness - and the persistent sense that everything is alive and fundamentally connected, even beyond what our eyes can see.”
Wow, right? I had to look up “pluripotentiality” (defined as the “ability to develop in any one of several different ways, or to affect more than one organ or tissue”) but I was grateful for the new word – and in deploying her arsenal of art theoretics, she identified something in my pictures that I hadn’t known consciously but is unmistakably there.
Meanwhile in my studio when people come to visit – and I’ll be open March 11 all day as part of the Ojai Studio Artists Second Saturday program, come by! – I’m still mostly tongue-tied when asked about a painting. I can handle the most common questions: where is that? What kind of paint are you using? But I’m totally unhelpful when it comes to the question: what does it MEAN?
Sometimes I’ll start out with an idea in mind - about the interconnectedness of nature or the way landscapes have been historically used as promotion in the exploitation or settling of wild lands. But then the tools take over, the paint starts moving and honestly I’m not thinking at all. Painting for me is a feeling, an experience, a devotional practice that exists way beyond words.
So I guess my only answer to the question of what does it mean is another question:
How does it make you feel?
So I’ll keep feeling and studying and hoping that over time, the work leads me to more new places and even some better words to describe it.
LA Weekly Q&A
Thrilled to be featured in the LA Weekly - arts editor Shana Nys Dambrot offered a critical assessment of my work and a Q&A that featured this exchange:
L.A. WEEKLY: When did you first know you were an artist?
CHRISTOPHER NOXON: Oh man the capital-A Artist question — that’s a doozy and one I’ve struggled with a lot, especially since I spent most of my life as a capital-W Writer, working as a journalist and writing books while compulsively sketching in journals and eventually getting into illustration. I started painting seriously in midlife so I’d rather just say I make art, which vibes with my two core beliefs that 1) identity is a trap, and 2) verbs over nouns.
The timing is terrific, with my landscape “Awha’y 2” appearing in a show opening Dec 10 at Gallery 825 on La Cienega curated by MoCA curator Rebecca Lowery. This is my first time showing in my old stomping grounds - excited to bring my “wild idyl” art to the big city!
Making pictures
For those of you who know me mostly from my writing, a recap: I started painting seriously after moving to Ojai in 2020. I was wrecked from the loss of my son and started working in the studio behind my house mainly as something to do besides feel miserable. Writing has always been super hard for me - I love having written but the truth is I kinda hate to write. I literally have to set a timer to make myself do it (OK for the next 30 minutes ONLY NEW WORDS NO CHECKING EMAIL OR DICKING AROUND). I know if I concentrate and work really hard, I can get the words to sound something like me. Making art isn’t like that. I’m out of my head. The truth is I don’t know what I’m doing. I sometimes have to set a timer to know when to STOP. I love all the materials and techniques and colors and layers. And the best part is I don’t know what’s going to happen or how something will turn out. I feel like I’m a witness more than a maker.
When I started I was mostly doing paintings of crowds, scenes of protest marches similar to the illustrations in my book “Good Trouble: Lessons from the Civil Rights Playbook.” In those pictures of bodies forming big abstract patterns, I was trying to capture the feeling of being in a group gathered around a higher purpose. I was also, it only occurred to me after many months and many paintings, using art to fill a more personal need (isn’t that always the case?). It was the height of the pandemic and like so many of us, I felt isolated and lonely and terrified at the state of the world. I craved crowds. I was like a cartoon man crawling across a desert, drawing pictures of pitchers of cold water.
At a certain point I switched from people to places. I can tell you precisely when that happened - it was a bright early summer morning and I was sitting in my studio, looking out the barn doors at an enormous outcropping of pricky pear cactus. In a flash, heads and bodies appeared in the shapes, a whole gathering right outside my door.
I made a so-so painting of those cacti and was off to the races, chasing scenes and panoramas and shapes and colors from walks and hikes and travels around Ojai and the surrounding wilderness. The work has gone from flat and graphic to layered and scratchy and abstractly patterned. I try to let the pictures tell me what they want and get out of the way. I believe it: the vortex is real. There’s an energy and spirit in this place, as tangible and powerful as the feeling you get amid crowds of people raising their voices together. It’s a simultaneous feeling of awe and humility, of togetherness and singularity, of personal insignificance and limitless possibility. The landscape contains it all.
To Charlie (on your 23rd birthday)
Twenty three - where would you be?
(Also, for real: where are you now?)
Imagine you in grad school, or abroad, or doing a fancy fellowship.
Maybe a junior diplomat or working for the CIA.
Please tell me you’re not toiling in a hedge fund.
Or maybe you’re floundering.
Stuck in a stupid job, roving the world, out on Rumspringa.
Finding your way.
It’s fine, really!
Just remember to call home, answer texts, don’t worry so much.
It’ll all work out.
You’ll be OK.
Ha.
Up until recently
When we called your cell we could hear your voice
(OUTGOING MESSAGE, how perfect).
So sweet and sad to hear you:
Smart, funny, gracious, silly, deep, scattered, eager to please.
It felt good and bad: the love of you, the loss of you.
Then one day this summer Oscar called and nothing.
Line disconnected.
It hit hard - harder than it should’ve (of course the line went dead what did we expect).
Still, it brought out one of the few things I’ve learned about all this:
Disconnection is not OK.
There’s so much that’s senseless and unknowable
(Why? How? What now?)
But this much is true:
You cannot be disconnected, erased, forgotten, deleted, moved past.
There is no “letting you go.”
(Fuck right off, “Ghost” and those tales of spirits freed once loved ones “move on” - that’s just toxic propaganda so non-grievers can feel less uncomfortable).
And so we hang on to what we can get:
Memories, reminders, breakdowns, “deathaversaries” and birthdays.
Feelings and rituals and visits to your grave
Saying the kaddish and being there for others in pain
Toasts at family meals and sharing of photos and stories
And nurturing and prioritizing and asking the question:
How do I honor you?
How do I make you proud?
How do I keep you here?
So happy 23rd, wherever you are.
We’re all here loving and remembering and celebrating you
As best we can.
Love,
Dad
My book was banned and it’s awful/amazing; I am horrified/honored
The LA Times just published my Op-Ed about how power and politics is playing out in a ban on “Good Trouble.” I appeared on LA Times Today to discuss the ban with host Lisa McRee.
News that “Good Trouble” is among six books targeted in a ban by conservative school board members in Virginia Beach is disturbing and outrageous - it’s also great for “Good Trouble.” A book that was previously languishing in the stacks of three school libraries in the district is now on a well-publicized hit list of Forbidden Material - what could be more attractive to curious readers than that?
There’s lots to say about the ban and why they included my book in their list, but my basic take is this: the ban isn’t about “protecting” kids from “critical race theory” or “pornography.” It’s about power and oppression and cynical efforts to win elections by whipping up fear among fearful white conservatives (the six books on the list include two prominent Black authors, three that deal with gender and sexuality and my book - huh).
If you haven’t already, please get a copy of “Good Trouble” and/or leave a review on Amazon, donate a copy to a school library, gift it to any and all the people in your life looking for inspiration and knowhow about how to answer oppression with big-hearted, community-minded, multi-racial direct action and reconciliation.
Dear Charlie (on your 22nd birthday)
Dear Charlie,
Hey kiddo! Dad here, writing to you at 3 am on a Wednesday, up with my fuzzy emotional support dog snoozing against my leg and a big mug of ginger tea and the feeling that I’ve spent way too much time ruminating over this TRIBUTE I need to deliver to you in my Grief Group tomorrow.
It’s freaking me out. What I’ve been stuck on is HOW. I don’t want to do a speech or PERFORM anything. I don’t want to pick out emotional songs for a memorial playlist, or make anything that turns you into some kind of mythical figure.
Point is, there’s simply no way to get across all the ways you’re important to me, or the ways you were unique, or what your passing has meant to your brother and sister and friends and so many people beyond.
It’s all too much.
Our hearts are shattered. They always will be. That’s just what we get, After Charlie (AC).
But you don’t need to hear about all that SADNESS. We’ve had enough of that in the last 500 days. 502 to be precise. That’s a lot of days, and God Charlie so much has HAPPENED - a global pandemic, civil unrest, attacks on democracy, fires and floods and ever more evidence that the world is spinning closer and closer to some kind of Great Unraveling.
I said it a lot in the months after your death but it’s still true: your passing seemed to kick off a cascading chain - things got knocked off their foundations when you went. The normal order is out of whack, all over.
Thank God the family is mostly OK. Not that everyone’s not damaged and fucked up, obviously. Grandpam died back in March and that was as painful and drawn-out as your death was shocking and sudden. But as we approach what would’ve been your 22nd birthday, it feels like everyone’s fine, knock wood. No one got COVID - and Bubbie beat her pancreatic cancer and will probably outlive us all.
You should see Oscar - he grew like two feet and started WORKING OUT - he’s now almost as tall as you and looks like some kind of soulful Tim Riggins jock. Plus he’s getting all-As and just got his driver’s license and has an actual girlfriend, a nice Jewish girl from the Valley who plays guitar in an inde rock band and does KARATE. He still gives the best hugs ever and is free with his feelings about losing you, but basically, yeah - he’s killing it at being a teenager… in a way both you and your sister never quite managed. You’d be proud, and prolly a little jealous.
Eliza spent the year of lockdown holed up in New York, doing a Zoom job for the Jewish Book Council, then went back to Brown over the summer and seems to have hit her stride. Just like you seemed to take every course that sounded hard and impressive-sounding, she’s taking everything weird and wonderful. She’s designing her own major: “interdisciplinary artistic practice,” which sounds impressive but will hopefully allow her to keep on using her Ivy League education to do things like build wooden boats, make fires with electronic instruments and decorate a porta-potty on campus with streamers and pom poms for an immersive theater project called “Porta-Party.”
Also she’s been dating a little - she doesn’t share much, but I take it she’s worked her way through two guys in her Dungeons and Dragons campaign - one of whom is a THEY. So that’s very intriguing, tho I guess just how it goes these days? You’re always on her mind.
Now this is sounding like one of those braggy Christmas letters. And why am I bothering: don’t you KNOW all this already? Aren’t you following along? Who am I trying to IMPRESS?
I guess I’m doing what I do when I visit your grave. Telling you the latest family news keeps you in the mix. And something tells me you ARE still aware of us, still keeping tabs, still PRESENT somehow. I picture you at camp or maybe on a fellowship in some remote spot in China. I can feel you smiling, hearing all this. And that makes me feel a little better.
But this is not a Christmas letter and you are not in China - this is meant to be a TRIBUTE to you, Charlie, the Remarkable Human. I know I’m your dad, plus you’re dead, so there’s every reason for me to overstate and lionize and romanticize. But come on - You really were EXCEPTIONAL. You spoke Latin and Mandarin and a fair helping of Hebrew, you worked in a university robotics lab at 16, you read everything from trashy fantasy novels to St. Augustine, you loved babies and dogs and your mother.
You were also clinically depressed, deeply contrary, painfully argumentative and seemed entirely unsure and anxious about what to do in the world. I’ve been reading over some of your schoolwork, and from those essays in philosophy it’s clear you KNEW you possessed a brilliant mind - but it’s also clear that beyond getting everyone around you to ALSO recognize your brilliance you had NO IDEA AT ALL what to DO with that mind.
But hey: that’s what being 20 is all about. You were figuring it out. (And for what it’s worth I’m 52 and still don’t know what I’m going to do when I grow up.)
No matter what you ultimately decided, there was never any doubt about who you WERE. Through all your stages and phases, from the soft curly-haired boy slurping noodles… to the weird tween practicing violin in his pajamas and Ninja mask… to the tall gracious man wandering the streets of New York puffing a Dunhill… you always had the same basic Charlie essence - thoughtful, warm, cordial, goofy, a little troubled. You came into the world apologizing and asking permission and ruminating on how things worked.
And mostly, that big brilliant brain of yours led you to rational, scientific conclusions. No one would have described you as mystical or woo-woo. I remember the day we stopped off at that place in Oregon, the VORTEX HOUSE OF MYSTERY, where the normal rules of reality supposedly go haywire - balls roll uphill and short people appear tall, like that. Eliza and I were all in, excited at the spectacle and open to the weirdness. Not you, no way. You arched that eyebrow, crossed your arms and answered every mystery with a rational, probably quite correct, explanation.
But whether or not you believed in it, you had magic in you. You possessed powers. I know it.
You were a sucker for fantasy and world-building and the supremacy of imagination over so-called reality. As a kid, it was all about trains - so many hours spent splayed on the carpet, connecting tracks, rolling those bright wooden models around. Then it was LEGOS and BIONICLES, robots and vehicles and structures you built and displayed and swooped around the room. You moved on to that crazy complicated card game Magic: The Gathering and then the irritatingly addictive World of Warcraft video game and then all those other games and anime worlds.
But I have a special place in my heart for the summer you got into closeup magic - remember that tutor we found you, who came to the house to teach you how to palm cards? Somewhere in your room there’s a stack of business cards your aunt Blair gave you for a birthday printed with the words: CHARLIE NOXON: MAGICIAN.
And it’s true.
The real proof is these stories that turned up a few months after you died. I first heard about one in particular in a taped conversation between your classmates at Columbia - your girlfriend Izzy sent over a few. The one about Jesus returning to the earth is amazing, and did you hear the college literary magazine published it a few months ago?
But the one I keep thinking about is called “Again.” It’s set in the afterlife. It begins: “The first time Elmer lived again, he stuck mostly to the way things had been.”
So this guy Elmer is a regular schmo who dies and is given the choice to run through his life again, moment by moment, from birth to death, as fast or slow as he likes, until he dies and comes back to a stucco, fluorescent-lit room, facing a desk with figure known as the capital-R Receptionist. The Receptionist welcomes him back and asks whether he’s “ready to proceed.” He can either go through a door to the unknown, or return through the door from which he came and run through his life again, as an observer, unable to alter any of his experiences.
The story follows Elmer as he recaps again and again, lingering on favorite moments and learning to speed through painful or boring portions. He learns to fast-forward through childbirth and the toddler years - “you only ever want to do that once,” he says - “the crying, the fighting, the near constant smell of your own shit” - and then to slow down and savor the best parts. He spends a month in an orgasm.
The story is written from a distance, describing how Elmer comes to operate in this newexistence. There’s just one fleshed-out, dramatized scene. It comes right at the end of the story. Elmer is seven years old and on a skiing vacation with his grandpa. The story goes:
“Coming down a slope, grandpa weaving a path behind him, Elmer closed his eyes. Everything was passing too quickly. The trees were blurs. The snow was shiny and fresh, scattering shafts of sunlight over the scenery. It’s too much. Little Elmer closes his eyes, because the darkness makes sense.”
The first time I read that scene I stopped cold.
It’s CRAZY you wrote that a year or so before your own fatal skiing accident. I wondered: is it a clue? Maybe you were up there on that mountain and you felt the same way Elmer did - maybe you shut your eyes because it was all too much and ONLY THE DARKNESS MAKES SENSE?
But I don’t think so, honestly. There’s no part of me that thinks you were that foolish or that you wanted to die. We’d just spent a solid week together and you were in such a good place, happy and confident and full of promise and joy. You were shushing down a sunlit mountain on a clear beautiful day. Your lovely and amazing girlfriend was texting you cute memes and sweet messages. It was New Year’s Eve. We had massages booked.
You were not Elmer.
But what you were was a really good writer, and a builder of worlds, and somehow in writing that story I think you folded the field of time and space and foresaw some of the circumstances of your own passage. You made a story out of it.
And that gives me hope. Hope that there is more than the raw emptiness of your absence, that the past and present and future are not as fixed and inescapable as they seem, that maybe there really is a world in which you are not gone at all.
It also offers an answer to my never ending, nagging question: WHAT DO I DO? By which I mean, how do I turn the loss and shock and incomprehension and self pity into something REAL going forward? How do I keep that precious Charlie essence alive in the world?
Some things seem obvious. I’ll keep talking about you and sharing memories. I’ll resist the urge to treat you as a Thing Too Painful to Mention and keep your pictures and stories around. I’ll keep saying kaddish and showing up for others experiencing loss. I’ll treasure Eliza and Oscar and do everything I can to be there for them in their grief and growth, never putting your absence ahead of their presence, feeling your love for them in our times together.
I can also keep your essence alive by simply doing the things you did, learning from your example. Like how you used to buy strangers cups of coffee. Or take long aimless walks in the city. Or seek out old people and little kids at parties. Or take care to share little pleasures with those around me, whether that means sending giddy texts when it snows or preparing fancy expressos for visitors or gifting friends with bags of exotic Yuzu gummi candies.
And I won’t forget that story. How you reached into the future with your imagination. In the story, Elmer crashes and breaks a leg - he doesn’t die. But from that scene, you flashed to the Receptionist, who asks whether he wants to go over it all again, relive and recapitulate his life, or if he’s ready to proceed to Whatever Happens Next.
“I think I’m ready,” says Elmer, at last. “Here goes nothing.”
It’s a great ending, kid.
I love you.
Always,
Dad.
Tree comic in Modern Loss
My stepmom Pam died last March, five weeks after the death of Charlie. She died after a long bout with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. It’s a rough way to go. She and my mom were together 30-plus years - they were among the first gay couples to get married when it was made legal in California.
Her passing was everything Charlie’s was not—anticipated, painful, drawn out, medically complicated. Being there for her and my mom in those last days at Kaiser Hollywood was intense and difficult and ultimately beautiful. As the hospital chaplain Daniel (happily, a rabbi!) put it, she had a good death.
Then Covid hit and we weren’t able to have a proper memorial. A few months ago my mom started planning a Zoom service and firing off emails about going to the LA Arboretum to pick out a memorial tree. I was not at all excited about schlepping to LA to pick her up and take her out to Arcadia… but the experience turned out to be amazing.
I made a comic about it for Pam’s service; it was published last week by the website Modern Loss. Check it out in the illustrations section on this site, or here.
A week before the memorial we planted Pam in a biodegradable container below the root ball of a peach tree in mom’s back yard. We took turns pouring her chalky grey remains from the plastic bag into the hole. The whole process was strange and oddly normal, like most momentous events. The container where Pam now rests was made of cheap cardboard. It looked like shipping material. Which I guess it was.
Not rarin’
“People are rarin’ to go,” someone said on a Zoom the other day, and she was right. You can feel it, the yearning to gather and hug and congregate and get past this godawful year of limitation and loss.
I get it, even as that cautious excitement lands in my heart with a resounding NO.
I am not rarin’. Not even a little.
I don’t want to get on a plane or ride on a subway or yell across a crowded table in a restaurant. I don’t want to wait in a line or push up against people in a nightclub for a better view of the band.
I’m OK here, thanks. I miss movies and restaurants and live music and theater, but I’m just fine in the weird state of suspended animation, highlights of my weeks sloshes through nearby creeks and pots of white bean stew. “Dude be careful,” a friend told me this morning. “You’re gonna end up a crusty Ojai hermit, going off grid and growing your own kale.”
Sounds pretty fucking good.
Maybe I’m just old (is 52 old? It’s definitely not young). Maybe the lockdown put my burgeoning codgerdom on a high steady temperature, hardening a relatively active, flexible social animal into a dense block of immobility.
Or maybe it’s the grief. It’s always there, a weighted blanket covering every movement. Fourteen months have passed since Charlie died (432 AC to be exact) and I’m doing a lot better than I was. But even now the world feels wrong and dangerous and empty.
The pandemic is awful and disruptive and terrifying, yes. But it has also been weirdly accommodating of those of us in mourning, slowing everyone down and focusing energies on deeper and more difficult truths.
Anyway none of this is over, obviously. We may never return to “normal.” Perhaps I’ll feel differently when I get my own shot. For now, I’m staying put.
Yahrzeit
A year has passed. It feels like 20. For everyone, sure - but for us especially. That makes it sadder, somehow. I want the time when he was here to not be so far away. I want him closer, always.
A friend told me the other day he was sorry our tragedy was so rudely preempted by a worldwide pandemic. I told him it’s fine, really. Yes, our loss has now become that awful thing that happened just before the epic year of uncertainty and upset and grief. But I see all that and I think: yes, exactly. The outsides match the insides. Loss is loss. There’s plenty to go around.
I’m less OK with the anniversary falling on this day. All our future New Years, all our Winter Wonderdays are now shot through with his absence. Then again, it’s not like there’s a better day. Every day is now overlaid with this dark filter. That’s just the way it is now. It’s like how when people apologize for bringing up Charlie. I explain it’s not like I’m NOT thinking about him. It’s better to mention him often, keep him in the world, have the outsides match the insides.
We had a lot of back-and-forth about the epitaph. We agreed to include a quote from Talmud that Charlie liked - he talked about maybe getting it as a tattoo. “The world was made for me” on one arm, “I am but dust and ashes” on the other, quoting the Talmudic teaching about carrying those messages on slips of paper as a constant reminder of one’s simultaneous importance and irrelevance. That feels very Charlie. If it was good enough for skin it’s good enough for stone.
We had a harder time with the other message. We wanted something personal, something that summed up Charlie specifically. Oscar, bless his 15-year-old heart, suggested the following:
Charlie Noxon: Extraordinary Human. Mediocre Skier.
Oof, right? Solid joke - but I was really not looking forward to seeing that joke every time I went to visit. Thankfully, he was kidding - in the same way he and his siblings constantly razz one another, and us—about how Charlie mispronounced words (ORGY!), or how he licked his lips in that weird way or how I wish I was Black, apparently.
“That’s what love looks like,” says Eliza.
The epitaph we went with is not a razz but a callback. Credit to Jenji for coming up with it. To explain: when Charlie was 11 or 12 we took a family trip to Ireland - he was in his full chubby-pubescent, newsie-cap phase. One rainy day on the Ring of Kerry we drove out to a nature preserve. Charlie wanted to stay in the car and read his book, but we insisted - this wasn’t optional, and we’d brought a bunch of exotic Irish candies as bribes. Charlie wasn’t having it. As we trudged up a grassy ridge he got madder and madder, hollering at us red-faced about the unfairness of it all. Near the top, I turned around and looked and the clouds had parted and you could see shafts of light coming down on these impossibly green fields, with flocks of fluffy sheep and glittering lakes and, no kidding, TWO full rainbows.
“CHARLIE, LOOK!” I said, triumphantly. “It’s BEAUTIFUL!”
He turned his head, gave the scene a quick look and announced:
“Beauty only lasts ten seconds. Then it’s just familiar.”
That became a favorite story, part of our family lore - Charlie’s Hike Rage. It was partly funny because he wasn’t really wrong—beauty does have a way of becoming ordinary. Also, we’d apparently forgotten the lesson from that Alaskan cruise when the kids were little: children could give two shits about scenery.
So sure, yes Charlie: beauty is brief. Yours was full of insight and humor and sweetness and soulfulness. And yes, it was all-too-brief. Unfairly, cruelly so. But your mom is right to use this epitaph to correct you on one thing—your beauty did not last ten seconds. We never got sick of it. It grew and expanded and deepened in your life, as you went from soulful child with fabulous Jew-fro to stupendously smart man who could do anything you put your mind to. You had some of my childlike wonder and some of your mom’s courage to call bullshit, and a whole lot ELSE that was all yours, all Charlie, forever beautiful. And we will miss you for the rest of our lives.
Second Coming
Charlie studied cryptography, robotics, philosophy, economics, Mandarin—if it was difficult (or sounded impressive), Charlie was into it.
Still, he had no idea what he wanted to “do” after college. I worried he’d get recruited by the CIA or, worse, get into hedge funds. At one point he said he’d probably go to law school “to delay the inevitable.”
I hoped he’d use that big brain to save the world or invent something or cure a disease—we wouldn’t be Jews if we didn’t want a doctor in the family – but the “inevitable” he talked about was almost certainly writing. Our family is lousy with writers – his dad, mom, aunt, uncle, two granddads and grandmas were writers, not to mention a whole slew of novelists and poets and journalists among his extended family.
And from early on, Charlie was a sucker for a good story. He read like a fiend as a kid, ripping through fantasy series and dressing up as an actual BOOK for Halloween one year. As a teen he started reading DeLillo and Murakami and famously carted around the Kissinger biography to high school hangouts (was it any wonder he didn’t make many friends his own age until college?). Recently I asked his girlfriend Izzy what books he talked about while they dated, remembering how I’d attempted to seduce women with the swoony-romantic novels by EM Forster. “Kant and St. Augustine,” came the reply.
So it wasn’t exactly a surprise that in college, between lab science and economic classes, he started turning out stories on the sly, for fun. Then in his sophomore year he took a fiction workshop and started writing strange, speculative, ambitious, death-obsessed stories. No tortured autobiographical slices-of-life for Charlie. In one story he imagined a near-future in which the destitute pay off their debts by harvesting their organs. Another followed the soul of a recently deceased man as he ran through his life over and over.
Then there’s “Second Coming,” a comic story about the return of an all-powerful, all-forgiving savior. I was initially surprised Charlie had chosen Jesus as a subject—the Christian Lord & Savior didn’t get much play around the house and while I’m from Quaker stock, whatever spiritual yearnings I possessed as a kid were satisfied by “Star Wars.” The spooky guy on the cross held zero interest to me; I was good with Obi-Wan. So it was especially moving to read Charlie’s version of the Jesus story, with the Savior appearing in multiple bodies as friend and confidante to anyone who calls on him. His Jesus is compassionate, comforting and not a little bit annoying. After losing his job and girlfriend to a far more suitable replacement (how can you compete with Christ himself?) a sadsack nonbeliever named Theo confronts his lord and savior in a scene that’s equal parts George Saunders and George Romero.
He may not have identified as a fiction writer, but Charlie wasn’t shy about his work. After he died I learned that Charlie had submitted “Second Coming” to the New Yorker, receiving a form rejection that he proudly displayed in his dorm room (One measure of what different people we were: I waited until my 40s with a sure-fire piece before daring to approach that particular mountaintop).
It turns out he also submitted the story to the Columbia literary magazine Quarto. And this month the magazine published it with the following note:
Quarto received an online submission from our late peer Charlie Noxon in early November of 2019. As an editorial board, with the support of his family, we chose to honor his writing in our 2020 Spring Print Edition and are posting it to our website now. We offer our sincerest condolences to his family, friends, and loved ones.
As birthdays go
As birthdays go, 21 wouldn’t have mattered all that much to Charlie. He was already such a grown-up in so many ways. Obviously reaching the drinking age didn’t matter much – in his first year at Columbia he and some friends got on the dark web and ordered ridiculously real IDs - his had his real name and photo, along with a watermark and a scannable strip on the back. He liked going to old man bars and ordering a Long Island Iced Tea (ugh - maybe he wasn’t so mature).
Then again, he probably would’ve loved the official milestoney-ness of 21. He definitely wanted to be seen as adult - or anyway he liked the props of maturity. He famously read the Kissinger biography for fun and had an elaborate cappuccino maker in his dorm room. He also had a secret stash of Dunhill cigarettes - and tried to quit at one point by taking up a pipe.
At the same time he could be so silly and childlike. He loved anime, fantasy novels, and the FB group Dogspotting. When we went to a family gathering he’d hang out with the little kids (and then the older folks - skipping the kids his age entirely). His summer wardrobe mostly consisted of T-shirts picturing cartoon bears. As a kid he was obsessed with trains and close-up magic and Star Wars - and he never saw the point in putting away childish things.
Which leads me to a memory from Winter Wonderday a few days before the accident. It’s painful to describe but it’s super vivid and feels important to remember today.
Winter Wonderday is the made-up holiday our family celebrates as a kind of alternative Xmas - we duct-tape our pants over the fireplace (bigger than socks!) and leave offerings to Irving the Snowchicken. This past year the kids and I spent the holiday at a hotel in Utah. We stuffed ourselves with the traditional chicken and waffles and made gingerbread chicken coops. Before bed, we wrote notes to Irving before lighting them on fire.
Charlie read his aloud:
“Hello Mr. Snowchicken! Here are things I want:
- Love
- Mommy and daddy together again (JK LOL shit’s toxic)
- Personal fulfillment
- Solace and stability
- Cool things and stuff.
Love, Charlie.”
Before bed, Charlie looked over from the armchair where he’d curled up and asked if I’d come over. “Pick me up!” he demanded. I did my best, heaving him up and taking a few labored steps around the room.
“Baaaabeee!” he called, laughing and looking me right in the eyes. “Baabeee!”
Then he picked me up and I did the same bit, saying over and over in a silly voice: baby, baby, baby. Then Oscar got a turn, and Eliza too. It was so sweet and crazy and funny and it only occurred to me later that we were basically acting out an exercise an attachment therapist might have an adult child do with an estranged parent.
The next morning, after he’d opened his presents, Charlie put on his new Chewbacca pajamas, cradled his Lego James Bond Aston Martin set and said, over and over,
“I’m an ADULT.”
Happy birthday Charlie. I love you.
Awake the Morning After
I did a dumb thing last night.
I drank whiskey and watched
As the criminal clown rallied his cult.
Whipping up fear
Mangling truth
Whoring the flag.
Drumming up his people to fight the radical mob
(meaning me, meaning us, meaning war).
So galling so shameless so deeply deeply terrifying.
And this morning was Torah study
(virtually, obvi, it’s all virtual now).
To learn about the shofar
From a smart & soulful rabbi.
So the shofar we know is a ram’s horn that sounds a blast a tone a long and holy honk.
In Torah it’s first of all a call to arms.
The sound of vanquishing enemies conquering cities taking slaves.
(Today’s parsha says hey maybe wait 30 days before taking a slave as a wife to give her time to grieve, because you know: ethics. UGH this book sometimes I can’t even.)
We dig deeper in the book and find more meanings (because this is what we Jews do, forever turning things over and over and God I love that so much):
At Mt. Sinai, the shofar blew in smoke and thunder above trembling masses.
It signaled revelation and the awesome power of God Almighty.
And in Isaah there it is again, sounding to the exiles
Bidding them to leave their slavery in Egypt and return to the holy place.
And the soulful rabbi says: also remember Rambam.
Who summed up the shofar as
An alarm clock.
Waking us up.
Reminding us to reject vanity and idleness.
The sound says, care for your soul, improve your ways, get with God.
The soulful rabbi says that’s it:
Let it crack your heart.
Let it wake you let it open you.
At this moment of strife and fear and plague and reckoning
We need awakening.
And the soulful rabbi says:
What’s your shofar? What’s waking you up? What’s calling you to action and revelation and atonement?
And so we offer our answers:
What about the seven shots in Kenosha
That paralyzed Jacob Blake
Setting off another mass spasm of outrage awakening reckoning
That’s a shofar.
Or what about the fireworks over the White House last night
The air thick with smoke and anger and aerosolized virus
Pop go the explosions.
Roar goes the crowd.
That’s a shofar.
Then there are the voices on the family Zoom the faces on the TV the bots on the socials;
A din of shofars, all day all night, a neverending cacophony of alarm.
Everyone sounding the call, announcing the crisis:
“Why is no one talking about this?”
A deafening din of horns of battle cries of declarations of war.
You can’t hear anything through the sound.
And I think
Right now we don’t need a rams horn.
Our fight or flight alarm is blasting nonstop.
The whole goddamn world is blaring shofars.
Maybe this is the year we
Put down the horn.
Maybe this year we need an INVERSE SHOFAR
Not a battle cry but a sweet silence.
An anti-noisemaker that produces a tingle
(Something like that crazy ASMR).
A wave of calm not a roar.
A deeper reverberation.
Something to quiet us.
To tune us to what’s inside.
To that small still voice.
Yes a great conflict awaits us.
And oh yes it’s crucial we win.
But as the polls and trolls and calls for war go out
Let us study Torah and Rambam and also the Hindus and Satyagraha
Which was taken up by Dr. King and the good Rev. James Lawson and Saint Lewis
Which says: the war will never end
If you seek to dominate and subdue.
The only way out
Is to quiet down, calm down, and (yes you know this is how this ends):
Love
Love
Love
Strange sick summer
As this strange summer stretches on
And sickness spreads
And tempers and cities flare
I wake with a jolt and think:
All that matters now
is the election.
Nothing else matters. Nothing.
Not work.
Not diet or exercise or sleep.
Not IG or TikTok or FB or TV or the GDP.
Not my drawings.
Not my grief
(which is here for good and not going anywhere - ever. That much I’ve learned, 213 days out from unfathomable loss: there’s no getting Over It).
It’s the worst of times
And the only hope of recovery is in
the election of actual adults with empathy and expertise:
Biden and Bubser and Gascon and Gideon and Kelly,
Adults who’ll work to repair the incalculable damage
Of the last three - no, hell: 244 years.
We need to win.
And not even because we need the victory
But because (oh here’s the real truth):
They need to lose
(all of them, the ring-kissing enablers the cynical cheaters the sleazy conspirators and the whole stinking shitpile of them, but but really, mostly, you know: HIM)
And I sit in that for a while
Savoring the image of Mitch and Kellyanne and Ted and Don getting
Ushered out and kicked in the asses and handcuffed,
dragged by their collars,
sputtering, red-faced, pathetic,
exiled, expunged, humiliated.
And then I stop and think:
Hoo boy maybe time to slow down the doom scrolling.
Maybe it’s not so bad.
Maybe this isn’t actually the end-all be-all, good-versus-evil, boss-battle showdown.
Politics is a game, a sport, a fiction.
It has always been thus.
The worst of times? Try 1969 or 1939 or 1913 or 1865 or 1616.
This current crop of goons didn’t invent fascist flim flammery.
Andrew Jackson Joseph McCarthy George Wallace
Could teach these dumb-dumbs a thing or two.
And then I’m stopped short again, thinking:
How bout I quit it with the name calling.
Goons, dumb-dumbs, lumbering dumptster barges, the ass menagerie - ha ha ha.
Yes they do the same and worse, yes they’re awful & yes it’s infuriating
But stop and see
See how retribution and revenge and oppression feed on one another
See how tit follows tat
See how when this election is done
There will another and another with progress and backlash and so on (unless democracy is done and the world is actually ending and these really are endtimes O God)
But really now:
See how malevolence and loss and humiliation is a never-ending fire that’s fueled & whipped up
By news cycles and powers that be
So yes donate and draw and protest and phonebank and wax poetic
Yes stand with the black bandana’d agitators kicking back tear gas canisters
Yes link arms with woke kids and POCs and old hippies and grizzled vets and horrified moderates and women in yellow T-shirts.
And all the while remember dear departed Saint Lewis, the Boy from Troy, the man in the white trenchcoat on the bridge in Selma
(who marched in the footsteps of Ghandi and CT Viviian and Ella Baker and Dr. King)
Who didn’t give in to hate or despair or hopelessness
Who absorbed the blows of opporessers and looked them in the eye and said, over and over:
Love
Love
Love
