to begin at the beginning,

in October nineteen hundred and seventy-nine, my saxophone flies with me to New York.“Message in a bottle“ by the Police is on the radio, the Gramercy and Chelsea are fully booked. The first days a wooden floor, near Columbia University, is night’s lodging.  The weather is warm. Californian avocados are offered on street corners, big as honeydew melons and tasteless. Ended up with Erinna König, Beuys Meisterschüler at the artist Arleen Schloss in Downtown in a treasure, a bed. Conveniently, a stage with a bed. Arleen spontaneously invited Beate Bartel, the Mania D bass player and me to perform. Just the two of us, bass and sax? SAMO©, who showed COLOR XEROX that evening, supported us with his band test pattern, he on the WASP synthesizer, all improvised.

 

 

 

The next day SAMO© and I start inventing music in Arleen`s bathroom with Michael Holman`s WASP synthesizer, the rhythm machine, the Selmer Sax, so we did not disturb our hostess. After the opening of the Beuys Retrospective in the Guggenheim, Erinna left, Jean and I shared the chamber. Portrait fall 1979 by  ©Gerard Pas, London, Canada.

 

 

 

 my diary, „You are my slumber. Wait for Jean“ he recorded our invented music, disappeared to play it to his friends, came back quickly, sometimes hours later.

Leaving NYC with Fredy Laker`s Skytrain, a DC-10, they crashed more often back then, he wrote in my coffer so that he would always be with me. Had to swear to come back soon. I didn’t succeed. For decades, the suitcase had disappeared, rediscovered, I realized that SAMO©, the homeless, who looked like a tenth grader, was Jean Michel Basquiat who painted two years later the SAMO© ESTA EN ALGO diptyc with a heart and a cross, catholic symbols for love and pain.

 

 

 

Why Spanish? An answer offers

                                Dr. Kellie Jones. „Lost in Translation“ Catalogue Brooklyn Museum 2005, p. 171

 

Basquiat`s SAXAPHONE is to be found a.o. in Eroica I, painted 1988.

Mine in May and June 1979, in my diary. When I write very fast, my letters are sometimes a bit crooked. I travelled from Berlin to Paris to buy a Henri Selmer Saxophone there. Beate Bartel, the Mania D. bass player, organised it for me; she had friends there. Selmer? The Rolls Royce of Saxophones. My father, an engineer, preached successfully: cheap is far too expensive, so only the best.

 

Malte Boecker, Director of the Beethoven House in Bonn

visited me 2021. He knows the story behind EROICA and Samuel Fuller in March 1945,  which has been told to me by SAMO© in 1979. Back then, when the 18-year-old frightened me with his knowledge. The ‘primitivist’ who was an encyclopedia on two legs. At the time, I was studying theatre studies and American studies and film in Berlin.

 

Follow the misspellings, not the $ 

or the academic arrogance when you want to know what he narrates hidden in plain sight. The best example is his contact address in my diary. He was homeless, so it is the address of his test pattern drummer Michael Holman. Find the mistakes, recognise their meaning and apply it to his work. Only then does it become clear that nearly nothing is known. If you correct his intentional misspellings, as art history has done for the last four decades, there is no progress. One example among many: Antje Stahl, author of ‘Das ist kein Koffer’ (This is not a suitcase) in the Frankfurter Zeitung ‘corrected’ his intentional misspellings.

Hints: Which name is spelt wrong and why? How many I’s are in the word circled in red, compare the I`s.  Why with K and not with C. Why did he also write the black continent with K and not with C, thus AFRIKA? Why two overlapping zeros, one would have been enough. The reason can be found in church records, or ask a pastor. In Eroica II you see ‘BAND: WOMAN’ and WOMAN are circled in red. N.Y.C. as in my little diary, on 23 October I bought a new one at Bloomingdales for 4$, the price is also documented.

 

in the beginning was the word,

the misspelled one, mine, Jaen. I never had French, you only learnt it at Gymnasium back then, a secondary school that prepares students for higher education at university. As a half-orphan, the school told my mother, it would overwhelm me. After her death, the youth welfare office sent me to a boarding school, a Gymnasium, there I had Latin and passed the matriculation examination at the age of 18. AN ORPHAN – IF YOU KNEW MY COUNTERPARTS he wrote in one of his notebooks.

 

VOGUE 2014

in the German edition, an interview with Basquiat’s girlfriend Alexis Adler, who was in the process of auctioning off her collection. My preferred opinion on this, although artist friends here in Düsseldorf claim that his hidden narrations, including those in the Collaborations with Warhol, would only be known if I sold the suitcase.

 

 

what I do not know

who wrote this and what does it mean. Found in the bathroom in December 2014 when I visited Arleen Schloss.  In any case, the point makes me think.

 

Michael, my brother, knew what I didn’t,

the very deep meaning of a misspelling. Thank God my brother is a Michael, not a Dieter or a Bruno or a Marc, and he is Catholic and has the finest antennae for justice like me.