An uncommon friendship

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

by Jimmy Fox when aged fourteen and three quarters

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Only when I decided not to run past the door to my father’s study did I get a full and long analysis of the back of Mr. Tyszko’s head.

 

It was shaven, and he sat with good posture.

It was the eternally lingering odour of dark incense that stated his familiar presence. Once every week or so, I would sit in my room monitoring every word of his through the wall and distantly contemplate the mentality with which I would approach him with. Should I act eccentric, myself, or genius? A recurring thought.

 

He would talk of computers, art and unpopular culture.

His brain was immense. My father’s computer was well tuned now, and it was time for me to have one as well.

 

Our direct communication began when our mutual interest in computers aligned, upon which we decided to build a computer, a Hackintosh; a pirated, hacked, custom built computer that sat, and still does, in a wicker basket beneath my desk.

 

We drunk ‘the gourmet sh*t’ (as Jimmie Dimmick from Pulp Fiction would call it) green tea, and broadcast our work on his slot on Resonance art radio station. Over the course of its month-or-so assembly, I could feel my natural appreciation for culture had shifted. With the Hackintosh came a vast library of music, which I buried myself into.

 

Amidst my preconceptions about Mr. Tyszko, was the apartment he lived in. Perhaps he doesn’t have a television, were the type of thoughts that arose in my primitive mind.

 

It eventually became reality when I was invited to work further on the computer, this time at his place. ‘Flat 1-4-2’, the combination I dialed in to the juvenile-proof device on the door and waited for what seemed hours in the skunk filled air beneath his flat. The door was eventually unlocked, I called the lift and was slowly taken to the fifth floor of the housing complex.

 

It was night when I arrived. His seemingly identical flat was differentiated by the collections of neon light flooding into the connecting hallway. The door was unlocked, although locking it was unnecessary, as vast amounts of vegetables had me climbing over the threshold of the door.

 

A girlfriend remembered she had answered the door and smiled with no words as I entered. As she moved out of the way, a Dakota DC-3 wing lodged through two separate rooms became apparent. Underneath it lay a bathtub, a depleted armchair and the inside of a piano along with an array of more artistic accumulation.

It was his brain reflecting the streams of creative genius.  I had never been so conscious in my life. It was as if someone had discovered floodlights in the part of my brain that stores all underlying subconscious thought of art and style. “Wow”, I said, followed by a laugh of the sheer understatement I had just made.

 

Two cats, Voltaire and Iduru sat in leather briefcases watching me as if I had just entered a old mafia-run club for the first time. On my third encounter, it was Simon himself, who sat on his bed playing some avant-garde expressionist music, which he seemed to enjoy with no hint of ingenuity. With his once fine tattered cashmere jumper, he resembled the epitome of a starving artist, apart from that we ate well, very well indeed.

 

 

 Out of an old Montecristo cigar box, which he swiftly brought out from his eccentric organisation, pulled out a carefully selected instrument, followed by some orders about how to apply it to the “‘tosh”.

 

After a seemingly lengthy segment of the evening, the activity around me became increasingly distracting as I noticed new wonders, to the point where watching Paris, Texas, followed by an Adam Curtis documentary whilst discussing Simon’s radical, far-left political views seemed more enticing.

 

After that day, visiting Simon on the weekend became an anticipated ritual. I found an opportunity to offer myself as his protégé, and then as a co-artist to some of our work. ‘Hypernym’, our most recent piece, is a book of carefully arranged words and photographs, which may be considered appalling to the untuned eye, and probably the tuned eye as well.

 

Today, I would have accompanied him to the Serpentine Gallery, but I was too busy with this. Only when writing this do I realise the value of my new insights to politics art and culture, igniting my anarcho-curiosity, showing me bad art and showing me good art.