“Did she ask what I am wearing?”

I have a running joke with my wife, whenever she talks to one of her friends on the phone, after she hangs up I ask, “Did she ask what I am wearing?”

This comes from a guy I knew in the 1970s by the name of John Voorhees. He owned a used record store in the U-District. If you ever got him talking — which we avoided as much as possible — he’d go off on how he was a “very well known guitarist” and whenever anybody heard about him playing somewhere, they wouldn't ask who he was, but “what was he playing?” He wanted everyone to believe he was bigger than Hendrix.

Of course nobody had ever heard of him, and there was no indication he'd ever played anywhere.

So it became something of a joke among my friends to say “Did they ask what I was playing?” or to non-musicians “Did they ask what I was wearing?”

This comes to mind tonite because I’m watching a Netflix documentary “Struggle: The Life And Lost Art of Szukalski” about a Polish sculptor living in LA in the 1970s who thinks he’s a genius and all other artists are crap. He learned human anatomy by dissecting his own father when he died, and invented his own language for all of his notes.  He was popular in Poland before WWII but fled the Nazis. All his artwork up until 1939 was destroyed in the war.  Fascinating doc.

But the guy’s egotistical to the point of being unhinged. When Jaco Pastorius said “I’m the greatest bass player who ever lived” he had the chops to back it up. Szukalski’s sculptures are mildly interesting at best, like most primitive folk-art.