Joan Mitchell, Rachel Cusk, mislaid quotations, more envy, Meat Club & the shit

I want to tell the story differently this time. Not to start at or near the beginning— which would be to say that Joan Mitchell, one of the most important painters of the 20th century, was born in Chicago, Illinois in February of 1925—but to tell begin almost one hundred years later, in the city of San Francisco, and tell about an encounter, beginning with what sounds like the opening to a joke.

Two girls walk into a gallery.