Annabelle

Above: Drawing by Annabelle(2001)


Here's a project I've been working on since early 2001. Ah, the spring of 2001... I was living in a crack house in Columbus with a couple of other artists, having finally graduated from my third college. I was putting my B.F.A. from Ohio State to good use, earning eight bucks an hour as a laundromat attendant. These were heady times; optimistic days before a handful of dickhead arabs, apparently acting on orders from the Commitee to Re-elect Gary Condit, decided to harsh the 21st century's mellow and give our new president the opportunity to accomplish the most catastrophic failures of his already storied career as a grade-A fuckup. But I digress....

In the nascent 21st century, there existed something called 'Napster'. It was a vast virtual library of music, stocked and shared by a network of users that spanned the globe. Whenever somebody digitized a track, and connected to the Napster network, the track was added to the shared library. You could find anything there, from the rarest out-of- print 7", to whatever hit single Jimmy Fallon was parodying on SNL that week(to hilarious effect*). Needless to say, it wasn't long before the music industry showered Napster with lawsuits, accusing its creators and users of copyright infringement.

But Napster wasn't just a warehouse full of free stuff. It was a system whose growth depended on the contributions of its users, and so its software included several features to facilitate a community and therefore sustain an active culture of sharing. The Instant Message was one such feature.

Annabelle first messaged me that spring. My screen name was 'Elbowdanginger'; a bizarre amalgamation of my roomate's dogs' nicknames. It was my roomate's computer, and therefore my roomate's Napster program, and therefore she got to call the shots when it came to the screen name. She was but one in a long line of clinically insane pet-owners I've lived with. Again, I digress.

Anyway, one day an instant message box pops up on the screen while I'm sleeping off a hangover on the living room couch. The accompanying, exquisitely annoying electronic 'Bloop' wakes me up. I walk over to the screen, and see this:

ANNABELLE SAYS: Divine Comedy?

I spend a moment considering whether or not I should respond to this apparent non sequitur. I've always been quietly terrified of new people. In my mind every opportunity for socializing is an opportunity for humiliation and hurt feelings. But unlike the phone or mailed correspondence, instant messaging afforded me complete anonymity. And anonymity does more for a man's courage than sixty-four ounces of cheap gin. So I proceeded boldly:

ELBOWDANGINGER SAYS: What?

ANNABELLE SAYS: Divine comedy, a band. u like em?

ELBOWDANGINGER SAYS: I... I don't know.

ANNABELLE SAYS: I see u have their songs. u don't know em?

I looked in my music library. I did have a track by 'Divine Comedy'. They had recorded a version of the Magnetic Fields' 'Famous'. Somewhat appropriately, my relationship with Annabelle started with a cover song.

ELBOWDANGINGER SAYS: Oh, yeah, I got a cover they did of Magnetic Fields. You like Magnetic Fields? I LOVE Magnetic Fields.

...


ANNABELLE SAYS: eh, they ok. Cheesy sometimes, no?



Annabelle and I started corresponding on Napster on a regular basis, trading music and occasionally revealing details about ourselves. She was 21 (I was 25 at the time). She lived in Paris, after running away from Poland as a teenager. She worked at a music magazine called 'Rock Sound' (Seriously, 'Rock Sound'. Isn't it adorable how the French manage to be so sophisticated and so totally unhip at the same time?)

We shared our music collections with each other, and realized we possessed the same predeliction for melodic, moody tunes that tended towards the European and electronic. I mailed her a CD. She mailed me a mix tape and a complimentary copy of the aforementioned periodical(right). I mailed her the postcard from my B.F.A. show. We became friends.

When she offered to send me a photograph of herself, I told her not to. After graduating, I had been somewhat listless; I needed a new project to focus my energy. So I decided I would draw a portrait of Annabelle, using only her written instructions as a guide. I would keep making new drawings until I made one that she felt resembled her.

She liked the idea and agreed to collaborate. So I got some basic information from her (color/length of her hair, color of her eyes, and a short list of public personalities she resembled, or had been told she resembled). With this information, I drew four pages of portraits, with four to five portraits on each page. Here is a page from that first series of drawings from the summer of 2001:

Since english is Anya's third language, we quickly worked out a system in which I would number the drawings so she could easily refer to them when she sent me the corrections. For example, here is the last set of drawings I mailed her, around New Year's 2006:






And here's the set of instructions she sent me last week:



How are u ? I hope everything's fine.
Here r the new drawing features :

nose : #4, 10 n 14. but a little little bit shorter.
eyes : #2, 10, 13
eyebrows : more 12. but the line that goes down starts a little earlier (like 3/4 of the eye).
lips : more 12. but line between the 2 lips doesn't follow the shape of lips in the middle, only in the extremities, which is ok in this drawing.
cheeks : + #10. but a little less shaped- they're well shaped when I smile-
chin : #6, 9, 15
all necks r ok.
hair : lenght is ok. but not that much amount of hait is under. only a few locks shorter in front, and not that shorter (start of the cheek/middle nose)-

I hope all that is clear enough for u, if not, just ask me-

An unfavorable ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court resulted in Napster's demise in late 2001. For the past few years, we've had to use the Microsoft Messenger service to keep in touch. Last week, my PC committed hara-kiri!** , so I've been scrambling to set up a new Yahoo! account so we can send messages between her PC and my new Mac. When she appears online, she's always sporting a different name. One day it's 'Mazzy Star'; the next day it's 'Cupcake', and the next it's 'Luna' or sometimes even the name of her newest boyfriend.

I moved from Columbus to Brooklyn three years ago, and traded up from my old 'Elbowdanginger' handle. Nowadays, I go by plain ol' Pat Palermo.

Here's my drawing for Monday, February 27th.






*We can put a man on the goddamn moon, but we can't invent a font that signifies 'bitter sarcasm'.

**(Japanese) ritual suicide by disembowelment!