"There Will Be Blood" is Sunday Rumpus Essay with art by Michael Tanzer which being Father's Day is quite lovely indeed.

Most lovely. And appreciated. Excerpt? Word.

"The air is salty, crisp, and inky dark.

This isn’t the summer Provincetown where the night is filled with packs of boys dressed in leather who follow Adam and I as we go to meet our parents after wandering the streets; where music plays everywhere, pulsating and full of kinetic energy; where every other storefront is a souvenir or T-shirt shop selling cans of Cape Cod air and where Spiritus Pizza, the Penny Patch, and the Army-Navy store filled with its ancient scuba gear are always jammed with tourists while rainbow flags flutter from every building, and there is life, so much life, and so much joy with every stop.

This is winter, and even on New Year’s Eve, the people on the streets are few, except for the drunken guy who yells, “Happy New Year’s” at me as he and another guy stumble by, and I think, “Happy New Year’s for who man, because it’s not happy for me and my brother?”.

And what must Adam be thinking at this point, laying on the floor of our room, alone, scared, and far from home, as he wonders whether keeping his hands clasped tightly around his head will keep his brains from spilling out onto the rug as he awaits my return?

Not that I’m really thinking about any of that."

This Interlude Will Change Your Life.

Wherein we find ourselves hopelessly immersed in the Michael Tanzer and by extension both profoundly saddened and terribly emo as we prepare to attend an upcoming exhibit of his work.

And now we pause for a brief Michael Tanzer interlude.

It is June 3rd. And today is the birthday of TBWCYL, Inc. spokesperson Ben Tanzer's father Michael Tanzer, artist, advocate, raconteur, tough guy and pool player. He has been dead eleven years this coming fall and at the risk of being morbid, nothing about that seems sadder than the idea that he will slowly fade from our collective memory, something we know he would have hated. So, in an effort to avoid, or at least prolong said fade, please do take a moment to revisit our 2008 storySouth award nominated creative nonfiction joint and Michael Tanzer homage "PaintWriteDeathLifeArt (Sketches from a Life in Art)," and please do note, and yes this seems coarse as hell, that his last work of art graces the cover of our soon to be released novella My Father's House, something we couldn't be more excited about.

Michael Tanzer. A shout-out.

We want to take a moment to recognize that June 3rd would have been TBWCYL, Inc. spokesperson Ben Tanzer's father Michael Tanzer's sixty-ninth birthday. He was a great artist and mostly unrecognized during his lifetime. With that in mind, we draw your attention to not only a piece we wrote about him titled PaintWriteDeathLifeArt (Sketches from a life in art), that ran in decomP back in 2007, and is briefly excerpted below, but an academic article about his life and work as well, which is titled Michael Tanzer: An Artist Searching for His Routes by the late UCLA art historian and long-time family friend Albert Boime.

"My father Michael Tanzer was a lot of things. Painter. Teacher. Activist. Raconteur. Filmmaker. New Yorker. High-school dropout. Tough guy. He was also a man who had regrets, someone who died much too young from a twisted form of cancer, an artist who never quite achieved what he hoped to, and a guy who never cried, not until the end anyway."

This Self-Portrait Will Change Your Life, Week Thirty-Four - "PaintWriteDeathLifeArt."

It is Week Thirty-Four of This Self-Portrait Will Change Your Life, our endlessly self-absorbed effort to post self-portrait per week for one year, and this week we have titled our self-portrait "PaintWriteDeathLifeArt," because one, we were thrilled to attend a retrospective of TBWCYL, Inc. spokesperson Ben Tanzer's father Michael Tanzer's work as an artist, and two, we were honored to have been invited to read something at the preview show for the retrospective and decided to read an excerpt from PaintWriteDeathLifeArt (Sketches from a life in art) a piece originally published in decomP. To say it was quite cool all-around is an understatement, but there you go, it was cool, and overwhelming, and all of that. Meanwhile, while we want to invite you to follow this project in its entirety at the Flickr, we also want to invite you to send us a self-portrait of you very own which we will post right here at This Blog Will Change Your Life. But then you knew that, right?