Letters from Dave Woodward to Carol Huebner

January 26, 1969

Sweetheart,

This is an invitation to the show opening tonight for which I’ll probably be pouring wine again. I’m writing at the gallery now, the show is up and it’s pretty weird looking. Its ribbons and carpet binding stuck to the walls like the one in the picture with darning needles. Some look really nice and others are just not very impressive. But the things are cheaper than most of the stuff we well, about $300, so maybe the show will be a success. She’s a nice chick, 23 with two school age kids, and a pretty successful local artist. Those kids really make a difference. She seems young, but the people I live with are mostly about 23, and she seems years older than they are.

Life in the commune rolls on. Don’s girl is coming up today and they’ll be getting married soon. The people who got married at Christmas may be getting divorced soon, since Greg seems to have gotten interested in this other girl, a source of great disagreement between them. Myra (Kaplan), the girl who was here (moved out or really never seemed to move in. I could have been close to her once though it seems like years since the fucked up-eastern Jewish-intellectual milieu. And the others here were never into that at all. And she was used to much more money than us) has moved into a place that rents for three times what each of us pays. I think everyone is pretty happy about the move, though there are no hard feelings or anything.

January 28, 1969

Tuesday

Sweetheart,

I wanted to get these pictures off right away. Some of them are pretty nice, yes? We have four good cameras in the house now, plus an 8 mm movie camera and a projector. Don hopes to buy a darkroom outfit through the school where he teaches, so he can get an “educational discount”. We have a big basement to put it in, too. I think, if he gets the stuff, we’ll convert the bathroom in the basement to a darkroom.

Not much has happened since Sunday. The opening Sunday night was a real hit. Hundreds of people were crammed in here, real freaks, mostly “friends” of the artist. They drank three cases of wine, poured by me at top speed, covered the floor with cigarette butts, and, of course, didn’t buy anything. These openings are really just for the hell of it. The critics came yesterday, when the gallery was empty.

Margy (hard ‘g’) arrived yesterday morning. She’s a pretty weird little chick. She has a lot of childlike mannerisms, if you know what I mean. It’s very endearing at first, but it must get hard to take after awhile. She did bring, however, an FM radio and a blender. This last thing especially is great. I made a date milk shake this morning, which tasted pretty lousy, but...

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...I got a letter from you yesterday, dated the twentieth, so the mails are not really so bad from you to me. I think they were slowed down there for a while. Some of your letters took two weeks to get here.

I’ve been feeling some of your urgency about production lately too. It seems as though translating ideas or conceptions into things is a very important process. The people who do it most often and in effect make that process the center of their lives seem like the happiest people to me. That’s what I have learned from working with these artists around here. The reverse process is important too I think, to know and maybe control what changes are coming from the outside inward. I’ve been concentrating on that sort of give and take between myself and environment lately. I feel a little bit more alive that way.

I was really excited to hear that you’re painting again. Why don’t you send photographs or slides or roll one up (is it on canvas?) in a tube and send it over. I’d like to see what it looks like. The Pollack Gallery, of course, gets exclusive rights to representation in Toronto.

Love,

February 17, 1969

Sweetheart,

Jan and Steve left this morning after a fine weekend, a little wilder than most because there was a party and an opening at the gallery, and then we got drunk in a bar one night, which I don’t do too much. They are just great. Steve is a senior economics major now, taking mostly radical, student-run economics courses. He’s going to law school next year, probably Harvard’s, to become a radical Movement lawyer. And Jan, Bless his heart, just did a piece of sculpture for $3,500. Actually, it is a sign for a building, one of those plaques, except 12 feet long and several thousand pounds. At the end of this month he’s enlisting in the Army. How about that? He, or I guess really his parents, have been working on a deal for several months, where he’ll be transferred to a design section in Washington right after basic training. We got drunk and agreed that it was morally execrable, but that if it was OK with him, it was OK with me. And he brought news of Duncan. He’s still a sophomore at St. John’s and the draft has just found that out and is apparently investigating him. He could conceivably be drafted out of school I guess. He told them to look around up here. He might be coming up, though the last time we talked about it, a couple of years ago, he wasn’t too hot on the idea. That would be pretty nice, though I can’t see Duncan functioning up here too well. Steve brought news of Suzy, too. She’s dropped out of Antioch, and gone to the west coast during the fall quarter. She stayed with Steve for a month or so before she left and he says she is really “confused”. Partly still by that Ira guy. That’s Steve’s story anyway. I don’t know if he is really objective about her yet or not. He said she was tired too of moving every three months. I can believe that.

Jan said a couple of times that this was a good scene we had going up here. I guess he knew that it was important for me to hear that, and I’m sure he meant it too. They got in a couple of discussions of the warehouse thing and I think they were both impressed. Instead of being out of it, we may have a small vanguard up here. I always knew the things we were doing were good, but it’s nice to impress old friends. Important to me, anyway.

Tuesday night

Besides Steve and Jan (and by the way they brought a friend, a black girl from Chicago who is staying with Steve and his friend in Boston. She is really shy and nervous, and never got over that the whole time she was here, but she was pretty nice basically.) As I was saying, besides Steve and Jan, my time is getting taken up with this warehouse thing. I’m assuming a sort of key role in organizing it, because few of the people interested have the kind of analytical bent that I do, I guess that’s what it amounts to. So when the discussion comes up, I seem to have a more definite idea of what I want to happen than most of the other people. Except for that computer engineer I’ve mentioned several times and, of course, Phil Mullins, who’s always good at things like that. And every dinner time almost is followed by a discussion of it. I’m trying hard to get it to be more than just another one of these “family affairs”. I mean composed of just our little group with no real way other than accident to grow into something larger and more open. I’ve made a discovery just in the last few days that living in communes is being to wear on me. I feel sort of suffocated lately, like I would really like some social fresh air. And this

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I’ve just been downstairs for a couple of hours, drinking beer and discussing things with the whole group. It really went well as far as I’m concerned. For one thing we just picked up two or three new members without any hassle at all, which means that the kind of growth I mentioned above is going to happen. Also the McCaul Street group is solidly in, which is great because you know I love them all except Pat, and she doesn’t bother me if I don’t have to live with her. Also we are renting Thursday a large, two-story warehouse on Baldwin Street, which is the first street south on McCaul from where we lived at 218. (By the way, remember I said that another commune was forming out of the one at 224? Well, you’ll never guess what house they got. Good old 218, our home last summer. Colleen is living in the room we had and it looks fine except that the people who moved in when we moved to 224 painted it tangerine. Of all the paint jobs you and I were thinking of, this one is much worse. But the little back yard is still as nice as ever and someone built a snowman in it. One thing that may or may not be unfortunate, that printer that I talked about, I think in my last letter, won’t be included, by a decision of the group. I was really the only one who ever really wanted him in, it seems. Everyone else thought that he was too different from us, because he is more established and also into a more traditional political bag than we are, namely the Canadian Party of Labor. I wanted different kinds of people, I mean broadly the same, but different enough to include this printer. No one else does, I guess, and they have some points. Mainly this guy couldn’t use this warehouse, which really is perfect for the rest of us. It’s near all three of the communes, and in the Baldwin Street area, where the store is. It’s going to be a very nice place, I think. With studio space and a gallery for you.

I’m getting sort of drunk, I think. (The typing errors are increasing anyway.) I took the last bottle of beer upstairs with me to finish this letter with. I’d better knock off before I stop making sense. So that’s what I’ve been doing since I wrote you last anyway. The warehouse and Jan and Steve that is, not getting drunk. All pretty exciting. I’ll write you again soon.