MAXWELL ORSEN
Vol. 01 | No. 02 | September 2026
Bobby Fischer, Hemingway, & Bunkt
BEFORE WE BEGIN
These pages collect the art, books, exhibitions, fimls, objects, music, ideas, and observations that lingered longer than expected for me. Everything here earned its place. Take what stays with you.
- Maxwell
CULTURAL DESK
PERSON
FILM
ALBUM
Bobby Fischer
I've always found Bobby Fischer to be a hard person to make sense of. On the one hand, he changed chess forever. On the other, he spent much of his later life saying and believing things that were cruel, conspiratorial, and impossible to ignore.
I don't think you can separate the player from the person, even if you want to. Both are part of the story.
Maybe that's why I keep coming back to him. He's one of those rare people whose genius and flaws seem to exist side by side, never quite fitting together.
The Darjeeling Limited
Wes Anderson
I've always had a soft spot for The Darjeeling Limited. Released in 2007, it follows three estranged brothers who reunite for a train journey across India, a year after their father's death. What starts as a carefully planned trip slowly gives way to something much less predictable, as the brothers navigate old resentments, unexpected detours, and the quiet work of finding one another again.
For me, this is Anderson's best. His signature visual style is unmistakable, but it always serves the story. Unlike some of his later films, the aesthetic never becomes the subject.
Chet Baker Sings
First issued in 1956, Chet Baker Sings combines the vocal recordings from Baker's 1954 sessions with six additional performances recorded two years later. Featuring fourteen interpretations of American songbook standards, it's one of the records most closely associated with Baker.
I own an original pressing and listen to it often. Over the years, it's come to mean even more to me. "Time After Time" was the song my wife and I danced to at our wedding, so every time I hear it, I'm reminded of that day.
BOOK
PLACE
EFFECTS
Interloper,
Peter Savodnik
This isn't another book about who killed Kennedy. Instead, it focuses on the nearly three years Lee Harvey Oswald spent living in the Soviet Union, tracing the isolation, restlessness, and search for identity that shaped him long before Dallas.
Rather than chasing conspiracy theories, Savodnik tries to understand Oswald as a person, making for a quieter and, in many ways, more unsettling portrait.
Kowloon Walled City, Kowloon, Hong Kong
One of the most intriguing places ever to exist. It was a dense maze of homes, shops, factories, restaurants, schools, and workshops packed into just a few acres of Hong Kong. At its peak, tens of thousands of people lived there, making it one of the most densely populated places on earth. The sheer number of people living within such a small footprint is almost impossible to comprehend.
What fascinates me most is that people simply lived there. They worked, raised families, ate, played, and went about their lives inside this extraordinary maze.
Demolition was completed in April 1994.
T206 Baseball Cards
They have been with me for as long as I can remember. As a kid in the 1980s, I'd stop into a local card shop and buy them for five or ten dollars apiece, never imagining that I'd someday own pieces of baseball history.
Today, even a well-worn common can easily cost more than $100, making those afternoons at the card shop feel almost impossible to imagine now.
I still pick one up every now and then. More than a century after they were issued, they feel less like collectibles and more like small windows into another era.
STUDIO REPORT
This photo is from 2011. Back when I sculpted, poorly, naked torsos with clay and made mixed media paintings. Back when I spent most of my time writing fiction, poorly, and trying to learn the piano. Back before I met my now wife. Back when I would go to the bar every night, get into trouble, and wake up hungover. Back when I smoked cigarettes every day. Back when I paid $725 a month for my studio apartment. Back when.
I remember taking this photo because the light was nice, and somewhere in my mind I thought it would be a good shot to have if I ever wanted to show people what it was like. I guess that’s now.
That person I was is long gone. Fifteen years has a way of wiping you out and rewriting you over and over again. I wish I could reach back and tell that guy to go easier on himself. To go easier on the people who loved him. To not equate self-destruction with artistic pursuit. To have the courage to put himself out there a bit.
I’d tell him marriage was coming. Fatherhood was coming. The pandemic was coming. Death was coming. Aging was coming.
I'd tell him to just sit and enjoy the light a bit longer.
IN VIEW
Wallace delivering the Kenyon College commencement address, 2005.
David Foster Wallace's This Is Water is less a commencement speech than a reminder to pay attention. In twenty minutes, he turns an ordinary grocery store checkout line into a lesson in empathy, perspective, and the stories we invent about the people around us.
IN PRINT
Hemingway's passport photo from 1923. Age 24.
Ernest Hemingway was not only a writer who cared deeply about art. He collected it, too. He collected paintings, prints, drawings, and photographs, and the artists he admired found their way into both his homes and his thinking.
This piece from The Met takes a closer look at Hemingway’s relationship with art, and at the curious overlap between collecting, looking, and making.
ON REPEAT
Fontaines D.C. at Laneway Festival in Sydney on February 5, 2023.
Boys in the Better Land by Fontaines D.C.
This track has that feeling of needing to get out without really knowing where you’re going. The guitars keep pushing it forward, like the song itself is trying to leave before you can catch up.
GOOD COMPANY
Bunkt
www.bunktartstudio.com
Instagram: bunkt
Brian Wagoner, better known as Bunkt, makes work that I keep coming back to. His paintings are built from cardboard, paint, staples, burned edges, and whatever else the piece seems to call for, but they never feel like experiments in material. Everything belongs there. His work is raw without feeling performative, and layered without becoming busy. It trusts the viewer to meet it halfway. That's something I admire, and something I think about often when I'm working.
I met Bunkt when we were both included in the same gallery show, my first. Instead of keeping his distance, he took the time to talk with me about making work, shared parts of his process, and treated me like another artist, not someone just getting started. I've remembered that ever since. His work is worth spending time with. If you ever have the chance to see it in person, take the time.
Middle of Nowhere
Who's in Charge Here?
Strike a Pose
CONDITIONS REPORT
I've been reminding myself not to protect the painting. Protect the process instead.
It's easy to keep working on something because the canvas cost money or because you've already spent hours on it. That isn't a good reason to finish it. If it isn't working, move on.
The beginning should be loose and fast. Make the mark. Cover it up. Scratch into it. Change your mind. Let the painting become whatever it wants to become.
The moment you start worrying about ruining it, you've probably already finished it. From that point on, you're usually protecting what you've made instead of discovering something new.
Not every painting deserves to leave the studio. The freedom to throw one away is what makes the next one better.
FROM THE EDITOR
Thanks for reading the second issue.
I'll admit, every time I sit down to work on this, part of me that thinks I should be in the studio instead. Painting always feels like the more productive choice, but I've started to realize this is part of the work too. Reading more, paying closer attention, chasing interesting ideas, and putting them into words works a different part of my brain. When I get back to painting, I can feel the difference.
I hope something in these pages sent you looking a little further or made you think about something in a new way. That's really the whole point.
If you know someone who would enjoy this, I'd appreciate you passing it along. That's how this thing grows.
There's always something worth noticing.
Until next month,
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