I met Zachary at a dance party at Rififi in the summer of 2005, and we became instant friends. He is the closest thing to a Renaissance Man that I know – always (and I mean always) writing, drawing, making music, doing little projects, and daydreaming about things. He kind of reminds me of Ray Johnson in a way I can't quite place. The last night I saw him was at his solo art show, 1 to 61 - a few days later, he moved to Ohio.
One thing Zachary has done in life (among stuff like being Nightlife Editor of The L Magazine, singing briefly in a super metal band, and popping up on The Sartorialist) is work coat check at Don Hill's. If you never saw it, it was located in a drippy, dark, freezing basement, its leaks covered by a makeshift ceiling made of the cardboard sides of beer boxes. One of the things Zachary did to pass the time over the years was draw on the cardboard with a Sharpie; his art show was the entire collection of these sketches (as a supplement, he kept a blog called Coats from the Underground, documenting everything from Brooklyn Industries and J.Crew to Chloe and Oak). The Culture of Me wrote a nice little thing about Zachary after the show (plus photos better than mine).
I could say a million more things – that he knows everything there is to know about both Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen; that he owns a Hot Lixx guitar in impressively good quality; that reading pages of his writing while walking a different way home one day in 2007 was what gave me the idea for this; or that he is pretty hilarious...
... but then this would just turn into another jumbled mess since there's so much I want to talk about! So I'll leave it with that, and with the hope that Zachary comes back to New York soon. The city misses your light.
