1If our waking hours are a canvas, the art is how one fills it: tightly packed, loosely, a little of both. At a time when they were both 40 and the art scene in ’70s New York was in thrall to street-centered youth of all stripes, real-life writer Linda Rosenkrantz asked her close friend, photographer Peter Hujar, to make a record of his activities on one day — Dec. 18, 1974 — and then narrate those details into her tape recorder the following day at her apartment.

The goal was a book about the great mundane, the stuff of life as experienced by her talented confidants. In Hujar’s case, an uncannily observant queer artist and key gay liberation figure planning his first book, what emerged was a wry narrative of phone calls (Susan Sontag), freelancing woes (is this gig going to pay?), celebr

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