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These pages provide glimpses into the artist’s relationship to his daily routines, desires, family, and treasured films. Coursing through many of these words and pictures is a sense of desire. Pfeiffer puts it succinctly: “A donkey walks with a carrot dangling before him. That’s my kind of life.” Yet beyond Pfeiffer’s characteristically self-effacing simplicity hovers an exacting and relentless quest for formal perfection in his subjects. The performance of beauty is projected onto people and things that are able to pull it off. This is self-portraiture by proxy. Five texts by scholars and critics deepen the reader’s understanding and situate Pfeiffer within broader art historical narratives of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.