artholes

2011-04-15T13:02:00.003-04:00

Bullet Point Wednesday Apr 15

[ok, so it's Friday, fire me]

At Last!

[Game of Thrones on HBO]

This poor schnook has been wandering the planet dressed like this since he betrayed Frodo over a decade ago. I'm glad he's working again. All is forgiven.

Nice Job Frenchie!

[France Bans the Veil--http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/12/world/europe/12france.html]

We should now rightly heap all the enmity we wrongly heaped on them for not backing Iraq II.

Speaking of which, why did we heap all that scorn on the French and not the Germans who also didn't back Bush's folly? Why were people dumping their Bordeaux but not their Mercedes? Had we hurt the Germans enough with the whole frankfurter/hot dog thing back during WWI?

This is Why I Live Here

Russian Girls Rhythmic Gymnastic Team walking down 9th Avenue! I want my own hula hoop case!!

Global v. Local

We were planning a trip to the ballpark for four, and we had two days/times to choose from. I asked my associate which time she would prefer to see the game: Friday evening or Saturday afternoon. In lieu of reply, she asked:

Who's playing?
How much are the tickets?
Should I not go?

After a while I was able to return the conversation to the initial question, and she suggested a time.

Later I pointed out that I had learned through this question [more pointedly than ever] that she had a global approach to answering questions whereas I might approach the question more locally. She asked me what I meant by "global v. local." I mentioned her asking a series of questions around the initial question before she actually answered it. She seemed confused, "Well, how else should I have answered?"

"By telling me what time you wanted to go."

"Oh."

"Hero" Was Exactly the Word I Was Looking For!

[Non-Italics are mine]

...To many, Mr. Charney [American Apparel guy] is not only a somebody but even something of a hero: finding a new niche in a saturated market for cotton basics by refusing to make them overseas [or with actual thread] (despite other companies moving operations abroad); crusading for workers’ rights; and successfully marketing the idea that young adults should embrace their natural sexuality [yeah, that's it]...

---New York Times, April 13, 2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/14/fashion/14CHARNEY.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=dov%20charney&st=cse

Hey, dude, embrace this.

2011-04-06T13:36:00.001-04:00

Bullet Point Wednesday Apr 6

[a new weekly feature when I remember to do it]

Take a Walk, Zach

I just saw this pic of Zach Snyder. Surprised to find he's a normal/decent looking dude. Having previously only seen his films [300, Watchmen, Sucker Punch] and not his face, I was convinced that:

He’s never been outside, and
He’s never gotten laid

I was thinking that Mick Jagger is beginning to look like my grandmother, then I realized Mick Jagger could have slept with my grandmother.

Al Pacino Has Been Cast to Play Matisse

Now that he’s ruined blind people [Scent of a Woman] and Jews [Merchant of Venice] for us, he might as well go all out and ruin one of the two pillars of 20^th century art as well. Wait til you catch Russell Crowe as Picasso!

News Line of the Week

from the wires

“He was a loving, caring individual,” said an emotional Snoop Dogg (no relation), who reportedly got a tattoo of his friend’s face the day before.

Wait! Does that mean that Donald and Daffy aren’t related? Queen Elizabeth II and Godfather II also not?

Me sad. :(

Heads Up!

Just walked by a truck that had Acme Safe Co. written on it.

Fisher Stevens Directing John Leguizamo’s One Man Show

Here’s how they decided to work together:

Fisher Stevens

[in voice that mocks his repulsive nerdiness but is really very angry about]

...I'm an annoying twerp

John Leguizamamo

[in voice that mocks his Latino-ness but don’t you dare ask him to do it Seinfeld, you racist Jew you]

or alternately

[with a very cute lisp]

OMG…Me too!

FS & JL

[together]

Let's team up!

Lamest Cry For Help of the Week

AND
Lamest Excuse of the Week

Beth was out with Simon, and I was in the middle of preparing tacos for the six boys sleeping over for Max’s 11^th birthday [We couldn't just do pizza like everyone else. No….] One of the kids told me that someone was knocking at our door. It was our new neighbor, a mom of two boys:

Neighbor: Do you have mice?

Me: Occasionally.

N: What do you do?

M: Feed em. Kill em. Depends.

N: I mean what do you do when you catch one. We have one on a glue trap, and I can’t get hold of the super.

M: I guess keep trying him.

N: But it’s squeaking, and the squeaking is really bothering my sister. [?]

M: Sorry, but I’m cooking for six boys now.

N: But my husband isn’t coming home for an hour!

M: Well, I guess you’re going to have to woman up and kill it yourself.

N: Oh, I can’t do that. I teach yoga.

2011-04-06T13:04:00.000-04:00

NY Times 3-31 The Good & The Bad

Oh Goodie! Another Thing To Be All Retro About: Typewriters!!

[The reason this piece is late is because I wrote it on a wonderful old Remington. Then retyped it because of typors. Then had it set in type face, printed, and fed manually into the interweb]

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/31/fashion/31Typewriter.html?ref=fashion

What’s going to make a comeback next?

Slide rulers? -- just love the feel of the wood, the incomprehensibility!
Beepers? -- need I say more?
Belted sanitary pads? -- I really like to feel protected
Pogroms? – veiled anti-Semitism is so done. I want to be hated to my face, have my home trashed, really feel the loathing.

Kids Doing Real Woodworking

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/31/garden/31kids.html?_r=1&hpw

I’ve tried for years to get my kids in actual cooking classes not the only kind you can actually find in New York City, the pudding-stirring-stay-away-from-heat-and-sharp-objects-you-precious-little-idiot-you classes. It’s like the first thing a seven year old would do in front of an open flame is put his face on it because it’s so bright and colorful. As if even if kids were that stupid, then all the adults present supervising would somehow be so inept or inattentive that they would let them.

Sorry I have to go now, Simon just flipped the steaks on our hardwood charcoal grill with a pair of tongs more than half his height, and I have to stir the pudding. [Actually Simon did that two summers ago when he was six. The following fall he got to chop celery with a plastic knife at the JCC].

I never did find a decent cooking class, but at least these dudes have stepped up with real tools!

2011-03-23T20:37:00.000-04:00

Dear Whitney:

I am a parent of a student in Ms. F.'s third grade class, and I accompanied the class on its visit to the Edward Hopper exhibition today. I want to thank the museum for accommodating us and for giving the students the opportunity to see the work firsthand and in an uncrowded setting.

Edward Hopper, Barber Shop (1931)

I know that the Whitney has always placed great import on arts education and for that I am also grateful. Because I know the high value you place on education, I am moved to write to implore you to reevaluate some of your approaches. Today's guide was a sweet person who clearly valued her charges but also did them a bit of a disservice in her talk.

On the first painting they looked at, my son mentioned that the bridge in it was the Brooklyn Bridge. It was the Queensborough Bridge. Rather than correct him, the guide praised him. This set the the tone for the talk. Her theme was that Hopper was intentionally ambiguous in his paintings to leave interpretation open to the viewer''s imagination. While mystery and ambiguity no doubt play a large part in Hopper's work, there are certain clues in his paintings that are incontrovertible. Allowing kids to miss those clues grossly undersells the work and underestimates the students.

Since my days as art critic, I have been teaching a good deal of art and English literature. I find that many students seem to deplore both. I believe that a lot of this loathing stems from students being taught that any interpretation is valid. Instead, it would be far more beneficial if students were taught that artists and writers often make choices for very specific reasons and that those choices suggest meanings that could take students beyond their own subjectivity [even eight year olds want to learn something more than the contours of their own minds].

After many years, the self esteem movement at large has taken a few steps back. It is time for it to do so in arts education as well. It is all right for children to lose occasionally and it's also all right for them to be told that the Queensborough Bridge is not the Brooklyn Bridge or that a painting called Barber Shop is not set in a science lab. Instead of leading the students to see that masterpiece as a character study of a manicurist in repose, a minor character idle in a busy barbershop elevated to heroic stature by her central placement in a shaft of brilliant light, our guide let the students go on about her being a painter, someone waiting for a haircut, etc...

Ugh.

Thanks for your time and efforts.

2011-03-17T13:29:00.000-04:00

Atomic-holes

Flint & Frum -- Complicit A-Holes

Lobbyists, pundits and think-tank shills routinely escape taking responsibility or paying the price for either being obscenely wrong or for pushing for causes they know to be obscenely wrong [“Free markets will regulate themselves!” “Once we invade Iraq, democracy will flourish!”]. It is galling that these people are allowed to spew their toxic propaganda with impunity especially when it is hard to believe that they are not aware of the criminal negligence inherent in their words. On the heels of the snowballing nuclear disaster in Japan, the atomic lobby has released a rapid response team into the media and the halls of Congress with a fervor usually reserved for fighting actual nuclear meltdowns. These creatures however, are not fighting to save lives, but to save $360 billion in Federal loan guarantees.

Yesterday, I absorbed a fair amount of nuclear poisoning from both tv and the radio. CNN covered a day in the life of Alex Flint, a lobbyist for the Nuclear Energy Institute, as he ran around Washington putting out anti-nuclear fires. He held a closed information meeting which 150 members of Congress attended and spent the rest of the morning sitting directly behind Department of Energy Secretary Steven Chu as he testified before Congress. One of the talking head type A-holes, David Frum, speaking on Marketplace, even used the conceit that he just bought stock in uranium shares on the grounds that, “If the danger from this shock is contained, nuclear will have passed its most extreme test.”

Frum’s commentary is not just wrongheaded but also criminal. Forget the growing fear that nuclear will NOT pass this test, and the horrible dread we are all beginning to feel that Japan will, literally, be living with the fallout from this catastrophe for decades. Even if all radioactive leakage were to stop this instant, there is no way to know that this will be nuclear’s “most extreme test.” Of course that is the biggest problem with nuclear energy.

Nuclear energy should not be allowed to continue as it is currently constituted precisely because the consequences of an accident at a nuclear power plant are so dire and because the world is fraught with so many “unknown unknowns.” What if instead of targeting the World Trade Center, the 9/11 hijackers had aimed their jets 70 miles north at the Indian Point Nuclear facility? Or what if, oh I dunno’, there’s an earthquake in California [that’s kind of a known known]? Or what if....well, you get the idea.

Later in his chat, Frum goes on to say that “the principal alternative to nuclear power is coal, and that the hazards of coal are less spectacular than the hazards of nuclear, in just the same way that the hazards of driving are less spectacular than the hazards of flying.” When Frum, a seemingly intelligent man [he used to write economic speeches for George W. Bush] starts tossing around such specious syllogisms, I begin to speculate that perhaps he bought those uranium shares with money from the uranium industry and notions of true criminality dance through my head.

Freedom of speech is a hallowed and inalienable right, but you still can’t yell “Fire!” in a crowded theater or, in this case, “No Fire!” in a nuclear meltdown.

2011-02-25T23:26:00.001-05:00

Oh Oscar!

Went to see The Fighter. Trying to fight my anti-stereotypical Boston film bias. It's a stereotypical Boston film (set in Lowell) AND and a stereotypical boxing film AND it looks like it was shot on a flip cam through a lens dipped in clam broth. However, Russell, as ever, has wrought great performances from his actors including Amy Adams who looks great with a tummy but gets lost in the final act, Mark Wahlberg who creates the strong backbone everyone gets to hang their ham on, Christian Bale who canned the ham and Melissa Leo who smoked the ham and nailed it to the screen. There is absolutely not one false note in her performance. It is truly remarkable. If Leo doesn't win Best Supporting Actress, the quintet who played her daughers should.

As for Best Film, I have seen seven out of ten nominated pics. I have not seen The Social Network [for reasons discussed here previously], The King's Speech [if you think I have a anti Boston film bias, you should hear what I think of small, well wrought Britishy oh Brit films], or 127 Hours [I know how it turns out]. Of course either Social Network or King's Speech will probably win, but I'm hoping that either The Black Swan or Winter's Bone wins. Winter's Bone has no chance, but wouldn't it be wonderful if, as Beth suggested the hill women from Winter's Bone slugged it out with the Ward women from The Fighter? The Black Swan is the most complete film of the lot save one, but it probably turns too many people off on its face. The one film that was better than The Black Swan and better than any of others on the list, is the most complete of all ten, the richest, and most fully realized. The film also contains the most enduring characters, some of the finest ensemble work you'll ever see in a movie and it was, by far, with only Inception [the boys' pick] coming in second, the most well crafted and visually stunning of all the Best Film nominees. This movie will NEVER win, but it should because the best film of 2010 was Toy Story 3.

2011-02-25T22:37:00.000-05:00

Reposted by popular demand:

Ski Day with Beleaguered Dad in 82 Steps:

Wake up
Make coffee
Make breakfast for boys
Get boys dressed, loaded with gloves etc.
Get self dressed, loaded
Load car w skis, etc.
Forget lift tickets
Drive to slope
Park
Get Max in ski boots
Get self in ski boots
Carry skis etc. to slope
Take Simon to ski school desk
Get ski school pass
Go to ski office to get temporary lift passes for day
Wait for and get temporary lift tickets for day
Find Max give, him pass, send him off skiing w no rendezvous plan except the one he forgot from last time
Take Simon to rental place
Get Simon boots and board
Take Simon to ski school at foot of bunny hill
Go back to ski school desk to sign Simon up for another hour b/c he just missed first 15 minutes of 60 min lesson
Explain to guy at ski school desk that I’m the beleaguered dad
Go get my own skis on
Try to find Max
Give up and go skiing
After two runs, run into Simon getting onto the ski lift w his instructor: asks me “Where’s Max?” [he cares about his brother!] then tells me I was getting paged
Run into ski school desk
Ask if it was they who paged me [Yes and they knew it was me, beleaguered dad, Max was looking for, so after he waited around a while until they told him to go ski and meet up w me at noon when Simon’s lesson would be over]
Noon: all reunited at last
Back to lodge to eat lunch
Get table
Get food [one cheeseburger, two orders of French fries, a cup of cookies, two hot chocolates and a Diet Pepsi = $32]
Eat lunch
Take Simon back to bunny hill and leave him there, so I could ski w Max whom it turned out I had left alone for two hours
Do two runs w Max, drop a pole off ski-lift on first one
Pick up Simon
All take lift
Simon and I get off lift half way up hill, Max continues to the top
Watch Simon board, fall, board, fall, board, fall, board…until he gets tired of my watching him board, fall, board, fall, board, fall and sends me to the bottom to wait
Do it again
Meet up with Max and we all go to top of mountain
Watch Simon board, fall, board, fall, board, fall…
Using video cam on cell phone, I video Simon boarding while I ski with one pole. [Back in NYC, Beth disappointed I only videoed Simon]
Watch Simon board, fall, board, fall, board, fall…until he gets tired of my watching him board, fall, board, fall, board, fall and sends me to the bottom to wait
Do it again
Send Max to lodge to get himself hot chocolate
Simon and I return to rental place to return his board and boots
Go to ski repair shop to look for guy who sold us skis in November on the super cheap
Find guy
Ask for new pole and snowboard and boots for Simon [I realize now that Simon’s boarded twice, the skis I bought him will be useless]
Go outside to check my pole size [no jokes here please], second pole gone
Lewis [the ski repair guy] sells me used board and boots and set of poles
Cost of boots and board: $50 -- Not having to wait for Simon to get rental equipment next time and thereafter: Priceless
Get Max from lodge
Buy water for Simon and myself [flop sweating is really dehydrating]
Bring Max to ski repair shop while Simon is getting fitted
Listen to black guy make anti-semitic crack to Lewis
Pay Lewis
Bring gloves, hats, scarves, new poles, board, boots and boys out to pick up area in parking lot
On way out of rental place pass two guys dressed like they’re trolling for paparazzi at Sundance instead of for night skiing at Catamount
Almost get in fight with two guys, who are dressed for night skiing at Catamount like they’re trolling Sundance for paparazzi, because as I passed them I couldn’t help saying, “Really?"
Leave boys to get car
Take off ski boots
Bring car around
Load car with boots and boards and gloves and hats and scarves and boys
Leave mountain
Go to supermarket, leave boys in car listening to music
Buy food for dinner
Get home, unload car
Crack a beer and some pain meds
Make dinner
Eat dinner
Make the boys clean the damn kitchen
Nod off watching Monty Python w the boys
Wake up to put them to sleep
Put them to sleep
Tell them I love them to which Simon responds, “You don’t have to rub it in.”
Shower off flop sweat
Watch golf on Slingbox
Draw
Read Time and Again
Sleep

2011-02-22T13:53:00.000-05:00

Hey Charlie. I'll do it! I'll do it!

"Hur, hur, hur!"

from New York Magazine, Feb 13 article
Fight Like a Pretty Boy --
Where male models go to prove they’re not Ken dolls.

http://nymag.com/fashion/11/spring/71649/

“Rockstar” Charlie explains, “I’ve been fucking decked at these things, but I’m not worried about it,” he says when I ask why he’d risk those cheekbones now that his career is picking up speed. “I wouldn’t mind if my face looked more like a boxer’s. It would give me some more character. I’m just like, ‘Come on, break my nose!’”

2011-02-16T10:47:00.001-05:00

If This Is What You Get When You Put Up a Bird Feeder....

Good thing we didn't put up a cat feeder!

2011-02-14T10:17:00.001-05:00

The 23rd St. Doughnut Plant Has Opened!

The best thing to happen to the Chelsea Hotel since Sid & Nancy.

2011-02-03T00:35:00.003-05:00

Must?

Jerry Saltz recommended Christian Marclay's video in the listing section of New York Magazine this week. In about 50 words he described the piece [I can do it in 33: Marclay did a tour de force clip job and pieced together movie fragments that tick off every minute of the day in a video that is shown in synch with the actual time]. Saltz ended his description by calling it a "must see" piece. My issue with this piece and most concept pieces is: if they can be described thoroughly enough so that you get the whole schtick in 50 words or fewer, what in all that makes the piece a "must see" or even a "see"?

It would, however, be cool to play it instead of having a clock in your home

To be fair, I feel this way about many books [novels, non-fiction and academic tomes alike] and most films which are often sold on one line concepts. Once you know the premises of these works [people in Brooklyn have feelings, poverty is bad, Jennifer Aniston needs another paycheck], you can pretty much posit their entire scope and obviate the need to experience them.

2011-02-03T00:19:00.000-05:00

Bullet Point Wednesday

Twitbook

As if to prove my point about having the whole social network thing shoved in my face like snow by a bully, when I woke up this morning and flicked on the clock radio in the kitchen the first three words I heard, swear to god, were "Facebook and Twitter."

I listen to a lot of radio; radio loves to talk about all the new media and the death of the old media. So much so that the words "Facebook and Twitter" have become linked like "salt and pepper" as the special flavor combo of newness and young-nocity. I wonder if the other old dying media talked so much about the new ones back in the day. Are there thousands of stone carvings fretting about papyrus? Were the telelgraph lines abuzz with talk of the telephone? Did lps devote cuts to discussions of cds? Did cd's have special bonus tracks that dithered about mp3s? Did horses chatter ceaselessly about cars?

Another Small Business Closes

It is sad, but if ever a business was asking for it, it was this one:

Curl Up & Dye has curled up and dyed

Buffalo New York

If New York City is going to turn into Buffalo, they could at least lower our rents and make us better bowlers.

Each morning I arrive at my office exhausted from getting the kids to school and then getting myself downtown. Today my sons argued over who held provenance over a chunk of ice. Today. The entire upper west side was a chunk of ice. Beth insists they're geniuses.

Anything But the Rand Paul Ads

Keep clicking. After four years of intermittent and now mittent blogging, my adsense dollars are up to $5.17. Google sends you a check after you've cleared $100, so at this rate I'll be receiving my first check in 2091. I promise, at that time, to give all the money to the committee to Landmark the Freedom Tower.

Catch

Now that golf Dave has one kid, he asked me what it was like to have two. I told him to imagine that having a wife and one child was like juggling a chain saw and a bowling ball, and then someone tosses you a cat....

2011-01-26T12:38:00.003-05:00

LA Diary

[More pics to come -- Camera on Hiatus]

Thoughts I Had Watching TV on the Flight to LA

The tvs on my flight kept needing to be rebooted, so JetBlue ending up comping all the movies. Even then I wouldn't watch Social Network. I love Aaron Sorkin even now that he’s sober, and I’m sure Jesse Eisenberg was great and Justin Timberlake can do no wrong in my book, but I still didn’t want to watch it. Later I realized why. Every day in every way I’m having Facebook pressed in my face like Aunt Ida's tits and not in a good way. The last thing I want to do on my time off is pay $20 or $0 to have it shoved in my face some more.

Instead of being cast in movies about accidental relationships brought on by the onset of an unexpected baby, Katherine Heigl should be cast as Wonder Woman. She has the boobs and hairline for it.

Outback Steakhouse is so fucking cheap they don't even hire actual Australians to do the accent.

Arrival

I know I’m somewhere radically different: the Long Beach baggage claim is outdoors. There not a speck of snow anywhere. Not even one of those residual snow piles that linger into May in NY.

Golf Dave picked me up.

Dave. I met him at the old Moshulu Golf Course in the Bronx. He was golfer who painted and I was a painter who golfed. Most impromptu golf partners are dicks or weenies, so our bond was instantaneous in spite of his being almost twenty years my junior. A few years ago he moved back to Cali, resurrected a gallery [http://raidprojects.com/], enrolled in grad school, had a baby, got married [Hello to Heather & Wagon Girl], and resettled in his native Long Beach. Tired of hearing about my desire to go to California to see Dave and meet the new fam, Beth arranged for me to get out there. Dave did the rest.

Most other motels only

advertise high ceilings

I'm staying right across the street from

combination Pizza Hut & Taco Bell

After Dave checked me in and took me to meet Ryan. Ryan is a completely ür California experience in and of himself. He paints in a Quonset tower within an amazing little family courtyard [his dad and grandfather both worked there] that contains a beautiful old workshop and tons of surf boards. His work is a little bit like Alfred Jensen meets Ed Rusche, but he’s not yet sure where his own hand fits in. Time will tell. After the studio visit we settled into a bar on the main street drag of Seal Beach. We talked about a lot of things including my propensity for cursing in public [not a great idea in Cali] and Californians propensity for criticizing people’s life styles to their faces [not a great idea in NY]. Then Ryan mentioned that he was into guns and owned a couple. He wasn’t into guns for hunting [I didn’t so much as see a squirrel in my whole time in LA], or self-defense, as he was into having one in case of, “You know, apocalypse.”

Maybe it was because it was 4am my time or because the whole Arizona calamity was fresh in my mind, but something crystallized for me and I had to respond:

The belief that having guns around to protect us from bad people is pure childhood fantasy and magical thinking.

If a burglar comes and knocks out Daddy, I’ll hide behind the door and jump on him when he tries to come into my room and I’ll be the one to save Mommy.

If there wasn’t anyone on hand in that Arizona parking lot to pull a gun and take down the bad guy, when and where will there be? In Arizona even concealed weapons are allowed to carry concealed weapons. But none of that matters because the chances of a civilian being in the right time and the right place and having the wherewithal to take out a deranged gunman in the midst of perpetrating a random massacre are even lower than the odds of the massacre occurring in the first place. As for all hell breaking loose, sure it could happen: civilization could break down. But as I told Ryan, “If the country really did go to hell, and I really did need a gun, I’m sure I’d be able to rustle up something.”

Living the Dream

Put palm trees around them!

[No one will ever noticethe oil rigs 20 feet of their shores]

Friday morning : I had the best breakfast burrito of my life.

Friday afternoon: I hit out of deep sand from 40 feet up a steep face to within 6 inches of the cup.

Saturday night:

I have now lived the social network in action. After a pleasant stroll through MOCA, I told Dave I had a hankering for sushi. He didn’t really know any places, so he did the text driving thing [we did a lot of the text driving thing – I felt like such an outlaw] and put the question out on Facebook. A young woman he knew, Dot Girl [she draws pics of endless color pencil dots], hit him back, and in 20 minutes we were in Little Tokyo eating really good sushi [http://www.sushigenla.com/]. Acoustic indie rock was playing in the background the whole time.

There was a couple seated next to us at the restaurant who were clearly on their first date. The man had those multi-level asymmetrical side bangs Japanese dudes seem to dig. The woman, super petite and immaculate, sat perched on the front edge of her seat, her large leather purse behind her. After they ordered, she took out an inlaid case. She withdrew pieces of wood and ivory, and screwed together her chop sticks like a pool shark would her cue. The woman’s order arrived all sea urchin and monkfish liver. She lit on each piece like an expert fly fisherman and slid her strikes into her mouth with deadly precision. She will marry this man and run his life and the lives of their children.

Later at the opening at the gallery Dave used to run, I saw a lot of girls with cute hats and complex tattoos including Dot Girl. The gallery is part of a complex called the Brewery part of which had been a brewery but was also composed of warehouses and office courtyards. Like LA at its best, it combined the inside with the outside in a sprawling open way that makes a tight assed easterner giddy in the dead of winter. There were giant studios and lofts and odd converted live/work spaces that made huge artwork make sense. We wandered and came back for the end of the opening and then wandered again through the warren of space, past a loading dock converted to a terrace and a back office space now a live/work space where Dot Girl was hosting a party with her roommate Airbrush Boy. It was a nice party, everyone was nice to me, and I was neither drunk nor stoned. Weird.

Sunday morning: We surfed.

Ryan lent me a board that was about 9 feet long and about as easy to maneuver as a garbage scow. Dave said it was better for me, but I think that after three days of putting up with me he was just looking to fuck with me. I did show Dave a little something by miraculously wedging myself into a wetsuit he was sure was too small for me.

The thing about surfing is it all looks so nice and bucolic until you try to get past the breakers without vomiting a lung.

I don't think any other person has ever said the word "paddle" to me as much in my life cumulatively as Dave did that one day. The only thing I succeeded at was not getting conked out by my own board as I was tossed like an overstuffed rag doll by the waves.

Eventually Dave tired of watching me and told me to try riding the whitewater. Eventually I got on top of a couple an almost got to my knees. I got a glimpse of the thing, and it was beautiful. Dave swore I did not look like a tool. He was lying.

Going Home

Living the Dream Part Two: I watched the Jets beat the pretty boy qb and the lipless sore winner/loser coach on the flight home via Slingbox and in-flight Wi-Fi. Not bad for a man who remembers the IBM Selectric as the height of technology. I managed not to cheer out loud both for the passengers on the plane who might have been taping the game and because I am, always have been, and always will be the guy stewardesses would most love to tase.

___________________

Ski Day with Beleaguered Dad in 82 Steps:

Wake up
Make coffee
Make breakfast for boys
Get boys dressed, loaded with gloves etc.
Get self dressed, loaded
Load car w skis, etc.
Forget lift tickets
Drive to slope
Park
Get Max in ski boots
Get self in ski boots
Carry skis etc. to slope
Take Simon to ski school desk
Get ski school pass
Go to ski office to get temporary lift passes for day
Wait for and get temporary lift tickets for day
Find Max give, him pass, send him off skiing w no rendezvous plan except the one he forgot from last time
Take Simon to rental place
Get Simon boots and board
Take Simon to ski school at foot of bunny hill
Go back to ski school desk to sign Simon up for another hour b/c he just missed first 15 minutes of 60 min lesson
Explain to guy at ski school desk that I’m the beleaguered dad
Go get my own skis on
Try to find Max
Give up and go skiing
After two runs, run into Simon getting onto the ski lift w his instructor: asks me “Where’s Max?” [he cares about his brother!] then tells me I was getting paged
Run into ski school desk
Ask if it was they who paged me [Yes and they knew it was me, beleaguered dad, Max was looking for, so after he waited around a while until they told him to go ski and meet up w me at noon when Simon’s lesson would be over]
Noon: all reunited at last
Back to lodge to eat lunch
Get table
Get food [one cheeseburger, two orders of French fries, a cup of cookies, two hot chocolates and a Diet Pepsi = $32]
Eat lunch
Take Simon back to bunny hill and leave him there, so I could ski w Max whom it turned out I had left alone for two hours
Do two runs w Max, drop a pole off ski-lift on first one
Pick up Simon
All take lift
Simon and I get off lift half way up hill, Max continues to the top
Watch Simon board, fall, board, fall, board, fall, board…until he gets tired of my watching him board, fall, board, fall, board, fall and sends me to the bottom to wait
Do it again
Meet up with Max and we all go to top of mountain
Watch Simon board, fall, board, fall, board, fall…
Using video cam on cell phone, I video Simon boarding while I ski with one pole. [Back in NYC, Beth disappointed I only videoed Simon]
Watch Simon board, fall, board, fall, board, fall…until he gets tired of my watching him board, fall, board, fall, board, fall and sends me to the bottom to wait
Do it again
Send Max to lodge to get himself hot chocolate
Simon and I return to rental place to return his board and boots
Go to ski repair shop to look for guy who sold us skis in November on the super cheap
Find guy
Ask for new pole and snowboard and boots for Simon [I realize now that Simon’s boarded twice, the skis I bought him will be useless]
Go outside to check my pole size [no jokes here please], second pole gone
Lewis [the ski repair guy] sells me used board and boots and set of poles
Cost of boots and board: $50 -- Not having to wait for Simon to get rental equipment next time and thereafter: Priceless
Get Max from lodge
Buy water for Simon and myself [flop sweating is really dehydrating]
Bring Max to ski repair shop while Simon is getting fitted
Listen to black guy make anti-semitic crack to Lewis
Pay Lewis
Bring gloves, hats, scarves, new poles, board, boots and boys out to pick up area in parking lot
On way out of rental place pass two guys dressed like they’re trolling for paparazzi at Sundance instead of for night skiing at Catamount
Almost get in fight with two guys, who are dressed for night skiing at Catamount like they’re trolling Sundance for paparazzi, because as I passed them I couldn’t help saying, “Really?"
Leave boys to get car
Take off ski boots
Bring car around
Load car with boots and boards and gloves and hats and scarves and boys
Leave mountain
Go to supermarket, leave boys in car listening to music
Buy food for dinner
Get home, unload car
Crack a beer and some pain meds
Make dinner
Eat dinner
Make the boys clean the damn kitchen
Nod off watching Monty Python w the boys
Wake up to put them to sleep
Put them to sleep
Tell them I love them to which Simon responds, “You don’t have to rub it in.”
Shower off flop sweat
Watch golf on Slingbox
Draw
Read Time and Again
Sleep

2011-01-11T22:48:00.001-05:00

My New Band

Black Swan Keys Eyed Peas Sabbath Crows

Furniture Hockey

It's hard for me to write for very long at a stretch. First of all, at any given moment I'm usually very tired. Second, I'm easily distracted, and, third, I'm not very talented. On top of all that, my neighbors have just resumed their endless game of furniture hockey. As best I can gather from what I hear through the uninsulated wall between of our 125 year old tenement apartments, furniture hockey involves uncarpeted wood floors instead of ice, and any item of furniture instead of a puck. The players seem to have shed ice skates in favor of what I imagine to be bowling ball shoes. Not bowling shoes, bowling ball shoes. The goal of furniture hockey is not to slide the furniture into an open rectangle of metal piping. The goal of furniture hockey is to utterly and completely shatter my mind. Them 1, Me 0.

Rich v Poor

The NPR show, Morning Edition, did a feature monday on a study about the differences between the ways in which rich and poor people raise their children and how that impacted education. The study was remarkable on many levels. On the first level it is remarkable because, unlike most of the studies NPR cites under the heading of "Why it sucks to be poor," the answer to this one was not merely reduceable to "Because they have less money." [As opposed to earlier studies such as those that showed that poor people often receive worse health care or drive crappier cars, or the one that showed a staggering 100% of all poor people have less money than their wealthier counterparts]. One of the major findings of this study was that rich people tend to talk to their kids more. A lot more. More than three times as much. This finding supports my own findings even from among my generally affluent students. Often I get students who, in spite of being quite intelligent and even moderately well read, still have horrendously limited vocabularies. I always ask them if the members of their family speak to one another of if they merely grunt. After a few laughs, they usually say "Grunt."

Is He Having a Laugh?

Now that Ricky Gervais has lost the weight he joins the ranks of Joe Piscipo and Roseanne Barr as those who, after dealing with longstanding physical insecurities, cease to be funny. In his recent HBO special Gervais spends a good 20 minutes of the hour telling us, with all the transparent self-loathing he could muster, why it's proper to make fun of fat people. As if no one had ever been brave enough to do that before. Edgy.

Why I Love My Wife

Beth emailed me the web page above with a confirmation of a motel reservation she made for me in Long Beach.

I wrote back:
Thanks, and thanks for having them stock the pool.

To which she replied an instant later:

It's catch and release, though.

Why I Love My Wife, Part 2

This Tuesday evening as we were sitting in the front room trying to wind the kids down for the night, I looked out the window and saw a clear and giant fire in the window of an apartment across the street from us. At first I thought the fire was inside the apartment; then I realized it was a reflection. From across the street. From us.

Beth and I were down the stairs at once, leaving the boys behind a closed apartment door. We got to street level, Beth got out the door first, and all I heard was her say, "Oh my god." Luckily the fire wasn't in our building at all [do you know how hard it is to replace a 2/3 bedroom rent stabilized apt on the Upper West Side?]. The fire was in the six foot high pile of garbage and Christmas trees next to our tiny walk-up building. The flames were easily twice the height of the trash and ridiculously bright yellow. The doormen from the huge apartment building next door [whose trash it was] were out front milling about. Then one of them disappeared, presumably to call the fire dept or dig up a hose. Beth told me to get a fire extinguisher. I dutifully ran back into our building, stopped and asked her where one was. To her undying credit she didn't say, "On every landing of every floor you've walked past at least twice a day for the past 15 years." She just said, "On the landing."

I got the fire extinguisher, pulled the pin [which I found myself still clutching another 20 minutes later], and went for it. All I heard before I let 'er rip was some dude behind me say, "Good luck with that, man."

2011-01-07T11:23:00.000-05:00

End of Year Notes

The Black Swan

For all the hype about lesbian love scenes and self-mutiliation, The Black Swan is really a spot-on character study disguised as a classic melodrama/opera/ballet adorned with the occasional Japanese style cgi horror image. Portman gives her best performance since Beautiful Girls perhaps because as in B.G. she is playing closest to herself. Aronofsky, for whatever reason, is able to slide into the head of a ballerina. He really does. I know. Trust me or else I'll tell you about the ballet classes I took in high school. Now there's a disturbing image.

Abstract Expressionist New York

Moma's exhibit of works all drawn from its own fabulous collection brings forth:

the under-represented pleasantly represented: Baziotes and Brooks
the enduring masters: Pollock, Krasner, DeKooning, Gorky, Rothko [displayed in in stunning range], Reinhardt
those hanging on for dear life: Kline,Still and Hoffman,
and those who have fallen off entirely: Motherwell and Gottlieb - who must have been one charming dude to ever to have ascended as far as he did.

Favorite extended wall caption [it always thrills me that when dumb paint on canvas can rouse people to outrage, Outrage!]:

When Reinhardt’s black paintings were first exhibited at

MoMA, in 1963, their reductive imagery and stark

palette shocked visitors, prompting at least one

Museum membership cancellation, in protest.

I loved the photography, not the obligatory Robert Frank's but the all-over, all out ab-ex silver prints of:

Aaron Siskind

Harry Callahan

Nathan Lyons

Frederick Sommer, and

Minor White [best name ever]

I did not love most of the ab-ex sculpture which, with very few exceptions, could not escape looking like dated dental office art.

Exhibit of the Year

Heat Waves in a Swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchfield curated by Robert Gober

June 24 - October 17, 2010

Unlike great athletes who often do not make very good coaches, great artists often do make the best curators. There is precious little I could quibble with in this pristine tour de force of an exhibition. If you don't know Burchfield look him up or buy the catalogue. He was an upstate New Yorker who lived his life as a working, middle class artist. He did things with nature, watercolor and raw energy that had never been done. Most revelatory, later in life he returned to paintings he'd begun decades prior and added to them by tacking on additional pieces of paper. I don't know what the dude was smoking, but like Cezanne and Morandi before him, you can see the air rippling around his world, but unlike either of those gentlemen you can also smell the moisture on the forest floor and hear the flutter of the butterflies.

2010-12-23T12:54:00.000-05:00

Wicked

I know that movies set in Boston have to feature Irish people, violence and beer in cans, but why do they all also have to be lousy with bad accents and epic scene chewing?

...but then the last thing I liked with a Boston setting was Spenser: For Hire.

2010-12-22T12:22:00.000-05:00

Untied We Stand

There is an unwritten social law that if someone tells you your shoe is untied, you must immediately stop wherever you are and whatever you are doing and tie your shoe so you don't trip. You may have been going along fine for the past ten blocks with your shoelace untied, but the minute someone notices it, you are immediately in peril and must tie your shoe that instant or else you'll trip. It's sort of the Heisenberg principal in reverse.

When strangers stop me on the street to alert me to the fact that my shoelace is untied, however, I do not stop immediately, bend over and dutifully and gratefully tie my shoe. I might nod politely, but I keep on going until I find something to put my foot up on or I might even, heaven forfend, wait until I reach my destination before doing anything. You may think that it being my foot and my general well-being purportedly at stake, that that would be the end of the matter. However, since this is an unwritten law we're talking about, people often become unusually agitated and often downright insulted if I do not stop and tie my shoe that instant. They think that I am fucking with them. Now while fucking with people is one of my all time favorite things in the world to do, that is not what is going on here.

No longer a young man, I am now both overweight and none too limber, so for me stopping short in the middle of a block to bend over and tie my shoe may have all sorts of disastrous consequences. If there isn't a massive pile up of pedestrians behind me, there is still a good chance of all sorts of things untucking and popping out which would invariably lead to mass panic and stampeding on the street as other pedestrians attempt to flee the scene. What's more, bending at the waist and reaching for my feet is far more likely to lead to my having a heart attack or stroke than my not tying shoe would lead to my tripping. In fact, in all my nearly half-century of living, I cannot recall myself or anyone else ever actually tripping over an untied shoelace. A stumble maybe, but never a full fledged trip. Neither can I recall anyone ever falling onto a pair of scissors while running with them, nor have I ever seen a baby choke on the dreaded uncut grape or suffocate inside the nefarious dry cleaning bag. Furthermore, I have never had the misfortune to witness a child poke someone's eye out with a stick or jump off a bridge because his friend did.

So if you see me on the street and my shoelace is untied, please don't worry about it. If you do feel concerned enough to tell me about it, please don't take it personally when I don't heed your advice. I do appreciate a simple heads up on dog shit though.

2010-12-16T17:26:00.001-05:00

Try This...

Anti-depressants and other prescription mood controllers were introduced to the general populace in the mid-80s and gained prominence in the 90s. Never a particularly reflective culture, we took advantage of these high grade stimulants to bury the dark stuff for good and STAY PRODUCTIVE!

In retail it is always great to have a supply of umbrellas handy when it rains. It is even better to have a supply of umbrellas and be able to make it rain. In the 80's we did coke and crack and Wall Street was able to sell us, fittingly enough, Junk Bonds. Like any good crack high however, the thrill of junk bonds rapidly wore off and we crashed. In the 90's as anti-depressants were kicking in we found ourselves remarkably susceptible to believing that various markets--beginning with the internet--would never crash . That bubble eventually deflated and then burst as the planes crashed into the towers, but instead of facing reality we swallowed more fistfuls of anti-depressants and kept on buying. As always the force of our denial was equal and opposite to the amount of crap we were trying to suppress. We swallowed the notion the infinite rise of real estate values and the viability of credit default swaps like so many M&Ms. And then boom, it all began to crash, again.

We swallowed Obama hoping he would make everything magically all better. Then he had the audacity to be human while trying to deal with the nuts of bolts of our long ignored realities. Instead of mustering more fervor and support for him, we buried our t-shirts and fell silent in the face of those who decided that pounding the reactionary bottle would do the trick [good luck with that].

Anti-depressants are life-savers for the clinically depressed [until they stop taking them, cf. J.F.Wallace], for the rest of us walking wounded, like all drugs, they merely forestall facing reality. Therapy, analysis, inter-personal communication [i.e. talking] are all messy and imperfect modes for dealing with the burdens of reality. How about we give them a try? What do we have to lose? The first taste is free...

_____

Hey kids! Here's an awesome video about a great moment in sports and a time when most drugs did not come from Duane Reade.

No Mas Presents: Dock Ellis & The LSD No-No by James Blagden

2010-12-13T15:15:00.004-05:00

G-L-O-R-I-A

I met Patti Smith yesterday. It made me very happy.

I told her I got her book for the holidays, and that I was looking forward to reading it.

I was around back then.

It’ll bring back a lot.

I hope I can remember.

I’ll remember for you.

Cool

2010-12-13T15:11:00.001-05:00

Weekend Pants

Lately my hair has been looking a lot like a cross between Brain Glazer’s and Yahoo Serious’. I’m really liking it.

One last thing about the tax deal: it spares us having to watch the Republicans run around pretending as if they ever really gave a rat’s ass about the deficit.

If you are married to a non-Jewish woman who hates to clean her hair out of the shower drain, and you point that out to her, she will either deny it, contradict it, or completely ignore you. If are married to a Jewish woman who hates to clean her hair out of the shower drain and you point that out to her, she’ll say, “I don’t clean hair out of fucking drains.”

Netflix is now totally bored with the DVD side of its business. Every third disk I get from them is scratched up and unwatchable.

I’m not saying Assange did or did not rape those women in

Sweden

, but, given what I know of the cases, if he were just some random Thom, Steig or Lars, the Swedish constabulary would NOT have brought charges…

If you think “constabulary” is an old-fashioned word, what about “cables”? –As in the diplomatic cables that Assange stole—As in short for “cablegram”: a telegram sent by underwater cable, c. 1875. Every time I hear the term I think of foreign relations being conducted in the drawing rooms of the well-born over tea and shared connections. I imagine missives being dispatched and, yes, cables being sent. I don’t know what it says about the practices of the diplomatic community that they think they are still communicating via a method that peaked about 100 years ago, but for some reason it’s oddly comforting.

2010-12-09T10:43:00.000-05:00

Bernie Sanders for President

According to a NY Times article from Dec 8, "the only groups likely to face a tax increase are those near the bottom of the income scale -- individuals who make less than $20,000 and families with earnings below $40,000." The increase for those in that bracket has to do with the difference between the new reduction in Social Security payroll taxes [there's a good idea, aging America], and the non-extension of Making Work Pay [Obama's signature tax cut-so sorry old sport]. " 'It will come to a few dollars a week,' said...an analyst at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, 'but it is an increase.' "

Put another way, loosely estimating those "few dollars" at $10 per week, that would add up to $520 over the course of a year. That same percent increase on a millionaire making exactly $1M [increase taxes on millionaires? then we'd see class warfare] would come out to be roughly $13,000 [the yearly latte bill]. If that increase were applied only flatly to all our nation's approximately 4.7 millionaires, it would yield $61,100,000,000. That's not quite as much as we would have reaped had the Bush era tax cuts on the top 2% been allowed to lapse, but you get the idea. This is to say nothing of what we're losing in capital gains taxes, the elevation of the estate tax cap or, most perniciously, the loophole that taxes hedge fund managers [hedge fund managers!] at a maximum of 15% of earnings [the capital gains rate] instead of the roughly 30% that is the going rate for normal million/billionaires.

Bernie Sanders for President!

2010-12-08T13:22:00.000-05:00

Get Off the Life Raft: You’re Squishing My Hips

We all know if it had been up to her, Kate would have skooted over. But James [“My fists are made of ham, but everything I touch turns to gold!] Cameron needed Leo to die somehow, so….Get off the damn raft pretty boy!

Still, while our economy sinks like the you-know-what because of can’t fail [can’t sink] bonds [boat], watch out for the fat ass rich scrambling to stay on top of whatever shit is still floating – they are vicious.

I remember once leaving a very posh benefit at the Met, I was leaving the affair feeling all classy and shit when I stepped onto 5^th Ave. to hail a cab. I was elbowed out of the way by a silver haired woman in a designer gown as if that cab were the last one off the island before the peasants revolted.

* * *

Tyler Brûlé used to be on my Top Ten List of People I’d Most Like to Hit, but then I took him off it because who really cares? Now, however, he’s popped up in New York magazine shilling yet again for empty consumerism and calling it style. I still didn’t care enough to put him back on the list, but then I noticed [somehow for the first time] that “Tyler Brûlé” is about as real as “Häagen-Dazs.” This d-bag had the chutzpah to add both an acute accent mark AND a circumflex to his last name, and it worked like a charm. We deserve everything we get.

* * *

Man of the People

I’ve always felt bad about being annoyed by the aural leakage of people’s cheap headphones on the subway. I thought, “Who am I to complain at having to hear the tinny blowback from their crappy music when these poor folk clearly can’t afford better headphones.” It took a few years to get past my middle class guilt and realize that these poor folk had their cheap default headphones plugged into hi-tech mp3 players. Cost of iPod Touch: $250. Not being willing to spring the extra $20 for a decent pair of earphones: just plain cheap ass.

2010-12-07T09:57:00.001-05:00

So That's Why!

Because he hates to lose!

One of the worst things about being a sports fan, besides having saddled my kids with the ignominy of being Mets and Jets fans, is having to listen to the god-awful ramblings of sports announcers and commentators. The twaddle comes at you like an all out blitz and only occasionally does it registers just how stupid or downright pernicious some of their pat formulations can be. My new least favorite is, "He really hates to lose." Lately, I've heard this chestnut trotted out when they're talking about quarterbacks and trying to explain just why they're so dreamy and awesome.

I first heard it in a Philip Rivers puff piece [a week later he went out and lost to the Raiders. At home. Rivers must have hated that!]. Then last night I had to listen to the Monday Night crew tell me how Brady hates to lose. As if that's why he's so great and not his height, arm, innate timing, talent, poise, hard work, the team around him or the [friggin] coach who put it together and schemes like Bobby Fisher. As if the rest of us who aren't elite quarterbacks or Yankee captains just love to lose; love, love, love it and that's why we lose more often than we win because we're weak. That's why we're poor, and that's why rich people are rich: because they wanted it more and deserve everything they get, so we should shut the fuck up and let them keep their god damn tax break.

2010-12-06T00:39:00.000-05:00

Not an Instrument; Not a Country

Renzo Piano's addition to the Morgan Library Museum is a creature both beautiful and rare: a museum expansion/construction that is not a grandiose testament to the egos of its architect and the museum's trustees, an abysmal breach of duty both to the art going public and the art they are going to see, or a colossal waste of money. Instead it is a seamless add-in that yokes together three disparate spaces across the better part of a highly developed city block. The main space is wide open and airy, and yet still manages to have nooks and crannies capable of surprising the visitor and granting her privacy and repose. Primarily steel,wood and glass, it is an incredibly warm space. The steel girded and gridded supports are painted, but in the grey December light seemed plated in silver and no doubt would have been had J.P. Morgan himself been footing the bill.

I was there to see the Lichtenstein show, a display of drawings early and on. The show itself was surprisingly warm as it showed the artist as a young man struggling to master his new approach. His greatest and most charming challenge seemed to entail finding a way to replicate the Ben-Day dots he loved so much with mechanical uniformity by hand. I got to learn that "poichoir" is a lovely word for stencil and that "frottage" does not just mean "dry humping." I also got a wonderful sense for Lichtenstein's sense of humor. In a special niche of the exhibit, the curators had dug up an old door from a studio the artist inhabited during a stay at an art colony in Colorado. A small windowless space, Lichtenstein turned it into a 3-D cartoon using electrician's tape to form contour lines around doors, walls and outlets, as well as heat squiggles and knocking sounds. Hilarious and, dare I say, fun.

Lichtenstein made a big deal about trying to make passionless art. In restrospect, I think he was trying to get away from the faux white boy passion of abstract expressionism -- and who could blame him? If the trade off is humor for the gesture of passion, I'll take humor every time.

Ultimately, however, Lichtenstein's work is about timelessness. Whether it be the tail gunner going down, the hot dog, the knock on the door, the Alka-Seltzer tablet dissolving or the brush stroke expressing--Lichtenstein captured it, froze it and reduced it to its simplest form funny, lovely and for all time.

2010-12-05T01:13:00.002-05:00

From now on things are going to change around here...

For years Beth has been urging me to put my random annoying and only lightly edited thoughts immediately into the blog, but I have always chose instead only to upload the carefully honed and well picked over nuggets of only my most highly relished brain turds. Then I read the essay "Isn't It Romantic" in David Rakoff's new book, Half Empty.

I do not say this out of pride or anger or bloated sense of self, but I could have written the entire essay - almost word for word - about fifteen years ago. Of course making a claim like that is ridiculous and unprovable, except if you're willing to believe Beth who could attest to having been made to listen to every annoying insight contained therein ad nauseum for almost the past fifteen years. However, as a wife cannot be compelled to testify by her spouse [or is that against her spouse], the only way to stop being unprovable and ridiculous is to step into the rush and the bother of the blogosphere, mind dump every day and force you to read it.

I shall hold my nose and jump in:

Half Empty?

It starts simply enough with an idea. The idea that cars should, at this point in their evolution, be able to tell us how much gas we have in our tanks. I do not mean a red needle pointing to a white lined fractional break down of the tank's contents splayed out like rays of the sun. I also do not mean an LED version of the same thing. I am not even content with those guesstimations of miles left in the tank before you need to fill up. I mean an honest to god reading of precisely or even not so precisely how many GALLONS are in my tank.

How hard could it be? My car, a 2006 Subaru Outback, tells me so many things I do and do not want to know [I love knowing the outside temperature/do not need to know their highly suspect miles per gallon estimates: 22 mpg, no wait 9 mpg, no wait 37 mpg...]. My car is also very concerned that if the key is anywhere near the ignition, I damn well better be in the driver's seat and strapped down NO MATTER WHAT otherwise the perpetually intermittent binging ensues. Why can't my car also tell me that I have 2 gallons in my tank? Wouldn't that be a useful piece of information? Wouldn't it be nice to rent a car and not have to guess how many gallons are in that eighth of a tank you just used and not have to spend your entire driving time trying to triangulate your mileage, your best guess at mpg all while trying to remember precisely where the needle started its decline all so you don't end up buying too much or, even worse, too little gas for the car upon return. Perhaps this one little feature could re-start Chrysler?

It's not a big thing, but it's a beginning. We could probably have done it fifteen years or so ago, but we didn't, so we might as well do it now. Let us begin.

2010-04-11T23:34:00.001-04:00

Fair Day

I had a little time to go the armory show at the pier and less time to go to the pier show at the armory, but I ran over to Volta because Golf Dave asked me to, and he’s the only one who can fix my swing, tell me where to surf on Long Island, and hook me up when I’m in LA. So I went.

It a nice concept for the mono-focused: Exhibitors showing one artist at a time so you can take or leave it, and I mostly left it which isn’t entirely fair because I ran through the joint at record speed. Dave’s friend, John Kinkead was showing Heather Cantrell who takes photos of people and prints those pics as her work ongoing. Sometimes she hops nude into the shots. Sometimes less nude. I promised to return also nude to have myself shot, but at $200 a pop she missed my price point by about $150.

The Armory was also a good one for the single minded. The booths were quieter: less noisy crap. I don’t remember much of it except running into Solange again after last running into her at the Armory three years back—with Beth next to me both times. Always so comfortable running into an ex named Solange with your wife and the mother of your children at your side. I also remember Amy Bennett’s work at Richard Heller’s booth [he's also from LA]. Bennett, working out of Bklyn, has perfected a style of locked down suburban landscapes which have the singular most amazing veneer I have ever seen on a work. Clearly worth the 20k they were fetching. If I had it, I would have paid the money just to make her tell me how she did it.

A Moment at MOMA

Tim Burton is the kind of facile genius that I always wished to be. He seemed to have emerged fully formed from thin air like a Cheshire cat.

Marina Abranovic was totally staring at me.

And in the End...

Health insurance. Yay!

Hollow Cores

Visited the Death Star on West St.: the new Goldman Sachs building. M got me in. The security of the place is subtle but pervasive. Artful landscape to prevent truck bombs. Elevators off to one side to prevent hollow core collapse. Sky lobbies with restricted access to upper level elevators to prevent lower echelon employees from staging coups or Alan Rickman from holding the building hostage. And on and on. How sad. But then it’s a small price to pay for a building made out of 100% foreclosed homes.

And off to one corner in the main lobby, in a handsome frame: the last dime!

A bit more front and center is Julie Mehretu’s enormous, immaculate mural. Made from five separate panels each huge in its own right, the piece is quite perfect in its place and a splendid commitment to art. M said the surface was like vellum and the marks floated and landed on it with the smooth precision of Kim Yu-na’s tiny blades.

According to Calvin Tomkin’s article on the mural in The New Yorker, Mehretu was paid $5 million for the work of which roughly $4 million went to fabrication costs. Tomkins does not cite his source for those numbers--especially on the fabrications costs, but if they’re Mehrtu’s, it is easy to see why Goldman Sachs was attracted to her in the first place.

Though perhaps ultimately all surface, Mehretu’s piece is far better than the Franz Ackerman in the rear lobby. Goldman, though often pr savvy-less, at least had the smarts to send the white dude to the back of the bus. Although his space is also huge, it lacks the cathedral lighting that bathes Mehretu’s piece. Ackerman also somehow manages to make the room looked cramped. Though formed by strong intuiting shapes, the mural is plagued by the twin Teutonic problems of didacticism and bad color [they tend to think being colorful means using lots of heavily saturated, clashing colors--whee!].

Good Friend

The last time I saw Joey Cruz he was breaking his hand on the hard head of a drunken Irish man who had very much been asking for it. Now JC was in town to put up a project with Mark Dion and sit on panels. We were supposed to go to the Whitney together, but he got too busy with his new friends talking grad schools and art making strategies. To make matters worse Golf Dave, who was also with us that night, now runs Raid Projects in LA and is himself a bit of an art professional. Ugh. All this respectability hurts worse than the Irish man’s jaw no doubt did.

So I went to the Biennial alone and completely sober.

Not since Klaus Kertess’ swipe at solo curating in 1995 has a Whitney Biennial looked so tasteful. Bonami took a well intentioned shot at putting the “art” back in the Whitney Biennial of…

It came up short because it came up thin. Not enough finds and not enough work [never thought I’d say that about a Biennial]. On the bright side the Whitney, like the Armory, was another nice break from the usual noisy cluttered committee crap fest. But it was so uncluttered that I went through it in 20 minutes! I am fast [I did the Hermitage in a day—didn’t want to, had to, so I did it, long story], but I never did a Biennial in 20 minutes! I even had time to go through it again. The only thing I missed the first time around was Babette Mangolte’s recreation of her 1978 piece How to Look [or as I like to call it, Go Fuck Yourself]. I wished I’d missed it the second time as well. Mangolte’s art is of the endless scrapbooking milieu that Hanne Darboven is so fond of plastering on the walls of Dia. So interesting and now I know how to look! It’s a miracle!!

I missed Mangolte the first time around in part because Bonami was kind enough to separate her piece from the rest of the exhibits with a black curtain. He did this to some degree with most of the video work—the entire third floor was almost completely occupied with discrete, entirely avoidable video rooms which begs the question: why include them in the first place? My guess is that deep down Bonami has about as much interest in video as I do but feels guilty about that. Hence he over-compensated by filling almost the entire floor with the trenchant, the insipid, the slice of life and a series of male dancers who looked as if they were, no shit, auditioning for parts in Bruno Zwei.

I did stop to watch Kate Gilmore doing Lucy Gunning by videotaping herself in heels and a dress climbing out of an enclosed column [the one in the space we were watching the video in!]. You kind of root for her to not get out.

In the end quiet and discrete was the rule of the day.

Even the de riguer Biennial vehicle in situ was a quiet ambulance parked nose in towards a wall.

Martin Kersels drums lay silent.

And quietly painting and abstraction in particular made some noise. Lesley Vance busted out some abstracted still lives in sweet oils, Taura Auerbach’s gi-nourmous canvas fold paintings were a bit been-there/done-that process-y but still lovely, as were the giant Suzan “with a ‘z’” Frecon’s across from them. Pae White straddled the ever entrancing line between abstract and representation with her best in show smoke tapestry that greeted visitors to the third floor. White’s piece impresses not just for its revival of tapestry [sucking up to Thomas Campbell?], but for the celebration of the magic of smoke as both here and there and here and not and forever and gone. And I’m not just saying this because I paint smoke [that just informs my judgment!]. I’m also putting photographer Josh Brand in here as an abstractionist because one piece of his, untitled corner, managed to channel Albert Pynkham Ryder via James Welling—sublime.

On the wall perpendicular to the Brand’s corner, Maureen Gallace found herself in an unusually sunny mood as did I as I stepped out of the museum and into a prematurely warm spring day.

It’s All About the Benjamin

When in the course of several prematurely warm spring days, we strolled the stupendously accessible historical sites of Philadelphia, it all came to seem as straightforward and cogent as a bunch of dudes saying, “These Articles of Confederacy are just not cutting it. Let’s get together and write a constitution!”

The city has come far in the decade or so since I noodled around her nether parts. Once dead or derelict neighborhoods are now filled with bars, shops and street life—crosses between Wicker Park and the Village abound.

Given that some of the most historic sites to the founding of this nation are located there, it is amazing how low-key the place is. The Liberty Bell is guarded by Wackenhut Security Personnel. I didn’t see a cop or a national guardsman all weekend. It’s sort of like an anti-Washington D.C., and everything is free or cheap to visit except for the somewhat incomprehensible Constitution Museum which charges $12 - $20 a pop for I’m not quite sure what.

There are two things I learned on this trip: Ben Franklin was most definitely the man and, believe it or not, I’m wiz with.

Meat Bags Update

The bread is chicken.

2010-01-28T14:24:00.001-05:00

Meat Bags

I blame:

computers
forthrightness and decency
bad strategy
not complacency or arrogance, but merely thinking that for one moment you can ever stop fighting even when you’ve won
forgetting that vengeance must be swift
not knowing that even if you choose a low sodium, organic brand, you still need, every once in a while to open up a can of good fashioned whup ass
underestimating the stupidity of the American people and the need to bang, bang, bang the drum to get your message across. That is, you must bang the drum to get your message across.
drum banging required.

This morning my computer couldn’t configure some updates and wasn’t starting. Even though the desktop said “DON’T TURN OFF YOUR COMPUTER” as the seconds turned into tens of second and I found myself running out of things to straighten on my actual desk, it was all I could not turn off my computer, throw it out the window, kick it, anything to make it work. Luckily, the configuration finally aborted and the computer started. I see it with my students [I run a private tutoring company], whenever they want to show me something on a computer or do something on a calculator, if something doesn’t work instantaneously, they’ll punch the same button over and over again, demanding it work. There is a panic and an anger that seizes us when our shit doesn’t work; not just when it doesn’t work, but when it doesn’t work instantly. I doubt that people were ever by nature patient, but since the advent of the computer et al. and the possibility for machines or anything to function at the speed of thought, our natural poise/patience has all but vanished. This phenomenon has, of course only served to make us better meat bags.

In sports, it can take years to turn a bad franchise around. It depends on the depth of the problems hobbling the organization, the rules under which the team functions and the management brought in to change things. A loyal fan does not turn on his team if turnabout doesn’t come, say, in spring training. Unfortunately if you run the U.S. government franchise, fans tend to be less loyal and your rivals are playing within and without your own organization. Even your own teammates are out for themselves—like playing for the Knicks under Isaiah Thomas. I’m don’t want to turn into George Will here, so enough with the sports metaphors, but for Christ sake, the guy never really had a chance.

And then he forgot the first rule of sports [ok one more sports analogy]: if you want to beat the Yankees you don’t ever stop fighting. Winning the election was like scoring a couple of runs in the first inning. If you want to beat the Yankees you have to keep the pressure on every single fucking minute because the minute you let up they’ll be up your ass so far you’ll see Jeter’s face in your colonoscopy. No, the only way to beat the Yankees or Fox or health insurance companies is to keep fighting until they are dead, and even if you think they are dead don’t leave them lying there to rot peacefully; no, you must rip their fucking heads off, bleed them, feed their entrails to Bo, sprinkle them with lye and nail gun them into the walls of an abandoned West Baltimore tenement.

Fox and the Republicans knew what tack to take out of the box, “Just say, ‘No.’” They opposed everything on the basest terms no matter how speciously. If Obama tried to help the sick, the poor and the middle class, they called him socialist. If he tried to prop up Wall Street, they called him elitist. If he had cured cancer they would have blamed him for not paying enough attention to heart disease.

If he could have gotten six Democrats to agree to say the same thing, here’s all Obama would have had to have his people do every single minute of every single day. At any point in the day during which they opened their mouths to say anything to anyone, this is all they would have had to say:

Health Care Reform will make everyone richer, freer and more secure.

Say that every day, first thing and then slug it out, explain, spin, finagle. But say that first and often. Go to Tea Parties. Rouse all the Volvo drivers you roused for the election [your base, remember them?] and get them to every town meeting to sell, sell, sell: freedom, wealth and security [never mind actual health]. I swear to Christ it would have worked. But that’s flaming excrement under the bridge now.

Here’s another handy strategy tip: when you’re formulating your administration don’t eviscerate the highest chamber of the legislative branch to do so. You might need them there. Obama’s election took a potent 5% of the Senate out of the Senate, leaving open seats vulnerable to corrupt Governors, special elections and weak fill-ins. Obama, Biden, Clinton, Emanuel and Salazar all left their seats, Kennedy friggin died and the only ex-Senator who could have helped them without leaving his seat, Daschle, was enjoined from entering the health care fray by idiot tax problems. Ugh. No wonder the Senate Dems need a super-majority to so much as requisition toilet paper for the Senate Chambers.

In the end, Obama wanted to be noble. He was noble, but in so doing he gave away the store. I’m a crappy haggler too, but, Jesus, when they let Lieberman keep his committee seats after the election, couldn’t they have wrested from him some agreement not to stomp on the balls of the health care bill down the line? When they gave all our money and our children’s futures to the banks, couldn’t they have stipulated that lending and liquidity be a feature of any return to profitability? The banks ripped us off, recouped their debt faster than even if the economy hadn’t tanked, and ended up laughing their all the way, well, to themselves, all because we couldn’t, wouldn’t or were afraid to stipulate. Leaving these things to people’s better natures will NEVER happen.

My bet is Obama couldn’t stipulate shit. One thing is clearer with each passing day, each nail in the coffin of Health Care Reform and each obscene Supreme Court decision, we are nothing but meat bags. We exist at the mercy of large corporations who have the time and resources to compound their power and advantage with every passing second. It is in no one’s interest for any of us to be healthy or empowered or to have a voice in our government. We exist to ingest food, drugs, entertainment and financial instruments—our mouths, ears, eyes and minds are taken. If they could devise products for us to ingest anally, we’d be getting those too. The more they can keep us plugged into our feed bags, dollar meals and iPods, the greater their power, wealth and influence. Which is why it’s so important for our food and our computers to be so fast—any gap in the intake process and we risk exposure to the world outside our pens: the hemp gray, sunless world beyond the matrix.

2009-11-20T23:37:00.005-05:00

Berlin Wall Fall – 20 years on

The wall came down and there was joy upon the land and across the world. Freedom for some from the grip of Soviet communism, and freedom for all from the specter of thermonuclear war. I had lived all my life under that threat, and, in the non-plutonium after glow of Good News, I rushed to East Europe to travel and eventually live and work.

Most of the meaningless utterances that have attended this anniversary are taken up with fatuous discussion of who was more responsible for the collapse of the wall Gorbachev or Reagan [who would win in a fight Plastic Man or the Brown Bubble?]. Few have mentioned the saddest legacy of the fall – the almost instantly nuked peace dividend. Somehow there was meant to be one, and there were some token base closings, but really, how long did it last?

Imagine if, instead of shouldering our way into three hot wars since then we had reinvested that peace dividend. Imagine if, instead of paying all that extra money to the oil companies because of “instability in the region,” we had instituted a—horrors!-- $.50 per gallon national tax on gasoline. Imagine…

If there’s one thing that historic moment taught me, and that I am painfully reliving in this historic moment as we grasp like blind mole rats for some pathetic excuse for national health care, it is this: Preserving freedom in America has come to mean preserving the freedom of our corporate bodies—the national military industrial complex’s freedom to expand its budget and the private health care system’s freedom to gouge the citizens of this nation. Teabaggers and Support Our Troop-ists have been artfully convinced to fight for the rights of Aetna, Lockheed and Merck.

Twenty years ago, as I watched modern history rekindle from my perch in the newly free east Europe [Prague to be specific], I made my peace [somewhat] with the last time history had raised her bloody head in that part of world. I tracked down the remnants of Eastern European Jewry in general and kicked over the traces of my family’s past in particular. At the time, as I watched Fascism and anti-Semitism perk up and stretch their deformed limbs as if arising from under a pile of pig shit after a forty year slumber, there was one thing I took away from that historic moment that I am painfully reliving in this historic moment: like it or not, most peoples get the government they deserve.

2009-07-28T01:01:00.003-04:00

In yet another example of why I am the world’s worst blogger, slogger would be the more appropriate term, I submit the following. I started this piece in September 08 when Sarah Palin was having her moment. It has proven a difficult piece to edit and I’m afraid it will never be entirely right, but I must move on...

I Understand Addiction

I understand addiction. I believe almost all of us contend with it in some form or other. Some addictions take less benign forms and may, therefore, seem less benign. However, the true danger in addiction is not in the thing we may be addicted to, but in how we manage our addictions. An addiction to gum could end up killing you—while an addiction to heroin, if very carefully managed, can endure into a ripe old age [see William Burroughs]. The worst though is thinking that you could cured of an addiction as if it is were an external agent, a disease.

I understand the whole Sarah Palin thing and the Bush thing before that. It’s not about white women and family values. It’s about addiction. Or denial. Denial being the core of addiction. Hiding in the thing rather than facing the other thing. We as a nation have been trying to ignore that we are a part of the world for as long as we’ve been a part of the world.

Now, we are mounting one last attempt to deny the reality of the world even as it crashes around us. The Reagan revolution helped us forestall facing that reality. Pushed time back for a generation. As the world has gotten closer to our shores, the need to block it out has become more desperate. We’ve had to hit the vein ever harder and with crazier mixes. We didn’t care where the shit came from or how dubious it seemed [W a man of the people? Sure, I’ll buy it and give me a hit of China White too].

The late David Foster Wallace, who took his life on September12, 2008, will be greatly missed. Motherfucker could write. Infinite Jest had more soul in its jacket cover than The Corrections had in its entire body. A major thread of the book is addiction. One character, so beautiful she has taken to wearing a veil for all the trouble her beauty has caused her, has the added burden of being a crack addict. Her addiction at once became so intense that she took to picking over the fibers of her carpet for stray white specks—whether or not these specks proved to be crack didn’t matter, she’d smoke them anyway.

Sarah Palin is the Reactionary Right’s last speck of crack dug out from the wall-to-wall carpet we laid in our mildewy rec room 30 years ago. Rather than hitting the pipe, a certain strata of America started taking regular hits of god and guns [yes, that line] and that particularly unreflective approach to patriotism.

Palin represents the last run: one last chance to deny the fact that the USA is not the center of the universe, that the rest of the world matters, that evolution is a basic tenet of nature and that global warming is real. There are so many things I would like to not believe in: cholesterol, aging, saving money. It is painful to think about these things and hard to deal with their reality, so sometimes rather than face them I hide in my various addictions.

The Reagan era gave us an uncontrolled crack epidemic. Then the Reagan era offered us damnation and redemption in the form of mandatory drug testing and rehab. The myth of rehab is that you can cure addiction, get clean. You can’t cure addiction, you can only shift it laterally, sublimate or manage it.

In order to manage addictions—first they must be acknowledged for what they are, but not judged. I grant people their religion and their patriotism and even their guns just so we can move along to the real issues like poverty, education, global warming, crumbling markets, the failure of unilateralism and the decline and fall of the American Empire.

I will always be prone to addictive behavior. I can quit smoking, but then I might shift to painkillers. The form changes but the urge is the same, it is the urge to hide. The myth that we can cure addictions is the most pernicious outcome of the notion that addictions are diseases in the physiological sense. It is no coincidence that the U.S. entered its least reflective, post-psychological phase during the Reagan era. The man declared war on sex and drugs and all of a sudden everyone was an addict of something but addiction was a disease that could be cured if you made your penance and received absolution in the form of rehab and renunciation. Defining everything as a disease was the silver bullet that made so much else possible. With everyone taking the cure, finding the 12 step religion, bowing their sweaty heads in contrition, the last ounce of counterculture rebellion was effectively snuffed out. Drugs became less a poor way of dulling the edge of hard realities faced or of exploring the contours of the mind, than at best alternate booze and at worst performance enhancers. Without drugs, the nation turned its lonely eyes to other more pernicious forms of denial. Flags and fags and god and guns trump facing the consequences of our behavior in the world and taking responsibility for our actions as stewards of it.

You would have thought that after 8 years of W, a binge of blind faith and pure avoidance [it’s no coincidence that Bush is a reformed alcoholic etc. who now denies the world through the cocaine rush of evangelical patriotic zeal], that folks would have been willing to swear off some of this shit and they did, but only for the length of one hungover day at work. As soon as our buddy came along with a whiff of something good—no matter how fucking bad we knew it would be, no matter if we knew it would cost us our job, our wife, our nation’s wealth and standing in the world—all that was readily sacrificed because of a little taste of the good stuff. Forget that this shit is pure shred. Hooking on to Palin is like smoking carpet lint. She is so clearly rock bottom. The desperation is so clear because the reality is almost impossible to stave off any longer—no wonder they had to go outside the lower 48 to find someone out of touch enough to peddle this crap.

In the end and after much thought, I believe I know what killed David Foster Wallace. I have been afraid to analyze a man I never knew and who was so clearly a genius and therefore existed in a different sphere of logic and dreaming from the rest of us, but what the fuck. In the end what killed him was the fact that he could not escape his own culture. A white Christian boy who came of age in the 80s, he ultimately believed in rehab and redemption and that one could be free of dependence and addiction and become purged and pure and saved—or die trying. Wallace had been suffering from hardcore depression since college and had endured the life of his mind with the help of an early powerful anti-depressive drug he’d been taking since the late 80s. In the summer of 08 he tried to get free of that drug. He wanted to cleanse himself and be able to function within the contours of his beautiful mind unsullied by external taint. He killed himself that autumn. Some see his act as noble, trying to get free; to me it’s the same sad and reckless denial of our nature that has landed us here on the precipice of nothing good.

2009-03-04T12:16:00.008-05:00

I Will Watch the Watchmen

One of the great joys of The Watchmen is that not only is it about anti-heroic superheroes, but it is anti-heroic and anti-comic in structure. Written after the Star Wars phenomenon began to change most films into comics, The Watchmen helped change comic books into novels. The graphic novel blew up in the 80s with mind-blowing works such as The Dark Knight, Sandman and Sin City, but although each of those titles put forth excellent stand alone efforts most were written as series. The Watchmen could only ever have been a one off and you know that in your bones going in—it offers up a complete world, takes up its history and posits a future. A truly finite work is rare these days, rarer still is one with a great third act—a third act that leaves the world slightly changed.

Besides serializing and syndicating every frame of film that came after it, the Star Wars altered the very structure of the movies that got made in its wake [although, oddly enough, this did not hold true for A New Hope, which had a fairly slow build] . As we know, with the rise of the blockbuster era most movies, in pursuit of greater punch and bigger first weekends, started front loading the crap out of themselves. More and more films were launched with more and bang before the credits—if there even were credits. Exposition was for losers.

It would seem that if you feed people corn long enough, eventually they are going to shit corn, and since the notion of front loading came to prominence everything from film to tv to comics and the novel has been infected by that approach. Even most authors who came of age post Star Wars sucked on the tit of big first scenes and suck at endings. They have the same pressure to grab the reader early and often, and sell books based on perfectly wrought first chapters. The rest, well, fuck third acts—you can’t make a living off great third acts. But you can make immortal works of art with them.

The Watchmen has a very slow, uncanny build. At times you feel like the piece will never lift off and yet you stay with it. Rereading it, the story came back to me—in a slow build. The end fits together brilliantly, but even that has an anti-climactic bittersweet bite to it. Moore has a depressive’s mind, but it is a mind that is inexorably trying to overcome its own darkness.

I will be watching Zack Snyder. Not just to see if the man who put buff men in diapers and made it work can improve on the original’s slightly underwhelming but apt visuals, but to see if he will dare to create an anti-blockbuster blockbuster. I will be watching to see if Snyder will be able to create goofy realistic anti-super superheroes, if he will have the guts to maintain the historical sweep of Cold War America so important to the piece, but mostly I will be watching to see if he will manage to resist the temptation and no doubt he pressure to follow the standard Syd Fields formula that has been handcuffing Hollywood for 30+ years. Batman Returns certainly made it possible for mega-blockbusters to venture into new creative territory. It remains to see if anyone else will follow.

Coraline

Coraline is one film that successfully resists the shackles of Syd. Gradual and abrupt in turns like its sophisticated stop action/computer animation format, Coraline’s story proceeds like a dream and resists those classic event markers that are even more prevalent in animated films than they have become in live action films.

The most resonant image to take away from Coraline occurs once she passes beyond the borders of the Other House’s property—the Other Mother only created what was necessary. When Coraline gets far enough away the animation begins to fail and break down to a white back drop. While this moment is not new, the geniuses at Warner Bros. did this to Daffy Duck decades ago, it does seem very timely as our economy recedes and shrinks back so that only what is necessary remains.

Bag Props for Hendrik Kerstens

Found this guy when I clicked on a photo of Scarlett Johansson as Girl with a Pearl Earring. He poses his daughter, a younger, chubbier, less groomed version of Johansson in poses from Vermeer and other Flemish masters [or in their spirit]—but with arch and subtle twists.

Some of his other pics: girl against barren sea, little girl in makeup—more expected/less enchanting. Overall, though, surprising, odd and immaculate photos.

http://www.hendrikkerstens.com/index.html

2009-01-15T23:11:00.003-05:00

The United States of Tara

Toni Collette in The United States of Tara

Is there anything more potentially embarrassing, off-putting, fatuous and multifariously insulting than the upcoming The United States of Tara on Showtime?

The tag line on the commercials I've heard spoken by Collette herself is:

Having multiple personalities is like hosting a kegger in your brain.

That's the best they could pull from the wreckage? This is what Diablo Cody has wrought of her Academy Award gold?

Why is the show insulting and to whom? People afflicted with dissociative identity disorder probably do not feel like they are hosting keggers--in their minds or otherwise--ever, but I can't precisely speak to that. I have not known anyone afflicted with dissociative identity disorder. I have, however, known schizophrenics with less sit-com compatible forms of the disease and they, to a person, are most assuredly not hosting frat mixers in their brains.

On a broader scale of offensiveness, why is Collete's "normal/original/baseline" persona Tara? Tara is, as described in the show's literature,

...a working mother of two who paints nursery room murals that totally rock and sometimes doesn’t feel like herself.

No, Showtime, you rock--you self-serving cable slum!

Why can't Tara's "real" personalility be the dude? That can't happen of course because no woman would ever really have a male personality? Certainly not on Showtime. Though I have etched in my mind several brilliant and enduring images to the contrary from the recently closed Catherine Opie retrospective at the Guggenheim. Her photo masterpieces of diversely gender identified individuals and families display more genuine humanity than a lifetime of Showtime.

Of course it would be even more beyond the pale for the brain trust behind the show [among them Steven Spielberg] to contemplate Collette's normal personality as being the retro mom, Alice. Alice, again from the literature,

...is the perfect homemaker who believes in good, traditional values and bakes cakes that would make Betty Crocker jealous.

It would have been completely too risque for Alice to have been her "real" personality. At least Hilary Swank made lady dudes sort of cool, but traditional homemakers?

Neither Buddy nor Alice could be real people in Showtime demographic land, they are merely funny and pathetic ciphers compared to the real women meant to watch the show [as Showtime attempts to stuff more and more working mothers of two into its dope dealing, bogus lesbian pie hole]. No doubt, however, we will come to love her inferior, loser personalities in spite of how superior we [and Tara] are to them. Yech.

Futrhermore, as a dude, I get pretty insulted by the way some women actors play men. Milton Berle had more insight into women when he played one [wigless and smoking a cigar] than Collette has into men when she plays Buck who...

...is a fan of beer and motorcycles who’s always up for a good night at he titty bar and isn’t afraid to kick some ass.

Wow! Could this project get any more nuanced?

But hey, lest the men folk become put off, The United States of Tara has shoe-horned in one more personality to appease us. Just for us emotionally stunted dudes out there forced to watch the show with our de rigueur mothers of two, they chucked in a hot teenager personality for Collette! Count me in!

Yech again.

It's a pity that Collette, who broke into film as a talented young actress playing a young woman totally against stereotype in "Muriel's Wedding," has chosen to play to and abuse so many stereotypes in what reeks of eau de talented actress vehicle.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a cake to bake.

2008-10-31T01:23:00.004-04:00

No, Martha

Martha Rosler
Great Power
Mitchell-Innes & Nash, 534 West 26th St. [btwn 10th & 11th Aves.], 212.744.7400, www.miandn.com

Sept 6 – October 11, 2008

The entrance to Martha Rosler’s show at Mitchell-Innes & Nash was blocked off by a black and chrome turnstile. With no written explanation. I was told that I had to pay a quarter to be able to gain entrance to the show. I was told that it was for charity—Artists Against Whatever. I was also told I wouldn’t be able to get anything else like it for a quarter.

It would be easy to make comments here about not wanting to pay money to see photo-collages, but that is not the point [and Jerry Saltz made it better: http://nymag.com/arts/art/reviews/50974/] . The point is that being able to go to galleries free is one of the greatest gifts we are given and I don’t want that taken away. While a quarter is indeed cheap, I’m old enough to remember when we were told that paying for tv would be a great idea and that it would only ever be for a tiny fee.

Worse though is that Rosler’s strategy is, writ small, the exact kind of left wing tyranny that turned so many people off to most of the other right headed thinking embraced by progressives. It provided kindling for so much of the reactionary behavior of the past 30 years because it turned so many people so decidedly off.

Consider that my .$25, Martha.

Yes, Richard

Richard Kern

Feature Inc., 276 Bowery [just below Houston], New York, NY 10012, 212.675.7772, http://www.featureinc.com/ October 2 - November 1, 2008

I was on my way up the Bowery to visit the new Feature for the first time. I ran into Deb. I hadn’t seen Deb in a long time. I told her I was on my way to visit the new Feature for the first time. We talked about Richard Kern. She had seen the show and told me he was revisiting his toothpaste cum shots. She told me she had come up with that idea when she posed for him back in the day. She didn’t want to take her clothes off and did that instead. She’s that girl with the braces.

I am not sure why I don’t hate Richard Kern. He has the exact job I would love to have, and yet I don’t resent him for it. It is not hard to understand why. Like Helmut Newton before him and unlike Larry Clarke, Kern seems to be honest, professional and non-exploitative [or as non-exploitative as one can be in these things] about what he does. He’s also really good at it. I don’t know if he is good at finding sexy women or finding women sexy. Either way [or both] there is no denying that the kind of old school pornography that Richard Kern practices oozes a love of women. Kern’s women seem most decidedly in charge of their sexuality. Go to a Richard Kern exhibition and you will leave it looking at the world differently [that’s what art does for you]. You will be surprised to find all the sexy out there. Women you might otherwise have overlooked, Kern finds them and makes you want them and it seems like you can have them because they seem to want you, want sex. These are not women who secretly want to be spanked and hope you catch on; these are women who pull down their pants, slap their asses and tell you to step up and smack it like a man.

But I digress.

Just as Morandi is the painters’ painter, Richard Kern is the pornographers’ pornographer. The internet has served to explode the porn phenomenon and saturate our consciousnesses and our cookies. It has not, however, succeeded in undercutting or diminishing Kern’s work, because, like desire, porn is infinite and like the priapus continually [we hope] reconstituting itself. In this show Kern has borrowed back from the web with upskirts, wet t-shirts and two girls in a tub—all now staple genres. He even includes among some of his framed shots the actual panties worn by, and/or shared by his models [order now].

No matter what pops up in my inbox or google searches, few experiences will ever outstrip the times I spent pouring over books of Kern’s pics at the old St. Marks’ Bookstore back in the day. I stood there among my fellow hipster art book aficionados hungrily poring over each page and with each page, I was laid bare, seduced and dismissed by one dirty ev girl after another. I was left sweaty, exhausted and utterly in love. Stay hard dude.

2008-09-08T21:22:00.006-04:00

The ARTHOLE Is Back!

I wrote the entry below last January fully intending to continue my sporadic contributions to this blog. I am well aware of the fact that in the two plus years I’ve posted to this blog I have consistently missed the point of the whole format which is to quickly spew out commentary. Though anally and orally expulsive by nature, I have chosen to interpret this most logorrheaic of forms in a completely tight-assed manner. Like an idiot I chose to edit my work!

Despite how tightly I grip onto my words, I never intended this nearly yearlong gap to ensue. That was another matter. The key to the break, and my almost near complete abandonment of art writing, lies in my ultimate response to the new New Museum as explicated below. I was dispirited.

The cause of that dispiriting is flushed out as specifically as I could manage below. My reaction to the space was so negative that I thought it had to be me and so I held off printing it. However, my one visit to that museum is something I replay over and over in my head, and so I have come to believe it means something.

What I believe my response to the museum means, and why I believe it is worth publishing [and resuming writing] is because I have managed to find a nugget of cultural and artistic relevance in all this. Even if most culture has ceased to resonate for me and even if I have become yet another burnt out art writer, there is something emblematic in the failure of the institutions that were responsible for the creation of the museum and the failure of the institutions whose job it was to receive that creation that makes the phenomenon resonate beyond the reality of it being one more crappy contemporary museum. These institutional failures function as the one truly cultural gesture embedded in the whole painful affair. They echo the litany of disasters our think tanks, government and press have perpetrated on the world at large in the past 8 years with precious little, if any, retribution. SANAA keeps designing. Fukuyama keeps publishing.

Bad Museum

For all the bullshit written about architecture, all the journals and magazines and newspaper articles, for all the conferences and talks and symposiums, for all the fact finding missions and juried contests, for all the seminars and lovely scale models and computer animations, board presentation and board reviews and for all the MONEY spent on all these things all in the name of architecture, why is it that none of these a-wipes know fuck-all or give fuck-all about a simple little thing called flow?

The MOMA re-do is infuriating. In a one billion dollar boondoggle swipe of his tidy hand, Tanaguchi managed to bind Prometheus—and in so doing shackle the greatest collection of modern art in the world. The Rose Center is simply annoying—critics love it because it looks good from the outside, but let’s say you actually want to, uh, go from point “A” to point “B” within the structure. Try it; it’s fucktarded. The new New Museum is something else entirely. The new New Museum is…dispiriting.

It took me a moment to find the word. I am normally fairly glib, but I could not find the word. I could not find the word because it was not a word I usually feel. Especially when I go to museums.

I have been to folk museums in tenements in Lublin and in white washed villages in Bulgaria. I have been to too many Holocaust and Concentration Camp Museums. I have been to children’s museums, craft museums and science museums. I have been to the Tolstoy museum and admired the leather wheels on the bicycle he took up riding when he was 70. I have been to museums tucked away in ancient synagogues, cathedrals and mosques. I did the Hermitage in one day: long story.

My first museum was the Brooklyn. I loved it for its large slowly unraveling charm, the giant totem poles, Aztec temple models and American paintings. I loved it for the treasure hunts it offered: my mom and I would track down a list of items tucked away in paintings and sculptures and amid period rooms. It taught me to look in an active way. We did this while my sister took art classes. I was too young for classes. I was 4.

From then on and within the scores of other museums I subsequently visited and revisited, I have felt every range of emotion. I have wept and mourned in museums. I have fallen in love and been heartbroken in museums. I have become abject, inspired and even redeemed within the walls of the world's museums great and small. Even when museums were bad or pathetic, I could find some perverse humor in them, some poignancy or bittersweet pain. Something. Never in my life have I been dispirited. After descending from the 5th to the 2nd floor galleries in the New Museum, I was at last dispirited.

Why?

In the past decade or so, something has been creeping into the equation of museum going. That something else has involved the complicity of the architect, the museum board and the various institutions that revolved around them. There are and have been many new museums and museum expansions that took place prior to this last decade. But never before were so many of these projects so intrusive and obstrusive. Never before had they promised so much, seemed so aware of their tasks, created so much bullshit and bullshit literature ululating their projects, and yet ultimately delivered so little. Never before had these projects so consistently failed to deliver and on such grand and depressing scales.

In spite of all the missions statements and douche bag verbiage generated around museums, especially contemporary museums, as they blather about community and education and environments, all museums have pretty much the same mission: to exhibit whatever it is they want to exhibit in the best manner possible. It doesn’t matter if your purview is Etruscan Art or middling contemporary art with political/global leanings: you put the shows up, write the wall texts, stock the the gift shop and open the fucker up.

I’ve seen enough contemporary museums to know and resignedly understand that most contemporary architects hate most contemporary art and find it a nuisance even when building spaces for it. Consequently, my expectations were low when I went to the New Museum. However, I was suspicious of my suspicion of star-chitecture. Perhaps I was just jealous? Perhaps I was merely overreacting to what my insecurities perceived as a spate of over-hyped, overfunded public works that failed to function for the actual living, breathing public despite all the lip service that was paid to said public.

Not wanting to let my overarching bitterness color my judgment [yet again], I walked up the Bowery with an open mind.

From a distance the building’s outer skin brought to mind the fences on roof gyms in schools across New York City. As I drew nearer though, it brought to mind less chain link fences than speaker covers, in fact the whole thing could be pass for an oversized overdesigned iPod dock. That’s ok. What's more, the thing sits fairly well on the street, though the big glass opening with the art nerds hanging out in front not smoking seems like an open wound in the street—a gash infected with arties such as myself. Not wanting my self-loathing to overwhelm me, I kept an open mind.

The lobby was fine if too small: open, and all done up in grays and whites and blacks. Someone’s LED boxes crawled with second generation Holzer style platitudes. Very New Museum – they’re entitled. It’s their purview.

I wanted to start at the top and work my way down. The three elevators are an increase on the available elevator space at the far larger and even more appallingly laid out MOMA, and still we waited. The very top was reserved for offices. The 5th floor, the highest floor open to the public, is the site for the obligatory study center. [What, if not study, are we meant to be doing on the other floors?] The center consisted of some photos of the neighborhood the museum was in the process of paving over and a very nice reading room that lead to some very tony looking offices. The exhibit proper started on the 4th floor and featured an assortment of new sculpture mostly based on crap and crap assemblages, again all very New Museum and that’s fine—it’s their purview.

The room itself was very tall and fairly big and all on one side of the elevator banks. Not wanting to wait for the elevators again, never wanting to wait for the elevators again, I ducked into the unmarked stairwell the runs down the off center of the building. A couple below me were stopped half way down the grand height of the next floor because they were unsure whether the stairs opened onto the 3rd floor or only onto the lobby. There was no signage hung on the already cracking cement that comprised the stairs.

With a little encouragement, I got us all to the next floor: another big fluorescent bin with a little more to it because of its stair feature. Starchitects don’t design well formed and functioning spaces; they design features. Think about it: what newish structure doesn’t have a skin- or glass- or water- or stair-feature? This stair-feature is long and thin and runs all the way down to the second floor behind the enclosed and unmarked un-featured actual staircase. Nevermind that halfway down the feature a speaker droned out a voice so nasal and annoying that you automatically wanted to disagree with everything it said. Nevermind that: at least at last some flow! A way to get from one floor to the next without waiting or opening up a door into a blind stairwell! The stair-feature also had a light-feature—extremely self and, no doubt, energy conscious incandescent style fluorescents that stuck out perpendicularly from the wall. Both these lights and the overhead lights in the galleries proper cast such a harsh hue that I pity the paintings that will ever have to hang here [as of my visit the wall collages that were to be part of the crap show were not yet up]. I’m hardly a lighting expert, but even I know that there are warm fluorescent options available. If only there were some neighborhood in New York City where a person could go and explore lighting options…

Done with the third floor I pinned all my hopes on the 2nd floor grand gallery. The 5th through 3rd floors of this BRAND NEW museum were distinctly nothing much. I’d already had enough of the stunted basement at the beginning of my visit. If there were any hope that this museum, after all the time and all the hype, would not be joining the ranks of the other overhyped and flowtarded, money wasting, shitbag museums and museum expansions that have infected this city---if there were any hope it lay in the second floor.

I went around the gallery bin on the 3rd floor to resume the long stair and take it down to the 2nd floor. But no monsieur. I had forgotten. The long thin stair being a stair-feature was unburdened by such pedestrians matters as, well, pedestrians. Where it should have continued, the stair feature merely ended. The space beneath the stair from the 4th to the 3rd was a vast narrow wasted space with a packing crate leaning against one wall—and to make sure that no one attempted to activate the space, it was roped off. Roped off dead space in a urban micro museum?!? Children with blocks make better use of space in buildings they intend to destroy by chucking action-figures at them. Children with blocks have more consideration for the placement of said action figures in their sweet doomed structures then SANAA had for us poor sap, sucker, pant-shitter, momma boy visitards.

So it was back to the blind stairwell, and, at last, clutching what feathers were still left un-plucked of my hope, I burst onto the grand 2nd floor. And at last: another even bigger bin! More fluorescents!! And this time instead of stair feature or a psyche out stair feature on the other side of the elevator bank, there was an long narrow gallery featuring actual art work!!!

And that was it. There was nothing else to be had of it. Millions of dollars and millions of words and all we got, pretty much, was three big rooms improperly connected.

Dispiriting isn’t it?

Does anyone who writes about, designs or selects these things actually visit museums?

2007-11-02T02:19:00.000-04:00

The Bowery’s Up

I went to the Bowery the other day. I went to see some shows, but I also went to the Doughnut Plant and Pickle Guys. I had a great time. It's exhilarating to view art in the midst of life and not amid a sterile warren of sameness, long blocks and huge void galleries [sorry Chelsea]. I can’t say I know the galleries on the ground on the Lower East Side well, but even between Envoy [see below] and the imminent return of Feature to its downtown roots, I find myself excited about the prospect of an afternoon viewing art there as I haven’t been since the last fully vested days of Soho!

PIckle Guys, 49 Essex St. [betwn. Grand & Hester STs.], 888.4.PICKLE, pickleguys@yahoo.com, http://www.nycpickleguys.com/index.html.

Doughnut Plant, 379 Grand St. [betwn. Norfolk & Suffolk Sts.], 212.505.3700, http://www.doughnutplant.com.

Kanishka Raja: In the Future No One Will Have a Past
Through November 17

Envoy Gallery, 131 Chrystie St [betwn. Broome & Delancey Sts.], 212.226.4555, office@envoygallery.com, http://www.envoygallery.com.

I do not seek affirmation in what I do very often, yet it is thrilling when on that rare occasion affirmation seeks me out. Kanishka Raja’s project touches upon so many of the themes with which I’ve been enthralled over the years:
1. He uses constructed landscapes in one spur of his work and multiple versions of remembered spaces in another.
2. His work has spurs.
3. He uses photos, but in purely handmade paintings.
4. He likes patterns and screens.
5. He likes smoke.
6. He is earnest in his project.
7. His paintings are linked to each other in sequence.
8. The world he creates is based on and directly in reference to this world.
9. He likes to paint.
Except for my family members, I don’t have nine reasons for liking most anything or anybody. There’s so much to absorb in the downtown show alone [his memory paintings are up at Tilton] that I really need a re-view. However, of what I’ve managed to absorb, In The Future No One Will Have A Past (part 5) rocks the hardest because in it the paint begins to take on a life beyond the project and the composition it has been called on to serve—a true glimpse of the future! Rock on Kanishka!

2007-10-31T14:30:00.000-04:00

Criminalized Apples
Come Halloween, who among us has not occasionally felt the urge to embed razor blades in crisp ripe apples, dip those apples in yummy candy or caramel coatings and serve them up on sticks to eager ghosts, goblins, witches and princesses?! Or simply sprinkle roach powder on fresh popped popcorn? But then you think:
1. Ok, but too much work.
2. Homemade stuff is easily traceable back to its source.
3. I’ll come off like some homemade hippie cheapskate even before I’m arrested and my house will probably get egged.
4. The candy industry, in the face of a surge in homemade hippie cheapskate types in the late 60s/early 70s, managed to convince the American public that anyone handing out homemade treats on Halloween is either:
a. A serial killer
b. Homemade hippie cheapskate type
Thus, even if you do decide to go to the trouble of doctoring you own homemade treats, most kids are trained to throw the stuff out and call the police on your striped and drawstring panted ass.

So, what’s a Halloween tamperer to do? Sadly, there’s not much that can be done. I know, I know, it’s tempting to give in and just waddle down to the local Duance Reades and buy a bag of mini O’Henrys or Snickers. Sure, it’s easy and anonymous enough to buy the candy and use one of Uncle Ed’s (dirty) insulin needles to shoot a bit of “I’m sleepy” juice into the heart of a Three Musketeer bar. But is it truly feasible and worthwhile? Let’s consider:
1. Where’s the fun in doing that?
2. How will anyone ever know it’s you? On any given Halloween there are about 3 million Milky Ways floating around—no one could ever trace one poisonous bar to one poisonous person. How will you ever get your 15 minutes of fame and ripped from the headlines tv emulation?
3. Little do most prospective candy tamperers know it, but the same candy industry that criminalized homemade Halloween treats also invented impervious candy. If you’re a first-time candy tamperer, you may not know it, but what looks to the naked eye a lot like a lump of variegated corn syrup wrapped in brightly colored paper is really a “smart” nugget. “Factory sealed” does not just mean that the wrapper has been machined glued shut in a factory manned by underpaid workers who just lost their pensions and health benefits and who would, therefore, never in a million years have any motivation to sabotage their company by tampering with its product. No, my friends, “factory sealed” means hermetically sealed in a wrapper that only looks like paper, but is really a micro-shield impervious to needles, gases or even radiation of any kind. The only method of penetrating these wrappers is with the use of fat little fingers eager for more, more, more!

The only thing for a would-be candy tamperer/apple trapper/popcorn poisoner to do is relent and give up on the whole urge. The Mars company and others like it, through their wisdom and care, have made it impossible for the average ne’er do well to ne’er do well. The only way our children can be harmed now on Halloween is via the traditional twin pillars of sugar and fat. The only thing left for those of us who prefer trick to treats is to give up on the whole treat giving business all together. Get out of the house and do a little trick or treating yourself. Dress up like a homemade hippie cheapskate handing out homemade treats. That’ll scare the crap out of them.

2007-10-09T13:56:00.000-04:00

Design Flaws

Due to circumstances beyond our control [too much wine at a benefit auction], we ended up renting a house in Maine for a week in August. Camden, Maine—the prettiest town in Maine—or so we were told. What we were not told is that US 1 runs directly through the town as it does through so many of Maine’s charming coastal villages. The “1” it would seem stands for “the ‘1’ and only road in Maine.” Without exaggeration there was more traffic on that road then on 106th St. on any given day. A perpetual flow made more pokey because in Maine if a pedestrian so much as dangles a pinky toe onto the road, all traffic must instantly stop. This means that anytime a tourist can’t decide which side of the street to stroll down, coastal Maine grinds to a halt. And there was no shortage of pedestrians. The highway was jammed with broken heroes: tow headed kids and their clenched parents sprinkled in among the heartier locals—white haired ruddy skinned men and women nearly alike to one another with their large sunglasses, high pants and low breasts. And who says WASPs don’t age well?

Here’s what else I learned about WASPs on my summer vacation:

1. They lack joie de vivre.
2. Not only do they lack joie do vivre, but to the WASP, in the cold stone sober light of day, Joie de Vivre and Bonhomie are just two more towns in France they’ll never visit unless forced to as part of an invading army.
3. They’re generally much better at golf than I.

On a less cantankerous note: Belfast is a lovely town. If you go there and choose to take a Lobstering Cruise on the Good Return, afterwards have Captain Melissa Terry direct you to her uncle, Mike Hutchings. He’s the harbor master and he sells lobster, clams and crabs from his home a little bit inland. Generally speaking, as we slowly learned, if you want to get away from the brutal triaffic and $40 lobsters, you have to go a little bit inland—it’s a whole other Maine.

http://www.belfastbaycruises.com/cruiseinformation.html

Mike Hutchings, M&L Seafood, 638 Beach Road, Lincolnville, ME 04849, 207.763.3983.

iMiracle

The other day I searched through all my 46 of my Ween songs for a particular dittie. I couldn’t remember the piece’s title but I had a sense of what it might be called. Finally despairing of finding it, I flipped on “Shuffle Songs.” The song I had been searching for popped up first: Mutherfuker by Beck not Ween. The odds of that occurring: 1 in 2587.

My erstwhile assistant told me that kind of stuff happens to her all the time. Any other icoincidences out there?

The End of the Ave

Beth and I were painting the attic floor of what was to become the boys’ bedroom of our brand new 1840’s farmhouse just up Rte. 217 from Philmont, NY. As we were spreading newspapers, Beth noticed Edward Avedesian’s NY Times obituary among them. Avedesian had died in a nursing home about ½ a mile down Rte. 217 from our brand new 1840’s farmhouse.

Back in 1994 when I was a younger art writer still happily careening about what was still a gallery packed Soho, I came across the works of Avedesian in a little storefront gallery off Sullivan St. The gallery was run by a NY city public school science teacher named Mitchell Algus. That far corner of Soho soon became my de facto home away from home, and Mitchell’s first show of Avedesian’s there blew my fucking mind.

The Avedesian show was one of the first strands of many lost threads that Algus gathered for those of us who were lucky enough to find our way to him. Many of Algus’ lost lights were brilliant and some were better left unlit, but none were as gripping or revelatory as those early Avedesians. Here were flat abstractions that were pure sight: the first glimmer of post hypnotic pop op absent any of the acid tainted automations that were to color most subsequent efforts. Avedesian left those paintings as a gift for us and continued along his path.

The rest of his path may not have been for most of us: “textured” abstractions, Birchfieldesque landscapes and Paul Cadmus redux—manly men fixing cars in the Hudson valley, but it was Edward’s path and he diligently followed it; career be damned. That’s the way an artist does it.

Gandalf’s Staff

Some very thoughtful people made it possible for Beth and me to be in the center of the front row of the Harvey Theater for the first U.S. night of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of King Lear. I’d always loved Lear and I really wanted to see Sir Ian’s stab at it. I won’t kid you: Magneto and Gandalf sealed the deal for me with Mckellan—in my book he earned his peerage just for the way he stood there when he first entered as Gandalf the White in Two Towers. Sir Ian did not disappoint, but Trevor Nunn and most of the RSC did.

Whereas McKellan gave it his all to lend Lear the air of verisimilitude, the rest of the company and the production mostly did everything but: we had a slow motion suicide by a poor old Gloucester who seemed, like many in the cast, to be still jet lagged. Scary to think they might all be tired given that the company will be doing double duty on Lear and The Seagull—sometimes in the same day. The stage fights were about as real looking as those in old Star Trek episodes, and, when the Fool was hung in plain sight on stage, he struggled about as valiantly as Paris Hilton would against a strip search.

Speaking of stripping: in a subplot that parallels Cordelia’s plight, Gloucester’s son, Edgar, is cast out and criminalized. In order to protect himself he takes on the persona of Mad Tom, strips off his clothes, rends his flesh and rolls around in the mud. In the text there are numerous references to Tom being naked, but in this production he wears a loin cloth. Even though the dude playing Tom and the rest of the cast, chose to be soft in their choices, Sir Ian refused to rest on his laurels. When the rapidly deteriorating Lear decides to emulate Mad Tom, our valiant hero [McKellan not Lear] decides to get real and truly naked in the middle of the stage. And there it was: Gandalf’s staff waving in the breeze and me and the mrs. just 10 feet away.

--You shall not pass!

You bet your flat white ass we won’t—now put that thing away before you put out an eye, pal!

Even more distracting than Sir Ian’s Willy, and for reasons that I’ve yet to figure out, Trevor Nunn dressed the cast like 19th Century Russians. It did not seem as if there were any point to that choice besides his wanting to look at a different era of clothing for a change; there’s not a lot of coin to be made going after late Czarist Russia. If Nunn were looking to make political parallels why not put them in Blue Brooks Brothers suits with red ties and be done with it, or just do the friggin thing right:

Lear is a an all-out pagan bloodbath and blood rite. It starts as if it were the ending to a traditional Shakespearian comedy--as a buildup to a wedding, and then something goes horribly, horribly wrong. One old man’s folly leads to 10 of the cast killed by the entire spectrum of means [Shakespeare really emptied his kit bag out in this his last tragedy] and a war between England and France [though most anything could have caused that back then]. What we are left with after this bloodletting is no burst of wisdom or moment of clarity [or lasting democracy], but rather just “Howl, howl, howl.”

Nunn made sure we were aware of the pagan aspect of Lear’s time. When characters in the play beseeched the heavens, they did not pray to JC or his Dad, but most pointedly to pagan gods instead. Too bad Nunn didn’t also stage the play as the pre-Christian, pre-Roman primal bloodletting the damn thing was crying out to be and put the fire to his players to boot. Howl, howl, howl…

Jerry Saltz’s Balls

Jerry Saltz has more hair on his balls than any other art critic has on his balls [or her ovaries]. Not only does he speak truth to power, but unlike the rest of us safely sniping from the sides, Saltz goes after power he undoubtedly rubs elbows with at this function or that. In an art world in which people are notorious for not putting anything at risk ever—even when there’s precious little to risk—Saltz continues to go all in. He is making the most of his new perch at New York, slowly turning it into a bully pulpit. Bully for you, Jerry. Rave on.

http://nymag.com/arts/art/features/37639/index1.html

2007-08-01T02:00:00.000-04:00

Sometimes It’s Not Beauty, Just Youth

I was walking across 23rd St. Claryssa Dalyrimple was sitting outside the Half King with some pretty young thing. They were looking at some sort of images between them on the table. I first crossed paths with Dalyrimple more than ten years ago. She wasn’t young then. She looks younger now. Watching her with the pyt, it struck me more starkly than ever how much the old feed off youth in the art world—suck it down like blood from the ripe jugular of a pale virgin.

"You Always Move In Reverse," curated by Bjarne Melgaard

Leo Koenig Inc., 545 West 23rd St [betwn 10th & 11th Aves],212.334.925, http://www.leokoenig.com

Through July 31, 2007

Ever since I first read about this gallery in a profile of Koenig in the New Yorker, I have hated it. Though young himself, Koenig came across as a Teutonic youth monger. This summer’s show is all about what those crazy kids are up to now. Or circa 92. I dunno. There is a bit of a visceral jolt awaiting you when you peek into the black curtained backroom. A slight edge. And so much wanting there to be an edge.

Banks Violette

Gladstone, 515 West 24th Street [betwn 10th & 11th Aves], 212.206.9300, http://www.gladstonegallery.com/default.asp

Through August 17, 2007

Banks Violette has the kind of name and back story that Jewish boys from the suburbs can only envy in a deeply sour way. If Banks hadn’t been born, Larry Clarke would have found him anyway. He’s the kind of blazing emblem for youth that warms the crinkled eyelids of the old. Fortunately he does this with more than a good backstory, a whiff of crystal meth, and Goth, Goth, Goth [or whatever hairsplitting denomination it’s meant to be called]. He does it by freezing time, salting away light and sound: he casts light fixtures and acoustic tiles in salt dessicating our senses, then he pumps liquid nitrogen to stop time—even our beloved 2-D planes, our getaways, are blocked—no space here just black or sheet metal flats, and imploded mirrors frosting over. Time stops; our image in the glass freezes. We are all Clarissa Dalrymple.

Violette’s touch is less abject than it was in the early Team days; given his huge budget it would be disingenuous for it not to be. Still he often owes more to Stockholder than Barney and manage bits of tenderness [horreur!] amid formal grace: orange and white ipods here, a $20 hardware store fan there, and one deep bowel cleansing note that rumbles across the black floor like that first great fart of the day.

Not just youth.

2007-07-18T01:12:00.000-04:00

* * *

SUMMER OF LOVE 07

Susan Inglett Gallery, 534 West 22nd Street [betwn 10th & 11th Aves], 212.647.9111, http://www.inglettgallery.com.

Through August 3, 2007.

I’ve been following Susan Inglett around since she was in Soho. Her spaces then and since have always seemed more than a little ambivalent. In Soho you had to be buzzed in, she’s had a few spaces in Chelsea that weren’t always open and often had more work in the office than in the gallery. Currently she continues to challenge the shy by proffering works in her tiny sheltered office, but her current space is at least and at last street level and readily accessible [don’t become too enamored of this space: in October she’s moving to 522 West 24th St]. Regardless of location, Inglett has always shown smart work, but her intelligence has never gone to her head. Her current show is no exception.

Annette Lemieux’s piece is a little too on the nose, but given that it’s summer and we’re all a little slow, we need something to make us realize what’s going on in the other works by Simone Shubuck, Greg Smith, and Christopher Ulivo and Bruce Conner. What we have here is a quietly brilliant discussion of good old fashioned imperialism suddenly made new again by the current administration.

CONCRETE WORKS

Mitchell-Innes & Nash, 534 West 26th Street [betwn 10th & 11th Aves], 212.744.7400, http://www.miandn.com

Through July 27

Going forehead to forehead with Susan Inglett is Jay Gorney who curated this crisp and deeply engaging affair. But whereas Inglett’s show is all about deceptively poignant content, this show is a strictly formal affair designed to deceive and challenge the eye. Some crazy smart heavies play light in the joyous a/c: Stockholder, Welling, Oehlen, Moholy-Nagy, Beshty, McKenzie, Lefcourt and Man Ray painting.

The greatest joy of this show is that you get to think of some of the issues Frank Stella has taken up over the years [the best thing about Stella] without having to look at any of his actual artwork [the worst thing about Stella].

MARLÈNE MOCQUET: Recent Paintings
Project Space: SYLVAN LIONNI, Zugzwang

Freight & Volume, 524 West 24th St. [betwn 10th & 11th Aves], 212.989.8700, www.freightandvolume.com

Through August 17, 2007.

Marléne Mocquet, Fingers on the Hand of the Birdmixed media on canvas, 13 x 9", 2007

I was walking around openings one evening alternately being appalled and ignored by the vast number of people at various galleries. I was on my way home when I passed by a gallery whose opening had spilled onto the street. The people out front seemed, well, palatable. There was a slight Williamsburg whiff to them, but there are worse things. I seldom choose to go to an opening based on the people in front of it, but this time I did and dang if I didn’t find a friendly li’l joint with darn cute work.

Marlène Mocquet knocks out small canvases with light wipes, splashes and spills on them to which eyes and other features have been added. Cute but not precious. Funny even.

I like this gallery. The tiny project room also doubles as the storage room with works sticking out the top of a shelf and a curtain panel from Bed, Beth & Beyond draped over the rest. This place is an oasis of amateurism [the good kind] in the heart of the bone chilling slick that Chelsea too often epitomizes [see next review].

Thomas Fletchtner

Marianne Boesky Gallery, 509 West 24th Street [betwn 10th & 11th Aves], 212.680.9889, http://www.marianneboeskygallery.com

Through August 17th, 2007.

This show is perfect: it is so on the nose, so lacking in tooth, and so clearly product as to attain a sort of formal transparency and an existential emptiness of which Barthes would be proud. Consider that the work is contained within the envelope of the Boesky gallery amid the wrapper of the Boesky building and you find yourself experiencing the apotheosis of 2007 culture.

Michael Somoroff: Illumination

BravinLee programs Off Site, 508 West 26 Street (ground floor), 212.462.4404, www.bravinlee.com.

Through August 10, 2007

The light is nice and all but I have questions:
Why must all video installation compendiums be accompanied by minimalist music recorded on cheap equipment? [Whereas it is true that you can recite all of Emily Dickinson’s poems to Yellow Rose of Texas, it’s also true that you can recite “I am repeating myself” to all of Philip Glass’s music] Where is it written that God’s music has to sound like a repetitive Doppler drone? Who’s to say that God wouldn’t occasionally emit a little ragtime or perhaps a nice polka?

Ellen Gronemeyer
Michael Hakimi

Andrew Kreps Gallery, 525 West 22nd St, 212.741.8849, http://www.andrewkreps.com/

Through July 20, 2007

I hereby challenge Kreps to put together an exhibition in which nothing leans against a wall or lies on the floor.

artholes

* * *

2007-06-01T00:56:00.000-04:00

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Dana Schutz: Stand by Earth Man

Zach Feuer Gallery (LFL), 530 West 24th St., 212.989.7700, www.zachfeuer.com.

Through May 19.

No, no, no. I think she tried to pull off a Daffy Duck profile in her Mona Lisa, couldn’t, and then just wiped the face off not up to the task. Quack! Then she did another faceless figure [giving birth] – that makes it a motif. [The one cool thing about that pic is that the woman is looking at a painting of spread mountains.]

Now she’s put holes into the canvas! It’s a progressive motif, see, carrying over the stains, rust and ink spots in other paintings. Something about positive and negative space mon. All painterly and shit.

No.

Aaron Johnson: Hellhound Rodeo

Priska C. Juschka Fine Art, 547 West 27th St., 212.244.4320, www.prischkafineart.com , gallery@priskajuschkafineart.com.

ThroughJune 16.

Talk about process. This guy is an inventor extradonaire. I won’t even go into the details of how Johnson does what he does. You sort of have to see it to believe it. I’m not overwhelmed by his acid colors, the netting and the ultimate look of his forms, but the way in which his paintings evolve and are built: cool!

Sean Landers

Andrea Rosen Gallery, 525 West 24 Street, 212.627.6000, www.andrearosengallery.com, j.bastien@rosengallery.com.

Through June 9.

Pretty words.

No Obstacles
Alec Wilkinson

The New Yorker, 4/16/07.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/04/16/070416fa_fact_wilkinson

The New Yorker has a gift for bringing seemingly boring topics to life in fascinating detail. Unfortunately this article took an incredibly exciting topic, parkour (free running), threw sand in our eyes and poured warm milk down our throats. Part of the fault here lies in that Wilkinson chose to focus on David Belle who purportedly invented the sport. Listening to this dude trying to be all enigmatic and shit makes me want to tie his shoelaces together.

The French have never excelled at sports. They smoke when they play soccer. They philosophize about sport. Not only do they philosophize the life out of thing, but they generally get it wrong.

Free running is about freedom. It is about the body in response to its environment in constant motion through that environment. No equipment, no apparatus [or rather everything becomes apparatus]—just a body pushing it through space.

Don’t waste time reading about it. And don’t waste time looking up David Belle. Just look up Russian parkour on Utube and you’ll get it.

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2006-07-21T23:14:00.000-04:00

Don’t Stick a Fork in It
by Bradley Rubenstein

Ron Gorchov: Double Trouble
P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center
22-25 Jackson Ave [@ 46th Ave], Long Island City, NY, 718.784.2084
http://www.ps1.org

Through September 18

Lure II, 1976, oil on canvas, 36" x 51" c 14"

“I respected him right up until I slit his throat.”
Truman Capote, In Cold Blood

Ron Gorchov is one of those really respected artists that only the Mid-West seems to produce. Respected, as in Jim Nutt respected or Leon Golub respected. Gorchov was born in Chicago in 1930, attended the University of Illinois (my alma mater), and began exhibiting in the late 1950s. Gorchov’s style paralleled that of artists like Frank Stella or Ellsworth Kelly. These three artists contended with the potential in the shape of a canvas to not only contain the painted image but also to give the painting itself form. Hybrids of Abstract Expressionism and 60’s Minimalism, his paintings were cool, interesting, and then largely forgotten. The art world is like that. Although his work has only been exhibited once before in New York, Gorchov has maintained a sort of following; artists like Guy Goodwin and Ellen Phalen owe him a huge debt.

The shaped canvases [generally two vertical parallel lines centered within rounded rectangles] have been compared to electric sockets, riding saddles and shields. I read that in the press release. I also read that he paints the floating shapes in the center of the canvases ambidextrously. The right one is the right handed side, the left etc…. I was oddly struck by these factoids. I was intrigued both by the ambidexterity, and, ironically, the lack of any discernable “hand” in his various marks. In a strange way Gorchov painted himself so much into the painting that he eventually painted himself out of the picture. Since the incredibly cloying work in the Elizabeth Murray retrospective, I don’t want to be told that a shaped canvas is supposed to look like, you know, “a shoe!” It struck me that until I read that these paintings were meant to look like something, I had never really noticed that they were shaped in any particular way. The pieces seemed bent to fit the space in the way that the paint bent to fit the canvas, the way he must have bent to make the mark. Really this is work to be looked at, felt and moved through.

If these paintings resemble shields (a favorite motif, it seems, among the Chicago guys; see Golub, Goodwin, et. al), maybe it is because this type of work ultimately needs defending; there is a delicacy to it that is belied by the size of the pieces. These paintings provide a private pleasure. Really good paintings don’t have to be seen by everyone to still be really good paintings.

Regardless of whether Gorchov faded from prominence by his choice or from critical and/or commercial neglect, the artist is brought back into the light by the current exhibition. Gorchov’s paintings prove to be both vintage and retro simultaneously which, considering that the focus of P.S.1 has been so much about newness lately, is sort of, well, cool.

2006-07-02T23:18:00.000-04:00

Moma & Dada

Dada
The Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53 Street [btwn. 5th & 6th Aves.], (212) 708-9400.
http://www.moma.org

Through September 11

Sophie Taeuber-Arp. Untitled (Dada Head). 1920. Oil on turned wood, h. 11 9/16" (29.4 cm).

I’m not terribly interested in this show, but I really wanted to write that title.

* * *

What a Web We Weave…

Studio in the Park: A Public Art Project
Curated by Karin Bravin and produced by BravinLee Programs. Studio in the Park celebrates the 20th anniversary of Riverside Park Fund.

BravinLee Programs, 526 West 26th St. [betw. 10th & 11th Aves.], Ste. 211, 212.462.4404.
www.bravinlee.com

Through September16

Photo by Luis Gispert

Putting art in any large public park is a thankless undertaking. A lot of people get bizarrely angry at the art [unless it involves cows]. Furthermore, unless under the thumb of a mass totalitarian vision [see The Gates] it is hard for art to unify large outdoor public spaces—especially ones as long, varied and in parts bifurcated and trifurcated as Riverside Park. The answer then would seem to be not to try. Better to try to capture the spirit of the place quietly and artlessly but with grace and good humor.

Studio in the Park is not so much seen as encountered. The art weaves in and out of the park’s precincts much as the park weaves in and out of its surrounding terrain. The park intertwines spectacularly with the West Side Highway, Metro North, the Hudson River and the numerous neighborhoods that abut its impressive length. Similarly, whether by chance or by choice, much of the work in this summer-long show is about lacing, looping and layering.

One of the cool features of Riverside Park is the trains that run under most of it. You can see them rumble by beneath massive grates and through stone arches. Elana Herzog wove pink wires into the gratings by the flower gardens in the 80s. The wires are grouped somewhat in the pattern of the train tracks below them. Sadly, that’s it for this under-realized piece; it’s hard not to wish that the wires were able to puff into the air when the trains flew by, or form a grander pattern or do something. Like Steed Taylor’s Road Tattoos. Taylor’s tattoos are painted onto the path of a promenade up by 102nd St. They are painted with a hi-gloss black latex that will eventually fade away [as many a 90’s tattoo victims wish theirs would]. The tattoo itself forms a looping pattern of ribbony lines—the kind of Celtic thing Angelina Jolie has somewhere on her body.

Meanwhile, at the beginning [or end] of the park at 70th St., Orly Genger’s Puzzlejuice delights the eyes and the kids with a simple land sculpture made from colored climbing rope webbed together and draped over a climbing rock formation. The work, placed at one of the park’s most hectic intersections, is in itself a sublime intersection of art, audience and park.

Equally lovely are Gary Simmons’ backstop covers. These airy white fabrics adorned with stars and the words I Wish and Forever are looped to the chain link fences behind the home plates at the 108th St. ball fields. The pieces succeed in bringing to life the aesthetic possibilities of a thoroughly neglected zone and capturing the wonder felt by anyone who has ever stepped into a batter’s box. I hope these covers stay up for as long as they last and set a precedent for the decoration of backstops everywhere.

There are numerous other works that weave their way through the life of the park [except for McKendree Key’s 8,000 orange balls cast upon the Hudson—they bob]. Each piece works to better or worse effect, but all strive to do the park a solid.

Olmstead grasped better than anyone what each of his parks were meant to do for their respective communities and what they could do with the land upon which they were placed. For the challenging terrain of Riverside he chose to create a many stranded park which would stitch together the upper west coast of Manhattan. Studio in the Park manages to illuminate and celebrate the form and functions of the place. Not bad for public art.

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Rusted and Chilled

Richard Serra: Rolled and Forged

Gagosian Gallery, 555 West 24th St [betw. 10th & 11th Aves], 212.741.1111
http://www.gagosian

Through August 11

Elevations, Repetitions, Weatherproof steel, 60 x 366 x 6 inches, 2006.

These babies are big and beautiful. Huge delicious chunks that are exactly what they say they are. Gogo has constructed entire rooms to fit the pieces [to the centimeter]. Plus the whole vast space is air-conditioned! Go. Go.

2006-06-17T00:02:00.000-04:00

Bradley Rubenstein is now officially an arthole. Rubenstein is a painter and long time resident of Greenpoint. In the hopes of getting him to review all the shows out in Brooklyn that I’ll never get to, I’m letting him cut his teeth on a museum show.

My Six Year Old Could Review That
by Bradley Rubenstein

No Limits, Just Edges: Jackson Pollock Paintings on Paper

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Ave [betw. 89th & 90th Sts.], 212.423.3500
http://www.guggenheim.org/new_york_index.shtml

Through September 29

Untitled (Green Silver), ca. 1949. Enamel and aluminum paint on paper mounted on canvas. 22 3/4 x 30 3/4 inches.
The current exhibit at the Guggenheim enjoins the now half an age old debate as to whetherornothecouldactuallydraw and shows Pollock overcoming his personal limitations to develop something other. Pollock did not just develop a way of working, he developed a way of working through: styles, materials and personal demons. He consumed his own innovations with such fervor that by the time he reached his signature poured style he was already a cliché, done. Yes, it is the 50th anniversary of his death or something, and yes, a Pollock show is always (usually) worth seeing, but in this case seeing the drawings in the context of the Guggenheim's über-modern architecture points up the struggle he faced trying to define what it meant for him to be modern.

The gems of the show aren't the delicately laced Duco drawings but the transitional early pieces. Whether Pollock was quoting his shrink in this work, really did a lot of reading up at the library, or was actually trying to unlearn how to draw (see Clement Greenberg) these pieces persisted for him and would be resurrected later in his black and white works like Portrait and A Dream. By the time we get to the end of the Pollock story, we are usually depressed because he had "lost it" (again see Clement Greenberg) or had "fallen off the wagon" (or is that “on the wagon?”) or whatever. I would like to think that he never really lost anything. Maybe these drawings were always lying around the studio, a reminder of just how far he had gone with the work. No matter how tight that final corner he painted himself into was, it was still worlds bigger than the one he had painted himself out of 15 years earlier.

2006-06-05T18:37:00.000-04:00

The other day I saw a man sitting alone at an outdoor café. It seemed as if he were talking to himself. I assumed he was merely talking on a blue tooth. But he wasn’t. He really was talking to himself. I was oddly comforted.

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The Robin Yount of Contemporary Painting

Thomas Nozkowski: Works on Paper

Bravin Lee Programs, 526 West 26th St. Rm 211 [btwn 10th & 11th Aves], 212.462.4404
www.bravinlee.com

Closed

Thomas Nozkowski can best be described as one of those quiet players who puts up great numbers every year and before you know it is ready for the Hall of Fame. He’s a pro’s pro. If he isn’t the flashiest player in the league, he’s certainly the steadiest. Pound for pound his paintings pay out the most consistently interesting rewards to their viewers. In this show oil on un-gessoed [!] paper paintings wring myriad possibilities out of their humble form. Anything you see in them I can see better: graffiti, Klee, Matisse, Lasker—but most of all Nozkowski. He’s been knocking around inside the same four sides of his surfaces with the basically the same elements for 25 years and it’s never boring and seldom precious. Like the great Robin Yount he rarely makes an error.

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Father's Day

Len Servetar

JCC-Y, 900 Route 45, New City, NY, (845) 362-4400
http://www.servetar.com/HTML/len_index.html

Through July 28

Ok, so I’ve completely compromised my journalistic integrity [oxymoron?] by listing this show. Then again, unless your dad is Andreas Gursky or Barry Frydlender, my dad is a better photographer than your dad anyway. Nyah.

At Play, 18" x 20", digital print, 2006

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Mish Mash

Robert Altman: I am what I am
Lothar Hempl: Umbrella

Anton Kern Gallery, 532 West 20th St. [betw. 10th & 11th Aves.], 212.367.9663
www.antonkerngallery.com

Closed

Endlose Reise (Endless Journey), Boat, MDF, photographic paper, lights, 80 x 45 x 128, 2006

So I walked into the gallery. I only saw Robert Altman’s name on the front wall. Saw a bunch of things that looked as if Altman might have made them in his garage when he wasn’t busy not-directing one of his tomes. Hippie art assemblages, photo collages and diamond shaped canvases in early 70s colors with faded frau themes—strictly rummage sale stuff. In the back were stills from Altman’s various films—the potentially money making part of the exhibit. I got to thinking about how celebrities have taken over Broadway plays, children’s books, procreation and now, so it seemed, art making. Then I found out that the stuff in front was by Lothar Hempl. My bad.

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2006-05-23T00:26:00.000-04:00

Amy Fusselman [see About Me] is now officially an arthole. From time to time she will contribute conversations with artists based on what they do to get by. Joe Fig’s last show was awesome, but the life of every full-time painter is somewhat the same [get up, go to the studio, paint, paint, paint!]. Amy will chart the paths followed by the rest of us.

art/work
By Amy Fusselman

Elizabeth Zechel is an artist and Kindergarten teacher at a private school in Brooklyn, NY. Her most recent exhibition featured a series of drawings entitled “Goddamn Bully” at A.I.R. Gallery in Chelsea.

She is currently working on:

-Over 90 drawings of pies for Bubby’s Restaurant’s forthcoming pie book
-Drawings of Chickasaw Indian myths for display in the permanent collection of the Chickasaw National Cultural Center in Oklahoma.
-A book with poet Jen Robinson
-A children’s book for Soft Skull press with poet Matthea Harvey

Where do you work?

My dining table. Elizabeth’s table, with pie.

How did you get your teaching job?

I had been waiting tables forever—and couldn’t keep doing that--I didn’t know what I was going to do. I mean, God help me, I even thought about Clown School at one point.

Oh, you are my hero.

I was like ‘What can I do? What do I like? I like to do silly things. I like to fall down. I like kids. Clown school! Of course!’ [laughter]. But it went from waiting tables to thinking about what to do, to even thinking…I took a class at the New School for writing and I was going to write this book and I was all over the place. I was drawing, I was painting, I was da-da-da-da… And then Todd [Colby, Zechel’s husband, a poet] was looking in the Village Voice at restaurant waiting jobs and saw out of the blue: ‘Looking for painters to paint prosthetic hands and fingers.’ And he said ‘You should try that.’ And I was like ‘OK. Sounds good to me.’ [laughter].

So I called up and got an interview. The company was called ‘American Hand Prosthetics.’ It was the trippiest job I ever had. It was… Well, first there was a three-hour audition… They gave us these little plastic swatches …you had to paint with latex paint, and you had to continuously put this liquid in the paint or it would turn into… a piece of silly putty….I felt like Lucy out of the Lucy show because I was looking at the time and I had to match about 25 different colors of skin swatches, and while I’m trying to do this, the paint is drying and I’m like ‘I can’t do it. I’m a loser. I can’t believe I’m the last one here.’ …I got the job.

Yay!

I worked with patients. It was fascinating. There was a guy who just did fingernails. He was amazing. And there was a guy who took the molds. We did arms, hands, toes…Some poor girl has my toe actually.

The prosthetics makers would take a mold of a patient’s right finger, you know, ‘cause the left one was gone, and then they would reverse it. And then …the patients would come in and I would paint. While they were there I would match their skin tones….The last guy I did was this older man who had lost his arm in World War II and I have never been so stressed out in my life because I had to do his entire arm and hand… it was looking orange…so I had to re-scrape the paint and he was being very patient and very sweet and we finally got it right but it was: ‘Let’s just put this arm [the other arm] in the sun for a little bit.’ [laughter].

So this is a long answer to your question, but I had that job and then my mom got sick and I left New York and went to Chicago to help her and I stayed there until she died in July 2001. When I came back, I needed a job and I wasn’t going back to the hand place…

Right.

Because I needed something a little more uplifting. [laughter]

Then I bumped into this woman who I had waited on years ago. She was a realtor in Brooklyn and she’s like ‘So what are you going to do?’ and I said ‘Well, I really don’t know. I was thinking maybe teaching art classes’ And she said you should call X and Y at these schools so I called...and interviewed and became the Afterschool Head at this school for a year. Then… they bumped me up to kindergarten. And there I stayed;… I’ve been there six years.

What’s your day like?

Whole day?…Get up at ten of seven, have my ritual oatmeal, coffee…

Uh-huh.

And we have everything. We have math, we have reading, we have this and that…. We have horrible fights between children, you know we have lots of happiness, lots of sadness and then it’s time to go home.

…I usually get home around 3:15. Get here, chill out for a little bit and start drawing.

2006-05-11T01:09:00.000-04:00

Yeah, well...

Bill Henson

Robert Miller Gallery
524 West 24th St. [btw 10th & 11th Aves.], 212.366.4774
http://www.robertmillergallery.com/

Closed

Ok, so they’re gi’normous nudes and partials of young nubiles mixed with late summer dusk shots of children’s toys abandoned in the grass. They’re gorgeous. Sue me.

* * *

Bashley Ackerton

Ashley Bickerton

Lehmann Maupin
540 West 26th St [btw 10th & 11th Aves.], 212.255.2923

Closed

A.B. is the Jimmy Buffett of the art world having abandoned civilization some time ago [though Bickerton chose the South Pacific over Florida and seems to prefer crystal meth to margaritas]. This show presents a continuation of Bickertons über-cranked hyperreal paintings on wood now with the addition of print elements, aboriginal style patterning and holes. The exhibit also celebrates earlier moments in the artist’s history with some terrific sculptures and combine pieces. The Edge of Things—S. Pacific, though of dubious ecological provenance [it’s made mostly of coral], is a welcome gentle touch amid the psychotropic postcards from paradise.

Quite possibly the first time I’ve had a good time in the plywood pavilion—Tracy Emin’s Soho skankfest notwithstanding.

* * *

What’s on Your Worktable?

Joe Fig

Plus Ultra Gallery
637 West 27th street [btw 11th & 12th Aves.], 212.643.3152
http://www.plusultragallery.com/index.html

Closed

I’m jumping on this show with both feet.

I’m a sucker for models. No, not those willowy creatures who never pay for drinks, I’m a sucker for scale models. I was all over Michael Ashkin before he lost all sense of perspective about his work [pun intended] and I’ll always take a second look at anything that attempts to recreated our world in miniature [one of my first enduring museum recollections is of the scale model Aztec temple on the ground floor of the Brooklyn Museum].

Joe Fig’s project is a very straightforward and very generous endeavor. He lays out for the viewer/listener/reader the work lives of the painters. He does so in a direct and refreshingly artless manner—more Museum of Natural History than MOMA. His work is a gift for the small group of people who actually give a shit about painting [mostly other painters]—a rare glimpse into those things about which we’re probably most curious [what brand of paint do you use?, what kind of table do you have? what’s your day like? Etc…]. It’s the best mix of art and design porn.

With meticulous care and thorough going inventiveness, Fig recreates each artist’s work table and its immediate environs and accompanies it with a fairly brief recording of an interview with each artist. Earphones hang off the pedestals on which the miniatures rest. The respective interviews play as we ogle the minutiae of their lives. The interviews are for the most part short, crisp and on point.

Just the other day Rodney A. asked me if I would ever review after only having seen it on the web. While I never would [we have to have at least one form of unmediated experience left in our lives], nevertheless, I would be able, in a pinch, to get a pretty good idea of Fig’s exhibition by checking out the gallery web site. Like the show the site is a straightforward gift to the viewer.

Artists in the show include a lot of great players from Dana Schutz to Joan Snyder, Chuck Close and a terrific roster in between: e.g. Matthew Ritchie, Will Cotton [he only uses 5 colors!], Karen Davie, Fred Tomaselli, Amy Sillman and Alexis Rockman [see below]. You could spend a couple of hours pouring over these dioramas, to say nothing of the larger piece leftover from an earlier show “April and Eric.” While it is fascinating to look into Gornik and Fischl’s dream-come-true his and her studios, it’s also just too much perfection to bear.

* * *

2006-04-25T01:13:00.000-04:00

Good Ship, Man

Matthew Barney: The Occidental Guest

Gladstone Gallery
515 West 24th Street [btw. 10th & 11th Aves.], 212.206.9300
http://www.gladstonegallery.com/default.asp

Closed

Matthew Barney, Torii, 2006. Vivak, cast polycaprolactone thermoplastic, and acrylic; 5 x 23 x 27'
When the prettiest boy in school decides that the prom song is going to be by Bread, and that we are all to be dressed like Scottish satyrs and smeared in Vaseline, who are we to argue? Who are we poor, ugly pantshitters to criticize?

And what are we to do when the prettiest boy in school takes to the prom a really cool, exotic girl from out of town? Oh man. And then they make a movie together! Oh man. This is what Brangelina’s baby would look like if he were born an art film. Too fucking gorgeous to bother.

God, I hate myself so much.

* * *

Free Running

It is perhaps the only thing purely and beautifully born of the great social experiments/disasters that were and are the large housing projects that swept the world from the 30’s on. From the Soviet bloc of flats to the council houses of Great Britain and the Corbusian nightmares of the French banlieues—the only good thing to have been directly inspired by this soul deadening architecture is a sport so pure it requires no equipment, apparatus, field or court. Crumbling concrete walls and stairs will do nicely for an arena. A pair of sneakers for equipment. That’s it.

The French call it Parkour [they have a name for everything], but the best name for it is Free Running. The combination of creativity and virtuoso physicality involved in the sport is exhilarating and downright liberating. Take a look at the clip in the link below and see if you don’t agree:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=515642196227308929&q=russian+climbing

* * *

The Little Dog Laughed

Amy Sillman

Sikkema Jenkins & Co.
530 West 22nd St [btw. 10th & 11th Aves.], 212.929.2262
http://sikkemajenkinsco.com/index.html

Closed

Amy Sillman—Get the Moon, 2006, Oil on canvas, 80 x 69 inches
If you wanted to rid New York city of a good many of its painters, you would have done well to set off an IED at Amy Sillman’s opening last Saturday. All the close-shorn and bespectacled painters from Brooklyn and lower Manhattan gathered to catch glimpses of each other against the backdrop of the diminutive painter’s strapping abstractions.

Amy gave Max, my older son, a melted candy the moment she met him—as one might hand garlic to a vampire. A couple leaned against the wall and peered out from behind curator and architect weight eyewear respectively. Another woman strode about purposefully in her Skull & Bones pants hoping to become a conversation piece.

I saw some people who clearly had forgotten me and others whom I wish had. Painting students and recent grads did the bulk of the smoking in front of the gallery. From the street you could watch Brent and Michael entertain clients in the conspicuously front/back room.

And the dish ran away with the spoon.

Prescient, Amn’t I?

Barry Frydlender will be having a solo exhibition at MoMA next year,early summer, in the photography galleries.

Life is short. Art is long. You never know.
artholes!

2006-04-15T23:59:00.000-04:00

Time Laps

Barry Frydlender
Andrea Meislin Gallery, 526 West 26th Street, #214 [btw. 10th & 11th Aves.], 212.627.2552.
http://www.andreameislin.com

Closed

Barry Frydlender is making photographs that succeed on so many levels and with such stunning breadth that the viewer is left to wonder: Why hasn’t he hit really big yet?

Well first of all he’s not young. Ew. Second of all he’s from Israel and that’s so, you know, er, problematic. And third, his large photographs are unabashedly masterful in their technical accomplishments: marvels of time lapse digital overlay that blend to seamless wholes into which all time seems to collapse upon itself. Theses are not callow pics of 20somethings adrift in nature nor are they monothematic concept images trotted out ad infinitum. Frydlender loves and cares about his subjects, some more intimately than others, but always with the spirit of camaraderie that comes from living in a small nation which, for all its issues, still has the feel of a groovy summer camp about it.

What are we to make of that?

His method is not a gimmick. It is has become his way of seeing. He takes many, many exposures of a site--a beach, a swimming pool, a café, a subway car--from minutely different perspectives. He gathers these fragments to form a single image with nary a blur or stilted crop. In this way Frydlender is able to capture time and narrative in a single image, be they scenes of action or repose, epic tableaus or intimate portraits.

It is curious, or perhaps fitting, that Frydlender often chooses as his time lapse subjects those who seem to be going most slowly. Some of his subjects are even asleep a la Warhol. One of his photos, Take a Picture of Me, features a composite portrait of a woman on a beach taken over a year’s time. When you look at some of his images, you know something is up but not exactly what. Even where you see the hand of time at play as when a red headed woman appears here and there at once on a contested beachfront settlement, Shirat Hayam (“End of Occupation?” Series #2), something in the overall atmosphere of the place makes you experience her movement as if in real time.

Despite the anger and sense of violence that hovers in the air like dry heat, these images and the people in them exude a languor that definitively captures the laid back aura of the land even today. There would be more frenetic tension in a photo of the entrance to an average American mall than there is here in the face-off between settlers and the army whose job it was to remove them.

On the wall opposite this photo, in Waiting, 38 Years (“End of Occupation?” Series #1), a line of Palestinian men and boys stand waiting and watching the scene that plays out in the photo across from them [this is actually as it occurred]. The Palestinians are waiting on a hilltop above the beach for the settlers below them to be dispersed. An older man among the teens and boys writes his path across the tableau, his steady patience that of the carrion bird waiting, knowing eventually his moment will come.

There are other gems in this relatively modest exhibit. In The Blessing a party of Hasidic men in a park on a beautiful day cast a simple but resonant color palette thanks to their uniform garb. The balance of colors are pitch perfect painterly.

Estates, however, is the best among bests. Read from the left, we first encounter a cemetery behind a pool which is in the back of a slightly faded luxury apartment building. The time lapse eye exposes itself to the ancient cemetery again and again waiting for something to move, the dead to rise, but here, alas, nothing does—not even a stray cat. In the large pool, 2 swimmers pass each other in opposite directions. Only it’s the same swimmer. Passing himself. Laps. Lapse.

There is no sweeter sadness than crossing paths with your younger self: a swimmer crossing in his own wake, a people returning to a land.

An instructional poster for swim safety hangs towards the back of the pool area. It is printed in imperfect international English and inadvertently points to the truth of the slow, inexorable downward pull of these lands, these scenes. It’s titled in red capital letters: DROWING. We are all drowing.

Life is short. Art is long. You never know.
artholes!

2006-04-06T23:36:00.000-04:00

artholes

goodbye to the inspeak of the overlords

farewell to the mespeak of the cybernaughts

welcome to the tautspeak of the artholes

2006-04-06T22:51:00.000-04:00

Brad Said

Brad said I shouldn’t call this a blog. “Blogs are so…you know. Try calling it a porn site.”

Welcome to my porn site.

I started writing on art on the heels of the ’93 Whitney Biennial, so it’s only fitting that I resume on the heels of the current Biennial.

Tit for Tat

Whitney Biennial 2006: Day for Night

Whitney Museum of American Art, 945 Madison Ave [btw. 74^th & 75^th Sts.], 212.570.3633. http://www.whitney.org/

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Someone called it the Post-America Biennial. It would be better to call it the Post-Traumatic Post-Op TransAmerica Biennial. That would be more like it. There is no Post-America.

Any pretense of art world globalization principally centers on an extended jet set of art professionals and collectors; all the work and the people are essentially the same—it is a traveling show that has the gesture of universality with none of the bitter aftertaste. Although jet-setting is far more accessible than it once was, insofar as I am tethered to this bedrock, I prefer the notion of grasping the global through the local. As the Senator from Massachusetts once said: “All politics is local” —even art politics.

Now that the notion of a themed biennial has been introduced, I’d like to propose a few of my own:

1) The Hierarchical Biennial: The Bucksbaum Award is a start, but I want a real judged show in which the exhibiting artists are pitted against each other in various hard and soft categories. Prizes are awarded by jury and, hold your nose here, the public!

2) Video-Free Biennial: Why not? We’ve already had painting-free biennials.

3) All Local/All World Biennial: Artists who come from somewhere: live/work in the Metro-area, America or truly international destinations, i.e. Westchester, Wisconsin or Ghana, who execute work of their place—not pale imitations of art mag art.

4) All Women Biennial: Isn’t about time? Besides, then we wouldn’t have to hear about the dearth of women artists in the Biennial until the following Biennial.

5) All People of Color Biennial: Ditto. [Except no fair recycling the usual suspects. There are other people of color in the world besides those Thelma Golden discovered.]

As for this one….

My favorite professor of gallery administration stresses that if you are going to curate a themed exhibition, you should shape your theme to the works and not vice versa. Ok, so right away they fucked that up.

The 4th floor played the theme day for night as black for white [and gray]. The first space off the elevator featured Uri Fischer’s busted room, The Inelligence of Flowers, which contains another piece of his, Untitled (branches), an inexorable aluminum slowly rotating and dripping wax and a large b&w painting by Rudolf Stingl, Untitled (After Sam) [what’s with all these untitled pieces having titles?]. Together the works make for a handsome gallery—something that might work well as a Helmut Lang showroom. Next to that Dan Colen’s heavy for light pseudo-cement pieces sort of reminded me of the clothing Santino did for Project Runway: long on personality and ambition, short on actually delivering the goods.

The 3rd floor seemed to interpret day for night as good for bad. Individual artists were called on to show their best and the worst pieces respectively. Hannah Greely contributed a good and then a bad sculpture:, Last Stand, a hat rack made of bones was at once raw and touching while her other piece, Silencer, beat the tired fucked-up baby sculpture trope firmly into the ground. Mark Grotjahn did some good, funny white on beige geometric abstractions: White Butterfly, White Butterfly, and Yellow White Butterfly [all Untitled, naturally] and then, like a suitor who picks his nose at the key moment, Grotjahn lost my heart before he gained it by also displaying Blue Face Grotjahn. I don’t care that he generally paints his abstractions over this kind of gestural expressive romps—he’s wise to paint over them: we don’t need to see them.

Lisa Lapinski’s self conscious Nightstand should have been included on the good/bad floor, the best and the worst of the artist was embraced in one piece. The oversized night table had brilliant drawers that folded out in waves. T’were beautiful. Unfortunately Lapinski didn’t feel that such formal invention was enough. She had to go and add “content” like msg to the mooshu—she junked it up with a with a bunch of crap too banal to list.

The second floor seemed to play out day for night as good for bad behavior with Billy Sullivan’s slide show leading the way displaying the now seemingly innocent [good] bad behavior of yesteryear [70s etc.] Although Sullivan also continued the good art/bad art trope with some bad full portraits paintings of his own. Further on, in a display of the kind of stunning racial insensitivity that only Europeans can still muster, a bunch of black artists were stuck together in one room [toward the back] along with displays of Ku Klux Klan and white supremacist themed art. Get it? Day for night/whites for blacks? “Only zees time Phillipe we will do ze theme in a racial way—it is brilliant! N’est pas?”

Otherwise, other trends stumbled along. Along the female photographer front, let us hope and pray that Hanna Liden is the last entrant in the semi-clad teen girls in the woods genre—less a milieu these days than a millstone. Conversely, Angela Strassheim’s photos show us something we might want to see again: the pristine rapture of a born again family going about its life. Ann Collier’s Cover [California Girl] was cool but the rest of her photos were predictable concept-y stuff: photos of record covers—covers of covers. Ugh.

Finally, it was amazing, but in all honesty there were no videos worth dallying over except Pierre Huyghe’s handsome meditation, A Journey That Wasn’t. Paul Chan’s 1^st ~~Light~~ did a lovely job evoking the long shadow that Marcel Duchamp cast over this show via The Bride Stripped Bare…. But really did we need an entire room of recreated Duchamps by Sturtevant? Aping Duchamp is not the same as being Duchampian. No one here was. Or maybe…

In the spirit of resurrecting defunct notions of good and bad [or in the hopes of being Duchampian], I give u RU Legal? by Miles Davis. A rumor had been floated that the work was really a hoax perpetrated by David Hammons. Had it been so, the piece would most certainly have taken “Best in Show” [and “Most Duchampian”] honors. However, although Hammons may have wished he’d done it, the painting, sadly, is genuine [http://servercc.oakton.edu/~larry/miles/main/paintings.html]. Painted in the last years of the legend’s life, RU looks like a teenager’s take on Basquiat. As talented a trumpeter as Davis was, that’s how untalented a painter he was; RU Legal [or RU Legal Yet? as it is titled in the site above] is the visual equivalent of Michael Jordan playing baseball. As such, and with a heavy heart, I award the painting—“Worst in Show.”

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Inka Dinka Don’t

Inka Essenheigh

303 Gallery, 525 West 22^nd St [btw. 10^th & 11^th Aves.], 212.255.1121.
http://www.303gallery.com/

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For a long time I’ve resisted judgment on Essenheigh [or at least judging Inka from on high]. I’ve also resisted making any references to Jimmy Durante. Now I’ve failed to resist on all counts. I’ve withheld judgment because I didn’t want to be hating on her just because she gets to do big fun looking paintings and sell them for lots of money while the rest of us have to work for our suppers. Now I can hate on her for more than that.

These recent paintings are straight assembly line canard. Each canvas is coated uniformly in its own tasteful background color right around the edges. Images are painted on top generally from dark to light building up imagery straight out of the computer-generated playbook—there may even be a shortcut for these particular distortions: oddish tableaus of figures in situ melting, drooping or swooping into and through each other to no particular end. These things aren’t even as fun to look at as most of Essenhiegh’s earlier extreme abstractions. Kudos to the curatorial machinations behind this show though. The least of the works Inka crinked out is hung alone in the back room beneath a fabulous skylight. By showcasing the thinnest and most under-painted [and not good under-painted] work in the exhibition, the gallery tries to spit shine the turd and pass it off as gold. A gutsy gambit but we’re not buying.

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Glücklich BuenaVista

Lucky DeBellevue

Feature Inc, 530 West 25^th St. [btw. 10^th & 11^th Aves.], 212.675.5772.
featureinc@feautreinc.com

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First of all his name is too good. Second of all they’re pipe cleaners not chenille stems…ugh. In spite of that and in spite of never really being terribly moved by the work—I am moved by the work. These simple sculptures each humbly and movingly play on the nature of the support; the pieces literally and heartbreakingly address one of the fundamental issues of sculpture by replacing classic armatures with canes, crutches and showers stools. In one piece, Cuirass, three clear minibike half-torso shields surround a green chenille blob of a drooping heart. Though less about support than protection, Cuirass reveals the vulnerability at the soft center of DeBellevue’s work. His pieces, barely able to stand up for themselves, nevertheless manage to do just that with the help of the artist’s strong and loving embrace.

For this exhibition, the gallery’s usual policy of group shows only [except for Tom Friedman] hurts the work. Hemmed into too small a space, the sculptures seemed crowded and diminished thereby. For this show the paintings, even DeBellevue’s charmingly slight 2D affairs, are the things that you bump into. DeBellevue’s work needed and deserved room to lean. Lean on Lucky!

Life is short. Art is long. You never know.
artholes!