halloween lessons

I learn the best halloween lessons when imbibed.

a) absolutely not leaving my house tonight. There are too many children roaming the streets on a school night with straight up sugar lust in their eyes.
b) chinese restaurants have the laziest treats. fortune cookies.
c) the best way to deal with monday drudge is as follows: relieve sunday night terrors and anxiety of embarking on another five-day work cycle by drinking so heavily, monday morning you clock in drunk and clock out just as the hangover sets in.
d) trying to find good asian pop music in real life=difficult and expensive. trying to find asian pop music on the internet=easy and free.
e) it should always rain/snow on record fair days because the unwashed record collecting masses that haven't left their houses in weeks will have been rinsed of their grime. a convention center full of those people can smell like compost.
f) it is always a good idea to ride the bumpercars.
g) i really hope i'm wrong, but it seems the more western influence a country receives is definitely proportionate to how good their their music is. :( but maybe that is just from my western perspective : (((( and i just need to explore more : )

my gold streak youtube music journey. what can i say, sometimes you get lucky:









really wish i had more than two songs from this band.








best record fair find.

i wanna smoke prismatic cigs with romy schneider

so the story goes, clouzot had a little freak out after seeing fellini's 8 1/2 and basically had a creative, "oh fuck," moment. new wave was creeping on his cred and that mid-career fear of becoming obsolete, old, and boring set in (can't wait for that one). it's hard when you have unlimited access to actors, production funds, and beautiful fucking film stock that you can afford 70+ takes of a color separated romy schneider. not to mention bullying your sound techs to refine every burp and hiccup of the soundtrack. one by one his crew left, and the film was never finished.

i guess it's a testament to artistic paralysis; that fear and competition with the world is never a productive motivator. or maybe making the hubristic claim to reinvent cinema is a damning goal that almost always equals failure. or maybe people really do have only a few good creative gestures in them and it's terrifying to accept and believe that possibility.

i have definitely had those obsessive moments, refining every microscopic bit of an image to the point where i've sanded it down to dust. i've wasted hours harping over a two-inch corner with a fine two-hair brush when i would have made a better drawing with two marks and a fat brush. i've whined about not having enough time to draw, and then make the most progress in compressed two hour intervals.

boundaries, limitations and bullshit are so important when making creative decisions. if there's no counterpoint to the crazy monologue you have with yourself when you sit down to push a bunch of ink and paint around or write a story, or make a song, you are just alone, demonstrating rote motor skills, and muttering crazy talk to yourself. and probably making a mess.

even so, the film scraps of inferno are so visually seductive. i think this movie would have been one of those movies. i mean, look how good that shit looks even on youtube!

this week i will buy a receiver and speakers for my trash-picked turntable.

rolling around in fresh laundry.


she seems like a sad and lonely person, no?

the first time i ever heard songs from joe meek/bbc radiophonic workshop world was in bushwick about two years ago. it was on a record player and very good speakers. it was a very special drunken time for me.



love it.

i'm not resizing it.

wow oh wow the dekooning show at moma makes you want to run home immediately, shake your loved ones, and make a bunch of shit ASAP. the more art I see in person, the more I realize how much photographs fall short of the crushing scale and presence of being in the same space as a piece of art.

one of his paintings is STILL drying.. it keeps changing. it has a life of its own. it's painting itself now. how fucked up is that!?!


this painting hurts your eyes in a really good way. it reminds me of going to dia:beacon and feeling like i was going to throw up in/on a richard serra.


probably my favorite. he used tusche with salt mixed in to create the dappled white spots. i guess the salt acted as a resist to the acid, and once rolled, the oily ink curled away from the salt spots. it made me homesick for printing lithographs.

it's so spare, but so perfect. he made an edition of 47, which is a nerdy punchline for me because I can imagine him aiming for 50 and getting frustrated and quitting at some odd arbitrary number. no disrespect though. when you've processed a lithographic stone for a day and a half of essentially sanding down a stone with a gigantic party noise maker that weighs fifty pounds, making it perfectly level (we were taught to check perfect levelness by using cigarette papers. how gauche!), and then another day massaging said stone with gum arabic, when someone hands you something as loose as ink to draw, it is a huge huge risk. you don't want to fuck it up, because it's back to levigating for two fucking days. so basically, i'm saying, dekooning's got balls.

fuck, i miss making prints.

the beatles t-shirt on the ground kills me