mind you, this painting is entitled, "the beach" by philip le bas

we can do it

this year's going to be the year. for something.

i can't tell if i even like this

i feel a fever coming on just in time for xmas.
i saw this ad in my office building's elevator that advised against pairing an inexpensive gift with an expensive one, as the cheap gift will diminsh the value of the expensive one in the recipient's eyes.
kind of dreading xmas.

this minimal wave's creeping me out right now.

looking at gordon matta-clark and dana shutz lately.
wanting to make my drawings look like they're backlit and glowing. it's hard.
i walked around tribeca on my lunch break and had all these ideas for drawings so i went back to the office break room to write them down and helped bobby microwave his banquet chicken pot pie so he could eat lunch in his, "secret honeycomb."

actually, this album is really weird and all over the place. it should be categorized as drunk wave instead of min-wave.

i need to stop sleeping in a small cat pile in the corner of my bed.
ankle sprain has freed up more time to make drawings, and now i'm healed just as the drawing sprain is setting in.
it must be similar to the sprain of chronic masturbation or knitting.

i'm going to either throw up or pass out now.
considering quitting drinking along with my smoking quit.

fulton record store

can of worms

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

I really just want to listen to old music I love most of the time. I keep trying to feed myself new books and movies, but I always find myself falling back in to old patterns. It's like that time me and alex were walking in prospect park and found a battery wedged in a fallen tree trunk. It looked as though the trunk grew around the battery and it just became part of the tree through stupid coincidence. It was also a battery brand I didn't recognize, and looked like the sort of antiquated energy source used to power a walkman or a ghetto blaster.

I forget where I was going with this, but I think I'm old enough now where I've formed indelible qualities and old man sticking points to what I like and what I don't. But I usually end up contradicting myself. For instance, seeing alex katz in person was like a brick to my head. I guess the subject matter undermines the process and allure of those thin, thin, fresh layers of paint. I mean, how excited would you be if I told you about some paintings of anna wintour and a bunch of flowers.. maybe a lake and a cat. Sounds mind numbing, I know, but trust me, they are really great flowers.

I am trying to keep the spirit of this blog alive which is I am usually drunk when I write in it.

My favorite person right now is Luigi Palma di Cesnola. He was the first director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a fucking crazy motherfucker. I can just imagine him ripping sarcophagus's from the ground in Cyprus and screaming, "ka-ching!" His wikipedia article is much more stately than the account I am reading of him. I don't know, everyone looks diginified in photos taken before 1980.

when I first started down the track

of trying to find this k-pop song I heard in H Mart today, I promised myself it would be a two hour commitment. But then youtube was all like, "no it doesn't work like that you dumb bitch," and here I am four hours later.

Let me tell you some things about k-pop. There is no such thing as too many band members. It feels like everyone in Korea has used the same synthesizer for the past like... thirty years. If there is ever a misgiving about the direction of a song, you should probably add some flute. By Korean genre standards, maroon5 would be considered a "melodic punk band." I guess it's comforting to know that mainstream creative lousery is a cross-cultural affliction.

After wading through progressive-folk, weird doors copy cat bands, and acoustic twee backwash, I don't know right from wrong, good from bad, and I forget who I am. I managed to find some gems, but I can hear some sloshing in my head so maybe I'm not to be trusted.


channeling edith piaf


kim choo ja is this lady who puddles herself on the floor, and then sings by herself, usually angrily.

last three, top of the heap.






now excuse me while i attempt to reconstruct my psyche.

non-boring video art

it's like the beauty of formalism and abstraction combined with the satisfaction of fucking shit up.

http://www.ubu.com/film/hubbard.html

put the fucking lotion in the basket

i think i kind of love this movie

which probably makes me kind of a bad person

book

References for the book of drawings I am making this week:





via stoppingoffplace






"The distancing effect is achieved by the way the "artist never acts as if there were a fourth wall besides the three surrounding him [...] The audience can no longer have the illusion of being the unseen spectator at an event which is really taking place." The use of direct audience-address is one way of disrupting stage illusion and generating the distancing effect. In performance, as the performer "observes himself," his objective is "to appear strange and even surprising to the audience. He achieves this by looking strangely at himself and his work."

lessons from youtube

russian people really bad at rapping, really good at dancing.


did your church have organs like this? you weren't forced to go to church as a child? oh. if this were a stereotypical hiphop video, all that expensve gear would have boobs (augmented, naturally), chains, and a bitching motorcade. either way both make you bothered. maybe kind of hot?


errr sometimes it's better off if you just close your eyes. is the case with drunk sex and misforunate youtube visuals. yeeesh.


this one's better anyway.


when you share a drunken cab ride home with a boy going from bed stuy to the upper east side PLUS the remainder of your trip home, it really makes a girl reasess her standing in the world. you wake up with a hangover, no renewed sense of financial maturity, and a shit ton of drunk downloaded library music. uh yay?

listening to the homosexuals, crying, smoking weed, drawing

yes this is my tonight.

youth and old age

scenery of the past month
- in queens, on my way from ps1 walking to the pulaski bridge, an old man nearly caned me, swinging at a mcdonalds medium size paper cup on the sidewalk.
- double-middle-finger dance by a seven year old on the rockaway beach boardwalk; his mother walking just far enough ahead with her head hung.
- toddler in stroller on the uptown c pounding his wristwatch screaming stop it stop it stop it.
- children in red hook throwing shoes at one another, performing a harmony korine script.
- a retarded man walks down eighth ave intentionally bumping in to chelsea breasts and no one quite knows how to address the situation.
- an old man walking past me eating lunch on a chelsea bench says, "don't think so much."