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