Fuck, today was one of those try to juggle financial transactions days. This is going to be a very short week, as I have to give a talk at the Painting’s Edge conference in Idyllwild on Wednesday, then do studio visits there Thursday, then the holiday is Friday. I have to go look one more time at the Kitaj show tomorrow as i have been assigned writing a review of it.

After doing the financial thing - really phase-one of the financial thing, I had promised to take my nephew to a baseball game. I had taken his brother last month. So we get to Anaheim Stadium and two of my oldest friends (grade school, high school) are at the game too, so we all sat around yapping about being almost forty and my nephew probably learned a little more about life than he did about baseball (the game was pretty lame, the funniest thing that happened was a foul ball was ruled a homerun, than overruled by another umpire. The next foul ball that was hit was obviously foul but my nephew shouted HOMERUN with hilarious precision).

My nephew lives in the house I grew up in, so it was a weird drive back to the old neighborhood. It is SO fucking quiet there, suburbia, 10:30 p.m. on a Monday night, the streetlights seemed like candles it was so dark and empty and so, so, so 3-D fucking familiar.

After stopping by to say hello to my sister, I get back int he car and almost have a full-scale panic attack - something that occurred about weekly back when i was a drunk, daily for my first month of sobriety, monthly for the first two years of being off the juice, but has come on as intensely only four or five times in the past seven or so years.

Well, i fought this one off by laughing at the ludicrous proposition of the darkened silent streets of my childhood bringing on a sense of worthless futility and the simultaneous terror of inconsequentiality. Basically, I have too deep a sense of irony to let anything so deeply cliched bring me down. So I ended up feeling more powerful that i actually thwarted a panic attack. Wow!

So tomorrow is more magazine distribution and more financial distribution. I am less depressed when i am doing things, i wonder if that is why I procrastinate - to subconsciously avoid long bouts of depression by having furious days of getting many things done.

I thought Katherine Hepburn was long dead. Not that i give two shits about some old movie star. But so much variety televsion humor 20-30 years ago was spent on imitating her in an exaggerated manner for laughs. And I was the kid looking blankly at the screen not getting it or caring or able to change the channels and you wonder why people like me do not have television sets.

Just got an email that Square Blue Gallery in OC had a fire last night. No art was damaged, nobody was hurt. They emailed me because i was supposed to give a talk there on July 18 but now that is cancelled.

It has been some time since i had to do distribution around L.A., but a one of my distributors had a son get hit by a car and had to go be supermom and Salerno was participating in an important show opening at Bedlam Gallery, so there i was this afternoon at Bergamot Station with bundles of Coagula Art Journal walking from gallery to gallery. Got some gossip, saw some folks.

It all reminded me of taking the bus to galleries with copies of the magazine when I first started it as a newspaper in 1992. There was no Bergamot Station back then, just big-assed Sue Spaid on Beverly and drunken Bill Radawec out in Mar Vista (I was a drunk then and usually had a great buzz going on during these bus trips). There was the Onyx Coffee House on Vermont and Troy Cafe on First and Alameda, next door to what had once been the Atomic Cafe that The Descendents mentioned in their song Kabuki Girl.

I used to go with a girl who would putt me around with the issues of the magazine in her Corvair if I had been a good co-dependent boyfriend. I used to hustle rides from people by helping them run errands and would bring along a short stack of magazines just to drop off some issues at a gallery or two. I bummed a ride from Kim Dingle in little MG to a gallery once and on the way realized that the issue had talked major shit about the space we were about to visit. So I conveniently forgot the issues in the car until we left and then ran back to get them and drop them off.

So there were a lot of pleasant and unpleasant memories merging as i grabbed the twined bundles of fifty copies and walked all over the frickin’ place. At Ruth Bachofner’s, an opening reception for Robert Kingston was about to start. He was late, apparently a regular occurence for him (and a sign of egocentrism I have always believed), one that people seemed to be making allowances for, although plenty of people who came to see the guy left before he got there. And when he did get there, he was wearing just a beat up t-shirt and passing out fliers (as in paper xeroxed announcements, no expense under three cents were spared) for a group show he is involved with at a gallery in downtown called POST. At his own solo show. Gosh, what a bold way to say “Fuck You Everybody.” His paintings were great and the show really showed them off, but he was just out of mind all around tacky.

After that, my dinner with Mister Winkle hardly rates a mention, but I had dinner with the famous dog tonight at Damon’s steakhouse in Glendale. Whopdeeshit-goodnight.

Not going to bother shipping copies of the magazine out to the 49 colleges/universities that take copies until mid-August.

So many details…

How Would YOU Take Over the World?

Well, Issue #63 was printed today. It is still at the printers being boxed and bundled and all the manual labor crap, but it is done and I am happy with it.

I was just reading through it now and it pretty much what i wanted. The photo of Leonardo DiCaprio came out great. The photo of Mr. Winkle can out fine. There is a photo of me that makes me look, oh, about sixty fucking three years old. The one pic in the whole mag that picks up the nuances of facial lines and gray hair out in front of darker hair and guess who it would be of.

One advertisement is right across from an editorial mention, so that looks like someone paid to get mentioned, and that just does not happen at my company - I am way too disorganized to complete a promise like that.

Anyway, now i have a million unfinished things on my plate here besides a magazine, so if you will pardon me, i would like to get to them all one at a time…

Well, my car is in the shop, four pages of the magazine were missing at the printer’s (my fault, problem was solved), The Hulk sucks (some great visuals interrupted by boooooooring build-the-obvious-narrative bullshit) and I am exhausted.

What you do will not be important, but it is important that you do it.
- - -Gandhi

The other night some comedians were performing at a restaurant. Some friends and i were on the patio, far out of earshot. The performers, on the other hand, were amplified, so we were able to catch the occasional string of their acts. It was bad shtick pretty much. I started mocking one guy and everyone got a good laugh. One guy sitting on the patio with us challenged me to go in the dining room and heckle Mister Lousy-Comic. This guy was sort of being alpha-male, egging me on. The implication was that I was talking shit out of sight, why not face the man I mocked.

But I explained that I actually had moral issues with heckling a comedian during a performance. I would never interfere with anyone’s art, as I wouldn’t want anyone interfering with my writing. To heckle a comedian changes that comedian’s art, it is like slashing a painting in a museum. A painting may have a lifespan of a thousand years and a performance only a few minutes, but either both are entitled to their respective lifespans as their creators intended or neither are. We, the audience, are under no obligation to laugh or to store the painting, but we are not entitled to affect the outcome. they announce that before baseball games. You are entitled to keep any ball that lands in the seats but are not allowed to reach over and interfere with any ball that is in play, as that could have an outcome on the game.

The role of any critic is to examine the finished product as it is presented, not to attempt to alter things along the way and influence the outcome. Journalists slant their stories quite a bit in the hopes of influencing people. Critics try to point out historical occurrences as they are purportedly happening. This is pretty foolish at best and out of balance at worst.

The critic must review the outcome, and the only way for that outcome to be achieved is for the person creating it to never consider the place of the final product in the world, but to just create the final product and put it out into the world. You don’t make love thinking that you are creating a baby who will grow up to cure cancer. The artist cannot go about making art with a narrative of art history or current trends that the artwork is going to fit into.

Does this make any sense? It is starting to sound too philosophical to continue…