I discontinued my storage space. The friend i hired to rent a truck pulled up today with a ton of boxes and paintings. I have been going through so much stuff it is funny. I am throwing so much crap out, stuff I kept at one time out of a need to hold on to it, now, almost everything is going in the dumpster. I have already filled a large trashcan. The need to hold on has decreased in me, almost gone, really. This is a big development, it is good to get over the past and i used to be quite the clinger, as well as a pack rat.

In the loft upstairs they left a fan on, they are working on the space, it is empty. The fan sounds like a frickin’ helicopter. So I have had to play my CD player all night in order to drown out the hum. Loft living cannot be beat. Wow, when it rains it pours.

I had a lousy fucking day Tuesday. Not the end of the world, but a goddamned drag nonetheless.

So I left a note for the guerrilla muralists last night. They had a “Do Not Disturb” sign out on the edge of their mural, so i put my note next to it. It read something like: Okay, I did not disturb, now it is your turn. I sleep until 2 p.m., so for today, no boombox, no noise, no aerosol fumes.

They complied. The music got turned on just before two p.m. I heard a knock at my door a little later. I had thought they might come and knock so I kept on my pajamas and was looking freshly-awoken. Who should it be but, not any of them, rather, Tom from High School. I am not going to put the poor guy’s name in my blog so some standards committee at some school he winds up getting tenure track at decides to look him up. Anyway, I went to high school with tom and we liked new wave and punk, putting us in a distinct, Styx-less minority. Tom HS came by to pick up some baseball tickets. I am feeling lousy and could not make tonight’s game in Anaheim. I had emailed him this info. He happily drove to Lincoln Heights for the tix.

The next knock was Veronica my saviour. Vero-MS sorts all of my papers and pays all of my bills, hence her title, saviour. I would be out on the street without her organizational skills. She plowed through so much paperwork today it was astounding. I had $797 in bills paid out today. That is phone, DWP, DSL, Target, Circuit City, some other department stores (okay, I confess, Mervyn’s is one of them) and Texaco. Paid everything off in its entirety.

Later on my girlfriend and i were looking for tom on television as we watched the baseball game. there was thunder and the tippa tippa sound of rain on my girlfriend’s metal roof. We went outside and there was a soaking cloudburst occuring. It was very rare for L.A. at this time of year. I recall growing up here and it was like this (hot and humid with occasional short but intense downpours) only once that i can remember, I asked my mom if the world was ending, she told me it wasn’t, and then on the news they said that Elvis had just died and I got really freaked out. So then i went to the movies and saw The Spy Who Loved Me and came out to more rain and it was just to eerie, although my hope that James Bond would see us through the post-Elvis world has been answered.

We were soaked tonight after about a minute, so we came back up and resumed watching the baseball game on television and about an hour later, the cloudburst hits the stadium. We are thirty five or so miles form Anaheim, without traffic we could have cruised there quicker than the storm. Nobody in the stadium of 38,000 fans had brought their umbrella. It was funny. I wonder if Tom HS got soaked.

The Anaheim Angels won the game, and earlier today, around three or so, the passive-aggro artists took their mural and split, by the way. I don’t think it was finished but neighborhood opposition was growing.

First things first, this is cool: t r i p p y

I am trying to get over a cold. The “artists” still have their giant canvas outside, they played music on a portable boombox all day while working on it all day. they stopped at 1 a.m. this is all taking place in an echoy concrete structure reminiscent of a highschool gym with a massive common area patio the size of at least a basketball court. There are almost forty tenants who can hear the racket from the atrium.

If you had a friend who owned a bar and someone walked in, helped themselves to a drink, drank, and left without paying, would you tell the bar owner? I feel like i should tell my landlord someone used his property without paying for it. Does this make me a tattletale? I mean, how do you confront a group of people who already spread out their massive canvas all over the place and are working on it?

You see, these people, who are basically walking all over us. They set up the situation so that they must be confronted, as if they set up a forty foot canvas and begin a job with any intention of negotiating anything. and if you make a big fuss - you are the uncool one, the one who is not into the communal thing, when in reality it is they who are abusing any semblance of community.

And the whole thing about confrontation has always made me ill. Why do you get to set the terms? Why do we need to talk about it? If I am angry, why can’t I talk behind your back? Why can’t I engage in sabotage? Why can’t I tattle tale? Why do you get to engage in the offensive behavior and also get to be the one who is approached?

Of course, the deepest irony here is that these artists already have large indoor painting studios, this is a totally selfish thing to be working outside.

Oh, and the painting is a backdrop for a rock video and they are on a deadline.

Let’s figure out this equation. Loft party, old friends, hot and sweaty, loud music, good food, a little catching up, yeah I stayed about an hour and a half. I have been a bit exhausted, so that was my absolute limit.

Other than that, today was a wash, some artists decided it was cool to NOT use their loft to spray fixative on a large canvas and used the enclosed atrium they share with thirty tenants. Like I said, being a bit under the weather, the smell was instantaneous. Loft living at its fucking finest.

My girlfriend’s brother is in stable condition. What the fuck that means I do not know, but it is almost two a.m. and she is at the frickin’ hospital with her family. Does that sound stable enough?

At 8 a.m. my girlfriend’s cellphone rings. Her brother has been in the hospital awaiting for a heart transplant. The call is to let her know that it is scheduled for Noon today. She calls throughout the day. At first it seemed to go off without a hitch but now they have had to install a pump to get the right ventricle to operate. they had not closed the chest cavity at 12:30 a.m. when i just spoke to her. it looks good not great. Best case scenario is the pump makes the heart work better, worst case is he needs another heart.

With that in the background, it was a hot and blurry day where nothing really of note occurred. I would get a call from my girlfriend at the hospital with updates.

Say a prayer for Frank and his new heart if you would. And one for the 31-yr old donor with Type O blood who was brain dead at UCLA this morning.

Today was weird. i did nothing, and then, in the span of a few minutes, i did a million things.

One of my oldest friends dropped by the Brewery Art Colony, so he and I and his girlfriend went to the cafe here for a drink (make mine a diet coke) and then suddenly, every single person who walked by was someone i had not seen in a while and had been thinking about getting a hold of and then there each one of them was, parading by.

Then, the Cal State L.A. Creative Writing Club comes in, they have decided to hold their meetings at the restaurant here, as it is close to campus. I founded this club in 1992, so that was weird and still know a lot of the members, but then i recalled the party at Rick Robinson’s new office tonight, so we split and went to see a little jazz trio and a bunch of corporate types in their Hawaiian shirts (when did that become the off-hours uniform of corporate America? I mean, Vegas is crammed with grey-haired overweight guys in Hawaiian shirts, and it is all just the suits on frickin’ vacation. Talk about attack of the clones).

So Rick has a new cool office and that was good to see and have a drink (make mine an Arrowhead Water) and some food and chat with Salerno and scoff at Jim Fittipaldi in godawful raver bell bottoms (I told him to act his age, but he has a young girlfriend to please).

So then back to the brewery, see my girlfriend, go back to the restaurant to pay my tab and see even more people I have not seen in a while. Either I gotta get out more or I gotta get out. Then about midnight, me and the lady are just about to start up a good snuggle and the phone rings and there is a knock on the door and it is more people just sayin’ hi. Like I said, weird.

Well, today i didn’t do much of anything. Was very hot and sluggish and felt achy in my chest - not like a heart attack but like dehydration was congesting my lungs. Oh fuck, i hate to sound like an old man complaining about his aches and pains, that is the worst thing in the world. I hate standing around with people at an opening or a party and they are all gabbing about their frickin’ health. That is when you know you are hanging out with old folks or narcissists or hypochondriacs or all three!

The highlight of the day was, well, there was no highlight of the day. Some days are like that i guess, they just kind of don’t suck and don’t rock, they are just there.

The best news today was in an email from my friend Roger the computer guy, perhaps I should just call him Roger Macintosh, anyway, he found the total breakdown on the miserable failure of Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle as a movie.

Last week for comparison:

The Cremaster Cycle
Rank: 58
Last Week: 78
This Week: $23,348
#of Theaters: 4
Per Screen Average: $5,837
Total Gross to date: $357,749
Weeks in Release: 13

Pirates of the Caribbean
Rank: 2
Last Week: 1
This Week: $34,034,597
#of Theaters: 3,359
Per Screen Average: $10,132
Total Gross to date: $133,007,414
Weeks in Release: 2

When you use the litmus of box office, Matthew Barney’s Cremaster is a dud. The man has had more press and promotion and buildup to this film than the art world has ever mustered before for any artistic undertaking and presentation. The myth is sunk. With the whole Artworld behind you, look to land in 58th place.

This is supposedly the epic of the decade, the Guggenheim coughed up their museum to used as a showcase for the spectacle and exhibition and the minute it is put in the major leagues of cinema, it cannot average half of the per screen average of a Disney production. One weekend’s gross of $500 is laughable.

It is wonderful when the giant curtain of the art world Oz is lifted and the reality of a lousy auteur with nothing of staying power is revealed. And to think the Doug Harvey-penned L.A. Weekly feature article was probably responsible for a couple hundred of that take…

Busy day. Stayed up late last night dealing with internet email and crap.

Went to the Museum of Contemporary Art to see the Maurizio Cattelan show. Forgot my press pass, but thank god a former student of mine (from when i taught at the L.A. County High School for the Arts) was working at the box office and let me in for free. I had to write a review of the show, which just opened. Had done my research on the goofy Italian artist but was not at all prepared for the exhibit which consists of a robotic little boy pedaling a tricycle around the museum. The sculpture is remote controlled by a museum employee following twenty paces behind. Very funny. Had to come home and write a review for Modern Painters and email them, as they wanted to fit in the review for an issue whose editorial deadline was July 11.

At the museum, there was an awful exhibition of artworks donated by artists to MOCA. There are obviously a lot of career shenanigans going on here. Claes Oldenburg donated a pathetic Donald Judd sculpture, one of his ugliest. You have to wonder what Claes also gave the museum, perhaps some “future considerations” in order for the museum to affirm the value of the gift. Maybe Claes needed a tax writeoff, who knows. The show has one of the single ugliest paintings ever made in human history. It is a big blue piece of shit painted by Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe who is not a fucking painter and not really a critic since his writing is all pose, no core, no idea, just pretentious circular avoidance of substance in order to render him uncriticizable and above all of the mere mortal crap you and I endure. What a horrible human being it is to defile all that is good in the world with his wretched painting and his puffed-up prose. Oh, I am supposed to feel bad for him because he almost died of cancer. Boo-Fucking-Hoo. (note: you can laugh at me when i die, if i am all sick and dying and the cliches all click in, you can hoot and say i am getting mine, i can dish it out and i can take it).

I took the bus home from the museum and did more email stuff. Round trip bus trip (with tokens purchased a month ago): $1.80. Cheapest parking near MOCA: hahahahahaha

My nephew then picked me up and he and a friend and my brother and i all went to see Neil Young at the Greek Theater. I have never seen the living legend live and wanted to. Well, the second half of the show was great, Neil blasted out a few hits, most of which I knew, bit the first half of the show bordered on the trivially ludicrous. Neil and his band, Crazy Horse, play a ten song theater performance. There is a whole cast acting out the songs. The play is entitled Greendale and it is about a family and their struggles with killing a cop and environmentalism and other concerns. What it turned out to be was a high-school theater production (at best, and my apologies to my high school drama teacher Gene Putnam, who would never have allowed such a crappy production) with a big screen computer background projection, cardboard props and Neil Young singing the libretto. The songs were your basic good Neil Young, but the actors had to pantomime every action and idea expressed on cue. It was pathetic, really. The music was fine and I am all for challenging the audience with new material (a trait Neil’s fans have become accustomed to), but this show bordered on the hokey.

I got home, finished up the Cattelan review, emailed Modern Painters with it and am going to go to bed now. good night.