I am quoted in the Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine if you have Sunday’s paper laying around. Page 18 as i recall. The whole issue is devoted to art as a hme decorating idea. I’m quoted in the section questioning us art world types on where in L.A. one can find great art for affordable prices. My mother called and left a message, excited to see my name in the paper. Salerno is supposed to save me his copy. Actually, his roomate’s copy. It was a nice coincidence to have the issue of the magazine come out on my birthday!

I have to turn in the tape tomorrow for my Downtown Artist Spotlight interview. The Brewery artwalk Open Studios is Saturday and Sunday October 11 & 12 and I have to start getting ready for it.

It is harder for artists here, as they are basically putting themselves out on the walls, watching people walk in and and walk out, that could be potentially depressing. Oh well, being a writer, you just look around and realize how many people are not reading what you write and it kind of makes you accept the absurdity of it all and then you just keep writing.

Artists, I know a lot of them are compelled to do what they do, but the loneliness has got to affect them. Communicating visually, beyond language, it is all such a damn dream and a gamble, but, why the fuck not take a gamble?

Today is my 39th birthday.
My girlfriend took me to a baseball game and will be taking me to a restaurant tonight for a nice dinner and she got me nice presents.
Did I say nice? yeah, nice!

Want to come to my birthday party?

Wayne Everett (October 11) and Mat Gleason (September 28) present:
LIBRA LAS VEGAS
(It is our birthday, and we can cry over losing all of our money gambling if we want to. Join us for all the fun).

WHEN? Friday, October 3 and Saturday, October 4
WHERE? Downtown Las Vegas
HOW DO I GET THERE? Cheapovegas.com and Hoteldiscounts.com will help.
WHAT DO I DO ONCE I GET THERE? This is the itinerary. You are under no obligation to do all of these events. You don’t have to participate in any or all of the drinking and gambling, you can just hang out with us. If you want to wander off, you will know where we will be at specific times, so don’t let us stop you from keeping yourself entertained. The reason we have an itinerary is so that we don’t get forty people stopping (to do their own thing, to buy souvenirs, pick up a prostitute, stop to photograph mullets) and stopping us from having a good time. With this itinerary, you can always find us, so don’t walk off saying we can find you (You can pull that during Leo Las Vegas or Taurus Las Vegas). If you don’t gamble but you do drink, bring about forty bucks each night and buy Wayne a drink or two.
Important: While there is a legend that if you are gambling, you get free drinks, don’t bet on getting buzzed to the point of no return on this philosophy. Assess your own gambling budget for each excursion, but remember the First Commandment of going to Vegas with friends: No borrowing money (married couples are excluded, it is community property). (the second commandment is no borrowing girlfriends, in case you are writing a book).

Friday
9:30 p.m. Meet and Greet. LAS VEGAS CLUB
Meet outside. We will eventually go inside and play their nickle slots. If you lose more than five dollars of nickles you are a gambling addict and must immediately drive back to L.A., regardless of how much booze you have already drank or whether you brought your own car.

11 p.m. The Fremont Street Experience BINIONS HORSESHOE
Meet outside on Fremont Street. We will join three thousand tourists to watch the cartoon overhead on the electronic canopy. Then (approximately twelve exciting minutes later) we will go into Binions Horseshoe and pretend to be big time gamblers in a small time casino. They have a good (did I say great? no, I said good) coffee shop here. The video Keno here is cheap and fun and some of the locals that are addicted to this game will make you feel like phoning mom and dad and thanking them for the gene pool they drew from when they drew you up.

Midnight: The Penny Slot tournament THE GOLD SPIKE
Meet inside this sleazy casino at their COPPER MINE, a vast array of penny slots. We will each start with a dollar. First player who gets to ten bucks wins. What do you win? Bragging rights. You won the penny slot tournament at one of the sleaziest casinos on earth. But everyone wins at the Gold Spike, where you will feel so superior to the normal clientele that you might actually become a narcissist. The Gold Spike also has $2 single deck blackjack for you serious types.

2 a.m. The Dollar Craps Tournament THE EL CORTEZ
Meet inside. There are two craps tables next to each other. If they are hot, they are easy to find because of all the noise. If they are cold they are easy to spot by all of the people running away from them, penniless. If you lose all of your money gambling here, the loss is exacerbated by the sight of homeless crack addicts next to you winning. There is also a 25 cent roulette table here and the stiffest frickin drinks in all of Vegas according to an unshaven man with leathery skin and a sweaty baseball cap who told me so last April.

5 a.m. Have sex with the one you brought (or the one you picked up) YOUR HOTEL ROOM
We don’t want to hear about it, just don’t get so blotto that you cannot perform and don’t lose so much money that you cannot get in the mood. Please Note: If you give someone else a ride, you are under no obligation to include them in this event. But if you do, we do want to hear about it.

SATURDAY
Get your own darn breakfast. Lounge around by the pool, watch some sports, call your brother or aunt and have them Western Union some money to make up for what you lost gambling the night before, and definitely get that hangover taken care of. Just pull yourself together by mid-afternoon and let’s all get together (at the Casino where Wayne has the worst luck) for a cheesy lounge show:

4 p.m. The Cheeseball Lounge act with stiff cocktails THE PLAZA
Meet inside, the lounge opens up directly onto the casino floor. There is no cover charge. While the slickly-sickly entertainment is making us respect New Kids on The Block and 98 Degrees as paragons of musical virtue, and as the cocktails begin to make the stage act tolerable, Wayne can give us a table-by-table, blow-by-blow account of why the Plaza Hotel is a great place to drink and be entertained but why and how it has historically been the worst place for Mister Lucky Libra himself to gamble.

5 p.m. Save some room, it is dinner time. MAIN STREET STATION
There is no way a large group is getting seated at a restaurant on Saturday night. So get ready for the best buffet downtown. You will not be eating at 5, no way, the line is forming, but we best go stand in it. Think of all the money you will save standing in line for food instead of gambling. Here is the description of the buffet from cheapovegas.com:
A very good buffet and a really nice room! This is a good one, especially on
the weekends, when the brunch is enormous and served with plenty of cheap
champagne. There are loads of variety: Italian, Chinese, Mexican, American
and a huge selection of desserts.
Perhaps we can have a belching contest at about 6:15. Anyway, the buffet runs $15 - $20, and that cannot be beat.

8 p.m. The Fremont Street Experience THE FOUR QUEENS
Meet outside on Fremont Street. We will again join three thousand tourists to watch the cartoon overhead on the electronic canopy (it will be a different cartoon than the one they played last night at 11). Then (approximately twelve exciting minutes later) we will go into The Four Queens Hotel for our Video Poker tournament. Your best odds are if you do not understand the game of poker in any way, shape or form. The nickel and quarter machines here pay off pretty good, or so an ancient Hawaiian legend claims.

9:30 Serious Blackjack THE GOLDEN GATE
Meet inside. You got balls? You got Five or Ten bucks a hand? Neither do I. But as long as one of us wants to sit at a table here, the rest of us can gather around and cause a big fuss. Maybe someone will think the guy at the table is a rock star. If Wayne still has any gambling money left, they will be correct in this assumption!

10:30 Lounge Dancing THE GOLDEN NUGGET
Meet inside. The Golden Nugget has a no-cover cheesy disco lounge near the sports book, so it is a good place to drink, chat, and to relax and watch some fortysomething bootyies shakin’ (perhaps your own!). If things have changed from last month, we can make due with whatever club is going on here, as the Nugget is the only sure bet downtown to have a lounge or club that has less derelicts than patrons in it.

1:30 a.m. Time to get our money back EL CORTEZ
We will storm the slots and tables and win back what is rightfully ours.

SUNDAY
10:30 a.m. Brunch THE GOLDEN NUGGET
This is a great Sunday brunch. Pig out and you won’t have to stop on the way back to L.A. Just make sure you have enough money to buy gas on the way home. BYE…

Here is a bitchin art world rumor: David “rawdog” Geffen reportedly just bought a giant Jackson Pollock painting from the Iranian Museum of Art in Tehran for a hundred million dollars. Funny thing, he owns a lot of Pollock drip paintings, but his are all the lame small cast-asides, so this is one (Red Mural 1951) he could use to cap the collection. Of course, a hundred million given to the Iranian government I’m sure that money is all part of one legal transaction

ENFP - “Journalist”. Uncanny sense of the motivations of others. Life is an exciting drama. 5% of the total population.

Take Free Myers-Briggs Personality Test

The funny thing here is that a judge (NY State Court Judge Elliot Wilke, to be precise) once ruled that I was not a journalist.

So I had morning coffee with Llyn Foulkes. He was bitching about Patricia Faure, his dealer who is very trendy but cannot sell art in his (very high) price range. She gets a lot of reviews and kisses the asses of (LA Times critic) David Pagel and (Art in America’s racist heterophobe Los Angeles reviewer) Michael Duncan, but the gallery doesn’t sell shit, according to Llyn, and he is not one to suffer the fools of glamour.

We were talking about a lot of things and I told him about my drive up to see the Philip Guston show. He quizzed me extensively about the show, the painting, everything. then he dropped a cool historical anecdote. Llyn said that in the 60s, one artist raved about Guston’s abstraction, called him the master of all painters, and as Llyn saw it, worked to emulate and pursue Guston’s abstract painting style. Llyn recounted how devastated then, was Robert Irwin when Guston switched to figurative painting in 1969.

Llyn told the story with glee. He beats the drum for calling Irwin a big poseur.

After coffee, I went and finished shipping issues of the magazine. I have seven boxes left, so if you want a box of the new issues sent to you, send me your address. The boxes have 25 copies and need to be distributed in palces where people who care about art will be milling about.

The reason we did not stay in San Francisco any longer, and it would have been nice and do-able, was that i had to go to a funeral on Saturday morning. So we were home and in bed by 1:30 a.m. and my girlfriend set the alarm for me for 8 a.m., and it went off and I got up and dressed for Lulu’s funeral. There are few people outside of my immediate family whose funeral I would make the complete schedule-intensifying effort that i did in order to attend. Lulu Scott was one of them.

Lulu was the woman in our neighborhood who babysat all of the kids. She was 71 and had died of alzheimers. The funeral was at a Catholic church in La Mirada. My mother had seven kids and remarked during almost every reminiscence of raising our family, “I couldn’t have done it without Lulu.”

My two older brothers, one of my older sisters, one of my nieces and my parents showed up. A few other kids from the neighborhood, now all grown, attended, as of course, her entire family, kids, grandkids, her husband. So there was everyone. As is the ritual with Catholic funerals, the priest couldn’t be bothered to take five seconds and get to know the family and a little about the person who had passed away, so his bullshit homily concerned the prayer card they passed out at the entrance to the church(I can just hear Lulu now scolding me for describing the events in such a harsh light, but I must tell the truth, I am compelled to tell it like I saw it). There was singing and Lord Hear Our Prayer and Lulu’s son Dale Scott read a great tribute to her. That turned the tear ducts on.

Outside everyone mingled and i saw Eddie Brooks for the first time in like fifteen years, that was cool, a kid i grew up with, now he’s a suburban dad, pillar of society, all that good stuff. Lulu didn’t really raise any rotten apples, I am probably the rottenest, and I am more like a sour apple than a bad apple.

In my life, I can think of four people who call me Mathew instead of Mat. My father, my mother, cops reading my i.d., and Lulu. You would be doing something bad, and she would be right there - not just when you were at her place, one day, when i was like 15, I punched out a glass window at our house while fighting with my brother and I thought to myself that I could deny I had done this, barring of course, Lulu finding out, she was the manifestation of conscience. Well, she “just happened” to walk by like a minute later while i am bleeding and cussing and picking the glass out of my fist, and all she can say is “You’ve made a mess and you’ve made yourself a mess.” It absolutely did something to my character, because i remember recalling her words when I heard about Kurt Cobain killing himself.

I was going to go to the cemetery, but my mother asked if I wanted to go with my dad and brother to Wilma’s 60th birthday party. When you have just gotten out of a funeral, you want to immerse yourself in life and love, so I went to the party for Wilma Coke. She was my mother’s best friend in suburbia, lived across the street from us for many years, the same years Lulu was baby-sitting, Wilma and my mother were drinking coffee and gossiping. I learned a lot about being a reporter from stealthfully eavesdropping on these gab sessions. My mother remarked during almost every reminiscence of suburban living, “I couldn’t have done it without Wilma.”

So I hopped into my parents’ van and we drove two hours out to Hemet. Now I had driven a total of eight hours the prior day, and plenty the day before, and now i am going on four hours of sitting in a car by the time we get to the party out in Hemet. It was a pool party. Here I am with a sore back, black jeans, shoes and t-shirt (waiting for the familiar retort of “where did you just come from, a funeral?”) and everyone is wearing trunks, bikinis and playing volleyball in the hundred degree heat. The day before i was looking at Philip Guston’s paintings wrestling with the themes of mortality and carrying the weight of memory, that morning I had just been to an intense remider of mortality and an emotional farewell to a person who had shaped me, and here I was suddenly confronted by carefree, uninhibited living.

It was too much. My father had looked up an old friend in Hemet and asked me if I wanted to go with him. We drove across the desert town and I was then sitting in a pristine little house with an old man and his wife and my father (who is now pretty old), and they are talking about engineering and I’m trapped. I’m there, but I’m just there. Nothing to do but listen. Heard some stories i had heard a million times, heard some new ones. We went back and got my brother and mother and split, drove two hours back to La Mirada and I picked up my car and drove myself home.

My girlfriend tells me that I walked in, hit the bed and began mumbling ludicrous things. I slept for twelve hours. We went and got yogurt at 21 Choices in Pasadena on Sunday, it was the first time we had gone there in while. All the kids said they had been really worried about us. One, Jennifer, came out and hugged us and told us she missed us. We came home and watched television, ate dinner at Suehiro and she went to bed at 11. Then i wrote all of this up and re-lived the whole lifespan that occurred in one weekend.

And, for the record, if I have a funeral, no music.

I reserved a rental car on Thursday afternoon. My girlfriend brought up the chance of staying in a motel in the middle of California that night. It made all of the difference. We blasted halfway up there and pulled into a Best Western at a little after midnight. Slept very well, had a decent truck stop breakfast and hit San Francisco. I parked the car at 2:15 p.m. one block from the museum. My memory for navigating the city was precise, it was actually perfect. Usually I feel like I am losing it, this time I felt like i hit a home run, but with only my girlfriend watching.

The line at the museum was just unbelievably long, and most of it was for the Chagall exhibition. I rarely make a stink about being from the press. Most people know me in L.A., so that gets me in, and if there is any problem, i would rather just pay the admission than stand around waiting for special treatment. But the line was so long, i said fuck it and went to see what could be done. The problem was, i had no press identification. Hi, I publish California’s largest fine art magazine, but I can’t prove it. The guy was not budging and who could blame him. So I went to the museum gift store and found the issue of Modern Painters with my picture in the contributors section. I bought the mag and took it to the press table. In the mag I was pictured wearing an Anaheim Angels ski cap and at the museum i was wearing one of their baseball caps, it was like, no mistaking this. So for the cost of the mag I got me and my girlfriend into the museum - and without having to stand in the long fucking line of everyone who ended up crammed into the fifth floor Chagall show.

We were at the show for like ten minutes when who should walk by but Marion Lane, Jennifer Wolf and Marion’s former roommate Robin. They had just driven up from L.A. and were going to be staying the night. So, okay, we weren’t original, but this was damn good company to be mimicking. And good-looking too, the gallery guards saw me and four beautiful women gabbing for a half hour, they must have thought I owned the Anaheim Angels. When i got home, someone had emailed me that Lisa Adams had driven up last week to see the show. We all should send the L.A. Museum of Contemporary Art a bill for the car rental, gas and hotel.

Ironically, there was hardly anyone else at the Philip Guston show. They were all up looking at Chagall. Pity. The Guston exhibit really put me in a good space. This was a show to give you faith. In the first room, you can see that he was a talented artist. Then he pushes it and gets abstract. Then he really rides the wave of being an abstract painter, and a good one. Then he arrives at a goddamned dead end with it, not sticking with a signature style, but pushing, and finding nothing.

There was a whole room of bad paintings, just shit, but it was good they were included, then you can accept what comes next, and takes up the final two-thirds of the show. The exhibit really makes you understand that he had to make the break, that he was nowhere, formally speaking, artistically speaking. They didn’t have his tax returns on display so i don’t know how his career was going, but this room was just a pile of shit, and then there begins his paintings with figurative elements.

Every history or reference calls these post-abstract paintings of Guston’s cartoonish, cartoons, or cartoon-based, but they didn’t look like cartoons at all. They were painted, not drawn, not illustrated and not illustrating things, nothing in these paintings functioned as cartoons. It made me realize what a moronic interpretation this was, what a conventional, insensitive read they have received, the establishment needed for these to be cookie cutter pop art cartoons, and they weren’t and they definitely ARE NOT. They are paintings, surreal, psychological self-investigations for the most part, they are painted thoughtfully and ruggedly, but never sloppily. Years of painting delicate abstractions had honed a hand into a sensitive seducer, but the man himself that was being painted, being analyzed and revealed, this was a gruff and bold man. So the raw is painted delicately.

The psychological overtones are rich and were on display in every picture. There were a few bad ones, but the greatness of Guston the painter, and Guston the artist, were absolutely on display, in a convincing manner. I even bought the catalog, which i never, ever, ever do. Why the whole art world gets a boner over a pretensious poseur like Gerhard Richter and barely notices a show like this is beyond my puny little brain, I guess the big important art world might be too busy minting the Marc Chagall’s of the future to notice and appreciate the great ones.

The lighting at SFMOMA has always sucked, not so bad this time to ruin the show, but it was noticeable here and there. The paintings had a lot of gloss (linseed oil probably) but that doesn’t excuse things. We walked over to see Lizabeth Oliveria and her husband recommended a great restaurant. We ate dinner, looked at the show one final time (our third walk-through) and then hit the road.

From the parking garage at the Yerba Buena center to the parking lot here in Downtown L.A.: 5 hours and 5 minutes. We listened to the Smiths, the Dream Syndicate and the Pixies the whole way home.