I turned 39 and a HALF the other day.
Countdown to the big Four Oh is in place.
ta tick tick tick tick tick

Hey, read about the upcoming juried art exhibition for video game artists. Read far enough down and you will see that I am a juror for the event.

Credit card declined. Ran out to the ATM. Cash was no problem. The weather was so perfect today, everyone was out, everywhere was crowded. Sometimes, I wanna get the fuck out of L.A.

Where would I go? I could live in New York, Las Vegas or Tijuana. But I am not going anywhere. But it was crowded and makes me think… Hmmm…

I am trying to wrap up a bunch of crap before i leave on my trip and meanwhile i have been having intense philosophical arguments about art, specifically the notion of what is and is not quantifiable in art - can one artist be proven greater than another, and can one artist’s career be seen as more accomplished than another’s? Like if you are in a Whitney Biennial, is that just a forever permanent mark on your record, as opposed to exhibitng in some group show somewhere that you can exaggerate in importance but it is really not anything? can careers, if not aesthetics, be quantified? Should they be?

I picked up my laptop tonight at the Glendale Galleria, 300 bucks, it is fine now. Those malls are just too frickin much. So many many many cars parked and so much crap for sale. The economy seems to be picking up. Seems. Lots of what appear to be sales are happening ion the art world as well. Maybe it is not as notice-able because there are just so many more damn players.

Mayor Hahn will be restructuring instead of eliminating the Cultural Affairs Department. I found a letter from Cultural Affairs thanking me and Salerno for donating an advertisement to them. Charity begins at home I guess.

We watched The Long Goodbye the other night. That flick was a ten out of ten all the way. Had never heard of it and now I am just fanatical about it.

While I have been eBaying a lot of old punk zines this past week, my girlfriend is auctioning off art catalogs. One of them had a picture of Richard Serra with a FRO and a profile pic of Roy Lichtenstein with long unwashed hair that made him look like Kurt Cobain. It was weird. She has a pamphlet written by Judy Chicago about painting porcelain. Random shit and yet art stuff, memorabilia beyond the art objects themselves.

I don’t have any art crap to sell. I was going to say something like, Its all in my head, but then I realized that is what a teacher is, someone who makes a living distributing what is in their head. No school would employ what i’ve got to say about art.

I got a little too buried in helping out with the Brewery Artwalk and fell behind on my own work. Seeing as we are taking a road trip in a few days for two weeks, it is like - bust a frickin’ move on.

So the more I think about that minimalism show, the more i get annoyed. The art world doesn’t even get it. I start to feel alone in the world or at least like a Morrissey song.

We watched Network tonight whch was funny in one regard. It is a film against television. Fine, right? Think about it though - that is like a painting against sculpture. We saw Blade Runner the other night. The director’s cut. I wish Edward James Olmos had been blown to frickin bits. Other than that, pretty good, I had never seen it. If you read this blog long enough you’re gona be all like Wow, this dude hasn’t seen jack shit. I did figure out that if the Bradbury Building is in Sector 7 then the Brewery is in Sector 11.

I am tired and delirious.

I didn’t have enough to do, so i started a new blog for the Brewery Art Colony called

Went to MOCA to view the Minimalism show.

I used to love minimalim, there is something so radical about the purity of the object. But this show crammed in so much crap it was just worthless. The lighting was godawful and the selection was tilted to include art stars Eva Hesse and Richard Artschwagger (big art world names that have sylistic approaches to art which mimic minimalism but they just ain’t minimalists; it would be like doing a CD of Indian music and throwing in a Beatles song that has a sitar stroke on one verse, but hey, big names are big names).

So MOCA was the clutter capital of the universe. Large obtuse sculptures pushed viewers toward art on the wall which demanded scope, scale and space to even function as artworks but then there were so many of them on the wall that nothing could be seen as an object - they could only be seen as part of the show. This is curatorial masturbation at its worst - the art is about the big show, not about the art.

And if you think artists are any better than academic curators, Mike Kelley (who is as much a college professor as he is an artist) curated a photography show for MOCA and it is as academic as can be imagined - all needing to put together tweaked interrelationships of different photographs. You can spot an academic by their encyclopediac vision, even when they try to throw you off the scent by switching the alphabetical order of the World Book set in their parents’ den.

Visited Michael Salerno in the hospital today. Roland Reiss and I went. He is going to be alright. Ate at McDonalds afterwards - something I do probably once a year, any more and I would have to go to the hospital.

Watched the 1967 Bonnie And Clyde with Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway. Don’t waste your netflix pix on this one, it was flat. Watching them bite the dust at the end was a relief. Anyone publishing a vanity novel or paying to show in a rental gallery is scorned by the critical establishment, but Warren Beatty produced the fucking vanity vehicle for him to screw Faye Dunaway and her to broadcast onscreen that he was perfect. What a friggin’ hack and a half.