The hits just keep on coming. This is the most important pro-Artist legal decision to come down the pike in a long frickin’ time.

A snippet:

U.S. District judge Ronald Lew, in a written ruling, said Mattel had forced Artist Tom Forsythe into a costly court battle.

“I wasn’t expecting this work to even be that controversial. It started out as a riff on plasticization, on crass consumerism, but when I started to work with the doll I added the dimension of the impossible beauty myth,” Forsythe told Reuters.

In the past 24 hours the Supreme Court has ruled (8 - 1) that the President cannot supersede a person’s Constitutional right to a trial (even in time of war, even if the person is a terrorist) and (5 - 4) that a person’s free speech rights outweigh the need for children to be protected from some of that speech (even if that speech is pronography, even if it is easily accessible on the internet).

Pop the frickin’ champagne, sensibility reigns.

This Saturday is the big Orange County ShinDig for the art exhibit that I am in.

I’ve been pounding my head trying to write a book this Summer. I focus on one theme and then get drawn to something completely different, it is frustrating. Nobody is going to want to publish one third of a book, nor three thirds of three separate books.

But one thing came into my head and I would like to share it with you. Consistency. Better than doing anything well, or first, or most inflammatory, doing something consistently, over time, over the years, as fads come and go and attitudes evolve and political parties seize power and dominate and then fade, as the establishment keeps the system chugging, as eveything waxes and wanes, just doing what you do, at a regular pace, is the most threatening thing to the established order, and simultaneously, the most secure act you can ever venture for yourself.

All the while you can be inconsistent in everythign else, save the one thing you want to do most. If you are painter, make a painting every frickin week or month or day, yeah, every day. If you are a poet, jump off the bride tomorrow afternoon, there is no hope. Just kidding, write ten poems a day, erase nine of them and work on the best one for a week. Am I making any sense? Good night.

By the time we got to Bergamot, Ruth Bachofner had closed up, so we missed the opening there. We had stopped by Amano, a new knitting store at 12808 Venice in that Marvistaish/Venice neighborhood. It was the grand opening and there is tons of great stuff there, especially if you knit. If you don’t knit, and I sure as fuck don’t, there are lots of knitted and sewn things to buy. I bought my girlfriend a purse.

At Bergamot we saw the Hollywood Bowl Balls show. For a gazillion years, the Hollywood Bowl had giant decorative fiberglass balls hanging above the stage. So they got rid of the balls and someone had the bright idea to let artists paint the fiberglass surfaces. Some of the balls were whole or halved, but most were plain old busted up. The show was a mess and the artists chosen were like Huh? Most of the paintings were like high school art. The giant balls were interesting, sculpturally, just for the amount of space they took up. Emmeric Konrad’s Mickey Mouse face was the best by far. Like when you go to a record store and everything there is some lame ass shit and then you see a great tape you don’t have, that is what seeing Emmeric’s piece in this show was like.

At Patricia Correia there was a sprawling group show featuring Leo Limon, Eloy Torres and Alredo De Batuc. The exhibit was made more poignant by the inclusion of original Carlos Almaraz paintings in it. This is the Correia Gallery’s way of asserting its position as the top Chicano Art Gallery on the West Coast.

The band Olin played the opening, there were free tamales. Steve Schauer told me they went through a kefg of beer and eight cases of wine. Then we drove over to Suehiro and saw Arturo Romo, Diane Gamboa and Salomon Huerta at different tables and it was like being in a perfect vortex of art history. It was a nice night out. I had to tell a couple people about Mikey dying and even a few about John Schroeder’s passing, but talking about their deaths is becoming more like process art, I want to honor their lives, not wallow in the grotesque final minutes of some physical failings. I just want to drop dead of nothing many years from now. Make that many many.

We watched American Splendor on DVD tonight. A great flick. Other than that, the Angels are playing the Doders this weekend, so I am thoroughly preoccupied with the hometown rivalry. We ate at Suehiro tonght for the first time in a long while, gotta remember to do that more.

I’ll spare you the part about being in Orange County this afternoon.
We made a dull day more exciting by watching Napoleon Dynamite and it was quite the awesome movie.
Tonight, we ate at Fred-62. Fucking Deeeeeelishuss.
Then we drove to the printer’s and picked up a copy of the new issue of the mag.
It was all new and I got black ink all over my hands. It is issue # 69 of Coagula Art Journal about which I speak.
It is still a thrill when the sucker is printed and in my hands like a newborn baby.

The magazine is being printed, probably as we speak. Went over the list with the new distribution driver, it all looks good. Still bummed about my friend Mike dying, but in that absence steps ina glimmer of what still exists as I crossed paths with an old friend from the 1980s tonight. She had three teenagers who looked like her with her, so i didn’t really have to ask Whatcha been up to? My girlfriend and i both have scratchy throats, must be from all that kissing, or could it be so much cat dander everywhere at the Brewery Art Colony?

Found out tonight that yet another friend has died. In his late fifties, pacemaker complications. Went to a hastily organized get together and had a few laughs and remembrances with some very old friends.

Anyway, I’m sure my friend Montebello Mike would have loved the dark, sick humor of this awful scientists’s story.

This Monkey’s gone to heaven.

The magazine (Coagula Art Journal, Issue #69) is at the printer’s. Paste up went well, lots of new advertisers and prominent ones at that, so things are looking up.

So I dropped off my artwork for my first big art show. i swore off painting in 1989 but in the past few years made a little artwork here or there for a show when someone would ask - definitely not painting (Tom Patchett wanted to use one of my paintings for the cover of Most Art Sucks, but fortunately, I had give all of them to Manuel Ocampo to paint over. If you own an Ocampo from 1994 and can afford an X-ray, you are in for a look at bright-but-boring-abstraction). So I have played around in photoshop, and when was asked to participate in a show by curator Mike McGee, did a big digital print, had it framed, drove it down to the show, and was surprised by the the Gallery’s director, Andrea Harris, handing me a copy of a fabulous catalog.

So you can go down to Orange county, to the Grand Central Arts Center’s Gallery and see the massive group show 100 Artists See Satan, and you will get a glimpse at the person in my life who has most succinctly manifested evil. Oh, and about my art, I only make art using the imagery of baseball.

Now here is a weirder thing. I had to pull a story from this issue of the magazine - things like this happen in publishing a lot. So I have an envelope of cartoons that i use if a page needs to be filled. This is no insult to cartoonists, it is either them or house advertisements (subscriptions, back issues, etc.). Open this envelope and pull out some old cartoons by Jeff Gillette. So paste them up at the printers, thinking it will surprise him. So four hours later I am in O.C., looking at this amazing catalog, each artist gets a page with his or her artwork on it, arranged alphabetically, and who is my page across from? Mister Gleason, meet Mister Gillette.