When I said I was infinitely bored yesterday, it was a mask. A necessary mask.

I rarely lie in this journal, less than once per sentence on average (bad joke).
But I was anything but bored last night and I knew it.

A few weeks ago I was voted President of the Brewery Art Association. Well, there are no perks, and yesterday I got kicked in the presidential balls. 20,000 invitations to our BIG EVENT arrived and there were glaring typos. Some neighbors confronted me and i lashed out. I had personally edited the frickin’ thing and as a publisher, you gotta live with some inconsistencies. But by the middle of the night, it became apparent that the errors were just too over the top - glaring, voluminous, depressingly amateur.

I was depressed, feeling I had let down a whole community of people. Plus, they had paid for that invite.

Well today it turns out that the printer of the invites had fucked everything up, not me (nor the people I was responsible for managing). A big relief. So I wrote an email to everyone here at the Brewery explaining the situation
To the Brewery Artwalk Participants:

There are egregious typographical errors in the Artwalk Invitation.

The errors have been discovered to be the fault of the printer.

The volunteers of the Artwalk Association designed and proofed a quality invitation.

The printer used an early version of the invitation -
one that had been sent in order to receive a pricing
quote. There is an obvious, irrefutable paper (eMail)
trail regarding this matter.

We are currently in negotiations with the printer to remedy this situation.

Our options are:

1. A speedy re-print by the at-fault printer

3. A refund from the at-fault printer and spending of
the invitation monies on additional print advertising.

If we cannot have invitations ready for the community
by Friday evening at the latest, we will proceed with
a more aggressive print advertising campaign. There is
already a big advertisement (with the corect event
dates and information) planned for the LA WEEKLY on
the weekend of the event.

As it stands, the invitations with errors are
servicable, if a bit in need of corrections. They are
still available at i-5 gallery tonight (Wednesday, 7 -
9 pm.) and Friday afternoon from Noon - 5 pm.

Thank you for your patience and support,

Mat Gleason
Brewery Art Association

…and I still found time to let my girlfriend take me out to dinner!

Just got out of the shower on my 40th birthday and could not find the shirt I bought a few years back to celebrate said date with. It was a 40th anniversary shirt for the Angels baseball team.

So I settled for some green stripe action. I am going over to muy girlfriend’s loft, she has been making lots of small drawings for the upcoming Brewery Artwalk, so tonight she needed head space and I provided my absence.

I am kind of infinitely bored at the moment.

’bout 85% recovered from my 40th birthday party.

I was dragging at two this afternoon and was like hey, whattthuhfuq - i don’t even drink or do drugs, why am i beat to shit from a night of intense socializing with 2,000 of my closest friends? and that sort of answered itself for me.

And now the thank you notes must go out…

Resolution for the rest of my life:

Avoid discussing in social situations:
Health
Politics
Childhood
Religion

Avoid, period:
Rollercoasters (literally and metaphorically)
Drama (metaphorically)
Alcohol

Bukowski had his first novel published at age 40.
John Lennon was murdered two months after his 40th birthday.

Let’s see, I publish for a living and my girlfriend is not Japanese…

The Robert Smithson show at MOCA is fabulous, I cannot imagine there being a more respectful and aesthetic show of his work. This is easily the best show at MOCA since John Cage’s Rollyholywhover of ten (or so) years ago. I wrote the review of the exhibit for the Los Ageles downtown news and it will be out next week, but don’t wait, go see it, there were crowds yesterday, including the Scottish guys from that band Franz Ferdinand. They were totally into the exhibit, and then I found out who they were.

Please eMail with suggestions of where to take my lovely girlfriend on a date.

I was suppose to take her on a date to MOCA Monday but a friend is leaving town and we are going with him and she was cool and happy to have him along but reminded me with a big AHEM that she is owed one date.

We ate at Fred62 tonight. I am not all spastic and trying to count that as a date. When we went to get in the car i saw some reading glasses on the ground. prescription ones. So if you lost youtr reading glasses with a bejeweled neckband in the parking lot across the street from Fred62 what i did was hang them from the handicapped parking sign, so they are there right now, although, if you are reading this you obviously have a spare pair or don’t need them.

Todd and I went to Inshalla Gallery tonight and apparently, it is closing. It was a party atmosphere more than a show. I saw Brady Westwater scrounging around for free food at the bar - he had to make due with Pringles and an orange juice. We hit 410 Boyd but that opening was winding down, unless you were Mark Oberhoffer, who just getting revved up.

I am ambivalent about Downtown L.A., after having lived here (or near here) since 1986. Watching big hummer limos with partying yuppies drive on by the homeless encampments is a stratification of wealth that i do not want to be around, and that I know a vote for Kerry or Nader ain’t gonna change it (nor willa vote for Bush, nor did any votes for Clinton, etcetera etcetera).

The minute my girlfriend wants to move, I am outta here. But home sweet home it is until that day arrives. Loft life doesn’t mean anything to me anymore, other than some neighbors who are friends.

Tomorrow I am taking the bus to the Robert Smithson exhibit at MOCA, which I have to write about for a publication.

Wow, here is a pile of horseshit disguised as a thoughtful essay.

This inane presentation of half-thoughts and prozacked metaphors is what is wrong with the art world - smug satisfaction with whatever is whipped out, a fear of cohesion and a stance of the rationalization of one’s own anti-stance. Psychological Projection at its fucked impactless unfinest from Slimey Jerry Saltz.

In other words - he calls his own bullshit a spade, putting the reader at ease. But the self-effacement occurs as he digresses away from blaming/ implicating his monied friends - which he cleverly avoids by portraying the reality of the current climate as an indefinable fog evenly coating a level playing field. And in the middle of the muck, he champions his own backyard with a limp pom pom penis.

He is a burnt-out, art-overdosed old man with no idea of the blood art can spill, and no horse in the race anyway, at least not until a consensus of the monied few has been reached. He has no ideas, no passions, but he does have a deadline, and at least he reached that.

In the words of John Lydon, Boring, Sidney, very boring…