I didn’t dress up for any weekend Halloween parties and I am not doing anything for the day tomorrow.

Yesterday I spent the whole daytime distributing the new issue of the magazine (Coagula #77) on the West Side of town.

Last night we went to a show in the neighborhood curated by Jennifer Faist - there weresome good artists, especially if you like minimal abstraction, which still after all these years has an attraction for me as somehow inherently boldly antisocial and simultaneously isolationist and proud of it.

Then we went out for dinner and I really did eat too much. Today we went to Suehiro and walked around the old neighborhood, Traction and Hewitt - it had been some time since I had been there and there is so much construction going on there that I fear the final shards of what i knew to be are disappearing now that the Downtown L.A. glass has been cracked. I told my girlfriend that I wasn’t sad or sorry to see it go, that I had gotten as much from that neighborhood as anyone.

If you have a good internet connection, watch this sculptural performance and tell me why it is or is not art, and then tell me why it is or is not art in relationship to the pretense of art institutions who would have us believe the less structured deteritus produced by their customers -er, students, happens to then qualify as art.

Especially compared to the Venice Bienale in 360-degree vision.

We went to Hollywood last night. My girlfriend’s nephew needed a ride to a show at the Roxy and we took him there, had dinner and decided to see a movie while he saw a band play. So we went to see The Squid and the Whale. Meanwhile outside of the theater there is a red carpet – the multiplex on Sunset and Crescent Heights is hosting a movie premier in one of its other theaters. When we exited, the lobby was full of mingling industry tyes. Some actor guy walks up to me and, noting my vintage Houston Astros cap, says “Bad news, your boys got swept,” news which I took just fine, seeing as the Astros are not my boys. A few minutes later, as we are leaving the movie complex, I see a movie poster advertising the film that is premiering there and the dude who broke the World Series news to me is there on the poster.

The Squid and the Whale is a great flick, rarely is blunt contemporary realism redeeming.

So we parked near the Roxy while this band there played on and on and artist John Garret was out there waiting for his friend and it had been a long time since we had seen each other and caught up and all that, took the nephew and his friend back to their hotel (they had flown into town to see this band as a birthday present – I think for my 18th birthday all I got was a Clash album).

New issue is at the printers, waiting game of hurrying up to wait has begun, blogging to kill time, blah blah blah…

UM, this seems like a total scam to me.

Hello sales,
my name is kate bill, i will like to have your product as gifts
from your store for my parent who are celebrating thier 30th
wedding annivasarys ,the shipping through DHL OR FEDEX,TO NIGERIA
so i will be gald to have your reply asap :i will be glad if you
can send me your website address to choose or send me four of your
product that is availble for me to choose . payment will be make by
my credit card for you to charge. Visa Or Master Card.

Waiting to read from you today.

thanks.

kate

Went to the house I grew up in for a family get together - basically an evening of screaming at whoever was happening to walk in front of the television during a World Series pitch. I didn’t think about it until just now, but I watched many a 1970s and early 1980s World Series Games in that house. My sister and her family live there now. I recall watching the 1984 World Series with a friend who died a week later. He said something so funny then, pointing to the crowd of people in the stands, I don’t care about baseball, but they do.

I can confess a terribly sentimental streak, but only with things that have passed through my Sahara Desert of dry, unforgiving cynicism. I gotta get back to work on the next issue of the magazine…

More on The Box Bash.

Well, I had to meet today to give three Boxed Magazine sets to Sinead from the Los Angeles Art Association. A patron, Michael E. Napoliello, Jr. bought them from Coagula (aka, me) and donated them to the LAAA for a fundraiser. The goal is to have all of the artists who appeared on the covers of issues #31-#65 to autograph the magazine and the box and then to auction each Box off at a Bash.

My task was to secure artist autographs of people who live near me – I got Carlee Fernandez and Llyn Foulkes, so those are big names, they should help LAAA get others to participate – they will be hopefully securing art by the newsworthy artists to auction off at the Bash as well.

Last night I bumped into Dabney Zorthian at the local restaurant here and she was heading over to watch Llyn perform – he is infamous for playing a one-man-band machine and Dabney had brought a friend, Shelly, to see it for herself. I went with them to get Llyn’s autograph – he was happy to oblige, as was Carlee a few days earlier.

I woke up to a little racket and thought that it was my girlfriend and the cleaning lady talking. So I made my way downstairs and to this scene you can add the cleaning lady’s sister and Sinead from LAAA all sitting around drinking coffee, gabbing – I totally felt like I was intruding. There was an espresso there for me. Sinead and I got a front row seat to hear the famous story of the time my cleaning lady hit her kid and they called the cops on her. The moral of her story for us was to beat your kids in a way that doesn’t leave a scratch.

So then Sinead and I went over how to delicately remove the magazines from the box and logistical strategies about getting the artists to agree to autograph the magazines, etcetera. The Box Bash is scheduled for the evening of December 8 – save the date, it will be a great party I am certain. It will be at Gallery C in Hermosa Beach and should attract a good cross section of art world luminaries and denizens.

I have an older brother who is mildly retarded. He can do things like keep a job in a shipping department for 30 years, understand bus routes, interact socially, etc. He has a great sense of humor and my parents never treated him any different than anyone else, which may have more to do with how well-adjusted and high-functioning he actually is.

He loves baseball, so it was a great chance for both of us to attend a playoff game on Saturday night – you never know when you are going to get a chance to see a playoff game – your team might not make it for years on end. So this was a big deal.

About ten minutes before the game starts, he shows up at my seats and shows me a rash on his arms. We talked, I asked him if he had eaten any shrimp or shellfish. No, just TV dinners. He mentioned that he had taken a benadryl and the itching stopped, but that the benadryl wore off about an hour ago.

The game starts and immediately sucks as our team gives up a bunch of runs before they even have a chance to bat. My brother is scratching away at the rash and the red spots are turning purple. In addition his hands are swollen so much he cannot close them or even clap to root on the team. He shows me a bottle of medicine he is taking, Amoxicyllin in case of infection from some dental work he is having done. Hmmm, pretty easy to add this two-plus-two now.

I went to the stadium first aid office and they gave me two benadryls no problem. He took them but it seemed to be too little, too late, much like the few runs the Angels scored after being behind for so much of the game. He was a little edgy and talkative, nervous really. He gets that way when he doesn’t understand what is going on and I tried to keep pace with him, meanwhile being completely miserable about the game, surrounded by fans feeling totally miserable, it was just bad.

He had been driven to the game by my other older brother who was sitting in another part of the stadium with a golfing buddy. We met up late in the game, when there was next to no hope for the team and a gnawing worry about the welts of this rash. They ended up going to the emergency room for a steroid shot and he’s apparently doing much better, they called to tell me just before midnight, but it really was a horrible feeling, sitting in a crowd of miserable people, helpless to do anything about the team losing, almost helpless to alleviate my brother’s suffering, trying to be kind and patient as his frustration grew, trying to keep my own frustrations in check – it was just the worst fucking night out at the ballpark ever.

If they lose today, the season is over. If they win, they still have to win two in a row on Tuesday and Wednesday, and really my head isn’t even thinking about the team or the game after the non-basbeall intensity of last night – it is like I have a psychic sort of rash that is between me and any enjoyment of the moment now. Reality dropped like an anvil while 40,000 people around me were involved in another tragic, distant epic.

So I’m part of organizing two big events, the Brewery Artwalk and now a joint-effort entitled the Box Bash. Save the weekend of Nov. 12 & 13 for the Artwalk and December 8 for the Box Bash, which will celebrate the Coagula Art Journal Boxed set edition of complete magazien sets spanning six years of issues. The Box Bash raises money for the L.A. Art Association, so they are helping out and will be held at Galelry C in Hermosa Beach, so they know how to throw a party.

How far would you go for your art? As far as poet Dennis Kim did?