I have a backlog of work. It makes for an interesting lack of contact with the outside world. I had a date with my girlfriend last night. We were both out in the world in a state of wonder - this is what is like to not work and to not be at home - the world is still there.

We stopped by Fitipaldi’s latest happening, a life drawing workshop for artists. It was quite bohemian. We bumped into many people from all sorts of years in the city of Angels - ex students from when I taught at the Arts high school, people I went to college with, people I drank with, drug scene people, rock and roll dropouts, borderline homeless carousers that I knew from the underground in the 1980s, old Marxist meeting types were there too, failed rock stars, aspirng actors, art stars, wannabe art stars, desperate addicts clinging to their way of life, Ememric Konrad was the bartender for crying out loud, it was a gaggle of freaks in an air-conditioned and art directed room on a weekday night. And the ringmaster Fitipaldi, almost oblivious to it all, happy to play host, shake a hand and walk away from someone who is in the middle of telling him how great he is. Theater, artwork, lifestyle and mortgage solution all in one.

Then we went to Canter’s. I think it had been one of our first dates. The food is still rich and filling. We had been to an estate sale and picked up a box of junk and personal effects from a woman who had been a waitress there. My girlfriend warned me sternly not to ask about her. Look, I read this woman’s diary, I know more than any co-worker would recall. But they knew her voice, and how her heels sounded as she ran in late to clock in. You can’t get that from a diary. You can’t get it from a blog either. But I didn’t ask about her, didn’t want to find out she had died.

I still love driving in L.A. after 3 a.m., that is when it is all familiar again, it is 1980 and there is a punk show somewhere and I am weighing the choices of seeing a new band or hitting on a new girl. All while driving through a massive empty melange of streets and parked cars. We gotta get out more, L.A. is still there, still fantastic.

There were two tournaments held today at the gallery.

We’re down to 20 artists left in Art World Poker at the i-5 Gallery.

July 9 and 16 (Sundays at 1 p.m.) will each have 10 artists playing to eliminate 6 - leaving the gallery with 4 artists from each tournament.

It has been great fun on a lot of different levels - like take for instance the old argument about abstraction versus representation. On the poker table, noted abstract painter Michael Salerno saw his approach to painting triumph as he added wall space by knocking painter Robert Morgan out of the tournament. the whole back wall of the gallery was represented by Michael’s painting and it seemed abstraction had triumphed. But later in the tourney, Joe O’Neill knocked out Salerno and now his realistic paintings of social and political situations dominates the galley’s back wall.

Funny when you think about it.

Busy Busy Busy.

I wrote a 2,000 word essay on the Art of Edward Colver for the book Blight at the End of the Funnel, the 200 page catalog for Edward Colver’s Retrospective Survey at the Grand Central Arts Exhibition Space in Santa Ana. The show opens next Saturday night there and it should be a great time. I spoke for a podcast on Edward at the GCA auditorium today – a small but good crowd was on hand.

I wrote a semi-erotic essay on the work of photographer Dave Naz for his latest collection of erotic photography, Girls of Seduction, whose working title mentioned “Lolitas” and so I wrote an essay that discusses the Lolita dynamic and then legally, they are in a bit of hot water using that term, so they change the title, but my essay stays the same – but this is one book where few if any will read it – although they have it translated into French, Italian, Spanish and German.

Here is a future-viewing essay on the art of Robert Rauschenberg that I penned for the July issue of ArtScene Magazine. I like Rauschenberg, but I think his legacy is entering a problematic phase.

Here is a recent photo of my girlfriend and I enjoying a Dodger game on Friday in the front row.

The new issue of Coagula (#81) is out – distribution takes place all next week. Busy Busy Busy.

It has been a packed week so far and it is only Tuesday afternoon.

Saturday waas the memorial for Steve Schauer. Touching. Intense. Life-affirming, ultimately, as he would have wanted it to be.

Sunday was the opening rounds of Art World Poker. It was fun in every sense of the word. A good people crowd, a good time playing cards and a subtle, John Cage-like ambience in watching artists walk out of the gallery with their art while other artists walked in with paintings to replace the blank spot on the wall.

One of the partrticipants blogged about her experience, Check It Out…

Monday was spent finishing up this issue of the magazine. #81 was dropped off at the printers today, right after we found two blank pages. Salerno thought they were editorial and I thought they were advertising. In one hour I had an Art World Poker exhibition advertisement and an announcement about the next session of Art World Bootcamp. Self-promotion city.

Today my back went bonkers and I had to take a walk, so I walked up to the locksmith’s to get keys copies for my truck. He came down here and re-keyed the front door. Everything runs fine!

We check the proofs for the magazine later tonight or tomorrow… maybe I will actually be able to watch a baseball game in the interim.

Whew

In case you hadn’t heard, artist Steve Schauer passed away last week.

There is a memorial planned for Satuday afternoon at the Patricia Correia Galelry at Bergamot Station.

I would anticipate that IF this event reflects the life of the man himself, it will be quite a party.

The opening of the Art World Poker group show at the i-5 Gallery was a big success, a good-sized crowd, but without the mob of freeloaders that is starting to infiltrate the Saturday Night Brewery Art Complex openings - it is a weird mix of college kids walking around with 12-packs as they look for girls and heavy drinkers looking lustfully at the beers walking by seeing as the girls are outnumbered 20-1. And nary an art collector in sight.

But the Sunday opening was great, everyone had a drink or two but there was no rowdy pardeeee atmosphere, the crowd was generally friends of the artists and the vibe was pleasant and sociable.

It is a good show, come by and see it. The games themselves should be fun to view, maybe some human drama of people adding art to the walls in the spots where the artists they beat in cards had hung…

So we went on a quick trip to Napa, which since I don’t drink is officially the middle of nowhere. My fabulous girlfriend has an Eagle Scout nephew who was graduating from high school, so we crashed on hr sister’s couch, went to the ceremony, listened to the same speeches you listened to at your high school graduation, ate well, drove home and spent four hours going through email.

I got quoted a few times in this detailed article about L.A.’s Art World Epicenter moving to Culver City. If you are in the L.A. art world, this is mandatory reading. How long it will last is open for debate. But there has been a tangible shift toward that part of town, which pisses me off as it is a long way to drive and has funny shifts in the roads between here (Downtown) and there that make it easy to get lost…

I am not too mechanical a person and it spills over into other parts of my life - I find it difficult to work within rigid systems. Conversely, ambiguous and elusive structures fascinate me and i love to deconstruct complex systems and organizations. In fact, doing that has made me far less paranoid and it is hard to convince me of a conspiracy theory. Neatly engineered things are almost unnatural to me.

So for the past few weeks I have been working on a Chevy Truck that found its way to through a meandering family grapevine (father to brother to sister to nephew to brother-in-law to me).

The idea of working on an automobile of any sort for five seconds is antithetical to my nature, but there I have been, in the Brewery Art Colony parking lot, looking like a redneck while I troubleshoot every little thing about the machine.

Car people have come out of the woodwork “WOW, this is a SWEET truck!” is a common refrain. People have all sorts of obscure knowledge about the engine and how to tell all sorts of things about the vehicle just by looking under the hood.

So rather than deal with day to day bullshit, i have been seeing how the other half lives. Kinda boring but also kind of like solving a puzzle that gets results in the end.

I would drive the truck over to show you but it is a gas guzzler.