Yes I got a job.

For me to accept a job it has to be soemthing, really.

For years I have been curating basically for free (i-5 Gallery) or as an entrepeneur (Coagula Projects Gallery), along with the occasional small-compensation show and the even less occasional prominent gallery show.

But all that has changed. I am the exhibition director of a large Los Angeles art gallery.

They pay me to get up in the morning and go to work. The first week highlight was ending the gallery’s relationship with over 20 artists.

The second week highlight was making sure the full page September show advertisement for a national art glossy looked as good as possible. The gallery’s owner made sure the staff ordered a box of Most Art Sucks books from the publisher to display and sell at the front desk.

Once we clean up the gallery’s website in a week or two, I will tell you all about it if you haven’t found out already thru the grapevine.

I spoke at Joel Bloom’s memorial service, held on a blocked-off Traction Avenue. There were quite a few people there. Council people Jan Perry and Jose Huizar spoke and then Ed, the master of ceremonies, called me up and all I could do was get everyone to sing Joel’s favorite song, “Take Me Out to the Ball Game”. Joel would have loved that.

Lotta strong reaction agianst the post below about MIMI the dog - well she is still at the pound, 11258 S. Garfield avenue, so instead of laying on your guilt trip on me like a Baptist does to teen girls at a Family Planning Clinic, maybe you should just drive on down there and ask for the dog I dropped off, the white Maltese that was a stray on Pacific Boulevard in Huntington Park on Tuesday.

I had never heard of a no-kill shelter in my life, instead of lecturing\g me about something I knew nothing about,maybe you could volunteer to help promote these no-kill shelters, I was shocked (pleasantly, after the whole MIMI experience) to learn of their existence, but lecturing me now will do nothing, using your dog-loving (or perhaps man-hating) energy on this cause might actually make a difference.

In other news, I started a real-life job on Wednesday. More on that next week. It is a big deal.

So there is a stray pack of little dogs in the neighborhood – definitely dumped from someone somewhere away from where anyone would see and on the streets for a few weeks. The kids next door take one of them, a filthy, famished, flea and lice riddled pekinese terrier and tie a rope loosely around its neck and tell me they have named it Mimi.

These kids are not eating, so I doubt Mimi is eating, but right away Mimi starts doing something. Mimi starts barking. The bark is a shrill rat-a-tat-tat that begins with mildest startle and continues a minimum of three or four minutes. Oh, and Mimi lives about eight feet from our bedroom window. The barking goes on at night, as the occasional passerby rattles the little dog and sets off the equivalent of a car alarm. When the sun rises, people on their way to work only serve to make Mimi more consistent with even less time in between orchestrated yelps.

Well, it had been almost a week and Mimi was not adapting. The barking was constant and it was hard not to notice that these kids are pretty much watching themselves. Their toys all seem to be from thrift stores and they carry around kitchen knives as accessories to hack at plants – that is one of their main little games. So dragging around Mimi by a rope and not feeding it (these kids don’t seem to eat much outside of empty tostada flat shells) is only making the dog more miserable – he/she roams the neighborhood for food, barking all the way, scampering back “home” when something seems to threaten it, with more barking to reassert dominance over the fenced-in territory.

We call animal control. Left a message three times. No response. I bet Huntington Park has a massive Animal Control budget and perks and vacation time and fat-assed administrators taking long lunch breaks, but the city has a pack-of-wild dogs problem and doesn’t do jack shit about it, not even returning the calls. Sunday night and Monday night we got little sleep. I phoned in a report of a stray, who knows, possibly rabid or infectious, being kept by a group of unsupervised kids. NO response. The lazy, overpaid fat-asses in Huntington Park Animal Control did not respond.

So I was grumpy and sleep-deprived but still took in the new issue of the magazine to the printers today and came home to see Mimi roving the alley. I called HP Animal Control yet again and got the recording. That is when I took matters into my own hands. I realized that if HPAC had actually shown up, they would have taken the dog to the pound. I was simply requesting a free middleman for my problem. I asked the kids next door whose dog it was. The oldest girl, she is 8, said it was hers and nobody challenged this. I told her I wanted to buy Mimi from her. She said “Okay, can I have five dollars?” I borrowed a kennel cage, put Mimi in it and drove her to the Downey Pound. I got sad. The dog didn’t make a peep in that cage at all.

At the entrance to the Pound there is the slogan: Duty With Compassion. I started to cry a little. Then I waited in a line and a sheriff gave me the once over – I absolutely hate it when they ask for your ID and start entering information. This was tough. On the way over I thought I could just let the dog run free, but that would be bullshit – it would starve or get run over by a car. I saw some homeless people and thought about asking them if they wanted it, but that was just a play at assuaging my own guilt that would have been an imposition and wrong.

I got the kennel cage out and was going to take Mimi back when we made eye contact and the dog started that insane barking. I did it. I handed Mimi over to the sheriffs and they put the dog in a cage and maybe Mimi will be adopted in the next week, but most likely she will be destroyed. Animal Control didn’t do this for me, I had to stand up and do it. I feel terrible but what the hell was to be done? I am angriest, upon reflection, at the motherfuckers who dumped Mimi in the first place – the packs of wild dogs in South Central are dangerous and disgusting. One of those kids may have been bit and infected, someone could have gotten attacked by a big dog, who the hell knows – dumping your animal on the street is chickenshit and cowardly. I am not proud of what I did, but I WILL sleep better tonight.

Goodbye Mimi, you deserved better owners and socialization the first time around.

So we moved. Moving is a chore and a half. My girlfriend moved her art studio into my loft - so that is now our job site - she has her art studio, I have my publishing offices and writing desk.

But home is where the clean underwear is, and our cleanies are out our HOUSE. Yes we have moved in together into a house.

Okay, the house is Huntington Park, which is near or in (depending on who you talk to) South Central L.A.

HP is its own city. It is 95-99% Latino, tilting heavily toward the immigrant side of the scale in that regard.

The house we live in was built in 1902. It is 850 sq. feet, has a separate garage. We have a patio and a large front yard with many shade trees.

We have a chain link fence and an automatic garage door opener for our one-car garage. We inherited two dogs from the previous homeowner - my younger brother, who couldn’t live here another day as his triplets are growing and growing. It is a tight squeeze, neither of us can figure how Joe, his wife, their 6-yr old son and their almost 1-yr old triplets managed. My girlfriend had a 1800 sq ft loft at the Brewery Art Colony and she downsized to 400 of my loft’s 1000 sq feet.

So I know nothing about owning a pet, but these dogs crap everywhere. So today the little boy next door asks me if I need any help around the yard. I tell him I will give him $5 if he cleans up the dog poop in the front yard. The kid gets his brother and they go to work - they pick up all the trash (We are adjacent an alley and some of the neighbors think throwing trash over the fence here suffices as “not littering”) in the yard and scoop all the dog poop and rake all the leaves - they work for like an hour, do a great job, the yard looks amazing. So I give them each four bucks. They look at the money like it is ten thousand dollars. Their younger brothers and sisters are looking over the fence hollering “Mateo, give me money”. You can buy popularity. 8 kids in the smaller house next door. Next to their house a sweatshop with 40 employees on each of 3 shifts sewing stuff.

So the 2 kids run off with the money, leaving me to relax in my front yard with my 2 dogs and the ballgame on the television. So what did they buy with their $4. Well, i want to say ice cream and I want to say Cheetos, but they came running back shooting their newly-purchased cap guns at each other. They were in ecstasy, they finally had a gun! There was no room for a lecture here, they will run out of caps soon enough.

So we are going on our 3rd night here and will get up Sunday morning and drive into work - I will be working on the next issue of the magazine and my girlfriend will be working on her art. That will be weird, commuting to a creative job. We will probably take a break and go see the Dan Flavin show at LACMA in the mid-afternoon. We’ll see - this is still so new to both if us that it is hard to make concrete plans beyond making sure the dogs got fed.