I may be the exhibitions director at Gallery C, but it was our director, Alisun Woolery, who hooked us up with Kent Twitchell. Props to Alisun…

We had a great meeting - Kent has some great stories and is like the last great hippie, so easygoing - and the gallery will be getting some work consigned from him for our racks. So we have subtracted many of the artists who were with the space (almost forty) and have added three so far: Baby Smith, Roland Reiss and Kent Twitchell. The gallery does not represent artists so much as it stockpiles a diverse selection of styles and media by artists who are at the top of their game.

Roland called today with the title for his November solo show (the space is so big we can host two solo shows and they function independent of each other). He wants to call it Onshore Flow. Meanwhile, Kenny Harris, a mainstay of the gallery for years now, gave me five titles to pick from for his show that will be going along with Roland’s (or perhaps it would be better to say that his show will be “contrasting with” Roland’s). Then we got an email from Kenny that he is at Burning Man so maybe we will flip coins to see which title will go with his show while he is flipping out at Burning Man.

Saturday night is an opening at i-5 gallery for 7 Sacraments 7 Sins which is curated by Stephanie Mercado - I think this one of those shows where I will have to scout new talent - seeing as the gallery is right next to the Coagula offices that should be easy!

Did you know that some cactus makes fruit? I asked the kids in the neighborhood if the cactus in my yard was edible as passersby are not shy of hacking the living hell out of it. They pointed to the fruits on the cactus that is deeper in my yard, that people cannot hack-and-dash on - I had just assumed that the yellow and red bulbs on the plant were flower buds that had not yet bloomed. Well, I hacked off abut 15 of these small papaya-sized fruits - only problem being that they have plenty of cactus needles in them. The kids knew how to mitigate the needles with a sanding-like process and we all ate the fruit - it was okay, I guess if I was starving in the desert it would have been fantastic.

One of my many nephews was born the day John Belushi died. Well, he got married today, in a near-perfect ceremony and reception. The bride and groom are honeymooning in Sonoma/Napa so we got them a gift certificate for the Indian Springs Spa up there, just in case they feel the need to take a mudbath.

I did not encounter Belushi’s ghost in the bungalow where he died at the Chateau Marmont in Hollywood the time I stayed there. It turned out to be a night of negativity and we checked out early to stay somewhere else (this was in like 1995ish), but I heard some pretty good ghost stories at Greystone Mansion on Thursday while I was screening the painting applicants for this October’s Beverly Hills Affair in the Garden. Apparently that place is ghost central. Perhaps Belushi made the mile trek from the Marmont to the estate and is one of the moaning stompers encountered there by so many.

I tried to explain to someone that while I do not necessarily really believe in ghosts, I absolutely WANT there to be ghosts and all of that kooky halloween shit, I want there to be an afterlife and life on other planets and astrology and psychics and bench players who hit homeruns when you least expect it.

I don’t waste time looking for them or worrying about all this, but I would much rather live in a world with all that unprovable stuff than one with people who remind you that the five senses are all we will ever experience as real. So listening to a good ghost story is the least one can do as a leap of faith toward a weirder world.

Just a note for you artists:
If you have an answering machine that does not have your name and the new exhibitions director of the gallery has a long, detailed message for you, if your answering machine does not identify itself as YOU, well, you may never get the message because, uh, who wants to leave an extended message at what is for all intents and purposes an anonymous voicemail box?

Think about it…

We would not expect ANYONE beyond his girlfriend to watch the entire 35 minute interview (note: scroll down for the video screen) of Coagula publisher Mat Gleason that was edited into the Ovation Network documentary Art or Not taped at Mat’s day job as a gallery curator, but he DOES trash the popular street-charlatan Sheppard Fairey in the first segment, so you may dig it…

I don’t expect ANYONE beyond my girlfriend to watch the entire 35 minute interview (note: scroll down for the video screen) that was edited into the Ovation Network documentary Art or Not taped at my day job as a gallery curator/art critic, but I DO trash street-charlatan Shepperd Fairey in the first segment, so you may dig it…

I don’t know how the new Bush administration hiring guidelines will be affecting me, but these kids cleaned up my yard today and did a great job - for $20 for all of them (and one brother not pictured) and a sherbert Scooby-Doo push-up each

So the gallery’s website is entirely done in Flash. What this means is that the people we have hired to give the site a basic scrub, they cannot make any changes without all of the original files. Voluminous to say the least. I tried to put the files together thinking I could burn a disc or email a ton of these files over but the new web perosn delivers the bad news: None of this flash is indexed by search engines!

Exsqueeze me?

The site has been up three years. I typed in the name of a featured artist and the gallery name - a few sites came up, but none of them was the gallery’s own site.

Do we build a new site from scratch? Dig deep for all the .fla files and maintain the Flash site as it has been programmed with my changes to the gallery’s program, knowing full well that none of it is searchable?

Either way, any or all of this will cost, of course. It can be simply maddening. I had other plans for the workday - a whole afternoon can slip away from you if you are not careful.

So two of the kids next door did some yardwork for me. I gave them 8 bucks each. So the little girl has a walkman type radio the next day and i ask her if that is what she bought with her earnings. She said it was. I asked her what she was listening to.

“I don’t have any batteries but I still want to look good,” she said.