Keepin it mellow…

Took lolitasir for a jaunt to some favorite SF spots: The Magazine, where I picked up Italian and Japanese dirty comics, the main branch of the Library to see my piece there, and then off to the Mission where I got two incredible luchador masks thanks to J. Finally we went to Mr S for a belated Birthday Present. SF is misty and slightly rainy, but that didn’t deter the protesters out in front of city hall. I’m rested, but not nearly enough. This event is of course busier and more packed with people I want to spend time with that I expected.

On to day three…

It’s funny the resistance I have to writing my posts beforehand. Even though the interface isn’t all that friendly, and I don’t have a client loaded on this laptop, I’d rather write on the lj post page than use my word processor. Well this is a little attempt to overcome that resistance.

Yesterday was another sunny day out here. I got into see my friend Kim Anno’s panel on shifting abstraction in the morning. After it ended, I ran into Prof Ray K. who is, I gotta say – so very cute ( sorry about the objectification, Ray) and who made the astute remark that on the whole, the attendees of CAA are not the most prepossessing bunch. It’s sadly true, I’ve seen many more downtown bums on this trip who have turned my head than conference goers. That being said, it has been wonderful to connect with so many pals at CAA. It feels like a part of my life that has fallen by the wayside a bit.

In the afternoon I ditched to meet up with the Dave White, who braved the pain of his surgical recovery to take me first to a great Mexican place in Silverlake for lunch and then a couple of doors down to a little thrift store that reminded me of how terribly picked over all the places in New York are. I managed to get out the door with only a couple of purchases, luckily. And then I gave him a mission: trusting to his impeccable taste I told him to take me to Amoeba and “metal me up” unfortunately, I didn’t get to meet Extreem Aaron, nor Alonzo who had work related stress disorder, but I did get to have the great experience of sitting in the store while Dave said, yeah you should have this , yeah this too. I was ready to splurge on a Plasmatics T-shirt but the cashier couldn’t figure out how to get one and it was getting late. Now when I get home I get to experience the blissful brutality as I ponder the futility of all things not metal.

There’s another weird thing: I’m traveling around without any sort of disc playback device. CDs have become just the thing I carry the music home on, before I rip them to my hard drive: a software delivery system.

Tide turned…

The snow didn’t happen. The rain was minor. Having received advice, I went to CB2 and bought some FLOR. The weather was raw. Now I realize that I don’t even like to walk down Canal Street any more. It’s devolved into a vaguely sinister souk, fueled by peoples desperate need for status. The elderly asian women who offer me dvd’s under their breaths remind me of the Times Square drug dealers of my highschool years, but what they’re trying to sell me is the chance to watch crappy first run movies in the privacy of my own home.

I used to love the way that the low rent knockoff market would generate weird hybrid commodities that just combined the desirable parts of a number of other items into some new monster. Everyone loves Franenstein’s creature. But now the goal is to look like you can afford some piece of Vuitton crap, and to head home with some story of how you braved the wilds of lower Manhattan to get it. It doesn’t matter if you are a smart shopper or a rube, because every one knows that what you’ve bought there is shit anyway. Herds of bovine suckers cluster in the middle of blocks, impossible to get around, while the sharps try to lure them into the warren-like storefronts, with an air of rapacious disdain. All of it is in service to a commodity ideal that has been drained of joy.

A few blocks up Broadway You can buy the “real thing”, from Vuitton, Prada, Kate Spade, etc., now that Soho has been completely converted into a cobbled luxury market. But there’s barely any difference. The notion of a ubiquitous standard of luxury is as odious as one of a ubiquitous standard of entertainment. People in Shanghai and Mumbai are being offered the same handheld video DVDs of Alvin and the Chipmonks as I am. I’m an advocate of dismantling corporate copyright, but even I don’t think that that’s progress.

Apres…

…therapy, and before tonight’s “Slidefest” an event which I had to curate this week because I had kept putting it off. Thank goodness I know some very patient artists who consented to come and present work tonight. Otherwise things would be looking pretty pathetic. In the 45 minutes of downtime, I’ve knocked out a drawing of a sinister stuffed rabbit for a benefit action that someone approached me about yesterday. They’re supposed to come pick it up any minute. I truly have to stop saying yes to everything because I can feel myself becoming more and more stressed out. The back twinges, acid reflux, and little bouts of binge spending like the one I just went on at the Strand and where I purchased:

A Taschen Book on Velasquez
Another Taschen book (icons series) on Indian Street Graphics
Waiting for Food #3, an R.Crumb placemat drawing collection
Drawing in England from Hilliard to Hogarth
The Acme Novelty Date Book, a collection of Chris Ware’s notebook sketches
America’s First Dynasty – The Adamses 1735-1918

Then I went by Barnes and Noble on Union Square, because I had a real hankering for The Education of Henry Adams, and also my friend Carl Frano might be working there. He was, and on the way out I saw that Amphigorey Also had been marked down to $10 so of course I had to pick that up too.

Meanwhile I sit at home and come to tears over the boxes of books in my apartment and how I can’t get way from them.

Well I have a long history of self medicating through shopping, and the ostensible justification for this particular binge was that I had just deposited a wholly unexpected check from my NY gallery. All of these images feed the work in some way, or would if I gave myself the time to do it. Sitting with the pencils in hand to make this benefit drawing felt very, very good. and it’s always reassuring to see that “I’ve still got it” hand/eye wise. But sometimes it’s thin broth.

Much of therapy was spent talking about the trip to SF and I found myself trying to articulate what I’m feeling about LJ right now, its odd mixes of intimacy and self presentation, especially when the mix includes real world contact.

Cubism

Well as some sort of a “reward” for some sort of “achievement” I went out and bought myself a Game cube. Just another way to waste the 18 minutes or so a day that I haven’t wasted already. I’m much more of a recreational gamer than a hardcore one: things like colecovision and pong were the provence of my rich “spoiled’ relatives and I only had a grudging access to them once every few months. Speaking of which: electronic gaming monthly is crap for the most part, but this is definitely worth a look: http://www.egmmag.com/article2/0,4364,1338730,00.asp

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The Catalog of Human Misery…

… is available for anyone to read. Simply go Amazon, and read the customer reviews of toasters. I’m a kind of finicky kitchen appliance consumer myself, but I was taken aback when I began to look through the listings: tales of insufficient coils, poorly engineered levers and useless settings. Getting toasted bread comes to seem like an impossible task, and the undercurrent of shattered, silent breakfasts is inescapable.