Because, you know, they stuff huge amounts of food down those poor geese’s necks and the farmers that do it have to do it everyday and they get no time off because the geese develop a sick loyalty to their force-feeders and won’t eat unless they’re fed by the same person every day.

I think I’ve had foie gras about three times in my life.

I’m trying now only to eat organic meat, which is hard because what random Thai restaurant serves organic meat? (none). Also, it’s expensive—sometimes three times more than regular meat, and being desperately poor, it’s tempting to just buy the cheap stuff.

But it’s nice to go to the farmers market at Grand Army Plaza and see the pig farmers and look at the cute pictures of their pigs playing happily in the fields—not stuck in some concrete cell biting the tail off his neighbor and squealing in agony. You look at the picture of the happy pigs and you think, “yeah, I could eat that.” But still, pigs are very smart, so it is sort of like eating your dog.

Man, pork is delicious! There’s a very good porkchop being served right now at Restaurant Sorrel on Carlton Street.

Here is a big lump of foie gras:

This is an open call to everyone in the comedy community. I don’t know if Anthony sent out info, but my brother is putting together a theater and poetry festival this April and is looking for comedic actors for roles.

It’s in all probability a paid gig!

If you’re interested, please contact my bro at: mmagee (at) risd (dot) edu
here’s the info he sent:

Seeking: all Comedic Actors to perform in a series of short absurdist plays for the “Flarf Festival” held April 20-22 at the Medicine Show Theatre.

This is a paid opportunity.

Award-winning experimental ensemble, Medicine Show hosts the celebrated and controversial Flarflist Collective for three nights as part of its ongoing Word/Play series, partially funded by NYSCA.

Launched in May of 2001 by six poets, the Flarflist Collective is dedicated to the exploration of “the inappropriate” in all of its guises. Poets mine the Internet with odd search terms then distill the results into often hilarious and disturbing poems, plays, and other subversive texts.

The Festival runs April 20-22, 2006, at Medicine Show (549 W 52nd St), and will be emceed by Jordan Davis, host of the Bowery Poetry Club’s popular “Million Poems Show.”

The latest time-wasting activity I’ve discovered (as all the money in my bank account slowly drains away) is to look at all of the search queries that resulted in hits to this website. The best so far has been the search on Google India for “dixcy underwear” which I noticed last night.

I was actually familiar with Dixcy Underwear having learned about this Indian company from my friend Christina who herself had done a search of her unusual last name (which is “Dixcy” not “Dixcy Underwear”).

I picture a struggling Indian businessman, hunched over his computer in Tamilnadu, searching hopefully for his company’s name only to find my ridiculous blog besting his business in the battle for internet dominance.

And so I’ve decided to link to their site (perhaps temporarily) in order to drive some business over to the good people at Dixcy Textiles Pvt. Ltd.

You will notice that in typical Indian fashion, the Dixcy people have arranged their underwear according to a strict Caste System.

I don’t know if I plan to see “V for Vendetta.” It seems fairly retarded, what with the strong-but-sensitive-dude who blows things up power-fantasy and the sexed-up fascist esthetic and what I expect will be plenty of Nietzsche-esque “will to power”-type speeches.

But I’m probably the wrong audience for it because I don’t read comic books; the first time I really heard about “V for Vendetta” was a couple months ago. What comics I did like as a kid—I was told by my friend Todd—were girl comics, so there you go. If you read this blog, you already know I have pretty faggy tastes. To say you don’t read comic books in the comedy world is sort of akin to saying you don’t have sex—kind of makes you a stand-out.

What I can appreciate, though, is the movie’s choice of typeface for the scary fascist poster:

It’s set in ITC Johnston and it looks great. The face is based on Edward Johnston’s 1916 design for the signage in the London Underground. It makes perfect sense for the movie because it’s British and it has a creepy no-nonsense quality to it.

Nearly all the sans serif faces designed in the early part of the 20th century are terrific. It was sort of the golden age of the sans serif before the Swiss with their damned Helvetica took over. Much of the look of these early faces must have been influenced by the simple monostroke sign-painter vernacular of the period (I’m not sure). More importantly, the Germans and their strict design principles and a general love of all things efficient and mechanical set the the tone.

This is the last sentence of this blog post.

1. I believe that half of all sales receipts are printed in a type of disappearing ink. I’ve been carefully collecting records of all my art expenses this year and now that it comes time to tally them up, I find a folder full of blank pieces of paper. What gives? Shouldn’t these things last for at least a year? I’m talking to you, Pintchik and Pearl Paint!

2. Colman’s Mustard is delicious. If you plan on celebrating St. Patrick’s Day, I would suggest trying some on a slice of corned-beef.

There’s a bunch of my new work now up on this site’s art page.

like this:

and what about this?

art page.

A couple days ago a Mary Heilmann post was placed on Painters NYC, sparking a debate regarding the merits of her work, compared to that of Thomas Nozkowski. While everyone seemed to gush over Nozkowski’s work, many were turned off by Mary Heilmann’s stuff and that led me to think that there is an unsettling Cult of Nozkowski afoot in New York and beyond. Go into any art program (especially at Rutgers, where he teaches) and you’ll see tons of Nozkowski-like paintings, quirky intimate abstractions, obsessively labored, always with a few gauzy washes, always with some colorful foreground shapes.

And of course, you’d really have to be a cold-hearted bastard not too like a Nozkowski painting. Look at this one from his show now up at Max Protech:

It’s incredibly sophisticated and lovely—that soft navy wash across the background, overlapping the outside blobby shapes—terrific. And the blobby shapes themselves, each a different color, are so subtle and precious, it really takes you aback. And the size of his paintings—that un-hip “couch” size that no self-respecting artist works in—is great.

Here’s another one:

And another:

So what’s the problem? No problem really. But Nozkowski’s strengths—his gentleness, his intimacy, the endless revisions his canvases go through—are also his weaknesses. You want to say, “Jesus, Tom, stop being so lovely.” You look at the above painting and you know that he must have changed the color of those squares 87 times and it just makes you depressed. Maybe you think about yourself endlessly mixing colors, fiddling with color relationships, thinking to yourself, “God, I’m such an asshole, just put a color down and be done with it.” Nozkowski lives in this world, this world of painters obsessions; it’s why so many painters love him.

Compare that with this painting by Mary Heilmann:

Bam! This painting would punch a Nozkowski painting right in the face. It looks so effortless; it probably was effortless. And it has a really charged “dumbness” that Nozkowski would never allow. It says to you, “look, I’m a ‘geometric abstraction’—my colors are orange, red, yellow, black, green and blue.” This type of semiological approach to painting is also very un-Nozkowski and it pushes Heilmann into a conceptual realm that most painters dare not tread. And still the paintings are very arresting, gorgeous even.

Like this one.

And this.

So I’m down on painters who don’t like Heilmann. But, I’m also down on clever types who can’t find joy in Nozkowski.

I think UPS should give up on trying to get everyone to call it “Brown.” It’s never going to happen and it just makes them seem overeager and pathetic.

Maybe they’re a bit insecure because everyone calls Federal Express “Fed-Ex,” but come on, UPS, you were once the United Parcel Service, so you already have a nickname.

Also it makes me think of crap.

It’s a Fisher SM-1000. God, it’s heavy! It was supposed to be a prop in the third installment of The Block. Unfortunately, due to weather-related snafus, it was left behind and we had to substitute a video projector for a filmstrip projector. Strangely enough, the entire sequence involving the projector—a series of flashbacks in “filmstrip form” that revealed my character’s back-story—was never filmed but a shot of me operating the projector was left in the final cut.

Oh, and the show was cancelled, so I remain the kiss of death for Will Hines.

There’s not much point to all of this except that it allows me to point out that the projector is very beautiful—sort of elegant and clunky at the same time. I’m guessing it was made around 1965-1975. It’s funny because it comes from an era of full-on ugly wood-paneled TV sets but the designers back then got it right when it came to industrial AV equipment, I guess.

The appeal of the first Star Wars movie, I think, is very dependant on the look of early 70’s design. It was fantastic as a kid to see a futuristic world that was so clunky and squared-off. This filmstrip projector could easily have been a droid from the first Star Wars. For some reason, George Lucas abandoned that vision in the prequels and everything took on a CGI gloss.

I’m a blogger talking about Star Wars.

One symptom of my profound dorkyness is that I’ll occasionally submit a caption to the New Yorker Caption Contest.

I have yet to win.

I was going to submit this week, but I never got around to it. What I came up with, I thought, was funny (in a hacky sort-of way)…

“If you lift my tray, I’ll show you what I think of high-yield bonds”