Went to Chelsea to see art a couple of days ago.

Man, is it taxing walking around looking at artwork.

The Nathalie Djurberg show at Zack Feuer (LFL), a series of creepy, sexually-charged claymation shorts shown on separate monitors, was fun but I didn’t have the patience to sit through all of them. For me, it’s weird standing around a gallery for an hour looking at TV monitors. “Send me the DVD!” I want to say. Why do video artists even want to show their work in a gallery context? Isn’t it strange that gallerists are always trying to hawk a bunch of CDs, something so easily replicated, for thousands of dollars? Artists in the 60s and 70s worked so hard to make art that was not commodifiable and now that we have it with cheap CDs, video artists want to run right back into the gallery with all the paintings and sculptures. Then again, people still pay good money for instructions on how to make a Sol Lewitt, even though I could easily make one on my livingroom wall right now and it would look great.

What else?—the Dirk Skreber show, “Crystal Mess,” at Friedrich Petzel looks good. Landscapes of strangeness and destruction worked up with fat layers of paint.

I liked the Stephen Mueller paintings at Baumgartner. I liked them because the small ones reminded me of my own stuff. The big ones I didn’t care for.

Here’s what the small paintings looked like—a shield-shape with a flat-footed pattern on top of a washy ground:

This one sort of looks like a Ukrainian egg hovering over a winter landscape:

Good paintings, right? I’m not so sure about that shield shape, though—it seems like there was once a vogue for taking the heraldic shapes you find in the sticker-books at stationary shops and putting them in your paintings, but that time has passed, Stephen. It’s probably better just to make up a shape. The symmetry is nice. I’m a big fan of symmetry—it’s a pretty dumb solution (in a good way) for organizing a canvas and it calls attention to the literal shape of the supports, pushing the painting ever closer toward “objecthood,” although maybe that too is old hat.

In the 60s, abstract painting was in its last gasp and it had a lot of symmetry. Artists wanted to make paintings as deadpan and direct as possible without all that faggy fussing around with composition. They also thought that compositions that were all about how the individual parts related to each other—as apposed to having the painting be just one big “thing” without parts—were lame.

So they made big symmetrical paintings like this:

And this:

These look better up close.

Still fatigued. Still coughing up mucus. Green mucus. Still having coughing fits at night.

The BBC is the main culprit—not behind my sickness, but behind the misuse of the phrase, “Carrot and Stick.” Because of British stupidity, the phrase has come to mean a two-part process of reward and punishment used to bend someone to your will.

But the original phrase meant only the use of a future reward as an incentive. The “stick” wasn’t there to beat the Donkey; it was to attach a carrot to (actually the carrot attaches to the string which attaches to the stick, but we don’t care about the string). So the “carrot”—the incentive—is always being dangled in front of the donkey’s mouth, making him perpetually move forward without ever reaching his goal. Kind of like the American Dream.

So thanks to the BBC, that nice little metaphor is fucked up.

I’ve been in bed for the past few days. Sick.

And I’ve really neglected Bloggy.

Poor Bloggy…I’m going to get back on the horse, you’ll see.

Blogging is weird; I imagine my students reading this blog—reading that I made a “TV show” called “Sexual Intercourse: American Style”—and it wigs me out and I don’t want to write anymore. Also, I haven’t had much to write about except for, you know, my general state of loneliness and despair…

ho hum…

I’ve just starting reading Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma and I’m excited about it. Michael Pollan’s books are right in my wheelhouse, you know. If you were to look at my long-neglected Friendster profile, you would find The Botany of Desire in the “favorite books” column.

Anyway, it all makes me think of the delicious eggs from Tello’s Green Farm in Red Hook, NY.

All that is wonderfully eggy is contained in these local eggs. If you were to poach them and sink a spoon into the still-runny yoke, you would notice the almost custardy texture. You also would notice a beautiful bright orange color. And when you ate a spoonful you’d say to yourself, “right! That’s what an egg should taste like!”

It’s like eating a tomato you bought from a farmstand in August—you’re overwhelmed by the shear tomato-y-ness of it all.

So local and seasonal food is where it’s at.

Eggs are always in season.

Here is a picture of Doubles…