Despite the shame I feel, knowing that some of my new students may be reading this, I’m going to come clean and say that I make an internet TV show called “Sexual Intercourse: American Style” and I recently opened a MySpace account to promote the show. Dear students, don’t worry—the show is a comedy.

So, won’t you be my MySpace friend? Click here to add my show to your friends list.

Click here to see the show on channel 102.

And come to the screening of the new episode this Monday at 8:00 at the Anthology Film Archives on 2nd Avenue and 2nd Street.

I think if I were a member of Congress, or the head of a university, or in some other such position of authority which demanded I get my portrait painted, I would hire Brian Calvin to paint it. I’m sure he would make me look like a pretty cool dude. I hope Brian wouldn’t mind, but I would choose to wear a navy blue suit, just to be funny and to separate me from his other models and because it’s only fitting that a member of Congress wear a navy blue suit.

Try as I might to hate his paintings, I think Brian Calvin is a pretty good artist. He has a show up right now at Anton Kern. You might think you hate him because of his subject—good-looking kids looking spaced-out in their street clothes. You think, “Oh Christ, this is some Barry McGee bullshit, isn’t it?” But rather than being a masturbatory exercise in street style, his paintings are austere and beautiful and carefully considered and very much engaged in the elusive language of painting that most people don’t care about because it’s pretty tedious, I supose, what with all the talk about the “edge” and “surface” and “the picture plane” and whatnot. So the paintings are great. And a little stupid because who really cares about his cute street kids and his cartoony style which is why I’d be wearing the suit.

The best Brain Calvin paintings remind me very much of Piero Della Francesca:

Some people taste soap, right? I may be one of the “soap tasters.”

I mean, I eat cilantro. And when I eat it, I say to myself, “umm, this is good, what with all the cilantro in it.” But something tells me I’m not tasting what other people are tasting when they ooh and ahh over their guacamole. I’m terrified to think that I could very well be deluding myself. I may hate the stuff.

My girlfriend describes the taste as very “fresh’ and “green.” I find it almost metallic, like eating the bottom of a cast-iron skillet.

So I could be like one of those wretched colorblind people trying to look at paintings; I just don’t have the equipment, perhaps.