But what if it was modeled after a signboard for the Société Anonyme?

I’m thinking of changing the picture that graces the banner of this blog—the one of me drinking. I’m pretty tired of it. Kaveri took it three years ago on New Year’s Eve. It was completely posed—I said, “I am going to pretend that I’m drinking and you take a picture.” And then she took it. I don’t know why I had to pretend—I was already drinking (Bourbon) so why “pretend.” I don’t know.

But that was three years ago and I look different now. I look like this:

So maybe I should get Kaveri to take an updated shot of me drinking. Or maybe not drinking. Maybe drinking is passé.

If I had the energy (and any computer expertise) I would redo this entire site—change the way my art is organized, update my résumé and artist statement, add all the SIAS videos. Who did Klausner’s site? That looks good.

Anyway, do you want to come drinking with me on Tuesday? I’m celebrating my Birthday.

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Am I hung over? I feel achy. I was all prepared to write something about Brice Marden today but, my God, that task seems pretty arduous given how I feel—I feel achy. I don’t feel like writing about Brice Marden.

I went out to a bar last night with Dyna Moe and Julie Klausner and two of Julie’s friends, one of whom had a cool haircut and was wearing a Russian Constructivist-style dress. Good going, with that dress! The bar was serving free vodka. So I drank a lot of free vodka tonics. Is that what bars do nowadays—just serve people free vodka?

The Brice Marden show at MoMA is certainly worth a look. I saw it about two weeks ago with Kaveri, so my memory of it has dimmed a bit. And somehow, Kaveri and I forgot to see the drawing part of the show so I can only comment on the paintings. They are good.

It’s like coming face to face with some Protestant view of the almighty—massive, austere, humane. The exhibition begins with a bunch of his early monochrome paintings. I remember them being mostly green and grey and beautiful. Beautiful because the color is so subtle—greens…greys…like being in the English countryside on a damp day—and because they have a waxy surface. He mixes beeswax into his paints. How does he do it? I think he dilutes the beeswax in turpentine and then mixes that into oil paint, but I’m not sure. He lays it on with a spatula. There’s a tiny strip of primed canvas with waxy drips at the bottom. If he were my age, he would just go out and buy some Gamblin Wax Medium and mix that in, but he’s too old-school for that. I could see how most people would be bored silly by these monochrome paintings and, eventually, I was one of those people.

In the next rooms there are some more monochrome paintings, but this time they’re made from canvases of differing colors, placed side-by-side or stacked. From a distance they look like flags—flags from a very sensitive country, a country whose flag designers decided to differentiate the left band of yellow ever-so-slightly from the one on the right. The larger ones look like the best Amish quilts you ever saw. You’ll see a painting made up of seven canvases stacked together with three slightly different reds plus a dark grey and light grayish-blue. “Very stately,” you’ll say to yourself. Like all his paintings, the surface has this soft waxyness to it that makes you feel like the paintings are your friends.

Then, all of a sudden, the monochromes are replaced by many large-scale gestural works—lots of beautifully-colored squiggles on a light-colored ground—like Jackson Pollock, distilled through the ersatz-Scientific Method of Minimalism. They’re very majestic and grand, the type of painting that would make a humanist like Lucio Fontana blush. If America had a tradition of making religious paintings, they would look like this. Actually, America does have a tradition of making religious paintings and they do look like this—Pollock, Ad Reinhart, Rothko—Marden basically falls into that tradition. A real minimalist would probably not like these paintings because they don’t adhere to a “what you see is what you see” philosophy—to appreciate them requires a leap of faith that what you’re seeing is not merely a bunch of squiggles on a surface. Painting is like that—it creates a world beyond the literal. This is annoying to some people.

The final paintings in the show are also of squiggles, but a different sort of squiggle—not gestural but carefully-painted and wider, like the train paths of some crazy subway map. The lines take very eratic paths but almost never go off the canvas, they skirt along the edge for a while and dive in to the center of the painting. I really love these final paintings; they’re my favorite paintings in the show.

These weren’t in the show.

I think the paintings of Alex Katz were an early inspiration for my show, Sexual Intercourse: American Style. I look at a picture like this (which was taken from a book so the quality is a little shitty) and I think, “yes! That’s exactly what I want SIAS to be like.”

The whole painting is wonderfully artificial and strange—just these flat, bourgeois couples, stiffly holding each other, surrounded by nature. I like how everything looks like a Land’s End catalogue. You say to yourself, “wait, is this a joke?” No, this is not a joke. This is deadly serious.

[EDIT: Wordpress won't let me go past a certain size picture so here's a detail:]

A Journey Jukebox Musical.

There. That’s it. There’s your million dollars. Does it need any more explanation?—A Broadway Musical centered around Journey songs. Now get crackin’ playwrights—all you have to do is figure out some loose narrative that can successfully weave “Don’t Stop Believin’” into “Wheel in the Sky” into “Open Arms.”

It is hardly a secret that every single person between the ages of 30 and 45 who has even a whiff of an interest in the Broadway Musical is an enormous Journey fan. More than ABBA, more than Billy Joel, certainly more than Frankie Valli —go to any karaoke bar and you will see the “musical theater crowd” wailing away to Journey songs. There is gigantic audience out there in desperate need of a Journey Jukebox Musical willing to pay good money! I don’t even like Journey and I’m tempted to take a crack at it.

I was at my cousin’s wedding this weekend.

All of my friends seem to be of marrying age—just waiting around, waiting to get married. Or deciding never to get married. One or the other. I’m not entirely against the idea. And I think I would like to have some sort of ceremony, rather than running off to City Hall.  It would be fun to have music and readings and such.

Maybe one reading could be Stan Apps’ poem,  “A Massive Image of Elmo”…

A Massive Image of Elmo

A massive image of Elmo is in the air above Elmo.

Elmo is surrounded by monsters of other colors

Looking at Elmo, listening to Elmo.

Elmo in the air holds his paws up and out

Reaching out to the world, to beseech, to cuddle

Blue monsters look at Elmo, green monsters look at Elmo

Monsters made out of used rags shake Elmo’s hand

Elmo is at the center

Elmo creates the circle that surrounds Elmo

There is nothing more deeply human than the family

The family is a dynamic power structure

That contains individuals by circumscribing them

Circles are sacred; the center of circles are sources

Elmo creates the circle that surrounds Elmo

The circle creates the massive image of Elmo

That is in the air above Elmo

All the monsters around Elmo take meaning from Elmo

Monster society is the production of monster consciousness

and monster being by monsters

The massive image of Elmo above Elmo is on a wall

The meaning that Elmo offers us is not a created meaning

Elmo is a monster at the center of the world

Which is where monsters belong

And the world shall serve the interests of monsters now

Rather than the abstract needs of imaginary beings

Popped into the local bodega today and bought a package of Pepperidge Farm brand English Muffins. For all intents and purposes, they are Pepperidge Farm Hamburger Buns with cornmeal adhered to the underside.

English Muffins, I believe, are an American invention, based on the English model of the Crumpet. The people at Thomas’ create the benchmark English Muffin, a dense disk that must be carefully split with a knife to reveal the famed nooks and the less famous crannies.

Any fool can rig up a hamburger bun machine to spit out faux English Muffins. This is what the scholars are thinking of when they speak of “Late Capitalism”—buns dressed up as muffins.

After a nearly two-week absence, this is what choose to talk about.