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.

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.

I finally got around to seeing the DADA exhibit at MoMA Yesterday.

This is the only picture I was allowed to take.

The guard said, “No pictures on the 6th floor.”
I said, “even if I don’t use a flash?”
He said, “Yeah, they don’t like people taking pictures of new exhibitions.”
I said, “OK.”

When you think of Dada you probably think of smart dudes in bowler hats making bad-assed art jokes.

Or maybe you think of paintings with a mannered hysteria about them—pictures of meaty-looking dudes with their legs blown off, maybe with some collaged bits of gears thrown in.

It was WWI, after all, and people were dying horrible deaths all around so I guess I can forgive Otto Dix for painting the way he did, but still they look pretty bad.

Duchamp’s art looks good: all these strange deadpan objects—like a freaky looking wine bottle holder—sending off their bad vibes throughout the gallery space. Yikes, readymades are creepy!

I like how little work Duchamp made in his lifetime—it makes me feel OK that I’m not producing a lot of work at the moment. Although I can’t play chess and Duchamp was a very good chess-player.

But still, Duchamp is pretty ice-cold and after a while you think, “I don’t care about this coat rack.”

Though, what you forget about with Dada is how lovely some of it is. How esthetic.

Man, I was really blown away by Jean Arp. Why hadn’t I thought about Arp? I think about Tuttle all the time and Jean Arp was doing Tuttle long before Tuttle. Some people called him “Hans.”

Look at this thing:

He would do some automatic drawings of shapes and then send those off to a carpenter to be cut out in wood and then he’d screw them together and paint them. Pretty good plan, I’d say. There are a few of these in the show. I love how gentle and unassuming they are. But also kind of tough and sloppy. He also made some great paintings and collages.

Kurt Schwitters is great too. I’ll take Kurt Schwitters over Rauschenberg. Yeah, I said it. I mean, wasn’t that Combine show at the Met disappointing? Didn’t you think, “Eh, these are kind of pompous. Who needs ‘em?”

Anyway, the biggest revelation of the Dada show was finding the work of Sophie Taeuber. Who the hell is Sophie Taeuber? I guess she was married to Jean “Hans” Arp. She made some really great needlepoint “paintings”:

I don’t remember if this one was in the show. Taeuber also did a series of small wood sculptures that are fantastic. Here is one of them:

I think she might have made these cool marionettes in the show too.

So Sophie Taeuber is great.

Here’s her picture:

Here’s a very cool picture of Jean Arp:

I was in Providence last week.

The people of Rhode Island pride themselves on their strange and miserable food—milk with coffee-flavored syrup, stuffed clams, lemon slush, vaguely clam-flavored fried dough. These are Rhode Island specialties, each with its own peculiar local name.

Another specialty item is the New York Hot Weiner or the New York System:

This particular style of hot dog has only a tangential relation to New York City, being brought over to Rhode Island in the 1920s by a pair of Greek immigrants living in Brooklyn.

The New York System is: a hot dog, a bun, a “meat sauce,” mustard, chopped onions, celery salt. I’m actually really eager to try one. If this type of hot dog ever existed in New York, it has long since vanished, replaced by the “papaya”-style frankfurter. And of course, Chicago is truly the place to go if you have any interest in hot dogs.

But ultimately, you really should be eating less meat, for a host of reasons.

So I was in Providence visiting Kaveri. Hopefully, I’m going to move my art studio there for a couple of weeks. While I was there, Kaveri and I fought terribly. We are both stressed out. And living apart while she’s off at graduate school has been tough. So, tough, in fact, that I appear to have developed a cold sore.

Here is a picture of Kaveri in Providence:

Hello Netflix.

A couple of days ago, I made mayonnaise.

That’s not a euphemism—I literally made mayonnaise. I was bored and I thought, “what can I do today” and “make mayonnaise” was the first thing that sprung to mind. This is what happens when you don’t have a full-time job.

It’s a strange thing to make—mayonnaise. Firstly, because no one does it—you can buy it in a jar for cheap and it’s perfectly delicious. And secondly because of the strange alchemy at work in mayonnaise production—turning a series of wet ingredients into a solid. You think, “holy crap, it’s mayonnaise” when you see it start to form. Basically, it involves whipping a thin stream of oil into a little egg and egg yolk. There is also salt, lemon juice and mustard. It’s easy if you own a food processor. I own a food processor.

Here is what my mayonnaise looked like:

How did it taste?

Like Hellmann’s Mayonnaise. Maybe a bit fresher-tasting. A bit creamier, I suppose. Maybe I could have thrown in a touch of sugar to give it that extra something. But, ultimately, it was very tasty. And remember—as the Buddhists will tell you—it’s the journey that’s important, not the destination. I had fun making my mayonnaise—living in the “now” and making my mayonnaise.

And then I made a very delicious potato salad from the mayo.

It looked like this:

Actually, it still looks like this because it’s sitting in my fridge right now. I used the recipe from The Joy of Cooking and added halved cherry tomatoes. I also added fresh dill because, for some reason the Joy of Cooking recipe didn’t included fresh dill which makes me think that the Joy of Cooking editors are psychopaths.

It seems as though I’m constantly shaving.

I may grow another beard when Summer ends.

Look for pictures.

That’s what I’ve been thinking for the past two days. I’ve also been concentrating on a pain in my left ear that hasn’t gone away, even after a doctor removed a big ball of wax.

The lyrics to the Sea Breeze jingle were, “beautiful skin can be a breeze with Sea Breeze.” If you stripped away the cheesy 80s production the melody is pure Bosa Nova. In fact, if you eliminate the last note (which resolves the melody in a overly-cutesy way), the “Sea Breeze” jingle begins to sound a lot like an Antonio Carlos Jobim composition (with its sophisticated chromatic run on the “be a breeze with” part).

So, good going, to whoever wrote that jingle.

I don’t know what I’m going to do for the next Sexual intercourse: American Style. The story has to revolve around the character of Tom, played by the talented Matthieu Cornillon. Any ideas?