BIRDTALK

5/21/2013

Organization.
Tumblr reminds a little bit of some of the "gangs" I use to make in '85. When I taped together nine "slides" and gave them to my lab. (They'd make an inter-neg and print it up into a huge photograph... 50X86"). I could have nine photographs on one piece of paper instead of nine photographs hanging on a wall. I could have a whole show in one frame.

5/18/2013

Dragged a comb across my head...
Got up and got out of bed and went straight to the East Village. Wanted to see Dan Colon's show at Oko...(was told Oko is Eskimo for "eye")... Have been following Dan's new body of work which he's showing for the first time there... had to wait for the place to open so I went to a magazine store and was immediately overwhelmed by the sheer number of publications. There were so many Purple Magazine knock-offs I made a "hasty retreat". (I counted twenty-six mags that promised to deliver a mash up of fashion art and music. With titles like Another Man, Another Magazine. Not Another Magazine). Back to Oko. It was open. It's a tiny store front space, a "project room" on East 10th between 1st and 2nd. Dan had two of his new "star-burst" paintings up. Based on a Disney cell where Mickey Mouse takes his magic wand and propels it thru the air... leaving behind twinkly little stars like a swarm of fire flies. (I think that's what its based on... it certainly looks like the "evaporating stars" that Mickey's magic wand streams at the beginning of The Wonderful World Of Disney). Anyway the effect of this gesture and the result of its aftermath is rendered in a syrupy mix of all kinds of color... the hardened flecks of paint sit above the surface as if the pigment's chalk got caught in its own gum and glue. It's minimally spectacular. These "almost" abstract paintings can go right beside his "candle" and "bird-shit" paintings. That's what I would do somewhere down the line... hang one next to each other on the same wall.

Next I went to the old Roxy space. On 18th west of 10th Ave. I remember in the eighties people use to go there to roller skate to disco music. It's been taken over by Hauser and Wirth and at the moment has a Paul McCarthy show. The stairway leading up to the second floor is pretty great. Its an architectural gem. It's solves the problem of having to climb stairs by being wonderfully inviting. It's more than graceful... it might be the stairway to heaven. Once upstairs you get the idea of why Hauser and Wirth wanted the space. It's huge. I don't follow McCarthy. And don't know much about his work. I've seen some of his inflatables and don't like the fact that they're "tied down" with ropes to hold them in place. The work at the top of the stairs is huge like the space and reminds me of the Alice and Wonderland sculpture my daughter use to play on in Central Park. Where that Alice is cast in bronze these are made out of wood. Carved. I don't know by who. And I can't begin to understand how long they took to "whittle". (Machine? The Chinese? The Seven Fucking Dwarfs?)... The "how long" began to bother me. These works were a commitment. To time. In the past I've taken as much as eight years to make a body of work... but right now all I can think about is making art that takes five minutes. To make art in five minutes is what it should take. Tops. That's it. Spit it out and take a photo. Leave the photo in the I-phone and if you care, "bird it out" to who ever follows you. If it can't be done in five, call it day or call it unfinished...
Scale...
The biggest of the works remind me of public monuments that were commissioned to commemorate a fallen hero or the dead from the two World Wars. Again they're huge and their hight is higher than the struts that hold up the roof. The shapes are based on "bookends". I like that one of them is tipped over, so that they don't line up. I use to collect bookends and had never thought to do this... to place one of them "upside down". It's an interesting solution to make something common uncommon. There are no books between McCarthy's bookends. I think about the Hans Christian Anderson bronze... also in Central Park. A lot of people use this sculpture to pose with and have their pictures taken along side the cast of Anderson. The scale of the Anderson sculpture is more "human". It would take an entire library to fit between McCarthy's "ends". Or maybe a kind of delusional big-ass bible. The absence of any of the ten "commandments" gives the gallery goer room to walk between the bookend "walls". The walls form a small corridor. Just before I left, a skate boarder flew thru the passageway with arms outstretched brushing against the walls as if he was touching the side of an empty pool. Although there was no disco music the gesture of his outstretched hands seemed a perfect "bookend" to the Roxy roller days.

Hotel(California)
Zwirner's new space feels like a hotel. All I hear is how great it is. Ten years ago, maybe, but the minute it was built it was already old. The door to get in feels like something out of a high-end health spa. It's like twelve feet tall and takes two hands to open. (Hey I'm not knocking it).
There's a Richard Serra show "up". It's a re-creation of a past Richard Serra installation. (My immediate reaction: the ceilings are to high and the resolve of the meeting between the walls and the floor is to pristine). There's a poster of Serra's original show out in the lobby. The picture in the poster looked like it was taken in his loft. There's pipes on the ceiling and instead of the ubiquitous cement floor... there's an old crappy beautiful dull wooden "loft" floor. Character? Patina? An everyday "artists" surface? I don't know. When I walked into the second room and saw the black tape that surrounded "early" sculpture... I didn't like it's addition. Sure I know it's suppose to keep back the viewer from falling head first into the heavy metal and having an accident but I felt that these "keep back" "don't cross" lines should never have been added. They weren't there in the first place and it's the "first place" that I want to see. Isn't that what the guards are there for? Keep back. Not to close. Caution... do not touch.
(I loved the last two show's at of Serra's work at Gagosian on twenty-first street. They made me feel good to be in front of an artists work. I can't say enough about what I saw there, so I won't).

5/17/2013

Going around the bases backwards...
Monochrome: Check out Yves Klein first published book. "Monochrome". Made in 1954. He was working in a paper store or factory and pasted strips of colored paper on pages and made the pages into a book and brought the book to Paris and showed it around and presented it like the reproductions of the "paper" were paintings. He was asked if he wanted to have a show of these "works". He said, "yes"... and he then proceeded to paint the paintings. (footnote: you can still buy Yves Klein blue in a can. It cost about three hundred dollars for seven liters of paint).

5/16/2013

Miracle For Sale Vs. Being Crucified
I read in the paper yesterday that a collector said, (after an auction) "there's not much that a million dollars can buy these days". That's not true. I don't think so. I disagree. I think artists should be able to make good art with pencil and paper. By themselves. In a small room. (In a chair in front of a table). Without anyone around. (Just like the song says, "All by myself"). Kind of like when Jesus pulled a dater out of a fishes mouth. Just enough art to pay the tax man.

Under a million:
What did Jesus say up there on the cross? "Hey, I can see my house from here". Untitled, (hand-written joke) 1986, 11X14" pencil on coated paper.


5/9/2013
Optional Aesthetics...
Tino Sehgal Vs. Steven Seagal.
Relational Aesthetics Vs. Under Siege. ("I'm just a cook. I'm just a lowly cook").

KarmaCon Vs ComicCon
First if you can, read Walter Robinson's text on how to conduct an artist's studio visit...
Second, if you can, go to Karma on Great Jones St. and see Piotr Ulanski's show of porno-look-a-likes. Karma right now, for me, is the best place in NYC to see art. Or one of the best. The wainscotting is so strange. I keep telling Brendon, the owner, he should keep it. The way the place is run is different from the way most galleries are run. Artist's can experiment there or show something they're not sure of and maybe want to test out. They might even change the show five days into the show. The ghost of Wallace Berman seems to be hovering near-bye. There's a small bookshop in the front and the place publishes too. Karma-Con...Good Karma.

5/4/2013

Orientation.
One of the definitions of politics is: the infinite number of relationships between men and women.

I once made a piece in 1978? called Untitled (Mixed Couples). I re-photographed three couples from advertising images. The first picture was a man and a women. The second, two women. And the third, two men. Back then someone had asked me what my art was about and I said, "My work is about men and women, men and men and women and women". Those were the three combinations that people could find themselves in... so, that's what I tried picturing. I think in those days, as the joke goes, "I ate politics, I slept politics, but I didn't DRINK politics".

Head Vs. Heart
These days my feelings about politics have hardened. I more alienated from the state of affairs and find myself more interested in beauty. I was reminded of this "position" back in 1985 when I sat on a panel with Robert Mapplethorpe. We'd become friends and had traveled to Chicago together to participate in some kind of group show. The moderator and the rest of the panel were all talking a lot of nonsense and art/speak and theory and ideas... and when someone from the audience asked Robert what his thoughts on his work were, he simply said, "I try to make beautiful photographs". I don't think he said another thing the entire night and his heartfelt response has forever stayed with me.

Forever
So... who was the president of France when Gauguin was painting his beautiful paintings in Tahiti?

5/3/2013

Apples and oranges. Apples have been painted to death. Oranges not so much. Cezanne painted apples lights out. He probably counted them in his sleep. Electric apples. That's how he painted them. He plugged his paint into the apple.

I'm still not sure why so many people go to the Met. Maybe they just show up there.

Leaving his Ferrari by the side of the road, with the keys in the ignition... Johnny Marco walks away under his own steam. (Check out Sophia Cappola's Somewhere).

Rowan and Martin. Martin and Lewis. Burns and Allan. Abbott and Costello. The Smother Brothers.

Stand By Your Man is a great song when it's slowed down and played by a duet with an acoustic guitar.

Tricks of the trade will only get you so far. But they'll get you where you need to go.

Thank god I'm not talented.


4/30/2013

"Covering Pollock", a new book published by Fulton Ryder. Go to fultonryder.com or something close to that and click on the tumbler.

My Lemon.
Warhol in that can of soup on the cover of Esquire with his arms stretched out above his head as if he's trying to keep from drowning in that whirlpool of tomato paste. How many artists would let themselves be "pictured" like that?

Vamoose.

If I was, (were?) a black person I don't think I would like white people. (At least the white people of my parents generation). My kids generation is different. My kids don't think there's any difference between black and white. They could give a shit. It's all the same to them.

Chips Ahoy.

Steve Miller was the only rock'n roller who signed a contract back in the day that gave him royalties up the wazoo.

Don't tread on me and Live Free Or Die are fine words to live by if your a writer.

John Dogg would be thirty today if he was still alive.

A lot of people died building the railroad. I've been working on the railroad.

If you never were kissed by Dinah Shore, you don't know what your missing.

Jerry Seinfeld had a lot of girlfriends. The other night I was watching his show and it seemed like he had one relationship that lasted five minutes. I know this because of re-runs.

Girls with natural hairy pussy's are more sexy than girls with shaved and waxed pussy's. Circumcision is barbaric.

Timber
I'm continuing to do "portraits" with four portraits in the picture. The first portrait has one person and it's stamped with the number one. The second portrait has two people in it and it's stamped with the number two. The third portrait has three people in it and it's stamped with the number three. And the fourth portrait has four people in it and it's stamped number four. I find these images in books, all kinds of books and when I find the right one I tear it out of the book and scotch tape it to paper. I try to get a mix. I try to mix pictures of art, fashion, music, and world affairs. I call the final "portrait" One Two Three Four.


4/29/2013

Bird Is The Word

I'm new to twitter. But I feel Iike I've been doing it ever since I started "Birdtalk" back in the early ninties. Back then I'd write down things that I was thinking about in a sentence or two. Then I would add those thoughts to "found sentences" and publish them in Purple Magazine... a magazine out of Paris that was just starting out... a magazine that was a mash up of art, fashion, and music. "Birdtalk" was ten percent art and ninety percent "cool shit".
My wife gets on me when I'm on twitter. She hates everything that has to do with the social media. Has no use for it. "It's all so fucking disposable", she says. I get her knock. (It closes you off). I'm not on Facebook or Instagram. But Twitter fits my early concept of Birdtalk to a tee.
Most of what I see and read on Twitter is crap, crap taken for granted, crap in granite. But it does provide information and a way to connect to people without going thru the usual channels. It's good for announcing things. It's good for testing things out. (Throw-a-ways). It's good for telling whether your shit is cool or whether your shit is bird.
I recently posted a composite picture of what Jerry Seinfeld's girlfriend would look like if you took all of his girlfriends and put them thru a computer program called "photo-mil". (I domained the name). Turns out Jerry had 57 girlfriends over the course of his show. I love the show and watch it whenever I can and the thought occurred to me after watching one of his "girls" walk out on him... man, Jerry's had a lot of girlfriends.
Anyway... I started googling them and found 57. I downloaded them and printed each one out on an 8X10" photograph. I took the photos to my edition guy... David Lazery at Two Palms Press and explained my idea. That's all it was. An idea, a pitch... stabbing air. A visual form of Birdtalk.
Last week I went by Two Palms and there it was. A single photo of all 57 girlfriends. It was printed on a large piece of paper and tacked to the wall. It's effect looked like a cross between a Richter and a Ruff. Lee Remick vs. Mia Farrow. (Before the Rosemary's Baby haircut). There's even a little Christie Brinkley 'sewn' in there. And don't rule out elements of The Stepford Wives, Village of the Damn and Valley of the Dolls. Perhaps nothing overtly visual but certainly the vibe of those classic matinees provide a second helping. I immediately liked its generic look. It was unintentionally dreamy. Non-threatning. "Where have I seen this face before" came to mind. Gene Tierney in Laura?
We talked about the edition number. (57 of course). And what to call it. Untitled (girlfriend) or Jerry's Girl are currently our choices.
I also threw out the idea of selling "Jerry's Girl" to raise money for a charity.
The deal would be that we would sell 57 raffle tickets, each ticket with a different girl on it for say 25k each, and then make one of those wheel of fortune contraptions and put all 57 girls on the wheel and get some kind of Vanna White look-a-like to spin the wheel and where ever the wheel would stop after it stopped clicking... whoever had bought that particular "girlfriend"... would get a huge unique free print. (Outside the edition). We're still talking.

So what can you do now that you couldn't do before?
One thing you can do now, is go home and "post" your "birdtalk"... get it out there and "test" it. (Can you pass the acid test?!) Kind of like how they use to put out hit records at the Brill Building back in the late fifties. (The Brill building was and still is located on Broadway around 59th St. In the building, they would write it, record it, press it in wax (in the basement) and get the record out to a radio dj that night. By the morning, they'd know if it was a hit or not).
So that's what I did. I posted the composite of all 57 of Jerry Seinfeld's girlfriends on Friday. (My wife said I was an idiot. I told her, "look, I'm not a genius but I do have unusual feeling". More birdtalk).
In the short time that I've been posting, "Jerry's Girl" has had the most responses, comebacks, "favorites", retweets, of anything that I've sent out. What does that mean? That's what I'm trying to figure out. (Popularity isn't something that I've ever wanted to marry into. I don't have to say that "recognition" has its dark sides). Part of me likes to think that maybe I've got a Neal Sedaka/Carol King monster on my hands. That maybe I'll be part of the hit parade. "Entertainment Tonight just called and they're asking you for an interview". (My response? Tell them to go fuck the horse they rode in on). Perhaps I should reconsider the title and call it "Release The Hounds". But most of me says that Jerry's Girl is just more "cool shit". Part of the 90%. Part of my wife's "idiocy" rant. And of course I know she's right. It has the stupid dumb failure equation written all over it. I can just hear her in the background..."Hey I know you like stupid shit but that's just what it is, (rimshot)... stupid BIRDSHIT".


My wife. My wife. She's a pisser. She's cut me down to having sex once a month. But hey, I'm lucky. I know two guys she's cut out completely!



3/4/2013

Riding by Philips on 57th and Park. Looked up and saw a big "cowboy" in the window. Looked like one of mine but wasn't. Someone had told me they had seen a "cowboy" coming up in one of Philips auctions and asked me about it because they said it was a photograph by one of the "original" photographers. I looked up again and it wasn't one of mine. It was indeed a "cowboy" but wasn't one of mine. My wife was next to me and said, "it looks like they appropriated one of your photographs". This sounded confusing. We were both confused. We weren't sure what we were looking at. It was hard to figure out. Its true, the photograph in the window was a "cowboy"... but it wasn't a "Richard Prince" cowboy. It was a "cowboy" by one of the photographers who worked for Marlboro who shot the photograph for Marlboro who was hired by Marlboro to go out west somewhere and take a photograph of a cowboy that Marlboro then used to advertise their cigarettes. The question for me is what was I looking at? What did they, (Philips) think they had up there in their window? It wasn't my photograph. It was someone else's. It looked like mine but it wasn't my photograph. Whose was it? And what was it... EXACTLY? I wanted to know. I wanted to know exactly what I was looking at. What were they trying to do up there in their window? All I know is that it wasn't one of mine because one of mine doesn't look like one of theirs.

What does one of mine look like? That's what my wife asked me after we passed the Philips window. "Well", I said, "to begin with, mine doesn't look real. The one up there in the window looks like a portrait of a cowboy. Or at least its 'trying'
to look like a portrait of a cowboy. I'm not sure how to say it, but mine looks more like a screenplay of a cowboy. There's something different about mine. And that 'difference' is what's always been hard to talk about. Better to look than talk. I can't tell you what the difference is except what was up there in the window wasn't mine".

2/7/2013

"It takes one to know one," Joey Adams.

A cowboy walks into a bar and says to the bartender, "Who's the asshole who owns this shit hole?"

1/23/2013

The figure, the nude, the female form... is a lovely thing to paint. It's never too late.

How do you paint today? Same as yesterday.

Walt Disney. Walt Kuhn.

Beats, Hippies, Punks... mix them all together... what do you get?

El Ron Hubbard... Mary Baker Eddy. They both founded a religion that keeps on keeping on. What they founded is a bit outrageous but at least they both have the word science in what they're selling...


1/3/2013

Who Gives A Shit?
I do.
And me.
Me too...

TELL ME EVERYTHING

I went to a psychiatrist. He said, "Tell me everything.” I did. And now he's doing my act.

I was born in the Panama Canal Zone, August 6th 1949. The same year that George Orwell came out with his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. In 2004 I bought a copy of Orwell's novel at Christie's at the Rechler sale. What I bought was a trial "file" copy... probably some editor's copy, with a brown dust jacket with the title penciled on the jacket as just a date...1984. Maybe a unique copy. Hard to tell. File copies of most published books have always been altered a bit by an "in house" reader... many treated like a student's textbook... This copy of Nineteen Eighty-Four looked like it had a brown bag wrapped around it. Like someone was going to take it outside, sit on a stoop, tip it up, hold it to their lips, and drink down what was inside. In 1949 Big Brother was the secret word.


Spy Vs. Spy
I was in the Canal Zone because my parents worked for the OSS. The OSS would soon turn into the CIA. My parents were spooks. My mother told me she used to hide in people's closets. I always thought she was messing with me. Pulling my leg. I could never decide what to believe. Was she joking? (My parents kept me in a closet. For the first fifteen years of my life I thought I was a suit). Right from the beginning it was always hard to tell the truth.

From Russia With Love
I remember a house on stilts. A sidewalk. Really stiff grass. (It hurt when I crawled on it). And bugs. Big bugs. If one got in a shoe, the shoe would move across the room. There's not much else unless I watch the home movies my father use to shoot. I'm not sure if you can remember anything before you're five. Maybe even six. I know I don't. If I didn't have those home movies I wouldn't believe I was from Panama. In one of the movies there's a guy called Uncle Ian. He's holding a long silver stem with a cigarette attached to the end. Turns out that Uncle Ian was Ian Fleming. The creator of James Bond. My mother says she knew him from her time working for Joseph Kennedy in London just after World War Two. They reconnected in Jamaica where Fleming owned a large property called Golden Eye. I was at the "Eye" when I was four. If I try to regress there's something about being underwater. The memory of the "being" isn't really clear. Maybe this is where I get my attachment for desert island cartoons. Fleming's first book Casino Royale was published in 1952. It's hard to find in decent condition. A fine copy goes for four figures. I've got an inscribed copy to Alan Turing. The guy who helped break the enigma code and enable the British Navy to keep up with the whereabouts of Nazi submarines. When books are inscribed to friends or family, fellow authors or well known people... they're called "association" copies. There are degrees of associations. If you got the one that's inscribed to the person the book is dedicated to... you've got the top, the best, the one and only. To the mother or father, son, daughter... the second best. Premium association copies are what book collectors are after. I like to think of my Casino Royale copy as something that might or might not exist. You've heard about it, but you don't believe it. I mean really... from Ian Fleming to guy who broke the enigma code...?


Citizen Kane
Americans who were born in Panama are called Zonians. To be described this way is like the word itself... other worldly. Sometimes when people ask me where I'm from I say... "Not from anywhere really.” Then they say, "What...born in a balloon"?

Fenway Park
In 1954 we moved to Braintree, Mass. To a development built by the Campenelli Brothers. Peach was the name of the street. It was a dirt road and it was a dead-end. There were around thirty houses pretty much looking all the same. Single story, three and four bedrooms, living room and fireplace... separate dining room, shiny new kitchen. Lots of Formica, a new finishing surface that was something between wood and plastic. The selling point was the "den." Never the library, always the den. A finished basement and a two car garage that for many of these "stylized ranchers" was never really completed. When most of these "add-ons" got finished they were customized by the husbands. A lot of them turned into mini-social clubs. The electric door could be opened by a new "fangled" appliance called a "remote." (Husbands would always be showing you their remote). Wet bars and lawn chairs and a new kind of carpeting called "astro-turf" decorated these outside additions. The "guys" would sit around Saturday afternoons and drink beer and talk about baseball. Always the Redsox. Mostly about Jimmy Piersall. The new right fielder. He was different. Strange. He was described as "off." Unstable was another description. He once hit a home run and went to third base, then second, then first, then home. In other words, he ran around the bases backwards. He went the "wrong-way." He was my favorite player. The first "celebrity" that acted unconnected and went out of his way to make-up his own rules. As a ballplayer he only lasted a couple of years and then when he left, checked into a mental hospital. They put him in a straight-jacket. When he came out he worked for the big super market Stop & Shop. He was some kind of executive promoting products like marshmallows, cool whip, and margarine. Products from "outer space." They called them "substitutes." My mother ended up working for his company as a food demonstrator. She would dress up like June Cleaver and stand behind a little folding table and try to hand you a piece of beef jerky. She always kept Kool-aid in small paper cups... "doctor's" cups... just in case you didn't like the taste and flavors of what she was trying to demonstrate. She said the "refreshment" was her contribution, her "brain child" to the job. Okay. If that's what you say. I just turned six so it's not like I'm in a position to beg and differ and congratulate. (What the fuck do I know about "contribution"). I always thought the fact that she ended up working for Jimmy Piersall bizarre, troubling, but at the same time par for the course. (I think uncanny would be a good description, but I don't think I would of known what inexplicable meant back then).
My mother didn't believe in psychiatry. She didn't believe in medicine in general. She dabbled in Christian Science. And was a follower of Mary Baker Eddy. (Mary turns out was the one needing institutionalizing). My mother and Jimmy Piersall. Perfect sense when you're a kid. Later Hollywood would make a movie about Piersall's life. "Fear Strikes Out." It starred Tony Perkins. Tony Perkins would later play the lead in the movie Psycho. In the end of that movie when he appears at the top of the stairs dressed up like his dead mother... scared the shit out of everybody. Perkins playing Piersall. My mother working for Jimmy. Perkins cross-dressing under that bird's nest of a wig. Piersall taking a lead off first base and turning around to face right field, his ass to the pitcher. My mother handing out dosages of Kool-Aid and Lemon Fizz. See where I'm going? And this started happing to me when I was six when everything was brand new.

Sister Ray
We had a sister. Susan. I say we, because my mother had seven miscarriages and never let us forget them. One actually died in her womb and she had to bring it to term and then bury it. My mother had lost her mother when her mother had my uncle Bob. My mother was twelve when this happened and she basically raised her brother. My mother never let us forget this either. I think losing her mother when she was a pre-teen turned her cold, bitter, distant. When I paint that joke about the guy asking his mother to please pass the butter and instead he says "you fucking bitch you ruined my life"... the expression of that joke when I paint it, is part of the reality of our relationship. It's no joke. The "ruin" part is the amount of guilt I have. I feel like I owe her. What do I owe her? I owe her seven babies.

"When I was just a young boy."
Some of the things that stand out about Peach Street. The road was dirt. That's how new the development was. Our first dog was run over and we buried her in the backyard. The dog was new, a puppy. She was hit by an ice cream truck. The kind that comes around late on summer afternoons. There was always that ding- dong pre-school tune coming out of its loudspeaker. In 1985 I would hire a Mr. Softee and park it outside the Guggenheim and film myself getting a cone with a swirl that resembled the shape of the museum. MTV would use the footage for one of its promos. Instead of me talking I had a dog barking for my voice. My shrink at the time asked me about why I wanted to have my voice sound like a dog. I told him puppy love.
I was sick a lot and missed most of the second and third grades. I hardly ate and had headaches and sucked my thumb so it was easy to get colds and fevers when I forgot to wash my hands and put that thumb in my mouth still dirty and covered with germs. (Germs was big word in the early fifties. The word always came at you in 3-D. They would throw it at you like a sinkerball. I would continue to suck my thumb until I was forty-two. I swear to fucking Christ. What can I say? Proud of it...The minute I stopped sucking I stopped getting colds).
I was born with a cleft palate. A deviated septum. I'm not sure why you get them. They're called "hair-lips." They're somehow associated with a German family, the Hapsburgs. They're also associated with being a hillbilly, kissing cousins, and Appalachia. I thought I looked contaminated. Like I was tested deep in Nevada at a proving ground. For a long time I felt retarded. I was never going to be Ricky Nelson. My relatives treated me like one of the Stooges. Do you ever get use to the way you look? If you have a scar that runs down your face like a river I don't think so. When there's something you hate and you can't change it, you change the hate. Eventually I would come to terms with the beautiful scar on my head. It became a censor. It stopped me from finding the spotlight. It helped keep me in the background. I would never run for class president. I would never join the Army. I would never make friends with my congressman. I would never become a Senatorial aid. I would never become an asshole.

Anti-social, Guarded and Suspicious
When I turned eight I started to pay attention to my bedroom. I use to re-arrange the furniture once a week. I once tried moving my bed and made it "kitty-corner." I was always asking my mother to buy real plants and flowers instead of the plastic kind. I would vacuum the wall-to-wall carpet three times a week. I became obsessed with the pattern I could create by crisscrossing it with the vacuum so it resembled the checkerboard of an infield. We had nothing on the walls except someone else's wallpaper. One day my father hung a painting. That's what I settled for... one painting. A reproduction of an exotic yacht surrounded by an abandoned beach and palm trees. This would be the only picture to hang in any of our houses. It was purchased in Panama and it moved with us each time my father would change jobs. Even today I know where this painting is. It's completely worthless except that it's probably the painting that I know and love and hate the most.

I never had a penny to my name, so I changed my name.
My mother and father were impossible with money. It's not like they really had any. They were always siting the effects of the "great depression." I always got the "when I was a boy" speech. If we spent a summer weekend out on Cape Cod we'd always stay in one of those motels that was described as a "motor court." I use to beg them... "Can we stay at one that has a pool? Please? Just once?" Never happened. It didn't take me long to figure out that we were broke. "You want water...go to the beach." That's what they would say. It would take even longer, but eventually I would figure in "cheap" right after the broke.


"They say I shot a man named Lee
And took his wife to Italy
She inherited a million bucks
And when she died it came to me
I can't help it if I'm lucky."
I painted that joke I NEVER HAD A PENNY TO MY NAME, SO I CHANGED MY NAME... in 1987, just after I moved out of the back of the 303 Gallery on Park Ave. South. I moved down to Reade St. in Tribeca and rented a loft just above an electrical supply store and got to work silk-screening my new found subject matter on paper and canvas. I used two panels stretched with canvas to stencil the "name" joke on... thinking that the divide or crease between the two panels when butted up against each other could function as the comma in the joke. I used disappearing ink when I silkscreened the joke. I sold the joke. The collector paid me fifteen grand. Serious coin. The joke part of the painting vanished. Just like it was supposed to. It left a white "ghost" behind. You could still read the joke, but the color that it had been silkscreened with, had gone "into thin air."
At the time I had friends who were punk rockers and hip hop rappers and porn stars and they all changed their names.
The sale from the joke was the most money I had seen in my life. The money was good because I wasn't a rocker and I wasn't a rapper and I wasn't a porn star. And yes, you guessed it...I kept my name.

Johnny Sheffield, boy Tarzan
One winter on Peach Street we had a chimney fire. Shitty construction. Half of our house burned down. There was always some kind of break down in the houses in our development. Foundations cracked. Siding turned green. Cesspools overflowed. Appliances shorted out. Basements filled with water. Windowpanes turned pink. Strange stuff. Suburban stuff. A lot of the lawns were seeded with chemicals. Sometimes I think Peach Street is where cancer was introduced. Anyway our fire...
My grandfather, in the town over, in Milton, was the retired chief of the fire department. He lived in the back of the fire station in a red house. When there was a fire in his neighborhood, his area, his "vicinity"... bells would go off in his kitchen and tell him the exact address of where the fire was. That's how he knew and that's why he showed up that night at our house on Peach Street. His kitchen bells told him.

After he retired he got old fast and lost his hearing and spent most of his time playing with the rabbit ears on top of his television, trying to get the snow and fuzz to mix into a resemblance of an image. He was the first one in our family to have a T.V. Small screen in a big piece of furniture. There might have been a "hi-fi" in there somewhere too. He introduced me to Milton Berle, Ernie Kovacs, Sid Caesar, and Lucille Ball.
I could never figure out if he liked me. He seemed to think I might have been a "love child." Out of wedlock. A bastard. He kidded my father... always kidding... "Hey Lou... you sure Ricardo there isn't your bosses son?”
One night we were watching The Tonight Show with Jack Parr... And one of Parr's guests was Jonathan Winters. Parr asked Winters about his childhood and Winters said, "Why Jack... don't you know... I'm a legitimate bastard." My grandfather looked at me and said, "What did he say?" I said to my grandfather... I said, "Winters knows dad's boss."

The smiling T.V.
Okay, so that part about me saying Winters knows dad's boss I made up. (I never said this is a fucking 'memoir').
Back then I couldn't answer my grandfather's question "what did he say?" I didn't get Winters punchline. I didn't understand the two words... legit/bastard. And I didn't understand how the two words cancelled each other out. The "gag" was out of my league. Parr's reaction was the only thing I could laugh about. The way he turned and looked into the camera. He knew something. The skinny on Parr was that he was too cerebral. Not enough slapstick. A lot of his "bits" were "over our heads." Smiles instead of guffaws. My mother would say about Parr, "to smart for his own good." Parr's comedy would soon be championed by Bob Newhart and Shelley Berman. They would get popular by putting out comedy on albums. Something new back then... "For your entertaining pleasure." For some reason my hard-of-hearing Grandfather would buy these new wax "word recordings" and play them next to the T.V. in that big piece of wood... somewhere in the hi-fi. Maybe my grandfather was the spy who loved me... (Calling uncle Ian)...Who knows, maybe my grandfather knew what Parr said all along.

I was part of the first generation to grow up with T.V. The thing it came in was called a console. A large piece of brown wood. More wood than T.V. The screen was tiny. Black and white. Three channels. You were lucky to get one. My father's mother Teddy called it... the bad babysitter. She had no use for it. Didn't understand how it worked. Couldn't understand the concept of this "new campfire." She used it as another surface for knick-knacks. She put the family photos on top of it next to a bowl of fish. I really loved Teddy. And she really loved me. She was the only relative I wanted to be with. My parents would drop me off on Saturdays. From age six to ten, maybe eleven... I spent Saturdays with Teddy. Nine in the morning. Overnight. Then picked up "For church" on Sunday. Teddy was all Saturday Evening Post. Right out of on of those set-ups painted by Norman Rockwell. She lived in a two family house. She was the renter. You could count on her. She behaved. She always stuck up for everything good. Jesus was her savior. And the Ten Commandments were her way of life. The only thing exciting and different about Teddy was her choice of wallpaper. It was striped. Green and white. The green was dark. Forest green. The white was cream. Half-and-half. The memory is clear. And it's clear because I loved this wallpaper. For me this addition to her interior was radical. Walls of other people's houses weren't graphic and loud. Everybody in my family hated the paper. This was the first time I became aware of aesthetic judgement. One of my aunts said the stripes looked like a prison. One cousin went so far as to suggest a movie stars pajamas. Like I said, I thought it was great and couldn't understand the umpiring. Thirty years later I'd meet up with Daniel Buren and watch him stripe a nation. His "covering" was Teddy all over again. I know he wasn't part of her "set up" but I asked him anyhow... "How did you get so lucky"?

Me Tarzan, You Jane
I wanted to be Johnny Sheffield. He played the "boy" in the Tarzan movies. He beat out 300 other "boys" for the part. He wasn't Tarzan's son and he wasn't Jane's son either. I'm not sure whose son he was. (The Priest to the Rabbi: "You see that choir boy over there? You want to fuck him?" Says the Rabbi, "Fuck him out of what?") Boy didn't take any shit from anyone. He was loyal. And he would do anything for Tarzan. The Legion of Decency wouldn't allow Jane and Tarzan to have a son since they weren't married, so the script doctors made up a story about Boy being the only survivor of a plane crash. They titled the movie... Tarzan Finds A Son. Edgar Rice Burroughs who wrote the original story Tarzan The Ape Man sued MGM for screwing around with his "vision". (In real life Sheffield would die from falling off a ladder while pruning a palm tree. It's true. Read the obit). Along with Dracula, Superman, Frankenstein, and King Kong... Tarzan is a key book in my collection of twentieth century first editions. It's hard to find in an unrestored dust jacket. And if you do find one your going to pay 30k. I once had a chance to buy about twenty various Tarzan books all "warmly" inscribed by Burroughs to his only son. (There were about fifty in the series). They were being offered by Biblioctopus out of Beverly Hills. I passed. I tried to "cherry pick" the Ape Man out of the twenty other titles but the seller wouldn't budge. All or nothing. This was thirty years ago. I haven't seen an inscribed Tarzan The Ape Man since.


One of my first erotic memories has to do with Tarzan. There was an episode where a white woman was captured and taken into a hut by natives. The natives were black and the natives in the hut were black women. There was a suggestion that the black women in the hut were getting the white women ready for some kind of unspeakable pygmy punishment machine. The white woman's body would be spread-eagled on a cross with her arms and legs tied to four different trees that were bent over and held in place with rope. When the rope was cut the trees would return to their original upright position and the force of the return would catapult the woman's severed limbs in four different directions. The dangling bloodied amputations would then be gathered up and put into a big black pot of boiling water along side the already par-boiled body of one her guides. (The guides head had been decapitated and taken to a neighboring village to be shrunk, traded, and worshiped).

As a viewer you didn't get to see the "getting ready" part in the hut. You could only imagine what the black women might be doing to prepare the white woman for sacrifice, for ceremony, to appease the bone-pointing witch doctor. The "imagine" part is where I filled in the blanks. My fantasy of what happened inside "the hut” is still clear, still weird. I might sound like a "head-case" but my hard-on involved peanut butter. I had this idea that the black women would put the white woman on a table, naked... face up, stretched out... and then slather the creamy caramel colored sandwich spread all over her luscious curvy cleavaged body. Since I was nine years old the brand they used was Skippy. (I got a boner so bad it could only be calmed down by shoving it into a jar of the lip smacking spread). That's as far as the fantasy went. There was no marshmallow, no jelly. No tasting, no licking. No dildos, or strap-ons. No clamps, whips, or chains. There were no bodily insertions. There was some mild exploration and knowing smiles from the natives... but that was it. For the most part the fantasy was strictly kid stuff. (To be continued)

A set of encyclopedias from A to G
That's what we had. An incomplete set. I remember it was from Funk And Wagnall’s. The deal was... we'd save up enough S&H Green stamps and after filling up a book, my sister and I would go to the supermarket and together with the groceries and the newly glued in stamps, a clerk would come over, add up our tab and if we bought enough food and if the book of stamps filled all the pages, we'd be given another volume from the encyclopedia company. (Whatever the grocery store was giving away we always tried to qualify). We did this seven times and then it stopped. I don't know if we changed supermarkets, changed neighborhoods, or maybe the people who were promoting the encyclopedia "give-away changed their minds. All I know is that we never got "H" or any other of the nineteen letters in the set. Maybe we weren't fast enough. It's not like we didn't try. We were always telling our mother to buy more groceries so we could get more stamps. The more food you buy the more stamps you get. And the more stamps, the more free stuff. In the end what I know is that I got pretty good at knowing information if the information started with letters from A to G.

Other than the abbreviated set of encyclopedias there was Life magazine and Reader's Digest. That was it. That's all the reading material that was in our house. There wasn't a novel, a biography, a book of essays, a dictionary. I'm not sure where I got my jones for books. It certainly didn't come from my family. None of them were readers. Not even a newspaper. When I sit in my library today I can't believe all the books I have. My library is a separate room specifically designed for my books. It's the kind of room I would dream about having when I was a kid. Floor to ceiling books, with one of those ladders that's hooked on a steel runner that glides from side to side. I love that ladder. According to my psychiatrist this dream of having a room like this has to do with wanting to be alone and keeping the outside world outside. He told me my books are insulation. Bricks and mortar. Poured concrete. It's sound proof. "You've created your own bunker. Your own fall out shelter." He told me I was getting ready for the end of the world. I showed him my special copy of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451... the limited edition that's bound in asbestos. Show and tell. He asked me why that one? Why out of all my books did I bring him the Bradbury? I told him that Fahrenheit was in my head. It's one of the few books I've memorized... just in case I get kicked out. "Kicked out of what", he asked. "Out of my hiding place. You see it’s just a matter of time before they start burning books again. I'm just preparing. I know my library won't protect me from the know nothing fanatics who believe in religion and ghosts". He looked at me and nodded his head. He agreed. "So you know it’s coming," I asked. "Yes," he said, "it's right around the corner." "Good," I said. "So let's begin... Let me be my book."

MEM (MORE)
Saturdays and Saturday nights were full of "programs.” In the morning, game shows. And in the evenings, comedy and variety. In no particular order... What's My Line? Who Do You Trust? Truth Or Consequences. Queen For A Day. The Honey Mooners. Leave It To Beaver. Ozzie And Harriet. The Jack Benny Show. The Howdy Doody Show. The Wonderful World Of Disney. I'm not sure when I started on cartoons. Right away. The Flintstones. Yogi Bear. Rocky And Bullwinkle. Tom And Jerry. It was all great. I loved watching. There was nothing else. They were friends.

The Lone Ranger
I always liked the quiet type. The guy people would underestimate. The "lowly cook.” The cape crusader. The mild mannered office boy by day... then some kind of "transformation.” I was obsessed with Zorro. One evening my mother returned from work and with great fanfare gave me a package of "official" Zorro gloves and sword. I went berserk. I'm not sure what I did to deserve the present and was completely surprised at my mother's "soft spot.” I remember the gift was given to me in the kitchen and it was given to me without strings attached. There were no ulterior motives. She was being a mother and that night I hugged and disappeared into her completely. I made drawings of Zorro all the time. In school I would draw all over my notebook. I would start with the "Z" and with my head bowed down and my hand cupped around the book, slash the letter a million different ways. I would draw Zorro's mask and cape and horse. I was pretty good with pencil and paper. Drawing came naturally. God given. It wasn't a big deal. Kind of like playing the piano by ear. Drawing replaced everything that I was supposed to be learning.

The early episodes of Superman were another favorite. (Especially satisfying). "Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound.” Who would of suspected Clark Kent to be that "super.” George Reeves who played the part never got another chance to act after he left the series. He was typecast. Pigeonholed. A one-hit wonder. When he finally got a chance to co-star in a dramatic movie the audience laughed when he appeared on screen. By the late fifties he was playing guitar and singing folk songs in coffee houses up and down the West Coast. I once did a drawing of George Reeves. It was based on a publicity picture that his agent would send out for casting calls. I did the drawing with a number 4-H pencil on hot press darche paper. I did it in 1981. It was spot on. My thinking at the time was to do a "portrait" of George Reeves. Not a portrait of George Reeves playing Superman. The point of view had to do with normality. It was against the grain. I wanted to present him as he was. Not the person he was famous for. POPULARITY had nothing to do with it. I always felt bad for George. I always felt bad because he couldn't get out of what he got himself into. (Painting yourself into a corner is half the battle. How you get out is where the real story begins).

When I worked for Time Life in the mid-seventies I did some research on George Reeve's death. I spent time in the library reading obits and collecting "clippings" from a file that Time Magazine had organized after he died. It's true he died falling out of a window. Whether he jumped or was pushed out by his girlfriend was never determined. (Supposedly the night "he went out" there was an argument about money between him and his girlfriend). What was determined was that he fell straight down into the ground. There was no net. No stunt double. No special effects to save him. That's what you get for getting famous. A one way ticket. When I turned ten a light went on. I said to myself, "I think I'll go after third place... leave first for the hero."

What Me Worry?
Bozo. Clarabell. Captain Kangaroo... No these clowns weren't part of Ringling Brothers... they each had their own T.V. show. Bozo and Clarabell were local and Captain Kangaroo was national... on in the mornings just after the Dave Garroway show. (Two cannibals eating a clown. One turns to the other and says, "Does he taste funny to you?"). And you wonder why there's an Insane Clown Posse.
I was always partial to the clowning around of Alfred E. Newman. The mascot and chief icon of Mad Magazine. He was the kind of character that could grow a Hitler mustache and explain it away as an "ironic" mustache. In the mid-fifties getting away with it was a sensibility that could be misinterpreted as Un-American. You had to be careful when you combined humor and artistry. Mad Magazine was something I had to smuggle into our house. The congressman Charles Keating was trying to ban comic books and pornographic magazines. (It would take me another year... eleven years old... to focus on "men's" magazines). My parents were friends with Keating. My parents were Republican. Anti-communist. Anti-Semitic. Anti-black, hated Catholics. My father was a Mason. The kind of "racist white folk" that Saul Below wrote about in his novel The Victim. I was never sure what Masons did. They dressed up in funny costumes and wore strange Moroccan hats. They had secret handshakes and had meetings in "temples.” It was an old club. Very old. Apparently going back to Egypt. The eye on top of the pyramid on the dollar bill has some Masonic meaning. "Keep out" instead of "welcome home" was all I could ever figure out. Masons wore sashes that were covered with pins and ribbons. Each pin each ribbon meant you passed some kind of test. The more tests you passed the more pins and ribbons on your sash. These Masons reminded me of boy scouts and wizards.

(Back at my ranch). My mother would find my Mads. (I was never good at hiding things... and my sister would always rat me out anyway). My mother would incinerate my treasures and treat me like a delinquent. My sister would jump on the bandwagon and use one of her new big words and call me a "degenerate.” My mother was the principal and my bedroom was the black board fucking jungle...

It was too bad too because now a Jim-mint copy of the first issue of Mad Magazine goes somewhere between two to four thousand dollars. (The what me worry Alfred E. Newman character didn't make an appearance until the fifth issue). In 2001 I paid fifteen thousand dollars for the first Zap comic. I bought it from Ken Lopez, a rare book dealer from North Hampton Mass. One of my go-to guys when I need to have my collecting habit fixed. Collector's thought I was crazy. Fifteen K? "What are you CRAZY"? I don't know... it's like that. Why? Hard to explain. You like it. You want it. You think it's important. For me Zap is part of the seven suns. After you fork over the cash you forget about what you paid, put on some shades, and start staring at the fucker.

Learning how to hustle
The best cartoon in Mad Magazine for me was Spy Vs. Spy. The graphic was original, sophisticated, subtle, and musical. How I learned to love the bomb. It had all the Strangelove you could ask for. The Cold War never looked colder. It was a perfect "tune" for a paranoid population. And the story lines always spoke about current events. Things like...The Berlin Wall. It was real. You could touch it. It really was a wall. There really was a no man's land. It really did separate East from West. The barbwire at Check Point Charlie really was part of a stalemate. The Wall was the perfect architecture for pen and ink. The vibe of the cartoon? Sitting on a fence. What was true, what was false? Right and wrong hardly existed. Good and bad up for grabs. And of course for the sparring spies... musical chairs and lots of backstabbing. (In 1968 I will visit Berlin and take photographs of the Berlin Wall... but that will come later).
I once heard that Terry Southern started writing storyboards for the strip in the early sixties. This made sense. (He got a screenplay credit on the film Dr. Strangelove). Southern wrote the erotic novel Candy under the pseudonym Maxwell Kenton and had the book published under the title Lollipop after French authorities declared the book obscene. (Candy was a send up of Voltaire's Candide). I have a 1958 copy of Candy by Maxwell Kenton published by the Olympia Press part of their Traveller's Companion Series. It's inscribed by Southern to Nelson Lyon who produced William Burroughs Dead City Radio LP. Nelson would later produce Southern's Give Me Your Hump CD. I read Candy one summer just before turning fifteen living in a tent with seven other pre-teen boys. The tent was part of a camp out on the back nine of the Hyannis Port Golf Club. We were all caddies, living there before going into the tenth grade trying to make tips to pay our own way. We'd all been dropped off at the beginning of the summer. Most of us were there because parents felt the experience of working and paying for your room and board would provide a life lesson. Discipline we were told was what we all needed. The place was run like a military camp for junior cadets. Golf was beside the point. Survival of the fittest was the way things worked.
We were all masturbating like mad and Candy helped get the spanking going. We took turns with the book, passing it around with a flashlight to read it under the sheets. Sometimes we would hand-job each other. Sometimes we would sit around in a circle and "circle jerk.” Whoever could shoot their cum the farthest got an extra ten minutes with the book. By the end of the summer you could hardly open the book. The pages were glued together with so much cum. This was 1964. President Kennedy had been shot the fall before. Eighteen year olds would soon start dying in Vietnam. Bob Dylan would pick up a telecaster, plug in and go electric. And Terry Southern would help write the screenplay for what eventually became Easy Rider.
Thinking back on Nelson Lyon... he was the one who came up with the idea for the Rolling Stones LP with the zipper on the cover. Warhol liked Lyon and appreciated his eye for design and stole the concept without ever giving him credit. When Lyon later confronted Warhol, Warhol sheepishly admitted taking the idea and gave Nelson half a dozen Cow prints as payment. For me and my tent mates, we were all Lord Of The Fly boys wishing, hoping, and thinking about boning Candy Christian. Who the fuck cares that nobody can be trusted? We just wanted to collect enough of our jizz to fill the cup on the thirteenth hole, (that night)... and in the morning watch the first golfer retrieve his ball after he sunk his putt.

Encore
Friday afternoon right at 3pm during the sixth grade was the best part of the week. That's when I got to go home and stop thinking. I hated school. The rest of the afternoon I could sink back into my beanbag, watch Leave It To Beaver and bond with Eddie Haskell. I don't know how they let Haskell into the living rooms of boys who were trying to grow sideburns and sneak cigarettes from older brothers and sisters. It always amazed me that they didn't arrest the screenwriter or Haskell himself for acting like a snot nose, brown nose, scheming little shit. One minute polite... the next, he'd be behind your back giving you the finger. I remember when I was seventeen going to the Boston Tea Party, a rock club in Boston and going because Eric Clapton and Cream was playing. (They were the "cream" of the crop). Before they came out though, there was an opening act. Two guys... a drummer and base player... They started thumping and pounding their way thru Tommy James' Crimson And Clover and then proceeded to destroy the Frankie Valli And The Four Seasons hit Sherrie. They played in their underwear, had wigwams on their heads and something around their calves that looked like big black elastic bands tightly wound. Put the Mother's Of Invention, The Fugs, and The Stooges all together and you come up with these two flaming creatures. They were nasty. They drooled. They blew their noses at each other. They couldn't play for shit. They were worse then the Shags. And that's on the other side of pathetic. (The Shags... another local band out of New Hampshire. Three sisters. All plainer then the next one. Frank Zappa's favorite group).
I didn't know shit about improv or performance and video art. And it was way to early for punk. The two creatures called themselves Eddie Haskell And The Junior. In between songs they'd recite Eddie Haskell lines from the Beaver show... The drummer to the base player... Hey Beaver... gnaw any trees down lately? Lame can't begin to describe their act. The audience threw food at them, yelling, "get the fuck off the stage... we want Cream". (It was like the Gong Show and they got gonged). The two "juniors" started eating the thrown food. Just when you thought they were ready to give up and beat it backstage, they did a complete 360 and finished us off with a twenty-minute cover of Billy Paul's Me And Mrs. Jones. The Chamber Brothers reincarnated. What just happened? I swear it was the biggest badass cover anyone had ever heard. They played like Keith Moon meets Howard Hughes meets Godzilla. What the fuck? They completely fooled us. The played us for saps. They took us all in and we fell for it. "We don't need no stinkin badges", said Junior. Eddie Haskell And The Junior fingered us and brought down the house.


Pink Slip
We moved to Weymouth Mass. when I was ten. Fifth grade. Another school. More being the new kid. More slipping on the banana peel.
My father lost his job and started working in the Weymouth Ship Yard. The direction was downhill. He made minimum wage, lost his government benefits and took on part-time work as an electrical engineer. Making ends meet meant Rice 'A Roni, casseroles and meatloaf. (My father never talked about why he was sacked. I was to young to understand his getting "pushed out" of the CIA. It wouldn't be until 1967 when he was recruited by LBJ's government to help "defoliate" the jungles of Vietnam that I began to get a handle on exactly what my father was up to. I always thought he was talking thru his hat. According to my mother, in the early fifties he had something to do with a program the CIA ran called MK-Ultra... a special operations division researching biological and toxic substances. This "info" all sounded like something out of Three Days of The Condor. I would later look up MK-Ultra and find that it also played a role in testing the effects of LSD on humans. Yikes! This was around the same time I was listening to Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds).
Clipping coupons and delivering newspapers was my job. Those S&H Green stamps I was talking about before? For us they weren't something on a painting. We were fucked. What had been a new "streamline" two-tone Pontiac "88" every September was now a 1948 a fifty dollar Ford clunker. (The shape of this ride was like driving a small Quonset hut). We were so far underground I would get the bends. No more zipadeedoodah. Describing us as Lower Middle Class would be putting a gloss on our lifestyle.

One thing that was cheap was gasoline. Nineteen cents a gallon. This was 1962-63. A couple of stations gave away free "drawings" of the N.Y. Giants football team if you filled up your tank. The Giants were my team. (There was no Patriots back then). I'd beg my father to pull into one these stations and ask him to "filler up" so I could get a new drawing. I started collecting them. I wanted the whole team. They were really nice pencil drawings on fairly thick paper and the way the players were illustrated was flat out impressive. It's hard to explain my attraction to them. (When I became a senior in college I was introduced to the drawings of William Bailey. They were figure studies. Delicate. Crosshatched. Lovely. I had the same reaction to Bailey as I did the Giants).
And it's hard to explain why gas stations were giving away frameable reproductions of sports memorabilia. You'd have to fill up twenty-two times to get the whole team. Maybe that's why.

Anyway, I started to hang them up in my bedroom... pinning them to the wall and arranging them like a class reunion. There was Kyle Rote. Andy Robustelli, Rosey Grear, Sam Huff, Y.A. Title, Frank Gifford. I also added a photo from Life magazine of a defeated Y.A. Title on his knees in the end zone, Helmut knocked off, blood trickling down his balled head. It was the end of his career. He had had it. Except for the baldness he looked like my father. It's funny to think about my first collection of someone else's art being free.

The Velvet Future
One of my first movie experiences changed the way I thought about where I might belong. It was a musical and the actor I loved the most in the movie was George Chakiris. The movie was West Side Story. Growing up in the suburbs I wasn't charged with city energy. Seeing a semblance of New York City on the screen opened something up. Especially the first scene, shot from above with the camera positioned in the belly of a plane or helicopter or blimp, roving along the tops of the skyscrapers and panning the grids of the streets and finally settling on a gang of kids dancing on an asphalt playground passing a basketball... leaping around like Merce Cunningham and Yvonne Rainer. Their moves, what were they... "Choreographed?”... I had no idea. Ten minutes in and I was besotted. Dumbfounded. It was finally happening. I was so fucking happy.

I always felt oppressed by the way I looked. (Or had to look). Part of it had to do with the "authoritarian" dress code dictated by my parents. Chinos, loafers, patterned button down shirts. No dungarees. No engineer boots. No turned up collars. My crew-cut hairstyle was waxed and uptight. What I really wanted was Elvis hair. A conk, ducktail, sideburns, and a can of grease up there that would help shape my couffe into a Hawaiian wave.
In front of West Side Story, (in front of the screen), I could see and hear and know there was something else out there. Something that wasn't next door, down the street or after school. (It would be another decade before I would pick up Adolph Huxley's The Doors Of Perception. Another decade too before I would walk into the Whiskey on Sunset Blvd. and catch a set of Jim Morrison and The Doors and know right then and there that the other side was the side I wanted to be on).So many doors.
The kids in West Side had sleeveless shirts. Some had light grey sweatshirts with the sleeve cut off just below the elbow. Some of them had three-inch thick black leather belts with a silver square buckle pushed over to the side of the hip. (I wouldn't find out until later this "fashion" of putting the buckle off to the side had its origins in practicality. It had to do with hot-rodders not wanting to scratch the paint when bent over "souping up" their cars).
Ked sneakers. Another accessory. Scuffed up with holes at the top of the big toe. I'd see some of this fashion later on, on other screens in other movies. Steve McQueen in the Great Escape. Mick Jagger on the Ed Sullivan Show. Maynard G. Krebs on Dobie Gillis). A wardrobe for heads.
The outfit I liked the best in the movie was what George Chakiris wore to the YMCA dance. He played the part of Bernardo, the gang leader of the Sharks. When he went to that dance he was "decked out.” Black suit, purple shirt with a "tab" collar. Skinny black tie and Puerto Rican boots with the zipper on the inner side... the same kind James Brown would shimmy and shake on...the kind Warhol would silkscreen, the kind the Beatles would wear and later come to be called Beatle Boots. Bernardo's suit was tapered. A perfect "V.” The pants were beltless, stove piped, and cuff-less, landing just above the heel of the boot. Where did these clothes come from? I had no clue. Nine year olds had no clues. The best I could do was a clean white t-shirt.
Sometimes I would forget I was watching a movie. A general lowering of wakefulness would come over me and I'd be transformed by the cone of light behind me and the make-believe would work its way into my brain and turn everything into a giant fantastic novel.
I would stay in my seat after "the end" and watch the credits roll and wait for the costume designer's name to appear. Edith Head. My new cape crusader. By the time I moved to NYC in 1973 I would settle on a simple black suit and white shirt. I would buy as many as I could in thrift stores. The tailoring would be generic. (The lapels not too wide not too thin). The only customizing I would add, was to button the top button of the shirt. There was nothing fashionable about it. Day in day out. The same outfit. It would help me blend in. It would be my uniform. My armor.

Little Richard
I've told this one before. This happened before West Side Story. I guess you could call it my "holy shit" story.
I was around nine and hanging out in our basement that got turned into a playroom by my father. It was always the first thing he'd do when we moved into a new place. Take over about half the space "down-under" and panel the walls and tile the floor and then set up his "ham" radio. Being a ham radio operator was his hobby. It was a strange way to spend time. Talking into a small microphone to like-minded people you'd never meet, talking about family, jobs, and the weather. My father with his radio could reach people all over the world. He had a map up on the wall and when he made a new contact he'd stick a pin in the place where the contact was made. He must have had a couple of thousand stuck pins. Sometimes he'd get a postcard from the contact with their "call letters" printed on the card. He scotched taped these cards next to the map. He'd also send out a card of his own "call". His call letters were...W1UOH. His "handle" was UNCLE OBO HOW. So when he turned on his radio and start to spin the dials (like he was opening a safe), he'd lean forward and put his mouth up to the transmitter and say, "This is W1UOH UNCLE OBO HOW"... say it a couple of times and then ask, "Is there anyone there?” (Think: The Man Who Fell To Earth, by Walter Tevis).
The kind of frequency a ham operator was on, allowed the operator to talk even when telephones were down. This frequency came in handy in case of emergency or storms. The wavelengths were up in the sky, invisible, always ready to receive and transmit. It was the kind of signal that the commander of the submarine in Nevil Shute's book On The Beach tried to hunt down. The commander and crew were stationed in Australia. They'd been a nuclear holocaust in the northern part of the hemisphere and it was only a matter of time before the fallout would drift into their part of the world. After locating the signals' origin as San Francisco, the Captain decided to sail all the way to the Golden Gate... to see if the signal might be a sign of life. Turned out the signal was coming from the pull on a window shade that was wrapped around a coke bottle that would, from time to time, settle on the kind of "key" that sends out dots and dashes that a finger would normally tap onto. The gizmo and the "caught coke bottle" were next to an open window and the fluctuations of the wind would send the shade up and down to create the effect of a human's touch. Da Dit Dit Dit. Dit Dit Da Dit. There was nothing human about it. The signal turned out to be an empty balloon. Nothing to do but return to Australia and wait to die.

I've always thought that if one were to try to define what art was... one might refer to what the coke bottle was doing in On The Beach.

To the best of my knowledge my father never got any rock-n-roll on that radio of his.

Praise The Lord
I'm hanging out in my basement in the playroom next to the ham radio listening to my record player. When I was nine I was a huge fan of Louis Prima and his lead singer Kellie Smith. They were on the Ed Sullivan show a lot and after I'd seen them several times I saved up paper route money and bought one of their albums. I was also listening to this monster hit, Trailers For Sale Or Rent by Roger Miller. He was from Nashville, part of the Grand Ole Opry. I could never figure out how this song took over some of my afternoons. Sometime you take a detour. Either that or that's why they call them "monster hits.”
My sister had some Patsy Kline, Connie Francis and Doris Day. About as far out as she got was the Everly Bothers. But she did buy this one record called Tutti Frutti by Little Richard because it was my birthday and more important she said, "you have the same name.” A ton of bricks was how much Tutti Frutti hit me. The sheer womp of the song floored me into thinking it was from Heaven Above. Boy O Boy. I started shit'in those bricks.
I woke up.
After I stopped shrieking and wailing I found out that Little Richard was a black man. A negro. I'm not sure if I'd ever meet a black man before. And not only was he black but he wore eyeliner and lipstick and had shiny kinky hair going six inches straight up like the bride of Frankenstein. I wasn't sure who the monster was. Little Richard or me.
Here I'm down in the basement getting high on his falsetto and I can only think... holy shit... my parents just put the kabosh on rock ‘n roller Jerry Lee Lewis for marrying his thirteen year old cousin... calling what he did "incest"... wagging their righteous finger from side to side like I'm suppose to know what that kind of union is... (What me worry)? I mean I'm romping around the clock calling myself Little Richard and sooner or later their going to check this routine out and raise the roof and bring the wrath and suck the spirit of my new born again choir right out from underneath my fancy dancing feet.

BIRDTALK

11/16/2012

Tell Me Everything

I went to the psychiatrist and he said, "tell me everything". I did. And now he's doing my act.
That was the first joke I used to make art. That was back in 1986. I was living and working at 303 Gallery on Park Ave. South.
The question is this...
Are you the psychiatrist?
Are you the teller of the joke?
Are you the writer of the joke?
Are you the publisher of the joke?
Are you the reader of the joke?
None of the above?

Me, I was the artist of the joke. I wrote the joke down on an 1X14 inch piece of paper with a pencil and scotched taped it to the wall.

This bit of patter is an excerpt from my forthcoming novel TELL ME EVERYTHING... to be published by Fulton Ryder in 2013. In the coming months more excerpts will appear here, first... maybe even the whole thing. Maybe. I'm not sure. I don't know. What do I know?
What do I know?... that's a pretty good too...

11/15/2012

Where's is Jack Goldstein? (Another one of my "question" paintings).

One of the best essays I ever read on an artist is David Salle's essay on Jack Goldstein. Salle wrote it when Goldstein had a show up in Buffalo N.Y. at Hallwalls in 1978. Now there's another, (essay)... this one by Ashley Bickerton... that accompany's a small catalogue put out by Adam Lindermann for Goldstein's show at Venus Over Manhattan. The show opened last night. Lindermann's gallery is at 980 Madison... a building that I like to refer to as the Brill Building for Art and Design. Lindermann's space is warehouse like... deliberately unfinished and lit like a nightclub. (EYE.like.It).
Goldstein's show there reminds me of nothing that I thought I remembered from when he showed at Metro Pictures in 1980. The work now looks like "good yesterday" and what was good yesterday is good today. (The paintings could easily hang alongside John Stezaker's early silkscreen paintings from 1982. Goldstein and Stezaker are of the same generation. John was Jack's counterpoint in London in the late seventies).
The first painting I saw of Jack's was in a summer "preview" show at Janelle Reiring's loft in Tribeca in 1979. The painting was all one color and in the middle of the painting there was a small "right on" representation of an astronaut falling. Falling falling and falling. It was summersaulting through a monochromatic field of colored space. The painting was magical.
Goldstein was the reason why Metro Pictures opened. Or at least that was my impression at the time. And even though I was part of the original line up, I never really felt part of the "family". I knew most of the artists... Sherman, Longo, Welling, Laurie Simmons and Troy Brauntauch... but I never fit in. If I talked to Jack twice during the three years that I was there I don't remember... it might of been once. I know he didn't want anything to do with me, and he acted as though he had one thought in mind... "how do I cross you off my list"? He wanted the spotlight and he never got it. And you can see why... the paintings that he showed at Metro are the same paintings that are being shown at Venus Over Manhattan. Do you think it takes time? Just wait. Now is as good as time as any.
I think what Bickerton says about Jack's position of being "dead set against being overly 'artistic' and unnecessarily 'painterly', pretty much left him in open water... To quote Christian Metz... "his paintings had that general lowering of wakefulness"...
His barking dog, his flaming window, his records with sound tracks of cars crashing are part art history. That's what we know.
I have a couple of his paintings in my collection. That's what I know.
His paintings are the fucking turtle.
Just like that "summersaulting astronaut"... right on.
The Brill Building has just put out some more"hit" paintings.


11/14/2012

The Deep End

"Hey Hey I'm a potter. And people say I potty around. But I'm to busy potting, to put anybody down". (Last night I had a dream that I had a Monkee on my back).
What does this have to do with Carl Andre?
The pottery everything.
The Monkees not so much.

I met Lawrence Weiner in Vienna in 1985. We were both part of a group show called Wien Fluess, at the The Session. Before that I would see him at the Ocean Club on Chambers in Tribeca hugging Carl Andre. They were always glad to see each other. It seemed to me that they were truly good friends.
Lawrence was a good guy. He took me under his wing in Vienna. Introduced me around. This show was one of my first encounters with a European art scene. I was impressed with all the languages Lawrence could speak. We did a lot of sitting around in cafes smoking and drinking. The language thing came in handy. Half the time I would just have to sit there. I didn't speak shit. The next time I run into Lawrence I'm going to ask him if he's ever written a sentence about deadly kissing.

Carl Andre didn't have wings.
He was full of himself and he wouldn't give me the time of day.
In 1972 I had just gotten back from a backpacking trip to France. I was broke. Desperate. I was staying with my mother in Braintree Mass. and she said I should go speak to her boss at Thayer Academy. (Her boss was Peter Benelli... the headmaster of Thayer. Thayer was and is a private country day school on the south shore of Boston... twenty minutes south maybe. It's where I grew up). She said go speak to Mr. Benelli and ask him for a job teaching pottery to the high school seniors.
I didn't see much of a choice. I hated going to where my mother worked and asking for a job. I really wanted to go to New York but I needed to save up before I went. I caved. I figured I could tell Mr. Benelli... "sure, I know how to throw a pot"... spend a couple of semesters, stash some cash and then split and live my version of West Side Story.
So that's what I did. I got the job. I lied about being able to pot and I spent the first four weeks teaching the kids how to coil and fire and after school I locked the door, pulled the shades and taught myself how to throw. (It's all labor. It's awkward at first but it's like leaning how to chord a guitar. After fits and starts one day you just find yourself humming along).
Part of the pot job was curating The Thayer Academy Art Gallery.
Benelli's wife was friends with Carl Andre. And had already arranged for him to come and have a show. Andre had grown up in the neighboring town of Quincey.
I took a crash course in minimalism.
The gallery had a total budget of three hundred dollars which we spent buying bricks for Carl Andre.
Andre showed up in May of '73... just as I was leaving... just as I was trying to get up and go.
He spent three days hanging around the Thayer.
He'd just come from his alma mater, Andover Academy where he'd also done a show.
He introduced me to his parents and we all went out to lunch. It was something like Red Lobster.
We went to the local dump where he rummaged through a pile of scrap metal.
He bought several strips of steel.
I paid for them.
He never used the bricks that we spent all our budget on. (I was kind of impressed by that).
He placed the strips of steel on the floor in grids, in patterns.
We went out to lunch again, just him and me and he told me about working on the railroad and reading Walt Whitman.
He told me how he use to go up to the Quincey Quarry's when he was a kid and sit and look at the rocks. He liked how they got configured after they were mined and abandoned.
He hit on my girlfriend.

I have to say I was taken by the way he worked. That kind of "post-studio" way of making art was new to me. It felt liberating. You could work anywhere.

I got to NYC late that summer. August of '73. I went there with two grand in my pocket and figured I could last three months... four tops. I got a sub-let on Prince and West Broadway for ninety a month. Outrageous. Full of roaches. And fuck me, I couldn't afford it.

I didn't know a soul. I knew a guy across the street... Bevan Davies. Barely. I had met him in Maine thru an old teacher of mine. He had a twin brother Jordan. Identical. I couldn't tell them apart. I would go three, four days without talking to anybody. I would sleep all day, get up, do some drawing, go eat dinner at Food and then drink at the Spring St. bar. I'd come home at four in the morning and watch the one channel that was still on...

I met Vito Acconci at that same group show in Vienna. He was good guy to. He also extended his friendship. He was a poet first then an artist. Now he's an architect.

When your new it's great to meet people who are older and who have been there and are not full of shit.

Carl Andre was full of shit. Okay... he murdered the pedestal and took sculpture off the plinth but he was still full of shit.

Nothing wrong with being full of shit.

Those stories about working on the railroad and reading Walt Whitman sound like something I would make up. And as far as hanging out at the quarries? The only people who hung at the quarries were guys with duck tails and chopped cars and girls who put out. You had to be in a fucking gang to hang at the quarry. People who went to Andover Academy didn't hang out at the quarry.

She came in thru the bathroom window.
I don't what happen to Carl Andre's wife. No one will. Lawrence Wiener says Carl didn't have anything to do with her death, and that's enough for me.

I went on a blind date. Her name was Linda. We said over the phone we'll meet at the coffee shop. When I got to the coffee shop I thought I saw Linda. I said, "Are you Linda"? She said, "Are you Richard"? I said, "Yes". She said, "I'm not Linda".

The were several times when I would be walking back to my sublet alone, late at night, after last call, four in the morning, and I would run into Carl Andre. He was probably doing the same thing. It was always on West Broadway. No one around. It was amazingly peaceful. The first couple of run-ins I would stop and say. "Hey Carl... it's me, Richard..." He'd just stare at me in his bib-overalls and walk on by. He would look right through me... X-ray vision. The way he would stare was what bothered me the most. His eyes told me, "I'm fucking Carl Andre and I already know the time".

Can I bum a cigarette? That's all I wanted.


11/10/2012

After Dark: The Family Feud meets The Dating Game meets The Newlyweds... black bars and fuzz-tone blockers optional...

If you're not doing anything Tuesday night December 15 try checking out my new XXX-rated game show on Showtime called "Who Gives A Shit." They'll be a revolving number of hosts... Jimmy "Dynomite" Walker, Peter Marshall, Gabe Kaplan, Jenna Jameson... and the "Who" girls... Pia Zadora, Kelly Madison, and Karen Black will be doing their best Vanna White. The show will be based on tired old formulas from Who Do You Trust, Truth Or Consequences, Queen For A Day, What's My Line, and You Bet Your Life. (The Price Is Right as of this date will not be sampled. We are waiting for the rights to Password and Hollywood Squares). Kinescopes from Your Show Of Shows, The Ernie Kovacs Show and Here's Johnny have been licensed. Contestants will "emerge" from behind a specially designed "canned" curtain by John Dogg. Upon entering, they will be "naked as a blue-jay" and will then proceed to re-dress themselves with every correct answer. (Starting with socks and stockings). Depending on the way panelists vote, the contestants can and will be subjected to being stroked, whipped, kissed, fondled, pissed on, blown or eaten out, sucked or pinched, clamped and masturbated. (If a contestant misses three questions in a row they'll be fucked in the ass... or if they use a one time "life-line"...piled on by a secret guest).
"The Envelope Please"
Questions: one example...Who was the actress who starred in the 15 min. "smoker film" in 1956 called Smart Alec"? Bonus question: "Who did this actress eventually "date" in 1962"? Double bonus: "What put her in federal prison for five years"? Clips from Smart Alec will appear on screen while a clock's "face" covered with a hairy ass tick tocks away. We tried to get The Roots for the house band...but they were already booked on the Jimmy Fallon show... Later we lucked out and were able to contract Woody Woodbury for the first seven shows. We have put out "feelers" to Joe Franklin, Pinky Lee, Soupy Sales, and Richard Dawson to be the "announcer" but none have returned any of our calls. (This lack of "return" may be due to the fact that three out of our four "feelers" are dead). We hope to talk to Scotty Crane, the son of Bob Crane, and try and get him to give us the rights to his father's super 8 "swinger" films. We would like to use the footage from these "home movies" as our lead in and also as background when the credits roll. The show will be up tight and out of sight. Laugh-In meets Boogie Nights. Says special consultant Diane Hanson, sex editor for Taschen Books, "Bang a gong and get it on...'Who Gives A Shit' will finally answer the question: who wants to be a millionaire"?

If you would like to appear as part of the "studio audience"... please contact: mervgriffen@i'dliketobuyavowel.com
Tickets for the "cat bird" seat will be auctioned off live before each show. The Pleasure Is All Mine singers will be there to guide you through the bidding.
Those lucky enough to score this "throne" will be provided, (after they sit) with their very own bean bag. (They will need it. The throne will be based on Mr. Ed's phallus reportedly used by Peggy Guggenheim, Annie Sprinkles, and Dom DeLuise to pleasure themselves into thinking they were Spartacus.
Canned yuks, guffaw's, and belly laughs will be sampled from out-takes from Hee Haw, Sanford and Son, Dobie Gillis, and The Bill Dana show.
A trailer from Howard Johnson's "Heave Ho" will round out the festivities. ("Rounding Out" "To Say The Least").
Due to advertising restrictions on cable tv... the bills will be paid for by The Dump... a company owned and operated by Dude 'O Liscious, a company owned and operated by Exactly One, a company owned and operated by Mistress Shaun, a company owned and operated by Shell Vaseline, a company owned and operated by A Zillion Uses...
The National Anthem will be sung by holograms of Andy Williams, Marc Bolan, and Imogene Coca.
We're in need of a theme song. Submissions can be sent to Confusion Is Sex. Guaranteed Lyrics will be performed by Pistolero Andsons.

11/9/2012

The Gig Is Up:True of False.

Richard Prince tries to asshole his way into mammary mecca Scores... only to be velvety roped the fuck out of there. "You can't come in here dude... Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock are inside taste testing their constituents genital histories. Sorry, the place is sold out". Prince misses out on the party favors. Prince bummed. Prince last seen instagramming pics of himself lap dancing with John Currin's Bea Arthur.

Memo to artists who use stencil: Check out... Sigmar Polke: We Petty Bourgeois!
Specifically his 1978 painting "GDR-Emblem". His 1971-75 painting "Lucky Luke and His Friend".

White Paintings: Per Skarstedt... just opened yesterday...has it really been twenty years? Painted them all at 94 Reade St. Tribeca. Before Tribeca turned. I remember renting a room in my loft to Sheryl Lee who played Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks. Also rented a room to Tim Burton's first wife. (Walked into her room once and the walls were covered with whips and chains. Immediately retired my leather chaps). Spent every night eating mash potatoes and spinach at The Odeon. Blacked-out on martini's for Mother Cabrini. Had "movie nights" on Thursdays. Richard Flood, Larry Clark, Matthew Barney, Christopher Wool, Glenn O'Brien would bring their favorite five minutes of film or video for "viewing pleasure". For lunch, I once went 165 days in row there eating chicken fried rice from a Chinese take-out. I painted and silkscreened these paintings on the floor. My back got fucked up from bending over all day and I had to kill the pain with pain killers. Pain Killing Paintings.

These paintings have never been shown in the states. A few times in Europe. In a museum in Wolfsburg. And in Berlin at a show called Metropolis. Shows that no one remembers. Eleven "white paintings" were made for Documenta in 1992? (I don't know the number of the Documenta. I managed to buy back on of these painting and lent it to Skarstedt's show).
Francois Pinault owns the four 'white paintings' I made for Metropolis. Tall paintings. Over 15ft. I remember seeing them when he showed them in Venice at one of his Palazzo's. When I made them I had my assistant Daphne Fitzpatrick video the making. This was 1993? A couple of years ago I looked at the footage for the first time. It's either the worst documentation ever made... fuzzy, out of focus, under lit, and with sound you can hardly hear and understand... or maybe it's good... unwatchable... maybe, instead, you have to see the paintings, in person... either way, the White Paintings are art made and from and for, what I like to call, Even Lower Manhattan...

11/8/2012

Howard Johnson says, "declares" Art Forum and Frieze magazines irrelevant. "I pick them up and I don't know what the fuck I'm reading. Frieze is especially frustrating. It's like I'm in Sharon Lockhart Anne Hamilton Bill Viola world. The soup is goo! I thought Documenta was suppose to be limited to every five years. Didn't they get the message? Rod Serling might have something to do with it... I don't know... it's like Rod The Mod is occupying the minds of the editors and sprinkled quicksand in their "marginalia". I wish they'd do more historical pieces. Or publish blasts from the past. Not another story about artists dipping elastic bands in paint and flicking them at gessoed canvas. Sure the ads in Art Forum are everything... but please don't take any out on me".

Howard Johnson will be hosting the first episode of Fulton Ryder's X-rated game show WHO GIVES A SHIT on Showtime December 16th 4am central 16pm Pacific. For more information please contact wesleysnipes@artforum.com.

11/7/2012

Your Jammin Me Up Here... Or... Could You Get Your Head Out Of My Ass..

Am I suppose to me nice to people who write about me?
There's a guy out there, his name is Andrew Russeth or Judd Tulley or something like that... I think it's Russeth...(doesn't matter, they probably both share the same brain)... and this guy Russeth describes himself as a "cultural observer"... (whatever the fuck that is)... And this guy Russeth keeps thinking about me and puts out what he's thinking for anyone stupid enough to listen. (I'm probably the only one who reads his crap so it's not like I've got anything to complain about). I think Russeth also works at Metro Pictures. (Now that's creepy). Anyway... four years ago he started drooling over my Tiffany Paintings... Well "drooling" might not be the operative word... more like heavy breathing than drool.
He went on to say (after he stopped breathing), that the Tiffany Paintings were a dead end... empty... and clearly the work of an artist who had run out of ideas. MMM MMM GOOD.
So... I would like to continue to "run aground" and come up empty and instead quote, (re-bird) my friend and artist Howard Johnson when he said, "Richard, you know better than anyone... get use to eating shit or your going starve"

Which brings me to... the cliche of the "starving artist"... Eat shit or die! (Right after this cliche you should hear a drum roll followed by the theme song to Groucho Marx's game show You Bet Your Life...

Which brings me to... I'd like to extend to both Andrew Russeth and Judd Tully an invitation to appear on my new X-rated game show Who Gives A Shit... soon to appear on Showtime. (A three show deal has recently been optioned). If they would like to appear as contestants please contact Fulton Ryder at richardprince.com. They can appear separately or fuse themselves together to Vincent Price their "easier said than done" shit...

File under: "I hadn't thought of it"... I wonder if Manzoni ran out of ideas when he canned his own shit...

Slappin Da Base Mahn: Tomorrow on the show... Filling in the Canal Zone. Laundering money. What happen to Noreaga? Why I can't vote. Growing up with spooks. Ham radios. W1UOH uncle oboe how. Who or what was sending out the SOS signal in the movie On The Beach?


11/5/2012

No. Yes. Yes. No. Yes and no. Maybe. I don't know. I don't care.
That's the trouble with art. It's subjective. It's in "the eye of the beholder". Yea that crap. "I know what I like". Well Richard Prince is here to tell you... "you don't". You don't know shit and never will. Why can Prince say this? Let me answer this question with another question. How many Clifford Stills are hanging in living rooms between the city of New York and Chicago? One? Two? Sixteen? That's the answer. None of the above. And I don't even like Clifford Still that much. I like the "idea" of Still... but if you've seen one you've seen them all. And I don't even mean that. That's just another lazy-ass way of talking about art. Clifford's main problem for me is that he didn't allow any other art to appear in his immediate surroundings. Studio or house. Even beach house. All that was there was his work. Not even a fucking postcard. What was he afraid of? Sure, you might call that kind of discipline, "focus"... but Richard Prince calls it "fear".

Richard Prince is the one to decide whether its good or not.
It's up to me. I don't need another badge. I am the art world. Stay out of it. Your not welcome. It's none of your business. And unless I ask you your opinion your point of view will be wrapped up in a garbage bag, put in a trash can, (with the lid solidly secured), and left out in an alley way down in Even Lower Manhattan. I don't need an audience. What I do is for me and a few. Very few.

Franz Kline is another idea that Richard Prince likes. The paintings are great too... don't get me wrong... "don't get me wrong" sounds like something I should say once a week.. I fell in love with Kline after I saw one of his paintings hanging in Hugh Hefner's bedroom. Is that anyway to fall in love with art? Probably not. I never said "Richard Prince is a genius". (But he does have unusual feelings) I think I said that about Richard Prince somewhere in an early "writing"... somewhere in Why I Go To The Movies Alone... Try getting that book, the hardcover... the limited edition with a dustjacket... I beg you, if you find one please sell it back to me...I have maybe two... it's one of my publications that has its own dreams. There were 150 signed and numbered copies that were suppose to see the light of day but the publisher, Tanam Press, disappeared along with it's publisher, Arthur Cravan... Arthur was last seen dropping off Lew Welch at Pettycoat Junction near Mayberry just down the road from Don Knotts farm... where was I?

"Where Was I?" (That's a phrase I should repeat every couple of months). Rain it in. Slow it down. You can coast from here. Breath... and yes, I know I misspelled "rain"...

Back to Betty Kline... Hugh Hefner's bedroom was the room I wanted to live in. I wanted to live in a bedroom and never leave a house. And it would be double pleasure if the house was mine. That's why I like the idea of Hugh Hefner. He did his job in his bedroom... in his pajamas... in his robe, smoking a pipe... and looking at pictures of naked ladies all day. Wait a minute. Is that true? Is that what he did? God Damn! And he did all that with a Franz Kline hanging on his wall.

Question: did Hefner invent the centerfold? And if he didn't, who did?
One of my first impressions of Kline was a photograph of him in his 14th St. loft staring out a front window with his foot up on the sill with a cigarette in his hand. Whatever there was in that photograph I wanted to be in...

And now I'm in it and I'm not done... Before I leave two "birds" with one stone...

Fat Fuck Dean Valentine has recently "blown up". A spokesman for Valentine said his recent "gain" prompted the West Coast collector to declare himself a "desert island". Richard Prince says he will refuse to pay his docking fees.

Dave Hickey, the American art and culture critic, (sort of)... has just received the Barbara Cartland Award for his book of essays, Air Guitar. (Is that what it was? A book of essays? I don't remember reading it. That's sort of like him talking about art without having actually seen it). Anyway, he will soon be amongst those precious few to be granted exclusive rights to Barbara Cartland's Pink Collection.

One more "bird" for tomorrow... John Dogg would like to know why is Tom Wolfe taking art "tips" from his idiot daughter...?

11/6/2012

Woke Up Got Out Of Bed, Dragged A Comb Across My Head.. Thoughts on the New Social.

I talked this morning to John Dogg about his "gripe" concerning Tom Wolfe's daughter. "It wasn't a gripe", he said. "I'm angry". "Besides", he said... maybe idiot wasn't the right word, the right description... maybe I should of said idiotic".
Angry... why is Dogg angry? He doesn't know. All he does know is that it's a relief to get it out. He told me he stopped going to his shrink. "It wasn't doing any good. I can't spend the rest of my life talking about my mother". I told him some of the best artists were "mamma's boy's". Cezanne. Mondrian. Warhol. His anger he said is part of the of the way he deals with his lot in life. "It's just part of me, and I'm not going to try to ignore it or hide from it, or take it to bed with me. I want a good night's sleep and when I wake up in the morning I'm not going to turn the other cheek". Wolfe's daughter blind sided me. Double-crossed me in an interview. She shit in my face. I know I can't even the score and shouldn't even try... I should ignore her and point a bone at her and do some secret voodoo shit to her... but this is just as good. Besides the rules have changed. The 'mediums' are here. The New Social has leveled the playing field".

Apocalypse Now

Four weeks ago I lost power at my place upstate. During a rainstorm. Lots of hale. Big winds. The telephone pole came down in my yard. It had been there for thirty years. I owned it. It's the only one in the yard and it's maintenance is my responsibility. We were three weeks without electricity. I don't know anything about electricity. I've probably bought sixty seventy flash lights during my lifetime. Maybe more. I've put all kinds of batteries in them and when it comes time to use them they never work. I lived upstate for fourteen years. Two thousand feet in the air. Just behind the Catskills at the end of a dead-end dirt road. During those fourteen years I've learned to live with the "elements". Not really my choice but you adapt and end up buying every snow removal piece of equipment known to mankind. (There's was a snowstorm on April 1st in 1998 that blanketed my yard with 38 inches of that fucking "white rain". I spent the morning removing the stuff riding my tractor slash plow and ended up getting sunstroke... very unpleasant... right up there with shingles and food poisoning).

Ice storms were the worst. They usually come in November. There's no snow. Just freezing rain that attaches itself to every surface in your immediate surrounding. You can't move. You stay in the house next to the wood stove and candles. Your "landlocked" for three days.

You learn about fuel. The difference between gas, diesel, propane. Generators are a luxury. You start off with one that's gas fed. It'll run up till six hours before it needs a re-fill. Pain in the ass. You can run your fridge and boiler and a couple of lights. You shut it down when you go to sleep and fire it back up in the morning. You don't want to get out of bed.

In January of 2001 we had thirty inches of snow on the ground and it turned unseasonably warm and it rained, so the warm temperature and down pour and melting of the snow flooded our yard and basement and our stream became a river and overflowed into our barns. One of the paintings I lost was a fairly large Meyer Viceman... I don't remember how many art works I lost that day but I mention the Viceman because the sides of the painting had already been eaten by mice.

One of my building got hit by lightning. Went up in smoke. The building was going to be part of the Guggenheim. Most of the art in it had been removed for re-modleing but there still several pieces installed. The lightning storm happened in August of 2006? I remember getting the phone call. "Lightning"? "Are you sure someone didn't start a fire"? (We have our share of meth labs in the area). What are the fucking chances? Sure... I know building get hit by lightning, but fire too? (Turns out the strike went right into the junction box that was located in the garage).

I learned about

11/7/2012

First let me send out a huge FUCK YOU to Artinfo.com for "re-blogging" my "blog". This isn't a blog asshole... (I don't know what the fuck artinfo is so that's why I'm guessing singular")... It's "birdtalk". And I've been "birding" since 1990. Check out early issues of Purple Magazine if you don't believe me. And yes, 'twitter" stole my idea and even had the one testicle to use a "bird" as their icon. But did I sue them? No. And why? I don't believe in copyright. You can take, steal, use, borrow, share and "appropriate" any idea I have and I won't give a shit. It's a free concert and I've got plenty of ideas. (More where that came from). And why do I "bird"? So I can empty all the stupid crap that piles up in my head before it explodes into fingernails on a blackboard and drives me insane. (I would take drugs again but I've got a family to feed) Do I care if anybody reads this shit? Does the Pope Smoke Dope? No. For all I care, artinfo.com can fuck the horse that I rode in on and fuck the bartender too. So now that's out of the way, let's begin...

11/6/2012

Woke Up Got Out Of Bed, Dragged A Comb Across My Head.. Thoughts on the New Social.

I talked this morning to John Dogg about his "gripe" concerning Tom Wolfe's daughter. "It wasn't a gripe", he said. "I'm angry". "Besides", he said... maybe idiot wasn't the right word, the right description... maybe I should of said idiotic".
Angry... why is Dogg angry? He doesn't know. All he does know is that it's a relief to get it out. He told me he stopped going to his shrink. "It wasn't doing any good. I can't spend the rest of my life talking about my mother". I told him some of the best artists were "mamma's boy's". Cezanne. Mondrian. Warhol. His anger he said is part of the of the way he deals with his lot in life. "It's just part of me, and I'm not going to try to ignore it or hide from it, or take it to bed with me. I want a good night's sleep and when I wake up in the morning I'm not going to turn the other cheek". Wolfe's daughter blind sided me. Double-crossed me in an interview. She shit in my face. I know I can't even the score and shouldn't even try... I should ignore her and point a bone at her and do some secret voodoo shit to her... but this is just as good. Besides the rules have changed. The 'mediums' are here. The New Social has leveled the playing field".

Apocalypse Now

Four weeks ago I lost power at my place upstate. During a rainstorm. Lots of hale. Big winds. The telephone pole came down in my yard. It had been there for thirty years. I owned it. It's the only one in the yard and it's maintenance is my responsibility. We were three weeks without electricity. I don't know anything about electricity. I've probably bought sixty seventy flash lights during my lifetime. Maybe more. I've put all kinds of batteries in them and when it comes time to use them they never work. I lived upstate for fourteen years. Two thousand feet in the air. Just behind the Catskills at the end of a dead-end dirt road. During those fourteen years I've learned to live with the "elements". Not really my choice but you adapt and end up buying every snow removal piece of equipment known to mankind. (There's was a snowstorm on April 1st in 1998 that blanketed my yard with 38 inches of that fucking "white rain". I spent the morning removing the stuff riding my tractor slash plow and ended up getting sunstroke... very unpleasant... right up there with shingles and food poisoning).

Ice storms were the worst. They usually come in November. There's no snow. Just freezing rain that attaches itself to every surface in your immediate surrounding. You can't move. You stay in the house next to the wood stove and candles. Your "landlocked" for three days.

You learn about fuel. The difference between gas, diesel, propane. Generators are a luxury. You start off with one that's gas fed. It'll run up till six hours before it needs a re-fill. Pain in the ass. You can run your fridge and boiler and a couple of lights. You shut it down when you go to sleep and fire it back up in the morning. You don't want to get out of bed.

In January of 2001 we had thirty inches of snow on the ground and it turned unseasonably warm and it rained, so the warm temperature and down pour and melting of the snow flooded our yard and basement and our stream became a river and overflowed into our barns. One of the paintings I lost was a fairly large Meyer Viceman... I don't remember how many art works I lost that day but I mention the Viceman because the sides of the painting had already been eaten by mice.

One of my building got hit by lightning. Went up in smoke. The building was going to be part of the Guggenheim. Most of the art in it had been removed for re-modleing but there still several pieces installed. The lightning storm happened in August of 2006? I remember getting the phone call. "Lightning"? "Are you sure someone didn't start a fire"? (We have our share of meth labs in the area). What are the fucking chances? Sure... I know building get hit by lightning, but fire too? (Turns out the strike went right into the junction box that was located in the garage).

I learned about

11/5/2012

No. Yes. Yes. No. Yes and no. Maybe. I don't know. I don't care.
That's the trouble with art. It's subjective. It's in "the eye of the beholder". Yea that crap. "I know what I like". Well Richard Prince is here to tell you... "you don't". You don't know shit and never will. Why can Prince say this? Let me answer this question with another question. How many Clifford Stills are hanging in living rooms between the city of New York and Chicago? One? Two? Sixteen? That's the answer. None of the above. And I don't even like Clifford Still that much. I like the "idea" of Still... but if you've seen one you've seen them all. And I don't even mean that. That's just another lazy-ass way of talking about art. Clifford's main problem for me is that he didn't allow any other art to appear in his immediate surroundings. Studio or house. Even beach house. All that was there was his work. Not even a fucking postcard. What was he afraid of? Sure, you might call that kind of discipline, "focus"... but Richard Prince calls it "fear".

Richard Prince is the one to decide whether its good or not.
It's up to me. I don't need another badge. I am the art world. Stay out of it. Your not welcome. It's none of your business. And unless I ask you your opinion your point of view will be wrapped up in a garbage bag, put in a trash can, (with the lid solidly secured), and left out in an alley way down in Even Lower Manhattan. I don't need an audience. What I do is for me and a few. Very few.

Franz Kline is another idea that Richard Prince likes. The paintings are great too... don't get me wrong... "don't get me wrong" sounds like something I should say once a week.. I fell in love with Kline after I saw one of his paintings hanging in Hugh Hefner's bedroom. Is that anyway to fall in love with art? Probably not. I never said "Richard Prince is a genius". (But he does have unusual feelings) I think I said that about Richard Prince somewhere in an early "writing"... somewhere in Why I Go To The Movies Alone... Try getting that book, the hardcover... the limited edition with a dustjacket... I beg you, if you find one please sell it back to me...I have maybe two... it's one of my publications that has its own dreams. There were 150 signed and numbered copies that were suppose to see the light of day but the publisher, Tanam Press, disappeared along with it's publisher, Arthur Cravan... Arthur was last seen dropping off Lew Welch at Pettycoat Junction near Mayberry just down the road from Don Knotts farm... where was I?

"Where Was I?" (That's a phrase I should repeat every couple of months). Rain it in. Slow it down. You can coast from here. Breath... and yes, I know I misspelled "rain"...

Back to Betty Kline... Hugh Hefner's bedroom was the room I wanted to live in. I wanted to live in a bedroom and never leave a house. And it would be double pleasure if the house was mine. That's why I like the idea of Hugh Hefner. He did his job in his bedroom... in his pajamas... in his robe, smoking a pipe... and looking at pictures of naked ladies all day. Wait a minute. Is that true? Is that what he did? God Damn! And he did all that with a Franz Kline hanging on his wall.

Question: did Hefner invent the centerfold? And if he didn't, who did?
One of my first impressions of Kline was a photograph of him in his 14th St. loft staring out a front window with his foot up on the sill with a cigarette in his hand. Whatever there was in that photograph I wanted to be in...

And now I'm in it and I'm not done... Before I leave two "birds" with one stone...

Fat Fuck Dean Valentine has recently "blown up". A spokesman for Valentine said his recent "gain" prompted the West Coast collector to declare himself a "desert island". Richard Prince says he will refuse to pay his docking fees.

Dave Hickey, the American art and culture critic, (sort of)... has just received the Barbara Cartland Award for his book of essays, Air Guitar. (Is that what it was? A book of essays? I don't remember reading it. That's sort of like him talking about art without having actually seen it). Anyway, he will soon be amongst those precious few to be granted exclusive rights to Barbara Cartland's Pink Collection.

One more "bird" for tomorrow... John Dogg would like to know why is Tom Wolfe taking art "tips" from his idiot daughter...?

11/3/2012

Bird Is The Word

Memo To Turner: Leave my art alone. The works of art of mine that were damaged... do not try to clean, repair, or destroy. "I like them that way". Memories of Second House. Who says lightning doesn't strike twice.

Memo to Artinfo: Fuck you and the horse you rode in on.

Vito Acconci follows Lance Armstrong down West Side Highway. Armstrong in a speedo... Acconci in a wetsuit. It's a photofinish. Tie goes to the artist.

Half Gallery invites Syrian Rebels to "hole" up... "it'll be like a vacation".

Howard Johnson reconsiders Thomas Hirschhorn. Say's he wishes he didn't have to.

Canal Zone paintings still locked up in Brooklyn warehouse. Prince says he tried to move them to Chelsea before the storm.

John Dogg isn't interested in re-fund. Says he likes his "cans" empty. No deposit. No return.

Richard Prince teams up with the soft drink Arizona. Prince accused of selling out. (For the seventh time, maybe eight) In his "offense"...he says, "The only thing I know about Arizona is that I've got an uncle there in the witness protection program".

God Save Freddy Mercury.

File under "my good buddy". Matthew Barney ups the ante: Reconstructs Norman Mailer's Brooklyn home and floats it down the Hudson. Al Green's "Take Me To The River" can be heard wafting out of Mailer's living room...

Calling all Avalanche artists.

Christopher Wool knows all to well...

Buyer Be Good: Sandy(Heller) said to flip water stained foul smelling dirt encrusted Howard Johnson to Phillips de Pury...confirmation not forth coming... at the moment there's no law or regulation governing Howard or Phillip.


10/26/2012

It Ain't Me Babe

What do they call a "royale" with cheese? I did not paint Kate Middleton topless on a pumpkin. If I was going to paint someone on a pumpkin naked I would of painted either Rupert(Pumpkin) or the very lovely Nettie Harris.

10/23/2012

The Hollies. The Byrds. The Buffalo Springfield. Put them together and you get Crosby Stills and Nash. Went to see them last night at the Beacon. They were there to perform their first album from start to finish. I'll always remember seeing that album cover. When did it come out? 1968-69? The photograph on the cover was down home. Very unrock like. I wasn't much of a fan until Neil Young joined. But I aways loved Stills and Crosby's voices. And they still have them. (I was reminded too what an amazing guitar player Stills is). "I almost cut my hair today". Killer song. It was great to see sixty and seventy year olds getting up and out of their seats last night and letting their freak flag fly...

10/24/2012

A Real Bronx Cheer... a new book by Dan Colen came out last night. The launch party was at Smalls in the West Village... a "small" jazz club that's literally underground. The book party was MC'd by Ron Delsner with special guests Glenn O'Brien, Stephanie Seymour, David Blaine, Uncle Dirty, and the ghost of Phillis Diller. Ron's been around show biz so long when he started out nickels were made out of wood. (rim shot) The book was published by Fulton Ryder and the event was organized Fabiola. (I'm trying to convince her to keep it single). Fulton Ryder would like to thank Dan and Ron for putting on a great show and showing us how to put our faith in good revolution.

10/18/2012

It's funny to see a work of art that you've made but never shown... that you've kept behind and out of sight and then see the very same thing "show up" and done by another artist. And I'm not talking about a variation. I'm talking the "same thing". It happened to me today when I was looking at the "outdoor" sculpture that's accompanying FIAC spread out in the Tuileries. (I wasn't there. I was looking at the art on line) The piece was a sunken boat. A row boat. The edges were the only thing above the surface and the continuous line they made turned the shape into an erotic opening. Maybe "opening" is the wrong description. The outline was more of a negative and the harmony of the object and its surroundings made perfect sense. It was actually better than what I had done in one of my upstate ponds. A couple of years ago I was making a video where part of the story called for the sinking of a ship. I didn't have a ship but I had a rowboat and I basically scuttled the tiny vessel until the only thing showing were it's edges which formed a perfect cunt like shape. (I wanted to sink one of those large cruise ships and have everybody jump overboard but Shelley Wintered it so I made due with what I had). The sunken row boat stayed like that until the cold set in and the pond froze and when the Spring came and everything thawed it had disappeared into the depths and the only way you could view it was to scuba your way down to its graveyard. I was glad to see the piece in the Tuileries today. It was simply called "Boat". As I said a better boat. Its purpose was more abstract, more artful and straightforward. It's kind of a relief. I guess I can leave my boat in its graveyard and leave it to its own adventure.


10/17/2012

Last night I asked my wife how to spell the name Robert Hughes. She asked me "why... did he say something bad about you"? I told her yea, but that had nothing to do with what I wanted to say. "Bad about me...that I'm use to." What I wanted to say was how I reacted to a text I had just read... about the fact that Robert Hughes was to be "remembered" at the Met tomorrow. That's exactly what the text said. She said, "and what was your reaction?" I told her my reaction was, and what I wanted to say was... "Robert Hughes is to be "forgotten" tomorrow at the Met". She kind of physically recoiled and said, "that's pretty mean. Why are you even bothering to say anything? Don't you always ignore these irrelevant people?" I said, "yea, but this reaction about being "forgotten" came pretty quickly. It rings true." "Yea, but even so", she said, "it's still mean spirited and shallow". She said, "didn't he write for Time magazine? I mean Time magazine... come on. They wouldn't know how to spell the word cat if you spotted them a "c" and an "a"." "Yea, your right", I said, "but it's hard to put it out of my mind. And why the Met? The fucking Met? What the fuck is that about? I don't see the Met remembering any of my dead friends." "Don't go there", she said. I said, "Where"? "The Met"? "No" she shouted. She shouted "shit head" too. Now she was pissed at me. She started to walk away and leave the room. She was in no mood to listen my "bother". One last turn before she went upstairs, "What you should do if you can and I'm sure you can't is forget about yourself".

There's Something About Mary

I wish women would stop shaving their pubic hair. Let it grow. I hate it when the pussy is shaved. It's awful looking and it looks painful. It so much better when it's covered by lots of hair. It's suppose to be that way. The more hair the better. A big nest of hair. Crimson flames. High and mighty traps. And while your at it, why don't you let the hair under your arms grow back too. Black bra... terrorist or friend?

THE JET GENERATION

Or how would they put it... Generation Jet? The process of ink jetting images on paper and canvas has been around now since the mid-eighties... maybe even sooner but I know I first came to use it when I printed a monochromatic joke painting and tried to give, (to feed) the process something that was hard to read. (Jeff Koons had used the same process a year before to print advertisements on canvas.) Back then you would farm an image out to a commercial lab and a technician would put the image thru, (scan) a commuter and the hardware would literally blow out four colors onto a chosen surface. My choice of giving the lab a monochromatic joke was deliberate. I knew the software would have problems reading the color. The results would be "mixed" at best. The interpretation of the mono(ness) would be off. I would get a color that was different, not the same, "almost" true. Fast forward now. Now you have your own printers, in your own room, and the control in your own hands. (At least you think you do.) And if you so chose to, you could use the printer, the process, the ink, as your medium. Well someone did. And that someone is now the subject of a mid-career retrospective at The Whitney Museum. The Whitney isn't open today. Tomorrow? Yea, tomorrow. Maybe tomorrow I can go over and see Wade Guyton's show. Right now he's the guy who's printing up the storm.

Base. Basic. Base(ism). Based on what? Grounded. Subtext. Non-fiction. Rooted in fact. Sort of. Almost. Almost real. As a matter of fact.... Versus... fabulation, made up, gesture, raring to go, ego, I'm a believer, psychic jujitsu, mumbo jumbo religious story telling fairy tales and in dreams begins responsibility... There's a clear choice. And I've made mine. I like my art on something. In other words... I like my art based.

10/16/2012

The Jet Generation (Part Two)

Wade Guyton. I went to see the show. Just got back. There's something about the Shroud Of Turin there. At least that was my immediate take... that's what came to mind. The way the Shroud is supposedly "printed" from the fluids that flowed out of the body of Christ. Anyway... I liked the more recent work. The Untitled 2011 four part piece, all over grey, (Is it four parts? They wouldn't let me take photos with my I-phone even though I did) And I liked the giant piece in the back room... the two part stripe piece. I think with these two pieces he gets it rolling. The printer as medium makes more sense and the fact that there's less to look at is more satisfying. I also know that the older the printer the less I like the surface of what's printed. The way the ink from these older models sits on the surface has always looked like bad xerox. These new printers are doing a better job. I didn't get the sculpture or the chairs and the plywood pieces. I didn't think there was enough room for them. He should been given two floors. The floor, (the third) is way to small for all that he put up. But thats not to say I couldn't get off and get around...(we all make the same mistake as artists... we always put to much in). I was even able to dismiss a "public tour" that started just as I walked in off the elevator... I mean what do I have to do... make an appointment? Get the fuck out of my art world. Don't you know that art is for the very few? If I had been the curator it would have been the stripes, the monochromatic grey's, and the black X's. That was all I would of wrote. That would of been (as they say in the Jet Generation) "rad".

10/17/2012

Last night I asked my wife how to spell the name Robert Hughes. She asked me "why... did he say something bad about you"? I told her yea, but that had nothing to do with what I wanted to say. "Bad about me...that I'm use to." What I wanted to say was my reaction to a text I had just read about... about the fact that Robert Hughes was to be "remembered" at the Met tomorrow. That's exactly what the text said. She said, "and what was your reaction?" I told her my reaction was, and what I wanted to say was... "Robert Hughes is to be "forgotten" tomorrow at the Met". She kind of physically recoiled and said, "that's pretty mean. Why are you even bothering to say anything? Don't you always ignore these irrelevant people?" I said, "yea, but this reaction about being "forgotten" came pretty quickly. It rings true." "Yea, but even so, it's still mean spirited and shallow". She said, "didn't he write for Time magazine? I mean Time magazine... come on. They wouldn't know how to spell the word cat if you spotted them a "c" and an "a"." "Yea, your right", I said, "but it's hard to put it out of my mind. And why the Met? The fucking Met? What the fuck is that about? I don't see the Met remembering any of my dead friends." "Don't go there", she said. I said, "Where"? "The Met"? "No" she shouted. She shouted "shit head" too. Now she was pissed off at me. She started to walk away and leave the room. She was in no mood to listen my "bother". One last turn before she went upstairs, "What you should do if you can and I'm sure you can't is forget about yourself".

There's Something About Mary

Wade Guyton. I went to see the show. Just got back. There's something about the Shroud Of Turin there. At least that was my immediate take... that's what came to mind. The way the Shroud is supposedly "printed" from the fluids of the body of Christ. Anyway... I liked the more recent work. The Untitled 2011 four part piece, all over grey, (Is it four parts? They wouldn't let me take photos with my I-phone even though I did) And I liked the giant piece in the back room... the two part stripe piece. I think with these two pieces he gets rolling. The printer as medium makes more sense and the fact that there's less to look at is more satisfying. I also know that the older the printer the less I like the surface of what's printed. The way the ink from these older models sits on the surface has always looked like bad xerox. These new printers are doing a better job. I didn't get the sculpture or the chairs and the plywood pieces. I didn't think there was enough room for them. He should been given two floors. The floor, (the third) is way to small for all that he put up. But thats not to say I couldn't get off and get around... (I was even able to dismiss a "public tour" that started just as I walked in... I mean what do I have to do... make an appointment? Get the fuck out of my art world. Don't you know that art is for the very few?) If I had been the curator it would have been the stripes, the monochromatic grey's, and the black X's. That would of been (as they say in the Jet Generation) "rad".

10/8/2012

"Christopher Columbus. Sailed around the sea without a compass". That's a lyric from a Jim Kweskin and the Jug Band song. Maria Muldaur played fiddle for them. She later had hit song on college radio that had something to do with the Sheik of Araby. I once saw the Jug Band open for Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention. It was a strange choice for an opening band. But I didn't care. I had my copy of Avatar in my hands and peyote in my brain. Frank Zapper looked like he should have a name like Zapper. He looked like the character that Muldaur's hit song was about. (Maybe it wasn't such a strange juxtaposition after all) The concert was in Boston. And it was 1968. I remember this concert every time Columbus day roles around.

10/7/2012

What does a painter do when the sun is eclipsed? A lot of art... a lot of great art... comes out of a crisis. When Picasso reduced his palette to blacks, grays, and whites in the early forties the Nazis were occupying Paris.

From the "everybody must get stoned files". Wahhabism is the Midnight Express of religions.

Nazis steal art. Nazis kill the Jews who own the art. Nazis sell the art. Fifty/sixty years later what do they call the sold art? "Misappropriations".

The Pope's Butler is sentenced to 18 months in prison. Scroll down and read Howard Johnson's text The Pope's Butler.

There was no such thing as the Picture Generation. And anybody who says there was is either a Scientologist, a Christian Scientist, a Mormon, a pomp or a circumstance or someone who now believes in relational aesthetics.

Christo's Gates. In central park. Please... tell me they've been removed...Fuck me. I told you I didn't want to start thinking about Christo.

10/6/2012

Luc Tuymans. Chris Ofili. Peter Doig. And I guess you could even add Marlene Dumas. I love washes and stains and bleeds... but didn't Francesco Clemente already cover this kind of "style"? Why are people leaving him out of the discussion?

Ai Weiwei. Yes the guy is fighting China. And yes, he's the only contemporary Chinese artist that's doing anything remotely interesting. But I think he should forget about what American "conceptual" artists did in the seventies. Maybe he should start by locking away those Avalanche magazines he brought back to the mainland. If he'd like I have a nearly complete run of Art Rite's he could borrow.

Columbus Circle. Re-sculpting. Re-sculpting Columbus. It's a good idea. I think. Sometimes I can't decide. Maybe it's to clever. It's certainly "appropriate". Maybe I wish Chris Burden or Vito Acconci had done it. I drove past the "circle" the other day and looked at the all the scaffolding. I said to myself okay... next week I'll come back and walk up the ten flights and take a look. It's got me looking at bronze's on stone pedestals. I hope it doesn't start me thinking about Christo.

I going to buy a Leroy Neiman this coming weekend. I'm serious. There's an especially juicy one up for sale in Texas. I know what your going to say... "is he fucking kidding"? But I'm not... and... AND... I don't care. Jimmy Crack Corn. A rat's ass mother fucker. I guess my buying the Neiman can pretty much cancel out the three "birdtalks" I just posted above.

10/2/2012

When Sartre published "Being and Nothingness" in 1943, there was only one review, and that was by a friend Jean Paulhan who joked that the bulky work would be useful for weighing fruits and vegetables. That same year, (1943) Picasso would reduce his palette to black, grey, and beige reflecting his feelings towards the Nazi occupation of Paris. Sartre and Picasso would become friends along with Camus and Beauvoir. The four new friends would spend hours hanging out on the Left Bank in cafes. A new play was scheduled to debut on March 19, 1944. The author wasn't Camus or Sartre or Beauvoir. The author was Picasso. The Nazis had refused to allow him to exhibit his paintings in Paris, "but they had said nothing about plays".

Amy Timberlake, "The Dirty Cowboy"... is currently being challenged in schools and libraries. It's one of many books being celebrated by Banned Books Week now in its 30th anniversary year.


9/12/2012

No is more.
Purple Magazine.
Bettie Kline.
The Question Paintings.
Arizona.
Monument Valley.
Max Blag.
The Can Paintings.
Catcher In The Rye.
New Cowboys.


9/7/2012

The chance juxtaposition of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table.

Eluard's wife, later Dali, better known as Gala.

I went on a blind date. Her name was Linda. I told her my name was Richard. I told her to meet me in front of the drugstore. When I got there and saw a woman standing there I went up to her and she said, "are you Richard"? I said, "yes". She said, "I'm not Linda".

Karl Max's mother once told him, "I wish you would start making some money, instead of writing about it".

Pegeen Guggenheim

The sound track to the movie the Social Network.

"Let it all hang out". That's not even close, NOT EVEN CLOSE to what Robert Crumb does.

Jonathan Winter, the comedian, is also a painter. He once painted a painting called "The First Day Of War". It was a landscape. Just a sky and a horizon. In the middle of the sky, in the middle of the painting there was a single bomb, falling, pointing down.

8/30/2012

A black man was arrested in Montgomery Alabama the other day for carrying a concealed weapon. He had a knife stuck in his back.

8/28/12

The Pope’s Butler

On Monday, a judge at the Vatican ordered the former butler of Pope Benedict XVI to stand trial, setting out charges for the first time that accused him of sexual deviancy. Specifically, fondling the Pope's private parts and inserting rubber bands into the Pope's anus to retrieve fecal matter that was then, when removed, "flicked" at the Pope's heavy clerical robes. At first, the brown stains on the garments appeared random and abstract, but upon closer inspection the secretions began to take on an "outline" that "articulated" the same kind of “ghost like apparition of Christ” that some say is embedded on the Shroud of Turin. An anonymous source told me that when placed under ultraviolet light the pattern on the robes appeared to "steam" and emit a foul odor as if something dead had not died. The accusations against the butler, Paolo Gabriele, were set out in a 35-page indictment that for the first time also accused a second Vatican employee, Claudio Sciarpelletti, a 48 year old "computer expert,” of aiding and abetting the crime. Previously the Vatican had said Mr. Gabriele was the only person suspected of sexual perversion. Mr. Sciarpelletti however, was described in the indictment as a "close friend,” not an accomplice whose only role was to make sure any extra discharge from the Pope's anus and erection was saved, bottled, and dated in order that the mix of fluids from the Pope's "back and front" could be soaked into wafers that would be then presented and placed on the tongues of pilgrims for future communions. The Rev. Federico Lombardi, the Vatican spokesman, said that the two friends described themselves as "the immortals"... a reference that was sympathetic to a forbidden organization of neo-Nazis based in Munich, Germany.

Benedict could at any time pardon the two lay suspects although it was not clear if he would do so. In any event, Father Lombardi said no trial would start before late September because the tribunal is in summer recess until September 30th. The two men would most likely be prosecuted in a single trial, Father Lombardi said.

Mr. Gabriele whose tasks included serving the Pope's meals and helping the Pope select altar boys for afternoon trysts, also admitted to frigging and fellating the Pope before bedtime. According to Gabriele..."The Pope has enormous testicles that hang in a pimply sack somewhere south of a lint filled groin. The testes are outsized to the point where the fulcrum of their seesaw would jab into my cheek like a well-delivered rabbit punch. Their movement reminded me of a pit and a pendulum. When I gulped the last squirt from the pontiffs member I would black out from the repeated blows to the side of my head. Another duty of mine was to transfer all of the Pope's pubic hair and place the curls under both of his arms. I would snip the pubes with specially blessed and wine-soaked scissors and attach the hairs with my saliva to his underarms. After they dried and fell away, I would restore them to his special pillow. It would take approximately two years of cutting and stuffing to achieve the proper fluff.”

The indictment, said Mr. Gabriele, had confessed to taking certain "sensitive" documents. The sensitivity at this time can only be guessed at, but sources close to the prosecution said at least one of the documents alluded to soiled undergarments that were used as restraints, masks, and a substitute for toilet paper.

The case has shaken the Vatican since January when leaked documents detailing claims of "devilish behavior" began appearing in Italian newspapers. In May, an Italian journalist, Gianluigi Nuzzi, published a book suggesting material based on sheaves of documents stolen from the Pope's office, highlighting the Pope's displeasure at the ways in which Jews and Arabs fornicated and procreated. Apparently, there were references to the lack of hygiene between the sexes. The derogatory term "towel-head" was used when describing the way the two cultures douched. There was also some misunderstanding on the Pope's part in wrapping his thoughts around a woman's cycle. He believed, it seemed, that the blood from a period was used to block light on stained glass windows. The Pope suggested this "filtering" of light contributed to the darkening of heaven. When asked about the report, the Pope’s only response was to chant and cheer like a monkey... the same kind of sounds favored by Italian soccer fans.

In May, Mr. Gabriele was arrested. At the time, he was handcuffed to the steering wheel of the Pope-Mobile located in an underground garage on Vatican grounds. Mr. Gabriele told investigators that he had taken the documents because he believed that the Pope was not adequately informed of "evil and corruption.” That the Pope had "gone too far" and that he, the butler, wanted to "expose and expunge.”

The former butler was said to believe that a "shock," perhaps through the media, would provide a "healthy" way to bring the church back on the right track. In some ways, he told investigators he saw himself as an “infiltrator” acting on behalf of the Holy Spirit. Asked why he was found "tethered" to the steering wheel of the Pope-Mobile when arrested, Gabriele smiled and said, "It's where the Pope would send me after I dogged his arse. He told me I would be safe there. It's bullet proof.”

The indictment also said that a search of Mr. Gabriele's apartment at the Vatican had unearthed items including a check for $123,000 made out to the Pope along with a golden nugget and sixteenth century translation of Virgil's "Aeneid". Found too, was a papier-mâché sculpture of a crucified Jesus made out of pages torn from James Joyce's Chamber Music (it's rumored that Joyce selected Chamber Music as the title for his first book of poetry after hearing a prostitute urinate in a chamber pot). When asked to explain his behavior and how he planned to respond to the charges, Mr. Gabriele told investigators that he had "no excuse" and only removed those items due to "degeneration of my disorder.”

Howard Johnson re-porting from an article based on a report that appeared in the Herald Tribune by Paola Nuvola.

8/24/2012

Who wrote the famous ditty Funculi-Funicula? Tony Danza? Ted Danza? Luigi Denza?

Young Land. Imitation One. End Apathy. Definite Hate. These are the names of bands. If I painted these names on canvas... should you love the painting, hate the painting, not care about the painting?

James Joyce's title to his poetry collection Chamber Music was inspired while Joyce was entertaining a lady of easy virtue who retired behind a screen to relieve herself in a chamber pot. Upon hearing the sound of her "stream", Joyce declared, "now theirs a critic"...

I'am always disappointing guests at party's... I'am neither inclined nor able to shine socially.

'Why should I regret my talent? I haven't any... Chance furnishes me what I need. I am like a man who stumbles along; my foot strikes something, I bend over, and it is exactly what I want.'

Virginia Woolf described Ulysses as 'an illiterate, underbred book... the book of a self-taught working man... egotistic, insistent, raw, and ultimately nauseating.'

'Piracy... Commerce without its folly-swaddles, just as God made it'. Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, 1911'.

'There was a young man from St. John's/ Who wanted to Roger the swans./ "Oh no," said the porter,/ "Oblige with my daughter,/ The birds are reserved for the dons." '

To make something an entirely new thing... it can neither be what the eye sees or the ear hears. It can be only what the mind imagines from moment to moment.

Woman's undergarments are a powerful fixation. I carry a pair of women's draws (from a doll) in my pocket.

Footheated faces. I have found my new whetstone.

"If I am a sun, as you say, it's a sun which is often under an eclipse."

As an artist, I am against every state.

The word "amanuenses" will be the subject of a new "definition" painting by Howard Johnson.

My story? You want my story? Fear of betrayal, unfulfilled marriage, sexual frustration, thwarted ambition, the smothering effects of religion, cruel and casual bigotry, the wretchedness of wasted lives.

I painted nurses as a protest against myself.

7/29/2012

Let it bleed

I wouldn't mind re-creating the stage that the Stones played on at Altamont. When you see it in the film Gimmie Shelter, it's pretty close to the ground and not at all that big. In other words, it was small and thrown together with crappy plywood the night before the concert. There was no "moat" or fence or other barrier around it to keep the fans away. I guess I could hire a Hell's Angel to walk around on it and keep a look out.

Chuckwagon

Walter Pichler passed away on July 16th. I remember seeing a catalogue of his "fantastical structures" in 1975? Anyway I loved them and the way he drew them and the fact that he retreated to his farm and built "underground" bunkers on his property. I loved them so much that I aped his style of drawing back in the mid-seventies and made several "after" Pichler drawings myself. I used hot-press drache paper and a number two-h pencil to do them. I stretched the paper with water-tape and applied a watery acrylic that would "pebble" on the surface of the paper. Fast forward... I just completed a small house shingled with "vinyl" long playing records on my own property upstate called "Loud Song"... It's just a simple one room structure, maybe 150 sq. ft. at most, with the most amazing views looking back at the Catskills. I'm thinking now maybe I should hang some of my Pichler-like drawings in the "Song"....

7/4/2012

I've never been a fan of "performance art". Well, maybe the word "fan" isn't the way to describe it. Indifferent is perhaps a better description. But I have to say after seeing the HBO doc. on Marina Abromovic I was kind of bowled over by the simplicity, and all the elemental stuff in that last piece of hers she calls The Artist Is Present. I think the title is brilliant. I can't think of a better way to describe what she was doing. And what she was doing hardly anything. I liked the way she muted her performance so that the audience became the real performers. Some of the relationships between her and her "sitters" almost became religious. (I wonder if she thought about providing them with a day bed instead of a chair.) I've always thought that piece she did with her boyfriend Ulyee back in the seventies of just her and him standing naked in a doorway so that when and if you went thru the doorway you kind of had to step in sideways and maybe even the stepping in sideways might make you brush up against their nakedness. That piece for me is the spiral jetty of performance art. And while I'm on the subject, don't forget Valerie Export. I met her once out in L.A. I've always loved that photograph she did where she's sitting down full frontal holding a gun and has cut a hole in the crotch of her jeans exposing her vagina and a big bush of pubic hair... I mean the whole vibe of that image was so "right on" late sixties up against the wall motherfucker don't cry for me Patty Hearst. The way she "electrified" her hair in that picture kicked the ever loving jams out of the park. On an aside... Valerie's "tits" in a box piece is in the top ten. Just to re-aquaint... she strapped a cardbox over her chest and if you gave her something like a dollar you or a friend could put your hands in the box and, well... cop a feel. There's great footage of her walking around somewhere like Prague and having complete strangers coming up to her and fondling and holding and squeezing and basically just getting it on with breasts. (Oh and and)... before I forget one more performance piece. David Hammonds selling snow balls on St. Marks Place. I don't know what to say about that one. To good to be true? Pure? Perfect? (This "oh and and" could go on) Chris Burden hiding on a platform he built into the corner of a gallery in the late seventies in NYC, (I forget the gallery... it was uptown). The platform was built "kittycorner" and just high enough off the floor so when and if you stood in the gallery you wouldn't know he was there. I mean I was there. I remember. I was. Standing, looking up, wondering... is he there? I'm here but is he? I once did a performance piece in the late seventies. At a place on Broadway in Soho called the Gromet Theater. It was pretty lame. I put my girlfriend on a swing, naked... and I laid underneath her in a black suit and as she passed over me swinging, she would mark me with a piece of chalk. It had something to do with Jesus but exactly what I forget. Flesh? Sacrifice? Pulling a "dater" from a fishes mouth? As I said pretty lame. (At least the audience got to see a naked lady). Maybe that performance was why I've always been a bit ambivalent about the art form.


7/1/2012

"Horsing Around"

The Priest says to the Rabbi: "See that alter boy over there? Want to fuck him?" The Rabbi says, "Fuck him out of what?"

When Tim Curly, the official in charge of the campus police at Penn State was informed that a ten year old was butt fucked in a Penn State locker room shower by Jerry Sandusky, he insisted that the nature of the assault amounted to little more than "horsing around".

"Horsing around"?

A horse walks into a bar. The bartender says to the horse... "hey buddy, why the long face?"

"A horse is a horse of course of course". Mr Ed.

I'm not sure where this is going. I guess my going has something to do with that "description". I understand "why a duck"... but why a horse? When I read Tim Curly's description... that he was "under the impression" that the assault was little more than "horse play"... I couldn't stop thinking about those words. Curly's "impression" was what? A different color? Or was it something more artful? I don't know. I don't have a clue. I'm at a loss for words.

6/30/2012

"This morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How it got in my pajamas I don't know." Marxism, 303 Gallery NYC June 29 thru July...

6/29/2012

"Garbage and trash are pages of history just as valid in their own way as generals and kings." Richard Brautigan

"When I had Kennedy assassinated I didn't mean to get my good friend John Connelly wounded." Lyndon Baines Johnson

"How to make art part two. You take a glass eye and ask your wife to put it in her vagina. You take a photograph of the glass eye in your wife's vagina and call it "
'The Hairy Eyeball'." Howard Johnson

6/24/2012

Panaman is the name of a new superhero. He's Panamanian. He was unearthed when the Americans were down in Panama digging the Panama Canal. He's 115 years old but looks 35. He calls himself a Zonian. His power is not unlike that of a diplomat. He's immune. To what, I cannot say. (I've already tipped off the anti-aging angle). I hope to debut this character at the next Comic Con... The one thing I can tell you is that "he's" down to earth. He will not "transform". If he looses an arm it will not grow back.There will be no magical surge or pulsating lights emanating from anywhere on his body. He will not be leaping over buildings in a single bound. If he needs to fly he will take a plane. (They'll be nothing StarTrek about the guy) Right now he will be "protected". The where's and when's and how's of this "protection" will be revealed after he gets some much needed sleep. All I can say is that his "actions" will be a result of the knowledge he gets from reading twenty, thirty, forty books a day. All you need to know is that he knows... and what he knows is how he survives... One more thing... he likes the jungle...

6/23/2012
According to the Taliban, who claimed responsibility for the killing, "the people who were killed were dancing". "Dancing is strictly illegal and prohibited in Islam".

The bulkhead of the ship the Lightburne, which sank in 1939 about 35 miles east of Montauk on Long Island has over the years been encrusted with blue mussels. The "look" of the wreck reminds me of a new Damien Hirst sculpture.

Someone named Ken Johnson wrote in the New York Times today an article on LeRoy Neiman. "The Art of LeRoy Neiman Made a Splash But Never Waves". I think this "hack" Ken Johnson is himself covered in blue mussels and doesn't dance. Either that or he's never been in a position to claim responsibility...

6/20/2012
Sofa Size
Leroy Neiman passed away yesterday. He was an artist that was linked to Playboy Magazine and the sports world. He created a character called the Femlin for Playboy back in the late fifties that continues to appear in the publication to this day. I own one of the earliest "studies" of this "character/cartoon" and have it hanging next to a copy of Sonic Youth's Daydream Nation. (The album is signed by Gerhard Richter, whose painting appears on the cover) Neiman's work was never embraced by the art world or its critics. He didn't stand a chance. He was a stud muffin. A guy with a mustache that crossed his entire face. A bon-viant. A rake. A man about town. He was right out of central casting. I always thought if Hollywood were to cast an artist for a movie they couldn't of gone wrong casting Leroy. Neiman wore ascots and favored Nehru jackets. He was never without a cigar known as a "charute" (not sure of that spelling) The guy had style. Not only in the way he presented himself but, if and when you look up "painting style" in the dictionary, Leroy Neiman's name is part of the definition. Neiman, in an interview in 1996, said he didn't care what the critics said about his paintings. He knew he wasn't going to be part of the "inner circle". (What can you say when your muse is Leon Spinks) October and Art Forum were never going to put his work on their covers. The best he could hope for is a "listing" in Elle Decor. Neiman's paintings were a concoction from a fanciful dandy. A head-on collision of abstract expressionism and Monet's water lilies. (Monet was Neiman's favorite painter) They were done quickly, in a day, sometimes done on camera, right in front of a television audience that would burst into applause after he "flourished" his name and signature on the bottom right of the painting. Yes, Neiman was a showman. A master of ceremonies. Step right this way. His paintings? To me? It's simple...they're naked and they dance.

6/13/2012

This coming Tuesday I have a meeting with the folks from HBO. They want to talk to me about my idea for a new game show. It's called "Who Gives A Shit". I think the fact that they don't have game show in their line up appeals to them. Either that or they just want milk my brain and be polite. (Humor me? I don't think so...Fuck me over and steal my first born is more like it). My pitch to them will be simple. Holograms of dead TV stars mixed in with real live celebrities. For example Bob Krane and Richard Dawson, (dead) saddled up next to Mason Williams and Jimmy Walker. I was thinking about Art Linkletter as the host, but I think he's still pissed about his kid thinking he could fly out of a ten story window when he was on LSD. (Kids say the darndest things) That's all I can tell you right now. I'd let the cat out of the bag but then I'd have to have a cat to let out of a bag. This much I can tell you. The show will be a serious mash up of Soupy Sales. Queen For A Day. Uncle Floyd. Glenn O'Brian's TV Party. And the Joe Franklin show. As they say in La La Land... "stay up, stay hard, stay tuned"...

6/1/2012

When Richard Brautigan was told he wrote like a sixteen year old, his reaction was "really?"...

Brautigan was "gruesomely loathed to talk critically" but when asked to comment on the new James Jones book he said, "terrible, everything is in there, nothing is left out."

Out now... "Jubilee Hitchhiker", (the life and times of Richard Brautigan), by William Hjortsberg.

And if you happen to come across this post Mr. Hjortsburg, I read your books Alp and Grey Matters years ago and really liked them.

5/30/2012

Jacob Zuma, the president of Johannesburg? Cape Town? South Africa?... all three? had his portrait done by Cape Town artist Brett Murray. The painting portrayed Mr. Zuma "in a Leninesque pose with his genitals exposed". Mr. Zuma has four wives and more than 20 children. The artist titled his portrait of Mr. Zuma "The Spear". This is something that the artist Mark Flood might interested in commenting on. If he is aware of this story I would welcome his thoughts. I asked my new artist friend Howard Johnson his take on the matter and he said, and I quote... I'm still a bit puzzled over the word "genitals".

(On another matter) To Russia with love: Let my Pussy Riot go!

Henry Ford once said "I wouldn't give you five dollars for all the modern art in the world".

William de Kooning would spread his arms out and say, "this is all the space I need"....

Is there such a thing as God Paintings?

When I was growing up the Lone Ranger and Tonto were an important part of my day.

Lew Welch, the beat poet, once worked for an advertising company in Chicago in the fifties, and came up with the jingle..."Raid kills bugs dead"....

It's hard to ignore the influence of Rod Serling's Twilight Zone.

Lothar And The Hand People was one of my favorite Boston bands.

In 1954, Lord Buckley wrote a little book of verse called "Hipporama"... He later appeared on the television show You Bet Your Life, (hosted by Groucho Marx)...

Two of my favorite painters are Jonathan Winters and Phyllis Diller...

The Diggers opened up a store in 1967 in San Francisco. Instead of charging the customer money, everything was free...

I'm going to be giving a talk, a "lecture" at Yale soon. Sometime in late April. I would like to talk about photography and how it coats and pours over what's out there in front of me...

I just had a show in Malaga... at the Picasso Museum. I always liked the fact that Picasso grounded his work in the figure. And... when he was in his "rose" period, he used black and white photographs of Greek and Roman sculpture as source material for inspiration. The way the photographs would "shade" the features of the marble and stone figures was something that he certainly "eyeballed"...

I wonder if Jack Parr and Oscar Levant were on a t.v. show today... would people watch it?

What was Victor Hugo's real name?

The movies Blue Velvet, Bullitt, The Fast and the Furious, Drive Angry... have something in common...

A book of my writings has just been published... Collected Writings Richard Prince... it was put out by Foggy Notion Books... it has one of my earliest "writings"... 'Bomb Dream Enameled'... it starts off the book... it's about what artists did during World War One...

Clement Greenburg, the eminent art critic, the bearer of the torch for abstract expressionists, once said, on camera, in an interview that was part of the movie Painters Painting..."Picasso never did anything after 1929". It's true. I'm not making it up. Check it out yourself if you don't believe me. He actually said that! The movie is on DVD. Painters Painting...

5/23/2012

I was walking by Phoebe's restaurant on the Bowery the other day and was reminded that Jeff Koons first apartment was right around the corner. I met Jeff in 1977 and visited him in that apartment. It was on the first floor, right behind the restaurant. He showed me his "inflatable's"... these store bought flowers that you would blow air into to make them complete. I asked him why they looked "limp", not fully blown up... and he said, "I don't want to stretch them out and damage their 'newness'..." I thought right then I was dealing with an artist I could grow up with.

About a year later Jeff moved into an apartment on Fifth Ave around 18th St. I asked him how he could afford the rent and he told me he couldn't. "All I had to do was come up with the first and last month... it will take them a year to kick me out".

When he was asked to do something in the windows at The New Museum on 14th St. he decided to show his three vacuum cleaners. New ones. These were part of a series he called "The New". I remember when one was accidently plugged in he told the Museum staff that they would have to buy him a "new" one. The one that got plugged in was "used". This request, (it wasn't really a request...it was a demand) caused a big stink. The New Museum didn't have much of a budget and didn't get the point. It was only plugged in for a moment they argued. The mess was cleared up when of all people my pill doctor who use to sell me "ludes" stepped up and made a donation... (the doctor lived right across the street from the Museum and was an early supporter) Jeff believed in the "new". I believed it too. To this day I think Jeff's idea of the "new" is the real deal.

When I met Jeff he was selling subscriptions, "memberships" at MOMA. He use to stand in the lobby and meet and greet the "oldies and goodies". It kind of reminded the way the character Max Blaylock use to sell shares in the Broadway play Spring Time For Hitler in the movie The Producers. Jeff would stand there, dressed in jeans and a vest and a short sleeve shirt and a bow tie and over the bow tie he would add on a regular tie. So it was a tie over a bow tie. I did a portrait of him in 1982 with this get up, this look... He also sported a pencil thin mustache. The same one that John Waters sports. Jeff's comedy was serious.

After Jeff had his first show at International With Monument in the East Village... around 1984-85, I was living at 303 Gallery, with Lisa Spellman and she got Jeff to show his basketball tanks in the gallery. The bedroom was separate from the gallery space so when I woke up during the night to go the bathroom I had to walk by the exhibition. I'll never forget walking by those basketball tanks. I had seen Jeff put them together and couldn't believe the crazy science involved and when I walked past them the light from the street lamp outside on the street cast... "bathed" the tanks with an other worldly glow. It made them look alive. A new form of life. Something un-nameable. The last place on earth that God didn't finish.

I wanted to buy one of those "tanks", maybe the one with two balls... but I didn't have the money. I couldn't afford one. I think the "two ball" was thirty-five hundred dollars, ($3,550.00) I was also a bit hesitant about how I would curate such an object. It wasn't until years later, when I walked into a collector's home and saw one of Jeff's "tanks" with the basketball sitting on the bottom of the tank without any of the "liquid" holding it, suspending it in place that I realized... fuck... that's how you curate it. When you want it "filled"...one of Jeff's assistants will come over and fill it. Until then you can just show it off "high and dry". Okay I didn't have the De-Niro... but still, the opportunity knocked and all I did was piss the pot.

5/24/2012
Out now... The Diggers, Notes From A Revolution: The Diggers and the Haight... published by Fulton Ryder Press in association with Foggy Notion Books... with essays by Peter Coyote, Kristine McKenna, Naomi Wolf.


5/22/2012

My father was never home. He was always out drinking. He saw a sign saying DRINK CANADA DRY. So he went up there.

I my brother just married a two-headed lady. Is she pretty you ask. Well, "yes and no".

I never had a penny to my name, so I changed my name.

I eat politics. And I sleep politics. But I never drink politics.


THE QUESTION PAINTINGS

What band did Sam Shepard, the playwright, play in, in the mid-sixties? Hint, it wasn't the Fugs. Bonus... what instrument did he play?

Who said "art is like stuffing a mattress"?
1. DeKooning
2. Matta-Clark
3. Manzoni
4. Walt Kuhn
5. Franz Klein
6. None of the above.

Peter Atkins, the actor who played opposite Brooke Shields in the movie Blue Lagoon, had both male and female genitalia. True or false?

Bob Crane who starred in Hogans Heros was... murdered? Died of natural causes? Committed suicide? Is still alive and living in Naples?

Who wrote the hit song The Beat Goes On? How long did it take to write? And what happen to the writer?

Samuel Jackson's character Jules, in the movie Pulp Fiction, says the "N" word in the movie how many times?
1. 25 times.
2. 75 times.
3. 389 times.

Who's famous picture is on the can of the Arnold Palmer soft drink?

Who chases ambulances? That's right!

If you like biographies check out Peter Coyote's "Sleeping Where I Fall"... published April 15, 1998 Counterpoint Press


5/20/2012

This past weekend I went to see the Christopher Wool show in Paris. Palais de Tokyo. (the modern part) Pretty amazing. It really lays out the argument and answer, that Wool's the best painter painting. Wool did his own curating. That's probably why it's a great show. All the violent tenderness is there. To quote Herta Muller... "you can think all kinds of things. But you can't know for sure".

If I owned a small piano bar, somewhere in the Florida Keys... I'd hire Woody Woodbury to tickle the ivories. The fantasy comes from watching an old Elvis Presley movie. He's on his way to Key West when his car breaks down and instead of getting the car fixed and continuing on... he decides to stay put and set up shop right by the side of the road. I think he opened some kind of hot dog stand. He'd sell you a dog and sing you a song.

According to my daughter, The Morning Benders.

"Is it safe?"

Marmottan... in the 16th, Paris. There's more than sixty Monet's in this house. Sixty!

Get your motor running. Dan Colen's motorcycles thrown down in front of the Segram building on 53rd St. What are you rebeling against? What you got? I took some photographs of the piece this afternoon. Then I went up to third floor of the Lever House, just across the street and took some more shots. There was a bar-bee-que for Dan on the patio. Pee Wee Herman was there. I asked him if he helped Dan tip the choppers over...

There's something about the basketball player Blake Griffin. It not just his dunks. Or the way he looks. It's more about the way he acts. His act is a new kind of cool. Strange cool. I don't know how to explain it. His advertisements for Ikea are weird. It's like the producer assembled him from different dead people and jump started his brain and this mesmerizing charming monster becomes your next best friend. The guy never gets rattled.

5/15/2012

I met Frank Geary in Hong Kong. I was there for an exhibition. I was complaining to him that I was disappointed by the way the city looked. I thought it was going to be more "Bladerunner". He said to me, "you were misinformed". The other day I passed by the building he designed on 11th Ave. and 20th St. This is one of my favorite buildings in NYC. I couldn't tell if they had removed the signs that the occupants put up on the facade, to advertise their occupancy. I had done a u-turn off of the West Side Highway and from sitting in the car couldn't get the right angle to check out if this un-warranted "addition" had been left up or taken down. This building is like a big piece of beautiful sculpture and shouldn't have anybody in it anyway. At least not anybody who needs to advertise themselves.

5/12/2012 (PART II...ON THE PAINTING)

Jonathan Meese. Jules de Belincourt. Barneby Furnas. Dana Shultz. Heran Bas. Andre Butzer. (Alfred Hitchcock)

Christian Holstad vs. Anish Kapor

Vik Muniz?

5/13/2012

Blake Griffin... you can see him... in your rear view mirror.

5/12/2012

BIRDTALK... was published in Purple Magazine almost twenty years ago?

ON THE PAINTING...(instead of the Road)

He's rarely seen seen wearing anything but a vintage suit and is fastidious to the point of keeping an electric shoe polisher on every floor of his building.

There was something he said about himself about being an information junky, churning out bad Xeroxes of images we once saw.

Drawn to the combination of science and art, of the pragmatic and aesthetic, of rigorous facts and intuitive leaps.

I like Carl Jung's cyclical interpretation of human existence.

Space-frame architecture... to create geometric patterns with light-filled inhabitable rooms.

Going to the Go-Go.

The father I climb, the more I can see of your ass.

Dont' knock the rock.

5/8/2012
I went to the Fontana show at Gagosian on 24th St. this past weekend. There were to many people there and I kept getting interrupted. I had just run into Adam McEwan and he told how much he liked the show. He said something like, "every young artist should see this show then go back to their studio and quit making art for a year". I started the show by going the wrong way, backwards I was told... I didn't know there was a forward, a beginning. I got annoyed. Luckily I had seen a Fontana uptown the day before, alone in a room, (also at Gagosian). It was the only art around. And I was the only person looking at it around. Sometimes my physical situation affects the way I feel about what I'm looking at. In any case, this Fontana made me collapse and fold in and swoon. There were four "slashes" on a grey background and the painting was framed in what looked to be a "vintage" frame. The painting was plain gorgeous and made me want to stand and stare and look. I wanted to take it back to my house and live with it.


5/5/2012
Praise the Lord!

The Holy Land Experience... part of the Trinity Broadcasting Network... what is referred to as "Prosperity Theology" (not bad)...

Who loves you baby?

Janice Crouch and her husband Paul Crouch run the world's largest Christian television network. And it's tax free. They have this "theme" park in Orlando Fla. (a side business)... kind of like Disneyland for people who believe in God and the Bible. Not that different from the Vatican. And it's tax free. The TBN, as it's called, is a pot-porri of Mormonism, Scientology, Christian Science, and Catholic mumbo jumbo. And it's tax free. Janice is known for wearing large bright pink wigs. (Anyone remember Tammy Faye Baker?) And the wigs are tax free. Paul and Janice live in "his and hers" mansions one street apart in a gated community in Newport Beach Calif. And it's tax free. People of faith gave them $93 million in 2010. And it was tax free.

Shakespearean Echoes. Non-profit practices. Excess compensation. Tax exempt money.

Janice Crouch is seldom without her two little white dogs housing them in an air-conditioned sanctuary that was originally a costly motor home. Warning sign...SHE HAS LOTS OF PORTRAITS OF HERSELF HANGING IN HER HOMES.

Religion. What is it good for? Absolutely everything...

5/4/2012
I just heard from Bill Bailey. He's not coming home.

I just saw the Picasso show at Gagosain. It's still out of sight.

I had a talk with Christopher Wool last night. It's always great to run into Christopher. I told him I checked out his new catalogue and that in couple of weeks I'm going to see his show in Paris. Christopher is one of my favorite artists. I wouldn't mind trading places with him, just for a day... just to see what it would be like to chop that mountain down and take the pieces and make a new island...

5/3/2012
I scream. You scream. We all scream for ice cream.

4/28/2012
"Everything Must Go", a movie based on a Raymond Carver short story. Very good movie, very "steady". (Netflix's with the family). At the end of the movie you hear the Band playing Dylan's, "I Shall Be Released"... I couldn't help thinking about Levon Helm, the Band's singer and drummer. It's sad... his passing is such a loss. "They should have never taken the very best".


4/27/2012
Again at the Frank Stella show. Did he really "duct tape" the edges of his "notch" paintings? Had a preview of the Picasso show at Gagosian. Right now it's "out of sight..."

Had a visit with James Nares the other day. Went to his studio in Chelsea. His new paintings are rightfully beautiful. He's using metallic paint. I've known James for a while and I've had one of his small paintings on paper hanging in a bedroom for years. I'm not sure what happened but a light bulb went off in my head and I said to myself... you got to go visit James and really look at what he's doing. He manages to loose and find in every painting. He also showed me his new film "Street". Soundtrack by Thurston Moore. If you ever get a chance to see it, see it. So fucking good. It produces, (just like his paintings)... a general lowering of wakefulness...

If you don't know the work of Walter Dahn...don't say you don't know it.

Went to Dan Colen's new studio in Tribeca. Love the guy. Love the work. "Mr. Christian"!!! Dan's setting sail. He keeps throwing all the bread fruit overboard.

My wife woke me up last night. Said I was having a bad dream. Something about an art auction. She said I kept mumbling, repeating, and asking about... "where's my five percent?".... "where's my five percent?"

Stephane Hessel... wrote a small book called "Time For Outrage".... "to create is to resist, to resist is to create"....

Don't forget... Walter Benjamin, (German philosopher) committed suicide in 1940 to escape the Nazis...

Jewish man to his friend: "If I live I'll see you Thursday. If I don't I'll see you Friday".

I just heard from the art police! They wanted to know about an "edition" to one of my "Cowboy" photographs. At first I didn't want to talk to them. But they kept hammering away. Pressing me. Trying to get me to remember what I did or didn't do thirty years ago. I told them that the "cowboy" in question was probably a gift. Since no one bought them thirty years ago I gave it away. I told them to leave me alone. Mind your own business. I said to one of them, "where were you thirty years ago when I owned half a stereo".

4/21/2012
Dan Colen just gave me a "Whoppie Cushion" filled with cement. I'm not sure if I'm spelling "whoppie" right. But who cares? Dan removed the "whoppie" from the cushion. It's the cement that matters.

A guy walks into an apartment and looks at the Warhol, the Basquiat, the Hirst, and the Prince... and says, "that's not interesting". I ran into the guy at a party the other night and said to him..."I am the art world".


4/20/2012
Went out to Bushwick yesterday. Spent the afternoon with Peter Hopkins. Google him and check out his artwork from the early to mid-eighties. He used to show with American Fine Arts when it was on 6th St. in the East Village. We talked about Colin Deland, (Colin use to run American Fine Arts) and how much we miss him. I had Peter up to my place upstate to repair a painting of his that I had purchased from Colin... it had been badly damaged... mice got to it... I was embarrassed to tell him... but he was cool with the crappy curating and actually did all the repairs himself. He took me to Roberta's for lunch... a great place to eat, right around the corner from his "gallery" that he runs out there in the far reaches of Brooklyn.

I went back to see the Frank Stella show this morning. I know Stella talked about how he figured out the "edges" of his paintings. That's what concerned him the most. The edges. Me, I kept looking at the "middle" of his paintings. That's the place that I kept looking at. The middle. Right down the middle. The center. I'd love to talk to him about the middle of his paintings. I can't imagine that he ever would... want to talk about it... the middle... but who knows? Maybe I could take him to Roberta's out in Bushwick, have a pizza, talk about the middle...

I'm a Knicks fan. Started watching them again two years ago. Maybe it's about being back, living in the city. Years ago I used to bet on basketball but when I found out that some of the officiating was "tainted", "compromised", "in the bag"... I stopped. Part of the pleasure of watching, was knowing I had money on the point spread.................. so where was I? Oh yea, the betting. I didn't like betting or watching after I found out that some of the referees were on the take. I always suspected it, but didn't know until it came out in the paper. The allegations turned me off to watching all sports. Soccer, forget it. The World Cup? Are you kidding? Completely corrupt. Anyway... when they started to put instant replay into the mix it got me interested in watching again. I've never really been able to saddle up next to any game that has a judge. That's why I like golf. Golf has two things going for it. One it's handicapped... so it provides a level playing field and two it's one of the only artificial "make-ups" that doesn't have some kind of official making judgment calls. It's up to the player to call a penalty... and... and this is the most important part of the game... you either put the ball in the hole or you don't. It's that simple. There's no one calling the game. And no one holding up cards with numbers on it telling you your game is a seven or a nine or even a perfect score. I know all the arguments against the game. It's boring. It takes up to much time. It's elitist. The dress code sucks. It's a game for big fat white guys. Yea, maybe some of that is true... but what most people don't know is that the game is set up perfectly for betting. Waging mucho dollars on each hole is it's best kept secret. As I said before, the game is handicapped. Doesn't matter how well you play you can play someone who shoots a seventy even though you might not be able to break one hundred. No matter how bad you play you can still bet money against a superior more seasoned player. If someone is a "scratch" player... (a player who shoots par... somewhere around seventy-two) and you come along and play to an average round of ninety-five... the par player will give you 18 strokes. An extra stoke on every hole. So if he shoots a four on the first hole and you shoot a five... you tie the hole. No blood. The money, the bet, roles over to the next hole. The whole reason to play the game (besides exercise) is playing for money. So, if you like to bet, if you like playing a game without an umpire, if you like to walk... who knows? Grab a hybrid, a seven iron, a wedge, a putter, and take the subway out to Pelam and walk onto one of the public links out in the Bronx... you just might find something that's down to earth and out of this world..

For all you cats and kiddies, (just so you know)... Iggy Pop is a "scratch" player... yea, that Iggy Pop!

Talking about sports... right after Jimmy Piersall... Pumpsie Green... one of my favorite (all-time) Red Sox players.

4/19/2010
Went and saw the Frank Stella show at L&M. Really early paintings. 1958 to 1962. The black and aluminum paintings. These are some of my favorite paintings. Ever. I've always liked that he described the reason for the width of the "stripe" was because "that's the width of my brush". I was curious about the homemade frames that were hammered onto the sides of the canvas. I assumed that Stella put these frames on himself. I would love to talk to him about the frames. It's hard to explain how much I like the "notch" paintings. I've always read about these two bodies of work but had never experienced them in person. The show is right down the block from where I live. I feel privileged to be able to walk into the gallery anytime I want... spur of the moment... on my way to get a coffee..



4/18/2012

When a father in India saw his new born daughter, he started punching her. This happened last week. He punched her until she died. He punched her to death because she was a girl.

A couple of months ago, a nineteen-year-old Egyptian girl videotaped herself nude and sent out the images of herself over the Internet. The country freaked out and demanded she be stoned to death.

Just this past year, in Afghanistan, a woman was raped, and because of the rape, had a kid and was given the choice of either marrying her rapist or going to jail. She chose jail and is still there in jail where she's raising her kid. She's eighteen years old.

In Israel, (back in January) a crowd of Orthodox men threw stones at an eleven-year-old girl. The girl was on her way to school. The men were throwing stones at her because her dress wasn't covering up her ankles...

Antonio Cromartie plays for the N.Y. Jets football team. He has ten kids with eight different women. During a 2010 "chat" with the HBO behind-the-scenes football show "Hard Knocks", he couldn't remember the names of all his kids. Cromartie is twenty-eight years old. He is expecting identical twins, his 11th and 12th, in November.


4/15/2012
"Dick carried the flashlight when we went to tape Mr. Clutter and the boy. Mr. Clutter wanted to know how his wife was, if she was all right, and I said she was fine, she was ready to go to sleep and I told him it wasn't long till the morning, and how in the morning somebody would find them, and then all of it, me and Dick and all, would seem like something they dreamed. I wasn't kidding him. I didn't want to harm the man. I thought he was a very nice gentleman. Soft-spoken. I thought so right up to the moment I cut his throat".

That's what I read this weekend. Capote's "In Cold Blood". I guess I should say I re-read it. I've read it several times. I was in Book Soup this weekend in L.A. and I ran into Wallace Berman's son Jesse who works there and we got to talking about James Ellroy and James Lee Burke and the conversation wound its way back to Capote's masterpiece. We talked about how unforgettable Robert Blake's portrayal of Perry Smith was in the movie version of "In Cold Blood". His greased hair. His motorcycle jacket and boots. How he formed his way into Smith's truncated body. I told Jesse my plans for maybe coming out to L.A. and doing some kind of "After Dark" show at one of the museums. He knew about my collection of letters from Perry Smith to Capote and Harper Lee. I told how it might be cool to zero in on Philip Dick and Jim Thompson. Put some of their letters and manuscripts in vitrines and some of my After Dark paintings on the walls. Maybe show original treatments of Thompson's "After Dark, My Sweet" and Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep". Put together some kind of sci-fi film noir show. Maybe get Brett Easton Ellis to write an introduction to the catalogue. (There's a great interview with Ellis in the new Paris Review).
Before I left the bookshop, I noticed my American Prayer book on the shelf. It was turned out and had a little "employee recommended" card attached to the front of the book. Jesse asked me to sign the book. I signed my name and added, "answered prayers" after my signature...



4/11/2012
It's a Mad Mad Mad world. Went to the Modern last night to see Kraftwerk. Had never been to the museum at night. It was dark and there weren't that many people there. I brought my stepson Graham, who's twenty-one and "really" into electronic house music. He's turned me on to Cascade and deadmau5... (Deadmouse). When Kraftwerk came on we were told to put on three-d glasses. After a couple of minutes into the first song, I couldn't help think I was stuck in an elevator watching a lost episode of Star Trek. The whole experience was strange. I remember Kraftwerk from a video that rotated on MTV back in the mid-eighties. (On the way to the concert I mentioned to Graham a contemporary band of Kraftwerk... Devo... and talked about the funny hats and outfits they use to wear) Anyway, the outfits that Kraftwerk wore at the Modern looked like they were styled from the movie Tron. After their third song Graham and I faced each other and wondered aloud... "Should we leave?" On the way out we ran into George Condo. "Leaving so soon?" he asked. "Yea, what about you?" George was outside with his wife having a cigarette. George said, "We have to go back in." (Taking one for the team) On the ride home, Graham talked about going to Electric Zoo this spring and I talked to him about seeing the documentary film on EDC... Electric Daisy Carnival... I talked to him about how much I liked the rave music in Larry Clark's film Kids. And Kraftwerk? I don't know... I have no idea... I mean I do, but I'd rather go off the deep end and talk about Dick Shawn's "send-up" of that shit head Adolph in "Springtime For Hitler"...


4/8/2012
"Having trouble falling asleep... these hotel walls are cheap".
I never really listened much to Paul Simon but have had him on the turntable recently. (Always liked his song The Boxer). For the past couple of years his song American Tune has become one of my favorites. Listening to it again the other day, I was reminded that back in the summer of 1985 my girlfriend was in charge of a photo shoot with him. She had just started doing music videos and he hired her to shoot an album cover. What I remember most about it was how many photos were taken. I forget the photographer but I remember thinking after they spent eight hours shooting Mr. Simon... I remember saying to some people involved in the shoot, "Christ, I could have taken a dozen shots and be done with it"... This "comment" was not appreciated. "Who do you think you are?" was the reaction I got. We were out on the East End, at the beach in Wainscott, and there were like twenty assistants for the photo shoot. I was just hanging around watching... the boyfriend. I was on my high and mighty... rephotographing "cowboys" and "girlfriends" and trying to re-wire the whole way photographs could be taken. Even the hairdresser, this guy Christian, ended up hating me. According to him I was a "piss-ant". At the end of the day there were hundreds of rolls of film. I think Mr. Simon was a bit uptight having his portrait taken. I wish I could have pulled him aside and told him about my own method for taking a portrait, but I didn't, couldn't... I wasn't that self-possessed. (My method was simple. You, the sitter, would give me five images that you yourself already liked of yourself, had already been taken, over the years... and then I would pick the one that I liked and then I would take that pick and rephotograph it and that would be your portrait. You didn't even have to pose. It was "fool-proof"). Anyway, I got into a big argument with my girlfriend. She accused me of embarrassing her. Even though I knew I was right, I shut up and retreated back to the city and waited out the rest of the weekend at my local bar. A couple of months later when Mr. Simon's album came out I looked at the cover and could hardly make out his image. He and his management team had chosen a blurry outtake off of a video monitor. It figured. All that effort. All that work and energy... and for what? A portrait that didn't even show up. Just goes to show. That's what I thought. But American Tune is still a great song. And the portrait of Mr. Simon on my CD package, a re-issue, a new and "up-to-date" compilation, is one where he's young, "just starting out"... looking cool and calm and very collected.

4/6/2012
Getting over Rimbaud. Lucien Carr boy Aphrodite. Allen Ginsberg wanted to dedicate his poem Howl to Lucien Carr. Lucian declined. I'm going to run up to my library now and check out my copy of Howl to see if this happened...


4/5/2012
"Say it ain't so". I think Phillip Roth is one of the best American writers in the past forty years. It seems like he comes out with a book a year, and every time one comes out I look forward to reading it. So it's pretty distressing to hear that he and his lawyers sent a cease and desist order to an artist over in Brooklyn who put himself inside a plexiglass box reading from Roth's book, The Great American Novel... (apparently he's reading it "silently"). Another part of the performance is he's getting hit with baseball cards. (I'm picturing a kind of baseball card snow globe). It's strange, because Roth was good friends with Philip Guston up in Woodstock and hung out together, and was exposed to Guston's "crazy" cartoon paintings. I thought that would have been enough to sign off on any "shenanigans" put out by an up and coming, "starting-out" artist. Instead, more paper work, more depositions, more briefs, more letters, more money. Fuck it...I would have thought that some of that Woodstock vibe would have rubbed off on Roth... you know... "It's a free concert from now on".


4/4/2012
My mother called me this past Sunday and told me she had just watched a segment on the art world on Sixty Minutes, (she's 94)...and wanted to know if I'd seen it. I told her "no". She said they talked about Cindy Sherman and Barbara Gladstone. (My mother has trouble seeing, but no problems hearing.) I asked if they mentioned Arthur Cravan? She said she didn't think so. Then I asked her if they talked about Walt Kuhn? "What about Arthur Dove" I asked. "No, I didn't hear any of those names". I asked her if she remembered giving me a book on Larry Rivers when I was eighteen. She said, "Kind of". I asked her, "Did they at least mention Larry Rivers"? She said, "They talked to Larry Gagosian". I asked her who did the reporting for Sixty Minutes. She said, "Morley Safer". I said, "oh... isn't he the guy who paints watercolors of the hotel rooms where he stays when he's out on the road?" She said, "Yea, he's a Monday morning painter". I said, "Don't you mean he's a Sunday Painter"? "No", she said... "On Sundays he's on T.V."

So after thirty years of collecting books, I finally got an inscribed copy of Raymond Chandler's "The Big Sleep". ("Dead men are heavier than broken hearts"). It's a great copy, inscribed to his secretary in the year of publication. The book is in original condition with an unrestored (unsophisticated) dust jacket. When I read it again I couldn't help but think of the voice-over in the film Blade Runner. (For some reason Ridley Scott got rid of this part of the movie when he put out the director's cut...) I always thought the "voice-over" gave the movie a kind of social science fiction. It made the "future" of the movie more believable. Anyway, after re-reading The Big Sleep, "I went to bed full of whiskey and frustration and dreamed about a man in a bloody Chinese coat who chased a naked girl with long jade earrings while I ran after them and tried to take a photograph with an empty camera".

4/1/2012
Woke up, got out of bed... dragged a comb across my head... Read today about two addresses in NYC that I used to have something to do with. The first one... 437 E. 12th St. between Ave. A and First Ave... I use to live there in the late seventies, early eighties... there's an article in today's Times about the place... Seems to be on some guide's list of places to be "pointed out". Allen Ginsberg lived there while I was there. My friend Richard Hell still lives there. It was pretty gnarly back in 1978... living there... I remember having to run from the building to First Ave late at night if I wanted to keep from getting mugged. The other address that was talked about (in some style section) was 5 Rivington... that's the place I had my gallery in back in 1983. I called it Spiritual America. It was a storefront. I guess the place that's there now is some kind of clothing store. It says in the article they're calling place Spiritual America... The past has never been in my forehead. When I read about things that I've been inside of... it all seems like Wild History...

3/30/2012
Read today that the author Harry Crews passed away. When I started to read fiction, forty years ago, he was one of the first people I started reading. I especially liked his essays... "Blood and Grits"... he wrote a great one profiling the actor Charles Bronson... His biography "A Childhood: The Biography of a Place" was pretty great too... When he was a kid, he somehow he fell into a vat of boiling water... or some such shit, and was burned "all over"... He had a lot of "ex's".... ex-wife, ex-kid, ex-dog, ex-house... check out his books... "The Gospel Singer", "Car", and "The Knockout Artist"...

3/29/2012
Recommended reading: "The Swerve", by Stephen Greenblatt...


3/28/2012
Just came back from Upstate. Went up there with Mark Grojohn, (sorry about the spelling Mark)... it was nice to hang out with another artist. I'm not sure when the last time I've done that. Just him and me. Talking about stuff. I have one of his paintings hanging up in the back of my "body shop"... We both agreed how much we like Chris Burden.


3/25/2012
Went to the Met today. Saw the "Steins Collect Matisse and Picasso" show. Especially interested in Picasso's 1909 "Head Of A Woman (Fernande)"... Does that remind me of anything I asked myself?... I couldn't help thinking what the difference between collecting art and making art is...

Before exiting the Met, I took out my iPhone and took some self-portraits alongside some Greek and Roman sculpture.... the busts...mostly the ones that had pieces missing... the ones with missing noses and mouths... the ones that had been worn down, chipped, scarred and cracked...

After lunch I went over to the Whitney. For some reason I wanted to see the biennial. I'm not sure why. Before checking it out I went up to the fifth floor. That's where they hang work that's in the permanent collection. I'm glad I did. There was a gorgeous late fifties Lee Krasner painting hanging in a room of its own. After staring, I walked down to the fourth floor and it looked like people were exercising on a huge black rubber matt that took up the entire floor. There were maybe fifteen people following the commands of a woman who was talking into a microphone... telling the fifteen people what to do. I think the fifteen people following the commands were people who had walked off the street. They kind of just "joined in". I've heard this type of activity in the art world is called "relational aesthetics"... or something like that... It felt like I was interrupting the "relation". I quickly got out of there. I walked down to the third floor and in the back there was a room filled with artist's junk. There seems to be a room filled with artist's junk in every biennial I've ever been to. I'm not sure why this artist's junk was there. (Don't get me wrong, I like junk... but I like it when it's in a yard). I walked around the corner and there were fifty Dana Schutz paintings on the wall. At least I think they were Schutz's paintings. (I walked by pretty fast). I skipped the second floor and went down to the lobby. What happened to the bookstore? There was none. There were some catalogues thrown out on tables that looked "remaindered"... what was there looked like a bake sale. I walked out of the Whitney having spent less than twenty minutes... fifteen of those standing in front of the Krasner.

3/24/2012
Nonfiction novel... the best of both worlds...

Hats off to Sigmar Polke. He was a sexy guy. Someone should do a comic book called The Polke...

Someone just asked me why I collect books? I told them I'm saving up for a rainy day. They said, "What does that mean?" I said, "History would be a great idea, if only it were true".

Recommended reading: "Mary's Mosaic" by Peter Janney... a book about the CIA conspiracy to murder John F. Kennedy. And anything by James Elroy... especially his biography "My Dark Places"....


3/23/2012
Went up to the Guggenheim today. Saw the Chamberlain show. "Hillbilly Galoot" 1960. Wow. A new kind of landscape. That's all I can say about that one. And I thought Cezanne's "Bibemus" from 1894 (in the next room) was far out...

I'd like to know what the fuck does Frank Stella think of Chamberlain's "Belvo-Violet" from 1962.

Metal Flake. Spray paint. Decals... all I thought about when I was going up the ramps was how much Chamberlain resisted...

Francesca Woodman... in one of the side galleries. I had just bought photo books by Gerard Fieret, Miroslav Tichy and Pierre Molinier... I couldn't help but think they all drank from the same well...Woodman resisted the authority of photography.

Woodman had strange, large, almost male like hands. At least that's what they looked like in her self-portrait 1976-77.

Her "Portrait of a Reputation" was especially beautiful. Personal more than political. A "fiction of the real" was what came to mind...

I love hairy women. I don't like it when women shave. I like it when they let their underarm hair grow and their pubic hair grow... It's the way it's suppose to be. Woodman had beautiful underarm hair.


I wish I had met Woodman forty years ago. It would have been great to live with her for a year. She didn't save anything. She played the camera like a new guitar. She murdered herself out taking pictures...

Henry Ford once said "I wouldn't give you five dollars for all the modern art in the world".

William de Kooning would spread his arms out and say, "this is all the space I need"....

Is there such a thing as God Paintings?

When I was growing up the Lone Ranger and Tonto were an important part of my day.

Lew Welch, the beat poet, once worked for an advertising company in Chicago in the fifties, and came up with the jingle..."Raid kills bugs dead"....

It's hard to ignore the influence of Rod Serling's Twilight Zone.

Lothar And The Hand People was one of my favorite Boston bands.

In 1954, Lord Buckley wrote a little book of verse called "Hipporama"... He later appeared on the television show You Bet Your Life, (hosted by Groucho Marx)...

Two of my favorite painters are Jonathan Winters and Phyllis Diller...

The Diggers opened up a store in 1967 in San Francisco. Instead of charging the customer money, everything was free...

I'm going to be giving a talk, a "lecture" at Yale soon. Sometime in late April. I would like to talk about photography and how it coats and pours over what's out there in front of me...

I just had a show in Malaga... at the Picasso Museum. I always liked the fact that Picasso grounded his work in the figure. And... when he was in his "rose" period, he used black and white photographs of Greek and Roman sculpture as source material for inspiration. The way the photographs would "shade" the features of the marble and stone figures was something that he certainly "eyeballed"...

I wonder if Jack Parr and Oscar Levant were on a t.v. show today... would people watch it?

What was Victor Hugo's real name?

The movies Blue Velvet, Bullitt, The Fast and the Furious, Drive Angry... have something in common...

A book of my writings has just been published... Collected Writings Richard Prince... it was put out by Foggy Notion Books... it has one of my earliest "writings"... 'Bomb Dream Enameled'... it starts off the book... it's about what artists did during World War One...

Clement Greenburg, the eminent art critic, the bearer of the torch for abstract expressionists, once said, on camera, in an interview that was part of the movie Painters Painting..."Picasso never did anything after 1929". It's true. I'm not making it up. Check it out yourself if you don't believe me. He actually said that! The movie is on DVD. Painters Painting...