Clockwise from Noon:
Baselitz, Guston, De Kooning, Beckmann, can't remember, Twombly.
Which is your favorite?
Baselitz, Guston, De Kooning, Beckmann, can't remember, Twombly.
Which is your favorite?
Clockwise from Noon:
Baselitz, Guston, De Kooning, Beckmann, can't remember, Twombly. Which is your favorite?
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In an order.
Mark E. Smith Charles Bukowski Captain Beefheart These are the men that I admire. Unhealthy, obsessed, artistic risk-takers. Very difficult to be around for many, in life. In death, their legacies have ascended. I think of each as a visionary. It doesn't really matter what the visions were, or in Mark's case, are. It's the fact that they had/have them. Mark E. Smith may be my favorite human being ever, even though he'd probably tell me to go piss up a rope if I ever talked to him. Or whatever the British version of that saying may happen to be. There are painters, too. Philip Guston Max Beckmann Willem de Kooning Smoking, drinking men. Paintbrushes in hand. Masculine, conflicted, beautiful souls. I stood on the corner in NYC where Beckmann collapsed after a heart attack and died. I felt nothing. I went and got a hot dog and a Coke afterwards. The first time I remember feeling the urge to walk away from it all was in Portland, Oregon, about 13 years ago. I had loaded my automobile with all of the belongings I had intended to take with me. There was a fight with the girlfriend. I was emotional. The car was parked on the street in front of the beautiful white house I shared with two girls. The damn thing wouldn't start, and I was enraged. I hurled my keys at the wooden fence near the side door so hard that one of them stuck. Like a chinese star somehow. As the key quivered, I remember laughing at the absurdity of it.
"This is it," I thought, and I began to walk. As I recall, I decided to walk towards Los Angeles. I'm not sure how I reached that decision. I've never had a desire to set foot in the place. In fact, I remember driving past the city several years after this incident (on my way to a rendezvous with one of the girls I happened to share the white house with, in fact) and shuddering at its bland vastness. But on this peculiar day, the destination was California, and I would walk there. I was going to just walk away, and leave everything behind. I walked out of my neighborhood, then out of downtown. I walked along an on-ramp towards a major road. My mind raced, ahead of my footsteps. After perhaps 45 minutes, I began to tire. I looked across the pavement and saw a field, and I headed towards the tree line beyond it. My fury had exhausted itself. I decided to sit. Once beneath the shade of the trees, I lowered myself beside a creek bed and noticed a most unusual thing. I saw a brown suit, certainly not modern, but also not old, on the ground. I touched it, then picked it up. It was filled with bones. Though I could not find a skull lying around, I'm fairly certain that I had found the remains of a man. As I looked for clues on his person, I found his brown leather wallet in a pants pocket. I opened it. It contained not a single thing. Absolutely nothing distinguished the remains of this man in any individual way. This discovery erased my mental plans to walk to California. I doubled back towards the heart of the city, retracing my steps. I would find an officer of the law, and lead him to the scene. About halfway back, I was picked up by a woman who was obviously very, very high on speed. I declined her offer for a ride, but she insisted. Before I had even shut her car door, she was on and on about gambling or something and before I knew it, I had forgotten the directions to the creek bed. I was both annoyed and amused by her rambling. I told her to take me downtown, and as we buzzed down Burnside, through Vaseline Alley, I remember watching a whore getting into a car with one of her regular Johns. I could tell by the body language between them. My chauffeur let me out by the bus stop and I walked a block before I found a cop. He wanted me to start from the beginning, so I shared with him roughly what I have recounted here. After my explanation, the first thing he asked me was what were you and your girlfriend fighting about? I looked at him and asked him what that had to do with any of it, and I could tell by the way he looked back at me that he either didn't care one bit about that suit full of bones or he thought I was stoned, or both. And that was that. I walked back to my house and called a friend, whose dad was a mechanic. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I discovered tonight that I am incapable of rolling a spring roll appetizer. Or unwilling. My livelihood in the service industry is in its death knell. So I picked up a paintbrush tonight. Dug some old paints out of the closet. Found some tubes of acrylic mixed in with the oils. Jesus Christ, that shit is toxic. The oils. I just can't do it anymore. Serving, working in a kitchen, tending bar. There's nothing left in the tank. And I welcome it. Here's the first, crude stab at organizing the composition. The blue lines out front will stay. I'll fill in the rest of the grid with lots of white. I've got de Kooning's "Excavation" in mind.
I spent thirteen years tending bar. Another decade before/during in the back of the house in many restaurants, from Dairy Queen to middling Italian joints to roadside tourist cafes. Oh, and at the #1 brunch joint in PDX. Look it up.
In Asheville, North Carolina today. Looking for that foot in the door at a bar. Until then, I'm slumming it behind the counter of a Juice Bar/Organic Cafe. I don't mind the work, but it's virtually impossible to read a ticket. Every single one is customized. Advertising yourself as an organic cafe is like shooting your employees directly in the face. That sign outside attracts the Healthy Living Set like shit does flies. I understand the desire to live a healthy lifestyle, as much as a career bartender can... but I still cling to the idea that I actually feel better and more alive when I'm burning the candle at both ends. And I'm like 40. Three ideas wrapped into one here, all based around my disgust for much of the 21st Century Human Condition: 1) Peoples' sense of entitlement over the fact that they have been offended by something, anything. Doesn't matter what. 2) The 'active lifestyle' marketing bamboozlement of America. 3) Hypochondria disguised as making healthy lifestyle choices. A warning, this is just a straight bitch/rant. Take for instance, the couple who came in tonight, in unintentionally matching 'activewear' outfits. Her: I want gluten-free bread. I can't have gluten. I'll have the salad. I can't have goat cheese. I can't have tomatoes. Can you read me the ingredients to every one of your dressings? I can't have soy. Him: I can't have gluten. Can you please read me the ingredients to everything in your resale counter? Does that muffin have gluten? Do those chocolate chips in that muffin have any soy? Any sugar? Me: Would you like two glasses for some water? Her: No, we brought our own water. (points to matching $25 water bottles) Twenty minutes later. They have their food. She comes up to the counter to request glasses for water. Me: There is a water & ice machine to your left. Her: Oh no, we brought our own water. They finished their meals. Made a big production of getting up and leaving. Thanked us almost oppressively. Of course, they left no tip (but that's not the point). Got into their sporty SUV outfitted with bicycle rack (no bikes). Off they drove. I glance over to their table and it's almost as if a preschool class had just held recess there. The floor looked like a sandbox. They must have used 18 napkins. I miss those Friday nights behind the bar when we had metal shows. So much fun. Those people know how to party. Great tippers. Drank their faces off and no one went to jail. Totally appreciative and just..... REAL. I'd flip them shit and they'd flip it right back in my face. This couple today did not seem like two real people to me. They were nice enough, but their shtick was comically self-absorbed. I had a really hard time taking them seriously. In a bar, I could have ribbed them a little bit for their exhausting routine, but not here. Why are you so special? Why do you go to a restaurant when you are so particular on what goes inside your body? Why the show? Who does it benefit? ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- What's missing, for me, inside this organic food cafe, is an ability to laugh at the human condition. I am not encouraged to make light of this veiled, self-important hypofuckingchondria. I am repulsed by people who always complain about being sick or lactose intolerant or whatever. I'm not saying that those conditions don't exist, but give me a break. How can people take themselves so seriously? I make a quip or joke, that would fly HIGH in a bar, and endear my patrons to me (which forms the bond that IS good customer service) and I am met by wide eyes and unmistakable loathing cast in my direction. I smile back, showing them teeth that have not seen a dentist's cleaning tools in a decade. It's a weapon, you see. I bask in their discomfort. And I miss the bar. Oh, how I miss the bar. ....The last magical place that I know of in this bloated, barren strip-mall landscape. I miss my people. My degenerates and misfits. No more fucked up then this new clientele - just somehow at peace with their imperfections. How much longer can I clock in to this world? It is destroying the one thing that keeps me going: my ability to share a laugh with people over the absurdity of our modern condition. And for chrissake, you can eat gluten. I guarantee it won't make a shit bit of difference. I've seen people belly up to the bar and have twenty drinks a day seven days a week for five years straight and still hold down jobs. Because they had the will to do it and not give a damn what their doctor or anyone else had to say about it. Those are my people, though most of them are dead now. See what I mean? That's the funny part. To me anyway. And to lots of others. Eat the gluten and learn to laugh at yourselves. Have you every watched every single episode of It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia so many times that you begin relating every instance in your life to a specific scene from the show? And wonder why other people don't instantly understand the humor after you comment on the similarities until you start resenting them for it? It happened to me. I spent six months in a studio without internet. Left with nothing but the I-Tunes on my Mac (Why didn't I just buy a cheap radio?), I just started listening to -not even watching- Frank and Dennis & Charlie & Dee & Mac arguing about the same shit over and over and over and over while I painted. Ten hour studio sessions, five or six days a week, filled with the sounds of drunk people yelling over each other. For six months. To my bartender's ears, it sounded natural & comforting. Looking back, though, I'm convinced that it's affected my outlook on life. It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia makes up the core of my sensibilities. It's my true center. Am I the only one? When I really settle into a painting session, I enter a meditative state. While my analytical mind cooperates with my right hand in an attempt to solve crucial compositional dilemmas that only I care about, the rest of my brain relaxes. Bits from that show (I mean 'bits' in a comedy sense) enter my porous consciousness and take root. And it leads to building paintings that look like this: Does a correlation exist? Would this picture look completely different if I had spent thousands of hours listening to the Walking Dead? Or The Office? Only those shows aren't as smart. Or as crude. There's a crudeness to this painting that appeals to me. Hit the orange comment button below and tell me about it. |