Asshole wipes penis on painting, steals glass vagina

Rock and Roll is a sham. It's shallowness eclipses any attempt at being profound. At best, it's purveyors, ala. The Rollings Stones, offer sonic-ally mood altering experiences.

On the other end of the rock idiom, the worst it could offer was G.G. Allen. Allen thought that rock was the ultimate in self expression and that others in the biz, never really understood its potential. He exemplified everything that some rockers tried to distance themselves from; pure unadulterated nihilism.

I bought into the sham for many years. Upon hearing The Sex Pistols in my early teens, I began a long love affair with the punk esthetic. It represented true freedom, and offered an alternative to every God forsaken hack song stylist that permeated the air waves around that time. The counter culture was were my heroes stationed themselves. Mind you , I never met any "punks" that actually represented my ideal; most were mean-spirited, egotistical, snobs. The club I thought of as all-inclusive was the most exclusive of all. My hair was never the right shade of purple and I cut my Mohawk with the sideburns clippers on the back of my father's norelco electric razor. I never went far enough for the gang. Never kicked enough ass. Never sneered the right way.

Back to the sham of Rock and Roll. It's cool now to dispel all the myths and sacred cows of Rock and Roll. And me, again on the band-wagon. The Sex Pistols were 2nd rate and if they truly made such a difference, why would we still be bombarded by awful pop music? The band (and others) tried to tear down conventions without offering any solutions. Also, Sid Vicious was just a pathetic excuse for a human being. Rock is not a religion. It will not save you from the harsh reality of life. AND, If you decide to take up Rock and Roll as your life's pursuit, don't use it as an excuse to destroy other's property. You just come off sounding stupid.

Corporations and lawyers inevitably get involved and it's no longer about "you as an artist". Kurt Cobain was the blue-eyed messiah that brought the counter culture to the masses. He seemed (to me) to be struggling with the idea that fame equaled selling-out. But he also craved attention, and the nice people at DGC and MTV helped to make it a reality. They were paving their gold-laden driveways as Kurt slept in his car. Eventually he cashed in the big checks but it wasn't enough to kill the pain. He was a tool and he knew it.

The Ramones always seem to be the band my generation recognizes as the true Rock and Rollers. I agree to some extent. They never pretended to be something they weren't. They never wrote symphonies or bombastic, self-important concept albums. They never amounted to much either. When you stay true to the Rock formula you don't get very far, because there's not much there to begin with.

Oh the asshole wipes penis bit? Over the weekend, a band named Banderas played at a friend's art show. During the band's set the lead singer allegedly wiped his member all over my friend's paintings. Nice way to treat your hosts. They later allegedly stole a glass vagina sculpture. The sculpture as yet to be returned. Their excuse, "It's just Rock and Roll."

Conversation About Painting, # 1

For my thesis, I'm interviewing painters about the state of painting in reference to the art-world and to society in general. This first conversation is with fellow graduate student at the University of Cincinnati, Kara Strouse.

We started by refrencing a quote by an essaist, Robert Storr, “ Painting is hardly the king of the hill it was for most of the 20th century. Nor is it likely to do so again.”


Kara: You know I've been thinking about that because the first critique that we had in Mark's (Harris) class, the question he asked was, "Why painting?" That's a good question. I was talking to him about painters that abandon painting and at some point go back to painting, or people that never painted at some point, later on, go to painting. It seems like the people that are most avidly against painting, or are doing the most talking about why painting is esoteric, or out-moded, trite; they are trying to make their way with something else. It's a battle for visual power. On one end, I can discredit painting so as to make room for "X".

Dick: It's my feeling that Kosuth, the artist that we talked about a lot in advanced painting, was just trying to make a name for himself, an opportunist. Just stir some shit up and not necessarily say anything really profound.

K: Arthur Dante goes on to claim the death of art. I read a response by Richard Shushmin. He claims that Dante/others were kind of right, but a lot wrong. That art didn't die but art as we know it certainly collapsed on itself. How he was evaluating art died. How can the same thing not be for painting? How we consider 20th Century painting, that might be dead. What made a painting then?

D: Right. People will still make paintings that look like them but they might not be very relevant.

K: I think too, that time is an issue. I think we are so aware of our time.

D: There's a man that works out of Essex studios and all he paints is Pollock look-alikes. Here he's doing something that at one time was revolutionary, and yet now it's just a decorative object.

K: That's interesting. I read this article called, Repeat Is Not Return, the idea that to repeat something still does not have the same effect. To revisit something but not to revisit it just the same, but to say; why did it go out of style? Why was it not relevant? To go and extract things that are still there; still left. I never put that into context as someone who's still doing something like this, never rewound, stuck in a mode.

D: You did that with your Rothko copies?

K: Yeah.

D: Then there are artists who take photographs of photographs.

K: To what extent is that gimmick? How much of it really makes you think differently and how much of it is just f#cking bullshit to make a name for themselves, an artstar.

D: How can you consciously look at yourself and say, "Wow look at this body of work I did it's really, I dunno, speaks on a lot of levels!" I couldn't do that. I couldn't just create a body of work of just photographs of photographs, copies of a copy and so forth.

K: I think it speaks more of the art world and the institutions of art, and the pressures that people have to make something original. You can make anything your life's pursuit. You pick something and without question just because you are curious or frustrated, you purse it. You're not bogged down by institutions like this (school).

D: I'm really sick to death of over-analyzing my work. I want to go back to those days of wonder and excitement. What do you think about that?

K: I think it's important in balance, in grad-school it's really good for giving you concentrated, bulldozer, plow you over, whether its analyzing yourself, your perspective; "Why am I here?" You go through all sorts of questioning, but (school) it's a microcosm. It's not real, it is, but it's so perverted as far as life goes. To see a whole, you are just one of these perverted environments, thousands. You have to see outside of school, just to get your measure, like where you want to be.

D: How really important is this bullshit that we put ourselves through? (In my opinion) The fine-arts (in America) have become just another specific interest in a sea of interests. There is a group of people that travel around the country and race snowmobiles on dirt tracks. A racing circuit. I look at the fine-arts as akin to this. What do you think?

K: It's like, the loss of cohesiveness, expand and contact: something is big and important and it dissipates and dissipates, at one point it contracts but it doesn't contact in the same manifestation of itself and elements are still there and relevant. That's across fields. There are aspects of psychology, sociology that are no longer considered relevant, then oh, some of it is; pulling it back and forth. The unfortunate thing is we don't have appreciation for beauty on a daily level. You look at strip malls, and that, maybe it can be beautiful. I just think about ancient cultures, they decorated things very consciously, not to say we have no more wonderful building design, but for the most part you can go down to Atlanta and you can find beautiful architecture, but what about on a common level? What about McDonald's? They're not beautiful. Maybe they have commercial beauty? They are easy to recognize, become a part of everyone's memory, nostalgia, but they didn't market it to be beautiful. They marketed it to be recognizable and get people to eat there.

D: What if it was beautiful?

K: They did it for money. That's the point. We don't have a collective understanding of beauty. Although everyone thinks seascapes are beautiful. Maybe, I don't know some people are sick of seascapes.

D: Are you?

K: Sick of seascapes? Seen a lot of seascape paintings. Some are really beautiful. The actual sea is kind of quite humbling. That's hard to replicate. It's hard to be a painter because it is image based. It's not considered very socially active; changing things, or being very generous or noble.

D: Right. There seems to be this attached significance. What's it gonna do for everybody? The image is secondary an after-thought. Sometimes, there isn't an aesthetic property to the image. Is image important to art anymore?

K: I agree. I think they're both important; Image and idea. I think a lot of work right now is experiential. It's not to say that there's people having experiences with images that are intimate. A lot of collaboration going on right now, it's like your work not valid, especially if you are a painter if you're not doing some sort of collaborative, experiential art. Weather your collaborating with some corporate group and they don't know it, or specialists in another field to make something. Sometimes it doesn't matter if someone has a experience that's meaningful to them; if it's at a stank-ass museum or a contemporary gallery. Even your memory can be triggered by smell, triggered by words, it's still an image.

I still think it's valid (painting). I understand not taking full weight in it. I think people were having problems excepting work that wasn't painting, and now that's not the case do we still need to be trashing painting? Their point was, that it's not the only thing that's valid; it's carried on to it's not valid at all. Which I don't think is true.

Money, It's a Gas

I searched the "Time" database of covers on "art". The last issue featuring "art" as the cover story was November 27, 1989. It wasn't really about art, but the art market. It seems as though, at the time, Americans at least cared about the fine-arts in some capacity. That was a long time ago.

Unpleasant Behavior: All in the Name of Love and Art, well...Just Art, uh...er, In the Name of Nothing (really)

I know many assholes. I know one asshole who years ago tried to publish a book about assholes he knew. He had a chapter on me. At the time, I would have never considered the moniker to follow my Christian name. I was so insignificant as a human-being that I was more likely to be associated with the phrase, "Who are you again?" But the years drag on and my once stable exterior slowly starts coming unglued, I'm prone to out-bursts associated with assholes. My unpleasant behavior is deeply rooted in muck that would take years of extensive therapy to be able to trace root causes. Eventually, you have to rack-it as a loss. Remember the song "Picasso Was an Asshole"? Well from what I understand, the song title holds true. But, when we as humans look back on the said artists' life, we marvel at its brilliance and quirky-ness. We never look at all of the lives that were devastated by the asshole in question. So when does playing by the rules slot you a place in history? It never really does. I'm not Picasso, I'm nobody, I understand this. I'm just waiting for someone who is somebody to come along and say I'm somebody, so my shitty behavior will be excused.

FOO-King The Dominant Paradigm: Depression, Main Library Weirdos, Pity-Party

Today's title is rather fun. It's all true. I'm feeling way down, and pissed. The anger is what keeps me going. Sometimes humor. (Anger) This is the truest of emotions. It is what people in our society shy away from. Let's lock it all away and pretend it's not there. Cincinnati let it all hang out. Before 9-11, they roped off the ghetto and let the people go mad. Riots. People were coming in from all over the city to join in the wildness. The cops and the local government just sat back and watched as the madness unfolded. You can still see the remnants today. The city continues to shrink in population, as the leaders never really solved anything. I'm not saying any of this is easy. In fact, I'm surprised riots don't happen on a continuous basis.

So, again I want to be successful. But right now I feel like a rat running through a maze in search of the cheese. I can smell it but it's miles away. I'm not alone in this, I know. I feel alone though. The dominant paradigm; outgoing, clean-cut, sporty. Me, none of the above. By the looks of it, either are those that waited for the downtown branch of the public library to open. What a strange bunch. They all look deppressed, with an exception being the young lady making slashing motions with her arms, looking directly at me and shouting a mixture of gibberish and obscenities.

Well I must be off, the meter is running and I caught a whiff of the cheese.

Networking Sites: I Spit In Your General Direction (Rehashing Old Blogs)

I'm on Friendster and MySpace; a new found waste of time. I posted blogs on both sites and found it to be akin to mental masturbation. I eventually got fed up and posted pictures of people passed out from excessive drinking. I think I lack patience with these sort of things. I never really got into chatting either. I have better luck talking to people outside the realm of smilies and LOLs. It would be an interesting art project to pursue how our relationships have changed due to online networking sites like the aforementioned. I've noticed that some people act entirely different when they don't actually see the person.

Here's an old blog from my friendster account. This goes out to all the supposed 19 year old girls who crammed my message box with promises of pictures of me and my hot friends...

Art Snob's Guide to Blockbuster Video
Being part of a class-action lawsuit against Blockbuster was kinda rewarding. I got two free non-new release rentals! Wow-ee, it's time to go hog wild. Wait-a-minnit, this is going to be difficult. I never find anything there, due to my extreme whiteness and art-snobbery. I made a handy little checklist to help me weed out the bad stuff and help me slay the dragon faster. If you are like me and find yourself in a similar position, this may help you...


First let's cross off certain categories, this will save time walking around the store cutting down on nerve damage from that awful Dave Mathews blaring on the TVs. No Family Section, No General Interest (See there's only one copy of CRUMB, it's probably out, most of the docs are about 2 Pac or Wrestling), No Foreign (too lazy to read subtitles, besides I've seen all the Ingmar Bergman movies I can take).

OK, this leaves us with Comedy, Horror, Drama and Action

For action, stay away from these mainstays...(please forgive my spelling, I don't have time to check everyone on IMDB)

Silvester Stallone, Richard Greco, John Travolta (yes, he's not cool, he's notorious for picking bad projects), football stars turned actors, Steven Segal, cover girls holding guns showing their backside (aka booty), rappers, Kid Rock or the Rock, movies about cars, racing and/or bikes, Tom Cruise (one movie where he's palpable, Minority Report, I have yet to see Last Samurai, so if I'm at a friend's and all he's got is porn and that movie, I'll take my chances with the Last Samurai), Chuck Norris, Rutger Hauer, and Kurt Russel.

Art Snob OKs- Jackie Chan, Bruce Lee, John Wayne, Chow Young Fat, Charlton Heston.

For Comedy, keep moving when you see...

Paulie Shore, rappers Dre and Snoop Dogg, most of the comedies from the 80's (check for old faded covers), movies that have anybody from the cast of "Friends", remakes from old TV show comedies, Woody Allen films after 1980.

Art Snob OKs - Steve Martin

Horror, keep clear of movies with 2,3, or 4 after the title (IE. Leprechaun 4, Halloween 3), and slasher flicks.

Art Snob OKs - I'm tempted to say nothing, the Vincent Price titles are somewhat entertaining. MGM puts out a series of "B" films that Blockbuster carries. Those are fun when you're loaded.

Drama is a crap shoot. The color of the box is very telling. The whiter the cover is, the more you can count on Emma Thompson popping up in it. Stay with chroma, especially reds.

Art Snob OKs - Directors Todd Solondz and Martin Scorcesse.

After I used my trusty Art Snob formula, I left the store with a film called "Man of the Century", it starred no one I know (which can be a good thing) and the critics like Ebert gave it the thumbs up (have you noticed the guy hardly pans a film). I watched 15 minutes and turned it off. It reminded me of a Saturday Night Live skit. A one-liner dragged out for way too long. Oh well, just forget everything I said.

PMRC (Parental Music Resource Center): Do-Gooders Run Amok!

Here's Jello Biafra having it out with Tipper Gore from The PMRC on Oprah.