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Ear Zit
Back zit
Cheek zit
Neck zit
Neck zit 2
Cheek zit 2
Chin zit
Shoulder zit
Lip zit
Lip zit 2
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Wednesday, April 1, 2009
p.s. RIP: Andy Hallett. Hey. Distinguished local Steven Trull is back today to lead the blog into yet new depths of transgressiveness, so duck and cover and enjoy or shake your fist at God or whatever feels right. Mr. Trull awaits your comments, as do I. Thanks, Steven. An alert for you people who are in or around NYC: The fine writer and distinguished local Mark 'No more teenagekicks' Doten will be reading tomorrow night with Sharon Mesmer, Mike McDonough, and Justin Marks at an event marking the arrival of issue #3 of Agriculture Reader, the excellent literary magazine co-edited by the fine writer and distinguished local Justin 'Maximum Etc' Taylor, who will also be hosting the event. The 7 pm reading is at Brooklyn's Stain Bar. Click that link for the address, directions, etc. Be there. I would. Let's see ... Tomorrow, the three day SPD extravaganza begins, and I think you'll be very lengthily pleased. I woke up too early this morning and am going to be a little zoned and sleepy all day, but so it goes. ** Esther Planas, I hope it's as springlike in London as it is here. The weather's sort of edible outside today. Yeah, let me know if you make it to Paris this weekend, please. I'll be tied up with 'Kindertotenlieder' auditions during the day hours from Friday through Sunday, but otherwise free. If the auditions are finished in time, I'll try to make the Jeu de Paume event. ** Steven Trull, Sounds like a match made in heaven. Thanks again personally for what you're putting us through today, ha ha. ** Oscar B, See, there's a problem that comes along with being an artist trying to do your work in a school context. The opinions of these tutors automatically become authoritative due to the whole hierarchical nature of the setting, and tutors can be by virtue of their jobs trouble seeking busybodies. They think teaching means looking for problems and trying to solve them, and way too often people in that position mistake something they haven't seen before for something they think they shouldn't be seeing. Teachers/tutors too often lack the ability to feel wonder, to approach a young artist's work as something they can learn something from. Too often they refuse to be rendered innocent or challenged by young artists or even allow themselves to see students as artists who just happen to be studying at the same time, and that's a big problem. You're getting support for your work from peers, curators, observers, et. al., all of whom know you as an artist, not as a student, and they/we are looking at your work with that level of initial respect, not seeing you as someone who's doing something that needs to be fixed, and it's important that you not discount your tutors' inability to see your work without the baggage that comes with their jobs and your status in their eyes as a student. Look, to play the authoritative card, I've taught art at UCLA when it was pretty much the top art school in the US, and I've been a Contributing Editor of Artforum for ten years, and I've written for most of the extant major art magazines and curated shows and so on, and I think these tutors' opinion is way off, suspicious, and very small minded. If your work has an illustrative component, and most interesting art does, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that, and for these people to see your work as too illustrative just tells me they aren't fully engaged in what you're doing. And you can't discount the possibility that they have a repressed discomfort with the gender issues you're working with. I find the 'irritating' comment quite telling in that regard. I'm sure you're right that they don't understand Oscar is you, is completely ingrained in you and you in him. That's exactly the problem here, and that's why you shouldn't take their opinion seriously. They seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of your work, and I think your goal, if there is a goal, is to make them eat their own words with your perseverance and belief in what you're doing, and I can tell you that if these people have any guts and continue to have any currency in your future life, they will. ** Stan_cz, I'm not working consciously with any particular cinematic influence with this novel, but I think I'll have a better sense of what exactly was impacting it once I'm finished. Right now I'm trying to be very hermetic and exclude outside influences, not that there aren't influences, obviously, but I'm trying not to identify them clearly for the sake of the kind of smothered, smothering style I'm working with, if that makes sense. ** Statictick, You're asking the wrong guy, ha ha. Yeah, if you talk to Ian, both say hi from me and let me know how he's doing. I haven't heard a peep from or about him in an awfully long time. ** Davidc, Mm, I get the feeling YourTiedUpSlave would like a cuddle here and there along the way to becoming a happy adult. So it might be that you're not his Daddy after all. Oh, I want to recommend Romeo Castellucci's 'The Divine Comedy' at the Barbican in early April. I just put together a post on his work, and from the pieces of his that I've seen, I highly recommend attending if it strikes your fancy. ** NB, The Facebook photo's good. It's very pro, very author photo-like but with a slight edge, an un-smug grabber if I ever saw one. If you figure out how to email liquid, I'll take ... an iced tea. You heard me right. I have a thing for iced tea, and Europe doesn't know from iced tea. Or liquid diamond if you can't find the iced tea. How do I start writing a novel? Hm. I don't know exactly. I guess it can start in any number of ways. I never know for sure when I start something if it's going to be a novel, story, poem, weird paragraph, waste of time, or whatever. It ends up being a novel if I keep being interested in whatever it was that made me start writing for long enough. Otherwise, it's just a little thing. I usually can't tell if it's a novel until it starts growing. Every time anything makes me want to write about it, I just write and see what happens. I think a cute guy on a subway could easily trigger a novel, if you let it. Go for it. That's my advice. Go for it. Tell me and the world more about this Dil fella. ** No more teenagekicks, Ah, the rebound thing. Oh, sure. Long soul baring letters work with parents sometimes. Sometimes I think they work before the relationship starts, but when it's ending, they only work if you want to be a memorable ex. That's my guess. Yeah, live and learn, that's the spirit. You sound like you'll be just fine. I wish I could see that reading of yours, duh. ** David Ehrenstein, Yeah, I thought you might appreciate that slave's name. I need to see that movie again. I think I underrated it when I saw it. For me, Ryan Phillipe will always best be remembered the boy drowning in his underwear in 'White Squall', but that's just me embarrassing myself. ** Mark Gluth, I'm going to find me a good naturopath in LA. I don't think France would understand the concept, but the French doctors I've been to don't have that anti-homeopathic thing you get in the States. Thanks a lot for the kind words about writing. Yeah, it feels good to be doing the novel thing again. ** Bernard Welt, So what does it mean that every time I dream or remember a dream, I'm always being pursued by someone or something that wants to kill me? I swear, ever since I was a little kid, that's literally the only thing I ever dream about. ** Jax, I had a fondness for Executionerssong too. Glad you agree. I know about gainers, yeah. I come across them fairly frequently in my slave post searching. I guess I don't select them as often as I should. I guess their requests tend to be a bit too plain spoken. Oh, I never believe anything I read in the media anymore, or hardly, but that Davies book sounds good 'cos it's always good to give one's knee jerk opinion more heft. ** Tomkendall, Hey, hey. What's the haps? ** Wolf, I don't know, I think you might look very fetching if you were seething inside a burka. This party can't be pooped, fyi. Well, not by you. Well, I think the problem is you're assuming you can only make good work when you're actually fucked up. Being fucked up doesn't go away, it just goes through phases when it doesn't control you as much. The devil doesn't leave. The devil reinvents itself and figures out how to survive your disinterest and hides out. You actually have more access to your fucked up-ness as an artist when you're not freaking out. You have more ways in to the material, and you just have to find the other routes or give them the opportunity to find you. And there are times when art making isn't needed, and that's totally fine too. I'd be patient with yourself on the art thing, and use the stability to experiment and try new approaches. Beauty always has something deeply screwed up in it. If you do beauty, it'll be fucked up whether you trying to make something fucked up or not. I don't know. I'm sleepy today. Does any of that make sense? ** Katsim, Oh, I don't know about the ticket price. They might be gratis, I'm not sure. I'll find out. Don't worry about being shy, etc. with me. I think I'm pretty relaxing and easy to be around. People say that. Can't wait. ** Dynomoose, So you just have to wait, basically? Shit. This is such a painfully obvious thing to say, but the whole way health care and doctors and all that shit doesn't work for people in the States who aren't moneyed up the wazoo is so incredibly barbaric. Not to say it's all heaven and light on that front over here, but you wouldn't have to wait two months to get an MIR in France even if you were living in a cardboard box, I'll tell you that. Ugh, Adrienne. But that's beautiful about the gifts being left for Persephone. You don't have a clue who it could be? ** Steevee, I was hoping someone would note the boy who wanted to be a suit boy. I thought he was a bit of a coup. ** Heliotrope, Hey, welcome home. Okay, this'll show you how utterly citified or superficial or something I am. There you were waxing beautifully about the joys of nature, and the first thing I want to say to you is ... you met the guy who's married to the 'log lady'?! Wow. Did you meet her? What's she like? That question is sincere and sad but true. But I also truly did enjoy hearing about your trip, the trees, your splendidly talented kin. But then I also must ask you, What was Ernest Tubb's Record Store like? I'm hopeless. I'm sleepy too, if that counts. ** Killer Luka, Oh, I'm mentally ill, trust me. I just play a decent, nice guy on the blog. I think Michele Obama introducing me in New York is the ticket. I'll fax that demand to my publisher post haste. Who's Ka-Tzetnik 135633? Was that a trick question? Your question, I mean, not mine. My feckless was as feckless as a Paris spring morning. ** Alan, I never did see 'Entre les Murs'. Reports were incredibly mixed, and I wound up deciding to wait for the DVD. What did you think? People I know over here were pretty much evenly divided between saying it was powerful and saying it was the irksomely simplistic French equivalent of 'Crash'. The 'Crash' that won the Oscar, not the Cronenberg one. That talk between you and Killer was a spicy eye opener. It's like you turned into the heterosexual version of Shai for a minute there. ** Ken Baumann, Hey. My weekend was dandy enough. I hope yours was as well. I was going to say hopefully doors will be open to you because of your acting, but then I thought that might also be tricky if there's some pre-existing idea in people's heads about who you are and, thereby, a pre-existing idea of what kind of project they think you should be doing. A close friend of mine is a well known actor, and he's been angling to produce films, and he's gotten a bit of that sort of prejudice, i.e. 'But you do 'this', so why do you want to do something like 'that'. You should do something like 'this'.' Etc. I even get that sometimes in my line of 'work' because people have such a set idea of what I do. Still, I hope the connections you do have will help, and it doesn't seem like people would have an overly formed idea about you and what you're capable of. Sorry, if I'm rambling. I'm kind of sleepy. ** JW Veldhoen, Yeah, Flaubert is pretty insanely great. I sort of put him out of my mind a lot, but then I remember him or take his stuff down off the shelf, and whoa. ** Chris, Oh, great, you found and like Destination Out. Yeah, it's awesome, right? Man, I hope you're right about your job being okay. Scary fucking times. You do need to get into a writing music phase, yes, I agree. Revisiting one's older work can be helpful, a reminder or whatever. Well, yeah, between the blog and the novel and the theater work I'm doing, my time and brain are quite eaten up, but I don't have a regular job, and that's the trick, I guess. The blog is sort of my full-time non-paying job, or I kind of trick myself into giving it that status in order to keep myself diligent. ** Creative Massacre, Hey. Oh, yeah, you can give the prof my email adress. Give him this one: dcooperweb@ gmail.com. Mozzarella just seems like it'd be really hard to make, yeah. Its wet, chunky consistency is so weird. So you're making pasta from scratch, I'm guessing? Do you at least get to feed it through one of those devices that make the pasta shapes, or do you have to do that by hand too? ** SYpHA_69, I've gone through about three tentative novel titles, but none of them were right, so I'm waiting for the next inspiration. Sometimes titles are easy for me, and sometimes I can't decide until the last second. It's weird. ** Misanthrope, So, when there are two slave pictures, and you think the slave looks cute in one and ugly in the other, which image do you think is the truer one? When you write about Danny, you write and think very beautifully. Not to say you don't write and think beautifully when you write about boys being eviscerated. I have a Mac with all the latest updates, so I'm not worried about that virus particularly. I just read on a blog that it's being suggested people with PCs change the date on their computer today to the 2nd or something and then switch it back to the real date tomorrow. ** Orestes, Oh, it's okay about the SPD, but, yeah, write the piece just to write it, and if we get a take a look at it sometime, all the better. I hope you enjoy the SPD's fruits. It turned out pretty well, I think. I hope work treats you better today. What is this work, btw? If you've already said and I'm spacing out, I'm sorry. Take care. ** Justin, They are like free puppies, ha ha, yeah. I'm exhausted today too. We're (lack of) wavelength buddies. Well, I'd love a post from you, like I said. Maybe doing one for here can get the ball rolling on your blog. I hope that's not too greedy of me. ** Paradigm, Camping sounds really nice. As does that squat, hopefully with future electricity. Have a great time, and the SPD will be here waiting for you just a wee bit further down the page is all. Take care, Scott. ** Right. Enjoy Steve's low tech pyrotechnics show today, and I'll be back tomorrow with Day One of the epic SPD. Take it easy.
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