Art, Motherfucker! ART!

The art world is a great place to go in order to feel like a failure. It’s a great place to develop a drinking problem and a bad attitude. Frank Ferraro, Josh Hogan, and Mark Gualtieri are the only guys I know personally who paint as well as I do. They’re all fucking awesome. Aside from them, I see lots of academic posturing, trendy hipster crap and amateurish junk. None of it has any heart. None of it has any soul. None of it has any grit. That’s all fine. I don’t really care. What bothers me are the rejection letters from all the juried shows to which I apply. I could wallpaper my goddamned house with them, and still have enough left over to wallpaper your house, too. If my work isn’t good enough, whose is? What really burns me is when I go to the show to see what beat me. I’ve made that mistake before. When I see it, I want to cut my eyes out with a box cutter. Who juries this stuff? MFAs do. Gallery owners do. Pretentious shitheads do. They’re arrogant motherfuckers who don’t have the talent and/or heart to make their own work and bring it out into the world. They’re people who have made a career out of their fetish for academia and academic standards, as if those things are a measure of quality. They’re one-dimensional people with no experience outside of the field. These people believe that art needs to be one of three things to be good. It needs to be 1) qualified, 2) trendy, or 3) a vocabulary word. Your art needs to be technically beyond reproach (ie, you’ve got an MFA or an established name), look like whatever’s big at that moment, or be so staggering in its technical sophistication that its lack of emotional resonance is easily overlooked, and questioning its quality is a more difficult task than putting it on a pedestal. This isn’t to say that all art needs to be evocative and emotionally charged. Cold, intellectual art is great too, but there are even fewer people who are good at that than there are of the former type. I’m glad I went to college and graduated. I learned a lot there, and I’m still paying off all of the loans. When I think about going back to grad school for my MFA, I just don’t think there’s anything they could teach me, and I don’t need another $40,000 piece of paper that badly. I can keep reading Charles Bukowski’s books, listening to Lou Reed’s music, pushing my paintings further, drinking black coffee on my own, and whoring myself out to any gallery that will hang me. No qualifications necessary.

Hostage

Time is escaping like blood from an open wound. It’s escaping freely and in copious volumes, but we are not. We are here, and not leaving. Freedom is drained of its vitality, like a raisin, and the beat drives hard, like a ’71 Mustang. A chipper little girl returns from the bar carrying two beers, one for her boyfriend, one for herself. They each belong to the other. Tomorrow they’ll both go to work, and so will I. Now we’re here. Then we’ll be there. This moment will pass like any other. So will that one. One moment bleeds into the next and into the next. Some are good. Some are bad. None are without choreography. We all belong to our destinations, obligations, relationships, and responsibilities. It’s easier than freedom. Perhaps freedom isn’t necessarily bleeding out like a gunshot victim, but instead is malnourished, like desolate soil that can no longer support life. Regardless, in this club, with this beer, I’m bleeding freedom all over my clothes and the floor. I’m a willful hostage, too scared to plug up the hole and be filled. I’m letting the moment flow through me. It’s one way of going. It feels like freedom, but not quite. It’s a reasonable simulacrum. What I really want is to go home, but not know where home is until I get there. I don’t want a map.

Holding the Bag

All our friends left. Jim and Ellen went to Philly. John went to Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Mike went to Austin, Texas. Brad and Renee went to Portland, Oregon. Dana’s leaving for Raleigh, North Carolina in two weeks. Amy and Stamatis are headed for NYC in less than a year. Pittsburgh is an awesome wingman. It’s great for making other cities look more attractive. Our Saturday nights often happen the same way. My wife and I, sitting at a bar, asking ourselves what we’re still doing here.

Three Hot Black Girls at the Deli Counter

There are three hot black girls that work the deli counter at my local grocery store. I think they’re awesome, but I’m pretty certain that they hate me. I’m gently trying to win them over with my cordial, gawky, long-haired, creepy, white guy charm. It might work, eventually. I don’t know. I don’t necessarily need to lay one of them. I just need a smile.

Privilege

Privilege spoils proportionately. It doesn’t spoil like milk does. It spoils like a parasite. It spoils its host. Privilege creates a want for more of itself. Whether earned or given, it behaves the same way. It is a fat, loud, sexless, suburbanite, SUV-driving, credit card wielding, permed stay-at-home-mom on her way to the mall, fists spilling coupons.