A Blog Called Nowhere

We're throwing a halloween party on our flight to San Francisco. Just a little thing for our fellow flyers. There I am on the bottom left and Mrs Cub on the bottom right, seats 1A and 1 D, I love the bulk head! Have a stupendous week, I'll be back next Sunday with a shit load of new music from Mod Lange and valuless life lessons from the road.

Halloween Picture Show: Molinier's Premature Grave, Kubin, Dore, and more....

Rodin's gates of hell, Goya, Karl Valentin, Bergman

I could use a little help today getting my 100,000 errands done. Like Jennie, I'll fasten on my coustomized Yoni Shield to begin this wearisome mission. We're jetting out to San Francisco tomorrow for the week. Mrs. Cub's dear uncle John passed away unexpectedly this week so we'll be going to a funeral but as a bonus will also get to spend some time with our lil' kernals, nephews Parker and Spencer. Of course we'll see BFF keith and kenny and a trip to San Fran wouldn't be compleat without a spree at the great great fantastic great record store, Mod Lange.

I'm not minding my new Giant Drag CD one bit.
Also on the 5 CD changer this week:
Tom Vek We have Sound
Soft Hearted Scientists Uncanny Tales From The Everyday Undergrowth
We Are Scientists With Love and Squalor
DJ Kicks Tiga
The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society
Clor

Sample lectures available for purchase:

1. On Cultivating an Image No One Understands But You
2. On Being the Kind of Person That Not Even a Mother Could Love
3. On a New Art School Taxonomy
4. On Ensuring Unsuccessful Transition
5. How to be Astonishing
6. On Extracting More From People Than They Think They Are Willing to Give
7. On Denying Death
8. On Cultivating Misery in the Name of Art No One Wants to See
9. A Lexicon, or: As I Understand It
10. How to Feel About Disasters
11. Turning Bad Habits into Charming Quirks
12. A Guide to Sex, Dating and Love
13. Becoming Stabbed by Grace
14. Making Friends and Ingratiating Yourself
15. A Guide to Staying in Bed
16. On Alienating Everyone Who Might Care About You
17. On last minute Decisions, Good or Bad?
18. A Guide to Irregular Language and its Usages
19. On Occupying a Moral High Ground No Matter What the Subject
20. On Near Death Experiences and How They Can Make You Special
21. On Faking Class
22. On Financial Optimism Against All Odds
23. On Professional Jealousy
24. On Maintaining Imaginary Friends
25. On Missing Opportunity and Not Learning Lessons

Three five minute lectures have been sold to date, none have been performed yet.

Lectures for Sale By Goody-B. Wiseman

Tinfoil in tree

Self Portrait with Moustache

Runaway kid at Sunset

Art feet will be wafting up the Taconic parkway on Tuesday. look up and see me painting toenails which have calcified into a large rectangular canvas.

Bulky grouping of confetti blowers storm HQ to squash "10,000th visitor to blog party" Meanwhile, reader of the week Mrrrwrm writes

"I made the mistake of hitting the button that sez something like "NEXT BLOG" on your homepage and this site appeared which is freaking me out:

http://encouragingthetis.blogspot.com/

The visuals make no sense and I think I'm going crazy. The whole blog reads and looks like what my body feels like when I'm deep in one of those weird fever dreams where your body feels like a filing cabinet or a soda machine with lots of monologues.

Weird."

SUNDAY SUNDAY SUNDAY
OCT 23rd
Wynne Greenwood and K8 Hardy
12:00 Noon @
Reena Spaulings
371 Grand Street

New Report is a deeply penetrating exploration into a mysterious girl named Chelsea and why she may have thrown out some perfectly good paintings...

Day 3 without coffee. we're finding this to be a bigger problem then anticipated. options:

a) spend day staring out window
b) cheese and crackers and TV
c) "attempt" to "work" in "studio"

PS. Sea Monkey, your comments in my previous post make me glow like a worm.

Pet Rescue Barbie: NOT OK!
Make your own potato Chia Pet: Maybe ok.
Be Your Own Pet: Rocks!

The video to the new single Damn Damn Leash is reminding me of The Monkeys tee-vee show, achieving the same level of kookiness but the music rules, nothing against the Monkeys...

Take it from me, operating on yourself only makes things worse. Suffice to say, cyst like growth on face > steak knife. I will be on the DL for now while I recoup from disfiguritization. The wound falls below my left nostril and may at times resemble dry nasal mucus. But it's not. The second I can go out in public I will visit The Contemporary Art Neighborhood.

I teach nursing every Tuesday at Bucolic Upstate Hospital. Tomorrow we will deal with wounds caused by stabbing to the head. Please come back on Wednesday for dispensing of assorted lipid lowering agents -This is a genius link. Please feast your eyes on this short film by Nick park, the guy who brought you Wallace and Gromit

A note from the famous anonymous author who is writing the O'keeffe essay,

No-one had ever done anything like them!

They drove the men nuts!

Women fell in love with them!

They were a complete sensation.

It's hard to imagine that now, just as it's hard to imagine Renoir's blurry but decorous teaparties as revolutionary, or Monet's dissolving waterlilies as rebellious. We may like them or loathe them now, but either way they're so familiar that it's hard to get excited by them. But at the time they were shocking, as were those strange, unearthly images of O'Keeffe's.

Also, O'Keeffe owns those images - magnified flowers, skulls, shells, bones. No-one can paint those things again without referring to her work - it's as though she used them so powerfully and indelibly that she's come to inhabit them permanently. That's pretty remarkable, I think. Picasso doesn't own nudes, or bulls, or interior still lifes. But O'Keeffe's images are still hers."

-I never thought I'd care but I have a renewed interest in this work, thanks R!

IRONY VS PASSION

"If I proposed that we divide modern art into two camps, and that they were Irony and Passion, I'd put Picabia, Duchamp, Dada, the Surrealists, Op and Pop and the New York School and practically all the big groups into the Irony side.

On the Passion side I'd put the German Expressioinists, Picasso (Guernica et al), Francis Bacon, Pollock, DeKooning and the Abstract Expressionists, O'Keeffe - and can you think of any others?

Also, do you think this is a theory that has any merit?"

# posted by Corny @ 9:40 AM 13 comments

We're feeling like all this talk about art and money is sucking the jam out of our doenuts. Angry rash clusters are enveloping my body and this time it's not just scabies. Please inhale some glue with me and check out Soulwax's new video E talking

....and exhale

Has anyone heard a band called Soft Hearted Scientists? They rule my school. The Cd to find is called Uncanny Tales From The Everyday Undergrowth If you like Field Music this is similar, but me likes MORE. The new Franz Ferdinand CD is pure pop genius. How many times did I listen to it in a row today, 6-7-8 times? The first release was chock full of hits but this one has flow, every single song is great. I'm not wrapping my head around the new Clap Your Hands and Say Yeah or Electralane But will listen again in the studio today. Thats all. Thanks for the heads up on the Soulwax vid Mr. Boadwee.

BREAKING NEWS!!! This is a major freak'n event for us at A Blog Called Nowhere, and yeah, even if our lives were full and interesting it'd still be a major freak'n event: Team Shredder has entered the orbit, we are as excited as a thrift store full of desert retards. Go Team Shredder! Our love for you knows NO BOUNDS. In fact I'm watching you right now, cute haircut...

Artist Aidas Bareikis is the hero of the 11 page article in This weeks New Yorker chronicalling the Days and nights of Leo Koenig.

(Bareikis) "as an art-school student in Vilnius, he'd been drafted into the Soviet Army. After two months, a Soviet general paid his unit a visit. There was a uniform inspection, and Bareikis was found to be wearing an undershirt on which he'd painted the Lithuanian flag. He was sent to the brig solitary confinement in a pitch-black cistern buried in the ground and then to a mental hospital, where doctors could not find evidence that his affection for his native republic had anything to do with madness. He was shipped off to Afghanistan, to fight the mujahideen. At first, he didn't see combat, but he did see, while loading trains bound for Russia, some of its results: caskets, quadriplegics, amputees. He came across a mangled helicopter covered in soldiers blood. Later, his convoy was ambushed, and he spent three days and nights behind a rock, pinned down by enemy fire. He told himself, "I've got to go back to art school". ...Bareikis and a few other Baltic draftees began scrounging for pencils and grinding the graphite into powder, which they inhaled through their noses in an effort to poison themselves. They also tried rolling fingernail parings into their cigarettes and depriving themselves of sleep. After a couple of weeks of this, Bareikis, delirious and suffering from high blood pressure, was ordered to see the unit’s medical officer..."

Then it goes on to describle Adias as living under a tree in Central Park and finally snorting vodka with Leo one fateful night and convincing him to open a gallery. Our R&D department is working on an Aidas Bareikis toy action figure complete with AK-47 and a glue gun. I mean, woah!

The article is thorough, there's a ton of information strung together and some interesting factoids (did we know Anton Kern is Baselitz's son)? Author Nic Paumgarten tags along on late nights out and then quotes Leo and Debora (who he neglected to mention is an accomplished artist in her own right) and others when they've obviously been putting a few back, it strikes me as unfair to quote someone when they're drinking. Also some of the characterizations have a bitchy, sometimes malicious edge. Still it's a good read offering insite into some of the obscure workings in the art world. Heres a link to the article if you don't want to spent 4 bucks on the New Yorker.

Are you aware of the appropriate prom dress for your personality? According to quizfarm, if I was an armless mannequin in a prom dress I'd look like this. Of course I'd want to snazz it up with a fun hat or iron bucket. Tomorrow we will discuss the massive 11 page artical about Leo Koenig in this weeks New Yorker magazine and also the ramifications of going back to temple for Yom Kippur for the first time in 10 years. Would it be so bad to bring a flask?

Sunday Night Double Feature

We had a double header of the cutes last night, First Was Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, then March of the Penguins. In "Were-Rabbit", our heros have opened a pest control business called Anti Pesto. Their mission is to rid local gardens of rabbits in anticipation of the upcoming Giant Vegetable Competition, which has been held at Tottington hall for the past 500 years. Anti-Pesto's BunniVac machine suck up the mega-ultra-supra-cute rodents. Wallace tries to brain wash the rabbits not to be so destructive but something goes wrong... A Blog Called Nowhere bigtime hearts Wallace and Gromit, Were-Rabbit is a claymation masterpiece.
March of the Penguins was pretty amazing too but I kept thinking of an interview with Morgan Freeman (the narrator) where he said he had no interest at all in emperor penguins, couldn't care less about them. Hahahaha, what a jerk. There's a bunch of Dreamworks animations coming out, "Over the Hedge" looks good.
Have a great day kids, I'm off to my studio to fight the good fight.

An entry from the Now What? Department: These Smurfs have left the village to live in Japan, but whats been happening with the rest of the gang? -Thanking Bonassas, our Washington correspondent for alerting us to this distressing story.

Last night: Before

During

After

Fashion Forward: Modern yet Complicated.

I'm having Lunch with my ex-dealer uptown today. My philosophy of luncheon is it's better to be over-dressed then under-dressed. I find if you incorporate the table itself into your outfit -as a kind of belt- you're good to go.
Today my favorite sneaker shop in all the boroughs is re-opening with new inventory for the fall. Dave's Quality Meat Check these chucks out. It's a great store without the "what the fuck are you doing setting your fat and hideous foot in my pashmina carpeted exclusive Nolita boutique" vibe. I'm so having Nike skate shoes, I have two pairs, one with the colors of the Jamaican flag but thats not nearly enough so will be shopping for new ones today. Also the cutest pug named SQUISHY, will be there to help you pick out the right style.

Dearest Gentle Reader, you'll be relieved to know this crack team of facial technologists have exfoliated all my negativity. I've been possessed by Hilton Kramer's ghost, woah, and he's not even dead, is he? What a bad trip I've been on, regarding the art world. I'm ready to be over it. I don't want to be a humorless old fuck, Not every single work of art has to be genius. Right? Heres how Jerry S. sees what artists now attempt to achieve, this sounds alright to me;

"They're attempting to thread together competing complexities, make pleasure precious again... Whether they succeed or not, it's a mistake to label any of them "great." Artists are after a less lofty, less autocratic essence. Something suppler, more "real," and willingly vulnerable. Maybe what Greil Marcus called "spirits of acceptance and desire, rebellion and awe, raw excitement, good sex, open humor, and a magic feel for history."

Now back to lighter fare... There was genius footage on The Daily Show of a fox running through the National Gallery, turns out it was artist Francis Alys who set him loose for the security cameras to record his movements during the night. Brilliant, Go fox go! The footage is on the web; google "fox national portrait gallery" and you'll find it, I can't seem to make the link work.

Sorry kids...my depression about the crisis of bad art has achieved gigantic proportions. MountainMan, I will insert my head in a pile of in dirt and Mr. Boadwee, you are a delicate flower, I will be gentle with you, but best not to read my blog for a few days, my usual feel good, going with the flow attitude is a casualty of this dark and humorless virus.

The Jim Shaw thrift store paintings I saw last week are confusing to me at this moment. They can be inspiring and funny but they are also really shitty paintings. The confusing thing is that the fluttery brain-crackling sensation you get from looking at a great painting is similar to the feeling of delight you can get looking at a Jim Shaw thrift store painting. Thats fine and good, I don't want to impicate the naif. Perhaps, when talking about "bad art" I need to distinguish thrift store paintings from the self-concious underdeveloped or formulaic "student grade work" that has no shadow, turn your back on it for a second and it disappears kind of work. The art market is a hungry beast at this moment and it needs to fill its gargantuan appetite and when you're hungry there's no difference between foie gras and a tofu pup, it's just calories. Thus theres alot of crap and spectacle being consumed. Hell, I'm going to lay my shit out, I want painting to be honest, revealing and daring, I want transcendent experiences, I want fucken deliverance man! Or something, (keeping in mind I believe a 3 minute pop song can be transcendent) but I think the collector class is insensitive to that feeling -they mistake transcendence for a stingy hit of crack, its all the same difference- those twits and jack-asses buying all the student-grade work at exorbitant prices affect the context in which we all show our work. I know, I've gotten all serious on your asses, shitski. Now, wheres that pile of dirt...

Baird Jones cracks me up. I really enjoy getting the invites to his openings that take place almost weekly, 10-11:30 at a nightclub. Last week it was the Art of Dr. Kevorkian. This weeks its “Art by Beautiful Celebrities” including Elke Sommer, Kim Novak, Lucy Lawless, Rachel Weisz, Jennifer Garner. Imagin with me the art of Elke Sommer. Imagin. Has anyone out there ever been to one of these shows?

WE'RE FINDING THIS TO BE A BIGGER PROBLEM THEN EXPECED

Curiously, bad art messages are repeatedly crossing my flight path this week. In Mexico I saw a show of Jim Shaws thrift store paintings. Oddly, the museum curators put on their own show of Mexican thrift store paintings to accompany Jim's show. Yesterday I bought a book by Jean Baudrillard, the first 20 pages seems to be about bad art, or that art is bad, (it's a depressing read "The Transparency of Evil") and today I had a long conversation with a trusted painting confidant about the state of affairs in Chelsea with underdeveloped, formulaic art dominating, or the spectacle that looks for a second or two like art but is souless... Bad art, it's in the air. What gives? I was feeling today that Chelsea as a context in which to show in is shitty. It makes bad art look okay and good art becomes infected by the corporate atmosphere and just the sheer anount of work...

Kate moss is in rehab in Arizona, probabley at the Desert Canyon Treatment Center, if you have to go, and have the money, this is the place to be, especially for hard drug users (whereas Betty Ford caters more towards the drinking set). Meanwhile Pete got taken in by the police again Saturday night for posession, I don't believe he was charged. What about the other ex Libs? Carl's new band without a name recorded their first demo in September, looking forward to hearing that. Carl said himself his music pre Libs was shit, so we'll see what he can do on his own. John Haskell is rocking Yeti, hopefully they'll come play in NY this year. Check out these Yeti downloads including XFM sessions, Demos and videos also and other stuff from the boys in the band. Heres a strange project, someone has set one of Pete's poems to music, it's naff but I like. Also if you want to download it, a link to Petes notorious Live8 duet with Sir Elton, this post may not be up for long...

Just back from El Museo de Arte Contemporaneo Carrillo Gil in Mexico City. It's a beautiful modernist structure with ramps and a lot of glass, (no stairs in the museum which made it easier for me to drag my tired-ass around, I was feeling the altitude and short of breath the whole time). I'm doing something at the museum which will involve an "intervention" (thats their art school word, not mine) on the collection, improvements as 'twere, or lets call it a blitzkrieg. The collection focuses on works by Mexican masters Orozco, Siqueiros, Rivera, I'll be mixing the collection with my own stuff... I feel deeply connected to those guys and their socially minded work but the machoness is tiresome and the revolution they depict needs a new focus. But fuck, that Orozco could draw! His depictions of war are grusome and beautiful, similar to Goya. Hey doesn't it suck (but not surprising) that there are there no artists drawing the horrors of the war in Iraq. Or are there? Steve Munford's gentle watercolors were such a disappointment!

Jesusa Rodriguez is the fiercest diva of them all. She runs a caberet in Mexico City and recently did a performance at the Gugenheim in NY as part of the Aztec Show. She's performing the night of the opening at the Museo de Carrillo Gil. Jesusa and a 6'4", 250 pound opera singer will be the fussy dictorial lesbian art collectors who hire me to redo the collection. We will hang the show the night of the opening, there will be a grand piano being carried around by men to accompany the opera singer as I (playing enfant terrible) draw/paint on the glass&frames that protect the master works, ruin the walls and generally cause mayham. It's going to be mental.