I found this poem in the ladies bathroom at work. I think it's about working for the NSF/NORC and hooded sweatshirts and appreciating time by oneself.
"Ask around the hood to see if I put in workThat's why the hood got my back like a sweat shirt.I can go anywhere 'n be all woodyOnly time the hood got yo back is when u wear the hoodyI knock on wood so I wont jinx myselfI could enjoy my own company by myselfget cha gunlil 'nigga I got yourselfDont let me go in the closet and get that thing off that shelf"
Lonely hair piece in the road,
How did you get there?
Whose hair did you hold?
Who did you know?
How far have you come?
and how far could you go?
Do drivers mistake you for a dead squirrel?
When you are so much more.
So much lonely hair piece, so much more.
Tyler with five kinds of barbequed meat.
The cowboy is sad that John's Guns is closed.
Real Streets in Texas:Pack Saddle PassOld Potato RoadSouth Old Potato RoadPaint CreekSquirrel Run
In Texas, one can drink liquor outside on the street or one can walk down the block with a beer in hand until one's arrival at the next bar. Texas- what a nutty place!
I spent the weekend in Texas, both College Station, TX and Austin. Texas is everything I thought it would be. I had been in Texas for no more than 10 minutes when I saw this fellow.
Notice the cell phone ear piece. This man is the apotheosis of vacation fashion.
Hoo haa! HR is in town to do pick-up shots, meaning that we are going around to visit the prison gals and their parents again. HR is doing some follow-up interviews, getting b-roll shots of things like warning signs, locks, etc...you know, cut-away shots.
Some of our favorite gals are back in prison after having been released. Others are pregnant. Still, it's good to see them again.
Enjoy these stills of the neighborhoods we visited:
Alright. This was my idea a long time ago, but I didn't know how to implement it. Now you can keep track of all the stuff your congressman or woman, senator, or political favorites are up to:http://www.govtrack.us/users/aboutmonitors.xpd
This is what I just painted (sorry the picture is slightly out of focus):
From this picture I took in San Francisco:
Hills are sort of a novelty for me, having grown up in the midwest where there are no hills. In the development process of San Francisco, a lot of the nearby hills were blown up. Sometimes just the hilltops were taken off, but on this one they made roads around it, making it that much more of a cartoon and a novelty for me.I started painting this:
and this:
I like seeing the insides of buildings that I feel like I'm not supposed to see. There's a matress sticking out of one of the rooms. The shapes in these pictures are really nice too. Next, I'm going to paint some of these nice storm pictures I took. We were on our way to Naperville yesterday for Memorial Day meat roasting and it looked like we were headed into the abyss.
I've also got some fine images of old folks from the Slovenian dance hall in Cleveland, OH. I'm going to paint some of them this summer. The color balance on the camera was off, but in a good way. It made everyone look sort of washed out and delicious. Lots of creamy whites in the hair, and streaks of light brown, next to blonde, next to gray. The old people/hair painting project will be a fun exercise in color.
Happy Memorial Day, O My! Happier malady. To honor those veterans let's play with the anagram maker: http://www.anagramgenius.com/server.php
My name spells "Lazy Cow, benign kid."
and my friends include "Trash Heroes" , "Join Sleazier Norm", and "Chimpanzees Freak Alert"
My father's business anagrams to "Hmm! Craziness and very"
I lifted this from today's post on Malcolm Gladwell's blog: http://gladwell.typepad.com/gladwellcom/
CEO PayAfter reading the article in the New York Times yesterday on the hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation given over the past few years to the CEO of Home Depot, I ran across this: in 1949, the highest paid CEO in America was Charlie Wilson of General Motors, who earned $586,100 in salary, bonus and stock. That's roughly equivalent to what some of the better-compensated CEO's are making today.But what did Wilson pay in taxes? $430,350.Times have changed.
This is the last SF travel story, I promise, but it's a lengthy one so I was reluctant to get into it. I visited both the San Francisco Art Institute and the San Francisco College of Arts and Crafts. (They recently dropped the "Crafts" part of the name because they thought it was denigrating.) I was there to compare and contrast to my own art school experience, to do a little spying. The SFAI was definitely very "rock and roll" as someone there put it. Lots of graphic t-shirt designs everywhere, an abundance of photo-realism in the painting department and also lots of paintings of decadent young life (i.e., paintings of people sitting in shabby student apartments drinking beer in their underwear and smoking joints. *See picture.).
*A Graduate Student's Watercolor of a Lesbian Quilting Romp.
When I went outside, there was a gathering of fashionable students in tapered ironic acid washed jeans and girls with really long bangs in their eyes eating chips. It was bright and sunny and warm and this upper level roof top pavilion of the school had a view of the city and of the ocean. A South-American teacher introduced himself and explained that the giant inflatable heart that the students were jumping inside of was his project. You know those giant castles that people rent for children's parties, sometimes they have them at fairs, and you have to take off your shoes to jump inside them? That's basically what this guy made except it was a human heart, with four chambers inside, just like a real heart. All the jumping inside made it look like the heart was beating frantically. It was very red and womb-like, pleasant even, but eventually the students broke the heart. The teacher had to shoo everyone out and trample the heart from the outside to squish all the air out. He said he couldn't have planned a better ending.
At the recent School of the Art Institute of Chicago grad show, I was super disappointed. Tons of architectural displays, cluttered installations, unappetizing monitors, and noisy video. Not much painting, but what was there was pretty unexciting, very minimalist 80's style. Lots of self-absorbed, self-referential work including a girl who made videos of herself talking about feminism while performing simulated sex acts. One installation stated "No one knows I'm a lesbian". But you know what? No one cares.
I took this in San Francisco. Look at it real good. See it? See! See! See! See that guy? He startled me.
Yesterday I went to see the opening of Sunset Limited, the new play by Cormac McCarthy. We went on the same night as the Cormac McCarthy Society, a bunch of elderly english majors who smoke (and eat) a lot. The wonderful Austin Pendleton played the part of a depressed professor who is rescued from a suicide attempt by a southern black Jesus loving stereotype of a man, basically a cheerful Sambo. The play is the conversation of the two men, anti-Jesus vs. pro-Jesus battling it out.
One time I hung out with some theater people, but on the grand scale of things I can't yet characterize them into some sort of cogent group. I haven't read a lot of good old Cormac either (I learned he was actually born "Charles"), but I can say that this is a man who is in love with his own penis. He wore a very unbuttoned dress shirt with a pale beige blazer. Anybody who writes about manly topics like cowboys, the desert, death, blood, violence, human suffering, and pathos is clearly in love with their own genitalia. It's kind of a fact.
Everytime I go to the Steppenwolf Theater I think I see the same play. Sometimes it's about a bunch of people sitting on the deck of beautiful home in southern California. Sometimes there's a mentally disturbed brother and sometimes they are drinking wine. Sometimes something crazy happens, like a falcon eating a puppy, but everytime there are a bunch of people sitting around fretting and venting their dark feelings about the human condition. There's lots of talk about futility and meaninglessness. It always a lot like that Sarte play, No Exit.
Not to be a Cathy-Complain-A-lot...it's always a treat to see something live, and sets are always fun to gawk at, and it's special to go out and sit in a room with other people. There was some snappy, fine writing and some funny moments, but there's something there that I just can't put my finger on about the kind of people that write or go to plays like this. We've all seen something like it before, we know it's not going to end well, and we know nothing new is going to be said on those subjects of human suffering and meaning. So why do they keep going?
If you are ever on your way to Santa Cruz for some reason and need a place to stay, may I suggest the Brookdale Lodge. I think the Brookdale Lodge was once a nice place, maybe up until the 70's? A photo of Marilyn Monroe in the lobby is proof that she was once a guest. Then in '77 there was a big fire, the hotel was rebuilt, but it was never able to recapture those long gone salad days. The once classic style can be described as rustic velvet Bavarian swingers nature camp. The bright red lobby features a round cream colored couch and a giant cage in the corner filled with about 30 male finches. You can have a drink in the Mermaid Room, which is located below ground level. Its large murky window is also the north wall of the swimming pool, providing a good view of any swimmers underwater. The best feature by far of the Brookdale Lodge is its dining room. A river runs through the middle of it and you can watch birds fly around as you sit in your high backed 70's chair and enjoy the Sunday brunch (9:30am to 1:30pm). 
Two things you should look for at the video store/put on your netflix queue:Michael Jackson's Dangerous . It is a collection of all of his music videos, but be sure to watch the amazing Leni Riefenstahl-like video in the beginning, the Michael Jackson concert footage montage. This video has very dramatic classical music and lots of slowed down footage of him dancing infront of frenzied crowds. The video makes him seem like a Jesus-Hitler-superstar. It's quite a treat. Also watch the extended version of Black or White. It is concrete proof that Michael Jackson is insane.
Peep Show. This BBC comedy only lasted six episodes, like all great comedy treasures (Arrested Development, Freaks and Geeks). Two odd couple-style roommates grow to hate each other more and more and their lives get worse and worse. The episodes were shot with cameras mounted to the actors heads for a lot of nice point-of-view scenes.
