Not Yet the State's Bitch

During my afternoon break, my not unsensible 'boss' lamented with me over the fact that I was not a recipient of a national artist grant. His suggestion: "Why not make art to live in - you know -like architecture, or even an interesting bathroom?...art is for everyone afterall, and it should be pleasing ... Stephen Harper is really a scary scary man"

Marcel Duchamp, “Untitled (Hand and Cigar),” 1967. Lithograph. Edition of 100. Norton Simon Museum, Gift of Mr. John Coplans in homage to Mr. Walter Hopps. © 2008 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris / Succession Marcel Duchamp]

Posture and gas

"You walk through the uninviting entrance into a completely dark foyer where you can vaguely perceive that there are a few people shuffling around. Then a flashlight lights up and you put your membership card in its beam. You’ve passed the first test. You go through the doors at the back of the lobby to the stairway. There are two official-looking if a bit stoned attendants there to check your membership number off in a ledger, write down the number of guests with you (you’re allowed two), and write out a bill—$19.00 for three. You then wait in line to go upstairs. This is the tensest part of the evening because you can hear the music from upstairs, and they’re usually playing one of your favorite songs, so you know you’ll miss dancing to it. At the top of the stairs, which are usually crowded with anxious, whispery guys, you pay your money and get your hand stamped with ink that glows under black light. Finally, you’re in, but still not ready for the dance floor. There’s another line at the coat check, which takes forever, because you have to decide there and then how much to take off, and there’s a feverish shuffling of necessities from the pockets of shed clothing to pockets in what you’re still wearing: joints of dust, poppers, inhaler, downs, cigarettes, matches, coke, coke spoon, ethyl chloride (if you’re a rag queen). If you’re smart, you do all of this at home, but that means making the difficult decisions before you’ve got the feel of the place.

"Place: Synthetic materials, industrial gloss, futuristic, spacey,
technologized surfaces and lighting. Enormous plants and
bowls of fruit appear as if technologically produced, having
no similarity to natural objects. Views through doorways to
the outside world are extremely disturbing. Views of reality
look unreal, nightmarish, tacky. Going outside is always a
shock, and it takes days to readjust to ugly reality.
People: Synthetically produced bodies using body-building
machines and protein supplements. Bodies moving en masse,
like cogs in a machine."

– Douglas Crimp

Sex in the (frankfurt) kitchen

“Irresponsible, reckless, carefree, wild, rich — we were just kids doing drugs and being bad, out at bars every night,” Mr. McGinley wrote in an e-mail message circulated to friends after Mr. Snow’s overdose. “Sniffing coke off toilet seats. Doing bumps off each others’ fists. Driving down one-way streets in Milan at 100 miles an hour blasting ‘I Did It My Way’ in a white van.”

TOM BURR

"a long perfect ash formed on the end of the cigar, the white ghost of the leaf with all its veins and its fainter pungency. It was ignored, in its beauty, by the old man. For it was beautiful. Wilhelm he ignored as well" - Saul Bellow Seize the Day

Why would 'we' not agree with the division of labour?

"When software enthusiasts tested cartoons using Green Dam, the Japanese Doraemon, a cat dressed in blue, was "safe" to the software. But Garfield, another fictional cat, was sometimes filtered, because the animal is yellow – and the software considers an image with a large area of yellow as pornographic."
Shenzhen Daily, Wednesday July 1st, 2009.

ONE YEAR AGO TODAY

"I will always be more indebted to those to whose favour I owe the ability to enjoy my leisure without restriction, than to those who might offer me the most honourable employment on earth." - Descartes

The Great Binge

I discovered the only Morel patch naturally growing on our 17-acre farm through a pre-cognitive dream. Upon telling my dinner guests of the dream I had had that morning, we went directly to the location. In exactly the 20 x 20-ft plot of ground seen by me in dream-travel, Morels were popping up. Nowhere else on our property has a native Morel patch been discovered in the years hence....

Baffling and beguling, Morels continue to tease us with their peculiar sense of humour. If any readers know of similarly unusual encounters of the Morel kind, I would like to know. Please write me c/o Fungi Perfecti, P.O. Box 7634, Olympia, WA98507 USA.

Paul Stamets - Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms

Etobicoke

I had a dream last night I was talking to members of a notable Quebec art collective. After one backhanded chauvinistic comment, a potty mouth school yard retort ensued; "You may think you are clever, you may even think you have skill and talent, but your art is fucking terrible".