So, three artist'es'sess walk into a bar. . . .

So this fascinating artist* took us out to dinner last night. I'm still trying to remember the high-lights of our great conversation:

Art is best when you introduce nothing new, but rather find a way to percieve familiar things in a new way.

Being an artist is like being a sick person, creativity is a malady. It's something you have to deal with.

Being in the middle of "work" is not like meditation or hypnosis or anything else that sounds romantic, it is most like sleeping. That said, working on art is as close to doing nothing with yourself as you can get.

He told of the different facets of himself as seen by others: The family who sees him as a wandering playboy, care-free, untethered by work or bosses or a proper job. His colleauges who see him as a madman, insane with work ethic, hunched over his drawing table for 14 hours (!) a day while his assistant fetches food and coffee.

I really wanted to take a serious tone, look him in the eye, and ask, "But Marco, is fourteen hours gonna be enough?".


*Supposedly, in Uruguay (which is located between Argentina and Brasil, for those of you who are as geographically ignorant as I was before I looked it up) the word Artiste is reserved as a description of an individual who enjoys life but cannot be trusted to accomplish anything worthwhile.

Pitching a tent

A couple weeks ago, the Milk Girl sold a piece out of a show in Maryland. What you can see is a drawing of cups, mismatched, atop a stack of plates. What you can't see is a vague, computer-printed wallpaper pattern underneath the drawing. The drawing is roughly door-sized.



Selling art is such a strange recreation. How many hours go into a six-foot drawing? How do you attribute a value to something, as an individual item, that works as a piece in a group? It's like selling the bricks out of the foundation of your house.



As a couple, our research often runs the same length of brain stem. It makes sense, we talk about our artistic aims (or lack-there-of) almost constantly. The Milk Girl has been collecting images of circus tents. I see large scale recreations of carnival dwellings in our near future. I've been reading 1850's Carnival/Saturnalia Theory and Performance based studies with the primary intention of making a complete ass out of myself while maintaining: free and familiar contact among people, free expression of the latent side of human nature in eccentric conduct, profanations, carnivalistic misalliances, and the combining and uniting of the most disparate and ill-assorted things.

The Mighty Resin King of the Undertable Fairgrounds has decreed a making of clown attire to be taken place immediately.

All U. F. employees must wash their hands and report to their respective G.L.o.V.E. Distribution Points for preparitory measures. There you will be assigned markers, crayons, scissors, glue and pointy sticks with which you will then have artfull associations concerning non-clown items in your wardrobe.



I say it's gonna bleed, but M'jolk says it won't . . . and she knows a lot about stuff, so we'll see.

Back to work

My body has started to snap back into non-driving form. The cramp in my middle right calf has not been activated for two days. The mere thought of piloting an automobile casts dark clouds in my brain and those same clouds will be blamed for the car being mostly unpacked. And my phone. . . .

Midway into the trip Kyle called while I was driving. My phone had been stored in the glove box, along with the iPod, the Belkin Charger, The phone/car charger and various other roadtripping essentials. You have to imagine a car packed to the fullest extreme. Melissa found a pair of shoes she liked at one of the bigger road-side "trading posts" and we had to leave them behind because they simply would not have fit. The dismantled stack of fifty four-foot-long sewing pins filled the entire trunk and most of the back seat. The rolled up tube of five foot tall drawings made finding room for our super small suit cases a hardship. It was all rather claustrophobic. So. . . .

Kyle calls and the phone is retrieved from the glove box only to crack the locking mechanism, leaving the door wide open and touching Melissa's knees. The quick fix of clear packing tape was accompanied by an insane rattle that could not be tolerated for 600 miles a day. At our next stop I got all Kawasaki-tech-fix-it in the middle of a parking lot while swearing loudly. I threaded a length of cleared braided tape into the catch of the lock and through the oscilating blades of the air-conditioning vent in the glove boxes face. I managed to tie it off tight enough to keep the rattle out and, more importantly, keep the light off that would eventually drain the battery and leave us stranded in the middle of the desert. Feeling good about my handiness we carried on. Fifteen minutes later my phone rang from inside the glove box. It's still there. Apologies to anyone I didn't get in touch with that wasn't stored in both our phones.

And now the list of travel high-light ala Reverend Punch:

1. Hearing every Love/Hate album in sequence while driving through the desert.

2. Listening to Chuck Pahlinauk reading aloud his interviews with famous people. Marilyn Manson reads his tarot and Juliette Lewis asks his her own set of questions ("have you ever stabbed anyone", "have you ever been mystified by your genitalia").

3. The gallery that put op Missy show flooded for the first time in over 100 shows while her work was "breathing". The dripping water bored a hole through the biggest and oldest drawing in the show. Several others has noticable wavey areas. In a perfect world the galleries insurance will cover this. We'll see.

4. The show looks great! It's funny to see drawings on a pristine gallery wall that had only ever been seen before in our dirty basement drawing studio. It took us from 9:00 in the morning til 9:00 at night to finish installing the show and that includes her lecture.

5. It's so strange to stay in a big Reno casino when you are busy with the outside world. Suddenly the cover band playing "Tough E'nuff" seems as ridiculous as it is.

6. The cocktail waitress who may or may not have been trying to scam me for dough with a tale of stolen cars and a dubious looking legal form that was supposedly from the police but entirely in Spanish. Missy was upstairs showering and all I could think of was her coming downstairs and seeing me sitting in the early morning casino with an attractive, crying woman.

7. Shaving Kyle's mustache off!

8. Homeless people offering to sell me Nugs.

9. Indians!!!! Lots of them! Had a moment where three massive indians with long pony tails and metal shirts approached me and regaled my resemblance to Scott Ian. I felt very safe and wondered how one goes about assembling a posse of indians. Baiting them with old school metal may work.

10. Visiting our friends Sue and Benita in their million dollar home with a movie theater in the lower floor. Great conversation, really invigorating people.

11. Having Lincoln Nebraska creep me out. It was my first time back and maybe my last.

More later, maybe pictures too if I'm feeling less lazy.