A few days have gone by without us even leaving the house. We did find some witch hazel on our last hike and I photographed it at night so there is life out there. I need to get my groove back. I almost forgot I was keeping a blog. No I didn’t. I started to say I was busy but that’s not exactly true. I mean it is true but how do you define “busy”? I get the sense that it has something to do with making money. I love that Lightnin’ Hopkins song where he stops mid sentence and says “I started to say . . ” It’s called “You’re Not Going To Worry My Life Anymore”. And I love how he refers to himself as “Sam” in his songs. I borrowed the Ornette Coleman box set, Beauty Is A Rare Thing” from Tom Kohn and ripped it and read the liner notes before falling asleep. (That last sentence is only interesting if you know that Tom Kohn owns a record store) I was thrilled to read the music critic, Robert Palmer, compare Ornette’s playing to Lightnin’s. What a wild comparison and so vivid.
I am putting the final touches on twenty new crime face paintings. These are sort of small, 11×14 each and all sort of rough and tumble like. I am trying to deliver attitude. After all, what else is there? Well, I guess there is the Plutocracy.
Peter Schjeldahl loves to use big words and I like trying to follow his deeply opinionated reviews in the New Yorker even when I disagree with him. When he tears something apart he levels it, Hiroshima style. In his review of Dakis Joannou’s (a Greek billionaire) collection at the New Museum he says”. . . big money, besides being just about the only money there is, brands the big-time art it buys — art that behaves, in economic terms, like a form of money itself. He calls Jeff Koons, the foundational artist of Joannou’s collection and curator of the show, “the creator of the boom era’s definitive art: perfectionist icons of lower class taste that advertise the jolly democratic sentiments of their loaded buyers.” He says this show “arrives on today’s downwardly mobile art scene like a bejeweled princess at a party that—opps—turns out to be a barn dance.
And I noted in this week’s 60 Minutes piece on the Wall Street robber barons that the fusion of money and government is so concentrated that only a handful of bankers understand what is going on.
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