First Off the Boat

 

Fuck Me Like We're From That Other City

 

I Like to Please As Much As Anybody Else

--
totally weird, but i didn't notice how similar all my recent titles were until i uploaded them just now. will have to work on crafting more varied titles.

this is 1mm German marker, orange; nuthin else.

 

I Like All Kinds of Music

--
i wanted to look at some drawings i did a few days ago in a particular substyle: basically Vice Premier of Executive Yuan and Self Help Seminar. and i wanted to see if i could expand on what i did. verdicts more than welcome.

i used German markers and ultrafine Sharpies on this one. this is my first drawing with a human-animal hybrid, and i would like to draw a lot more hybrids like that in the future. also, i think this is the first one of my drawings to make my suture fetish look kinda sporty, like stitching on a baseball or football or something. hmmm. never thought of footballs and baseballs in that Frankenstein-type context before.

 

Innoc

--
so the frenetic pace of my drawing has slowed. i hope this is good for its longevity. lately i've mostly been drawing in an 11x14" [28x36cm] sketchbook, 1-3 drawings a day. the sketchbook is too big to fit in my scanner, so i'll snap the pages to post.

i dunno if i'm going to write a novel in November, now. this visual art project seems to be, uhhhn, writing itself? unveiling itself? i cannot remember the last time i felt so compelled to create something every day, seriously. anyway, i'm not sure whether i want to write a novel in November _too_, or whether i just want to give most-to-all of my creative energy to visual art right now. hmmmm...

in the drawing above, i drew lines with fountain pen for the first time. the filled-in black is also fountain pen calligraphy ink, same as the rest of the black in the drawing, and the pink is some kind of special ink that is for technical pens and airbrushing, but _not fountain pens_. i tried using it in a fountain pen and, yeah, it did not work. so, lacking technical pens and lacking+much-disliking airbrushing, i dropped some of the pink ink onto this drawing using an eyedropper. i think the ink is made by some dude named Dr Martin, presumably not the same Dr Martin of the popular English boots. the particular color is called 'Sunset Pink'.

i believe Innoc is what you call a 'compromised work'. yeah... i'm just so startled by drawing; i have no trouble exhibiting drawn works of mine that i find imperfect/daft/whatever. I Am Grateful.

drawing Innoc i thought: what could be more terrifying than totally nonsense graduations on a syringe? that's more or less what i was thinking about while i was drawing it. i had a vague desire, also, to make it look like an illustration from another era, but i don't think that comes across in the finished drawing.

 

Fuck the Vote

--
it's Halloween and i'm in such an absurdly terrible mood. i just got my laptop back, which is great news, but yeah, turns out the hard drive died and i lost the entire contents. yeah of course i have backups of some of it, no of course i don't have backups of all of it. yeah naturally i lost all manner of cool shit including some of my own art. swear to god, i was turning my computer on to _execute a new backup_ when the hard drive failed. precisely at that moment. i had a brand new LaCie drive out of the box, ready for its first backup. bleh. plus, tonight, circumstance prevented me from heading to the West Village Halloween parade and photographing it, as was my plan. yessy yessy yessy enough enough enough

so ok: this drawing. day-glo ink has a long tradition of being used in future-primitive type art, so i wanted to mess around with it while exploring stuff with color. i used highlighters on this one, and as you can see, i had a pretty hard time drawing with them- sloppy stuff. also, when i first started drawing, i got this absurd idea in my head that i wanted to draw dinosaurs. i mean, why? i need photographic reference to draw most things, so fucking hell, why dinosaurs? maybe it's a project for later in life or something, but this particular dinosaur drawing, to me, says: Illustrious Future Ahead In Designing Trapper Keepers. yeah, so. dinosaurs are not actually a muse, i don't think. not right now anyway.

 

the title of Long May It Last comes from one of my favorite songs ever, i could listen to it every day

Why Don't You Find Out for Yourself by Morrissey [320kbps mp3 / around 8MB]
on Vauxhall + I, 1994 / lyrics

the album title is one of my favorite puns. Vauxhall is all kinds of things, including a make of car, a district of London, a British bar someplace [maybe also London], and a Tube stop. but also: Vox, Hall and I. yeahhh. go Moz.

also, the phrase 'Long may it last' is the best tattoo i've ever seen on anyone. if you're out there, Mary of Los Angeles [you know who you are], i would love to draw your tattoo if you would like to send me a picture of your arm.

 

Then I wanted to do something more like painting with a pen: starting with simple color and making fields. Keith Haring wrote in his journals about having these really intense experiences painting with red and black ink on paper in New York City. Yeah, I dig. On this one, I used red and black ink with the fountain pen, and with the shapes, I started on the inside and worked out to make outlines, instead of drawing borders for the shapes first, which is what I usually do.

The tablet is too big to fit in my scanner. The photo came out a bit blurry.

--

But the Blues Are Still Blue

 

i'm pretty sure that my art is fundamentally a line art, but i felt like experimenting with some fields of color today. since i basically don't know what i'm doing with ref to fields and color, i first wanted to make a super-'safe' place to paint fields, so i stuck [1] two of Keith Haring's dudes and [2] a quick impressionistic drawing of parts of Brooklyn on the page. then i made colored fields using a fountain pen and turquoise ink.

holy shit people, _fountain pens_. they're amazing!

oh, yeah, so far as i know, Keith Haring never actually drew any of his figures with a +. that's my addition.

--

The Sky Over Brooklyn

title from the literal English translation of the German title of the film aka Wings of Desire: Der Himmel Über Berlin, or The Sky Over Berlin

 

My Ancestors

--
after the second big porn drawing, i wanted to clear my head by drawing something with no possible referents. i used a purple Uniball vision pen that i got at Staples.

Other views -->

 

Militants [900x856 -->]

--
this is my second drawing on the big easel paper, also drawn from Russian porn. this time i used the manga markers. it's obviously not as complex as the first easel paper drawing, but it took about as long because i was paying a lot of attention to the thickness of the line. i was surprised and pleased how Dragonball Z / L.A. graffiti the drawing ended up.

Detail -->

 

Smalltowne Boy

--
a pretty boy with a guitar is something i can draw while totally spaced out +paying attention to other stuff. that's what happened w/ this one.

 

Earth Is Holier Than Hell

--
by definition.

second experiment with the manga pens and different line thickness. this time i used all 3 black markers from the manga set. for the colors i used a couple of the German 1mm markers, some brush markers, and the lightest gray manga marker. and the red hair is the red markup pen again.

that's all for now. see you when i can get on the computer again.

if i owe you an email, again, i promise i will get to it as soon as i get my laptop back, if not sooner... my webmail client is fucked up and it's not very convenient to set up my POP3 account/etc on other people's computers... so i have several days of email that i haven't even read.

 

Glamboy Gets Spanked to Dialogue from Poison

--
i went back to the fine-tip Uniball Vision pen for this one. the text is from this custom stamp-making kit i found at Staples [4th Ave + 3rd St, Brooklyn] last night that lets you put together any message to make a stamp. it's very poorly made and everything holds together in the most incredibly clumsy way; i can't imagine using it for actual 'office'-type purposes; but it's pretty fun.

 

Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For

--
on this one, i used the medium felt-tipped black pen and the black brush pen from the manga marker set to experiment with different thicknesses for my lines. then i added some pink cuz DUH

 

For Keith H

 

Long May It Last [900x795 --> ]

--
after several failed attempts drawing with thicker markers on the gigantic easel paper [27x34" / 67x86cm], i finally made this from my Russian-porn-viewing. it took forever. i used a lilac ultrafine Sharpie, the fumes of which eventually gave me a severe headache. the Sharpie and the easel paper are a good match, though. while the paper is incredibly thin, the marker barely dots or spreads out; the lines are very skinny.

when i got done with it, it seemed proper to cut off the pieces that weren't part of the overall shape of the drawing.

i had to crank up the contrast like crazy to get a viewable image of it. skinny lilac lines on white paper don't photograph easily. in real life, the wall isn't nearly so yellow.

Detail, wall context -->

 

Either You Face These Things Or You Don't

--
antlers, horns, wings, gills, searchlights, everything

 

Gimme Gimmes, Bad Case Of

--
here i drew the thin lines with an ultra-fine Sharpie marker and filled in the top with a brush marker. i wanted to try to make the space of the drawing appear more 'solid' by filling in an area of color 'behind' it.

 

10 Billion Tribes

--
on this one, i first drew lines with the same red pen; then i used some Faber Castell markers to fill in the rest. the markers are a gray/black set designed for drawing manga and i'm totally in love with them: 6 brush pens similar to calligraphy markers, plus a medium and a fine felt-tip black pen. amazing markers. i wish they came in every colorscheme.

 

Subway Bloody Subway

--
ack. not having a computer sucks bigtime, but tell you something you don't already know, right? i drew this in [yeah] the subway, on the F line, using a red corrections pen designed for marking up manuscripts. i don't know how to finish it. any suggestions?

 

Morrissey

 

Ollie 1988

--
Ollie, currently a Londoner, is aka Commonpeople. i drew this from a photo taken when he was 13.

Ollie has a skyline behind his head [top left] and radiant countries on his shirt because he's lived so many places.

this is the first drawing i did with a 'Uniball Vision' pen. it's a writing pen. fine-tip.

 

Yury Oct 25

--
since we've never met and i've only seen about 5 photographs of him, and he's looked incredibly different in all of them, i have no idea whether this actually resembles him as a person or not.

this is my first drawing with Sharpie- the 'ultra fine point' kind, of which i bought 24 in assorted colors yesterday for under $1 apiece. bizarrely, the colors have no names or numbers! i wanted numbers!!

they give good line, if kind of 'dotty'. it's still maybe slightly thick for paper this size. i have some gigantic easel paper [no i don't have an easel but i have a very big safetyglass desk]; i would like to do a very big drawing with maybe 2 or 3 colors of Sharpie.

i still haven't tried the fountain pen + nibs i bought yesterday. i fell asleep before i could.

 

Angels Don't Breathe

 

I love Steven

--
first multicolor experiment

 

and, obviously, i prefer art that fusses the divide between positive and negative space. but whichever is which, whewee! look i used one more than usual!

My Pompadour Has a Pompadour Has a Pompadour

 

You Fucking Love It

--
wanted to do another one with words on it

 

Demon

--
this time i tried 2 colors of the German markers. behold: a demon appeared!

 

Death

--
i should add that i drew this from a photograph of a guy who was actually incredibly nice and un-death-ly. we met in line at a Morrissey gig in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

 

Heaven Is Pink

--
just wanted to draw something super yummy

 

HMBavian47

--
a stand-in for a famous writer's ex-boyfriend

 

Boy Happy

--
i drew the darker parts of this with a Pilot writing pen, and then i got some 1mm German markers and drew the rest in a lighter blue. the German markers are interesting and were an absolute steal, 20 precision 1mm markers for $20, but the line they make is a little too bold for me, almost too 'easy'. my hand moves across the page too fast. i definitely want to work with markers more, but so far as using color, i think a fountain pen might be my ideal vehicle. i bought one today at Utrecht [4th Ave + 12 St], along with a bunch of nubs and inks. can't wait to break that shit out later, though for all i know i'll suck at using it.

but yeah basically i think i like writing and drafting pens the most, for use in drawing.

 

Shoplifting

 

Famous Like Fucked

 

Raymond Radiguet

 

'I'm Really Into Beverages,' Said the Boy I Wanted to Fuck

--
i drew this and thought: gawd. i made, like, a pepsi or beer ad. rightly or wrongly, i assuaged myself by reminding myself that all work in service to the line appears essentially commercial in some way. you get in line at the store, right? at Disneyland, etc. P.E.

 

t.r.e.c.k.o.

 

Vice Premier of Executive Yuan

 

Why I Want to Have Sex with Robot People

 

Wishing

 

Boys Who Claim to Be Submissive But Actually Just Want to Wrestle

 

Brokeback Starbucks

 

London

--
in this set of drawings from the field emblem sketchbook, i sometimes experimented with delimiting the 'canvas' area before drawing, and sometimes drew right to the edge like before.

shopping list: finer pens. so far in the sketchbook i have been drawing only with 'pilot precise zing' pens, which are for writing and keep getting clogged by the heavy paper.

 

Hardly news right? But every time I open a can of soda, I too hear the entire 20th century in America.

 

Guernica by Pablo Picasso, 1937
tagged 'kill lies all' by Tony Shafrazi, 1974

 

Bertolucci
Dave Eggers
White Stripes
Nan Goldin

 

well obviously the moment was captured, so in that sense, yeah, his beauty is eternal. but i look at Bjørn Andresen aged 15 and i just feel time passing so rapidly, with the intensity of a physical sensation. was he 15? i think he may have actually been 14 in these stills.

Death in Venice [hail Visconti] is one of my all-time favorite movies and all-time favorite pieces of art in any media. it's better, even, than the Mann book. shit you not.

 

so as many of you know, i had the fortune of hitting up the Drawing Restraint retrospective at its only U.S. location, SFMOMA [twice!]. anyone who also owns the DR9 sketchbook either got it at SFMOMA or in Japan. or through eBay etc.

this photograph was at the entry to the floor with most of the Drawing Restraint stuff, framed and poster-size, maybe about 30" tall?

now, titling something is kind of a feat, right? -->

 

Ha, finding shit like this makes me want to manifesto, 'every [populist?] artist of any note, who has ever lived, has made use of the red + at some point.' Warhol's red-painted cross silk screening: easy for_instance. Maybe there are better red +'s in Warhol to discover.

The incredibly photogenic Keith Haring managed to make art that looked even sexier than he did. I hadn't really thought about him or his art for a really long time when I most recently started using the +; it wasn't a conscious reference to anything, though I have drawn the + in margins and shit since I was a very little kid. But Haring's art has been in my life an incredibly long time, as it's basically modern art training wheels. The cartoon version. I bought Keith Haring Editions on Paper 1982-1990 [the Katz book] for an incredibly low price, like $25 maybe, in Boston, over ten years ago. It's an outsize book so it's followed me anyplace I've had large bookshelf space, including to Brooklyn. Until I picked up that Mao Mag thing I mentioned, I hadn't thought about Keith Haring or his art for years. In my recent reappraisal of his stuff, I've been pleased to discover

[1] dude was a genius
[2] dude also tagged using the red +.

'Untitled', 1985. Yeah, basically all his works were untitled, and their number is staggering. It makes me want to sit down with all his work and title it. I mean, not like I feel my connection to the work is _that_ special or anything, but I'm competent at writing titles. Who does not love to title their artwork? That's fucking daft. It's totally the best part.

This 1985 one, I think I call it Red Plus.

 

outfit 1: 2005, 'i raided Conor Oberst's closet, blow me'
outfit 2: 1999ish, what is that, duct tape? i own a closer crop of this print, and the weirdness of his outfit isn't readily apparent.

outfit 2 photo by Todd Oldham; don't know who shot the first one.

 

 

Basically it's a flag on a boat but I'm not sure where to go from here.

 

This was a masterpiece until I started trying to draw +'s in the lower-left, heh. They ended up looking like crosses because I was using a totally fucked method to draw them. When I was doing this drawing I realized that in terms of my understanding of the +, I'm supposed to physically enact the lines crossing. For me to understand the sign I have to not only make the lines cross, but also, pay attention to especially that aspect. Try to draw around that and it starts looking like something else right away. So yeah. Now it looks like there's a graveyard in the lower left. How emo.

 

Matthew Barney field emblem fan art, my symbology mixed with his

 

 

Steven's recent sexy shit inspired me to scan a couple pages out of my sketchbook.

 

No matter. I have a Drawing Restraint sketchbook, do you?

 

me in my favorite shirt, 2004
Runyan Canyon, Los Angeles
shot by Steven

 

A little under a year ago, Steven and I were driving all our belongings cross-country to Brooklyn in a Penske truck. It was expensive.

I took this picture on a day when I was sick, to show that I had gotten a cherry limeade from Sonic that was as big as my head. It really was; it's not an illusion. I think it was 64 oz maybe?

I made it home to Brooklyn safe because I was wearing my lucky sneakers. I didn't know at the time that they were lucky.

 

If pleasure is easy, right, then why aren't I handing out awards? Awards make everyone feel good.

So: makin crownz. I only want to give very meaningful awards.

Yeehaw: the first_ever pleasure is easy Award Made While Screaming [tm*]-->

[infinite loop --> first mention]

 

not quite
2005

 

Beautified

 

Sexual restraint at the state of the art

--
The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim. The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things.

The highest, as the lowest, form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.

Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in the glass. The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in the glass.

The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium.

No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true cannot be proved.

No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.

No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything.

Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art. Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art.

From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of feeling, the actor's craft is the type.

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface, do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol, do so at their peril.

It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital. When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself.

We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.

All art is quite useless.
--

it was for me as it was for many: Oscar Wilde was the first sloganeerist to catch my attention and throat my heart. this is the introduction to The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891, my favorite work of 'art criticism'.

infinite loop --> oh baby baby

 

Compelled To Revisit Disaster Sites

I'm American But Not In That Way

 

Me?

Me, I have long held that the best way to code yourself as physically available [which is to say sexually available, yeah, but also something much larger, 'in public' in a way that's morally correct]- the best way is to look a little bit preppy, a little bit young+masculine, and a little bit pink. If I want to look like a whore [a: servant of the city], I imagine a boy in a pink Lacoste shirt with chemically burnt hair, and I try to evoke him through similar gestures. Not the same gestures, precisely. I don't look very good in a Lacoste shirt myself.

Soooo, I wanted to like the new hot pink automat in the East Village a lot more than I do;

St Marks Pl -->

 

God. Heroes you acquire at age twelve are easy to forget.

Not true. That's bullshit.

I don't know why I forgot about Keith Haring, the art darling who slips between Matthew Barney and Andy Warhol, a bigger and truer prophet than either. This past week, I reread his diaries and official biography for the first time since 1995. Why can't I be like that? Well of course I can. Why aren't I like that already? Girl? Gah.

From Keith Haring's diaries:
'You don't know me.
You never will.'

Ha. He wishes? But he doesn't wish that at all. What a queer thing to say. Something There, Something There, Something Here...

And:
'I don't care if I don't paint on it.'

Swoon.

Smart:
'The medium is a tool of the message.
The medium is not the message.
The message is the message.'

Killer K. Can you believe his best friend Kermit grew up to make _frames_? Jesus fucking christ.

 

George Condo on 'what is inside a Keith Haring painting':
'that suspense'.

 

man, you've got some mad daft shit masquerading as the vanguard of modern music. i mean, nevermind about Arctic Monkeys, but Bloc Party? Kaiser Chiefs? that shit is abyssmal. Franz Ferdinand, all eyes are on you: will you make a listenable 3rd album? Dirty Pretty Things are already sorted. the New Order of current times, if you will. perfect music dwarfed by the story of The Other Band They Were At One Point.

 

Yeah, I'm still reading Love Is Colder Than Death. I'm a very slow reader actually.

pp. 119-120:
--
[Kurt Raab] would clean up, but that was only one of his jobs [at Fassbinder's house]. With Rainer dead and buried, Kurt would recollect those days and speak to him "directly" in this voice:

So now I'm your private secretary. And if there's nothing to do, you'll think of something to keep me busy. The telephone rings. You don't answer anymore. That's beneath you. Mostly, you lie in bed, getting up only when it's dark.... I'm left to invent the excuses and the lies. I'm also your nurse. Not only do I have to cook, and serve you in bed, I must also look after you like a child, to make sure nothing bad happens to you. All night long you've taken cocaine and now it's four o'clock in the morning and you want to sleep. But you're too stimulated, so you have to take three Mandrax pills to calm you down. Then you remember you have to call Ingrid in Paris, to argue with her, so you take two more lines of coke and you're more awake than ever. More Mandrax. Suddenly the telephone receiver falls out of your hand and you collapse to the floor. My God, I think, now it's over. He's had a heart attack. I bend over you and listen to your chest. You're still breathing. You start to snore, so I drag you to bed and try to go to sleep myself. A little later, I find you in the bathroom sleeping very peacefully beside the toilet. I bring you back to bed again. You keep me going day and night.

Rainer's relationship with Armin was rapidly deteriorating, too, and both Kurt and Armin were finding themselves more and more frequently locked out of the apartment and searching for places to sleep, sometimes for a week at a time.

In March, Rainer shot his version of Clare Boothe's 1973 play The Women, which he called Women in New York. It was filmed in seven days just as he had staged it in Hamburg some months back, his final work in the theater. There were forty actresses and no men in the piece, and when released it was hailed as brilliant by some of his critics and as antiwomen by others.

During the staging of Women in New York in Hamburg, Irm had gotten pregnant. As she's said, she always used contraceptives with Rainer, and whether he knew it or not, whenever her period was late, he would fill up with childlike delight, says Irm, "thinking at last it's happened." Their sexual relationship, however, left much to be desired, at least as far as Irm was concerned, and copulation between them was sometimes unnatural, if Rainer's indiscreet confidences are to be believed: there had been vegetable and mineral phallic substitutes. So it was not surprising that when conception finally took place, Rainer was somewhere else.
--

I mean huh? It's one of the only places the book declines to give details. 'Vegetable and mineral substitutes'? I can't tell whether the author is trying to render, like, basically dildos extremely exotic, or whether he's being vague about something actually really bizarre, out of some impulse towards politeness that doesn't seem to exist elsewhere in the book.

 

Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith
photographed by Norman Seeff

 

all other entries are in the directory. some questions are answered at return the ring.