wow

...opening my Art in America, looking at contributors and what they would be writing within the pages that would be following, I saw something about a memorial to Mike Kelley... My mind did a double take since memorials are for dead people and last I read of Kelley he was alive, vibrant and making good stuff.  So I googled him and death and: wow.  He committed suicide!  Of all the personas out there, I would never have guessed but maybe should have: so much abjection...

just a passing thought

...on reading art criticism: it seems, sometimes, that these people, who clearly love art, but clearly love words better, seem to try to explain art away, perhaps without being aware that that's what they are clearly doing...

Curt and My Reading Habits

Curt and I now do one incredibly large and annoying food shopping circle which includes going to Whole Foods in Greenville to get meat from humanely treated animals and foreign crap, and then driving to the Anderson Publix

subtext

  

to get more mundane crap like (hopefully) American-made cat food... Anyway, in Greenville, there is this guitar store Curt wanted to stop by the other day and where he ended up buying this awesome beat-up Epiphone Something guitar cum new amp he fell in love with.

home

subtext

Though this is nor here nor there, it means we spent a lot of time in the area the store is located in.  He tried a new guitar one week (and trying guitars in Curt's book, or maybe anyone's, means hours spent noodling), did not fall in love with it, and we eventually left to buy food.  Then we went back on another week, and while I was at the dollar store picking up dollar things, he tried this second hand guitar and just fell in love.  We left without it, but he couldn't get “her” out of his mind, so we had to go back and get it, thus making our food shopping trip take even more time than the usual 4 hours. 

Anyway anyway: the store is located in one of these defunct old outdoor malls; and, weirdly for me, I love these defunct old outdoor malls because of how they feel and because of the marginal businesses that seem to inhabit these places after mainstream businesses who used to thrive there have abandoned them for bigger concrete bunkers.   In this particular defunct outdoor mall whose karma and Feng Shui totally suit me and where the Guitar Center has located, there is also a Books-a-Million. 

home

home

subtext

subtext

home

No, not a marginal store per se, but of the big retail bookstores, it feels marginal; and this particular one feels particularly marginal.  It feels like the corner bookstore, and hey, it’s Podunk America, we have no real choice; it’s as good as it gets...  And, just as he did with his guitar, Curt fell in love with this particular Books-a-Million. He much prefers driving out of his way to go there, rather than go to the brand spankin’ new Barnes and Noble, in a brand spankin' new kind of outdoor mall, full of brand spankin new retail outlets, right across from the Whole Foods we drive 40 miles out of our way to shop in.  And on our food shopping trip yesterday, Curt decided, once again, to take us out of our already out of the way trip in order to stop at his favorite big retail bookstore in search of magazines. 

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home

home

home

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As I was wallowing away the time waiting for him while he first looked for the ideal music magazine he never seems to find, and then while he ran off to the guitar store, a place he does not seem to get enough of, I noticed that among the bad art magazines, mostly geared towards amateurs and lovers of kitsch, they also carry, as if it were the physical embodiment of an antidote to all the other magazines, Cabinet (!)  So heck, I picked it up, started reading, and decided “what the hell, I’ll buy it.”  The surprise here is that Cabinet used to annoy me... My reading habits seem to be a-changin'...

Addendum: Having read this, Curt asked me about "subtext": it's the visual thread that refers to the American built environment: click on pictures to view one ugly experiment in living...

Addendum 2: pictures captioned "home" came 2 weeks later- we were back in Curtis' favorite outdoor mall and I had the camera... 

The Welcome Mat of Death

abstract

real

One more little "present" left on "the welcome mat of death". Unfortunately Tomtom is a doer and not a thinker; and a well-fed one at that.  He'll humor me with abstraction, but he can't deny his nature. A nature now compromised by the domestic; he no longer eats his prey.