Thursday, January 20, 2005

My first time

Prelude

Been blogging ever since I became Mac literate in 1992. Of course, there was no "real" such thing as a blog back then. It was more of a daily electronic journal that could only be seen by the intrepid ones who A: inadvertently found you, and B: then had the fortitude to actually read what you wrote.

My interest in it began with my rather clandestine discovery of the discarded e-log of a certain grad student (we shall call her Ms. H) at the "all that" art school in SoCal, where I worked and studied. She had just returned from Switzerland, from the Biennale. She had a taken a lover, who was an aging curator at a huge international museum...he was married, of course.

Anyway, it made for fascinating reading, and, more pertinently, it sparked an interest in my keeping a "log" of my doings, and beings. Of course, I feared that my existence paled in comparison to the glittering emptiness featured in Ms. H's recounts. (An empty fear in retrospect.)

Oeuvre

So today, I received an email from my longtime friend, Mitchell. He is going to see Nina Hagen tonight at the DNA Lounge. WTF! Didn't we see her together in 1985 at the DNA Lounge? The night my eardrums burst? No, he is certain that my eardrums burst in his little atomic Volvo 2 seater on the way over the bridge to Art School #1.

At art school #1, I actually gained such arcane knowledge as: how to make my own stretcher bars using a miter box, a hammer and nails; How to set-type using little metal letters; how not to put my fingers in my eyes while making an aquatint (self explanatory after seeing the little drinking fountain with two half-eggshell things in which to put your eyeballs if you were stupid, or careless, or both!) I also learned that I wanted a more down and dirty art experience so I transferred to Art School #2.

Art School#2-the sun in the NoCal art solar system. A legend in its own mind kind of place. Despite their best efforts, I learned to paint there. And I learned that words had no place in art (which I have since unlearned) and I learned what a broken heart felt like, and it felt like I wanted to leave California forever and move to France with my beautiful friends Dana & Daniel.

I graduated. And I went to Paris. And I had an affair with a Belgian posing as a Frenchman-and just when things were humming-the heartbreaker's radar kicked in and he showed up on the Belgian's doormat--looking like 10 miles of bad road. He had hitchhiked from Denmark, where he had been shacking up with his teenaged Nordic girlfriend and a crew of gnarled Icelandic buskers. He had hitchhiked to Paris in November! Have you ever been in Northern Europe in November? Have you ever slept in a German Truck stop bathroom stall in November (well, I guess any month is a bad month in a German Truck stop bathroom)? It's like those dogs who get lost while on family vacation and figure out how to get home! What can you say to that? I said, come in.

And he did. And he started to serenade me. He serenaded me in the pouring rain outside the Japanese noodle place. He serenaded me on bridges, in alleys, in the metro, on the train to Lisbon, in Lisbon, back from Lisbon—until finally an old dame threw a rotten apple at him and we returned to Cali.

Which brings us back to the beginning, to Art School#3, where I learned that Painting was dead; and a gallery full of cultivated mold could secure you a coveted place in a gallery's "stable" and that the Art World was so odious that I didn't want to make Art ever again. And I almost didn't.

Oh, yes, and I learned to blog.

Finis