You ever question everything you're doing?

[Oh no...here comes the navel-gazing]

I don't like my tone. I re-read the B.O.C. post (and others) and I sound like a fucking stuffy old rock critic who writes for Rolling Stone or the LAT, like Robert Hillburn.

I hate that.

Rock critics mostly suck. How can you be a rock critic and not, uh, rock?

That's why I like Kate Sullivan. She wrote this thing that rocks about rock and critics and all that, and some people got mad at her because she refused to use the shift key and got all kind of loose and wild and animal on rock, and that's what rock should be. Right? Rock isn't polite or proper or nice and neat and fit and trim. You can't hold it all in one hand; not easily. It squirms and punches and spits and is rude and nasty and doesn't like shift keys.

It's not stuffy.

I hate stuffy.

But I'm writing stuffy.

I know this project aint going anywhere as far as trad blogging type stuff goes. I don't have the right stuff, and my attention span's too short to adequately fact-check or do the research anyway. I just want to do a Pollack and throw buckets of paint at the screen and see what sticks and see what drips off onto the floor, leaving a bright red scar for people to look at and stroke their chins over and mumble incoherent profundities over like "it represents the shredding of the boundaries of producer and consumer, violating the trust of the artist/viewer compact that promises to contain art within a proscribed space; the violence of the suffering depicted on the canvas is metaphorically vivified and cast forth into the personal space of the viewer..."

That happened. In real life.

That friend and I who made a silly art show with Raymond Pettibon in San Francisco in 1988 made a giant canvas and attached real live roadkill to it which we'd collected on the highways of Marin County and cured on the top of the roof of the elevator shaft on the roof of our apartment building at Sutter and Taylor with a noxious pickling mixture of gasoline and a whole bunch of other chemicals (we got the recipe out of a DIY taxidermy book), and a month later, when they were nice and dry and preserved we wired them on the canvas with a bunch of shattered car parts, and then, the night before opening night, lay the canvas flat on the gallery floor and splattered and poured household enamel paint of the most vivid colors all over it, with a dose of clear varnish. The varnish mixed in places with the red enamel, and made a stunningly realistic looking kind of fake blood. You know how with blood sometimes the plasma will separate from the whatever the non-plasma is called? Like that.

The next morning, we lifted the whole stinking mess (actually, the only thing it smelled of was paint) on to the wall, and slowly-- s l o w l y --a rivulet of blood began to run down the middle of the canvas and began to drip off the bottom edge on to the floor.

We didn't plan it. It just happened.

It didn't occur to us that maybe the paint wasn't completely dry.

It formed an increasingly large pool on the floor beneath the canvas, and began to seep outwards, towards where you'd stand if you were looking at it. By the time it settled, it was over a foot in diameter; kind of an irregular circle.

That night, people mumbled and murmured about it and thought it was brilliant and we just laughed and laughed and laughed the private laugh of misanthropic 21 year old art nerds and drank more Guinness while we played the Ramones in the gallery during the opening, and ate chips and salsa and then listened to the Stooges and wondered if the wine and cheese and classical string trio opening up the street was more fun.

Days later, when the show was over, the gallery owner refused to return our deposit because we couldn't completely remove the stain.

So I'm thinking that this ought to be that. This, err, blog(?) ought to be that rude stain of dripping paint with some of that vicodin whiskey business that Kate knows about.

It shouldn't be Robert Hillburn.

What's my problem?

Am I too serious?

Answers on a postcard please.