Art Basement

When I arrived at John's apartment this afternoon the only portion of Art Basement I had written was the chorus. John handed me a piece of paper and a pen. I took his implied suggestion and cranked out three stanzas while he was creating the musical backing. And then we recorded it:

The shading is so subtle

That the rinse will disappear

Paint the burghers in the clink

And the villains in the clear

Let me take you to my art basement

We’ll mix some colors in my art basement

We’ll surf the zeitgeist in my art basement

We’ll start a movement in my art basement

A symbol’s just another way

Of sifting through the mire

Like a golden cup of malice

That’s been purified by fire

Let me take you to my art basement

We’ll mix some colors in my art basement

We’ll surf the zeitgeist in my art basement

We’ll start a movement in my art basement

What’s there is never frozen

Into reveries of crime

When the hand that wields the brush

Moves outside the bounds of time

Let me take you to my art basement

We’ll mix some colors in my art basement

We’ll surf the zeitgeist in my art basement

We’ll start a movement in my art basement

Lives of the Poets: Billy Viscous

Billy Viscous, also known as King Heroin III, was a Mumbled Word Artist who performed on the Poetry Nod circuit (also sometimes referred to as the Anti-Slam circuit). His first chapbook, entitled Walt Whitman was a Phony, was published when he was fifteen. He had all of Edna Millay’s sonnets committed to memory and he began his readings by reciting one of them as an invocation – most often either “Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare…” or “Oh, think not I am faithful to a vow!” His stage costumes were always some variant of what a gentleman in the Augustan age wore. Mimosa O’Toole created his signature outfit – a three-piece suit composed of tailcoat, waistcoat and breeches of green silk velvet. The stories he told between poems consisted of outré descriptions of things like the notorious activities of the Hell Fire Club at Sir Francis Dashwood’s estate, and the opium habits of Thomas De Quincey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. But there was one big secret that Billy never shared with anyone, apart from Mimosa. The fact is that he wasn’t a junkie, and had indeed never even tried heroin. At one time he did have a taste for smoking skunk but he eventually gave that up because it made him too paranoid. Nowadays he contented himself with rather pricey white wines imbibed in moderation.

An Excerpt from Chapter 5: Mimosa Rising

Mimosa at first had a hard time with the meditation technique Yogi Baksheesh had given her. But eventually it became so effective as to become almost addicting. The first step was to sit or lie comfortably and to get sexually aroused any way she wanted to. Then she was to start masturbating. But she was never to allow herself to have a complete, earth-shaking orgasm. To the extent possible she was supposed to keep herself from getting wet and especially to avoid ejaculating. The goal was to reach for fainter and fainter orgasms that paradoxically were more and more powerful, and in their own peculiar way earth shattering (rather than merely earth-shaking). The point of the exercise, according to Yogi Baksheesh, was for Mimosa to free herself from the constraints imposed by birth onto this planet and to begin visiting some of the quirkier realms of a five-dimensional universe. To accomplish this she was to imagine a current of electric energy flowing down her legs, through the ground, and into the molten core of the earth. Then she was to imagine this energy flowing back up through the ground and up through her feet and legs until it reached her root chakra where she was to imagine a bright red sphere turning clockwise, and then up through the second chakra in her genital area with an orange sphere turning clockwise, and similarly up through the other six chakras with their associated colors, and finally as a spray of energy cascading out of the top of her head and traveling to the furthest points of the universe. Then she was to reverse this process and pull the energy back down into her body, first into the chakra at the top of her head with a sphere of violet light now turning counterclockwise, and from there into the middle of her forehead with an indigo sphere turning counterclockwise, and down through the other six chakras, and finally down through her legs and feet. At the end of the meditation she was to deposit this energy back into the molten core at the center of the earth. Mimosa was discovering the intensity of this exercise to be increasing exponentially over time.

Some Notes on Genderella, the Perviest Clown of All-Time

Genderella is a serial-killer clown and covert upright citizen who anonymously donates a large portion of his earnings to the social-causes wing of the Republican Party, especially to groups fighting to end abortion, prevent gay marriage, crack down on illegal immigration, and retain or stiffen current drug laws. Some clues about how Genderella turned out this way can be found in an examination of his childhood, about which some preliminary notes are archived below:

"Genderella, the Perviest Clown of All-Time, was born Francis Xavier McGillicuddy in Providence, Rhode Island on May 13, 1957. At the age of six he began a seven-year consensual sexual relationship with Father Gilligan, a local parish priest and later a proponent of Liberation Theology who spent three years trying to foment a revolution in Nicaragua before getting thrown out of the country under mysterious circumstances by the Sandanistas. Genderella’s father, Tobias, was a high school gym teacher who in the evening after drinking a six-pack of Haffenreffer routinely beat the crap out of him for no reason other than his perception that his eldest son lacked the appearance of what might be termed consensual masculinity. But Genderella was not a typical sissy bottom. From the age of four into and through adolescence he was an avid participant in sex games with several girls in the neighborhood. When they were seven years old he and Ellen Goldfarb found several decks of pornographic playing cards in her father’s sock drawer and took them out into the woods behind H. P. Lovecraft Junior High School. On an antique Navajo blanket featuring a red background with two central diamonds and a whirling log in each corner that her great aunt Zazua brought back from a trip out west in the 1920s they acted out the scenarios they found on the playing cards. Genderella’s asshole had become sensitized by the attention paid to it by Father Gilligan. He felt the tiniest and most intense tingly sensations when Ellen licked slow circles around his anal opening, and even more thrilling pulsations when she occasionally poked her tongue as far inside as she was able to. Ellen seemed to like it the most when he pinched her tiny nipples while rubbing his hard little penis against the outside of her cunt lips…"

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My First Response to E.T. 101

This is from an email I sent to a friend who is interested in this topic:


In all the relevant material I've seen to date including the piece I sent to you [E.T. 101] what seems missing is a clear sense of the different stages of intervention. There are arguably many ways of defining these but one I find useful divides the main tasks into three stages: Stabilize, Transform, and Maintain. If we are correct in assuming that the people on this planet are not going to blow themselves up then the Stabilize function has been completed. How long has this process taken? Different people have different views on this. My sense is that the intervention has been going on for centuries rather than decades. And there is still some mopping up to be done, as the main functions tend to overlap in time. If I'm correct one can infer that the Transform and Maintain phases will take centuries as well, with the Maintain phase extending pretty far out into the future. 

Self-Portrait with Truck Reflection in Gallery Window

Art is Capital

It’s Happy Hour at the Wobblie Wonk on Rivington Street. A Pandora rockabilly station is playing Wanda Jackson’s “Let’s Have a Party” as the curtain rises. Carl and Sam are sitting by themselves. There is an empty seat between them. Carl is wearing a Paul Smith suit, Hermes tie, and Berluti loafers. Sam is wearing jeans and an open-necked white shirt spattered with paint. The bartender is texting at the other end of the bar.

Sam (to the bartender): Another Calvados for the gentleman on my right.

Carl (to Sam): Thank you.

Sam: My pleasure.

The bartender comes over and pours a glass of Calvados for Sam.

Carl: I’ve seen you in here a few times. You live nearby?

Sam: I live in Tribeca but my studio is nearby. How about you?

Carl: I live and work in the financial district. But I usually go for a long walk after the market closes.

Sam: What do you do?

Carl: I manage an investment fund.

Sam: Do you enjoy it?

Carl: Actually I do enjoy it, at least most of the time. Of course I don’t enjoy it when I make moves that in hindsight prove to be wrong-headed, but one hopefully learns at least a little something from one’s mistakes.

Sam: Overall you do well? You beat the market averages?

Carl: To date I have. The fund is five years old and I’ve outperformed the S&P by a good margin every year. But my success could just be a function of randomness, I don’t know for sure. If you flip five coins a hundred times and tally the results you’ll likely have a number of cases in which heads come up five times in a row. Maybe that’s all my outperforming the market really is.

Sam: My way of beating the market averages is reflected in the prices my dealer can command for my canvases compared with the average sales price of works by other artists in my age cohort. Or that’s what one is led to believe in the essay “Art is Capital” that was purportedly written by one J. Guggenheim Sachs III. My sources in the art-crit world tell me this is the nom de guerre of a philosophy professor at Columbia who takes great delight in skewering the hedge fund haute bourgeoisie.

Carl: What are you working on now?

Sam: I’m putting the finishing touches on one of a pair of family portraits. They’re titled Imbeciles 1 and Imbeciles 2. At the bottom of each painting is the statement: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

Carl: Ah, the Oliver Wendell Holmes quote from the 1927 case Buck vs. Bell, which upheld the sterilization of Carrie Bell on the grounds that she was feeble-minded.

Sam: Exactly. Above the legend Imbeciles 1 depicts Ambassador Joe Kennedy in Nazi regalia, Senator Teddy Kennedy driving off the Chappaquiddick Bridge, and Representative Patrick Kennedy giving a demented, drug-fueled speech on the floor of the House of Representatives. Imbeciles 2 shows analogous scenes from the lives of Senator Prescott Bush, President George H. W. Bush, and President George W. Bush.

Carl: I think you have a stronger subject with Imbeciles 1. Not that the Bushes are any less imbecilic than the Kennedys, at least in my opinion. But they are certainly a lot less colorful.  For the Kennedys you could alternatively have shown Jack banging the Nazi Spy known as Inga Binga and John John dressed as an airplane pilot. But what can you show the Bushes doing – 41 passing out into his food at a state dinner in Tokyo and 43 clearing brush on his ranch, and who the hell even remembers Prescott Bush?

Sam: As you no doubt would surmise the painting that’s just about finished is Imbeciles 1. And I’m happy to report that it has pre-sold for seven figures. So the next one is on me….

Girl Masturbating

This photo is from the mid-90s. Images like this are not very likely to be posted in public spaces in the Manhattan of 2010.

Clarissa and Henry

Clarissa was a serial decorator. Henry indulged her in this passion. He always liked the results. She was extremely talented and in his opinion could have done this professionally if only she had a little more consistency in her approach to life. He also knew that when she was planning and implementing a makeover of the interior of the apartment she was less likely to be drinking to excess and taking pills. Money fortunately wasn’t an issue. Although Clarissa had her own money from her father’s estate – Clarissa’s father was an inventor who made significant improvements to components used in undersea oil drilling, and he hung onto his patents -- Henry insisted on paying for everything. After the initial design it actually wasn’t all that much of a capital outlay because Clarissa had a keen eye and was a shrewd bargainer. The year she did a Modern makeover of the living room she found a George Nakashima coffee table at a yard sale, a Harry Bertoia spray sculpture at a church bazaar, and a George Nelson sunburst clock in a thrift shop. Before embarking on an Arts & Crafts redo two years later she sold these pieces at premium prices at an auction. Once disassembly work on a new makeover began they moved into a hotel until the job was completed. Hotel living agreed with Henry. Clarissa usually worked late in their apartment. Once she started on a project she focused on it with her entire being. Henry usually dined out, sometimes alone but often with friends….

Fluxie Sings the Blues

How did you come to make the painting Fluxie Sings the Blues?

Fluxie is a rescue dog, a mutt. Two years ago I went to the Animal Control Center on E.110^th Street. We made eye contact and she came home with me. Fluxie’s full name is Fluxie R. Mutt. Her purposefully anarchic nature led me inexorably to this name for her. One afternoon, about six months after her arrival, I was working on an acrylic study of Jeff Koons Creating ‘Michael Jackson Suckling Romulus and Remus at the Founding of Rome’ -- this is an image that comprises one of the gates of a large mandala I was working on at the time. The painting was about ninety percent done. There was some detail work on Jeff Koons left to finish, plus the lotus motif around the borders, that’s all. The study was primarily in ochre. I had Bronzino and Goltzius in mind while I was creating it. I had just prepared some International Klein Blue to do the lotus pattern in but I hadn’t applied any of it yet. Well anyway, that afternoon I took a phone call from my dealer into the library and I must have inadvertently closed the door on Fluxie, trapping her inside the studio. Being who she is, she knocked over the easel and my palette. The canvas landed face up on the floor. Fluxie landed in the International Klein Blue and proceeded to apply it liberally to the entire canvas using her paws as brushes. When I came back into the studio my immediate reaction was anger that almost instantaneously turned into huge, cathartic peals of laughter. As I was picking up the canvas the phrase “Fluxie sings the blues” popped into my head, and I knew that with no further work to be done we had just collaborated on a NextGen readymade.

Here is Portrait of Fluxie R. Mutt (with a nod to Picasso's 'Dog'):