Thought
"If you're not making money with your art, you have to say it's art. If you are, you have to say it's something else."—Andy WarholSearch
My Music. Song, Art, Writing Entries of Various Sorts
- I rest my case - DJs truly suck balls
- New Art Prints - A thousand colors made from tears
- Bono & U2: Abho(RED) By So Many Thoughtful People
- Happy Easter
- Flower Power Vs. Venus In Furs
- Bulboscity in Stasis
- Roy Sablosky on the Blue Serge and the Savoy Tivoli
- The Love Shack, Hockney-style
- Cat + Synthesizer
- The Serge Modular Synthesizer and the Origin of the Atom Bee
- Disposable Pop From the (song)Device
- Happy Birthday, David and Elvis
- James Brown, R.I.P.
- Happy Birthday Louie Van Bee
- How The Brain Processes Words
- A Love Supreme - Chiclet Edition - Edition Info on the way
- In Loving Memory, John Lennon, Oct. 9, 1940-Dec. 8, 1980
- British Prize For Art That Has No Meaning
- LeisureTown
- Art School Confidential
- Total War on DJ Culture
- Welcome to Sun Pop Blue
- Hunter--We Hardly Knew Ye!
- Poor Hunter Thompson
Words and Art
Art School Confidential | Art School Confidential |
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| Friday, 27 October 2006 | |||
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Many years ago, at the dawn of my cafe-artist life, where I ceased actually making music and began talking about it and art while exploring new dimensions of inebriation, my cafe-artist crew and I were sitting around a going through pitcher after pitcher of beer (we had yet to discover the efficiency of brandy, gin, and whiskey) and there was a table full of art-school-fruityloops at the next table, discussing something about ... i'm not sure, but I would surmise modern dance ... "The toe is trivial!" blurted out a another certified cafe-artist in a shrill, nasally whine that cut through the din ...
I ridiculed then the remark, the sentiment, and even the anonymous
ass-clown who said it, and I do so again as I type these words almost
35 years later. Berkeley is possibly the Cafe-Artist capital of the world. I say possibly only because I've not spent any time in New York, London, Paris, or any other boho-certified metropolis long enough to determine. San Francisco has a new breed of cafe-artist: the Burners (a derivation of Burning Man), but that is an essay for another day. As a result of my experiences in the cafe-artist world for many years, I thoroughly enjoyed the movie Art School Confidential. Funny how things stick in one's head.Most ... no not most, really, only half of the art school kids I've met over the years have been rich kids who have been sent as far away from home as possible by their parents ... with a few earnest art makers and craftsmen thrown in the mix. An an occasional true artist, as well. Rare. Very rare. One of my favorite art students of years past is Penelope Houston who went to the SF Art Institute in the late 1970's. Disgusted with the preponderance of dogshit all over the campus, she and some friends made a poster showing a dog hanging by its neck with a legend "KILL ALL DOGS" in huge block letters and posted them all over the campus, causing a huge furor among the dog lovers. She dropped out of school shortly thereafter and formed the infamous punk band The Avengers, who later opened for the Sex Pistols. I'll write about that show some other day.
"Art School Confidential" is true to my observations and delivers its
jokes gently and lovingly ... it's not a mean movie. There is a stupid
stupid subplot about murders on campus which becomes central to the
movie at the end ...
Art School Confidential falls into the "would go again with a cute girl" category. Definitely worth watching once. I took one quarter of college at UC Berkeley, the summer of 1968. One art class, two music, and one anthropology course ... the foundation of a mastery of business administration ... This was a hard time in which to study. My two best friends had taken off for Europe. I was stuck in school. I'd go to a movie in the evening at a theater near campus, a calm summer Berkeley night, and when we'd walk out, a riot would be in progress and the cops would be firing tear gas canisters at us and we'd have to run for it. My family lived next door to a Berkeley judge and I was friends with his sons. One of them and I took some Blue Wedge acid - incredibly potent (I was on a massive hit the first time I heard "I Am The Walrus" a few months later - not sure I've ever recovered from that) - one night and went up in the hills. It was getting dark and we could hear the sirens and see the riot bonfires far below. Darkness covered the whole bay area ... for some reason, Dave and I looked up directly over our heads and there was a perfectly circular hole in the dark cloud cover, through which we could see perfect blue sky. We both groaned - this was a little too close to the coming of Sauron and the Great Darkness in the Lord of the Rings, for sure - and spiralled into a rather bad trip. I finally went over and sat with a eucalyptus tree for a while who helped me out of it. So yes, hard to focus on school work.
I met a guy a few years back
- electronic genius who built amazing analogue synthesizers - he
explained that our combined mental energy (Dave & I) from the acid
was what blew the hole in the cloud cover ... knowing what I know now,
i'm not totally skeptical about that assertion. We live in a mysterious
world.
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