* the birthday of evan tanner has come and gone... sorry champ.

former UFC champion, warrior-poet, philosopher-king-- myth, future legend, who knows?

i like to think that down deep, i'm a good person. i've no proof of this-

it's just a hope, a passing fancy. tanner was a great person, a great man.

he was the man we were told we should be long ago

when the mist still settled over the mornings of our youth

and we didn't understand what being a man meant, or could mean...

if we live a life worth living and screaming at,

we will end up (or begin with) demons.

the demons haunt and give chase- seduce and beguile,

deliver and abuse... we make art or poetry

out of the remains of these experiences--

we live or maybe die because of, or in spite of, them...

tanner's death in the desert cannot be called an accident.

i don't, for a second, believe he was looking to off himself.

he was too engaged by the world around him

and the world he created. he was, if nothing else, a warrior.

suicide is too easy a way out... even if you pick a hard way out.

but it made sense in a horrid way. tanner was a man

that was too good to die of some sad old age,

riven with disease and dementia.

he was certainly too strong for pills or booze

and too smart to go for the shotgun. and too wise. too wise...

"BELIEVE IN THE POWER OF ONE..."

that was his line. his mantra.

the power of one person to affect change in the world.

i think that he believed that so much that it killed him.

that it drove him. that it pushed him to test limits,

perhaps best left untested...

most people stagger through life

without any trace of a singular philosophy.

tanner not only had it-- he died from it.

he could have been in Vegas hotels,

living it up with the whores

and the dreamers of material dreams.

he could have put it all on the line

and worked his way back into title contention.

maybe, maybe not... maybe his time was done,

but no matter. his was a way of solitude.

a martial artist as close to Musashi as we've come in our time.

i've disappointed myself so many times,

i've quit counting, or worrying about it...

and now, at 45 years young, my power is in the 3 OF MY FAMILY...

but i look at the life of evan tanner and i know--

i know that the path i've taken-- with all its stumbles

and regrets, all it's lost hours and postponed possibilities,

was the right path. just because you're a seeker doesn't mean

you're going to find anything.

but i've found more truth in 18 rounds on the heavy bag,

slipping in puddles of my own sweat,

than in any number of books i've read.

i found more truth going 3 days without eating

trying to hitchhike to Vienna, than in all jobs i've had

or all the churches i've sat in...

tanner was a great man and a bad-ass...

and (like me) i'm sure he cried for the simple things...

as a new father, tortured by the bliss and grace of my baby girl,

i know tanner would have been a beautiful father.

and i'll leave it at that...

barney rosset has passed at 89.

and it came to me that at 45, i don't know what wisdom truly is, but i know that you probably get closer if you live your years and stay open minded and somewhat clear as to the fact that you want to live an interesting and engaged life. art can figure into this. cooking can figure into this...

travel, love, spreading some positive vibes, etc, etc...

in the last writing i mentioned my focus in the studio of late. i can say that about life now...

at 45 it became clearer to me what i've always heard-

what everyone always hears: life is short-- the time goes so quickly.

yeah, i've lost a lot of time and freedom for the studio practice

of making paintings and dreaming.

fine. i didn't go into fatherhood thinking it would afford me anything

approaching time.

but if i accept that, then it's on me to make sure

that when i get in there i am working like a beast

being totally honest with myself of what i want to paint

and how i want to do it...

an artist can get lost looking over his shoulder

at galleries and sales and collectors and critics

and other artists and what he saw last week

that he wishes he had done so long ago...

don't get lost.

be honest in the studio putting that shit down.

paint what you need to, write what you need to

and don't take on the bullshit

that anyone else might want you to take on.

don't waste your time. get up early and work out.

get home and put the coffee on and make it strong

and do whatever it is that needs doing.

eat good cuts of meat and eat as clean as you can

while still enjoying the process and sipping your vodka

or wine or cold fuckin lager. take care of family and friends--

they need you or they wouldn't be there to begin with.

read good literature. or if not good literature

read what is interesting to you regarding this voyage we are on--

don't waste the awesome power of your eyes on garbage... draw. often.

don't waste too much of your precious energy on politics--

everything is pre-decided, it's a dead circle and really--

it spins with or without you...

travel when you can. get out there... somehow.

this is probably not wisdom that came to me

having lived the life i've lived...

these are just my thoughts

coming out while my baby sleeps- hence the fevered expression.

my dear friend, paul chambers, used to stand in front of the mirror

in the locker room of the club where we taught tennis,

looking at himself, having stepped out from the shower-

convinced of his beauty.

he spent a lot of time in front of that mirror...

when we'd meet some dude in a SoHo bar

(and we always met people- women for sure,

but, being an aussie, paul would start talking to anyone),

he'd introduce himself thusly:

"i'm paul, i play tennis and fuck models..."

i kid you not.

and then he'd buy the drinks for everyone.

once, when he picked me up from my stanton street sublet

in his 930 turbo, he took the time to drive 12 or 13 kids from the projects

1 at a time around the neighborhood...

it took him well over an hour. he loved that shit.

he always said if he died the next morning he'd be happy--

he'd led the greatest life he could: he drove fast and drank hard,

charged waves and hit tennis balls like a madman.

and he fucked those models...

and when i got the word that the cancer

that took over his body killed him.

i tried to remember that.

it's taken me my life up to this point

to understand how beautiful everything is.

(i was once so young that it almost killed me.)

don't waste any time.

it's all we've got...

* so, first off, i need to go off into the world of MMA for a bit...

diaz/condit.

great fight. what a confusing pile of shit we have left now.

watching the fight, i don't know, i saw diaz doing his shit and walking condit down- maybe taking some shots, but who doesn't? and then joe rogan mentions something about condit taking it- diaz being down going into the 5th round... shit.

and yeah, condit takes a unanimous decision.

i don't know. i don't know...

i've had guys dance around me and hit me with kicks that meant nothing and when i got inside they just made sure they got out. part of the game...

bas rutten made a great point- condit has generally ended fights. he is a game motherfucker. and (the train of thought goes) he came in with a game plan that he did not tilt off for a second. he road that razors edge for 25 minutes and came out with a belt and his paw prints all over the face of diaz. ok. fair enough...

i've been pondering the merits of "ring generalship" and "aggression" as if, at this point, it mattered... diaz stalked his man and landed some great shots, but it did not fall his way. he didn't end the fight. condit didn't either. but condit walked away with the win...

then diaz tests positive for weed and faces a year suspension. after already saying he's retiring... this could surely be the last we see of the prodigal fighter. it's sad.

it's literary...

and i'm sitting here wondering about all of it...

* i've avoided MOMA because of the cindy sherman retrospective...

i can't take it. can't take the oxygen. can't take the bullshit. can't take the art school kids who fall in love with everything that rings false and insincere and pathetic.

can't take it...

and to think they just packed up the de koonings...

* good painting in chelsea, i'm just not the guy to be able to get out there to see it.

i'm a man tethered to a baby and i have my few hours of karate in the morning and when the kid sleeps in the afternoon i push the weights and the studio time and maybe other training at night and thats what i get...

the leisure of strolling the western avenues is a leisure of another time and another place.

kinda sad, but a lot of things are sad.

she's crawling now- all over the fuckin place.

she knows her name and she kisses her daddy and says "da da..."

thats better than going gallery to gallery and dealing with the crap.

regardless of how much good is missed, or lost...

* on that note: tadaaki kuwayama at gary snyder gallery is amazing... i made the opening with wife and baby in tow and while the art crowd lost it over my deegan, i lost it over the feverish stoicism of the work.

the color.

the intent.

i mentioned to snyder that i never thought of the artist as "lyrical."

my mistake...

* which brings us in a round about way to gesture. i'm not sure how i've been so productive of late in the studio. increased focus? sure.

but that just seems a fall back response to the question.

i'm invigorated by the new program- the (perhaps) baroque quality of the physical gesture laid on canvas. so fired up to just get in there and put down paint...

so totally IN EACH MOMENT...

i'm a lucky man.

i think many men could say that if they looked with any honesty on their lives.

perhaps they don't want to see that luck.

perhaps they want to feel they have, in some way,

powered their way to whatever grace

it is in their lives they are dealing with.

maybe.

i'm a lucky motherfucker...

and i got no problem writing that shit down.

* so, kelley "despised" minimalism "as elitist".

ok... whats wrong with elitism??

art as democratic program is such a sad sad song.

rap is democratic. rip-off, commercial country and western, fresh out of LA is democratic. television is democratic. shitty food, shitty attitudes-- homophobia, racism, ignorance-- is democratic... it comes down to mob rules.

and i don't run with the crowd...

it's painfully hard to make good art. a kick-ass painting takes time and romance and sincerity. that shit is hard to come by. write a great poem? forget it... a novel? shit...

word is, kelley had wanted to go into literature, but found it "too hard..."

I could leave it at that.

to write something that is real and powerful and true is difficult, if not (near) impossible in this day and age. yeah, it's hard... but to go against it and proclaim yourself an artist is easy. shoot your video, mimic your commercial, your cartoon, your fashion model bullshit, put your politics up there and never get your hands too dirty...

and if they get dirty, make sure it's during a "performance"

in front of 7 of your friends...

it's easy to be the art rebel.

ask the dash de menial kid that overdosed in the bathtub.

what a stupid game.

* and to continue with the dead artist theme, now tapies is gone... sad to say, but i don't think i got into him enough... bold bold heavy work.

painting that takes "painting" out of what we know of the cannon and into other (perhaps more earthly) modes... so little has been seen in the states. or so it seems.

perhaps thats just my excuse.

but maybe not.

* chelsea? yeah, it's there... kicking and screaming as the new 7 line is dug up and laid out.

tottering on high heels and $$$ and loving itself as the whore she is.

i remember when the galleries began the steady crawl up from SoHo to those vacant plots between 10th and 11th avenues. all the art world bitching and moaning about the distance and the cold and the wind and the on and on and on...

does anyone remember holly solomon?

i wonder...

mike kelley dead... a new member of the joyless suicide club. he lays himself out in good company: gorky, plath, roethke, crane, rothko, mayakovsky, wallace, hemingway (did jackson off himself? that car-dive into the woods...?)...

did his body of work stack up to any of them? I'll be the asshole and say NO.

punk rock and "youth culture" does not make powerful art. sorry...

sorry.

...and then i hear of the passing of dorothea tanning. at 101...

tanning was (or is) one of the female artists nobody knows but should know. a lot of her work comes off a bit spotty to my eyes-- and much comes off as horribly dated. but she was there, working her paint, digging down deep into her own reality. and yes, as a woman, who knows the peripheral bullshit she had to deal with?

the surrealists were a dicey lot. effete, cafe society europeans- laying low in nyc while the nazis did what they did.

breton? please... a bad poet does not a leader make.

but, as a whole, the surrealists took us all to another place-- looking at and making art.

tanning, in her very existence as a woman putting down paint and living the life she led is a beacon for BEING AN ARTIST and LEADING A full CREATIVE LIFE...

all that and she nailed down a multi-decade marriage to an artist.

god knows that can't be easy.

kelley? well, yeah...

at least we still have hirst.

right?

ok, happy new year...

so much going on-- life, art, love, life, fatherhood, trying to be an artist, etc... what a fine adventure i've stumbled into.

hirst. yeah...

well, he's a whore. a pawn of his own lost, pathetic ambition. a ghost adrift in manufactured "punk" pedigree-- so stupid he doesn't understand that he's one with bad dance music and reality TV shows; bags of potato chips and institutionalized poverty. indeed, he may actually believe that he creates an "art" that is challenging (in a real sense)...

yeah. hirst...

and yes, hirst sucks.

he's just smart enough to exploit the fools and the market and just emasculated enough to think it's cool to do so.... it's so easy. so easy... years ago i understood it was not a difficult agenda to plot a career of "false art"-- an art of parody: the empty space, the ridiculous video, what have you... so easy.

and he will die perhaps believing that he really did something. maybe in his dwarfed way of thinking his oeuvre is a comment.

OF COURSE HE THINKS THIS...

thats where i get caught-- is he part of the joke or just playing the joke?? in the end it doesn't matter. there is nothing there.

the first piece of writing i ever published on art was on hirst. he and i have been odd bedfellows these many years. i was a young drunken, stoned, tangled hair lad in SoHo, finding my way along the cobblestones on Wooster Street- horribly hung over after too long a night of tall drinks and brazilian women.

i wrote, in closing, "art is death, not dead flesh."

and there is no life here.

so there can be no death.

hirst is simply the fat left over from the slaughter

of what was called "post-modernism..."

money and the wretched materialism aside,

it is as if he never belched his foul stench into the void.

his end will be meaningless.

as was his "art"

and his life...

and now frankenthaler has passed... i've been torn of late trying to piece together my thoughts on her time and her art. i've seen some great pieces and i've seen some real crap and i saw that show at knoedler years ago that was an embarrassment.

helen had a lot of breaks handed her way. you can't deny it or pretend them away... another rich girl out there playing the game-- hook up with the most important critic of the era; marry an established painter, etc... why not?

in the end, i'd say she left more influence then art.

if she gave noland and louis a way out of pollack, she didn't give herself much else...

she blotted and poured and stained away the years and ended up doing poorly wrought landscape-based works that looked like the work of the bankers wife (i think) she was...

it saddens me to think of what she could have done--

how could it go so wrong??

but she did what she did and some of it will stand the test of time.

and as we're told to mourn her,

i'll wonder again to myself

when the pat lipsky retrospective opens...