The purging continues to the exclusion of almost everything else. Every day I'm amazed by how much junk can accumulate over the course of 5 years. Everything now goes in big piles designated "sell," "give away," and "throw away."

current music: WC Clark, Marcia Ball, Odetta, Toni Price, Muddy Waters, Mavis Staples et al.

In my continued quest to clear the clutter, I've accomplished one of those things that is always theoretically possible, but you never actually see, like reaching the speed of light or achieving absolute zero: I've completely cleared out my email inbox. Everything has been answered, dealt with, or otherwise disposed of. And no putting messages in some fake "to answer" folder. No everthing is genuinely outta there.

Meanwhile, I'm excited about this new magazine. "Make" is being touted as Martha Stewart's Living for tech geeks; i.e., privileging the practice of making things over buying things. The editors credit Stewart with helping to slow down that 2 decades-old trend in which people had stopped making things (like their own Christmas decorations and sweaters and baby toys) and instead started buying everying readymade.

I'm more excited than I can express over this new contemporary art space in Segou, Mali. I've been to Segou and let me tell you if Segou can come up with an artist's residency program like this, cities like Austin have no excuse.

The Washington Post has given a nod to Texas art here.

Clearing the clutter has now become an obsession as I find ever more things to sell, give away or toss in the trash. My life has been far too yin and I need more yang. One of the principles of feng shui is that you keep your surroundings alive, not dead. And dead includes all those piles of things you plan to get to at some point in the future, and it just never happens. Out they go.

I've been saving a big piece of plywood since 1999 just in case I ever decide to paint on it. It's gone. If I do decide to paint on plywood I'll get a new piece.

Meanwhile, I've been drawing time machines of various kinds, some becoming more abstract now as I sketch out different rough ideas.

current music: The Roots, Things Fall Apart

I was late to Eric Gibbons's surprise birthday party last night, but I had a good excuse (other than the fact that my teeth were filthy). My heart was heavy, feeling conflicted by a million competing priorities, plans and ideas. Somehow I came to the brilliant realization that my physical surroundings had a lot to do with feeling this way, so Kazki came over to help de-clutter my life and feng shui me right into spiritual bliss--though it took a good part of the evening.

Out went 3 years worth of ArtNews, Artforum and Art in America (above). Out went 15 layers of "I'm gonna get to it someday" junk. I've put a bunch of furniture up for sale, all of it fusty and weighty and mostly purchased to impress nonexistent design clients.

Ah, the freedom! Ah, the light that pours into my life! I suddenly realize I'm free to do anything.

current music: Beulah, The Coast is Never Clear

The book design job I was working on has returned from the author and various other constituencies. Time to put this through as quick as I can, unlike the illustration job from earlier this year. May have some effect on posting frequency.

Not having gone to art school, I try to take advantage of little opportunities like today's Hands-On Art demo sessions sponsored by local art supply pushers Miller Blueprint. Not that you learn that much during the 90-minute sessions, but with no investment you can get your hands on some material or technique just enough to know whether you want to explore more of it. Like I said, a luxury I never really had. (left, Andrew Jones teaching a session on concept illustration)

So I took sessions in screenprinting, manga art, and fast rendering methods for concept illustration. Nice stuff, and I'm sure I'll do more screenprinting, which I didn't know was so cheap.

During the breaks, I walked around the Palmer Events Center and took in some of the booths at the Artists Harvest show, which was happening in the same place. After about 5 minutes all those friggin' paintings looked exactly alike--only the measurements varied. I mean I know these paintings are all meant for dentists' offices and the like, but I would think you'd just get bored creating art indistinguishable from about 30 other artists within a 100-foot radius. (left, one of about a zillion paintings that looked exactly like this)

Meanwhile, the art on display by high school and junior high school kids blew the grown up stuff out of the water. It wasn't only just honest and direct and exuberant, a lot of it was actually executed quite competently. It was so depressing to turn right around and bump into the kind of watered-down, self-satisfied fake impressionism that dominates these events. As usual, the kids understand. (below, art by high school students)

Anyway, I picked up a few pointers in the sessions, including the right way to use copic markers and the right amount of pressure to put on a screenprinting squeegee. Andrew Jones's sketching session was cool as he basically sat there and drew about half a dozen monsters and creatures in about 20 minutes (Jones is Nintendo's US concept artist). The best moment came about halfway through the session when some woman asked him where he gets his inspiration. He looked right at her with his disturbed face and said, "Girl, I have so many demons I just close my eyes and reach inside my head."

Now that's someone I gotta get to know.

current music: Poi Dog Pondering

Kojo Griffin gave a talk tonight at Arthouse as part of their traveling exhibition "Comic Release." When I'm not so tired I'll do a full review of the show. For now you'll have to settle for gossip. (left, Kojo Griffin)

Anyway, I went to dinner afterwards with Kojo, Regine, the curator, Deborah Roberts and a few other people. I think we caught Manuel's on a bad night because the only thing that really satisfied was the company and the 2 bottles of Dos Equis I downed.

I'd never met Kojo in person though we've communicated by email. It was both comforting and depressing to hear him talk over dinner about worrying about money, still trying to plot his career, trying to figure out how to navigate the art world, etc., even at his level of success. As he put it, "As an artist, there's never a time when you feel like you've finally made it and now you can relax." (right, Kojo Griffin painting from "Comic Release")

He also gave me renewed hope about the joys of working outside of the New York art world. Not economically outside of that world, which he's very invested in, but geographically outside as he lives and works in Atlanta. Another Kojo quote: "Moving to New York to become an artist is like moving to LA to become an actor. You can go wait in line, but in some ways being based somewhere else actually makes it easier to get noticed." That's probably both true and not true in different ways, but I think about an artist like Hernan Bas who undoubtedly has gotten more attention because there's more elbow room in Miami than in Williamsburg.(left, Hernan Bas)

When I first arrived in Austin on the heels of the January '97 ice storm, which all but sealed the city off from the rest of the world for 2 days, I stayed at the seedy Texas Motel. It was a right shithole of a dump; bare mattresses on the floor, no windows, strange stains on the carpet. As a by-the-week residence, it was home to several long-term occupants who were probably about half a paycheck away from living on the streets. (right, Texas Motel at North Lamar near 183)

At the Texas Motel, you could not control the temperature in your own room. Instead there was a communal thermostat in the hallway. This led to problems. First the rooms would get too hot, whereupon someone would venture out to the thermostat to turn it down. Because there is a time delay between turning down the thermostat and the temperature actually going down, someone else in the meantime would come out from their room and turn it down again. Then someone would come home, feel that their room was too hot and then that person would go turn down the thermostat some more unaware that it had already been turned down twice.

Invariably, now that the thermostat had been turned down 3 or 4 times, the rooms would soon become way too cold. At that point, someone would venture out to turn up the heat. And then another resident would go turn up the heat. And so on until the rooms were sweltering hot. It would go on and on like this through the night, everyone taking charge to get the temperature right, but instead creating the conditions for everyone to be oppressed.

I bid farewell to the Texas Motel after a week once I'd found a place to live in my adopted city. But I took this lesson from the motel: in living as a group, the sum of individual wills, even when rightly motivated, will always tend to push too far one way or the other. In groups, there is no center, only a constant vascillating between unbearable extremes.

I thought of this anecdote today reading about Saatchi's most recent declaration of official British art taste, wherein he has put away all the pickled sharks and unmade beds and has decided now that painting is once again where it's at.

This seems to me part of a slow return to...let's call it traditionalism that I've seen poke its head up here and there, what some have called a conceptual backlash. The '04 Whitney Biennial, tepid as it was, did at least capture this incipient moment where people are starting to pay attention again to drawing and painting, and not just as seasonal fashion but as a necessary and vital thing. For years, the only way to do painting was to put it in quotes, to wink at the audience and say, "Yeah, I'm painting, but of course I'm not serious. I don't actually mean it." Now left and right, young punky artists like Zak Smith talk about painting without apology and take aesthetics as a given. Meanwhile, the ship of postmodern theory springs a leak and the likes of Terry Eagleton, Homi Bhaba and Skip Gates abandon it in favor of advocating for radical things like beauty and love. (left, British art patron Charles Saatchi)

This is all good, and yet Saatchi's move bears all the hallmarks of a movement that slips from self-assertion toward just another tyranny of ideas. In equal measure to which the orthodoxy of conceptual art made it nearly impossible for painting to be seen as anything but an art historical footnote or a quaint gesture of nostagia, so too do moves like this tend to place painting on a pedestal as the only legitimate art form. (right, Zak Smith, Most Accurate Self-Portrait To Date, 2004 )

Saatchi has gone and cranked up the heat full blast when a bunch of artists had already inched it up in an effort to knock the chill off the art world.

The rhetoric surrounding such a move is probably more problematic than the trend itself. Collectively, we seem uneasy with ambiguity and plurality. It's not enough to say there's room for lots of different kinds of expression; we seem to need to declare who's winning at any given moment. Maybe it's a natural human urge. I don't know. I do know that I won't miss the tyrannical dominance of the hyper-conceptual and anti-aesthetic. I'll enjoy this cultural moment we seem to be entering, when the chill is thawing, when the temperature is just about right, just before it gets burning up hot.

Yesterday's "Bridging the Gaps" art symposium was pretty cool. Not so much for the official information during the sessions, which was mostly a)common knowledge, b)publicly available on the internet or c)total bullshit. But it was very cool to get an interesting mix of artists and curators talking about pertinent issues in the para-spaces: the Q&As, the hallways between sessions and over lunch. In a city where almost all art events are monoracial or nearly monoracial, it was nice to have some of those barriers broken down. Props to Deborah Roberts.

Hey, curators that I've talked to, this is what I meant--it is entirely possible to have a mixed crowd, to create a space that addresses a variety of constituencies without setting up some kind of stupid quota system or going about it imperialistically. If it matters from the beginning, then it will happen almost in spite of yourself.

The symposium was all about how emerging artists can get access to the biggie art institutions. Even though there was lots of "send in slides and we'll review your work" rhetoric, Sue Graze of Arthouse did broach the truth of the matter: you just have to know the right people and go to the right parties. Splendid. I'm all for telling the truth, gross as it may be. (top to bottom: Tonya E., Rachel K. and Larry W. from the symposium)

After the symposium, Kazki and I went over to Roi James's house where he was showing his new work, which is simple, abstract and divine. The fussier, renaissance-y stuff is still his cash cow, but his heart appears to be in the abstract work (which interestingly enough is nowhere to be found on his web site).

We talked about different motivations for doing particular kinds of work, that vague, unsettled insecurity that every outsider kid had in high school when you both hated and wanted to be accepted by the in-crowd cool kids. That question creeps up sometimes when I venture into a new kind of work: "Am I just doing this to impress the cool kids?" If I suspect the answer is yes, I stop immediately.

From there, we headed over to Hole in the Wall to watch Paul play with The Fighting Brothers McCarthy. I enjoyed the band, but was hating the smoky, collegy crowd, so I didn't hang around too much longer than the end of the show, which was already after 2am. (Paul, in medias gig)

A drawing from this afternoon (not a nude, even though it looks like it at this scale). It is the kind of piece that Bernadette Phifer made very clear at the symposium would not be welcome at the Carver Museum and Cultural Center. The whole complicated truth of experience can be so inconvenient.