Since the New York Times stole my friend HR (the artist formerly known as HA) and my idea about having a Moderate Traveler column, we’re thinking maybe we should offer to be the Luxury-addicted, Flashy, Wasteful travelers?!  Coming to a manmade-island-shaped-like-a-continent in Dubai near you…

A good friend of mine, City of Angels citizen and saxophone accompanist to Molly Ringwald’s jazz crooning, animates probably the only thing I watch on YouTube, short clips about a hopeful dreamer and down-and-out hero named Smigly.  Smigly was recently featured in a big article in Tina Brown’s The Daily Beast.  From writer James Gavin:

“If it pains you to see flesh-and-blood contact disappearing in a digital world, you might relate to Smigly, an average guy in search of love. Dumped by corporate America, he sits on the landing of his apartment, blowing his saxophone while a neighbor jeers: ‘You know the tune, ‘Go Get Lost’?’ He chokes on a nut, and his girlfriend won’t look up from her laptop. He becomes a ventriloquist, and gets laughs only when the dummy pees on him. The irony of his quest for human feeling is that he too is unreal; he’s just a figure on a computer screen.

Smigly is a rising YouTube cartoon series with an emotional theme: How do you survive today’s onslaught of rejection while keeping your soul intact? The show’s creator, Allen Mezquida, knows that struggle. When his career as a jazz saxophonist floundered in the late ’90s, Mezquida took up animating and entered the movie business, which repelled him. Now he funnels his conflicts into Smigly. To Don Barrozo, a trumpeter who has edited The Simpsons since its inception, Mezquida’s funny-sad nebbish is the Charlie Chaplin of the cartoon world; his walk alone, says Barrozo, ‘tells you all you need to know about Smigly’s state of mind, be it dejection or elation.'”

Allen says: “Hopefully the SMIGLY article helps spread the word…”

Read the article:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-09-03/youtubes-rising-cartoon-star/

I think Smigly’s TV station is linked on here somewhere.

PS I almost got a job recently doing (I shit you not) re-reporting.  That’s sort of what this feels like, though I have a slight edge with this topic, I think…

So I’m scarily poor and job-less (I know my father reads this occasionally, and yes, Dad, this is a veiled cry for help) and trolling around Craigslist (amongst other, less sketchy sites) looking for jobs.  I’ve pretty much been throwing my resume at anyone who provides an email address, and oftentimes I get responses from people who then fear I’m “over-qualified” for the position.  Which makes sense, because I’m pretty damn qualified.  A woman told me the other day she feared I would be “bored” at the position she’s looking to fill, and I almost felt like responding, “Well, it is a job, right?  So of course, I’d be bored.”

Ah, the plight of the unemployed “writer” who lives in Brooklyn and is tattooed!  The Times magazine is shivering with glee at the prospect of another whiny youngster with such a cynical and lazy view toward work.

This is all beside the point.

In any case, whilst perusing Craigslist, I come across some pretty interesting ads, such as the one cut-and-pasted below:

Young, 20-something high-profile female is in need of someone who LOVES to organize (apartment, closets, etc.), and assist with personal duties (errands, reservations, etc.). The perfect candidate is someone who is looking for flexible, part-time work on an “on-call” basis. If the candidate loves to clean, then more hours will be available to clean a 2 bedroom, 1.5 bath apartment and do laundry a few times each week when client is in town. Client travels and needs someone to unpack, keep apartment and closets organized, and keep this busy gal in line! Please email name, phone number, general location of residence, age/sex and a photo if available. Candidate must be very meticulous, flexible, and confidentiality is imperative. First task is organizing, taking items to resale shops and donation centers and cleaning. This will be done with client’s family member sometime in late September/early October. This could be a great job for a student who needs flexible working hours.

• Compensation: $12/hour
• Principals only. Recruiters, please don’t contact this job poster.
• Please, no phone calls about this job!
• Please do not contact job poster about other services, products or commercial interests.

This is totally for, like, Paz de La Huerta or some equally erratic “busy gal!” with delusions of grandeur, and the job probably includes sterilizing needles and wiping the watery mascara from beneath her eyes after she has a meltdown because a casting agent tells her that with her naughty rep,  disheveled public appearances and “coke bloat” she may no longer be able to play the ingenue.  For 12 bucks an hour!  So not worth the hassle.

I have adopted a new style icon as a result of reading Just Kids.  Smith writes:

“Possibly the most influential person we met at the Chelsea was Sandy Daley.  She was a warm and somewhat reclusive artist who lived next to us in room 1019.  It was a completely white room; even the floors were white.  We had to take off our shoes before we entered.  Silver helium pillows from the original Factory drifted and suspended above us.  I had never seen such a place.  We sat barefoot on the white floor and drank coffee and looked at her photography books.  Sandy sometimes seemed a dark captive in her white room.  She often wore a long black dress and I liked to walk behind her so as to observe her hem trailing the hallway and the staircase.

Sandy had spent much time working in England, the London of Mary Quant, plastic raincoats and Syd Barrett.  She had long nails and I marveled at her technique of lifting the arm of the record player so as not to damage her manicure.”

“I used to ask people ‘Where’s the local glitter factory?’ and no one could ever tell me because, in
fact, very few people knew where glitter comes from. Subsequently I found out it was invented on
a cattle farm in New Jersey in 1934 where you can still buy it today. At one point I found out that
glitter, kilo for kilo, is a drug-like commodity. You can go to Vienna, buy two kilos of glitter for the
same price as a tiny vial in Stockholm. It has a very under-exploited commodity status. Part of
this is to do with the fact that very few people could ever tell me if glitter was made by Chinese
children or was a by-product of the arms trade. Maybe it was an innocent material made by well-
paid artisans. To this day, I’ve still never been to a glitter factory. I can’t tell you if people are
happy in glitter factories, whether glitter factories are organised collectively or a “Glitter Board”
regulates them.”

Artist Liam Gillick on one of his favorite materials

WHY IS THIS SHIT FORMATTED SO STRANGE?

Something about this whole thing smells fishy to me…

Ew.

JF: hey how’s it going?

I’m reading this story in the New York Times right now about a member of the Carnegie family who lives on a tiny, isolated, most likely wind-swept island up in Maine and wrote a book about her family’s history of mental illness.  Her daughter, pseudonym Sandra, now 55, first diagnosed with schizophrenia and then with BPD (Borderline Personality Disorder) also lives on the island.  Excerpt:

[The author of the book] discovered Jungian analysis and Transcendental Meditation and stopped speaking to her own father, though he lived, until his death, in a house within view of hers. He was, she has come to believe, as ill in his own way as Lucy, who was as ill as Sandra. In time, Sandra married, had two children and then divorced. Now 55, she has a house on Crescent Island, and the company of a companion hired by her parents.

The person I’m MOST interested in, based upon this excerpt, is the paid companion.  What is that like?  Do they just hang out, or is her BPD so bad Sandra needs to be taken care of?  What kind of melancholy does she (I’m assuming it’s a female) face on those chilly New England island nights?

So I’m going on a last minute trip abroad and am frantically trying to prepare, but wanted to share these random notes I found scribbled in the back of my copy of Harold Pinter: the Complete Works Volume III
Jenny Holzer: “I personally killed a child.”

Female personnel at Gitmo wet hands and touch prisoners to make them feel “unclean”

Francis Bacon, in a letter 1954: “It is about dreams and life in hotel bedrooms.”
Hm.  Wonder what kind of head space I was in then…

So I’m kind of isolated up here in my tiny hotel room, hence the over-blogging.  Friend just sent a fantastic piece about performance art, excerpted below:

Can you tell us about another piece from the 20th century we should not forget?

Chris Burden, 1971, December 21-24: Disappearing – “I disappeared for three days without prior notice to anyone.”

What’s unforgettable about this?

Well, can you imagine trying to do that today, bound as we are by constant digital ties? People wouldn’t only immediately think that we were dead in a ditch; they would probably take our unannounced disappearance as offensive.

James disappears for three days. He eventually returns and resumes the conversation.

Thanks for coming back James. Do you draw lines around gallery-sanctioned performance art and other kinds of contingent actions that take place in everyday life?

Outside the official realm of performance art, I think Zinedine Zidane’s headbutt of Marco Materazzi in the 2006 World Cup final might be the greatest performance of this century, and it must not be forgotten.

Why so?

Zidane was sacrificing what was most important to him – winning the World Cup for France in his last-ever game of football – and also taking some satisfaction in defying the fairy-story ending to his career everyone wanted to write. He was “taking a strike at himself.” This is the phrase Slavoj Zizek uses in The Fragile Absolute to describe an apparently irrational and self-destructive act: “This act, far from amounting to a case of impotent aggressivity turned against oneself, rather changes the coordinates of the situation in which the subject finds himself: by cutting himself loose from the previous object through whose possession the enemy keeps him in check, the subject gains the space of free action. Is not such a radical gesture of ‘striking oneself’ constitutive of subjectivity as such?” This is an excellent definition of performance art.

I’m thinking that maybe my red robe wandering last night was a performance piece?  Or I am a pretentious shit.  These two things are not mutually exclusive, I guess.

James Westcott and Shumon Basar discuss performance art:

http://www.tankmagazine.com/magazine/magazine-feature/james-westcott-shumon-basar-performance-art-129