What stikes me listening to David Bowie’s new album “The Next Day”: For an album made in 2012 it has virtually none of the touchstones you would expect for some one being canny about contemporary music. For example, there’s nothing “rootsy” about it. nothing about the arranging or recording that would make you think it was made anywhere but in a studio. And that makes me think that Bowie’s music has never been part of the British embrace of American blues, so as such he’s never been tempted to approximate that sound. For him, the prehistory of pop music is simply more pop music: music hall and lieder. Even at his folkiest he hasn’t indicated that the folk have any greater access to authenticity than the professionals.

The record is booming and closed off all at once, with bits that recall other Bowie songs in the manner of someone running their finger through their wardrobe, wondering which favorite garment to slip into; a drum beat from “Rock and Roll Suicide”, guitars from “It’s No Game”. It’s all tinged with the same dread that has been Bowie’s special gift to rock. I can’t tell yet if I’m going to inhabit this record like I do my favorite albums of his, but then again I rarely do that any more for any new album. Very little seems to stick anymore in the eternal present of online life.

I fucking love the Acela, Amtrak’s highspeed train up and down the northeast corridor.  I’ m on it now, flying down to DC for weekend workshops and reunions with friends. I love that the Acela cabin comes equipped with solo seats that have a little desk connected with them, a perfect office on the go.  This trip is  the capper to what has been a powerful couple of weeks.  I feel dumped back into the art world after years prowling its fringes.  After being part of the Museum of Modern Art’s forum on photo grad programs, and creating the new show for Matthew Marks, I went with my friend Justine to the opening of the New Museum’s show about 1993 New York.

The opening was another kind of class reunion, with people and art that caused instant memory vertigo. It still cracks me up that I was practically a peacock, because I was in the blue Pendleton plaid I got for Christmas.  Art folk will wear black darlings, and that’s that.  The piece I have in the show is “Equipment for a Shameful Epic” , which I showed in my first show with Matthew, on Madison Avenue. There’s a lot of carry over in to the new pieces I have up there now, and on the whole the New Museum show looks fresh and rich. The ideas of that time don’t seem too flattened out by the installation.  But it is strange to see yourself anthologized, pressed into the role of interesting artifact by a younger generation. I was happy to see so many old pals, but also puzzled by what the younger sleeker folk were making of all of us.

Everyone is always someone else’s “grown-up”, but that doesn’t mean that the role sits well on your skin.  Weirdly, the pice I have in the show, the show that’s looking back twenty years, contains a script I wrote that uses the Watergate transcripts, so an artifact twenty years distant from my self at the time. Do I sit in the consciousness of today like some Halderman or Colson?

The snow is bearing down on us – at this point icy pellets of pre-made slush.  Walk down the street and the wind whips it into your eyes.  The cold is not bitter, but persistant. Work is shutting down.  I’m heading over to the studio to try to get a couple of things in place before it all goes dark, if that is indeed what will happen.   I like being able to type those words, heading over to the studio.  It was way too long without.

I was going to go to dinner with my friend Justine, but we’ve decided that this isn’t Brooklyn sushi weather, so I’ll probably grab something more filling and bundle myself in for the evening. Maybe I’ve been trying to deny the reality of winter by refusing to dress for it.  Today at least I grabbed my blue corduroy cap off the stack before I hit the door.  I was grateful for the protection, but I really to need a scarf for this mess.

Here it is,  my 53rd year, and while it hasn’t exactly snuck up on me, I do feel unprepared for all of the announcing and celebrating.  I’ve been hard at work on both of the recent shows, especially opening the new show at Matthew Marks. My new process of working in the space and creating the show in an improvisatory manner means that I have a period where I don’t want any one asking me what I’m doing, or how it’s going or any of the polite questions one would ask to show interest and concern to a friend. So I isolate until the last minute and then reveal the show.  Luckily this time I felt it all went remarkably well, and the show is not only one of the most solid I’ve done in New York in a while, it also marks my 20th year of working with my gallery here.  As I told Matthew at the dinner after the opening, I’ve never wanted anything more.  The art world for the most part has seemed to abandon the long term, but having a home that you can come back to over and over makes a huge difference.

Half a century and I’ve worked with them longer than I’ve worked any place else. That’s something to celebrate.

Nine, as in this is my ninth blogiverasry. As in I’ve been blogging for nine years, since 2003. Remember when I used to write this blog? When I used to update more often than once a quarter? It’s true. It really used to happen. Daily even.

Yesterday I had a probing chat with a friend about his work block, and as always, the things I said to him said a lot about what has been going on with me as well. Feelings of unworthiness are devilishly hard to break. I so rarely trust my own abundance. The more I get, the less I deserve it seems, in the twisted bits of my own mind. So that makes these days, where by any measurement I have quite a lot, a perfect storm of self doubt.

But as I would say to any artist: We don’t want to hear your agonizing, we want to see your stuff.

So I’m going to go make some more stuff. Who knows, returning to writing here could be the jumpstart I need. At the very least I’m glad I haven’t take the whole site down, as I’ve been tempted to do lately.

So this is how we test a possible new blogging set-up. Right now I’m typing this on an android tablet, sweating in my house after some earlier troubles. It’s been an odd week, filled with some good news but with a lot of troubling occurrences. I’m once again struggling to find coherence.

Update: There’s a few things the tablet can’t do, that’s for sure. I’m still having to figure out if it can compensate for all of my workflow.

I was not a good international worker yesterday. I didn’t strike, generally, instead I showed up for work and walked past the mini protests at Bryant Park in the morning. I did however put some of my ill-gotten earnings to use in support of a good cause, heading downtown in the evening to help celebrate the book release of all-American Kate Bornstein, who inhabited (rather than occupied) Dixon Place, making it glow with grace, and truth, and gathered well wishers.

It was an evening of rock and roll in the best sense, and it sent me back to my San Francisco days. You hear what you need to hear, if you’re lucky. And these days, it seems like I need to hear about fearlessness, about leaping past boundaries, and about putting in the work. I’ve been in fear for much of the past year, I think, at least fear about my public life. I want to plow that under, and recapture some joyousness. Kate and all the people who celebrated her last night gave me that. Gratitude to all of them for that.

You should buy her new book, if possible from Bluestockings.

Back to trying: trying to keep track of spending, trying to keep track of calories, trying to keep track of emails and other things, and trying to gain momentum.

Trying to post here. Trying to be self forgiving. Trying to manage technology without being a greedy chump.

Trying to clean the house the dog the floor the clothes the walls the sheets the hard drives the inbox. And don’t forget to scrub the soul.

And yet: there’s season one of Alf available for free viewing on Amazon.

Trying.

I took myself over to the Armory Art Fair and its tiny twin Volta yesterday. I’ve been curmudgeonly about fairs for quite a while, so generally I don’t go. They are a business that seems to succeed despite the fact that almost nobody I know enjoys them: artists are either pissed that they aren’t included or frustrated with the look of the booth when they are, dealers find them expensive and time consuming, and critics see them as a place where commerce trumps ideas. As for the people that the really seem to be tailored for, collectors, I can’t tell you what they think.

I remember when the Armory got its start as the Gramercy Art Fair a weekend event crammed into the Gramercy Hotel. The first time around it was real event, a group of young art dealers, staking a claim to attention in a forum born of necessity: it was a lot cheaper to take over the hotel than it was to revnt any of New York’s other exposition venues. Dealers set up work in hotel rooms and since the bar for entry was lower, the work was wilder.

The Gramercy’s success led to a rash of other hotel fairs around the world, as well as ensuring that the days at the Gramercy itself were numbered. The law of New York cultural life took over: if one year 200 people think something is fun to do and they talk about it, the next year 200 of their friends will want to do it too. Quickly the numbers became unmanageable for hotel hallways and rooms and voila, here we are with an event that is almost as big as the boat shows that my parents used to take me to when I was kid.

With a few differences. The most amusing one is this: the first rule of socializing in art circles is that you must play it cool at all costs. You don’t want to appear too interested: if you’re a shopper, dealers will smell blood in the water and and buttonhole you. If you’re a dealer, an artist may start bending your ear in an attempt to get you to look at their work, potentially making you miss that maybe-a-little-interested collector whose purchase could ensure that you don’t have to ship so much heavy art home. If you’re an artist you want it to appear that you aren’t too busy tallying up the successes and failures of your peers. Above all, there is a common belief in cultural circles that everyone smells better with a little spritz of hauteur. New Yorkers love the aloof.

Combine all of this, and what you get is the experience I had yesterday: thousands of people shoved into a hastily thrown up favela of white cubelets sparingly crammed with merch. Each box represented a gallery where the proprietor sat on a self-furnished chair (or you can rent them from the venue at a ludicrous amount) poking at an iPad and waiting for marks. In the barely passable corridors, people who had paid thirty dollars to get in the door tried to meet or avoid each other’s eyes and at the same time did their best while pressed up against each other to look like they actually had someplace more important to be, something better to do and that they had just happened to find themselves there in a pier at the outer edge of Manhattan in the midst of a flash mob. It would be like cruising, except nobody gets off, and the brutal “last call, it’s time to get your ass home” lighting is always on.

I leave it to you to attempt to imagine what any of this has to do with the encounter that we call art. It’s a cliche` to decry the market’s influence on art. But this is weird even as a market: can you name a single other trade show where the participants spend most their time pretending to have only the barest stake in the product?

So, why did I go? I was handed a free ticket, and a good friend who has a booth there is having his birthday, I stopped in to dispense good wishes, and then figure I’d make my way through all three venues. Out of some two hundred-odd exhibitors, there were about five things that made me take a second look, or make to note for further research. I can’t quite decide if 2.5 is a heartening or depressing percentage. I shot a bunch of pictures, however and I’ll put some up in the coming days.

Ominously warm here in New York today. After all of the crush and tumble of the past few weeks (months really), a regular day on the job seems like a sinful luxury, one that I extended by skipping any social events (tonight is Pleasure Salon), picking up a couple of comic books and heading home to eat falafel and snuggle with Lehigh.

Once home of course I ran up against the fact that the apartment is strewn with half finished projects and that dirty clothes definitely outnumber the clean ones. Luckily, even though I have a house guest today, she is a casual one who has seen the house in as bad if not worse state. I did manage to get some of the rougher edges tidied.

I’m finally getting around to editing some of the many pictures I took on my trip to India a month ago. My head spins to think how recently I was there. Maybe that’s all that’s going on right now: I’ve been taking in so many experiences that I can barely chew, much the less swallow them. So, little bits, let the fragments come out and don’t worry too much about the meaning of them all. Yes, a picture of an elephant on the street in India is overwhelmingly exoticizing. At the same time, hey, we drove past elephants on the street in India. My experience there was confounding and and past any ability to condense it into a simple summation. I’m still waiting to see how the new possibilities that I encountered there will play out.