My calendar didn’t list it as a holiday, but I’m guessing today was Dumbass Driver Day. Is it me, or are drivers becoming progressively worse? Let me discuss a few people who annoyed me on my journey home.

• If your car is so impaired that you need to drive with your hazards flashing, stay off the highway. Back roads only. Tow truck preferred.
• If you're driving 45 mph in the left lane, you may as well build a blockade, because that’s what you’re doing.
• People who apply their brakes with the frequency of a hummingbird’s beating wings… stop it. You need therapy. Electro-shock therapy. Connected directly to your brakes.
• I won’t delve into people who simultaneously smoke and talk on their cell phone while driving. Let me just say that if I’m Dante, you’re in my ninth circle of hell. Along with all pigeons.
• There is an enormous difference between being lost and acting lost. Being lost allows you to discover new places. Acting lost will get you mugged. Possibly shot.

In the time it took to read this, a woman driving on Balboa Avenue just applied her brakes one hundred and seventy three times.

I got a new car stereo installed this afternoon so my aforementioned car silence has ended. My car stereo is pretty cool. It comes with a remote control so if I'm ever in a horrific accident and thrown thirty feet from the car, I can still adjust the volume. Woo hoo!

A week ago, my car stereo broke. No radio. No CD player. Being sans car stereo makes for an odd driving experience. During this time, I've made a few observations:

• Without the distractions of music, my driving skills are honed like a ninja wielding a sword. Double lane changes at eighty five miles per hour within a distance of a hundred feet are artfully conducted like an orchestra. Sipped like a fine wine.
• I talk to myself. Out loud. A lot.
• The beautiful subtleties of the landscape. How the morning sun illuminates the hillside in golden green tones and gracefully shades the palm tree leaves in yellows.
• That being without a car stereo really, really, really sucks.

This is my favorite time of year in San Diego. If San Diego had such a thing as a season, this would be it. The weather cools slightly, adding a chill to the nighttime air. The Santa Ana winds whisper enough to clear out the misty marine layer and lower the humidity, leaving a clear sky. It's a beautiful scene.

This morning I visited one of my favorite places in San Diego, the Mission cafe. It's a small shack located along the Mission Beach boardwalk. My last visit had been far too long ago. So long so that both the color (now green) and name (now Cantina) of the place had changed. During my self-imposed two year sabbatical, I ventured down there every morning to write and draw. It's a great place to people-watch as they stroll, walk, bike, and jog across the boardwalk and descend onto the beach. So as to not disappoint, this morning as I wrote in my journal and drank coffee, a dog wearing a harness with long leash flew past me swiftly as it pulled a man crouched low on his skateboard. It was a Southern California version of the Iditarod.

I first became aware of art critic Robert Hughes upon watching the documentary Crumb (one of my fave movies). He was interviewed and asked to comment on Robert Crumb's work. I admired Hughes' articulate and knowledgeable critique, flavored with humor.

Due to the subjective nature of music, I frequently find its written criticism to be trite and contrived. I'll read a Rolling Stone album review and cringe when the reviewer includes two lines of lyrics to support his or her view. Two isolated lines prove nothing as a song's power depends heavily on its music, and you completely remove them from their context (the substance of all art).

I argue that painting is even more subjective than music. Consumers and critics can come to a general consensus that some music sucks, but I don't believe that you find this same consensus about art (outside of people that just hate art as a whole). If you encounter a painting style in the everyday world that you hate, there's a good chance that you can find that same style housed on a museum's walls. I remember walking through the Denver Art Museum with my friend Meegan ten years ago, and she commented, "Have you ever wondered why one painting makes it into a museum and another doesn't? What makes a painting museum worthy? If you see two similar paintings, why is one included and the other disregarded?" They were poignant questions, and I try to answer them as I stroll along museum walls. Rarely can I answer them absolutely.

Painting offers a rare quality in the creative fields. Immediacy. It elicits an immediate reaction. A book takes six hours to complete, a movie two, and even a song takes a few minutes to seep in. But standing in front of a painting the image is burned instantly. Of course one acquires additional messages and impact upon absorbing the image through time and study, but it still possesses that initial reaction (or lack thereof). How do you describe it and the cause? Is the painting effective?

My long winded approach is arriving at the fact that I've never really read any art criticism. I questioned if it be worthwhile or is the subjective nature of art too prohibitive. Would I find it as pretentious and contrived as music criticism? Would it resemble the current nature of politics where a person has already taken a stance and simply warps facts to reinforce this idea, or would it consist of a dialogue that evolved into an enlightened view?

I decided to give it a shot and returned to Robert Hughes, best known as the art critic for Time magazine. I bought his book, Nothing If Not Critical: Selected Essays on Art and Artists. I've found it thoroughly engaging and fun. I've seen enough artwork to have developed what I believe to be informed opinions on what I like and dislike, the reasons thereof, and whether a painting is effective. It's been fun to volley my thoughts against his, and try to understand where we concur and differ and why. I've made no veiled declarations that I thoroughly despise the work of Mark Rothko. I enjoyed reading Hughes' essay on Rothko explaining his genius. He validates my reasons for dislike (Rothko can't draw, the paintings have been identical for the last twenty years of his oeuvre and meanings associated with them are dramatically overblown), but Hughes' doesn't see them as a distraction to the paintings' power. The book collects his critiques on art exhibits and books and are based per artist. His ability to articulate his thoughts is amazing, and I enjoy that he gives a context to the art we're seeing (my own creative dogma is that an artwork derives its power from context). A thoroughly engaging read. Highly recommended.

As an aside, I also bought his book, Barcelona, which gives a historical and opinionated view of the city. The city is one of my faves. I'm looking forward to reading the book.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading Chuck Klosterman’s essay collection, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs. You gotta love a book that spends thirteen pages detailing the social relevance and power of TV’s Saved by the Bell (who didn’t watch this show in between college classes?). His more entertaining essays deal with focused topics like how John Cusack ruined his love life and the sad reason why soccer is the world’s most popular sport. His weaker essays tend to be those where he extrapolates universal laws from popular cultural tidbits.

They boil down to the phrase, “Society believes (this) because of (that).”

Perhaps my criticism is guided by my adverse Pavlovian response to the phrase, “Society thinks….” Upon hearing it I cringe. I heard it frequently repeated during critical thinking classes in college and the phrase always struck me as being pretentious and trite. It’s a concept too ambitious to be uttered by a guy having done keg stands fourteen hours earlier. It’s simply a pet peeve of mine. I have a visceral reaction to the word society. I hate it, and thus never use it in my creative writing.

Arguments involving it always collapse on themselves, where one caveat can turn the carefully balanced structure into sawdust.

Society thinks that this journal entry rocks.

Saturday night I went to see my friend Adam's band (Secret Apollo) play at Joe n' Andy's Hole in the Wall in La Mesa. Great show in an interesting dive bar. Painted murals and photo collages of regulars covered the walls. The stage was slightly larger than a pie tin -- but not by much. Adam's band played first. The lead singer of the second band placed a cloth over the microphone. I asked Adam why the guy did that, thinking it created subtle voice effects or prevented cooties. Adam replied, "For insulation. The grounding isn't very good in this place. Everytime you touch the microphone you get electrocuted."

For an artist, there's nothing like painting from life. With that being said, I packed up my oil supplies, threw them in the trunk of the car, and drove down to Mission Bay hoping to capture a scene. I got down there and found it incredibly windy. With the easel folded out and large canvas secured, it resembles a windsail. Not good. I opted for another location. Ah, I'll go to one of my favorite places in the city, Balboa Park, I decided. I drifted south on the highway, rounded the corner onto Park, and saw three mounted policemen stationed on the bluff. Upon approaching the entrance, I discovered that there was a huge protest taking place. With my plans being thwarted a second time, one due to nature and the second political, I returned home, my canvas blank.

There are two art forms that the general public frequently resents: abstract painting and poetry. I think it’s because artists and writers receive acclaim and fame for doing something that appears relatively vague and easy to do.

Out of curiosity, I tried my hand at abstract painting, and thus produced, Abstract Number 1.



A close up taken at an angle....


The challenges in creating an abstract painting arise from the number of variables. They include color, style, texture, spontaneity, and arrangement, among others. It was both fun and frustrating playing with all. Unfortunately I can't get a good photo reproduction of the painting and its texture.

I have one general rule when flying that I expect all other passengers to follow. I shouldn’t know that they exist.

Like Spiderman and Haley Joel Osment, I too have a sixth sense. By witnessing a person’s smallest perceptible behavior – a poker player would call it a tell – I can immediately discern whether he or she will be a pain in the ass. In my head, I catalog these tells. Included in this list are people who make substitutions at restaurants and those that require more than three qualifiers to describe their coffee order. After my flight to France, I have added two more: women who take small dogs with them as they would a cell phone, and hippy parents accompanied by their kids.

If you choose to bring your tiny yap-yap dog on the plane, I shouldn’t hear it yap-yapping. I’ll tolerate a couple of minutes for you to get settled, but I would consider two hours of yap-yapping on an international flight to be excessive, and by all means violates my general rule of “not existing.” Out of the four legs of my trip, two of them contained yapping dogs.

I saw her carry the dog down the aisle and instantly knew what to expect the rest of the flight. She would be a pain in the ass. It didn’t necessarily involve the incessant barking of the dog either. During the entire flight she had the flight attendant scurrying around the cabin to bring her various items.

I’ve transported kids on planes. I know how difficult it can be, but parents must show a little decency. The entire plane is not a playground. The hippy parent sitting across the aisle from me, attired in tie-dye, governed her child with a free spirit laissez-faire style. She let him run continuously in the aisles, scream, jump, swing around seats, and disrupt other passengers within a couple aisle radius.

If it wasn’t for turbulence, I would have had a vasectomy on the plane.

I have a couple of solutions for parents traveling with kids you are unable or unwilling to control. The first is to add a little Kahlúa to their milk. Not only will it make them sleep during their flight, but it will also build their tolerance to alcohol so that they can more easily become raging alcoholics once they reach college (if they aren’t incarcerated before then). The other method of subduing your child on long flights? Tranquilizer gun.

When it comes to painting and writing, there is one environmental element I cherish most: a great album. But it can't be any great album, it must meet specific criteria. First off, it must set a mood conducive to creative endeavors. Although I love Slayer, double-bass 178 beats per minute riffs are distracting, so mellow works best. It's imperative that the album sets an engaging tone, whether sentimental, longing, melancholic, reflective, hopeful, or somber. Another requirement is that every track must be good. When I'm elbow-deep in turpentine and yellow ochre, paintbrush swinging wildly, I can't afford to venture over to the CD player to forward ahead tracks.

Here are the all-stars in my current rotation:

• Miles Davis - Sketches of Spain
• David Gray - White Ladder
• Leona Naess - Comatised
• Mazzy Star - So Tonight That I Might See
• Mazzy Star - Among My Swan
• Norah Jones - Come Away With Me
• Spain - She Haunts My Dreams
• Sheryl Crow - Sheryl Crow
• Shawn Colvin - A Few Small Repairs
  

In the past few weeks, I've added two new ones that haven't left the CD player:

• Beck - Sea Change
• Garden State soundtrack

I was never a fan of Beck's previous work, so it surprised me how much I like Sea Change. It's a wonderfully intimate album. The Garden State soundtrack elicits a strong association as I reflect back on scenes from the movie and their tone.

Any recommendations?

Spent Saturday in Los Angeles. A city that absolutely fascinates me.

L.A. traffic is a visceral entity. It becomes a part of your life. If someone asks you if you have a family you could realistically say, "Yeah. I have a wife, three kids, and traffic." It's like having a girfriend. You schedule your life around it. It has a personality that you work diligently to try and understand, but despite all your efforts, it still maintains its sometimes random and mysterious nature. A girl can't reveal all her secrets. In my case, the secret would be that I wouldn't get past third gear driving from Anaheim to Hollywood.

In Studio City, I picked up my friend Shannon, and we headed to Pasadena. We ate lunch at a Spanish restaurant called Bar Celona (say it outloud) located along the downtown Colorado Boulevard strip, and I ate one of my fave foods, seafood paella. Following lunch we visited the Norton Simon Museum. The museum has an astounding collection, both exhaustive and diverse, spanning from the 14th to 20th centuries. Everything from Rembrandt to Van Gogh. One of the interesting aspects of the museum is that it has pieces from early moments in an artist's career, that reflect a different aspect of the artist. I have a love/hate relationship with Renoir. While I love his use of color and subject matter, I question his drawing skills and find fault with the way all of his female faces look identical and even unrealistic with their puffy and balloon shape. But then I see an early painting like The Pont des Arts, Paris, and it makes me rethink my stance. They had an extensive collection of works by Degas, Van Gogh, and Picasso. The placards describing each artwork were enlightening and informative. Especially intriguing was the one sitting beside Modigliani's painting, Portrait of the Artist's Wife, Jeanne Hebuterne. It described how the day after Modigliani's death, his wife was so despondant that she commited suicide. She was nine months pregnant.

In the evening, Shannon and I went to the ArcLight movie theater in Hollywood and bought tickets to see Garden State. The ArcLight theater is an enormous complex offering fancy service. Tickets cost $14, and the seating was reserved. Like attending a concert, you selected your actual seats (there isn't general admission). Before the movie starts, an usher announces the movie, running time, and the fact that there aren't any annoying commercials, just three movie previews. Also, if we encountered any problems with sound or picture, to alert them immediately.


Watching a movie in Hollywood is a unique experience. An alluring aspect of movies is its suspended reality. However, seeing a movie in Hollywood causes fiction and reality to coalesce. The audience contains many people familiar with the industry -- the most (ab)used word in all of L.A. -- and know about Oz hidden behind the curtain. They're familiar with the science behind the trick. The audience laughs in odd and delayed segments, like a high school band where a few people are ahead of the beat and a few people behind. They may have friends who worked on it, or the always popular friend of a friend. Also, the stars of the movie, projected thirty feet high, can potentially live a few blocks from where I sit in the darkened theater. At the end of the movie, the audience applauded. I haven't heard applause after a movie since my fifth grade teacher repremanded us for applauding, adding that it was a useless practice since none of the people responsible for the movie could hear us. In Hollywood, this isn't necessarily the case.

One of the previews was for Ben Affleck's upcoming movie, Surviving Christmas. If Ben's goal was to get people to stop talking about Gigli, it looks like he's succeeded. After the first thirty seconds, I scrounged for a sharp object and prayed it wasn't dull. A painful viewing experience.

I really enjoyed Garden State. I loved its pacing, tone, and intimacy, and found its quirkiness -- disliked by other critics -- to be a welcome asset. I'd rather have a personal yet flawed movie than a perfect and disingenuous one.

When we bought the movie tickets, we had an hour to kill before the movie started, so we walked next door to Amoeba Records. I've been to the original in Berkeley, and the L.A. one has its own unique charm. Based on a friend's recommendation, I bought the Garden State soundtrack, movie unseen, and was really glad I did. I left L.A. after the movie -- around 11pm. I asked Shannon if I should expect problems with traffic on the way back. She said there shouldn't be any. I left Studio City, put the soundtrack in my CD player, and discovered that my girlfriend named Traffic still held another tiny secret. Brake lights from Hollywood to downtown. After that, she blew me a kiss and I floated effortlessly down to San Diego.

I've done some figure painting the past week. It's been a while since I've picked up watercolors. It was fun sloshing them around. This is Michelle Leaning.


The painting below, Elizabeth, was done with oils, which are always a bit of an adventure.

I returned from my business trip to France last weekend. I had a great time. My hotel was located on the beach in St. Laurent du Var (a few miles west of Nice airport). A couple dozen restaurants and cafes lined the sea path below. I spent the evenings eating long dinners in the cafes, armed with my notebook and pen.



As I referenced in a previous post, I love the cafe culture in France. In America, eating at a restaurant is based largely on sustenance. We're hungry, and we need food so that we don't pass out. From the restaurant owner's perpspecitve, they want turnover. But in France, dining is a social endeavor, and an evening long event. A couple will go there together, talk the whole night, continuously engaged in the conversation. They look at each other, and don't stare off to continuously monitor every passing person that walks by. You start off with a drink and appetizers, move onto the entree, and follow that with coffee and dessert. All the while, taking your time. Never feeling hurried. Everything done casually. Enjoying each other's conversation. To an outsider, it may seem haphazard and wasteful, especially if you're used to everything being done in American staccato fashion. But I love the pace, and the respect people give each other at the table. It's genuine.

I worked late Monday through Thursday, so my evenings consisted mainly of descending down to the beach and lounging in restaurants. We had a half-day at work on Friday, so with the afternoon free, I took the train from the hotel to Nice proper (about seven miles east). I walked down to the beach and sat there for a while writing. It was abominably hot, between the temperature and the humidty -- a level I can't ever remember ever experiencing before -- and had I been dressed for it, I would have jumped into the Mediterranean Sea and stayed there for hours. And for those of you wondering, yes, I did sunbathe topless. Longing for shade, I crept back onto city streets and wandered through old haunts. I sat down under the awning at my favorite Nice cafe called Mori's Bar. On average, it may have the ugliest clientelle in all of Nice, but it has an undescribed charm that I gravitate to. Perhaps it's because I feel good looking when I'm there.

I returned to the beach and ascended up a staircase that wound up the side of Castle Hill, upon whose plateau offered one of the most beautiful views of any city I've ever seen.

Nearing dinner time I strolled the streets of Old Town and heard two acoustic guitarists playing familiar songs on an outdoor patio. I took a seat and enjoyed drinking beer on a beautiful evening while the guitarists played an ecclectic mix of English covers including Beatles' songs, Nora Jones' Don't Know Why, Leaving on a Jet Plane, Billie Jean, Stand By Me, and Wonderful Tonight.

I left Old Town to catch the train back to St. Laurent du Var, but I literally missed it by seconds. It departed as I approached within yards of it. With the next train not leaving for two hours, I found a nearby Chinese restaurant to grab dinner in while waiting. The food was horrible, but the ambience charming. I drank my favorite French beer, Kronenbourg 1664, and upon completing my dinner I caught the train and returned to the hotel.

On Saturday morning I caught the train to Villefranche-sur-Mer. Well, technically I caught three trains to Villefranche. I had assummed that my train from St. Laurent du Var would stop at my desired destination, but it happened to skip that one, so I had to take another that returned me to Nice's main station and the third train took me to Villefranche. The town is stunning and one that I had become enamored with when I visited France two years ago. The village is comprised of tightly woven buildings that cling to the mountainside. I passed through narrow alleys, paths, and staircases, to arrive at the Citadel, an amazing stone fort built in 1557. Two sections contained the ouvre of two local and deceased artists. The artwork was exceptional, but as there was no ventilation or air conditioning, the heat in the corridors was beyond intense and I couldn't linger for long. I saw one work on paper and thought that it was a watercolor since the paper was buckled. I looked closer and saw that it was pastel, but the weather conditions within the room caused the paper to bend as it would if water were placed on it. The sculpture and drawings in the Musee Volti were fantastic. Just wondering through the building made you feel like you were living in Medieval times.


After spending much time walking around the city I took the train back to Nice and went to its Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art. The building itself is a piece of artwork. It is composed of four five-story columns with connected glass corridors. The museum has a great collection of artwork, and I was impressed -- and surprised -- by its focus on modern American art. One of my favorite pieces was Damien Hirst's, Five Black Dots. It was painted directly onto the enormous wall, and resembled a Twister game with large equidistant dots of different colors. Upon first look, it appeared that there were more than five black dots. But closer inspection revealed that some of the dots that appeared black were actually dark brown, green, and blue. Perhaps a comment on race and the hazards of judging on first appearence? I found it engaging in its simplicity. The very top of the museum had an open air atrium with beautiful views of the city and an interesting way to interlock the functional columns. They were spanned by an arching path that resembled a bridge that one would find in a Japanese garden.


I retraced some of my earlier steps through Old Town, accompanied with a cup of gelatto. In the evening I took the train back to the hotel, and left Nice early Sunday morning. The flight had a barking dog and kids that continuously ran through the plane and swung off seats, so it wasn't a calming flight, but not too bad. I wrote, read, watched TV, slept, and did a drawing.