shawn avery

a few weeks back i wrote briefly about my experience at the MOCA basquiat exhibit in LA. I had finally seen, after looking for years, my first (and the biggest) jean-michel basquiat exhibit. Instead of posting my 2000 words of notes on the exhibit, i posted (on myspace) the first "real" article about basquiat, which was published in december 1981. since then, i've read more about some particular pieces and i ran across this article about the exhibit. It's not the most flattering article. the article itself seems to be so concerned about dodging basquiat's hype, that it kinda gets in the way of the actual critique. that and the guy mentions nothing about how one actualy FEELS to be standing in front of a painting such as "pegasus" - 1987. the painting is about 7 ft. vertical, and completely envelopes your field of vision. everything in the painting... mostly repetetive words, symbols and phrases... is all in black and white... except for one one phras...

ok. two posts in one month. september marks one year of this journal thing. i might be taking a break from it for a while... my life will be changing shape here over the next month or so. i'm hoping all positive. i have a four sided life. it's possible that all sides might be in harmony. then again i'm old enough to know better... so... lemme break out a calendar and see what i've been up to this month. ok... i left for a few mins. got heckled by this black homeless dude downtown who always calls me white boy. an obvious mental case. that kinda sucks. homeless and nuts. i guess i don't feel too bad about turning 31. besides, some girl on myspace just told me i look like jeremy sisto. i'm gonna go ahead and file that under "huge compliment." so... the days leading up to my birthday 9/12-16th... were supposed to be all awesome and funky. some of them were. i spent some time editing "na na na" and another track. there were a few shows i thought ...

for the past 8 or 9 years, one of my favorite artists has been jean-michel basquiat. but he wasn't my absolute favorite. i thought a lot of his allure may have been hype. his race - and thus his "novelty in the art world", his omnipotent street cred, his early death at the magic age of 27, his association with warhol... there were plenty of reasons to be suspect... until i stood inches from his paintings last week in LA. he was the one. he's my guy. i'm reposting the first major article about basquiat titled "the radiant child" by art critic rene ricard. this article was written during the first moments of relevant hip hop. it gives praise to graffiti culture and some of jean michel's contemporaries. i've written a fairly involved review of my 90 minutes being immersed in basquiat, probably 2000 words or so. but then i realized that i'm writing from the point of view of a fan, almost 20 years after his death. my opinion is hardly relevant...

i'm getting lazy. i had an entire week to update this thing, but i wasn't crazy about the laptop at the house where i was staying. and i never made it down to starbucks with the laptop. so... what's new... how shall i bring this all up to the here and now. might as well start with the fun stuff. katrina. the body count estimate has been lowered, but the potential cost of the disaster is being set at possibly 200 billion dollars. that's roughly the price tag of our "war on terror." not counting the other places we've overthrown lately... just the iraq occupation is costing us about that much. so basically we have found ourselves fighting three wars. funny what happens when you get a fuckhead for a president for two terms. there's been a lot of sissy jabber talk on myspace and elsewhere about "not blaming" people and "focusing on the disaster." even bush said it himself... "let's not bring politics into this." ok, fine.....