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.....

last week i edited a few songs in anticipation of getting them all mixed last week. on sunday the 21st, we started mixing, but only got to do a little bit because of technical trouble. and then we decided to record that live demo with the girls. so last friday, the 25th, we go in again - and again we have bullshit technical problems eating up time. lucky we don't get charged for bs. we got most of badluck edited on friday... then came back saturday another full block - 8 hours. and of course, we got two hours of down time and lost an hour of work after a computer crash. and the drums took a while to mix. a this rate its gonna suck. but i've made some changes in the way i'm going to approach the final editing. i'm going to treat the tracks - individually - as modular items... things that don't need to be edited during the mix. we can fix them "offline" then re-import. so we've spent half a grand in the last 2 weeks and we have two mostly mixed songs and...

so the long story short girls can be notoriously late. but they are 20, and unemployed and beautiful and more talented than any family should ever be... so what are you gonna do right? nuthin'. thursday night was no different. they were supposed to meet me and ashby at his apt. so that we could loan them our rehearsal gear, pa system, etc. we are in the middle of mixing, and they just got their dad to spring for some nice new instruments... so why not upgrade the pa for while as well... we had sake and wine and a piano and a guitar, so we didn't mind waiting... so ashby, as he does often these days, started plinking out this cute little melody on the piano. i had this kinda sad d - a minor - e minor thing that i thought was catchy... so we kinda combined them together. the acoustic was tuned down a half step and ashby transposed the chords on piano. it sounded really pretty. very sing songy. and then the words came... verse after verse... the air got heavy... ashby did some st...

thursday night... i met up with this girl i've been talking to... drank a little bit, shot the shite. she doesn't like rock stars though. i'm kidding. well sorta. i dunno. we both like disco jackets though. friday... worked, errands... edited audio for three songs at ashby's from 9pm to 6am.... while he slept. he still gets to stand in the middle of the stage though. whatev'. saturday... we got to instant karma to begin mixing some songs. this was gonna be like the-big-day. but jeff had a previous project to finish up, and since the computer had crashed on me at 5:30am... and i didn't get to finish editing, i had to finish at the studio. we spent several hours trying to get our tracks into the system. jeff got it working though, and for the remainder of the mixing process, we should be good to go. we will not only be mixing, but we'll be finishing up some recording there as well... primarily vocals and a few acoustic parts. at the moment, during the evenings...