January 19, 1986
1:11 am

My friend Craig read your communique and said "Oh, wow! I've never gotten anything like this from somebody." (He's from LA and was impressed with your embellishments).

Ventured out to a gallery opening last night. The artist did dots and I don't know if they were good dots or bad dots. One painting was all pink and a particularly nasty shade at that. There were photographs of other paintings framed in big mats. But I've decided not to criticize anyone who gives me a free beer. My friend Maggie and I fled to the Olde Sod to soak up more beers. Is it unnatural for an artist to feel like such an alien in an art gallery?

I have a picture of Christopher Lambert shirtless in a kilt kissing some wench on my fridge. The glimpse of a man's knee can fill erotic volumes ...

Tim and I went to a gallery talk given by Laurie Simmons and Robert Mapplethorpe at Artists Space. I was curious about Simmons -- I have a post card of one of her "Actual Photos" on the fridge, too. I left impressed with Mapplethorpe because, I think, he had nothing to say and said it very well.

I'm working on a series of NEWSWEEKS -- each week I take an issue and do something to it. Framed the first one in a gold frame and chamois mat.

Tim made me a book for Christmas that I'm filling with odds and ends. Trying to begin a new painting and have cleared out my painting area. Starting from scratch. A New York luxury to sit in an empty room. The book of odds and ends will eventually become a painting called SANDPIT.

What have I been reading? Hal Foster's "Recodings" (I'm sick of Cindy sherman -- I want real porno!); New Yorker Magazine (I ignore the cartoons); Boswell; Berkley; a bio of Henry Adams; and Yeats' "A Vision." And my own journal.

Craig said there are a few places in New York that begin to approach the beauty of the beach at Santa Barbara when it's empty -- but not quite.

Ciao,

6 September 1997

I don't know who I sent this letter to. There's no salutation at the top since I only have a carbon copy (a real carbon copy) and I only wrote the name on the original. Probably a friend in California.

The gallery I went to with the dot paintings was the first incarnation of American Fine Arts and I think the paintings were by Gavin Brown though they could have possibly been by Damien Hirst. Maggie is Maggie Buckley, an old co-worker at Vogue who had a friend working there. I remember the mother of the owner, Colin de Land, sweeping in to the funky little store front on 5th Street in mink.

My reading of Hal Foster's book was pretty surface at that time. I may have picked up a few key ideas but I was more interested in Henry Adams' autobiography and Boswell's "Life of Samuel Johnson" mixed in with Yeats' mysticism.

The "NEWSWEEKS" were entire issues of Newsweek Magazine transfered page by page onto a surface so that, at least theoretically, you could see through the magazine. They were lost at some point but I do have one made from The New York Post with the headline "My Story" by Bernhard Goetz (who I have a slight resemblence to).