I once knew a 36 yr old character actor who was going with a beautiful & warm, smart, dimpled actress with a smile that made you happy & she broke up with him. He and I were drinking & he started talking about her and how great she was. And he said, This is a quote..”I just thank God I got to feel that much in love.” It was a wildly healthy take on a rough circumstance. It helped after the Clipper game.
blurg.
this is Val
Jack. Upright. Uke. I just died and went to folk heaven.
I have stared at this building a million times and I’ve never noticed this painting.
Sometimes I miss caring. Just kidding.
“This is exactly what you were like with baseball.” -My Mother [who knew I was always so cute and charming?]
Sage Words on Beckett
So Beckett strikes out 9 tonight FTW. Is it horrible that I completely wanted him to get shelled? Beckett was my favorite member of the Sox for the past few years, but I’m not sure I’ve ever disliked a person more at this point. Getting hurt golfing on your day off while you’re also mending a shoulder injury is retarded, but lashing out at people who point out how retarded it is is just about unforgivable:
“We get 18 off days a year. I think we deserve a little time to ourselves.”- Eighteen days, huh? So mid October to the end of February…not days off?
“I spend my off days the way I want to spend them.”- You’re a professional athlete with an injury who is expected to be at least attempting to heal it and make your starts. It’s what you get paid millions to do. I may want to spend my days off shooting heroine, but I don’t because there is a good chance it will hurt my work performance.* It’s just what you do when you have a job.
I said from the start that the six year Beckett deal was ill-advised. Even of they wanted to get rid of him they can’t- he is a 10/5 and there isn’t a single team that would take on that paycheck for a pitcher past his prime with an attitude problem. They should really just stick him on waivers and maybe the fact that no one snags him gives him an attitude adjustment. Don’t be an asshole. You make zillions of dollars to play a game, show some respect to the people buying the tickets that pay your checks.
*I do not want to spend my days off shooting heroine.
Interview with Eddie Martinez
Part I.
The paintings of Eddie Martinez contain a grunting, primal urge for mark making. With a slew of tools and techniques, he piles up canvases with chunky shapes and smears that appear simultaneously accidental and blithely confident. The layers of his work go deep, and a nice, long look at a Martinez image reveals an idiosyncratic history of art: cave paintings, still lifes, animation, art brut, children’s drawings, and graffiti are all stacked and spread into an undeniable slab of satisfaction. A process interview with Martinez appears in our June issue. The below interview was conducted after Martinez’s recent trip to Jamaica. - Ross Simonini
THE BELIEVER: When you’re drawing on the beach in Jamaica, what do you use?
EDDIE MARTINEZ: Markers mostly, colored pencils, crayons.
BLVR: Do you show these drawings much?
EM: I’m gonna. These ones have been getting kind of destroyed from paint that I’ve been working with. I feel like they’re really showing the direct link between the drawings and the paintings. You can see the physical paint on them, and it’s important to me to show them like that. People might not like it, but that’s not always a problem.
BLVR: Do you have names for the forms that reappear in your drawings?
EM: Yeah.
BLVR: But you don’t want to say what they are?
EM: Sometimes… [chuckle] I don’t really like to use them.
BLVR: There are still lifes and then these portraits, and then even the abstraction - they all feel connected to art history.
EM: Oh, yeah. There’s portraiture and landscape and still life.
BLVR: All the work stems back to these basic forms.
EM: I think that comes from the way that I have been continually reading and looking, without having any formal art history training. The things that I originally picked up on were all these certain things that made painting painting - still lifes and portraiture and landscape. In a way, I think the abstractions are landscapes too.
BLVR: What are you learning these days?
EM: I look at everything all the time. I’m constantly looking at art. I went to the de Kooning show the other day. I have this really strong connection and admiration for the Ab Ex painters, the New York school guys, Pollack and Gorky, de Kooning and Guston and all that stuff. That to me is the source, that’s the truth. Just the way that their lifestyles, and the way that they did it. They were all manual labor guys, doing murals and painting houses and stuff like that, that just sort of feels like how my life has been, and I can understand, I just understand those paintings.
BLVR: You’ve done a lot of house painting?
EM: Yeah, yeah. A lot of house painting, all that kind of stuff.
BLVR I remember reading about how de Kooning’s understanding of painting came from house painting.
EM: Yeah, and then also those guys’ monetary restrictions. They were so broke that they would just have to go to the hardware store and buy enamel paint, and house painting brushes, and paint on wood and cardboard, whatever they could find. Growing up working with my dad, I really had no interest in doing the actual work, so I was always like drawing on the wood, doing stuff like that. It just has a real hands-on approach.
BLVR: And you’ve never been to art school?
EM: No I did, I just dropped out of a couple schools in Boston.
BLVR: A couple of schools?
EM: I couldn’t do it.
BLVR: The discipline?
EM: Couldn’t do any of it. At all. It was just not for me. And I really wanted it to be at the time because I thought, ‘Oh, okay, I’m going to school, I’m going to art school. I have to do it.’ But I couldn’t. I felt like a real failure. But now I don’t. But at the time it felt like, ‘Okay, if you’re going to try to be an artist, you have to at least go to school.’ And I felt really below everyone.
BLVR: How long have you been showing art?
EM: Well, I’ve been in group shows and stuff since early 2000s, but not with anything that connects to what I’m making now. I started making good-size paintings and showing them in 2005.
BLVR: Is that the date that you feel you became the kind of artist you are now?
EM: Yeah 2005, 2006, I started really developing.
BLVR: How old were you?
EM: Twenty-eight, twenty-seven. Started feeling like I was actually able to make some things.
BLVR: Before that you were making paintings, but you felt they were…
EM: It was always based in drawing, and it was using paint. I feel like I’m drawing with paint, but then it was really like paint-markers, and not really using a brush. It also had to do with scale. I was in my bedroom with a big piece of wood. I mean, it would take fifty-thousand paint markers to do this. I didn’t feel like I was making paintings, but now I feel like I’m painting.
There is a man - a certain man
And for the poor you may be sure
That he’ll do all he can!
Who is this one?
This favorite son?
Just by his action
Has the Traction magnates on the run?
Who loves to smoke?
Enjoys a joke?
Who wouldn’t get a bit upset
If he were really broke?
With wealth and fame
He’s still the same
I’ll bet you five you’re not alive
If you don’t know his name
Teacher thinks that I sound funny, but she loves the way you sing.
Demands.
I’d like to go back to March 2000 and switch places with Meg White, because I feel I could have made that relationship work. I want to watch Lost for the first time again. I want to live in a hut in India between the months of October and February. I want to be the lead singer of a folk band and sit on a stool in a dress and trendy scarf and play the harmonica. I think it’s cool that Stephen Colbert and Elvis Costello are friends, and I’d like to be part of that. I’d like to sit on the Green Monster and catch a home run. I want to go to the pound and adopt the ugliest dog there. I’d like to spend my week of vacation in July at Maccu Picchu. I wish I could pull off the orange pants I bought a little while back. I want to meet Tina Fey, to dress like the girls on Mad Men, and go to the Wimbledon finals. I wish I could do math without having a sweaty anxiety attack. I want to write a screenplay. I want to grow out of my anxiety and acne and also look like Charlize Theron. I want to go to New Zealand and take the Lord of the Rings tour. I want to open a line of Discovery Zone franchises for adults. But more than any of these things, I’d like to go back to last week, when I was still the happiest girl in the world.
