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Tapo has taken to lying down on the desk to the left of keyboard and resting her head on my left wrist. She likes the movement of the fingers, the waves it makes on the back part of the hand, kind of like one of those motel beds in the 50s with a box to put a quarter in to make the bed mattress vibrate. I tried just lying down on one once to see what it felt like. It was kind of raucous and not at all relaxing. I supposed it was there for some other reason. She never becomes a nuisance. I can push her out of the way easily when I need to move. She purrs while her head is resting on the back of my hand.



I have discovered YouTube. After uploading some videos onto it, it became a curiosity. It's like anything is there. Johnny Cash's video of HURT. Found some meowing cats for Tapo, but she took no interest. I could tell she was hearing them, she just preferred not to pay them any mind. She doesn't know what it is, but it's not real, whatever it is. Of no interest. I put on a barking dog. She moved her ears alerted by the sound, but it wasn't real either. She knows it's just one more unreal thing that dances on the light screen. She sees it up close like sitting on the front row in a movie theater. Yesterday I saw a video with camera evidently taped to the top of a motorcycle's fuel tank showing the speedometer below and the highway above. It was called Running From the Cops. He zipped between cars on the southern California interstate totally heedless of the unforeseen. He evidently got away.I imagine it was made by somebody driving like that to get the thrill of it on video. He did a good job. It was an intense minute or so.



I like about the videos that they're made by anybody anyplace anytime. Somebody had a video camera and recorded a moment someplace. Some of them remind me of the joke that goes, What were the redneck's last words? Watch this. I saw somebody skiing down a perilous slope and an avalanche overtook him. A bit further down the mountain he came skiing out of it. The man knew how to ski. He's got the "right stuff." Like the old hippie said, What a rush. It seems endless what is there. I found early Rolling Stones videos, Walkin the Dog, King Bee, Like a Rolling Stone. A lot of Siouxsie Sioux concert videos. I've always had a liking for her. She's an artist. Her music is her art form. Probably about everything in contemporary art in NY is represented there. Today I was looking at contemporary art in Shanghai and the Saatchi Gallery, London. I like what I see of the current art scene. It's not something I want to pretend to get into, but I enjoy seeing what a lot of people are doing to make some sort of art expression.



The thing I like about now is everything goes. Everything, anything. We've reached the place the momentum from impressionism on through conceptualism, the deconstruction of art in a century, and now we're playing with what was learned over that century, the greatest of all renascences since the Classical Age. We lived through it and nearly everybody never noticed because it didn't get on tv or in the news, nor was it regarded important in any way. During WW1 in Zurich, Switzerland, the dadaists took art to the chopping block and cut off everything that went before and started again as though there had been nothing before. Between the wars, the surrealists. Then the abstract expressionists after WW2 into Pop, Op, Minimalism, etc. unto Conceptualism, unto post-modern. We're definitely post-modern now, but I've an idea the period called post-modern is over. I don't know what it's called we're in now, but it's an interesting time. I'll use YouTube to find out what's being done. The PBS series art:21 shows everybody off in their own direction like a big bang happened and galaxies were going off in every direction. I remember the time abstraction was considered the apex of art, the very height of pure art, and Pop came along and literally popped that bubble. Yet abstraction is always there, composition being the basic foundation of visual art.



I like the way art has become something Andy Goldsworthy of Scotland can make with found things like twigs, leaves, etc., create some wonderful something, take a picture of it or video the making of it, and then it's gone and the image remains. He seems to me to embody the essence of art, making something that has its moment, and some to stay awhile. Then there is Carl Andre who stacks blocks of wood and arranges bricks and tiles on the floor. I like doing what I do, because it's what I like doing. All through the time when abstraction was held up as the only real art, I didn't care. I like painting people so you can recognize who they are. It's just a weird thing I've got. I live in mountain culture not New York City culture. It took a long time to learn that my art does best going with the culture I live in, same as the music does. We're in such a melting pot of everything now, it seems like fusion is the word to best name what's going on around the world.