holiday books

Friends,

Over the Jesus-bday visit upstate I read Picasso's Mask. It was good until the middle 1/4 then picked it up again for the last 1/4.

Note: always divide your books into quarters so you can break them down into good quarters and bad quarters. Also, if you can buy a book with quarters I would advise doing so as often as possible.

I may go to the Whitney tonight after work if anyone is interested. I may instead go to the Met or the Guggenheim. I haven't decided yet. This is the crazy-throw-caution-to-the-wind kind of life I live.

The above painting I made before the holidays. It's me and my mom.

If anyone's doing anything on New Year's Eve/Day and wants a little Matt Jones sprinkled on top let me know. So far Brian and I are going to some party with people I don't know but I bet we could be convinced to go elsewhere. Maybe we couldn't be convinced. Who knows?

ruffian arms

oh damn

odelay, vatos... this is me being a blogger. It will take me a while to come up with anything clever to say because Albuquerque dries-up my brain...

Response to Steph

Go to settings - then go to email - put your email address in there and it will send you emails whenever someone updates the blog. Only you can do this as the administrator. Under permissions you have to set us up to receive emails - go to "grant administrator privileges" to the right of our names and we may be able to set the blog up to email us as well, but I'm not sure about that, I have never tried it, but I hope it works.

Posting

Can everyone figure out how to post? Matt can you reply here with where to go to do that? Also, the email notification I tried to set up did not work for me - maybe it did for Mary and Matt? But I really want to know how to set that up, so if you know that, share that info as well!
-Stephanie

Books/books

The T.S. Elliot essay/speech that Kadar recommended is called "What is Classic" and I will scan/PDF it for you all when I go Upstate for Xmas. It's not too long. I think my parents have a scanner. Who knows? They do. Anyway, it's part of this his collected prose if you want to buy it.

Also, I've been reading Picasso's Mask by Andre Malraux. Picasso isn't cool or so I thought. Seems as though his spirit was incredibly bright and powerful. Maybe other people were right. Maybe not, maybe they just listened to what someone else said. Anyway, I'm drawing parallels between his working manner and my own obsessions/needs. It's written in flashback for the most part which is, of course, neat.

There's a new Kippenberger book coming out in March.

That's it for now.

Matt

Some Topics Discussed Last Night

Wade Guyton - http://www.petzel.com/index_guyton2007.html
David and I saw this show and I think we liked it. Guyton is maybe important, I can't tell really, yet. I know I'm keen on his work as I'm keen on Christopher Wool. We both decided that the black plywood floor really made it happen in the show.

Urs Fischer - http://www.gavinbrown.biz/artists/view/urs-fischer
A couple of us saw this show. It is a must! I think it runs til January 19th, 2008. If/when you go to the site you need to click "images". I'll post some of my personal photos here tonight or tomorrow, too, of myself, James Case, and Maggie Dickenson interacting with the space.

Merlin James - http://sikkemajenkinsco.com/exhibition_merlinjames2.html
Whether or not we talked about this show I'm not certain. It's good. Maybe you have to be a painter-nerd to totally get into it. Merlin taught at Cooper my last year there and I tried to set up a studio visit with him and he was 2 hours late and came by the next day apologizing but I said I didn't need the visit anymore. That was probably stupid. These paintings make me kind of sad, like there's no hope in the world but maybe just a little hope.

Two shows at the met worth seeing before they close - Rembrandt and Friends, Tapestries
The Rembrandt show = amazing, a must see.
Tapestries of the Baroque is really really really compelling. They're just so weird. Who would think to make these? What a pain in the ass, right? Well they're all pretty amazing and beautiful and old and important. What impressed me most was their scale. Sometimes I think I understand scale and what it means and why it's used and for what reasons ... then I see something like this show and I'm just like "shit. Those are big and powerful."

There was also a lot of discussion about music last night and, well, I don't know anything about music beyond my own personal taste which, so I've been told, is awful.

Happy blogging,
Matt

MONDAY! + tonight (thursday)

Ok - starting this upcoming Monday 12/17 - every two weeks at Life Cafe - 7pm.  Show Up!! 

Thursday 12/13 : Artists Space - Call to meet up!