All posts by Lambchop

Live with Lambchop

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Oh trials!  Oh tribulations!  I had hoped to leave you behind in 2010, but here you are, strewn across my path like cowflops of the devil’s own herd. 

I am searching for a roommate for my apt. *and* a tenant for an opening in my studio.  The search for a roommate is somewhere between a date and an audition.  They want to impress you with their skills and their tastes, you want them to be reasonably attractive, for some reason.  And you might make an offer and they might accept and change their minds in the hopes of finding better.  The first person to show up was Ann Veal! This, nobody needs. 

The search for someone to fill the studio is merely a matter of ensuring that the person answering the ad is not some random lunatic, but an actual artist who is also capable of paying rent.  If this sounds *less* difficult, it is not.  It is much, much harder. 

The stress of my endeavors has me ill for my third bad cold of the season.  At work I am sure they are starting to wonder if I have consumption, or the constitution of a 19th century orphan, for all the Mondays I show up at my desk fresh as a dying lily, coughing. Please sir, can I have some more jasmine tea?

I need an assistant to help me keep track of all this nonsense.  Except that I am a paid assistant.   Can I be my own assistant?  Am I settling?

Looking Back

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 Everbody has a year end wrap-up these days.  I bet even the toothless prosti that stands out in front of your building in a velour tracksuit has posted a year end review on her fbook.  She has her “likes” and “dislikes” too, dammit. 

It was a banner year for your lambchop, more drama than I have known in years.  But for once, it was not of my creation, so I didn’t even really register it in that way.  Looking back, though, “whoa.”  I started to make a list, but it was too ridiculous.  I may have lost a job and a gallery and a world cup title. My best little pal moved away. I got divorced and had a friend nearly die.  But a lot of good things happened, too.  I am lucky to know talented people who are busy making the world, and existence, bearable.  Sometimes even fun.  Even when Germany loses.

I am making my work and riding around on my bicycle, and that’s really all that I want to do.  I can’t slag on a year too badly at any rate, that was a WORLD CUP YEAR.  So thanks a lot 2010!  At the end of the day, you were what you were. 

It is time to look ahead, to new work that will surely bring us fame and fortune.  To new shoes and hairdos and torn stockings.  Let nothing stand between us and joy.  Or at least medication. We sail optimistically into the future!

Nature is a Whore

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I am not a fan of complaining about the weather. You need something to chat about in elevators, sure, but I like to think that if you can’t change something, you ought to get used to it, even if you don’t like it.

So I am not going to complain about the winter. But I could have handled the following things a lot better than I did: being stranded, weighing impossible travel options, anxiety, wet feet, and canceled xmas plans. Turns out I am a big fan of caramel, Hoarders: Buried Alive, and Fables 3 on xbox. At the very least Blizzard 2010 has been a voyage of self-discovery.

Enjoy this Christmas, It Might Be Your Laaast

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This song makes me wish Alien Sex Fiend had put out an entire Christmas album. It would have gone something like this:

1. Crack Santa
2. Buy me sh$t
3. I ain’t wearing socks
4. Stocking’s Full of Drugs
5. My Mistletoe
6. Hung From the Tree
7. Sit on my knee, tell me what you want
8. What happened on my Christmas Bender?
9. Cocaine Sleigh
10. F@#$ this Holiday

But it’s cool, I can just put on “Here Cum Germs” and pretend the entire thing is about Christmas. It works for just about anything.

This is what they pay me to do, kids. Sit around and dream up the really good ideas.

Seasonal Affectation Disorder

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Nope, still not winter yet.  And yet and yet.  We wish it were over. On the other hand, I can’t believe it is almost Christmas, because I spent the last couple weeks fretting and not for buying people for things.

Someone who came to view the space last week turned out to be some kind of nutcase or fraud who has approached many people in the building to look at spaces or to buy frames from the frame shop, each time with a changing story about what he wanted. Unfortunately, the frame shop people are convinced he is casing the building for a band of thieves and marauders to hit the place over xmas. Hrmm. But he keeps calling and leaving messages. Seems like a lot of trouble and risk to score a drill driver and some scrap wood. That didn’t stop someone from pasting hysterical signage in the stairwell to warn of the danger. Giant letters warning of dangerous criminals wandering our hallways. As I said, I met the guy, showed him around even. He was actually kind of effeminate. Maybe I should ask future applicants if they have homicidal tendencies or own a ski-mask before I have them come over.

I met a lot of interesting people over the weekend, in my ongoing quest to find an appropriate exhibit for my new work and to make xmas merry with other artists and various profligates. At various salons, artists collect like the stuff around the drain.

Here I must take leave to plug an amazing little film by Remy Bennett.  It is a delightful David Lynch-esque vignette on the transformation of two gorgeously grieving women.  In face you can vote for it in a David Lynch music video contest via the attached link.  Please do.

Am I Blue?

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What is it about the holidays that make you curl up in the fetal position, listening to Lou Reed’s Berlin (hooray for those wailing children) or Television Personalities’ the Painted Word? Oh, everything. The cold and the darkness that is stretching out for the next two or three months, the looming problem of January’s rent. I lose interest in the question halfway through the answer. What are you people doing to remain cheerful? I am finding that bingeing on cookies is only a temporary fix that leaves one worse off than before. I think it was Baudelaire who first noted the loneliness that follows such debauchery. Although he was talking about drinking and having sex with diseased prostitutes.

Speaking of debauchery, we had our work christmas party yesterday and that was definitely a missing element. In the good old days, we had these galas in fancy bars and ballrooms and people would get dressed to the nines and drunk to the zeroes. The next day spent discussing who had photocopied their fanny or made out with so-and-so. Now we have a modest but nicely catered couple of hours in the office, no dancing, no tipsyness. But we did have “s’mores”- a toasted marshmallow covered in cookie dust impaled on a plastic pipette filled with soft chocolate that you had to suck out.

Is it wrong of me to want to rock in a corner, sucking chocolate out of a pipette, playing “Closer” until Christmas is over? I should have understood this would be my fate when I quit smoking and binge drinking. I regret nothing everything!

Ask Dr. Stupid

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Welcome to Part II of our series, Our Crazy Bodies, Our Crazy Selves. I have no idea how many parts there are to this series, that is just how crazy it is. Yesterday we touched upon the Imagine Diet. Today we follow up with Imaginary Ailments. Just as good as the real thing? You decide!

Every once in a while, something is just wrong. A pain here, an indescribable something there. I don’t like to spend $25 just to reel out bizarre complaints like, “No, it does not hurt exactly, but my Rachmaninov has not been the same, especially if it is cold outside.” Only to then be palpated and declared a medical marvel of normalcy. So I try to ignore my body’s little misfires as long as that is possible. Once acknowledged, the problem becomes unbearable, though nothing has actually changed. There is much room for torment in this scenario. Does it hurt, or am I just thinking about it?  I come to the conclusion that any part of the body hurts or feels weird, if I think hard enough about it.

This is how it came to be that weeks ago, my eye felt funny and I thought little of it. After a few weeks ha ha feelin funny, I casually thought I should be seen. I phoned the doctor for a next-day appt. and spent the rest of the day in an agony of twitching and blinking. Suddenly, it was unendurable. At the doctor’s office we had the usual description of “symptoms” of a highly fantastic nature, followed by the discovery that my eyeglass prescription needed an update. So there were a bunch of weird tests and blue lights and drops, and new glasses. And if my updated Rx does not fix it, there will be more tests. My right eye is wonky, but I was not emotionally prepared to be choosing new frames today! So lord knows what I have gotten myself into sartorially, to the tune of a couple hundred bucks that OF COURSE were just LYING AROUND saying “hey, what about us, we’re bored”.  A most ill-timed medical fugue, since I am still looking for someone to rent the studio.

My point here is that the mind is very powerful. Just two days ago, I sat at this same desk, twiddling my auburn locks ’round a pencil and wondering if I should have a bisque or a stew, oh and go to the doctor or not? Just one day later I can’t concentrate for the strange sense I am staring out of two unconnected holes in my face, one of which won’t play along, and the glasses won’t be ready until next week.

The lesson here is simple. Put you body out of your mind.

The Bride Stripped

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I was asleep in NY when my divorce was finalized in a Berlin courtroom on Friday morning, but my ex-husband assures me that my attorney, Herr Danne, is as handsome as ever. It is too late for the divorceé, the jaded slattern sucking on Nat Shermans and Hendricks. I’ve worn out that pose long ago and am far too busy playing the struggling artist. So there was no champagne uncorked or letters burnt. Just a sad, hollow feeling, and a lot of things to do, as usual.

Saturday was a fine day for a bike ride up to Madison and 77th, to see the John Currin show at the Gagosian. Currin is an old fave, but I must say his work used to be weirder back when the bearded lady men were ogling the balloon chested blondes. He is still milking the “master technique” to great effect, but the facility is starting to feel purely showy, like Sargent. Yessir, he sure can paint the dang drapery. There was enough eccentricity there to make the trip worthwhile. I do come away with the satisfying feeling, though, that I would not have to be ashamed to hang my best work there.

Everywhere on the streets are lots filled with pine trees. I breathe them in as I pedal by, along with clove and cinnamon ringing the parks. I turned into Central Park for a lovely view of the pond framed by bare branches. Unfortunately, it was also Santacon. Behold the far less picturesque occasion of 1,000 drunken, roaring santas and their skanky “helpers”.

Chelsea was miraculously Santa-free. I ran into a guy a know from the street around my studio. He draws faces on the sidewalk. One time I came to the studio and the faces all the way down the block were talk ballooning, “Hey Heather, how come you never call me?” Felix was drawing faces from 20th street to 30th street along 10th avenue, including in the crosswalks, dragging himself along on a milk crate as he drew. I bought him a coffee to keep his chalky mitt warm, told him not to bust my chops, which he did anyway. I ran into friends at Joes. What a nice feeling to run into people you know in the middle of the city! Maybe this is common for you cosmopolitan types, you who are known at book readings and bathroom queues alike. But I am not Tina Brown, so I find it pretty cool and unusual.

Miss K. and I toddled off to see the Anselm Kiefer show at the Chelsea Gagosian. Glorious despair, tactile violence and decay. Similar to Kiefer’s big room at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. The New York Times put it marvelously, “Anselm Kiefer has become better and better at making Anselm Kiefers.” Roberta Smith, you’re a caution! Needless to say, I was arrested by the sight of the decayed wedding dress in the glass and iron case, shot through with giant shards of broken glass. Hello, there.

I am yet in the throes of trying to get an opening in my studio rented before Christmas. And there is a similar overturn possibly happening on the home front. I don’t know what is going to happen, I am just reaching for the antacid and hoping for the best. Maybe I’ll be joining Felix on the sidewalk.

Uh huh

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The slow start of my brain today reminded me of subzero mornings in Boston, rushing into the car, somehow feeling colder inside than outside the icy metal box and waiting for the heat to kick in. Waiting and waiting. I was never good at that. It was 12pm today and I found I had not done anything useful. Some guy randomly cold-calls and wants information on asylum seeking. I don’t have to help him since he is not a client, but I do and I wish him luck. I would like to seek asylum as well. A warm room with an easel where a slab of meatloaf and some mushy peas will be brought to me each evening, and I will have to think of nothing but how yellow do I want my yellow.

How yellow *do* I want my yellow? Pretty yellow, I should say.

Nonsense. Hello, reader, it is about time you heard from us germs, we are running the show over here now having taken over the organism. We are going to run it much more efficiently. We like warmth, food and self-replication. Don’t know if we get into this journal-ing business much. Please stop by and say hello to us personally. Come closer, you smell nice. Much closer.