I care.

No one cares.

Here’s what I found:

• An ongoing series of cartoons, but I’m not sure whether or not they and/or my notebook(s) are art. (I do know, however, that it doesn’t matter at all whether or not they’re art, Art, or something else entirely.)
   
• The portrait I made of Elizabeth that was the result of decades of dreaming, a piece that’s serving as the basis for large body of new work.
   
• A passing reference to Of What is Adobe Made? without mentioning that most of the photographs from that huge project are online elsewhere.
   
• And no mention of HTF or any of the other pieces I’ve been quietly working on for years.

The bad news is that my work on large projects doesn’t lend itself to presentation in my notebook(s).

The surprising news is that, for the immediate future, it looks like I’m mostly done making conceptual art that was designed to be downloaded and printed by the viewer. I can’t believe I never noticed that until now. I should have been suspicious when I showed a couple of pieces—Big Bad Brutal Baghdad Bully Boy Bamboozler Bang! and the jazz piece with the nine-hundred and ten character title—in my notebook but chose not to make downloadable PDFs available. And I really should have known that I’d changed directions when I wrote about the latter piece, “Until now, I’ve been satisfied with small prints, but this one needs to be huge.”

As Sherlock Holmes might have said, “This is a three-bowl problem.” I wonder what ever happened to my pipe?

Once upon a time, Teledesic LLC announced plans to launch two hundred and eighty-eight satellites into orbit in order to provide global Internet access. I decided to make two hundred and eighty-eight small art pieces, one for each satellite. I grouped the elements into thirty-six sets—or quadrilles—of eight that would interact with each other in orbit. I knew the company would go along with the project, so I didn’t bother telling anyone at Tesedesic that I’d be putting my art in their satellites.

After completing Thirty-Six Quadrilles in Orbit, I learned that the company had scaled back its plans, and would be using just thirty satellites. Damn! I couldn’t find a straightforward way to fit two hundred and eighty-eight pieces—or thirty-six quadrilles—into thirty satellites, so I put the project aside for a while.

Today, I decided to see what Teledesic was doing, so I visited the company’s Internet site. And that’s where I discovered that the company’s founder announced the “decision to suspend our activities.”

Since I have no idea where I’m going to find thirty—let alone two hundred and eighty-eight—satellites, it looks like Thirty-Six Quadrilles in Orbit is another of my stillborn pieces.

Lee declined my request to photograph him; he was tired after a long show. I understood, and told him that I wanted him to have a photograph I made of a couple we both knew.

“Where’d you get this?” he asked when he saw the portrait I made of Bill and Betty Koon.

I told him that they’d taken me in when I was a teenager stranded in San Francisco for a few days. (The story of a hiking trip gone horribly wrong is another story entirely.) The Koons recounted the story of how their daughter’s friend from Denmark had come to spend a night and stayed for six months. That friend was, of course, Lee.

Having established a common link, I again asked him if I could take a photograph to send to our mutual friends.

“I’ll do anything for the Koons!” Lee replied. If I recall correctly, this remark generated a few raised eyebrows among the other people in the dressing room, most of whom were black.

Today, I saw Lee again. I told him Bill died fifteen years ago, and we shared fond memories of the Koons. We enjoyed a pleasant conversation that generated no amusing anecdotes.

Roses are red
Violets are blue
Oh my lump in the bed
How I’ve missed you.

On second thought, I suppose it’s not too surprising; they each married someone on their own intellectual level.

After I showed George’s alleged poem to Pamela, she was unable to resist the urge to edit, and came up with this:

Roses are red
Violets are blue
If I were married to George Bush
I’d sleep in the loo.

I’m surprised by the amount of drugs and alcohol I’ve seen backstage in the course of sixteen concerts: one bottle of wine shared between four or five people. That’s it. No whiskey and heroin, no marijuana and cocaine, no speed and beer, no pills, no powders, just a little bottle of red wine. Jazz is even less entertaining without the clichés.

And that’s why I was happy to hear that many of the musicians still use the word “cat,” e.g., “I saw this cat in Chicago,” “Joey was playing with some cats just outta school,” et cetera. Although jazz has so far failed to seduce me, I do love cats of almost any persuasion.

Go cats go!