Better pickled than canned! That's my motto!

There's a man next to me talking in a studied business voice about schools in Dayton and Canton, Ohio. In every conversation, he alludes to hitting the academic big time in Cleveland! I then learn he's from Farmerville, New Jersey!

Somehow this strikes me as the funniest thing I've heard this year, and I laugh aloud. I never laugh aloud, but I'll make an exception for the New Jersey administraitor working in small Ohio schools.

He keeps pressing the can against different parts of his face; I think he's seeking a message. That's silly. If you want to hear beer's message, just drink it.

That's all.

I have a good time.

"No Leica."

Today, I just read an even more succinct aesthetic commentary. Although he did in fact use three more characters than Parker, Bill Bornstein managed to compose an even briefer essay on Philip Tempton-Roth's recent exhibit, "Nautical Watercolours."

Here's the text: "Unseeworthy."

I wonder when the metamorphosis took place? I think it must have been one of those fuzzy logic changes.

"I know I touch people with music and I know that in some cases it may have been to the point of saving somebody's life, maybe. But there's nothing quite like what happens between one alcoholic and another--that's somehow a deeper thing."

Even if he was a disgusting cretin, I'm still glad he never pulled the trigger all those times he had a loaded shotgun in his mouth. I particularly liked his suicide avoidance strategy. "Yeah, but if I did this then I'd not be able to have another drink."

During his second attempt to dry out, Clapton concluded:

"... being a musician was not going to save my life. In fact it could destroy me, because if it meant that in order to write a song I needed to drink, then perhaps being a musician was not such a great idea. So I slung that away, I got rid of that and I thought, 'What am I? What am I, really?' And, on the record, I'm an alcoholic and that's where my identity is."

I've had friends who've screwed up their lives--and the lives of those around them--under the influence of alcohol and other drugs. Remembering those tragedies, I suppose Clapton must be commended for his evangelical commitment to sobriety.

There's one thing I must add, though. It's a tired cliché, it's a horribly cruel and selfish thing to say, and I fear that it's true. Eric Clapton produced his finest work when he was using three thousand dollars of heroin a week and drinking two bottles of vodka a day.

Here's what I found in the old paintings: lots of ugly people.

Why?

I've come up with several explanations. Human aesthetics have changed a lot in recent centuries. I'm told by People Who Know These Things that, once upon a time, anorexic teenage girls were not considered to be the epitome of female beauty as they are today.

(And in some parts of the world, they're still not. A lithe friend of mine married a delightful man from the Ivory Coast; he's trying to convince her to gain a hundred pounds.)

And then there are the old guys. A lot of the subjects of the portraits are quadruple-chinned portly. My knowledgeable sources also tell me that rolls of blubber--not trying to look as young and lean as a teenager--were signs of wealth and success.

And then there are the faces: they're ugly too. It could be that facial aesthetics were different back then, too, but I think there's a more plausible reason. I suppose a lot of people were actually triple-ugly, and the portrait painters earned their shillings or guilders by making their patrons look merely ugly.

Page through any current business magazine and you'll see a lot of triple-ugly corporate types looking singularly ugly. I'm not against the approach; I use the same techniques to make myself appear singularly ugly in my self-portraits.

Some of those alleged portraits are embarrassments, as are some of the notebook entries I've made over the three and a half years. I've written some real stinkers. But that's fine; I'm used to public embarrassment. The premise of a notebook isn't to make three hundred and sixty-five brilliant pieces a year. The notebook is intended to be, well, a notebook.

I haven't failed to succeed; I've succeeded to fail.

These notebooks, in their various manifestations, have always had "(an artist's notebook of sorts)" in the title. It seems, however, that I spend a lot of time rambling on about interests and pursuits that are, at best, only tangentially related to art.

I'm too lazy to do a thoughtful analysis, which would involve reading one thousand two hundred and seventy-six entries. Who's got time for that? (I will ignore the obvious response, "Then why bother?")

Instead of providing a comprehensive review, I will instead present a number of numbers, data masquerading as insight. Here are the thirty-eight words I looked up, the number of entries in which they appeared, and the percentage of the total entries those occurrences represent.

friend	190	14.87%
good	185	14.48%
alcohol (all flavors)	163	12.75%
art	153	11.97%
old	150	11.74%
photography	140	10.95%
bad	90	7.04%
beer	66	5.16%
computer	65	5.09%
wine	65	5.09%
young	60	4.69%
age	48	3.76%
camera	47	3.68%
beauty	34	2.66%
painting	34	2.66%
sex	33	2.58%
aesthetic	32	2.50%
animal	21	1.64%
drug	21	1.64%
whisky	21	1.64%
whiskey	20	1.56%
dog	18	1.41%
cat	15	1.17%
ugly	14	1.10%
wife	12	0.94%
Duchamp, Marcel	11	0.86%
alien	9	0.70%
Leica	9	0.70%
vodka	9	0.70%
lover	6	0.47%
orgasm	6	0.47%
Weston, Edward	6	0.47%
scam	5	0.39%
Adams, Ansel	4	0.31%
drawing	4	0.31%
administraitor	4	0.31%
Hasselblad	4	0.31%
lust	3	0.23%

It looks like I talked a lot about art, just under once a week. I suppose that may be enough to avoid being sued for false advertising. I thought I would have talked about something more than 14.87 percent of the time, but I guess I didn't. About the only thing to come out of this is the beginning of a bad poem.

friend good alcohol art,
old photography bad,
beer computer,
wine young age,
camera beauty painting,
sex aesthetic animal,
drug whisky whiskey.

Actually, that may be an entire bad poem. It's clear I know very little about poetry or poets; they were only mentioned fourteen times over the last three and a half years.