Are You Ready For Some Football – Revisit

Today I am so busy and a little sick and I only have 10 mins to post something so I looked back at my post from around this date in 2011 when I started this blog and funnily enough its about football.

Anyone paying attention to politics knows about Trump and his bat-shit insane tweeting and calls for firing of NFL players who are kneeling during the National Anthem as protest to police violence against people of color in this country. Obviously I agree 100% with the freedom of expression by these players and think Trump is shilling to his racist base regarding this issue. I’d like to get deeper into this but I literally have no time so here is what I posted back then. It’s fun and silly but then as now, I like sports and it is something that does unite in a way that most things, including art, can’t.

Are You Ready For Some Football?

September 25, 2011

Football, America’s game, is in full swing. I am not a football-head, nor do I follow a particular team but football is truly something fascinating to behold. This 9 billion dollar industry is the most successfully marketed sports industry and this does matter, especially for those who have any visual cultural wherewithal. Not only does it have the most revenue of any US sport it also has the most eyeballs with 66,957 spectators in its meager 16 game season.Compare that to the 30,135 for baseball’s 162 game season and basketball’s 17,149 visitors in their 82 games. The disparity of the length of the seasons for each respective sport speaks volumes to this marketing blitz as well as the nature of the game. Many critics of the sport think that football is no more then mindless violence. Some think that it represents all that is wrong with this country and with the shockingly base need for its citizens to see a form of combat on the field. To be sure it’s a physically unforgiving game but football, like all sports, has moments of spectacular form and bodily accomplishment. Those that cannot see even a bit of wonderment in this game lack poetic openness and basic admittance that human beings require many things that this sport allows.

As previously admitted, I am a novice to football. I enjoy watching all sports as it makes me giddy to see perfection of form. Because I do not know much about the players or the rules of the game, at many points of the game I linger on the uniforms, the colors, and the formations before the ball is released. From this activity I will now list some choice teams in the National Football League and reflect on their colors, logos and also the history of their names in brief.In addition I will suggest an artist who may function as a cultural mascot. People who think arts and sports are un-mingleable need to just loosen up.

Baltimore Ravens – This most poetic of teams calls themselves the Ravens after their most notable resident Edgar Allen Poe. They have a ghastly designed logo as does so many of today's teams who seem to be using the same horrid graphic designer who makes the mascots and logos look like a 7 year olds lunch box, but I digress. Their colors are predominantly purple and white with a few dashes of yellow. Although they have a perfect literary reference, an additional cultural mascot could be Rirkrit Tiravanija, their purple color makes me think of grape juice or jelly.

Cincinnati Bangles – They have fab uniforms, orange and black and white and they have Tony the Tiger stripes on their helmet and pants. Very sexy. They are named from a pervious team called the bangles and also from one of its early couches previous gig at a high school with the same name. Their art icon would be Kehinde Wiley, bangle wallpaper, grrr.

Cleveland Browns – They have no logo at all, they are just the color orange and a strip here and there. Their name is from the couch Paul Brown, totally boring back story in a way but one can appreciate the minimalism of it all. Art coach would be Barnett Newman.

Pittsburgh Steelers – Now this is a team with good colors and a logo. Black and yellow is the pride colors of all Pittsburgh teams, just love that matchy match. The logo is the steel industries seal of red, yellow and blue star form. Sadly, they don’t make logos like that anymore. They have a fab ratio of black and yellow in their uniform and I just love the yellow pants. Also love that they don’t have cheerleaders. Art guru would be Chris Burden, sorry Warhol but your just too fey for this town.

Detroit Lions – Fab colors of a more saturated sky blue, white and gray. The logo is just fantastic, a blue lion in full kill mode. Detroit is a hard-knock, no frills city and there art guide should be no different, I name Richard Serra.

Green Bay Packers – Obviously fab-tastic uniforms and color. They are bold and bright in yellow and green and they leave little room for white. The name derives for a wonderful little back story of one of its founders, Earl Lambeau, getting funds for the uniforms from the Indian Packing Company in 1919. I give you Kippenberg, if you’ll have him.

Minnesota Vikings – Their purple and yellow ratios are just perfect. Love the mean looking mascot of the blonde braided Viking. The horns on their helmet are just the best as well.Nodding to the large Scandinavian population in Minnesota the Vikings posses that great folkloric touch. Their patron would be Marina Abramovic, not sure why but she seems like she could handle a horn.

Indianapolis Colts – Love the horseshoe. The blue and white are nice to look at. They were the first NFL team to have cheerleaders. Hmmm. A lot of teams have used the name colts in the past, but with the horse culture in Indiana, it seems the best fit for this team. Their art gal is Georgia O’Keeffe.

Buffalo Bills – The wild west in the cold east coast, what’s the deal with that? Well anyways, the blue buffalo with the streak of red to indicate its awesome fast charging is interesting symbology. Their cheerleaders are called the Buffalo Jills, cute eh? Their art pal would be Jasper Johns

Miami Dolphins – They have odd but delightful aqua and orange colors. Their dolphin wears a helmet making the porpoise look lean and mean. They are from the sunshine state that grows the oranges so the color choice is apt. Their art avatar would be Elizabeth Murray.

Dallas Cowboys – A most fantastic uniform of silver and a blue star, simple yet to the point.Being from the lone star state the team does two at once with the star badge. Their cheerleaders are the best in town and its hard not to like their guff. Their art star would be William de Kooning.

New York Giants – Their stadium is in my home state so there is always a bit of partiality there. They are the USA colors of red, white and blue and they don’t need no stinkin logo besides NY in all caps. Silly that they are actually in NJ but NJ is the type of state that will take that slap in the face with pride. To them they get Robert Smithson.

New York Jets – This team too is fair-weather to its actual location, sharing the Giants stadium but know one really cares. The green and white is classic. The logo includes both NY and the name Jets in case you don’t remember what team is playing at the meadowlands that night.Taking its name from it closeness to the airports, the Jets are truly a Jersey beloved team. Their artist would be Mark Di Suvero.

Philadelphia Eagles – From the constitution capital the Eagles have a darker green and white and have a mad looking eagle as their logo and eagle wings on their helms. This not New York City is burly and they are serious as hell about their football. They used to even have a court inside the stadium for unruly fans. Yikes. Their artist would be Vito Acconi.

New England Patriots – This is the most patriotic of teams with a colonial man as their mascot and a truly red, white and blue all over attire. Being from the refined area of the North East there is a snowy stodginess but the fans are resolutely, if not as boisterous, in their support of this leading team. Their artist would be Matthew Barney

Oakland Raiders – This is the prisoner batch of the NFL. They are rough and tough in black and silver and they have an old-timey, patch-wearing pirate as their logo. Their artist is Carl Andre.

San Francisco 49ers – In 1849 there was an influx of those seeking fortune in this area, becoming known as the gold rush. With gold and red they are a uniquely colored team. The manifest destiny history of the team is charming. Their artist would be Alexander Calder.

Art I Want to See!

Rosemarie Trockel

Back in New York City and yeah-eh, I’m a glad to be back. Don’t get me wrong I had a swell time in London and it was bags of fun but when I landed and was embraced by NYC’s humid stank, I was happy, relieved and excited.

I was extra excited because of all the fabulous art that has opened and will be opening. On Saturday me and my jet-lagged self walked around Chinatown and bopped into many shows. I have this new podcast project (Art Party – subscribe on i-tunes ya’ll) and I’m going to dish about those shows there (don’t want to give you duplicate content dear readers!) but there are still so many shows I won’t be able to see before next week because my life is a piñata filled with acid at the moment.

Anyways here is a little run down list of what I want to see and why. I’m sorry I do these damn lists all the time but seriously, I have like a million emails on like 7 different accounts to crawl myself out of today.

I hope you are seeing some great art. Is it just me or do things seem to be getting a lot more fun and exciting out there in art land?!  Ta-ta till next week and hopefully I can be more thoughtful by then.

Peter Halley, Green Naftali – I feel like I should know about Halley’s work more then I do, but meh, probably doesn’t stick for one reason or another. Anyways, want to see this show because I don’t see shows like this often and I want to see if Naftali is still as coolest gallery cucumber that it is known to be.

Allen Ruppersberg, Green Naftali – Now this I can get on board with! Ruppersberg is so fuckin cool.

Trevor Paglen, Metro Pictures - I feel like Paglen should be considered a scientist more than an artist. He is one of the few whose brain seems massive but his art/his persona is not total shit/ego town. Not sure what to expect and sometimes the end aesthetics of his work don’t quite do it for me but the whole process and the way he goes about it is impressive and so so smart.

Amanda Ross-Ho, Mitchell-Innes & Nash – She cool.

Carey Young, Paula Cooper – I once saw her talk at this weird artist activist place I used to go to back in the day and she seemed so smart and with it. Not sure what her art is focusing on these days but really happy to see she is still at it.

Aurel Schmidt, P.P.O.W. – Full disclosure I used to work for this gallery and I am curious to see this downtown hot thing in this setting/this gallery’s history.

Josephine Meckseper, Timothy Taylor – I will prob not have time to see this by the time it closes (Saturday) but if I did I would.

Andrew Ross, American Medium – My boys at AM opened a new space in Chelsea, got to show that love.

Justin Berry, Essex Street – He is my friend and I support the shit out of my friends.

Omer Fast, James Cohan – Tried to sneak in but it wasn’t open yet. Really like Fast's work and interested to see what he is doing right now as most of my catalog of his work is from a few years ago.

Rachel Rose, Gavin Brown Enterprises – She is still the belle of the art ball. Seems fair.

Rosemarie Trockel, Gladstone – Baddest B eva.

Weird Jet Lag Thoughts While Sleep Deprived – London Edition

I am supposed to be in Berlin (well outside of Berlin in the countryside) today thru Wednesday but instead I just woke up from a nap and am sitting in a fluffy pink robe in my friend’s lovely kitchen in Dalston London. I tried to catch that 6:30am plane but instead I was wide awake, covered in a sheen of anxiety and slight sickness sweat at 3:00am UK time and thinking, ‘I’m fucked.’ I bailed on the trip and have sort of bailed on the idea of sleeping for more then 2-3 hours at a clip since arriving.

Jet Lag, it’s a funny thing. It’s like being on drugs/coming down from drugs but without the fun parts and instead it is time messing up your body/mindscape. It’s only five hour difference from LDN to NYC time (LDN five hours later) and I have traveled a lot and have had much worse time differences but for some reason, on this trip, I am unable to adjust. Maybe it’s my subconscious being like, ‘this is not home,’ or maybe it’s the fact that I am wanting and having to communicate with people in NYC more often than usual so my brain is always thinking in relationship time back there. Not sure why, but I give up and will just be in this weirdo time land until I return later this week.

With the total lack of proper sleep I have been having some weird thoughts and reflections while I’ve been visiting London. (Yes, even weirder than usual...) and I will share some of these with you because god only knows when my brain/body/time frame will ever be right again (was it ever?...) Till then, I hope you are all sleeping a glorious, undisturbed 7-8 hours a night.

Weird Jet Lag Thoughts While Sleep Deprived – London Edition

I wish I had a UK oven, I don’t know Celsius but who cares! I have google and their ovens have this option with a fan so you can roast things easily and better and making roasts is like a thing here (but why?!!) and it comes out so much better even though when you open the door it blasts you in the face with hot air, it’s totally worth it because you could roast like 3 chickens without having to let them air out for hours and they would be perfect.

I want one of those Henry vacuums with the lil cute face on it. Do they sell them on Amazon?

Why do they say whilst? WHY? It’s annoying as fuck but meh…

Artists in Europe are wayyy spoiled. They are always complaining about not getting artist fees to participate in shows. I mean like small group shows, in like nowhere places! It’s nuts! Can you imagine if artists in NYC all were bitching about getting/not getting artists fees to be in some LES/Chinatown/BK group show?! Ha! I mean I guess in the big anti-capitalist scheme of things this DOES have merit but I can’t help but think that in some way it still shows that Capitalism makes everyone their bitch. Am I right? Or am I off totally? (EU artists don’t dare come at me with your PC privileged responses btw).

Museums are free in London BUT what they don’t like to brag about is that to see the featured shows (the main reason why you want to go in the first place) they totally charge, ALOT! Like 17-20 GBP aka like 20-25 bucks so it’s just as shit as it is in the states. You can’t have your ‘for the people’free entry but also have it be elitist! Tsk tsk.

It’s shit that the further you live from the center of London (aka rich town) the more you have to pay for the trains. It is done by zones so if you live in like Zone 5 and you work in Zone 1 you get charged wayyy more then if you live/work in Zone 1. It’s shit and not cool London. The poorer/further you have to travel the cheaper transit should be.

What the heck is up with ‘private clubs’ in London? I went to one very drunk the other night and I get it, it’s posh and makes one feel like they are very ‘VIP’ or something but really it’s so silly. It’s like being on a set for some weird iTV show. I know many people who are members of Shoreditch House and even have a friend who works for them and they told me they are opening a new location in Brooklyn. Ha! I mean people will join but it just really won’t work in NYC. The only members of that location would be like the worst of the art world’s worst. Sigh… Class is so peculiar a fixation.

Not sure if it’s me or just my total lack of reality aka, no sleep, but these British boys are looking damn fine on these streets this trip. Well hello there.

I’ve met and am revisiting the loveliest ladies in London this trip and they are all very pretty and they all have great jobs and these amazing accents and hair and they are all super single. I guess it’s the curse of every city. So many wonderful babes and so few males to date, travesty.

London. Your thrift stores are shit.

People (still) rarely ask you ‘what do you do’ in London and it’s amazing and humane. NYC, stop being a lil thirsty bitch about that!

Biscuits! Biscuits! Biscuits! I love you!

So the weather is crap most of the time but because of all the daily rain spritzes the flowers/foliage in this city is amazing. Like roses shooting up from nowhere and ivy and flowered walls just covering this and that. It’s so lovely it’s cliché.

Eggs on the counter at room temperature still freaks me out a bit but they are way more amazing then the yellow ovary puddles we have in the states.

It’s weird trying to ‘be on vacation’ when you actually ‘work all the time.’ People are like, ‘take a break! Don’t work!’ blah blah, but you can’t, so you keep working and you think, ‘what is this life I lead,’ but you secretly can’t help it so just stop complaining about it.

It’s weird when you are not ‘with’ someone but you are not ‘not’ with someone so when you are away you are all like, I’m single! But you text like soo much it’s silly and you obviously are not taking the, 'let’s use this time to think things over,' in the way you planned and that’s okay but whatever… who cares.

People with babies in Europe are lucky as fuck and they know it and g-damn it USA, get your maternity shit together (plus all the other bullshit you keep messing up).

Everyone everywhere is cool as shit, it’s amazing how small/big the world is. I’m like high on life aka demented from not sleeping but really, going to other places and seeing old friends, making new ones and all that jazz is like pretty freaking amazing. Everyone travel as much they can and as far as they can. And if you can’t that’s cool, the people right next to you are super amazing too.

Whoops, I Forgot to Blog (Again)

I’m in London (and Berlin-ish) for the next two weeks or so and I forgot to blog yesterday and I’m jet-lagged and have to go out with some friends soon so I really can’t blog all that much.

What I do want to quickly say is that lately I have been feeling like there are some big changes to be made. I’m not sure what they are but does anyone else feel like this? Some sort of stuck-ness, or possibly the staggering boredom of repetitions in behavior that feel like yokes of some sort. I’m not sure what is spurning this…Maybe it’s the start of a new season. Maybe it’s the looming new year. Maybe it’s new people in my life or old ones leaving or those relationships shifting. I’m not quite sure but it feels like an overflow.

Perhaps it’s the fact that I am traveling/letting myself travel for the first time in some time. Perhaps it’s my career and how it is steadier and also busier then it has been in a long time. Perhaps it’s the prospect of letting feelings be felt and vulnerabilities being shown.

Still I go in this circle of hypothesis, but yet I know that something will give, has to give. Yesterday I had all the time in the world to blog but I just forgot. I was catching up on rest and feeling a knot of something about nothing in particular. This total slipping of the mind is a bit odd, as this has become such a formula of my week, but at the same time maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe my brain is too busy processing things it doesn’t even know or can name to remember the set rules I have created for myself.

This post is really a bag of nothing and a way for me to just fill a page so I can get on with the living of my actual life. But I wanted to also throw it out there in case some of you are also feeling this strange compression/about to burst feeling.

Luckily for me I have jaunted off to other countries where this process of thinking about all these unnameable things can have some breathing room and my everyday is forced to be different. I am hoping through that whatever it is that feels so essential to change can come to the surface and for me to be okay with whatever that may be, regardless of whether I can name it or control it.

Till next week! I hope you remember what day of the week it is and that in your own way you can take a trip from your regular life and figure out some things as well.