Below are the 12 most recent journal entries recorded in mat's LiveJournal:

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Thursday, February 16th, 2012
11:32 pm	Valentine's Day New Normal So here was my plan for Valentine's Day... we drive to Union Station. We take the red line train to Hollywood to see THE ARTIST at the ARC-LIGHT theater a short walk from the Vine Street station. Then we walk over to a curated art show with Carlos Batts, Dave Naz, April Flores and others in it. Supposed to be a big opening. Then we take the redline BACK to Union Station for dinner reservations at TRAXX Restaurant. So we drive over, park, get our red line ticket and head to the train platform. It is about 4, we talk that maybe Leigh will get a drink at a cocktail lounge before the 5:10 PM movie... ...But the train platform is a little TOO crowded. There are three sheriffs and a German Shepherd among the throng of people. Then another sheriff pushing a cart appears. It is loaded with a folding table, traffic cones and reflective signs that say something about a checkpoint and the right to search your car. he is followed by a custodian with an empty trashcan on wheels. They go thru the platform and take the elevator up to another part of Union Station. An announcement comes over the PA apologizing for the delay and includes some indecipherable verbiage that includes the line "other means of transportation" ...groans from the crowd are released like a collective, odorless fart as people stream to the stairs back up to the station. Many stay, though. "Baby, we gotta get the fuck out of here and find a different way to Hollywood," I tell her and she is not in an arguing mood. We make our way up and pas a digital screen. It is 4:19 PM. We're downtown and we got to get to Hollywood. Knowing there could be some scary bizarre terror problem illustrating the new normal in American society, I take a side exit out of Union Station and walk to Sunset. It is three blocks to the 2 Bus line, Sunset Boulevard. We walk up and a bus is just departing. Leigh doesn't mind, there are open bus benches. We sit and wait. One girl says there was a fire in the tunnel at the Civic Center Stop and the whole red line is shut down. Who knows. What good would it do to know? The bus finally comes. We get seats. It slugs through traffic faster than a snail, slower than a bicycle. Leigh recalls that THE ARTIST is playing at The Vista Theater. We will be by there soon. I check. Nope, we missed the screening. If it had started at the same time as the ARC-LIGHT we would have made it as we pass the Vista at 5:08 PM. We finally make it Sunset and Vine at 5:25. We walk into the lobby to see if anything is playing. It is kind of a dead-zone of a time. Everyone is home getting ready for the big date or already on the second cocktail of a wild one. The next show is a 5:40 screening of SafeHouse. This is a film I would never voluntarily go see, but one I can happily sit thru. It is a "guy's film" with Denzel in it to draw in the ladies. There are seven couples in the whole theater. The film is way better than I imagined and Denzel is the best part, just as Leigh predicted. Our Valentine's Day streak of seeing a movie continues. It stretches back a few years. Last year we saw The King's Speech, one year we saw the Julian Schnabel Diving Bell film. Leigh loves to stay for the credits but this time we are both out of there, fast, and we run back to the bus stop - no art show tonight, we gotta eat! Ten people are waiting for the 2 headed downtown. I ask out loud to anyone listening, "Does anyone know if the Red Line is running, it was shut down earlier tonight?!?!" and one guy answers "Yeah it is running again." The only way we are going to get to Traxx on time was the subway, but we had to run up Vine two blocks to Hollywood Boulevard. We did this, a fast walk not anywhere near a jog but no one would have said we were dawdling. The train platform there was crowded but people were sure the train was going to be running. Finally it came, slowly, while the clock ticked at the same fast pace. On the train the guy sitting across from me had a freemason's ring and I asked him about it. He was shocked I could spot the "G" logo from my distance but it was not a tiny ring. He explained to us that the Freemasons are the Jedi Knights of the world. We could have seen Star Wars Episode One in 3-D but took Denzel instead. We made it to the station and to TRAXX, the 5-Star gourmet paradise at the train station at 8:35 PM and had a wonderful, romantic Valentine's Day dinner, no terror attack, no police search, no masonic conspiracy. That we were able to enjoy the entire thing and laugh the whole way through (well except for the five minutes when leigh's feet started hurting walking to the bus bench) is a testament to loving every moment we spend together even when a tactical alert spills us out into the streets.
Monday, January 16th, 2012
10:30 pm	Artist Leigh Salgado Amazing ten minute film about artist Leigh Salgado in her studio:
Wednesday, January 11th, 2012
12:10 am	DESSERT The Custard Cup at PHILLIPE'S is one of the best desserts in Los Angeles. It is almost exactly the same as it was 25 years ago (it is a smidge lighter as are most dairy-based things these days because the milk is just lighter and less milky because of all the stupid propaganda about diet that insists you listen to a chart instead of your own body). The tapioca cup is bland. The Custard Cup is dynamite. I had one tonight and it was the same perfect light watery nutmeg custard as always. Had not been to Phillipe's in a long time.
Tuesday, January 10th, 2012
5:40 pm	My E-Mail Might Be For You! I get lots of email, this is an opportunity I would like to pass on to you if you are an artist who is interested... Hello Mat, My name is Barbara Lee and I am the media specialist at California Community Foundation (CCF), the public foundation for Los Angeles County since 1915. I wanted to introduce myself and share news that the CCF Fellowship for Visual Artists is now taking applications for 2012. As an important member of the arts and media community, I wanted to share news of this opportunity for you, your friends, and others who may be interested. The fellowship is a unique investment in both the artistic and business development of emerging and mid-career artists in Los Angeles. We’ve distributed nearly $2 million in $15,000 - $20,000 grants to hundreds of artists since its establishment in 1988. More information on the fellowship and former fellows can be found at www.calfund.org/artistgallery.  Please let me know if you have any questions and are interested in being notified when the 2012 fellows are announced this July. Thanks and a happy new year! Barbara Lee | MEDIA SPECIALIST
Monday, January 9th, 2012
10:34 pm	DESSERT BLOG My New Year's Dessert blogging has already skipped a bit, but it is not because I have been skipping dessert, oh hell no. The main reason I have not been blogging is that most of my desserts this year have been ice cream at home after dinner. Even when we have dined out I have opted for ice cream at home. Lemon Sorbet. Coconut. That has been about it. The two desserts I had at restaurants last week were as followed: Melted Belgian Chocolate. This is a hot chocolate drink served at SYRUP downtown. They heat up a chocolate bar until it melts and make a beverage around it. Thick, rich, hot, bittersweet... it tastes like something that Louis XIV would have his royal kitchen make for you as an honored guest, and there it was in a to-go cup on the way back to the office. But it made the 7 Street crackheads and trannies seem like the King's court on a cold, cold evening. Now for a lousy story. At Cole's I ordered my dip sandwich WITHOUT BREAD. They have a whole way of doing it gluten free there and it was great, truly a delicious bowl of meat (i ordered the pork), hot beef juice, garlic fries with stinging tang and seriously one of the best pickle slices i have ever tasted. Best of all, they made me feel totally okay about being gluten free in a restaurant whose whole purpose is to soak bread. So we were on a roll and I saw that they had blackberry pie. I explained to the waitress that I eat around the crust and she said that would not be too difficult. Well, she was right. it was not too difficult. The problem is there is literally (and I measured this) one heaping tablespoon of blackberry-laden filling in Cole's Blackberry Pie. There is a thick bread crust, a thick back side and a crust topping so thick that when I broke it off it looked like two medium scones on my plate. So five bucks for a tablespoon of blackberry jelly. Ehhhh...
Sunday, January 8th, 2012
12:51 am	Coagula Art Journal Webisode #1 okay, try this instead of TeeVee...
Monday, January 2nd, 2012
1:56 am	Was That Car Fire Arson? As December wound down... an arsonist or plural set over 40 fires in a hellish night of "street art" vandalism - starting many of the fires by igniting cars. Weird... on December 18 I was out shooting moonrise pictures, an eerie red crescent moon was rising... On the right there is the moon, but it is about to be a co-star. Look to the left. Okay now look again... KA BOOM: That is a car blowing up. I was standing in my front yard and the boom blew off. I did not stick around, btw, I ran in the house and called the heat (pun intended), then cautiously came out and snapped this shot. Then the horn went off and the headlights went on - I adjusted the camera for this shot... Parked car explodes, burns, fire department foams out the fire and Huntington Park Tow takes it away. Next morning I go across the street and take a few shots. The car is gone except for a FORD bubble and a remnant of the rear view mirror. Some melted plastic and minor damage to the building adjacent to the parked car... Google streetview 2621 e 54th st 90255 all you want, no clues that I can find. Was this a trial run or does shit like exploding cars in the middle of the night just happen ...or did that red moonrise have anything to do with it?
Sunday, January 1st, 2012
9:58 pm	Last Thoughts on 2011 Hey yeah, so there goes 2011. Gotta write what I did this year before I forget... Published a book of Gerald Locklin's poetry YOU NEED NEVER LOOK OUT A WINDOW The Complete Coagula Poems Volume One. Got the book up on Create Space and published a limited edition of 100 hardcover copies signed by the author, numbered 1-100 and including a print of the paperback's art work by artist Sharon Suhovy. Curated TEL - ART - PHONE which I am proud of as pretty much a lifetime achievement, curatorially speaking. The ambitious show was realized becuase of the astounding Beacon Arts Building exhibition space. CURATORS COLLEGE: Could not have done that show without my assistant Bryan nor without the help of the show's co-curators from the Curators College seminar I organized. Curated TOP TEN NOW as the Avant-L.A. exhibition in Downtown L.A. to run concurrent with the neighboring Platform Art Fair. Wrote many essays for the Huffington Post that reached a wide audience. Spoke to the art department (seemed like a crowd of over a hundred) at Azusa-Pacific University about writing about art. Organized a Summer Studio Tour over three weekends to artists' studios around Los Angeles. Wrote and delivered a major (4,000+ words) essay for a book on COOP that should be published some time in 2012. Totally got into photography (with my late-2010 purchased Leica camera) and even had a "studio visit" from a fine art photographer I admire and was encouraged to publish a book of my photos. Stayed sober (18th straight year). Remained in love with my girlfriend Leigh (9th straight year). Kept the Angels baseball team honest and the hardcore Angels fans entertained running Halos Heaven Dot Com writing under my sports pen name of Rev Halofan (6th straight year). Went to Vegas twice (July and August) and San Diego for the holidays.
Tuesday, December 20th, 2011
3:17 pm	Discarded Art Essay Fragment This did not make the cut of a recent essay but here it is as its own little saying: If the appetizers were as bad at Los Angeles restaurants as often as the art is regularly terrible at the galleries and museums, we would have all died of food poisoning. Since bad art does no damage to our eyes, perhaps that is why we slog on. Like a losing season for your favorite sports team, there are always a few sweet victories to relish.
Monday, December 5th, 2011
11:20 pm	Getty Curators Are Demonstrably Amateur Hacks This is a defense of the legacy of a great artist. This artist is a very nice person. My assertion here of his greatness is most emphatically not nice. My tone here reflects the crimes, not the artist. I swore I was over writing about the half-assed “take” on Los Angeles called Pacific Standard Time that the Getty has foisted on Southern California. It’s sloppy excuse for scholarship would not pass muster at a Community College interview for teaching assistants. Its clique of out of town assholes retelling the L.A. narrative is insulting. The complicity of the local art press is one more reminder that everyone in the art world media is a clever whore or a dumb slut. The compliant pleasure at accepting received opinion of the survey show’s “importance” is a reminder that the dumb sluts are the intellectual giants in a town that only cares about the art world because it is easier to slum around than the movie business. I swore I was done and had moved beyond it. But god damn the Getty if I didn’t just get shocked all over again. The exclusion of artists is always a touchy subject. It is the curator’s prerogative, of course, as one can see the curator like a film director, excising scenes from a film that do not follow a vision of sorts. Some actors end up on the cutting room floor. The curator as artist is a legitimate endeavor. But when the institution uses the rubric of “scholarship” to exclude perfectly qualified and interesting people from curating shows, well then, the artistry of curating is off the negotiating table. If the Getty is hiring curators who are academically qualified as scholars in the field, the shows in their Pacific Standard Time should be, well, scholarly; the shows should reflect research in a subject. When MOCA had its big Street Art show earlier this year, the curating was done by non-scholars and presented itself as a survey done by people who had witnessed the rise of the movement first hand. Bravo. Do you know how low and dirty it feels to insist that the Getty could learn a thing or two about curatorial integrity from Roger Gastman? Scholarship implies that a survey will, in fact, reflect the thing which is being studied, objectively, rather than thru the investment portfolio of some dude’s fanboy commercial favorites. The Getty is delivering an extensive survey of the history of Southern California art from 1945 thru 1980. Most of the curators of the show were not in Southern California at that time. Christopher Knight mocked East Coast coverage of Pacific Standard Time, implying that the exhibit was curated with New York in mind, curated so that New York would take it seriously. Why mock those East Coast writers? When I look at PST, all I see is scholarly careerists groveling for an East Coast gig (Knight himself is an East Coast transplant and brings his elitist sensibilities to every segregated review he writes). The whole contemptible enterprise has been a handshake between art dealers dusting off crap out of the attic and academic curators dusting off their tenure applications. The list of shows in Pacific Standard Time is long. The artists that were included vary in degrees of merit, quality, relevance, impact and aesthetics. The importance of all of these categories is debatable and some of them can be entirely subjective. Many of the artists who are included in these shows are ridiculously inconsequential players whose artwork is of little merit and had no role in shaping anything about the Los Angeles art scene or anything else. But they were friends of friends and someone had the old pile of art in the garage. And yet still we can be happy that someone made some art at some point in time and years later was acknowledged for going to a party or two with Billy Al Bengston or having sold Walter Hopps a couple of greenies. That is all fine. If this were a survey put together by five art dealers out to bid up the price of what they have taking up space at a public storage unit, it would be understandable, laudable perhaps. But the vile scholars of the Getty are using this flood of nobodies and their dusty, dinky relics from the Nixon administration to appear encyclopedic when what these curatorial twits really are is “half-assed”. Here is my beef. Nowhere in the sprawling Pacific Standard Time exhibits is a giant of the Los Angeles art scene from that time period. Muralist Kent Twitchell is not included anywhere in a survey of Los Angeles art from 1945 to 1980. Considering that this is an epic sweep of the multitudes of movements percolating in a particularly expansive time period, this oversight is unconscionable considering Twitchell’s contributions, legacy, talent, appeal, popularity, impact and innovations. This is an oversight that kills the credibility of the Getty’s efforts, curatorially self-promoting as they were, mask of scholarship and veneer of academic objectivity be damned. If you lived in Los Angeles in the 1970s, you interacted with Kent Twitchell’s art. His Freeway Lady mural was the region’s icon of the decade. In an era before it was realized that public art could function as a money laundering method for civic-embedded vermin, Kent Twitchell was the only public artist for a majority of Angelenos during that time. His Steve McQueen house on Union Avenue, his Strother Martin on a Hollywood apartment building, but most of all his Freeway Lady overlooking the 101 Freeway... these were the monuments of a generation of rhetoric about giving good things to all the people, of finding common ground in a search for better things. The mysterious freeway woman looked at a million visitors a week and shared a mystery with each of them... with that eerie moon and magic carpet of an afghan only deepening the wonder of who she was and why she was there and what it all meant. And what was art in our lives? That was street art that insisted we do anything but “obey”. It insisted we imagine; it didn’t tell us anything more than to complete the story. The Freeway Lady was a lot of things. But it also was not a lot of things. It was not art about art, it was not about art world digressions and it was not about art theory suppositions. You couldn’t sell it. Nobody bought it then, flipped it to a dealer and it didn’t end up in the possession of the right people. There were murals then that fulfill agendas now and there are murals now that purport to have the authenticity of the past. And that is all good, and that is all important, and that is all worthy of discussion and exhibition. But if Kent Twitchell is not included in anything purporting to summarize Southern California in the 1970s, your survey is without a masterpiece, it is a corpse without a pulse, with no moon to rise and shift the tides your way, with no woman watching out for you every day. So many qualified curators were here during that time and the Getty has handed the public the vision of a bunch of librarians who dream of Manhattan while they deny us the truth about our own paradise. -Mat Gleason LINK TO MY VIDEO (audio only in one part) of a 2009 Kent Twitchell survey show:
Saturday, December 3rd, 2011
11:15 pm	Brick and Mortar Punk Rock Memory Lane If you are going to have an art show on the subject of punk rock, an industrial warehouse in Downtown Los Angeles is a load better than a westside art gallery to make the thing work. And a poster for a Bad Brains gig stripped from a New York Subway Wall and framed for the show greeting you at the door is a stamp of authenticity that the "smart set" of art world thinkers would never think of. Curating a melange of "art names" as formally diverse as Raymond Pettibon, Thaddeus Strode and Shark Toof with his own work, recent selections from a decidedly fine art photography series of gas stations by Nicole Panter (to explain her credentials here would be to blur the line between initiate and tourist too much) and the "back in the day" photography of Monk Rock, the legendary roadie for Social Distortion, Shanty ditched the art world pretense and allowed the objects to deliver a layered encounter with memory and iconography, literally curating an actual distortion of the social. Shanty's own wry paintings recreate punk rock fliers, a hallmark of "having been there", as stenciled pop art, updating and degrading the genre to ensure that punk's impulsive contrarian exorcism of purity marches on. Ever the punk rock nerd I had to strut my encyclopedic recollection of the subculture by pointing out that one of the flyers he had reconstituted as a painting was for a Misfits gig that never took place, as the scheduled venue, Mendiola's Ballroom, had cancelled all shows with punk bands because of a November 1982 riot. Buck knew quite a bit about those events and there is nothing sappier than two guys with headlights near the half-century mark cruising down memory lane. Fortunately, Buck's daughter came by to show off her cocktail waitress attire: Ah, ya gotta love the costumes. Monk and Shanty have aged well, so far avoiding the inevitable mortal lottery that has already taken two original members of S.D. and by the point the opening was filling up, the DeeJay was balancing Brian Eno with the Buzzcocks and the paranoia that there might be people with very old scores to settle started to vibrate. Or perhaps in my old age it was just the low blood sugar calling. It was a great trip to see an attitude, an aesthetic and an era that just won't die all composed as art wihtout capitualting "art world". The whole affair rhetorically looked Johnny Thunders in the long-gone eyes and debunked his claim that you can't put your arms around a memory - you can indeed, especially if you have $500 for one Shanty's punk-pop anti-masterpieces. The abandoned industrial gutters of east Downtown are almost unchanged from the pre-Madonna days and nights of beer and cocaine fueled rages into nihilistic oblivion. The drug of choice for lots of us now just happens to be red bull or what Starbux is pushing. But the night is young and seeing Punk resonate yet again with unselfconscious strength inspires me to take the girlfriend out to a nice dinner of all things - how's that nihilistic urge to scream in an embrace of the ugly? Or it may just have been the damn low blood sugar. Church and State seats us at the bar and sells me a $13 cocktail for her. I don't know if I could have kicked the old sauce all those years ago if my world had been as elegant and seductive and (based on her description of the exquisite beverage) beautiful as the bars today. Admiral Ackbar murmurs "It's a trap" and Garland Jeffries snarls something about running "Wild in the Streets" and we dine but don't dash as we are not tickled with temptation to taunt the police state Jello predicted thirty years ago. Walking to the car we pass the old LACE building, the intersection of the punk scene's most aesthetic and the art world's least stuffy. You'd call it an edge at one point, but LACE turned into the great art world swindle on its way to Hollywood and the shell of a building does not even house ghosts who can't get a Getty grant anymore. At the brick and asphalt enclave of Buck Shanty's one night of punk art, emptiness is the last worry, as the genuine is still the enemy of the self-inflated and a fossil doesn't need a grant or even permission to be a work of art, on the wall or looking in the mirror, satisfied.
Wednesday, November 16th, 2011
2:53 pm	New Art Review Policy New Art Review Policy: If I cannot take pictures, I cannot write about it. You want me to put my own words to the art, I need to record and publish my own images. I will not fill out a form. I will not ask for special treatment. I will not accept your official images (unless they are demonstrably superior to my own). I will ask for permission and if it isn't granted, that is cool, It is like giving me the day off, there is one less artist and one less gallery to write about.