taking the bus from edmonton to the fort today (waiting 15 years for this), we followed a cereal and oil train, and it was the road, adn the prarie, and the farmland and the train track, and the houses, and the river valley, like a dozen horizontal planes interacting and the sun was going down, orange and pink and yellow---creamsicle colours, and i thot i would stay for a microsecond.

a building was being built, and it was covered by tarps, a dozen, blue, orange and white, and it looked like a grimy colourfield painting, a ridcouls artty prentesne, it didnt look real.

edmontons decay is much better then anywhere else, the paint peels, and the tiles fall off interesting ways, and the dirt from melted snow buckles side walks, and pipes are exposed, and things just fall apart better--less money or less care ?

i reignited my love of 50s modernist houses and churches and sqaures of all sorts--which i will assume occur because of there being nothing better, and move on.

i am writing about country more and more, hoping that it will mean that i can break thru professionally, with some magazines actually sending me comapct discs, which is nice.

kenny chesneys new cd is actually kind of boring, and i think he misqoutes hemmingway, but the first draft (and the second) of the essay i wrote about him and toby actually turned out ather well

raymond i talked tonite, bantered, gossipped, feels almost normal (had a seizure in front of orange julius in eaton center, and rachel showed up to slap me, apparently raymond did this too ?)

i have a telemetry appointment that i cannot miss in TO on the 31st--i have to wait for taxes, disability, aish, social workers, et. al which might keep me here longer then the 31st...its an awkard and odd 22, knowing that i need to be in two places at the same time.

was going to edit the andy essay (it needs work) and start the rejig on anglicans (sojouner is interested, ie took the pitch, but that still doesnt gaurentee, plus i want to write a poetic autobiog wrt twombly, who i keep finding deeper and deeper, harder and sweeter, more careful and more random, a paradoxical figure, and an impt one, but thats on the back burner. (to mention: adam and vancouver; raymond and email; the cr and the u of a; danielle and her troubles; W and Artforum)

Hal Foster has a brilliant essay about flavin in this months art forum--i keep forgetting how much i get from foster, esp. as i move away from writing about conceptual and onto formalism/aesthetics--he tears apart the cult of object, but in this lovely, and difficult way, like trying to leave a realtionship that has collapsed b/c of its own inertia... ie he qoutes flavin--who said "As I have said for several years, I believe that art is shedding its vaunted mystery for a common sense of keenly realized decoration. Symbolizing is dwindling--becoming slight. We are pressing downward toward no art--a minimal sense of pyschologically indifferent decoration--a netural pleasure of seeing known to everyone" (which is wonderful because it foregrounds pleasure and decoration adn decentralises theory and is thourugh bullshit because no pleasure is neutral and decoration is actually more of a pyschologically important then art, but thats ok, b/c its impt bullshit, and anyways Foster says this stuff better then i could anyways.)

he also (and in the article previous) writes about these amazing works from 61-63 called icons, which are sqaures of masonite painted day glo camp-pop colours, with random light bulbs stuck to them, referencing everything from marylin monroe to blind lemon jefferson to this anon. queer english poet in nyc that flavin had an obsession with (the more and more i think about it and foster backs me up minimalism hid its signifers, but it had them, it had them all over the place, it didnt discard them, they were closeted, but they were as popcult as anyone else--this makes me happy, flavin watching gentleman perfer blondes, judd obsessed with harley davidson motorcycles)

the icons, like icon one is this bright red valentine coloured thing to sean macgovern, which is light w. a single smal white flourscent, and icon ii is this sandy salmon colour with an old fashioned pull chain and porcelin repcetacle and 40 wa bulb, all off set--and the the one to blind lemon jefferson is really fucking weird, the note in art forum will do--icon viii (the dead niggers icon) (to blind lemon jefferson) acrylic on masonite, porcelion receptacles, pull chains red incadescent bulbs and socket disc flashers--which i read at first as disco flashers--what could this mean?!---my favourite is corans broadway flesh--which looks like the ruddy pasty english stereotype, and has 28 candle bulbs, like a marquee--why arent these more famous (they are all small too, less then 3 feet sqaure

i like how we are taking these stody musuem favourites and fucking with them--back to judd, and the bbc documentary about his obsessive collecting of flags or the book that shows him as a furniture designer. it makes me happy when we can destroy these pretensions.