Happy Saint Patrick's Day, Happy National Mike Kelley Day!

I recently made the cake above for friends who came over wanting to reminisce about Mike Kelley. It's basically this cake,  topped with cream cheese icing, and LOTS of green food coloring dumped into the batter. It was surprisingly good. You can also see from the picture above I lack fine motor skills and cake decorating abilities.

Today for the first time in my life I'm celebrating St. Patrick, for the first time because I don't have an ounce of Irish blood in my veins, I'm not even catholic, and I don't like beer. Irish whiskey will do nicely, thank you. I'm really celebrating in Mike's memory, because he loved St. Patrick's Day and I guess from now on, for me it will be National Mike Kelley Day forever. And for you too, if you wish. Kelly green is really Mike Kelley Green.

Here are below a sample of Irish bands that are not U2, if you need some musical accompaniment to the day. Also, if you wish to bake some dessert today, I recommend this recipe. The smell in your house will be totally insane. As for drinks, aside from the ubiquitous Guinness and Murphy's, I suggest you sample the Irish single malt they carry at Trader Joe's. Much better than Bushmills and slightly cheaper!


The Virgin Prunes, Down Memory Lane:




Them And Van Morrison, Baby Please Don't Go:



The Undertones, Here Comes The Summer:




And that's all for the Irish music sampler today.

Before I leave you celebrating National Mike Kelley Day, a few things. There's an opening tonight at Richard Telles, a group show that looks very interesting. 
There are a few things that should be coming up on FBC! in the next few weeks, depending on where I am with the shitload of non art-related paperwork I have to do;  and also depending on how my back pain is evolving. Right now, it's not looking too good,  so I'm not sure how much posting I'll be able to do.
I intend to write a double post on Jennifer Moon and Andy Alexander's current projects, also to write something on the Mono-Ha exhibition at Blum and Poe. There are several interesting things coming up in the next few months, like the Jennifer Moon solo show at Commonwealth and Council in mid-April, and the Will Fowler one at Kordansky in May. Also, as you may know there's a new Biennial coming up at the Hammer/LAXart, etc. with a big cash prize attached, not that I care about that part, but since I have quite a few friends whose work will be featured in the Biennial, so I'm crossing my fingers for them. And, the event everybody has been waiting for: the Jack Goldstein retrospective at OCMA opens on June 24th. Don't miss it!

Lastly, I've been asked recently if there was a Facebook page for FBC! The answer is, no, and I don't foresee one in the immediate future. This blog was started as a personal outlet almost 5 years ago after a devastating car accident, merely as a way for me to fend off the boredom during the many months that recovery took. It's not a way for me to "make it into the art world", as too many blogs - mainly based on the East Coast -  were created for,  just a way for me  to get some personal writing out once in a while. If it touches some people, I am glad, but I don't want this to become a gigantic piece of work, especially work that doesn't bring in any income. It's just a space for me to have the freedom to write whatever I want, and as stated in the header, it's unresearched and un-edited. Warts and all!

If you would like to keep in touch with updates, I believe there's an RSS Feed button somewhere (I don't use RSS myself, so I have no idea if it works or not), and I use the Networkedblogs app. to import it on Facebook. If you don't want to use these, I'd say just check in once or twice a month to see if there's an update. It's very rare that I update more than twice a month anyway.

Happy National Mike Kelley Day everybody, and happy pagan Persian Norouz to all as well!

Your Social Life Behind The Orange Curtain

FBC! this weeks encourages you to go behind the Orange Curtain and drive down the dreaded 405 to Newport Beach where OCMA opens its new edition of the California Biennial, featuring FBC! pals and super fave artists Juan Capistran and Vishal Jugdeo, and lots, lots of other artists.

Tonight you can rush to festivities in Chinatown for the Zoe Crosher series of event at Dan Graham and Charlie James. I link you to the Facebook events page. Tomorrow, still in Chinatown, 3 shows open at Tom Jancar, Doug Harvey, Nancy Baker and Cyril Kuhn.

On Saturday, you can attend the opening for Dorit Cypis at 18th Street Art Center in Santa Monica.

Meanwhile... FBC! has some pressing family issues that may require an urgent trip back home if I can find the $$$ for a last-minute plane ticket. So there may not be any YSL for a couple of weeks, and I'm not sure about the Stephen Kaltenbach review I was planning to write. Watch this space, but don't fret if there's nothing going on for a while, I may be en route for yet another funeral.

Lastly, congrats to FBC!'s favorite young curator, Aram Moshayedi, who's just been named assistant curator at Redcat!

Your Social Life

This week will be a happy one, my friends, let me tell you. First of all, Amir Zaki and John Divola both open at LAXart. Two immense smart photographs united in the same space, what's not to like? 6 to 9 PM on Saturday.


Same evening , at Regen Projects is the opening of the Walead Beshty-curated Summer Show, and it's chock-full of artists I really love, Pictures Industry (Goodbye to all that): anybody from Carol Bove, Troy Brauntuch, Tony Conrad, De Rijke & de Rooij, Wade Guyton, Imi Knoebel, Glenn Ligon, Michael Snow, etc.  From 6 to 8 on Saturday.

In Chinatown, China Art Objects and Tom Solomon unite forces for a Summer group show at Cottage Home where FBC!'s favorite emerging artist, Juan Capistran, is included, another good reason to go see it, not even mentioning Analia Saban is alo in it, as well as Alex Israel and Jonathan Pylypchuck. Also 6 to 9 on Saturday.


And, if you think you don't have enough "6 to 9 opening on Saturday, my freaking God why haven't they invented teleportation yet????", there's also Kory Newkirk, except it is 6 to 8 PM, almost guarantying yours truly will be unable to attend, but it is conveniently located smack in the middle of LA, at Country Club on 805 South Genesee. Country Club is a gallery that has, IMHO, an editorial problem, since they show fab artists such as Newkirk, as well as lame-duck crap such as Shepard Fairey, Harmony Korine, etc.
Seriously people, if you need to show commercial stuff, so be it, but it's detrimental to your image and to the other, good artists you are showing. A bit more intellectual rigor would be welcome. Unless you have a secret plan to join the Jeffrey Deitch team at MOCA, who knows.

Speaking of which, congratulations to OCMA for taking over the Philip Kaiser-curated Jack Goldstein retrospective from MOCA, a formerly respectable institution that lost its mojo since NYC sent us its own commercial rejects. THE exhibition everybody in Los Angeles has been waiting for a decade, and it's been scrapped for... James Franco? Dennis Hopper bland photographs and mediocre paintings? People, flock see the Arshile Gorky show at MOCA, because it is the very last good exhibition there for a long, long time.


After this rant, let's congratulate also LACMA with the opening next week of the Thomas Eakins, Catherine Opie and Tad Beck trifecta. Super intelligent exhibition. If LACMA folks are reading me, I also wanted to tel you: I love you, but your Twitter feed during "Cell Phone Stories"? Painful. I had to un-follow you a couple of times to clean up my feed. Please, don't do horrible things like this again.

Your Social Life Takes You In Paris And In The OC

Hello, my dear beloved readership,

Your social life is going to be fairly complicated this weekend, what with the California Biennial opening, and a bunch of other things here and there.
Before I get onto that, a personal message for my friends: my family keeps on being on the verge of decimation these days, so I'm not particularly social, in addition to being reclusive on account of the novel-writing. So apologies for not going anywhere, also please be kind and don't call me, I wouldn't be able to hold a conversation. At the best of times I loathe the phone, but at present a truly, truly don't want to even look at it.
But I appreciate if you forward me links to silly websites, YouTube songs and whatever, as long as it is funny.

For my readers who I do not know personally (you have no idea what you're missing), please disregard the paragraph above, and enjoy seeing how I'm going to organize your social life with the few tips below.

On Friday night, you can go by anotheryearinla and see the Richard Hailey exhibition. As usual it's from 7 to 10 PM, so you can have dinner before and head to the Eastern part of town after traffic slows down a bit.
Now, on to Saturday where you will have to be all over the place. With the time difference, you will have to be simultaneously in Paris for old FBC! pal Matthieu Laurette exhibition at Gaudel de Stampa. It's a fairly new gallery opened by Denis Gaudel, a former director at Yvon Lambert.
Approximatively at the same time, here in Los Angeles the 3rd Archives Bazaar will be held at USC. If I haven't messed up with code you should be able to find the pdf. program here.
Meanwhile, tomorrow Friday and Saturday is the REDCAT symposium, Untitled: Speculations On The Expanded Field Of Writing. FBC! gal pal Stephanie Taylor is speaking on Saturday afternoon. Saturday is also the private opening for the California Biennial organized by Lauri Firstenberg of LAXart fame, but you would be well advised to avoid traffic and go down to Newport Beach on Sunday to the public opening. I see it's up until March, which I'm very happy about as I don't see how I can possibly go down there before early next year. There's a fairly interesting list of artists, mingling California artist veterans with a younger generation. There's also a bevvy of off-site projects, which in theory are always cool as it is indeed called the California Biennial, not the only-if-you-live-not-far-from-Newport-Beach-Biennial, but in practice I doubt most people, your truly included, will be able to schedule road trips up North, in the desert and elsewhere to see everything.
If you think you cannot possibly go down to the OC on Sunday, you can alternatively go to Highland Park to Sea and Space Explorations (yes, this is their complete name) and attend the show called "The Audacity Of Desperation" . Is it political? You betcha'. Note on November 9, Nancy Popp (a very, very old friend of FBC!) is curating a screening of videos. While FBC! is usually reserved about the effectiveness of political art, I can only encourage you to have a pre-election art viewing and participating.

While I'm at it, since I cannot vote, let me endorse Barack Obama as a president, of course, and "No" on Proposition 8. As for the rest, I'm all for forced collectivization of national production means, or whatever are left of them, redistribution of wealth (tax the rich, subsidize health care, no tax breaks for anybody, thank you) and let's send the Trustafarians on farms as day laborers. I'm kind of waiting for the creation of new currencies and fixed exchange rate between those as well, but I don't foresee that before a few years. Oh, and Halliburton should surrender all he profits they made during the last 8 years to improve public educations. C'est la lutte finale, groupons-nous des demain... And before you label me a communist or a socialist or whatever, for the record I'm more of a neo-Keynesian, and I do think Obama is a fairly conservative Democrat while McCain is a purely loathsome old crank, war hero and all. My Grandpa also is a war hero (WWII), it didn't prevent him from becoming an old crank in old age, except he's not loathsome an doesn't pretend to lead the free world.