The Beastly Life by Sally Eckhoff

How to Progress from One Minute to the Next

"Man is the only creature who is always doing something instead." (Michael Krüger, poet, quoting someone else)

"We write in order to say how we want to live." (Krüger again)

There is a while spot inside you, something that is not filled in by sleep or sports or your job. And the ten lines that you can (maybe) write across that white spot will say how you want to live, and how it is different, because it has to be different. And you have to find what that difference is.

"Now it's your turn to talk." (Krüger, in summation)

The New New Year

"Once the French started writing about art, they no longer seemed capable of making it."

Lance Richbourg, painter

Dilbert Does Ruscha: "Course of Empire" drawing by Scott Adams

My Front Legs

The Kentucky Derby ran itself out in a cloud of controversy and damage. I watched the race, and had to keep reminding my astounded companions that the horse who came in just behind Big Brown was indeed the filly, Eight Belles. But shortly thereafter, the camera strayed and showed, for a second, the unmistakable black body of that filly lying motionless on the track. "What's she doing over there?" one of my friends asked. "That couldn't have been her coming across the finish line." For a second we thought a horse had gone down around the first turn and the field had simply run away from it. But that turned out not to be true.

Big Brown pulled wide for an awe-inspiring win, and the seventeen-hand filly, Eight Belles, who came in second, continued her "gallop-out." All racehorses do this after a race; they can't simply be slowed to a walk after they cross the finish line. While Eight Belles was gradually throttling down her torrid pace, she started galloping funny, her jockey said. Then she went down. She had smashed both front fetlocks (ankles) and fallen to the track. She had compound fractures, if you can imagine it. The vet was on the track with a euthanizing shot even before the race crew had time to erect the barrier around her. She was dead as dead could be.

I just got home from buying a bottle of wine, and the guy behind the counter is a pedigree consultant. I had to ask them what that meant. He said, "I help people buy racehorses." His take was that the Derby is a tough race for fillies with such a big field. They bump each other around so much. He speculated that she might have had a heart attack and fractured her fetlocks after that. Who the hell knows. Anyway, he went on to say, "breeders are killing the sport." They're retiring horses too early—Bernardini and Hard Spun, for example—and starting horses way too early, too. He described how a two-year-old who can run really fast training fractions can bring a higher price than an untested horse, but that such a two-year-old might not really be ready to run that fast. The guy said that Eight Belles really shouldn't have been in the race in the first place. She was big—a seventeen-hand three-year-old. Jesus.

I don't think Polytrack will help. I don't think anything will help. The owners are too eager to make a profit off the price they pay to buy a horse, so they're not going to want to keep these young horses at home while they develop. But they should. I wouldn't race them until they were five if it were up to me, and I know some exercise riders who agree with me. I have never discussed this with a jockey, though. I'd like to.

Artists' Statements: Cool to Read

Check these out...there are some surprising things here"

http://www.pegi-eyers.com/txt/77_artists_statements.html

Thanks to Pegi Eyers for compiling these.

On the roster of things to do in 2008

My revealing weakness.

http://www.skowheganstatefair.com/agrifairs.htm

Overheard at Peace 2000, Sideshow Gallery, Brooklyn

"We always like to think that natural things come easy."—Henrietta Mantooth, painter

"I hope my stuff's awful enough to get in."—Anonymous, spoken of Art Omi, an art foundation outside of Hudson, NY

"People self-replicate instead of running against the grain."—Marvin Cohen, writer

"We all need to get out more."—Someone popping their third beer

"I had a really good time yesterday. I tried on thirty dresses."—Young woman

"Can you add your pigment to any kind of house paint?"—Grown-up man

"Smell me. I think it's vanilla."—Another grown-up man

"I asked the students where they were going for winter break, and and they say things like, 'Antarctica.'"—A dedicated university professor

"Are you in this show?"
"No."
"Say yes. No one will know the difference."—Someone else

Brooklyn is the place to be. Sideshow's huge group show (more than three hundred artists) is a high-quality hodgepodge, cram-'em-up-to-the-ceiling style—fairly common in downtown venues now, and more a decorating scheme than a piss-take on the French salon esthetic. Here, it delineates the idea that getting onto a wall in any New York borough is the best anyone can do. You're going to have a lot of company, so you might as well learn to dig the atmosphere. This gallery definitely makes that sour little dose of reality into a decent flavoring for the salad of work. This show is all ostentation, acrobatics, pomp, and humor.
There are lots of things to like here: Jerelyn Hanrahan's two ceramic busts, Fred Gutzeit's psychedelic paintings and drawings—hyperrealized, labor-intensive. Also a string of beeswax hand grenades, Claude Carone's murky, classical abstraction, Portia Munson's big flower C-print, something by Carl Fudge, a molten blue powdered lumpy panel by Art Guerra, Tim Wilson's rural tableaux painted on trophy plaques, Francine Tint's painted nougat, Vincint McLaughlin's striped lozenge that looks like an exotic beetle that got run over by a road-painting truck, Katherine Bradford's two guys lugging a canoe, Eung Ho Park's wild irises (the kind in your eyes) mounted inside bottlecaps, and Joe Ballweg's ink wash of a supplicant (or a hostage).