I went to the convention center via the bus to speak at the L.A. Art Show and to hang out at the Coagula booth. My car got a flat last night and i didn’t want to drive on the donut in the rain and I didn’t want to rent a car.
So I took the bus. I took the bus a lot for years when I was a drunk. I can count on one hand the number of times I drank and drove. In my deepest periods of self-destruction, I avoided what was the ultimate roulette. So the bus doesn’t intimidate me and I know a lot of the routes. It was 5 bucks for an all-day pass. I could have just paid a buck and a quarter but i wanted to have the pass in case I needed it later.
My girlfriend met me there. We had a full day, the talk was great, Mark Bradford and Kim Abeles and Renee Petropolous were on this panel with myself and others and those three were excellent, insightful and entertaining.
MORE COVERAGE OF THE PANEL HERE FROM THE BUSTARD
So then we go out to dinner with the ArtScene magazine honchos. Marlen Donaghue sits next to me and insists that students and teachers are barred from sexual relations at Otis. An Otis student at the dinner confirms this, noting that it would be impossible to hide something that hot and inspiring at the apparently sexless, dull bitchy gossip-filled campus that Otis has apparently been prozacked into.
So my girlfriend and I take a taxi home. 20 bucks. $5 tip. $5 busride for me. Girlfriend took the bus separately but only spent a buck and a quarter. $31.25 versus $12 convention center parking sounds like a rip off, but just sitting in that cab after a meal, laughing about sexless Otis students going thru art school never even once getting drunk and giving in to the advances of baby boom casualties bragging to their classes about having seen the Who while Keith Moon was still alive… it was a nice day and night.