Did odd chores today

I worked as a security guard for a little while when I got to New York, I liked the job, but the guy who scheduled me to work moved to Baltimore, and someone I did not know started to schedule me. If you have never worked in security then you probably would not know that it is a really low profit business, and the big companies that have started to dominate the market, largely because insurance is too expensive for small companies, have really minimal management. So for every hundred or two hundred guys you have out working as a security guard you probably have one scheduler who works out of an office and one guy who works as a supervisor and drives around to the different sites and checks up on you. So when you get a new person in a management position things are going to be going crazy for the first six months, and I did not need to headache of dealing with this new guy who screwed me over on the first time he scheduled me to work.

So, anyways, today I turned in my uniform this afternoon, they had sent me a collection letter saying that if I did not turn it in I would have to pay 250 to a collection agency.

After my scheduler moved to Baltimore and the new guy started working, he did not know me at all, and the first place he sent me was a parking garage in a bad neighborhood that was undergoing partial reconstruction. I was covered in dust, and had people yelling at me about how traffic was not moving fast enough. It was an eleven hour shift and I was wrung out by the end of the day. The new guy had told me I was going to an office building, and I inferred from that I was going to be inside. That was the last day I worked as a security guard. I finished the day, but I lost interest in the job after I realized I could not trust the new guy.

I have been thinking about what makes painting interesting to me. I have spent a lot of time wondering about narrative, because I never seem to be good at making a narrative painting, but I am really good at making a striking image. So, where should I locate myself in contemporary representational painting? I used to be really interested in Gerhard Richter, and I really like the blurry black and white photo paintings. I also liked Gregory Gillespie's paintings. So I have started to think about Giorgio Morandi and Luc Tuymans, I asked someone really knowledgeable about these two painters and they said that both of them paint alla prima, which means they make the whole painting in one sitting. That appeals to me. I think I am going to buy a few books of both of their paintings, and start knocking out some killer one day paintings. It is a challenge to finish a painting in one day, and if the painting stinks you can just wipe it off and start over the next day, and all you lose is one day not the two months. I sometimes spend months making a painting that often as not, is not that great.

So I am going to use oil paint and I am going to try and finish one painting tomorrow, and it is going to be based on an image, not constructed around a narrative. Hopefully it will be awesome. I know writing on this blog everyday, as a daily activity, has made it much easier for me to write, and I can write much longer posts in much shorter time than I could when I first started on it.

Oh, one more thing, I received the current issue of The Believer in the mail last week, and it came with a great DVD called the Perverts Guide to Cinema, and the DVD is worth the price of the magazine. The Perverts Guide to Cinema is a psychoanalytical tour of some of the best films ever in Western movies. The narrator gets into Freuds concept of the id, ego, and superego in a very interesting and complicated way.