Modern art? (from Substitute Intelligence)

March 22, 1980

One thing I have to learn NOT to do is bring my art study to the My Way Lounge, or any other place where the go go girls and the bouncers complain about my doing homework.

Normally, I get grief when I bring my notebook here and jot in it, but when I bring a text book from college, they go off the deep end.

I don’t mind the mockery so much as the subject itself – since much of what I do here and when I’m working with the rock band is rewriting class notes. One problem is that the more I drink the less coherent the notes get. The other problem is that some of the art that made no sense looking at slides in the classroom, start making too much sense.

I don’t mind Pollack – even when other art students think I’m crazy for seeing his work at significant. But I have no use for Kandinsky – even if he invented abstraction, or maybe I hate him because he did.

I’m sitting here with beers and shots and my school book open to “Autumn,” with the terrifying number 198 attached to it (to think there were 197 others just like it) and I hate it. At least, I hate it through the first round, and then, those swollen forms floating before my eyes start to pulsate and I start getting warm and fuzzy inside.

I know it’s the booze. But damn, I’m as bad as Pavlov’s dog, associating one thing with another when they really aren’t connected. Too much studying here at the go go bar has also made me react oddly to my art professor, 50 something year old woman who thinks I’m staring at her because I’m in love with her enlightening lectures when for some reason, I keep trying to imagine her topless – oh, the horror! The horror!

Meanwhile, I blew my chance to go to Germany this summer with my history professor – a real radical I’ve come to admire, and who is taking a number of students on a tour of the Nazi and 1920s arts scenes.

This, of course, makes me think of how hot I got over Liza in Cabaret, and how the My Way Lounge here in Passaic is my personal pre-Nazi art scene, even if management doesn’t appreciate my studying blobs of Kandinsky’s paint more than I am the go go dancers.

As long as I keep buying drinks and ignoring the taunts, I can stay, although my art professor did ask about the stains in my text book earlier this week.