You know how you have an acquaintance, and you’re sort of dimly aware of their lives away from you? Maybe you know they paint or sing or do something or other, but you don’t really get it?
Maybe they’re really modest, and they don’t talk about it all the time. Or maybe this is Los Angeles, and everyone is a fucking asshole with a screenplay or a portfolio and you’ve learned to just put that information in a quiet place where it won’t continue to to rob you of your will to live.
Well, I have an acquaintance named Robert Kirk. I’ve known him for a number of years, and I really like him. He’s one of those people that just makes your whole day when you see him. He’s funny and bright and bitter and sweet and just an absolute joy to know. I often go to the place where he works, and if he happens not to be there that day, it’s enough to get me to turn around and go home.
Robert has been talking about a web site for a while. He paints, and he’s been working on putting some of his pieces online.
Or something. I’m usually eating when he’s telling me these things, and I’m really only minimally interested in the lives of other people anyway, so I never got the whole story.
The last time I saw him, he gave me the URL for his site. He said it wasn’t quite ready, but soon. I put it into my bookmarks and checked it a few times before I went on my trip, but it wasn’t live yet.
So this morning I clicked on the link, and the site was up. And I almost soiled myself.
Who knew he was this talented?
I mean, that’s serious ability there. We’re talking about someone who can actually paint. A bona fide fine artist! And it doesn’t hurt that one of his portraits looks like my little Sully boy.
Wow. Is it really like this? Are there those among us who are gifted and wonderful and exciting, and we just don’t know it?
Maybe I need to start paying more attention to other people.
Oh God, I crack myself up.
11 responses so far ↓
1 JohnnyBoy // Jan 14, 2008 at 1:47 pm
First !
Anyone who paints pictures of dogs is all right by me !
2 Scott // Jan 14, 2008 at 3:23 pm
Yes, those are quite nice. Thanks for sharing with us.
3 bnaivar // Jan 15, 2008 at 6:10 am
Great stuff! You can hardly see the little numbers under the paint.
4 JohnnyBoy // Jan 15, 2008 at 7:32 am
Be that as it may, I’d rather look at these than some idiot who spits on a canvas and calls himself David Hoctui or something.
5 ListenerJustin // Jan 15, 2008 at 1:41 pm
I’m not certain where you’re getting this “paying attention to others” drivel from, but it sounds like something the godless Left would foist upon us. It’ll never catch on. San Diego is proof of that!
6 pal Jacky // Jan 15, 2008 at 4:57 pm
I think it is natural not to pay attention to your friend’s claims of talents. Since, It is surprising when one actually does have talent. However, more often than not, you have to gawk at things or worse yet go to their godawful music performance. I just can’t lie anymore. I have no poker face. It’s just easier to not look so interested when someone starts mentioning their artistic abilities. I’ve got friend whose my age in a ‘new wave/punk’ band that hounded me for years to see his cutting edge music making. A few months back they were opening for the dreadful ’smut peddlers’ at ‘Frog’s’ on Hawthorne Blvd. in beautiful Lawndale on a thursday night. It was only after I paid the two dollar cover that I discovered he fronted a ‘Devo’ cover band.
7 Pookie // Jan 15, 2008 at 5:16 pm
Don’t bother paying more attention to ‘people’, just pay more attention to me.
These are amazing. They are almost photographic!
bravo
8 pal Jacky // Jan 15, 2008 at 9:39 pm
Uwe Boll is making a film out of the video game ‘postal’. For those who don’t know the name Uwe Boll is the worst filmmaker currently working. In fact, I think he’s already passed Ed. Wood for the simple reason that people keep giving him money to make films. His newest ‘dungeon siege’ is tanking in theaters right now. It had a budget of 70 million dollars!! His best known films are based on video games. No not ’silent hill’, not ‘resident evil’ those were brilliant polanskiesque masterpieces compared to his ‘bloodrayne’ and ‘alone iun the dark’. Now he’s doing a game based on the solitary concept of a laid off postal worker shooting people dead. YEAH. His Imdb page for those who think I’m going off half cocked againhttp://www.imdb.com/name/nm0093051/
9 pal Jacky // Jan 15, 2008 at 9:39 pm
oops this hyperlink should work
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0093051/
10 pal Jacky // Jan 16, 2008 at 10:03 pm
sorry for the halfcocked info but ‘postal’ has been out for a months.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0486640/
and its got both Mini-me and the Seinfelds’s soup nazi. The latter plays Osama Bin Laudin. Again, boll is the worst filmmaker today and I contend has passed Ed wood for the worst of all time. He grew up in Germany. His childhood heroes could have been people like Fassbinder, Wenders, Herzog or Schloendorff. Maybe they were. Wenders(’wings of desire’/'paris, texas’ said on the twentififth anniversary of Fassbinder’s death that ‘I was his closest colleague, and I’m still learning things from his films’ Obviously Boll knows better.
11 adorisday // Jan 17, 2008 at 10:16 am
Hey, if there is any art left in postmodern portraiture, your pal renders well. I’d paypal a few bucks and I’m sure others on this site would kick in, too, to have you sit for him with your doggie.
As for the uniquely Angeleno problem: “everyone is a screenwriter”… of all people April should know that scripts are actually a postmodern social apparatus, akin in some abstract and inverse way as to how the East Coast regarded having ancestors coming over on the Mayflower as high mark on the social register. In LA, it’s a bit more dicey. (There is no DAR membership, for one, only WGA.) As a birthday present, I just gagged through a “comedy” a friend (who actually is a fine painter in the vein of Blakesian metaphysics) wrote. Why they thought all that art training could be converted to screenwriting is beyond me, except that those rare excellent scripts “seem” so easy to do. On the other hand, I’ve been stalling on the read on another script — that I happen to know is pretty good — in order to socially qualify for a job I already have. As a former reader, I’ve lost friends over my reactions to their scripts. It’s just a fact of LA life: screenplays have become difficult social apparatus; forget about actual film production.
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