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Midnight Ramble — Not
What's on the editor's mind these days
Ramble + photos by J R Compton
August 2005
ver since I found, about a month after it was sent, the letter from the cheery Bath House Boys saying — after assuring me for nearly three years that the proposed DallasArtsRevue exhibition was still in the works for them but that it was being delayed so it didn't look like they were too entwined with us, since I had my grande solo hall show there in the spring of 2004 — that our proposal had been declined.
There will be no DallasArtsRevue exhibition at the Bath House.
They didn't say why. I can only assume it was something I said, or wrote or did, or was, or am. Their letter was written just after I wrote that their Outside The Lines show didn't seem to be outside any lines.
This notice has been on the M-O Index (M-O is members-only.
You have to have a DallasArtsRevue Supporting Members or Subscribers Users I.D and Password to enter M-O pages) since minutes after I found the letter. But nearly nobody ever goes there, so this may well be news to you.
I hate having to tell DARts Members this. It was and is devastating news. I hate that it happened. I wish I could do something about it besides write this depressing page...
I took it personally. I am DallasArtsRevue, and DallasArtsRevue, for better or for worse, is me.
Ever since I found that letter I've been depressed about the future of DallasArtsRevue. Mildly then, then it got worse, then it got a little better. Right now I'm seriously worried. It's become a constant state of up and down, bouncing around, rollercoaster riding along.
All my adult life I've managed to keep busy making enough money to keep body and soul together. Sometimes we even invited my mind into our reindeer games. But lately, I've been really worried about my own and DallasArtsRevue's finances. Which are, of course, pretty much the same thing.
Please, please, when you write a check for this publication, make it out to “J R Compton”, not some acronym or publication or website name.
It is so very disconcerting to get a check in the mail, rush it down to my bank, then get told they can't take it, because I am obviously not the Dallas Area Rapid Transit or anything else but my own true self.
DallasArtsRevue is published by J R Compton. It is Copyright by J R Compton. If is financed by my meagre savings and your checks to J R Compton.
Earlier this summer some stalwart Friends of DallasArtsRevue performed a quick infusion of future accounts receivable that brought me up out of the red.
I bought a refrigerator (in a 20% Off Sale at Sears for just under $500, delivered.
I've been wanting a Kenmore for at least a dozen years, and now I finally have one, and I love it.
The hulk of the other piece of crap White -Westinghouse refrigerator is resting door-down for safety's sake on my front porch, because I can't get the stupid doors off without ripping them, and I'd love to give it away to someone who could either put up with its temperature fluctuations and piddling on the floor or fix it.
Then I joined a freebie ListServ @rt turned me onto and the day after I posted the possibility, a guy and his dad hauled it away. I'm sure they'll fix it up and sell it, but I don't care. I've got my Kenmore.
My new fridge doesn't leak water all over the kitchen floor so everytime I'd wander in there in my stocking feet I don't walk away leaving damp footprints and a sodden attitute all over. The bright white new fridge also doesn't freeze my insulin.
I also bought a new monitor whose colors, contrast and tonal range match the real world's. Unlike the 15-year-old CRT behemoth I replaced it with, this one is clear and sharp and adjustable, and it almost always works.
I had sugarplum notions about buying a new camera...
Yesterday photo illustrating a new story by Michael Helsem at Craighead-Green, my elderly digital camera insisted that there wasn't a memory card in it — there was — then it started flashing all its little signals, lost the last couple of shots I'd painstakenly made. I turned it off, popped the card and the battery out. Waited awhile, then turned it all back on and went about my business interrupted only three more times by the same bizarre behavior, which has not repeated itself since, but I'm kinda afraid to use it.
... and a new computer and a lot of other things new I've also done without for too long. But this is too expensive an undertaking (ironic word, that) to entertain such fantasies. Yet.
I changed over to a new, much cheaper — different and difficult — web host. The savings from that move won't kick in till next November, but then web space for this humongous and getting humongouser website will be suddenly a lot cheaper. Meanwhile, it's a lot more expensive.
I did without air-conditioning till June 15, so that month's bill was only $26. In July, we got hotter, and I use it sometimes — when I start sweating profusely or just can't stand it a minute longer. Then I turn it off again when I remember what I can and cannot afford and employ the fans — or go somewhere in my airconditioned car or hang out in an airconditioned book store or library or at Anna's.
Last winter, Gallery Director of the Year Nancy Whitenack and I devised a way galleries could help support DallasArtsRevue, and I managed to sell (I am a terrible salesperson. It still scares me silly to sell ads or anything else, even though I depend upon them, even though I believe in the product. Even though...) her and Cidnee Patrick on the deal.
Then, after three months, Nancy declined to continue in the ad program she literally invented, and my only other advertiser then, Cidnee Patrick, went out of business. It must have been something I said or wrote or did or am...
Back then, I still thought the Bath House show might save our bacon. There seemed to be hope. They kept telling me they were just procrastinating until there was no apparent conflict of interest with my show there last year. I thought something might actually happen. I was excited in a mindlessly enthusiastic back-channel sort of way.
even procrastinated another exhibition possibility, albeit one that would require curating some DallasArtsRevue members in and others out of a show possibility in a much smaller, but educational venue. More than enough members said they'd love to show in it.
At first the response was exciting. Then the whelm went over. Everybody wanted in the show, and everybody would not fit. Serious culling would have resulted.
I wasn't up to the fight.
I love working with a bunch of people on a show. Tranquilla was gangbusters fun. But I barely have the energy to do the calendar (my least favorite job and the one I procrastinate the most, and I know it's important, but I also know not that many people ever go there, and I keep wondering if all the energy I put into that damned page could possibly be worth it) and all 800 and growing of the other DallasArtsRevue pages.
The idea of producing another exhibition is daunting. But I know I promised one or more, and I know I need to, and I just can't see adding yet another major, unpaid task to my already mile-long list of those.
My recent vacation...
to my parents' house, all I could possibly afford, netted me another pro bono job rewriting and mixing in photographs of one whole wing of my Family History.
I suggested putting it on the web, where everybody could see it, but they want to make a nice printed package they can send everybody for Christmas
... was lovely and restful and essentially free, and I'm eternally grateful, but what I really need more than anything is more income coming in.
Luckily, happily, joyously, my one major continuing client, Joel Cooner of Joel Cooner Gallery, where I almost always love engaging with the work there, taking photographs to email to potential clients and putting together his extensive and ever-growing website, is coming back to stay and be there and me coming in once a week for the foreseeable future till next summer's financially draining him going off to Borneo and beyond.
I've been there, working my once or, rarely, twice a week for five years. The longest job — except this one — I've ever had and kept. I even recently got a substantial raise to the vicinity of what I'm worth and what would be a living wage if I worked there every week day instead of just once a week.
Wonderful, as it turned out, pipe dream.
Maybe I should give up that dream, too. Put together the CD full of digital images of prospective member exhibitors, write up the proposal, make the meetings in some far-flung DCCCD satellite college, engage their interest (and mine), wait, wait, wait, then finally have the show of some select few members and not have to worry about that particular issue for another couple of years.
If DallasArtsRevue is still going by then.
In one frame of mind I know I will always do DallasArtsRevue.
In a more practical frame, I have no idea how I can continue to do DallasArtsRevue. I need a job or several jobs. I need income.
Trouble is with income comes no energy for much else for a long time. Money to do it with, but no great desire or need to spend all that energy.
DallasArtsRevue could serve its community fairly well by just sitting there without a calendar or new stories for several months or years.
All active internet surfers have discovered sites out there promising another update real soon now only to discover it was last updated sometime last century. They just float along in the electronic aether like the Exon Valdiz, bubling crude, going nowhere...
If only I could learn to write puff pieces.
Never balance a nicey-nice statement with a neutral or negative word. Lie through my teeth. Engage in the whipped cream business of inflating egoes instead of informing a community. Ignore the quality of the work or the needs (not necessarily the wants) of the community.
Engage, instead of in serious criticism, in mindless promotion and puffery.
Everybody wants their work written about until there's anything negative to say.
Then I get letters like Lisa Lovegood's saying “J R Compton doesn't appear to have any respect for art or the people who create it. Next time, send someone” else.
What a concept! Send somebody else next time. As if I were some giant conglomerate with dozens of art writers, any one of whom would be happy to trapse around all some Saturday afternoon visiting jewelry sales in garages and studios where no work is ever done and artists who don't know what they're doing writing only good and positive stories to make everybody happy (except me, of course, and probably you) — somebody inherently better at it than that guy we sent out on that last job.
The absolute best thing about periods of Mercury Retrograde (Merc Rx) is that, after three weeks or 33 days (depending upon whether once believes in the ancillary Mercury Whiplash Theory) it's over. Energy returns to lives, appointments happen on time, email works again, browsers open the required dialog boxes online, the only thing flashing on digital cameras is the flash, and all is right with the world once again.
I can't wait.
Mercury starts going direct on August 15, then after whiplashing for maybe another week or ten days, life settles back into possibility and positivity and J R stops worrying for a few nanoseconds until the next crisis...
I guess the best thing I can possibly do is spend more time on my art and less time on DallasArtsRevue, which oddly, is just what I am doing these days. Just walked out to get my mail, felt the weather had cooled considerably, I was wondering how I could go this deep in the day and still no deep seated need to turn on the box, so I turned on the attic fan (PC term is whole house fan) and am enjoying a bit of breeze while I try to figure out what to do next, settling finally, on sitting in my best lax back chair with my best cat and wait for the next opportunity.