The sun finally decided to show itself as it was setting tonight, putting an warm glow on what has otherwise been an overcast weekend. The sky has been flat. An empty plane that defines neither sky nor horizon and seems to suck the hours out of the day. It's been impossible for me to measure time the past couple of days beyond day/night. I spent part of the morning helping Alex and Nansi get my old iMac set up in their apartment, drinking wine before noon and smoking a little. Alex is reading Vincent Van Gogh's letters to his brother Theo, and I happened upon an article in a two year old copy of Smithsonian on the nine week cohabitation of Vincent and Paul Gaugin. Alex bears what one could call an ominous resemblence to Van Gogh as he painted himself not long after his release from hospital (where I was told he had his head shaved). He hasn't been working and I've offered to turn part of my apartment into a studio he can use when I'm gone from work, at least until he can find somewhere else to work, although I think all of his materials are still in Paris. He did manage to bring some new work back from France; he's doing more portraiture in graphite and monochromatic acrylics, some of the same motifs like the medical drawings, but also with more military themes. They cross over a little in that the military pieces (they are usually with the portraits in tryptics on linen canvases) seem to be of soldiers in biomedical suits, which of course links back to the doctors in masks. It further implies SARS. He seems to be tapped into current modes of thought as they relate to the danger of war and terrorism and pharmaceutical industries and the collapse of health care and economic anarchy without being conscious (or verbally explicit) of it. What a load of shit that last sentence is.