Gregory Smith: Trompe L'oiel Troubador

My friend Greg has been painting for nigh on sixty years now whilst eating nothing but peanut butter sandwiches and drinking Exxon Valdese grade Folgers coffee from tin cups resembling the aftermath of the Somme, but he is a legend in his own time. I met Greg while doing a piece on Bi Polar mania and Safety with Scissors. I was in deep cover as a teenage psychotic in one of the local nut wards and happened to stumble across a diamond encrusted in obsessive compulsive sucidal ideations. Gregory and I became fast friends and set out at once to overtake Walter Hagen on the Augustan plains where he chased little white balls and swilled mint juleps like a Twainian nightmare ne'r do well straight out of some nineteen twenties B movie horror flick. We would sit up late, engulfed in the OE and strumming "You Idiot" like madmen on an old Danelectro (with the wallpaper attached) and fly into song as soon as the sun came up above the snow covered hills of Matney. Ida Jones was never safe from the men coming to shovel her sidewalk and the goose hung high for nigh on 8 years until one of us felt like drinking again. These days its a shifty somnolence but we've been shaken from our lethargy by the wheels of time and the impending apocalypse. Just kidding. We're both the pragmatic sort and the lone hillside where the White Rock resides has been stilled by the deconstructionists and the howling of Flaming Lips and Junior Kembrough's illegitmate offspring. Fuck Art rules and Rita rides the prairie (I lost a fifth grade spelling bee because of that damnable word) shooting up the stars and flaunting her wares for the Hampshire Grenadiers and the Hellbrokers. You should be in myspace. You should be in my life. Ciao, darling.

--LC 11/11/06