Good god,
I thought for about one minute that Mr. Pettibon may have been quirky,eccentric and interesting based on his unusual oratory skills. I was however, so fucking wrong.
Children, this is what happens when you’ve taken one to many bong rips to the dome. I could barely resist the urge to go up and pound on his back while yelling “just get it out”. His speech was punctuated with so many non sequiturs and the increasingly frustrating inability to answer a question.
Here’s some highlights….
When discussing his baseball related work he instead opted to speak for 20 minutes about some obscure play in a game AT LENGTH, as if it had just occurred or was somehow relevant to his process. Hi, we’re at an art school and no one needs a play-by-play of a game that happened 40 years ago.
He chastized the audience for being at his talk rather than being “in Oakland”. Uhhh, excuse me? I would really like to make my own decisions about whether the whole Oscar Grant/Bart shooting incident and did he have any idea that there was a whole lot of reckless violence that coincided with protests.
Anyway, I could go on for ever about how much Raymond Pettibon killed my boner for him. I’m not saying I fancied him, but I would’ve preferred to keep him on a pedestal with all my heroes of yore.
Instead, he gets onstage in a sloppy dress shirt buttoned wrong and spills beer on himself every time he swigs and plays in a sucky band where he reads lyric sheets and stomps off angrily in the middle of his set after fighting with his bandmates.
Do me a favor and don’t go see him.
