Below is the latest The Pain -- When Will It End?
Updated 5/29/02

Artist's Statement

I found myself in one of those big chain bookstores a week or two ago, killing time while I waited for my showing of Spider-Man to start at a nearby theater. Man, those places creep me out. I really think there should be another name for products that are packaged like books but have as much to do with literature as N'Sync or Fear Factor do. It doesn't seem like Rick Russo's Empire Falls belongs in the same store as the unauthorized Britney bio or Chicken Soup for the Menopausal Soul. (Similarly, I never understood what graphic novels like Jimmy Corrigan or Perfect Example have in common with collectible Vampirella statuettes or Star Wars role-playing games, but for some reason they're all sold in the same places, too.) Basically I think of used bookstores as being the bookstores for smart people and the big chain bookstores as bookstores for dumb people--sort of like how Diane Rehm is the equivalent of Oprah for women with bachelor's degrees. I'm an elitist asshole, I know it. I can't help it. It's not that I think I'm all that intelligent. I don't. But when I look at other people--I mean, have you been to a shopping mall recently? My God.

Speaking of me not being all that intelligent, that's me in the SEX section, surreptitiously glancing through A History of the Ass. There really is such a book, by the way. I saw it at one of those chain stores a year or so ago. It wasn't by that title--it was called The Derierre in History and Art or some dumb, classy-sounding thing--but it was the same item, just a pretense to sell an upscale, legit-looking softcore "book" to the ass man market. I surreptitiously glanced through it. The asses weren't that great. But then, I am an ass man of the highest order. Even as a lecher I am a snob.