Maxi Boyd honors Bob the dubious artist with a spot in her art show memorializing our departed friends and loved ones

In memory of Albertine Sarrzin
Remembered by JNP, France

from the on-line and Toronto gallery art exhibition
"All My Friends Are Dead,"
by Maxi Boyd and fellow artists.

Several fine visual artists keep mistaking me and my strange, confused, substandard regrigerator art for visual art. I find this both mystifying, inexplicable and, of course, very flattering.

Well, I think I'm a good joke-teller, most of the time with words, but a joke is a joke whether you tell it with words or with pictures, so they laugh at my picture jokes and behave toward me as if I were an artist. I'm not complaining. This is a very high-class bunch of Kunstlers I have been allowed to hang with. In the coffee-table biography books about their lives and achievements, I'm the guy at the party in the third row behind the famous artists. I'm eating a sausage.

The highly talented and accomplished Toronto artist Maxi Boyd is one of the artists who -- for reasons she has never made very clear -- keeps confusing me with and accusing me of being a visual artist. It's almost Halloween, and her annual Halloween Show, an invitational from a large and worldwide community of artists, is entitled

"All My Friends Are Dead."

She has asked dozens of her artist pals to make works of art to memorialize dead friends and loved ones. I would describe the results, but

1. You can see the whole highly colorful and interesting show for yourself, and

2. The whole thing rather echoes and radiates the spirit -- both beautiful and creepy -- of Halloween, so if you know and like Halloween, you'll like the works of art and the ideas these artists have sent to Maxie.

And I'm one of them! My Vleeptron Talking Board and Planchette are there, on display, as well as a little bit of text about my dead friends and lovers and my relationship with them.

The original Talking Board post, with some comment about Communicating with the Dead, and a beautiful song about those who have foolishly left this "Sweet Old World" before they had to or before they should have or before I gave them my permission to leave, is here.

I don't know if Life is clearly superior to Death, because I know a lot about Life, and I know absolutely nothing about Death. I only know I wish my friends and my lovers wouldn't have died and left me here missing them.