detail, Sean Visits Georgia O'Keefe, Sean Adams, 1984

I recently found some notebooks from my time in college. It’s nice to think that you’ve changed over time, matured, and found some wisdom. But these notebooks prove two things: I haven’t changed since I was 20 years old, and I was clearly insane. While other students were hastily taking notes about Roland Barthes, I was intently drawing the objects I deemed “mean.” The notebooks reveal a person obsessed with bizarre trivial ideas. Why did I create a narrative where Georgia O’Keefe serves me toast? I catalogued the world around me, which Southern California of the early 80s was new wave Vals (Valley teens), Bevs (Beverly Hills teens), and their shopping habits. I also include a page on semiotics to prove that while I was busy drawing LA Eyeworks sunglasses, I was also trying to understand structuralism.

The sad part of this, or the good part depending on your point of view is that my current notebook is no better. Today I finished a rather intricate drawing of a riverboat during a meeting.

Sean Visits Georgia O'Keefe, Sean Adams, 1984

detail, Sean Visits Georgia O'Keefe, Sean Adams, 1984

Portrait of Post Mods, Sean Adams, 1985

detail, Picture of Post Mods, Sean Adams, 1985

Art Things, Sean Adams, 1984

Nice Things, Sean Adams, 1984

Mean Things, Sean Adams, 1984

Picture of Different Glasses, Sean Adams, 1985

Actual notes, Sean Adams, 1985

Notebook cover, "Save me from the pig" added by me

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Citroén DS, Paris, 1960s

If you’ve seen the movie 2012, don’t. I don’t expect a movie about the entire world collapsing due to crustal displacement to be very realistic, but this one pushed it beyond the limit. I spent the entire movie saying, “Yeah, right,” or “You have got to be joking.” The biggest tragedy is when a Citroén DS is destroyed. Of course, the director of the Louvre drives a vintage Citroen DS. Don’t all French people? And the British only drive Jaguars. See, “Yeah, right.”

The Citroén DS is a sublime piece of sculpture. The first model was released in 1955. Production ceased in 1975. For those who appreciate an intellectual, rather than aesthetic, point of view, Roland Barthes wrote about the Citroén in 1957. In response to its showing at the Paris Auto Show, Barthes writes, “The object here is totally prostituted, appropriated: originating from the heaven of Metropolis, the Goddess is in a quarter of an hour mediatized, actualizing through this exorcism the very essence of petit-bourgeois advancement.” To which I respond, “Yeah? Of course.”

Citroén DS, 1959

Citroén DS, 1959

Citroén DS

Citroén DS

Citroén DS, 1957, interior

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