Below is the latest The Pain -- When Will It End?
Updated 05/23/01

Artist's Statement

A variation on the city's gun and needle exchange programs. I believe I came up with this while sitting around on my porch drinking with friends--or else, more likely, someone else came up with it and I stole it.

In my idiosyncratic opinion the best thing in this drawing are the titles of the porn magazines: Smut, Slut, and Slit. (It seems like it would be possible to continue that series, altering only one letter in each variation to produce a plausible title for another porn magazine, but I haven't pursued that project yet.) The titles of the books being handed out
are in-jokes, although erudite readers will recognize them as some of the Great Hallowed Bores of western literature: Lawrence Sterne'sTristram Shandy (misspelled in this drawing) and the tetraology Parade's End, by Ford Maddox
Ford, were both recommended to me by friends, neither one of which I've been able to get more than twenty pages into, so impenetrably tedious are they, and Henry James's "The Golden Bowl" is the book a friend of mine always
refers to as epitomizing of the sort of turgid, unreadable shit he was forced to slog joylessly through in his graduate program in English Lit. He still utters the title with the same tone a Vietnam vet might use to pronounce the name of some village where he witnessed some unspeakable atrocity.

Another friend has since pointed out that this drawing would be funnier if the library was substituting the porn with musty classics once considered scandalous, like Lady Chatterly's Lover. She's right, of course, and I may revise it accordingly before I include it in the big Pain compilation.