After the traditional birthday lunch with my mom and her husband, I decided to walk back to Brooklyn. I’m always after a novel route, so I decided to walk east to where Moses parted the tenements (Robert, that is) and turned them into a maze of grid bricks like suprematists and abstract painting and Russia and Stalin. I’ve been in Stuytown and some of the other developments over the years, but I’ve never taken in this huge stretch of brick housing in one good walk before. My meanderings ran from Kips Bay all the way down to Chinatown. It was like visiting a whole “other” Manhattan. I was thinking to myself how I’ve never really seen it used effectively in mass culture. For a city that’s been so thoroughly pictured in t.v. and movies, it’s amazing to me that no on has seen fit to find what a great character this architecture might play in a story. It got me thinking…

I am visiting the campus of some university and I go to the art department, which is in a large modern building. The ground floor is a well lighted, airy, white wall gallery. It is full of people coming and going to classes and studios upstairs. As an art show, someone has put an enormous real live black bull in the lobby. I know its art because it’s dressed in a well tailored orange suit. Someone asks me if I’d like to ride the bull. It’s very tame I’m told, but when I get on it of course starts bucking all around the lobby. Everyone scatters and I dismount. They apologize and ask me if I’d like to join a tour of the campus. I say, “I’ve already joined a taurus of the kick ass” No one thinks it’s that funny, but I’m self amused and I go walk my dog around the park-like university. I turn my head for a minute and she gets off leash and I run around for hours looking for the old dog. Seems there is a lake in the center of things and she’s gone swimming.

I was running around brooklyn to see a friends show and decided to bring my still camera and note pad and experiment with jamming together whatever I came upon. Someone was extoling the vitues of a buddhist teacher’s MP3s so I threw that in along with colin stetson and me muttering to myself.

working on grant, or rather avoiding working on a grant.

I’m at a meet up of Flickr, or Vimeo types: camera people. We are running around some strange, beautiful city shooting pictures and films and video. I use a strange digital camera with a pencil long lens shaft. It’s fairly small, but you can shoot thousands of pictures.