Electric Sumo, ITIN (mixed media)

White Phospherous Tracing, calk and chinese ink on canvas, ITIN ‘05

Pollokcodex, mixed media on panel, ITIN ‘05

I’ve got some sort of four year old plague from the cutest buddhist. So I’m doing shots of Tussin and lemon juice with pediatric Tylenol to cut the ache and pain. Dammn…. Is this shit actually leagal?

Laurie Anderson’s voice is Haunting me (as it has for years):

Full Fathom Five
They Father Lies
Of his bones are coral made
Those are Pearls that were his eyes
Nothing of him that doth fade
But that suffers a Sea Change
Into Something Rich and Strange
And I alone am left to tell the tale
Call me Ishmael

I expect her to show up in pimped out red ElCimino any moment.

Birthday Blues with an Ompossible Boink, ITIN (various & ‘05)

There was the big bang from the Ramoans and Ludwig Van and then the city openend up like it was my birthday (because it was and the Ferdinand the bull’s too) and I marched over the Cathedral B.K. Bridge and saw three presidential helicopters and I imagined Bucky had built a dome decree over lower Manhattan and it was a Mingus III boink three eyed smiley smile and all was well and good and mad and it was my birthday and the cherry blossoms were falling all around and words were flowing out like endless petals and blanketing the yellow brick road and I wept to see you suffer though I didn’t know you well and all my life was a tapestry beneath the flowing beer and he you were dressed in black and unraveling and taking me back to the three eyed balloon. I was Elvis and Le Roi Orbison… singing for my dinner and…

Are you sleeping, brother Droog?

Fiddlehex, ink on Japanese paper, ITIN ‘05

Last night I was up till four in the morning. The better half got home late and I’d been nodding off on the couch watching arrested developement on dvr. I told her all about my lunch with Josh Fagin (or dinner with André…?) and it wound me back up like a balloon and then I came upon Kubrick right at the climax where the kid is tagging up redrum with the lipstick and Jack is swinging the axe and there is this disorienting camera move like it’s the axe POV!? How fucking brilliant is that scene and Jack is over the top and chewing the scenery to make Pacino blush and it is just right and I think about how 90% of the public remember Jack with his “Here’s Johnnie,” line, or also Cuckoo’s Nest.

I’d been looking at the Gates Memory article in Time Out and wondering if my orange you glad? is still available for downloading and suddenly the little boy is running in blue ice box shrub labirynth with that wild (first time seen by me) steadycam shot… which to my young eyes looked lika an impossible dolly to rival the opening of Touch of Evil. I was thinking how The Shining is a kind of anti gates… a color contratst: terror to joy - private to public, fantasy to new realism… etc…

So I start working on redrum and suddenly a raft of three thirty illustrations from Mingus III comes over the e-mail. So here’s Mingus jamming on the boink boink which was a three eyed smiley face that I used as my toilet tag on condom machines etc. in Paris: BOINK 2K - for fuck the year 2000. Our way of saying that the 2K was being over hyped by greedy high tech con men. Ooops, right again. So here goes MINGUS III solo:

Fiddle Sticks, Charles Mingus III (with ITIN background) ‘O5

I was looking at this picture and was overcome with a wave of nausea so intense that salt water poured into my mouth and I nearly puked. Was it the Mingus, or the Kubrick? Pink Pepto saves the day and the sweetie rubbing the buddha belly don’t hurt neither.

Laurie Anderson

And I fell asleep to the words of Luarie Anderson and The Nerve Bible throbbing of her electric voice and fiddle. She is just so clever that it is a little like listening to your own thoughts.

Somehow this has me thinking of my old job in the Pearl Paint shop when Vincent Gallo was coming in all the time (redoing his loft after Buffalo ‘66). He was in Gray with JMB and so we talked about his work and Gallo thought his real contribution was his SAMΩ(megg) t.m. poetry. Gallo was a lovely freak, but really facinating and charismatic and fun to talk to with - his manic energy and mine in that little HDC on Lispenard. He’d ride off with his girlfriend on the back of the bicycle holding five gallon tubs of Venetian Plaster. He was fun and David Cross made me laugh too. I learned a lot about different non-fine art paint finishes there and then SAMO turned me into Swigger and it was all over in a week of D.C. madness throwing my pearls before the Dukes and Barrons and Earls and Counts (who peppered the crowd at the Bash) and the Swine who filled the rest of that fair Southern/African city.

I went to the Vietwall with a bottle of Absolut Mandarin (I had hundreds of dollars stuck in the pockets of my suit from selling souvenir book drawings and one big Spoerri/Schnabel commemortive Clinton plate portrait) which I poured over a particularly good drawing and then the whole memorial smelled of oranges and then I lit it on fire and it was my way of getting into the Smithsonian Collection before I died - whicha as far as I knew, could be any minute. I bought a bunch of Korean War battle pins and wore them on my valise for years (five and six point stars… who knew the seventh army was Jewish?) and pinned one on Bill Batson’s Vetran dog walker who had no insignia, but had sad memories of Korea. Here I am as Swigger the Swiss Nigger:

A Bash Fit For A King Documentation, Wyatt Closs ‘99

Killed a Wabbit, Killed a Wabbit…, ITIN ‘O5

Where The Fuck Is Prescott Bush, Charles Mingus III ‘05

Today was a day like any other except much much better. I was greeeted at the door by a Witness and took their literature in honor of Orwell and being Down and Out in Paris and London and Honolulu and New York and Basel… etc.

Took the orange dog (Zuzu Pearl Bailey) to the park for the first time since her operation. She is now sleeping in fuzzy red ball on her gray bed.

Yesterday was full of words, so today I will try to tell as much as I can in pictures. Mentor is Orson and the collector with his arc along the watchtower.


The philosopher stone called his emmaculate collection The Ark yesterday. I laughed and thought of Kane. How could a man as young as Orson (or JMB for that matter) know so much about growing old. It’s like he told his own story before he lived it…Sort of like Heroes and me (Villain?…I try not to be)

I met a couple just back from their honeymoon. She plays a viola…suomething. A big viola and played last Easter in the Basel Munster. He is from Austria.

They gave me this 1968 film magazine, because I knew all the films listed on the back. Dustin Hoffman is my mother and Ben’s favorite actor.


And Bailey got to see her old friend and sometime sparing partner, Snowflake the wolf dog. I got to see Donna (brilliant handmade filmmaker, N.Y.U. multimedia teacher, and former RISD student of Dadi Wirz). We laughed and laughed and talked about movies and music and met the above couple and I quoted spalding gray:

All the stories I’m telling you tonight are true, except one: the banana sticks!”

Right on cue we came upon a pair of bananas just sitting on the stoop. Did I tell you my mom e-mailed from Spain just as I was writing about my dad’s last sleep? I think she may be the Good Witch of Long Island, or something pagan like that. My mom, the telepsychic.

Spinner Face, Krista Grauer, ‘03 (S. Choi Collection)

“You’re sitting in a dentist’s chair, and they’ve got music for you there to add some music to your day… ” - B. Wilson.

I had strange and woderful conversations yesterday with my brother Christian, Marie-Pierre Nakamura, Kate Rothschild, my attorney, and Allan Stone.

The atheist Christian was in Calli at some experiential education conference. He was in a good mood and chatty and (in true big brother didactic professorial know it all form) correcting my timeline on the old man’s death. Relativity and relatives… Time and space are what you make of them.

Allan had some oral surgery and is now regretting it. He came down with the big C right around the time my dad was dying. Allan chose the road less traveled and believe me, it has made all the difference…ie. he’s alive.

I’m still convinced that it was a route canal that killed the old man. I’m praying that Allan is on top of the crystal bugs that escape with serious tooth work…

I suggest listening to Coltrane, or Monk, or whatever lifts your immune system, but for sure: add some music… kick it root down… doctor Alex’s orders.

Dead Nature with Little Soldiers, ITIN/CHOI ‘05

I’ve been reading Yellow Submarine to UGI the cutest buddhist and he is singing all the time: “All you need is love” and I am melting like a chocolate easter bunny held too tightly in the hand.

All the paterfamilas jive has got me thinking of the time I played my last game of catch with the old man. Oh yeah, it was after he had already died. Those of you out there who went to my old man’s funeral have already heard this story. It was my uligi, or eugi, or eulogy, or whatever.

I think I’d got you to the point where the old man was sleeping soundly…

In the morning he awoke swollen like Verucca Salt (or was it Violet Bick?…) in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. He was huge and silent and in need of a shit. The thing about my dad is that he was a fairly proud and stubborn man. The home care workers had given us (sold us) bed pans and a portapotty, but he wasn’t having any of it. For months he shook off whatever opiate stupor he was feeling and sat on his porcelain throne like the king he seemed to me as a child. He tried to maintain dominion over his failing lands, like Lear slowly going mad with the pain and drugs and cancer.

On the day after his infant sleep, we tried to move his blueberry body towards the yellow bathroom, but he crashed against the cork doors and couldn’t go forward or back and so I peeled the plastic off the flimsy portapotty and he sat there in the living room swelling up.

You see, his lymph system had shut down over the past 48 hours and all the water he would usually process through that reptilian system of canals was backing up and flooding the Holland of his boddy. I was just a little Dutch boy and nothing would stem the flood. He sat on that portable potty for what seemed like hours and in his eyes you could see him getting smaller, while his body grew and grew.

He did not die like Elvis in Memphis. We shot him full of morphine and put him to bed - we’d moved it close to him in the living room and he fell into a sleep again. But this sleep was different and began with a distant rumble like thunder on the horizon.

It was the beginning of the death rattle… Where all the water broke the dyke of his flesh and headed for air…his lungs. The sound grew hour by hour and into the night… like forboding… like a drunk snoring in an imposssibly long breath. You’ve never heard a noise like it, unless you’ve heard that noise.

At about four in the morning the house went suddenly - weirdly - silent.

The king was dead: Long Live The King.

Le Roi… Le Roi… Le Roi!

And my mother started laughing hysterically. My brother Christian and I looked at her as if she were posessed.

I thought, “Great. Dad is dead and my mother has gone insane. What am I, Job?”

She said, “He’s in me. I can feel him. He’s inside me and he loves me…aaaha ha ha ha…..oooooooooooooo……” She was raving now. “Oh,” she said now becalmed. “He’s gone.”

I thanked my lucky stars, when suddenly something tickled my insides as I took a breath. I started laughing, like an idiot.

It was as if I’d taken a bong hit of GOD. He was inside me and playing my ribs like Lionel Hampton. The tune was ridiculously inappropriate laughter. The text was, “Thank you, thank you, Danke Schoen….”

It went on for some time and then suddenly, like an ejaculation of spirit, out of the place where the Jews wear a yamuka and the Mets wear a blue ball cap… in a great gallactic woooosh…. he was gone.

We turned off all the oxygen and so I could light candles now and I used the matches and wax to draw fatty ash portraits of his dead face.

my mother has those drawings, so this Fasnacht mask will have to serve as a metaphor, or stand in untill I can scan those deathmask portraits. It captures the feeling perfectly. Mummanschanz

When all was said and done and the room was made empty and the all the candles had flickered out and the morphine was poured down the drain by our home care nurse (who only a month later suffered a brain anurism and ended up the patient… fate is cruel)… I was suddenly unemployed. You have to understand, I left my studio, my woman, my life and married the dying of my father. I was, like Sinatra, a man alone.

This is at it’s core a story about design and gardens. When my father decided to shut down his graphic design company, Visualconcepts, he was an old dog. He’d tried to bring my brother into the business, but the computer revolution seemed to spell the end of his craft. He thought any idiot with a computer could make good design and his top dollar prices would disappear (boy was he wrong, but that’s what it looked like to a painter who was essentially a faker as a graphic designer… sure he’d gone to the Kunst Geweberschule in Basel, but he was a painter… only the Americans were fooled - and he walked off the boat a typesetter and into a plush New York international-style-modern office an Art Director… he told me on smack nod, “I’m a faker… I wanted to paint… I don’t know anything about graphic design… I just know what I like… slap some sans serif type face over a good picture and voila!” … he thought himself Salieri in Amadeous - just smart enought to see a good picture, but not quite smart enough to make one… he thought of himself as a sort of overpaid picture framer… I, however, had to lay out the pills and the vials and the tubes and cans - on a laquer tray of his choosing…everything had to be in place… drugs, tissues, strange alternative essiac tea, shark cartiledge… I think he was a Japanese Samurai… which makes him an okay designer in my book… but it was that Daffy Duck seppuku comedy routine… you can only do it once… I was the grateful audience).

MEAT OF THE STORY:

So in retirement, my father read the sunday times and saw an article in the magazine about a moss garden in Kyoto, Japan. I don’t think I need to talk about the connections between Japan and Modernity and Swiss design philosophy here. If you don’t see it, please do research. Start with Art Nouveau and Monet, and Van Gogh and… fuck it: Modernity is simply the West digging the East and now vice versa.

He said to me, “Lexi look at this moss garden. Do you think we could do something like that in the swamp? Moss always grew well there.”

I said,”Sure, but dad, read the article. Moss is a tricky woman. It takes forever to grow. This thing is tended by serious monks who have stepped out of the Karmic Circle to return again and again to tend the moss. It took thousands of years to make that moss Garden… That’s where Amataratsu lives, man. This isn’t casual sunday gardening, this is religion and Nation. Nippon des ka?.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he said dissmissively. “I’m just saying that it burns me up that the swamp by 684 is feral…We could make it beautiful… I think I’ll do it. A river garden! Like Giverney.”

And I knew enough to know it was a fait accompli, but the thing is that when a man in his late sixties begins to build a path to the river…

I didn’t like the garden. He would call me at ridiculous hours of a sunday morning saying, “Lexi, there is a two hundred pound boulder I need to move in the Japanese garden, I’ll pick you up. We’ll have lunch and then we’ll move he stone.”

I’d say in groggy voice, “Dad, man, I was up painting till sunrise… let me sleep.”

“Good,” he’d say. “I’ll be there in an hour.”

I’d sleep for two and a half hours and get a call, “Lexi, never mind. With you mother and lever I moved it myself. But if you’d like a nice lunch…”

And I’d go over and have white wine and sandwiches and see the progress on… well you could call it THE WORLD.

So when his corpse was in the hearse and the spirit and shot through me and the drawings were drying and the sun was coming up like a big bald head, I went out to his garden:

this was me around then… skinny, happy, dumb, and poor, but I had to walk over the lame ass arch bridge my brother had built (oh he was put in cahoots too…. we all were, but Christian who was in Colorado and too far away and ironically too atheist to get involved) and then you landed on an Island called St. Helena. In other words, you entered this fiction world by way of my mother… which is presumably the way you entered this world. You arrivec first on St. Marcel… the father and from there the Isle de St Louis and the Isle de Cité… further on past bamboo and grasses were CDA (Chirtian, Damon, and Alexandre) and the Okeefenokee. Now the Okeefenokee was the never never land at the end of the garden… it was purgatory.

I don’t know what my dad was talking about, but I remember like yesterday’s rain the map he drew so carefully when I broght my (then new) sweetie to visit. There was a mythology to the place. It was his greatest composition… Solierei my ass.

Garden Map Recreation, ink on Japanese paper, ITIN ‘05

That day of days I walked out there with the laughter and tears still in my lips. The sun was coming up still and the world was bald and blue (here comes the sun king)… in a notch before the arch bridge (which turned into something like a three angle hexagon bridge because my brother liked straight lines) I found a single yellow tennis ball… I think it was a Spalding.

These balls would floast down from HAL… I’m sorry: IBM, and jam in the nooks and crannies of the moss garden. My father would trap and bag them like furrs and bring them to my Yale Lock Factory (LAA… looks like ALE from I-95) studio and my first solo show at Sound Shore Gallery was all what the big man had fished out of the Byram River for his son (you can give a man a ball, or you can teach him to catch a ball…)

So I picked up the ball and negotiated the labiryth path to St. marcel and I thought to myself that Plato and Bucky spoke of perfect shapes… I thought that a sphere must be the most perfect and so I threw that little Spalding ball into the current of the river and it stuck.

I meand to say that it sat in the middle of a current, smiling at me at its seems and then…

It came back.

I thought, “That’s pretty fucking weird, man.” And threw the ball back in to the spring-running water and it stuck again.

Now you must dig me, this was no eddy in the stream. I watched leaves and sticks and shit flow by the Spalding, but it stayed loyal, like a dog and always smiling back at me.

So I sat down and did my om nam renge kyo chant and then said, “Dad, really. Man, you are freaking every one out. Just go. I love you, but I want you to go.”

And I threw spalding back into the flow and it came right back and I picked it up and threw it without saying a word. I heard a nightingale cry out, like an infant and when I looked back, Spalding-dad was gone and I followed the flow all the way to the Okeefenokee. The ball had traveled an impossible distance and avoided a myriad of briar patches.

I like to think it made it to the sea, but it, at least, made me see:

There is more on Heaven and Earth than is contained in your Philosophy Horatio.

So if you are ever hitting the skids, I guess you should ask the first attractive face you see: “To be, or not?”

Hope and pray that the answer is: “Vivre”

But remember George… All Things Must Pass.

Tunnel (from arc installation), oil on cigar box, ITIN ‘04

Sophmore year of college I worked as dishwasher at chez rattez (or Sharpe Refectory) to earn money to get me back to Paris so I could finish my novel Heroes (or To Walk a Circle). It was the story of two kids Phil and Pat (who went by the name Niz). Niz was a punk rocker who I’d seen on the left bank four of five years earlier. He and Hemmingway inspired my sixteen year old brain to try writing a novel when my Parents and I lived at the American Cathedral on Ave. George V for a month (more on this trip later). I started seeing this guy in his red leathers and mohawk all over Paris. He haunted me like a ghost, so I started asking myself: “Who is this guy? What’s he doing in Paris? Is he a drug addict? Heroin?”

Ironically, the main character turned out to be this sullen Dead Head, Phil. Niz sort of spiraled out of control on heroin and hash, where as Phil met the daughter of the U.S. ambassador to France… they had a stalking sort of love affair all over Paris. Phil wanted to be a painter long before I did. You could say his is directly responsible for my becoming a painter (my father was a failed painter… it didn’t seem like a great career choice even at 16). It was Phil and Caroline (more on her later). I blame both of them… and the old man too if we’re throwing stones.

Flash forward and I’m 19. I’ve been on Heroes for Five years… workshopping it in Brown Fiction writing classes (where British types tell me it may not be appropriate to name a novel after a pop song?!). I want closure on it, already. I decide to take a solo trip (the one I ended up doing in ‘98), when my rabbi and attorney with the shared name of David… (me middle, him first), but he is a Cohain and I’m …I don’t know what I am, Russian Gypsy by way of Basel, that was what my father liked to think (and you do find Itins only in Switzerland and Russia)…

Anyways, my attorney calls from Yale and tells me He’s coming to Paris too. I figure he’ll play Niz and I’ll play Phil. Flash forward to the Dordogne where Davey baby has hooked us up with lodging at the local castle. His Yalie pal who has been nick named Chateau at school because he lives in one, let’s us crash with his dad (a famous American writer of Russian spy thrillers) and his knock out of a young French Paramour. We drink the local near rosé red wine from a cask in the celler by the oubliette. I start reading Saughter House Five for the first time and editing my Heroes draft.

One day we made a picnic and walked along the unused train tracks that slither snake-like around and through the green hills of Dordogne. Chateau pulled out a ball of black finger hash and we climbed into a fenerated castel-like turret to smoke and drink the wine. The spice like perfume smell mixed with vin rouge and the green alfalfa and the safron sunflowers growing in the fields: a perfect moment - all along the watchtower, princes kept the view.

After lunch we walked along the rails and smoked more and came to a kilometer long tunnel. You couldn’t see the other end and we walked into the darkness where the wine and hash grabbed my brain and I became existentially high… it was almost a flashback (I’d taken LSD earlier that year at a Grateful Dead show and had messianic hullucinations… the world was a lotus flower dream and I had to sheperd all the people I knew because they were essentially characters in my dream… it was a sort of writer’s trip I guess… The ony song I remember from the show is Dylan’s Quinn The Eskimo).

I realized suddenly that I was in a tunnel and that tunnels are a metaphor for death. I realised that I was surrnounded by two Jews and the trinity came harshly to mind.

“I’m in a tunnel surrounded by these two people who are thieves and they will steel my face. They will kill me and I will be a skull… Alas poor Yorick.”

We got deeper into the tunnel and suddenly I realized that the entire history off narrative was a conspiracy leading up to this moment: Metaphors for death, no! All metaphor had been invented so that I could know what a metaphor was so that I could read this murder metaphor at this moment… this moment when I would die!

I walked the train ties in terror, waiting for my friends to draw their long knives and butcher me: initiate me into their world of the dead. The hash was a trick…. A trap. I walked and waited and walked and waited, listening for their footsteps to change in the solid dark, listening for the sound of steel unsheathed and the stick of the bare bodkin… when Low and Behold we were coming again to the light. You could see it in the far distance… a white speck at first, like a star. Was it Paradise? Was it doom? Were we three thieves, or three kings?

And then we were back in light and back in day and I was still alive and staring face to face with a purple wild flower. The Flower glowed in purple and yellow and I swear I could see it breathing and hear it smile at me.

I said to myself, “So this is what the hippies meant by flower power.”

Never have I fealt such relief. The whole Universe changed flavor.

“What’s a metaphor,” I said to myself - quoting Meera Viswanathan, my Indian teacher of Japanese Literature (don’t ask… she was a real beauty who’d stumbled on to Buddhism by way of Keuroac… Sidhartha by way of Hesse…)”What’s a Meddow for? To feed a Cow, of course.”

The Swiss in me loved that bovine joke as much as the Hindu in her did. I laughed and laughed and later we stayed up drinking wine and scotch with the writer and his lover and he talked for a long time about Vonnegut and other writers I should read and he signed a book for me: October Circle…weird.

Mr. Bubble - Plato’s Perfect Hex

When The old man was kicking (and this is the central story of Arc) he saw a dark tunnel in my mother’s closet. I woke her up at four in the morning to move his huge medical bed. She resisted, but I remembered how much looking at that flower had changed my head way back when in the French country side. I’d done his terror trip already. I knew how to calm him down…take him home.

I said to my mother, “Wake up we’re moving the bed. He’s scared of that closet.”

“What closet?”

“Your closet. The one Christian and Damon used to lock me in. It’s a scary place. Trust me. He sees a tunnel. He’s scarred.”

“It won’t help.”

And my father, perhaps hearing his wife’s voice for the first time in hours, let loose a cry of fear and anguish, “There’s a girl under the bed. She’s dying! Save her, Cookie (it was his term of endarment for her). Save her!”

I said, “Mom, I’m the only one in this room whose done enough acid to know that he’s having a bad trip. We’re moving this bed to look out into the rock garden. It will make him calmer… Please believe me! NOW!”

He was screaming about the girl, the tunnel, and the house on fire… He was Willy Lowman and the trees were burning and morphine and she climbed out of a sleepless marital bed and we moved his elaborate contraption bed towards the growing dawn and he instantly calmed…. like oil on the foaming sea.

He looked at the orange birds of paradise that someone had sent as a bouquet. Earlier they had appeared to him as Picasso Guernica hands… Picasso hands on fire, but now as the sun came up like an egg, he said (and these were to be his last words to me and my mother):

“If you look at it differently, It’s really quite beautiful.”

And he fell into a peadeful sleep, like a baby in his mother’s arms … he hadn’t slept in 48 hours… none of us had. The room went all blue and peaceful moving into orange.

My mother has always counted herself a Christian. Her grandfather wrote The Greatest Story Ever Told. She cried like a baby when I told her years earlier that I had tried pot (Roger Waters with Eric Clapton). She cried worse when I told her of my experiments with acid (Dead). It hurt me to hurt her, it is true.

I, however, am eternally grateful to The Dead to have been able to give my father his last good sleep, so he would be well rested for the next morning from which he would never awake. It was a gift… a mitzvah.

Bucky Tries Angles, circa ‘64

I had meant to talk about Dungeons and Dragons and how God doesn’t play dice, he plays D and D with octohedrons, etc. I don’t know, maybe I did do that. And When I put the i-tunes on and lit insence and candles Stevie Wonder laughed at me for being “very superstitious”… also a gift from the rabbi cohain… Weird.

MBNA Paris pig, ITIN ‘98 and Willoughby study ‘04

This porcelain pig is filled with ten thousand dollars woth of Paris credit card receipts. Film is expensive and so is drawing paper and so is life. She is a sort of good luck altar fetish. She is Porco Rosso, the wine swilling pig. She is a few years of therapy rolled into a couple months in Montmartre at the turn of the century.

I’ve been reading a book on heraldry in honor of the Basquiat show at BAM. I wanted to know more about crowns and what the various shapes of crowns mean… well actually I found the book in the street and it interested me because of JMB. You see a lot of crowns on bottles of red red wine.

The brain dead lady couldn’t eat the host yesterday. According to NPR, she could only have a little bit of wine. It’s the only sustenance she’s had in days… Sounds like a real Parisean.

For the Easter Feaster we had sustenance: little lambchops in a balsamic reduction… couldn’t be beat. The wine was a Chateau Talbot (maybe a bit young… but still a real journey in a glass).

One of the initial inspirations for omEGG was Wine. I started this about a year or six months before I even heard of Sideways… me and the Zeitgeist… but anyway I wanted to talk about culture and vitriculture… about Romans and roads and arenas and aquaducts… and mostly wine. If you are a Eropean, wine is your culture. Without it there is no reason to organize anything (this reminds me of Herzog in the South American jungle for Fitzcaraldo trying to organize the native extra’s booze… A Burden of Dreams for sure). There’s no farms, no towns, no cities, no armies, no nothing without the grape.

The other vibe was that omEGG is set in the spring after 911… I don’t know ’bout you all, but I got to taste some good wine that year. There was a whole lot of carpé diem: let’s drink today for tomorrow we die and those about to die salute you going on. I kept all these labels and used them for background plates in omEGG. It is a habit I started in Paris. Labels are such the illuminated text by themselves… they contain hyper information… codes and clues. For instance, both the Chateau Talbot and Pichon seem to be from dukedoms…


at least judging from crowns, but it says Comtesse… well its a book on British Hereldry for children. I’m just saying the crowns can be deciphered along with chateau and region and varietal and on and on. They are like Tarot cards, you have to know how to read them and be a wine geek, which I’m not… just a wino. Still, I like the idea of illuminated bottles and this is why I paint them for the holidays, or to commemorate something like the gates, or…

I did a lot of bottles after 911 (just to keep from drinking everything in the house while watching the news). A year later my better half and I drank them in honor of the dead. You can still see some empties in the window of Blanc et Rouge in dumbo.

Max play with the PSP, Damon Itin ‘05

Well the nephew got the PSP (or actually his parents got it for themselves…hmmm) for Easter. This thing points the way to a device that is a book and a toy and t.v. and and ipod and a phone, and a blackberry,and an i-book, etc. Anyway we are getting close and Sony is the best word that means nothing ever.

Ben was posting on if book about the new generation of apple products that may or may not come out. They sound nice, but the PSP is here, maybe not as sexy as a v-pod, but Don’t put on any aires when you’re down on Rue Morgue Avenue…. I can’t afford any of it.

It was one of those days where you draw a strange hexapentahex and then end up seeing galleries full of hexa-octagon paper bags (O.K. Harris) or Emma Kunz (drawing center) doing even weirder things with hexes and pentas and cruciforms. It feels like you’re on an easter egg hunt and each egg holds a clue to the location of the next egg, but actually I was with my better half and her sister. Her sister has had a crummy winter and when women are unhappy, I have learned they like to shop… She was off on a mission to find an easter basket… or rather a pink handbag. In and out of boutiques in Nolita and SoHo… there’s a lot of pink handbags in New York…. we saw all of them.

I got bored and drew the pentahex in honor of pagan bunnies and eggs and orgies that have been filling my aching head since the full moon. I cut off after luch to see some galleries. The ladies continued to follow the bunny trail and I fell further down the rabbit hole.

First, I saw the dumbest show on earth at Deitch Projects: David LaChapelle - Prostitutes and Artists. By artists I guess he means actors and comparing actors to whores is just so obvious that….never mind. It just made me roll my eyes and get depressed…

Luckily I followed my nose and the sweet smell of cigar smoke to O.K. Harris and low and behold: Philip Pavia sitting on a modernist throne surrounded by some of the best heads in New York - I mean his sculptures and drawings. Here is work that will be interesting a hundred years from now and would’ve been interesting a hundred years ago. It is, in short: honest.

Or ernest. The line from the play that this entry is named after comes to mind: (Dame Maggie Smith says): “A Haaaaaaand Baaaaag????!”

As the Grateful Dead say (in The Other One into Black Peter… the song that is subtext on Arc Along the Watchtower): “Coming around, coming around, coming around…etc.”

Coming around to B.K. in the gathering gloom and cold, I saw a Christo orange shopping cart in the middle of Union Street. It was empty except for a single book. Dante’s Divine Comedy was sitting in the folded down children’s seat like a toddler off to purgatory. I put it in my pocket and when I got home my mother had sent me a post card from Navarra (my favorite rosé) Spain. She and Hooker spent the night in that tall tower of the castle below… it is a State run Hotel now (a Parador and $75 a night… thank you generalissimo Francisco Franco and the Socialists who took your place now that you are still dead).

So life is some strange coinciDANCE, or bunny trail dotted with clues. Like last week when I was with Ben in B.burg and we got onto how I’d found Moby Dick in the street on the same day he started rereading it. We got onto a discussion of Melville as we smoked cigarettes in the street (like Clark and the narrator in Willoughby)… Up pulls a cherry red, pimped out ElCamino with the licence plate: Moby Dick.

There is more on heaven and earth than is contained in my philosophy…grace under preassure… Death and rebirth in the afternoon… Ferdinand the bull.

Newark Airport, ITIN ‘O5

The best thing about Newark airport - asside from its architecture of hexagons is that the Annehuaser Busch people are brewing beer next door and the whole lovely Jersey sky fills with the smell of hops and barley. A drunkards dream, if I ever did see one.

Boss Hex, ITIN ‘05

sphere from omEGG, ITIN ‘04

All this Borges talk reminds me of a sketch I drew for the ideal viewer for a piece that was then called New York Idyll and is now called omEGG (a love story). The idea was that both characters wold have a time line that overlapped in one arena, or picture plane that was controlled by a third character - the viewer, god, the eggman, M. Tristan, etc. The two really important characters would be the lovers (hey I’m a romantic with a roman nose who wants to make what the French call a Roman….so arena is the right word).

The arena hexagon would be a sort of layer or double exposure zone. The information held in one time line stream would react with the information in the other characters time line stream (sort of how babies end up as combos of mom and dad) - the images in the arena would be always changing and more than the sum of their parts. Also one characters change in arc would affect the way the other charcter looked in the arena even if his/her timline remained stationary.

This whole idea goes back to manic night of drawing and drinking at a friends bartending gig on the lower east side. I drew up a storm and bought an Argus camera for ten bucks and a drawing from a second hand store. It was army green bakelite bodied camera with the odd quirk that if you didn’t advance the film you could just keep snapping the shutter. Instead of taking a series of photos, you could just make one very complicated one… which is what I started doing for a few months and spending ruinous amounts of money doing it. Here is a pictue of Richard Sera I took using this camera and my method. He looked at me strangely as I snapped away around him without advancing the film: “Cubism,” I told him.
Richard Serra Installing Torqued Elipses, ITIN ‘97

There is a lot you can do layering visual information. It would be nice to work at Eyebeam (where I applied for a residency) because there isn’t really a chance in hell of me figuring out the technical question on making such an interface for omEGG. Right now it’s a pretty nifty TK3 book. Samples are available from the top banner.

Basel Munster (which like my local BK church can also be rented out as a Synagogue…I guess). I’d never seen this in a Gothic Cathedral, or even on this cathedral where I was Baptised untill Fasnacht 2002 and I was delighted to discover that the Baslers at least weren’t afraid of the HEX.

Devil With A Blue Dress, Blue Dress, Blue Dress…, mixed media on a blue dress, ITIN ‘O5, Willoughby Scrolls, playing card

This is a new painting (in progress?) that I did on Kate’s blue Brown Senior Formal dress. It also has bits of Gucci boot bag (seen below). The two scrolls contain the story of Willoughby which I drew during a long depression after Bush won the election….from about November to January. They are the spine of the story, all else is vestigal fetuses (plural?). The playing card I found in the P.S. 32 playground where the chalk drawings were photographed. Infinity goes back up on trial.

Paris Blues on in the background (Pops in Paris….Roll over Beethoven). It is good to see that Joanne Woodward was ounce as beautiful as Paul Newman (a relief actually). Paris in ‘61… talk about infinity on trial.

Willoughby Shops, ink on vellum, ITIN ‘05

I was watching a documentary on Hitchcock last night and (a guilty pleasure) Project Greenlight. It got me thinking on some of the logistics of Willoughby shopping and eating (the stuff that is not on the scrolls already worked out). I’ve been struggling with a sandwich drawing for about a week and then yesterday I threw it in the trash and quickly drew a beautiful sandwich. Turns out I was drawing the wrong sandwich. I was drawing a club, I wanted (or Clark wanted) a hero sandwich.

heroesandwich from Willoughby, ink on vellum, ITIN ‘05

It’s a little ironic because Clark is the Villain, but a compelling Villain always acts and thinks as if he were the hero.

Ben sent a link to me in the comments on European History part 1 to a great Borges piece,The Library of Babel. While I have a small familiarity with Borges, I hadn’t encountered his library idea… yet somehow he describes what I’ve been thinking about for many years (must be that ideas, like language are viral… and books are a sneeze and I caught hexagons from bucky). Here look at this cross section of a lotus stem:



Where as before I had only seen an annoying brand name boot bag that my sweetie spent far too much money on, now I see a model for infinity and multipath narrative structure. Thank you Gucci. The hexagonal scales fall from my eyes. They say the full moon is a traditinal time of revelation and at 4:00p.m. we go full. In the words of OZZY: “Bark at the Moon.”

This said: I woke up at 5:30 this morning with a large railway spike stuck into my left brain. It took asprin, advil, and finally aleve to end this migrain (amd its still floating on the horizon). I don’t know how people live in chronic pain. I become a scary monster. I’ve been yelling at my dog all morning… she likes to follow me from room to room, but today her little claws on the wood floor sound like nails on a black board.

baptismal tchotchke, pewter plate with Basel Munster, circa ‘71

This thing seems to have eleven sides…it goes up to eleven…

There were three years where if I had died, I would have gone straight to nowhere… purgatory. All you Dante fans know what I’m talking about… I was not Baptized till I was three… so I actually remember that scarry kraut putting a water mark on my third eye and Peter the Basel Butcher (biblical rock and head of the Midevil Butcher’s Guild and frequent Fasnacht piper) carried me up the aisle. I was terrified, like Sophia Coppola in God Father II. Only Peter was my God Father and still is, but he’s probably killed a lot more things than any mafia Don could dream of. He kills for living and has a collection of many sharp knives… ancient steel… Swiss steel.

This goes back to my question about the body and language. Peter’s wife (not my Godmother, who is Trudi and lives on a sheep farm in Whales) had the same cancer as my old man, only the Swiss kept cutting it out with their sharp steel and she’s still alive… it is a struggle and they butcher her again and again, bus she’s alive. The old man they refused to cut at Sloan Catering. So the ghouls filled him full of strange drugs and took away his clothes and things and like that vega table lady in the news: fed him by tubes and killed him with indescriminite Chemo and never even gave him a bong hit to ease the pain… but I digress.

It all some how reminds me of my first nervous breakdown I had during a final examn for Martha Nussbaum. She kept talking about the fragility of goodness and Greek Tragedy. Little did I know I was walking into one. I had been dating this rich Hawaiian Japanese girl and her mother decided to fly me out to Hawaii as a Christmas gift… that would have been stressful enough, but this creepy South African Jew (son of an arms or diamond dealer no doubt and a real pig and apparently rich as pig shit) was threatening to join us and make it a cozy threesum (the girl liked to think this guy was just a friend, but who are we kidding?…and sho’ ’nuff, he eventually he got in her pants… I knew he was trying, the mother knew he was trying, the sister, the brother, even the estranged father knew… she really couldn’t have been that dumb… for chrissakes she’s a E.R. doctor in the Bronx now!) So that was a freak out, but what was worse is that I’d done up my dorm room as the Sistine Shrapnel… a sort of grafitti/expressionist five sided installation. The ceiling was done up as a Hans Aarp meets Keith Haring and I had Kline and Japanese Calligraphy and German ghouls and it was pretty fucking cool. Parents fresh in from Debuque dropping off Freshmen would poke their heads in and laugh: “Psychedelic”…. Really it wasn’t all that trippy, but it was intense and colorful. Kids would knock on my door (okay they may have been under the influence, but I didn’t ask or tell) just to sit in the room and look for a while. One kid told me: “Man this is the exact reason I came to this school.”

The fucking administration should have charged tickets, but instead threatened me with ten thousand dollar lawsuit. I had this and Hawaii on my head when I went to my Greek Tragedy final. It was a question on Plato and Aristotle that set me off. Something about five paragraphs summing up their differences on what the good human life is or something.

I was all: “Five paragraphs for that? What am I, a japanese Poet here?”

I kept trying, but hating what I’d written so I’d tear out the pages and start again. I went through about three or four of those little blue exam books and was quite literally in a pile of torm paper on the edge of tears and just spinning in infinity. I didn’t finish the exam…at least not to my own satisfaction, but went back to the Sistine Shrapnel to start grinding the paint off with a sander I’d borrowed from a local RI student(who’d fallen madly in love with her Chinese T.A. whose father was apparently in the pharmeceutical industry in China and imported opium and was insanely rich in Hong Kong…weird… you’d ask him what his dad did…cause it was obvious from his car that he was loaded, and he’d say: “Oh he’s an Opium dealer” and wait for your jaw to drop, mine never did, so he liked me… I mean who doesn’t realize that traditional Chinese medicine might involve opium at some point… even Woody Allen knows that).

I had only a few hours before catching the train to New York and the plane to Hawaii. I was a wreck, but busy. In the dust of ruined frescoes I got a call from Martha Nussbaum who’d been alerted by an hysterical T.A. that I was about to go out the window or something (honestly the thought hadn’t even crossed my mind YET…I was too busy). She and the T.A. had taken the pile of half finished torn essays and glued and taped them back together and she was calling to see if I was still alive and tell me that I’d passed the test….I’d probably written more than needed and in an insane hyperlinked bit and pieces way… Very William S. Burroughs….she claimed I’d hit all the salient points with my shotgun technique. Thank God for the Pass/Fail good old Brown (before they fucked that up too).

I remember her saying: “They were good essays, why did you stop?”
“Were they as good as Plato? Aristotle? Euripides?…” I shrieked.
Clearly I was putting myself under preassure that tears a building down and puts people on streets.

Had this been a comedy and not a tragedy Martha would have quoted me the old joke: euripides, eumenedies and we would have had a good laugh about the torn pages and who ripped what and mended when….ha ha ha.

It didn’t work out like that, but it was really nice of her to call and I started crying like a baby and no one was more surprised than me. It is possible to be clinically depressed and have nø idea. She stayed on the phone with me like Yossarian in Catch 22 saying over and over: “There There.. There there.” Which begs the question: is Catch 22 a comedy or a tragedy?

Any way Martha was real Mensch (can women be a mensch?… saint? and naturally Brown lost her to Chicago)… a real life saver and in the only compliment she’d really like: a good human being. She taught me this one lesson: Goodness is not always fragile even if people always are and will be.

It occured to me the other day, that the book drawings (which involve tearing up the books) are directly related to that breakdown which went down and down and down in blue Hawaii, so far away from blue Hawaii, but that is another story.

book found in tunnel on route to see Basquiat, ITIN ‘05

I am always asking myself how information technology may or may not have effected the shape of our bodies and minds. I am particularly obsessed with scroll cultures and codex cultures… That act of splitting a circle in half and turning it into a storage machine (a book). There is violence to cutting pages, but also a sort of biological metaphor. Charles Mingus the Third got me thinking about Laurie Anderson again with his kind comments on Boink Boink. She did this word piece about how the Chinese view the ears as vestigal featuses and use them in accupuncture accordingly. The image is wild because it makes Freud’s trifecta split of conciousness quite physical on the head (where as Jungian duality is reflected in the split of brain and spine)… really you have to read the body as a book: left page, right page, and in the middle the spine that holds it all together. Of course if the Chinese are right than your face (read identity, or ego) is just a spine holding together two dead babies: alpha and omega Kubrick space babies no doubt.

It is these rambling thoughts on scroll into codex that makes the cruciform (particularly the simple graphic northern European variety) so damn facinating. Obviously the Christians did not invent the form of the cross. The Romans most likely hung Jesus on a T…but a t is still a cross as long as you don’t get Roman on it and try to Capitalize it… so T…(its no accident that the Swiss got rid of serifs) The asians pretty much built their religion(s) and philosophy(ies) on a T, or Tea anyway and isn’t Tea what kicked off our revolution?

And let’s not forget the flowers: “Poppies, poppies,” says the wicked witch of the West (to be played by the Queen of England). The cruciform is ancient and mystical. The Buddhist Swastika is a spinning cross. What is it about splitting the world by two axis (while drinking wine,or tea) that makes man smarter and closer to God?

The Cartesean World View… the fact that opium is the chemistry of human joy? What?

It seems to be a way of organizing the mysterious circular universe into a thing man can quantify and grasp. It seems to relate to the Fibbonacci sequence and the gridding out of a spiral… the golden ratio (a cross is only a cross cause it’s the right shape to nail a man onto)… the understanding of flower petals and pine cones.

Buckminster Fuller pointed this out to me in his book:The Critical Path (this was the only book I could read when I had my first major depression… somehow my parents and brother found Bucky in a small book shop with no one around… talk about magical visions… out of respect my stingy father bought a hard cover copy and had bucky sign it… the book sort of saved my life… and it is odd how the path metaphor is so present in my work). He argued the cartesian grid, or square (all the beatnick delight in mocking squares is no accident) was finished and we should move back towards the Egyptians who organized on triangles. He, however, advocated a more complicated geometry using hexagons. The satanic overtones of a HEX (we’ll cover and levitate the pentagon in part 2) are really alluding to its pagan, or non Christian/European derivation. If it aint white kids, it’s the devil’s work. You’ll find that a lot in European technical thinking before (and after) the enlightenment. The Rennaisance was really just learning again what the Church had forced everyone to forget. Let us now thank certain folks like the Jesuits and the Swiss and a few Benedictines and mostly the Arabs who hung on to those old books. They were easy to store, or Europe would still be in the dark ages, and we’d all be speaking Chinese and reading scrolls…. Oh wait, you kind of are….Hmmmmm back to the future?

Iron Poppie, Park Slope ironwork detail, anonymous metal worker, circa 1900

“There is no greater compliment to an artist than to inspire someone to THINK,” Kate wrote me this morning. I’d cooked up a yin a yang of pork chops last night with shitake mushrooms in pan sauce. To die for. Washed it down with a bottle of Sancerre wine that took me back to my favorite Montmartre café: Le Sancerre.

Woke up this morning with a dollars worth of pennies in my mouth, walked wonderfully healing dog outside and found a big stack of stretchers to make Kate’s painting and several more. Brooklyn provides.

Plus I’m back to work on the final act of the screenplay (Super 8 Days…or Film Geeks, deepending on who you talk to). The nice thing is that the internet went out and I was forced to just be me by myself. Sometimes it’s good to get rid of your nervous system. It’s like meditating. Hold on to your Ego.

Boink, Boink for Charles Mingus III: white balloon w/ sharpie,zippy (?), bouncy ball vending machine, and fence subsumed by tree, ITIN ‘05

Willoghby wakes up and Willoughby thinks about Germans and beer and sex and the Swiss-good-will-porno-Turk who blew him in massage parlor in Zurich when he was 23. He shops at the Lebanese bodega and whishes the drunk Muslim:

“Salaam Alaikum” as he buys Malt Liquor - Night Flight. “Best brand name since Night Train,” thinks Willoughby, but he says to Machmuud, “I don’t want to die.”

“A lakaam A salaam,” says Machmuud.

“Hmmmm mmmmmm,” says Willoughby (and that is technically not words, but notes… music is only a language to a computer modem, or a “primitive” warrior… for the rest of us it is beautiful nonsense).

And Willoughby walks out on 5th Avenue and says nothing to no one, but in his head James Brown and the J.B.s are slamming out “Night Train” so funky he can smell it. He is thinking of the ICE train from Berlin to Basel and the girl named Caroline who sat across from him sleeping, or masturbating, or both…but either way moaning “Hmmmm mmmmmm” to the insane fast rhythm of the rail through a German landscape.

“God I want a beer,” thought Willoughby. “But it’s fucking breakfast… Breakfast of Champions,” he thought.

And then he remembered Kurt Vonnegut in Dresden… Slaughter House 5… and that film about McNamara and how even the guy who bombed Cammbodia said: “Tokyo, Dresden… Had the war gone the other way, we would have be legally executed as war criminals. No… They were war crimes, but I’d commit them again. But… Vietnam is the question… and I think we made a mistake. We underestimated the long term views of the Chinese. Really, it’s about China.”

Scorscessee ought to make a film about that mafia… Oliver stone doesn’t have the narrative talent and it comes off as J.F.K. and puts the cause of Democratic reform back by five years. I’m not insulting Oliver’s stones. He’s got plenty of stones… It’s his eyes and ears I’m concerned with. If you want to talk to Americans, you must be a populist. This is why I still love Carl Sandburg. You have to understand this is a revolution between European dominence (by this I mean republican(read old Southern money… read European slave/drug/imperialist money interests… don’t you know that the queen of e-(I won’t capitalize it till they get rid of the royalty)ngland still owns most of the world?” and truly labor based ownership of the means of production.

I’m not a Commie. But I am an American (well Swiss American… dudes I can duck out of this mess at my leisure… so trust me I’m telling you what I actually think… I’m glad to live in the alps and drink white wine and eat cheese that teaches you more about God in one tounge full than a million tasteless Catholic waffers). I do belive in democracy and free trade. I just want to see it …not have lip service for a ruling oligarchy of clowns and deamons.

Sorry I digress, but that is where WIlloughby is at, man. I kill myself, or I change things. Action, or despair. You decide. It is exsitential.. .and we are liberals and Harvard is a nice school and the North East is cold in winter, but full of smart people… and L.A and S.F…. well sure that’s where Satan lives, but he lives worse in your own heart and if you actually read the Bible, than you would not throw stones… you know that Max Von Sydow hung out with whores, and beggers, and leppers, and pariahs, and no doubt faggots (Oh wait: maybe not - afterall: homosexuals were the ruling elite class in the holy lands… i.e. Rommans who got it from the Greeks - who gave it to the British… doesn’t anyone read the classics anymore?)… Honestly, let’s just get along people BE… Cause you Intolerance clowns (shout out to D.W. who managed to make himself feel like a victim after making Birth of a Nation) are just barking at the mirror. There are more rules against eating pork in the bible than fucking another man. So if you like bacon, you should shut up you Christian idiots….and I know you like bacon, because what else is there that distinguishes you from the jews?…. shut up Christ WAS a Jew and wanted you to be a better Jew… so start over and tell me about what the bible says and take that ham out of your fucking Easter mouth you sinner fuck you.

(Please read the above as De Niro in Taxi Driver… thank you … management)

Any god who asks you to be mean to other people isn’t god…that’s mom, or dad, or uncle Hitler.

God wants you to love her creation… Play nice kids. It’s all we got that we know of.

I digress, but in the words of the Rabbi in full Hassidic clothes speaking on a cell phone on the airtrain: “I’d love to talk, but it’s the high holy holidays.”

To which I add, my pork chops look like yin and yang in their wine sauce.

vandalized angel at Green-Wood Cemetary, ITIN ‘05

images from Palm Sunday Bloody Sunday, ITIN ‘05

And we woke up impossibly sick yesterday. I’d been out at my old friend and neighbor Kate Rothschild’s new Brooklyn Pad. She lives below her sister Gail, who is a first rate artist and for whom I assisted on a number of her early 90’s installation projects. It was like a family reunion and Yours truly did a few spontaneous scenes from Willoughby and mostly Arc. The wine and chocolate cake and Gail’s brilliant, OCD, rhizone accretion drawings pulled out the ghost in me. I was either the life of the party, or wearing a lampshade, depending on your view (like relativity) and Kate gave me the shimmering blue dress she wore at our College Formal in a mansion at Newport.

I’m meant to make a painting. Ode to Ethel Merman perhaps who Kate somehow channeled the entire night of our formal … more than a decade ago… and I still remember laughing and laughing.

Good Times, as the NPR chicks say on SNL.

My better half stayed home, feeling ragged out by work and life and what else have you got? She is a rebel without a Pause (I’m her cause).

So I would have thought I was hung over, but my better half was fairing much worse than me. We were like an old married couple…groaning and bickering and shopping at Cost Co and buying seltzer. Bought a Neil Diamond box set for a song (the song being Cracklin Rose), but am realizing how many great songs he wrote. Monkey’s I’m A Believer (a great Brian Wilson/John+Paul knock off if there ever was one…and maybe Neil won that round as far as POP is concerned…hey he was old school Brill Building before Bob showed him the light) …that song in Pulp Fiction Girl..You’ll be a woman Soon….Cherry…fucking Red Red Wine! I’d always heard he was well respected in the industry, but he came off as a bit of a cheese ball. When he showed up in Scorcesse’s The Last Waltz, however… Well he rocked and if he can come off well in that company, I’m in… shiny shirt or no shiny shirt.

The better half loves his Jazz Singer, with Larry Olivier doing a pretty good New York Jew for a British Lord. Oy Sir Larry, Mo, and Curly!

Still Landscape, mixed media and painter’s calk on found still life painting (circa 70’s, oil on bedsheet), shown with Korean paper boxes ITIN ‘05

david, king of the jews and Esther his charming wife. ITIN ‘05

We are playing with the look over here at ITINplace (or however e.e. cummings is writing it now). I’m letting ben play with our masthead, or whatever it would be called. I think were both thinking about the red line piece we saw at diva which may influence omEGG, or Smile, or just ITINplace. There is a sort of four cornered up down left right crudiform scroll gimick going on here. The painting of the BK bridge is about seven foot long…on a crate I found in SoHo in the rain, dumpster diving when I had IT IN place. It’s just chinese ink, tissue paper, gesso and acrylic medium on plywood: An archival disaster, or it may just crack and look ancient and distressed. Let’s hope cause otherwise bob stein (the owner) will ask me to paint another one and….I think it was just one of those lucky days. That said, it should maybe be photoshopped a little to be more graphic.

My i-pod died last week. IT was the first model and I guess the battery life is an issue with i-pods. I’ve got to buy a new battery and learn how to take the white obelisk apart.

That said, I borrowed the better half’s. I’d forgotton how much I miss random play. IT gave me Richmond doing Abdul Loves Cleopatra, into Bowie doing a BBC live Absolute Beginners, into Coltrane live in Paris doing Love Supreme, into a weird late Brian Wilson gospel chorus piece called Add Some Music.

Sweet in the morning, indeed: now milk and coffee and pig bellies.

flatbush flowerpower, ITIN ‘05

Cleaning House Still Lives, ITIN ‘05

arc along the watchtower installation, Asi Nisi Masa installation, @ IT IN space, ITIN ‘03

People in my life seem to be having daughters. They are months off, but everyone gets to know the sex, long before the birh. Thank Heaven for little girls…

I spent yesterday afternoon doing Willioughby dialogue in the park. I’ve decided that the exterior dialogues have to be recorded outside to get the ambient street/park noise. The narrators Voice Over will be recorded in the bathroom, or living room: depending.

I had already done some work under the gates (I’d wanted to drag Conrad out of L.A. to rehearse omEGG, but one potential actress bailed and then he got stuck in a casting call for someT.V. show with maybe Gary Oldman. Connie said: “I’ll sign a contract saying I can’t talk to my mother for year, if I could work with him.”

Oldaman is about his favorite actor of that generation. I don’t know what happened since.

Now that the grant stuff is over, it feels good to work work work. Grand Army Plaza is a really great set.