The so called, “Feedom Tower” that looked something like the side view of the “Kentile” sign in Brooklyn, is dead. It was an awful design with the idiotic conceit of looking like the burnt out skeleton of the Stature of Liberty… what would that have actually said to people? Looks like they’ll build something a bit simpler… might even be elegant. Let’s hope… but I still think the THINK project was a better solution…. this new concept looks like one of those new New Jersey towers you see off in the downtown distance and dream of Hong Kong. In short, it ain’t to pretty, nor witty, nor novel, but at least it’s better than the previous stab. Still, the beauty of the twin towers, was the space between them and their monolithic (non-tapered) sillouhette. They were plinths for the sky… this is just another tower.











The dog kept me up all last night making a strange coughing noise. I think it’s the airconditioner, but the better half wants to get some sort of cough medicine for dogs… I’m trying to imagine a syrup for a dog and get ready for a meeting to show some e-books out in Greenpoint… When I get there, its nothing but computer glitches and sweat and general no sleep all night inarticulateness. I hope the work speaks for itself, because in this heat with no sleep I was barely functioning… dog seems better now…. but what a horrible noise…. Like ghosts choking.

I dreamt I was hanging out with Sonic Youth at the bus station trying to organize my luggage. My mother dreamt I was making abstract paintings like my old man’s, only looser (which I sort of am). I was rolling around in the subways yesterday seeing all the shapes I’m playing with (though I can’t imagine these paintings will stay like this too long… they seem more like architecture for little people to run around on). Seems like there’s a million things to do, and I have no desire to do any of them, but maybe ride around in the subway and look at shapes… or sleep and dream. The heat has me out of sorts.

I was again thinking of painting in the 80’s, when Clark came up to me asking for a light. Was it Schnabel, or Bill Jensen who was laying down the future of Abstraction? But Clark didn’t care, he was after coke and a beer and the belle in the stockings, who was dressed more or less like an International Harvester Combine. “Ahhhh college,” I thought. “What was she thinking?”

In the book it is written of triangles and the scent of flowers that fills the sunset street with its humid perfume of the New Orleans’ brothel quarter. There is the sound of Pop’s trumpet playing “Azalea” and three yellow dots and always the sweet wet air around you. It’s hot out and in the far foggy distance, you see a great tower lumbering down the Brooklyn streets towards Bethlehem…






I awoke from a college dream, where I’d somehow missed my last final in English and would maybe not graduate. This because my betther half’s mother was in town causing chaos. But on the good side, she was giving a me a big hug as she left in a car for the airport and I was waking up. Not bloody likely, but ain’t dreams nice?

I continue working acrylic onto the new canvases to ground them. I also keep experimenting with ways of abutting them and arranging them that links them aesthetically together. I suppose it is a continuation of How I scroll photos on the blog, or installed drawings at IT IN space.




After the studio, it was out in the sunset East Village for Margaritas with old friends in town from Providence (such a forboding city name)… Somehow the light and air reminded me of Providence and my misspeant youth. I seem to be struck with sudden overwealming bouts of Nostalgia lately. Wonder what that’s all about? I was even tearing up in Spielbergs fairly schmaltzy, The Terminal. He is the cinematic equivilant of a stripper, in that, you know you are being manipulated and lied to just for money, but you some how go through all the feelings anyway… in this case it’s tears and not a hard on, but it’s all the same at the end of the night. When I told Conrad that, he gave one of his aphorisms: “I don’t drink before noon and I don’t watch Spielberg movies…” or something like that. Speaking of Conrad, one of the people in from Providence used to stay in on Friday nights to watch Relativity…. We started talking about Vonnegut’s notion of the Karass (I’m still convinced that Vonnegut would be a better scifi writer to base a religion on than L. Ron Hubbard any day, but then we couldn’t watch Tom Cruise on Auto Destruct). Now that I remember it, Conrad was also dismissive of Vonnegut: “Literature Lite,” I believe he called him. Seems to me that most of our friendship is based on verbal sword play about culture… I’m suddenly nostalgic for my contrarian youth, where it was always about argument, just for sport… like hunting ideas (and fuck Good Will). I don’t have so many people I like to argue with any more…. just myself playing three characters in my head.

Continued with the three canvases and taped up my cut thumb to streatch two more. Thought I’d play with a Max Ernst technique of dipping a string into paint and laying it on the canvas.



It was an emotional day. The Godfather of this blog and probably fifty percent of the reason you’re reading it right now, was out in L.A. on a “medical adventure.” The past couple of days, I’ve been enacting a number of art ceremonies in lieu of praying. Chanting in Willoughby makeup, “I don’t want to die” was one. Abstract painting was another and then today I called his cell hoping to wish him well, only to find his beloved, who’d just left him in preop. Slightly shocked at how fast things move once they start moving, I decided I should walk bridges, like Arc Along the Watchtower… something physical to focus the energy on positive, forward motion. I ended up walking from Williamsburg over to Manhattan, down through Chinatown, back over Brooklyn Bridge and then back through Carrol Gardens to the Slope. You could call these places new and old stomping grounds. Turns out I was walking more or less the length of his operation (which was several miles).



















So I walked an enormous smile shape and meditated on the fragility of all things…. including my feet.



I made it home in a cloud of bubbles that floated and burst around me in sunset soap rainbows. “Forward,” I thought. “You must always move forward. It is the nature of living in Time.” Pop pop pop and it was then that I photographed “fragile” signs on a shipping box. My better half was out on the town, so I cooked some dinner and finally Before Sunset… the sequal to Before Sunrise. As I write this, it is sunrise. Vigil, vigil… I hear by e-mail that things are going well on the left coast.

Yesterday I spent spelunking through my storage space and finding old canvas. I’m thinking of stretching my old dropcloth from Soho as a way of transferring some energy from IT IN space. Then I did some Willoughby makeups and then I cut my finger making a sandwhich with stale French Bread.



Here’s the door to an old studio I summered in…. christ how many years ago? It is now part of Superfine Restaurant. I still can’t believe that Between the Bridges is gone. Never thought I’d see the day… where do all the Teamsters drink now?

I still can’t figure this “nice move” out. Someone is building a three or four story structure with a car built into the the third floor… do they want the engine? Is it like that kid’s book, “Mike Mulligan and Mary Ann” where they build the steam shovel into the basement of the town hall? Puzzling. Maybe it’s one of those Al Jaffe Mad Parking Solutions?


This is more or less the continuation of yesterday’s (read this mornings) blog. I woke up on the couch at 5:30 in the morning and posted the Hollywood episode. It seemed sort of dreamy and self contained, so this is the more technical (how to fix a drum) caffinated episode.





You can barely read it, but someone’s taged “Penelope” on this building. Joyce, or Homer rears his head again.




Stopped off at Major Tom’s on the walk back. He’d bought this set of drums in the East Village in the eighties when he first got to town and tried to be a rock star. Now that he’s having his Fitzgeraldian second American act, he’s refinishing his kit (its nice and simple with only three drums: base, snare and one tom tom… plus his new Swiss cymbols). I guess he’s beat it pretty bad, so he was doing some glue repair on the rims. We also had a couple of Spatens to celebrate Summer Solstice.




In one of those magic moments where you gets whatchya need, Tom had some big 68″ heavy duty streatchers he let me have. I had to carry them home through the streets, like Jesus with his cross, or at times like Buster Keaton with a board, nearly bonking people as I turned to snap a picture… also I was like a soldier marching with a gun… i kept switching shoulders in a drill-like manner and fealt like I should be doing some Full Metal Call and Response (This is my streatcher… there are many like her, but this one is mine… etc.)

Spent the day stretching canvases and hiking abround the Navy Yard. Started working on three canvases: striped, Swiss cross, and the the two monoprinted together. These are just starting points. I like to begin at minimal abstraction… where my dad left off… and just see what is supposed to (or accidentally) happens after that. I’ll try and follow the progress of them over the coming months, etc.











Walking through Williamsburgh is a bit like falling into a Chagall painting. You Feel like you are in some mythical, Jewish world. If this wasn’t enought of a tear in the fabric of space/time continuum, walking by Brooklyn Navy Yard makes you feel like you have fallen into the ’40s. It’s all rather decrepid now, but I still marvel at the shear scale of American Industrial might at that time. You can’t help but imagine all those battleships and merchant Marine Victory Ships sliding down into the east river with a Champagne splash.




You can still see one of the earliest radars in America. It is two toweres with some wires spanned between them. If I recall correctly, it was a gift from the British to protect the ship building yard and also to play around with and get a grip on the technology. The British had tons of these towers along their coast.
This one just sits above the New Hollywood…Steiner Studios. Looks a bit like the Paramount Lot and only adds to the fourties nostalgia.

A lot of the flowers I’ve photographed for this blog have been pressed and turned into drawings. Here’s a few examples for you to enjoy:

When I’d dug out all my old oil paints and brushes from storage, I beat it over to the studio and back in time for the late sunset to pour out over brooklyyn and onto a several yards of cotton duck someone was throwing out…. like mana from heaven. We cooked up two gorgeous t-bones with a nice Burgundy and a Takaji for dessert… fealt like a king and fell asleep to the Hitchhiker’s guide.

I awoke from a strange schizoid dream… something about going to russia and having two studios and being confused about where I should go to do my work. I guess it is free floating anxiety about the new B.burgh studio… I always get a little stressed by changes and changing space is a sort of big deal to the psychology of one’s work. It sounds sort of goofy, but you can hear plenty of artists go on and on about the sanctity of SPACE. I’m certainly not alone in finding that the studio you work in tends to have a profound inffluence on the work you create. So, I hope it will be a good fit…I toured the open studios they had on saturday and there seemed to be some okay people working there.










It was a weekend for errands and stoop sales and strawberry margaritas and the nieghbor’s house warming. He is an architect and she is a jewelry designer and they have gutted the interior and started from scratch. It is kind of interesting to see modernity growing in this turn of the century Park Slope white stone. They served a tasty cava that I drank with bubbly glee. I had a nice mellow wine hangover for the stoop sale the next morning. We mangaged to sell off all the furniture I’d bought over the years (which has all been replaced by pricier/nicer things by my other half). I managed to pick up a tape set of the original BBC Hitchikers Guide from my neighbor. I hadn’t remembered that The Guide is an electronic book, till I heard Douglas Adams’ old audio spot for Voyager books on the IFblog.






The corks were flying and one of them got away from me and I nailed the better half in the back (the only good thing was that it’s probably better to nail someone you know and love than accidentally wind a stranger).

Walking down from the met, I had the scheme to hit MOMA on a friday and not pay $20, but the better half got off work early and as I was already suffering art ache and overload (why is it that you can walk five miles and it feels great and standing around a museum makes your whole body ache?). So I beat it down to her office and stubled on to a glowing light buidling in the distance. I took the first snap, before I realized it’s the new rear end of MOMA (she had a little work). It really is a nice building…Everything changes everything passes. I keep thinking of Kundera asking in German “Must it be? It must be.”

Always nice to end a run on one of Keiffer’s dreary, beautiful, oh so German fields. Speaking of Germans, I finally got to see Max Ernst at the Met… and well….dada beats surrealism most every time… I was a little diappointed that I didn’t like more of the show. I did like the grottage paintings and some of his constructed works… and I liked how he innovated with technique, but most of the work just felt oh so fussy to me… very up tight and anal prewar German, if you know what I mean (though I love German expressionism…). It took Pollock and Co. to bust these techniques out of the service of classical picture plane illusionism. So I wandered up to the roof and was pleasantly surpriesed by Sol Lewitt’s work (something that doesn’t happen often, I can assure you). The stuff is just made for the roof garden and plays nicely with the sky line and will be photographed ad naseum for this, like the Christo Gates. Context is everything with that generation and well this context works. I also got to revist Tony Oursler’s stuff and without the crowd, I could hear the performance on Climax…. reminds me a little too much of Willoughby stuff, but I can’t change it now. Folks were sitting down in the galleries and spending a lot of time with the pieces… so that’s a pretty high complement in an era of short attention spans (course they are watching t.v… so I guess they’re just used to sitting down and watching t.v…. even in the MET!).




Nice to see Guston and D.K. hanging together (continuing the debate between Allan Stone and David McKee abut weather Guston can hold up next to a deKooning). You sort of realize that D.K. has the best technique around and that Guston’s paint was getting muddy right before he went back to the figure… still if you play with the contrast, he has a hell of a line compositional sense and you see a wine bottle in the left corner and is the whole thing built from chairs like a Kline?


At the end of the day, however, the truth is that Alberto Giacometti can do more witha ball point pen than most people can do with marble, bronze, oil, video, architecture….and whatever else. This one is Diego and is from Pierre Matisse’s private collection.

Continuing from where we left off yesterday: We had to taken the wounded Zorg in to Bay Ridge for repairs and so far were laughing, but on the way out the clouds rolled in and we parted in anger. I decided to walk home and photo safari Chinatown and the waterfront from where I’d left off after the Verranszano Bridge. {As I lunched on noodles, Sundance had an interesting documentary called Within A Play about touring Hamlet in Taiwan which sort of resonates with Chinatown and Bloomsday}:



I like how the 9 9 cent store is yin yin because it is missing it’s 6, or yang. It seemed delightfully logical and funny and sort of out of balance.








Chinatown comes to an end like the chapter of a book (maybe Lotus Eaters) and you come to a sort of dead end of train yard and industrial buildings and Sunset Park and then Greenwood Cemetary. These block off 5th thrue 8th avenues and so I beat it down the ridge towards the shore along 2nd Ave.




















Irony abounds on the waterfront. I’d never realized we had a brand spanking Federal Pen right behind costco and then a little Muslim Chicken Gitmo around the corner… the brothers do love chicken, right… or is it freedom?

As if to mock the inmates at the Pen, there is a door factory right across the street. All they do, is stare at the door, waiting for it to open… waiting to fly away, but they are now wingless birds… stool pidgeons… Halal poultry… American Eagles… symbols stripped of all power by corruption and lies… and right around the corner an ever exapanding universe of pornography.

Then we were woken up at seven in the morning by the door buzzer going off and off and off again and she got out of bed and the abrupt voice sqwaked and garbled, “Your cars been broken into… They stole your air bags!”

“Thank you,” she said, still asleep, but always polite …. “I mean… Who is this?”

“What difference does it make!?” the voice snapped back. “Your air bags are gone and there’s glass all over the place.”

“Oh… well…thanks for telling us,” she was confused, but waking to the cloudy morning and thinking, “well you don’t have to be so rude about it… I’m just wondering how you found out where we live and who we are and what apartment… I mean really.”

She came back to the bed and I was bleary eyed and abstract and suddenly I had the feeling that it was an elaborate con… we would go out to check the air bag, and someone would bonk us on the head and rob the apartment. Paranoia and exhaustian ran deep, but we threw some clothes on and went down to find this abstraction… or was it neo realism?:


No it was a busted fucking rear window and the thief had unlocked Zorg and (albeit carefully) made off with the steering wheel and side passenger airbags. The abrupt voice of the Nasty Good Samaritan rang out: “You’d think this was a safe street, huh?” He was carrying a rag with which he abstractedly polished a silver Mercedes. I was thinking, “Sure you wrap a rag around your hand and punch out the window… I’ve never seen you before… are you the messanger, or the perp hiding in the open? What difference does it make, in deed.”


We called the cops and moved the car to see if it would drive and it was opposite side of the street day and I could just see one cop writng a ticket while the other wrote a report… beaurocracy is a many headed beast after all. The men in blue arrived and asked a few questions and wrote like Bartleby and I was struck that most of police work must be red tape and desk work broken up by encounters with assholes and the occasional bit of action. It’s the thing you don’t see in the movies and t.v. The boring day to dayness of it all… how many airbag reports do you suppose these guys write in a year? I’d bet it’s too fucking many…They were as emotionless and detached as the guy who gives you your Big Mac and fries. You had the sense that they’d rather be doing something else… anything else… than filling out this report. “Some guys will be around to take fingerprints,” he said. “So if you see some guys nosing around the car, it’s them.”

Now I’d been impressed by the promptness of their appearence (I knew why later)… but I wasn’t holding my breath for detectives… or CSI, or whatever. We went upstairs and had coffee and walked the dog and got drycleaning and laughed at how the only thing we’d found upsetting so far was the neighbor who gave us the news. We were laughing about it… but he’d creeped us out.


The Evidence men showed up and they were a whole different ball of wax. For one thing, it was the first Prius this guy had dusted, so he was curious and questioning and funny: “I’m gonna dust this baby and take it for a test drive at the same time…. how many miles to the gallon does it get?”

Someone once said: “A conservative is a liberal who has been robbed.”
Someone else said: “A liberal is a conservative who has been arrested.”

I’m still smarting at some of the things that went down during the Republican Convention protests, but I’ve known a lot of cops and sons of cops and a good, professional cop is a reassuring and pride inspiring thing. It’s not a job most of us would want (paper work alone and jerkoff encounters alone…and… well people shoot at you and stuff)…. anyways these guys seemed first rate to me.

One of the things I noticed was his Nike golf gloves. I wondered how many different gloves he’d tried untill he’d hit on these and he said a lot. She asked if he played golf and he said no an then he told us that he was real strict about wearing gloves, because sometimes it happens that you pull your own prints if you don’t and the boys at the lab come back saying, “We’ve got a match” and you get excited and they say, “And it’s you you idiot.”

I said, “I bet they give you a hard time for that.”

“For about two weeks,” he said quietly…. like mabe it had happened to him… and well it sure as shit wasn’t going to happen again… not today anyways….

So for the point of procedure: They dust the surface with this feathery brush.

Then they take a piece of clear tape and lay it over the revealed print (which they spot with a maglite that they hold in their teeth like a plummer as they do the other things).

Then they stick this tape to a piece of black film (it looks like the back of a Polaroid film…and the environmentalist in me sort of hopes that they take the cast offs from the Mug Shot Department and use that… This is fed into a computer and, the limits of technology were pointed out to me: the computer culls down the number of matches, but finger print reading is partially art… and so a human is needed to go throught the twenty or so matches (out of millions) that the computer identifies. You can see why fingerprints are becoming controversial in the era of DNA… Art is always suspect over science (unless your talking about Darwin and monkeys)

So we were off to Bay Ridge Toyota and she was making me laugh by saying: “I know there’s a problem with the air bag” to the read out and it looked to me like Orson Welles chewing bubble gum as we cruiesed at risk (Geico wanted to tow us because suddenly after a hundred years of automotive history, it is unsafe to drive a car WITHOUT an airbag… what the fuck was GM fighting for or against with Nader?)

So, long story short, we get there and see the clone of our Zorg: turns out a block away the same dude hit another green Prius and the cops came by and iterrupted his little play date. Would that they had caught him and brought us our air bags in a bag… but the thief fled into prospect park where the cops are loath to go….the twin only had a window broke and no finger prints taken. Me, Well… I liked the cops with the machines… so if they broke the window at least we got the smart cops…who even got my blog address… Maybe they’ll bust this ring…anyone who wants the blog address must be smart right?

This run seems like the red night of Gowanus…. defending the honor of fair maidens all about the lands of Brook….. or maybe Quixote bending at Moulin Rouges all up Pigalle into Montmartre. History will tell us, we must squire on like Sancho Panza.

And Moses split the sky with enormous water towres of Babel…. the old Italian neighborhoods split by highways and housing projects along the Gowanus… their Mafia, like an old fifedum surrounded by the Government - under seige, but you couldn’t cut them off with water, or walls, or asphalt…. they tunneled out by night along the BQE highjacking trucks and living off the swag. The whoe neighbor hood was smoking tax freee Marlboroughs and eating prime rib…


Spent the evening with Lady Kate, delivering her repaired and signed painting before she flys off to OZ to spend more time with the long distance love. She is invoved in an intense relationship borne on a tour of India and nurtured (coincidence?) by the internet. She reads to the guy’s kids (C.S. Lewis’ Narnia series) over the computer and talks constantly by way of the information super highway… it is a kind of relationship you couldn’t have untill very recently. Still, falling into big brother mode, I was warning her that virtual love and being stuck in a room with some dumb bastard who farts and sweats are entirely different things. If she doesn’t believe me, she should ask my better half. But the girl has stars in her eyes and new love is new love… which we concluded was a form of insanity, so all those who have survived love and slipped into our bitter detante of marriage, or “long term relationship” have to look out a little for the starry eyed dreamers…. so they don’t, you know, run off a cliff or something.

I wanted to talk about this apartment building that towers over the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens, along with a radio tower. My first response to it, was to try and avoid it in as many shots as I could. It’s rigid grid modernism seemed a mediocre example of International Style architecture and it seemed to clash with the neo classical and neo Nippon gardens there. It seemed, in short, an eye sore, but it got me thinking about modernism and the Japanese and the Germans and the end of World War Two. I was thinking about the tremendous need to rebuild on the cheap after blowing Europe and Asia all to hell… and how the International Style is a kind of rational response to this obvious need, but I liked that Americans some how talked themselves into building in this style too (after all no one had blown us up)… it seems like we really believed in what we were doing and I found that charming (I suppose it had something to do with fashion, but fashion is a belief system too)… and of course it brings to mind the Swiss and my old man and Geneva and The U.N. and how nice it must have been to believe in progress and Darwin and science and peace, etc. I don’t want to get all romantic about it, but I started to see the squares of the buildings as a kind of antithesis to the biomorphic natural shapes of the trees and flowers and waters… that sort of split down the center of the picture, like the spine of a book, or woman… that thing born of fish swimming into a sphere (or carp into a rose)… I thought of this and more importantly, the building when seen from the Japanese garden had the affect of making me feel like I was really in Japan (since so much of Japan is post War architecture). The building was the flaw that made the lie work… and I was transported to Japan from Brooklyn in a way that all the Neo Classical stuff surrounding will never make me feel I’m in Greece, or some idealized European past… no that ugly little apartment block (with the nice grid balconies) made me feel like I was in Japan Today… that minute… and so altered time and space…it stood tall against the chaos of flowers and nations. So yesterday it was the ugly little building that could…..also: When seen in the context of a pine tree, the shape seems to harmonize with the Fibonacci sequence of tiered branches… or is that just me?

June is Rose month… and It’s been said that by looking deeply into the shape of a rose, you can see the mind of god… so that seemed worth trying and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden is free on Tuesdays… the following is a meditation on time, space, and as always the duality of man, but it is also a sort of rose binge, as I keep seeing them everywhere and staring at them and then they keep showing up on the blog… Maybe I”ll get it out of my system by tantric excess.

Will miracles never cease? Looks like I’ve got a couple of walls to paint oil on in Williamsburg for the summer. God bless the sublease season. It will be nice to take the oils and brushes out of storage… they’ve been untouched since IT IN space. There is a lot you can do with acrylics and inks and various mixed media, but at the end of the day there is just something so luminous and flesh like about oil paint… nothing compares and it smell like heaven (or sex at least) as well. Finally I get to do the Diners paintings and Willoughy and Clark.









So I was off to Manhattan yesterday by way of 2 and 3 at Bergan, when I was struck by an intense need to rid myself of the gallon or so of ice coffee I’d drunk moments earlier. Hard to find a public pissoir on Flatbush Ave, so I wanderd into Freddy’s, the Art Bar a block off. The above wall gaffiti is some of the best I’ve seen since Basquiat closed at BMA. Freddy’s is the sort of place where you find paintings on the wall that you recognize from past Allan Stone group shows… real serious paintings and lots of art zines and poetry and of course drunks. Quigley and I used to fancy the place quite a bit, but then life happened… so thanks to my bladder it was nice to visit ecore fois for all the old times.

I took a walk in the swelter of Central Park and there is a fair set up at the skating rink, which is a fun idea, but I was mostly interested in the engineering of this new skyscraper. I guess that these exterior tirangles are load bearing like that thing I.M. Pei built in Shanghai, or was it Hong Kong?


Here is the Summerstage stage, where Major Tom and the boys will be opening for the Blind Boys of Alabama some time soon. Nice venue.


Sometines Central Park seems like a Seurat Idyll…


…with little Picassos along the paths…

Actually the Picasso chalk drawing is from Prospect Park and was by some Puerto Rican kids hanging out after the parade… here they are:

This mornings miracle involves the Polyphonic Spree. I’d seen them a while back on Trio in a live show and the they sort of freaked me out. The lead singer is filled with charisma and sounds kind of like Pink Floyd front man, Rodger Waters (who has agreed to reunite with Floyd for Live 8… which is sort of amazing) but witha better voice and then his huge band has all this Brian Wilson Smile type arrangements and instrumentation going on… you know the guy playing the glochenspiel will put that down and play tuba… and weirdest of all, they dress up like a church choir in robes and sing all this happy peppy music (sort of like The Happiest Guys In The Wold… but more Brian less Beatles and more people)… When i went to to Thiebaud opening with Scooter, we talked at length about how great and weird they were and I really wanted to get their album, but as I’m always broke and I had no idea what any of the songs were called,… it seemed risky. So I’m walking Ms. Pearl Bailey and we come upon a huge bag of empty c.d. cases … not a c.d. in the bunch…just the jewel cases… except for one sleeve laying in the middle of the street: The Polyphonic Spree… with the song I liked best (the single with video) Light&Day. Shall miracles never cease?

Well it was Sharron’s birthday thrusday and we all gathered on a friends East Village Tar Beach for Magaritas and laughter. This big bald head of her husband (AKA Major Tom) reminds me of his latest fall down laughing story. It seems at the last Royal Wylds gig, they placed a big light behind his head on the drum riser. So All through the set, his head is glowing like an enormous egg and heating up like said egg in an incubator. Well birds didn’t fly out of his cranium, but all that skin beating and light gave him heat stroke… all the world went grainy and sounded funny and he more or less fainted, but kept on playing. “Thank god for all that rehearsal and motor memory, ” He said. “I don’t even remember the second half of the show… they say I sounded okay though.” It’s funnier when he tells it, but I love to imagine his head lit up like Jebus returns. Of course here he looks more like something out of The Importance of Being Ernest…”A Hand Bag!”… And then Sharron got all excited opening gifts.




While sister Maureen and brother in law Josh became more and more relaxed.

It’s allways fun to find old book drawings scattered around the city from various events… here is a black cat, or Gato Negro which nicely brackets this weekend with the book I restarted reading while Yachting in Prospect Park.






Actually, Saturday we finally dined at Applewood in the slope (Josh and Maureen’s raves being enough to break the camel back)… it lived up to expectations: great fish and pork and they had creative cocktails and for once nice rosé on the list. We walked out into Brooklyn Gay Pride Parade… Me, I love a parade… Sylvie doesn’t quite get the point…. I think it is to flow along with others… like a ship at sea, or maybe more like a boat on a river…. any parade is a current that may carry you along… Puerto Rican, gay, Italian… whatever. The special thing about Fasnacht is that it is a seemingly chaotic form of parade… like a storm…., but Linear is fun too….. like Hollywood movies, or t.v.

The ritual for Saturday is to go to the florist in the morning and then the Pork Store in the afternoon. In both places you find the comedians of daily life at work. I mean to say that the people selling and the people shopping all have that Brooklyn convivial nature that leads to lots of good natured ribbing and laughter and by now it feels more like visiting friends than running errands. First you stop and smell the flowers, then you stop and eat the food and sometimes you go down the street and taste the wine… what could be better I ask you?… Work? Scroll down… I’m still working on Clark drawing from Hitler and Chaplin…. but he is sort of morphing into me as a young man playing an old man… ie. M. Tristan holding his snow globe of doom.




And the numbers came in 9 with a crown and five with the second place… like degas in the Montmatre Cemetary, or Basquiat, or the strange film “Birth” I just watched with Nicole Kidman and a Kubrick Fetish and also Zoe Caldwell with a rare film appearence. Kind of haunting and strangely paced. Worth seeing…. oh and Lauren Bacall who I’d been watching in the Faulkner written Big Sleep.

We went to Sette last night, the new Italian wine bar right up the street with a large outdoor cafe… Proseco and a nice white and some very good hints at what might come (they are on a limited menu until the kitchen is finished next week). We came home and sort of fell asleep at some ridiculously early hour. Which means I woke up at four thirty and went right back at editing Willoughby video…. Still a huge hunk of stone… maybe I can carve it down into someting…It looks good… and I’m using the adante from Mozart’s 25 piano concerto… the rhythm helps me to edit.

Major Tom’s cross breezeway neighbors have an annoying habbit of smoking at the window and starring into his bedroom. They say nothing,nor wave, but rear window stare and smoke and smoke. Then they leave the butts and ashes right there in the hall… I guess it’s an installation… or at the least a still life.

I have always been struck by the golden arches relationship to the B.K. Bridge. I remember the first time I walked over the Brooklyn Bridge from Dumbo to Manhattan with Richard Heinson. We suddently noticed that the Double Gothic arches were mirrored by the Twin Towers behind. I somehow took this with Chinatown accross the way with the streets paved with golden mountain yellow brick road…. ease on down The Wiz, etc… and thought of the arches as the “ORIGINAL GOLDEN ARCHES”… I thought of Miyazaki’s tower’s as a sort of Immigrant Song… a love song to the original engineering marvel/aesthetic triumph… only made minimal zen by a Japanese.

Yesterday Major Tom calls up with a load of fancy plywood that he needs to move into the shop… each one pricy, so He doesn’t want to ding it up… Naturally I agreed, but the heat the hot heat and sweating oy! But he’s letting me have the scraps to paint on… and the Red Stripe tasted cold and delicious after all that lifting. Later we walked out to breath the air around Tom Paine.














I have always loved this moment of early modernism beneath the gothic bridge. It is controversial and I’m not certain of its landmark status. It is supposed to be an important early international style building, I think. Problem is, they all look like public schools now… though this does have a certain quailty to it… it sits like that little light house in the children’s book. Something about the clash of style, sings.