In the studio all day fooling with enamel and stretching canvas and drawing over Hitler and Chaplin making him a sad faced father self portrait with a strange inward looking cross eyed philtrum hair lip yarmulke depression. I spent a good hour looking back at him. I think I sort of like this drawing, even if it looks like a Macasso. It captures something dead on about how I was feeling. Ran out of batteries on the camera for my Fakooning, but it looked good as a start … the anxiety of influence dictates that I some how escape the liquified cubism and come up with something new, but still it’s a nice start to look like deKooning. It certanly could be worse. The meat of the story is the homecoming and the two loud explosions heard in the distance again around nine; followed by sirens and again no news on the t.v. about it. What if they had war and no one reported it? Seriously, it’s duck and flinch time… could have sworn it was a bomb in Manhattan… I mean they don’t sound like firecrackers, or gun shots… just single rumble reports….with more concussive strength than any firework… and isolated.

The round world wheeled behind me like a sack full of Indians and I need a casino, or Doctor Speer to take out half my brain and let me be a millionaire and leader of men, at last. “It ain’t likely,” I shrugged. “I’ve got to carry this thing uptown.” So down past dumpsters full of the new and the sun always heating and the steel always rusting and the white of marble always going gray, I see crowds and crowds and crowds. Should I lead them? Should I follow them? Or should I walk among them?

And all the little feet are standing in the heat, waiting to mash up the marigolds.

As I write this, there has just been an enormous boom in Brooklyn and then sirens and I have no idea what’s going on and it is hot (maybe a transformer blew, maybe something else). I did this ink crowd today (I’m sort of thinking I want to do a seires of crowds… it came to me in a dream and also at the Summerstage show… I’m really fairly isolated in the studio of late and the idea of standing in crowd…. well it’s odd). My mom was asking me about the symbolism and there really isn’t any, but what I was thinking of was all these people at the end of one century, moving into the next and they are all going to get blown up and or blow themselves up and or watch some variation. I don’t know. I’m just thinking of Dada and WWI and just how absurd right now feels to me. But honestly, I should watch the news… and the space shuttle and Ezekial and Kubrick and turning turning turning… the rat in the wheel.

Today was off to a funeral and back and it put me in mind of Ulysees. I’d been wanting to pull the OddCity gif out, but today just seems the odd day to do it in. I was dressing myself in black and coffee and feeling like Bloom, when all along I’d fealt more like Stephen. “Getting old,” I thought and then feeling like both of them, but not feeling like me at all. In the Eulogies I learnd that the Jesuits had had a big role in the life of the man going into the ground. It got me thinking about religion and it’s contemporary corallary; terrorism.

It is truly odd to ride the subways and trains these days. Cops on the platforms, National Guard (with full automatic weapons) in Grand Central, and Connecticut State Troopers in full formal wear on the trains. Life has become one big duck and flinch and then at the funeral they go on and on about Jesus and people wear flags in their lapels and I feel like a free floating alien…. floating on the nearing tide. This and that rusty boot with its snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs to read in the diaphane remind me of Willoughby and the work I’ve been doing late at night after painting in the studio. I’m standing on the shores of Coney Island trying to figure out Violence and love and what makes for good neighbors.

Here’s another sketch of something that I sort of dreamed making this morning. It occurs to me that if you put this mob on a table top and put the hungry men around that table top, you’d have an okay painting…maybe.

Another meal sketch. Tried to put the figure over an abstract, but more or less ended up with surrealism. Got some larger stretchers for some sort of dinner painting. These may all get overpainted, or torn to shreads. As it is, I’ve been turning a lot of the earlier stages over and restreatching the unprimed side and painting on that (Bacon used to prime the opposite side and paint on the raw canvas, preferring the way it caught the paint and tugged at the brush and I have to say he was on to something).

I’m feeling disturbed. Someone I was very close to in my youth managed to cut themselves on a shard of glass last night and bleed to death…probably right around the time I was writing about glass shards yesterday. I have no words,



In the studio, the skizum between abstraction and figure continues to puzzle me. The nice thing about the blog these days is that it seems to unify the split into a temporary coherence. The figure acts like a character and the abstraction acts as a sort of landscape/soundtrack/action/…. or I guess the character’s thoughts, or mood, or dream, etc.

It was impossibly hot and the pidgeons went up over the roofs and spiraled like DNA into the sky.





I was cutting up and collaging the painting made from the pants my father died in. It had been a brutal day of doubts about the figure vs. abstraction and throwing caution to the wind and then I was kneeling and listening to Coltrane and sort of praying-like over the tearing and gluing and destroying a recreating thing with the pants, when my naked knee came to rest directly on a tiny shard of glass. It looked much worse than this as the blood was in crimson red rivulets down my leg and and my knee was printed again and again on the studio floor. I should have been wearing pants, you see.

It was a busy day for home improvement and cleaning and picking up framed pictures like the one above from omEGG. First off I wanted to sleep, but the farmer’s market called and then I had this desire to go and take a boat ride on the Gowanus Canal and then see the multimedia projections as part of the Submerge Festival…. But the better half wanted to clean the bathroom and vacuum and buy a blind for the kitchen and hang that blind and rehang the Phospherous Tracer painting that fell off the wall on … was it 7/7? and rehang everything else in response to the newly framed drawings. By the time I got down to the canal, nothing was happening… nothing till it got dark anyways … and well frankly it looked like it wasn’t going to be so exciting, so I beat a retreat from a personal Waterloo …but I did find two nice pieces of quality ply wood to work with in the studio with the sweat pants that my dad died in…. and some great old tapes (second time in one day I found tapes… people seem to be tossing out whole collections… Peter Gabriel, Led Zep, Beethoven, De La Soul, etc…). These bastards are throwing out my youth and if I weren’t walking down the block, well who’d be there to collect it? I mean to say that there happens to be a tape player in the studio… Hell I threw out my youth a long time ago. I’ve got almost nothing that plays a tape anymore…


We ended up going to our old haunt, Rosewater. It was one of the first good restaurants in Park Slope (now it’s becoming a veritable scene). Nostalgia filled the air. You could taste all the years that have flowed away like the waters of the Volga… and it was some sort of Chekhov night… I had allergies, but that can’t explain all the tears, can it? We drank an Alpine wine from the Savoire and talked to John, our old neighbor and the restaurantuer and time and space got all funny, like the Murakami book I’m reading (Kalfka on the Shore), or a Nicholas Roeg movie. He was talking about coincidences too… what a coincidence.






They brought the bird out on a silver platter. She had been fattened on tarmac and cheetos and fried up in the the orange marmalade of napalm and butter. It was delicious, but you couldn’t help but think of all those who’d died in the kitchens and Roman arenas. They’d been eaten by lions and here we were eating the lions, while the music played dominoe on the old black and whites.

Artkrush did an artickle on photoblogging this week. Apparently most people just put up one or two little photos a day. Who knew? Guess I’ve been working too hard. Well it’s friday and I forgot to bring my camera to the studio and it has a weird spot on it… maybe on a lens inside? Anyone got a clue what I do now? It really shows up when I zoom in… depressing… so I’m keeping it short today in honor of…. well everyone else I guess…. but then, maybe not.


Also it’s the dog days of summer and the gardens are in bloom and it strikes me that the blog needs some cheering up. Also: Alex Itin, Alex Itin, Alex Itin, Alex Itin, Alex Itin. That’s so maybe if someone Googles me, this blog will show up. I should probably write: luscious tits, or wicked wet vaginas as more people are likely to google those things than my name, but… hey I just did.

Course then I walked the dog… and well I cant help myslef…


Speaking of blogging and all… doesn’t this say something about the state of literature, or at least its tools. Hard not to be notstalgic for the tap tap tap of a typewriter. I like to think this one typed only love letters and flowers… since its been smashed up, it only types flowers.

While the French were out drinking wine and toasting the revolution, I was again carrying doors over draw bridges and scribbling and erasing. Tallest door yet.

It was hot and the sun all cadmium colored while somewhere in Paris cathedral bells were ringing and Clark ordered frites while nodding off and stroking his bald head and muttering about the Vietcong and how he’d swallowed a bug. The sun in Brooklyn set over I-278.

It was another morning of ripping apart a refrigerator door and than carrying it over the draw bridge, so I could draw on it. I felt like a perverse sort of Beach Boy, carrying an aluminum board past the piers that bloom like six petaled lotus flowers, from the murky poison of the Gowanus canal.

I was drawing the hungry men again… only on a taller door.


He seems to be eating a Twombly, or is it spaghetti? or is it his own black heart?

I was working late and tearing up some things and scribbling and listening to NPR and thinking about politics and war and terror and erasing. Outside it was a balmy night so I decided to walk the dicey industrial streets home from Smith and 9th. I’m fairly in love with the F line bridge over the canal. It’s all wrapped now in carbon fiber, or something and the train roars by in a yellow rumble. There was a lady doing watercolors under the tressle of the oil tanks and the canal (she had a flashlight in her mouth). I was going to snap her picture when the Fire department showed up with sirens blaring and lights throwing red. Maybe they thought she wast taking particularly aesthetic notes on where to plant the bombs? Actually, I think they were just testing the water preassure of the hydrants, but who knows? I’ve been stopped a few times photographing bridges and things.



On the way home I was thinking about how I only had one fridge door left and boom there was a fridge in front of me. I was starting to carry it home, when I realized it was all dented up on one edge. I’m kind of particular about the edges of these things, so I threw it back. Still it’s nice to know I can fish so easily. But I’m also stretching a canvas tomorrow. These big drawings are giving me ideas about paintings and vice versa.

spent the morning ripping apart old fridge doors I’ve been storing. There is nothing quite like the industrial smoothness of a a circa sixties/seventies fridge door. Like an old Chevy, but hung together with a million bolts (the newer ones are all glued together like a Stealth Bomber… it is funny the revolution in adhesives in the last fifteen, or twenty years). It took a lot longer than I’d hoped to get the backs off. Then I carried one over the Gowanus to the G and to the studio… an awkward and sweaty affair. Once in the Studio I felt my typical despair about canvas and started drawing on the old Admiral fridge door with a lumber pencil. I’m crazy about the line. It sort of reminds me of the drawings I did from Goddard for Ashes and Oil a while back.


Now it seems that the three characters dining at the Admiral’s table are sort of the cast of Willoughby and or the face and psyche of America right now, or are they Dadaist at the Cafe Voltaire?

Clark showed up finally in the new paintings. This used to be the Hex/egg/dome painting, now it seems a study for Clark when drinking every tap beer at the bar and eating every sadwhich on the menu before heading out to try and kill Willoughby. This seems early in the evening… maybe when the narrator stops by the bar he snaps this picture?

In general it was a sort of emotional roller coaster in the studio today. Oil behaves in such a facinating and at times frustrating way. After a year of only working in acrylic ang guache and ink, etc… oil is like a whole different beast. I felt like I was on a carnival ride going up and down…. speaking of carniavals, this one is going on in Central Park. Pretty as a picture, but it some how reminds me of Dylan’s Desolation Row… like the circus is in town and they’re getting ready for a hanging. The war sort of overshadows all beautiful visions.


We went to Summerstage yesterday to see the Royal Wylds open for Citizen Cope and the Blind Boys of Alabama. It was nice to see Major Tom beating that kit he’d recently refinished… only now in front of huge crowds. Mostly I was in the dog house for being poor (again) on the better half’s birthday, but it was still a kind of nice day between deserved insults. I really ought to figure out how to make some money.

When the sunset down in the cream of clouds, we left, knowing that the blind boys may not have seen that sun setting, but they sure as shit must have felt it. It was a hot day and I was glad to see the sky turn indigo.

Another year and another birthday of the better half. I’ve been making these flower petal drawings for her, but she has informed me (in no uncertain terms) that she prefers living flowers. So if you like these drawings, here’s an idea: send me some living flowers to:

Exterior morning: Pink cherry blossom petals are moving down the street like ashes. They gather and swirl in the center of the road and seem to move with a ghostly will of their own.


Exterior Coney Island Beach VO: “We were all out on the street because of women.”

I’ve been working on editing up a long version of Willoughby Monologues. It is a strange exercise in that the finished e-book pobably won’t use much of it, but as sound track. I’ve mostly been walking around and recording little monologues and dialogues around brooklyn. I may use these as audio tracks for narration in the e-book, or I may just rerecord the thing in a controlled environment. In short I’m making something I may not use, but somehow I feel like assembling all these disparate parts from a year’s worth of scattered efforts will be worth it. I’m trying to make some structure out of the chaos and find the through line of the story.


A Police helecopter circles over head. There has been an incident and it darts about like a bee.
VO: “I was out there because the wife couldn’t stand my smoking in the house. She said it made the place stink like a bar.

VO: “Clark was out there because of his mother. She’d died in that very house. Emphasima. He still wouldn’t dare smoke inside. He said she was still hounding him from the grave about smoking in the house. She haunted the place; an all seeing ghost, looking out at him from framed family pictures. He would slink out of the house, like a guilty child to sneak cigarettes in the open Brooklyn air…. and talk. Clark was a real talker. Talked about his mom mostly and the ghost of her, but today he was talking about Willoughby.”


VO: “Willoughby was the third point of this triangle of smokers. He was the other side of the street…. But he was still sleeping.

From here, it would be just as good to download the sample TK3 book of Willoughby: Here, but I wanted to talk for a moment about low rez video. Last night I was watching BBC about the London bombs and I was struck by the camera phone videos. I’ve always known that Willoughby is about the cycle of violence we currently find ourselves in, but I was sort of struck by the way that low rez video is becoming the look of contemporary crisis, or craziness, or whatever the fuck is going on. I’ve seen plenty of bouncy pexelated journalists, but this was clearly shot by a “civilian” (which is becoming a meaningless term and may have been since WWII, but I digress). It showed smoke pouring down the street and ashes and bodies in an erratic hand held jumble of pixels… Somehow it felt very intimate and home made… you could almost feel the person behind the camera experiencing this vision, but also having enough distance to film it… then I went back to editing, and my first shot is similarly jerky and grey, but it is pink petals moving down the street. It sort of slapped me back into what Willoughby is all about I think. Anyway I ended up working late into the night, or was it morning when the rain came?




Clark:“What the hell is wrong with Willoughby. Listen to him. What’s he saying? Sounds like… I don’t wan’t to Cry.”
VO: “I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die. He’s saying I don’t want to die. Jesus Clark! It’s all he ever says for weeks… how can you not know what he’s saying!?”

Clark: “Is that what he’s saying? I thought he said he didn’t want to cry…. Like he was some kind of cry baby… Like boo fuckin’ hoo, I’m fuckin’ Willoughby and I’m so sad…like I’m NOT sad, like YOU’RE not sad, like the whole fuckin’ world ain’t sad…. Doesn’t want to die huh? Shit. Is he sayin’ that I DO want to die, or that you wanna die… or that my mother wanted to die? Is that what he’s sayin’?”

VO:“I don’t think he’s saying that. I don’t think he’s saying that at all. He’s just saying that HE doesn’t want to die.”
Clark: “Well, who the fuck wants to die?”

The dream of yesterday cracks open like an egg made by bees in waxy yellow fire. I’m pouring resinous, amber liquids on wood and the sun goes behind clouds and the rains are coming tomorrow hard. They put the girls head on a cutting board and there was a resevoir to catch the blood and dreams…later they would pour it back into its shell… I mean to say these are some smaller paintings I’ve been screwing around with (along with the Coney Willoughby series). These are starting to be oil paintings….and of course London’s Calling.

They’re getting ready for the festival of San Paolino d’Nola in Bburg. The Giglio is resting. This enormous tower with the saint at top will be carried throughthe streets on the backs of men. It is a tradition brought over from the south of Italy. The phalic quality is obvious and the summer heat is echoed by the walk sign on Metropolitan:









Today was about the first day I’ve fealt relaxed in the studio. It is hard to adjust to the physical act of painting and I’ve been sort of coy and shy like a teenager around the physical act of love. I am struggling with what a painting means in the context of all the linked narrative work I’ve been doing with drawing and computers. I suppose the blog is making the glue that holds my practice together. These thing exists not only as discreet objects to be bought by one person and kept as property (or sold without my owning a copyright and thus no residual), but as a journey in time and space to be shared with all of y’all out there in the blogosphere… they keep changing, but the memory maybe lives here and in some way in the final painting, because in the end, I still want a good painting … and painting is a tricky and hard business…. but today it was sort of fun too. Today, the streets were offering signs to be read, like in Ulysees. It was almost making sense.

We tore out over the Triboro and through the wetlands of Queens and the Bronx to find Civic Christos and Coop Cities like great brick chunks of Stalin’s rage littered among the cat tails and the swamps. It was the dangerous nation’s birthday… and a good excuse for meat… steaks seared on the Bar B Q after the BQE and into the pool of light to float and moan like Moby Dick crying after Ahab in their unrelenting dance of revenge and erotic violence. You could see the new born birds, fresh from eggs, eating the remains of light and then it was dark and we went home again.














At home- after Whitestone and the DC 10’s landing with it’s wheels like talons and flaps fully extended and heading head on at us - the t.v. flickered blue: the Twilightzone.

Strange figurative things started to happen in the studio today. Sweating, even with the window unit on, I got sick to death of the abstractions and just started throwing paint around. Still trying to prime the canvases so I can go after them with oils… who knows where it ends, but the one thing that is true is: I don’t understand people who paint to relax. What the fuck is relaxing about painting? It seems like a dance with death… very tense… There are moments of bliss, I suppose, but most of it is a filthy slog… a long march through leach filled swamps under artillery attack… or is that all in my head? The problem is, it is all in my head… also I’ve got to build some panels. In the end, I hate canvas. It’s a shitty surface to work on. It’s always giving way, like a trampoline, or a pillow. Okay for sailing the Pequod towards the White Whale, but rotten for brushing and beating with paint.