They sit in the café at the end of the pier.
“What time is it?” he asks.
“Late.”
“Where is she?” He asks.
“Late.”
“Where do you think she is?” he asks.
“She’s searching for sea shells by the sea shore… how the fuck should I know where she is? Let’s get some crabs.”
“She hates crabs,” he says.
“She’s not here.”
“A crab bit her once when she was young. Now she hates them. They make her retch,” he says.
“What’s a crab’s bite got to do with how good it tastes? They’re not gonna bite me, I’m going to bite them.”
“She hates crabs. She says they eat litter. She says they’re like rats,” he says.
“Like they’re worse than lobsters? I see her eating lobster whenever she get’s a chance.”
“Well lobsters are more expensive. They’re sort of designer rats,” he says. “That and she was never bit by a lobster.”
“Let’s get some crabs.”
What time is it?” he asks.
“Let’s chop down the tree and count its rings. How should I know?”
“Alright, alright, let’s get some crabs,” he says.

Willoughby wakes up to find them fixing the sky. People keep telling me I ought to do animations. I’m not so certain. It might just be that people like movement on a computer, but I fooled around with this little Willoughby waking up scenario today. All week men have been up in precarious cranes held by cranes fixing the sky and making great noise. I find it hard to sleep, but harder still to get out of bed in the morning. I’m listening to dreams and the chunks of blue falling all around me. Sounds like armies marching up the face towards the summit meeting refridgerator. It goes on and off compressing ice that rolls back down the hill, where Willoughby wakes up to find them fixing the sky.

The whites luff slightly in the late August breeze and the crowds gather in Carrol gardens.

An old woman in a house coat wanders out into the riot of sun and air.

and suddenly you feel young again.

The road was cut off by a wall of steel. Couldn’t make sense of it at first, but it was Just the draw bridge up. I’d never seen it up before I guess.

This morning I dreamt I was in a graveyard looking into a valley of stones. Off in the distance desecraters were approaching. The were coming to erase the stones, rob the graves, cause general mayhem. I tried to stay in the dream, to wait for the desecraters and defend the stones, but I woke up.

This morning began with an AbEx oil slick on the Gowanus canal…. I woke up dreaming of Nazis and the birth of Jet Engines: The ME 262 (and the guy who made the engines moved to Switzerland after the war and sold the Engines to the French, who sold them to the Israelis who used them on the Arabs) and The Americans flying B-52s on 36 hour Sorties from Stateside to Iraq in the first Gulf
War. Jets meeting jets to refuel jets - copulating like humming birds and the gasoline mixes with air and explodes out the back and thrust thrust thrust. Since that war, the military ethos of insane fuel consumption has leaked down to the oil slick housewife who drives an SUVs to the grocery store to by Crisco. Lubrication nation.

I am thinking about the theater of war as a sort of burlesque, or strip show, or belly dance in the Arabian night. We’ve all gathered in a strange dark place to find that we are staring at the asshole of our culture and then someone comes in and light floods the theater and and the pupils all dialate and everyone curses the last one in: “ASS HOLE.” The door slowly shuts. Now that he’s in, the question is, when should he leave?

This morning started with an oil slick on the Gowanus Canal and ended with an insanely large moon that floated in impossible clouds. What happens next?

The dancer walks out over the oil slick, over the water, over the heads of the audience. APPLAUSE! APPLAUSE!

So I keep working on the abstractions which only seem strange landscapes in which these gluttonous characters gather and eat and drink themselves silly. At one level they are celebrating their existence in an insane world… grabbing the last moments of pleasure… but in another way, they are examples of the depraved greed and selfish consumption that has sent the world into the shitter to begin with.

Got sick of looking at these tentative figure things I’ve been doing… I just couldn’t imagine a time when I would like to look at them over a period of days, or months, so I blew up at them with ochre architecture… and speaking of blown up architecture, the Drawing Center is getting muscled out of “Freedom Tower”, because they may, MAY mind you, put up a show that might, MIGHT mind you, criticize America, or something. So the terrorists have won. I’m less afraid of people who want to blow me up, than I am of the bone heads clucking about the Drawing Center and even worse the politicians who listen to the them. These people claim to love America, but they love it the way Lenny loves rabbits. It sucks terribly that so many people died in the twin towers, but just because you’re related to one if them, doesn’t mean you get to be McCarthy…. just because you’re McCarthy doesn’t mean you get to be McCarthy… It’s just too ridiculous. Freedom? Freedom? That said, I never thought the Drawing Center should be there. It’s too great a little institution and I think that the whole project downtown is devolving into kitsch. The Center would have ended up all pumped up on steroids and lose its intimacy. While I’m ranting: How did this country let those idiots invade Iraq?

These two bigguns have been changing today….

I went walking past the Hasidum in Williamsburg and fell into a fever dream of fire hydrants and silent film… something about their hats fills me with Chaplin and Keaton and their women dressed from the twenties and wigs and the brick and the city and the heat and the F-15 fighter bomber and trains and Friends back from Israel and I am struck by how Religion is very much like nostalgia. It’s nice to believe in history even if no one ever seems to learn shit from it. There’s David and there’s Goliath and they are standing in the naked street waiting for the paparazzi.

Spent yesterday streatching canvas in the heat of an enormous empty studio (building sold and no leases renewed and so the exodus starts). The canvas is 48″x 68″, so I looked like a dust covered wet rag by they end of it. Today on crossing over the gowanus canal I saw this painting in my mind… at least its composition: little head, upside down man, big head. It sort of seems to be a painting I would have wanted to make fifteen years ago, but hadn’t gotten around to yet. In some ways, it samples the best of the eighties, or something, but there it was and I sort of liked it. I liked it even more when I giffed the photos together into this animation. It may be Clark coming to Willoughby’s door… or some sort of pulp boxing story, or punch drunk romance. Can’t say as it’s done, but…

He could hear the echo under the arch and his footsteps turned into thousands.

Started on this fairly large thing today…. Not sure which way it goes. It’s either almost done, or no where near.

So today the Swiss are celebrating and drinking beer and eating cheese and chocolat and having fireworks. Happy birthday Switzerland.