All there is is the gaping maw and the turkey and more and more empty holes and turkey.

Just happens to be the book I’m reading and speaks to the impossiblity of speaking, or at least communicating coherently, or maybe paranoid delusions… all of which speaks to me. The above painting looks much better in person and even better through a veil of tears where all the lines get blurry and become like a cloud and landscape while still being a head, or so I am told.

I carried this ancient RCA Whirlpool fridge door through the cold, biting rain to Williamsburg. I started drawing, but frankly I’d had so much scribbling the day before that it just felt tedious and I took a break and leafed through a stack of ArtForum magazines till I felt sufficiently alienated from contemporary art practice and alternately angry at myself for just not getting most of it and angry at it for seeming cold and remote and obtuse and unsensuous and as dull as an office cubicle to return to the steel door, but still the pencil bored me and I’ve had a couple of cans of black and white oil enamel waiting for a desperate experiment to happen. Mix the enamel with some oil paint and it should stick to the old metal paint on the fridge door. Something about this painting now reminds me of drawings I was doing a long long time ago, but you know what Faulkner said, “The past is not dead… it’s not even past” or something. And speaking of the past, this door is one solid piece of beautiful metalwork. It’s really quite an object (all the paint worn off around the handle from years of midnight snack’s blind fumbling). It is well built, unlike the Welbilt which is acutally not at all, but was lighter to carry.

Meanwhile, back in the studio, I dragged a Welbilt fridge door in and went at it with pencils and erasers (after a hiatus on that style of work). Somehow the food drawings gave way to sex and a freakishly endowed character (or maybe he’s being devoured by a snake?). It could be called “Something In The Way”. He sort of popped into my mind when I looked at the blank door, but then I have been getting a lot of penis enlargement spam these days and you can’t help, but wonder what would happen to someone who actually purchased whatever it is that they’re selling?.. I don’t know, but I used up most of my paint on the the large giant guy who now has a sort of Pinocchio Picasso profile. It could be called, “More Thoughts on Fascism and Modern Painting”, or “Pinocchio Von Frankenstein. The top portrait I just like after three months of noodling.

This morning’s visual detritous seems to be a meditation on time and space when I look at it now, or perhaps a retelling of Ziggy Stardust by way of a Pynchon glyph (which I came upon last night in Lot 49). Any way, it always strikes me as odd how three seemingly random photos taken while walking to the market always end up wanting to tell a story when you put them together.

It’s somewhat pleasant to watch the Pres. fianlly suffer in the press, like some guy whose pressed up against paint and left right arm marks all up and down the subway porcelain. The sad thing is, it’s not green paint, but red blood and the fist goes bang bang bang, “I’m bigger than you”. Furhter more, they are showing Cosmos on the Science Channel (which might explain the Sagan zeitgeist) and I miraculously stumbled on to a discussion of exploding stars at one in the morning only to find out that there is no such thing as a yellow giant, only a red giant. Yellow is just a normal sun. I can’t say if that’s why the whole painting went red today, but maybe its that, or Castro still talking and reforming his sugar economy. There ought to be a band called, “Sugar Economy”. There ought to be a President that makes dictators look bad, but what can you do? The Universe is expanding.

Yesterday’s work got me in a mood to play with photos. I happened to have a series of portraits that Christa Gruaer shot of me and they seemed like a good place to start.

It was one of those studio days where you get the yellow giant to where it looks like a cross between the Michelin Man and Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now and you sort of like that because it goes to the Vietnam War and the present Middle East crisis as a sort of self indugant gluttony for gas and mangos, when suddenly you paint out the witness/assassin and use a lot of precious colors and get tired and are almost ready to call it a day when the whole thing goes south and you have to paint it all out and start over again and hope you saved it. Giant pain in the ass, but I’m past caring. Now it seems some late night creature in solidarity with no one, but itself.

How true: “Carl Sagan cared, punks!”. It seemed kind of funny to find this scrawled along a hundred feet of sidewalk under the Williamsburg bridge as I’d already decided to call today’s entry, “Yellow Giant” early this morning when I found a battered yellow lens that had popped out of the frames of a some kid’s sun glasses. I shoved the lens into my pocket like a bar of glycerine lemon soap and carried it with me the rest of the day. A yellow giant is the early state of a sun’s demise (before the red dwarf, etc.) if I can remember all the stuff I learned from Sagan’s show a million years ago… (or was it billions and billions of years ago?). But I wasn’t thinking of Carl Sagan this morning. I was looking at the green walls we’d spent Sunday painting with a fourth, or fifth color glaze of a decorative finish. We’d given the first four layers three years to dry before deciding it was too brite a green. So that’s why last night’s entry was a green giant (blue and red the days before that… which I just realized and so I suppose an accident). I thought it would be funny to name today’s entry, “Yellow Giant” in a sideways glace at yesterday’s green giant, ho ho ho… Today I had a nervous pocket of green money to pay the studio rent, but first went to Utrecht for canvas to start a giant painting and walked over the Williamsburg Bridge to save the two bucks subway fare, where I dug into my pocket and found, at last, the scratched yellow lens which I held over the camera lens and shot the distorted skyline for the Yellow Giant which exploded into an odd portrait after the sun died., but who cares? …. Yes Carl Sagan.

On the way to the studio I was singing La la la la la down the hill untill I came to the Muslim school and the ladys in the burkas… so I kept the toon but switched the words to Allah allah allah (I think I was humming the Marriage of Figaro, or something) and I was transported in a moment of Middle Eastern mood when suddenly an enormous Hummer passed like punctuation. It was all tricked out with chrome instead of armor, but it seemed like a sign. I crossed the canal pondering cars as cocks and hidden women and ass holes and gas guzzlers and sex and cigarettes propped out of car windows at the end of crooked elbows waiting for the red light on Metropolitan Avenue.

It was one of those days where I must have been wearing a friendly face. A electrically disheveled man staggered towards me in the subway station. He seemed strung out on glue and thorazine, or maybe it was just smack. He held a wad of cash in one hand and with the other he thrust a small electronic device at me.

“What does this mean?” he asked me.

I took the device in my hand and I have no idea what it was - smaller than a beeper/bigger than a watch. I think the word “security” was written on it and it had an LCD screen showing a series of numbers (or one very large one): 478945203

“I have no idea,” I told him.

He looked at me with a sort of surprised shock, like he couldn’t believe that I didn’t know what it meant either. Then he got a sort of self satisfied expression on his face, like maybe he wasn’t so crazy after all.

But he was pretty fucking crazy, or high, or something and he stumbled off down the platform with his untied shoes and his hand full of money and his other hand full of electric mystery.

Then on the way home, his female doppleganger walked up to me and asked, “Does this train go to Claxton Ave, or something like that?”

“Or something like what?”

“I can never prounounce it right,” she said.

So we walked over to the map and I read off the names and it was Classon Ave she was looking for and she never could pronounce it right she told me. That wasn’t so crazy, but when we sat down on the bench she put on her headphones and gave me a fractured concert: “Oooh baby…the one…now do it….all night…get up… no one like you…yes!” top of her voice every third word of some half Spanish song. So you sometimes have to love the subway and this painting seems to be about those faces and kids and fashions and all you see underground.

Image search collage for Clichy-Sous-Bois.