I’d been thinking of animating the saddest little tree in Brooklyn… maybe with music, maybe with color… but when I saw this little tree in Chinatown today…well it seemed as good a place as any to start… particularly as it feels like spring today and we are all reborn in the new year. You’ll find some music to go along down below…

This is a hunk of wood I’m playing with…I think I’ll keep changing it and post future variations… not everything has to move. below is earlier, above is later. The idea being to let time talk in space, or spatial relations.

Walking through the Brooklyn Museum today, I came upon a bunch of reliefs with cuniform across the bodies… it caught my eyes for obvious reasons. Turned out they were Assyrian from a town not far from Baghdad. It was impossible to look at them without thinking about the looting of Iraqi museums. Talk about dropping the ball… or something that won’t bounce, like a rock.

This is almost a rough draft. I have this idea for stripes of texture and pattern to sing along with a melodic line, but there’s so many variables to keep track of…. hopefully these bass lines give the basic idea. Anyway, it brings us back to the ground where some young lady walked up to me and asked, “Are you actually filming the sidewalk?” I nodded my head and she looked at me like I was a completely insane… after tryig to get this to work, I maybe agree.

Still, I like that it looks like a cross section of tectonic earth or human skin.

Here’s another idea for a music animation…. ends up looking like a Pollock almost. I don’t want to beat the music metaphor to death, but seeing these sad chestnuts up in the winter wind, just cried out as musical notation…. and it continues the suspended in air theme.

I was thinking of a synthesis of the crosswalk and the helicopter when I walked up the street and saw these shoes twisting in the wind. Seemed like an apt metaphor for my state of mind. For several years I’ve felt like I’ve seen the path before me. No doubt this was an illusion, but a comforting one. Now I don’t know where to turn. Anyway, this might look nice with the layered Monk moment on the right side quicktime below.

This really borders on wrong headed, but somehow there is something about the desperation of mothers and children that might work. Maybe it could be called Desperate Mothers, but that ends up sounding like a Zappa idea. Suggestions?… I only put it out there because the idea popped into my head and an image search of famine and desperate housewives yielded eriely matching poses…

All through December I was experimenting with a long form blog by trying to tell Willoughby in order. I’m not so certain it was really working, so I’ve decided to susupend the story arc in the middle and switch direction and make short thoughts, which I’m callng T-Shirts. They are my attempt at making a grander propaganda… These things just keep popping into my head. As far as I know, they’re original works.

“By the rivers of Babylon, where we sat down…”

“I’m confused.”
“About what?”
“I don’t know… everything.”
“You don’t have to.”
“What?”
“No one expects that of you.”
“Expects what?”
“No one expects you to know everything.”
“I never said they did. That’s not what I’m talking about.”
“I thought you said you had to know everything.”
“I never said that.”
“I’m confused.”
“About what?.”

I finally made it to the new Moma today (I’ve been pissed at their twenty dollar entrance fee, but a year later… well its free on friday)… Is it me, or has the place become really stiff? The art looks sort of dwarfed by the galleries (like little drawings stuck on the side of a refridgerator door… I like drawings on refridgerator doors, but I don’t want my de Koonings to look like that). The scale is sort of retail, or big box retail and it throws off the human scale of the work (only the enormo Schnabels have the right size, but I didn’t see any there) It’s now a Judd Judd Judd Judd world (but I prefer it mad). So I Felt more or less like I was in an Ikea and the art was secondary… seemed all of the collection was broken up in favor of little vanity galleries too. I was, in short bugged and it made me feel old and nostalgic (it is a better place now for people watching… if that helps). Caught a few nice pieces though and the Rauchenberg combine show earlier at the Met and a weird new Twombly show at Gagosian. My feet hurt. Wonder if I’ll ever get used to the new Moma… someone really needs to make a mess in that place soon (I liked it better when they were doing demolition). We need some serious Chaos to spice up all that order.

And so the thing of it was to never give Willoughby a voice… to let him only say five words: “I don’t want to die…” and never let anyone know what he was thinking about…

but in this version… which is all now for you backwards… and for me erratic and tonally confused… back story if not on Willoughby than on me seems okay… I was crawling through suburban streets raising money door to door and standing in blocking formation in City streets begging money for John Kerry to loose with (though we didn’t know it at the time… though we feared it) and I was always saying to myself, “I don’t want to die” and so I became intrested in a character with that basic motivation and that basic dialogue… and it is odd now a year later to be working on this thing and feel it makes no sense to me.

I’d be in the winter dark streets of New Jersey towns telling myself small snippets of Willoughby and Clark and I… and a year later I don’t know if it means the same thing and I don’t know what I’m saying and half the time… well I do want to die. How do we save this situation…? Where is this story going?

Willoughby goes to the store and the ailes spread out before him long like a river and he puts his hand in that river and pulls out not a fish, but a can of fish and a can of soup and a can of beans

and he throws them into the chromed cart where they make a satisfying metal on metal clang.

Thinking about Willoughby crossing the street and stepping down the stoop steps towards us and is it raining? Well it was today and there are all the other pepople moving about in the ritual morning as he comes closer and Clark is calling out to him, “Hey Willoughby! How are you doing? How’s it going Willoughby?”

No answer.

“What the hell do you keep saying to yourself,” asked Clark. “Something about… ‘you’re gonna cry’? Is that it? Seriously how are you doing?”

And Willoughby sort of shrugs and he has to admit, “I don’t want to die.”

So there is a sort of horror moment before Willoughby stands and the top of the stoop and steps down towards the street and we are all looking at eachother, or not looking at eachother and clark is quiet for a moment: