Toured the Press Preview for the Whitney Biennial today. The show manages to ask a question I thought was more or less irrelevant by now - Namely: “Yes, yes, but is it art?”

There is an awful lot of Art Poverra… which only works in a context and when you have too much of it, everything just looks like junk. There’s also a lot of post-Barney dressing up in animal costumes with an emphasis on antlers… a lot of home video stuff and in contrast a lot of slick video that hearkens to Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. There’s also some hamfisted political art that makes you think that War on Terror(sic) may never end, if this is best our cultural elite can come up with to protest it. Oddest of all, is a small ghetto of black political art that has some great work, but seems oddly isolated and tucked away…. like well… like a ghetto. It comes off as condescending to both the audience and the artists, but no doubt someone meant well. There are these things and of course an awful lot of Neostalgia (I made up that word today and am feeling proud of myself). You come out feeling like you’ve seen most of this before, made by someone else, a little more sincerely. Still, it’s worth a peek. It’s always worth a peek. I hate it less than any Whitney Biennial I can remember.

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The Olympics are over and tomorrow starts the Whitney Biennial. I find time to be like a wheel of cheese… is it possible that we’ve eaten another year of Gruyere? Basel Fasnacht is only around the corner… and Mardi Gras is already in somewhat skinny effect.



It seems so long ago, but IT IN place is over a year old. It was only last year when Central Park was full of a carnival of optomism in the way of Christo’s Gates. I find it odd that it’s taken me a year to realize that the orange of the gates is simply a color contrast (or negative) of the blue tarps they use when a building is under demolition, or a flood has sunk a city. You live and learn… but you do…. but you must….but you will go on hoping for orange.

-ITIN

He was not paranoid, but he still thought everyone was out to kill him. Out in the street, the doppler effect of a passing subwoofer bass was enough to make him duck. So he watched the scene unfold on television in awe. The men were moving the wounded across a field of fire. They zigged and zagged in a serpentine to avoid the snipers. It was, in its own way, a beautiful example of athletic motion. It was a dance choregraphed in cordite and blood, with the passenger hanging in the balance. He was not a third wheel at the prom. He had a partner too. For him it was Totentanz.
.

“Somebody stop the music,” he said alone, in his living room, to no one but the cat.

The cat walked by while he was trying to have a shit. It sat in the hall outside the bathroom and looked at him in a way that seemed quite human and made him feel ashamed and vulnerable.

“Am I on stage here?” he asked and it didn’t answer. It just went on looking at him with a detached air of disgust.

“I don’t watch you when you’re crapping,” he said and this was an out and out lie. She was a fastidious cat and her excretory rituals fascinated him. She had an elaborate dance she did around her litter box - jumping in then out and testing every corner to make certain the litter was clean. It sometimes took a half an hour. That cat had a square dance ballet, while he just read the idiot gossip magazines his wife left in the bathroom for that very purpose. They were all about the scandals of this actor and that actress and illustrated with absurdly ugly photos of absurdly beautiful people. The mucking up of filth on celebrities was, he thought, some sort of elaborate cultural ritual not unlike the litter dance of his cat.

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I had the acting dream again… where I am Orson Welles in the early days of magic and Shakespeare. I am trying to pull a rabbit out of a hat and I do, but the rabbit turns into a skull and I am suddenly having to switch gears and be Hamlet. I start creeping the stage at a petty pace, but I’m like a rat in a wheel and I can’t cross to stage left to squeek my lines, “Alas poor Yorick…” when the skull starts lunging at me, like it wants to kiss me, or bite my neck and I try to push it back down into the top hat when it turns into a mango in a Cezanne bowl and quiets…

…and I’m suddenly Marlon Brando on the set of Apocalypse now and Dennis Hopper has handed me a copy of Mao’s Little Red Book and all its pages are laced with pure Swiss Sandoz L.S.D. and the drug seeps into the mango juice and I eat impossible doses… enough to trip all of Nixon’s China and I start crying uncontrollably and washing myself in the tears.The warm salt water coats my body and I realize that I am huge and full of Paul Masson wine and poi. As many tears as I cry, I can’t fully marinate my fat-tasticallly huge body. I am a swine for the spit. I am the golden calf for the sacrifice. I start to slice off sashimi bits of myself to feed to the audience when I realize they are nothing but skulls lined up like under Paris, or in Rowanda and Cambodia. I realize that I have eaten my own audience and grown huge on their flesh. I give a soliloquy that can’t be beat and I don’t want to wake up for the bone on bone glockenspiel applause.

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I couldn’t sleep all night with the radiator spitting steam and the pipes knocking and banging like Tony Orlando on acid. It was maniacal. Every time I’d fall into a dream: hiss, knock, bang back out of it. By dawn, I was beginning to nod out in exhaustion when the Lady from 5A called to tell me that her radiator had just spat tobacco juice across her white rug.

I went down to the boiler room and sure enough the valve had gotten stuck again and the whole system was flooded with opaque rust-red water. I had to drain that scalding mess into bucket after bucket and pour it down the slop sink. There is a sort of terror you get when draining a pot of spaghetti: the awareness that you too could get cooked. It was like that, only dirty and more frequent.

I drank coffee which was more or less the same color and temperature as the boiler mess, but I missed breakfast and I missed lunch and by dinner I emerged from the lower depths in need of a clean well lighted place. So I went down to Bar 51 and ordered a Bloody Mary. Something about the tangy blood smell of hot, rusty water had given me a tomato juice craving… plus it was still breakfast by my count.

The great thing about 51, is that Paul was from Beirut before Brooklyn, and he puts out pistachio nuts. I can’t get enough of them.

So I sat there nursing my drink and watching little Olympic skaters twirl and whirl and fall all over the ice until there was a pile of red shells like ladies’ lacqured finger nails. No one bothered me and there was no way to tell how much time passed except for the deepening red dying my hands.

Kirby came over and tried to engage me in a discussion on the physics of ski jumping. He was on and on about arcs and trajectories and certain formulas used for artillery. I’m sure there are more boring topics of discussion in the world, but I can’t think of any.

I said, “Excuse me, but I’m starting to look like Lady Macbeth..”

I went home to wash my hands and try to sleep.

It is in the mornings mostly when I am reminded of the cruelty of New York real estate. That is when I usually see her crossing fifth street and after all these years of never having seen her and never having talked to her and never knowing what had happened in her life, I still like the way she crosses a street. I find myself lingering to catch a glimpse now and remembering then. We smile. I wave. We never talk and never touch. It seems impossible. I’d like to kill the asshole who showed her that apartment.

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I saw Kathy pushing that monster of hers in a red Stroller. I hadn’t seen her in a long time and like an idiot I waved to her and she turned the stroller on a dime and charged across the street, with her kid out front pointing at me like a rhino’s horn. No: “Hello, how do you do” from an old Kathy. She just lit right into me, “What the fuck is wrong with your friend Ivan?”

“Ivan? Nothing. He passed the bar… moved back into Manhattan. You know, he got that job… ironically, he’s turning out to be the only one of us who’ll make any money… so much for saving the world..”

“That’s not what I mean and you fucking know it. Why is Ivan Sending Two dozen roses to my house on Valentines Day?”

“He actually got up the nerve,” I said under my breath.

“Some Nerve,” she said.

“Ivan came out for lunch last week and we saw” (and the kid’s name fell out of my head, because I always called it the little monster to every and anyone, but Kathy… the kid was a screaming terror who even in his present state of sleepy, slack jawed drooling, was only storing energy for his next violent fit)…”We saw YOUR CHILD,” I offered. “With his nanny. Ivan was quite smitten by her. You know how he always loved French girls.”

“Marguerite? She’s not fucking French. She’s Haitian.”

“Well she speaks French,” I said. “She has that charming patois… and let’s face it… She’s soft on the eyes.”

I found myself speaking like I was stuck at the turn of the century… I mean the last one. I can never talk to women and especially mothers in my own voice.

“Well that explains why the card was in French,” Kathy muttered and I could see her storing the energy up for her own fit. I got nervous and fished in my coat for the cigarette I’d bummed from Danny two days ago. It was bent and shedding its innards, but I lit it and smoked like a man on the proverbial firing line. I remembered now why I was out of touch with Kathy.

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We ran into Teddy Blowshardly outside the bar where he gave off the immediate perfume of beer and tobacco. We hadn’t seen him since his old band, Power Sander played The Continental. We were just going to nod and walk by when he offered up a pack of Dunhill Red cigarettes and we each took one even though we’d both quit smoking. Teddy had never been a generous sort and it seemed we should grab it while the grabbing was good. We lit up and stood there in a triangle when Teddy went off on a lecture about the inequity of the bass.

The cigarette tasted good and I looked over at Treadwell and he looked at me and Teddy went off on how the bass contained the melody and the rhythm of a song and could act as a bridge to both. He was saying something about chords and notes and that if you played a different root note in bass it chould change the whole sound of a chord…. I didn’t know what he was talking about, but Treadwell told me later that it was all very basic stuff. Teddy tried to draw in the air a magical line between Mingus and McCartney and Jaco Pastorius… something about harmonics and the pop song and he said, “The joke is that the bass is the most important instrument and most schlubs can’t even hear it. Fuckin’singer gets all the attention.”

He went on talking about aspects of the bass and unsung bass players untill the cigarettes ran out. He offered to buy us a beer inside, but we told him we had to get going… neither of us wanted to hear more about the bass.

“Geez he’s gained weight,” Treadwell said.

“Yeah, he’s really hit bottom, ” I said.

“Ha ha,” Treadwell said. “I thought he played piano?”

“And sings a little,” I said.

Press Play For Music

I’m in a cycle of reworking drawings from the year that never quite felt right. The above was a background for an early gif experiment here

I went out into the parking lot with two papier maché puppets on my hands (his and hers). I found the dog panting in the back seat of the convertible. I tried to pet her, but couldn’t due to the over size puppet heads and then the flies showed up and I was thinking that the dog must’ve crapped in the back of the car. The flies circled the dog’s head and landed in her ears and there were suddenly a lot of them and they crawled into her ears and down into her head and you could see her skin buckle and shift as the insects crawled deeper and in greater numbers into her sweet, innocent head.

The dog promptly threw up on me and her vomit was the color of an oil slick, which is to say no color at all, but every color. When I looked closer I could see that she’d vomited little chips and electronic devices that looked like enlarged viruses. I had to go back into the museum.

It had been built in the shape of a large metallic cow dropping… the Swiss-Indian architect from Texas had meant it as a joke on “Sacred Cows”. It had been controversial and was oddly beautiful and there were no hard edges after the door. It was a completely biologically (scatologically) shaped building. However, the art inside was an installation which painfully reproduced a Victorian library (They’d built a classical building inside the enormous turd dome) complete with classical busts, leather chairs, wooden tables and leather bound books on the shelves and one of those ladders on tracks to reach the books high up in the stacks. The art consisted of a team of performers sitting around the library reading and shooshing anyone who talked. They were dressed more or less like a bunch of Princeton students circa. 1953. The only thing odd was that one guy was all tricked out in green body makeup with a red afro and posthetic makeup that made him look quite freaky with bulging eyes. he was spinning records with two turntables, but he was listening to it with headphones,so the library remained dead silent.

I spent the better part of the show trying to get the performers to break character and talk to me. They were like British Royal Guards. I kept insisting that there was no point in doing a show like this unless the audience could participate and I was playing the crazy unwashed guy who talks to himself at the library and demands conflict. “I want to know what’s going on here,” I kept insisting. Eventually I pissed them off so much that they all relented and we started talking about art and drinking wine and having a good time. I don’t know what happened to the dog.

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Sometimes I wonder what is left to see after Picasso saw what is left to see, etc.
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Bud walked by and looked at the ladies as they looked back at him and I looked down and he said under his breath, “The thing about Mommies is, you know they’ve fucked at least once.”

“You’re a sick man,” I said and then I peeked at them looking at us and their suspicious eyes seemed to half close in arousal and extacy. I couldn’t see them the same way anymore. By force of Bud’s words, I had to imagine sleeping with them and with it their kids in the other room and a whole Oedipus play.

“You talk too much,” I said.

“Like I was saying…” Bud went on.

Bud was talking too much. He’s always talking too fucking much. He was off on arpeggios. He’d been up all night smoking pot and practicing arpeggios on his acoustic guitar. He started recording them on his midi and stacking them together until at some point all the broken chords coalesced into a solid sound… “a sort of magnificent white tone,” he called it, but that’s not really important. The thing was that Bud was talking too much and too loud and we were walking by beautiful Brooklyn mothers with their precious, or at least expensive kids and the way Bud kept screaming, “ARPEGGIO! Arpeggio!” must have sounded filthy coming from his manic mouth. The ladies covered their kid’s ears with mittens and I said, “You can’t say arpeggio like that in public. You’re freaking people out.”
“What?” bud asked. “Doesn’t anyone study music anymore?”
“Sure,” I said. “But does it have to be so loud?”
He was quiet untill he said, “You sound like a mother.”

Listen to arpeggios here

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This is another wood block and paper variation. Above that is my Valentine play on Courbet’s The Origin of The World… Seems obvious to me, but clearly most people still think the heart of things is really a heart.

Out of the snow and out of the clothes and wet and drying. This is a variation on that block of wood I’ve been working with and a monoprint from that same said block. The two were digatally collaged: so it’s paper kissing wood kissing stone (silicon), or something.

Press play for music

Everything is now heavy in the blue of the white and the trees are creeking and moaning like strange ghosts outside the window. I am mourning the death of people who are lies, or rather I finished a novel… It is a strange sadness to know I won’t be living with them tomorrow.

The snow came just in time to make the Winter Olympics feel suddently relevant and near by. My Italian Flickr friend thought the above image suggested a Bruegell.

Billy the Bag hung out in a Bodega in Brooklyn, behind the register on a hook with a stash of other plastic grocery bags. Mostly, he just hung there shooting the shit with his cousin, Carlos the Condom and his buddies Larry the Light Bulb and Mario the Marlborro Light. They liked to laugh a lot and make jokes behind the customer’s backs. They joked about the things they bought and how they dressed and the hang dog expressions they wore on their faces in the morning going to work and still hanging on their heads in the evening when they stopped back in off the N and R train. It was easy for Billy and his friends to laugh. They were just hanging out. They had no jobs and they had no faces.

Life was uneventful and nothing much happened at Tata’s Grocery untill one day a bird got into the store. It tore around the newspapers - careening past the canned goods. It really made a mess of things and Tata went crazy and chased the bird with the baseball bat he kept behind the counter to beat off the beggers and the thieves. Mario and Larry laughed at Tata as he smashed a whole family of beer bottles, but Billy was speechless. He’d never seen anything like this bird in his whole short life. It was beautiful. It caused chaos and that was enough for most of the gang behind the register, but Billy saw something else. He saw the way the bird seemed to break the shackles of the earth, the way it darted in and out and up and down with all the simple ease of smoke. It was miraculous. Billy watched in awed silence untill Tata magaged to herd the bird back into the street, where it hung out for an hour trying to figure a way back in.

Billy didn’t know what to call what he’d just seen, untill a customer came to the counter that afternoon to buy a forty ounce of Carey The Colt 45.

“Heard a bird flew in your window,” said the customer.

“No,” Tata answered. “He didn’t fly in the window, This bird had the balls to walk right in the front door, but he sure was flying all around the place once he got in here…. No pennies asshole.”

“Flying,” Billy thought to himself. “Flying. That’s what they call it and That is what I’m going to do. One off these days I’m going to get out of this hell hole and I’m going to fly.”

He was like a different bag after that. He was more serious now and kept mostly to himself. If Carlos, or Larry tried to bust on him, he’d announce in an important voice, “Fellas, hanging around here may be all well and good, but my handle to God, one of these days I am going to fly.”

Billy was not alone. All the bags of Brooklyn learn to fly in winter, if only for a moment.

The restaurant was loud at lunch with Bud standing around telling one of his stories. Bud wouldn’t shut up. When will he? He was going on and on and Mr. Vance sat at his usual table. He tolerated Bud with a causual smile, not to be rude, but he was looking out the glass door where he was the first to notice the bird. It walked right in off the bright street and through the dining room, into the kitchen and out the back door. The old pidgeon was as casual as you please, like it was his normal short cut, like he owned the joint. Everyone shut up and just watched the bird…. Even Bud. We were speechless.

“Nobody order the fucking chicken,” bud finally said. “It’s too cocky.”

I’ve been mixing metaphors in my mind all morning like a sleepy Marshall McCluhan. The sight of seeing the cable man pulling up the cable like Queequeg pulling in a harpooned whale and the way his motion seemed similar to a man peddling a bike (only with his hands) Got me thinking about Internets(sic) and fishing and sailing and the spouting of a whale and the spinning of a wheel. I was thinking specifically about where did belt drive machines evolve from in the industrial revolution and I think it is the rigging of ships and fishing tackle (though chain drive may relate more to the gears of milling). “Is the white whale just a cloud of steam?” Is technology one big fishing trip? I started thinking of that man on the roof pulling on a cable that is wrapped around the earth and spinning it just a little faster with each pull and a little faster again. (It’s a good thing too, because I don’t think anyone can really look at this experiment without DSL or cable… tell me if I’m wrong). Then I thought of us all on this electronic ship and that guy is up there in the rigging with the ropes and the wind. Someone should write a shanty.

Well the chestnuts went into the archive and Sunday I did a sort of old school blog entry and IT IN place is almost a year old, all of which combine to remind me that there are a lot of nice chestnuts floating around in the archive… so I will try to make occasional links to the past… like these that echo recent entries:
chestnuts
tunnel
La Bagel Delight
bagel as empty world and the crazy door… only blue

or bowl?

The interesing thing about the above passage from The Brooklyn Follies, is that so far it’s the only store, or restaurant name in the novel that corresponds to a real place in Brooklyn (the rest are invented). I always thought it was a bizarre name for a bagel store … but the bagels are fresh and warm out of the oven.

And jonah steps out of the whale and into the blinding light of language, or was that Ishmael?

It rained last night and the bark on the trees seemed to come alive this morning. The sap must be starting to run and I was already thinking about paper. Seven pages of Moby Dick crumbled into fragemts in my hand as I drew the birthing woman last night. The shape of fragments seemed echoed in the peeling patterns of the tree bark. A woman walking by in camoflage pants seemed to walk right out of my thoughts because Crosswalk For Shadows And Keys just slipped into the archive.

Back on the ground where the rubber hits the road and all discussions of China these days end in the question of cars, so I’m dusting off a trick I once did with a super 8 camera (fifteen years ago for a college art film) and watching people and watching cars is like watching waves: infinite variation and vast sameness. I’m not one of those people who likes looking at cars for a thrill, but I do like the hubs.