Two book collaborations started by yours truly and finished by Tony Van den Booman.
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My last studio Patron called me a few months ago and informed me that my painting is hanging next to a Damien Hirst. I couldn’t imagine why I should care, as I’ve never been a huge fan of his. However, there was this one series of prints he did using Swiss Pharmeceutical design. He replaced the brand names with food names. This one I just altered said, “Chicken”. There were also ones that said, Fois Gras, Steak, Caviar, etc. One should have said Mushrooms. Food and drugs are related for sure and I have always been intrigued by how Swiss pharmacology seems to have grown out of Swiss food science. The whole act of making chocolate and or cheese is a very complex act of chemical engineering and leads nicely to making any sort of drug. It is an issue of being Chinese and making Tea. You put nature into solution and then percipitate out crystals of the compounds you want. It is sort of Alchemy. Though this time not lead, but something like Coca leaves that you suspend in petroleum solvent tea and then percipitate out the purified (what did Sherlock Holmes call it? Seven Percent Solution) cocaine. T being the symbol of Switzerland always seemed fitting to me as it’s less about Christianity and more about T and Tea and TNT and all the permutations that cruciforms have meant to man long before some desert Jew named Jesus started making trouble in the Empire.
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They exit the train station and parade up the wide Geneva Boulevards past the chrome and the gold and the cheese and the chocolate and the watches and knives and the cheese. It reminds me of the start of this whole thing which was an opening in Dumbo under the gothic arches of the two bridges just after the dual steeple fell and gave way to the single protestant spire of Empire. He was out of her depth by the water taxi and she was in too deep. They hated eachother at first sight, but somehow wanted to fuck like wild animals and maybe spend the rest of their lives fighting and fucking at turns… but at that moment it was more about brunch and trying to fix the hangover from the cheap art wine at the opening. Had they met at the opening and maybe snuck off to her loft? Or had they only met on the ferry? I’m not certainn but it certainly refers to Whitman’s On Crossing Brooklyn Ferry and the idea was always that the ferry, at Fulton landing would somehow relate to the cable ferry at Basel and the way the cathedral looms over the Rhine with it’s double spires would echo in the conspicous absence of the twin towers… only leaving the gothic arches of the bridges.

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The book covers were started by your narrator and finished by Double You in England for The Library Project. I found the Video on Vimeo today and it seemed fated to go along with the cinema centric nature of todays book covers, plus the whale as a Kestone cops is almost too perfect to believe.
Post in progress

From Neuk posted in The Library Project.
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This is a large paneled scroll book from Korea by way of Ben… an experiment in Moby Flukes. I will try to post the whole in reverse sequential oder over the weekend, so that in the end the blog scroll will roll in the direction I made the drawings start to end: alpha to omega. I’m also working on a video that docments the drawing and the day of drawing in time lapse and running hand held comentary all set to the music of Thelonious monk (ugly beauty andor Evidence) called 1000 Monk Keys…. Thanksgiving cinema.

I woke up this morning and saw a Star of David clearly formed in the wind twisting branches outside my dawn window. I grabbed the camera and tried to make a quick snap, before the branches blew back to being just branches again. It was odd, as I went to bed thinking about the Jews all wandering and about Hitler and Hanibal and Switzerland during the war… and thinking about Kramer.

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IF A is for Alphaville than B is for Bergman:Gregory Vershbow provides a haunting coda to todays randomagic. music is Jonathan Richman

Ezekial For Kubrick,etc.
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He closed his eyes and remembered the Catacombs under Paris and all those skulls and all that death and he had laid down on his back on a bed of bones, high on mushrooms stairing up at the arch vaulted ceiling, watching the shadow’s play against the ribs of the arches and it occurred to him all in a moment, that he was Jonah in the whale staring up at the inner gullet of a great fish swimming under Paris and that further more, that signature stroke of Roman technology, the arch and the key stone were nothing more than the ribcage and the vertabrae turned over on its side… It was so obvious. Why hadn’t other civilizations seen it? Hadn’t killed big enough fish maybe… still, leave it to the Romans, he’d thought, to turn carnage into an urban infrastructure… all that water all that sea all those aquaducts and ampitheatres born out of a ribcage like Eve and he had read Moby Dick out in the deserts of Utah and Arizona and Nevada, while camping out in the National Parks. He’d actually started the book at Moab and was struck by how it sounded like Ahab and on a rafting trip past red rocks he’d heard the guide talk about Uranium and the Manhattan project and how it had all been mined out of the red Moab earth, the color of an Indian. The rest of the trip, reading as the sun set against the desert stones, next to a juniper fire with a can of river cold Budweiser, he had imagined he could see the whale breaching white above the horizon line like Shiva in the moonlight. At Lake Powell by the Hoover Dam, he started trying to write a novel… Not just any novel, “A Great American Novel” It was set against the backdrop of Las Vegas and contained the central image of a great pigmentless fish that had been living deep under the Moab stone in an enormous underground aquafer. The Americans had accidently woken it up and it crawled out of it’s cave… A mamal, it slouched arcross the dessert like a great walrus towards Los Alamos and beyond. He’d never gotten much past the third chapter, but the image came rushing back at him as she talked about being a cave salamander.

“I should try to finish my novel,” he ejaculated.
“What? What novel? You have a novel?”
“Unfinished… I started one after college…didn’t everyone?”
“No. Everyone has a screenplay… or an internet start up… How old are you?”
“Ageless and all knowing,” he said. “Call me Ishmael.”
“Just don’t call me late for breakfast.”


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From gundanasu u zeneize from The Library.

“It’s a bit of an anticlimax,” she said.
“What is? The omlette?”
“No. The omlette is a climax,” she said. “I love the omlette. I’m talking about the election.”
“You really love it?” he asked puffing up like a fugu fish.
“I have been living in a sort of cave, or tunnel and It has blocked out all of the sun for so long that I’m like one of those lizards with no pigment… “
“Salamanders.”
“An anti chameleon.”
”They’re salamanders,” he repeated.
“What?”
”They’re not lizards… not reptiles at all. Amphibians, actually… but you’re right about the pigment.”
”Who the fuck cares if they’re lizards or salamanders? I’m trying to tell you about how I feel about my country.”
“I just thought you’d want to be scientifically accurate… besides, you’re Korean. It’s not really your country… you just landed there because of the war.”
“Fuck you. Fuck you twice…. Who cares more about America than people who CHOSE to live there?”
“I don’t know… I’m Swiss.”
“You’re not… You’re as American as I am.”
“Which isn’t very much, is my point… Neither of us are all American. We are always outside of it… and We have ways to escape when and if the empire falls… we have our JURUSALEM somewhere across the desert… We have a way out.”
“I don’t feel that way… Korea is insane. It’s foreign to me. Switzerland, from what I can see, is maybe even more insane… America has always felt like the last best hope… HOME… and to see it succumb that way… no way out… I’m just saying I felt like pigmentless… what do you call it? ….salamander. Okay? SALAFUCKINGMANDER…. Now I’m scared of the sun….”
“Sun’s no fun when you have no pigment. Ask the swiss yellow lady.”
”Are you trying to piss me off?”
“A little.”
“I don’t know how to feel,” She said and took another bite and spoke with her mouth full, “All I’m saying is this whole election… I was waiting for a real candidate 2008… or I’d given up hope.”
“Keep hope alive,” he said in his best Jessie Jackson voice.
“Yeah,” she rolled her eyes. “All I’m saying is that this whole thing is like fucking you.”
“What now?”
“An anticlimax,” she said.
“You don’t have to be mean.”
“You’re trying my last nerve… and I’m hung over ,” she said.
“We all are,” he said. “We all are.”

Fallen wing man fromTan Jun book is my start forThe Library Project.
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When she’d dried off the shower and hung the clothes upon herself like onaments on a tree she came down to the kitchen and he presented her with eggs and she said,” What the hell is this then? It looks like Jabba the Hut.”
“It’s an omlette,” he said, deflating a little like a balloon.
“It looks like Dick Cheney on crack,” she said.
“Some one woke up on the wrong side of bed,” he said.
“That I’m awake at all is a small miracle… I had to drag your insane ass through half the train stations in Switzerland last night and you kept trying to yodel and buy more beer,” she said.
“Really?” he asked… “It’s all a bit foggy for me now.”

Collab with CM3

“It tastes good actually,” she said chewing the first bite and he inflated a little again and said:
“Good news… They got voted out.”
“Who?”
“The Republicans… the Democrats took the House and maybe the Senate.”
“I’d almost forgotten all about the mid terms.. I vowed not to vote again untill the Democrats ran an actual candidate… ” chew chew chew…”How much money did I give to them last time?” chew chew chew “And you were out there volunteering for the idiots…” chew chew chew “Best thing I’ve eaten in weeks,” she said chew chew chew.. “Or is it that I feel I can hold food down for the first time in years…?” chew chew chew.

From Double You of The Library Project.

collages from The Library Project

She getsdressed and spends a long time trying on the various clothes she’s brought with her in the luggage. She has a sort of modular outfit method that she designed to maximize her limited travel wardrobe.. The unfortunate side effect of the system is that the potential permutations of each outfit are nearly infinite. She winds up spending much longer than usual trying on this pant with that shirt and that shirt with this dress and on and on twisting in front of the mirror like a Rubick’s Cube.

press play for audio text:



Collaboration with Tony Van Den Boomen from The Library.
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From Bella at The Library Project.

Collaboration with Sonja from The Library Project.
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This picture is a collab between Canadian members of The Library… Viva La Revolution (I mean the American one… vote the bums out).

From Tan-jun of The LIbrary.

In the pisser, he thought he saw the ghost of his father in the mirror, but it was simply his own face which resembled that of his fathers and had grown quite a bit older since he’d last looked at it deeply. Two other men came to piss beside him and he grew fearful and thought, “They are two thieves and they want my money… I’m surrounded…” He was not sure what to do with his new fear and suddenly he imagined the image of Christ crucified… he too had been surrounded in a trinity by two thieves and he decided that the ghost of his father’s face in the mirror would protect him and so he shook his cock and flushed and walked out from the back of the bar where he noticed a small flower placed in a vase on one of the table, glowing purple yellow by candlelight… It flickered and radiated and pulsed at him and when he came closer to it he saw that the petals radiated out from a central idigo Hexagon… like a perfect fortress and he said to himself: “So that’s what the hippies meant by flower power.” And the flower radiated a color of love and so he looked in the dark crowd for his love (and her being Korean in a cast of cheese-white Swiss caused her to stand out and radiate and glow not unlike the little purple/yellow flower. He hugged her emotionally:
“I want to got back to the cemetary,” he said.
“What?” she said.
“The cemetary. I want to see the stone again.”
“We just went this morning.”
“Yes, but now I think I know what I’m looking for.. Or atleast I know that I’m looking for something in the stone…. It’s… Nothing…. Nothing is what it appears to be.”
“You’re not making any sense.”
“I know… I’m a little fucked up, but you see, here everything means something else, do you see? The stone, you see is something other than stone… it’s like words only words made of stone out of pictures.”
“I think you’re high,” she said. “The Cemetary is closed… Look outside it’s late.”
“But we should go at night… maybe you can read it like runes in moonlight.”
“God you are high.”
“Am I?”
“The stone will be there tomorrow… The stone will be there later… whenever… The stone will always be there. That’s the nature of stone.”
“That IS the nature of stone,” he said. “You ARE SO RIGHT!… you’re brilliant and beautiful.. Kiss me.”
She kissed him and then she gently lead him outside to get some fresh air and they kissed again in the full moonglow and the Cathedral bells began to chime across the river.


Stone from double-you.

At some point in the evening he is leaning over a table staring into one of those ubiquitous circles of soft cheese when someone says to him, “You are looking at ze perfect model of the Swiss nation.”
“What?” he says…”I’m looking at a cheese.”
“You see a cheese,” said the stranger. “I See a perfect model of the Swiss Nation.”
He noticed the brand was “Swiss Knight,” “Oh I get it, the knights of the middle ages.”
“No,” said the stranger. “The defended fortress.”
“I need a beer,” he said and stranger made one appear.
“Do you know the story of the last Romans?”
“No.”
“They came to live here in the mountains at the end of the empire….well here and at the Watican in Rome…It is why they only speak Latin in the Watican and in certain part of the Alps…Romansch..it is the fourth Language of Switzerland.”
“I”ve heard of it,” he said.
“It is Latin,” said the stranger.
“I’d heard that.”
“The story starts much earlier when the Roman empire was in its period of shrinking and expanding and shrinking… the decline…”
“The decline and Fall.”
“It was not so much a fall as several centuries of war and corruption. Like all empires they became arrogant and lazy and set in their ways… but around them ze people were trading and learning from all parts of the world… and the Swiss who were not called Swiss yet, but were the ones who live here….They were particularly clever and mean, yes? The Swiss have a particular capacity for war, it is why they take peace so seriously here. You know everyone thinks of what when they think of Switzerland?”
“Cuckoo Clocks.”
“Yes, exactly, but do they know that the cuckoo clock is also the key to military victory in Europe?”
“I don’t get you?”
“Spring steel make a clock go tick tick, but it is also the key to a very sharp sword. When folded into the hard center of carbon steel you get a blade that is felexible and strong and stays sharp. It is the Japanese trick, but also Persian.. and also Swiss… Spring and Steel makes a knife and a clock and later a gun verk. Ze Swiss learn these tricks from ze east, by trading, by buying, and by making and so The Romans come up the Pass from Italy and they are used to go someplace and take the wine and the women of the willage and ze cows and ze food, yes?”
“Sure. They’re the Romans.”
“So zey come wis a whole legion… 5,000 man and they are met on ze pass by only a few Swiss men with their steel swords … the Romans use bronze, or iron now I zink… short swords… so It is usually told with five men in the shape of a Pentagon, but it could be six in a Hexagon,” said the stranger dumping the cheese wedges on the table.”
“Tell it with five,” he said opening a cheese and popping it in his mouth and washing it down with the beer.”
“Yes,” said the Stranger. “Five… it is the shape of a hand and the four elements plus spirit… so you have the five men: the king who is the center and he has the sword of the center which is the thumb,” The stranger said, closing his thumb. “Then you have the sword of ze West - Earth,” and the stranger closed his indexfinger. “Zen sword of North - Wind,” and he closed the middle finger. “Zen Sword of South - Fire,” And he closed the ring finger. “And finally you have Sword of East - Water,” and he closes the pinky and turns his hand around to show his fist… and these five swords make a perfect weapon.”
“I see,”he said

‘ You see yes, but ze Romans, don’t see this, they see five men in the middle of ze road and so the General says: “Out of the way farmer Cow man…We are ze Roman Legion, Yes? We come to pass and take wis us your wine and also women and food, yes?”
“You are what now?” says the Swiss man… Center- thumb sword who speaks.
“We are ze Roman Legion and….” He goes through it again ans the five swiss laugh.
“Why do you laugh cow man?”
“We think it is funny you announce that you plan to steel from us… It is not the way we do things here. Let me explain. If I were to come to wisit you….Where do you live?”
“Como”
“Let us say that I come to wisit you at the Lake of Como, yes? I would first bring you a gift… perhaps my best wine, or my best cheese, or my best cow… It is all depending, but I can assure you I would bring you first a gift. Have you brought me a gift?”
“We are the Roman Legion.”
“Yes, You say that before, but it is not the question I ask you. I know who you are, but here is the problemm you have… You do not know who I am.”
“You are a cow farmer.”
“If you say so,” says the thumb.
“We are coming through… now get out of the road.”
“You are still not understanding me Como. You are not coming through unless I invite you. If I were you I would try to persuade me with a gift… this is the story I have been telling you.”
“But I am The Roman Legion and I have five thousand men and five thousand swords and you have nothing, but five men,” and the Roman pulls out his ugly short dull sword and announces, “This should persuade you.”
“Perhaps it should, Como. But it doesn’t. I have not drawn my sword and I think it is rude that you draw yours.. Now put it back. We are discussing business here and this is not the time for swords.”
“It is time for swords when I say it is time for swords. I am the Roman Legion.”
“You never get tired of saying this, do you?”
“We shall pass,”said the Roman. “My five thousand say so.”
“You won’t unless I inwite you in.. My five say so.”
“Enough!” says the Roman and he make a sign and all the Romans draw their swords.
“I don’t know why it is,” says the thumb. “That I should have to teach the Roman Legion Manners?”‘

The stranger took the five cheese wedges and formed them into a radiating pentagon. “Look here,” he said. “You see the king take the five men and form them into this shape… Like where the U.S. has the army… no? It is an impenatrable shape… if you get through the walls you are in the killing zone center where all five blades can cut you from all sides of your body, on the outside points, the sword cuts a perfect arc and the Swiss sword is longer and sharper than the Roman… The crazy Swiss don’t so much fight the Romans as they do a Dance of Death… They spin and yell and yodel and the whole time the five swords are spinning and chopping off Roman heads and the Romans can not get through this pentagon shape of spinning steel …the steel cuts right through the armor and the bronze and iron swords.. it is a blood bath yes… In Twenty minutes the five thousannd are five hundred in a route.

They have cut of ze sword arm of the Roman commander and the thumb says, “Next time… WIth the hand you have left, you bring me a present and we will talk about doing business with you. I don’t hold a grudge. I hold a sword… you will hold a gift, or so help me, you will hold nothing. I have one of your arms already Como, I have no use for the other, but I will take it from you all the same and then you will have to come up the mountains next time carrying a gift in your teeth.”

“Great story.”
“So yes, the Roman probably looses the other arm coming back with two legions, but ewentually they are not so arrogant. Maybe they bring a nice Italian wine and so they become in business together with all the cheese, yes? The Swiss have always like war and business, but business more than war.”
“Nothing is just a cheese,” he said, eating another wedge.
“Nothing here is ever as it appears…. the whole country is a weapon. Behind everything is something else.”
She comes over with more beer, “What are you two talking about?”
“My friend was saying that Switzerland is a weapon, or a cheese, or something.”
“Yeah right. They haven’t fought a war in seven hundred years….Ha…These chickens are neutral.”
“Nothing is ever as it seems,” he said turning towards the stranger, but the stranger was gone. “Weird he said.”
“Swiss army,” she said laughing. “What a joke.”
“Well they do have the knife,” he said pulling his out of the pocket and there he saw a five sided shield with a cross in the center. It appeared to him now like a diagram of a perfect fortress. He was starting to feel slightly fucked up.

Collaboration with Me-Jade from the Library Project

Eat a Bug from Tokyo by way of America asks the Socratic question: “Dude, What if the characters were actually gay, half asian, drug dealing, low level Yakuza?”

Don’t know, but it surely is a fluke that he called this short: “The Whale”.

Reworks of Library submissions from Van den Booman and double you.

He Came back with two bottles.
“In the spirit of the aroma,” he said.
“Vos is das?” she said in her best beery german.
“Das Is hampf brau.”
“What?”
”Instead of hops, they use hemp….you know… That stuff,” and he pointed to the smoking Swiss man in the corner by the juke box with the Zappa still playing “Baaaaaaybeeeee Snaaaaaaakes.”
“Which is which?”
“One is Swiss, one seems to be Japanese…or printed in Japanese… maybe by Swiss…. I rember in College that the first thing everry Japanese exchange student wanted to do when they hit campus was smoke pot. They’d sit there like stones for a couple of days listening to Beatles and Charlie Parker tunes and then, bang back to business.“
“They throw you in Jail forever over there.”
“Unless you’re Paul.”
“I’ll take the German, you take the Japanese.”
“You always were more Western than me,” he said. “I wanted the Japanese.”
“Figures,” she said.
They drank.
“It tastes like pot,” she said.
“Yeah but not like bong water…. I mean hops and cannnibus are related right… aromatics?”
“Why is it that you never just shut up and have fun?” she asked, tilting her head back and chugging the beer. “More please.”
“He drank his and got another and laughed and laughed and drank more and others and all they could find and the Zappa fiend at the jukebox came over and rolled them some of his homegrown Edelhampf “That make Hiedi Yodel in the valley,” he said and she coughed and laughed and drank and smoked aand the evening melted into a carnival of sorts with the gothic town becoming like an animated Fleischer Brothers Film with Betty Boop and Poepeye’s spinich and the whole glorious world rocking and turning. It was the laughter they would remember. What made them laugh wasn’t nearly as important as the all glorious polyglot belly shaking laughter that filled the bar and overtook all their new friends and politics and business fell away and just the laughter now… just people laughing with beer.

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Here the narrator points you back in time towards Larry at the Colony Bar.

Now back to the present and the two characters in the Swiss bar, or beer hall in Basel drinking Uli beer and smelling the pungent aroma of alpine Hempf. She is alone at the bar when he comes out of the door marked Herrenand announces, “I just had a great beer shit.”
“I’ll inform the media,” She said.
“I don’t know what it is, but sometimes beer is like a laxative… I feel like I passed a whole cheese cow.”
“Too much information,” She said. “You’re not Bukowski.”
“No, but I just shit like him… and who needs to write when….”
“Right.”
“Write.”
And they were silent and smelled the marijuana and he inhaled and on a T.V., C.N.N. had Rumsfeld on and he said, “Does anyone else think it’s strange that Rumsfeld seems to dress himself to look like MacNamara? The resemblance grows greater the deeper in the shit we get.”
“It is kind of uncanny.. Who is the stylist on this war anyway?”
“MacNamara was supposedly brilliant and all, but doesn’t anyone remember that we lost Vietnam?”
“No,” she said. “They remember Rambo… or Rambo Three…. or what was the last Rambo? We’d like to think we won it somehow.”
“Was it a concious decision to look like MacNamara, or is it just the look that all meglamoniacal men get when they are making huge blunders that they refuse to see or accept?”
“I haven’t smoked pot in forever,” she said smelling it in the bar and Frank Zappa came on the juke box as C.N.N. cut to the war footage and he said, “You never hear Zappa on a juke box in the States….”
“I think he’s more famous in Europe… Moon Unit and Dweezil are more famous in America.”
“Why?” He asked. “What did they ever actually do other than be his kids?”
“They were younger than Frank and in Hollywood…that is how you get famous.”
“What? Be young in Hollywood?”
“It’s a start anyway.”
“Didn’t Vaclav Havel make Zappa his culutural emissary or something?”
“Yeah, but he got cancer.”
“Which one?”
“Both actually…they both got cancer.”
“Always the great ones.”
“Hmmmmm,”she nodded and thought and said, “Dweezil had a cooking show with Lisa Loeb…. and wasn’t Valley Girl Zappa’s only hit?”
“Probably…. Another Beer?”
“Let’s try something else”