IT IN place

The map face is by Brian Raszka. The books for The Library are coolabs started by Sonja and finished by Brian.

The drawing on a map page that came in the mail yesterday (a barter that Brian and I threw into our cover swap deal) is something that has shot me into a sort of sad nostalgia (sadstalgia) as it is almost a self portrait - only done by someone else. It reminds me so much of the map drawings I did in Italy after putting the ashes of my father under the Stone in Basel, that I just needed to have it. It is small in size, but enormous in weight like Uranium, or maybe Gold.

I went down to Dumbo again yesterday to help S’aint Necessarily So Thomas Aquinas load in lumber for building more walls- the better to seperate his tennants (good walls making good neighbors as t’were). It is always interesting to go down to the wharfs and engage in the sort of physical labor that reminds you that the waters used to be for working men and not luxury condos. You can still see the trucks loading and unloading and the men with gruff voices and cigarettes and the tug boats and the barges that really make you miss the New York that was and dread the New York that’s coming… still the N.Y. that’s coming probably buys more art, so … I have to keep my perspective …. Regardless, Johnny Cash singing The Beatles sums up my nostalgic mood about the city. These days,it lays before me like an enormous text to read and I can sort of understand how Joyce felt about Dublin. Every block I walk echoes with memory and meaning of lovers and friends and the places and things I’ve done… some still standing and some vanished as smoke. It’s coming on Christmas and they’re chopping down trees and we were waiting for the lumber to come and so walked by the river to skate away on old memories and watch the birds.

Acutally, whenever I go to Tom’s place, all the old paintings he has of mine make me read through my back pages. Major Tom has many of the early New York work from my mad days - haunted by ghost - when I tore out of Connecticut trying to run from all the ideas that came rushing into my head like a crystaline bullet and I was talking and drawing and talking and drawing and drinking to try and stop talking and drawing so much and all the world and all the art seemed clear and spinning before my eyes and Tom, having been a rock and roll drummer in the Lower East Side of the Cocaine 80’s was about the only person who could put up with me; I think because people bouncing off the walls just made him nostalgic for the snow drifts of those Peruvianuevo York nights…. everyone else just thought I was nuts… and of course, I was a little, but I took a lot of notes and they still are the map for whatever it is that I’m trying to create now.

Which brings us back to the characers and since I’m in a nostalgic mood, I’m thinking we go back to the beginnning in a sort of flash back. It is 2001 and the towers are down and it’s November and they hook up at this opening (Arc Along the
Watchtower) and take the water Taxi to the Empire State Building the next morning…Like tourists. The viewing deck has just reopened and it is now the tallest spot in New York and they go up and look downtown at the wound and they are nothing like eachother, but that they are romantics and have a soft spot for “An Affair to Remember” and of course the world is upside down and through a looking glass, so love is an issue of carpe diem. Yes I think that’s how they should meet, or how they should fall in love after fucking at any rate. Maybe the Swiss part is five years later and they are married, or living together in the spring of Brooklyn real estate five years on. WIth a nod to Ziggy Stardust’s “Five Years” and my lucky number (5/5/67). Five years… all that Bush, all that war, all that … and now they are on a vacation, or a sabbatical of sorts.

When Orson Welles was allowed to make a movie at RKO, he fealt like a kid who’d been given the world’s largest train set. I sort of feel that way about computers and the internet… It’s like a great train set and so much cheaper than RKO’s.

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