When the dead look down at us we are as harpoon heads at the end of time’s arrow. They can see the line of our live’s, tethered to the umbellical chord of our conception - ending in a thud at the target. The target is the dirt under ground. This image reminds me of the characters… their harpoons have tangled tight while on the rivers of New York and togther they have traveled the Atlantic Ocean into the mountains of Switzerland. The Target they seek is indeed in the dirt, underground. It is not the grave. Nor is it Dante’s inferno. It is the tiny inferno of the Cern Large Hadron Collider. That is the end of their tragectory. This is the concentric circle target they are aimed at. This the White Whale they will pierce. We can see that, because we, like the dead, can see the characters as harpoon heads at the end of time’s arrow. We are above them, like the dead.

I started thinking about timelines and characters in time and space over the holliday, when I went with my brothers and nephews to the Bridgeport (there’s bridges and ports in that name, funny) Science center and we all got facinated with a Einsteinian gravity model, similar to the penny spinner video below. I didn’t bother to shoot it, as I knew there are tons of similar videos on vimeo. I regret it a little now as Ithink I could have made something rather pretty in the editing and music, but it is sort of fun to just pull stuff of the web like a readymade (I did make the rubbing and the pendulum orbits drawing, however, and they seem very related and part of my thinking). Anyway, seeing the dangerous orbits of the ballbearings (instead of pennies as shown here) reminded me of individual characters traveling with and colliding into eachother as they arc down into the deep dark hole of time.



Spinning Pennies on Vimeo

Rolled into Pittsburgh and washed up at a cocktail party like angry sailors. We spotted Dave Conrad (Pat [trick] of Arc Along the Watchtower fame) charming the Ladies of PIttsburgh at all ages and stages and spoke of theater and Shakespeare and drank a little Glennfiddich and somehow the subject turned to Art and how we should go over to Mattress Factory (annex?) and put something into the show Graham Shearing and Michael Olijnyk currated, called “GESTURE”. Connie convinced himself and me and then Graham (who was at the party and so there for the convincing) that putting it into a show three weeks into its month long run in the middle of the night would be part of the gesture. Also part of the gesture was having no actual art materials and no idea of what we we wanted to do and a belly half full of Scotch and wine and raw meat (Carpaccio… mmmmm). It was sort of a Genghis Kahn barbarian invasion of the Pittsburgh art world. Conrad magaged to scrounge up a box of sidewalk chalk and a black whiteboard marker. “My kingdom for a brush and some ink,” quoth I. But we knocked up chalk and marker drawings in three spots in the rambling old house, now serving as an art space. Half the fun was spelunking through the dark midnight rooms, bumping into sculpture while clawing for a light switch. Ended up tracing the actors instrument and it’s shadow, etc. The work felt at home in my Library Project mode as it was sort of literafitti (or literary grafitti: Connie documented all the books he started reading this year, but never finished… the romantic in me likes to think it was because he was called to set and just never quite got back to the book, the realist in me knows that I’ve started a ton of books this year and I don’t think I got all the way through any of them… I think maybe our attention spans are getting fucked by things like blogs and youtube and video games, or we are getting old and lazy). It was also like the Library Project in that we maybe didn’t make the best work we could have made, but we made different work than we would have had we worked alone and more important, we had a lot of fun making it and documented the physical event digitally. Still I’d like to score some materials and return to the scene of the crime and work things a bit. However, the next day was Christmas Eve and then we blew out of town like bitter dust on Christmas day, so rather than great art, the thing is a gesture….as I suppose it is meant to be. The song in the video is David Bowie’s “Cracked Actor”. I padded it with various movie samples from various e-books and tried to contemplate the dangers of Hollywood performance…. and, yes that IS Connie getting a thumping from DeNiro at the end. It’s a bit of mash up from the first run through of OMegg, where DeNiro stands in for M. Tristan beating up Pat. All things that go around come around like particles in a Large Hadron Collider… etc.

SOMETIME AFTER THE FALL, NEAR PITTSBURGH

Somehow the devil talked me into getting Christmas Eve dinner at a Japanese Hibachi steak house. It was one of those places that serves any kind of Asian food - from Sushi to chow mein, but also cooks your surf and turf on a hot Hobart grill right in front of you with a weird mixture of soy sauce and butter. I mean, it wasn’t real authentic, or anything. It was Asian food for white people. Scratch that, it was Asian food for white people who still call Asians Orientals. Yeah. It was Oriental food and the devil mostly liked it for the waitresses dressed up like Geisha and the drinks that came with tiny paper parasols.

By the time I got there, the grill was already warm and the devil was half crocked on mai tais. He was wearing a parasol behind his horn like a Polynesian virgin and talking smack about the Buddha.

“Sit down,” he said. “Don’t be so passive. What are you the freakin’ buddha.”
“No,” I said. “I’m Ishmael.”
“You’re an A hole is what you are,” the devil laughed, waving me to sit down with his red, claw hand. I slid in behind the grill table and the Korean chef came over to cook like a Japanese guy. It was all a weird sort of theater where nothing was what it appeared…. I mean from a historical or cultural perspective. Mr. Lee was chopping away with the sharp knives and making a James Brown rhythm on the griddle with a pepper shaker and the devil ordered me up a mai tai with extra umbrellas from the pretty cocktail waitress, who was half Peurto Rican, Chinese Filipina dressed up like I said, as a Geisha… cute too.
“I could fall for her,” the devil said.
“Shit, You’ve already fallen.”
“Must you curse at the table,” the devil scolded.
“What the fuck,” I said.
”Please,” said the devil. “There are ladies present.” and the waitress came with the cocktails and the devil took a long pull and so did I and he ordered a round of Kamikaze.
“Come on,” I said. “The waitresses are dressed as Japanese whores.”
“Geisha are not prostitutes,” he said. “They are artists… granted their medium is eros.”
“Fuck me.” I said. “You’re the fucking devil.”
”You forget, that I am an angel too. Just because my father thinks I’m no good, doesn’t mean I AM no good. I’m a freakin’ angel and stop swearing before I get angry. IT’S Fuc….IT’S CHRISTMAS.”
“What do you care for Christmas? You’re the devil.”
“Jesus is my freakin’ cousin, okay and he’s next in line… Show some respect.”
”You make religion sound like the mafia.”
”Well it sort of is.”
“And you’re Fredo.”
“Yeah… I guess I am… but I am really smart you know?”

“Sure,” I said and the kamikazes came and then we had more and few more mai tais and the chef made a volcano out of a stack of onion rings and burning liquor. It made the devil homesick and he started getting drunk and pinching the ass of the cute Chinese/Filipina and whispering dirty things in her ear and calling Mr. Lee the best knife chink in the business and just really getting loud and out of control and I was sort of embarrassed as he kept throwing the food around the table like a spaz. He couldn’t keep anything on his chopsticks.
“Who fucking invented these things?!” he yelled at Mr. Lee.
“Maybe Chinese,” Mr. Lee said in a flourish of knife work.
“Bullshit Chinkboy, I did. Who else but the devil cold invent these fucking things? Useless. Give me a fork. I’m a god damned devil and I like pitchforks and forks and…. I hate fucking devil sticks…chop chop chinaman,” he said.
“Me Korean,” said Mr. Lee.
“You get me fork, or you be Solly,” said the devil.
“Cool it,” I said. “You’re acting like a real…as… A hole.”
“Fuck You,” he said. “Who’s paying for this fucking dinner anyway? Me, asshole. You don’t have any money.”
It was true. I hadn’t sold a story since the whale thing, so I was the devil’s guest.
“Right…so I’ll fucking act like I fuckin’ want to act,” the devil said.
”Hey the language,”I said. “I thought you said you were an angel.”
“Sure sure. Most of the time I’m a fuckin’ angel, but listen…” and he dragged me close with the red claw and said in a whisper, ”I’m a god damn devil when I drink. How the fuck do you think I fell out of heaven anyway? I fuckin’ tripped on a cumulous cloud, drunk on Rum and pineapple juice… A funapple , I called it. A God Damn Fun Apple.”
He ordered a round of funapples and dumped the rest of his kamikaze on the griddle and it exploded in fire and heat.
“That’s more like it,” he said. “Just like home.”
It was that kind of night all the way into Christmas morning when the devil stumbled out of a strip club and tried to pick a fight with Santa Claus, but santa just tried to give him a stuffed bear.
“You fucking Buddhist,” he yelled at Santa and. then he tried to fuck the stuffed bear. He couldn’t find a viable orifice and made a lunge at Prancer. I grabbed him by the left horn and I dragged him away. I walked him back to the gates of hell.
“Merry Fuckin’ Christmas,” the devil said.
“Merry Fuckin’ Crhistmas to you too,” I said and he slurred something and fell down the hellacious stairs.
I heard him yell up from hell in a bruised hoof groan, “I’ll be an angel in the morning and you’ll still be an asshole, out of work writer!”
I realized then that those who’ve known the heights of heaven, always think they’re above you. They look down on you, even when their drunk asses are falling down the stairway to hell, you know? I was good enough for hibachi Christmas Eve, but you know… I wasn’t really good enough. Anyway, I bet they use chopsticks in heaven… I mean if they eat or anything, I just bet you they use chopsticks.

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“We should order some wine,” he said.
“We’re drinking wine,” she said.
“I mean something special. Enough of the Swiss white. It’s all good, but let’s have something great. This is supposed to be an extravagant shopping spree and you haven’t bought a thing.”
“I didn’t see anything I want. It all looks sort of matronly.”
“I told you Geneva is dull town. Politician’s wives,” he reminded her.
“But what about the mistresses?” she asked. “Where do they shop?”
“They shop in Paris,” he said.
“Of course,” she agreed and they asked the waiter for the Carte de Vin.
He looked at it earnestly for a long time and then admitted, “What I don’t know about fine wine is a longer book than what I do know.”
“Yeah,” she said. ” What I know is a short story.”
“Well speaking of,” he said and pointed to a Chateau Margaux. “This is the wine Hemmingway named his daughter after.”
“Which one?” she asked.
“Margaux.” he said.
“….Ummmm duuuuuh. Was she the one in Manhattan, or was that Mariel?”
“I’m not sure,” he said. “I get them confused. One was the suicide and one was Lolita.”
“Both pretty,” she said. “I think Margaux was in the Manhattan and lived.”
“Nope, I think she was the tragic beauty,” he said.
“Mmmm tragic beauty sounds delicious,” she said
“Okay,” he said. “We’ll drink her… whichever Hemmingway she was… You have to figure Papa wouldn’t name her after plonk.”
And he oredered a vintage that was about as old as that Soon Yi was when she first Lolited Woody Allen, or he Humberted her… whichever way you tell that story.

One of those impossible days, with too much to mail, too much to scan, too much to wash, too much to clean, to much to make a mess with, and too much to edit. In the back of my mind I keep remembering that the characters are sitting in a cafe (either in Geneva, or Brooklyn) and Pat is about to order some wine. Remember that… I’m too tired and getting sick to go any further with it.

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Party Hopping during the Holidays makes me feel like a forgotten boy ready to search out and destroy.

Mask for Janus:

Death is not information
Stone that I am
He came into my quiet
And I will be still for him
- W.S. Merwin


Allan Stone, Noted Art Dealer and Collector, Dies at 74

That was the headline in today’s The New York TImes Dec 18th, 2006.

I had the great privilege to know and be collected by Allan Stone. I think I learned more about painting by having his eyes in my studio and having his hands hang my work beside my heroes at both his home and gallery, than I could have learned in ten years of universty graduate art studies. Being a part of his gallery from the old 86th street location to its present fire house, was like grad school and seminary rolled into one. Over the last few years, Allan’s health and my intinearant studio status meant that we didn’t get to do the studio visits I had so loved in younger years. I had sincerely hoped that I would settle down somewhere and that he would be of sound health and we would get to spend a few more years visiting again like we did in the nineties. I’m so very sad that I won’t have that priviledge again, but I realized today that over the last six or seven years, I would drop little paintings and drawings that I liked by the gallery so that he could see them when he came in from Purchase (an ironic place name, considering he was such a great shopper). It was always an honor and an education to visit Claudia and look at “the old man’s desk” (a truly gorgeous piece of furniture by the way) and see some little tsotchke of mine propped against an African feitish, or below a Franz Kline, or deKooning, or Thiebaud. I always tried to take the position behind his desk and see what the context was… how he was looking at it?… what were the site lines? And then spend the week figuring out what it all meant - what did he see? What was he saying? What should I look at? It was like being taught by Hansel’s trail of bread crumbs method in the dark forest of New York art… but what exquisite and wise and nutritious crumbs they were. You can’t always see people in person, but through art, you can communicate beyond the limits of time and space. I will always value the correspondence of objects that we shared these last few years and I have every reason to believe it will go on and on, because objects keep talking long after the maker and the owner of the object has stopped talking. There is a kind of immortality in things; a way of talking to the future. Allan Stone’s collection, if kept together, will speak to countless future generations.

A few years back Allan did an amazing retrospective of Willem deKooning’s career. A couple of months before, he visited my then studio in Stamford and we had a long talk about the new Gallery on 90th, the present state of the Art world, the new dealers, the old dealers. He said he was planning to do a show during the Metropolitan’s deKooning Retrospective. He was going to call it: School of deKooning, or deKooning and friends, or something. It was going to be Kline, Gorky and deKooning. Being young and opinionated and probably a bit cocky and arrogant, I told him: “Look Allan, half the people in the New York art world think you’re dead. I go into galleries and say that you collect my work and they say, “Didn’t the gallery close? I thought he was dead.”
He laughed.
“Seriously,” I said. “This is your opportunity to ride the publicity wave and announce to the world that the new Allan Stone Gallery is open and that you are alive and well, etc. Don’t dilute the moment… Do deKooning alone. Your personal collection would probably be more interesting than anything anyone else could currate. You have the real shit, Allan. Fuck Gorky and Kline. Show me all those funky little deKoonings I haven’t seen yet. Show the world too… sure… , but more importantly… show ME!.”

Sometimes you get what you ask for. I don’t think I’m the only guy who told him this, but anyway it is what he did: The best little deKooning show anyone is ever likely to hang.

Allan liked to tell the story of how the British currator of the Met’s show came to the gallery one morning and spent about four or five hours just looking. He finally came upstairs to see Allan and said, “Mr. Stone, you have said more about the painting of Willem deKooning on these four walls, than I have managed to say in the entirity of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. My hat’s off to you, sir. I salute you.” I like to think he gave him a hug and a kiss, but anyway… You get the idea. The show was a masterpiece, a joy to behold, a love letter in art.

During that show, at the top of the stairs to his offices, he hung a large painting of mine that was made of three or four years worth of paint tubes glued and painted into a sort of cross armmed funerial fetish figure (quasi german/egyptian/New Guinea). It was a painting I obsessed on for years (started out on an 8 foot hunk of plywood that I litterally started trimming with a saw). He hung it next to a DK trasparent vellum paper pull from a larger work (a technique Willem used, to save gestures he liked, but which he was going to paint over). The pull probably took seconds, but it glowed like a stained glass window… etherial, witty, sly, charming, serious, and magical… a sort of giggle in paint. It was the total opposite of my piece… like a Janus face. I still dream of that picture… and think about the pairing often. It is a touchstone moment in my life (pun intended).

I remember talking to him during that show and thanking him for the prominant position he’d put my painting (after all, all the heavy hitters in the art world would be in town to see that show and would be invited upstairs to talk and maybe buy art…though nothing in that show itself was for sale).

I said, “Thanks Allan. It’s just an amazing honor to have my painting next to DeKooning’s.”
“Well kid,” he said. He always called me KID… even last month he called me KID…. “Kid,” he said. “It holds up.”

Nicer words were never spoken.

I will truly miss him. I think anyone serious in the art world will miss him too. He was a force of nature that rolled and rolled and still gathered much moss. The Stone is dead. Long Live the Stone.

Top is mine then a start from Brian Raszka of The Library Project and then a Raszka solo book.

My two favorite Vimorons from Japan: Eat a Bug and Zebous with some Library stuff from me and SAL painter from Japan.

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This is a sort of ARC redux. A revisitation on the death of kings and fathers and Lear and M. Tristan, which turned out to be extremely clairvoyant on my part, but more on that in another post. Yesterday, I went for a run across the brooklyn bridge to go see the graffiti mecca, 11 Spring Street that is not long for this world. The building has been vacant for over twenty years and become a sort of beacon for the internatinal “urban art” movement. But like every other square inch of NYC, it’s going condo. As a cool last hurrah, however, the developers have invited graffiti people from all around the world to tag the exterior one last time and then also tag up the interior. The whole work of collaborative art will stay on the naked brick walls and will be sealed up like a time capsue behind the sheetrock. The building opens today and will be open for a week or so before the sheetrocking starts, so go see this. I suppose some day, if urban art proves it’s potential as the next big thing, all the developers have to do, is gut the fake walls, and voila the world’s biggest masterpiece since the Sistine Chapel… call it the Cistern Shrapnel.

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Everyone thinks everyone else is stupid, but everyone can’t be right. Here’s a couple of painings… um duh, paintings on found wood.

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Willoughby wakes up and Willoughby says, “Call me Willoughby.”
I’ve decided that Ishmael is Phil Willoughby, the star of Arc Along The Watchtower and OMegg is about his brother Patrick.
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I am thinking about Tristan as a sort of Lear figure. I don’t think he has kids, like I said, but I like to think that he took a sort of pater familias approach to his board who have begun to try and force him out of power as anything but a figure head (with good reason as Tristan is a bit raving in a wind storm like Lear). He is obsessed with a new set of psychoactive pharmeceuticals that have the ability to created instant experience of emotion. He is also working on a form of chemical jungian knowledge… to convey archetypes through carbon based molecules… sort of chemical computer chips… you eat them and know how to porgram your VCR lets say.. but if you mix pills, you might know how to program your VCR but when you do, it makes you weep, or dance for joy. Tristan is melomaniacal about this innovation, his life’s work, and at times is a bit like a mad scientist threatening to dose the world into self destrucition, etc.

There is something about Quantum Mechanics and String Theory that is involved with the manufactureof these pharmeceuticals and so The Cern Collider coming on line is important to making the drugs work. Maybe they need a quark or two?

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Here are some finished by me Library collabs with Double You and Tara Ross (inner and cover). This is nice as Tara’s cover brings us back to the start of The Library Project:Magic and Loss. Some how the light in the park yesterday got me thinking about an F. Scott Fitzgerald story called: A Diamond As Big As The Ritz. I like to think that Tristan lives on such a stone… impossible wealth… not only hard assests, but knowledge… It is a sort of funny conceit to think that there is a mountain that is all crystal and that harmonizes with Pete Townsend’s mystical pure and easy note. It is particularly interesing in light of string theory’s notion of vibrations and the Cern Large Hadron Collider…least wise it’s interesting to me… A great trick would be to make it interesing to you, dear reader.

Now I picture M. Tristan as old, yes. But also, he may be suffering under the weight of disease, or the knoledge of a disease. I think he has a brain tumor and he is slowly loosing all the knowledge he fought so hard to gain. He is a trained man. Also he is loosing his mind…and the tracks.. His sanity and his knowlledge are starting to leave him and this is his motivation to grab onto young lovers… He may or may not be gay, but he defintitely has no heirs.

He has no children.
He is brilliant.
He is sick
He is given to moments of lucidity.
He is given to mad hallucinations
He is rich
no one tells him which is which because he is rich.

He is Nietzche at the end in the alps.
He is Zarathustra also…
He is Chaplin
He is Keaton
He is Groucho
He is Robin Williams on a good day and Steve Martin too.
He is Mao
He is Pinochet
He is Pynchon
He is Joyce
He is Hitler
He is Luther
He is Martin luther
He is Martin Luther King Jr.
He is Max Von Sydow.

Collabs from the Library:
godalways hungry and Tony Van denBooman and Bella and Brian Raszka