We are all on the beach at night when they start setting off the ordinance. Who knows where they got a hold of it, but they are far enough off shore that it is hard to see the great plumes of water rising into the air - fifty? a hundred feet? It reads as smoke or clouds, but then there is the roar as the towers of water collapse and seem to walk towards us on the beach like gray giants, lumbering out of the ocean and the dark. It’s marvelous and haunting until they start shooting the ordinance closer and closer into the waves and the towers of water react randomly; seeming to skit around our heads like giant snakes, bursting forth at impossible angles and pouring down and we panic. I dive into the sea and swim over to the harbor police and tell them they have a problem: very well armed lunatics, having way too much fun for a beach party.
I imagine myself at a dinner with Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas and I keep on talking and talking and I never let the ladies get a word in edge wise.
Bought a new pad of paper yesterday. Wide and large and impossible to scan, so I’m playing with what I can do with it by shooting with the camera and taking out the noise in photoshop. Still looking for the big idea.
The Narrator is walking along looking at things and people and trying to figure out what to make of it all and how to make something out of whatever he makes of it all and all.
I’m walking along Seventh Avenue and I hear a man say into his cell phone, “Where are you?” and I walk a few more steps and hear another man say, “I’m right here.” I suppose they were to meet right there beside the pizza parlor, but it also seems possible that the logical flow of words might be a total coincidence; two snippets from two entirely unrelated cell phone conversations. I thought how beautiful it would be if this illusion of a conversation continued up the street from the mouths of a series of unrelated strangers. That would’ve been a great Bloomsday miracle.
I am driving around with my hand searching in the back seat of the car. I slide my hand below the seat and feel something smooth and warm and I am wondering if it is flesh, or leatherette. I feel around the area untill my finger touches lips and the mouth opens and tries to bite off my finger.
The pretty young one has the idea first, but the ugly and the old and the plain all go along with it. “Let’s have a dinner party,” she says. “Just a few friends at a restaurant some place downtown; away from the little bar and all the beds.” She’s so cute as she says it and so full of naive vitality that it convinces the whole bitter group and they set about making lists and reservations and raiding closets to find the right outfit; something classy, something that doesn’t scream “Whore!”
I get talked into going. I don’t know why. I never could afford the brothel, but I know the pretty young one from when she was an “art student” and I had wanted her then and I suppose I still want her now, or I’m at least fascinated that she has capitalized on what I felt was MY desire. I had wanted her. Now everyone wants her. She’s the star of the whole whore house and it makes me feel strange. Do I have common taste, or was I simply ahead of my time? It’s like a song you love until it becomes a hit and then everyone likes it and you pretend you never liked that song but still you tap your toes when you hear it.
She had on a purple short shorts number when I saw her and she made the night sound like an erotic dream. I told the wife I had some dumb thing to do at the gallery and she barely listened because she had some dumb thing to do with her idiot friends and I wasn’t even invited and it pissed me off to the point where I nearly announced: “I’m off to dinner with the whores. Don’t wait up!”
I smiled to myself and beat it down to the back room of the restaurant where some of the girls were setting up decorations; streamers like it was a child’s birthday and I take a seat next to the large brunette with the curly hair and she jabbers away asking me all sorts of questions about what I do and how are the paintings coming along and frankly I feel at a loss. It puts all the onus on me and I can’t turn the conversation around because I know what she does and I can’t very well ask her how’s the fellatio going and how are the johns coming…..along. At least I can’t sober. I order a whiskey and slip out of excitement into irritation.
Not only my mind, but my bowels. I Never should’ve had Indian food for lunch. Gurggle gurggle. Then the “boyfriends” arrive. They wear little leather jackets like toughs do in the movies and they sport elaborate, ugly tattoos and speak in dees dem and doze. I can’t imagine what the hell any of us will have to talk about all night. Why had I agreed to come? SHE isn’t even here yet. I drink down the whiskey and resolve to get drunk when my stomach constricts and I quickly run off to the toilet.
A whole gaggle of men and women fall out of restroom door, laughing. “Now this is interesting,” I think. “Some sort of cocaine orgy right here in the bathroom.” Pity I missed all the fun. Pity I’m about to shit myself and I rush through the door only to find that It’s one of those gender neutral restrooms they have now, with one common sink area and separate stalls for both men and women. No orgy, no cocaine, just too cheap to put in separate bathrooms. They’ve spent the money instead on an elaborate decor where you have to climb a sort of pyramid of box shapes to get to the toilet. It’s way up there near the ceiling. It looks wonderful, but not when you actually need to crap. It’s a god damned obstacle. I get to the top and drop trow and let out a symphony of shit just as I hear HER laugh down by the sinks. Suddenly I realize that this will not be a night of erotic heights, but rather an evening of humiliation and embarrassment… but still I love her laughter. It makes me nostalgic for the days when I thought that I alone wanted her that she was my own mystery; back when I thought I loved her, back before I was a hack and she was a whore. Then the whole room starts moving, like a train leaving the station and I’m clinging to the toilet; terrified that I’ll be the thrown from the throne and topple down the pyramid of useless decor, shitting myself at her boot clad feet. Then I wake up.
This was yesterday. All day on the phone to Roadrunner rebooting the computer and the modum ad naseum. Later I ate dinner alone on the couch watching the finale of Top Chef. Pointlessness so grand, I felt I had to paint it today.
Somewhere out there is lovely half naked humanity basking in the bright light of this summer day, but I wouldn’t know it. I’ve been on a phone all day trying to figure the recent internet troubles I’ve been having. It’s too god damn annoying to describe, but they came pretty close to having me take the computer to the shop, but when I talked to the the third person (after going through two charges of hand held phone batteries so I had to keep calling them back and go through the whole elaborate script again and again) he realized it was probably a faulty modem. I’m posting this by the good graces of a neighbor’s open wifi.
And then the heat came and the dog freshly shaved and soft as a new lamb lies under the table in a shadow and the whole neighborhood pours out to the street with wine and beer and the kids all with squirt guns and its like an enormous block party.
More a concept than a finished piece. Making drums from fireworks seems like it could be a great idea in the right hands. I’ve never seen it done, but send me a link if you have an example.
The video comes out of a Vimeo video challenge where one person uploads some silent video and others interpret through editing and sound. I hope there’ll be a lot more of these kinds of online collaborative explorations in the future.
It’s a morning like any other. I see her in the mirror fixing her hair and she says, “Do we take the dog to the vet?”
and I say, “If we do, they’ll kill her.”
“Not if we don’t let them.”
The dog woke up in the night and found that her hind legs no longer worked. I heard her nails scratching the floor and the weight of her body hitting the floor and then scratching and flop and scratching again and again. I turned on the light and she looked up at me like a lost child and I got out of bed and tried to help her stand. She fell into my arms and then started to spin around like a dying shark. She crashed back to the floor and emptied her bladder. Now she was lying in a pool of urine and panting and drooling in a panic. I spent a while just sitting on the floor petting her and calming her down and smelling the piss and she just kept looking at me. Staring at me. I found it somewhat odd. I spend a lot of time accompanying the dog on her explorations of neighborhood urine smells, but I’m essentially unfamiliar with the smell of hers. Now I think I’d recognize it anywhere. Once she was calm, we cleaned up the puddle and when I came back from the trash can she immediately threw up on the floor. More cleaning and more petting and the other half says to me, “This could be it.” Because the dog is fourteen and has some strange cancer of the lymph nodes and she’s already lived a year longer than we ever expected and we’ve been waiting for the other shoe to drop. I shoot back, “No Kidding!”. I spend some time on the floor with the dog to make sure she doesn’t panic again and somewhere around dusk I go back to sleep
When the necklace is on, she says, “Well?” and I say, “I don’t know.” and she says, “Can she walk?” and I say “I don’t know.”
She goes to the kitchen and gets some dog treats and the beast pops to its paws and wags it’s tail and all is as it ever was, but for bit of a limp in one leg. Charlie horse, I suppose. There may be more nights like this ahead: confronting mortality and those pleading eyes.
The pretty young one has the idea first, but the ugly and the old and the plain all go along with it. “Let’s have a dinner party,” she says. “Just a few friends at a restaurant some place downtown; away from the little bar and all the beds.” She’s so cute as she says it and so full of naive vitality that it convinces the whole bitter group and they set about making lists and reservations and raiding closets to find the right outfit; something classy, something that doesn’t scream “Whore!”
This was yesterday. All day on the phone to Roadrunner rebooting the computer and the modum ad naseum. Later I ate dinner alone on the couch watching the finale of Top Chef. Pointlessness so grand, I felt I had to paint it today.
Subscribe