It was one of those days where you draw a strange hexapentahex and then end up seeing galleries full of hexa-octagon paper bags (O.K. Harris) or Emma Kunz (drawing center) doing even weirder things with hexes and pentas and cruciforms. It feels like you’re on an easter egg hunt and each egg holds a clue to the location of the next egg, but actually I was with my better half and her sister. Her sister has had a crummy winter and when women are unhappy, I have learned they like to shop… She was off on a mission to find an easter basket… or rather a pink handbag. In and out of boutiques in Nolita and SoHo… there’s a lot of pink handbags in New York…. we saw all of them.
I got bored and drew the pentahex in honor of pagan bunnies and eggs and orgies that have been filling my aching head since the full moon. I cut off after luch to see some galleries. The ladies continued to follow the bunny trail and I fell further down the rabbit hole.
First, I saw the dumbest show on earth at Deitch Projects: David LaChapelle – Prostitutes and Artists. By artists I guess he means actors and comparing actors to whores is just so obvious that….never mind. It just made me roll my eyes and get depressed…
Luckily I followed my nose and the sweet smell of cigar smoke to O.K. Harris and low and behold: Philip Pavia sitting on a modernist throne surrounded by some of the best heads in New York – I mean his sculptures and drawings. Here is work that will be interesting a hundred years from now and would’ve been interesting a hundred years ago. It is, in short: honest.
Or ernest. The line from the play that this entry is named after comes to mind: (Dame Maggie Smith says): “A Haaaaaaand Baaaaag????!”
As the Grateful Dead say (in The Other One into Black Peter… the song that is subtext on Arc Along the Watchtower): “Coming around, coming around, coming around…etc.”
Coming around to B.K. in the gathering gloom and cold, I saw a Christo orange shopping cart in the middle of Union Street. It was empty except for a single book. Dante’s Divine Comedy was sitting in the folded down children’s seat like a toddler off to purgatory. I put it in my pocket and when I got home my mother had sent me a post card from Navarra (my favorite rosé) Spain. She and Hooker spent the night in that tall tower of the castle below… it is a State run Hotel now (a Parador and $75 a night… thank you generalissimo Francisco Franco and the Socialists who took your place now that you are still dead).
So life is some strange coinciDANCE, or bunny trail dotted with clues. Like last week when I was with Ben in B.burg and we got onto how I’d found Moby Dick in the street on the same day he started rereading it. We got onto a discussion of Melville as we smoked cigarettes in the street (like Clark and the narrator in Willoughby)… Up pulls a cherry red, pimped out ElCamino with the licence plate: Moby Dick.
There is more on heaven and earth than is contained in my philosophy…grace under preassure… Death and rebirth in the afternoon… Ferdinand the bull.
