“There is no greater compliment to an artist than to inspire someone to THINK,” Kate wrote me this morning. I’d cooked up a yin a yang of pork chops last night with shitake mushrooms in pan sauce. To die for. Washed it down with a bottle of Sancerre wine that took me back to my favorite Montmartre café: Le Sancerre.

Woke up this morning with a dollars worth of pennies in my mouth, walked wonderfully healing dog outside and found a big stack of stretchers to make Kate’s painting and several more. Brooklyn provides.

Plus I’m back to work on the final act of the screenplay (Super 8 Days…or Film Geeks, deepending on who you talk to). The nice thing is that the internet went out and I was forced to just be me by myself. Sometimes it’s good to get rid of your nervous system. It’s like meditating. Hold on to your Ego.

Boink, Boink for Charles Mingus III: white balloon w/ sharpie,zippy (?), bouncy ball vending machine, and fence subsumed by tree, ITIN ’05

Willoghby wakes up and Willoughby thinks about Germans and beer and sex and the Swiss-good-will-porno-Turk who blew him in massage parlor in Zurich when he was 23. He shops at the Lebanese bodega and whishes the drunk Muslim:

“Salaam Alaikum” as he buys Malt Liquor – Night Flight. “Best brand name since Night Train,” thinks Willoughby, but he says to Machmuud, “I don’t want to die.”

“A lakaam A salaam,” says Machmuud.

“Hmmmm mmmmmm,” says Willoughby (and that is technically not words, but notes… music is only a language to a computer modem, or a “primitive” warrior… for the rest of us it is beautiful nonsense).

And Willoughby walks out on 5th Avenue and says nothing to no one, but in his head James Brown and the J.B.s are slamming out “Night Train” so funky he can smell it. He is thinking of the ICE train from Berlin to Basel and the girl named Caroline who sat across from him sleeping, or masturbating, or both…but either way moaning “Hmmmm mmmmmm” to the insane fast rhythm of the rail through a German landscape.

“God I want a beer,” thought Willoughby. “But it’s fucking breakfast… Breakfast of Champions,” he thought.

And then he remembered Kurt Vonnegut in Dresden… Slaughter House 5… and that film about McNamara and how even the guy who bombed Cammbodia said: “Tokyo, Dresden… Had the war gone the other way, we would have be legally executed as war criminals. No… They were war crimes, but I’d commit them again. But… Vietnam is the question… and I think we made a mistake. We underestimated the long term views of the Chinese. Really, it’s about China.”

Scorscessee ought to make a film about that mafia… Oliver stone doesn’t have the narrative talent and it comes off as J.F.K. and puts the cause of Democratic reform back by five years. I’m not insulting Oliver’s stones. He’s got plenty of stones… It’s his eyes and ears I’m concerned with. If you want to talk to Americans, you must be a populist. This is why I still love Carl Sandburg. You have to understand this is a revolution between European dominence (by this I mean republican(read old Southern money… read European slave/drug/imperialist money interests… don’t you know that the queen of e-(I won’t capitalize it till they get rid of the royalty)ngland still owns most of the world?” and truly labor based ownership of the means of production.

I’m not a Commie. But I am an American (well Swiss American… dudes I can duck out of this mess at my leisure… so trust me I’m telling you what I actually think… I’m glad to live in the alps and drink white wine and eat cheese that teaches you more about God in one tounge full than a million tasteless Catholic waffers). I do belive in democracy and free trade. I just want to see it …not have lip service for a ruling oligarchy of clowns and deamons.

Sorry I digress, but that is where WIlloughby is at, man. I kill myself, or I change things. Action, or despair. You decide. It is exsitential.. .and we are liberals and Harvard is a nice school and the North East is cold in winter, but full of smart people… and L.A and S.F…. well sure that’s where Satan lives, but he lives worse in your own heart and if you actually read the Bible, than you would not throw stones… you know that Max Von Sydow hung out with whores, and beggers, and leppers, and pariahs, and no doubt faggots (Oh wait: maybe not – afterall: homosexuals were the ruling elite class in the holy lands… i.e. Rommans who got it from the Greeks – who gave it to the British… doesn’t anyone read the classics anymore?)… Honestly, let’s just get along people BE… Cause you Intolerance clowns (shout out to D.W. who managed to make himself feel like a victim after making Birth of a Nation) are just barking at the mirror. There are more rules against eating pork in the bible than fucking another man. So if you like bacon, you should shut up you Christian idiots….and I know you like bacon, because what else is there that distinguishes you from the jews?…. shut up Christ WAS a Jew and wanted you to be a better Jew… so start over and tell me about what the bible says and take that ham out of your fucking Easter mouth you sinner fuck you.

(Please read the above as De Niro in Taxi Driver… thank you … management)

Any god who asks you to be mean to other people isn’t god…that’s mom, or dad, or uncle Hitler.

God wants you to love her creation… Play nice kids. It’s all we got that we know of.

I digress, but in the words of the Rabbi in full Hassidic clothes speaking on a cell phone on the airtrain: “I’d love to talk, but it’s the high holy holidays.”

To which I add, my pork chops look like yin and yang in their wine sauce.

vandalized angel at Green-Wood Cemetary, ITIN ’05

images from Palm Sunday Bloody Sunday, ITIN ’05

And we woke up impossibly sick yesterday. I’d been out at my old friend and neighbor Kate Rothschild’s new Brooklyn Pad. She lives below her sister Gail, who is a first rate artist and for whom I assisted on a number of her early 90’s installation projects. It was like a family reunion and Yours truly did a few spontaneous scenes from Willoughby and mostly Arc. The wine and chocolate cake and Gail’s brilliant, OCD, rhizone accretion drawings pulled out the ghost in me. I was either the life of the party, or wearing a lampshade, depending on your view (like relativity) and Kate gave me the shimmering blue dress she wore at our College Formal in a mansion at Newport.

I’m meant to make a painting. Ode to Ethel Merman perhaps who Kate somehow channeled the entire night of our formal … more than a decade ago… and I still remember laughing and laughing.

Good Times, as the NPR chicks say on SNL.

My better half stayed home, feeling ragged out by work and life and what else have you got? She is a rebel without a Pause (I’m her cause).

So I would have thought I was hung over, but my better half was fairing much worse than me. We were like an old married couple…groaning and bickering and shopping at Cost Co and buying seltzer. Bought a Neil Diamond box set for a song (the song being Cracklin Rose), but am realizing how many great songs he wrote. Monkey’s I’m A Believer (a great Brian Wilson/John+Paul knock off if there ever was one…and maybe Neil won that round as far as POP is concerned…hey he was old school Brill Building before Bob showed him the light) …that song in Pulp Fiction Girl..You’ll be a woman Soon….Cherry…fucking Red Red Wine! I’d always heard he was well respected in the industry, but he came off as a bit of a cheese ball. When he showed up in Scorcesse’s The Last Waltz, however… Well he rocked and if he can come off well in that company, I’m in… shiny shirt or no shiny shirt.

The better half loves his Jazz Singer, with Larry Olivier doing a pretty good New York Jew for a British Lord. Oy Sir Larry, Mo, and Curly!

Still Landscape, mixed media and painter’s calk on found still life painting (circa 70’s, oil on bedsheet), shown with Korean paper boxes ITIN ’05

david, king of the jews and Esther his charming wife. ITIN ’05

We are playing with the look over here at ITINplace (or however e.e. cummings is writing it now). I’m letting ben play with our masthead, or whatever it would be called. I think were both thinking about the red line piece we saw at diva which may influence omEGG, or Smile, or just ITINplace. There is a sort of four cornered up down left right crudiform scroll gimick going on here. The painting of the BK bridge is about seven foot long…on a crate I found in SoHo in the rain, dumpster diving when I had IT IN place. It’s just chinese ink, tissue paper, gesso and acrylic medium on plywood: An archival disaster, or it may just crack and look ancient and distressed. Let’s hope cause otherwise bob stein (the owner) will ask me to paint another one and….I think it was just one of those lucky days. That said, it should maybe be photoshopped a little to be more graphic.

My i-pod died last week. IT was the first model and I guess the battery life is an issue with i-pods. I’ve got to buy a new battery and learn how to take the white obelisk apart.

That said, I borrowed the better half’s. I’d forgotton how much I miss random play. IT gave me Richmond doing Abdul Loves Cleopatra, into Bowie doing a BBC live Absolute Beginners, into Coltrane live in Paris doing Love Supreme, into a weird late Brian Wilson gospel chorus piece called Add Some Music.

Sweet in the morning, indeed: now milk and coffee and pig bellies.

flatbush flowerpower, ITIN ’05

Cleaning House Still Lives, ITIN ’05

arc along the watchtower installation, Asi Nisi Masa installation, @ IT IN space, ITIN ’03

People in my life seem to be having daughters. They are months off, but everyone gets to know the sex, long before the birh. Thank Heaven for little girls…

I spent yesterday afternoon doing Willioughby dialogue in the park. I’ve decided that the exterior dialogues have to be recorded outside to get the ambient street/park noise. The narrators Voice Over will be recorded in the bathroom, or living room: depending.

I had already done some work under the gates (I’d wanted to drag Conrad out of L.A. to rehearse omEGG, but one potential actress bailed and then he got stuck in a casting call for someT.V. show with maybe Gary Oldman. Connie said: “I’ll sign a contract saying I can’t talk to my mother for year, if I could work with him.”

Oldaman is about his favorite actor of that generation. I don’t know what happened since.

Now that the grant stuff is over, it feels good to work work work. Grand Army Plaza is a really great set.

scrubbing bubbles, from the oddCITY drawings on Ulysees, ITIN ’01

There is a great line at the end of Schnabel’s Basquiat, it has JMB turning to what would be a sort of vincent gallo gray gang composite (again gray… the ineluctable modality…., etc.) IT’s after warhol dies and Basquiat wakes up in the gutter and says like a Pogue: “Let’s go to every bar in Ireland and have a drink in each one….”

Or something and then the Pogues play….So Happy St. Patty’s day. May the road rise to meet chya when its summer in siam and ¥øu’re swimming to Cambodia….or Thailand. As my old friend Chuleenan Svetvillas said: “Thai one on.”

Or as Cohen says: “Let go a my lucky charms. They’re magically delicious!”

This from a guy with a framed cell of the scrubbing bubbles in his batheroom.

Tom also dropped by to pick up the old green i-mac. All his IBM pc stuff exploded from a virus, or something. He and sharron aren’t marching today, as they usually do.

“Amature Night,” Tom calls the holiday, like Sinatra st the Sands with Count Basie.

I made it all the way to the BMA only to find out it was closing. So Basquiat was interrupted by five o’clock. Least I got a walk in.

He’s at home with his beer and his wife. He only needs some corned beef and cabbage and he has the perfect St. Patty’s day.

Pet Sounds is also green. I’ve been watching the dvd. Brian sounded great…still hitting the high notes. I’m drinking green tea in honor of the Irish. Watching George Harrison tribute on DVR. Irish/Indian/Japanese… and the cutest buddhist called me… My little nephew UGI (or Tyler to you Whitey) He was laughing so much it nearly made me cry.

In the words of Spalding Man: “Suddenly I’m back in time… I’m back in space…”

And I remember how shitty the NYPD can be. Zorg, our lovely little alien hybrid Prius car got ticketed… not once, but twice by some over zealous traffic cop. I was Inreadulous… snapping digipics…. Why?

Registration sticker sitting on Danish Modern furniture.

“Well they got us,” I said to my better half.

“Not us, It.”

Asi Nis Masa

I walk up the street and find the fourth corner of gates fabric.

Which reminds me, I’m reading Jung again. Anyone know a good Jungian therapist (I’ve done Freudian and frankly if a rabbi-wannabe asks me one more time “How does that make you feel?”… I’ll fucking hit him. I need a Swiss, or a German… or an artist. Neutrality after a certain point is just one big escapist rationalization.

That said, check out The were pad, where my old roommate Jaques is working on a new B genre: The Jewsploitation film.

Man and his Symbols

HUB, ITIN ’05

Had another wild talk with Charles Mingus the third. He was off on the subject of Ad Reinhardt and Allan Stone and Religion in Art….I don’t know what he was talking about, but I’m still thinking about it…so it must have been smart.