In the studio all day fooling with enamel and stretching canvas and drawing over Hitler and Chaplin making him a sad faced father self portrait with a strange inward looking cross eyed philtrum hair lip yarmulke depression. I spent a good hour looking back at him. I think I sort of like this drawing, even if it looks like a Macasso. It captures something dead on about how I was feeling. Ran out of batteries on the camera for my Fakooning, but it looked good as a start … the anxiety of influence dictates that I some how escape the liquified cubism and come up with something new, but still it’s a nice start to look like deKooning. It certanly could be worse. The meat of the story is the homecoming and the two loud explosions heard in the distance again around nine; followed by sirens and again no news on the t.v. about it. What if they had war and no one reported it? Seriously, it’s duck and flinch time… could have sworn it was a bomb in Manhattan… I mean they don’t sound like firecrackers, or gun shots… just single rumble reports….with more concussive strength than any firework… and isolated.
Monthly Archives: July 2005
Columbus Shrugged (or Send In The Crowds)
The round world wheeled behind me like a sack full of Indians and I need a casino, or Doctor Speer to take out half my brain and let me be a millionaire and leader of men, at last. “It ain’t likely,” I shrugged. “I’ve got to carry this thing uptown.” So down past dumpsters full of the new and the sun always heating and the steel always rusting and the white of marble always going gray, I see crowds and crowds and crowds. Should I lead them? Should I follow them? Or should I walk among them?
Marigold Margins
And all the little feet are standing in the heat, waiting to mash up the marigolds.
An Audience
As I write this, there has just been an enormous boom in Brooklyn and then sirens and I have no idea what’s going on and it is hot (maybe a transformer blew, maybe something else). I did this ink crowd today (I’m sort of thinking I want to do a seires of crowds… it came to me in a dream and also at the Summerstage show… I’m really fairly isolated in the studio of late and the idea of standing in crowd…. well it’s odd). My mom was asking me about the symbolism and there really isn’t any, but what I was thinking of was all these people at the end of one century, moving into the next and they are all going to get blown up and or blow themselves up and or watch some variation. I don’t know. I’m just thinking of Dada and WWI and just how absurd right now feels to me. But honestly, I should watch the news… and the space shuttle and Ezekial and Kubrick and turning turning turning… the rat in the wheel.
The Nearing Tide
Today was off to a funeral and back and it put me in mind of Ulysees. I’d been wanting to pull the OddCity gif out, but today just seems the odd day to do it in. I was dressing myself in black and coffee and feeling like Bloom, when all along I’d fealt more like Stephen. “Getting old,” I thought and then feeling like both of them, but not feeling like me at all. In the Eulogies I learnd that the Jesuits had had a big role in the life of the man going into the ground. It got me thinking about religion and it’s contemporary corallary; terrorism.
It is truly odd to ride the subways and trains these days. Cops on the platforms, National Guard (with full automatic weapons) in Grand Central, and Connecticut State Troopers in full formal wear on the trains. Life has become one big duck and flinch and then at the funeral they go on and on about Jesus and people wear flags in their lapels and I feel like a free floating alien…. floating on the nearing tide. This and that rusty boot with its snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs to read in the diaphane remind me of Willoughby and the work I’ve been doing late at night after painting in the studio. I’m standing on the shores of Coney Island trying to figure out Violence and love and what makes for good neighbors.
What Now?
Here’s another sketch of something that I sort of dreamed making this morning. It occurs to me that if you put this mob on a table top and put the hungry men around that table top, you’d have an okay painting…maybe.
Canvas The Town
Another meal sketch. Tried to put the figure over an abstract, but more or less ended up with surrealism. Got some larger stretchers for some sort of dinner painting. These may all get overpainted, or torn to shreads. As it is, I’ve been turning a lot of the earlier stages over and restreatching the unprimed side and painting on that (Bacon used to prime the opposite side and paint on the raw canvas, preferring the way it caught the paint and tugged at the brush and I have to say he was on to something).
I'm Going (or Creeper)
I’m feeling disturbed. Someone I was very close to in my youth managed to cut themselves on a shard of glass last night and bleed to death…probably right around the time I was writing about glass shards yesterday. I have no words,
In the studio, the skizum between abstraction and figure continues to puzzle me. The nice thing about the blog these days is that it seems to unify the split into a temporary coherence. The figure acts like a character and the abstraction acts as a sort of landscape/soundtrack/action/…. or I guess the character’s thoughts, or mood, or dream, etc.
Knee Deep
It was impossibly hot and the pidgeons went up over the roofs and spiraled like DNA into the sky.
I was cutting up and collaging the painting made from the pants my father died in. It had been a brutal day of doubts about the figure vs. abstraction and throwing caution to the wind and then I was kneeling and listening to Coltrane and sort of praying-like over the tearing and gluing and destroying a recreating thing with the pants, when my naked knee came to rest directly on a tiny shard of glass. It looked much worse than this as the blood was in crimson red rivulets down my leg and and my knee was printed again and again on the studio floor. I should have been wearing pants, you see.
A Hole In The Wall
The service was good there and that is why she went. There wasn’t much else to recommend it and so it was never very crowded and she liked that too. Mostly she liked watching the crowds of people that never became customers pass by. She sat there watching them go under the grand arch and up the block. There was always a moment when they were under the massive vault of stone that everything became alive. Everything hung in a balance – the tiny human form/the great heap of white stone. Each person seemed like a key, sliding into a lock – and the world opened up and was alive and then they were through it and the door was locked again.
The table cloth lay before her like a map, or chess board and she played a game with her fingers, connecting different shapes and countries and colors and then sprinkling them with a snow of salt. The men in the back were growing drunk and at turns quiet and then loud. One was yelling at the football on television. He went on and on exhorting and cajoling the players on the screen, but the television igonred him and She ignored him too. She simply sat there and sprinkled more salt and sipped her wine and smiled and watched another person pass .
Then there was a screaming sound and a hole opened up in the wall and light rushed into the dark room with rust red dust. The dust rained down onto the salted table cloth and it was time to go home, she thought. “Time to go home.”
