Toured the Press Preview for the Whitney Biennial today. The show manages to ask a question I thought was more or less irrelevant by now – Namely: “Yes, yes, but is it art?”

There is an awful lot of Art Poverra… which only works in a context and when you have too much of it, everything just looks like junk. There’s also a lot of post-Barney dressing up in animal costumes with an emphasis on antlers… a lot of home video stuff and in contrast a lot of slick video that hearkens to Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. There’s also some hamfisted political art that makes you think that War on Terror(sic) may never end, if this is best our cultural elite can come up with to protest it. Oddest of all, is a small ghetto of black political art that has some great work, but seems oddly isolated and tucked away…. like well… like a ghetto. It comes off as condescending to both the audience and the artists, but no doubt someone meant well. There are these things and of course an awful lot of Neostalgia (I made up that word today and am feeling proud of myself). You come out feeling like you’ve seen most of this before, made by someone else, a little more sincerely. Still, it’s worth a peek. It’s always worth a peek. I hate it less than any Whitney Biennial I can remember.

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The Olympics are over and tomorrow starts the Whitney Biennial. I find time to be like a wheel of cheese… is it possible that we’ve eaten another year of Gruyere? Basel Fasnacht is only around the corner… and Mardi Gras is already in somewhat skinny effect.



It seems so long ago, but IT IN place is over a year old. It was only last year when Central Park was full of a carnival of optomism in the way of Christo’s Gates. I find it odd that it’s taken me a year to realize that the orange of the gates is simply a color contrast (or negative) of the blue tarps they use when a building is under demolition, or a flood has sunk a city. You live and learn… but you do…. but you must….but you will go on hoping for orange.

-ITIN

He was not paranoid, but he still thought everyone was out to kill him. Out in the street, the doppler effect of a passing subwoofer bass was enough to make him duck. So he watched the scene unfold on television in awe. The men were moving the wounded across a field of fire. They zigged and zagged in a serpentine to avoid the snipers. It was, in its own way, a beautiful example of athletic motion. It was a dance choregraphed in cordite and blood, with the passenger hanging in the balance. He was not a third wheel at the prom. He had a partner too. For him it was Totentanz.
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“Somebody stop the music,” he said alone, in his living room, to no one but the cat.

The cat walked by while he was trying to have a shit. It sat in the hall outside the bathroom and looked at him in a way that seemed quite human and made him feel ashamed and vulnerable.

“Am I on stage here?” he asked and it didn’t answer. It just went on looking at him with a detached air of disgust.

“I don’t watch you when you’re crapping,” he said and this was an out and out lie. She was a fastidious cat and her excretory rituals fascinated him. She had an elaborate dance she did around her litter box – jumping in then out and testing every corner to make certain the litter was clean. It sometimes took a half an hour. That cat had a square dance ballet, while he just read the idiot gossip magazines his wife left in the bathroom for that very purpose. They were all about the scandals of this actor and that actress and illustrated with absurdly ugly photos of absurdly beautiful people. The mucking up of filth on celebrities was, he thought, some sort of elaborate cultural ritual not unlike the litter dance of his cat.

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I had the acting dream again… where I am Orson Welles in the early days of magic and Shakespeare. I am trying to pull a rabbit out of a hat and I do, but the rabbit turns into a skull and I am suddenly having to switch gears and be Hamlet. I start creeping the stage at a petty pace, but I’m like a rat in a wheel and I can’t cross to stage left to squeek my lines, “Alas poor Yorick…” when the skull starts lunging at me, like it wants to kiss me, or bite my neck and I try to push it back down into the top hat when it turns into a mango in a Cezanne bowl and quiets…

…and I’m suddenly Marlon Brando on the set of Apocalypse now and Dennis Hopper has handed me a copy of Mao’s Little Red Book and all its pages are laced with pure Swiss Sandoz L.S.D. and the drug seeps into the mango juice and I eat impossible doses… enough to trip all of Nixon’s China and I start crying uncontrollably and washing myself in the tears.The warm salt water coats my body and I realize that I am huge and full of Paul Masson wine and poi. As many tears as I cry, I can’t fully marinate my fat-tasticallly huge body. I am a swine for the spit. I am the golden calf for the sacrifice. I start to slice off sashimi bits of myself to feed to the audience when I realize they are nothing but skulls lined up like under Paris, or in Rowanda and Cambodia. I realize that I have eaten my own audience and grown huge on their flesh. I give a soliloquy that can’t be beat and I don’t want to wake up for the bone on bone glockenspiel applause.

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I couldn’t sleep all night with the radiator spitting steam and the pipes knocking and banging like Tony Orlando on acid. It was maniacal. Every time I’d fall into a dream: hiss, knock, bang back out of it. By dawn, I was beginning to nod out in exhaustion when the Lady from 5A called to tell me that her radiator had just spat tobacco juice across her white rug.

I went down to the boiler room and sure enough the valve had gotten stuck again and the whole system was flooded with opaque rust-red water. I had to drain that scalding mess into bucket after bucket and pour it down the slop sink. There is a sort of terror you get when draining a pot of spaghetti: the awareness that you too could get cooked. It was like that, only dirty and more frequent.

I drank coffee which was more or less the same color and temperature as the boiler mess, but I missed breakfast and I missed lunch and by dinner I emerged from the lower depths in need of a clean well lighted place. So I went down to Bar 51 and ordered a Bloody Mary. Something about the tangy blood smell of hot, rusty water had given me a tomato juice craving… plus it was still breakfast by my count.

The great thing about 51, is that Paul was from Beirut before Brooklyn, and he puts out pistachio nuts. I can’t get enough of them.

So I sat there nursing my drink and watching little Olympic skaters twirl and whirl and fall all over the ice until there was a pile of red shells like ladies’ lacqured finger nails. No one bothered me and there was no way to tell how much time passed except for the deepening red dying my hands.

Kirby came over and tried to engage me in a discussion on the physics of ski jumping. He was on and on about arcs and trajectories and certain formulas used for artillery. I’m sure there are more boring topics of discussion in the world, but I can’t think of any.

I said, “Excuse me, but I’m starting to look like Lady Macbeth..”

I went home to wash my hands and try to sleep.

It is in the mornings mostly when I am reminded of the cruelty of New York real estate. That is when I usually see her crossing fifth street and after all these years of never having seen her and never having talked to her and never knowing what had happened in her life, I still like the way she crosses a street. I find myself lingering to catch a glimpse now and remembering then. We smile. I wave. We never talk and never touch. It seems impossible. I’d like to kill the asshole who showed her that apartment.