Monthly Archives: October 2008

Math Homework

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Draw a circle.

I found this sheet of math equations in the street while walking the dog around the block. It reminded me that later drafts of my “frist novel” were titled: To Walk A Circle. It was more or less about walking around all those etoilles they have in Paris that get you so lost sometimes and there is no grid by which to dead reckon your way home. Instead you go from L’Opera and walk for thirty minutes and somehow end up exatly again at L’Opera. Last time I was in Paris, I had one entire foot (my gimpy right one) turn into an enormous blister… the whole foot, one blister. For the next week I hobbled around Paris like Ratso Rizzo: Je promenne ICI! I thought it was a grand metaphor for life. Now it sounds a little pretentious, but it does explain Arc Along the Watchtower as a title too.homework.jpg

With Without

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The old man dies.

Paris Pairs

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Yesterday, I think I mentioned, that I’ve started greeting the day by trying to write prose accounts of my Paris Hub stories. These are little tales of manic madness and mad men of Paris I’ve been letting leak out in drips and drams of distilled essence for the last ten years. Oddly enough an e-mail for a contest to win a free trip to Paris showed up in my Inbox right after I hit save on the first installment (the Hub itself). I won’t give you the details of the contest, as frankly you’d be competition, but it seemed rather magical… several people forwarded it to me as well and I had to thank them but explain that I’d entered moments after the announcement. The first time I ever got to live in Paris was with my folks for a month. We’d gone out to taste Indian food in Greenwich Village for the first time. It was an odd and mysterious cuisine to my suburban sixteen year old palette. At the end of the meal I announced that we should go to Paris (both my older brothers were in college, so for the first time I had them to myself and thought we should make a sort of party of it). With two kids in college, it was probably not a good time for them to take a vacation… who could afford it? In a strange coincidance; the next morning a family friend called offering us to trade houses with the minister of the American Cathedral of Paris for a month in the summer. We got to live on the Avenue George V. Omens Oh man. Sometimes they work.
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Maps and Legends

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Here is a drawing I did last week at Frost Street and an old collage from Paris about a decade ago. It’s made out of the sex club cards they hand you all up and down the Piagalle and a few found images and some drawings I made and some rose petals and some blood red ink. I call it Nooky Money. Too see a larger size press: here. Below is another in a series of Hub maps I’ve been drawing while actually writing a prose version of all my Hub stories. Why is it that Paris is the only place I ever like writing about?
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Sweet

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saferedirect.jpgWent on the bummer to a rather staggering party at what used to be The Tunnel (and now they call it the Tobacco Warehouse). It was sponsored by the Food Network and Perrier Jouet so there was a lot of Champagne and all sorts of world class pastry chefs knocking out sweet stuff and a devilish selection of after dinner type drinks (scotch and port and absinthe). Too much fun.

Frost Free

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third version of this vid,but new replacements and the openings, etc.

Black Shirts

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drawing lots of maps towards Hub these days. Here’s one from a few months ago actually. I have a strange ability to be working on things long before I know I’m working on them. Also I had a nightmare last night.
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I had a strange and powerful dream last night. I was visiting friends in the North West (maybe even Alaska?). It was in some America of the future, a realm where the war on terrorism had become domestic and the Feds were everywhere in their black uniforms. I remarked to my hippy type pothead North Western friends about how strange it was that the feds would choose a uniform that so completely quoted Italian Fascism. They didn’t get the black shirt reference and we all went out to eat and drink some spectacular beer: a lot of laughter and joy and little talk about the war. Later I was walking through the snow filled streets when a strange vehicle hovered out of the sky and landed in front of me. Two Feds got off and started casually talking to me. I asked them about the machine. They said it was a snowmobile. I said, Snowmobiles can’t fly. They assured me it was a snowmobile. They asked me if I always walk in the middle of the street. I said, no, but the snow hadn’t been cleared from the sidewalk (if there was one) and I was just trying to get back to my friends’ house and that I was visiting from New York. They wrote me a two hundred dollar ticket for walking in the street, but they expected immediate payment in cash or credit card. I told them I didn’t have that kind of money on me and that I don’t have a credit card.

They hand cuffed me and took me off to the station. I was interrogated for a long time by a senior Fed who had a sort of Judge Wapner / Dick Vandyke kind of charm. We talked about the Twin Towers falling and what New York was like at the beginning of the war. We mentioned the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. We laughed. We commiserated. I didn’t mention the rebels in the hills, or the mortar attacks that I’d heard several times while visiting. I explained again that I was an artist out here for a show and staying with friends and didn’t have two hundred dollars and couldn’t afford a lawyer (I didn’t want to scare my now elderly mother and try to get a hold of hers’…. even though I knew that one good call from Msrs Stein would have squashed this thing that was clearly a form of extortion…the black shirts were raising money to keep fighting in the hills through illegal taxation: parking tickets, speeding tickets, trash tickets…. Even tickets for walking down the street). He said, “You say you are an artist? But I look at you and I see crummy clothes. Cheap, dirty shoes. A beard. Long Hair. You aren’t an artist. You’re a bum. I don’t like bums. I put bums in jail.”

With that, the arresting officers grabbed me by my arms and hoisted me up into the air. I started screaming in panic (I knew that falling into a Federal jail was much harder than getting out: the Federal jails had all been gitmoized). I screamed, “Put me down! Let me stand up. Up Up Up. I just want to stand up and be free for two more seconds. You can take me to jail right after. Just let me be free again! I want to be free again!”

I awoke in a panic.