Earlier, I had a near religious experience (not only was someone sky writing x and y all over brooklyn, but…) when I crossed Manhattan bridge by foot, the light came behind the brooklyn in such a way that it cast a magnificent reverse gothic arch shadow across the flaming sunset water… the key hole arches both cut out in fire on the water. It was only there for about sixty seconds, but good shit it was glorious and luckily I was on a nikon safari. New York is just a magnificent place sometimes and its filled with people that you know and love, but didn’t know were living so close to you. One big urban reunion project.

gee don’t I sound like king lear?

Well a house devided, etc.

Once I saw the changing of command on the USS Pittsburgh at Grotton, CT with my brother from a Bolex mother. When The Captain leaves the ship they blow a dog whistle and say: “Pittsburgh going Ashore.” It is as if the soul of the boat has left the boat. When The new Captain walks the gangplank, the dog whistle is blown in opposite progression and the Ensign speaks these magic jazz hand words: “Pittsburgh Coming Aboard!” and it is as if the boat is born again.

Me and Pat call melady Young Pas (or green onion in Korean, or Sly to the Midwesterners or Sylvie to you… etc.): Pittsburgh. She is the Captain my Captain. She is the queen of that little steel Swiss, but rusting Town in the middle of the Eastern Sea Board. I was throwing out all my old clothes yesterday and getting rid of all the wire and plastic hangers… nothing but wood is good quoath Pittsburgh and I concurred while wearing the buddhist Stettson and the silk guns and the Star Wars blasters still in the a tiny casket to be burried by the IRA somwhere beside the river Liffey. I tripped and fell upon a Bazooka shell full of old memories of Pittsburgh’s youth and there were steller shots of her as Stella amongst the stars and my street car named desire and some calling cards from old beaux and a shot of her leaning away from a dire wolf… him stealling kisses and trying to eat her heart out and I realize it is good to walk with pax but always have silk guns in a silk casket somewhere… the silent big stick as the Church on the Hill said, or was it The Mac daddy Author, or Ike? Yes Ike who I like if only because he said, “Beware the military industrial complex”… The king can speak the truth, but the wolves are still there… stealing kisses, and hearts, and gold, and souls.

I became quite green with jealousy looking at the explosive contents of the shell… and then I found a receipt for the first futon we ever shared and a letter I wrote to fair Pittsburgh in Pittsburgh when I was in the Tower of Pain and hats and song. It was not the most regal of things… a manic all night scrawl on yellow legal paper… but you know what? It was really a very romantic letter. It brought a single tear to my eye that dropped into the vast Atlantic… How can a shell hold such wealth I thought? For in that moment I realized that this was a contract signed thirteen years ago… So Why has it taken me so long to honor it and honor fair Pittsburgh?

… Because you see, I have been hiding in plain sight, playing the fool on the hill. Now it is time to wear the purple robes and take the crown that is mine. Today Pittsburgh. Tomorrow the world. It is my job to be her knight in shining armor coming to her emotional rescue on a fine Arab charger. It is my job to keep the dire wolves at bay. Hail Pittsburgh hail the Queen.

I was at Freddy’s the night Sly Fox left for Las Vegas and I gave two guys my moleskin and said, “Make me a drawing, buy me a beer…sort of as a joke…and I went outside to smoke… when I got back they had drawn this and bought me a magic hat #9… it is names of the superbowl champion (two years in a row) Steelers from the seventies when I used to wear the black and gold slicker to protect me from the hard rain…. Coin see dances coincidences…. They were Pittsburgher… friends from many moons ago… reunited in the city on a drunkes Spree… fiddle di di.

I went to the memorial/bash/wake… I don’t know what to call it… for Allan Stone last night. It was a fairly joyous event as far as anyone can be joyous around the subject of death. There was a lot of laughter. Still, walking home in the fridgid city, I couldn’t help but feel a real sense of loss and a sense of my own mortality. He bought the first painting I ever sold… I think twenty years ago. It seems impossible.

The drawing is a collage from the drawings I made for the video.

It’s funny that we are scared of the dark (I was always terrified of OUTERgowters (like alligators only interdimennsional beings who walked by my crib and looked at me without speaking). Most people Iknow who are dead, died at night. Bergmann did a great film called Hour of the Wolf. That is the hour before dawn when it is darkest and most insane… the hour my father died I think.

Death is not information
Stone that I am
He came into my quiet
And I will be still for him
– W.S. Merwin


Allan Stone, Noted Art Dealer and Collector, Dies at 74

That was the headline in today’s The New York TImes Dec 18th, 2006.

I had the great privilege to know and be collected by Allan Stone. I think I learned more about painting by having his eyes in my studio and having his hands hang my work beside my heroes at both his home and gallery, than I could have learned in ten years of universty graduate art studies. Being a part of his gallery from the old 86th street location to its present fire house, was like grad school and seminary rolled into one. Over the last few years, Allan’s health and my intinearant studio status meant that we didn’t get to do the studio visits I had so loved in younger years. I had sincerely hoped that I would settle down somewhere and that he would be of sound health and we would get to spend a few more years visiting again like we did in the nineties. I’m so very sad that I won’t have that priviledge again, but I realized today that over the last six or seven years, I would drop little paintings and drawings that I liked by the gallery so that he could see them when he came in from Purchase (an ironic place name, considering he was such a great shopper). It was always an honor and an education to visit Claudia and look at “the old man’s desk” (a truly gorgeous piece of furniture by the way) and see some little tsotchke of mine propped against an African feitish, or below a Franz Kline, or deKooning, or Thiebaud. I always tried to take the position behind his desk and see what the context was… how he was looking at it?… what were the site lines? And then spend the week figuring out what it all meant – what did he see? What was he saying? What should I look at? It was like being taught by Hansel’s trail of bread crumbs method in the dark forest of New York art… but what exquisite and wise and nutritious crumbs they were. You can’t always see people in person, but through art, you can communicate beyond the limits of time and space. I will always value the correspondence of objects that we shared these last few years and I have every reason to believe it will go on and on, because objects keep talking long after the maker and the owner of the object has stopped talking. There is a kind of immortality in things; a way of talking to the future. Allan Stone’s collection, if kept together, will speak to countless future generations.

A few years back Allan did an amazing retrospective of Willem deKooning’s career. A couple of months before, he visited my then studio in Stamford and we had a long talk about the new Gallery on 90th, the present state of the Art world, the new dealers, the old dealers. He said he was planning to do a show during the Metropolitan’s deKooning Retrospective. He was going to call it: School of deKooning, or deKooning and friends, or something. It was going to be Kline, Gorky and deKooning. Being young and opinionated and probably a bit cocky and arrogant, I told him: “Look Allan, half the people in the New York art world think you’re dead. I go into galleries and say that you collect my work and they say, “Didn’t the gallery close? I thought he was dead.”
He laughed.
“Seriously,” I said. “This is your opportunity to ride the publicity wave and announce to the world that the new Allan Stone Gallery is open and that you are alive and well, etc. Don’t dilute the moment… Do deKooning alone. Your personal collection would probably be more interesting than anything anyone else could currate. You have the real shit, Allan. Fuck Gorky and Kline. Show me all those funky little deKoonings I haven’t seen yet. Show the world too… sure… , but more importantly… show ME!.”

Sometimes you get what you ask for. I don’t think I’m the only guy who told him this, but anyway it is what he did: The best little deKooning show anyone is ever likely to hang.

Allan liked to tell the story of how the British currator of the Met’s show came to the gallery one morning and spent about four or five hours just looking. He finally came upstairs to see Allan and said, “Mr. Stone, you have said more about the painting of Willem deKooning on these four walls, than I have managed to say in the entirity of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. My hat’s off to you, sir. I salute you.” I like to think he gave him a hug and a kiss, but anyway… You get the idea. The show was a masterpiece, a joy to behold, a love letter in art.

During that show, at the top of the stairs to his offices, he hung a large painting of mine that was made of three or four years worth of paint tubes glued and painted into a sort of cross armmed funerial fetish figure (quasi german/egyptian/New Guinea). It was a painting I obsessed on for years (started out on an 8 foot hunk of plywood that I litterally started trimming with a saw). He hung it next to a DK trasparent vellum paper pull from a larger work (a technique Willem used, to save gestures he liked, but which he was going to paint over). The pull probably took seconds, but it glowed like a stained glass window… etherial, witty, sly, charming, serious, and magical… a sort of giggle in paint. It was the total opposite of my piece… like a Janus face. I still dream of that picture… and think about the pairing often. It is a touchstone moment in my life (pun intended).

I remember talking to him during that show and thanking him for the prominant position he’d put my painting (after all, all the heavy hitters in the art world would be in town to see that show and would be invited upstairs to talk and maybe buy art…though nothing in that show itself was for sale).

I said, “Thanks Allan. It’s just an amazing honor to have my painting next to DeKooning’s.”
“Well kid,” he said. He always called me KID… even last month he called me KID…. “Kid,” he said. “It holds up.”

Nicer words were never spoken.

I will truly miss him. I think anyone serious in the art world will miss him too. He was a force of nature that rolled and rolled and still gathered much moss. The Stone is dead. Long Live the Stone.

Top is mine then a start from Brian Raszka of The Library Project and then a Raszka solo book.