Category Archives: brooklyn

West Gorgeous

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First day off and what a day it was folks. I went off with my rabbi to walk in snow flurries through Greenwood Cemetery and find tacos in Sunset Park. From there to the gym and back to the machine to download new audio mixes and then Chelsea to see one show by a College friend, one show by an Allan Stone Gallery friend, and one show by a Cousin… and for once I loved them all and mostly Leon Kossof who I know not and am related to not, but he feels like blood, or at least oil.
So the Posterboy, Aakash Nihalani, Ellis Gallagher opening is tonight at 17 Frost Street Space. You should come… or drop by some time.

Brooklyn Warming

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I came upon this little landscape while walking under the BQE during the recent blizzard. I suppose the salt on the higway melted the snow and it dripped down and refroze here. It reminded me of the Alps and now reminds me of last week when it snowed in this week where it is spring-like warm.

Take This Waltz

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I attempted to flatten some of the creases and folds in an old canvas I grabbed out of storage. The best I could come up with was to soak the whole thing from the back and try to soften the aging acrylic paints. I danced a bit of a jig on it to help the process along and what’s funny is that you end up meeting a lot of people when you are canvas dancing on the sidewalk. They come by with their dogs. I met lots of neighbors and strangers and this is what I’ve learned: People tend to talk about their dogs more than themselves. One guy didn’t have his dog with him so he showed me photos on his cell phone. I didn’t tell them, but they just kept reminding me of my own dog and so I danced to her end if not the end of love.

Wyld Bites

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In what feels like a flow of collaborative energy, I spent yesterday editing some footage shot by Dave Scarborough from my opening party of The Royal Wylds playing 17 Frost Street. I quite enjoy how the talking head sometimes seems to synch with Will Croxton’s vocals. A great software program would be to take the thousand head man and build a audio sensitive logarithm that could fit the face to certain key vowel and consonant sounds in speech so that the head would be like a giant Wizard of Oz and would synch up behind the singer, or comic, or performer, or whatever. Oh if I knew anything about computers I’d do it. But even in this ambient accidental method, it’s a pretty funny trick. Later that afternoon I played with some of Akaash’s tapes on the floor: letting them and the tiles dictate some abstract gestures, etc. I’m hoping he’ll swing by and work into it. Ironing out details on the closing party. More on that later.

The Addictions

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So I’m back. The better half is back and sleeping has become less an act of rolling around in lonesome sheets till sunrise and more like, you know, sleeping. The screening is done and I was happy with the narrative arc of the pieces together as a group. I feel like I’ve been composing about a half hour stream of consciousness narrative over the last two, or three years in video. I have composed it all out of sequence and semi unconsciously and every time I do a screening (which is more and more frequent) I try to take the opportunity to chip away the extraneous bits and get to the core themes and images. I get closer and my present feeling is that I will have to overlap and edit the present sequence into a more coherent and shorter whole… Or Mash it up into a two channel diptych which worked beautifully at Monkeytown several months ago. Speaking of Mash ups, My favorite part of the weekend was hearing David Scarborough play some of his songs. He has appeared in cameo on several of the Frost Vlog videos helping me hang the big paintings, etc. I knew he sang, but it’s always nice when someone exceeds your expectations. At some point I did some timelapses of him playing (and his wife watching the whole set, sitting at his feet in what has to be the most romantic tableau I’ve seen in months). After we got the video equipment set up on Saturday night and after we’d had a few beers, I shot a video of him on my little flip cam singing in front of my animations. It was strange how the song and the pictures seemed to collide in happy tragedies.

Ha Ha Facade You Are

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Went walking around Chelsea Galleries yesterday. A very poor day for art. Some nice late Louise Nevelson’s at Pace and an interesting show on Manzoni at Gagosian. They included a great deal of pieces by Manzoni’s contemporaries as a way of contextualizing his career. However, most everyone else came off better than the show’s subject. The show is worth a look and there is a lot of great work there, but mostly it’s not by Manzoni (though there were a few pieces of his that I liked quite a bit). Not much else worth mentioning.

Flutter of Spring

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It was impossibly warm yesterday and I ran to the studio and all of Brooklyn was alive and thrumming and I finally spotted the pigeon coop that houses the birds I’ve been noticing for a couple of years spiraling over Williamsburg. Up on the roof there was the exact guy you would want tending the pigeons, which is to say he looked like a retired boxer. His big mug peered over the roof looking at the traffic and the guys drinking beer at the bodega and I gave a him a wave way up there and he waved back.

Aakash Nihalani: Available Space

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I went Aakash Nihalani’s opening on Atlantic Ave. Saturday. He got hired by the real estate company to install some work in an otherwise empty piece of new retail space. This month I am beginning to see the economy and it looks like an ugly paper Space Available sign taped to an empty store window. Of course when you have nothing, you’ve go nothing to loose and so it is important for artists to see this as an opportunity not just a precipitous drop in the art market (which was all but ignoring me anyways). A depressed city/country/world might make an excellently vast museum. The void should be filled with creativity. I like the little baby in the cube as it speaks to my Kubrick Space Odyssey obsession and what is a child, but a sort of empty vessel ready to be filled with life and knowledge and culture, etc.