Category Archives: hub

New New York Correspondence School

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This is some mail art I got these last couple of weeks from my friend Chuck Sasson at the New New York Correspondence School. I fell on his mail art Fluxus fun while doing the Library Project. He works at my local wine store and it’s nice to run into him and find that he’s been reading the blog and then find some of his mail art in the letter box…in some way I think these works are his response to some of my recent stories, etc. Anyway I can’t seem to make anything I want to show anyone and I’m sort of saving up my mojo to go into Frost Street starting Monday and knock up some large dogs and dead ducks, etc.

Thinking of Airplanes

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I spent a lot of time last night watching Bergman films and thinking about a visual sequence for the first hub story. I think of this first story as a small test beta to see if it is worth doing the whole hub memoir in Sophie. It has to do with flying and landing and the little bar that I went to in Paris that seemed like the center of things and was called hub and gave me the title. So maybe this first story is like a title page… or title sequence… or preface, or preamble, or something. I would pause the film (Smiles on a Summer Night) and story board a few frames and then press play, etc. I am imagining the visuals based off an old gif animation I did two years ago. It popped into my head after I watched the video below. I think my sequence could really take advantage of the layering possibilities in a Sophie book. We’ll see.

Flying from Sam Fuller on Vimeo.

Walking on Carousel

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carouselmm.jpg A new Paris painting and an old Coney Island video (now in HD).

Rim

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hubmap5.jpgwheelhub.jpg I’ve finished the first four spokes and the hub of the wheel. Now I am working on all the periphery stories: the rim? Of Hub…. goes well. I think it’s a nice idea to sit on a story for a decade… you get a good sense of what matters and what doesn’t. Here is a video from about two years ago. I thought I’d upload it again, now that I know how to make it look good.

Other Green Worlds

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parisballs.jpgWhen I came back from Paris in 1998, I brought with me a stack of drawings and paintings and two gifts for Sylvie; an antique green glass fishing net float and and an antique green boule ball. I told her they were new green worlds, but of course they were also a joke about potency and my balls. She said to me, “You go to Paris and bring me back green balls? Why couldn’t you have gotten me a hand bag?” It’s just like a woman. You offer her a metaphor for your manhood and she demands a metaphor for the womb. You can’t win. But it’s fall again and the Osage oranges are falling in the park. I saw them yesterday on a long run, but everything had been smashed by a mower, or malevolent children. I ran back this afternoon on way to the vet for more dog drugs. I could only find two and it put me in mind of Paris.parisballs2a.jpg

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

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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