Electric Sumo, ITIN (mixed media)

White Phospherous Tracing, calk and chinese ink on canvas, ITIN ’05

Pollokcodex, mixed media on panel, ITIN ’05

I’ve got some sort of four year old plague from the cutest buddhist. So I’m doing shots of Tussin and lemon juice with pediatric Tylenol to cut the ache and pain. Dammn…. Is this shit actually leagal?

Laurie Anderson’s voice is Haunting me (as it has for years):

Full Fathom Five
They Father Lies
Of his bones are coral made
Those are Pearls that were his eyes
Nothing of him that doth fade
But that suffers a Sea Change
Into Something Rich and Strange
And I alone am left to tell the tale
Call me Ishmael

I expect her to show up in pimped out red ElCimino any moment.

Birthday Blues with an Ompossible Boink, ITIN (various & ’05)

There was the big bang from the Ramoans and Ludwig Van and then the city openend up like it was my birthday (because it was and the Ferdinand the bull’s too) and I marched over the Cathedral B.K. Bridge and saw three presidential helicopters and I imagined Bucky had built a dome decree over lower Manhattan and it was a Mingus III boink three eyed smiley smile and all was well and good and mad and it was my birthday and the cherry blossoms were falling all around and words were flowing out like endless petals and blanketing the yellow brick road and I wept to see you suffer though I didn’t know you well and all my life was a tapestry beneath the flowing beer and he you were dressed in black and unraveling and taking me back to the three eyed balloon. I was Elvis and Le Roi Orbison… singing for my dinner and…

Are you sleeping, brother Droog?

Fiddlehex, ink on Japanese paper, ITIN ’05

Last night I was up till four in the morning. The better half got home late and I’d been nodding off on the couch watching arrested developement on dvr. I told her all about my lunch with Josh Fagin (or dinner with André…?) and it wound me back up like a balloon and then I came upon Kubrick right at the climax where the kid is tagging up redrum with the lipstick and Jack is swinging the axe and there is this disorienting camera move like it’s the axe POV!? How fucking brilliant is that scene and Jack is over the top and chewing the scenery to make Pacino blush and it is just right and I think about how 90% of the public remember Jack with his “Here’s Johnnie,” line, or also Cuckoo’s Nest.

I’d been looking at the Gates Memory article in Time Out and wondering if my orange you glad? is still available for downloading and suddenly the little boy is running in blue ice box shrub labirynth with that wild (first time seen by me) steadycam shot… which to my young eyes looked lika an impossible dolly to rival the opening of Touch of Evil. I was thinking how The Shining is a kind of anti gates… a color contratst: terror to joy – private to public, fantasy to new realism… etc…

So I start working on redrum and suddenly a raft of three thirty illustrations from Mingus III comes over the e-mail. So here’s Mingus jamming on the boink boink which was a three eyed smiley face that I used as my toilet tag on condom machines etc. in Paris: BOINK 2K – for fuck the year 2000. Our way of saying that the 2K was being over hyped by greedy high tech con men. Ooops, right again. So here goes MINGUS III solo:

Fiddle Sticks, Charles Mingus III (with ITIN background) ‘O5

I was looking at this picture and was overcome with a wave of nausea so intense that salt water poured into my mouth and I nearly puked. Was it the Mingus, or the Kubrick? Pink Pepto saves the day and the sweetie rubbing the buddha belly don’t hurt neither.

Laurie Anderson

And I fell asleep to the words of Luarie Anderson and The Nerve Bible throbbing of her electric voice and fiddle. She is just so clever that it is a little like listening to your own thoughts.

Somehow this has me thinking of my old job in the Pearl Paint shop when Vincent Gallo was coming in all the time (redoing his loft after Buffalo ’66). He was in Gray with JMB and so we talked about his work and Gallo thought his real contribution was his SAMΩ(megg) t.m. poetry. Gallo was a lovely freak, but really facinating and charismatic and fun to talk to with – his manic energy and mine in that little HDC on Lispenard. He’d ride off with his girlfriend on the back of the bicycle holding five gallon tubs of Venetian Plaster. He was fun and David Cross made me laugh too. I learned a lot about different non-fine art paint finishes there and then SAMO turned me into Swigger and it was all over in a week of D.C. madness throwing my pearls before the Dukes and Barrons and Earls and Counts (who peppered the crowd at the Bash) and the Swine who filled the rest of that fair Southern/African city.

I went to the Vietwall with a bottle of Absolut Mandarin (I had hundreds of dollars stuck in the pockets of my suit from selling souvenir book drawings and one big Spoerri/Schnabel commemortive Clinton plate portrait) which I poured over a particularly good drawing and then the whole memorial smelled of oranges and then I lit it on fire and it was my way of getting into the Smithsonian Collection before I died – whicha as far as I knew, could be any minute. I bought a bunch of Korean War battle pins and wore them on my valise for years (five and six point stars… who knew the seventh army was Jewish?) and pinned one on Bill Batson’s Vetran dog walker who had no insignia, but had sad memories of Korea. Here I am as Swigger the Swiss Nigger:

A Bash Fit For A King Documentation, Wyatt Closs ’99

Killed a Wabbit, Killed a Wabbit…, ITIN ‘O5

Where The Fuck Is Prescott Bush, Charles Mingus III ’05

Today was a day like any other except much much better. I was greeeted at the door by a Witness and took their literature in honor of Orwell and being Down and Out in Paris and London and Honolulu and New York and Basel… etc.

Took the orange dog (Zuzu Pearl Bailey) to the park for the first time since her operation. She is now sleeping in fuzzy red ball on her gray bed.

Yesterday was full of words, so today I will try to tell as much as I can in pictures. Mentor is Orson and the collector with his arc along the watchtower.


The philosopher stone called his emmaculate collection The Ark yesterday. I laughed and thought of Kane. How could a man as young as Orson (or JMB for that matter) know so much about growing old. It’s like he told his own story before he lived it…Sort of like Heroes and me (Villain?…I try not to be)

I met a couple just back from their honeymoon. She plays a viola…suomething. A big viola and played last Easter in the Basel Munster. He is from Austria.

They gave me this 1968 film magazine, because I knew all the films listed on the back. Dustin Hoffman is my mother and Ben’s favorite actor.


And Bailey got to see her old friend and sometime sparing partner, Snowflake the wolf dog. I got to see Donna (brilliant handmade filmmaker, N.Y.U. multimedia teacher, and former RISD student of Dadi Wirz). We laughed and laughed and talked about movies and music and met the above couple and I quoted spalding gray:

All the stories I’m telling you tonight are true, except one: the banana sticks!”

Right on cue we came upon a pair of bananas just sitting on the stoop. Did I tell you my mom e-mailed from Spain just as I was writing about my dad’s last sleep? I think she may be the Good Witch of Long Island, or something pagan like that. My mom, the telepsychic.

Spinner Face, Krista Grauer, ’03 (S. Choi Collection)

“You’re sitting in a dentist’s chair, and they’ve got music for you there to add some music to your day… ” – B. Wilson.

I had strange and woderful conversations yesterday with my brother Christian, Marie-Pierre Nakamura, Kate Rothschild, my attorney, and Allan Stone.

The atheist Christian was in Calli at some experiential education conference. He was in a good mood and chatty and (in true big brother didactic professorial know it all form) correcting my timeline on the old man’s death. Relativity and relatives… Time and space are what you make of them.

Allan had some oral surgery and is now regretting it. He came down with the big C right around the time my dad was dying. Allan chose the road less traveled and believe me, it has made all the difference…ie. he’s alive.

I’m still convinced that it was a route canal that killed the old man. I’m praying that Allan is on top of the crystal bugs that escape with serious tooth work…

I suggest listening to Coltrane, or Monk, or whatever lifts your immune system, but for sure: add some music… kick it root down… doctor Alex’s orders.

Dead Nature with Little Soldiers, ITIN/CHOI ’05

I’ve been reading Yellow Submarine to UGI the cutest buddhist and he is singing all the time: “All you need is love” and I am melting like a chocolate easter bunny held too tightly in the hand.

All the paterfamilas jive has got me thinking of the time I played my last game of catch with the old man. Oh yeah, it was after he had already died. Those of you out there who went to my old man’s funeral have already heard this story. It was my uligi, or eugi, or eulogy, or whatever.

I think I’d got you to the point where the old man was sleeping soundly…

In the morning he awoke swollen like Verucca Salt (or was it Violet Bick?…) in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. He was huge and silent and in need of a shit. The thing about my dad is that he was a fairly proud and stubborn man. The home care workers had given us (sold us) bed pans and a portapotty, but he wasn’t having any of it. For months he shook off whatever opiate stupor he was feeling and sat on his porcelain throne like the king he seemed to me as a child. He tried to maintain dominion over his failing lands, like Lear slowly going mad with the pain and drugs and cancer.

On the day after his infant sleep, we tried to move his blueberry body towards the yellow bathroom, but he crashed against the cork doors and couldn’t go forward or back and so I peeled the plastic off the flimsy portapotty and he sat there in the living room swelling up.

You see, his lymph system had shut down over the past 48 hours and all the water he would usually process through that reptilian system of canals was backing up and flooding the Holland of his boddy. I was just a little Dutch boy and nothing would stem the flood. He sat on that portable potty for what seemed like hours and in his eyes you could see him getting smaller, while his body grew and grew.

He did not die like Elvis in Memphis. We shot him full of morphine and put him to bed – we’d moved it close to him in the living room and he fell into a sleep again. But this sleep was different and began with a distant rumble like thunder on the horizon.

It was the beginning of the death rattle… Where all the water broke the dyke of his flesh and headed for air…his lungs. The sound grew hour by hour and into the night… like forboding… like a drunk snoring in an imposssibly long breath. You’ve never heard a noise like it, unless you’ve heard that noise.

At about four in the morning the house went suddenly – weirdly – silent.

The king was dead: Long Live The King.

Le Roi… Le Roi… Le Roi!

And my mother started laughing hysterically. My brother Christian and I looked at her as if she were posessed.

I thought, “Great. Dad is dead and my mother has gone insane. What am I, Job?”

She said, “He’s in me. I can feel him. He’s inside me and he loves me…aaaha ha ha ha…..oooooooooooooo……” She was raving now. “Oh,” she said now becalmed. “He’s gone.”

I thanked my lucky stars, when suddenly something tickled my insides as I took a breath. I started laughing, like an idiot.

It was as if I’d taken a bong hit of GOD. He was inside me and playing my ribs like Lionel Hampton. The tune was ridiculously inappropriate laughter. The text was, “Thank you, thank you, Danke Schoen….”

It went on for some time and then suddenly, like an ejaculation of spirit, out of the place where the Jews wear a yamuka and the Mets wear a blue ball cap… in a great gallactic woooosh…. he was gone.

We turned off all the oxygen and so I could light candles now and I used the matches and wax to draw fatty ash portraits of his dead face.

my mother has those drawings, so this Fasnacht mask will have to serve as a metaphor, or stand in untill I can scan those deathmask portraits. It captures the feeling perfectly. Mummanschanz

When all was said and done and the room was made empty and the all the candles had flickered out and the morphine was poured down the drain by our home care nurse (who only a month later suffered a brain anurism and ended up the patient… fate is cruel)… I was suddenly unemployed. You have to understand, I left my studio, my woman, my life and married the dying of my father. I was, like Sinatra, a man alone.

This is at it’s core a story about design and gardens. When my father decided to shut down his graphic design company, Visualconcepts, he was an old dog. He’d tried to bring my brother into the business, but the computer revolution seemed to spell the end of his craft. He thought any idiot with a computer could make good design and his top dollar prices would disappear (boy was he wrong, but that’s what it looked like to a painter who was essentially a faker as a graphic designer… sure he’d gone to the Kunst Geweberschule in Basel, but he was a painter… only the Americans were fooled – and he walked off the boat a typesetter and into a plush New York international-style-modern office an Art Director… he told me on smack nod, “I’m a faker… I wanted to paint… I don’t know anything about graphic design… I just know what I like… slap some sans serif type face over a good picture and voila!” … he thought himself Salieri in Amadeous – just smart enought to see a good picture, but not quite smart enough to make one… he thought of himself as a sort of overpaid picture framer… I, however, had to lay out the pills and the vials and the tubes and cans – on a laquer tray of his choosing…everything had to be in place… drugs, tissues, strange alternative essiac tea, shark cartiledge… I think he was a Japanese Samurai… which makes him an okay designer in my book… but it was that Daffy Duck seppuku comedy routine… you can only do it once… I was the grateful audience).

MEAT OF THE STORY:

So in retirement, my father read the sunday times and saw an article in the magazine about a moss garden in Kyoto, Japan. I don’t think I need to talk about the connections between Japan and Modernity and Swiss design philosophy here. If you don’t see it, please do research. Start with Art Nouveau and Monet, and Van Gogh and… fuck it: Modernity is simply the West digging the East and now vice versa.

He said to me, “Lexi look at this moss garden. Do you think we could do something like that in the swamp? Moss always grew well there.”

I said,”Sure, but dad, read the article. Moss is a tricky woman. It takes forever to grow. This thing is tended by serious monks who have stepped out of the Karmic Circle to return again and again to tend the moss. It took thousands of years to make that moss Garden… That’s where Amataratsu lives, man. This isn’t casual sunday gardening, this is religion and Nation. Nippon des ka?.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he said dissmissively. “I’m just saying that it burns me up that the swamp by 684 is feral…We could make it beautiful… I think I’ll do it. A river garden! Like Giverney.”

And I knew enough to know it was a fait accompli, but the thing is that when a man in his late sixties begins to build a path to the river…

I didn’t like the garden. He would call me at ridiculous hours of a sunday morning saying, “Lexi, there is a two hundred pound boulder I need to move in the Japanese garden, I’ll pick you up. We’ll have lunch and then we’ll move he stone.”

I’d say in groggy voice, “Dad, man, I was up painting till sunrise… let me sleep.”

“Good,” he’d say. “I’ll be there in an hour.”

I’d sleep for two and a half hours and get a call, “Lexi, never mind. With you mother and lever I moved it myself. But if you’d like a nice lunch…”

And I’d go over and have white wine and sandwiches and see the progress on… well you could call it THE WORLD.

So when his corpse was in the hearse and the spirit and shot through me and the drawings were drying and the sun was coming up like a big bald head, I went out to his garden:

this was me around then… skinny, happy, dumb, and poor, but I had to walk over the lame ass arch bridge my brother had built (oh he was put in cahoots too…. we all were, but Christian who was in Colorado and too far away and ironically too atheist to get involved) and then you landed on an Island called St. Helena. In other words, you entered this fiction world by way of my mother… which is presumably the way you entered this world. You arrivec first on St. Marcel… the father and from there the Isle de St Louis and the Isle de Cité… further on past bamboo and grasses were CDA (Chirtian, Damon, and Alexandre) and the Okeefenokee. Now the Okeefenokee was the never never land at the end of the garden… it was purgatory.

I don’t know what my dad was talking about, but I remember like yesterday’s rain the map he drew so carefully when I broght my (then new) sweetie to visit. There was a mythology to the place. It was his greatest composition… Solierei my ass.

Garden Map Recreation, ink on Japanese paper, ITIN ’05

That day of days I walked out there with the laughter and tears still in my lips. The sun was coming up still and the world was bald and blue (here comes the sun king)… in a notch before the arch bridge (which turned into something like a three angle hexagon bridge because my brother liked straight lines) I found a single yellow tennis ball… I think it was a Spalding.

These balls would floast down from HAL… I’m sorry: IBM, and jam in the nooks and crannies of the moss garden. My father would trap and bag them like furrs and bring them to my Yale Lock Factory (LAA… looks like ALE from I-95) studio and my first solo show at Sound Shore Gallery was all what the big man had fished out of the Byram River for his son (you can give a man a ball, or you can teach him to catch a ball…)

So I picked up the ball and negotiated the labiryth path to St. marcel and I thought to myself that Plato and Bucky spoke of perfect shapes… I thought that a sphere must be the most perfect and so I threw that little Spalding ball into the current of the river and it stuck.

I meand to say that it sat in the middle of a current, smiling at me at its seems and then…

It came back.

I thought, “That’s pretty fucking weird, man.” And threw the ball back in to the spring-running water and it stuck again.

Now you must dig me, this was no eddy in the stream. I watched leaves and sticks and shit flow by the Spalding, but it stayed loyal, like a dog and always smiling back at me.

So I sat down and did my om nam renge kyo chant and then said, “Dad, really. Man, you are freaking every one out. Just go. I love you, but I want you to go.”

And I threw spalding back into the flow and it came right back and I picked it up and threw it without saying a word. I heard a nightingale cry out, like an infant and when I looked back, Spalding-dad was gone and I followed the flow all the way to the Okeefenokee. The ball had traveled an impossible distance and avoided a myriad of briar patches.

I like to think it made it to the sea, but it, at least, made me see:

There is more on Heaven and Earth than is contained in your Philosophy Horatio.

So if you are ever hitting the skids, I guess you should ask the first attractive face you see: “To be, or not?”

Hope and pray that the answer is: “Vivre”

But remember George… All Things Must Pass.

Tunnel (from arc installation), oil on cigar box, ITIN ’04

Sophmore year of college I worked as dishwasher at chez rattez (or Sharpe Refectory) to earn money to get me back to Paris so I could finish my novel Heroes (or To Walk a Circle). It was the story of two kids Phil and Pat (who went by the name Niz). Niz was a punk rocker who I’d seen on the left bank four of five years earlier. He and Hemmingway inspired my sixteen year old brain to try writing a novel when my Parents and I lived at the American Cathedral on Ave. George V for a month (more on this trip later). I started seeing this guy in his red leathers and mohawk all over Paris. He haunted me like a ghost, so I started asking myself: “Who is this guy? What’s he doing in Paris? Is he a drug addict? Heroin?”

Ironically, the main character turned out to be this sullen Dead Head, Phil. Niz sort of spiraled out of control on heroin and hash, where as Phil met the daughter of the U.S. ambassador to France… they had a stalking sort of love affair all over Paris. Phil wanted to be a painter long before I did. You could say his is directly responsible for my becoming a painter (my father was a failed painter… it didn’t seem like a great career choice even at 16). It was Phil and Caroline (more on her later). I blame both of them… and the old man too if we’re throwing stones.

Flash forward and I’m 19. I’ve been on Heroes for Five years… workshopping it in Brown Fiction writing classes (where British types tell me it may not be appropriate to name a novel after a pop song?!). I want closure on it, already. I decide to take a solo trip (the one I ended up doing in ’98), when my rabbi and attorney with the shared name of David… (me middle, him first), but he is a Cohain and I’m …I don’t know what I am, Russian Gypsy by way of Basel, that was what my father liked to think (and you do find Itins only in Switzerland and Russia)…

Anyways, my attorney calls from Yale and tells me He’s coming to Paris too. I figure he’ll play Niz and I’ll play Phil. Flash forward to the Dordogne where Davey baby has hooked us up with lodging at the local castle. His Yalie pal who has been nick named Chateau at school because he lives in one, let’s us crash with his dad (a famous American writer of Russian spy thrillers) and his knock out of a young French Paramour. We drink the local near rosé red wine from a cask in the celler by the oubliette. I start reading Saughter House Five for the first time and editing my Heroes draft.

One day we made a picnic and walked along the unused train tracks that slither snake-like around and through the green hills of Dordogne. Chateau pulled out a ball of black finger hash and we climbed into a fenerated castel-like turret to smoke and drink the wine. The spice like perfume smell mixed with vin rouge and the green alfalfa and the safron sunflowers growing in the fields: a perfect moment – all along the watchtower, princes kept the view.

After lunch we walked along the rails and smoked more and came to a kilometer long tunnel. You couldn’t see the other end and we walked into the darkness where the wine and hash grabbed my brain and I became existentially high… it was almost a flashback (I’d taken LSD earlier that year at a Grateful Dead show and had messianic hullucinations… the world was a lotus flower dream and I had to sheperd all the people I knew because they were essentially characters in my dream… it was a sort of writer’s trip I guess… The ony song I remember from the show is Dylan’s Quinn The Eskimo).

I realized suddenly that I was in a tunnel and that tunnels are a metaphor for death. I realised that I was surrnounded by two Jews and the trinity came harshly to mind.

“I’m in a tunnel surrounded by these two people who are thieves and they will steel my face. They will kill me and I will be a skull… Alas poor Yorick.”

We got deeper into the tunnel and suddenly I realized that the entire history off narrative was a conspiracy leading up to this moment: Metaphors for death, no! All metaphor had been invented so that I could know what a metaphor was so that I could read this murder metaphor at this moment… this moment when I would die!

I walked the train ties in terror, waiting for my friends to draw their long knives and butcher me: initiate me into their world of the dead. The hash was a trick…. A trap. I walked and waited and walked and waited, listening for their footsteps to change in the solid dark, listening for the sound of steel unsheathed and the stick of the bare bodkin… when Low and Behold we were coming again to the light. You could see it in the far distance… a white speck at first, like a star. Was it Paradise? Was it doom? Were we three thieves, or three kings?

And then we were back in light and back in day and I was still alive and staring face to face with a purple wild flower. The Flower glowed in purple and yellow and I swear I could see it breathing and hear it smile at me.

I said to myself, “So this is what the hippies meant by flower power.”

Never have I fealt such relief. The whole Universe changed flavor.

“What’s a metaphor,” I said to myself – quoting Meera Viswanathan, my Indian teacher of Japanese Literature (don’t ask… she was a real beauty who’d stumbled on to Buddhism by way of Keuroac… Sidhartha by way of Hesse…)”What’s a Meddow for? To feed a Cow, of course.”

The Swiss in me loved that bovine joke as much as the Hindu in her did. I laughed and laughed and later we stayed up drinking wine and scotch with the writer and his lover and he talked for a long time about Vonnegut and other writers I should read and he signed a book for me: October Circle…weird.

Mr. Bubble – Plato’s Perfect Hex

When The old man was kicking (and this is the central story of Arc) he saw a dark tunnel in my mother’s closet. I woke her up at four in the morning to move his huge medical bed. She resisted, but I remembered how much looking at that flower had changed my head way back when in the French country side. I’d done his terror trip already. I knew how to calm him down…take him home.

I said to my mother, “Wake up we’re moving the bed. He’s scared of that closet.”

“What closet?”

“Your closet. The one Christian and Damon used to lock me in. It’s a scary place. Trust me. He sees a tunnel. He’s scarred.”

“It won’t help.”

And my father, perhaps hearing his wife’s voice for the first time in hours, let loose a cry of fear and anguish, “There’s a girl under the bed. She’s dying! Save her, Cookie (it was his term of endarment for her). Save her!”

I said, “Mom, I’m the only one in this room whose done enough acid to know that he’s having a bad trip. We’re moving this bed to look out into the rock garden. It will make him calmer… Please believe me! NOW!”

He was screaming about the girl, the tunnel, and the house on fire… He was Willy Lowman and the trees were burning and morphine and she climbed out of a sleepless marital bed and we moved his elaborate contraption bed towards the growing dawn and he instantly calmed…. like oil on the foaming sea.

He looked at the orange birds of paradise that someone had sent as a bouquet. Earlier they had appeared to him as Picasso Guernica hands… Picasso hands on fire, but now as the sun came up like an egg, he said (and these were to be his last words to me and my mother):

“If you look at it differently, It’s really quite beautiful.”

And he fell into a peadeful sleep, like a baby in his mother’s arms … he hadn’t slept in 48 hours… none of us had. The room went all blue and peaceful moving into orange.

My mother has always counted herself a Christian. Her grandfather wrote The Greatest Story Ever Told. She cried like a baby when I told her years earlier that I had tried pot (Roger Waters with Eric Clapton). She cried worse when I told her of my experiments with acid (Dead). It hurt me to hurt her, it is true.

I, however, am eternally grateful to The Dead to have been able to give my father his last good sleep, so he would be well rested for the next morning from which he would never awake. It was a gift… a mitzvah.

Bucky Tries Angles, circa ’64

I had meant to talk about Dungeons and Dragons and how God doesn’t play dice, he plays D and D with octohedrons, etc. I don’t know, maybe I did do that. And When I put the i-tunes on and lit insence and candles Stevie Wonder laughed at me for being “very superstitious”… also a gift from the rabbi cohain… Weird.

MBNA Paris pig, ITIN ’98 and Willoughby study ’04

This porcelain pig is filled with ten thousand dollars woth of Paris credit card receipts. Film is expensive and so is drawing paper and so is life. She is a sort of good luck altar fetish. She is Porco Rosso, the wine swilling pig. She is a few years of therapy rolled into a couple months in Montmartre at the turn of the century.