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