I’ve been reading a book on heraldry in honor of the Basquiat show at BAM. I wanted to know more about crowns and what the various shapes of crowns mean… well actually I found the book in the street and it interested me because of JMB. You see a lot of crowns on bottles of red red wine.

The brain dead lady couldn’t eat the host yesterday. According to NPR, she could only have a little bit of wine. It’s the only sustenance she’s had in days… Sounds like a real Parisean.

For the Easter Feaster we had sustenance: little lambchops in a balsamic reduction… couldn’t be beat. The wine was a Chateau Talbot (maybe a bit young… but still a real journey in a glass).

One of the initial inspirations for omEGG was Wine. I started this about a year or six months before I even heard of Sideways… me and the Zeitgeist… but anyway I wanted to talk about culture and vitriculture… about Romans and roads and arenas and aquaducts… and mostly wine. If you are a Eropean, wine is your culture. Without it there is no reason to organize anything (this reminds me of Herzog in the South American jungle for Fitzcaraldo trying to organize the native extra’s booze… A Burden of Dreams for sure). There’s no farms, no towns, no cities, no armies, no nothing without the grape.

The other vibe was that omEGG is set in the spring after 911… I don’t know ’bout you all, but I got to taste some good wine that year. There was a whole lot of carpé diem: let’s drink today for tomorrow we die and those about to die salute you going on. I kept all these labels and used them for background plates in omEGG. It is a habit I started in Paris. Labels are such the illuminated text by themselves… they contain hyper information… codes and clues. For instance, both the Chateau Talbot and Pichon seem to be from dukedoms…


at least judging from crowns, but it says Comtesse… well its a book on British Hereldry for children. I’m just saying the crowns can be deciphered along with chateau and region and varietal and on and on. They are like Tarot cards, you have to know how to read them and be a wine geek, which I’m not… just a wino. Still, I like the idea of illuminated bottles and this is why I paint them for the holidays, or to commemorate something like the gates, or…

I did a lot of bottles after 911 (just to keep from drinking everything in the house while watching the news). A year later my better half and I drank them in honor of the dead. You can still see some empties in the window of Blanc et Rouge in dumbo.

Max play with the PSP, Damon Itin ’05

Well the nephew got the PSP (or actually his parents got it for themselves…hmmm) for Easter. This thing points the way to a device that is a book and a toy and t.v. and and ipod and a phone, and a blackberry,and an i-book, etc. Anyway we are getting close and Sony is the best word that means nothing ever.

Ben was posting on if book about the new generation of apple products that may or may not come out. They sound nice, but the PSP is here, maybe not as sexy as a v-pod, but Don’t put on any aires when you’re down on Rue Morgue Avenue…. I can’t afford any of it.

It was one of those days where you draw a strange hexapentahex and then end up seeing galleries full of hexa-octagon paper bags (O.K. Harris) or Emma Kunz (drawing center) doing even weirder things with hexes and pentas and cruciforms. It feels like you’re on an easter egg hunt and each egg holds a clue to the location of the next egg, but actually I was with my better half and her sister. Her sister has had a crummy winter and when women are unhappy, I have learned they like to shop… She was off on a mission to find an easter basket… or rather a pink handbag. In and out of boutiques in Nolita and SoHo… there’s a lot of pink handbags in New York…. we saw all of them.

I got bored and drew the pentahex in honor of pagan bunnies and eggs and orgies that have been filling my aching head since the full moon. I cut off after luch to see some galleries. The ladies continued to follow the bunny trail and I fell further down the rabbit hole.

First, I saw the dumbest show on earth at Deitch Projects: David LaChapelle – Prostitutes and Artists. By artists I guess he means actors and comparing actors to whores is just so obvious that….never mind. It just made me roll my eyes and get depressed…

Luckily I followed my nose and the sweet smell of cigar smoke to O.K. Harris and low and behold: Philip Pavia sitting on a modernist throne surrounded by some of the best heads in New York – I mean his sculptures and drawings. Here is work that will be interesting a hundred years from now and would’ve been interesting a hundred years ago. It is, in short: honest.

Or ernest. The line from the play that this entry is named after comes to mind: (Dame Maggie Smith says): “A Haaaaaaand Baaaaag????!”

As the Grateful Dead say (in The Other One into Black Peter… the song that is subtext on Arc Along the Watchtower): “Coming around, coming around, coming around…etc.”

Coming around to B.K. in the gathering gloom and cold, I saw a Christo orange shopping cart in the middle of Union Street. It was empty except for a single book. Dante’s Divine Comedy was sitting in the folded down children’s seat like a toddler off to purgatory. I put it in my pocket and when I got home my mother had sent me a post card from Navarra (my favorite rosé) Spain. She and Hooker spent the night in that tall tower of the castle below… it is a State run Hotel now (a Parador and $75 a night… thank you generalissimo Francisco Franco and the Socialists who took your place now that you are still dead).

So life is some strange coinciDANCE, or bunny trail dotted with clues. Like last week when I was with Ben in B.burg and we got onto how I’d found Moby Dick in the street on the same day he started rereading it. We got onto a discussion of Melville as we smoked cigarettes in the street (like Clark and the narrator in Willoughby)… Up pulls a cherry red, pimped out ElCamino with the licence plate: Moby Dick.

There is more on heaven and earth than is contained in my philosophy…grace under preassure… Death and rebirth in the afternoon… Ferdinand the bull.

Newark Airport, ITIN ‘O5

The best thing about Newark airport – asside from its architecture of hexagons is that the Annehuaser Busch people are brewing beer next door and the whole lovely Jersey sky fills with the smell of hops and barley. A drunkards dream, if I ever did see one.

Boss Hex, ITIN ’05

sphere from omEGG, ITIN ’04

All this Borges talk reminds me of a sketch I drew for the ideal viewer for a piece that was then called New York Idyll and is now called omEGG (a love story). The idea was that both characters wold have a time line that overlapped in one arena, or picture plane that was controlled by a third character – the viewer, god, the eggman, M. Tristan, etc. The two really important characters would be the lovers (hey I’m a romantic with a roman nose who wants to make what the French call a Roman….so arena is the right word).

The arena hexagon would be a sort of layer or double exposure zone. The information held in one time line stream would react with the information in the other characters time line stream (sort of how babies end up as combos of mom and dad) – the images in the arena would be always changing and more than the sum of their parts. Also one characters change in arc would affect the way the other charcter looked in the arena even if his/her timline remained stationary.

This whole idea goes back to manic night of drawing and drinking at a friends bartending gig on the lower east side. I drew up a storm and bought an Argus camera for ten bucks and a drawing from a second hand store. It was army green bakelite bodied camera with the odd quirk that if you didn’t advance the film you could just keep snapping the shutter. Instead of taking a series of photos, you could just make one very complicated one… which is what I started doing for a few months and spending ruinous amounts of money doing it. Here is a pictue of Richard Sera I took using this camera and my method. He looked at me strangely as I snapped away around him without advancing the film: “Cubism,” I told him.
Richard Serra Installing Torqued Elipses, ITIN ’97

There is a lot you can do layering visual information. It would be nice to work at Eyebeam (where I applied for a residency) because there isn’t really a chance in hell of me figuring out the technical question on making such an interface for omEGG. Right now it’s a pretty nifty TK3 book. Samples are available from the top banner.

Basel Munster (which like my local BK church can also be rented out as a Synagogue…I guess). I’d never seen this in a Gothic Cathedral, or even on this cathedral where I was Baptised untill Fasnacht 2002 and I was delighted to discover that the Baslers at least weren’t afraid of the HEX.

Devil With A Blue Dress, Blue Dress, Blue Dress…, mixed media on a blue dress, ITIN ‘O5, Willoughby Scrolls, playing card

This is a new painting (in progress?) that I did on Kate’s blue Brown Senior Formal dress. It also has bits of Gucci boot bag (seen below). The two scrolls contain the story of Willoughby which I drew during a long depression after Bush won the election….from about November to January. They are the spine of the story, all else is vestigal fetuses (plural?). The playing card I found in the P.S. 32 playground where the chalk drawings were photographed. Infinity goes back up on trial.

Paris Blues on in the background (Pops in Paris….Roll over Beethoven). It is good to see that Joanne Woodward was ounce as beautiful as Paul Newman (a relief actually). Paris in ’61… talk about infinity on trial.

Willoughby Shops, ink on vellum, ITIN ’05

I was watching a documentary on Hitchcock last night and (a guilty pleasure) Project Greenlight. It got me thinking on some of the logistics of Willoughby shopping and eating (the stuff that is not on the scrolls already worked out). I’ve been struggling with a sandwich drawing for about a week and then yesterday I threw it in the trash and quickly drew a beautiful sandwich. Turns out I was drawing the wrong sandwich. I was drawing a club, I wanted (or Clark wanted) a hero sandwich.

heroesandwich from Willoughby, ink on vellum, ITIN ’05

It’s a little ironic because Clark is the Villain, but a compelling Villain always acts and thinks as if he were the hero.

Ben sent a link to me in the comments on European History part 1 to a great Borges piece,The Library of Babel. While I have a small familiarity with Borges, I hadn’t encountered his library idea… yet somehow he describes what I’ve been thinking about for many years (must be that ideas, like language are viral… and books are a sneeze and I caught hexagons from bucky). Here look at this cross section of a lotus stem:



Where as before I had only seen an annoying brand name boot bag that my sweetie spent far too much money on, now I see a model for infinity and multipath narrative structure. Thank you Gucci. The hexagonal scales fall from my eyes. They say the full moon is a traditinal time of revelation and at 4:00p.m. we go full. In the words of OZZY: “Bark at the Moon.”

This said: I woke up at 5:30 this morning with a large railway spike stuck into my left brain. It took asprin, advil, and finally aleve to end this migrain (amd its still floating on the horizon). I don’t know how people live in chronic pain. I become a scary monster. I’ve been yelling at my dog all morning… she likes to follow me from room to room, but today her little claws on the wood floor sound like nails on a black board.

baptismal tchotchke, pewter plate with Basel Munster, circa ’71

This thing seems to have eleven sides…it goes up to eleven…

There were three years where if I had died, I would have gone straight to nowhere… purgatory. All you Dante fans know what I’m talking about… I was not Baptized till I was three… so I actually remember that scarry kraut putting a water mark on my third eye and Peter the Basel Butcher (biblical rock and head of the Midevil Butcher’s Guild and frequent Fasnacht piper) carried me up the aisle. I was terrified, like Sophia Coppola in God Father II. Only Peter was my God Father and still is, but he’s probably killed a lot more things than any mafia Don could dream of. He kills for living and has a collection of many sharp knives… ancient steel… Swiss steel.

This goes back to my question about the body and language. Peter’s wife (not my Godmother, who is Trudi and lives on a sheep farm in Whales) had the same cancer as my old man, only the Swiss kept cutting it out with their sharp steel and she’s still alive… it is a struggle and they butcher her again and again, bus she’s alive. The old man they refused to cut at Sloan Catering. So the ghouls filled him full of strange drugs and took away his clothes and things and like that vega table lady in the news: fed him by tubes and killed him with indescriminite Chemo and never even gave him a bong hit to ease the pain… but I digress.

It all some how reminds me of my first nervous breakdown I had during a final examn for Martha Nussbaum. She kept talking about the fragility of goodness and Greek Tragedy. Little did I know I was walking into one. I had been dating this rich Hawaiian Japanese girl and her mother decided to fly me out to Hawaii as a Christmas gift… that would have been stressful enough, but this creepy South African Jew (son of an arms or diamond dealer no doubt and a real pig and apparently rich as pig shit) was threatening to join us and make it a cozy threesum (the girl liked to think this guy was just a friend, but who are we kidding?…and sho’ ’nuff, he eventually he got in her pants… I knew he was trying, the mother knew he was trying, the sister, the brother, even the estranged father knew… she really couldn’t have been that dumb… for chrissakes she’s a E.R. doctor in the Bronx now!) So that was a freak out, but what was worse is that I’d done up my dorm room as the Sistine Shrapnel… a sort of grafitti/expressionist five sided installation. The ceiling was done up as a Hans Aarp meets Keith Haring and I had Kline and Japanese Calligraphy and German ghouls and it was pretty fucking cool. Parents fresh in from Debuque dropping off Freshmen would poke their heads in and laugh: “Psychedelic”…. Really it wasn’t all that trippy, but it was intense and colorful. Kids would knock on my door (okay they may have been under the influence, but I didn’t ask or tell) just to sit in the room and look for a while. One kid told me: “Man this is the exact reason I came to this school.”

The fucking administration should have charged tickets, but instead threatened me with ten thousand dollar lawsuit. I had this and Hawaii on my head when I went to my Greek Tragedy final. It was a question on Plato and Aristotle that set me off. Something about five paragraphs summing up their differences on what the good human life is or something.

I was all: “Five paragraphs for that? What am I, a japanese Poet here?”

I kept trying, but hating what I’d written so I’d tear out the pages and start again. I went through about three or four of those little blue exam books and was quite literally in a pile of torm paper on the edge of tears and just spinning in infinity. I didn’t finish the exam…at least not to my own satisfaction, but went back to the Sistine Shrapnel to start grinding the paint off with a sander I’d borrowed from a local RI student(who’d fallen madly in love with her Chinese T.A. whose father was apparently in the pharmeceutical industry in China and imported opium and was insanely rich in Hong Kong…weird… you’d ask him what his dad did…cause it was obvious from his car that he was loaded, and he’d say: “Oh he’s an Opium dealer” and wait for your jaw to drop, mine never did, so he liked me… I mean who doesn’t realize that traditional Chinese medicine might involve opium at some point… even Woody Allen knows that).

I had only a few hours before catching the train to New York and the plane to Hawaii. I was a wreck, but busy. In the dust of ruined frescoes I got a call from Martha Nussbaum who’d been alerted by an hysterical T.A. that I was about to go out the window or something (honestly the thought hadn’t even crossed my mind YET…I was too busy). She and the T.A. had taken the pile of half finished torn essays and glued and taped them back together and she was calling to see if I was still alive and tell me that I’d passed the test….I’d probably written more than needed and in an insane hyperlinked bit and pieces way… Very William S. Burroughs….she claimed I’d hit all the salient points with my shotgun technique. Thank God for the Pass/Fail good old Brown (before they fucked that up too).

I remember her saying: “They were good essays, why did you stop?”
“Were they as good as Plato? Aristotle? Euripides?…” I shrieked.
Clearly I was putting myself under preassure that tears a building down and puts people on streets.

Had this been a comedy and not a tragedy Martha would have quoted me the old joke: euripides, eumenedies and we would have had a good laugh about the torn pages and who ripped what and mended when….ha ha ha.

It didn’t work out like that, but it was really nice of her to call and I started crying like a baby and no one was more surprised than me. It is possible to be clinically depressed and have nø idea. She stayed on the phone with me like Yossarian in Catch 22 saying over and over: “There There.. There there.” Which begs the question: is Catch 22 a comedy or a tragedy?

Any way Martha was real Mensch (can women be a mensch?… saint? and naturally Brown lost her to Chicago)… a real life saver and in the only compliment she’d really like: a good human being. She taught me this one lesson: Goodness is not always fragile even if people always are and will be.

It occured to me the other day, that the book drawings (which involve tearing up the books) are directly related to that breakdown which went down and down and down in blue Hawaii, so far away from blue Hawaii, but that is another story.

book found in tunnel on route to see Basquiat, ITIN ’05

I am always asking myself how information technology may or may not have effected the shape of our bodies and minds. I am particularly obsessed with scroll cultures and codex cultures… That act of splitting a circle in half and turning it into a storage machine (a book). There is violence to cutting pages, but also a sort of biological metaphor. Charles Mingus the Third got me thinking about Laurie Anderson again with his kind comments on Boink Boink. She did this word piece about how the Chinese view the ears as vestigal featuses and use them in accupuncture accordingly. The image is wild because it makes Freud’s trifecta split of conciousness quite physical on the head (where as Jungian duality is reflected in the split of brain and spine)… really you have to read the body as a book: left page, right page, and in the middle the spine that holds it all together. Of course if the Chinese are right than your face (read identity, or ego) is just a spine holding together two dead babies: alpha and omega Kubrick space babies no doubt.

It is these rambling thoughts on scroll into codex that makes the cruciform (particularly the simple graphic northern European variety) so damn facinating. Obviously the Christians did not invent the form of the cross. The Romans most likely hung Jesus on a T…but a t is still a cross as long as you don’t get Roman on it and try to Capitalize it… so T…(its no accident that the Swiss got rid of serifs) The asians pretty much built their religion(s) and philosophy(ies) on a T, or Tea anyway and isn’t Tea what kicked off our revolution?

And let’s not forget the flowers: “Poppies, poppies,” says the wicked witch of the West (to be played by the Queen of England). The cruciform is ancient and mystical. The Buddhist Swastika is a spinning cross. What is it about splitting the world by two axis (while drinking wine,or tea) that makes man smarter and closer to God?

The Cartesean World View… the fact that opium is the chemistry of human joy? What?

It seems to be a way of organizing the mysterious circular universe into a thing man can quantify and grasp. It seems to relate to the Fibbonacci sequence and the gridding out of a spiral… the golden ratio (a cross is only a cross cause it’s the right shape to nail a man onto)… the understanding of flower petals and pine cones.

Buckminster Fuller pointed this out to me in his book:The Critical Path (this was the only book I could read when I had my first major depression… somehow my parents and brother found Bucky in a small book shop with no one around… talk about magical visions… out of respect my stingy father bought a hard cover copy and had bucky sign it… the book sort of saved my life… and it is odd how the path metaphor is so present in my work). He argued the cartesian grid, or square (all the beatnick delight in mocking squares is no accident) was finished and we should move back towards the Egyptians who organized on triangles. He, however, advocated a more complicated geometry using hexagons. The satanic overtones of a HEX (we’ll cover and levitate the pentagon in part 2) are really alluding to its pagan, or non Christian/European derivation. If it aint white kids, it’s the devil’s work. You’ll find that a lot in European technical thinking before (and after) the enlightenment. The Rennaisance was really just learning again what the Church had forced everyone to forget. Let us now thank certain folks like the Jesuits and the Swiss and a few Benedictines and mostly the Arabs who hung on to those old books. They were easy to store, or Europe would still be in the dark ages, and we’d all be speaking Chinese and reading scrolls…. Oh wait, you kind of are….Hmmmmm back to the future?

Iron Poppie, Park Slope ironwork detail, anonymous metal worker, circa 1900