airtrain, ITIN ’05

Yesterday was the first day in four years I was proud to be an American…or at least a New Yorker. Finally some people with a clue are doing architecture out at Idlewild. It hasn’t looked this good since ’64, when they had the World’s Fair and Kennedy was a President, not an airport. It’s like they all looked at Sarinen’s T.W.A. terminal and took it as inspiration. No one tops it, but at least they give it context. The airport is again the sight of Modernism with a capital M. I was like a pig in shit (God I love airplanes… and fuck Osama Bin Laden and his band of droogs).

For decades I’ve returned from Europe with the gnawing feeling that the States are backward and anti-progressive. I strongly advise everyone who wants to change the administration next term to ride the airtrain out to Kennedy. It’s the greatest civic project since we put a man on the moon… no it’s better. Light rail is the path to the future past. What did Buckminster Fuller say in the Noguchi film: “If you want to shoot an arrow forward, first you have to draw the string backward.”

That said, my mom went off to Spain after reading The Sun Also Rises. Her take on the book: “Boy did those people drink!”

I said, “They didn’t call it the roaring twenties for nothing. They were all roaring drunk.”

Hooker laughed from behind the New York Times.

Sylvia got home late to find me half in the bag on Spanish wine. She’d been at some charity auction and no on was bidding on signed Brian Wilson material (People just don’t get IT yet). Long story short, we have a signed smile poster, Our Prayer music score, Smile CD, and Pet Sounds in London (where I think this lot would have cost huge) DVD all for the price of a song… More or less.

This gives me the juice to negotiate with Columbia Records to get the Use of A Mingus tune for the ODDcity download. Goodbye Porkpie Hat, Hello Airtrain.

Funniest thing is the lyrics to “Our Prayer”: oooh ahhhh oooo ahhh.
Reminds me of what Ugi says a monkey says: ooh ahhhh eee oooh eee aaahh.

Respect when you come home, says Otis and Aretha. R.E.S.P.E.C.T. Give it to her, the woman knows how to shop.

Manhattan Cathedral, ITIN ’05

Ben and I spent Sunday at diva fair down town. It was odd to be at ground zero again. I haven’t visited in a while… Still a big tourist draw, but it looks awful clean now.

There was some interesting work at the fair, but most of the interest was in going room to room in a hotel…it had a strange brothel-like quality… a hint of sex in the air.

Should be a few ideas I can steal for omEGG. I particularly liked the way a French/Canadian guy, Alexandre Castonguay was playing with image and interface.

Dadi Wirz at IT IN space 2003

On monday I had to return down town to give the LMCC grant to the attractive woman in the lobby of 120 Broadway. It was a very funny site: Office people in suits going about their daily downtown-financial lives and then a few random bohemian types wandering the lobby lost looking for a place to drop their slides. I got directions from a lobby guard and shouted to anyone who looked scruffy: “You’re with me!” and soon we were a parade marching through the catacombs of the lower mezzanine. We kept gathering new lost artists along the way. Deadalous would have been proud.

With that done, I visited my old lower east side studio on Stanton. It’s a basement of an old tenement and used to be a German workers beer hall, or keller (like in Basel). There is a bar down their and a water garden with fish and a lot of cool stone work and welding. Jack and Daniel have turned it into a gallery now and it is worth a visit. 178 Stanton Street: Basement Aire Gallery. There’s an opening on friday. Check it out Sid (a quote from Swimming to Cambodia).

Jack and Danial are old members of the Rivington School of welders and have been down there since the early eighties at least. The place looks so nice (compared to when I was slinging paint there …I was just back from Paris, working at Pearl, and about to be haunted by J.M.B.) In general the lower east side is a mind fuck. It’s just so different now. I never thought I’d miss the junkies on the corner, but I sort of do.

Jack is dealing with the aftermath of working at Groundzero. He spent months there and lost like 150 pounds doing it, but I think he breathed some shit that’s messing with him (I know I did in Brooklyn…so…) Unsung Heroes while we focus all our money on the Villains.

It reminded me of when my dad’s old friend from the Kunstgeweber school, Dadi Wirz visited me in the basement. We drank Ballentine beer and I showed him all these pages of drawings I was doing. To his credit, he was about the only person who got what I was trying to do at that point (of couse he’s a great teacher and taught at RISD for years). Everyone else just saw scribbles (even Allan Stone, who usually gets stuff, was mystified… of course in a contrarian mode I probably showed Allan the absolute worst drawings… to be fair to myself, I only liked the bad ones).

It was a real treat a couple of years later to show Dadi and his close friends Crista Grauer and Beryl Sokoloff at IT In space on Mercer Street. Dadi was back in N.Y.C. talking about his father Paul Wirz and showing his photos of Papua New Guniea at the Met. A Swiss film crew just brought Dadi back to New Gunea and….Well I guess Dadi is a daddy. He met a son he never Knew. A living memory of his youthful adventures with his father. The documentary should be interesting.

4 Now and then invite, Crista Grauer ’02

B.K.Bridge: mixed media on crate, ITIN ’03, Bob Stein Collection, aprox. 7ft.

It was another weird and impossible morning. For those of you who have seen Arc Along The Watchtower (sample pending), you know I have a strange connection with those proto-hippies, The Grateful Dead. So what should I find this morning in a box on 7th avenue?… Dead bootlegs (plus phish and strokes and beck, etc.). Apparently, another pot smoking hippie was forced to move out of the slope by high rents, or the call of Hollywood. The story depends on your view… Like Relativity.

Asside from the nice C.D.s, the kid left C.D. cases which I needed to give ITinomEGGsample to the Crat Cats at LMCC. Synchronicity or Coincidance… Ja, God, JeHova ,Allah, Buddha, NewYork provides…I am grateful, but not dead, nor dying. (In best drag queen voice): I’m busy being born.

alex

PopArt, nature mort with ice branch,lotus, poppies, and portrait, ITIN ’05 in collaboration with Sylvia Choi

It has come to my attention that I am a blabbermouth. I’ve been up since 3:30 in the morning chopping up grant proposal essays for Creative Capital and LMCC. I’d overwritten all of the limits. Nothing like trying to limit your life to 500 characters (not words…CHARACTERS). It’s like trying to invent a new genre: biographical haiku:

Born
Make lovely mess
Asking for money

In Japanese that might have the right syllabic rhythm. All Japanese speakers please leave translation in comment box.

I’m tired and I guess I should shut up already…. Damn!

Fasnacht, Ink on paper, ITIN ’04

Theater Fetish
mixed media with mask
24″x72″ ITIN ’03
So my mother calls me last night and says, “Your blog is obsessed with death. Are you OK?”

I say, “Well I’m obsessed with death, but I’m fine. There just seems to be a lot of people dying in the world…always has been.”

And I start quoting Woody Allen from Annie Hall as I am want to do

And she says, “Stop quoting movies.”

So I promiss her I’ll go to a happier place in my blog, like memories of Fasnacht in Basel, when we all went as a family, but really that was a trip right after 911 to flee America and for my brothers and all significant others to stand around that stone my dad carved in a way we hadn’t done when just my mom and I and my Aunt put half of his ashes there a few years earlier. It was a happy time, but certainly orbiting around the big D.

Of course, Fasnacht is in itself obsessed with the dance of death (Totentanz) and seems to have that “primitive” obsession with history and anscestor worship in its dance of the mask (Mummenschanz). It manages to be dark, but still fun and funny.

There is a line in omEGG where the old Swiss man, M. Tristan announces: “I never wanted to be a German, but it happens to you sometimes when you are born in Germany….”

Germans have an odd outlook on the world and certain Austrians haven’t made that any easier for German culture…this goes almost double for German/Jewish culture and Einstein and Freud and on and on…

Which brings us right back to Woody Allen and todays morning movie moment. I’ve been making omEGG for my old friend from college, David Conrad. I’ve always known him as a fairly erratic and angry guy – albeit with a lot of charm and charisma. He’s gotten a fair amount of work in Hollywood and in the theater, but he usually gets cast as the “pretty boy”, or the “confident prick”. Having watched him chew the scenery of life on plenty of occasions, I thought it might be nice to let him chew up a set, or two as well.

Because of this, I spend a certain amount of time thinking about him and drawing “him” from old rehearsal footage from Arc (he plays my rich brother on the Brooklyn Bridge in that e-book). It was sort of funny to turn the Channel from news about the snow faintly falling on the living and the dead and see old Connie in Woody’s last americanpiecture Anything Else. Not Woody’s best, but interesting in that Woody is finally allowing himself to play old and he’s sort of recycling his old movies and it is a weird Bergman trip in time for him…or maybe we’re back at Orson in the mirror again. Inside the museum, infinity goes up on trial,as the poet said.

Painting for Orson Welles (Hamlet), oil on canvas, 65″x85″, ITIN ’03
Munshani Collection

mixed media on vellum, ITIN ’05

Nobody ever gets a ghost with the bright idea that a ghost would be a right handy thing to come off just about now. Ghosts show up when they are least expected and most unwanted. It is their nature and their right. Who can second guess the dead?

Those of us who have met the dead know they are volatile and erratic, like smoke. Jean-Michel Basquiat is about to have a retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum and it reminds me of the time I accidentally channeled his spirt for about three, or four days after doing a drawing performance in D.C. It was called A Bash Fit For a King. It was a lot of fun and also truly terrifying. There is a line in Swimming to Cambodia where Spalding says, “I suddenly knew what killed Marilyn Monroe.”

Well after living as SWIGGER a.k.a. the Swiss Nigger – a name given me by John Seed, Basquiat’s L.A. studio assistant and Valet who was called White Sambo by J.M.B…Swigger was my haunted character’s name during a painting performance(odd that J.M.B’s band with Vince Gallo was called GRAY….like a half white half black ghost…or like Spalding) – I couldnt get out of character…shed the ghost…stop being SWIGGER for days. It cost me my job at Pearl Paint (a job I hated I grant you… but you can’t work retail as a crazy half negro ghost) – Anyway, long story short: I know what killed Jean-Michel Basquiat.

I am looking forward to seeing the show…I just hope SAMO haunts some other poor fool this time.

I bring it up because the film Basquiat was on during lunch (kim chee noodle soup) and it made me think: “Hey this is the best damn painting Schnabel ever made.”

You know, it’s not a painting, it’s a film, but what’s the difference these days? I suppose he misses a lot about J.M.B., but it always looks and sounds great and that is enough for eating noodle soup with a wounded hound at your foot.

That and Gary Oldman is a better Schnabel than Schnabel….but Bowie’s a pretty good Warhol too. So let’s all go to Pittsburg! You don’t have to go to Europe anymore, you can just go to Piiitsbuuurg.

And if you come to Brooklyn, I might recomend you visit Green-Wood Cemetary (see below) and bring flowers for the man. I understand he loved lotus blossoms and poppies among other things.

Willoughby drawing, Chinese Ink on Vellum, ITIN ’05

Willoughby wakes up and Willoughby sits on the edge of the bed and Willoughby thinks again of suicide. There is a man in Canada who lit himself on fire in a Budget rent a van (you’d think for his final act he might have splurged a little on a Hertz…it would have certainly been more poetic…and the words of Bugs Bunny to Daffy Duck echo in the theater up to the gates of heaven: “Great act kid, but you can only do it once.”). Now I’d talked a lot of shit about lighting myself on fire on the steps ot the capital building in D.C. if Bush won…shades of Vietnamese Monks and Schadenfreude. But it was just talk, this guy meant it. The Canadians are as puzzled as anyone else…Maybe he was one of the few Americans who actally fled to Canada after the election, but then determined that wasn’t enough…or maybe his surtra was “I want to die” ? Or maybe we can blame the body. Maybe the happiness just went out of him.

To top off this sad stew Spalding Gray is on IFC doing his Soderberg directed Gray’s Anatomy. I’ve always found Spalding’s voice comforting and sad. Now it is even more so. You can look at a sample of my Self Portrait which was a ferry ride I took while Spalding was still lost at sea…presumably swimming back to Cambodia, or maybe Jerusalem Rhode Island.

Who was it who said: “I wake up every morning and ask myself; ‘Well do I wan’t to kill myself today?’ and if the answer is no, I get out of bed.”?

I like to think it was Sartre, because he died of old age, didn’t he? Camus went off the road like the James Dean of French Philosophy. Some one leave a comment and tell me.

Well Wlloughby decides to get out of bed, but it seems important to remember that the question is being asked.

There is a fine line between joy and despair.

The words “I don’t want to die” are the mirror image of “I want to die.”

Also, they are often followed by “So I will kill you instead.”

Willoughby wants to be passive in his despair, but finds violent action in his joy.

Who was the poet who sang: “It’s a thin line between love and hate” ?

You can now see a small and highly compressed version of Orange You Glad for free. This is the short documentation of Christofest: a night and morning of music and walking and art and community held by the beloved Bob and Ashton.
Enjoy!

Vietnam seemed to grow out of my navel like an improbable lotus flower this morning. Maybe that’s just because Three Seasons is on IFC now. Ironically they shoot in a bar called Apocalypse Now…It’s Ironic because the film stars Harvey Keitel who was supposed to play the Martin Sheen role. Indeed, the first thing to go wrong on that impossible shoot, was Francis realizing that he had to fire Harvey. He was right too. There is something so perfect about Martin Sheen’s awesome good looks (like an overaged drunk/drugged James Dean….I think Sheen was thirty and ended up with a major heart attack…It’s not like Charlie’s bad boy behavior was born in a vacuum, but then: Charlie don’t surf!). Anyway, Sheen’s face has that sheen of America (names are destiny) all California surf scrubbed corn. I guees Coppola saw Bad Lands and it hit him like an Irish Pub epiphany.

Anyway this film (and by “this film” I mean Three Seasons…remember?) has a great deal of lotus imagery and it must have something to do with the saffron gates….I mean they must have created some sort of odd unconcious Buddhist practice in me…like counting prayer beads (does anyone else wonder how the Catholics stole this for the Rosary?..but sill a rose is a rose is a rosary…and you can’t copyright no beads…or beats says flavor flav pill). So I’m basically chanting Om Nam Renge Kyo …or whatever it is (some secretary at MTV once gave me a card with the sutra on it…she said she could see in my eyes that I was unbalanced and should start chanting…she was like those guys in that Hal Ashby – Jack Nicholson film about the Navy The Last Detail…Om Nam Renge Kyo…). This Buddhist stuff has really started to put the Zap on my head. My chemistry is mostly German/English…you Know Anglo Saxon…WASP. Our idea of meditation is a dose of Guilt, a Lord’s Prayer, and a Martini.

And so that brings us to Willoughby and George Bush, who are, if nothing else, brothers in arms. Willoughby is a character whose sutra chant is “I don’t want to die.” I came up with him while canvasing the bad lands of Brooklyn and New Jersey during the last election. Willoughby is in the throws of an existential crisis…and for me, the last election was about as close as you can get to existential crisis and still call it politics. I was going door to door begging for money for the Democrats. I don’t like asking for money for myself, snd so the idea of begging for politicians is a pretty long stretch, but it was a crisis and I didn’t want to die. I knew if I spent those months sitting on the couch yelling at CNN, I’d hate myself in the morning.

BEAT: Well we lost! We didn’t, but Kerry sure did. It is as if he wanted to loose, but then you see: Vietnam….Vietnam…Vietnam. It is a many petaled flower that never seems to die. You cut it’s lovely head off and it just grows out of the mud and shit and gore again and again like Simbionese Liberation Army Patty Hearst Snake head. Again the only trenchant image of the late twentieth century may be Orson Welles in an infinite mirror to be seen with Brian Wison singing “Our Prayer” from Smile on in the background.

I was born in the Spring of 1967…on the fifth day of may (like Dylan’s Sara and the nation of Mexico) right before the summer of love would open with its lysergic petals like a perverse viral strain of Swiss chocolate. That war was my childhood and if I really go into the whole Buddhist reincarnation mythology: well I think I died in Vietnam and was reborn in America. I had unfinished business with the Americans….For one thing they’d taken my right leg…for another they’d taken my life. And that brings us back to the dog’s leg. The bandages are off and the infection is getting better. I am relieved.