The other day bob called me while walking the gates with a friend. He said he’d more or less given up on art that didn’t exist with time. He was saying something about how a contemporary work of art (and by this I guess I mean anything made after say 1969) has to contend at some level with cinema, or the moving image….or maybe just time and space.

I said, “Oh bob, you’ve finally stumbled onto relativity.”

He said he was more or less fed up with painting and photography…or suspicious of them and their relevance.

Actually, I’m not sure if he said that at all, but I’ve been saying it for over a decade. So there it is: Any work of art has to compete at some level with television. Most of the time art loses. Let’s face it telvision makes pretty lights and noises.

But here I am trying to draw pictures of Willoughby and everything I do is based first on drawing still pictures. But paintings do, in fact, exist in time…they are little love letters to the future. The fact that we can see Mona Lisa smile with her highway blues as if DaVinci painted her yesterday is really quite a remarkable thing. If that’s not enough for you, look at a Jackson Pollock and try not to imagine him dancing around with a whip of enamel cracking off his brush. Those things are still alive and moving and really do fuck with time a space.

Or maybe he was getting at the ephemeral nature of installation. In a way, the gates have the sad beauty (mono no aware) of Japanese cherry blossoms. I saw today on the news that they have hot houses in Japan, where the cherry blossoms are already blooming. You can rent one and get drunk with your friends as the petals blanket the astroturf. God bless those pagans.

SPILL (or Dresden Woman With Her Throat Cut) mixed media on Dresden Picture bottle with ink bottles and paint brush on cutting board with reverse unshown ITIN 2001

I’ve been feeling caught in an early Hemmingway post-war short story. Every day it’s been back to the Vet for bandage changing and then they put the dog on the machine which moves its legs and accomplishes nothing. We had a joke: “Friend or Enema”. It was all very funny and the wine was good and red and she was barking.

One of the more relevant ideas I was exposed to in College while studying film theory with Michael Silverman et al was SUTURE. This is a concept about how film works. I think I read about it most in Stephen Heath…but frankly it was a long time ago, dear reader. So cut me some slack. Any way, Suture has to do with how the “subject” as they were fond of calling the audience (as if they were pawns in some MK Ultra experiment) are “stitched” into the illusion of time and space created by….let’s say Hitchcock since he did it better than anyone. The dog’s leg reminds me….The great thing about interactive media is a chance to liberate the viewer from the tyranny of suture. The subject is free to wanter at will. If I can make omEGG the way I want…well it would be something else.

Any way. Bandage is off! And I’m writing grants for Creative Capital and a studio space downtown. Wish me luck dear reader.

marcel itin circa 1955-58

Here’s the thing I noticed off the bat last week in the cemetary: People who died fifty or a hundred years ago, or more, had better taste than people who die today. The monuments you see today have no real sense of sculpture, or craft. They are dull, squat, machine made lumps of over polished marble.

The other odd thing is that modernism hasn’t made a single dent in the Brooklyn death industry. All of the monuments are of a decidedly conservative bent. Even in Russia – you don’t see modernism, but you see social realism and you see photographic technology deployed onto these elaborate totalitarian stones – It’s fascist-commie-modern, but more modern than us.

All this brings me back to the best piece of art my old man ever made. I guess my pop had a rough youth. Everything was not chocolates, cheese, and cookoo clocks. His father had lost the family bakery during the depression…so money was always tight and then his mom lost her health, or mind, or both…I’m sketchy on the details. I remember him telling me wine soaked stories of running through the Basel streets as a child trying to find the hospital to see his sick mother. She finally shook off the mortal coil when my dad was fresh out of art school.

It should be noted that my dad had studied painting at the Kunstgeweber School. I imagine he slapped some plasticine around in a figure class or two, but he was no sculptor and certainly not a stone carver. He was, however, young and arrogant and probably battling a break down of his own. So he went out and bought a few tons of granite.

I don’t know if the gentle reader has ever carved stone, but let me tell you: Lime stone is nice, marble is fine, but Granite is a bitch! I shared a studio with dumbo carver Max Whalan for a while…Marble is no walk in the park (and they turned his studio into Superfine). But Granite?! Granite is hard and crystalized in a way that the slightest misstrike can break great hunks off in improbable fractures. Greif struck, he was undeterred. He made arrangements with a local stone carver and set about making an abstract monmument for his mother: sort of matisse meets giacometti by way of early mondrian – an abstract landscape.

The whole thing took longer than anticipated (granite again) and the local sculptor lost his lease. Now the kid had a few tons of rock he needed to move and no money and no studio and no tools and no prospects.

Somehow his story convinced someone and somehow (I’m sketchy on this) work went on and eventually he finished the stone and it was placed at the little cementary outside Basel (where they put all the car dealerships today…fucking assholes!). It was always my favorite sculpture he ever made. In one of those strange twists of fate, we burried half his ashes under that stone after he died. I still think its odd to bury half his ashes there, but my mom wants half of him for herself (and I suppose she deserves it) and besides he was always keeping one foot in the old world and one in the new.

Is it any wonder I am like I am?

Anyway, the Green-Wood side is pretty much standing in the old world. Modernity missed America, or Brooklyn, or at least that cemetary (where they buried SAMO).

You can see a detail of the stone in the TK3 book “Self Portrait”

There is an interesting radio show on Genius and creativity at The Infinite Mind. It has a preety good take on bipolar disease, etc.

Well my only friend and reader, Yoko is 72 and still sexy and surreal and fluxus and richer than spit. All my love to her. The only problem she faces is English and her lack of command… that said, what she says is right on….and who else takes out adds to tell you what’s on her birthday mind?

And her kid is a Brian Wilson Fan…which is funny and sad and you should listen to his interview with Brian

Symposium for John and Yoko, mixed media with objects on tabletop (work in progress) ITIN

details of Ezeakeal for Stanley Kubrik and post war wine bottles ITIN 99-05

My mother is planning a trip to Spain with her Hooker…now before you all get George W. on me, notice the fact that the Noun “hooker” is capitalized. Dude…That’s my mom’s new husband’s real name,… so get your head out of the gutter. That’s my mother you’re talking about, pilgrim (and so far she’s the only one whose left a comment on this blog….so who loves your humble narrator).

All the stories I’m telling you tonight are TRUE!
Except for one: the banana sticks!

So Spain got me on running with the bulls in Pamplona, the Existentialists, and poor Hemmingsteingaryspaldingonzoduke. Suicides. Sangria….the bull fight of life. Hamlet.

Fear and Loathing in ought five:

I’m not going to miss Hunter S. too much, but he was my hero. Atleast he was for a few months in college.

I have a pretty good story about another college roommate of mine from Brunotown. For our purposes, This guy’s name is now….I don’t know…..Raskolnikov (in honor of realizing that a clock work orange is basically a riff on Doestoyevsky and the whole Russian bunch…thanks to Ben). Raskolnikov was a priviledged son of a high powered New York lawyer. Some how Sir Duke became his highschool hero (Dalton? St. Anns?….who knows? …some prep school). At Brown, we’d all heard that he’d spent his entire freshman year dosed on LSD 25. He’d maced a girl for laughing too loud at a party… He was crazy… Or so the rumor had it. In some drug fueled state, he decided that Hunter S. Thompson needed to lecture at Brown University. It became a sort of wrong headed religeous obsession with Raskolnikov.

By a series of bad craziness choices by yours truly, I ended up sharing a house with this nut and his band of droogs just as the culmination of his antisocial dream came true.

It was the days when Hunter was touring campuses with G. Gordon Liddy…so it was doable. Raskolnikov simply had to raise the money to pay the honorarium and make travel/hotel arrangements. His newly tuned in mind set to work and achieved everything. He was on! Raskolnikov would meet his literary hero….and what’s more be his protegé and factotum for the weekend Hunter would spend on campus.

Word to the wise: Never have heroes unless they’re already dead. Heroes will let you down when you meet them. You will be their anti-hero. They will hate you…despise the earth you stand on…or atleast that’s how it worked out for Raskolnikov.

Raskolnikov had spent a year and a half drinking, fucking, and consuming vast quantities of drugs in an effort to be more like Hunter (and to be fair: Robert Towne, Jim Morrison, Verlaine and Rimbaud, Dylan, Hendrix….who else can you name?). The droogs had stored in a month’s supply of crystal meth (before it was popular mind you…leave it to Brown students to be ahead of the zeitgeist) and some pot and a case of whiskey, and I think Raskolnikov still had a sketch pad of blotter acid left in a drawer of important legal papers (trust fund perhaps?) in his desk.

Hunter arrived and immediately drank a liter of whiskey and snorted the entire ounce bag of Crank (“enought to kill a horse”, I was informed by the Southern Californian Water Polo turned proto-tweeker who’d scored the stuff…lord knows he’s probably a Senator today). Hunter then went to the fraternities and drank beer and became a sad Hemmingway like character. He became Doctor Gonzo…and wasn’t that what they were paying him to be?

By the time of the lecture/debate/slurr, he was a drunken, abusive, idiot and our poor Raskolnikov (with the sad duty of trying to coral a bull) recieved the lion’s share of the abuse. With a years worth of dedicated effort behind him, Raskolnikov felt obliged to honor the contracts (No matter how much acid this kid ate, he was the son of a lawyer after all).

Raskolnikov tempted the bull out of the boozy campus with a bottle of scotch in the back of the limo (and I think I heard some real cocaine). The catch for this was a reporter from the Brown Daily Hearald, or whatever…Hunter was contractually bound to do a post debate interview.

He was drunk. He didn’t want to. Raskolnikov insisted.

Hunter S. Thompson punched this kid so hard he nearly flew out of the limo. He started to bitch slap the kid, yelling

“I’m fucking Hunter S. Thompson…don’t tell me I have to do an Interview. SHe saw the debate….Fuck you, you pretentious…..blah blah…” You can imagine that Hunter S. could probably light into a sycophant like Raskolnikov with a razor wit of truth.

Raskolnikov’s heart was broken. His hero had not only rejected him, but torn him a new one.

The experience changed Raskolnikov…I would say for the good. He stopped doing drugs all together and went on to become a fairly respected idependent filmmaker. I like to think that Hunter S. saved this kids’ life. That’s why he was my hero….for a little while…

…but Spalding Gray really was for a long time. So was Hemmingway. And that didn’t do any of them any good in the end. So much for Heroes. It’s a pretty great album though and title of my first (never published) novel, whose characters live on in Arc Along the Watchtower and omEGG.

The dog’s leg went south of cheese – the paw swelled up like a lobster claw – red and oozing pus. This sent the girlfriend into what can only be called a maternal panic. We were calling anyone we knew with even a hint of a medical degree. “Vetinary science, fuck it. You’re a dentist? I see. What do we do with a lobster claw paw?” Suddenly in an Altman movie, I had to cut off the preassure bandage and long story short, she’s doing fine. There’s nothing like the threat of gangrene, however, to make you want a long walk…what better place than (Gang) Green-Wood Cemetary…? Brooklyn’s most beautiful place to be dead in…

And all the dead of Brooklyn lay out before me in a blanket of pure untrammeled snow. I had been talking with a guy name Chirstian at the Christofest (he’s a guy who spent the last year kicking a soccer ball literally around the world). Somehow I got on the subject of Victorians and how cemeteries used to be the only public park spaces. People used to have picnics – stroll hand in hand – woo eachother amongst the dead of Green-Wood. As the gates come down in Central park, it put me in mind to visit the cemetary in the snow. No one but the grounds crew and one funeral party had the same idea. It was one big sculpture garden…all for me. The anti-gates.

It is a bit odd that no one has mentioned “The Gates of Heaven” in all the gates hoopla. In the post 911 New York vibe, you’d think that would be the first thing out of every tourist’s lips: “They’re like little gates to heaven for everyone who died…..blah blah.” Cynicism asside, the contrast between granite and saffron cloth struck me. I was sent back in time to a sunrise film shoot for my old pal Colin Waters’ final project for the legendary Giles Milhaven’s Religeous Studies class at Brown University. Colin had the bright idea to play a round of golf through a Marblehead Mass. Cemetary in Winter (don’t ask me….something to do with life being a game….I don’t know…I just shot it and it looked pretty good as I remember…last google revealed about Colin, he was teaching at a Buddhist meditation center in Berkeley….four!). The grounds keepers (we called them cemetary thugs) nearly hauled us before the man, but we got the shot. It seems odd to me now, that we didn’t realize how disrespectful driving golf balls in a cemetary is….fucking kids! It was an bizarre image though and goes back to my thoughts about “Open Spaces” in an urban world. Cemetary, Park, Sculpture Garden, Golf Course: What’s the difference? A little lawn and a little landscaping. I suppose like all things, it is intent. Colin was a soccer player before he was a Buddhist and Christian kicked a ball around the world. Todays question is: Intent?

Me? I like walking.