Sometimes I think my dog should charge by the hour, like a therapist. This silly faced thing has more or less saved my life and she is always glad to see me, which is better than I can say for everything else in the world. Her eyes melt me like cheese on a hot potato. She’s my reall homie…

A is for Alexandre The Great, or all young men arrogant enough to try and conquer the world…. SAMO© I mean you!


So the Basquiat Green-Wood trip was too long and too OMegg centric not to go forward and tell you how I Met the better half, or yin to my yang, or is it yang to my yin, or is it wu-chi and just graygreygrisgris…. We shall call her Sylvie to protect the innocent (or guilty as the case may be)

One of the more amazing things in the world is that some genious built a commercial bread bakery right across the street from the Grand Gothic Gates of Green-Wood Cemetary. As you visit the dead, you smell the baking bread. Prozac be damned, there is nothing that shall lift you forth from the funk better than the smell of baking bread: It truly is the staff of life… now remember Gentle Reader: yours truly is a Grand Son of a Basel Baker… during Fasnacht Morgan Streich we all stood before the old store front (bakery lost in Depression…stop) and rung in the Fasnacht… Bread…. oh bread the body… My father’s rants on why America was doomed if only because you couldn’t buy a decent piece of real bread (thank god, like beer and wine this is no longer true if you have $$$$ and live near a major corporate cash center (red or blue I think)


This is God Son of Peter The Basel Butcher and Stone Of the Rock Church Speaking to you of The Greatest Love Story Never Told: or Happy New Year!

MP beneath the blossoms with wine and sunset.

Now like young Fred in the Yellow Submarine, all music was fading from Pepper Land. We were out of College and I’d survived Brown, but not without a damaged ego. I was spending a lot of time with my Art Dealer’s daughter… who was dating a silent Korean, who loathed me, becaudse… I suppose now… she and I could talk, and she and him… well couldn’t without kissing and just making those squishy noises… He was a handsome architect… I was an ugly artist.. he had me beat, I think… anyway… I get an ivitation from her to come to her New Year’s Eve party… okay… I bring my favorite Greenwich Brunian/graphic designer… he shall be called Bruce Lee to annoy the innocent…

I tell this story as an antidote to death… Call it Karma… Call it Fate… sometimes God shows up in your life and if you’re real lucky, God is hot and Korean, and carrying three bottles of blood if you know what I mean.


You know what? Fuck God, cause you know there ain’t no devil, there’s only God when he’s drunk? Well, to me anyway, this was the sort of Wu-Chi grisGRIS moment when GOD throws you a banana peel in the middle of the road.

Bruce and I went outside to have a smoke…. Midnight had fallen and there was no champagne, only Papov vodka and Conch y a Toro red wine… miserable I was and to top it off no one would talk to us because of the odd vibe with the Architect… all the Hostesses hid up in their room… probably doing exotic drugs, or hell hording Champagne… it sucked…



I had been having some sort of flash back affair with the dog-fish-shark-Hawaiian/Japanese… but she was out of med-school and off to Paris to see her five year boyfriend who was in from Tokyo and I was just alone with my damn Korean Buce Lee who was telling me all about a font he’d just made and copyrighted while going to Parsons to get a descent commercial portfolio together… (Bruce worked for MTV and VH-! for a long time and is now art directing at major television networks).

We sat there, him and me, on the steps… bored…. smoking… sipping Papov Screw Drivers… Missing Champagne and our Greenwich, CT sense of propritus wine: when in the distance a music video dry ice ground cloud parted and there did appear a vision of Korean beauty so intense that I think poor Burce Lee pissed his pants slightly and smiled knowingly… knowing I loved Asian girls and said….”Ha ha ha… you are in trouble now.”

“What?” I asked Bruce.

“Look what I see coming.”

I turned and saw her… She was, it is true, in a crowd, but I can’t tell you who, nor how many… because (cliché alert) I only had eyes for her…

I stood at attention, like a rodent catching the smell of a nut.

She was carrying two bootles of Chateau Lafite and a Magnum of Moet Chandon Champagne… she was in red, with tassles (like the Hippies meet the British coming to my Paul Reveare Heart), under this was a shiny black shorts suit with black hose and the cutest shoes… and oh yes, pearls, pearls, pearls and red lipstick to match the redcoat…Devil in a Red Dress…

I turned to Bruce and said, “Please, whatever you do, don’t let me talk to this girl. I can smell the trouble from here.”

Bruce shoots back, “Of course we’ll talk to her… She has Champagne!”
“Shit,” I mumbled as Bruce called out in Korean, “Happy New Year!”

She landed at our shore like a grand ocean liner… bringing with her in tow inferior vessles at her wake… What yacht could be so yaar?

Like a scared squirrel, I tried to flee, but the Moet needed opening and the Koreans had no grasp of the wire as they talked about Paiks and Lees, and Parks, and Chois and Lees, etc.

“Give me that,” I said, twisting the pop in a moment as they listed cousins, or tribes, or whatever it is in Korea… and I got the glasses and poured the wine and said, “Hey, Happy New Year!” and I was thinking of the dog fish shark girl and how alone I was as the Koreans smiled and ate Doritos with the wine.

So I was watching her as she talked with him and she had a gace and stature of a statue looking at Libertpy and her nails matched her lipstick and her dress…. she was shocking hot, but for the moment I was safe. She was talking to Bruce Lee.

Suddenly, she turned on him with a snap, “Well, you’re boring, what are you about?” and I saw it all in slow motion, her eyes turned first, and her head and neck followed like a Willow branch moving in the breeze to find my eyes.

“Who are you?” she asked.

My heart exploded in a blue flame… and I remember moving my lips and breathing, but the words escape me… corks flew and fireworks, and lightning, and thunder and nonsense and then they were throwing us out on the street….

We eneded up in Bruce Lee’s car with keys and bottles of wine to move the party to the East Village and then Bruce let us out of the Toyota and popped the trunk with the wine and then sped off, leaving us drunk and alone and the rest, I suppose is better left as history.

It is my greatest story… she tells it like this:

I got drunk and then there was this guy with red sox and red briefs and I laughed…

At some level, I think that yesterday was my last technical day as Artist In Residence at The Institute…. Seems only yesterday we started this, but three months have passed…almost. I think this site will keep going, as I’m not quite out of death and love stories and we haven’t even begun to hit on The Great American Novel, which is money. That is my sly way of telling you all that much of what you have met on this site will be made available for purchase in the lobby on your way out of the theater. In other words, I’m building a commercial site. Look for it to be some sort of virtual installation that will change as the fair reader relieves me of the burden of storing all this krazy kunst.


All my love to the nearly three hundred hits we’ve had without any publicity… The Great American Novel, hoever, will want hype… it alwasys does: but look at it this way, you can always say you were in on the ground floor. Now, about these properties I have in Glenn Garry Glenn Ross (Oh I saw Alec Baldwin coming back from a jog as I left The Institute… I told him I liked his work and he seemed glad… I should have told him he wins the steak knives…)

The rain comes down and washes the street like tears and I start thinking of my pal from way way back, who shall be called Roy to protect the innocent and as that is the name I’ve given the character in the Screenplay I’ve been working on for two years now: Super 8 Daze, or Film Geeks (we’re still hashing that out). Anyway, he put the fear of Jebus into me last week, when I called him and he said, “I can’t talk, I’m going to the doctor.”

Then I didn’t hear from him back and well you have to understand that Roy was sort of born like one of Larry’s gut shot Chinese. His intestines and vital degestive organs were all on the outside of his body…. he had a whole where the rain gets in and all between his balls and his heart was all shot up by God, or the devil, or their cousin Pandora. Who knows? So this was my best friend from about third grade on….

Yesteray, I went to my U-Haul and did not find this tag, but I did find all the old drawings from IT IN space in SoHo, if you were lucky enough to come to one of Sylvia’s throw down wine and cheese events (which also featured art from yours truly and many of the folks you’ll meet on this blog… but lets face it, it was the chashews and the cheese that we miss most). So as I picked up my passport and left the key I smiled at the lady and told her to have a nice day and she said: “You’re breathing?”

“Excuse me?”

“You breathing, right?”

“Yes, barely.”

“If you’re breathing, then it is a nice day.”

Philosophy can be found in the strangest of places, but that’s the shit about grwoing up with a guy like Roy as your best friend… everyday is Passover (please let death pass over), every day is Thanksgiving or as the boss says, “It’s Idependance Day.”

So The Boss was all day on VH-2 and I must hand it to the guy for not only making great music, but having his heart and mind in the right place politically. I sort of live in broken glass neighborhood of liberals who are still flying their “WE DO NOT ACCEPT THE BUSH AGENDA” banners. However, the minute I saw those things, I knew we had lost. They are rainbow flags, like gay pride and the Grateful dead… yeah middle America really can’t get enough of gay hippies…mmm or not!


That said, it gives one hope that these fag flags fly through rain and sleet and snow… Does it do any good? Not yet, but we must let the world know of the Skizum in our nation and heart… we are like the Catholic Church in this respect… we are at war in Skizum (my old drawing DJ’s name… who is off again to Berlin next week):



But I think again of Roy and how we both loved Ilsa Damenhinder and yet I got to fuck her and he never did (he has the jewels, but the rest of the broken bits mean it will take an understanding Mary to Marry him and sire his Dauphin… because to me his is a King among swine.

Due to the fact that he is more or less bionic and was the six million dollar boy and is such as a man… he can’t drink, or really take any drugs to speak of (other than whatever they prescribe)… so it is hard, I should think, on his battered soul and spirit with all that pain and preassure (and crazy family history which is another sad story) but he is Le Roi des Biers and the Prince of Tides, and Roy Orbison all wrapped up in a nice (if neurotic) guy.

He reminds me always of Oskar from the novel, The Tin Drum (also a good movie). Which takes me back to the film we made in the fith grade with Bill Eliot who now runs the Avon Theater in Stamfor CT. I was the fat kid and he was the kid without intestines (but plenty of guts)… so naturally we made a film about food: The Big Mac Attack. It had a glowing response at the Greenwich Film Festival of 1977 (?), but was destroyed in a plane crash coming from duping at Kodak in Rochester, NY. It lives only as a memory, like a love affair. This one eyed burger cyclops was it’s hero and villain, Monsieur Mac:

All this goes back in some way to our discussion of witches, Jebus, gnoticism, Judaism, DNA, the body, the soul, and Pork flesh… but the question is asked by some guy who you would think was me, but isn’t:

So when you are tired and it is raining, just think of it all as a baptism; because the fire born, they go far, being at home in fire and even bullshit Coke made mineral water can’t put out that flame.


This sip for me and this pour for the hommies of Brooklyn that will keep you honest and in love with breathing.

And this sip for Umberto Ecco, to whom we gave a doctorate the same day as we gave one to Little Stevie Wonder… that might make you very superstcious and ask what is the name of the rose? Gotta love Brown sometimes.

Kate writes (and I think it illustrates these illustrations):

ah, the joys of synchronicity…the Blogmaster neglects to mention our
discourse touched on judaism, witchcraft, and gnosticism.  Elaine Pagels
fascinating “The Gnostic Gospels” leads one to ponder the intriguing
case of the two Mary(s).  mother/madonna and partner/apostle.  the
latter recast as whore by the history-altering church.  one can hear the
bishop’s cry: ‘I want rewrite on that script dammit!  the messiah cannot
fall in love with a woman!  oy.  this will never do.’   from The Gospel
of Philip: “…the companion of the [Savior is] Mary Magdalene.  [But
Christ loved] her more than [all] the disciples and used to kiss her
[often] on her [mouth].  The rest of [the disciples were offended by
it…].  They said to him, “Why do you love her more than all of us?”
The Savior answered and said to them. “Why do I not love you as [I love]
her?” 

methinks the response was: ‘because the bed ain’t big enough for 14!’

perhaps the biggest threat to the church was the idea that human love
when it fearlessly delves into the spiritual realm is the true way to
approach G-O-D or whatever metaphor you choose for the cosmic force that
ties it all together.  the two Mary(s) undoubtedly taught Mister J a
thing or two about LOVE…
here’s an additional interesting tidbit from Pagels book that would be nice to include…

“Often in these gnostic texts, the creator is castigated for his arrogance–nearly always by a superior feminine power.  According to the ‘Hypostasis of the Archons,’ discovered at Nag Hammadi, both the mother and her daughter objected when:

“he became arrogant saying, “It is I who am God, and there is no other apart from me.”…And a voice came forth from above the realm of absolute power, saying, “You are wrong, Samuel” [which means, “god of the blind’].  And he said, “if any other thing exists before me, let it appear to me!” And immediately, Sophia (“Wisdom”) stretched forth her finger, and introduced light into matter, and she followed it down into the region of Chaos…And he again said to his offspring, “It is I who am the God of All.”  And Life, the daughter of Wisdom, cried out; she said to him, “You are wrong, Saklas!”

how interesting that my father and grandfather bear the name Samuel which my sister has also chosen as a name for her son.  I would like to have a daughter and name her “Sophia”

The femminist doors of perception I ask?

So Kate Rothschild stopped by to visit yesterda and have a dress up seder with the blue dress standing is as talis and we had pork saussage, so not very kosher, but plenty of wine and matzoh and paintins and we watched sideways and laughed.


We started with a Shiraz to honor the Aussie boyfriend and then once we’d eatean and looked and drank all we could we went out to fine a Lafite Rothschild, but only could find this Chilean owned by said same…. improted from Greenwhich CT, who knew?

Kunst Kat says he’d prefer Christanity if the Virgin Mary wore a strapless and wasn’t so damn pure.

Suddenly I’m thinking of Clark’s mother…. well not that suddenly. I did two improvs on clark while walking the dog in the park… and you start to wonder how did Clarck get so damaged?



Now this old woman that we never see is a huge part of all characters motivations… She is a Jungian maternal force… she is based on two neighbors I’ve had in the last decade: one who died of cancer and one who died of Alzheimer’s disease. They were real, desperate, fragile women… I lived next to them and I ended up loving them and feeling a great sense of loss when they finally – mercifully – passed. They were not my father, but they held in their Anima, some of my Animas for death.



There are Jews in the Abbey Road, but these ladies were old Slope Catholics. The one with Alheimer’s used to knock on my door at all hours of the night and say, “Hey nice neighbor… come see… there’s a strange man in my bed..”

That man was her husband, who was physically ill…. they were a pair… him going in the body, her in the mind. I remember once he fell in the tub and couldn’t get up and she came to me and said, “Hey this strange man wants you to get him out of the tub and I went over there and lifted his aged body from the porcelain – flashing back on my swolen dead dad the whole time.

Sweetest of all, every time I would good samaritan for them, they’d try to give me something… it was always the most kitschy tsoske…but I have them all…





I spent hours with the other discussing cancer and my father and family and borthers and sisters and how some people will never understand the pain of life…. I would borrow from her garlic and and sometimes some tomato paste… she never told me she had cancer – but it was all I talked about when my dad passed. I really thought of her as the grand mother I never had… I loved her, though I think she was far to practical to approve of my life choices… hoever, she was Italian, so …. like I say and not for nothing… Italians sort of get art harder than most…



Now what happens to you when you deal with the terminally ill (and the Italian didn’t want to be known as that… her life of Manhattan cigarette secratary single mom Catholic…..she was too proud

But how do you treat the terminally ill… play music… change nothing, but more music….had I known it would have been a Frank Sinatra/dino festival.



The Italian and I were cool, but it was with the Irish that I had the juicy nuts affair. Somehow she remembered my kindness and when her brain pan froze out, she would ring my bell for a feed in: “Hey nice neighbor whos is this and what is that and why do I do that , and when do I go home.”

We live in a coop, and the board was upset at the turn of events (these guys were grandfathered in on the old rent control lease and were paying nothing, etc.

I however, found this whole retlationship both flattering and therapeutic.




Now again I think about the stength of women and of how by birthing all men they take greater risks than warriors and I say: Woman Is The Nigger Of The World….but also Pharaoh….

I walked out to try and shoot the moon and found blue paint spattered in the road and a blue moon spattering the petals. I’ve finished a first collage round on the little hooker witch drawings and so it was odd how trick or treat it all seemed… like spring had toilet-papered the trees. I wanted to fly on my broomstick to Newport and remember all the sordid pleasure of youth. That said, I have a new modern work station for the i-mac and the whole studio feels cleaner and better organized and more spacious… I’m all about De Kooning who had a neat studio and then painted like a drunk lune… like the guy we saw stumbling up the afternoon blossom street.

“Is he drunk,” the better half asked. “It doesn’t seem safe for him to be walking in the middle of the road like that.”

“Drunk, or overdosed on his antipsychotic meds… or both… He seems to have the Palsey that shit gives you at higher doses… He’s shaking like Kate Hepburn: The calilillies are in bloooooom again….”

Later I got ready to walk the dog in my weird cut off striped P.J.s and she told me I looked like I’d just escaped from an asylum.

“Why do I look that stressed?” I asked.

“No. Look at those pants with that sweater and those shoes.”

Suddenly I saw what she was seeing and we both just started laughing to beat the band (after a fairly bickering spring cleaning day, it was sweet).

And it is a Lunatics moon out tonight following me through the cherry blossoms.

Newport at full moon by the Breakers, I keep thinking – with the hush and rush of the waves on the cliffs and the briney foam falling like petals and that sweet salt air… it is a basic pleasure… like India Pale Ale.