I just grow more and more amazed by the cherry tree in front of the building. It is ever more abloom and makes me feel like the top of the world… though possibly this squirrel is feeling it more.


The beautiful sadness of knowing it is a brief candle, has me thinking about our nation’s history… as usual… specifically how our Westward expansion created a collision with the people’s of the East… Native Americans (who would seem to be Mongolians from across the land bridge despite what P.B.S. says lately) and ofcourse, the Chinese who built the silver rails for the iron horse with the one eyed coal spit flame eye and a smoke stack always calling for Ch ch ch ch ch change… you call it a rail road.

And it gets you thinking about the grand coolie building the Grand Coolie Dam and the railroad and all that opium and the Dutch East Indies Company and the queen of england who owned it and how they flew a flag that looked suspiciously like our own and what is a revolution of “free trade” really about and who owns us and who killed all those Chinese, or worked them to death and for that matter ran rum and slaves and sugar in a triangle and hell: Iraq and oil…. Who ran this Iron Horse into the ground? Whose fucking responsible? Cause the body count just keeps piling up and you can’t throw people out like old toys and for that matter, I’m a bit shocked that a Park Sloper would throw out old toys… surly they must know how many kids in this city have nothing but a bottle and an old syringe to play with….Let’s waste not – want not shall we? and cycle into recylce…Bicycle rider just see what you’ve done to the church of the American Indian.













The Last Gasp

Here are some stills of Willoughby Improvs. I’ve shown you here the head shots, but often I will shoot only a mouth or eye, or ear, or what have you and instert these quicktimes over drawings of the rast of the head and or body. Willoughby is built like a t.v. puzzle and he loves to talk and so does Clark and the Narrator, I, he loves to tell you what they both said. He’s a big gossip that I is… a real male biddy, but he alone is left to tell the tale, send him an I-mail at the “What Do You Think?” section of the page. He loves comments and don’t forget to download a free sample of Willoughby at the book samples section at the top of the page. Enjoy and send checks so we can finish.

And just like that a wind whipped up seventh avenue past all the buddhas and petals and the clouds grew gray and I said: “Uh oh, here comes Gary Oldman,” by way of quoting Coppola’s Dracula. Sure enough, when I got home there was an envelope of books from Conrad in Pittsburgh where he has me doing some work for a show at The Mattress Factory… I have a month to whip something up. No prob and I’ll be showing you the results as a running gag… should be an owl’s Halloween hoot (wait for punch line book).

So the sweety says, “Shure, but he’s not Gary Oldman.”

“No, but hopefully he can hold his own.”

Then we went to A&S to buy pork… what with it being Passover and all.

And Gary Oldman can even play a midget, or dwarf, or tree gnome I suppose, as I just watched him do in a lovely subtle large/small performance in TipToe. He was acting like E.T. and you could watch is heart light. Here’s my impression in the cracked mirror.

And so the whole thing was feeling like a witchy incantation (something to do with seeing Stevie Nicks on VH-2): by the pricking of my thumbs, something theatrical this way comes (beat) and so the last book was this one and when you combine contraception and riding broomsticks… well that’s wicked that is:

Grand Army Plaza is, as always, a great set and setting for a monologue on U.S. history.

Collumnaded ruins domino. Canvas the town and brush the back drop: are you acting brother droog? The die it is cast and the curtains are raised, the stange is set for a grand army and the Prince: places everbody, places. We’re just waiting for Guffman and then we can start.


Been watching Coppola’s Dracula movie and now I realize that if I can’t get Max Von Sydow to play M. Tristan,Gary Oldman plays a good old man….names being destiny and all. That would make Conrad happy and relieve me of the burden (yeah good chance of getting him… but it’s nice to have options even if it’s all in the mind as George would say in the Yellow Submarine).




Here is a sort of smashed wall mirror solliloquey that resembles The Unbearable Lightness of Being pictures, or maybe Tommy… but really it’s Hamlet as played by a green tree gnome (me) which begs the question: whatever happened to Noam Izenberg my old college room mate… and near as I could tell the only one who survived that Dead show with a smile on his face and an untorn ego… but his set and setting were better prepared.

All art is a cracked mirror in which to read reality…I don’t know who said that… maybe I did as part of my course on Ulysees and Picasso.


I’ve come all of these years from my Hollywood highes, I’ve stiffened my legend, the films that I’ve made. Forget that I’m fifty cause you just got paid. Suck baby suck, give me your head, before you start professing that you’re knocking me dead….ooooooooo.

Manic Kaddish for my Father, 38″x48″, oil on canvs, ©ITIN ’98

I found a sketchbook of my dad’s drawings from the early to mid seventies. It was when he was mostly designing work to be built by Italian craftsmen out in Queens. This guy Joe Deluca, who lost an eye to a flying nail in his shop, made mostly industrial trade show displays and sets and things of that nature. It was probably a real thrill for him to make “fine art”… seems all Italians are raised with a respect for art (even the mobsters I’ve met were always very impressed when you told them you were an artist). We’d go and have dinner with him and his wife and his nine daughters, or whatever it was. My parents would be offered the wine that he made hiself in the basement… and they hated it, but always tried to get a glass down just to be polite. Anyway, they made these things up in wood and the new tinted plastic laminates. It was all very high tech, high modern, and hard edge… So I was sort of pleased to find a set of studies for what would have been a large public sculpture (I don’t think he got the commission) being reverse engineered into a study of trees.


Actually, its a study of our front woods in winter at sunrise. The model of the sculpture was done in shades of orange and yellow. I found some other drawings I like that seem to relate to landscape and mapping.

These landscape drawings took me back to a walk, or forced march that my old man took me on during my first clinical depression… the old man got me out of my bed and made me walk into the deep woods behind our house and up into the area that IBM hadn’t developed yet. It had once been a large farm and we came across over grown Alleys of trees, with their gothic arch branches and we followed the running stone walls that mark New England’s Glacial fields. I remember we stopped in the burned out ruins of the farm house… surroundedd by bonzai like juniper trees… with only the walls and the chiminey standing and we both cried and he told me about all the pain øf his youth and how he’d hoped that by making some graphic design money and sending me and my brothers to good schools, that we would avoid the pain he’d known growing up and how terrifically disappointed he was that sadness is something that comes with blood and life and you can’t escape it, if you are sensitive. It was really very sweet and somehow I think that is the day I started reading Buckminster Fuller’s Critical Path… it was like we’d found the path in the woods… the path out of darkness and home. It’s a nice memory.


So I’ve started drawing some trees in the empty pages… you can see rather dramatically where he quit painting in this book… which is sad….because the drawings are this awkward funny attempt to go forward and I think they would have been cool. I’ll show you later…. Right now I’m standing under my father’s trees.

IN ON IT IN PLACE AND SPACE AND TIME…. NOW I DIDN’T MAKE THIS PHOTO UP:


Somtimes you have to wonder what that white smoke coming out of the Sistine Shrapnel might have been… Odd Swiss Chocolate Papal Bong hit perhaps? Here we all are thinking of the first African, or Latin American Pope and out pops a Nazi. Go figure folks… they must be on the pipe right, like Captin’ Kirk Jerkin’ ’em up to werk, Yeah Boy… Flavor Flave is a dope trip, come take a big sip of the funky cold Medina (or is that the blood of Jeebus?).

Well the world seems a bevy of beautiful unanswered, or even unasked questions… this is particularly true if you come from a Germanic heritage. Rest assured we at IT IN place are ON IT in here. What do you make of a pope who sat at the wrong end of a Nazi Howitzer AAA shooting at Americans and British and Swedes and whoever else had the balls to get in that fight… I say this as a Swiss kid whose most knock out drag out fight with my old Basel Deutsch speaking father was about whether the Swiss Germans … or Switzerland in general were in some way corrupted by the Nazis. My argument was that once the wine turns to vinegar, or the cheese to mold, the whole thing is compromised. He really wanted to believe you could pour off some of it, or cut off the rind, etc. This was long before the Swiss Bank settlements with surviving Jews… long before the Swiss faced the legal music… but to give the only Europoean nation not Nazi in WWII some credit and some time: The Swiss argued… to my mind very convincingly, that the numbered account system was invented specifically to protect Jewish assets… because the German State was LEGALLY (at least by Law) seizing assets… the numbered account was to provide a blind against the Nazis… but it meant you had to remember the number or all bets were off. That’s the rub. There is little doubt that the Swiss were acting as snakes in the grass… they knew what Hitler and his assholes were up to and they ran numbers and figured it was worth it… at least thirty or forty percent of assets would fall from Jewish to Swiss bank hands and the Nazis would have no way of grabbing it back. Remember a lot of these assets were cultural in nature… Paintings and sculpture… The Swiss were playing a deep game of chess…. all other nations in Europe were Nazi… or would become… they were the lone Watchtower where British and American spies could land and sneak through the Black Forest… Basel was a sort of Weird Casablanca-like Hub and got bombed by both sides. I imagaine the Swiss like to think of themselves a Noah (when they’re not seeing themselves as Job that is). Why take the risk of inventing the numbered account if you don’t think some thirty to fifty percent of assets will cede to the bank in the end… knowing of the gas chambers? I mean it was business and if the U.S. wants to argue for a free Market Economy… it’s actually a fairly bad bet. The Swiss at the time wre worrying about being invaded…The only thing they had in their favor was ballbearing factories in Basel, the banks, and the Alps and “the cost of admission” policy, by which all Swiss men were in the Army and all bridges, Dams, Mountains, highwasys, etc were honeycombed and “pre mined” – booby trapped in a way that makes the Vietcong seem quite casual (and where do you think Ho Chi Min got the idea anyway?). You have to remember that The Swiss were this most tiny Rhode Island sized Polyglot island in the middle of a great Fascist Storm. They couldn’t save all of Europe, but they did what they could and that includes Einstien and enough artists to shake a stick at and I’m willing to rob some bourgeois Jews of their diamonds to save a few great Jews… but then I’m not the Jew getting killed so I grant you it’s an ethical debate worth having… Still I’d rather sue the French for just getting on the S.S. Final Solution boat in the first place… they Capitulated with a most unseemly Catholic Joy at tormenting Jews.

The thing that makes a thinking man sick, is that no one sues the French (or other Europeans), because there’s no money involved. The Swiss have always known how to play both sides and protect their polyglot haven of European culture (only place where Latin is a living tounge…. called Romansch and is on the money and the money is not kings or presidents, but artists: Sophia Arp, Giacometti, etc…). It gets one thinking: what is it all about… Hmmmm? If I was Keith Harring I’d draw it like this:




Sacré Snake Penis $$$$$$weeeet, ©ITIN ’05

Now it gets you asking the very question I like to ask my cutest buddhist nephew: I say, “Ugi what does a snake say?” and he answers: SS etc.

I’m listening to Samba and Samba Bowie on the Life Aquatic sound track. It reminds me of my first Girlfriend, Anna Piexoto… who works or worked for MTV Brazil now. She gave me all sorts of cool Brazillian music when last I saw her at the VMAs. Wonder where she is now. Our first kiss was in the back seat of very same Ford Fairmont, only driven by my parents as we returned from a Joan Baez concert at the West Side Piers. The Intrepid was just an empty ship then. The future was a rail line through tunnels and language… like this study for omEGG, ©ITIN ’04

Study after side scrolling video game, mixed media on painter’s caulk on canvas, ©ITIN ’05

Sometimes VH1 redeams itself, or more likely allows itself to be used as a pawn in some private citizen’s redemption. I am speaking now of their All Request Hour on VH1-2, or whatever it’s called. We interactive types, love when the audience (read subject) gets up out of it chemoculturetherapy chair and pulls out the i.v. and takes control, even if for only one video.

Bowie Study, ©ITIN ’01

Some mother wrote in that her daughter had fallen in love with the Queen and David Bowie song: Under Preassure. She recalled it having a great video and wanted her daughter to see it. I’m a rabid Bowie fan, but I couldn’t recall it at all. I imagined it would have Bowie and Freddie Mercury doing their ambi-sexual theatricality all over the jernt. Instead, they don’t appear (which is a real delicious decision because I think they’d have overwhelmed what is a really inerestingly made song in terms of studio production…. which is why its riff is constantly sampled). The video was built entirely out of old news reels and silent films with an emphasis on Murnau’s Nosferatu… my all time favorite dracula image… if only because the still from it scared me as a kid when reading in AFI magazine about the Herzog/Kinsky version then in production (oh I was a big time film geek all the way from fifth grade on… you know reading Cahiers du Cinema on the school bus and American Cinematographer during recess….can you say LOOSER? as my sweet and sour sweety likes to mock).

Napoleon Quixote, paint tubes and mixed media in clock housing, ITIN (in progress?)

So, if that wasn’t sweet enough, the next vid opens with a gorgeous shot of seagulls flying and some real 80’s ambient art rock/pop riff that sounds like Eno producing Laurie Anderson, Peter Gabrial, Robbie Robertson, or Talking Heads, but in fact turns out to be Leonard Cohen First We Take Manhattan…. What a gorgeous video (and great evocative song). Looks like Wim Wenders…or Lars VonTrier in his Zentropa days. Real scary stuff… A good German breakfast in honor of the Nazi Pope (well I did see him in a German military uniform where he actually shot an anti aircraft gun at our boys … so if you right wing fucks want to get all pissed off at lovely Jane Fonda for just posing on a gun… well now’s not the time to be a hypocrite… either forgive Jane like a real Christian would, or condemn the pope… that simple fellas… Fonda time, or Sinead O’Connor time… or Hammer time?… and don’t tell me that he deserted, because that just makes him a coward on top of being a coward the first time). What have you let Wagner do to your culture fair Isolde?

Marcel Itin Circa ’73






It is warm today in Brooklyn, but I can smell buckets of rain, buckets of tears, I got all these buckets coming out of my ears, and maybe buckets of moonbeams in your eyes… It’s going to be a hard hard hard rain. Dorothy, it’s a twister!



Lately I’m feeling like a door mat… somehow sullen and used up and graphic. I guess I mean I’m still sick and broke and all the cough syrup don’t help and the better half is now on anti-biotics and I have no health insurance and I’m just lucky its so damn warm and upliftingly lovely outside. It’s that Summer Feeling again.

The summer feeling is so strong beneath the blooming boughs that even Junior High School looks good, which you hated… and first grade too…overrated… and you long for some little girl that you dated, do you long for her, or for the way you were and that summer feeling is going to haunt you again in your life.

All Along the Watchtower Princes kept the view for rare books