Some how I am thinking of the girl I lost my virginity to…. Let’s call her Ilsa Damenhinder. It was the night of my Junior prom and it was the front seat of the Ford Fairmont station wagon. She was s Wagnerian beauty, with blond braids down to her ass. We reeked of sweat from wild dancing, and Champaigne from reckless drinking. I think she threw up after the deed and the next day informed me that the whole thing felt like rape to her (she was no virgin mind you …she was sort of the opposite, but with serious issues). Well that was a freak out and you must understand I’d been in love with her since about the fifth grade… a real obsession… So maybe I had some anger in me along with the lust. She got my rabbi’s cherry the year after that while I was with Hedda Gabler at the Senior Prom. She was sort of doing community service… and now she is a real opera singer and all grown up…

I wrote a lot of love songs about Ilsa, she was a real muse for me, but this is not one of them. This is a love song for three other muses. One is still living and the other two are dead. Moira is alive, but Linda and Katherine, or Rinny as we called her both died in drug/alcohol related car wrecks.

Rinny and I were Steve Martin friends. We knew every word and would do the routines in the hall and at recess. We loved to laugh and she was a real cut up in a sort Irish Catholic gift of gab way. I bring up Ilsa only because it reminds me of the time I got a call from Ilsa in the sixth grade. My heart beat wildily. Linda got on the phone first and aked me if I liked Ilsa… I said yes and she said…”Well she wants to talk to you.” So we started talking and long and short she managed to ask me out… the trick was that it was actually Katherine and she felt I was now some how trapped into dating her. I was furious and it really fucked up our friendship and soon she was off to Sacred Heart Catholic School and then to Florida where she was side swiped by a drunk driver while riding her bicycle. I’ve felt original sin guilt for not going along with her joke and just dating her… you know before she died. She should have at least had sweetheart to laugh with in her last year on earth.

Marcel Itin circa 1973

I was never in Love with Linda, but I cared for her deeply… probably becase we shared the sadness of Katherine in common. I remember she got involved with drugs and booze way back in Junior Highschool and I was worried about her and knowing that she was trying to hide from Katherine’s death and pretending to be happy … and surrounding herself with people dumb enough to believer her lies. She was a real dark German soul that way.

I recall a conversation we had in Biology class while disecting fetal pigs. I just came out and told her that I was worried about her smoking pot and taking acid and I told her I thought she was too young to get so fucked up. She told me, “Alex, you are a special person… You have a special sort of brain that makes you very weird and funny and you see things in ways that most people can’t. You are like that naturally, but I’m not. Most of us are not. When I smoke pot I see the world like you always do… You can’t deny me the ability to see the world in this strange, beautiful way, just because you see it like that all the time…. can you?”

Maybe she was just blowing smoke up my ass, but it did shut me up and give me pause. Having lived long enough and suffered enough mood swings from manic to depressive…I’ve come to see what she was talking about. But Freshman year Linda joined Katherine. Some how she got drunk and ate a bunch of magic mushrooms and got in a car with someone who did the same, or worse and that person managed to Launch them into a tree on King Street. They were DOA.

This brings us to Moira who is still alive and hopefully well in California. I got to know her in seventh grade… she left Catholic school after Katherine died and we were in the same home room (Mr. Stein). She had a sort of lovely Irish sadness… pale skin, long hair and the body of an elegant weed. I was smitten from the first sight, but we never had a romance…. it was unrequited love, but I think very requited friendship. We had Katherine and then Linda in common… She became very sad and very afraid that she was next on the hit list. I was scared too. She was a real horse person and since I was working with horses as a stable boy, cleaning up shit for rich girls who didn’t want to. She was doing the same at a different stable, so we had the whole stable horse world too.

I was a chubby kid all during puberty and in ninth grade I decided that I would loose that weight. I became a bit of a maniac and started running vast distances and not eating. I would often magically come upon Moira on the back country horse trails… she on steed and me on foot and I’d run along with her and we’d talk. She’d also taken to haunting graveyards and I would find her among the stones and we’d talk about the men in her life and God and Jesus and any and everything. I seem to think we did a lot of that teenage phone call stuff too….for hours. We just loved to talk I guess.

Now when my dad got sick I found her in the halls at Greenwich Hospital. Turned out her dad had the same kind of cancer. He passed a few months before my dad. We spent some weird intense time together – she mourning, me still waiting for morning… After my dad passed I went real bonkers. She was already back in L.A. I think… working with horses and then working For Wes Anderson on Rushmore (I helped location scout private schools on the East Coast when they were planning to go for a more traditional New England prep school look for Rushmore Academy).

Anyway I lost all sense of time and space and time difference in California and I kept calling her at ungodly hours. I was sort of falling to pieces and felt she was probably the only person in the world with the right glue to put my egg head back together again… but she couldn’t and she couldn’t stand the four a.m. phone calls … and maybe she just had too much on her plate and my frantic babbling probably scared her as much as finding her in tears in cemetaries used to scare me way back when… and she flipped out on me and the long and short of it is that I haven’t talked to her in almost seven years. It seems like too long. Anyway she was one of three muses from my youth. Three Tall Women… I like to listen to the whisper of muses still. You have to listen, because sometimes they stop talking… sometimes the gris gris wears off… sometimens young women die, or come to hate you. There comes a time.

Round and round the wheels of fate spin and mesh and sputter along and it seems like just a couple of days ago I was speaking of Hemmingway’s A Farewell To Arms and it was in the context of child birth and what an unsafe proposition that was (I think I was talking with my neighbors who just had a daughter). Anyway, I was pointing out that up till recently more women died in childbirth than men did in Military Conflict and it was far less safe being a woman than a man. It got me thinking on what a clever and cruel plot turn it was for Papa to take that reality and turn the love story into a tragedy. Hell they made it all the way over Lake Geneva to neutral Switzerland where presumably they could find the dadaists at the Café Voltaire, but instead Catherine dies in Labor. It got me think about how that’s a near perfect novel and it got me thinking about my much less than perfect attempt, Heroes. It shared the heroine’s name, Catherine.

When I was young and working on the tome, I went to Harvard for a Summer course in writng and film and I think I audited Philosophy and there I met a girl named Catherine who sort of seduced me by saying out loud in a group: “Hey there’s an Antonioni film at the Brattle, who wants to go?”

Now she’d already told everyone else to say they were busy, cause she knew I’d want to see that film… I can’t remember what it was… or really even if it was Antonioni…. I want to say “NO ESCAPE”… it was Italian and possibly Neo-Realist. Any way, she played that hand excellently and I fell for it. She claims I said some line about her hair lighting up the dark theater and I did probably try to kiss her first and it was all very whirl wind and she was dating someone else from her high school and so it was all very hush hush, sneak sneak which honestly was a bit of a turn on even then.

I only bring this up, because she’s a librarian now at the Folger Shakespeare Library (ironically, because I broke up with her to date Hedda Gabler who I’d met while doing Measure for Measure)… anyway the whole thing ended badly… I recall I was campus touring and I went up to Brown to visit a Shakespeard chum, Michael Lipman, with my other Shakespeare bud, Richard Rothschild and I was supposed to go up to Lexington to see Catherine and I hadn’t told her yet and I was all confused because I really liked Catherine, but you only get to be a Senior in high school once and I thought it might be fun to have a girlfriend and go to the prom and all that shit with her and honestly the distance thing was a bitch and I was a horny seventeen year old kid … and it was fun having a girl friend my senior year, but it sucked not having my cake and eating it and we never really spoke again for how long is it now…twenty years?! I’d always regretted it, because she was about the only girl I ever dated who liked the same movies as me and was a total film fetishist and general pretetious culture vulture and I had really hoped we’d always be friends, but there it was. Kaput. So it was pretty freaky hearing from her as it was always a stone in my heart shoe… last sound was her crying and then the phone buzz and she said, “and you were going to come all the way up to Boston…?”

I said, “Well I wanted to tell you in person….I don’t know what I want to do… I really love you….”

“You,” she said sobbing. “You just broke my heart!”

And she hung up and then she wouldn’t pick up the phone and her mother started answering the phone (God rest her soul) and I never talked to her again… some letter attempts while we were in college, but she didn’t want to deal…. understadably as I was sort of a prick to her (or atleast thinking with it).

So circles in circles, she’s married and has a three year old and it’s just so nice to take that stone out and walk into spring with a spring in my step (if still a little blister of regret). You could probably grow a million years old and I still think you’d have intense feelings about the people you dated in your teens. It’s just the way we’re wired I guess.


I’ve been listening to Pet Sounds again (actually the tracking sessions with out the lyrics… god could that man record… sounds even better than Spector and he never tried to kill anyone… okay maybe himself). Listen to my heart Beatles. And we have German Pope… so much for an African, or Hispanic.

I have a feeling we’ll be seeing a lot of this black on black Yankee cap this season. I really like it. It’s sad… and this guy works at the Footlocker in Times Square where it is available… it’s like baseball in mourning for the Pope or something… I was off to see Christa Gruaer after getting an e-mail from an ex grilfriend I hadn’t heard from since before college even…so a wave of Harvard Summer School memories following on a morning of drive Zorg around looking for a parking spot while listening to Johnathan Richman: I Johnathan… That Summer Feeling indeed… and since pictures are worth a thousand words….


kubrick maybe?




It was real good luck having met Krista and her man of Forty some odd years (and still unmarried… thanks much) Beryl Sokoloff through Dadi Wirz… also good luck and priviledge to have shown them at IT IN space in SoHo… aroud the corner from Krista’s space…. where we used to lunch and have wine whenever I felt lonesome… which was often….



Beryl is a great filmmaker and photographer… the thing with him is that he has the same love of mixing double prints of the same image that I have… and so when I saw his work, it was like meeting my own eyes.


He was also first rate New York School painter… student of Rubin Kaddish and friend to Jackson Pollock, etc…


From the visit we went to an opening at the Swiss Institute… where I lost them, but how nice to see old friends on such a spring day.


and so back to Korea and Larry by way of the peephole of Christa’s work…

When at last we awoke we drove Zorg into the Carrol gardens and ate Cuban Foood and I had my first Cuba Libre and I thought… why isn’t Cuba free and how many assholes does it take to fuck up Paradise…. Damn poor Hemmingstein would rock and roll over in his grave if he realized that his whole legacy there is six toed cats… But didn’t those cats at the Buena Vista Social Club sound great. I’m finally getting the hype on that… took some time to see past Wim Wenders… who I love… but find too fucking German to be in good taste.

That said, the Korean dude above was a major Calligrapher and Schollar in is province… his writing was what you’d carve on the tomb stones… and what better rave is there… even if this is a love story? So it is nice that me and the ladie’s family have a love of letters in common even if we don’t have eyelids and language to share. Letters trump (and not Donald) all else me thinks. So If that guy had some sort of great great great grand kid, I’d want to teach him a few things about words and letters and that we all live in a yellow submarine on a blue marble and that love is all you need. So I guess I’m trying to do that… Oh yeah and watch out for the fish.

Sunday was all about staying in bed and trying to kick cold…. a lot of catching up on lost sleep. For a couple of months I’ve been waking up at ungodly hours to heed the whisper of the Muse and blog and draw, ect. Candle burning at both ends and middle makes jack a dull boy with bad cold. In this sleep I suffered strange art anxiety dreams… I think I was thinking of the Morrisey song: “We hate it when our friends become successful…” In my dream some friend was making really great pictures and sort of blowing up large. Now the nice thing is, it was a dream and I remember how he made the pictures… I think I was living in some strange version of Providence…


These are really drawings of Willougby snoring before getting up….

When they said, Repent, repent, repent, I wonder what they meant, but you should give me a Leonard Cohen after world, so I can cry eternally in this most Moorish Hebrew Temple Mount… and David sent fourth three books out of Pittsburgh to the Land of Brook and Able, forth with to draw upon like a little Prince…Plus I bought some Leonard Cohen yesterday…I’ve seen the future Mr. and it’s murder.

So the first play I ever did with David was a Le Roi Jones play (now Amiri Baraka). I had no lines, but as they say, no small roles, just small actors. I played a drunk homeless guy and every night I’d drink a half pint of whiskey (just for the smell you understand) and do a Chevy Chase prat fall into the audience… it got bigger and funnier every show… Total grand standing on my part, but the show was in need of comedy relief and I love to play the fool. I think it was called Dutchman and starred David Graff, the only black Jew at Brown (and second half of our rap group L.L. Hiyem and the Babid Rabbi…the d.j. was Terminator Jehova and he spun two stone slabs with five tracks on each..). Maybe Shanga was in it too… I think two actors played the one male lead… Oh who remembers, I was always near drunk and near concussion. I remember one night an Ex showed up and I made the most violent attempt to prat fall into her lap… Youth has no shame.

Samples of Willoughby are now available here: Willoughby, or from the book samples section at the top of the page.

You won’t get the whole story, but you’ll get some of the basic outline and visual ideas around the story.

Now in a sad announcement: Pavia is dead, long live Pavia. I’d put these dead Clark’s up today only to read at 4:30a.m. that Philip Pavia is dead. Click Portraits to see the portraits I shot of him only a couple of weeks ago at O.K. Harris, or scroll down… Granted he looked as old as one of his sculptures, but…

Willoughby drawings (Clark Dead), mixed media and Chinese ink on paper, ©ITIN ’05

Sugar Magnolias All A-bloom and the better half took the day off with a fever and sore throat… looks like I’m going to play nurse and be relatively quiet. How ’bout those weird tulip petals…very Pink Floyd Wall Wife in the trial scence.

Somehow it was too sweet a day to stay at home and compute, so I organized a pic-nic beneath the bridge and a visit to Tom’s for wine and song. We liberated the wine from Blanc et Rouge where it had been on display since the auntumn of 2001. Seemed the wine would be past peak soon, so any excuse for a Sideways warm bubbly romp…and Tom had just been to a Pinot Noir tasting the night before where they had a lot of Champagne… “They leave out the skins,” Tom announced by way of describing how it stays white with a pinot grape.

“They taught you well,” I mocked his didacticism.

Tom has decided he likes expensive wine the best. The idea of the tasting was to compare tenish dollar bottles to hundredish dollar bottles. “More expensive is more better,” said tom in Mardi Gras authority.

Anyway, I left some Vin De Terror empties at the store for them to display… so have a peek when in dumbo… those are the bottles from a case of French Merlot that I painted while watching Anthrax news, etc.

Tom was playing me some new songs from his band (with Steve Lewis). They are wokring up to a big Summerstage show and yours truly may be doing a video for them. They’re supposed to open for the Blind Boys of Alabama… nerves, nerves, nerves.

Major Tom shows off his post vacation interior driving skills…Four! Ah but can he play through a cemetary?

Now this painting of the Dada faction at the Café Voltaire in Zürich circa 1914 (dressed in semi-Fasnacht Klique outfits) seems to come from the Verona sketch book drawings of eating too much and drinking too much I did during all that family burial business. It makes a direct line to the large Orson Welles painting I did for Suni and also the Willoughby Sandwich feast in progress.

Now my brother is leaving for Switzerland and Italy tomorrow. He’s taking my two nephews and it should be an interesting trip. Hopefully he’ll be posting some photographs for all to see, but one thing is for sure, they’ll all be eating and drinking too much! What is vactation for? Me?, I’m gargling salt to try and kill my sore throat.