And yesterday burst like bloomsday and all that rain forced forth flowers and it got me thinking about love and women and tranformation… that Hans Christian Anderson story of the ugly duckling. Now I suppose the single greatest transformation I ever witnessed was a theatrical illusion of youth and beauty. I was young and living in Stamford CT, in a small walk in closet sized studio with a loft and a single electric hot plate. I did my dishes in the community shower (I had no sink). When I had no money, I got a job at the new theater in town, The Rich Forum. They were doing out of town shake out runs for new plays there, like they used to do in New Haven. Aileen Atkins had written a thing from the letters between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West. She’d hired Vanessa Redgrave to co-star as Vita and Zoe Caldwell to direct. I got to come in and sit light cues for the ladies as this new wonderkind out of Yale drama stage craft programmed a computer (can you imagine) to make lighting changes… the idea was to have a simple set and then do projections and atmospherics all with this new generation of computer controlled lights. The long and short of it was that I got to be directed by Zoe Caldwell, which for the theater geek I was in highschool and college, was about as thrilling as it gets.

“Mr. Alex,” Zoe would boom from the back of the house. “Darling could you come downstage and turn that lovely face of yours stage left….no darling that’s right…exactly. What a profile you have. Now hold it for a moment as we change the gel…lovely…keep still….marvelous!”

I mean she could get me to do anything that way: “Mr Alex darling, could you please walk into the band saw… lovely we need more blood spatter dear…” She could chop off my whole neck with that flattery. I’ve never before or since seen a woman who so absolutely took control of the space she occupied. I mean she was magnetic. This little tiny dynamo. I started to understand my women friends in college who slept with their professors. Power was indeed an aphrodesiac… “Mr. Alex let’s move you into that chair now….” a voice like cannon fire.

The plinth is the thing, or worlds first minimalist sculpture….some grass on a greek column at BMA…finally saw Basquiat yesterday, but more on that next column.


Now the only thing that was sort of a turn off about Zoe… I mean besides the fact that she was seventy five years old or something like that… the only really weird thing about her was that she walked around like Rocky Racoon. I mean she wore enough eye make up to choke a horse. She looked ridiculous and freakish and I started to wonder about her mental health. Had anyone told her how bizarre it was to walk around in Connecticut with pankake makeup and black circles around her eyes. She looked like Alice Cooper.

Once the play was up and running, Aileen Atkins emerged as my hero. She’d written the script and was flawless every night. Vanessa, however, was dropping lines, mumbling into her shirt, dropping character, she had no real interpretation of Vita Yet… she was all over the place and I was starting to think she was over rated, or maybe washed up, but I’d stand in the back every show and laugh at all the delicious words that Virginia and Vita wrote to eachoter… the words were wonderful… and good words have a way of making me giggle like a school girl.

One night Zoe came up to me in the back of the house and put her tiny hand (not even the rain has such small hands) on my back. She was wearing her black stirrup pants, black blouse, and black eyes. She whispered in my ear,”Alex the ladies know you have been out here every show hitting the laugh lines for these brain dead audiences. They are very grateful. The ladies thank you very much.” And then she was gone like a whisper.


There was one magical night when the curtain was delayed and delayed again and then suddenly Zoe was behind me at the back of the house. She smiled at me and then she did something with her breathing and her face changed and she became relaxed and she strode down the aisle and up onto the stage in the most commanding entrance I have ever witnessed. A spot light found her and suddenly I got the racoon face. On stage, in this direct light, from my vantage point, Zoe Caldwell looked like a 16 year old ingenue. She was stunning… radiant… electric…. and she hadn’t even said a word yet. This is my recollection of the text of her speach:

“Ladies and gentlmem, we live in wonderful age of high technology. Computers have made all of our lives easier. However, I’m am sure you have been to the airport, and had some horrible person tell you that there will be a significant delay because of one problem. What does that person tell you?”

She may have planted someone, but it seemed that the audience got her drift and spontaneously announced: “The computers are down!”

“Yes. You may have gone to your bank, only to be denied your money because of one problem?”

“The computers are down!”

“You may have tried to pay your bills at the gas company, or use your credit card, or any such task only to hear those words….”

“The computers are down…” the audience was in her hands now and loving the church like call and response.

Ladies and gentlemen, the lighting designer for this show is a brilliant young man and he has made some beutiful light arrangment for you, but you won’t be seeing them tonight, because….?”

“The computers are down!”

“Exactly. However, backstage there are two women and they are not machines. Thes women are flesh and blood and bone and they are actresses and the actresses are not DOWN! The are alive and living in the this theater and the theater is NOT DOWN! We would love to have you return and see the play with it’s lighting cues, but play is UP, the actresses are UP, the Theatre is up and we will watch it with the lights UP! CURTAIN UP!”

The red velvet rose at her command as did the audience which stood at its feet and gave that woman a standing ovation and then the stage working lights went on and to reveal Aileen Atkins who was spot on as always and then to my delight Vanessa Redgrave came out and ate the stage like a chocolate covered cherry. Somehow this technical failure was like the sand in the oyster that makes a pearl. Vanessa was never the same again… It was always after that a well balanced match between Aileen and her. It was amazing.

But the real star was that little dynamo of a Rocky Racoon who’d been waiting in full stage makeup incase the stage called for her and when it did she was ready and looked like a million dollars and lit that night like a skyrocket blooming at apogee.

That’s what I think about as I see all these flowers turn winter into the sparks of spring.

Sort of looks like a map of Rhode Island, doesn’t it?

The first thing you notice on approaching Tom Otterness’ studio is the almost cicada like roar of the orange line subways (B,D,Q, etc.) screaming over the blue Manhattan bridge. You are surrounded by this periodic sound and the thrum and hum of rubber tires on the steel road of the bridge. Then you notice the graffitti on the humble red brick wall: Visualize Peace…world peace, etc) and only faintly can you see Tom’s name written with a sharpie over his bell. You however also see a huge truck being loaded with tons of bronze cutie pies (albeit cutie pies with guns and nooses). When you enter the studio itself you see a chaotic, fecund scatter of old molds and half finished castings, then you notice a bear in a helpless pose watching a huge man cry. This huge man crying was Otterness’ attempt at a memorial for the trade center, but you don’t know that, even as you feel it to be true.

You don’t meet the man himself, you meet first Moby Dick and Ahab and they lead you to a personal studio off to the side where you meet a self portrait.


There are scores of small projects being built in clay and wax dummies lay spread eagle, ready to be posed like expensive action figures. These tableau will be blown up my master sculptors, like this man and his apprentice who are working on Don Quixote piece. You feel the old worldness of the process.



He is a vision in white with white hair and some sort of white light/white heat pouring out of his eys… you think of kung fu movies and Gandalf the Wizard. He starts to talk with M.P., who is writing an essay for the catalog of his first major private showing in Paris (he has just decorated the Tuillaries, like he has now done up Broadway in NYC). He speaks pedagogically about how a sculpture is made and how much is his hand and how much the hands of his fifty plus staff. You soon realize that this a conversation by, of, and about hands… pushing hands… hands touching hands…hands touching stone and bronze. Tom Ottorness is a dedicated practitioner of the martial art, Thai Chi. He travels the world to compete at a serious level. His walls are decorated with ribbons and buddhist shrines. You then notice a well used punching bag hanging in the middle of the studio and gloves. He looks like a saint, but you realize he could take you out with one good blow… hands touching face.



It seems that he holds all the cards as he deomonstrates Thai-Chi and then warms a wax character with his flesh and breath until he can manipulate it as he speaks about power and politics and pain and terror. He has submitted the crying man as a memorial for the trade center and also for Liberty State Park in N.J. It would be like the Statue of Liberty in that you could climb it and use the head as a look out. The New York version would be eighty stories and occupy the foot prints of the original towers (and is later rejected on this basis…even after a compromise arrangement is offered, but you don’t know that yet and you are amazed at the scale and ambition of the piece… can cute be made so large? or does it become like the Staypufft Marshmallow Man in Ghostbusters…some how silly?)


He talks about the relations of power in the making of public art:

As he does this he makes two little towers with his thumb and index finger – one goes up and one goes down and he says, “In the beginnning the governemnt agency, jury, or corporate and or private donor has all the money and all the power. You are asking them for money and you are weak, but once you have the money and the process has begun and the mold is cast, then you have all the power and momentum and they are working for you. It is very much like pushing hands in Thai Chi. Now what we strive for in The Way is what the Chinese refer to as Wu-Chi. If you are familiar with the symbol of yin and yang, Wu-Chi is the moment when white and black cease to exist, but rather form an harmonius circle of gray.”

This is the Chinese idiograph,or pictograph of Wu-Chi. You notice the similarity to the Swiss cross and feel a frission shiver go up your spine. It arrives at your head and you are knocked out by the ineluctable modality… wasn’t that the thing your brother, Christian quoted your dad talking about in his Eulogy? And why does gray and grey keep coming up?

Now you are alone and it is three years later and there is the sound of doves… not pidgeons, mind you but actual doves and they sit on the old laundry line post out the rear window and woo and coo and kiss eachother. The pope is dead and you are thinking about the Chateau Neuf de Pape you drank with M.P. after the interview and of how this and all Cote du Rhone always tated of perfection to you even before you knew that the water of the Rhone had it’s origine in the Alps and carries with it Swiss Minerals and you wonder is it possible to taste the Mother land? Could one be genetically predisposed to a certain style of wine? And you think about Sideways and of how Sly keeps saying: “Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t Grand Cru Classe Bourdeaux mostly Merlot?…so what’s Giamatti’e porblem…Merlot is good.”


The birds stop cooing and start screwing and it reminds you that you are alone.



Last night I had strange dreams about trying to sell art and I am struck by how what Otterness said about power and art is very relavant for any one (Christo, Barney, Murakami, and maybe even you, or me) trying to pull off a large art project. One must play a chess game of black against white and be prepared to defend and offend and maybe in the end go gray and uniffy the opposition into your camp: Mono No Aware… the beautiful sadness of time and cherry blossoms.

All drawings and photos ITIN, all sculptures Tom Otterness.

There were thieves in the neighbors house and cops came by around three in the morning, as I was working on revolution and lit up my room with their helicopter spot lights and it all took me back to what seems just yesterday. I’m about to start the new Murakami novel and the other Murakami is also in the news and so I thought it was about time to ask if anyone else read Murakami’s New York Installation the same way I did. Ironically, it was funded by Target.







It seems kind of obvious to me that Murakami was comenting on the two bombs we dropped on Japan and making an analogy with the Twin Towers and psychedelic mushrooms. The two inflatable spheres covered in eyes look exactly like the plasma spheres that you see in the nanoseconds of the A-bomb’s detonation.

This goes back to MacNamarra and The Fog of War, but it is odd that no one freaked out and lost it. The guy is clever to dress it up in cuteness, because we all know that cute is the end of intellect. One just goes all soft when they see those little mushroom cloud deamons. The devil is probably cute and I hear that Charlie Chaplin felt that Hitler copped his mustache so he made The Great Dictator as a way of protecting his trade mark look…didn’t work of course. If a French artist had done a show with these themes in N.Y. we would have been pouring Bordeaux down the drain and eating Freedom Fries… Oh wait, some of us were.

No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the average American. They’re lining up to by Murakami’s hand bags (just cause he photoshopped some colors out of the same old shit YSL has made for a hundred years or more…bloody French Aristocracy). So it has been for Public art in N.Y., the best of times and the worst of times. Tomorrow I’ll do a portrait of Tom Otterness who also dresses difficult ideas in cute, so as to fool the censors. It’s genious, but I still love the German ability to look god, the devil, and death square in the ugly face.

But they threw a great party with food and Champaigne and Sly and Me and M.P. and Damien all got little flashy magnetic L.E.D.s that we wore for days and I stuck on a refridgerator painting off black flowers. Hiroshima Mon Amour.


And so Prometheous flies from America to Asia and brings with him a new glow.

Here is a peek at my mind in Paris…here’s four pages that I still like…most of the leather bound book is a disasterous mess (you may feel these are too). I always, however, thought they’d look good in reproduction. Having been raised around a mom and pop graphic design company (Visualconcepts inc.) I was familiar with the concept of paste up.

Now I left from New York where the sweety had just gone to Agnus B. I was facinated by the fact that the line was called Lolita and had a Mao red star. I was listening to Beatles and Johnathan Richman (as I am now). A good deal of this book is sort of drunken lists of the pros and cons of present and exgirlfriends. Who do I want? What am I now? What was I then? There’s good points and bad points, but I’ll find myself a city, find myself a city to live in.

I had one such talking head moment today. I took some cold medication after five and started reading my John Lennon bio (trash by Goldman…a true philistine, but better than t.v… maybe). I fell fast asleep like … not Rumplestiltskin…Hmmm?

Anyway, I awoke at nine thirty in pitch dark, dog next to me, but no woman and no lights and I said: “This is not my beautiful house, this is not my beautiful wife… Well how did I get here? What fucking day is this? Am I the thousand year old man? Rumplestiltskin, Rumplestiltskin….don’t say it.”

And so a lot of this book is just lyrics so I could use them in my twisted Franglish raps on why people should buy a drawing. American pop is the world language…even if they don’t speak English, they know the words.

So there is flower power and the key to Swiss Chocolate and the body and the world and Michou is a drag bar in Montmartre…like La Cage Aux Folles.

Now there are two movies my old man absolutely adored. One of these is La Cage… which he laughed till he nearly plotzed, but he saw it with my mother, so it’s hear-say. One day, however, he gathered us up in the car and said we’re going to the movies and we had no idea what he was up to. He must have read a review in the Times, or something. We go to The In Laws. I have never seen anyone laugh so hard as the old man. He literally fell out of his chair and rolled down the aisle. The whole audience broke up in sympathy. He was snorting like a pig and choking for air and the whole movie was so funny that is really never stopped. He’s lucky he didn’t die there like that Monty Python joke as weapon conceit.

He was a great audience and loved laughing. He was hard to get started, but once there, it was loud and inappropriate… no WASP he.

When he was dying one of our nurses had a relative who’d closed up a video rental business. She had thousands of videos in her garage and so she found us a tape of the In Laws. We Watched it during his last days and a lot afterwards too.

I remeberr that he laughed through the morphine and the pain. We all did and Seinfeld was a religion every day. If you didn’t wake him from his nod at seven thirty, it was hell to pay. believe me. Thanks Jerry, and Peter, and Allen you guys gave a lot of joy to a joyless situation.

Now the weird thing is that last drawing which seems to be the twin towers and they were done in ’98. In ’99 I did two e-books for Nightkitchen. They came out September 7, if I’m not mistaken. Muslims and death. Check them out here: Zoodoo and Morococo and you need the free TK3 Reader (I think the books are free too…or samples are on the main page)

This is a shot from the local Korean Laundry. In the end I came back from Paris having decided to stay with the gal I’ve been with for eleven years or so…She’s been buying suits again and I’ve been taking them to get altered. Does this mean we’re off to Paris soon? Let’s hope so… We need a vacation… together this time to get away…. Plus there’s an abmominable snowman in the market down by the peas and carrots and that is what I now say….me and dave.

“Hey, look at those cans!” says Allan Stone.


The caterer bring me pigs in a blanket with a spicy mustard dipping sauce. I drink The Veuve Cliquot which tastes of oranges and looks orange too… When finally MTV producer, Mensch, guru montain man in drag (or at least shorts) arrives and we turn to the white wine and eating tuna and filet mingnon on little cracker like things and talking about old Brown friends like Liz and Lisa and Dweezil Zappa who married Liz, or was it Lisa?… and their terrible Food show and some rock and roll folks I’m iffy on and Craig Lively who I thought was running Atlantic Records, but that turns out to be someone else and Scooter thinks that Craig of Big Heads of Plutarnis fame may have done a Syd Barrett and become a plummer and given up music…Is there anybody out there?….anyone beyond the wall know what happenend to the hardest working man in campus show business?

Scooter looks oddly like Jeebus, or maybe a pirate: ARRRGH! Or Charlie Manson?

This piece ends up reminding me of some of my dad’s work, only it has circles and triangles along with the layered grid. Allan not liking my dad’s work may have been something of decisive factor in my dad moving away from painting to embracing himself as a first rate graphic designer (and mediocre artist, ie. Salierie from Amadeous)… that and my mom selling more work than he did and she was a trained costume maker, not artist. That may have torn it. He told me once on a morphine nod: “Don’t listen to art dealers. They need you more than you need them, but it is very hard – the alchemical trick of turning smeared shit, into gold. I tried to sell work (not just my own, mind you) at IT IN space and It is a shitty job… thankless and difficult.



In this real estate madness, Scooter is buying a new apartment. In talking about this major life decision (and let’s face it kids, money is important as you could witness as you looked around the room at various billionaires and starving artists) Scooter’s persona fell away and there was Scott Alpert with worries about a Coop board and his own rage problems (the nicest people are often sitting on a lot of pain and anger… at least from my experiece). Would he jump across the room and strangle some snobby Coop board member during his interview? I thought it was good rehearsal for him to be at a hoy ploy art opening, instead of his steady diet of divebars and rock shows that is the MTV universe. He did great, but the only problem was a little Thiebaud of dogs catching frisbees in the snow. It’s totally out of left field for Thiebaud and and it costs $275,000. It’s about the size of the screen you’re reading on now (unless you are reading on a big sceen). Scott has to decide: New apartment, or dogs catching frisbees? Which one will make him happier?

Probably the dogs.

So I took the orange Pearl Bailey out for a walk and did a great improv for Clark. I may even put on some make up today and do some Willoughby. Spring is Sprung and we fly forward. Sunrise has a way of arriving at the right time, it won’t always be this way… still: All Things Must Pass.

Is it Possible that George really was the most talented Beatle? I’m beginning to see the Light.

And the sun is Oscar’s Tin drum that beat beat beats the morning from blue through orange to yellow and then cyan with white fluffy clouds…listen…

Model for an interface based on the map of dad’s Japanese moss garden

These are sketches from fair Verona where my Mom and I stayed in a hotel overlooking the arena. She was tired from dealing with the family and the funeral in Basel, so we lit out for places in Northern Italy. I suppose there are places more Freudian one could go after putting half your dad under a stone, but Verona – site of Romeo and Juliet – is about the weirdest one I can think of. But there it is, or rather there we were. She would go to sleep early and I would walk this most crumbling – ruinous – roman – poplar treed city. It was gorgeous by night and I would walk the hills with the Cathedral and the Roman theater where they do Shakespeare every summer (shows you the power of words….Willy B. never set foot in Verona, but he owns a good deal of the tourist trade). I’d go to the small cafés over the arch bridges and have a glass of Italian vino rosso and draw the local clientel. It was very off season, so it was really an Italian Idyll. I would pack up my watercolors and go back over a differnt bridge not wanting to repeat my tracks and wander through the Roman and Midevil streets. I grabbed a grappa at a bar by the river and near the hotel, where a young face-pierced man with dreams of Brooklyn where an uncle lived, would ask me,”Are you here with a woman?”

“Yes,” I told him. “My mother.”

“No I mean a real woman.”

“She’s real enough,” I told him.

“But she belongs to your father, yes?”

“My father is dead,” I told him. “We just burried half his ashes in Switzerland.”

Half?”

“It’s a long story.”

“I am sorry about your father. Mine is a pain in the …how you say? Issss?”

“Ass. So was mine, but I loved him.”

“Yes. I understand, but you should come back here with a woman . You should come back with your own woman. One you can kiss.”

“I’d like that,” I said. “I’d like that very much.”

“Yes. It is a romantic town for kissing. You know Romeo and Juliet?”

“Not personally, but I’ve seen the play.”

“It is sad, yes? And beautiful. Like Italian girls… Me, I like American girls.”

And he went on about what he liked about the American tourists he picked up and how it was the only perk of living in a backwater town like Verona. New York… that was a place he could become rich.




“And Verily I say: unless a seed be cast into the dirt and die, it abideth alone, but if it should die; it bringeth forth much fruit,” says The Bible and Doestoyevsky in Brothers Karamozov. Now what is odd to me is that this Argo corn starch (my people call it maize) looks for all intents and purposes like a vision of Jeebus Christ. This Land O Lakes Pochehantus (pretty as a poplar, lovely as a haw haw in may) looks like the Buddha of Butter. Advertising has some weird Semiotics, does it not? Eat god in deed.

At times it seems a conspiracy of duncess. Though my cold is feeling much better (thank you Nyquill), the fact that they are playing Plague war games in New Jersey and I woke up to find Visconti’s Death in Venice on, is a Paranoid’s wet dream of death.

But this is a love story. It is specifically a love story abou† one couples love of their land and of gardening.

Now, When I was young and happy as the days were long and time held me green and dying all about the leaves of Fern Hill and I sung in my Chains for the wine and the women and the singing in itself, my newest sweetie come up the coast as if by fast attack submarine from Pittsburgh and she’d roll into New York Harbor and the honor guard would greet her at the gang plank and announce with whistle call: “Pittburgh coming ashore!”

She had her luggage and her loveliness and the cutest bobbed haircut I’d seen since the roaring twenties – a smile and a smell that could melt ice at a hundred paces.

My parents went off to Italy, I think and so we went to watch the house and make fires in the wood stove and make love in my rooms of memory. My father drew us an elaborate map of his new domain. This map I realize now was the story of our Lives. It was a sort of family history written in water and earth and moss and ferns and skunk cabbage and trees and when we strolled out there we found a small fawn… not the magical being André Gregory’s talks about over dinner, but an actual fawn, like Bambi, with white spots.

What makes a painter quit painting and take up gardening? It is a mean trick to make gold from mud smeared on a wall, or canvas, but perhaps it is a meaner trick to play with God’s materials as if they were a paint box. To deploy nature through the mind of man. Certainly the Japanese have achieved this and so have some Americans – Propect park comes to mind and so do some of Noguchi’s rock gardens, but he sort of has the best of both worlds.

This map and model seems a good place to reflect on the interface for omEGG. The old man (now of the sea) seems to have been telling me that all things can be deployed as words, or signs. He sort of taught me a good pedgogical lesson about art and life. It may be the best lecture I’ve ever attended, problem is, it’s a lecture you can only deliver once.

Evolution Map, ITIN ’01

Mathew Barney at his Guggenheim Retro, shot ’03 and renderd ’05 ITIN

Barney the dinosaur seems to dance with his hands as he chants, or speaks. In omEGG I have him stand in for M. Tristan (anyone bald will do, though the ideal casting is Max Von Sydow). He is talking a stream of art talk and I suppose he’s pretty good at it, but I can’t generally bear that sort of pseudo intellectual drivel, so I put Brian Ferry singing Dylan’s Hard Rain and the earnestness and passion expressed by Barney’s gestures really does the song justice. Then Just to be cute I fade out Roxy and put Bjørk doing Venus As A Boy. It’s kind of cheeky, but truly, it doesn’t make me gay to notice that the kid is cute and he obviously believes in beauty… so I guess he is Venus as a boy, or Godzilla as a boy, or the devil as an old man…I’m sypothetic to the devil.

What is the mantra around here? It all depends on how YOU look at it.

Anyway he is a liberating influence in that his practice is seamless between art object and film. I really enjoyed his retro after meeting him and the idea of making the Guggenheim into a sports arena is only funnier now that we may get a Frank Gehry stadium in B.K.

Still he should have invited me and Scooter and M.P. to rollerskate the ramp… but I forgive him.

Let’s all sing I’m A Little Dinsaur on a heart shaped guitar:

I Saw Her Face, Now I’m A Believer, for Neil Monkey Diamond and Sly, ITIN ’05

I went through restless rain to visit Lawrence Quigley who had a baby about a year ago, or so which means I haven’t seen him in about a year ago or so. In our younger days we did a whole lot of drawing together in various spots around the city. He’s a RISD grad and can draw like a whip. It is always fun to see old friends because they bring up old stories you might have forgotten. If your old friend is a painter then they might bring out old drawings and paintings you’d forgotten having made. Our studio visit was a bit like that. You can see the dunce we did together at Max Whalen’s old studio that is now Superfine in Dumbo. Oh we have all gone through great rooms together.

I also love his wife, Julie’s collection of bakelite handled martini shakers and Lawrence’s collection of Pimp and Ho mug shots. After a period of interruption (Web designing, buying rehabilitated urban housing, and birthing beautiful baby girl) Lawrence has his studio up and running again. He’s seemed happy and productive. We drank an increadible 18yr old Scotch (purely for medicinal purposes you understand…. the rain and the frog in my throat, etc).

We went to first Saturday at BMA, but Basquiat was too crowded, so we went to look at the Degas and Picassos and Monets. Walking home, I got picked up by a wind in Grand Army Plaza. It caught my new umbrella and twirled it and me around and I slid on the slippery street and landed in a puddle. It was slapstick funny.

When I got home I told my sweetie all about my cocktails with Lawrence and Julie (and André?)

Computer Jockey, trade off portraits, Quigley/ITIN ’05

Beuys To Men, Cartoon Collaboration, Quigley/ITIN ’05

Bloomsday, ITIN ’05

Sketches of Spain, Helen ITIN ’05

I guess with all the intense religiosity going on in the news with the dead Pope, my mom’s pics from Spain seem especially moving. I kept saying, “Jesus Christ” as I down loaded them and then thought, “Well that was probably the intention of the artist… weather it be a crucial fiction or a psychedelic mirror in the bathroom wall, or a flower puppy: Jesus Christ!

Nice job mom! It is so greath how digital imaging has really allowed all sorts of people, even retirees with little computer background, to explore their eyes and take risks with the camera. I keep thinking that the freedom to erase your fuck ups is real license to experiment. If only life had the same little button. I also think about how much money I used to spend on silver technology. You have to admit its getting better… a little better all the time.

I love Paul Simons Mother and Child Reunion song even more sice I heard the story of how he wrote it. He as having lunch down in Chinatown and there was a dish on the menu that was chicken cooked in egg. It was called of course: Mother and Child Reunion. It sort of changes the whole flavor of the song into something rich and strange. I am the egg man cock a doodle doo be do be do!

Jeff Koons’ Flower Puppy at Bilboa Guggenheim