Woke up fron another strange dream: the better half’s sister had dragged us out to L.A. to attend some “church” meeting… We were deeply afraid it was a cult, but when my sweety saw all the cute young men and women administering strange, magic bone massages (using an x-ray ring that went right through the flesh and carressed the calcium) she seeemed to lose her anti-cult resolve to tantric longings.

The brawny-paper-towel-man-looking-surfer-dude-messiah gave me the name “Zeustra”.

I said, “Do you mean Zarathustra, or Zeus, or Zeustra?”

“What’s the difference?” he asked.

“One is Nietzche’s mountain profit and one is a Greek god, and the other is some stupid bastardization of the other two.”

“Oh,” he said. “We’ve got a smart one here. You think intelligence is important?”

I said, “It can come in handy sometimes.”

I had to get these girls out of here, was all I was thinking, or soon they’d be concubines of Mr. Brawny, or worse.

It was an odd dream and so I woke up early and was reflecting on the weekend, during which me and the better half got on pretty splendidly. We only had one fight and this was on the last day (yesterday… love was such a tricky game to play) when both of us were trying to get used to the fact that this is the last day we get to be in the blissful spring Idyll…. We have never been good at farewells to all that… so we tend to fight at the anxiety of loss… we tend to do it with our family too…. I went for a long walk in the park yesterday (see below for some photos) and watched the theater of the boat house (where Woody shot a very funny scene in Bullets Over Broadway) and tried to chill out, but in the end I kept coming back to how she’d made fun of my blog and my belly… these are the two things I work hardest on! I sort of am enamored of my middle age pot belly (I was more or less anorexic in my teens and it was no fun and I was a moody bastard)…. but I also saw what she was saying, even if she said it in a less than kind manner (and that, my gentle reader, is putting it nicely) so today’s experiment involves wokring on the Super 8 Daze script, and making some large pictures on Arches paper and the rice paper we bought in Korea town… it is beautiful stuff …. one for floor, one for wall… one for text and one for all and one for WIlloughby and Clark eating (read me) and one a hot Asian chick (figure that out for yourself dear reader) for the large marblized fram I found with Donna Cameron while the cherry blossoms were drifting in spring streets.

Don’t fret too much, I’m not giving up on the blog, but using it to document the chages of each picture and if I have time and the sun holds, I’m going to go walk under the Veranzano Bridge.

The point is this, I woke up and dragged all the the big stuff out… move the ink and paint… move the body… change my mind, as Elvis put it.

Phase two:


So one of the nice things about living with my better half is the influence of Korean calligraphy. Her Grandfather was a schollar and this means he was also a painter in some respect (so different than the West). He had to practice the messy art of calligraphy and he knew characters to the distance that the Sweety’s mother’s teachers couldn’t recognize the character for her mother’s name. Hi calligraphy was used by the mazons carving funeral stones for the local cemetary. The few examples that made it to America, mostly sat rolled, or folded up in drawers and so it was so great to get this stuff framed and live with it… it tends to humble me at my every turn. The energy and thought that he got inot a gesture kills me… and we probably don’t have anything like his best work.




So then I went out to explore the calligraphy of the street and see what the man with the door has done for Memorial Day: he added impasto….


My other project is to scan some David Conrad pictures onto some vellum paper as part of the Little Gnostic Witch project and make him the love interest for our little broom rider with a cervix… (I owe him… trust me)…






.

It was a day for long walks and sunbathing in the park and reading and kites and thinking about war.

I awoke this morning from some impossible cinematic dream. I was living in Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather Trilogy and some how I could sort of leap from one time frame to the next and this was contingent on trying to understand the narrative structure of the original novel and descerning how prose fiction structure is differnet (and more elastic in time and space) than the structure of cinema fiction. The key stone in the ablitity to arc around from DeNiro to Pacino to Branndo seemed to be about the difference of codex and scroll (a film being a large picture scroll up there in the dark black mystery of the projection booth)… There was this and my better half dragging me to Canada for some marathon road trip and all I wanted to do was go see the Max Ernst show at the Met.

“Can’t you just let me off at the Met,” I pleaded.

“No, we’re going to Canada and we only have 24 hours till Tuesday, when I have to be back. Climb in,” she said reving our Prius… (can you even rev a Prius?)

“But why? We’ll only be there for two hours and then have to turn around,” I pleaded and I never got a good answer: Shopping? Escaping a war? An endourance stunt? Trying to hear French?

I suppose a Coppola dream scape is the perfect dream day synthesis of the two films I saw yesterday: Revenge of the Sith at Zigfield and The Aviator on DVD. They are both, in some way, the bastard children of The Godfather. Certainly, the films abound with intertextuality and enjoying all those quotation marks, may be the only way to really enjoy either of them. But first the theater (as it is so rare for me to even go to a movie theater any more… so if you do, why not the Ziggy?):












It is fairly impossible to read this last Star Wars episode without thinking about our post 911 world… The landscapes read as some Future Manhattan and the Senate as some Future U.N… I kept wondering what they had to pay in rent for those double sunset views. It also begs the question, Is George Bush a Sith Lord? Where are the T-shirts to this effect? I’m going to try and make a photoshop image for the fun of it.

Scorsese’s Aviator also seems to explore the “dark side” of American genius and innovation. Under all the speed and sex and Hollywood tinsle, there is germs, and sickness, and obsessive craziness. It being Memorial Day, just reminds me that sometimes innocent kids get sent off to kill and be killed for a whole lot of speed and sex and germs and obsessive craziness… or some leaders are just evil… you decide.






On another level, it is fun to think about Disney and how both of these films, are more or less painting brought to life… I mean they are so many scenes shot on virtual stages with digi-backgrounds and synthetic flying machines and virtual actors. They are neither animations nor live action, they are a sythesis, like Willoughby, only much much much more expensive. It is an interesting world full of strange, germ carrying rodents… Mickey mouse and Darth Squirrel… Oh well, have a nice Memorial day and think about those who died (whatever you think of why).

What is history? What do we think about during this WWI based holiday? First I recommend you read Hemmingway’s In Our Time and then I suggest you ponder the notion of lost generations, cause we’re sort of sitting on a potential one…


… I took the road less traveled, and that has made all the difference…

Now I am a student of military history, as much as I can be… and partly because I felt my Liberal, Brown, Ivy League education sorley lacked the basics of what has really gone down in the world… and it is nearly memorial day and I do respect and honor the men and women who have fought and died for this great experiment in governmet, but I would like to take this day before memorial day to honor those who didn’t go… the peacenicks, hippies, quacker oats, real Christians, Mohammud Ali, Kent Staters, and whoever else…. Today should be your day… You are also great patriots and we need your kind now. Which is not to put shit on our boys… it is to tell them what they are fighting for and to tell them that sometimes you must ask the question: “What if they held a war and no one came?”






This guy’s 5th avenue door has showed up several times on my blog… and like a jerk, I never noticed this metal thing on the sidewalk… I saw the swastika and started to shoot it and then noticed the color paint and thought, “Shit man, that’s the same color as the lune with the door and I turned around and saw the famous door…” This is the thing I love about 5th Ave. as it is now… I see something new and show you it every day… Will they turn it into Disney land? Can someone do that, in good concience, to Brooklyn?




I don’t know, but I’ve been walking around my neighborhood and noticing that it seems mixed race central… it is what your Southern Big Daddy warned you about… not so much Tennessee Williams Mendacity, as Uncle Hitler’s Miscegenation… God bless it, you never saw so many beautiful kids with the culture/DNA to go forward towards GRAY…. but still, could you belive the beauty and the beast motiff of East meets West?

Well Indy 500 is coming up with a chick driver so hot in all respects, that it is beating the dull and terribly American stock NASCAR scene. If you are going to race cars people, race hot good looking cars… with hot good looking drivers… male or female… Think Paul Newaman, etc. Some day baby we’re going to leave this town, so strap your hands cross my engines, etc… I like this Austin Healey cause as a kid, I had a Chorgi toy of the Bond car given me by my God mum, who also put me on Concorde… Speed and family and God.





Tramps like us, baby, we have decided to run…

My beat is the waterfront… more specifically, I woke up thinking and blogging on the future of B.K. shoreline. It’s all changing in the biggest little Boro since Montmartre. When Major Tom called, I suggested we walk the river up to the heights and see it all. The cameras were out, with their sattelite trucks, but I just had my trusty Nikon and I was there to cover the waterfront, not whatever trial is on…


Now I like this reporter’s self contained set up… She get’s all dolled up and sets up her camera and then she talks to her camera and its all very auto erotic…. she is a self contained broad… cast.

Believe it or not, this sort of goes to the nature of how B.K. will grow. Will it be the uber waterfront parks, the Ratner stadium strips, or…


…will it be left to smaller, more localized efforts and entreprenneurs? As an example of what the little guy is up against here, let’s go back to the subway, before I got to dumbo: Dee Dee Donuts has been on the corner of 9th and 5th Ave. for years. Suddenly a month ago Dunkin Donuts surrounded it… talk about preassure business tactics… Dee EE Donu s doesn’t have a chance… though I hear some people are being loyal: 8 to 10 Dunkin makes better dounuts and coffee too… the owner of Dee Dee is quoted in the times as saying, “Well they’ve got clean new tables and chairs where people can sit in there and people will pay for that…” They will too….obviously.

I’ve been working, or hanging out in Dumbo since the early nineties, I suppose. It’s always been a scrappy/dirty place with great views and a fun vibe, but in the past few years, you’ve seen a lot of cheap lofts turn into million dollar condos. It’s changing at light speed….I always knew it would. No place has such amazing views of the two sweetest bridges in the world (at least as a team they are… we can argue Golden Gate and there’s always Paris… oh don’t get me started on Paris, even if that is what N.Y. is becoming: a beautiful antique, to precious to be handled by the working classes, let alone the poor).




When lilacs last in the bridge yard bloomed, the bridge itself became a camera obscura, or at the very least an astrological clock. I noticed at my feet a perfect japanese flag circle of light and when I looked up for the reverse shot, I could see the smallest hole in the deckof the Manhattan bridge. “How Cool,” I thought. “Someone should lay out some photosensitive paper and make some art.”




And I single yellow glove bobbed out in the water like the hand of the lady in the lake… sweet Sir Gallahad went down to the river and he gave you tea and oranges that came all the way from Chinatown… etc. But it did point to the playgrouds, in their Semi-Vitto Aconcci boat motiff… There’s kids living down here now, where there was only artists, and drug dealers,and small manufacturing.



In the end, it all comes down to the beautiful bank and sweet money and Major Tom and I tried to put it into our domes that cap our heads, that you have to be rich to stick around here and we sat under the dome scheming and hoping , like every generation that came before us.

Tom’s got his band, The Royal Wylds (which just realeased this c.d. with cover art by Steven Lewis, who plays guitar and writes in the band and some of you may remeber his enormous political oils from IT IN space in SoHo) and me I got all you’ve seen and read and then some…but dreams are like a dozen donuts all empty in the middle without you, dear reader… so tell your friends and spread the word about the blog… we need what makes the donuts and the world go round….

I spend a long time bemoaning some mythical past of New York City… well actually, it’s not that mythical, it’s my past. I miss SoHo back in it’s hey day, when people were serious about art and living where they showed and Fanelli’s was always right around the corner. You’d meet people and go see their studios and drink wine, and they’d photograph you in your painted shoes, if you wore painted shoes and hat… and I did… These things happen to some extent in Dumbo and WillyB, but the real power is in Chelsea and nothing ever happens there, but snubs and shitty attitude. I miss the hookers lined up down Madison Avenue in furs and hot pants looking for coke and money for more coke and disco… I miss the funky galleries that mattered… Castelli’s was pretty funky compared to the Spa-like atmosphere of todays kunst palaces…. Ivan Karp’s Ok Harris was funky and smokey… it still is smokey, but suspiciously clean… Allan Stone was a chaotic view inside one man’s brilliant, compulsive, manic collecting mind…. it was beyond funky and an argument for gallery as art object…. now it looks more or less like Tiffany’s… which is nice, but somehow the art suffers for the artist… I’m well aware that people who buy art, can’t generally see it, unless it is in a frame on a clean wall… you can sell anything in a frame on a clean wall… for artists it is different… spotting the gold in the mud… the diamond in shit… digging through the chaos for order…that is the general job description and I liked how the old New York worked like that… in Galleries, in nightlife, in culture, in relationships… whatever.

That said, It is a sort of facinating time to live in New York now. All eyes are on us… architecture wise… there is a moment (God, I hate to agree of with Trump on anything, but please spare us that Childress mess of a sky wire, Hollywood flat front empty, tall gesture of nothing he calls architecture… Give me back my sky line Zip duality! Let’s do the Think project at least). One of the terrible things about 911 from an urban point of view, is that they’d just got that waterfront area about finished and it was starting to feel like a world class bit of urban planning and the towers on their super block worked! They were the two poles of a giant magnate (you couldn’t see the burried arch connecting them, but it more or less existed underground) that drew downtown together. It’s going to be another fucking decade before they get all the feng shui right again, if they ever do…. too many comittees… and please, more or less leave the victims families out of it. Let them mourn at home, like the rest of us who are mourning something. I don’t want to be insensitive, but good intentions nearly lost us the Vietnam memorial (I still hat that fucking bronze bad rip off of Rodin with fatigues on)…. and gave us the God Awful WWII memorial… So just nicely push them asside, because a city lives on it’s future and if we can build on the African graveyard, we can build on this too. Period. Stop.

So it’s not ony Manhattan. Yesterday at Coney (in deed plans abound for all of Brooklyn’s waterfront) they were announcing the prize winners for a new developement around the parachute drop from the ’39 worlds fair… we call it the B.K. Eiffel Tower. They made this poor kid wear a plastic sign around his neck that said, “Winner”… it gave him the look of the exact opposite…. he should have been at the “Shoot the Freak” booth wearing a cone, if you know what I mean.

I think the old lady needs a face lift. Many are bemoaning the cleaning up of a place that since the sixties, or seventies (when I started going for some bizarre reason with my mom and brothers…it was pretty seedy in the seventies and I could never figure out what my otherwise timid mother was thinking) part of its charm has been its very decrepitude… the decaying jet coaster (now gone) with a house under it (Annie Hall) and overgrown with REM Georgia Kudzu of something…. wild dogs and drunk Vietnam Vet squatting there with a lawn chair and forty ounce of Bud… It was like Providence used to be: one big movie set, waiting for the actors and crew and cameras and a story…. you and your head were the story… a coney island of the mind, in deed.

Being a fan of modernism, I always had a weak spot for the roof line and material use on this sports facility building. I have no idea when it was built, but it always stood out as a fairly good architectural moment in place full of disasters ever since Luna Park burnt down… all the International style, Stalinist brick shit towers they built there are the single worst example of fucking up Waterfront views in the history of New York… no the world!

It seems that most of the new rest rooms, first aid stations (with their perfect Swiss crosses) and showers, etc. take their cues from the roof of this building (which is in shit shape, by the way) they all have that aluminum, or whatever metal roof…If anyone knows some history on this building please leave comments… it’s always stuck out on the boardwalk as a modern moment…

I have a feeling the new Coney will be a fine example of urban plannning and architectural seriousness… but we’ll all miss the crazy chaos we grew up with… the freak shows… the toughs…For everything you gain, you loose. I recommend you summer in Coney this year… it will all be changing at the end of the season … it will be cleaned up and sanitized and we’ll only have ghosts of our summers and rain-wet winters to haunt us… and go on huanting us:


This should probably bring us to Bloomberg and the West Side Stadium and his ego and his bid for the Olympics (which he has now glued to the side of the subways which kills me), but it was raining and I wanted to get home… besides Bloomberg is the first mayor in a while who really understands the importance of art and artists and culture in general to a city…so I don’t feel like beating up on him… He’s allowing the Un-Parade next Wednesday downtown… so he gets a pass. There’s a boat that’s leaving soon for New York… come aboard, that’s where we belong, Sister!

It’s Miles’ birthday, so I’m going through the catalog and listening to everything and since we’ve been talking about opera and minstral shows and Porgy and Bess too… I chose this cover. It was very controversial at the time of its release, because the chick reads as white and she’s grabbing at his horn and he looks like the black of night as always… they didn’t call him the prince of darkness for nothing. You can imagine him loving to put the race spin on a thing like Porgy, while still loving the music and Gil’s arrangements. It puts me in mind of how European T.V. is probably showing all sorts of Miles footage and celebrating his genius and I can’t even find him of BET Jazz… so I am afraid of Americans, or anyone else who has no regard for their history. These paintings are some Coney Island studies I’ve been working on for a while.

But let’s start at the beginning, when I headed down to the subway on 9th Avenue and suddenly a huge plane came up over the arch bridge… flying way too low and all the folks next to me on 4th Ave gasped and cursed and then you saw the persuing fighter jets and thought… “Oh Shit! It’s happening again! It took us all a second to see their fabulous formation and realize; “Oh crap it’s US, not THEM, whatever that means.” Suddenly I was surrounded and part of B.K. U.N. stamp: tall black man, short hispanic guy, chubby white boy me and the passing Asian student. We reassured ourselves it must be some one, or some THING very important on that plane. Later I read the Metro paper and realized it was all for show… Fleet’s in… hide the booze and lock up your daughters the boys in white are going on the town… me? I was heading for Coney to do Willoughby by the sea.



When I got to Coney the were there too reforming the formation out at sea (it is extremely hard for and f-16 to fly as slowly as this lumbering sub spotter… I am afraid of Americans, but the bastards sure can fly airplanes.

There is something really surreal about squadrons of jets flying tight formation over a crumbling beauty of a rain-wet theme park (acually there was some architecture news going on at the boardwalk, but I’ll discuss the future plans for this place of great past tomorrow… what a sentance). You can see the white dots are the F-16s showing their white tops in the sun, but they look like U.F.O.s and the whole thing sort of reminded me of Hour Of The Wolf by Bergman, which I saw at Harvard a million years ago and haven’t seen since (it did recently come out on Criterion, but before that, it was hard to find).


You arrive at Coney by following a Dante-like path past a necropolis and horrible Moses-like developements… with the 911 flashback, it had me thinking of the karmic wheel and eternal return… metumpsychosis… or whatever Joyce calls it…

It was the better half’s brother’s birthday yesterday and It is Miles Davis’ today… In honor of a winter rain trip out to Coney I took with Uncle Stevie Doctor (that’s what the cutest Buddhist calls him, to distiguish from the other Uncle Steve on his dad’s side who ain’t a doctor, get it? ) many moons ago… and it was nice because at that point I’d been dating his sister for some eight or nine years and still not met her parents… I couldn’t decide if it was because they were Korean, I was white, or perhaps they were space aliens in government lock up in Roswell just outside of Pittsburgh… I’m still not sure, but it was nice to take a lonely walk in the Winter time of a summer location and be sort of like family (that word keeps coming up, huh?)

So till I get back, here is a drawing of Paul Giamatti in a hot tub I did while watching Sideways. The sisters bought the birthday boy a wine fridge to store all the fancy Austalian hooch he bought while supposedly studying medicine in Adelaide… no sense letting all those “studies” turn to plonck no is there?

I’m having some weird bugs in Mozilla browser… so anyone effected, I aplogize… seems to work fine in Safari and Explorer, if you have the right Quicktime plug ins.

The Museum seems a sort of stage… an arch under which to sing… and all the little objects are cast (particularly if bronze) in some opera at which the rainbow ends. Is it Louis and Ella singing Porgy and Bess? Or Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer?







Well I was still feeling haunted by Rodin, so I thought I’d go visit BAM and see their collection of studies and Maquettes for The Burgers of Callais. It’s great to see the little placement study and then the great big head studies. I also went to see JMB again. I liked the show even better the second time without all the hype and expectation I had before… today I could just enjoy the paintings while listening to Jazz and P.E. John Macenroe owns a pretty great late Basquiat and my favorite is owned by Peter Brandt in Greenwich, CT of all places… the large Charlie Parker record of my most favorite song of his: Now’s The Time. Then I went to Brooklyn Library to see if they had a copy of Family Story (they don’t) and then I got rained on.

In Unrelated News, Rick Rubin is producing a new Neil Diamond album… That could work. Jazz Singer in deed… Al Jolson Mammy… Al freakin’ Jolson.

Call me crazy, but both of these images sort of remind me of Orson Welles… maybe it’s because Wednesday is Sun King day on TCM (The Stranger at 8 and then some weird stuff). It was an interesting evening at the Metropolitan last night… a sort of occaisonal family reunion I get to have with the long lost wing of my family from my mother’s side. Tony Oursler, the video artist, and I share a great grandfather… infact he is named after him: Fluton Oursler. He was a very successful writer in his day and is now remembered for only one book, however, that book is called The Greatest Story Ever Told. So, I suppose if only one story is going to be remembered Kekorian (see pillowman), it should be the greatest one… only his is not about a green pig, but rather Jesus Christ Superstar.

Here is a poor quality image from Tony’s studio installation at the Met. It is either a picture of a green pig, or God… Who can tell? The guards were on my digiass and so I can only smuggle a few images to you… I suppose I could kull some of the web, but I’m sort of enamored of the hand made quality of the blog up till now… besides, they didn’t care at all if I shot the classical sculpture… I’ve never much gotten into classical painting… always seemed like a bag of liars tricks (F is for fake)… However, sculpture is another ball of lost wax entirely. A well made bronze or marble is a sight to behold. I suppose the guy who really snapped my mind on this point is Auguste Rodin and his great Gates of Hell and The Burgers of Calais, and Later his Balzac. Rodin sort of stands at some pivot point betweenn that greek Orson and That Tony Oursler Orson (of course Orson is big enough to stradle the classical and the modern… one reason among many to love him). But enough about Orson, more about Rodin:




I first really got Rodin in Paris at his perfect little museum. As I understand it, Tony did this show as a residency at the Pompideu (or Beauxborg as most French seem to call it). I wonder if he really got to live in Paris for six months, the lucky bastard. In one of the weird coincidances, Paris is the theme on TCM this morning leading up to Orson. Tony’s dad was amazed that Tony had invited me (I’d gotten an e-mail at 2:30 in the morning). “That Tony would do that,” his dad said. “Is what I call magic!”

He then proceeded to introduce me to the rest of the family (some of whom I have never met… I only met Tony about ten years ago at his first or second show at Metro Pictures back when SoHo existed)… He introduced me as the guy who gave the best wedding toast ever! Turns out we disagree on politics, but agree on Orson Welles, so I gave him the little drawing from Immortal Story entry because I love this guy’s eyebrows and Orson has similar eyebrows in the drawing and Immortal Story seems to echo the title Greatest Story… so that’s what I call magic. Here’s father and son photo (blog theme redux):


To read up on the nature of why I never met that wing of the family till Tony started rebuilding, or maybe just building the name Oursler in his own right, William Oursler wrote a pretty good book about the battle over the family fortune that more or less squandered it: Family Story, Oursler, W., (1963), New York: Funk & Wagnalls Co. (I’m sure it’s out of print, but maybe in the Library) This is the second book I read after Bucky’s Critical Path following my Brown breakdown. It seems some kind of cautionary tale… you know, you write a story about Jesus and end up causing your family misery as it battles over the scraps… Money changers in the Temple, in deed… Sad really, but very happy that all that is more or less the problem of an earlier generation and ours is to look to the good and heal old wounds… Jesus, I sound like Dr. Phil, or something. But family stories are strange beasts and I was delighted and freaked to realize that The whole wing of my mother’s family is sort of Witchy and obsessed with connections and accidents. For instance, the drawing I gave Tony was of a coiled snake with the motto: Don’t Tread On Me. It was the last page in my sketch book that I’d drawn only that morning as a response to the SLA snake. There in his installation is a flag of a snake bisecting the globe (the image of circle and line from Heroes, my Paris novel) with the motto: Don’t Tread On Me. Weird. So Father and son got their little ITINs and I got to drink Vangogh Gin (did Vincent ever drink gin?… I doubt it…Absinthe for him… but a very pretty bottle and Vincent once winked at me as a bronze statue in a Cemetary in Arles, or Les Beaux, or something when I was three and had just been finally baptized in Basel). Speaking of Witchy: I guess Tony’s gig was to hang out in his Paris studio and have people visit him… like David Bowie and Sonic Youth and his family and all… in the manner of (I forget… wait for research). I could swear this is Mick Fleetwood…and if so he was there, but it could be someone else {everyone there looked like some one else: Paul H.O. looked like George Condo, Some guy looked like Robert Altman, etc.).









Eventually they cut the head off the party and we all got to wander through the lonely ancient greeks. There is really something grand about being alone at night in those great rooms… with nothing but the sound of your own foot steps on marble surrounded by marble. Here’s a tender little moment as Tony guides his father past ancient faces… I looped one step series and then played with it. It was the nice gesture of Tony’s hand on his dad’s back that caught my eye.

The city seemed on fire as I crossed back over the river towards home: