Spent the day stretching canvases and hiking abround the Navy Yard. Started working on three canvases: striped, Swiss cross, and the the two monoprinted together. These are just starting points. I like to begin at minimal abstraction… where my dad left off… and just see what is supposed to (or accidentally) happens after that. I’ll try and follow the progress of them over the coming months, etc.











Walking through Williamsburgh is a bit like falling into a Chagall painting. You Feel like you are in some mythical, Jewish world. If this wasn’t enought of a tear in the fabric of space/time continuum, walking by Brooklyn Navy Yard makes you feel like you have fallen into the ’40s. It’s all rather decrepid now, but I still marvel at the shear scale of American Industrial might at that time. You can’t help but imagine all those battleships and merchant Marine Victory Ships sliding down into the east river with a Champagne splash.




You can still see one of the earliest radars in America. It is two toweres with some wires spanned between them. If I recall correctly, it was a gift from the British to protect the ship building yard and also to play around with and get a grip on the technology. The British had tons of these towers along their coast.
This one just sits above the New Hollywood…Steiner Studios. Looks a bit like the Paramount Lot and only adds to the fourties nostalgia.

A lot of the flowers I’ve photographed for this blog have been pressed and turned into drawings. Here’s a few examples for you to enjoy:

When I’d dug out all my old oil paints and brushes from storage, I beat it over to the studio and back in time for the late sunset to pour out over brooklyyn and onto a several yards of cotton duck someone was throwing out…. like mana from heaven. We cooked up two gorgeous t-bones with a nice Burgundy and a Takaji for dessert… fealt like a king and fell asleep to the Hitchhiker’s guide.

I awoke from a strange schizoid dream… something about going to russia and having two studios and being confused about where I should go to do my work. I guess it is free floating anxiety about the new B.burgh studio… I always get a little stressed by changes and changing space is a sort of big deal to the psychology of one’s work. It sounds sort of goofy, but you can hear plenty of artists go on and on about the sanctity of SPACE. I’m certainly not alone in finding that the studio you work in tends to have a profound inffluence on the work you create. So, I hope it will be a good fit…I toured the open studios they had on saturday and there seemed to be some okay people working there.










It was a weekend for errands and stoop sales and strawberry margaritas and the nieghbor’s house warming. He is an architect and she is a jewelry designer and they have gutted the interior and started from scratch. It is kind of interesting to see modernity growing in this turn of the century Park Slope white stone. They served a tasty cava that I drank with bubbly glee. I had a nice mellow wine hangover for the stoop sale the next morning. We mangaged to sell off all the furniture I’d bought over the years (which has all been replaced by pricier/nicer things by my other half). I managed to pick up a tape set of the original BBC Hitchikers Guide from my neighbor. I hadn’t remembered that The Guide is an electronic book, till I heard Douglas Adams’ old audio spot for Voyager books on the IFblog.






The corks were flying and one of them got away from me and I nailed the better half in the back (the only good thing was that it’s probably better to nail someone you know and love than accidentally wind a stranger).

Walking down from the met, I had the scheme to hit MOMA on a friday and not pay $20, but the better half got off work early and as I was already suffering art ache and overload (why is it that you can walk five miles and it feels great and standing around a museum makes your whole body ache?). So I beat it down to her office and stubled on to a glowing light buidling in the distance. I took the first snap, before I realized it’s the new rear end of MOMA (she had a little work). It really is a nice building…Everything changes everything passes. I keep thinking of Kundera asking in German “Must it be? It must be.”

Always nice to end a run on one of Keiffer’s dreary, beautiful, oh so German fields. Speaking of Germans, I finally got to see Max Ernst at the Met… and well….dada beats surrealism most every time… I was a little diappointed that I didn’t like more of the show. I did like the grottage paintings and some of his constructed works… and I liked how he innovated with technique, but most of the work just felt oh so fussy to me… very up tight and anal prewar German, if you know what I mean (though I love German expressionism…). It took Pollock and Co. to bust these techniques out of the service of classical picture plane illusionism. So I wandered up to the roof and was pleasantly surpriesed by Sol Lewitt’s work (something that doesn’t happen often, I can assure you). The stuff is just made for the roof garden and plays nicely with the sky line and will be photographed ad naseum for this, like the Christo Gates. Context is everything with that generation and well this context works. I also got to revist Tony Oursler’s stuff and without the crowd, I could hear the performance on Climax…. reminds me a little too much of Willoughby stuff, but I can’t change it now. Folks were sitting down in the galleries and spending a lot of time with the pieces… so that’s a pretty high complement in an era of short attention spans (course they are watching t.v… so I guess they’re just used to sitting down and watching t.v…. even in the MET!).




Nice to see Guston and D.K. hanging together (continuing the debate between Allan Stone and David McKee abut weather Guston can hold up next to a deKooning). You sort of realize that D.K. has the best technique around and that Guston’s paint was getting muddy right before he went back to the figure… still if you play with the contrast, he has a hell of a line compositional sense and you see a wine bottle in the left corner and is the whole thing built from chairs like a Kline?


At the end of the day, however, the truth is that Alberto Giacometti can do more witha ball point pen than most people can do with marble, bronze, oil, video, architecture….and whatever else. This one is Diego and is from Pierre Matisse’s private collection.

Continuing from where we left off yesterday: We had to taken the wounded Zorg in to Bay Ridge for repairs and so far were laughing, but on the way out the clouds rolled in and we parted in anger. I decided to walk home and photo safari Chinatown and the waterfront from where I’d left off after the Verranszano Bridge. {As I lunched on noodles, Sundance had an interesting documentary called Within A Play about touring Hamlet in Taiwan which sort of resonates with Chinatown and Bloomsday}:



I like how the 9 9 cent store is yin yin because it is missing it’s 6, or yang. It seemed delightfully logical and funny and sort of out of balance.








Chinatown comes to an end like the chapter of a book (maybe Lotus Eaters) and you come to a sort of dead end of train yard and industrial buildings and Sunset Park and then Greenwood Cemetary. These block off 5th thrue 8th avenues and so I beat it down the ridge towards the shore along 2nd Ave.




















Irony abounds on the waterfront. I’d never realized we had a brand spanking Federal Pen right behind costco and then a little Muslim Chicken Gitmo around the corner… the brothers do love chicken, right… or is it freedom?

As if to mock the inmates at the Pen, there is a door factory right across the street. All they do, is stare at the door, waiting for it to open… waiting to fly away, but they are now wingless birds… stool pidgeons… Halal poultry… American Eagles… symbols stripped of all power by corruption and lies… and right around the corner an ever exapanding universe of pornography.

Then we were woken up at seven in the morning by the door buzzer going off and off and off again and she got out of bed and the abrupt voice sqwaked and garbled, “Your cars been broken into… They stole your air bags!”

“Thank you,” she said, still asleep, but always polite …. “I mean… Who is this?”

“What difference does it make!?” the voice snapped back. “Your air bags are gone and there’s glass all over the place.”

“Oh… well…thanks for telling us,” she was confused, but waking to the cloudy morning and thinking, “well you don’t have to be so rude about it… I’m just wondering how you found out where we live and who we are and what apartment… I mean really.”

She came back to the bed and I was bleary eyed and abstract and suddenly I had the feeling that it was an elaborate con… we would go out to check the air bag, and someone would bonk us on the head and rob the apartment. Paranoia and exhaustian ran deep, but we threw some clothes on and went down to find this abstraction… or was it neo realism?:


No it was a busted fucking rear window and the thief had unlocked Zorg and (albeit carefully) made off with the steering wheel and side passenger airbags. The abrupt voice of the Nasty Good Samaritan rang out: “You’d think this was a safe street, huh?” He was carrying a rag with which he abstractedly polished a silver Mercedes. I was thinking, “Sure you wrap a rag around your hand and punch out the window… I’ve never seen you before… are you the messanger, or the perp hiding in the open? What difference does it make, in deed.”


We called the cops and moved the car to see if it would drive and it was opposite side of the street day and I could just see one cop writng a ticket while the other wrote a report… beaurocracy is a many headed beast after all. The men in blue arrived and asked a few questions and wrote like Bartleby and I was struck that most of police work must be red tape and desk work broken up by encounters with assholes and the occasional bit of action. It’s the thing you don’t see in the movies and t.v. The boring day to dayness of it all… how many airbag reports do you suppose these guys write in a year? I’d bet it’s too fucking many…They were as emotionless and detached as the guy who gives you your Big Mac and fries. You had the sense that they’d rather be doing something else… anything else… than filling out this report. “Some guys will be around to take fingerprints,” he said. “So if you see some guys nosing around the car, it’s them.”

Now I’d been impressed by the promptness of their appearence (I knew why later)… but I wasn’t holding my breath for detectives… or CSI, or whatever. We went upstairs and had coffee and walked the dog and got drycleaning and laughed at how the only thing we’d found upsetting so far was the neighbor who gave us the news. We were laughing about it… but he’d creeped us out.


The Evidence men showed up and they were a whole different ball of wax. For one thing, it was the first Prius this guy had dusted, so he was curious and questioning and funny: “I’m gonna dust this baby and take it for a test drive at the same time…. how many miles to the gallon does it get?”

Someone once said: “A conservative is a liberal who has been robbed.”
Someone else said: “A liberal is a conservative who has been arrested.”

I’m still smarting at some of the things that went down during the Republican Convention protests, but I’ve known a lot of cops and sons of cops and a good, professional cop is a reassuring and pride inspiring thing. It’s not a job most of us would want (paper work alone and jerkoff encounters alone…and… well people shoot at you and stuff)…. anyways these guys seemed first rate to me.

One of the things I noticed was his Nike golf gloves. I wondered how many different gloves he’d tried untill he’d hit on these and he said a lot. She asked if he played golf and he said no an then he told us that he was real strict about wearing gloves, because sometimes it happens that you pull your own prints if you don’t and the boys at the lab come back saying, “We’ve got a match” and you get excited and they say, “And it’s you you idiot.”

I said, “I bet they give you a hard time for that.”

“For about two weeks,” he said quietly…. like mabe it had happened to him… and well it sure as shit wasn’t going to happen again… not today anyways….

So for the point of procedure: They dust the surface with this feathery brush.

Then they take a piece of clear tape and lay it over the revealed print (which they spot with a maglite that they hold in their teeth like a plummer as they do the other things).

Then they stick this tape to a piece of black film (it looks like the back of a Polaroid film…and the environmentalist in me sort of hopes that they take the cast offs from the Mug Shot Department and use that… This is fed into a computer and, the limits of technology were pointed out to me: the computer culls down the number of matches, but finger print reading is partially art… and so a human is needed to go throught the twenty or so matches (out of millions) that the computer identifies. You can see why fingerprints are becoming controversial in the era of DNA… Art is always suspect over science (unless your talking about Darwin and monkeys)

So we were off to Bay Ridge Toyota and she was making me laugh by saying: “I know there’s a problem with the air bag” to the read out and it looked to me like Orson Welles chewing bubble gum as we cruiesed at risk (Geico wanted to tow us because suddenly after a hundred years of automotive history, it is unsafe to drive a car WITHOUT an airbag… what the fuck was GM fighting for or against with Nader?)

So, long story short, we get there and see the clone of our Zorg: turns out a block away the same dude hit another green Prius and the cops came by and iterrupted his little play date. Would that they had caught him and brought us our air bags in a bag… but the thief fled into prospect park where the cops are loath to go….the twin only had a window broke and no finger prints taken. Me, Well… I liked the cops with the machines… so if they broke the window at least we got the smart cops…who even got my blog address… Maybe they’ll bust this ring…anyone who wants the blog address must be smart right?

This run seems like the red night of Gowanus…. defending the honor of fair maidens all about the lands of Brook….. or maybe Quixote bending at Moulin Rouges all up Pigalle into Montmartre. History will tell us, we must squire on like Sancho Panza.

And Moses split the sky with enormous water towres of Babel…. the old Italian neighborhoods split by highways and housing projects along the Gowanus… their Mafia, like an old fifedum surrounded by the Government – under seige, but you couldn’t cut them off with water, or walls, or asphalt…. they tunneled out by night along the BQE highjacking trucks and living off the swag. The whoe neighbor hood was smoking tax freee Marlboroughs and eating prime rib…


Spent the evening with Lady Kate, delivering her repaired and signed painting before she flys off to OZ to spend more time with the long distance love. She is invoved in an intense relationship borne on a tour of India and nurtured (coincidence?) by the internet. She reads to the guy’s kids (C.S. Lewis’ Narnia series) over the computer and talks constantly by way of the information super highway… it is a kind of relationship you couldn’t have untill very recently. Still, falling into big brother mode, I was warning her that virtual love and being stuck in a room with some dumb bastard who farts and sweats are entirely different things. If she doesn’t believe me, she should ask my better half. But the girl has stars in her eyes and new love is new love… which we concluded was a form of insanity, so all those who have survived love and slipped into our bitter detante of marriage, or “long term relationship” have to look out a little for the starry eyed dreamers…. so they don’t, you know, run off a cliff or something.

I wanted to talk about this apartment building that towers over the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens, along with a radio tower. My first response to it, was to try and avoid it in as many shots as I could. It’s rigid grid modernism seemed a mediocre example of International Style architecture and it seemed to clash with the neo classical and neo Nippon gardens there. It seemed, in short, an eye sore, but it got me thinking about modernism and the Japanese and the Germans and the end of World War Two. I was thinking about the tremendous need to rebuild on the cheap after blowing Europe and Asia all to hell… and how the International Style is a kind of rational response to this obvious need, but I liked that Americans some how talked themselves into building in this style too (after all no one had blown us up)… it seems like we really believed in what we were doing and I found that charming (I suppose it had something to do with fashion, but fashion is a belief system too)… and of course it brings to mind the Swiss and my old man and Geneva and The U.N. and how nice it must have been to believe in progress and Darwin and science and peace, etc. I don’t want to get all romantic about it, but I started to see the squares of the buildings as a kind of antithesis to the biomorphic natural shapes of the trees and flowers and waters… that sort of split down the center of the picture, like the spine of a book, or woman… that thing born of fish swimming into a sphere (or carp into a rose)… I thought of this and more importantly, the building when seen from the Japanese garden had the affect of making me feel like I was really in Japan (since so much of Japan is post War architecture). The building was the flaw that made the lie work… and I was transported to Japan from Brooklyn in a way that all the Neo Classical stuff surrounding will never make me feel I’m in Greece, or some idealized European past… no that ugly little apartment block (with the nice grid balconies) made me feel like I was in Japan Today… that minute… and so altered time and space…it stood tall against the chaos of flowers and nations. So yesterday it was the ugly little building that could…..also: When seen in the context of a pine tree, the shape seems to harmonize with the Fibonacci sequence of tiered branches… or is that just me?