June is Rose month… and It’s been said that by looking deeply into the shape of a rose, you can see the mind of god… so that seemed worth trying and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden is free on Tuesdays… the following is a meditation on time, space, and as always the duality of man, but it is also a sort of rose binge, as I keep seeing them everywhere and staring at them and then they keep showing up on the blog… Maybe I”ll get it out of my system by tantric excess.

Will miracles never cease? Looks like I’ve got a couple of walls to paint oil on in Williamsburg for the summer. God bless the sublease season. It will be nice to take the oils and brushes out of storage… they’ve been untouched since IT IN space. There is a lot you can do with acrylics and inks and various mixed media, but at the end of the day there is just something so luminous and flesh like about oil paint… nothing compares and it smell like heaven (or sex at least) as well. Finally I get to do the Diners paintings and Willoughy and Clark.









So I was off to Manhattan yesterday by way of 2 and 3 at Bergan, when I was struck by an intense need to rid myself of the gallon or so of ice coffee I’d drunk moments earlier. Hard to find a public pissoir on Flatbush Ave, so I wanderd into Freddy’s, the Art Bar a block off. The above wall gaffiti is some of the best I’ve seen since Basquiat closed at BMA. Freddy’s is the sort of place where you find paintings on the wall that you recognize from past Allan Stone group shows… real serious paintings and lots of art zines and poetry and of course drunks. Quigley and I used to fancy the place quite a bit, but then life happened… so thanks to my bladder it was nice to visit ecore fois for all the old times.

I took a walk in the swelter of Central Park and there is a fair set up at the skating rink, which is a fun idea, but I was mostly interested in the engineering of this new skyscraper. I guess that these exterior tirangles are load bearing like that thing I.M. Pei built in Shanghai, or was it Hong Kong?


Here is the Summerstage stage, where Major Tom and the boys will be opening for the Blind Boys of Alabama some time soon. Nice venue.


Sometines Central Park seems like a Seurat Idyll…


…with little Picassos along the paths…

Actually the Picasso chalk drawing is from Prospect Park and was by some Puerto Rican kids hanging out after the parade… here they are:

This mornings miracle involves the Polyphonic Spree. I’d seen them a while back on Trio in a live show and the they sort of freaked me out. The lead singer is filled with charisma and sounds kind of like Pink Floyd front man, Rodger Waters (who has agreed to reunite with Floyd for Live 8… which is sort of amazing) but witha better voice and then his huge band has all this Brian Wilson Smile type arrangements and instrumentation going on… you know the guy playing the glochenspiel will put that down and play tuba… and weirdest of all, they dress up like a church choir in robes and sing all this happy peppy music (sort of like The Happiest Guys In The Wold… but more Brian less Beatles and more people)… When i went to to Thiebaud opening with Scooter, we talked at length about how great and weird they were and I really wanted to get their album, but as I’m always broke and I had no idea what any of the songs were called,… it seemed risky. So I’m walking Ms. Pearl Bailey and we come upon a huge bag of empty c.d. cases … not a c.d. in the bunch…just the jewel cases… except for one sleeve laying in the middle of the street: The Polyphonic Spree… with the song I liked best (the single with video) Light&Day. Shall miracles never cease?

Well it was Sharron’s birthday thrusday and we all gathered on a friends East Village Tar Beach for Magaritas and laughter. This big bald head of her husband (AKA Major Tom) reminds me of his latest fall down laughing story. It seems at the last Royal Wylds gig, they placed a big light behind his head on the drum riser. So All through the set, his head is glowing like an enormous egg and heating up like said egg in an incubator. Well birds didn’t fly out of his cranium, but all that skin beating and light gave him heat stroke… all the world went grainy and sounded funny and he more or less fainted, but kept on playing. “Thank god for all that rehearsal and motor memory, ” He said. “I don’t even remember the second half of the show… they say I sounded okay though.” It’s funnier when he tells it, but I love to imagine his head lit up like Jebus returns. Of course here he looks more like something out of The Importance of Being Ernest…”A Hand Bag!”… And then Sharron got all excited opening gifts.




While sister Maureen and brother in law Josh became more and more relaxed.

It’s allways fun to find old book drawings scattered around the city from various events… here is a black cat, or Gato Negro which nicely brackets this weekend with the book I restarted reading while Yachting in Prospect Park.






Actually, Saturday we finally dined at Applewood in the slope (Josh and Maureen’s raves being enough to break the camel back)… it lived up to expectations: great fish and pork and they had creative cocktails and for once nice rosé on the list. We walked out into Brooklyn Gay Pride Parade… Me, I love a parade… Sylvie doesn’t quite get the point…. I think it is to flow along with others… like a ship at sea, or maybe more like a boat on a river…. any parade is a current that may carry you along… Puerto Rican, gay, Italian… whatever. The special thing about Fasnacht is that it is a seemingly chaotic form of parade… like a storm…., but Linear is fun too….. like Hollywood movies, or t.v.

The ritual for Saturday is to go to the florist in the morning and then the Pork Store in the afternoon. In both places you find the comedians of daily life at work. I mean to say that the people selling and the people shopping all have that Brooklyn convivial nature that leads to lots of good natured ribbing and laughter and by now it feels more like visiting friends than running errands. First you stop and smell the flowers, then you stop and eat the food and sometimes you go down the street and taste the wine… what could be better I ask you?… Work? Scroll down… I’m still working on Clark drawing from Hitler and Chaplin…. but he is sort of morphing into me as a young man playing an old man… ie. M. Tristan holding his snow globe of doom.




And the numbers came in 9 with a crown and five with the second place… like degas in the Montmatre Cemetary, or Basquiat, or the strange film “Birth” I just watched with Nicole Kidman and a Kubrick Fetish and also Zoe Caldwell with a rare film appearence. Kind of haunting and strangely paced. Worth seeing…. oh and Lauren Bacall who I’d been watching in the Faulkner written Big Sleep.

We went to Sette last night, the new Italian wine bar right up the street with a large outdoor cafe… Proseco and a nice white and some very good hints at what might come (they are on a limited menu until the kitchen is finished next week). We came home and sort of fell asleep at some ridiculously early hour. Which means I woke up at four thirty and went right back at editing Willoughby video…. Still a huge hunk of stone… maybe I can carve it down into someting…It looks good… and I’m using the adante from Mozart’s 25 piano concerto… the rhythm helps me to edit.

Major Tom’s cross breezeway neighbors have an annoying habbit of smoking at the window and starring into his bedroom. They say nothing,nor wave, but rear window stare and smoke and smoke. Then they leave the butts and ashes right there in the hall… I guess it’s an installation… or at the least a still life.

I have always been struck by the golden arches relationship to the B.K. Bridge. I remember the first time I walked over the Brooklyn Bridge from Dumbo to Manhattan with Richard Heinson. We suddently noticed that the Double Gothic arches were mirrored by the Twin Towers behind. I somehow took this with Chinatown accross the way with the streets paved with golden mountain yellow brick road…. ease on down The Wiz, etc… and thought of the arches as the “ORIGINAL GOLDEN ARCHES”… I thought of Miyazaki’s tower’s as a sort of Immigrant Song… a love song to the original engineering marvel/aesthetic triumph… only made minimal zen by a Japanese.

Yesterday Major Tom calls up with a load of fancy plywood that he needs to move into the shop… each one pricy, so He doesn’t want to ding it up… Naturally I agreed, but the heat the hot heat and sweating oy! But he’s letting me have the scraps to paint on… and the Red Stripe tasted cold and delicious after all that lifting. Later we walked out to breath the air around Tom Paine.














I have always loved this moment of early modernism beneath the gothic bridge. It is controversial and I’m not certain of its landmark status. It is supposed to be an important early international style building, I think. Problem is, they all look like public schools now… though this does have a certain quailty to it… it sits like that little light house in the children’s book. Something about the clash of style, sings.

In this hot summer start, you want wind and water, or the air conditioner, but after spooling up Willoughby video, I had to trek out to Billy Burg to look at a studio to maybe sublet for the summer. It was hard to leave the rose gardens of the slope for the Hell’s Ditch of B.Burg. I never quite got the area. It’s dumpy, it’s bridge is dumpy, but I guess ass these pseudo hipsters keep telling themselves how fabulous it is, untill they believe it. Still it might be a fun spot to paint in, if for the only reason that I’ve had a studio in every artsy neighborhood in N.Y. by now… except B. Burg and Chealsea…




The nice thing was it gave me the opportunity to walk the B.Burg Bridge for the first time. I’ve been so hung up on it’s grander cousins, that I’d ignored the squat thing till yesterday. You feel a bit like a rat in a cage on this bridge. It is all fenced in, so you don’t have that open feeling of the Brooklyn and to a lesser extent the Manhattan bridges. I suppose it is to stop people from killing yourself, but crossing over bidges is a great way to feel exalted and after scurrying through this cage, you want to kill yourself more… or more than you would if you walked Brooklyn Bridge…. Good for biking though.

All through the hot and humid park, the petals were falling and the perfume wafting and bees buzzing. It made you remember you are alive and you sweat and smelled the sweetness while looking for shadows to lurk in… running from the light to the dark with the panting dog beside me.






They were shooting something called Children’s Place… maybe t.v. It looked really low budget till you turned the corner and saw all the trailers and wardrobe and props. Anyway, they were dressing the park to fake fall. Nice day to try…not. Everything too lush and them with a bag of leaves and some pumpkins. Ha. F is for Fraud. I did sort of like how the name, “Children’s Place” contrasted with the theme of death and ghosts and war… and then I like how this old man studying his own reflection in the lake played with those themes too. I imagine he looks young in the reflection and he just can’t turn away.

Walking under bridges, through musty tunnels to see the ship come in and the stage set with characters ready to play out the drama of life and death and learning, or wait, those are just kids going to the Audobon Center, but from here it looks like Shakespeare.