These are little plaster and caulk and chinese ink “paint bricks”. They are sort of a step in a series of moveable type type abstractions that can be sort of mixed and matched on a wall, the way a typesetter used to move lead type around doing lay outs for the printing presses. It’s the job my dad had out of the Geweber School when he went abroad to swinging London. He bacame a “Graphic Designer” more or less off the boat in New York because of the fashion for Swiss Geweber School Modernism (international style, etc.)… and an Art Director in a few weeks. He told me what a riot it was to go from being low low man typesetter in conservative London, to the head man in crazy New York. I think he never trusted it and fealt he’d pulled really one over on those “Stupid Americans”… but that was just his insecurity talking. He was pretty good I’d say, as objectively as I can. And won the Art Directors Club Award two years in a row for in house promotion (67, 68… first was a calander using his own paintinngs and a cool lay out with diffent type faces for each month… and the next year he used his friend’s psychedelic abstract photographs of New York City. I guess I’m thinking about my dad after seeing David Conrad’s new Pilot for Ghost Whisperer on CBS in the fall. This is the one where he is married to Jennifer Love Hewitt (and her breasts) who can see and speak to ghosts. I wasn’t expecting much, but I found the show sort of affecting… a real tear jerker in fact… if only because it sort of makes you think of anyone you may have lost and starts you wondering if they are looking over you, or whatever. Cheesy yes, but I’m a sucker for this conceit as I have fealt powerfully haunted at times (and it nearly drove me mad)…. So if they get some good scripts, I have a feeling that the Ghost/M. Night Shalyman vibe might work in the intimate space of television (for me it worked sort of better actually as you could space out and deal with your own drama while the t.v. fades to background). It is that abliity to cause empathy in the audience that the show will live or die on. Conrad was pretty good… relaxed and charminng… and Love Hewitt was cute and sort of oddly sexy, but looking like a woman now…. I think it may work. She has pretty great eyes that she can open up wide and get teary (and there are a lot of teary shots… nicely lit and all)… it is like looking at a puppy dog and damn if you don’t tear up in sympathy. It’s manipulative as shit, but it works. I’m sure there’s about a million ways they can fuck it up, but the chemistry on the pilot could be a lot worse.



The calandars were actually for a typographer, I now realise and not his add agency as I’d always believed. It was a nice break for him from doing pharmaceutical design (his was the orginal Clearasil package design with the German flag of skin tones (black, red, “flesh”). It was even printed in Switzerland and on good paper, judging by how well my print looks 38 years later (same year as my birth… Coincidence?). This next image, he had turned into a wall sculpture of wood and colored laminates and you could spin each ring to change the composition and the center circle was the screw that held the whole thing together… naturally it nearly crushed a few overzealous ring turners who would unsrew the center circle the whole three inches of thread length just to see what happened. It was a good antitheft device as the whole thing teetered and leaned onto the potential thief. Wouldn’t chop your legs off like a Stella, but it did its job none the less.

All that drawing of Charlot/Hitler made me realize again the clever use of Nazi helmet for darth vader, and how his mask has a sort of mustache on the Damn d’Avingon quality to it. So I just drew Darthitler for the hell of it. It is a great post modern sculpture that mask. We nearly bought a very good version with light saber at Cost Co for the the cutest buddhist, but it fealt wrong to give him anthing associated with the dark side. I’m also doing some sketches from Mr. Arkadin Goya masked ball… THese one are on nice arches paper that I’ve been saving since the beginning of my residency at the Institute. Seemed like the time was now.

NOT DONE YET…..or maybe it is…










I have this funny thought that maybe Clark inhearited this Chevy from his dead mom…. a long with a lot of money left in the bank and he has been spending his time fixing up the car as an alter to 911 victims and drinking beerl. I imagine that the narrator (Charlie?) inherits it and it is in the back seat at the funeral, or after the trial that the Wolloughby/narrator confrontation takes place. It is an improve based off of Brando in On The Waterfront. “You shoulda looked out for me a little Charlie.”




Today is as hot as Clark’s temper. I’ve been doing these drawings based on Hitler and Charlot. It is odd to watch The Great Dictator (it was on TCM this weekend some late late hour and I cought Charlie giving his political peace speach at the end) and realize that Charlie came before Hitler… the Mustache was his trade mark. A friend tells me that Lenni Riefenstahl (the great and controversial maker of Olympia and Triumph of the Will) told Hitler to cop Chaplin’s Mustache. She said it would work to his psychological advantage in the mass perception. He would be instantly recognizable, sympothetic, working man (Socialist)… and he could talk the most hateful stuff while giving a warm glow. I don’t know if that’s true, but Leni was pretty clever. I had a professor at Brown who taught European History. He had been in Berlin in 1938 for the Olympics. When You got him on the subject of Chaplin’s film… even all these years later, you could see the steam shoot out of his ears: “It didn’t make it any easier having Chaplin turn Hitler into a laughing stock… Hitler was not funny… Hitler was serious and most of the world was just trying to laugh him off and Charlie Chaplin with his good intentions didn’t help one bit…. comedy…Ha! Tragedy.

My new hard drive has finally arrived, which means edititng Willoughby improves and doing a new build. Maybe that’s why I’m posting so much now…. To get ahead of myself. I’ll be shaving ice and posting clark as he comes along.

The question of worth seems interesting to ask in these strange times of heavy debate over the Euro. I spent Sunday visiting artists and or trying to visit. It seems important to point out that today was the last day of Basquiat at BMA. I wanted to see the end, but it was mob scene, but still nice to see the lines on the stage of the Brooklyn Museum (and the renovation does give it back its stage, sort of like the MET… so where are the annoying mimes?). I spoted the shadow man and shot his portrait. He is a kindred soul and I hope to do a more in depth portrait of his project. In short: he chalks out the shadows cast by prominent street furniture (most of it government issue… so politics are also here)… it marks time in a very special way. You can bet on it… it’s like a check… and that is CRIME tagging the new bank… almost invisibly. Real class.


The plan had been to meet up with old Wyatt Earp Closs, the master mind behind A Bash Fit For A King, and also a major organizer at SEIU. He had one day off from fighting the Labor battle in these odd times. It was too crowded to wait on line, but Wyatt had figured out a bum rush with someone’s spent tag… CRIME, in deed… SAMO would have approved, I’m sure. With plans to reconoiter, I left him there in the glory of BMA and tried to see old Bill Batson (AKA Shazam):





Bill was not home, but I got to see some of his work and also meet his Alex. We are brothers of subway sketch stories, but he his the master of that genre. Go see his show…. his work is a bargain at any price. It’s like a check. So I went on down the road towards the whole Rothschild art clan. Gail was having an open Garden.


At the Garden I ran in to Lawrence Quigley. I had no idea he knew gail. I had the sudden happy feeling that it really is a small community of serious artists you can get to know in NYC and they will probably know eachother… and yes, it is like family… sort of… and you hope when their foot prints are not beside you on Coney Island Beach, it is because they are carrying you… like Willoughby said to me: “You shoulda looked out for me a little… You wuz my Neighbor Charlie. You shoulda looked out for me just a little bit.” That to me is what art is for… to remind you of the most intense feelings in life: happy, or sad… so that when you are feeling almost nothing, you can be reminded of why it is important to be alive. Dig me, I sound like the Reverend Al: “Take me to the river… washing me down…..etc.” But carry me do into the cool cool water drip drip.

And I recall every moment of my youth as if it were lit by the double suns of Tatooine, with its morococo curves and excess. It was the way the camera was used in the first movie that made it work. The camera got very stiff and subservient to the special effects. In the first one, it was a Seventies camera style.. it moved and was sometimes hand held, and often beautiful in its quasi-documentary style. It was the fourth wall and third character… it was my eyes and it is impossible to over estimate how much the art direction meant to me then and there for now. It relieves me now to see how much modernism is hidden in those masks: Giacometti, Klee, Bacon. DeKooning, Picasso, etc. Darth’s face really is the face of the 20th Century perhaps. And the Modanna with child? R2 and C3PO perhaps?

Boom boom blom, let’s go back to my room… This Force Be With You! (“and also with you…”).

They lit fireworks off and showed star wars in the park to celebrate Grand Army Plaza. The confluence of fireworks and war (both the star kind and the civil kind) make one ask the question: what is the word for gunpowder in Chinese? Why did one culture find it so important in making beauty and another find it so important in making ugliness? Comments appreciated. I’m really asking.

I’m still processing The Magnificent Ambersons and Mr. Arkadin, which I watched again on DVR. I was shocked at how much I like Arkadian this time… infact in some way omEGG seems born of it, but I didn’t much remember it before. The great costume sequence of Goya masks is right out of Fasnacht and Arkadin in general seems M. Tristan’s great grandfather. In an interesting joke for those of you familier with the Institute for the Future of the Book, Sophie is the “Rosebud” of this story. So I’ve been drawing and dreaming and chewing the cud of these films.

This weekend they are throwing some sort of shin-dig for Grand Army Plaza. The nice thing is fireworks over the whole area and Star Wars on the Long Meadow in Prospect Park. For some time I’ve been thinking there ought to be a web site, or better yet and e-mail service that would tell you when people are launching firworks in NYC. I can’t tell you how many times I have to run to the roof or out in the street to catch the magic. It seems that they go off every week or so in the summer, but how do you know where and when? Fortuneately I got tipped off at the Green Market this morning.




We went to markets sweet and sour today. The lovely, charming, community flavored, expensive farmers market and the horrible, viscious, ugly, cheap, supersized Cost Co. It is nearly impossible to get through a Cost Co shop without a viscious knock down drag out fight before during or after. The place is just about the ninth circle of retail hell… where your food is bigger than you are, but Alice-like, you eat it and grow and grow and grow. Look at this kid eating from a barrell of cheese puffs bigger than her. When she’s finished, you can stick her in it and float her downstream.


Escalator to shopping heaven, or hell? It is facinating to see the immigrants from China and the former Soviet Union and India and The Middle East all gathering enormous amounts of STUFF into their giant sized carts. But then… then… well most of them have never driven a car, let alone a shopping cart, let alone the U.S.S. Normandie Ocean Liner of shopping carts. People are a menace with these things… running over small children – stopping short, swerving… Its like a drunken fromula one race running in slow motion. The enertia of all the coke and forzen meat and deep fired wombat takes yards to pull to a stop. I’m always amazed to walk out without a major leg injury. God bless America… but maybe just a little less next time.






Is America so much under attack, as it is falling to its knees under the great weight of its greed and avarice? I see us as an enraged monster, perhaps frightened by a mouse, proceading to tear the whole city to pieces Godzilla-like as the mouse skirts around its feet… waiting for us to finish off what he could never do himself. That little fucker will be eating a barrel of cheese puffs in the rubble if we let him… maybe you can take consolation in the fact that he will then grow the same size and repeat the mistakes, but that doesn’t give me much consolation. I like my city. I like democracy and I don’t see how you beat religious fundamentalists with religious fundamentalism. I suppose that its the viral innoculation theory of government, but I saw some scary stuff today about how our efforts to innoculate people against polio may have caused aids by mistake. So what if that “protein gets out protein” idea is a dumb one… then what? Rubble and death… “I cut off my nose, because I hate my face.” And now a video metaphor:

It’s sort of funny. I’ve been studying certain locations in Brooklyn since starting omEGG a year and a half ago…. and now I’ve been returning and blogging them which means a lot of photo studies and that whole time i’ve been working on this little tryptique which is sitting over the t.v. so I can look at it whenever I look at movies, etc (today was Mr. Arkadian). I try not to look at the photos and videos, etc when I work on these pictures for fear of falling into a traditional perspective and just copying the camera view. Instead I try to remember the actual place, remember the scene from omEGG and then remember the recent blog studies. They are in this way informed by the photographic process, but not taken directly from any one photragraph, or video still.


Like some of the installations at IT IN space, I try to jam these pictures together in the manner of cutting film. Here is a large study I did after Arc Along The Watchtower, which also comes out of this distilling from the moving image towards the “active still painting.”


I am also travelling with a few sketchbooks and yesterday when my dogs gave out after seventy, or eighty blocks of walking, I hopped on the subway andI quickly drew the Verranzano before my stop… wondering if the fatigue and rush would give some sense of an immediate reaction to this modern masterpiece of elegance.

I have fallen into a strange pattern of sleep, like two bridge towers. I nod off while reading with The Daily Show on and then at about three in the morning I bolt up and I usually go back and try to fix a few of the spelling and grammar disasters in the blog and refine the images and scans and I draw a little with ink and then it is five and the sun is turning the sky cyan and magenta and I try to catch some NPR news on my little Coby am/fm radio with the one remaining ear-pod from my i-pod and drift off till morning when the sweety is thumping about and the dog is jumping about and then it is back to you and I am out of dreams and over the bridge so to speak.

Last night in dreams (Roy Orbison please) I was working up a film by doing video improvs with an actor… don’t know who… Then we had some party to go to out on Long Island… maybe in West Egg. The actor said he knew how to fly a helicopter and he happened to have his up on th roof. We flew out there and it was a mansion with elevators up to a viewing tower from which you could watch the end of the world. My sweety was some how in charge of all this and she was bouncing around like a pinball with Champagne and sedatives and soon We had to get back to the city (now terrified as the actor had only just learned to fly and now we were going at night… having to massage his ego and catch the helicopter views for a scene, I agreed to go and miss the end of the world). I couldn’t find my gal, but at the last minute I found herl on line for the elevator going up. I told her, “Nice party, but we have to get back to the city.”

“But you’ll miss the end of the world,” she said.

“I know, but we really need this shot,” we kissed, maybe for the last time and I waved from the chopper to all the hoy ploy waiting on Apocalypse.


I drink coffee and the dream world peels away like a veneer. I go back to the blog and picures and nudge and push them towards something like a tug boat landing a great ocean liner. They are bigger than me, but I’m pugnacious and determined even as the clouds come and currents flow. I realise now it is the reviews for Herzog’s White Diamond that made the dream day irritant for oystered pearl.


And the bridge stands there in my memory like a great cathdedral to progress and Moses finally parts the sea and the single seagull soars by towards Coney Island, like that D-Day paratrooper drifting helplessly towards the ground battle below: then hung upon a Normandie steeple, he comes face to face with a stain glass widow of a dove. He waits and waits and waits for the ground.


I found this canvas in the trash. It was a nice canvas, just as an object and I rather liked the abex start on it, but it did seem unfinished and the color choices in places needed a glaze, or something. So I’ve been ripping up one of the large rice paper figures from the Name of the Rose entry and using the beer soaked gestures to collage down onto the canvas. The black lines seem to bring it together and it sort of feels like the Veeranzanno Narrows after all. Work in progress?