Monthly Archives: August 2005
clocks
They sit in the café at the end of the pier.
“What time is it?” he asks.
“Late.”
“Where is she?” He asks.
“Late.”
“Where do you think she is?” he asks.
“She’s searching for sea shells by the sea shore… how the fuck should I know where she is? Let’s get some crabs.”
“She hates crabs,” he says.
“She’s not here.”
“A crab bit her once when she was young. Now she hates them. They make her retch,” he says.
“What’s a crab’s bite got to do with how good it tastes? They’re not gonna bite me, I’m going to bite them.”
“She hates crabs. She says they eat litter. She says they’re like rats,” he says.
“Like they’re worse than lobsters? I see her eating lobster whenever she get’s a chance.”
“Well lobsters are more expensive. They’re sort of designer rats,” he says. “That and she was never bit by a lobster.”
“Let’s get some crabs.”
What time is it?” he asks.
“Let’s chop down the tree and count its rings. How should I know?”
“Alright, alright, let’s get some crabs,” he says.
Litter
Summit
Willoughby wakes up to find them fixing the sky. People keep telling me I ought to do animations. I’m not so certain. It might just be that people like movement on a computer, but I fooled around with this little Willoughby waking up scenario today. All week men have been up in precarious cranes held by cranes fixing the sky and making great noise. I find it hard to sleep, but harder still to get out of bed in the morning. I’m listening to dreams and the chunks of blue falling all around me. Sounds like armies marching up the face towards the summit meeting refridgerator. It goes on and off compressing ice that rolls back down the hill, where Willoughby wakes up to find them fixing the sky.
Whites
The whites luff slightly in the late August breeze and the crowds gather in Carrol gardens.
An old woman in a house coat wanders out into the riot of sun and air.
and suddenly you feel young again.
Drawn Bridge
The road was cut off by a wall of steel. Couldn’t make sense of it at first, but it was Just the draw bridge up. I’d never seen it up before I guess.
Waiting For The Desecraters
This morning I dreamt I was in a graveyard looking into a valley of stones. Off in the distance desecraters were approaching. The were coming to erase the stones, rob the graves, cause general mayhem. I tried to stay in the dream, to wait for the desecraters and defend the stones, but I woke up.
American Burlesque (or Exit To The Rear)
This morning began with an AbEx oil slick on the Gowanus canal…. I woke up dreaming of Nazis and the birth of Jet Engines: The ME 262 (and the guy who made the engines moved to Switzerland after the war and sold the Engines to the French, who sold them to the Israelis who used them on the Arabs) and The Americans flying B-52s on 36 hour Sorties from Stateside to Iraq in the first Gulf
War. Jets meeting jets to refuel jets – copulating like humming birds and the gasoline mixes with air and explodes out the back and thrust thrust thrust. Since that war, the military ethos of insane fuel consumption has leaked down to the oil slick housewife who drives an SUVs to the grocery store to by Crisco. Lubrication nation.
I am thinking about the theater of war as a sort of burlesque, or strip show, or belly dance in the Arabian night. We’ve all gathered in a strange dark place to find that we are staring at the asshole of our culture and then someone comes in and light floods the theater and and the pupils all dialate and everyone curses the last one in: “ASS HOLE.” The door slowly shuts. Now that he’s in, the question is, when should he leave?
This morning started with an oil slick on the Gowanus Canal and ended with an insanely large moon that floated in impossible clouds. What happens next?
The dancer walks out over the oil slick, over the water, over the heads of the audience. APPLAUSE! APPLAUSE!
Mob Rule
I particularly like the way the guy is checking out the girl
and she is pleading outside the
picture plane for help
and the turkey
looks like a
vaginal
cave.
M
I’ve been having fun with this one point perspective triangular composition thing.
I’ve always been morally opposed to perspective (took Ab Ex too seriously perhaps, or just Clement Greenburg), but somehow drawing Kubrick’s 2001 obelisk for Asi Nisi Masa started me thinking about pyramids and ancient desert visions and triangular composition by way of El Greco and Cezanne. I hope that the perspective is stylized enough to be an obvious trick…. a narrative convention – a way of organizing the marks and the characters described by those marks in a satisfying way. It also points towards some questions about ways of seeing and knowing the world – questions about monotheism and the subjective and the objective and the narrator and illusions and lies… which brings us back to a political screed I’m too tired to talk about. Any way, these things seem to work on several levels for me, but I was not thinking about any of that as I actually worked on them, I was listening to Led Zep II and III and laughing at the guy’s expression. Let’s blame Robert Plant.
The Dinner Party
So I keep working on the abstractions which only seem strange landscapes in which these gluttonous characters gather and eat and drink themselves silly. At one level they are celebrating their existence in an insane world… grabbing the last moments of pleasure… but in another way, they are examples of the depraved greed and selfish consumption that has sent the world into the shitter to begin with.