It’s somewhat pleasant to watch the Pres. fianlly suffer in the press, like some guy whose pressed up against paint and left right arm marks all up and down the subway porcelain. The sad thing is, it’s not green paint, but red blood and the fist goes bang bang bang, “I’m bigger than you”. Furhter more, they are showing Cosmos on the Science Channel (which might explain the Sagan zeitgeist) and I miraculously stumbled on to a discussion of exploding stars at one in the morning only to find out that there is no such thing as a yellow giant, only a red giant. Yellow is just a normal sun. I can’t say if that’s why the whole painting went red today, but maybe its that, or Castro still talking and reforming his sugar economy. There ought to be a band called, “Sugar Economy”. There ought to be a President that makes dictators look bad, but what can you do? The Universe is expanding.

Yesterday’s work got me in a mood to play with photos. I happened to have a series of portraits that Christa Gruaer shot of me and they seemed like a good place to start.

It was one of those studio days where you get the yellow giant to where it looks like a cross between the Michelin Man and Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now and you sort of like that because it goes to the Vietnam War and the present Middle East crisis as a sort of self indugant gluttony for gas and mangos, when suddenly you paint out the witness/assassin and use a lot of precious colors and get tired and are almost ready to call it a day when the whole thing goes south and you have to paint it all out and start over again and hope you saved it. Giant pain in the ass, but I’m past caring. Now it seems some late night creature in solidarity with no one, but itself.

How true: “Carl Sagan cared, punks!”. It seemed kind of funny to find this scrawled along a hundred feet of sidewalk under the Williamsburg bridge as I’d already decided to call today’s entry, “Yellow Giant” early this morning when I found a battered yellow lens that had popped out of the frames of a some kid’s sun glasses. I shoved the lens into my pocket like a bar of glycerine lemon soap and carried it with me the rest of the day. A yellow giant is the early state of a sun’s demise (before the red dwarf, etc.) if I can remember all the stuff I learned from Sagan’s show a million years ago… (or was it billions and billions of years ago?). But I wasn’t thinking of Carl Sagan this morning. I was looking at the green walls we’d spent Sunday painting with a fourth, or fifth color glaze of a decorative finish. We’d given the first four layers three years to dry before deciding it was too brite a green. So that’s why last night’s entry was a green giant (blue and red the days before that… which I just realized and so I suppose an accident). I thought it would be funny to name today’s entry, “Yellow Giant” in a sideways glace at yesterday’s green giant, ho ho ho… Today I had a nervous pocket of green money to pay the studio rent, but first went to Utrecht for canvas to start a giant painting and walked over the Williamsburg Bridge to save the two bucks subway fare, where I dug into my pocket and found, at last, the scratched yellow lens which I held over the camera lens and shot the distorted skyline for the Yellow Giant which exploded into an odd portrait after the sun died., but who cares? …. Yes Carl Sagan.