New camera

Off to Riga, Latvia and Tokyo, Japan in a few days. My old Canon Elf from 2003 is on its last legs, so I picked up a new Samsung NV10 because of some great pix I saw on my friend Adam's blog (http://hammerheadsharkattack.blogspot.com) using the same model. I've probably been getting on peoples nerves the past few days cause to learn this new tool I've been taking many many photos just to see how it changes under different lighting circumstances. Today has been my best day so far in regards to learning the interface. Sunny and beautiful. I did yard-work in NJ all morning for my mom, and then my dad hooked me up with a ride back to NYC where I met up with my best friend Diego and his girlfriend JoJo in Central Park.

paper time machine

How depressed I was today!
I tried out my grandfather's Leica last weekend, and droped off two rolls of film for developing at "the best photo place on the upper west side" apparently. Today I went in to pick up the prints and was shocked by the contemporary state of lab printing! The prints were pixelated! So sad. I got in a big fight with the woman when I tried to return them, and she told me there are no more optical printers in this country, they have all been traded in for digital printers. lost are subtle tones, and the beauty of film. As I work with vintage prints of my grandfather's all day, and see the richness of tones in the silver, and preserve them for the future I wonder how amazing they will look in 200 years (if they even last that long). According to my collegues at the Avedon foundation, they don't expect the prints to last that long and are digitally archiving all of their material... So what about these collectors who are dropping millions on Andreas Gursky prints? Apparently the Jeff Wall prints up at MoMA now are starting to fade at the edges. Its all a lesson in impermanance. The art of the moment. Alive now, closest to its date of creation. I saw a Discovery channel special on excavating an Egyptian tomb. Sealed for 3 thousand years, but as soon as it's opened the contents start to disintegrate rapidly. Create. Preserve. Study. All feeling the affects of global warming here in NYC. Snowing on easter.... How can conservative TV pundits get on TV and bash Al Gore. How out of touch are these people? The rotting matter fertalizes the new seed. When's that flood coming again? Its so easy for me to let my mind spin out of control into the apoclyptic vortex prognostication. I guess it only bothers me because I love life so much, and no matter how fucked up I thing things are here in America, I know damn well its easier to live here than a lot of other places on this planet. Maybe its so easy that people cant relate to suffering anymore. Digital is easier than optical printing I guess. Beauty suffers for convenience. A cultural desert surounded by oceans. NYC oasis. SF oasis. (Just getting my boo-hoos out so I can move on). So the lesson here is learning to embrace change instead of strugling against it. I guess I need to go out and buy a new digital camera. Shooting on film is fucking expensive. I've been listening to my grandfather's lectures on tape while I paint my post apoclaypse beauty salon series. So amazing. So technical. Lost to time....
shit. we're all gonna be dead someday. all our knowledge preserved on the best means available at the moment, forever becoming obsolite. But those Egyptians...they knew a thing or two about permanance....
Some of us live our lives and wind up as trivia if we are lucky. R.I.P Sol LeWitt

Knock-knock.

Who's there?


Papa Smurf.


Papa Smurf who?


Papa Smurf in the oven and eat him for lunch.

Coal Miner's daughter

Is there a diamond at the heart of every piece of compressed carbon? Is that what we turn into over eons?

Monday nite salons on the upper west side. Drinks @ Cafe des Artists, then wine in the DaDa elevator I call home.

Constructivist conversations deconstructing fashion with underground icons...

Sky color clothes...the population here is like the atmosphere....white, blue, grey, black....some of us have to be the sunset...

Family, ever expanding and reconnecting, life knows where its going if you just let it be...

here, breathing, its spring in NYC

Ancestral Home/DaDa elevator

Newish? Funny, you don't look newish...

all is fair

The spotlight, is the stage wooden or steel? Will it crush under the weight of those that wish to feel the touch on their skin of the love in that light of attention? I wonder as I stroll the halls of art fairs as an outsider by choice (some of the time) how do I see thee of world of art. In the context of the art fairs this weekend, I give a thumbs down. the great art pieces I've seen don't even stick out in my memory. Its like a handfull of rubies and emeralds mixed in a majority of costume jewlery. Walking up and down the convention floor i felt like a pixel moving around a jpeg of an art fair on the internet. Infact, the way these fairs are set up are so disrespectfull to artists. No cohesive vision is presented (except in the case of Peres Projects who went minimally with 3 Terrance Koh pieces). At $15,000 a booth, that can bee seen as throwing money around, but I respect a dealer, in that context, to have that much faith in their artist. I can understand why art critics like Jerry Saltz (who I keep running into now) have written recient articles for The Voice and Modern Painter expressing horror/facination with these fairs. When I collected baseball cards as a kid, I'd go to huge convention halls, searching for Bo Jackson cards. He was my hero, and I wanted every single card ever made of him (from obscure ceral boxes in the midwest to bogus european editions). It was fun to go around, find some new pieces for the collection, and leave happy. This isn't so different from what collectors do at these fairs, one stop shopping for the international art scene, and i think it comes down to your personal relationship with art, and whether you believe it is more than a product for consumption like baseball cards. I still believe art is divine, and somehow it is being prostituted in venues like this. The artists, in many cases, just producing art because that's what the marked demands. Weak art too. Can I blame them? Not really, art is such a struggle, why shouldn't artists get a piece of the pie. But you can look at work sometimes and see how its a body with out a soul. Some artists from the San Francisco scene I really like weren't even show by the dealer that represents them. So its all subjective, based on the dealer trying to recoup the costs of booth rental. This is a Capalist structure that dosen't mesh well with art, but it exists, and I am not interested in trumpeting outside this Babel tower. It will crumble under its own weight and pride eventually, and it will be the best thing that happened to art in a hundred years. Maybe, because what rises will be what is necessary and true, and not superfluous. Can we blame American culture for this state? Lack of funding means corporations are new the new Medici families. Reciently a museum in SF was going to aquire a piece of mine, but the donor the curator brought to write the check thought the colors of my piece were too feminine (yellow ochre, purple and turquoise). I'm not upset. I think its funny but sad, and sexist in a way. But its an illustration of how the purse holder is the cultural taste maker now. I think I'll just donate the piece to the museum....




My way of interacting with these 3 art fairs this week was to bring along a suitcase of my work with this sign on the side: Looking for a miracle? Ray Johnson's brain inside, $5 a peek. I envisioned myself a traveling salesman at a snake oil convention or something, but it was just a fun way to interact with people. Just two examples of many interactions: When I went by the Feign booth at the Pulse fair (they represent Ray Johnson's estate) I had a good time explaining to them that I had taken Ray's brain, and made prints (like you do when you put a sliced cabbage in ink and then on paper) from the part where his dreams were stored. As I showed them a little painting of mine, I would come up with some story about Ray's dream from that brain print. Then I looked closer at one of his collages they were selling, and in really tiny pencil it said Bill Dekoonings brain next to some ink blob. Awesome. At the Armory I had a friend in town from San Francisco working at a galley I always dreamed about showing at when I lived out there. She wanted to see my new work, and while I was showing them to her, some collectors in the booth started looking over our shoulder and asked "whats that? who's work is that?" It was akward enough, but then the gallery owner sent over some stinky negative vibe which was embarassing for all parties.




This was maybe the most memorable piece I saw. Eveytime I see this guys work it gets better. FOLKERT DEJONG. There was a Thomas Hirschorn blobby exploitation of physical deformities piece. Was it a mirror he was holding up to the fair and the search for beauty/value, or just another artist trying to be more memorable than the next? There were some great Barry McGee drawings and a Chris Ofili water color pair, but by the end I felt like i needed a machete and had lost my compass. Another model which would be interesting would be the flea market model. Of course it would be massive, but in a non exclusive context, the true gems would stand out amongst the gravel. Other than that I think it would be more interesting to see an artists work in an artist created context, which i guess is what the Venice Biennale and Doccumenta are more like. So why hate on the fairs...I feel more educational programs would be better... as long as all this "great" art is under one roof why not have a sliding scale admission day and get "regular people" to come and see it? Collectors need to realize that if there is no community outside of the community of collectors and dealers who respond to a work, then their art probably wont have a long shelf life. Art is so subjective, and you can tell someone why a particular artist is great till you are blue in the face, but then it becomes a mental appreciation, where as art has the power to occupy a space that is beyond words. I am one for unity, but I think there is a seperation between the kind of mental/conceptual art that has emerged the last 100 years or so, and visual/emotional based art. Does it really matter? Do we need a new museum or text book just for mental art? My friend Jay Nelson just drove out to NY from SF in a car which he built a fiberglass bubble shelter for the roof that he sleeps and does art in. He said he got many positive responses on the highway. I guess it all depends on who you want your audience to be. Perhaps Highways are the new museums. Certanly all the amazing car art that is made for the Burning Man festival must seem like some artistic mass migration across the great states, flocking to Nevada every august. Andy Warhol would probably be camoflaguing truck stops if he were alive today...

ps spell check is dead. Im an artist, not a writer.

saying goodbye

out of the pan
into the fire.
I thought i'd be able to look at you
ever.ever.ever.ever

this will have to due

I told her her her legs were like poems

golden pigs and inverse swedish massage

month two swirls away

too cold to leave the home, except for tempura lunch box special

Eyes Age

Madeline in the morning, smoothie stop, central park, antique map dealer meeting, Metropolitan Museum Glitter and Doom, prayer in the dark park, kick triangle piece off frozen lake, photo-shoot at home, off into the night....



This is what it means to be back in NYC

crazy

boxes we rest in

Back in my childhood home.In my old bed room. A Chinese Dragon kite hangs the length of the ceiling. I can remember a tiny visitor crying uncontrollably when he looked up and saw the scaly green face and tongue sticking out. A tub of pistachio shells my mom draws faces on. A Max Beckman in Exile poster I stole out of the subway. A flyer for a radio show I did in college called: The Bottom 40. Art my mom made of her black cat. Piles of art books I love and don't have the space or time to look at. CDs I never listen to anymore. Marionettes I bought in Prague. A Mayan time calendar from 2005-6. Art from San Francisco. Regina Spector playing on the stereo, depressing me. More books. A tapestry I picked up in Hanoi. Dressers filled with clothes I never wear anymore. Memories of reading Popeye comics under my sheets with a flashlight. a photo of two of my closest friends when I lived in San Francisco, one of whom lives in Tokyo now, the other doesn't talk to me anymore, not even to tell me why she doesn't talk to me anymore. a water damaged drawing from Mithilla India that used to hang on our refrigerator for years, planting a seed for me to travel over there and collaborate with that community of artists (which has been my plan on hold for almost a year). Memories of being an unpopular high school student, listening to my classmate neighbor's pool party one summer night. Years of sitting at my desk, drawing comic books and video games, playing basketball alone in my driveway listening to Guns n Roses on my Walkman. Hot summer nights drinking gallons of milk at midnight. catching fireflies with neighborhood kids in jars with holes punched through the top by a screwdriver. Trying to set fire to ants with a magnifying glass. A pet hamster destroying Lego cities. obsolete technology. National geographics. Listening to the Hair record laying on the rug as a kid. Dancing to Jimmy Cliff with my cousins. Journals. crates of photographs. My first painting of the NY skyline set ablaze nuclear holocaust style. A box of sea shells. Gifts from ex-girlfriends. Akbar and Jeffs guide to life. And who knows what else buried under all the piles of paper and fabric....

 

Maybe its because I'm working on my grandfather's photo archive right now, but I can't help but thinking about the stuff we collect, make, and leave behind. I miss my grandmother. I feel left behind. One day I'll collect dust and disintegrate and leave stuff behind too. That thought is so scary to some people they distract themselves from it their whole life. I haven't mentioned on this blog yet, that when I was 24, in the year 2000, I bought a motorcycle in Vietnam and spent 6 weeks driving up the coast. Towards the end of the trip I got in a serious motorcycle accident, and walked away unharmed, and was convinced I was dead and had been shattered into another universe. The next 3 years I learned so much about life living as a ghost. Death is the answer to the question of life. Tick tock, the dreams replace the nightmares and vice versa ad infinium. mind heart, mind heart. The pulse of life. empty needs full to be empty. absence is presence. every subtle thing kisses every subtle thing.

Echos

Echos
art shouts
out
ripples
against a far rock
send them
concentricly
back to me.
Have my stars alligned for now?
seems like the love i give has found its way home
this up pendulum feels nice
2007
will it be as good as last year was difficult?



Good news from the NY Times today:

★ OLIVER HALSMAN ROSENBERG: ‘DADA FOR GRANDMA,’ through Jan. 28. Mr. Rosenberg conceived this show of a dozen lovely, small gouache paintings with references to the zodiac, the Kabala and Egyptian and Hindu cosmology as a tribute to his grandmother Yvonne Halsman who died last year. She was the wife of the Dada photographer Phillipe Halsman, and Dada zaniness has its part in the show. The artist has turned the paintings into an ingeniously low-tech “prayer wheel” set into motion by the visitor pedaling his grandmother’s exercise bicycle. Mr. Rosenberg, a founder of the alternative space Triple Base in San Francisco who is, with Clint Taniguchi, half of the collaborative Crust & Dirt, has other drawings in a box at Triple Candie, worth a look. Little Cakes, 625 East Sixth Street, Apt. 1B, East Village, (646) 342-1056. (Cotter)

Relationships

Relationships

As if I could control the universe.....
I cant change people
I am not a planet
I am this expression right now
realization and calm emerge after the frustration
my whole life
it seems
has been spent
trying to right others wrongs
..As if I could control the universe

The moon and the son
the darkness pushes the light
pushing the darkness pushing the light
who would I be with out you?
endless tag
why stop this game?
why break this cycle?
does thinking about it tire me more than just being in it?
Mind! Are you just a flopping fish out of water?
will I strangle you accidentally whilst trying to make you still?

These games must be fun we play so much
social sandbox
didn't mean to make you cry when I took your bucket...
its just that someone once took mine......


Professor mc brain know it all,
I humbly report to duty.
Doctor Intelligence,
wise beyond your ears....
General mental sir!
where do I fire?
where do I burn?


the door knocks,
as I answer I already know who it will be behind
I invited you
that's why you are here
I wanted to see you
but what made me choose you to see?
I wonder as you stand inside me .....


The page turned like a sudden wind come blown right away the cobwebs of the year just gone
just four days into life again
fucking the spiders out of each other
a new dawn shines through these windows again
ready for the first dust particle to stick and
start
that
slow
build
up again


unapollogies for having a kind heart that leads me into mistaken battles
my footing seemed so sure, but your path was so wrong
forgive me
not only did I not see your no trespassing sign,
but I also stepped into shit


Does the victim only feel strong when having something to fight against?
In what new ways can we feel strong?
Is this scenario infinite?
have my bags been packed and I'm just stuck in the spin cycle like a Saturn ring?
Dali lama whispers tame the lion...
Friction of existential graffiti on the tabula rassa like flatulence
keeps me up at night


The time has not come
it never was not here.
all those times of past and fore...
wait like seeds, caught in my life tornado, invisiblanketing me, ripening, and rotting
like the motion of the ocean
my time egg...
lets keep the sunny side up!


Theres a good reason why
It makes sense to me
I just cant tell you
I dont want to hurt your feelings
do we attract what we repell?
what is this cruel magnetisim?
I'll be hanging out at the supposed flower on the top of my head, try not to bug me.


the tattered flag stands his ground in the wind.
the plastic bag is blown cross country,
winds up in the ocean,
and gets caught in some seaweed.


braile map o braile map
I'm feeling around,
tring to remember where
you could last be found.

Good bye 06

Dear 2006,

I'd be lying if I said I hate to see you go. You kissed my ass when I was in San Francisco, and kicked it when I got to New York. I made new friends and lost dear old ones. I rode on the fulfilled/desperate see-saw, and took more steps towards understanding myself more deeply, and observing unhealthy self created patterns which I'm gently letting go of. I learned a lot this year through the trials and tribulations, like that Kali image of divine liberation torture. I am starting off 2007 by turning all that pain and growth and knowledge into an art experience, which makes me feel like I can move on, and up and beyond what has come to me these past 12 months. I welcome 2007 with open arms and mind because I have learned that no amount of planning for the future can prepare you for the unexpected, and if I try and control the unexpected, well then I'm just taking all the beauty and mystery out of my life, and that my friends is not a life I want to live. So, here's to living where complexity and simplicity balance each other. James Brown and Saddam Hussein usher us to a new dawn.

Tall stack

Just Finished:
The Tantric Way -Mookerjee/Khanna
The Left Handed Coconut -David Aron

Just Started:
Against The Day -Pynchon
A New Kind of Science -Wolfram
Nature Word -Schwaller De Lubicz
The Dali Lama at MIT
The Hermeneutics of the Subject -Michel Foucault
and
Biological Structuralism -Pivar

Getting ready for some art shows, helping a major photographic database get off the ground, and watching some Tennessee Williams DVDs. Beard is huge (people call me Rabbi on the street)... India sometimes seems so close and sometimes so far. I feel like I am torturing myself just thinking about it. Its a mild winter in NY at least. What do we do about the fact that there will be no north pole by 2040?

Thoughts

Woah, I've been feeling the full moon's weighty light recently. Messing some things up, making room to breathe with out stress. So many people I know have had a hell of a year. Will 07 be better? I need to elect a new governor for my state of mind. I was joking with a friend today that mental institutions are the new graduate programs. In the sense that, although you are deep in debt when you graduate from an art program like lets say Yale, your foot is way in the door. I wonder which mental institution has the best art department? Maybe its in France where VanGogh spent some time, or Germany where Adolph Wolfli resided. I think I'm more interested in doing the equivalent of rain forest medicinal knowledge preservation in the field of art. As I've been researching my inevitable trip to India I've come across dying traditions which I'd like to spend some time getting to know and collaborating with the practitioners of. So much has been lost. Like the art of mummification for instance. Who does that anymore? I went to an art auction this morning and saw a mummy and sarcophagus go for a million dollars. Crazy. Who collects mummies? Orphans?

Sludge skin

Sometimes New York makes me feel so heavy. No, I don't mean fat, or lead like. Its like my flame feels diminished here, and I take on some sludge layer made of car horns and shopping bags and nose corks. Seriously, Its bumming me out. I escaped from my ghetto fabulous gallery squat with the taste of Indian planes on my tongue, only to wind up locked in by my own key deep in the heart of my childhood fortress. My Mecca. My third eye studio. This safe place. Home of my love is now only filled by my memories of her, these flints of paint and paper I rub together to generate some heat to make me feel connected again. Its getting colder out. I took advantage of late fall by sacrificing a $75 monthly metro card to the god of meandering walks.

Working on an art show. My first solo solo show in NYC. My Drawing Center show this summer was solo cause it was only crust and dirt collaborations, but it was a harmony we created, and now I get to speak with my own voice. And its a prayer. Its a prayer wheel, set in motion by the viewer. Feeling the Dada spirits in the history of this building. Not leaving for days, wonder what my friends the Slavic elevator men think I'm up to in here...

Little Cakes, It's a wonderful gallery. Honestly, It feels like the most connected space in the city. And I mean connected to the planet and the community. I have the honor of showing there...January 5th I think is the first day. They are too tiny of a place to have a reception, and Its kinda out of the way, but I hope those who go see my show will be touched by what I am creating. Here's their website so you can make yourself familiar with how rad they are: http://www.littlecakes.org/

To trim or not to trim

Some of my heroes

Dostoyevsky

Brahms

Brancusi

Old Masters

Woke up in the morning
read from the book of the dead
spent a lot of money at Kinkos
until a worker decided to refund it all
good stretching in yoga
till family drama dampened the mood
free ticket to Carnegie hall appeared
London symphony orchestra
the ticket was not there when I arrived
checked again after the show started
and I was in
after intermission snuck down to some empty seats close to the stage
Brahms Symphony #2 D major activated my 3rd eye
and blew a hole through the top of my head
cool silver light from above filled my skull
and I lost track of everything
last night the mountain top in India was a floor seat at Carnegie Hall

NYC fermentation

Ok, I'm here. Longer than I planned to be. Flowing with it, yet wanting to be somewhere else at the same time. Things are really ripe for me right now here. In fact things are really good in gerneral. I miss not getting to India yet, but it hasnt stoped me from growing a mean urban beard and starting yoga and being blissed out walking as much as I can. I guess that impulse to go to India was a subconscious prediction of future changes, no matter what soil they ended up taking place on. Its getting cold here, and I left all my cold weather clothes in SF, not thinking I'd be needing them any time soon. Got some solo art shows in January coming up, and some other secret projects to be excited about.

Fresh Window

Ah yes, Duchamp and Rose Selavy...just returned from the MoMA, Brice Marden show...one amazing room that took 20 years to get to...and then...the rain falls and clouds the bright day. So I need to finish up describing the French trip, cause life is moving on and I can't get stuck in the past. My cousins were here this week for a memorial gathering we held for my grandmother. They are like the sisters I never had. Shared lots of family stories, each of us filling in missing pieces, and learning and growing, and I feel like a fuller person now. A table of photographs of my grandmother, spanning her life. 93 years. Amazing. Wishing I could scoop her out of the photographs and bring her back into this world. Well I've got some white wine chilling in the freezer, I'm gonna make sure its not frozen, pour myself a glass, get cozy with itunes in the living room of my ancestral home, and resize some jpegs! (see below)

After Arles we hit collioure, the home of Matisse and Derain for several years. Fortress fishing village turned tourist trap. We went in off season, so it was totally chill and totally beautiful.

(someone remind me to post my art from this trip, I did a sweet little study of this wind mill)

(where the wind comes from)

After a few days we drove along the coast into Spain to visit Cadaques and Figures, both were former homes of Dali and each had a museum dedicated to him. Little coastal town. mom drew some faces on rocks and put them back on the beach. We got a free hotel room one nite cause of our connection to Dali. Worked on some paintings in a city square one day and had a group of 4 year olds as my temporary fan club. I was missing French cuisine, so we split after absorbing so much Dali and headed to Toulouse.

On the way there we saw this huge castle from the high way and pulled off. It was called La Cite, and was super commercialized inside like Disneyland version of an ancient castle, yet it was the real thing. They had some strange tradition 600 years ago of throwing a pig off the tower that kept showing up on postcards.

Never can have enough prayer shots..

Toulouse was soooo amazing. I really loved this city! The colors were all orangebrowns and bluegreengrays. old ass bricks and wood. my fucking piece of shit ipod decided it didn't want to import my photographs so I was really limited as to what I could photograph. Anyway, it was a university town, and a nice blend of history and contemporary energy. I very much enjoyed the French version of a drum circle which consisted of an accordion, violin, standup bass, guitar, saxophone, and beer bottles. Dancing with Spanish girls till 3am....

My friend Charlotte (who I met in Paris a week and a half earlier) happened to be in town. We met up and had a nice lunch. The light was so amazing, reflecting off the river and filtering and fluttering through the leaves. Stunning.



Our flight back to NY ended up getting delayed for a day, so we had a bonus day in Paris. I took my time to walk and explore new areas, still looking for that perfect wine bar...girl...bakery. Went thru parks, old churches, shed a tear at sacre coeur, watching a French girl play accordion for change while herds of tourists shuffled down these streets where artists used to live hundreds of years ago when it was affordable. Locals playing the role in their barrets and scarves and sketch pads drawing caricatures... The public square where artists display the generic Parisian cityscape paintings that they make from memory day after day... Saw the Pompidou's yellow and blue pipes below and decided to walk that way. After an hour or so I made my way there and decided to take advantage of its late hours and catch some art. Rauschenberg and Yves Klein both had solo shows (I gained a lot more respect for Klein's vision), and while exploring an amazing Vija Clemens show I bumped into an artist who I had met in Chicago a couple of years ago. Small world. We got kicked out of the museum before getting to see the end of a huge art/cinema exhibition, which was so excellent. As we were leaving, I saw that there was a free Brancusi studio recreation museum right next door which was closed. He is one of my art heroes, and I felt like a real dumb ass for missing that one. After a nice vegetarian meal with my friend we said good bye at the Louvre, and I sketched some sculptures, trying to wring out every last drop from the trip...

Well, now its fall in NYC. Stain glass leaves over old central park playgrounds

Me and my cousin and her wonderful daughter

I miss that smile

This was my room for like 3 months, and I'm finally moving on up, away from the vintage darkroom fumes.... The next chapter starts tonight.