Quiet Morning? Late Night?

The bored doorman picks up an errant plastic bottle as Yours Truly is walking out the front door for a fresh WSJ and Stobba as a Chinese cabbie pulls up yelling "Anything for me?"
"No, quiet morning," says the doorman.
And as I walk toward Broadway I hear the lopsided conversation with the cabbie lobbying.
Quiet morning indeed.
Construction - or restruction - of a building across BWay commenced with the blazing sun rays resting on my face at 6:00 AM.
Somewhere behind/below my room rests the weary heads of Dead Can Dance, who YT watched at Beacon Theatre (b. 12/24/29) last night with Justy and Heady.
An aural triumph - sold to the gilded rafters.
Imagined the same wonder of an earlier audience, perhaps eighteenth century, experiencing the magic of an opera.
It was lush and transported my mind to not only the early 90's dance clubs of several cities, but to a foundry of ideas.
That should be the mission of all Art.
Inspiration.
But inspiration to create more Art.
To quote Keith Richards:
"I receive, I transmit."
Onward to More Art.

Foundry Love.

Shoulder pads.
When the 90s and its bulk waned one would slice shoulder pads out of jackets to spare them the Goodwill dump once the next sleek decade made its aesthetics apparent.
It was indeed the 80s on the cusp of the 90s (the decade in focus) that Yours Truly spotted thee one and only Grace Jones (see above cig-centric image) emerging from a brownstone in the west 60s and that seems impossible suddenly and I am trying to better pinpoint the exact site.
But that is where it was, it was not a then-decrepit Broome Street with its mix of cast iron, cardboard, spray paint, and creeps which seems where she would have emerged.
She exited the brownstone, approached and mounted a scooter, and zoomed in a western fashion down the street.
Decades are not neatly packaged, their vibes imbue, influence participants before lightly melting into the next momentous cluster of changes.
Tonight Jesus and Mary Chain will be hitting a free stage in the Middling City, and YT will be shooting the gig.
It's been over a decade since the last time YT shot the band, and the venue was perhaps the gym at Buffalo State College.
[Of course it would be handy to have a database of shows shot and all that and that will transpire once there is a spare month.]
Homage to the 90s includes the leaving-behind of the 80s odd haircuts, and madcap dancefloors, and the emergence of the MC's Goo Goo Dolls (who became stellar during this time frame - as we friends and media types all watched and cheered and shot and attended the parties), and the emergence of Nirvana and that roadtrip (where were You when you first saw the video, where were You when you heard the news), and the emergence of sundry other guy-fronted bands (The Verve! Oasis! Third Eye Bind!) with contemplative names, and the emergence of ladies with guitars, and odd politics, and explosions of online life.
Onward.

Just Like Honey Love.

So there was Yours Truly, enjoying the business of dreaming, when YT was aware that Brutalism Architecture was playing a prominent role – as prominent as YT indeed.
For there in front of my face, in front of my body, my knuckles knuckled deep into concrete ridges, was Brutalism. And how utterly metaphorically obvious: I was scaling a high building by joining with the unyielding surface. In the midst of the climb I knew that I could not succumb to the pain of climbing the concrete (my knees and fingers were bleeding), but that I would not fall.
I believed that I would not fall, and I did not fall, and made it to the top of the building.
YT dreams a lot about scaling difficult buildings: architecture is always a lead character in my dreams.
In my nocturnal central casting my brain casts about for tall, challenging, encompassing buildings, and interiors are filled with Art, craft, and intricate details.

In this moment I think of Walt Whitman, melder of Nature/Love/Body:

Houses and rooms are full of perfumes, the shelves are crowded with perfumes,
I breathe the fragrance myself and know it and like it,
The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.

The atmosphere is not a perfume, it has no taste of the distillation, it is odorless,
It is for my mouth forever, I am in love with it,
I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked,
I am mad for it to be in contact with me.

 It continues, find it.

The concrete structure in this dream was a compilation of several buildings that I have visited: it was in part the squat that I visited several times in the Lower East Side of the Shiney Apple, where Bernie lived on East Thirteenth Street for several years in defiance, with a group of other pre-Occupy defiers. It is now, of course, a fixed-up building filled, assuredly, with exquisitely furnished expensive flats.

I learned to love Brutalism somewhere along the way of this interesting life, perhaps while writing a story about court buildings in the Middling City: City Court here is in a building much like that in my dream. I am not sure if some interesting public art graced its northern edge.

Climbing Love.

Re-cover/Recover Love.

Yours Truly, looking about whilst editing as a cornea-protecting measure (that nice Lisa at the eye joint reported that I have the classic bent corneas of one who spends entirely too much time looking at the backlit screens of le monde moderne) spots some summertime flaws:
1. Men in sandals. Unless they're the sort that men wear in the state of Maine for legitimate, kayaking-related reasons, please, men, spare us.
2. Tattoos, badly executed and splayed on limbs in collagey fashion. To my right a man who otherwise looks alright has collaged on his arms (in no particular order): a black lobster head/puma head, life-sized scissors, crystals coming out of a wave/cat's paw, spots resembling bruises or tropical flesh-killing disease.
As YT advised a young person recently, who breathlessly awaited my cogent reply to the question "Where should I get my tat?" - "You do realize that it's not mandatory, right?"

Getting ready for several things presently:
1. Deadline du jour of images made of an upholstery lady whose job (see Trade Tools above) it is to salvage and creatively recover furnishings that have been beat to hell by undergraduate students who drop pizza slices and slop their snowy feet all over the seats and sofas. And yesterday, while meeting with a friend for summertime bevvies, she reported that some of these upholstered furnishings - in libraries - are covered with unmentionable fluids after unmentionable activities.
2. Roadtrip to a lakeside joint for a brief respite.
3. Workshop using this very tool (Blogger), FB, Twitter, and smarts for a group of teens on Thursday via YAWNY (not to be confused with thee one and only YANNI of "Is GREEK spoken here?" in heavy accent despite living in the USofA for ... like forever. NB: caveat away if and when You, on a lark, open up his cheeseball flash page as some horrid music will stream into your life).
4. The solo YT drawing show - "Direct."
 But that is an ever-present fact until Friday, September 7th.

Onwards to the push of pixels.
Indie Love.

Because I missed epinw.
Because the evocative air of spring is around me.
Because I want to document this moment for several reasons.

Yours Truly is sitting on a semi-comfortable chair in the daylight-only light of a room in Buffalo General Hospital.

The most important person in my life has been sealed into this place, breathing its rarefied air, for nearly one month and today he is leaving - finally.

As with his other monthlong journey/stay/visit at nearby Roswell Park Cancer Institute, the daily visits are never a chore, but an anticipation of a meditative moment. Time spent in hospitals is time to leave behind much of the bullshit of the daily world, to enter into a place of selflessness amid a world that is nothing about your self.

Time here with him, when it is the two of us, is a celebration of Life, and of Art.

If he were to look over now at my face and to see my eyes all swoony with tears he would become alarmed, and worried about me so I'm thinking I may have to take a quick stroll along the bustle of the hallway until this subsides. And what is needing subsidy? Well, it is the transition that is difficult. Getting accustomed to a certain reality, and then a modification of that reality, and then another jolt, or change.

The rhythm of the days has been the racing, walking up the windswept hill to Buffalo General, the process of opening doors against the rush of lake winds, the familiar faces of volunteers and guards and people selling the shitty Tim Horton's coffee, the changing holiday decorations, the advisories along the walls and on computer screens, the turning off the elevator and the turning down into the wing, the nurses at the station who never glance upwards, the arrival at the door, the quick assessment of what is happening in the room, the kiss hello, the conversation, the other guests, the conversation continuation, the kiss goodbye, the retreat to the daily rhythm.

And now of today.

Today is the leaving. The transition so the documentation of the feeling of this room.
This room is the usual assemblage of hospital colors that are meant to soothe. This room features a buttery yellow, a bleached-out mauve, an earthy maroon around the four vertical windows that are locked tight.
I was inspired to draw at Roswell Park, with its several flourishes of stainless steel and interesting lines that converged over the bed. But Buffalo General hasn't - didn't - inspire any drawings out of me.

Our conversation today has been about Art, anticipation, medical matters, Love, and more. What impresses me constantly about him is his Love of people and life, truly the smartest man I've ever met - an intellect I am in awe of, one that amasses information while mine sort of throws itself upon facts that are useful, but many times, sadly, what remains is a shadowy remnant of the original excitement of the gleaning of the fact. And this perhaps why YT is a better journalist than creative writer: I am good at gathering and putting-out of fact and moving along rather than archiving intellectual arcs between things.

I have suspected that I am not a great hospital visitor as I push the boundaries of what is acceptable to be a visitor. I cry in front of the patient and said patient has to comfort me. I grab a wheelchair and decide to take it for a spin around the hallways with orderlies offering to help me with a tight turn before I've mastered the moves, I lay on the patient's bed to get more comfortable as the patient sits upright in a chair, I suck oxygen from the mask attached to the green valve on the wall after the breathing treatment meds are finished for a nice blast of freshness. Bad visitor conduct. C'est la vie.

Vie indeed.
Spring is for life, as Life is for the living, and Love is for us all.

Love Love, Love.

The Big Wont.

Yours Truly: Accidental Shadow Self-Portrait 12.11

There was Yours Truly, as is the big wont, in car, in traffic, in captiva, listening to all-day Patti Smith (that is not part of the wont-ness, but was today's unofficial soundtrack, Easter to be quite specific, and more specifically, a few of the more YT-unloved tracks), and en route to the offices of the Shiney Happy Mag for a photo shoot. As in YT in front of the cam, not on that other, and more usual, side of the divide.

And despite having listened to Easter since its release, and absorbing the whole of it as a work of art (voice, lyrics, band), the following snippet was quite a surprise from its title song.

Again I am the salt, the bitter laugh.
I am the gas in a womb of light, the evening star,
the ball of sight that leads that sheds the tears of Christ
dying and drying as I rise tonight.

So many surprises.

So there I was in the slow 190 North situation, from before where one gets off in the Middling City to get to officialdom, or that big ugly concrete hotel, or to meet someone at Stobba, or to whirr around the feeble yet still kicking encampment rendition of Occupy!, to the 290. And YT had no clear explication what this image was for. Why I had to wear a black shirt, why I had to be there, why I would be wearing a handed-over vest embroidered with the logo of the Shiney Happy.

The car was relieved of me and I trotted into the building and up then to the Shiney Happy offices to be photographed by KC & G Kratt.

I hopped onto the mark, a white-on-white X.

So what is this for, YT queried.

Apparently for something to do with Valentine's Day.

So, using that for inspiration, I decided to play Cupid by jumping à la Philippe Halsman of jump-model fame (and his subsequent, famed notation that Marilyn Monroe jumped like a little girl, for whatever that might be worth) sky-high.

And then I added twirls.

And then a trot to the mark and a twist in the air with hands nearly off the seamless. And G, always concerned & full of maternal sweet vibes, reminded me to not trip on the cables of the battery packs, and YT had to - of course - offer the visual implausibility of YT crashing through the seamless and through the window behind said seamless.

Then YT moved on to another style of jump, and then to heart shapes with hands and arms and then on to points beyond and beyond and beyond. As in outside the offices of the Shiney Apple.


Moral: One might be a cranky ass after sitting in post-accident slow-downs but when One is called upon to hit the mark - any mark - one must do so with vim and vigour.


Vigorous Love.


postscript: Blogger has once again tweaked itself to high levels of annoyance and now for whatever reason all my words are in italics and YT loathes Italics, an unnecessary hold-over from the early days of typesetting. Not that there's any little thing wrong with the days of my pub forbears, but this tipsy styling - unwanted - on Blogger is ever so pesky, as pesky as a car that cannot move to the beat and surge of rock & roll.

Accidental Frame Series: Blue-Lit Curtain + Revelers. Gala. Amherst, NY 11.4.

Yours Truly lives life as an endurance sport, one of a few cherished chestnuts being "Sleep when You're Dead." Amongst the collected chestnuts the very private "Attack the day with Joy," which I say to myself every morning, repeated on the wake-up message on my iPhone screen. In case You didn't realize this, wake-ups are customizable. 

Everything is customizable, if You can figure shit out.

Thought about YT's Accidental Frame Series: sometimes these images, to my reckoning, are the off-kilter, usually, mis-firings that capture the aura of events Perfectly.

After a marathon, Art Endurance Test of four solo shows within a span of 1.5 years, including the most magical one of all in DUMBO a year ago (magical in its inception, its happening, the opening, and the loving crush of my Shiney Apple friends) YT self-promised a rest of Art for a while. Like a year or so. Well, if You know YT, this is a self-ruse at its best as as soon as the wall labels are yanked off the walls, I'm thinking 'What now.'

The What Now is now a solo show in October in the Middling City and I'm thinking of an all-drawings show. And then I committed to a group show after the new year, its theme being Janus. As soon as I read Janus I RSVPd as a yes as Janus has captivated me since I paid attention greatly to a drawing by Robert Longo of same title - or so, as my artistic imagination can at time take small and pleasurable liberties - and learned more about this Roman god of beginnings and endings. 

At Parsons I made several video pieces, including one devoted to the idea of Janus. I am now thinking, as of this morning, of casting two male twins (the video featured two women, not twins) to be Janus. The video is a forehead-to-forehead awareness, rolling, before a stretch to touch backs of heads, into a neck hug, and lastly the Janus gesture.

Endnote on the idea of endurance. Yesterday afternoon I went out on rollerblades for twelve miles, starting out with music, the usual protective gear, and the goal of looking and pushing, on the roadway along the water, curving to the small town, to a backroad with ditches full of water, occasional trash, and dead animals. It was two hours of limbs reaching, rolling along with music, giving an occasional wave to people burning leaves, or mowing, or on their bikes. I passed at one point a young boy teen with something in his hands, walking slowly along a ditch, and I had a rush of childhood memory - that feeling of wanting independence, and how that could be found in some moments where time could be stretched out while the adults were occupied. 

And now there's a collage of other roads meandered down for a moment to reclaim balance: the road in Pennsylvania after a long car ride and before a funeral; a road in Massachusetts before the beginning of a job, and meeting a man down the road who showed me his art studio, and then finding my boss walking toward me on the road, looking for me and a piece of my adventure; the street in Chicago to just have a fucking break and lose the nausea of a frenetic cab ride.

Onward.

Endurance, Love.

Unified Chaos: Occupy Wall Street, From the Loud Comfort of a Found Arm Chair

Manhattan’s Wall Street is under siege. Barricades have seized this quadrant of the city; every block has barricaded sidewalks quelling foot traffic. On my way from the Subway and walking along Broadway to Zuccotti Park, home of New York City’s Occupy Wall Street encampment, I overheard a tour guide complaining that barricades would be barring them from uncomplicated sightseeing.

Occupy Wall Street: Manhattan's Zuccotti Park. 10/12/11 Photo: Nancy J.Parisi

I write this seated in an armchair a few feet behind the sprawling onsite jam band facing outwards toward Trinity Place on the park’s steps. Straight ahead are musicians, flag wavers, dancers, and beyond them the barricaded onlookers, photographers, passersby, and First Responders.

The band is mainly drummers with someone on a full drum kit, various people on other drums and buckets, and a wizened sax player, who at this moment has stopped playing to outstretch his arms toward his audience while shouting “Freedom!”

The armchair is faded floral and was probably found curbside on some nearby partially-residential street. I had an artist friend who had a live-work space on nearby Beaver Street: this is not the most livable of Manhattan neighborhoods. And, as everyone knows, not too far away is Ground Zero.

Moments ago a man, perhaps pleased with my recording of the goings-on with my camera around my neck, and laptop on my lap, came up and gave me a big kiss on the cheek. I can still feel where his stubble brushed my face. Where are all these encampers shaving, and bathing?

There are hundreds of placards (held aloft, and at rest on top of dozens of electric blue tarps that cover clumps of personal possessions. I watched a woman enthusiastically create two anti-greed/government placards from two sides of a pizza box. People donate food, and pizza is a popular item: food is free and I watched the peaceful chow line where people could make a PBJ, eat some pizza or other donated food.

This is all very organized. Live music faces Liberty Place, just across the street from Brooks Brothers and the sky-high NYPD surveillance box, replete with video cameras, and, for some reason, devices to measure wind velocity and direction. A chalkboard announces when organized marches will be taking place, and where they will be headed to.

Just now the band went a bit more up-tempo, inspiring me to write faster: this entire collaborative voiced action in this park is powerful, and is being noticed around the world. Hopefully those high above this park in offices, are realizing that their own actions must change. It's idealistic, and as one of the placards read, it's organized chaos. But it feels - and sounds - good.

Libran Musings at the Height of Libra Season

Yours Truly, while minding her own business, sipping a little anti-cold vodka at The Pub last night after a full day of shooting, spied a fellow Libra across the room - the famed AJ Fries.

There was the famed AJ Fries hug of significance, and then the discussion of birthdays and parties, and balloons and festoonery.

As the Buffalo Bills (who make all of those with Buffalo DNA want to shout, for good and bad) play on with Cincinnati  (a name that would be much more interesting pronounced with a faux Italian accent - try it) YT is plotting the next and much-needed foray to the Shiney Apple for art, erudition, and the making of art and ideas.

Speaking of Ideation and such, there was a big rock rumour that Radiohead would be playing for those encamped on Wall Street. A quote from Occupy Wall Street's site:

Due to miscommunication within our rapidly expanding and adjusting group, we were unable to determine that this was a hoax in time; it can be difficult to seperate rumor from fact in an open source movement.

We are all living amid the open source movement, know it or (k)not. This is the sharing of information of all genres, an empowering facet of our ever-controlled social structures.

Time to make, do, and drive.

Driving Rain, Love.

Bob Memories During Irene Weekend.

“Some are born mad. Some remain so.”  - Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

Bad-Ass Hurricane Bob. 1991

 Bee-stung, wind-stung, song-stung.

There is nothing like battening down hatches (physically and metaphysically) to wrap most in the all-for-one and one-for-all sentiment that should occur more frequently - the sense of collective well-being and cause, not the natural/man-made disaster taking place along the east coast of the USA this weekend, of course. As Al Gore implores, the frequency of disasters of natural/man-made varieties will keep coming with more severity as the ice melts, as the sun shines with greater ferocity, frying our collective protective skins, and destinies.

And today, as the hurricane Irene seemingly wanes from a 4 to a 3 to a 2 to tropical storm, the thoughts of Yours Truly, former, decade-long counselor/teacher of children in the state of Maine (at the toppermost) naturally/man-madely turn to memories of Bob.

Bob encroached on the summer of 1991. According to my calculations that is exactly one score ago, and was at the end of our camp's second session. YT was acting as not only an assistant director, but the Arts & Crafts teacher. I created a program for all campers, daily. I taught six periods a day, and kayaked away my stress on the spring-fed lake daily, taking to open roads when possible to enjoy the surrounding area, and Portland, as time allowed. Or as heartstrings tugged.

As I had proved myself many times to be unflappable in the face of kid-related disasters small, x-l, natural, and man-made, I was always called in by camp foundress Nancy Maier to assist and brainstorm (and at times to deliver the most unruly of girls back home before dinner in the camp van - to backroads Maine towns, to Providence, and to Manhattan) in the midsts of challenges.

Discussion took place about what to do about Bob, expected in the next day or so. We planned a move down the road to a closed-for-summer brick elementary school. We expected that this would be an overnight, and we'd all be returning to camp the following day. Everyone was piled into the gym, where everyone was to sleep in their sleeping bags, mats were in short supply. We/they had food, water, games and music to play.

YT and Nancy Maier surveyed the background, technical aspects of the school as some of the power was obviously waning, with lights flickering as the storm approached and heavy rains fell. And heavy branches fell.

Here it should be noted that YT was supposed to have a night off and had been very much looking forward to spending a night in Portland with a friend. Coming from Buffalo, where blizzards deter no one from leaving the house and heading out to what is usual, YT drove off after lunch expecting to make it to Portland despite reports of twelve-foot waves in the city. What does that mean to a woman from Buffalo who knows that three feet of snow can seem, with drifts, and other heady factors, like a mere six inches. So off I drove in my little car, making it about three miles when it became very clear that a hurricane meant lots of falling branches, and trees, with big pieces of debris of Nature flying by the car. The car and I returned to the school parking lot, relieved. I had made an evacuation plan and now I was in the midst of that plan.

Nancy and I decided we should investigate ways to keep the power going (if need be), and I located the fuses and breakers. Lights were half-off, it was like a Filipino brown-out. Nancy grew up in the Shiney Apple with supers, but I, a Middling City renter, was more familiar with these items. I flicked breakers. I looked at fuses. The security system began to wail as its power supply was momentarily cut off when I jolted that breaker. When the alarm sounded we looked at each other with "oh shit" looks as the sounds of several screaming girls could be heard coming from the gym. Finally I figured out how to turn the siren off, or it went off. The power was out and while it was still light I decided to attempt jumping the generator battery with my car. The generator was in a small room near a door so I could reach it with my jumper cables. What YT didn't realize was that the battery needed water - when the school's maintenance man was finally able to make it to the school, he told me so, and then did jump the generator in the same way that I'd tried with his truck. So much for being a powerhouse superhero.

After a semi-sleepless night in the principal's office with Nancy and Mo Ganey, Nancy and I returned to our camp to survey the damage, to see if the kids could return. Funnels had spun off the small lake and cut the top halves of trees off, leaving a clear path of damage. Power lines were down. Toilets could not flush. The campers had to be evacuated from the school before their session was complete - and staff had to move personal belongings for the girls. It was a bit chaotic but nobody was hurt, and there were many disappointed kids (and parents, I'm sure) as that summer ended abruptly.

Hurricanes, in a nutshell, are more than a Neil Young metaphor, more unpredictable than a raging Middling City blizzard, and nothing to sneeze at. In January YT will make a third trip to New Orleans, the first time after the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina. On my first trip there I photographed a week of Mardi Gras. The second trip I shot a jazz funeral. This trip I plan on shooting what remains of NOLA's charming eccentricities.

I'm not one for fruity drinks (and fruit in general) but may sip a Hurricane there with the hopes of banishing remaining hurricane badness, like a liquid smudge stick.

Smudgy, Liquid Love.