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.