Tonight I told one of the richest men in the Middling City this, as he was en route to the podium for a little mid-reception intro-ing:
And remember to smile, in my most self-surprisingly snarky voice.
So he did smile, right at me, and said, into the mic, Look I'm smiling for you.
This would be the same man who, as I was speaking to a venture capitalist (perhaps one of this great land's last) I know and who I've shot for, bragged about his Leica collection, who took my camera out of my hands to shoot me with the venture capitalist. How did he do? He probably does better with a Leica, less of a complicated machine, in his hands.
At one point at aforementioned reception a student/server asked me (well before his time) Are you a professional. Only a stone's throw from the question mentioned in Sunday's post.
I said, over my shoulder
Of course I'm a pro, can't you tell by the way I can shoot through this floral arrangement.
I mean really.
Student/servers and their silly questions these days.
Today snarkiness at the deserving.
Tomorrow I jet off to Manhattan for high times and misdemeanors.
All my jet stream love.

Setting:
Halloween-themed wedding. First-ever wedding happening at a downtown Middling City venue. The venue put finishing touches on the room 45 minutes (according to my former chef friend Paul et al who now happens to be the new venue's GM and it ain't motors we're talking here... we mean suit, tie, pressure, eyes all over details and the staff) before wedding reception, much to the Type A Chagrin of bride. Bride is dressed as a bride. Groom has changed into a devil costume. If ever there was a man undeserving of a devilish costume, it is this man.
I am the wedding's photographer (if I had a Euro for every grown man who has asked the question - drunken and non-drunken - Are you the Official Photographer (emphasis on Fish) I'd have enough to retire tomorrow to a French chateau and employ a houseboy and have enough guest rooms for all my pals.
The reception is underway. Guests are still arriving in costume when Yours Truly spots a man leaning with shitloads of attitude against a wall near the patio for smoking.
He is completely dressed in black leather, is wearing cowboy boots, aviator frame shades, a duster overcoat and has shaggy, circa 1970s hair.
I approach him not with the intent to shoot but talk.

Bob Seger, you're Bob Seger, right.
silence, more leaning.
Bob Seger, right, you're dressed as Seger - Night Moves?
silence, more leaning.
Suddenly I think No wait, maybe it's Neil Young. No, Neil wouldn't be fucking caught dead in a duster jacket. Paul Hogan? No, it's a rockstar.
You are supposed to be Bob Seger, aren't you.
"Bob" takes off his sunglasses, revealing blue eyes rimmed with crimson.
I AM MYSELF.

Later in the evening I found myself in a storage room with Paul, who whisked me away to have me paint his face Like Alice Cooper.
What exactly do you mean by Alice Cooper.
I wanted to be sure as I've known Pauly for a long time (he's one of the few who still calls me by my self-Italian-nickname Nunzia) and didn't want to drive a Halloween makeup fuckup wedge between us and our longstanding joviality.
Tear drops, he instructed, one on this side, two on this side.
I added shadow. I said, Relax Pauly, I'm in art school, I KNOW how to do this.
He laughed.
I said, No really.
Then while I added blood spilling out of his lips he told me he's getting divorced and other fun facts.
I shared one of my several theories about relationships.
I was done with the makeup and he offered me a scotch and soda. I said Only if you can make it look like a tall ginger ale.
After finishing the "ginger ale" I sought out chunks of gorgonzola and strategically-placed Halloween treats to mask the scent.

Masked and scented luvv.

Bumper cars of logic and change cavort about at this moment as Patti, thee Patti, thee only Patti, thee only wall-eyed Patti, sings Because the Night as I crave and yearn and post and am about to head back out for ding-ding round 4 rest of the night.
Had dinner with three lovelies (Kate, Liz, Cheryl) this evening and at one point snatched the comical/seriousical Middling City weekly out of Liz's hands. She tried to stop me, suspecting the brakes would be thrown on my good times. Wrong. I leafed through in smirky silence. Cheryl: We're awaiting your colour commentary, Nancy. Then it was unloosed from my honest, journalistic-raised and diplomatic pair of lips.
I was très inspired to evacuate the premises and squat in front of my very illegally sidewalk-parked car to change the sidewalk sandwich board. ARTVOICE became Fartvice.
Immature.
Sated.
I have simple goals, simple pleasures.
You should all be so lucky.
Yours in Immaturity.

Despite my somewhat dishevelled and over-caffeinated grad student condition (in case you do not know this means hair unbrushed, eyes glazed, shirt not really thinking of being tucked, curvature of the spine and wait... oh, matched socks) you do really want to be my pal as today I finally received my official and really great (despite the 50/50 blend) BLOGGER hoodie. Now I can wear my colours with pride, with urban abandon.
So that depressive singer/songwriter Elliott Smith self-dropped out of the life race, no surprise, having heard his oeuvre.
All and now it's time to race out to the suburbs once again to deliver my handiwork that makes people not only smile but pay me.
Love.

One of Yours Truly's dabblings (dalliances) is saintly historical fact or lack thereof, the miraculous administrative process of beatification and the life and high times of soon-to-be-saint-to-you Father Nelson Baker of Lackawanna-based Baker Hall/Orphanage fame.
So imagine my piqued curiosity and Catholic-induced intrigue when Mother Teresa of India is in the Express Lane to sainthood. The Pope, as I've always said, is No Dope. About to leave this un-astral plane he's shoved his bud to the front of the line. And yesterday elevated several cardinals to boot.
Imagine my glee upon reading VF contributor Christopher Hitchens's piece in one of today's Slate posts. If you have a desire link
here maintenant.
This story digs deep and reveals her unmatronly duplicity.
Amongst the piece is an excerpt from her 1979 (hooray at the Memory of Jim Carter, decidedly un-hip, cause-ridden U.S. prez) Nobel Prize acceptance speech in which she states I feel the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a direct war, a direct killing - direct murder by the mother herself.
As I listen to John Lennon, amongst others, on cd shuffle, and among the music Imagine popped up moments ago I find Teresa to be (one of my favored words of late) just so wrongheaded.
I rest my rightheaded, really not righteous, case.
Libra Love.

Since seeing his holy rockstar likeness on VH1 (with an odd new logo, I might toss in to the fray), I am wondering how it is possible that Michael Stipe of REM stellar humanhood has begun to resemble Woody Allen of all men. Stipe was never a handsome man, even with his early 80s tossled hair (yikes, and then that frightening longer hair pulled back into a braid - the hairdo I witnessed in that thrift shoppe in Athens GA when I spoke with him that empty early morn), and his eyeliner underscored his gauntness - but Woody Allen?
It's disconcerting.
Another cd, another tour are coming from down there where vines grow visibly and the voices of men rattle basso profundo with mystery.

There's a night of Beckett/Albee near PSD/Union Square and that's on the big to-do list, experience one of the muses firsthand.

Muse Love.

Yours Truly, a Geek, a Gear Head. Evidence.
Was at the NPPA conference, Northern Short Course, yesterday in Cleveland. As in O-Hi-Oh!
Touched a Nikon D2 yesterday (eta: 2 weeks on the international photo scene), slithered around its newer, larger back-end controls and its other bodily functions, like a hungry non-poisonous garden snake.
Power: wireless transmission from camera to laptop.
Power: improved snazzadelic magnifying of captured image.
The nice Nikon repair man onsite, Michael, fixed my f5's.
Not just the loose/missing screws but the flappy grips' rubber.
Hovered back twice in an hour due to separation anxiety.
Spent much time at the Olympus table querying about the in's & out's of my 5050. Things like super secret metering items, and much much more.
Three photog speakers waxing big on the craft, the Zen of ops, rush of priviledged view, more.
Wondered how the Parsons others would find the other realm of image, of non-art doc work.

Two interesting stranger encounters.
While minding my own business.
That completely goes sans saying.

1. Writing an article about NYC shopping for the shinyhappy Middling City mag and let me tell you, it's going to be brilliant. It practically is now.
So, meandering along my concept I wander into ABC House and Whatever the hell it's called. I jotted it down, lest you think I'm a journalistic slacker. So I find, amid the bazaarness of it all, a new, brand new, boutique. Michal whatzername, Israeli designer of excellent jewelry and housewares and a few clothing items. Her man behind the counter was just oso charming, an Israeli Queen. So I buy this Michal's cd, impressed that she is such a super polymath, and IQ boxes and bags it for me. Then he informs me that I have great energy. I tell him he has a great nose, that I'm a purveyor of noses. And that is true. And that was also true, too.

2. So just before meeting the Israeli Queen I am walking through Union Square when I spy an absolute fine specimen of a man. A man with mystique, perfect for my upcoming video project. I think wow and he wanders away. I turn to see where he went as he's instantly haunted my head and *ppooff* he really is gone like a ghost on the day after All Soul's Day, the day after Halloween. So then I'm eating a sandwich. Jump cut to the sandwich eating moment. Suddenly there goes Mr. Mystique past the window. Taking this as a Zen moment of good fortune I abandon the last of my late lunch and follow him down the side street. I watch him watching things and then hopped on opportunity: Wannabeinavideo?Everactedbefore?NoI'mnotstalkingyou?
His name? John Kennedy. And that's not a lie. He's a Brit. He'll pair well with the girl I've earmarked as my girl protag.

Serendipitous Love.

Yesterday traipsed, and I mean traipsed, out to Dia:Beacon in Beacon! Beacon! Beacon! Beacon Beacon! (as the Metro North conductor shouted into the ontrain p.a.), NY with fellow Parsons geniuses: Beth, Philip and Vanessa.
We are currently studying systems in our online "course" and lo and freakin' behold there in our art-seeking midst were works by conceptual system makers Sol LeWitt. I had read about the Richard Serra torqued ellipses there and was ravenous to experience them.
It was like my Belgian workhorse experience: as they got closer, or me to them, they got larger in size, not scale, as Serra says.
The torqued ellipses are four systematic sculptures constructed of three inch thick slabs of steel which is interactive. Each of the four pieces can be entered and #3 there is a double ellipse so you make your way to the center of it via a steely corridor where above the average human's head is about fifteen feet of brown steel ellipse. As the sun comes through the former factory industrial windows light and shadow make the steel, with its own random markings, even more beautiful.
Art, ever surprising.
Grad school, ever challenging.
Coffee, ever needed.
Love.

Well, since my last epinw blogging I turned 40 and before that, the day before, to be très specific, John Lennon's birthday happened.
There was an ultra-fab party tossed in my honor and held at Big Orbit Gallery on John's b-day. While I was talking to some guests I began noting that the artwork on the walls was made by Yours Truly. I looked all around the white walls. All me. It was shocking, a gigantic surprise, a retrospective of sorts. And, as I described to members of Janet Reno Fan Club last night over dinner, like being in a room with several of one's past lovers. Intense. Self-reflexive. And so much more.
To the party I wore a Peach Berserk dress from TO, given to me by an MIA older friend, Marilyn. I have my theory that this very dress is what got the ol' divorce ball rolling in her life: her husband Mark HATED that dress, forbade her to ever wear it again and she presented it to me in a shopping bag, bolero jacket and crinolines and backup dress all in there. What does it look like? An upside down psychedelic phantasmagoric yet somewhat vintage tulip.
During my hungover condition on the 10th, thee 40th b-day day, I had to drive out to my niece's grammar school with cake and soda and cups and the like. Why? Because I did same for nephew on his b-day, my niece and I share a b-day and her mom/my sister forgot to make cupcakes and my niece said That's OK, mom, Auntie will come to school... Auntie always saves the day.
With that kind of familial pressure I loaded me and my champagne-soaked brain into the Forester and trundled off to discover that the school had no idea that I was showing up, DMB shirt on and shopping bags in hands.
The office lady had to speak to the principal and this is where the story gets really interesting, how it illustrates my truest, authority-hating self.
I had to go into the principal's office and stand before him, seated at his desk. A fat and bald man wearing a cheap shirt who had apparently been doing nothing in his office. There was the overarching vibe of non-productivity in that office.
At one point I minorly snapped and said Look, I'm a really busy person. I just drove 45 minutes out here, am I going to get into my niece's classroom... or not? While he blopped off to see the office lady in her office area to give my sister a call I called her myself on her cell phone. Hi. The school doesn't know I am here, I said very very loudly. Mr. Fatso Principal came back into his office, where I was standing and talking. It's OK, go ahead, down the hall to the left, room 111.
For the love of Educational Gods, I didn't have a blanket and rope in my hands. What the fuck? They let teens with guns into schools and not aunts with cake.
For the record I dig being 40. It means being ever-more the real.
If you don't understand this you are too young to know.
I rest my middle-aged ass. I mean case.
Love.

"Lethal injection is now the dominant way Americans are executed. It is used in all 38 states that have the death penalty except Nebraska, which uses electrocution. In 10 states, prisoners may choose between lethal injection and a second method, including hanging, firing squad, electrocution and lethal gas."
- New York Times, 10/7/03, Adam Liptak story on how the fangled drugs hide suffering

Fucking firing squad?
But, this being a democracy and all, you do have a buffet of endgame choices post-last meal.
Give me Ol' Sparky
and give me Mort.
I am hardly willing to march with Susan Sarandon & Co. but do find the above one of the most abhorrent American things.
If pro-death penaltiers were regulars on the Middling City protest scene I would stop my car and verbally abuse them much like I do at anti-choicers in front of WomenServices on Main Street.
Thanks, NYT, for this evening's blog rant.
Justice Love.

Saw the historical epic Luther with Laura tonight, it starring Joseph Fiennes who at moments looks very much like my pal Justin, who called me moments ago in a tipsy condition as he wandered down a Brooklyn street.
So in the midst of the Luther cinematic experience I'm trying out my new analytical gradstudent skills (Benjamin, in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: "While facing the camera he [the screen actor] knows that ultimately he wil face the public, the consumers who constitute the market. This market, where he offers not only his labor but also his whole self, his heart and soul, is beyond his reach." whew, there's some real gradhood for your perusal and edification. You're welcome.), transposing this Luther's story to that of MLutherK, Jr - that lusty nun at the end becomes Coretta Scott King and the men in geometric hats and capes straight out of the Catholic Church costume department represent the KKK and other American Apartheidists and civil rights marchers are peasants et al on Luther's team.

As I finally read the article that Pam sent me, concerned about me always, now I am terrified of eating tuna fish. Mercury. Memory. Mercury. Memory. What was I writing?
Love.

"What the tiger, along with a four- to five-foot reptile called a caiman, was doing inside a cluttered apartment in the Drew Hamilton Houses at Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard and 141st Street remained a mystery yesterday. In a news conference at the scene, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said the police became involved in the case on Wednesday when the apartment's resident, Antoine Yates, called to say he had been bitten by a pit bull. When the police went to investigate, Mr. Kelly said, Mr. Yates met them in the lobby. He went to Harlem Hospital with bites on an arm and a leg. On Thursday, the police got an anonymous tip saying a wild animal was somewhere in the city. On Friday, another call directed them to the exact address. On Friday night, the police found no one home, but talked to a neighbor who complained of large amounts of urine and a strong smell coming through the ceiling, Mr. Kelly said. The neighbor said her daughter had seen the tiger. Yesterday, the tiger's existence was confirmed. after a hole was cut in the apartment door."

First the Siegried and Roy tiger debacle yesterday, now this situation.
Coincidence? I think not.

Had a full-tilt art day this day what with being one of a group of featured artists at a benefit for Burchfield-Penney Art Center and think I sold one of the 13 Conflagration steel silkscreens. I gave one to Liz (sneaking it into her home during a party and installing it myself) and I don't know if I can bear to part with another. It's a syndrome following creating one-of-a-kind pieces.
After the BPAC benefit did another Penney-related, art activity: delivering work to rep myself for an upcoming show of Charles Rand Penney's massive art holdings. As a prop to us the gallery co-conspirators are having each of us sell/show more more more.
A new slogan to put in your car's tailpipe and smoke it:
MAKE EVERY DAY AN ART DAY.
So, at the art cocktail-fueled (read: turbo-powered) Albright-Knox Art Gallery, enjoying SCOTCH and a smattering of mixer, I was approached by several who wondered just what in hell has happened to my photo column WhatHasHappened. One person, a scholarly type who digs on gin, asked thee question and then complimented me on a piece I wrote for a mag about a Middling City landmark. Then he said Well, with your expertise and all and connections to the university I wondered if you might come by the building where I work and look at it and give your opinion about its architectural style.
This was one of those beautiful moments that my life seems to gather like hued pearls washing up on an autumn beach on a windswept night after a slight white wine buzz: a moment when Yours Truly is confronted with a slight dose of Surrealism and maintains composure.
He's explaining the building in great detail, inside and out.
Finally I said, in my most authoritative tone, the one which sort of propels me outside my self to regard myself somewhat incredulously, Well, I'll come by and take a look at it and tell you what I think.
What I think. Here's what I think. Lots. But I am more interested in snooping about the mysterious third floor he mentioned more than anything. Then maybe, if I get busted snooping, I'll mutter things like Ionic... Doric and some Late-Gothic flourishes over the obviously Sullivanesque Moorish touches of stately Republic lines, just to throw them off my course.
Actually now I'm on the prowl for a rickety old stage, with musty velvet curtain, for my video sequences.
During the man in the snippet's ramblings I was transported back to my days as a temp at an arch firm, when I'd eat a sandwich or something in the en plain air boardroom while paging my crumby fingers through catalogues of arch suppliers and other building-related bric-a-brac. How one time I thought I'd follow along that crafty path.
Moving, along.
Last night I told Kate (of Kate and Tom, The Apple Maker, fame) Well, Kate, you know you've had a good party when you end up with a two-foot skid mark across your hardwood floor.
I won't even ask you to guess who created said skid mark. Or to what internationally-renowned rock and roll band it happened. Or how many brazen femme dancers happened to be around in a circle when said skid mark occurred.
Most memorable, to date, post-party artifact of a party thrown by Yours Truly:
(in the famed Richmond Avenue house, where I was den mom and cruise director)
(a mere moment of many of that home's untold, screenplay-worthy tales)
From the basement, packed with oddities left behind by several, including the wacked Viet Nam Vet landlord, Ralph, I procured some antique lamp parts, including stands. One after-party-morning I discovered that one of my guests had lost a still-buttoned shirt cuff around a lamp stand.
The End.
Love.

Talked to one of my several editors today spouting forth a fab story idea. And if I tell YOU what it is howinhell do I know that I willn't be scooped.
Therefore a smoke screen:
The story for the glossyhappy mag is to do an in-depth profile of the several Middling City fluffers employed by the region's burgeoning porn industry.
Had a coffee break to the max with MQM, better known here as Marky Sparky, Boy Colleague. He bought me not one - but two - jumbo coffees and I am roasted.
Amongst other things we discussed music, the pending re-re-re-union of 10,000 Maniacs (according to Blair W better than ever + with a new vocalist to boot), the state of my grad studenthood, the state of the Middling City photo industry, our various hilarities and firings & hirings about town.
Good to the last drop, I thought nearly aloud as I just completed coffee number two, dripping the ultimate spec of it into my awaiting and exuberant self.
I must mention that Ryan Adams is a-playin over there to the east of the room and as always he's got my heart all wonky poetic.
Reading The Necessity for Ruins, collected essays by a JB Jackson, rec'd by The Man, JR. After reading from the online course's reading packet, an expensive amassment of xeroxes from copyright-cleared books, it's a fucking pleasure to read hard copy from a real soft book. Texture! No keystoned words floating into a binding's replication.
I remain.

So I'm a photo phly on the wall today in the 30th floor boardroom, actually not, as I had been Perfectly snapping photos all about said room and en route to the room, as the Canadian Ambassador to the USofA and the Canadian Consul Général are looking over the Middling Cityscape before them/us.
The latter is mentioning how the streets are designed for three times the population, that that's why there is never - ever! - a Middling City traffic jam. Then he points out the crumbling Deco train station to the east, trying to be architecturally uplifting. A small Canadian woman says Well... at least they aren't destroying it, tearing it down, yet.
So the Ambassador is being walked in to his next speaking engagment by former Congressman/Perfect Nancy buddy John LaFalce when LaFalce sees me in the front row. He marched Mr. Ambassador over, gave me a big hug and kiss and said Michael, THIS is Nancy...
Mr. Ambassador looked at me quizzically, maybe not so sure that I was one and the same as the boardroom silent gazer.
During his big talk in the former church owned by the Catholic College Mr. Ambassador quite deftly answered the former Congressman's question of the American soldiers friendily firing upon the Canadian soldiers and our unfortunate country's presidential snubbing of the post-9/11 aide that Canada supplied - airspace for thousands of stranded travelers heading to American cities.

Onwards.

I have some serious posting to do for the online class. I don't simply want to do a reworking of the ideas but have to prove I'm still e-there. I've noted that about half of the class is eerily absent. Spending the cashmoney to get to NYC/PSD is well spent as it makes the online experience less distant, helps me to connect to that nouveau world.
Met with JR for advisement and he forced those struggling art ideas out of the folds of my (then hung over) brain lobes and miasma. I think he was getting frustrated but when he talked about my pending work I kept seeing, previsualizing, images that I described. I did my best to explain my main focus or concern: to document or to create to capture the essence of life, the desire and touching that we all are imbued in. The sensuality of everyday life that is not discussed. Life energy. Sensuality. The "gravity" (to borrow one of Jim's several quotes) between people.
And then.
And then.
He had me describe scenarios... Write a play that is one minute long.
I described three scenarios after explaining that they were inspired by Samuel Beckett - spare, minimal in gesture and staging.
Aside: Sam's work is about memory, our meandering through life, our inevitable encountering of our selves, our marriage to our memories and ourselves, breath, passion for the idea of passion.
I don't want to describe the three plays I created.
Jim said Let's make a video of the middle one.
I could weep for the feeling of elation, of being freed from the boundaries I created for my creative self.
I am going to make a series of digital videos of the middle play made yesterday. Variations of gestures.
And I am going to make *GloryBe* breaks in the variations that I am also not going to explain, yet.
I left Parsons and smoked a smoke with Jim before trundling off to the nearby french joint to be greeted as the regular that I am by the Victorias et al.
And then.
And then.
I realized Holy Pixels, this camera around my neck makes videos and I made my first video. Not so good. Then I made a surveillance video, a study of a couple interacting in front of me at the counter. Because of my framing you see only a triangle of her face, mostly her eye, and her man friend's back. At some point he stands and removes his coat and it's like a giant curtain over most of the frame and then her eye is visible again.
I really dig this video.
I am on to something and I have JR to thank for this.
Now to get the cast, the stage, the video camera.
I've outlined the gestures, it's even Sam-like in its numerological concerns.
All.
Love of All.

Why Your Perfect Nancy Loves Technology: Item 316

Technology, in my non-humble opining, fucking rocks. This is due to the simple fact that pixel molecules can be transformed while in card readers into email molecules after some simple friction and commands. Therefore one is able to make an image, say, in Manhattan, carry said card of images from one point to another and "send off" images, in jpeg format, to one's editor approximately 400 miles away in mere moments.
Previously, as I discussed with subject matter, a person, in the aforementioned images, a photographer had to (and this is back in the day, about two decades and even one decade ago) rush to the darkroom, process film, make contact sheets, select frames and then make prints and then deliver these to wherever the hell they needed to be.
Therefore technology rocks.
I rest my case.
During yesterday's study session in the rearmost table in a subterranean diner near Union Square with me, Philip, Sienna and Beth, we came to the following non-scientific conclusion:
postmodernism, to appropriate what Jim Ramer said on the front steps of Parsons this afternoon, is a slippery fish.
Or what it a slippery something else?
Whatever the hell it is, it's damn slippery.
All.
Love of All.

Due to my slight mistrust in the turns of buses I was doing some late-night walking, a healthy and thought-provoking 15 blocks are so and the elegant, and true, phrase
Beth puts me on buses
intermittently chimed in my head.
But because Beth puts me on buses that are never too close to my destinations I discovered about 12 hours ago a handful of wondrous things like a 24-hour florist where lilies chosen are wrapped with topnotch cello and tied with tri-colored ribbon, on a corner lurking is an old-school diner with tuna sandwiches under $5 and I laid eyes on a building that looked, at least in last night's light, like it had dropped in from Roma.
It is time for me to lunge off to an unnamed caffeine destination where nobody knows my name (a clue that it's not the French joint where I have been shuffled to the Regular column) and force theory about images down at the same same time.
New mantra:
Grad school is what you make it.
And here's hoping that none of you Perfect readers find that echoing in any way a tag line of an armed force.
Grad school - where you're not armed and are a force to be reckoned with.
Love.

In my ongoing hunt for online course clarity (not to mention the small list of MIA readings) I found myself in a B&N bookstore, the one that sells the crappy versions of Parsons School of Design t-shirts - 90% cotton, 10% nylon. Whothefuckever heard of such a blend? These shirts suck and on the ongoing to-do list is inquiring whether I can produce another version of this shirt in a more quality fashion, or perhaps simply a closer-to-home, renegade PSD Photo & Related Technologies model.
That is probably the sartorial way to go.
So I'm in the fairly feeble (yet so close to school as to render it convenient) art theory and criticism section when, 180 degrees to the left is this perfect gem: Overlook Illustrated Lives: Samuel Beckett, by Gerry Dukes. A photo assemblage, and writings, about Sam. What a great treat, what a balm for this Perfect soul.
*
Production shots, family snapshots, some garish color photos, some ramblings, some little-known facts and a clear-up, once and for all, of the great birthdate question/fiasco. April 13th, 1906 the answer. And Dukes's book prints the birth announcementas irrefutable proof of when Sam sprung onto the planet.
Onwards.
So we, we Parsons Photo and Related Tech grads, are meeting en masse this Sunday as a study group to non-e-discuss, our readings.
Now I am digitally editing images and then finding the braincells to meander through the readings for this week for the online course/discourse/discombobulation.
Love of Knowledge.

Hints as to what I consider to be one of thee most bodycentric, unaesthetic images - experienced live - to date.
Hints:
1. it involves toes
2. it involves open-toed sandals
3. wedgey, vinyl and white open-toed sandals
4. it involves frosty mauve nail polish
5. it involves overhead, flourescent lighting.
Do you glean the picture.
I wish I had not.
For the Love of God.

But I don't want to wait until 2005 to see the Diane Arbus retrospective.
I was thinking of canceling American Photo until I got past the usual titshots to read about the Arbus show as well as the technical (painters take note: photographers talk about technical matters... f-stops, films, papers, contraptions. why? because we fucking rock, that's why) (oh, but painters are okay, too) notations about several shots. What other feature do I dig? The one where they have a famed photog empty out their bag and list everything. From Sharpies, to mints, to lenses to fuzzballs at the bottom. I finally ditched Rolling Stone. Who needs RS when one gets Spin and Alternative Press and can breeze through RS in about 15 minutes at a newstand.
Today has been a day of interesting emails, let me tell you. Just like a photo bag, all diverse and interesting: all-femme Qi-Gong classes, Olympic-style bragging by a Middling City megalomaniac, acknowledgement and thanks from someone who received his packet in one day (one day!) via US Postal Service, and a few more.
Off to make and do and venture forth to sink into grad student matters.
Love.

We live in world in which late adopters reign unchallenged as our tastemakers.
By Stephen Metcalf
Posted Friday, September 19, 2003, at 2:49 PM PT

This quote rattles about this morning as I multi-task, sipping coffee from just yesterday (Laura, my dear friend, is wretching as she reads this), procrastinate and send off jpegs to interested cliental parties.
Metcalf is writing about VH1's series Where Are They Now - Ford Supermodels, kvetching how the once-focused network has become more MTV in its fashion sense. I think the phrase 'late adopters' is grand, really jabbing into the complacent ribs of the producers and vp's out there attempting to sate celebrity-obsessed viewers. OK, I can be obsessive about the music makers of our world (in the alternative sphere, usually not seen on such networks - and the writer writes about one of the all-time favs, Flaming Lips, whose brilliant Do You Realize is appropriated for a promo and who barely have appeared save for the whatwasit She Don't Use Jelly which everyone thought was their saving commercial grace at that time before Wayne Coyne romped off to parking ramps with multiple boomboxes to create symphonies of echoed noise), and Johnny Depp, but fashion and H-Wood has creeped much too up the asses of the music world. Of course rock stars will always fuck models and vv but what about those of us who, before floating off to REM world (and I'm not talking about those men of GA), want a piece of rock and roll greatness.
Wow, there is con/destruction happenig right outside the building where I now blog (my home) and it sounds like the apocalypse is nigh. Just looked out the window facing west, from where the infernal noise is coming, and no, not the apocalypse, just some city workers who obviously don't comprehend that behind this modest window is a blogger, a churner of words, a thinker who needs to not be embedded in their workday chaos. I have enough of my own, thanks.
Love.

I put the AHHHHH! in adrenaline.
Last night I attended, late, in rockstar fashion, the well-meaning yet poorly-attended benefit in & outside of Mohawk Place produced by Robby Goo et al from his recording studio, Chameleon West. There I saw The Kid, the model-to-be, and we discussed my pending series with him which went swimmingly until he began tossing in his four or so cents about how he likes to be photographed. From what he described it could not be further from my aesthetic intent, but was interesting nonetheless.
He is, remarkably, one of thee most spatial and unanchored rockstars I've talked to in a long while and thoughts of mine drift to how difficult it might be to pin him to the schedule of a shoot. Onwards.
Off to NYC again later this week to scramble to fix the chaos of the online course.
At last night's wedding gig, deep in the ski hills of an area south of the Middling City, I met a man (with seven wives? nope) who is a self-proclaimed DreamWeaver master. Imagine my glomming, my joy, my tunneled vision that this man will be sitting with me and tossing me a veritable electronic life preserver to make my Parsons School of Design website the beautiful and lush landscape I intend it to be. Actually, this man offered to do just that, in so many words.
And then... and THEN... the kid/model/flakey rockstar also knows DreamWeaver and I thought OhHappyDay things are e-lookin' up.
I was artfully inspired this weekend by these items:
1. chance encounter with a picture book on religions that I picked up ferfucksakes I don't know when and turned Zenstyle to the pages devoted to Zen Buddhism and there on the section's first page was a gorgeous repro of Buddha giving his Flower Sermon, holding up a lotus flower.
2. in the current Art News, in the hoaky piece on ten to watch, there is a piece on Adler Guerrier, a photog who makes images in NYC and Miami - lush semi-peopled landscapes. "The images evoke a playful and fluid sense of transit." and on.
3. in the lav at Cybele's this AM there, at the top of the heap of ancient lexicon, were the exposed endpiece pages, botanical illustrations. For me, clearly. They are in my back pocket, moldering and perfect gems of the green world.
All the above are to be inserted into my journal for artwork's sake.
Grad school. A wild mental ride.
An expensive wild mental ride.
An expensive expansive wild mental ride.
An expensive expansive chaotic wild mental ride.
An expensive expansive chaotic wild mental rock & roll ride.
All.

I've examined my subconscious and am fairly certain that what happened last last night was not some sort of retribution. My elder stalker, a richly brought-up man who is perpetually slumming as a barkeep of a low-rent, scuzzy joint, and who obsessed about me at one time enough to send several bouquets of long-stemmed roses to my office, rushed out of his own bar last night with a smoking microwave oven in his hands. Muttering, as he moved towards his car parked in front of his shithole, Try to be nice and people try to burn the place down. I had left the smokey back room where my pals were still playing pool and trying to open windows and was sitting at a crappy plastic table talking to a few random people. Polly had given me a rose. I wondered what happens when a rose is microwaved. There was a microwave in the corner, unplugged. I plugged it in and set it on cook or whatever after putting the rose in the middle of it and concurrently noting that there were several paper towels stuffed in there and a rim of thick white grease was around its door. Cooked and imploded, that's what happened. Then, after a few minutes, I smelled smoke and the paper towels were smoking and I said to Mark, Well I didn't think anything of the paper towels, don't people use them for microwaving. I know nothing of microwaves and am a firm believer that slow cookin' is good cookin'. So eventually we all left the shithole and it was way time to be sleeping and the owner/stalker had been watching me and I was not certain he knew it was me or not as he was in his cups and I was purposely sending out the vibe that I was not who I am/was at that moment - a scientist, a just-off-the-dancefloor-across-the-way hellion.
I remain.
The microwave does not.
Your Perfect Nancy.

Well I'm at ol' Peace Bridge, at the one Middling City fringe, and fishing about for quarters to pay the $2.50 toll when I was suddenly startled by the manic and very loud voice of the man toll taker. TAKE YOUR TIME... FOCUS... FOCUS... YOU'RE DOING FINE...
At the end of our transaction he handed me a small plastic packet the size of those crack baggies you find on the ground. Now with his kooky behaviour and all I admit in a flash I thought he WAS handing me a crack baggy. It was one of those giant LifeSavers. Wintergreen. Tasty. I sucked on it for about three minutes and tossed it from my moving vehicle, over the side of the bridge.
I went to Orangeville, more specifically, Hockley, Ontario, to have needles inserted into my accident-addled shoulder, to be snapped and cracked and popped. I feel different now, more... focused (or was that the toll taker) and postured.
My online class is a bit of a flaming fiasco and all of us 15 are apparently in the same chaotic boat.
All.
Love.

As I was logging in to Blogger saw that one of the 10 most recently written to included one entitled Boobs Are Good. Failed to investigate that one.
The men of Blogger are sending all of us Blogger Pro pioneers Blogger hoodies for being such, a very nice treat.
Reine just sent me a very hilarious advert for a tech company, great cgi images of cowpokes herding kitty cats over the plains, wrapping balls of yarn, lamenting their facial scratches from their charges.
Speaking of charges.
Look, whomever granted me those several student loans, I'd appreciate not hearing from you for at least another few years. Why keep sending me paperwork telling me where to address any concerns? Do so in two years, okay? Thanks for your attention in this scholarly matter.
As my 40th approaches, and so does all the charming chaos of change, I remind myself Hey, Baby Poet (and all the other semi-secret self-nicknames) this is what you wanted. HAPPY FUCKING BIRTHDAY.
Time to rock on and chase down the book that mentorJR recommends, The Garden in Ruins.
Love.

As she was in her ivory wedding gown, tea length, she opted out of crawling across the dance floor at her wedding reception alongside me and Michele. Hungry Like a Wolf. Duran Duran. Michele looked at me, Remember? I did. It was a dark and tipsy night at a gay bar with karaoke. I had been banned for over an hour for doing Leo Sayer's You Make Me Feel Like Dancin' in an authentic style of his high-high falsetto. The karaoke mc was not impressed, snatching the mic away from me as my last tortured and disco-ridden note hung in the smokey air. So, about an hour later, when I was unbanned, my selection was Hungry Like a Wolf, which I performed with aplomb (as well as bumps and grinds) to the delight of several. Suddenly yesterday's bride/Annie and Michele were crawling across the floor before me, on the gay bar's small dance floor/karaoke staging area.
So last night's dual re-creation apparently resulted in gasps from those who noticed it, according to another Michelle (note the 2 l's), Michelle Gigante, a famed dancer/choreographer/actor. Gasps. At a wedding. And their wedding photog, one I do not know but by name, snapped it all up into his Canon.
More to tell.
Suddenly, minding my own business and all, after a few more cocktails, the same Michele (1 l) came up to me to propose a new dance move. It somehow resulted with us rolling atop each other à la Madonna's Like a Virgin performance on the video music awards show of yore. This amid some other questionable dance moves by other guests, some vintage pogo-ing by Gary, schemes to catapult guests off the nature-induced wavy dancefloor by other mischievious guests and cross-genre mixing and matching.
We were busting loose, sending the newly-linked off on a plane of freeform expression and unbridled passionate movement. Giving their guest list, vendor and site selections, engendered and biographical leanings, their fateful happenings along life's path, their ensembles, the Swedish Fish favours (yes!), the deluxe florals, their scents and their whole day a collective, celebratory high-5 - all this under the hyper-planned and overhung and irascible spiritual presence of the whole site's daddy, Frank Lloyd Wright, creator of Graycliff Estate.
FLW's most triumphant building still standing there, according to Perfect Me, is the heat house, a small and semi-sunken structure which housed all the mechanicals of heating the main and guest houses. Now it is a bunkerous shell perfect for a studio with one window facing trees and a small and wide door painted with chalky lead paint.
All.
Time to caffeinate.
Love.

Speaking of blindness and veracity in advertising.
onwards
Working at Parsons as that is my wont these weekdays and inundated today and yesterday with Middling City confusion and chaos, oh so non-productive for one who must teleport oneself to another galaxy to benefit most from a graduate undertaking of thinking and art making.
Fi(r)stly.
The publisher of the paper. In a blink of a chintzy eye there was an economic squabble between yours truly/newspaper over a $50 portion of a cell phone bill, incredibly. The incentive to say hello! to a two week sabbatical ensued. This concept was greeted with a big gigantic I told you so (to take a leave from the get-grad-go) from said publisher.
Then there was his post-summer inability to meet with me because of inter-office construction. Then emails were sent by me to set up a time to meet. Today I heard from Lead Boy Colleague that the word on the street is that I quit - my job description shifted radically in my absence.
Item 1.
I am/was/will be forever and ever a columnist.
Item 2.
I am not a photo editor.
Item 3.
Photo editors edit photograhic content of newspapers.

Future: I told publisher pal that I am interested in special features, continuing column and perhaps even being a senior editor with occasional feature writing. No reply.

Dear sweet grappling blogreaders.
This is a time of transition and your openmindedness and fairmindedness regarding me, my commutes, my undertakings, my shifts, my dilemmas and my goal-seeking are greatly appreciated.
Some of these posts are poetic riffs, some blend fact and foe and fiction.
Dig?
All my undying and photographic and artful Love.
You know what that is.
ps: met with Jim, my nouveau advisor who fucking rocks. He told me to distill my ideas down to five items. Still and distill. Be still, no way. Knowing his audience/me he gave me a big categorical metaphor in terms of musical genres. And, dig this, I dug it down to its note-addled core.

Saturday, as I posed a wedding couple on a V-Rod Harley in the midst the of rose garden of the Middling City's Delaware Park (okay by the cop on the watch as he loves - and who really in love with a uniform, the power of firearms and the whirr of power in one's ears does not - a great fucking powerful machine), heard a familiar voice from the east, from the midst of the pink roses in the dusk. Mary Ramsey, my heartmate, soul revivor, of John and Mary fame, of one-time 10K Maniacs fame. I was at wedding B. She was at wedding A in the same dang building. As we were both en route to our respective social obligs we had a speed meeting/talk. Interestingly, just as effective.
Off to document the exhibition of Parsons Dream Weaver Mistress/Instructor Robin at Middling City Art Studios. Had a dream about it. Can I ever have a night of reverie without them attaching to this other world. I think not.
Just re-read Sam's That Time, aloud, as it should be read.
Perfection.
Love of the Perfect.

*Ding* *ding.*
Muses versus Perfect Nancy... round three.
Just marathoned, birthed a truly excellent drawing - frame & all - for the charity auction ce soir. Based on a b&w print my moi made a while back and, all intuitively, I made the drawing and then checked my cache of frames and lo and behold there was one so parfait and even a decent pre-cut archival mat in there with green inner mat (as opposed to the polymat(h)) that I nearly screamed thanks luck thanks luck thanks luck. And I continue along that thoughtal plane to here:
partaking as I do, lunging out into the energy that is the world, one is as bound to have near-death vehicular experiences as one is to locate a perfectly sized frame for a charity art auction when one is giving giving to a venerable institution worthy and musty.
And tomorrow *ding* *ding* round four or maybe five when I drop another piece to another org, Burchfield-Penney Art Center. Then a charitable break fer fucksakes.
I have embraced an old perfume fav, Calèche, a hard fragrance to wear, but fitting my Ryan Adams-besotted and autumn and change-embracing heart.
Love.

Rendez-vous'd with Beth last night and meandered through Chelsea, my main mission to see the new work of The Art Guys. Whose Middling City projet d'art via Hallwalls a few years back resulted in numerous faux advertising placards nailed into the most grime-ridden and impoverished and near-death storefronts along Main Street. These placards went up and then quietly started disappearing. I had spotted a fav, the one with the large banana and the red word THRUST, and knew it was to be mine, part of my wavering and eclectic and cherished art collection. So. One night, crowbar in hand, I wedged and screeched it off a building. Then I thought, Hmmmm, Nance, why not acquire one, too, for your beloved pal Liz. So I did. Then weeks later I was attempting to crowbar a third when a frightening and muttering man approached me and my crowbar and I split. Then Scot Fisher of Righteous Babe Records saved said building from wrecking ball and a crew put boards over the artwork and the building.
So Beth and I are in Chelsea last night at The Art Guys show. One of the Art Guys, the shorter one, said HIIIII, how are you? You stole one of our pieces.
In a joking manner.
Sara Kellner, formerly of Hallwalls, was there, and is still living in Houston and working at Diverse Works.
Then politicoe Barbra Kavanaugh's son Bryan was there.
Then we moved along to more more more shows and the last stop we started climbing some steps when I heard a small voice Hey, aren't you supposed to be in Buffalo?
It was Photi, he dated Larry from CEPA, now an assistant director at a gallery. He invited us to a gallery-sponsored fete in SoHo and, he advised, if we stuck to him there'd be plates of pot brownies.
In the interim I called Dorota who tipped me off about a Nike party and, as luck usually has me in its grasp, I was wearing a Nike shirt. I told Beth this was a message from GOD himself, and Bacchus to boot, that we should be at that party.
Flashing my left-boob-nested Nike logo did not mean less of a wait.
Once inside we tippled with sporty types on three levels until we'd had our fill of techno beats (we looked for Anthony shimmying in the corners), creative snaxx, free drinks and other inter-active artful experiences.
Love.

lucky.
unlucky.
lucky.
unlucky.
he loves me.
he loves me not.
So I'm driving to NYC, minding my own business - and driving the speed limit, for your snoopy information - when I hit a patch of water on the NJ Turnpike, sending my well-equipped Forester into a fast spin. NoNoNoNo I remember shouting, my panic mantra of choice.
As luck would have it there were no cars or trucks near me and when I hit the center guardrail with the passenger side of the car there was no severe damage to the car... or me.
I was facing traffic. You don't realize how zippy traffic is until you are facing it, the wrong way. So I had to guage when traffic wasn't a-comin' around the bend and go for a big fast fat fucking u-turn to get going again in the correct direction, after a quick breather to regain breath and steady hands.
Oh Gramma Vickie, up there, thanks for your navigational powers. You rock.
I am not checking out the traditional rock star way, in car. Not this lifetime.
Rock on.

Well it has been a while but now you can really really savour my Perfect Nancy words. I was in NYC. I was in the Adirondacks. Now I'm in the Middling City. Tomorrow, hooray, it's back to NYC.
Why interim Adirondacks experience? Because dear Andrew married the woman of his dreams. Not me. Laura. It was such a great wedding, very Andrew, with lots of music and a duet from Trinity in Boston (there were about 20 other choristers there from there) who performed one of his compositions. Later, much much later, after plenty of a really good chardonnay and great conversations of Clarkson ilk (Nan insisted that I sit with her and Will et al - primo!), I danced with Andy, Will and Max Clarkson. Who were all wearing kilts. It was contra dancing and after my last horrific experience with contra dancing I nearly ran screaming from the wedding party tent. Last experience: gig shooting a day of cultural events at former dumpsite Artpark. One of the events was a contra dance escapade and they were short a woman. They called for me. ME. I said, No really, I have to shoot, I can't follow... well, after three songs/attempts they excused me. Last night fared better and nobody was injured. I ended the evening dancing three songs with a woman from Boston named Amanda as my partner. The caller said same-sex partnerships were welcome. It was about halfway into the first number of our same-sex partnership that I noted that my partner had one hand. I was intrigued but never got the chance to ask how her hand went away. Andy's wedding shooters were unbearable. During the ceremony they were right next to Nan and Will - literally in their faces. They had bad grouping skills and I snatched drinks and a few handbags from subjects. Egads. It drives me to distraction watching shabby wedding photographers. While Andy and Laura were exchanging rings (speaking of distractions) I snuck up the aisle to shoot a few with my new digital number, the Olympus 5050. Nan hadn't seen me yet and when she noted it was me she reached over to hug and kiss me and talk to me ever so briefly. During Andy putting the ring on Laura. Oh well. But it was that sort of wedding, very casual, lots of movement throughout in the area that Andy cleared beyond the pond and garden.
I met Will's brother Austin for the first time, a musician and Volpe scholar. I told him of my Parsons School of Delight experience, and meandered over to my difficulties with (former) mentor Anthony. I described the situation. Austin suggested I think of another program, one more inter-disciplinary, challenging and more history. Not so sure about those concepts. I am appealing the final seminar grade that Anthony bestowed upon my hard summer of work. I was stunned by it, and am moving right along to another advisor I feel will benefit me and my work more. There are several others (3, to be exact) in his group who are equally perplexed by him as an advisor. Two of those three are equally upset about their grades. Grades do matter in grad school when it comes time for grants and such. And for an advisor to wallop his charges with low grades is further unproduction.
To end on a more light note.
Two nights ago, Friday, my sister and I rode up to the casino, the one in NF, NY. Her idea. We split a flask of Oban en route. I wore my lucky Sam Adams ballcap. I did well, winning about $200. I made sure that she went home with as much as she stumbled in with. While we were parking to go in I realized that I had sort of fabricated a spot and was dangling precariously into the aisle for more cars. I had my sister stand on another less-obvious spot and did a great big fast circle to get there, purposely crushing an orange safety cone. There's nothing like the feeling of crushing an orange safety cone. No, scratch that - my old practice (before the cars got nice) of arranging tossed-out Christmas trees in the middle of the late night Middling City streets to rush over them, sometimes backing over them and repeating step (always with Justin in the car), approached that. Inside there were the requisite drunks, kooks, elderlies and conventioneers. I talked to a few of them. There was a bleary-eyed Native parked at a slotmachine, his eyes so reflective that the little cocktail waitress (let's just say her nickname will never be Speedy) cut him off. Free drinks cut off.
Tragic.
All for now, love.

I approached the dad with the boy with the extreme wall eye and inquired thusly:
Is this venison jerky any good?
The dad looked shocked (perhaps it was my Neil Diamond concert t and we WERE in the throes of white trash Penn mountains) and referred me to the son... He'd know.
Me to wall eye: Is this any good? (holding aloft the venison jerky, priced at 99cents)
Yes, answer.
Sucked on that jerky for a good half hour listening to classic rock along the route to NYC.
Road trip perfection: CCR, other classic rock tunes, a good strong voice, a good strong cuppa joe and a slim salty fix of venison jerky shot and fabricated in PA.
Just stuffed the car into al fresco bistro expensive parking, after a mathematical discussion/debate with the man in charge of the big P.
Tomorrow registration, arbitration, administration and then a reception for us, the grad people of New School U.
Rock on road scholars.
Love.

Why you are glad you're not my neighbor, part 32:
well
yesterday I entertained Rio, Ron and their kids Lily and Ace and ferfucksake I don't want to send children off, back onto the highways and biways of this great land, without a proper pyrotechnical send-off.
So
I busted out a small pyrotechnical display and one of them was really loud, I mean so loud and whizzing by ol' whatzizname's open window (what is that guy's name, the next door drunk?, the creepy man who hates his own kids, really thick glasses... anyhow) I'm sure he was awakened abruptly from sleeping off his night of Adolf's goodness from down the block.
Off now to points beyond to deliver my photographic goods.
Tomorrow it's off to skewel to register, to activate the fall term membership.
Studiously,
Love.

To be filed under I can tell my grandchildren:
Have a three-part Fisher-Price gig today and tomorrow and the highlight of today was sitting behind the desk of F-P's CEO, Neil Friedman. Not only sitting behind the desk but I had my feet up on his desk. And I also was trying to figure out his computer's password? Fun? nope. Toys? nope.
Had to arrange eight kids under the age of 7 in and around his desk and came up with adult-style office tasks for them. One lucky kid got to sit on the CEO's desk, crosslegged, playing with an F-P toy.
Now off to Middling City U then back out to East Aurora for more more more.
Love.

The Baby Rockstars contacted me in exultation to say that they're opening for the openers for The Goos on Tuesday night and would I, as their official chronicler, be there? (much mulling)
I replied
I am on sabbatical from the paper. Although I don't doubt that I can get credible creds from another source I ponder.
I have also enough history with the Goos, JesusRockinRollChrist, going back to pre-nosejobs and gigantic hair and guitar-fumbling, to think Shit I can be there if I so choose.
One of my art patronesses, Fern, contacted me and selected and purchased one of my most sensual for a gift to a woman in Italy. Fern and husband have a ***** art collection and one of mine - or is it two? - hangs amongst. So now, after this blogging, it's descending into the bowels of the darkroom to print and print. And then frame and frame. And deliver.
And then another two deliveries.
As the cats, my perfect little fuzzy angels, do nothing more than lounge and wait for me to open the door and join them and then lounge at my feet or hands. Awaiting the love that emanates from me to them.
Ron and Rio are heading this direction shortly, oh, tomorrow.
Hello Oban purchase!
Got a fab booking just seconds ago for a day and a half that'll have me scrambling on the floor with children.
After sweating last night saw that VH1 was airing I Love the 70s and it so happened (in case you wondered if there is/was a God) to be 1973, the year that my life changed, when it derailed from what could have been a middling Middling City middle class existence of pastel houses, solid definition and maybe church on Sunday, to see the great rock and roll possibilites beyond. Dark Side of the Moon.
I was 10, I was enlightened and forever I thank my conservative-minded cousin Frankie for giving up the goods.
Gilmour was on, in a '73 interview, stating: This is not about drugs, you can trust us. I thought Jesus, I was 10 and if you had told me that then I would have perhaps had a naive trusting childness hearing that statement but was savvy enough to know there was something extra-terrestial boiling under that surface.
I rest my artful case.
Love.
ps: parting thought = Jim Ramer at Parsons rocks

So Justin has this great theory of what caused The Ol' Electrical Fiasco of '03: it was the French, causing mass inconvenience.
I'm not sure I'm 100% behind this theory, instead, after a bat plunged toward the borrowed car I plunged through the darkness in back to NYC (after several Middling City gigs), I believe now that a bat chanced into a portion of the grid resulting in mayhem for many. The bat was a flutter of brown and highlights and it whacked the car above my head, loudly.
So I was at Parsons having a smoke with others, watching black smoke billow on the eastern horizon. It's a fire - or explosion - at the ConEd plant, someone offered.
I attempted to take the 6Train to Dorota's and Union Square station was about 150 degrees and half the lights were off, the other half were blinking discoically. Both 6s were sitting idly, forlornly. I walked down Broadway and all stores were dark, all ATMs were dark, all cell phones were not dark but useless.
No ice, no delis, no cabs, no streetlights, no elevators, no Starbucks, no buses, no trains, no city lights, no looting, no mayhem, no non-cash sales, no chance of quickly escaping the largest power outage in the history of America if you were in Manhattan. Until the next afternoon. At first I heard the rush of fountains nearby and I knew the power was on as I had wanted to sit by the fountains the night of the blackout and realized that fountains, although they're all elementally water, rely on another element - fire/electricity. So when the fountains came on the children danced and screeched and sporadic whoops of joy were heard on the streets.
I borrowed Erin's vehicle after arrangments via the spotty cell phone service and walked to Brooklyn/Park Slope to fetch the car.
As soon as I drove into New Jersey I realized a curious thing. The gas stations and pumps were operational, as were all the other electrical devices. Laura and my father, the two I called early on Friday following the 4PM darkening of Thursday, seemed to not realize the impact of the outage: But Katie Couric's on t.v., Laura said. A quote from my father: The media sure isn't playing up this whole outage thing (to paraphrase).
So the Wired Studio websites are on hiatus, Act of God Clause in full effect.
I am in NYC, I am at Parsons, I am thinking, I am writing, I am ending this post with love of change and Love.

The final of the final three Olympic events must be completed today. It's when I have a self-challenge and invoke the magical powers of the song Dream Weaver and figure out a really competent way of dreaming said song into my personal website at Parsons School of Design.
Yesterday me and Margaret and Erik completed (sort of, it borders on the theoretical at this point) our site centering on Parsons Hair Styles. It was, as Margaret stated, a light way of ending a rather serious class. We had links to various hair-related sites, a link to a celebrity look-alike page where we had side-by-side images of Parsons people next to amazingly similar stars.
Today the personal website, tomorrow the world.
Actually, tomorrow it's back to the Middling City world for a while.
No comment.
Had a dream that I saw a car that had just crashed and while I looked at it the twisted metal turned into a substance like layers of thin paper and it began to burn. Smoldering and then a rush to ash and then the ashes floated silently away. The car was burning from the top down and I wondered, as I watched from a second-floor front porch, where the body or bodies were. The car burned down to the floor and I could see the shape of one body and it looked like it was moving but it was burning and moving. When the burning had finished I saw the spirit of the person move away from the car, at first a strong presence and as it walked away it disappeared.
This dream actually continued with me laughing uproariously with Margaret (where in hell was Erik) about our website. As I was dreaming/laughing I thought I never get to laugh like this, with so much gusto.
Matt Taibbi is here in NYC, writing hilariously for New York Press.
Had a most meaningful talk with Jim Ramer at PSD yesterday, he'll be my acting unofficial advisor, as will Martha. Thank the photographic gods.
All my love for now.
Onwards to learning.

Deliciously off the grid in the present, in the Knowledge Union of venerable and eccentric Parsons School of Design/Refrigeration ... and which I also lovingly call Factory of Art and Ideas.
Researching again the Liquid Architecture and thoughts on cyberspace made by Marcos Novak. Found a photo of him on the web, it screams guru or I've-found-my-schtick-now-luvv-my-goatee.
Squatted in a glorified bakery this grad school morn (read early afternoon after reading Novak etc. until the wee hours, enhanced by sips of Oban) and read New York Press. Was most impressed to see not one but two pieces by former Middling City terror Matt Taibbi.
One is his lecherous take on girl teen mags and the other is a book review by an elder dispensing financial advice to GenXers.
Both well written, of course. His writing leaves you with a lingering sensation of cynicism, sinisterism, voyeurism and here's another ism - hilarity.
Back to the smarty pants goatee, Marcos Novak, and Neuromancer and all other things fluid and poetic.
Novak calls forth the poetry of Lorca several times and I read a bit of him today. I am ashamed to say that my honors english major self is not too familiar with the dense and non-linear words by him - yet.
My love.
My NYC-based love.

For class - for seminar - really! - I had to watch Lawnmower Man.
Abso-fuckin-lootly one of the most challenging movies ever made.
NB: I did not call it a film.
Challenging how, you wonder, squinting your suspicious eyes.
To not keep screaming (as I did) What the HELL happened to the monkey? He was a real winner, and then *POOOF*, he's gone, EXEUNT.
No more monkey.
Then there are twists and turns and the oddest protagonist hairstyles ever viewed. And the movie stretches over two hours. You'll feel like you've donated an organ or something and want something in return. Don't do it.
Giving a seminar chat on Tuesday about three complicated readings.
One of the three of our little Group E has decided that she cannot meet until the night before - amazingly.
I'm forging on and will be making a handout summarizing all of our seminar readings (nutshell-style) and will be putting together a geeky a-v presentation. Solo.
And if my Geek Quotient were not high enough, I'm going to be finishing William Gibson's Neuromancer today.
Love, CyberCult-infused, Love.

Heard from The Kid.
Totally into it was how he began his email and then went on to state he's got a few ideas of his own. That is a plus as working with a model is and should be a collaboration of sorts and if that other person has ideas and a sensuality and a sensibility it will be better than if they are strictly a body in front of me and the lens.
Had a very unforgettable dream about an unforgettable image.
Saw a show of photographs by a Middling City artist who is not a photog but a photo-realistic painter - Curtis Parker. I know him from ages ago, from clubbing, and now he's married to another friend.
In this exhibition was a large print of moldy hollyhock leaves (their stems had not yet projected forth so it was early spring - or maybe autumn and they had been cut down) and much beyond them a gray house, looking rather in need of a paint job. It was a color print but the color was so muted it had hardly any color. Lots of grays.
I kept looking at the print and decided that I had to buy it.
I went back to look at it with JenD and was studying it very closely (just like I was looking at an Iris print yesterday made by Martha Burgess) when JD said That's going to cost about a grand to frame. At least, I said.
Such a beautiful image, not too unlike what I'm making right now for PSD.
Large-scale photographic Love.

Received the email address for The Kid from Marky Sparky Norris (front man at ARTVOICE) and seconds ago emailed said Kid to see if he might consider being my muse and central focus for some new photowork.
*please say yes please say yes please say yes please say yes please say yes*
Told him there'd be no nudity, no pyros, no oddness.
Well, unless he thinks that frenching a hibiscus flower is odd.
Kidding, sort of.
My Kenneth Cole slingbacks turned to sponges in the torrential rains today and so had to purchase some other choices, backups so to speak.
Met with fellows to discuss our presentation in a week of the week's three readings - one dense as stale swiss cheese and the two others less so. On top of usual grad student activities which includes impressive daily ingestion of caffeine.
Had an e-go-round with publisher/editor/pal a few days ago and will meet up with him around the 15th (when school is done for summer) to decide my ARTVOICISTIC fate.
Can go either way.
Is this a cliffhanger?
You betcha.
My gradschoolful Love.

Spent the better part of today making the freelance cash money photographing kids at camp, the camp of lushest green and rimmed with pine forest in a valley. Translation: no cell phone service all day. Chatted illegally on the cell to a NYC pal in a monsoon, ironically after describing how the pre-torrent landscape to my right just off the bi-way resembled Japan rice paddies - tiered and foggy and unbelievably green.
Camp. Teenaged drama. Preteened levelheadedness. Had lunch amid a table full of 11 year olds, rather than the table of grownups. They came to fetch me midway to rescue me from the 11 year olds and I looked up from a conversation about the structure by age, the benefits of peanut butter, the benefits of spreading peanut butter on Fudgicles and the like, and said I'm fine here.
The kids were mainly camera-savvy. Everyone knows how to perform these days, not only for cameras but for each other. Everyone can bust a VH1-perfect move.
Received complimentary art-related email from Ollivier Dyens, Parsons visitor/guest artist, who received several of my jpegged art images. Restrained, passionate.
I will surely plagiarize his NJP-related thoughts.
Back to Parsons/School/NYC tomorrow and tomorrow is a marathon group critique, in preparation for the following Monday's full-on critique with Everyone.
24 months more and I'll be sashaying across a Manhattan stage in crimson robes to a symphony of airhorns and hoots and hollers. I imagine.
Summer Camp-burnt Love.

As Bach violin concertos frolic along the four stray feline pals lounge just outside my door and occasionally Bootsy scratches at the door for my companionship. Even beat-to-shit Faux Extra is lying at my steps while Extra (my most perfect Angel of Darkness) is aloof and Tiger is just plain ol' effusive.
Last night was first Friday in practically my entire lifetime that I did not have to rush about and make images for my column WhatHasHappened. I wore a skirt. I carried my little Coach bag. I drank wine. I supped with Jen and Eric. Went to nouveau O and dug the food but not the suburban vibe happening around us. We were in a parking lot. There was at the end of our meal the Chippewa Street-appropriate thud-thud of top40 dance tunes. Our waiter sucked. When he inquired about dessert I said I want banana pudding. He thought I was joking. I want banana pudding. They had none.
He returned to our table with a comp dessert - banana mousse with macademia nuts in a dark chocolate crust. Not banana puddding but sufficient.
Putting together work and received a fab call from one of my patrons of the art genre, looking for more of my originals to give to her friends - this time a family in Italia.
I sign off, artful, restful and Bachful.
Love.

Met with visiting artist/thinker Ollivier Dyens, who teaches at Concordia in Montréal today. Why, just yesterday, during our seminar, I raised my hand and stated I really don't agree with anything that you're saying...
defending then I was the notion that making images/rendering light via digital is not too far from the same process via film.
Embedded in both is information that an artist/imagemaker must use.
He did not agree with my disagreement.
Today he reinvigorated our disagreeing. By the end of my presentation to him he said that he was beginning to understand what I mean/meant, for whatever that's worth.
I just sent him some jpegs of older work that I think he'll dig.
Made Justy go with me to the macrobiotic joint just around the corner from PSD for organic wine and wholesome fare. He didn't pout too loudly and his pal Jen, married to Steve Bartoo, joined us.
Then back to the lab, where I've been convented since about noon.
It is time to break free for extended hours.
I am happy with my new images, prints, art, pieces.
Tomorrow I meet with Anthony encore to show them.
Then Monday is the half-group again, in prep for the next week which will be another full day and a half of the 15 of us.
This intensive extensive summer session is coming to a quick end.
Am I a master of the DreamWeaver universe?
Does the Pope have Johnny Depp's likeness tattooed on his arse?
Yikes, now that is a perilous image indeed.
Due to annoyances beyond my control (those of you in the know will in fact know know and know) I am taking a leave from AV for the next three weeks - due more to assinine behaviour than my own ass dragging.
My artful and imagistic love.

Spending this AM catching up up up whilst listening to napalm-my-heart Ryan Adams. Such sights last night at Artists and Models, a veritable tapestry of people I know, avoid, talk to, admire and document.
Anna was a cyborg, David Butler was a presidential candidate (along with ex-drag queen Guy) with a fab economic plan advocating shopping, Mark Stockton was wired up in a complex panda head with night vision goggles and other such complex paraphernalia (totally rocked), Mike (formerly of treelinedhighway) was really drunk and he explained so after he was going to start saying something about my weight loss, Curtis was also tipsy but did manage to explain to CG and I how the lovely gigantic prints from former Artists and Models were made (I had several up - 3'x8'... Perfect Heroic Nancy!), the bartender didn't have scotch (?????????) so I had to have a vodka and something (!!), the tall lanky tv guy was all coked up, literary Ed worked the door and didn't quite get the whole way those Tyvek® wristbands were supposed to be installed on a wrist (I looked at mine and said Gee, Ed, I like your technique... he didn't get it), the artwork was of a certain elevated quality, Bruce Adams had an excellent church and art star-inspired chapel with relics of Cindy Sherman and Robert Longo (brilliant) and other various pedestrians interested and engaged me.
(sonic note: I might have to change this Ryan Adams cd as it's about to toss me off the edge into an abyss of heavy-eyed melancholia).
Notes on pre-Artists and Models yesterday:
Had a wedding in ski resort Ellicottville, an hour outside of the Middling City.
I seemed to spend more time staring at the landscape and getting some good deep thinking done than shooting the glowing couple.
I was in a Native landscape where highway signs are bilingual.
I knew the band, always a treat. Sid Winkler Band which features zany Susan Rozler and the amazing music encylopoedia Joe Rozler... young, hip, funny as hell.
I stood behind him for several songs and sang off-colour versions of Wedding Tunes as he sang the veritable versions. Sometimes as I passed on the dancefloor he'd sing a Hi Nancy J into the lyrics and - amazingly - guests would not hear it over their choogling and socializing.
Met a guy who does video production for Court TV. Nice conversation, how can it help my career?
So I'm talking to Susan Rozler for a long while when suddenly she reveals that she thinks she may have malaria. I was in the Philippines. I know about malaria. I avoided it. I took poison once a week to keep it away. I'm thinking she's being funny. Nope, her one kid is in Africa, she visited. BUT when you hear someone has the notion they may have malaria and you are an independenct contractor type you want to run like the West Niled mosquitoes from hell are on your ass, as you never know what in hell it could contagiously be.
Off to further work and social exploits.
My love, most of it.

Spent the latter part of last night in Liz's garden, drinking white wine as the fragrant lilies towered over us. This after seeing her at an Allentown art opening where I was happy to discover Burke Paterson among the tipplers and lookers. Burke is still tall, wearing trendy t-shirts and making art and living in Toronto. He was very excited to tell me how he just built a second floor into his loft, where his beloved Jet Stream alumi-trailer still holds court.
This is a city of several Middling City festivals - food-related as well as hobby-related. Tonight is the 20th annual Artists and Models, the first-ever I'm not participating in due to gradstudent-related (and travel) constraints. I'll be there as docu-girl.
Off to the sunshined outdoors to see, make and do.
Lead Boy Colleague dropped by to say Hi, he was off to shoot much the same.
Saturday saturnine Love.

Decided against shooting the Goo Goo Dolls early AM gig here in NYC, thinking (wisely, I believe) to forego that for the bigass Middling City show in August.
Tonight Lead Boy Colleague is shooting Skynyrd for me, for the paper. Fuh-reeh-bird. Having troubles of late with Netscape. Apparently nobody gets my replies so there are whole bunches of people out there thinking I'm a bad replier. So not true.
Back to the Middling City in several hours.
For the usual marathon weekend working.
All for now, time to do some art shooting while the sun is as high as my caffeine level.
Love.

Finished mere seconds ago an excellent visit with a PSD visiting artist, Antonio Muntadas. Needless to say, since I'm gleeful, he completely dug my work. Even asked for updates on the project. Wants to see the series finished, as in August. Wants it to be a book, suggested its format. Rock on.
Suddenly it's sunny in NYC and I'm committed momentarily, longitarily, with working on the raging elephant that is Dreamweaver.
We are to learn slicing in PhotoShop and apply it to this other software. To make panels. To make do-dads. I want to learn this, really I do, but am not locating the portal in my mind that intuitively grasps onto the 1's and 0's of this technique.
I shoot pictures - digital and analog.
I know that from the innermost beings of each cell in my body.
I do not know Dreamweaver. One day I dream that Dreamweaver will be as in there/in me as the aforementioned.
All for now, 1's and 0's are calling, no. They are screaming Nancy hurry the fuck up and learn us, use us, know us.
They win. Every time.

Nearly, no not really, time for my Sunday nap afore my jet to NYC/PSD encore. I still have yet to pen a zippola Statement of Intent & Discovery to pledge before the 14 others. Marathon Critique.
This, oddly, is very much the same in grad school as it was as an undergrad, maybe just ratchet up the impassioned opining a bit.
To all who have never been an art student: (scenario)
You are naked in a room, everyone is clothed and eating a snack that they are not sharing. You are doing a handstand and some classmates are very willing to say Hey, neato technique. But one sour apple says something like You know? When I read XXX he said that handstands are mere simulacrum of spectacles of paradigms! You get off your hands. You think for a moment and then jump into a karate kick and then suddenly have sparklers coming out of the top of your head, bright golden showers of sparks.
And you realize this: your art and ideas abso-fuckin-lootly ROCK. And you are willing to share enthusiasm and not brandish the weapon of ego. Re-met my friends' daughter, who I haven't seen since she was 2 or 3. She was NOT impressed until her father and I started doing our bad cop/bad cop sort of routine, regaling ourselves with our most outlandish drunken exploits. Suddenly I noted the barista of the coffee joint where we were standing had on one of those pukashellesque candy necklaces. I asked Do you know what to do with that? She did not. I demanded the necklace and taught her, and the friends' kid, how to shoot the candy off via the clenched front teeth. I nearly took some guy in a cheeseball suit's nuts right off. The kid later, when I was gloating on nearly taking the guy's nuts off referred to them as Two eggs in a hankie. I said Jeesh, thanks, that's an image that'll be haunting me for some time.
When she noted one of my Paul Frank watches on my wrists she really then thought I was okay for an adult, still a shade of youthful mistrust in her eyes.
Off.
Hey, go HERE for an interesting diversion, compliments of Reine. An old version of Netscape yielded a most interesting and eclectic collection of bookmarks.
Off again.

The Middling City's Main Street has been littered with a wrecked red sedan for a long while. I've been to & fro from MC to Parsons several times and still it's there. Saw it last night and then again this AM en route to the photo lab. But a wondrous new twist! Some art students, I speculate, armed with day-glo pink spraypaint went to proverbial town on the car and it's entirely hot hot pink.
But now that I think of it perhaps this is a band of concerned citizens setting out to highlight Middling City eyesores. These folks will be damn busy.
Had freelance gig #1 this AM and one of the Bar Mitzvah boy's uncles remembered me, a moment which always has me feeling slightly howshallIsay under the XY microscope, and he said You're a photographer I like. After about half an hour of my guerrilla family-arranging strategies and gentle cajoling and general photog merriment (my Perfect specialty) he (jokingly) said You're the photographer I LIKED?
Off to many points beyond. But not the bigass country show tonight at Darien Lake, a gig delegated to Lead Boy Colleague, who's been making my traversing days a heap easier with his rootin' tootin' shootin'.
All.

Today in our grad seminar we spent the better part of 3 hours discussing postmodernism and the fore, modernism.
Self, noself, etc.
Saw and shot Ani last night at Central Park, part of Summerstage. It was a fabulosic night after a day resembling rain. A very mellow gig and everyone was very stonerific... yeah, like whatever.
She came out with a growl and the up and downness of the show was usual, her army out in full force, grooving on every little nuance. Always interesting to observe.
There was a girl shooting for D'Addario Guitar Strings, a German guy shooting For German television, a guy from Central Park and a random other. In the front of the crowd a few people asked who I was shooting for and when I replied ARTVOICE two people said Oh... I read AV, are you Nancy J. Parisi? There is no escaping Middling City escapees.
I am a grad student, thinking all the time, all the time, all the time. Making and doing and making and doing.
And diggin' on the whole dang thang.
My overworked and overtaxed love.

Further barrage of Photoshop information and my brain is saying Hmmmm, it's so nice and sunny outside right now, howsabout a meandering with the camera? I have a meeting in a few hours with a visiting artist to go over my newest work, all printed-out as 8x10s and looking very good, if I may say so myself.
Back in session of marathon Wired Studio class so off I go.
Braincells don't fail me now.
Love.

Right to the important part. The Perfect Nancy Johnny Depp review. Having to look at him with dreads and unsightly braids in beard is better than having no Johnny Depp to look at at all. I rest my case.
Two miraculous things about the pirate movie:
1. His kohl eyes, what's best referred to as the Keith Richards eye thing, never are diminished even after watery battles and endless rum-filled nights. And swashbuckling and general mayhem. Perma-liner. And why, I wondered, would pirates have had this like linebackers do to prevent all that pesky reflection? I need answers.
2. Even when Johnny Depp becomes an accursed skeleton (plot device!) he is still beautiful and the age-old cliché of 'jumping one's bones' sprung to mind.
Only bad part of the movie was that my PSD schoolmate I was with misplaced a wallet and I received a frantic call to see if I had accidentally grabbed it. I had not. But I would like to have grabbed Johnny Depp. Today in the Post I saw a photo of that bimbo Vanessa Paradis, what the hell does he see in this woman?
Had the imagistic priviledge yesterday of shooting an ultra-Orthodox Jewish wedding at Niagara Club in Niagara Falls, NY. Made for Life mag-type shots of the veiling ceremony, the drinking of wine under chupah sub-ceremony, etc. There were two standoutish moments.
The whole day was sexually segregated but as a person with a mechanical device strapped on I was able to float between the two spheres. In the mens' pre-ceremony room (where bottles of topshelf liquor were everywhere and so were plastic shotglasses) I was even offered a drink. Only after I replied Thanks, Diet Coke, did I realize the error of my freelancer ways. I was to drink a hard drink.
The second standout was that the dancefloor was divided by a white cloth and the same klezmer band played to the women and to the men, who enjoyed their post-nuptial merriment separately. It was a sight. The men danced sweetly in each other's arms, more touching than displayed with their girls and wives. They were red-faced with liquor and hard dancing. The women played more games like jump-roping and I thought that maybe the games seemed somewhat childish because back in the day brides might have been mere teenagers, ready to rumble before the big ol' (yikes) premier wedding night rumble.
Oh, the B&G made off to the private room (which all Jewish weddings I've shot utilize, a moment to say Hi, etc. before the social onslaught) but this Orthodox wedding included male elders watching the door to make sure that... no suitors/interlopers/pretenders slipped in?
All for now, back to graduate matters at hand, afoot, amind.
Love.

She just wants to be somewhere.
She just wants to be.
She just wants to be somewhere.
She just wants to be.

I tried to find The Kid tonight, to ask him to be my muse. He must be the muse of me. I got a response (an artful rsvp) from the prof who so shattered my ideal world. He had no ideal. I did. But then I did not.
I have embraced Oban again. Hello Oban, give me bigger, give me bigger ideas.
I pet Extra until I wore a path into his fur and he screamed for Mercy.
I have no idea. I have no ideas. I have no ideal. I have no ideals.
I am a grad student?
I am a student of life?
I am a liver?
I am alive?
I am a lie?

Buddha Love.

As my grad student luck would have it I was phoned yesterday, nearly 24 hours ago, by my Middling City editor in NYC, as I was working on my DreamWeaver creation. Yikes, I thought... what tragedy has befallen the paper that he's phoning me, what photo needs have crossed his mental desk, I wondered.
Hi, he said, where are you?
Fucking around with DreamWeaver was my curt response. Why?
Oh, because we are in a cab heading to Balthazar and I wondered if you'd like to join us.
Us was Jamie/publisher/pal, his pal Seward and two associates of the paper.
I joined them. Much joviality. Much great French vin.
Then the two associates split.
Then I discovered that Seward had attended some very historic rock&roll gigs - like Hendrix at Fillmore East, Led Zeppelin's first American show...
and Pink Floyd shows - with Syd Barrett.
Poor Seward (no, not really), I really pumped him for SB info. How was he on stage? What did he wear? Did he seem in control?
Seward said that at Pink Floyd shows he felt like he was Underwater.
This has captured my rockstar-luvvin imaginings.
So Jamie, Seward and I wandered the Village, finally landing at The Bitter End to watch some mundane local bands, hepped-up on their respective and collective fans.
Just before that ultimate stop Jamie (after I gushed about the womblike qualities and Canarino Voltaire at Caffé Reggio) mandated a stop for some eggy-rummy-boozey treat. Called? Something starting with V that the 'boys in the back' have to make. That complicated.
Finished week numero three-o of PSD (interesting sidebar: whereas my pal/publisher Jamie was once unsupportive of my MFA decision, requesting - though I did not oblige - a leave of absence, unpaid, last night he was damn-near beaming with paternal pride at my studenthood) and am now contemplating wandering over three blocks to see Johnny Depp in that pirate charade.
Johnny.
Depp.
melt

"USA Today's lead, in an exclusive, suggests why you've never seen a clear photo of that piece of falling foam that likely doomed the shuttle Columbia: Budget cuts. According to the paper, the photo department's 'staff was reduced, cameras were eliminated, and the repair shop that helped keep the cameras and telescopes operating was severely cut back.' The photo program had 150 workers in the early 1990s and 35 by last February. 'It now appears in retrospect that there were not enough cameras in place to support the Columbia mission,' said the president of company contracted to take the photos."
This quote is fetched via MSN, I subscribe to their compilation of lead stories in the world's leading journals. I mis-read their header and thought I was going to read a story about the legendary Chuck Taylor sneaks and their rumoured demise when I began reading about the prez of Liberia stepping down. His name? Charles Taylor. Chuck, Charles, big diff.
So I begin blogging with this quote self-satisfactorially as when that Columbia debacle happened I instantly questioned why there were nothing but amateur snaps and videos of it, wondered aloud (a lot) why NASA had no tracking documentary means. Many (usually egg-heady boys) scoffed that saying that NASA tracks things via satellites and blah blah blahditty-blah.
I rest my case, but not on my laurels.
Back to Parsons work and then to hit the streets a-shootin'.
All my Big Appled Love.

Made freelance moola to pay, in my humble estimation, for the next few weeks of school where the meter ticks along heartily.
Have been making layered street images and been having incredible visual dreams.
Sat last night, as I awaited Jackdaw's set, upstairs at the venerable and stinky Continental to get some art ideas. Told Jesse at the door that I get some of my best art ideas while in the loudness and darkness (and anonymity) of upstairs. It's loud enough that your thoughts must fight the decibels. On the dance floor were The Goths, represented last night by a scrawny dyke with bandanna, her girlfriend with some sort of long red head wrap and fishnets, and a thick man with piercings doing what's best known as the coffin shuffle. When anything, of course, was not Goth enough they'd vacate the premises. The non-responsive dj went on an all-80s bender and played When Doves Cry which I just had to end art thoughts for to dance in the corner, head down. This is what it sounds like when doves cry, indeed.
Jackdaw's set was truly great and that tall Irish boy was wearing his usual kilt. Such a big sexy and athletic man that he pulls off a kilt better than most.
Bought one of their girlie t's with an upside down crown. They were $15 but I managed only to scrape together $9 and they let me have it, being Perfect Journalistic and Jackdaw-boosting Nancy.
Went on to the final destination, Mohawk, where I saw Two Cow Garage and Slobberbone. I've seen the latter numerous times but preferred the former better, especially their screaming Beatles cover. Whose title escapes me at this moment.
Had meaningful conversation with The Kid of Girlpope and he was completely irradiated and for a while we discussed fairness and spf's and harmful UV rays. I told him that I go from pale to third degree burns in a flash and that's no lie.
He is a beautiful boy, of the dark red-headed variety and we spoke so long that his girlie pal came over to throw her territorial arms about him.
(sidebar: it's been a Barry White tribute weekend and he's been crooning and rocking my world all weekend when I've popped into the home office hovel to work)
Love.

Just jetted back, again. Was greeted by several of the boys/the kitties and gave them a sound brushing to get rid of the flotsam and jetsom in their fur.
Ani is playing Central Park's summer stage on July 16th and I have to call Righteous Babe, home of the Little Folk Singer, for creds... and passes.
Barry White, I heard via an overhead tv monitor, passed onto the big soul lounge in the sky today - too soon.
Thank you Barry for all your romantic music.
Time to play some of that and thank you some more.
Off after that to a bbq and some small-scale pyros before a walk to Delaware Park for larger, more expansive pyros.
God Bless My Underwear!

dreams.

1. A few nights ago I dreampt/drempt/dreamed (?) that I made an art installation and that the pieces were sculptural, sound art. They were on pedestals and when a certain word was uttered the piece would grow. A piece might recognize the word fuck and when the sculpture heard the word it would snap to life and get larger, change configuration.

2. Last night after twelve hours at school I walked, as always, through Washington Square Park and there were, on the eastern quadrant around the fountain, hundreds of chalk circles. Big and small. The artist(s) left behind several unfinished chalks and it looked like they suddenly lost interest in their circular project and went away. They used many of the circles to write words that have O in them... lOve, spOrts, hOnor, etc. I wanted to shoot this circle art and today it was gray, rainy, no circles. Almost like a dream of circles, chalk, temporality.

Somnamulistic Love.

Purchased and have been playing with the Olympus digital 5050. Almost accidentally blinded myself last night by throwing it on night setting, pointing at my face and getting zapped by a shocking beam of orange light emanating from it. Have been doing street photos as well as some images ranging from thoughts of flowers wrapped in bronze wire. Both shot with 5050 (amazingly 6megapixels) and the Hasselblad borrowed from Parsons. Still not impressed with the Hassel501, it makes me further appreciate my Mamiya RZ and its wonderful rectangular format. And rotating back.
My street images are always of something with figures in the background, inspired by my gallery (usually) newspaper images when I purposely include and crop in the paper to images/figures in the background - to me as important as the foreground faces.
A reaching pathetic urban planter with figures walking away way in the back.
In moments there's a demo for us grad people of a Leaf digital back which is thrilling me to no end. I'm thinking I'd like to avoid the darkroom if possible, go from digital back to screen to print. If we're to be stretching the black & white prints, still in my mind, should be shelved while I play with the aforementioned.
Discovered a very secret french joint perfect for reading, a far cry from the salad bar universe around the school. And mere steps from it. Where a bottomless bucket of coffee, baguette and accoutrements are $4 and the background music is oso French.
Baguettes of Love.

Yesterday was a rockstar extravaganza with 7 or 8 hours of walking from stage to stage and talking with some of my favored Middling City residents, those who populate bands.
In a nutshell: Tony Christiano couldn't play as he had a dislocated shoulder from softball, Steve Ryder can play now after recuperating from punching a window - when his hand "went through something glass," The Sheila Divine is fairly done, members of Cracker complained about border crossing and their drummer asked me when I was standing onstage near him what the non-alcoholic version of Labatt Beer is (?), Alison Pipitone had a blemish on one side of her face and asked me to shoot her from her right side so I began to call her Liza (as in Minelli, who had me shoot her from her left side ONLY), Mockba performed in matchy-snatchy b-ball unis, Freeland played in his uniform FUCK tights which shocked my 6-year old niece for some reason, Val Townsend from The Edge showed me the exciting things she was crafting up with the wack of Mardi Gras beads hanging about the radio station's remote van, missed Baby Rock Star but not his one remaining bandmate who was covered in sweat, got hugs from numerous sweaty individuals, tried to get a shot of Eddie The Cop Cotter emptying some unfortunate punk rockers' 40s onto the ground so as to make it look like he was drinking it himself, etc.
Imagistic and Meandering Love.