Minding nobody's business but my absolute own I arrived at Middling City JetPort to discover that my plane was to be one hour late not only due to terroristic possibilities in the Shiny Apple (the runways were closed last evening, the nice pilot told us), but to a missing hunk of rubber on one of the plane's wheels.
So time for not a snooze but a small joe.
And then I nearly missed said flight when, paying attention to pilot and his timely announcement that changing a plane's tire takes a good 30 or so minutes (fun fact!), I gave myself half an hour to do above. When I rounded the corner 25 or so minutes later all my planemates had vanished and Steve (the JetBlue guy who knows me from my 2x/week stint at his counter) said he was on the verge of worrying wholeheartedly about my whereabouts and paging me. I was nearly one of those MIA travelers. The ones that have their names boomed through the echoing spaces of the airport and you ponder Who in HELL are THEY that they get a special ComeOnDown and where in HELL are they, anyhow. And now I know. It's due to following instructions/orders/directives. And this drove home the fact that the flying world is an amorphous blob of a world.
Arriving in the SA acquired the day's Post to learn that a tiger had escaped a circus and did his own share of terrorizing, causing some unfortunate and extreme injuries to a femme cop in Brooklyn.
I had just regaled Kennedy's dogs with a short tale about alligators escaping in the city and how tigers are usually left alone in apartments and feed upon raw chicken meat that is tossed through apartment doors opened a mere crack.
Terrorizing humans teaching the animals how to do same.
Terrorized Love.

Now Blogger has made it easier to upload images so I've got no good and solid reason not to be thrilling You with images, too.
La Dolce Vita on big screen is so big screen, the Fellini moments that one needs to see XL include the moment near end when several characters are standing among trees about to walk to see a very large fish. The moment that they are standing needs to be seen that arms wide open big.
Speaking of arms wide open, or not, about to jet back to the Middling City for the weekend.
The swing from right to left, from here to there.
Heard from Nick who is marrying, there goes sweet Julian down the aisle. Hopefully towards utter happiness.
Heard from RR in KY who laid down a red carpet of utter awe at my swingin' to and fro lifestyle, a balmish email for sure.
Blogging at Geek HQ, the Mac Clubhouse and now it really is time to sign off and log off and step off.
Steps of Love.

Not exactly a Courtney Love carcrash but one nonetheless is the state of exhaustion, intensity and deprivation that marks the rounding of the summer bend toward the end of what is best referred to as bootcamp. When everyone's eyes suddenly develop a certain glossiness and faces reveal a pallour that says I've been having more coffee than naps. Spoke to Newbie Andrew last night about the oddball Parsons School of Bootcamp Proportions switcheroo from summer to autumn session style when suddenly the community, frazzlements, arguments, bumping into each other goes *poof* in the night and one is left to one's own online/distance learning devices.
Here I must absolutely thank Phillip for coming to my rescue last night as I was immobilized (see above) on a park bench on Thompson near Spring, and that handsome French (though he swore he is Spanish but we spoke French as only Yours Truly can do after wrangling the foreign syllables, post-bevvie) bartender who took pity upon my sobbing self propped up on stool by Phillip and made a record-setting scotch & soda - smattering of latter. And he deposited two double shots of same in front of Yours Truly as special mood-enhancement.
Back in the saddle, reading for Misery Seminar (of which there are 15 hours remaining, count 'em), editing video and being my usual dazzling self.

Specious Love.

Completely, well, sort of, captivated by the story of Jackson taking an entire family hostage. Asked one of my schoolpals how much money it'd take her to go along with a Jackson-related captivation. As if anyone of sound body and/or mind couldn't knock that fucker to the ground and escape NeverLand whenever they chose.
About to call my attorney (Mercure, not JW, Esq. as the latter is probably too busy contemplating strategies for making Oracle a more ferocious corporate presence. Either that or he's out watching the hottest, newest band out at some joint in SFCA.) as I am going to get all litigational at Parsons School of Hepped-Up Concepts as we traipsed our diligent gradschool asses on the 4 to Fulton Street to get to South Street Seaport to interview a man from a Shiny Apple company to tell us all about wi-fi down there in the SE.
And now I am sunburned. And furious.
Thinking complex thoughts each and every day does not include the remembering of 45 SPF.
Kennedy tells me he has a zit.
To that I state I have 3rd degree burns.
And a tendency to exaggerate.
Tendency towards Love.

To quote one of my gradschoolmates, the seminar we have on Tuesdays and Thursdays is Dense. I have another few, choice words such as unenjoyable, stultifying, and draggy. La Dolce Vita is being shown at Film Forum and heading there this fine rainy evening is next or so on the list as I've seen it small but not XL. The same unnamed colleague last night at a throw-down at the 79th Street Boat Basin spoke of a nonfiction warning to one in the past to wear Knife-proof earmuffs. I asked for him to repeat the phrase, to make sure that I'd heard him correctly. And it was true and my eyes gleamed with imagistic possibilities, you know, being in a band named Knife Call and all. The Knife-proof earmuff tale involved the cutting off of a man's ear as the offender had spat into another's ear and, to make him an example, his ear was Van Goghed. As I wrote this, on my too-short break from the Dense seminar, I imagined the critical gaze and voice of the seminar leader and how she'd tell Yours Truly how all I'd just blogged was incorrect. And then I'd cite some passages and pages to say Uh, nope, I didn't hallucinate this, see here. If not for all this seminar time Yours Truly would be merrily plodding and trolling the Shiny Apple streets for images digital and beautiful. All for now, time to head back up to 8, to Hell, to the most unenjoyable portion of the summer.
Unenjoyable unsummer unlove.

Per executive decision have not been gleaning wartime info via telemessages, rather, via print. So, imagine the wonder of Yours Truly, this asscrack of dawn, when I was confronted by not only the archetypal CNN graphics, but the title of this segment of the Iraq Thing: The Final Chapter.
Now, being a writer, does one know certainly that one's chapter currently open and worked-upon is the final. Does one ever think I am on chapter 10 and therefore must call this thing called book a wrap. Does the agent, the press agent dictate the duration, length of a book. So, who dictates the length of war, this war. How is this chapter the ultimate.
Back now now in the Shiny Apple, happily ensconced in newspaper (print media of indeterminate, infinite length = no chapters, only sections) and coffee numero duo and about to become en route to Parsons, Joint of Higher Learning.
Was greeted off the 5 at Union Square by first a 6'7" self-proclaimed Jew as Jesus who can freestyle rap at the drop of a eucharist, or a buck.
Then, around the bend, a homeless guy who lingers always at University & 14th with a brand new sign proclaiming him the most handsome bum in the Shiny Apple.
Jubilant sun, signage, synchronicity.

S'Love

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Today is the day that Beth first burst forth from her mom in the state of PA so happiest of coming out days, dear Beth.

Note to self:
Korean "vodka," steer abso-freakin-lootly clear of this liquid in future.
Accidentally sipped some with Phillip last night in Korea Town and am now reaping the benefits of a beverage I gave the benefit of a doubt to, despite its yellowish cast.
Now in the midst of critiques, day number two. Presented my new works yesterday to good reviews and this pending week am meeting with JR to discuss their better, bigger, beyonder presentation = projections on other surfaces, compositing them together to view, for example, three at once, in all their looped glories.
Have ditched shoes, off in a corner, as they were soaked by the Shiny Apple's monsoon this morning. Humoured the Parsons School of Thoughtful Industry doorman (the chain smoker) by dumping a cup of brackish water from each sad, leather shoe.
Back to critiques, back to Middling City and all that entails, in mere hours.
Soju/Rotgot Love.

The Roots's nouveau is what I imagined, pure hip-hop perfect.
Squeezed in a listen this earliest of AM's before readings, ruminations and rooting about in the Academie, and the trek to Parsons and points beyond. As is the scholastic usual, a study jag from 7AM to classtime, in this case a solid 4.5 hours, slightly longerish on Tuesdays and Thursdays when punch-in time is 3. Lest you think all that happens in this Perfect School World is long walks, puffs on American Splendours and a smattering of shoe shopping. Well, no comment.
Blogging from Bowling Green for wi-fi-oriented class, allegedly this the oldest park in the Shiny Apple. Makes sense as it is so south and where did those that lived under Stuyvesant's rule live but down here, on the tip. The tip of farmland, downhome development.
After some bantering about with a record shop boy acquired also a fine fine recording by a Shiny Apple band, Ambulance Ltd. Terrible name, wondrous 80s-like sounds that are all pepped up and highly recommended to my music geeks.
Back to class, focus, studenthood, brown-nosiness.
Reminds me of my classic remake of the Julio Iglesias smash hit:
To All the Noses I've Loved Before.
Love of Noses.

+
Since the most current newstale of a possible leave-taker, muck-maker and deserter have been thinking of what it is to repatriot one. The shoving back in, the shoveling out, of ideas. A term that might be used in oso many day-to-day situs: I return from a voyage and then You get to repatriot Yours Truly. The whos, whats, whens, wheretofors, whereuntos, whichevers and the like.

Upon hearing that the Middling City is yet again at the cusp, or in the midst, of further economic miasma - this from a reliable source this shiny Shiny Apple day beginning - I toggled over to the virtual edition of Middling City News. And what a collection of hard-hitting, pensivity it is: in-depth stories about saving personality-free suburban buildings and the like, a columnist's whining about not making deadline of Middling City-area beaches that close at 7PM while she is a "drone" until 5 and must stop off at home first to get her beachgear and snack, bad slices & dices of wire service stories, loads of human interest stories from the Curio Division, broad appeals and shouts and murmurs to whomever to help save a small-yet-heartstring-tugging condiment business from financial ruination due to loss of commercial rates on utilities, and insipid reviews of The Roots's new one (which, along with the latest Tuxedo Moon I'm drifting towards today) and a restaurant where the reviewer apologizes - apologizes - to the management for reviewing them under the header of Cheap Eats while she delves into her cheeseburger.
Orders to every citizen of the Middling City: get your news elsewhere. But to find out where you can sup on cheeseburgers you must read MCNews. And apologies to my boy colleagues but the picture makers are not the taste makers. And ever the twain shall lie in journalism in separate, twin beds.

Beds of Love.

Sometimes, after a foray down deep into gradstudentness, it is time to head to the more swank end of the spectrum. And so, with trusty day assistant, Beth, meandered in to Balthazar for civility - before foraying back again to the curriculum.
Last Friday, en route to the Middling City and at JFK, saw flames on the runway. Like Conflagration art collaborative project style, only bigger, angrier. Flights were delayed. The news trucks were not present but I watched from the elevated walkway the foaming of the fire and the spreading of the fire and the foaming of the fire and the eventual cessation.
Today, en route to school after leaving the MC, had to wait and wait for the A as the engineer ran through a red light, tripping off a chain of alarms that meant extended concern and locked doors and sitting train and worrisome workers.
But still, despite Americano onslaught yesterday, a freelance gig timeline conducted with gimp knee, a stressload that might have killed one less determined, and about 1.5 hours of sleep, managed to be student numero uno at seminar today. Gold stars are shooting out of my ass.
Was nearly capitulated back to Middling City today/tonight to shoot a Kerry/Edwards fun-raiser but, alas, there are not enough schekels in the coffers to have me running back to the 6 to the 4 to the A to the AirTrain to the JetBlue to the Middling City to the gig. Lather, sip coffee, rinse, repeat.

Repeated Love.

Bicoastally, unconfusedly, for the most part, working on freelance gigs and non-free school. Only one massive loss of personal GPS when I was sitting in last Monday's seminar, fresh from Kennedy/Kennedy and looked around the room and thought Am I in the Middling City or Shiny Apple.
Decided to leave crutches for weekend in Shiny Apple as they, I believe, are more injurious to a person than injury.
Shot/imaged at the Salamanca Pow-Wow half of yesterday and drove down with Neal and his son Steven and ate bear sausage, most notably. Talked to man who made/acquired said meat and he apparently shot the black bear I was chewing alongside the ching-ching casino on the Rez, followed by some preparations and the stuffing of the bear's flesh into casing with other herbs and spices.
Unabashed carnivore, my Libran nature swingin' from tofu to venison jerkey in a flash.

Flashes of Love.

Was it the grappa or was Justy sooth saying that he'd get a gig for my laptop band, Knife Call, on a double header of a bill with his own not blunt but sharply -named band, Knife Fight. For the musical record: I told him my band's name well before his quote unquote Knife Fight was a twittering blink in any guitar monger's eye. I rest my pickless feckless case.
Amongst other things learned today was this: Stuyvesant built a wall to keep out pesky native people and hence that's where Wall Street got its name.
I also learned that the depths of some people's pedantic tendencies is fathomless, striking an ire-inducing chord of sorts in Yours Truly. Talked to JR aobut this, during our Perfect Art meet-up this fine evening. A seminar, in my mind, should be an open-ended conversation, one in which relevant ideas are tossed about and adding to a collage of thought - as opposed to the I'm giving correct answers at the teacher methodology.
Discovered that pineapple lilies are what grows in Kennedy's garden's northeastern quadrant, via thrilling gardening mag appropriated from that knee jerk reaction doctor's office.
Had a horrid fright as I crutched along to the 6 Train. Thought, out of corner of one eye, the left, same side as bum knee, that my X was approaching and my instinct was to run in opposite direction. It was a mournful stranger, giving a hairy eyeball to a homeless wanderer.
Art art and more art.
And Love.
+
And Joyeux Bastille Day, belatedly. Bastille Day signifies the ancient pagan festival of towers where both the insane and political prisoners were mercilessly kept, beaten and released and, annually, they were made to run alongside a troupe of bulls who could, at a moment's notice, gore them and/or ungainly tourists. In celebration of Bastille Day the French have been known to put plastic babies in "King Cakes" and to toss handfuls of red pigment at their foreheads. Holidays, as it is known, is a delightful mishmash of myth, reality and practicality.

Humourless Doctor Howard Levy did not give Beth the ol' backstage photo pass to shoot the knee procedure of Yours Truly. Well, actually, the knee procedure of tapping like a maple was nixed by Humourless Doctor Howard Levy who said all will be virtually evaporated like maple syrup in a sunny bucket in the woods.
Crutches I did get. Navigating on the streets of Manhattan is a workout and I did ask the Humourless Doctor Howard Levy to mentor me in the usage of them. He declined. I did, however, encounter an MTA man, working outside the hospital, in orange hard hat with tools hanging off his belt and other macho regalia, who, without prompting, gave me a very thorough tutorial. Hey, slow down. Get your rhythm going. Get the swing down. Then he meandered alongside me and showed me the technique for navigating subway steps. He, unlike Humourless Doctor Howard Levy, knew the Zen of crutches.
Tonight opening of Yours Truly et al at Thomas Werner Gallery in Chelsea.
Hello white wine. Hello cheese cubes. Hello crutch art opening tottering.
Tottered Love.

Me (in snark) to doctor (in sandals), mere moments ago.
Under glare of mandatory medical fluorescence, surrounded by health concerns, re-re-xeroxed NYT health-related articles, helpful hints.

I am a Francophile, this much is true/vrai. However. I don't want to live - LIVE - a vrai Jerry Lewis and furthermore Chaplin moment by wrangling my limbs and attendant bags/sacs up and down the subway/le metro all the day/jour long with borrowed crutches angling out and about.
Mercury buckets/thanks... thanks for the ref, thanks for the memory, thanks for not tossing my western medicine-skepticizing self out of your swell office/bureau.

Equipment malfunction, left knee is still all peculiar and so tomorrow, not today, I go off to a knee specialist. I wonder about a person who only looks at knees all day.
No crutches, just a bunch of grad school readings to plow through in my bag, and a song in my heart.
The song.
A nice techno one You would really really like.
Off to Chelsea gallery to deliver the piece that was mis-delivered by post orifice, for the show that happens momentarily.

Momentary Love.

Just in case you didn't comprehend that Yours Truly completely, utterly, certifiably rocks I have a few free-wheelin' statements. Of sorts.
1. The review is in and it does not look so good. Of course I do not blog of any art gig or show, I blog of my performance a few weeks ago in the role of wedding date to Mr. Daniels. Heretofore known as Mr. Daniels, he once had another brandishment that shall not be continued.
Yours truly, in true form, schmoozed merrily and you may recall the regale of the story I conjured of me committing circumstantial homicide (just toggle back if you don't know what in heck I'm criminally referring to) and recalling a much previous meet-up with a boy named Obediah.
Onwards.
So Mr. Daniels sends me a letter, one dramatic page, deconstructing what I thought was a fine fine job of role-playing. I had had my nails done and I looked damn good. Apparently, in a gesture of jest, in my sub-role as castmember of the show "The Three Siblings, The 40-year Old and The Gay Guy," brilliant and hilarious and being pitched as I blog to folks at MiraMax, I touched lips with one of The Sibs. Much to the astonishment, the righteous indignation of a gaggle of MidWesterners. And to those of you so in the know, you know how I feel about the righteous. Down with the righteous ones, no tolerance for the intolerant.
Mr. Daniels sent me a check with the letter, payment for a piece of art by Yours Truly which was a most suitable and luxe wedding gift. And to that I say Thanks and Sayonara.
Mr. D says my "impish, rockstar and blogger" ways just don't gel with those of the MidWest. Oh well, other stellar roles and roads await my luminosity in the northeast, the east, the north, the south, the outwest, the northwest and the west.
2. In the throes of working a gig on Saturday, the rooms of the building chilled to ice cream happiness levels (niveaux that is in the country of France), my knee did a wonky snappy thing and now I am hobbling about with a left red knee. While mid-break during seminar Teaching Methods I practiced some good old-fashioned chalk & talk by approaching the green black board and diagramming out the two knees - for comparing, for contrasting. JamMasterV, Madge, Justice Wild Bill, S.S., Phillippe, Pam, Beth (in rockstar ballcap and shades because of a three-day migraine), Yong, Lexie and Lori gleaned much from the kneely psa.
3. My Knife Call bandmates are coming to the Shiny Apple for some music event at Coney Island, with Michael Baumann. To that I say bring on the noise, bring on the funk, bring on the Oban and pass the joie de vivre.

Tales of love, never woe.

Worked on the novel last night into wee hours, amongst other tasks more Academy-based.
Minding my own business meandered into the midst of the launch party (after observing revelers on a fire escape, after blending in with three frenchies and a solo femme clutching an invite/directions) of a tshirt silkscreening guru, he in a light saffron robe and matching sandals, his wares or product or Work hanging from his lofty pipes - about 15 samples/works/wares in all. A woman photographed Perfect Me looking up at the ceiling/art/shirts and I thought You know, those men in Customs were SO right, I do look better with shorter hair, it suits things better, the Look... I'm here but not so here thing. And through this all, and a glass of mediocre pinot grigio, I was still clutching a whiteboard from the morning when I met Yong on the steps of The Academy to work on our collaborative web-design project.
Us: Hi, we're grad students at Parsons and we're...
Them: No.
Us: (trying another person, other strategy) Hi, would you like to be photographed holding this whiteboard with a special message of your own devising that we will digitally document and beam to the Earth's four corners.
Them: Fuck yeah.
Our yesterday victims included a french couple who I spoke with in their lingua franca, a heavy (as in large, as in serious) punker who used the whiteboard to send out major props to his very own band's gig, and an actor guy who used the whiteboard to draw a cartoon of himself.
So I'm still holding the fucking whiteboard as I'm looking up at the pipes and shirts of the launch party. The guru kept glancing at me (maybe because I was hanging off his robes to glean some guru wisdom, oracle style) and at the whiteboard perhaps thinking I was going to proffer up a score of sorts for the whole affair.
Score: 8.5

Scores of Love.

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See today is birth anniversary of an early art prototype of Yours Truly. Wherever you are, happiness to you Greg Sader, sorry for nearly killing you with my vehicle that night and you missed your deadline.

Dark Side of the Moon of Yours Truly.

Point in the summer when the Division Bell between Empire State's left and right spheres is so great that there is an implosion into delightful, self-centered Art.
The Greatest Gig (not in the Sky, on plane) is that of meandering entropy-rich streets of Shiny Apple, unfettered. And this does not include anything mandatory, xeroxed or purposefully collaborative.

When Middling City becomes Pluto.

Went to a classical, vocal, Anglican mid-day concert at historic and under-scaffolding Grace Church to witness talents of OllieB, britboy met upon CDG-JFK flight.
Seating Plan: A/Yours Truly; B/as in Beth; and C/OllieB, 6'2" 20year old, bedimpled and chatteur par excellence.
Wandered into Grace's place about 15 late and made my way up the aisle and there was OllieB with three other britboys and two britgirls, singing like their lives depended upon it, like they were, like the wailing wall recently viewed, our transmitters, our hopes for something celestial.
Moved along to Marquet to read, etc. and it was there that I discovered that NYPost made an error grande - on their front page, for all the world to see, was their lead story about horsefaced Kerry's selection of running mate, sprayheaded Gephart. I had read about an hour earlier that, in truth, the r.m. was/is John Edwards, another man of sprayed proportions.
So this is a collector's item, which I pitched into trash as I left Marquet, which I several hours later came to regret and I sprinted out of the computer lab, out of Parsons's 5th Avenue digs, across the Ave to acquire another, and another, and another. To discover all were gone at what I've dubbed The Studio/the deli on the west side of the street. So I charged over to the lesser deli and purchased their last. This, I'm speculating, will pay my grad student debts. Or those of my heirs. Or theirs. If eBay's still around.
Back to digvid editing, walk to another french joint for coffee noir to go, to art, to lecture, to listening, to collaborative seminar, to meeting with JR, to more reading, to move through the streets, to think, to think, to move, to more.
Blooper Love.

Tortured I was mere moments ago by - count 'em - seven crash scenes so far, via Cronenberg movie CRASH, based on JG Ballard's novel. As You may recall Yours Truly was nearly exeunted by a drunk who decided to drive through the Middling City at a brisk 50 mph one night, and whizz through a light most sanguine.
If not for James Spader (aahh) the film is a complete visual fiasco, usual gray layerings that scream HiThisIsSo80s. Read the novel whilst in San Francisco and staying with an interesting assortment of people.
Movie last night, Time of the Wolf/ Temps du Loup, a Kennedy rec, was good. Visually arresting at moments and spare in terms of dialogue, the narrative moseys along at a deliberate pace. Wiping her just-kilt husband's blood from her cheek, Isabelle Huppert is still so Hot.
Gave JR his contraband, multi-packs of Marlboro Mediums. We have a meeting scheduled for tomorrow after the Collaborative Seminar, at which time I'll regale him with more travel tales, digvid shot in foreign lands, and oso much more.
All for now and over and out.
Medium Love.

Back in the Shiny Apple where, unlike anywhere else on ze planet, one can eat to one's heart's content around the stinkin' clock.
Have been reading The Rules of Engagement by Anita Brookner since procuring it from CDG yesterday, after le metro ride to airport, when I had to arouse Beth from her above-ground and bumpy slumber to say Beth, dearest, we are on the wrong track, we must go back two stops to catch B3. And on. I had noted there were too many butterfly bushes (which grow wildly in France) and not enough gypsy encampments.

Sojourn Fun Facts about Yours Truly:

* Number of multi-coloured shots imbibed by Yours Truly at the wedding of Inbal & Gideon in Tiberias, rolled out or carried out onto disco-ball-adorned (4 total) dance floor by the Tippler Sisters, twin shotgirls in fun fur cowgal hats.
= Indeterminate.

* Number of American Splendours puffed out over Sea of Galilea during aforementioned wedding.
= 4.

* Total number of feet of Yours Truly soaked in Sea of Galilea night of wedding.
= 2.

* Percentage of times Yours Truly successfully infiltrated AirFrance First Class lounge for coffee and wi-fi.
= 50%.

* Number of officious French bitches who gave Yours Truly one of her very own paintmelt stares over counter when attempting to infiltrate AirFrance VIP lounge.
= 1.

* Number of times Yours Truly misheard (due to 20 years of attending/shooting rock & roll extravaganzas) French waiter and believed he'd said I've ordered you gizzard for after your lunch (while lunching at Musée d'Orsay) instead of what questioning me as to what I'd like for dessert.
= 1.

* Number of times Beth thought I was joking about the gizzard/dessert mix-up.
= 1.

* Believing me to be Française, due to blatant savoir-faire, total number of Parisians asking Yours Truly for directions.
= 3.

* Total number of Francis Bacon paintings that blew head off of Perfect me, so to speak.
= 5, including favored one, ironically from Middling City's Albright-Knox Art Gallery (a piece that, to my Perfect memory, has never graced their walls).

* Number of kir royals slargled by Yours Truly.
= Not enough.

Into the cab jumps Mohammed (armed with handy Glock) with a half-drunk bottle of red wine, from the lights-a-blinkin' squadcar to our trundling vehicle. He passes off his handcuffs to Rafi, the cabbie, who I'm sitting next to.
Oh, note to self: Next time in Israel, specifically Jerusalem, when wanting to acquire the front seat next to driver do not holler S-H-O-T-G-U-N into the winding and shadowy street.
So Rafi, Mohammed, Yours Truly, Beth and Sandra go to see DisneyHolyLand - the place where myth and martyrs collide. Every spot pointed out I'd inquire, being the star journalistically-minded femme you know me and love me to be, Oh yeah, really, is that true... Shrine to the BlahBlahBlah... Is THAT true, is THAT the spot.
Did some digvid shooting at the wailing wall and of some adjoining wall with weeds gently blowing against a shocking array of disarray.
So Jerusalem was left behind as we made our way back to Tel Aviv, via Peugot 505 manned by the hairiest, smelliest human known to ourkind, Asher. Having a propensity to drive in other countries (illegally, non-illegally, public transportationally like the jeepney in Philippines, etc.), and beginning to suggest to Asher the Stank that I do some driving I began to think how I'd be sitting on the same seat that he'd been sweating and farting into for who the hell knows, so I declined, realizing I'd have to fumigate my self and dispose of my outfit soon after arrival.
Speaking of arrivals, my departure out of Tel Aviv airport was an utter fiasco as security could not comprehend the very quick pitstop of a travel to their land of DisneyHolyLands. I showed them travel itinerary, explaining planular fiasco at JFK. I showed wedding favour. I showed them email from the bride. After 1.5 hours it was decided that I was not, am not, a terrorist. Bags were x-rayed, many times, shoes and camera equipment were examined for explosive residues (and it was at that moment I was so relieved I'd not shot off the Glock the previous night), this very same laptop was examined and manhandled and re-examined. Thanks to my dear little canine pal Ollie, who, once upon a time, leapt off Kennedy's sofa so vehemently that she pulled wire and laptop and nearly the lap of Yours Truly, too, several feet away, resulting in an unsightly bulge near the MacLatch. This created much consternation for Tel Aviv security. I re-enacted, with graceful and over-baked hand gestures, the moment when Ollie leapt and the man fondling this laptop (which I will be having disinfected shortly) was not moved. At all. I was, near the end of my security infringement, led off by a femme to a partitioned room and I thought This is not the metal detector test, this is the biological detector test. But nope, no derobing happened.
Upstairs, searching for Marlboro Mediums for JR and for lunch medium, spotted one of my security pals. Her unsmiling misery made me oso glad I'm not in the security racket, and glad I was leaving Israel for gai Paris.
Where I am now.
Where I must go drink more café noir.
Where I must go see a show of Francis Bacon paintings.
And shoot more digvid.
And blow smoke, it's mandatory, into the ancient streets.
And then, when that list is accompli, jet off to the Shiny Apple for more more more.

Particular Love.

Minding my own business I was jettisoned from my plane seat due to ticket misprinting. This did not please Yours Truly as they wanted to move me to the rear of the plane, in a center seat... for an international flight of interminable hours. So I grumbled. Said Look, I need some sleep, etc.
Suddenly a new seating op opened up, a nice roomy one with a next door neighbor who was in Air France's 1,000,000 club. No lie. So he's angling to get bumped up. Then he is. Now I've got no neighbor and the flight, or so I thought, was leaving imminently. Nope. The entertainment system was kaput and suddenly some kid got sick and had to himself be jettisoned. Then they couldn't find the luggage of the family who was deplaning. This all equals 2 hours. Suddenly Perfect Me is approached by a nice crewperson who had heard my stellar grumbles and this femme moved me up to 1st class. But the next flight was missed so instead of Tel Aviv I'm in Paris. Where I've been wandering for 12 hours. So tomorrow CDG for another attempt at Israel for Inbal and Gideon's wedding.
Today Paris was sunny and in its summery heyday packed with gawkers and wanderers and lookers and bona fide citizens.
Headed for the George Pampelmousse Centre and got lost in some good, some bad, art there.
Onwards to dozing and jetting afterwards.

Doze of Love.

Rimbaud believed that the poet became a true visionary by a systematic 'deranging of the senses' and by absorbing all 'poisons.' William Blake coined the maxim, 'The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.'

On an overly school-imbued day like today Yours Truly might think of days of yore when poets and artists were just that. Were they grad students. No. Did they jet to and fro to do things. No. Were they required to be other than somewhat irresponsible creatives. Nope. Did they hunker down and make art. Yes. Did they enjoy the thickening joys of wormwood-enhanced Green Fairy juice. Yup.

Where does that leave Perfect Me on a day. Like today.
Full of poisons of the caffeine variety. Full of excess of ideas ilk.
Wending my way to that palace of wisdom.
In my mind it's a ring road, not a path, to Wisdom Palace, an approach, a leaving, another approaching and on.

Approach Love.

If anyone suggests to you that you MUST see (misogynistic) The Saddest Music in the World (starring Isabella Rosellini), don't just respectfully decline, vehemently do so - peppered with words of both slang and salty varieties. Wasted two hours last week doing so, well, it wasn't a complete wash as I used said time to update my contacts in my cell phones.
Arrived in Shiny Apple mere hours ago. And speaking of salty, a renowned woman with a salty tongue who shall not be named, former top administrator of Middling City Hospital for the Unwell, was alongside JetBlue Yours Truly. I have done work for her in the past, political and personal, years ago. I intended to say hello when I saw her terminally in the Middling City and, as I fall into Travel Coma before planes are rolling, didn't actually realize she was next to me until I awoke from the deepest of pre-liquid nap (read coffee) zoo snoozes with my head back at a 90º angle and mouth at Venus Fly Trap ready. Then we deplaned. Public transpo was sought. On the way to JFK a few days ago started talking to two teens who shared with me some of their top slang words that they've coined and that they're trying to get into the public sphere. I did alert them that I'd be stealing some of these words. I did not, however, tell them that I blog and that I'd be bloging on their words in the near future. First word: chillaxin'. Second great word: conversayshuh (short for conversation, a short conversation).
Three or four times used and they are so yours.
From Kennedy to Kennedy to Parsons to Kennedy to Kennedy.
My jubilant whirlwind.
Whirled Love.

It may be grad school but there are field trips. However, no bus, box lunch nor over-sized name badge in the shape of an animal. To see August Sander's spot-on portraits of types at The Met and then on to Metro Pictures to see (again for me) Cindy Sherman's self-clown-portraits. Barbara Gladstone next door had the day's greatest surprises, a sculpture show that skewed one's depth perception with work that delves in unexpectedly on itself, in cast steel and fiberglas. Anish Kapoor.
Boarded the 6 to 72 and right about 23 in came what was the day's first surprise, all 5'8" of her, about 55 and dressed for dancefloor success.
Paying little attention Yours Truly was thinking, thinking, thinking when I heard Her say to no one in particular, well, a seated no one, Let me sit down before I break my ass. I thought Ah, here's the 6 Train Oracle to greet me, guide me. But then.
She sat and then a few stops later I sat next to her. She was busy, reaching and sorting on her lap an extensive array of makeup that she was slathering (hold onto that word, make it last a good three seconds) colors all over her face. Red Nike swooshes on cheeks and forehead and chin. Then blended in. Eye liner, shadow and then... navy blue and silver sparkles tossed on top and underneath her eyes with abandon. Across from both of us were two 12 year old girls and a woman about the same age as the makeup lady whose faces at turns expressed humour, horror and then sorrow at the sad and careless/free exploitation of the sparkles.
She toddled off at 59, giving herself the sign of the ol' cross four times before detraining, perhaps to apply for a job at Scores, perhaps to meet her lover.
She left us plain faced riders feeling grateful we had not personally, mentally chosen to board the P or the I.
Painted Lady or the Insane trains.
Trained Love.

Cadillac need space to roll.
- The Roots, "The Seed"

This is what I prefer to see, a band (The Neighbors, band of adept guy rockers with ever-shifting cast of players save one Allen) that takes the time – the time! – to espouse the rock aesthetic and m.o. of Yours Truly. Just back from an Oban foray (see, Blogger is a left coast operation so blogging after midnight means that you may not be into a new day, but hours behind in a Cali last day) with two rock & roll pals in these SoHo parts.
And what a bar it was. If the lights were not all about resembling shortie condoms dangling in circles I may have sworn the theme was Ye Olde Wild West, via 1985. If you catch this drift. I had flashbacks to clubs full of bad haircuts, shoulder pads, and not a touch of irony anywhere except in an occasional snark rock classic.
There was a non-drinking couple so resolute and silent, staring straight ahead that I was certain that this couple was mis-directed, believing that they were in a train station, awaiting the late-night arrival of a handy train.
But caveat, riders.
The 1 had a random act of not kindness but the opposite, unnameable and unforseeable, yesterday as it wheeled to a Chelsea stop.
A pop, a spurt, a stiff.
Frail biological love.

Meandered over to the nearest French joint for turbo-powered coffee and an American Splendour (as Kennedy calls them) this AM, for another early-AM gander at the asphalt triangle that is Lt. Petrosino Square and to send me on my reading way.
Had a strong visual dream this AM that awoke me at 6.
My hand was holding a very simple and monochromatic bouquet which I kept waving slowly in front of me.
Perhaps inspired by my walk back to SoHo last evening when I stopped to buy lilies and lisianthus and these flowers hovered near my head all night, filling my head and mind with pollen molecules and perfumed flavour and scent crystals. Not to get too technical for You.
In mere moments it will be time to meander again slightly north, near the French joint of turbo-powered coffee, for the 6 up 3 to school, where I'll meet yet another new instructor who I'll be regaling with my hot plans of most ambitious and perhaps eccentric variety, for the summer's public art project. It involves the demi-heritage of Yours Truly (the Italian portion), badass attitude, making a place really lusher and the celebration of the Underdog.
All dogs is good dogs but the underdog gets my hardest bite.

Love bites.

+
this just in:
No Lollapalooza. Poor Perry. But really, Morrissey as a headliner in this day and age. Meat is murder... to concert tours. Too bad for Sonic Yoof and PJ Harvey, however, no chance of corrupting younger minds with their audio this time around.

Green Line Oracles, 6 Train up and then 6 Train down, first and last ride of the day.

1.
Woman walking with purpose, belly out:
You got to be careful, he got the pills, she got the pills.
Not entirely sure who she was speaking to, too affixed on the Oracle.

2.
Yours truly, after a full night of grad school imbibing with colleagues old and newbie, watching three trackmen working on the quiet 4 Train tracks, flashlights out and down about 100' from where I am impatiently awaiting the 6. One man walks along and over the top of the third rail, without fear.

Deducement:
1.
You never do know what lurks in the pockets, the secret compartments, of others.
2.
You don't always need to fear the third rail. The reaper, yes, the third rail, no.

Love Oracles.

Stuttering and faltering, like a Middling City car engine mid-January, my memory caught up with a recent past happening, at this weekend's CT wedding.

This morning, as I was reading the required readings for grad school, and with my brain looking for a hale escape strategy, I recalled one of the weekend's most interesting conversations - a primo blend of fiction (via Yours Truly) and a man named Obediah (the non-fictive part of the blend).

I thought of his full name, something biblical, and how he introduced himself as Obie. Over a dozen years ago I met this guy who was then a kid in tow with his hippie parents working where I was working in Maine - at my third month of summer camp art teaching, at Samantha Smith Peace Camp after my usual art teaching gig for Summer Camp, Inc.

Obie then was a lanky teen with wild hair. Today he's a full-bodied guy but with more tamed hair, and a tiny wife.

He told me and some random gay male wedding guests a hilarious (well, we made it hilarious) tale about his do-gooder hippie mom who was at one point a Black Panther (is this possible) and how she dragged her brood off to the local prison to visit a woman incarcerated for life, a woman who killed (or possibly did not kill) her lezbo lover. The lezbo lover was beheaded and a gang of teens and 20-somethings somehow, the story gets a little convoluted here, pointed fingers at this woman. Who swears, I think the story goes, but then again I had had a heap of white wines (replete with sulfites), that she is INNOCENT.

Before the tiny wife joined our tell-tale circle I told the group that I, too, had been incarcerated before, for killing a man. Actually, I called it circumstantial homicide. Is there such a thing. I said I killed a man, but it was not my fault. They asked my method and I replied that it happened with a pair of shoelaces. In some confusing twists and turns of happenstance the man had bent over to do something with shoelaces and somehow I had caused his untimely death as I knocked into him, perhaps somewhat with purpose, resulting in his falling into oncoming traffic. Circumstantial homicide.

When the tiny wife joined our circle she was being caught up on the story that her hubbie was telling and then one of the gay men said She (pointing at Yours Truly) killed a man. I said That's right, I am a former convicted felon. The gay man, Tommy, chimed in But you were a juvie, you were only in for how long. The tiny wife's eyes widened unbelievably and, revelling in the feeling that those who have been rehabbed but yet still encounter the suspicious eyes of others, I went along with it, basically, to fuck with her and her suspicions, preconceptions of a Criminal, rehabbed or not, and her tidy littleness.

So now I think I have to contact the B&G (the groom, I delightedly found out, is a Bonesman) to see how to contact post-hippie-mommed Obie and say Hey, I met you way back when in the woods of Maine.

Maine Love.

One worm, a dead fly and a bunch of small spiders.

So said the uniformed man on all fours, muttering into his walkie-talkie, in the middle of Yale's Museum of Art, in the Asian/African sector - an inventory of their lower-order interlopers.
The smattering of Asian art in the house was non-impressive, especially not the silk scroll painting fading out from bad lighting. The Yalie curators might consider visiting the Asian art collection of Cleveland Museum of Art, as I reach for my imported and stylish art snob cap.
And the prints and photo section of the Yale Museum is open only after a rez is made. And I thought And this is the joint famed for its photographic offspring and faculties.
The African section featured a wall of masks that simply did not rival the collection of the Clarksons but one, Hook spirit mask, was mesmerizing with angular deep sensory organ recesses.
New Haven also offered up a shop that had such great shoe wares on its shelves that the choices were overwhelming and I was turned on to the Austrian shoe line Think! as well as CYDWOQ, created by an American architect.
Needless to say, I have samples of both lines's product. A triumph!
Within an hour of being in New Haven stumbled upon my art target, Skull and Bones's h.q., The Tomb. Too dark at night for filming but gathered up the camera, an Americano and my senses for some morning shooting.
Onwards now to Cubanesque food, Canadian film, art reading.
Sensory Love.

Yup so I'm a communist so why not report me to HUAC. Living communally in SoHo means that outside the shower you are aware that maybe someone wants in but you are not so sure. And when you round the corner to fetch your Post Toasties there is a lanky boy in a towel. Shaving no less. Just drags me, kicking and not really screaming, to the Richmond Avenue days when I was den mom and lease holder and one of seven one summer. And one bath and it never felt like trouble to anyone.
After school (oh, and my stellar screenings of the short & sweet digvids) headed over to the Mac Clubhouse (where, once again, Final Cut workshop was usurped by one for... Motion) and then onwards to Angelica to see some Italian movie, I'm not scared, which featured Courtney Love (represented by a bedraggled Italian kidnapping victim in a pit near an abandoned house). And, as usual, nearly expired due to hypothermia in the theatre as they like to, despite seasons, keep the theatres at a nice, bracing 40º. Afterwards I spied an Italian wine bar and we proceeded to meet two new people, Megan and Dino (2 of the 3 co-owners). At some point, after some white sangria(s) I decided that I had to, just had to, danceresquely gambol down the long hardwood floor of the adjoining clothing store (a good 200') towards a giant, 3-way mirror. And then back towards my stool, the concrete bar, Beth, my sangria.
The manager of the store, a humourless gay guy who came in to order a ginger ale (barf) was not warmed by my self-introduction as fashion model. Nor my suggestion that he phone me if ever he needs a fashion model.

Amongst David's books, around the bend from my sleeping corner, I discovered a copy of Bukowski's Shakespeare Never Did This.
A snippet from it, which warmed the cockles of my tarpit heart:

3.
We were driven to a Paris hotel which was right across
the street from the French editor's office. There were
2 French editors: Rodin and Jardin. I sent down for 5
bottles of wine and Linda Lee and I went to bed and
started drinking. These 2 French editors were
publishing 4 of my books. After a bottle or 2 I picked
up the phone and called them. One of them answered.
"Listen, you son of a bitch, are you Jardin or are you
Rodin?" Whoever it was, I cussed him good for 5 or ten
minutes. Then I hung up and Linda Lee and I drank some
more. Then I phoned again: "Listen, you son of a
bitch, are you Jardin or are you Rodin? I demand to
know who I am talking to! Are you Jardin or are you
Rodin? Are you Rodin or are you Jardin? I demand to
know!" After a while we all went to sleep.

Time to tug on my kneesocks and part my hair, grab my protractor and head back to school.
Protracted Love.

I suppose there could be far worse things than having Queen's Bohemian Rhapsodywhirling through one's head first thing in the morning. Is this real life. Or is it just fen-tess-ee. Oh, I am so caught in a landslide.
Asked Dorota yesterday So is that MCCR (Mysterious Cat Carrier on the Roof) still out there, while turning towards the windows. Well yes, it is still there, down two floors. I imagine a cat skeleton in there, or that the wily cat, spotting the carrier, shimmied down the side of the building to escape the plastic cluthces its owner had in mind for it.
Last night, following a trek to Sweet Rhythm to shoot pianist Pete Malinverni, saw the most gorgeous thing which was digitally captured by Yours Truly: a hybrid and overly-manicured tree that resembled an overly-manicured poodle was lying on its expensive side in SoHo so I shot it. From the trunk out and through the expiring foliage are city lights, passing and changing. And then a few more shots of reflected and changing light on a somewhat static object. In hours is the first group critique since winter, all of us remaining in the MFA class of 2005 huddled together for 2 days to look and talk.
Time to capture and render and burn.
Captured, rendered and burnt love.

Some little geezer walked in front of my shot and internally I was sniping Hey, down in front, yoo-freakin-hoo.
And that sniping would have been directed towards the very legendary Les Paul: O'Doul's guzzlin', double hearing aid-wearin', guitar and audio device devisin' guy who had to table hop throughout the Jazz Journalists Association awardshow that I shot for All About Jazz last night at the BBKing joint in the midst of Manhattan's version of Disney Land.
So AAJ wins best jazz website in the country and they have a plethora of shots by Yours Truly and they are as of yet not uploaded. So here is something I didn't comprehend until this moment's gleaning - jazz guys can be oso slacker guylike.
After awardshow went to see doc Bukowski. Bulbous and battered and belligerent Mr. B. Made some parallels between him and Creeley. Dukers with hearts of gold. Who believe in the old-fashioned institutions of the heart. Who wrangle words in seemingly simple trips and turns.
And Bukowski, it is revealed, hated Mickey Mouse more than any thing on this earth. And to that fact I chortled loud and clear in the theatre full of hanger-ons and hipsters. He hated that Mickey stood for nothing. That he had only three fingers. Bukowski's goal, it is said in the doc, was to kick the Disney out of our collective heads.

Disney-kickin' Love.

Eve, the woman who recently went postal on her roomie and whacked her in the head with a telephone, whose dog, Jazzy, who stinks to high heavens and who rubbed his face all over my khakis this morn, whose eyes look a little dark and such after the thorazine helpers that she was administered after her little visit to Bellevue's Psych Ward, asked if I knew of ANYone looking for a roomie. I stated that I knew of no one but would keep an eye out. An eye out. Like what does that mean.
In mere moments heading over to the BBKing Hall of Blues and Whatnot to shoot the Jazz Journalists Association jazz award show, a real early 4-7. JR and I decided that this, instead of being a din-din (as stated on all promo materials), is in fact a jazz brunch.
Shooting then burning a cd on the spot for the mag who has me sitting at their table before the shoot shoot shooting.
Note to self: hold off on the Oban, these are not Your People. Yet.
Holding Off on Love.

Back in the schoolgirl saddle and I forgot to purchase all brand new #2 pencils and such.
Six minutes to the next *ding-ding* thing so this must be snappy.
Arrived in the Shiny Apple yesterday with several bags and artwork in tow - the artwork has the dinstinction of having ridden on the lap of Captain JetBlue from Middling City to here. Well, nearly on his lap as it was behind his seat.
Immediately picked up by Justy who drove alongside the espressoway onwards to a primo brunch joint in Cobble Hill where we were met by Steve Bartoo and Jen and then I proceeded to turn the whole crew on to the concept of the Salty Dog = tequila and grapefruit juice and even our waitlady started knockin' them back on the job.
Suddenly I noted that the busser girl had an enormous hickey alongside her neck, upon which I commented immediately, of course. She turned on her teenaged heel and literally ran away and hid. I told the drunkard waitlady Hey, tell that busser kid I'm a blogger and I stated maybe over a month ago that the hickey is my pick for hot new spring accessory...
On this note I traipse back to Student Land.
Land o' Love.

Finally a call from recuperating Lead Boy Colleague, who phoned as I was about to be hit upon by the fat-headed, RayBanned Canadian border patrolman. I says to LBC, call back and then *poof* I was outta range for the next 8 freakin', unbearable, no-cell hours.
Patrolman: You an artist.
Yours Truly: Yes.
PM: What kind of art.
YT: Photographer.
PM: Have a CAMERA in there?
YT: Um, nope.
PM: What if something happens.
YT: (pause... thought of cleaning up salty tongue) Well then, I guess I'll just be out of luck then. No, I'll SKETCH something.
PM: Eww, I love beautiful, multi-talented women. Would you take my picture.
YT: Would your family buy it.
PM: No, probably not.
YT: Well then, Cliff, let me proceed along to exchange my dollars for doe-lerz and be on my way.

And then on way back:
YT: A box of crackers. (to query on American side from crimson-faced codger in the bigshot/security/First Line of Defense boof)
CFC: Crackers.
YT: Yes, crackers.
CFC: (pointing back to stopsign I apparently breezed through) That octogon is a stop sign, we don't want you sending any pedestrians to the (note article, we are back in the ol' USofA. To non-Middling City people - Canadians are articleless in ref to institutions. Example: We Don't want you sending any pedestrians to hospital.) hospital.
YT: (paint melt stare)
CFC: ID please. And open up the back window.
(time elapses)
CFC: Open up the back hatch.
(closing hatch he comes back to my window, hands me driver license)
And get yourself a CLASSY bumper sticker.
YT: Funny, that's what my father said.

*Thanks Rio and Ron for getting me so in trouble with the border authority.

Last night's Buffalo Conversation 3 gig had an odd snare when a producer from the television station had had enough of seeing my illustriousness on camera, stating this thusly
YOU are in too many shots, move back to here (leading YT to an outer ring).
Fine.
Then, as luck would have it I was featured prominently in the next several shots. Much, I'm sure, to the chagrin of Mr. Producer.
Smoke may follow beauty but television cameras follow rascals.

Rascally Love.

PostScript:
I am more saddened by the loss of Ray Charles, a man who filled my ears with beautiful voice and music, than that of the 40th U.S. President who I protested and abhorred vehemently a few decades ago.

Ron and Rio (of KY fame) sent me this bumperwizer (along with two new musical choices. Presents are on the Things That Rock list. I need more presents. Thanks in advance.):

You say tomato.
I say Fuck YOU.

It immediately was slapped upon the car and now I have got to thinking. Say, for example, I'm at a gig and all dressed like a hotshot with the 50 pounds or so of photon-capturing equipment. Some client takes a gander at the bumperwizer. Are they offended. Do I care. Onwards.
As if I need further post-hippie, Niman-esque reasoning that WalMart equals the downfall of human civic planning and civil interaction the following happened to Yours Truly this past floral-enhanced weekend.
Bought the mower. Let teen gangmembers assemble it. Oops, they forgot to insert the oil into the engine, but I'm getting ahead of myself and my story. They take turns gleefully mowing down the grassy chaos that was my backyard until said mower is seized, over, kaput. Sunday I used my geometric knowledge and, making calculations, tipped the mower over and stuffed it into the automobile. En route to WalMart/EvilCorp began to notice a most pungent smell of petrol in vehicle. Way overpowering. Arrive at WM and wheel the mower to the outdoorsy section where they say Nope, head over to the Customer Service Desk. En route there one of the wheels wheels right off the mower, damned teen gangmembers. The greeter greets me with a smile (assuredly 100% dentures) and slaps a sticker onto the errant wheel, directing me to Customer Service whereupon I stand in line marvelling at the girth of the neck of the man in the super-extended wifebeater in front of me. My turn at last and the woman behind the counter asks Is there gaaaaas in that. In my best squeaky dumbass girlie voice I say I don't know (I reek, the mower is covered with gassy juices and there's gas on the lino). YOU CAN'T HAVE GAAAAS IN HERE, IS THERE GAS IN THERE. She runs from behind counter, opens gas cap and runs the 3-wheeled mower right out the front door, past the aged greeter. Many minutes later she returns, I get my money, I leave and head to a real store. Another corporate giant, for a re-con (as they say in the mower biz) machine and get indoctrinated into the sphere of those who KNOW small engines, mowing, oil pan dripping, mulching v. shooting. My prof was a man who saw in me his accolyte, a ballcap-wearin' butchy (ha.) type to impart all his mower wisdom and I soaked it all in, for the moment.

Mowing down Love.

You have no idea.
No, you have idea(s) but I'll fill you in on mine. Mine ideas post-nightout, trolling for serendipity like I troll my happenstances with all of You for blogposts. Yes, I've become one of those writers who elevates, who alienates, a few. For art's sake. Is the muse forever a shining golden figure with snacks for one and all. I think not.
Tonight's gig yielded this unfortunate, yet fascinating, result. A woman with mental derangement (perhaps sensing in her condition that her kindred spirit, RR/666 had expired) was lost for hours.
Cops were called, flashlights were lit.
And two hours later she was retrieved.
As I left said gig I noted some with cell phones at the ready and flashlights out at the ready and thought Perhaps I should inform them that Ms. Kook turned up in the Cosmic L&F (lost and found, getwithit) but then again this is like summer camp when some knew and some found out and some never found out until the next morning over waffles and it was a study in political interpersonal honing. Hone in or be lost on a suburban street corner for too long, missing out on festivities.
Onwards was girl-on-girl social interaction and deflecting the unwanted attentions of male arrivers.
In one week the plane for complicated, not plain, grad show and tell and do and say and talk about get withitness.
Note to self:
David Beckham is allegedly soooo hot, yet not for Perfect You. Give me Kennedy and his wanton fuzz any ol' day.
Hot Love.

By daylight, as opposed to full moonlight, the lawn is a study in multiple layers, perhaps referencing the rice paddies that fly up into one's face upon descending upon the seaweed-rimmed, paddy-dense, plastic gadget-dense, and arid-in-parts country of Japan.
How.
Three boys, one bored girlfriend (with charming speech impediment) of one of the boys, two lawnmowers and one inattentive, weed-pulling adult (Yours Truly).
In a move to eradicate the Rube Goldberg miasma of the X (who should move to Tex), a new mower was purchased. Hip hip.
The boys complained of the shin-high blades of grass cutting them like hundreds of knives.
A glance from YT, over weeds. No blood, fine, just boy whines.
A glance over at the teens/kids to discover the bored girlfriend with her hands around the neck of the teen gangmember she's "dating," my pal, Andrew.
Back to weeds.

Weeding out loves no longer lovelorn.
Shorning love choking out perennials.

Love weeds.

"saw your blog about dead bodies in NYC.  remind me to tell you about the east-river-dead-dog-wedding story."

This just in, from a true, dyed-in-the-soul epinw reader/fanatic.

But, fercrissakes. Cliff-hanging in this day and age is so two hundred years ago. If you are to write to Yours Truly give full details, details, details. Do not, I implore you, casually toss off some Oh, remind me sentence for another time. This does not fly in my Perfect World. Dig.

To the penner of the snippet, more.

More.
More.
More.

And know, to not cliffhang others, your whole tale will be forwarded onwards to your epinw teammates.

Cliffhung Love.

11 days to blast off.
11 days to grad school summer session.
11 days to marathon art making and thinking and doing.
All in the super-charged environs of the Shiny Apple - delightful distractions and all. Suddenly memory rewinds to one day, when the pressures of one day in particular were so great that I escaped our building, 66 Fifth Avenue, for a one-hour walk around Union Square - OFF THE GRID, unfettered, notebook-free.
Strains of DreamWeaver back, too.
For art's sake am reading Mary Roach's book Stiff and now have a deeper gleaning into understanding how J.P. Witkin procures his own for his own. Bodies, cadavers, stiffs, they're freakin' everywhere.
Had to shoot an autopsy/dissection last year for Middling City U and the stench of formaldehyde or embalming fluid hung in the air like a swarm of bees.
Knife Call meeting coming up, more making, more doing, with my new bandmates.
Who rocks.
You rock.
I rock.

Love rocks.

Logic will break your heart.
So goeth the title of the disc by The Stills purchased this gray-hung day, along with the nouveau Stereolab (their usual and unshocking textures) and other items so sundry, so necessary, so small - like Italian curly paperclips. A must. The Stills, to not be confused with The Chills, The Spills, nor The Schills.
But the true reason I was even audio hunting was to procure something by New Zealand band Stereogram. None of that and note Stereogram and Stereolab are but a few short letters away in the great ocean of rock music.
It is completely official, Jen + Jamal are a unit, a bliss-drippin' post-nup couple. She was supremely Jen-like in her tardiness for photos and when she finally emerged and came towards me in the woods my eyes nearly dropped salty waters as she was so beautiful. And Jamal looked pretty hot himself. When we photo finished they were married by the rotund minister who married the couple I shot the previous day. Ministeressa is smooth on the mid-wedding patter, a real Hey, folks it's a wedding, fercrissakes, let's be all joyfully giddy and never waver from the reason for the season: Luff. Jamal picked some love-related quotes, some shockingly and deliciously snarly. My fav by Kate Hepburn on how, as a woman to trade the adoration of many men for the contempt (or some such appropriate word) of one. Marriage. Punch line. Dig.
Jen came down the aisle deal and began sobbing. So Yours Truly began to basically jumping jack with camera gear to lighten her up. When she was halfway down I turned back towards Jamal and said Jamal, you made Jen cry.
Highlights include:
finding a clump of faux hair on a pathway and telling the bonfirees that it was Alan's pubic hair that Liz shorn, practicing my tennis serve in terry bathrobe and heals with glass of scotch nearby, mucho.
Onwards.
Logical Love.

In the voice of one about to engage in !Meltdown! I said to famed filmmaker Jon Hand this: I am nooooot taking any more photos, as he was nearly dragging me by my right elbow towards the dancefloor where 50 or so did their best collective FunkyWhiteFolkGrooveThang, post-nuptials, mid-reception.
No. He wanted to dish on a Middling City luminary who shall be unnamed, who is of ill repute, &C, on a smoking balcony of the wedding reception factory where we found ourselves mere hours ago gainfully and freelancefully employed.
And, as we ran into a cigar sub-fete on said patio one of the puffers, remembering or recalling Yours Truly as an imbiber of stogeys, planted one in my hand. I proceeded to crumple the sad brown thing unintentionally and smoked it from the crack down.
The theme of this weekend is weddings. Unrelated song quote happening concurrently to this post: Aluminum tastes like fear. Compliments of Stipe and Smith, REM's New Adventures in Hi-Fi or whatever the helk it's called.
To date I have made images of perhaps 6,783 of them. And some of them confirm that people have love, real-live love, in their hearts. Today's was one of those, the look on the groom person's face was a study in intent desire, love, yes. The look that inspires this very - and temporal - thought: Hey, I'd like to have a look like that tossed my way from time to time.
The wedding of yesterday, I explained to one a week's worth of beautiful blogposts, and this was harvested from that one:
(Woman meanders up sun-drenched sidewalk of a church in toxic Niagara Falls, NY, a shamble of a building alongside some dismal, mustard-coloured housing projects. She is speaking loudly, nearly panicky, into a cell phone.)
This is YVONNE, when I left your house I had a LIT CIGARETTE IN MY HAND. Did I put it out.
This got my artful mind to thinking of a home in the toxic Niagara Falls area bursting into flames, aluminum (tastes like fear) siding melting off of the sides faster than you can mumble unfortunate fire. No, really, unfortunate fire.
Love's Fire.

Chomped on some jerky, bison/beef jerky, as I left the Middling City behind me for a few days of roadtripping with Kennedy. Sucked on the sinewy meat product until but a clump of protein-rich mass was in my mouth, then time to unroll/download the window for a ptewee out into the highway wind.
On this trip met a girl named Phoebe who showed me how to suck (no, not sinewy masses) the nectar out of honeysuckle. A miracle. At this advanced and garden-centric age to not know that the central thread may be pulled to unleash a drop of bee-left nectar.
Last night, post vino with Laura at the Goldman Joint, discovered my wedding outfit for Jen and Jamal's unity, part Diesel, part swooshy velvet.
Back to work marathon, Middling City gray sky, and the rest.
The Parsons School of Law co-profs landed me a B+. B as in boo, as in b.s., as in bitchy, as in but...
B+ Love.

To Whomever it is/was that designed the miasma, the horrific headache, of cul-de-sacs, pain-in-the-sacks and chaos of suburban "streets" with quaint names with twinnish names in Court formation bending off and bending off into oblivion.
Why.
Why not think in terms of the tried & true grid. Blocks. Streets with names of substance. Relevant to location.
Not Poofery Splendour Way, doglegged off of Poofery Splendour Court, for the love of Urban Planning.
Needless, I think, to say/write, I spent the better part of an HOUR this evening trying (stubbornly refusing to resort to the ol' cell phone appendage for a whine of assistance) to find a locale, a client's home. I meandered and re-meandered looking for a certain #36.
And then I realized this very important realization.
The planners of said sub-sub-sub-division, nestled into former wetlands near sinking Middling City U, decided it best to have all mailboxes on one side of the street/court/cul-de-sac to facilitate strongarmed and righthanded delivery.
So a mailbox offering up a #35 blocked the destination's mailbox. And so on.
Now a memory floats to the surface, like a fiber-based masterpiece in Dektol:
Fanny, the Poland Spring postmistress, who had perfected the art of delivery from her K-Car, leg stretched over the car's median hump to allow her the requisite right-armed delivery. Irascible, chain-smoking and intrepid Fanny.
Intrepid Postal Love.

At it again, Yours Truly, Martha Stewart of Middling City's Old First Ward.
Repotting plants - with hot inner-city agri-tips - for neighbor juvenile delinquent.
Potato salad recipe dispensing to Dorota, calling whilst SoHo grocery shopping (no small feat), replete with firm instruction to blend the secret blend of condiments and sundry spices while all is HOT.
And, finally, a quick parfait pedicure while watching Kurosawa's Dreams and burning cd's for freelance gigs and drawing this conclusion:
I don't give a wet soba noodle about all of his Dreams. Some, yes. Some are deserving of an efficient FF.
FF Love.

Golden urban goddess... or oompa loompa.
The question posed by Yours Truly to a gay couple making their way into the sushi joint I happened to be leaving with dear Laura, who had just dolloped some insta-tan crap into my hand, which I promptly slathered on my face.
The jury, so to speak, is still out.
And, JW,Esq., if you are reading this, I may need your services, despite the fact that you're the high-test corporate attorney that you are, well, in between bouts of music fests and the like.
Beth and I delved into some role-reversal this fine evening that went something like this:
Beth: Oh, I am so hungry.
YT: Fercrissakes, eat something.
Beth: But I don't know what to eat...
YT: Guacamole, it has all the food groups - lemon, avocado, cucumber for dipping and salt. It's perfect.
Off I go to make others happy via my photo vision.
Visionary Love.

Apparently, according to a strange man who called my rez, my image Street Lock Lady won honorable mention in the ASMP National Photo Contest. This same day that that venerable Middling City org, Albright-Knox Art Gallery jettisoned me from their WNY ranks. The good, the bad. The yay, the nay. The heyYEAH, the fuck you.
Promised Marlene that I'd head over to the ER as I think the bug that flew into my left ear is nesting there but I am not sure. Rich at the most recent gig's venue fetched a flashlight and gave a look.
To ER or not to ER.
But first a vino date with Liz and Cheryl.
First things first.
First and thirst for love.

One of the weekend's highlights, to be filed under s - as in stealth - was hanging with a certain cadre of jazz guys post-gig and then the sighting of a, now, what is the correct term, little(r) person. It was the gathering of Imperial Courts, the annual Middling City Coronation Ball. And I was not there to document it, as I had for 15 years, but to get glances of be-tiarad and tuxed-out and leathered-out attendees, post haste. As I had my Olympus 5050 in my hands (a stealthy bit of equipment) I suddenly thought it a great idea to follow the little(r) person about. Through the lobby, into elevator, even up to her room's door. All stealthy. The images are a study in patience, composure, littleness.
That same evening talked with Scott V about being in a laptop band and we are going to give it a whirl.
Have a great name, a name I discovered on the pages of the 12-page West Side Times, in the Crime Blotter section: Knife Call
A good band name = half the ol' battle. And this is a primo one.
What exactly is a laptop band (really, I prefer MAC band) and what does one sound like.
Today I meet up with Pam, a Middling City rez, to discuss, hash, rehash the comings and goings of our recent Parsons School of Law class. And oh, so much more.
Knife Call Love.

Happy freelance day to you, too.
Just returned from one and am about to embark on another until god only can say for sure. The season of mai flurries to bring juin checks.
A bunch of white men in suits with a PET camera, had two of them looking at Yours Truly through the scanning bed hole. What people will do for a camera, how they will bend.
Listening to a mix made for another and, quite truly, it rocks, what with all my favs and all. And somehow PJ Harvey made it on not once, not twice, but thrice.
Showed newest of digvids to JR yesterday, as we talked art and other technie matters for what seemed two hours. Safely, I can state he dug the new ones, all looped and short and beautiful. The work made in the Middling City definitely has a different palette, flavor. Thinking I prefer those made over there, 400 miles to my immediate left.
Ron sent me a late-nite email telling me of his complicated, recent journey and, at one point, he mentions wild boars that root for truffles. Only a snippet of epinw readers will know my fondness for Rooting for Truffles, the game.
Restless, after jetting back to the Middling City, headed out to a tried and true music joint (where the doorman gave me the icy shoulder for not being a regular as of late but this meant I didn't reek of his cheapassed cologne the rest of the night. Brute. Hai Karate. Stetson. Jean Nate for men) for some talk, laugh, smoke, drink.
Vice Love.

Geeked out with Justy and his pal Mattie last night in some dark hellhole not too far from Union Square about noo music and talked about our favoured wrecked voices when - suddenly - I looked under the world's most uncomfortable boof to discover hell lookie here someone had forgotten, left behind, their iBook and other sundry accessories. Justin suggested leaving it with the barkeep. I thought better of that and opened said iBook and traipsed about the info, the saved emails on mac.com as Justin slipped off to acquire more booze for us and I horrified Mattie that I was familiarizing myself with this woman's life. He started off familiarizing himself, too, but became horrified only when I began getting engrossed in a rather long email about a certain Nate who was a real shit, who wanted only to fuck her but I couldn't decipher (because A numero uno I do not really know her and her sense of propriety) if she dug this - or not.
So Mattie and I spontaneously spot an Asian woman who fit the name on the emails. A Columbia stoodent, no less. Dumbass. Justin and Mattie are New School alums and I will be one in 1.4 years. So we spy the Asian woman. I approached her at the bar.
Are you Helen. Yes. What's your last name. She tells me. Oh, how do you spell it and where's your iBook. Over there (pointing to beat-to-krapp sofa) with my friends. (apparently not thinking it odd that I'm asking about her Mac) Well, no, it isn't, I have it over there (gesturing).
Did cheapass, ingrate Helen buy us some booze. Nope. I proffered that next time I find an iBook I'll hit the street fast & hard and make a cool $100 or $200 before handing it over to a dumbass Columbia person.
&
Today had a gig for All About Jazz mag, shooting bass player Bob Cunningham in his amazingly New England stylee pad with the writer there, too. At the end of all the hobnobbing and such BC gave Terrell and me glossies. I fished for a Sharpie. He signed mine: To Nancy, Lots of Love, Bob Cunningham. And for Terrell: To Terrell, Best Wishes, Bob Cunningham.
No love for Terrell.
After that headed straightaway off the L to Chelsea to see the new Cindy Sherman clown self-ports and Gursky's new gigantic heroic surveilling works.
All good and the rain came down and as I made a digvid short in Matthew Marks Gallery a surveillee began shooting images of Yours Truly.
Double surveyed Love.

THIS JUST IN. to be read in the voice, in the spirit of the woman who is atop the diner table in the Quentin movie, screaming, in a Brit accent, that she'll blow the heads off of every last muthafukkin one of themmms...
I AM DONE. I AM DONE WITH THE PAPER. I AM DONE WITH THE RESEARCH PAPER. I AM DONE WITH THE RESEARCH PAPER THAT HAS PLAGUED ME (AND ALL MY SPECIAL FRIENDS) FOR TOO LONG. AND, THANKS TO THE FOLLOWING WHO WERE ABSO-FUCKIN-LOOTLY INVALUABLE MINDS: Beth, CentricS, JW,Esq., Kennedy, Laura (for that special urgent push today) and JR. You all rock. And now I must drag my sorry grad student carcass out of this library and out into the warm night to meet Justy for a nice jeroboam of white wine. Addended Love.
As I cannot possibly, though try I might, steal wi-fi molecules all the day long I was, sadly, offline, missing an email from Mentor JR instructing - or advising - me to head north rather than south. And it was too late, for I had gone south and proceeded to, as I only just recently replied to him, waste some time and then write - as opposed to reorient myself in the north at the Whitney for another biennial look. Assume Vivid Astro Focus bellows me to sit again in the corner, on the floor, and mesmerize away some time. So instead I whiled away time by working, yup, you got it, a bit on the (fucking) research paper which is now an appendage shooting off my left shoulder and sticking out a good two feet, whapping people in the back of the head as I squeeze past them on the Fat Apple sidewalks. The only Alfred I know was not in the proverbial house last night, although he had instructed the staff of Gotham to keep me in (no, not stitches) booze of various colours. As I ripped into my duck's flesh the sommeliere sent over a bulbous glass of an oaky red and I just realized it may have been polite to inquire whatinhell it was. Not that I'd remember. Really, no, really, it's time to finish off the misery. No more wasted ops to look at art while I stare - no offense - at this PowerBook and formulate some brilliant or near-brilliant or non-brilliant phrases and passages about who really cares what. Oh, and suddenly I discover Interpol to discover that they've already been discovered by Laura and JW,Esq. et al. Thanks for the sonic suggestions, pals.
This is spring fever.
Feverish Love.

Landed in Land of Big Apples this AM, suddenly transported into my Perfect Conventioneer status. Immediately detrained and retrained and retrained again to meander into Virgin Megastore where I acquired new Patti Smiff and Interpol, listened to over diesel-fueled French lunch at Marquet, where I sat and read and read more about copyright world and Time Out New York. Now entrenched in Parsons School of Law and Ideas Design Library, overly-flourescent and beat to crap, where I'm attempting to construct The Paper. To my immediate left a large-scale oil of an important-looking woman in yellow jacket, taupe gown, hands folded studiously in her lap. She keeps watch over these several PC's waiting for genius.
Faded beauty Love.

Roughed up an artist, Tom Holt, last night. Actually, to my recollection, it was a friendly conversation about me buying his wondrous painting of a "creature" who ingests stars and other geometric shapes and has a stream of them shooting out of his posterior region. Suddenly, to be ridiculous, I had him by the lapels and was shaking him, in Mark and Polly's kitchen. Now, I wonder, does Holt, in his fury and humiliated condition, want the stinkin' painting back. He willn't. It hangs, most perfectly, alongside Dorota's landscape I received post (Doug Lavere's suggestion) concussion after I wakt the shit out of my head on a metal eye-beam in her studio offa the Bowery.
One man's horizon is another creatures poo stream.
Streams of Love.

And this, just in.
Wi-o-wi does a high-powered corporate attorney, dear JW,Esq., get to traipse off to Coachella and witness the complete magic of the reformed Pixies (my heart races with envy) et al et al et al while Perfect Me, an artist, a grad student, (!), has to suffer through legal mumbo-jumbo when I should be the one jetting to infamed rock shows and he, with mind chock full of caselaw, should be sequestered in a room with tomes and mold and dust and words and flourescent lights. He finds role reversal "sexy." I find it objectionable, Yer Honour.

Photographed a few juicey items yesterday, Middling City U's new provost, a man who was feted for having a great sense of humour. Funny, I didn't witness any. But perhaps imbued in the administrative life one begins to find great joy in the most offhand joviality. I told my editor at MCU that if I was an FBI employee I'd have noted, I think astutely, that he seemed most nerve-wracked, maybe something only I could see through a long lens trained on his wavering face. Next was the premier Commencement of one of the long arms of the med school, a two plus hour affair of the general and usual pomps & circumstances. Giving the keynote was a Nobel Laureate of the Middling City, Hauptman, who rambled on and on and on and on about crystals and x-rays. How New Age, I though. Crystals, I thought this was science. But seriously, folks, there was much scientific in-joking and how then I yearned for the presence of another artist, anyone creative, someone who does not know the interior of a lab inside out.
Transfixed by the research paper deadline, as well as sundry others.
And, You ask, what else is new, Oh Perfect One.
Loaded up the PowerBook with a plethora of favoured music to listen to on headphones whilst across state editing DV, to avoid the sonic assaults of random strangers in public places.
Onwards to research, onwards to yet more creative time management and thinking.
Managerial Love.
ps: Kristin Hersh's 50Foot Wave hits the scene on Sunday night, oh jubiliation and joys.

Flurry of bizemails to and fro, fro and to, this time when I should be subsumed more more more in this "research" "paper" for "art" "class" in "NYC."
As one orchestration of Radiohead is looped and loops and loops and, as is my wont, I am occasioned to meander over to here, to there, for distraction's sake. It is suddenly very important to hang that excellent image I made of Jonny Lang, for example, right NOW.
I am falling in to a circle of jazz journalists, or so it seems. I'm going to shoot some portraits for them of the "legendary." I am shooting, also, the annual Jazzy Awardshow at ol' BB King's. I remember back when BB King played standing. Standing. And one time, while he still played standing, there was a beautiful woman in the front row so coiffed and so intent with that backstage know-how look you only see on the faces of women who are thusly intented to squeeze some fun out of the onstage idol. I've never seen that look on the faces of men or boy fanatics. At the BB King standing gig a handler told me that that frontrow woman is his Middling City woman.
A port in every storm, or so the saying goes.
A cool, welcoming cave in every desert.
Updates:
Ron is apparently missing and I am afeared he's been eaten (or gummed by) a band of roving toothless backwater hillbillies in KY, Lead Boy Colleague is way broken and am awaiting a call-back after a snappy send-off yesterday, Jules and Jim (a Frenchie movie, to You non-cinés) featured the elegant and gorgeous sculptural nose of one Wutzizname Serres... YUM, haunted (in a good way) by pending video images and am wondering who will be cast in a few roles - one being the boy hands rolling and unrolling/wending/unwending in white sheet, Mr. Hung celebrates a big OJ Simpson b-day tomorrow/the tender age of 32 on the most tequilest day of the year, Faux Extra (in the process of expiring) has disappeared and amn't sure if this is IT or not, scheming how to Manic Panic the nephew's hair into a nice blooo sans a parental freak-out as he's distanced from the strictures of middle school, and, lastly, wondering how many cuppsa joe I can have before my brain explodes (that ol' occasional science project).

Projected Love.

Forcrapsakes. Could this Parsons School of Law research paper please be fucking over already. Cheese & Crax, it was really swell getting turned on to Larry Lessig and all (and now I hear the deafening chortles of JW,Esq. coming from the west) but I mean really. So I decide to write about the music industry and P2P stuff and music © and such. It is interesting. It is info I'll spout out at cocktail parties, whenever the occasion rises. And, after these measly 3 credits for $6K you can bet your Intellectual Properties I'll find a shitload of occasions to bust out fun facts of fair use, the four factors to determine such, odd assortments of caselaw and the Copy Left treatises.
Suddenly, oh, about half an hour ago, it became URGENT to listen to Dark Side of the Moon, the disc that changed the life of Yours Truly at the tender-headed age of ten, the year of its appearance on the sonic landscape with the band's electronic fiddlings and poetic ramblings that still, in my non-humble estimation, carries forth in ageless beauty. Now there's some post-AOL/digitalcity.com well-honed verbage for You.
Last night wished a Bon Voyage to Paul Deck who is departing the Middling City for points beyond, at the wise/clueless age of twenty-two.
Drive Fast, Take Chances = Travelers' Perfect Send-Off.
Decided that the Parsons School of Art/Law thesis must include some rock lyrics, including "Ooh Child." And it make no never mind whose version.
Someday we'll get it together and we'll get it undone.
Someday when the world is much brighter.
Someday we'll walk in the rays of a beautiful sun.
Someday when the world is much lighter.

Someday Love.

As it's spring (although troublingly the wall of bushes has lost its ability to bud, remaining a wall of sticks all dry and casting thin shadow) chanced upon a Mercury Rev disc (stereo phobic '92 Yerself is Steam) with David Baker (Alf-obsessed roomie of yore) howls. Now it's time to move on to the '98 Deserter's Songs, never kept with the others of the collection. DS, no Baker howls, bordering on Wayne Coyne reedy voice and a sonic landscape everyone needs to give a whirl in spring.
Justy alerted me to the fact that Kristin Hersh is actually heading towards the Middling City on May the 9th, a day to Sharpie down as being important as 50 foot wave plays Mohawk Place. Actually a show to anticipate. And buy merch at. Justy may actually jet in for this event and jet back with Yours Truly to the Land of Apples across the Empire State.
Oh, if anyone has seen my research paper topic and its attendant interminable hours necessitated by it, and my enthusiasm and care, please contact me immediately.

Distracted Love.

Hello confused readers.
Beth called my attention to a pertinent fact that I described the creation of a cocktail of Maltov proportions but not its intended target. That being the rollicking evangelicals next door to Yours Truly, who have a knack of salsa-ing for the Lord on nights when my concentration is most needed. That's the story.
Booked r/t flight to Israel today with an extended layover in gai Paris. Just enough time for a few kir royales and some art looking.
Onwards to digital editing.
Love edits.

nancyjparisi@gmail.com
Wowee. I am a Gmail pioneer. First, a Blogger pioneer (though these fuckers have never selected Yours Truly as a Blogger of Note but, to borrow Brucey's patented phrase... They'll be sorry.) and now this.
Yesterday's toppermost of the poppermost happening was the shooting (no pun intended, for real) of an army lady who is also a college type who has returned (4 days and counting) from Iraq. Who is shell-shocked. Who is shellacked.
I was in her mother's kitchen discussing the various poses and stances and attitudes and such I wanted from her and her likeness (as Avedon says, an OPINION and so freakin' be it).
Her mother trotted off and retrieved this femme's helmet, pointing to a sore spot, a bullet hole made when little army returnee was over there in the hot hot desert, in the hot hot action. A graze mark. While on her head. And how did this happen, I asked, her mother wanted me to ask, the army girlie did not want me to ask. Well, she began, one of the new recruits emptied his round accidentally. Accidentally nearly shot her head off.
Blowback nothing.
Friendly fire.
Shot her amidst some flags her mom had festooned in front of the family's suburban property.
Plastic flags for a nearly gunshotheadoff lady.
Sounds like a song.
Patriot Act of Love.

Plastic, nope, plastic is a mistake for a shattering is necessary. And there is not enough gasoline in the lawnmower out in the barn for over the sultry winter it has apparently evaporated. So where is a siphon. Who owns a siphon. My father, for one, but I'm not driving over there to siphon gasoline into this bottle. So it'll be off to the gas station for a gallon in the handy red plastic. Then the bottle, a funnel. Whatever. Then the fuse. What to use. An old tshirt. But which, since after the cleaning and purging and corporate reorganization there is less clutter, or so it seems in my mind. Tshirts are all concert tshirts and things relevant. So which. An old rag. The SoCo bandanna that lingers somehow making it past all the purge action. Stuffed into the bottle. Tossed. Flames. Smile.
The End.

Maltov Love.

Whereas the room was a flat, frightening medicine pink now it is Shimmering Lime after Dr. Waffner and I painted and rolled the stomach lining colour into oblivion in anticipation of his and Jen's pending daughter. Mid-paint Deb and Sarah came by and I gave Sarah a brush to pretend paint a myriad of colours - I do not think that she was convinced.
Lead Boy Colleague called to tell me that he broke his ankle. In his driveway. Playing catch. Now I am mindful of the pratfalls of mine own driveway, its hidden dangers.
Watched moments ago the thrilling conclusion (to borrow this recurrent phrase of one with whom I mingle) of the doc about architect/artist Maya Lin, the femme behind the VietNOW Memorial as well as the Civil Rights Mem in Montgomery, AL and others. I'm about to transcribe a speech she made after receiving an honorary doc at Yale. And portions of this speech are going to be transmogrified into my thesis statement for Art/Law School. So, JR, if you are reading this, these brilliant haberdasheries are really the brilliances of Yours Truly. I meet again with JR the second week of mai when I'll be regaling him with tales of waiting for action, action, action on Middling City industrial sites and my bumpings into words like aforementioned. Maya Lin, Sam, the movies that Kennedy shows me, my own random art awakenings are the thesis with the mostest.
Awake Love.

As if the world doesn't inspire enough confusion there arrived this snippetlike story on televised and self-imported Middling City local news, burst into the midst of the international news of MidEast sandblasting.
An Eagle Scout of long face and local suburb had gathered canned goods for a Middling City food pantry when "his collection went up in flames."
What the fuck, I say and please pass the thorough journalistic edge, s'il-te plait.
Flames. Cans. A home burnt to the ground? Where in hell was Eagle Scout hording these cans. I need answers. I find none.
Canned Love.

I'm, like, so totally jealous of this guy who's writing a blog about working at a boobie bar and whose writing style is A-OK but, I mean really, whyowhy is he a blog of note when Yours Truly has never been? Kev, if you are reading this, no hard and craggly-assed feelings, but, again, really.
So yesterday I was fondling (no, not boobies, pervert, skim your thoughts along anew, afresh) articles from the James Joyce collection of Middling City U. It had been a good 20 or 25 years since I had last done so, when ol' pal/flame Patrick G worked there and I rap-a-tapped Joyce's walking stick along the orange carpeting and wrapped his specs around my inquisitive and illustrious head. So now, a few decades later, les lunettes are broken beyond belief and repair and the walking sticks are still intact. I had a walking stick in each hand and walked towards the nice dear folks who had hired me, both not very observant of the most archivist laws of the land (you shoulda seen the way the texts and such were manhandled) so they were not alarmed by Yours Truly with a Jimmy J walking stick in each hand complaining of severe knee pain. Shots by Me of the collection are in celeb of the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday upon the Emerald Isle. My shots'll be used in catalogues, in journals far and wide. And they are smashing. Not as in smashing artifacts. The rez Joyce scholar was a quippa minute about all things JJ and after a few hours of his gushy reliquary reverence I wanted to stuff the large Motherwell-illustrated Ulysses up his arse. Which would have made Joyce, dear sweet stinking coprophilic that he was, darnt proud.
Poop Love.

Yesterday was Deposition Day. The day that I first-ever laid eyes upon the woman who nearly crushed Yours Truly with her mother's sedan exactly two years ago on the 21st of avril. A quick glance was sufficient. And her mother was there, and she sat, non-stoically, during my interview, rolling her eyes and sighing aloud and shaking her head as if she had written - even produced - the accident. The other driver woman was mysteriously absent, sent down the hallway to wait the two hours. I had to divert my attention from the shaking and sighing mother by telling myself that she was deranged and had a nervous condition to not glance in her direction with my patented paint-melt stare. I had met earlier with my attorney, Tom, and told him I was afeared of becoming emotional rehashing. I did not, only once I found myself sort of lost in that memory, looking perhaps too intently too long down at the conference room table. So, the joyous part of this accidental tale is that Tom hammered, to usurp his verb, the other driver woman until she admitted that she ran the red light. Lead Boy Colleague, an expert in all things depo, said now my fate, or case, is sealed. Or something to that effect.
And so on.
Convinced Middling City U's Law Library that they should indeed give me, a litigious alum, a permissive card to fondle (not borrow) all their legal tomes for the next year. But, thankfully, that'll be necessary only until the end of my Parsons School of Law course in IP. . . a few more months where I can glean more info about all things CopyLeft. JW,Esq. thinks I am now an IP geek and, coming from senior corporate counsel for Oracle of the left banks of the USofA, I take that as a compliment most deliciously supreme.
After this long-ass day of freelancing, regal legal researching and more more more I find Oban and Orton and some digital editing to be just the thing to usher in a new day.
New Love.

special ps: link to this Kill Bill-related game, discovered as a link on a Japanese blog.

Sent to Yours Truly by David Hoffman, epinw-mentioned previously, pals with this rock & roll trio that includes a girl who used to revile me and my newspaper column, who moved from the Middling City, and who apologized to me years and years later.


Fancy Pants by Kate Mosstika

Live thinking that you brought yourself out the waste
So sly thinking that you caught yourself - I'm the slave
Don't lie to me and tell me you disagree now
'Cause I know just what you're freaking on
When the times change and you want in on our palisades
You'll find that you're not wanted anymore
Lay me, oh my Amy, but you're just too messy late
Fancy pantsy Nancy J. Parisi -- Jeez he's singing about me
Blah thinking that I brought yourself up the blame
So sly thinking that you brought yourself up the same
Don't lie to me and tell me you disagree now
'Cause I know just what you're freaking on
When the times change and you want in on our palisades
You'll find that you're not wanted anymore
Lay me, oh my Amy, but you're just too messy late
Fancy pantsy Nancy J. Parisi -- Jeez he's singing about me

Where have I been. I will tell you where I have been not. Not at the law library of Middling City U. Not getting my artwork ready for the somewhat venerable CEPA Gallery auction with a cocktail preview reception TOMORROW night and there they are, I'm certain, the entire staff, pacing pacing pacing Where in H-E-Double-Hockey-Sticks is her Perfection. And not avoiding the grand tradition of too many turbo-powered Polish beers and honey liqueur/Krupnick at my favoured Dyngus Day extravaganza nestled deep in the Middling City's east side. Much to my current chagrin. Highlights include: a conversation with a woman of a certain age who informed me that she dates her Dyngus Day date but once a year and that she likes to beat the crap out of him, a man most Slavic who had the most dense chestpatch that I couldn't help but squirting and marvelling at in sheer disgust until his large-scale lady friend dragged him out by his dishevelled blonde hairs, my dollar store faux camera which does not leak and has a powerful jet of water reaching upwards of 10 feet to my utter Perfect dee-light and a collage of faces dripping with water and red from the aforementioned bevvies.
Lead Boy Colleague left moments ago, helping me scrape my framing brain cells together in his usual helpful manner and JW,Esq. contacted me commenting that to round out the post-Dyngus malaise I should have thought to ingest Jaeger shots and cheap red wine as well. He also thinks I'm a perfect Intellectual Properties nerd, with my Larry Lessig fanaticism and all and I heartily concur and rest my case, yer honour.
It's a Fake Plastic Trees re-re-re-&-repeat sort of grayness and now it's time to wend my weary-assed way to CEPA where the people with the white gloves are salivating awaiting my arrival. ETA is like so now.
Salivational Love.