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.

A flurry as of late of Nancy Pants references, much to the astonishment of Yours Truly. First the long overdue email from NYCbased David Hoffman (not so-named barkeep with heavy hand at Hamlin House) who had heard and then hunted for a song by a woman who names me in her song that sort of rambles about. Then that harkened up the song of way-yore by Kenny Kearney, "Nancy Pants," whose lyrics I will not quote here and now. Then a Friendster testimonial by Steve Bartoo, then another ref to NP. Fascinating, Jung-style synchronicity. And there should be no mental leap to the Police. Thank you.
Out last night following a full day of scholarly activity with Justy and Erin, flitting from bar to bar to bar in Williamsburg and at the first one one of the boy Marc Jacobs models lounged about looking somewhat extraterrestrial. Ended the evening by making the aforementioned sibs give me a whopppppper of a hickey, the hot new spring accessory trend that I am starting. Now. Go get one for when is the last time you had a well-placed hey get a loada this hickey. I rest my bruisish case. Now that I've informed New School U that I do not care to be innoculated contra meningitis thank you and now been free (ha!) to register for not one - but two - (ha!again) terms of Parsons School of Law/Art/Teaching/Snark I am free to leave this melodius metro area for the trans-statal crossing towards the Middling City and Kennedy.
Hickey/Vehicular Love.