Around the Block on the Upper East Side

Happy New Year Chalice...

2009-12-31T11:08:00.012-05:00

There's light snow falling and some people already partying in the New Year. 2010? It seems like just yesterday we were bringing in the Millennium, now we're already bringing in the second decade of the Millennium and probably tomorrow we'll be bringing in the year 3000 but we first have to get by Dec. 21, 2012, the infamous end of the Mayan calendar and supposed end of the world, two years and counting so as my first resolution it is my determination to live the next 720 days of my life with an abandon of realizing you only have so much time left. There's something to having a deadline on life. I thought about that as I ate an onion and olive slice at Delizio's on 2nd Avenue. Yes, that is what I said onion and olive, I have never eaten an onion and olive slice, I've stood by pepperoni through out my life, but change, that's how I roll with 720 days left. By the way, it's delicious, onion and olive, who would have thought? As I stepped out noticing that the Second Avenue subway construction has moved south and now is annoying people and storefronts from 89th to 85th. It leaves you wondering when the great construction project will hit midtown but then again why worry we only have 720 days and in that time this subway won't be close to midtown. My second resolution is very simple, just enjoy, there are many things that create an intellect to not enjoy or rather be damned pissed off about almost everything but those are worthless actions. I'm walking home, I'm going to fill my chalice with champagne and drink the whole thing in one gulp and then there is only 719 days left...

Louis Nevelson Revelry...

2009-12-17T12:17:00.010-05:00

There are many great sculptures on display on the Upper East Side. They sort of jump out in front of you when you aren't looking. There's the Venus and Manhattan between 76th Street and 77th Street on Madison Avenue, it floats above and is a graceful depiction of half nude god and goddess. I could look at that for a long time. There's The Castle created by Priscilla Kapel on 79th Street and Fifth Avenue, the Unidentified Object by Noguchi on 80th and Fifth Avenue, there's my all time favorite Peter Pan in Carl Schurz Park but the sculpture that makes my day and purposely walk by when I can is, Presence IV by Louise Nevelson. It stands in the middle of the mall on Park Avenue. It's twenty feet and some change high, its lines and curves change and undulate creating a different image at every point from where you view it. From one angle it's a bird's head, another a door complete with gigantic door knobs, an ocean scene, a curvy woman and a linear man, a throne, a castle, a very modern totem pole. It is like all great sculptures, something to meditate on, to not judge but let it present itself to the viewer and change what you are seeing by just moving around it. On this brisk, cold day it makes me forget the chill. It's diabolical, it's calm, it stands guard silently as traffic running north and sound pass it by without a second look but I'm sure it has caused an accident or two from some more attentive drivers. Sitting under it makes you feel safe. When Louise presented the sculpture she said, "New York represents the whole of my conscious life and I thought it fitting that I should give it something of myself." I walk on remembering this epitaph and this encounter and wonder when my next one will be....

Drugstore Cure-All...

2009-12-02T16:27:00.021-05:00

The media...It's quite obvious the media is not only the message it is Satan incarnate. It does no good, it is a riotous virus that infects and destroys and everybody who works in it is a criminal.
Hold on a minute, I guess I work in the media....And with this self loathing I decided to do my favorite thing to get my mind off of things I would rather not think about like Tiger Woods'
transgressions, the health care debacle, the lack of job growth, the build up of troops in Afghanistan, the Audi car ad that suggests just by turning on the headlights of an Audi it is more spectacular than a whole neighborhood of Christmas lighting jocularity or EBay's ad with the really catchy catch phrase, Come To Think Of It, the absurdity of Micheal Bloomberg saying he has a mandate after he captured 51% of a measly turnout against a guy who I already don't remember his name. Yeah, the media is the message alright it is the meandering, retching mind disorienting jetsam that is making it hard to have a good time in this day and age and I'm a part of this charade; so I decided to take a walk to my great personal diversion, going to the drug store of my choice and meandering down aisles looking for sales and taking in the scents and scenery of goods that not by any coincidence is a place that a lot of women go to supplement their supplies. Yes, Duane Reade, the pharmacy of my choosing on this day, is a great place to cruise the babes. Anyway, as I filled my basket with shampoo, razors and saline solution and lined up to pay for my fodder, a woman, seemingly homeless from the rarefied smell that she spread and her duct taped slippers scuffled in directly to the register in front of the five of us that waited in line. There was no protest from the line just a yawning of curiosity as the woman demanded an exchange of a penny she was holding. "I want another one!" she demanded. The cashier took it in stride, motioned to her to hold a minute while she rang up another shoppers goods. "I want another penny, not this one." The cashier took the credit card of the paying customer opened the register and with a courteous smile took out a penny and exchanged it with the one the woman held. She scuffled out examining the copper coin. The cashier feeling all eyes on her , smiled and when the woman had left the store said, "She comes in everyday to exchange a penny." And then shrugged . We all looked at each other and group shrugged. As for me all thoughts of media wickedness were gone. My drugstore cure-all had done it again...

Thanksgiving...

2009-11-22T17:07:00.009-05:00

On the Upper East Side there are many ways to enjoy Thanksgiving one being that you don't live on the Upper West Side with huge crowds and even bigger balloons being blown up and then floating down Central Park West. Maybe most people think that isn't such a bad thing, it's an exciting tradition but it's a nightmare of gigantic balloon proportions. Don't get me wrong I've gone over to view the balloons being blowing up with my flask of Irish whiskey and I've gone to the parade and enjoyed the whole gigantic cartoon character floating down the Avenue thing. But none the less, I'd rather live on the Upper East Side on this my favorite of holidays because of the sense of calm that goes along with it. Instead of dodging crowd control nightmares and out-of-towners that seem to think they are entitled, instead on the Upper East Side, you can go for a jog along the East River or a walk down any Avenue or you can go to one of the great markets and enjoy the aromas of the feast that is about to take place whether it be Agatha Valentina, Dean & Deluca, Butterfield Market, Grace's Market Place, Citarella, The Vinegar Factory to name a few. It's a miraculous thing, no angst, no high emotions, they're both watered down by that chemical in turkeys that I can't remember the name of but I know it sedates you into a mind numbing sleep or nap that transcends all other sleep. My mouth is watering thinking about the alchemical mixture of turkey, mash potatoes and gravy, yams, stuffing, gravy, cranberries galore, pies, pies and more pies with the ala-mode attached. Not to forget the egg nog, wine, beer and any other libations that tickles your fancy. Oh, what a beautiful thing it is, oh, how I sit in anxious anticipation, oh I'm already full of what the feast will present. Enjoy Thanksgiving, it's a gobble-gobble moment that we are given every year. Thanksgiving...

O'Keeffe's Abstract Relief...

2009-11-11T18:08:00.021-05:00

I have a love\ hate relationship with Georgia O'Keeffe, I love her feminist realization, I love that she was married to one of the greatest photographers of the modern age, I love that she went to the Southwest and owned it with her imagery. My hate problem with her is that some of her paintings can be loosely described as having as much interest to me as a chick-flick, in fact, they may be the still version of a chick-flick with their vaginal and labiatic verve. But when I read that The Whitney Museum was having a show of O'Keeffe's abstract work, well I asked myself, O'Keeffe did abstraction? So I went to the show, wondering if it further my love or my hate relationship with Ms. O'Keeffe. When I got to the show it was quite obvious Georgia did abstract, in fact she did it before every one else did it. In 1914 at the grand old age of 17, she created extraordinary abstract imagery with charcoal and paper. It was so far out there I'm sure some of the art crowd at the time must have thought Georgia had come from anther planet. There are over 100 paintings, drawings, sculptures that each delight with their self sufficient individualism. After her early abstractions she discovered her imagery that included flowers, landscapes, object and still life's but in the 1940's she returned to abstract and that's when the sexually suggestive abstractions were first assigned in her tableau. The show is like a slow wave that covers you in warm ablutions. And to put a cherry on the cake there are photographs by Alfred Stieglitz of Georgia throughout her life. She lived to the grand old age of 99. I left the museum feeling grateful for what Georgia had given us all in the last century. She was a great relief even in the abstract...

All Is Gold...

2009-10-24T16:09:00.012-04:00

The goblins of the world wide web or the bogey man of blogger played a trick on me by making my last week's blog disappear into the ether of 'where did it go?'. I thought I had posted a little ditty about Halloween but when I tuned in this week it wasn't there, lost in the deep dark hole of cyberspace. I kind of think of it as a kind of Hades with the River Styx flowing through it and the river is a flowing garble and babble of words floating into a fiery lake. Oh well enough of my cyber-mythology, fall is here on the Upper East Side, gold, orange, yellow, brown all in autumnal bliss with smells that hearken deep seeded memories from past lives. One of my own is of playing high school football, the smells bring me back to the gridiron where aches and pains still vibrate in my body from all sorts of violent collisions, hamstring pulls, sprained ankles and concussions. Ah those were the days. What was I talking about? Oh yeah, fall on the Upper East Side and what a fall this has been, lingering on with a mellow inspiration and visual deciduous fireworks and with the Yankees winning the World Series it makes things glow even brighter. Walking down Fifth Avenue the psychedelic Central Park streams in my periphery. I sip on my green tea and take in the rapid fire international voices that flow from the lips of the tourists that are visiting all the cultural heavy weights that hold down the Avenue. A waft of sunny wind blows golden leaves down the sidewalk, making it look like a golden byway, gleaming and seeming to levitate all the pedestrians in its way. It is fall on the Upper East Side and all is gold...

Kandinsky Inspires The Guggenheim...

2009-10-13T13:34:00.010-04:00

As part of it's 50th Anniversary the Guggenheim has a retrospective of Vasily Kandinsky the painter who inspired the building and has been a favorite of the Guggenheim family since the beginning, Solomon was inspired by Hilla Rebay to purchase large swaths of the painters aesthetic creations that he made famous by writing the creative treatise, On The Spiritual In Art, a must read for those that never understood, will never understand and don't want to understand abstract art. The show is voluminous, so voluminous that I'm surprised the building hasn't floated away. One hundred paintings and sixty drawings line the spiral of the museum in an overpowering transfusion of mind addling images that left me sucking air from my dizziness after looking at them all. But I digress. First thing is the always questionable way of setting up a retrospective at the Guggenheim, it starts at the bottom and you climb up the spiral to the last days of the master but I don't roll like that, I roll down hill so I headed up the elevator to watch Kandinsky devolve from his airy images of spiraling and musical motifs to his youthful landscapes that fill the canvases to the brim. I actually feel that Kandinsky got better as he got younger. This is not to denigrate any of Kandinsky's work, I like it, I really like it, it's just that I feel that looking at one Kandinsky gives me as much inspiration as looking one hundred sixty, in fact, looking at one hundred sixty Kandinsky's was like eating two or three meals in one sitting, it made my head light and my body heavy and my spirit, the real thing that Kandinsky was trying to reach, well I guess it was nourished...

New Gallery On The Block...

2009-09-30T16:12:00.010-04:00

I was going to go out and tour some of the Upper East Side Galleries when I was called by my friend, Werner Hoeflich, who said he had a piece up at a gallery on 79th Street. So I stuffed my buds in my ears to listen to some Cats Stevens; I don't know why but Peace Train and Moonshadow make me feel happy these days. On the way I stopped at Viand and bought a hot tea to-go. I burned my tongue on first sip, (there must be a McDonald's like lawsuit I could get some litigious lawyer to support), then I took the top off to cool off the molten Darjeeling and was immediately bumped by a nanny chasing an escaped toddler and spilled the acid hot tea on my left hand, I tossed the tea into the street bin and began caressing my paw. I shook it and blew on it and I thought there were blisters but realized it was the spilled milk from the tea. I almost turned around and walked back, feeling the walk could be cursed, but not to be deterred by innocuous thoughts of doom looming I doubled my efforts and turned up the music. I arrived at the DFN gallery at 74 East 79 Street and was surprised and a bit saddened that it had replaced one of my favorite galleries for years the Adam Baumgold gallery. Fortunately, I found out from the new director, Rick Davidman, that Adam had moved down to 66th Street so he was still officially on the Upper East Side (hooray). The show at DFN was an eclectic collection of portraits by the gallery's artists. It was amusing, entertaining, serious and well displayed and though it might sound like I was less than enthused, I was actually paying more attention to my still hot hand, burned tongue and a catalogue and card of the upcoming show that opens, Wednesday October 7, New Drawings of Susan Grossman. The card soothed my burns; the drawing was hypnotic and looked more painterly than any drawing I had seen before. I grabbed the catalogue and flipped through it with my scalded hand and my burnt tongue licked my lips. These were large delicious charcoal and pastel on paper that riveted my attention and these weren't even the real things I was looking at. After I stopped drooling I took out my camera to take a picture of a painting on the wall of a cowboy on a horse with a lasso but unfortunately my camera was out of batteries. I groaned and left the gallery realizing that bad things happen in threes and maybe my bad luck had passed with the burned tongue, burned hand and burned camera. I looked down at the Susan Grossman card and knew it was so...

Shameless Self Promotion...

2009-09-21T08:32:00.005-04:00

Gallery On The Green, Pawling, New York

This exhibit is a collection of studies and paintings of real and imaginary flowers inspired by the gardens, garden stores and countryside of Duchess County.

The studies are all painted on found paper and cardboard and the paintings on canvas and board. This eclectic grouping of paintings created with mixed media and collage, bursting colors and unusual found objects come together to express the personality of each flower in a flamboyant, captivating way.

"I was immediately struck by the intense physical nature of Charles’ painting," said gallery owner Michelle Farnum, "they are dynamic, full of life and color."

Long is a self-taught painter, who has painted for 25 years and been in over 50 one man and group shows worldwide. His mercurial work begins with the creating of an abstract background using mixed media, collage and found accoutrement creating a chaos, from this chaos he works outward slowly drawing out an image until it is fully expressed. He has worked with images ranging from Stonehenge, fish, seahorses, cups, butterflies, still life’s and angels. He was described in Time Out magazine in London as "cunningly expressive". He is represented by Art Movement in London where he lived for six years and has been represented by Project Room 88 in New York City and now is showing at the Rogue Gallery in Chelsea. He has had a home in Pawling for fifteen years.

Walk Don't Drive...

2009-09-10T09:04:00.007-04:00

I like to walk as anybody who reads this knows, but I got the big idea to drive out to the country so I got a car and drove to my apartment and parked in a space so I could transfer my dog, some boxes and other things to the car, I put my warning blinkers on and ran into my apartment so I could get the transfer of those things done without being ticketed, when I got into the apartment the phone rang and like an idiot I answered it. I never answer my phone because of fear of advertisers, politicians, bill collectors, the IRS, enemies of all kinds and the dreaded recorded win a million dollar scam. But I answered anyway quelling the fear of the unknown and lucky or unlucky for me it was friend from far away who wanted to talk. So I talked and talked and talked and when I was finished I put the leash on my dog and threw my things over my shoulder and headed out the door. There I stood squinting at the place where my car was parked, trying to imagine it still being there, trying to will it back, questioning if I had parked there at all, walking up the street to see if perhaps it was somewhere else and finally ending up in the same place and looking up at the, No Parking Anytime, sign that somehow I had not seen. Had I been towed or had it been stolen? In reality stolen would have been a lot better than towed. I went back to the apartment. I called 311 and was informed that my car had been towed to the pier at 38th Street. When I heard this I was amazed at the quickness and black-ops precision that the New York City traffic department had towed me and informed the communications department of the towing in less than an hour. I wondered why the rest of the city's services could not perform with such efficiency. I headed to the pier and I cannot go into the bleakness of the place, it's like going to prison for two hours but on-top of being held hostage you are forced to pay 185.00 dollars for the tow and another 95.00 for the ticket; so basically I could have flown to Vegas played Black Jack and stayed the night for what I payed because I wanted to drive out to the country. The prison that you arrive at has about twenty chairs and about fifty pissed off people. The people who work behind the bullet proof glass are nicer than I would be dealing with a legion of people who had their automobiles disappear off the streets of New York City. Of course,everyone of them have an excuse for why they parked where they parked and those alibis are usually given in outrageous rants to the people behind the bullet proof glass. After my two hour sentence ended and I showed all the proof of ownership and paid my pound of flesh I walked through the mammoth space crammed with every kind of car imaginable to my car. I drove the car to the garage and headed home deciding to walk in the city rather than drive to the country...

RIP Summer...

2009-08-26T15:27:00.008-04:00

It makes me sad, makes me mad; it's been a strange summer with rain and death soaking us with it's misery. Maybe all the notable deaths this summer is why it has rained so much or maybe its global warming, but that wouldn't explain why there was not one day over 90 degrees in June and July. But what of all the deaths; last count it was over 20 distinguished citizens that had been put to rest so far this summer including amongst others, Dom Deluise, Micheal Jackson, Farrah Fawcett, Walter Cronkite, Billy Mays, Karl Malden, Davids Carradine, Chuck Daly, Steve McNair, Robert MacNamera, Merce Cunningham, Frank McCort, John Hughes, Les Paul, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, Robert Novak and now Ted Kennedy. That's a hell of a list no matter where you stand on any subject. Rumor has it it has been the most remorseful summer of all time and we still have about 20 more days. Is there meaning behind all this death? If I knew that I wouldn't be writing a blog. It has served to prove the maxim that life is short, live life like it's your last day of life, life is fleeting and live life to the fullest among hundreds of other ho-hum philosophical adages. As I walked down Fifth Avenue watching people of all ages, races and philosophical leanings, I thought of the list of luminaries that had passed and what they have done to inspire and lead so many; there has to be people who will take the place of these great people because what they have left behind is the way they lived and an inspiration for other people to live there own lives...

The Masterpiece...

2009-08-20T20:41:00.006-04:00

I was out for a walk on a very sweaty day my shirt soaked from the inside out. I grabbed some fruit at my corner fruit and veg cart and stumbled down the block looking forward to feel the kiss of some expensive air conditioning. Sweet, sweet cool air. And much to my surprise I noticed two women, looking up into my window, pointing. I thought that perhaps Bertha was doing a song and dance on the windowsill. She likes to show off her talents to anybody that will watch, especially the fairer sex. I arrived on the scene and joined the two women looking up into my window. What's so interesting? I asked, noticing that Bertha was nowhere to be seen. The painting, the painting, one of the women gushed. It's nice, I said, looking at the painting I have named the masterpiece because it is. It has hung in my many homes for over 25 years. It has traveled across the Atlantic back and forth twice been uptown, downtown and upstate and it hasn't lost its shine. Yes, the other woman purred, looking at the little girl's face in the painting, she's the Mona Lisa of our time, she sighed. Wow, I thought, these women really know their art. Finally, they both sighed and went their own way. I looked up at the painting and then entered the apartment building and my apartment, switched on the air conditioning and took another good look at the masterpiece. I had obtained the painting from friend and painter, Werner Hoeflich, in a trade for a painting of oranges that I had done. I think I got the better of that trade. The painting itself is very simple, sepia and white, a recording of the early eighties in New York City when the subways were never air conditioned and covered with graffiti. On closer inspection the painting has many monikers scribbled into it including: 'sweatshirt' and 'open doors for you" to name a few. It is as a masterpiece usually is, more than it seems and every time I look at it I find something new. I poured myself a gin and sat down feeling the sweet kiss of air conditioning and stared intently at, The Masterpiece, letting it entertain me once again...

Walking The Dog...

2009-08-11T20:01:00.005-04:00

I write a lot about walking Around The Block but I haven't written much about walking my dog Around The Block, twice a day, 365 days a year, probably because my dog doesn't walk, she stops. Her name is Bertha or Birdy depending on what she has done; Birdy when she is cute and Bertha when she is everything else. She is a Tibetan Spaniel or Tibbie pure blood. They are a breed of lap dog that came from Tibet where they would run around the Monastery sounding the alarm if there was impending danger or intruders; they have a high pitch bark that is more than enough to warn the monks of oncoming peril; they also would spin the prayer wheels and on those cold Tibetan nights the monks would put them under their robes to keep themselves warm. Marilyn Monroe owned one which caused a spike in interest in the breed in the 50's, but I regress. My walks or stops with Bertha are amusing, her stops are usually in front of people of interest, children and women, she lifts her head and preens to show off her cuteness that she is quite sure of and waits for the forthcoming pet. This happens about five times in a walk, so I've met a lot of people through Bertha; I think she thinks she's the canine equivalent of e-Harmony. Her interaction with other dogs is almost non-existent, she ignores all that pass except for Labradors and Golden Retrievers, I think they remind her of her only two dog friends; she ignores every other dog she passes except for any dog that shows any aggressiveness and it does not matter how big the dog she goes into an alpha-dog growling and barking and usually turns away the aggressor. One time a giant Rottweiler made a move for her and she snipped at it's nose and growled making the mammoth dog go down and roll on it's back and show her belly. The owner of the Rottweiler laughed, admonishing it,' You big baby Dolly'. Bertha turned and walked away wagging her bushy tail,pulling me along. When we get back to the apartment she lays down and waits for her next walk or stop, or whatever you want to call it...

Rain Dementia...

2009-08-01T15:55:00.006-04:00

'Where's my umbrella?' is the new phrase that has invaded the minds of New Yorkers everywhere. The rain is falling again, if I didn't know better I thought I might be in a terminal shower. Umbrella salesmen are making a million, the streets are clean, the parks are muddy, people walk ominously looking up, there is always a cloud in the sky, rust is the new chrome, green is everywhere even under my fingernails, puddles are everywhere, kids splashing in them not so cute anymore, people being caught without an umbrella plod and don't run, you don't get any less wet running, awning and scaffolding have become meeting places for the soaked masses, newspapers are damp, everything is damp, ducks waddle up Madison Avenue feeling right at home, rain hats have become the style, leather briefcases are stained and ruined, thousand dollar hair-dos done, cement is crumbling, wood is soaked and stained, heavy, parades of ponchos, the subways are humid, buses sweating, raincoats, trench coats, the smell of mold and mildew,the 2nd Ave tunnel a big muddy pond, we're swearing in the rain not singing in the rain, raindrops keep falling on my head, when the rain falls you run and hide your head, rainy days and Mondays, it's a hard rain, it's a gentle sprinkle, it's a deluge, it's a monsoon, at noon it's dark as winter, the sun has become a forgotten entity. Rain dementia is taking over in a frothy, wet deluge. It is the rainy summer of our discontent, all this rain and no rainbows but there's always a way to make yourself feel better, think about all those people who bought rentals in the Hamptons. Gotta go, where's my umbrella...

Do Something...

2009-07-20T17:27:00.007-04:00

I headed out to Carl Schurz Park on a sunny day wanting to catch some ray and read a novel by a friend and writer, Joseph Riippi, who lives on the Upper East Side and whose works I have caught in dribs and drabs and always appreciated, but this was a novel and I was excited to read it cover to cover while sitting and sucking in the sun and all the skin cancer it could provide. I arrived a little late in the day so most of the benches were full, fat guys stretched out like drawn pork, red as beets and not really caring just sucking in the heat after a month of drenching rain. A toy poodle ran around her elderly owner like Indians circling a wagon train yapping like a hyena and the woman cried out exasperated, 'Shandy! Shandy!' I decided to come to the rescue and asked the woman if I could help, 'Grab her leash,' she yelled. I did and the black curly haired devil nipped me on my ankle, I think it was trying to bite my throat. No blood, no law suit. I handed Shandy over to the woman and she thanked me profusely while also admonishing the dog with the threat of no cookies when she got home. As I searched for a seat I hoped that the book DO SOMETHING, Do Something, DO SOMETHING published by Ampersand Books would be spellbinding and riveting as the new Harry Potter movie has been described and I had decided not to go to so I could enjoy a sunny day, get some ray and watch people play and read. I finally found an empty bench and settled in watching two jet skis racing down the river their rooster tails rainbowing behind them. As is my custom I flipped through the pages and stopped at a page so that I might read two sentences from it; I've found that I can usually tell if I like a book by this act of pure coincidence. I had flipped to page 40 and the first two sentences read: 'Martin sits in the back of the police cruiser blood on his forehead, vomit between his legs. His ass burn from the rash forming there.' Winner! Riveting! Spellbinding! Yes, I think I will like this book very much so I decide to DO SOMETHING, Do Something, DO SOMETHING, and so should you, make a mad dash to your computer screen or closest book store and buy the book and read it. That's what I'm doing...

The Morning Song...

2009-07-13T12:49:00.005-04:00

I found out that I had a poem published in the prestigious Boston Literary Magazine http://www.bostonliterarymagazine.com/. It's a cool deal, you should check it out because there are a lot of good poems in there. Anyway, to celebrate the momentous occasion I decided to take a walk. The sun was out and the sky aquamarine and the first thing I run into are two nanny accompanied toddlers looking up in a tree where a squirrel was doing an acrobatic act jumping from limb to limb; the toddlers laughed with glee at its exploits. I laughed and moved on. I headed to 5th Avenue to do some people watching. The pedestrian parade on 5th is all I needed and more, hundreds of museum goers and residents walking, talking, enjoying the day. I watched them from behind my dark sunglasses noticing their gates, conversations and looks, trying to get any inspiration I could for a character in a story I haven't written yet. At 72nd Street street I spied a very beautiful woman being dragged by a myriad of colorful balloons skipping across 5th Avenue. I decided to let her lead me in her direction. She wore a white dress and also wore dark sun glasses. Everyone she passed would turn and look at her. The balloons bouncing and floating seemed to almost pick her up off the ground. I followed her to Lexington and 79th Street and then let her float off by herself. I headed home repeating the mantra of my poem, The Morning Song, The morning song goes a lot like this, first a yawn and then a wish, then a long sure stare, and the where turns to there...

Making Bacon...

2009-07-03T12:03:00.011-04:00

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is full to the brim, tourists, tourists everywhere and children under foot, over head and crying insanely next to the Rodin sculptures and I think I'm hearing a dog bark from the American Wing. I'm hearing more languages than a Berlitz Library but I part the chaos of the masses like Moses parted the Red Sea, heading directly to the Francis Bacon show. You either love him or you hate him. I actually started out hating him or his art anyway but after living in London for a while I started to like him. His life was the first thing that brought me into the fold. He gallivanted from London to Berlin to Paris and back again. I mean this guy lived a life and a half. His drinking was renowned, hanging out at The Colony with Freud and the other artist debauchees in London, one being his lover George Dyer, who he met when he caught him robbing him. Also admirable or inspiring was his buying back his old paintings and destroying them in front of the gallery he bought them from. And his studio,the glorious chaos in constant disarray, looking as if it would be impossible to create any type of painting there, much less one of the pristine paintings of Bacon full of gore and chaos. A studio that is now on display as a piece of art in a museum in Scotland. As I learned more about Bacon I started looking at his art closer; at first I was put off by the gore of his imagery and horrifying subject matter, the scream, being the overblown theme through out most of his work, but then I started looking closer, the detail and the exactness of his painting got to me. His work may portray everything ugly but they are nothing less than beautiful. Although Bacon was a professed atheist from his painting I detect a great god lover. A lot of his subject matter concern church, Crucifixion, pontiffs etc. My favorite paintings though are his studies of baboons. I circled the show a couple of times looking at the paintings. They are brave paintings floating behind glass and display all that Bacon had seen in a mercurial life. It's a beautiful show of ugly images...

Books, Fashion, World Peace...

2009-06-26T16:13:00.012-04:00

More Barnes and Nobles than you can shake a book at. I'm not complaining but another Barnes and Noble is opening on the corner of 86th and Lexington. I'm not a big book store fan I like small cozy reading spaces. But when I'm in one of those small cozy book stores I feel guilty downing dopios and reading cover to cover books instead of buying them. You can actually do that at Barnes & Noble like I did last week when I read Obama's book in two sittings. But things are a bit out of control now that there is another B&N opening up on the corner of 86th and Lexington. I mean there is already one on Lexington and 87th Street and one between Third Avenue and Second Avenue on 86th Street. That's a lot of Barnes & Nobles in a two block area. A lot of books to sell! I thought books were becoming obsolete with all the electronic readers, Kindle and the like. But not up here in the two block radius of the Upper East Side. It's book city man! Hallelujah reading! And that isn't the most exciting thing that's happening on Lexington and 86th Street, with all the bad economy synergy circling the globe like a warped 45 record, whatever that is or was. Here, finally is a store I can wrap my mind around or at least buy some threads from. In fact it is my favorite fashion store H&M. It's the coolest thing since Gimbels and if you remember that store you probably know what a 45 is. I went in and bought a shirt and the place was hopping, a sure sign of better times. Books and fashion, what else could you ask for, I guess world peace wouldn't be a bad thing either...

Art Is Everywhere...

2009-06-16T12:50:00.008-04:00

One of my favorite things in life as I have often said is finding real art but not in galleries, museums or people's homes but everywhere else. So I decided to go discover some art on the street or subway or somewhere else altogether. I prepared myself by opening my mind and a sixteen ounce Bud. I walked out the door feeling a little buzz and a lot of enthusiasm at finding something aesthetically pleasing. I passed on a puddle reflection because I did that about 100 entries ago; and if nothing else you have to be original. It was the day of the Puerto Rican parade so there were plenty of Puerto Rican flags waving on hot rods all over the Upper East Side but I passed on those images, too; way too easy. After weaving through scores of humanity celebrating all that is Puerto Rican and wondering why it hasn't been made a state; it would jig things up here and besides I'm tired of the whole even number thing, 51 states would be a lot of fun! Anyway finally, after over an hour of scouring the streets I found a pattern on a sidewalk that was quite interesting, how it was formed, I don't know, but without a doubt it was art so I clicked the pic and walked on. I decided to get on the subway to head downtown and escape the joyousness of the parade. And there it was the second piece of art and it was not only an image but a whole performance piece. A woman and her cute as a bunny son were drinking hot chocolates. The boy set his down on the floor to eat a glazed donut and as donut eating usually does, makes you lose your attention, he lost his and kicked over his hot chocolate that rivered down the subway like a tsunami. His mother yelled like a banshee, screaming at her son as any matriarch might do when embarrassed by their children. They left the subway and the chocolate puddle and when I observed the spilled milk folly, there it was, more art, right there on the subway floor. I took the pic and left the subway a good day had. Two pieces of art found and a good feeling about all that is and a renewed faith that art is everywhere...

Thinking About Leaving...

2009-06-09T10:30:00.031-04:00

I was walking not out of curiosity, not to relax or to go to any destination but a bar was starting to look good although it was ten o'clock in the morning. Beer isn't bad at ten in the morning and like most sordid alcohol aficionados I could explain with the usual good reasoning that it was happy hour somewhere in the world. I was trying to think about a title for a painting and I was steaming about my Chase credit card which I have had for over twenty years recently I had been told in two consecutive months that my interest rate was going from 9,9% to 12% then from 12% to 29% with no explanation as to why? I was going to call but decided to wait and let my anger wane since the last time I called I lost my temper with one of the robotic service operators some where in Azerbaijan who could not answer any of my questions and when I asked for a supervisor I was left to wait fifteen minutes until the original operator came back on to tell me she was the supervisor. I asked why she had not told me that to begin with but I don't think there is a translation for 'because I'm an idiot' in Azerbaijani. I hung up readying my wicked pen to exorcise some banking evil, I sent the letter but I haven't heard anything except that my interest rate was raised to the rafters. I know I'm not the only peasant who is feeling the pangs of our financial institutions becoming fiscally retarded. It used to be that people robbed banks but now banks are robbing people. These pitiful institutions who flaunt their crews of MBA's from the heavens are what everyone should have realized they were if you ever hung out in a macroeconomics class, howling, boring, useless places people count money whether it is money they have bilked, stolen or sharked off of trusting patrons. Not long ago it cost more to do a bank transaction on a Citi Bank ATM than it cost to buy a share of Citi stock. That made me laugh and feel a little better. After another hour of calming myself down I headed back to my apartment and put the finishes on the painting that will be in a show at the Rogue Gallery in Chelsea, 526 West 26th studio 9E, this weekend. I decided the title would be, Thinking about Leaving. I put the finishing touches on it and felt a bit of respite from my banking headaches. In fact I kind of forgot about them, art does that, so does walking and so does just remembering I'm lucky I'm not a banker or a thief since they are about the same thing these days...

A Man Ray Day...

2009-06-01T15:52:00.004-04:00

Sometimes you just trip Around The Block and come upon something that you find quite interesting, in fact, a dream come true. And there it was on East 79th Street. The Shepherd & Derom gallery was presenting the works of one of my favorite artists, Man Ray, who lived from 1890 and 1996, who not only took photographs, painted, printed lithographs, to my delight he also created my personal favorite a chess set that he designed and carved. It cost a cool quarter of a million dollars. But what is a quarter of mill if you find yourself moving chess pieces that were touched by everyone from Picasso, Klee, Dali, Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Duchamp and every other master artist of the day that had stopped by to challenge Ray and move the ivory across the checkered board. I felt the power and magic floating from the smooth rounded pieces not to mention the chess board itself. I had a Jones to play. I had a bigger desire to steal, but instead I just drooled. The photographs in the show place you in history with a cool black and white aura. Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Marcel Duchamp, Picasso and his son Paulo, Max Ernst, Paul Eluard and others are just a few of the artists that Man Ray photographed living and visiting Paris at the time that are depicted here. It's a ride down a mind blowing history of modern art. It is a small show but it is grandiose in the rewards the viewer receives. It is a check-mate in inspiration. Man Ray was not only a recorder of history he was a great artist himself which is what a Man Ray Day is all about...

Starbucks Is Bombed...

2009-05-26T09:38:00.012-04:00

I noticed the police tape and the preponderance of uniforms and jackets with letters screaming from them but didn't know what had happened. I asked a smiling cop with a twinkle in his eye what was happening. A bomb. A bomb? I asked incredulous. Yeah, a bomb. What were they trying to blow up? I asked. The cop shrugged his shoulders. And left me to wonder, what anybody would want to blow up at Third Avenue and 92nd Street. I found my answer when I got closer to the site. It was a Starbucks. The bomb had actually blown up a bench and blown out two windows. I know people can get a little pissed off about four dollar cups of coffee but a bomb? This bomb was way to close to home and I slept on it and woke up with nightmares of the ramifications. I returned to the scene of the crime the next morning having read an article about the bombing in the New York Times, it seems it was similar to four other bombings in the city over the past year. They all happened at about the same time of night and none of the others had injured anybody. While I was taking the picture of the blown out windows a woman in a car waiting for opposite side parking yelled at me saying, the guy in the car in front of me had witnessed the bombing. I lowered my head into his car window and asked what he had seen. It looked like teenagers. I live above. It woke me up. It was really loud and stunk of gun powder. That must have scared the crap out of you, I noted. He nodded. Well I'm glad you weren't hurt. Me, too, he answered. I waved and took a look around not noticing anything that was compelling. People were sitting in the Starbucks working on their lap tops and sipping libations like they always do, the bombing not disturbing their obvious routine on-goings. I walked away feeling eerily bedeviled, none of these bombs hurt anybody, but sooner or a later one will and then what? If this is a teenage prank, teenagers are a lot dumber now than they were when I was a teen. It worries me as I imagine IED's lining the Avenues in Manhattan.
I calm myself by trusting that city, state and federal forces will catch these bombers before the worse case scenario plays out...

Boutez En Avant...

2009-05-17T20:52:00.025-04:00

It stands there ominously, protecting the Upper East Side from all comers or used to anyway; it was the 94th Street Armory built in 1895 to be home to the infantry. Through the century it has been the home for soldiers, polo ponies and now gifted students. The saved facade is red brick with parapets and a large arch way entrance and seems totally out of place surrounded by pre- war and post-war buildings, townhouses and private homes in the very up-market neighbor- hood. I walked around the facade feeling the history. The bricks have been cleaned and look almost fake, the blood red color making it even more formidable. The facade is the only thing left saved from the wrecking ball at the last minute in 1966 when it was made a landmark. When it was taken over by Hunter to serve as their middle and high school for girls it was dryly referred to as the "Brick Prison". In 1974 a lawsuit was won and the all girl school became coed. It is one of the best public school's in the nation according to the Wall Street Journal and Newsweek. On the other side of the wall is a playground with basketball courts and infant swings and slides. On the wall by the entrance on Madison Avenue are the words, Boutez En Avant, the battle cry of the original armory, meaning, Charge! Not all the neighborhood are thrilled to have the "sore thumb" in their backyard but as I look up at the red brick wall that has been such a big part of the Upper East Side history, I say boo-hoo to those that find it an eye-sore, close your eyes when you pass it. Sure, it is out of place and time but it is perfect none-the-less...

Metropolitan Museum Maelstrom...

2009-05-11T09:26:00.019-04:00

May 1 is always a good day for me, not because in some places children are circling poles with colorful ribbons or some nations are showing off their war arsenal, the thing that makes me happy is that The Metropolitan Museum of Art opens their roof garden. Unfortunately, the first couple of days of May the weather didn't cooperate. Finally, on Thursday the sun shone and I walked to the Met to see the much heralded sculpture that graces the rooftop, Maelstrom, by Roxy Paine. It did not disappoint. It was as magnificent as the day. The sculpture is a shiny silver labyrinth that covers the whole roof, a leafless gargantuan tree, spraying it's branches upward and outward like a fountain of metal; the light splashing off of it making everything glow. One of the silvery branches actually goes into a water main with a red open valve wheel. I thought it might be cool if water would go into it and the marvelous maelstrom could spray a light mist from all directions. It doesn't, but regardless, this piece is a magnificent, eye grabbing and crowd pleasing masterpiece. You have to marvel at not only the scope of it but the preciousness of it and not only the child like play but the mature reality. It is this disengaging and engaging melding that make it so interesting. After gazing and following the flotsam of shiny branches from their beginnings to there ends all you can do it is stand back and gaze at it in awe. The final question always being how they got it up here. The many welded joints sanded but left to give more of a branch-like effect probably are proof that Roxy and hordes of welders put it together on the roof. I hope someone got that on video. There is nothing better than enjoying a seminal piece of art on a sunny day on the roof at the Metropolitan Museum of Art...

Flower Eating Squirrels...

2009-05-02T09:42:00.008-04:00

I Walked Around The Block checking out all the spring flowers blooming. The daffodils on Park Avenue are especially inspiring. Carl Shurz Park is flooded with plumage of all kinds. On my walk I spied brownstones with flower boxes cascading with forget-me-nots; trees with small plant stands brimming with daffodils; azaleas popping and forsythia screaming; all in this smorgasbord for the eyes walk. Around every corner there was more floral fantasia for me to succumb to. On one corner a man was tending a small garden around a tree, planting some already blooming pansies. He stood up as I passed and grumbled and I thought he was talking to me. What? I asked. Damn squirrels, he mumbled. What? I asked again. Damn squirrels ate all the flowers. Bummer, I said under my breath imagining flower eating squirrels. I'll show em, he said. I slowed and looked back as he took out an authentic looking owl and put it in the dirt next to the flowers. I chuckled and moved on wondering how long until the owl would be removed by some fake owl stealing passerby. When I got home after all the flower inspiration I finished a project I have been working on since January. It seemed the right time to finish what I have been calling fourteen flowers. They are small paintings on paper, board and plastic I have found on my walks. I am happy with them. It's as nice to paint flowers as it is to see them and one thing I know for sure is that no squirrel would consider eating mine...

The Doe Fund...

2009-04-25T10:40:00.016-04:00

Warmth, warmth and more warmth. Saturday April 26 and it is bikini weather so I'll go for a walk to the East River and see if I am fortunate enough to see someone in one. As I strode down Second Avenue I stopped to buy my weekly lottery ticket and trade acerbic remarks about the economy with the store keep. I walked out feeling good in my khaki shorts, white cotton shirt and sandals happy to be out of my winter garb. I headed toward 86th Street and walked past a grouping of Doe Fund workers talking and laughing waiting for the pickup of their tools of trade. I paused at the joviality and camaraderie of the group. And from that moment my mind did a reset from scantily clad woman to this amazing, inspired idea to help the homeless. The Doe Fund was created in 1990 by two very successful visionaries who acted with their heart, George McDonald and Harriet Karr, both who had different experiences that led them down this path; both compassionate and humane seized the moment. Mr. McDonald during the eighties spent 700 nights handing out sandwiches to the homeless around and in Grand Central Station, one of the homeless woman, April, who McDonald had befriended, died on the streets. Ms. Karr was doing research for a movie about the homeless and she had met April, too. Karr and McDonald met each other at her funeral. Together they set the wheels rolling for the creation of the Doe Fund. Doe for all the Jane and John Doe's who die on the street homeless and nameless. The Fund has created jobs, found living arrangements and created real happiness like I had just witnessed for people who are trapped in the vicious circle of poverty. In these times when it seems to be the worst of times this inspiring story is truly more amazing than bikinis in the park, in fact, my even entertaining the thought of this voyeurism made me feel guilty. So I walked back to the apartment and decided to give props to the Doe Fund and encourage everyone to donate and if you don't donate go up to one of these industrious workers who have fought through hardships we can't even imagine and thank them for keeping the city clean...

Spring Passages...

2009-04-18T11:33:00.009-04:00

A beautiful spring day (finally). Daffodils are at full staff, dog woods are flashing their flowers, cherry trees are pink and fuzzy creating what is the closest to an impressionist painting you can get. Central Park is ready to burst at the seams. Everywhere you walk on this 70 plus degree day there is proof that the winter of great change and consternation is behind us. People actually look happy? Coats are thrown over shoulders, people are sitting on benches basking in the sunshine. I am happy just to walk, feeling the vibe of spring arrived. Walking as much as I do on the Upper East Side, I see a lot of people, some regulars some not so regulars, like the she-male that rides around on his/her bike with her chiffon dress flowing, or the guy who wears the sandwich sign advertising a hair salon, or the many smokers who hang out on their stoops breathing in the elixir of death or the legion of dog walkers being led by herds of dogs, but on this spring day I was unfortunately presented with a sad remembrance and passage on the corner of 90th and Third Avenue on the plaza where a gentleman named Ivan, usually wearing his Veterans of War jacket and Yankee cap would sit in his blue, fold up chair smiling and taking in the sunshine, greeting everyone who passed by with a wave, a smile and a handshake. As I walked by I noticed his chair empty with a note attached to the back. Curious, I walked to the chair and read the sad obituary. It seems Ivan, whose name I never knew, had died and the note was a remembrance for the happiness he exuded on the plaza to everyone who passed. It made me very sad. As I walked away I thought about him and felt the warmth of sun and thanked him for his smiles, handshakes and good will all from a man I did not know but was always a source of happiness...

Lights, Camera, Carbon Monoxide Poisoning....

2009-04-09T10:56:00.008-04:00

It's always exciting to see a film being made on the Upper East Side. The cameras,the swarm of techies, the anxious crowds cameras in hand, waiting to see a real life movie star on set. Yeah, it is something that can really make your day, unless of course, the tech truck is parked in front of your window and it's a cold day so the motor is running and diesel is pouring into your apartment because the techies need to keep warm in the cab of the truck. I didn't blame them but I didn't want to die and I didn't want my daughter and dog dead either. So it went throughout the day and into the night, someone would turn on the truck to get warm and I would go out and ask very politely for them to turn it off, because by the way there is a law in Manhattan that you can't idle a truck on the streets; they would kindly turn off the truck but sooner or later another frigid techie would come and turn on the truck and on and on and on. Finally, I decided that it was pretty fruitless to continue the tit for tat so I went out to talk to the techies I was tormenting and ask what exactly the movie was they were shooting. The movie was, When In Rome, with Josh Dushamel and Kristen Bell, who were nowhere to be seen. I thanked the techie and he handed me a plastic wrapped tuna salad sandwich the perfect thing to top off my carbon monoxide poisoning, a little mercury poisoning. I took some pictures and took a walk Around The Block to clear my head and when I got back the techies were busy shutting down the set, filling the trucks, that were of course idling. I watched them from my window, enjoying my tuna salad...

What's Up, What's Down...

2009-04-03T10:54:00.015-04:00

A windy cold day with daffodils peeking out from tree ground settings, buds starting to bud, dogwoods blooming, but it's cold and windy and weird things are happening everywhere I look; two little boys sword fighting with branches almost bludgeoning passing pedestrians until finally one boy jabs and nearly pokes the other's eye out, crying ensues and the nanny, who was nowhere to be seen while the violence was happening, runs in crying, too; on the other side of the Avenue a girl is slugging her boy friend in the chest so loud it sounds like a bass drum, crying and shouting expletives; on the Avenue a cab driver comes to a screeching halt barely missing tail ending another cab, obscene gestures are exchanged; a baby's hat flies by me as quick as a bird and the mother sprints by leaving the baby alone in the stroller; a woman getting out of a cab with a hand full of cash, probably change, turns and a gust of wind blows it out of her hands setting off a chain reaction of events, several people scurry to retrieve the cash almost get killed by speeding traffic; a greenback flies toward me and as I try to make a Derek Jeter catch on it I step in a pot hole from hell and almost break my leg, when I look at the hole that it so deep I can see the cobblestones from a by-gone day, I have to laugh at the rapid fire moment. When I look up, I think about all the craziness happening around me on this particular day and think about the past and the future, when I look down I feel the pain. I limp away wondering if I should sue the city...

Spit, Soot, String And Paper...

2009-03-26T09:37:00.020-04:00

I was reading a review of James Castle's work in the New York Times and was floored by what I read. I picked myself off of the floor and headed out the door to go see for myself the work of Castle at Knoedler & Company on 70th Street. I thought about Castle as I walked. I had seen some of his creations in books but it was not the work that interested me most but the artist himself. Castle was born deaf, did not read, write, speak, sign or anything else to communicate except do his art and that alone is more than anything he might of said or heard. He was born in Idaho in 1899 and died there in 1977 where he lived on various farms with his parents. When I got to the show I was floored again by the powerful single mindedness of this creativity. I picked myself off the floor again and started looking at each of the small drawings each created with the same things: found paper or cardboard, soot, spit and string; he would use his finger and sticks to apply the soot to the paper. Spit and soot are not the most kingly of artist's media but his went a long way in creating a body of work that baffles the mind. The pictures all have a sepia tint almost looking like photos from the period. There are both interiors and exteriors of the farms, barns and landscapes he hiked around during his life. The intimate detail and simple, delicate lines are mesmerizing, placing you in Castle's world and giving you a birds eye view of an Idaho farmer's surroundings. If nothing else Castle is a recorder of a place and time that won't be revisited anytime soon. Drawings aren't the only things he created, but that is all that is here; there is another show in Manhattan at the Ameringer Yohe Fine Art Gallery, and it is of his sculptural work, that seems to look as intriguing as the drawing from pictures that I saw. I will go to that show too, but for now I am satisfied with ruminating on the miracle of James Castle's incredible talent and the world that he recorded in his drawings only using spit, soot, string and paper...

Good-bye Brunhilde...

2009-03-16T10:14:00.013-04:00

In a recent Our Town article by Adam Bloch he affirms what everybody already knows if you pay attention to walks up and down the Avenues on the Upper East Side is that a lot of shops are empty, approx. 175 closed on the Avenues so that's not counting the shops on the streets, I would say by own private approximations that would make it closer to 250. But it's not only the jobs and stores that are going to be missed but the storefronts. Especially one that thrust a dagger deep into my nostalgic heart, The Brunhilde Hair Stylist Shop, on Second Avenue. Although I never went to the shop, the name and ancient styling of the shop facade is without a second to none for me even with the missing e in Brunhild 's name. I've been walking by this place off and on and getting a slight joy of its existence for 20 years. It seems the storefront is closed but the place has moved to 1713 First Avenue, although when I called and talked to Jenny, she said that indeed it had closed. She lamented the moving and claimed the place had been there for over 6o years, she had been working there for 16 years and she was referred to as the baby. Brunhilde had sold it many years before and moved to Florida. She claimed that there had been an article written about it by Time Out magazine many years ago. After I hung up the phone I thought about that storefront being there for over 60 years, I mean we're talking nearly World War II. It sent me into a time machine frenzy. Then I thought about the name itself, Brunhilde, in German it comes from bruni (coat of mail) and hilt (battle), so an image of a large woman wearing armor comes to mind. The most famous Brunhilde was a Visigothic princess married to Siegbert 1 King of Austrasia. She convinced her husband to go to war to avenge the death of her sister and after losing the war she was jailed but came out of that by marrying her jailer and becoming royalty again. I will miss it when the facade comes down, but as they say, Brunhilde is dead, Long live Brunhilde!

What Are They...

2009-03-06T22:03:00.012-05:00

When you walk around the Upper East Side you're bound to see many things but you are also bound to find somethings along the way. I've found everything from a Charles Eames chair to a lost wet cat, but there also things you find that you cannot determine what they are. Today I found two things I could not identify, maybe someone out there could help me. I've asked some friends but nobody seems to know what they are. This is what I found today on my Walk Around The Block. First, this metal ornamental stand that is about three feet tall. It seems to be a form of some sort but I'm at a loss to what it might be a form for. It works nicely as a little cane and could obviously and will be a found object d'art. It's too light to be an umbrella stand. I don't have a clue. On this same walk I also came across this bright yellow chick, that I could not identify. I thought it was hurt at first as it bobbed underneath some bushes. It was so yellow it almost looked fake but it wasn't. I took my new found metal object and shooed the bird into the open so I could find out if it was hurt. It scampered down the sidewalk but did not fly. I wondered if I should inform someone about this chick, maybe call a city official and see what could be done with a lost yellow birdy. I walked toward the yellow chick and reached down to pick it up but before I could touch it, it flew away. A yellow streak in the gray day. It flew to a branch in a leafless tree and sat there staring down at me. I raised my found object toward it and wished it good luck. It's yellow color bright as the sun. I walked away holding my found object wondering what it was and still wondering what kind of bird had teased me on this gray day. So many questions confusing my mind on this Walk Around The Block, if anybody
has the answers please let me know...

The Magic Of Marble...

2009-02-27T11:11:00.009-05:00

The new or newish Gagosian Gallery on Madison Avenue, has added another floor of gallery space that if they keep giving shows like the one on the new floor, Marble, this new Gagosian could be something special, but I'll get back to that later. As I've said before the Gagosian is probably the most unfriendly gallery in the universe, with frowning and grimacing desk jockeys, who find it difficult to even recognize the existence of anyone who arrives on their private elevator. But who needs people with people skills when you have a good space and good art. The show at the Gagosian is three-fold affair with Andy Warhol on the top floor; this show features the work of Warhol from the Sonnabend Collection with over forty pieces of the Pop God's work ranging from his earth shattering Campbell Soup cans to the culture stretching portraits of Mao. It is a great show of an eclectic quality that keeps Andy doing what Andy did best, staying in the public eye and discussion. On the fifth floor there is a small show of Calder's work playing on the theme of the season, Calder, Calder everywhere. The work is an intense display of sculpture and mobiles that spit shadows that make the great child-mind artist even more enticing. And finally, on the new fourth floor is the show,I aforementioned; Marble, in all it's spiritual, organic and sensual glory. Displaying pieces from ancient to modern the show is illuminating, magical and visually startling. There's marble from the Greeks, Romans who worshipped the monumental sculpture material and which Michelangelo described as "when not yet carved can hold the form of every thought the greatest artist has". And there are some great artists represented in this show, Anish Kapoor, Henry Moore, Noguchi, Jeff Koons to name a few. I touched a couple of the pieces covertly trying to take some of the magic with me and as I walked home to write this I could still feel the magic on my hands...

Shutterbugging At The Met...

2009-02-20T15:46:00.009-05:00

I was all excited to get to the Met and take some pictures so I could fulfill my destiny of becoming the shutterbug of my generation by entering and winning the photo contest the Metropolitan Museum is now sponsoring. The contest entitled, "It's Time We Met", allows you to submit up to five photos of the Metropolitan Museum or The Cloisters and the gardens to the Flickr group. You can check out the guidelines at www.flickr.com/groups/metmuseum. The winner's photo will be used in the Met's next marketing campaign, plus the photographer gets 250 bucks plus a year's membership to the museum. So with all this excitement I strolled into the museum with my handy camera and friend/model in tow. As I started to scout the perfect photo, I directed my friend/model to stand in front of a native American ceremonial robe as I focused on the perfect shot I felt a tap on my shoulder by one of the ever present museum guards, "No picture taking," he said. I turned and looked at him with what I guessed was a 'what the hell' face. I said, it's for the contest. I know about the contest, he said with a tone that could only mean,' this pain in the ass contest is driving me nuts', You can only take pictures where it is allowed, he said, and before I could say, where's that, he said, wherever there isn't one of those displayed, he pointed at a poster with a camera encircled with a slash through it. I smiled and thanked him for the information. This was going to be a little more tricky than I thought. I scoured the museum for a picture friendly arena. I finally found one in the Modern Art section, I positioned my model/friend next to a provocative Rodin sculpture and stood back to take the award winning masterpiece. I focused the camera, zoomed in on the subject and when I was about to take the shot, the lens reverted and the camera turned off, the batteries were dead. I had no juice. I couldn't take a picture. My desire to become the next Mapplethorpe were dashed; I was a man without a way to take a photo. I left the museum with my model/friend vowing to return and fulfill my destiny of becoming the shutterbug aficionado of my generation...

The Sky Alive...

2009-02-10T11:17:00.007-05:00

I was walking toward the subway at 86th Street on 87th Street between Third Avenue and Lexington, thinking about how bad the economy really is as I walked past empty store fronts that seemed to be multiplying by the day. As the grayness of times started to cloud my thinking I was startled by the mass fluttering of swooping birds. I looked up to see the sky filled with pigeons. Pigeons are far from being my favorite bird; I tend to go along with the assumption that they are basically flying rats. Their cooing makes my hair stand on end,but looking at these birds doing pirouettes in the sky over leafless trees and around a church steeple was impressive. They were acting in unison, turning on a dime, spinning in orchestrated movements. I stood there looking up and several other pedestrians stopped to look at what I was seeing. One mother with a little girl, encouraged her to look and when the girl saw the birds she started clapping, 'Are they trained, mommy?' 'Maybe' she said. This struck me as a mystery but really not one. I had witnessed this type of flying only once before and that was in London, and the birds were trained by a bird man, who kept the pigeons in coops on a rooftop and every day he would let them out and they would do hijinks in the sky entertaining the masses. My thought was, who was training this flock of rock doves? I watched for a little longer waiting to see what rooftop they would end up on but they were too caught up in their flying phenomenon to stop for a second and I was running late for an appointment. I left with the mystery of who the bird man was that was keeping this flock and what rooftop their coop was located on, flying in my head? I watched one more pass and walked on still looking up at the luminescent turquoise sky alive with pigeons...

Calderdash...

2009-01-30T09:23:00.033-05:00

With Alexander Calder showing in two places at the same time on the Upper East Side it was more than worth making a mad-dash (calderdash), first to the Whitney where the show highlights Calder's years in Paris from 1926-1933. The place where Calder became Calder. He came to Paris as a painter and left a Calderer. That's the only thing you can call it. Some would say he is a sculptor, some would even call him a craft maker. But I'll stick with Calderer. Paris must have made him feel like a child in a candy store, because that is exactly why his work has always made me happy. The whimsical childish energy and imagery that he creates. It makes you happy, it makes everyone happy. The show is complete with wire sculptures, mobiles, toy-like gadgets, a wonderful playground of imaginary reverie. And it seems Calder didn't grow old as he grew older, a wonderful video of an elderly Calder setting up the infamous, La Grande Cirque Calder, the arena that has been displayed at the Whitney for years, is enthralling. He's on the floor setting up the circus like a kid in the sandbox, it is a wonderful depiction of a man who knew who is inner child was. I left feeling happy and continued my calderdash to the Metropolitan to see the other Calder show, Calder's jewelry, and as steeped in joy was the Whitney show, the jewelry show was laden with sophistication, elegance, beauty and a touch of the primitive. Necklaces, bracelets, broaches all contagious with metallic idolatry that made me want to steal one so that I might have a bit of the magic this man was full of. A couple of pieces I truly adored were, The Jealous Husband, a necklace that twists and turns and looks like a flight of fancy that a beautiful woman, wanting to make her husband jealous, might fly; the other piece is entitled, Caged Crockery, a necklace that has broken pieces of crockery enveloped in precious metal. It's the bomb. And with a fused energy of joy and elegance, I walked out of the Metropolitan feeling both childish and sophisticated...

Miracles, Miracles, Miracles...

2009-01-22T09:42:00.010-05:00

I was walking down Park Avenue enjoying a sunny, cold day, full of energy from all the excitement from the miraculous things that happened the last couple of days. First "the miracle on the Hudson", to land a plane on an icy river safely and have not one casualty, was jaw dropping and inspirational and the quicksilver reaction of all the rescuers was beyond the ken. As I watched it all on CNN I couldn't believe what I was seeing, elderly folk being helped off the wing first, babies being passed from passenger to passenger to safety. It was awe-inspiring and then when it was determined there was not one casualty that's when it became a miracle to me. And to even make it more miraculous the captain who did the flying and saving and became a real life, dyed in the wool hero didn't preen, didn't self-promote, didn't go on Oprah (yet anyway), he was basically no where to be seen or heard. A humble do the right thing guy with no agenda, no fifteen minutes of fame, no show me the money agenda. So, inspirational, such a breath of fresh air, so hopefully what this new world ushered in by the second miracle in a week, Barack Obama becoming president of the United States. Again I sat in front of the tube watching millions of people in freezing weather wanting to be apart of a change. I'm not a big believer in politicians doing anything close to being miraculous but as I watched the most emotional event that wasn't a death or tragedy in my life it was the closest thing to an outer body experience I have ever had. I was in New York when John Lennon was shot and in London when Lady Di was killed, and again in New York for 9/11, all tragic and cataclysmic with a spectral of sadness that was universally felt that connected you with the rest of humanity, but in such a horror felt way. This event, the swearing of the Obama, was full of joy, full of redemption, full of love, full of an optimism that brought tears of happiness on such a large scale a salt lake could have been created if they were all to fall in the same place. We, the world, needed these miracles, in fact, I think deserved them, after all this world has been through lately. I am grateful and inspired by both of these improbable events, I mean 2009 is starting out miraculously, the only thing is I believe everything comes in threes, what will happen next, but perhaps the third miracle will be everything that happens that has been inspired by the first two miracles...

Get A Hobby...

2009-01-16T08:36:00.006-05:00

As I was tripping down Lexington Avenue freezing my nads off trying to stay tight to the store fronts to feel what little warmth I could pirate from the shops along the way a huge model boat in the window caught my eye and forced me to stop and take a picture. A beautiful hand built wooden model complete with mermaids hanging off the side. It takes up most of the window of
Jan's Hobby Shop. I took the picture and took a sneak peak inside, I started to sweat at the floor to ceiling display of hobby oriented minutia. I was tempted to go in but I knew this would
be a disastrous event leading me to take up another hobby and fill my spare time with yet another recreational pursuit. Over the years I have entertained a plethora of hobbies that sometimes led to near obsession. It started with coin collecting, stamp collecting, rock collecting, baseball, football card collecting, cooking, gardening, chess, backgammon, poker, model making, golf, bols, badminton, whittling, girl watching and on an on. It's all kept my time filled sometimes to the point of not doing more important things. I blame it all on my mother, who on one of those bored little boy days when I was moaning and groaning because there was nothing to do, she yelled "Get a hobby." I didn't know what a hobby was but an image of a small man with big feet flashed in my mind. She took me down to the hobby shop and bought me a penny collecting book with a magazine that gave the value of all the pennies. She brought me back home and sat me at the table with my father's jar of discarded pennies. I started to go through them and when I found a penny that was actually worth five dollars I was hooked and the rest is history. My mother sort of regretted turning me on to such pursuits after I got a rock polisher and started polishing every rock I laid my eyes on, filling coffee can after coffee can with shiny, soft, lucky stones. I almost filled the garage and I'm pretty sure she sabotaged my polisher just to stop the insanity. I've tried to shed myself of most of my hobbies and I don't need anymore so I decided not to go into the shop, avoiding the curse, besides I still had my favorite hobby to finish: walking Around The Block on the Upper East Side...

Moon Over Madoff...

2009-01-09T11:09:00.009-05:00

I was taking my walk, heading down Madison Avenue when I looked up and saw the
moon and then out of no where came a camera crew sprinting down the Avenue. I perked up and followed wondering what news story they were chasing. They took a left and
marauded toward Park Avenue then I was passed by a camera carrying chaser so I asked
him as he trotted by, "What's up?" He answered, "Madoff". I slowed my pace and turned around
not wanting to be a part of the media circus that is the madness of the Madoff malarkey. I'm kind of surprised the guy hasn't been killed and I'm kind of depressed that this megalomaniac lives on the Upper East Side. I mean it's so depressing in this time of financial fiasco that this guy has created a worldwide disaster through an on-going Ponzi scheme he has been duping people with for years, some smart, some dumb, some naive and most just trusting people they didn't know because they were getting constant shekels that were too good to be true and passively took what they could without asking any questions. It's mind boggling that this one man has lost over 50 billion dollars and nobody had a clue, of course, it's even more mind boggling that the whole worlds economic system has been shaken to the core in less than a year, it's even more mind boggling that not one financial shrill talking head in all the business television shows that stain the television air waves never guessed that this was coming. Complicity is king as is cash that nobody has anymore. I walked slowly away from the frenzy looking up at the moon in the middle of the day and felt lucky just to be able to see our orbiting sister and realizing not all is money, not all is corrupt, not all is what it seems to be...

Happy New Year...

2009-01-01T10:32:00.006-05:00

Over the holidays I had the pleasure of driving up to the Adirondacks with my daughter and her friend to visit Scott Renderer and his family, he is the friend that I magically ran into on the Upper East Side just before Christmas. Beyond being entertained by two teenagers in the backseat rapping and engaged in a non-stop dialogue about everything from Lil Wayne to Obama and being driven crazy by the unrelenting repeating of Britney's newest song, You're a Womanizer, womanizer, womanizer. When we did arrive we went to the National Ski Jump Competition at Lake Placid. I had never witnessed such a dazzling event and it was far more amazing than I could have ever imagined and after all the high flying excitement there was a ferocious fireworks display. After all the excitement we returned to Manhattan for New Years Eve which was subdued but pleasurable. On New Years Day I do a handful of things religiously, they include: have a good greasy breakfast which I did at a local greasy spoon; then I rent or go to the funniest movie I can find, I rented Tropical Thunder and laughed until I cried; then I smoke a decent cigar as I take my daily walk blowing big puffs of smoke into the New Year ether making like I'm Mark Twain or something; then I start reading my first book of the year exactly one chapter, Jesus by Deepak Chopra; I do a drawing, this year I drew a picture of my dog, Bertha, and it turned out pretty bad; then I have a small snack of smoke salmon on Ritz crackers; then I go out and have some beers with some friends watch the Rose Bowl game and recollect the past year and think about the year ahead; finally, I light a sparkler, say a prayer and go to sleep and dream about the upcoming year...

First Snow Fall...

2008-12-23T09:09:00.007-05:00

I don't really like snow, especially in the city. Don't get me wrong, I love going to snow to go skiing, actually my forte is apres-skiing. But snow in the city at first beautiful in its pristiness changes quickly to nuisance then to out and out horror complete with slushy messiness and muddy ugliness. As I walked around in the first snow of the season, watching children open there mouths and catch floating flakes on hot tongues, I thought about the past year and almost froze in my tracks at everything that had happened from financial crisis to war, war and more war to Obama being elected president. If nothing else 2008 was not dull. An errant snow ball hit me in the ass, not a hard target to miss, and I rose above my reminiscence and turned to face a toddler who apologized while laughing hysterically. I had to laugh, too. Getting hit by a snowball in the ass will do that to you and I wondered if it was not just the thing I needed and for that matter the world needed to get 2009 started. It's time to clean up the mess that we find ourselves in, time to be better people, time to draw inspiration from all that is good and do good, time to rethink the importance of money, time to do good deeds without being asked, time to tell the truth no matter how hard it is, time to be better, time to understand things we have never understood before, time to listen, time to let people know that you love them, time to forgive. It's funny what the first snow fall of the season inspires in you, I walked on trying to concentrate just on the snow as it fell softly, silently painting the city in a cold whiteness that froze time, making it possible to enjoy the winter wonderland even if for just a moment...

The Smelling Season...

2008-12-16T10:25:00.013-05:00

As you walk around the streets on the Upper East Side during the holiday season there are so many olfactory delights from corner to corner it can turn you into an addicted sidewalk sniffer or someone who sniffs while walking on the sidewalk might be more appropriate. So that's what I have been doing lately walking around smelling all the the holiday season's scents that are floating around every corner. There's the chestnuts burning on the open flames of the sidewalk vendors along with the caramel nuts aroma floating down the avenues enticing the saliva from a nut thirsty mouth. Then there is the smell of pine from the Christmas trees sold on every other block that is almost surreal because the city streets smell like you are in a deep forest. There's the smell of peppermint from candy cane sucking children not to mention Starbucks' seasonal peppermint coffee. And from each restaurant comes wafting out a different delicate ambrosia that makes your mouth water and feel the pit of hunger or the desire of craving whether it be the sweetness of Indian curry, the blast of oregano from a stone oven where they're baking your favorite pizza, the tingle of soy and brown sauce from the multitudes of Chinese restaurants, the smell of fresh bread from the many bagel shops and bakeries, the smell of barbecue, the stop walking aroma of a prime rib being served to some lucky carnivore, and if food isn't enough, there's the smell of candles burning in essence of cinnamon, nutmeg, peach, the ocean and every other thing you can imagine having a scent trying to lure you into the bevy of gift stores everywhere you look that want you to come in and buy. And if that is not enough walk by any church and take in the heavenly, soul searching aperitif of incense, myrrh and frankincense. Yes, it's all there, waiting for the discerning nose. They say that smell is the most powerful memory invoking sense, so not only can you enjoy the many mind blowing aromas, you also enjoy a myriad of memories...

Bad Paintings...

2008-12-10T10:28:00.016-05:00

It's raining and I don't have an umbrella, so I scamper from awning to awning and finally slide into a Duane Reade to buy one. Back out on the street I head to the Allan Stone Gallery to see a group show and then on to see the Neil Jenney show at The Barbara Mathes Gallery. Jenney is well known for his "Bad Paintings" a term assigned to him by the art critic Marcia Tucker, and a description that Jenney liked very much. The paintings were simple big strokes with dripping paint that set off a surreality in his realistic painting. One of my favorites was of a row boat on the water. It was beautiful and I was looking forward to seeing more of the same at the show. The Allan Stone show was entertaining as are all of the shows that are there but besides a wooden monkey on a divider looking down at everyone in the gallery and a punklike portrait of a girl the show was somewhat mundane. In fact it was a disappointment. The rain was falling harder when I got outside but I picked up the pace excited to get to the Jenney Show. When I arrived I was not so thrilled with what I saw. The show is not of his old 'Bad Paintings' but his new "Pretty Paintings" that are unoriginal and without a bit of spirit, clouds that look like turtles and rabbits floating across luminescent blue skies with snarky things written below them like 'atmosphere'. There are even some pieces that aren't paintings at all just limp phrases ala Holtzer that are lifeless and evoke nothing. To say I was disappointed is an understatement. It's not that the paintings aren't good and most people would find them aesthetically pleasing but I wanted "Bad Paintings" Neil, not these overworked, pristine damar varnished narratives. Two disappointments in one day wasn't thrilling. I walked back into the rain that truly was more emotional than any art I saw that day. I walked in the rain without my umbrella wanting to feel something even if was just getting wet...

Zen Outside The Door...

2008-12-01T09:23:00.013-05:00

I was headed for the Whitney Museum to take in the always amusing works of Alexander Calder when a magical thing happened that could only be described as a Zen defining moment. As I put on my leather jacket plugged in my I-pod and headed out halfway out the door I realized I forgot my camera, so I walked back in and started the search for my digital photo taker. As I looked I noticed a picture that was given to me by a friend about fifteen years ago. I picked up the picture and looked at it. (It is above) It was a gift given to me by my good friend Scott Renderer in remembrance of playing chess together on a weekly basis. I looked at it and it ruminated fond memories. Scott now lives in the Adirondacks, manages an upholstery business and runs a small theatre and art coop, The Resurrection Lounge, in Upper Jay. (Go there is you have a chance.) I've been up to visit on several occasions and enjoyed the entertainments that were on view there: plays, bands, art, readings. I put the picture back after realising a good reminiscence and finally found my camera and headed out. It was a sunny and funny day, little kids were playing in the park and a very loud stereo boomed down from an apartment above. I put on my sunglasses and turned up some Wilco to drown out the boom. I was looking forward to seeing Calder sculptures. I was between Second and Third Avenue when I looked up and sitting in a white van looking quite nervous was no other than aforementioned Scott. He shook his head , I shook mine. He jumped out of the van, we hugged and shook hands and asked each other what the other was doing. I'm delivering some art, he answered, and I'm worried about this parking space. I told him that it looked good to me. and asked, are you delivering the art around here? He said, no, that he wanted to go see a show at the Met, and then he asked what I was doing there, I explained I lived on the block. He did not know that I had moved. I told him over a couple of beers that right before leaving the apartment I had looked at his picture and thought about him. We toasted our meeting and marvelled at the magic of it all...

A Thanksgiving Thanksgiving...

2008-11-25T09:46:00.030-05:00

My Thanksgiving doesn't start on Thanksgiving, it starts on the Sunday before the Thursday that is the granddaddy of all Thursdays. The Sunday before is when I start thinking about Thanksgiving. It's when I buy my frozen Butterball so that it has plenty of time to thaw. Thanksgiving as we all know is traditionally the last Thursday of November and was made a national holiday by President Abraham Lincoln but before that it was declared a holiday by the state of Massachusetts but the date that was recognized as Thanksgiving was June 29; just imagine basting yourself while you baste the turkey. Of course, the Pilgrims are known as the first celebrators of Thanksgiving, but truth be told the first Harvest Festival was actually celebrated in September 1565 in St. Augustine, Florida, probably on a beach and they probably they didn't dine on turkey, they probably were drinking Pina Coladas and eating fish kabobs. And of course our Canadian brothers also celebrate Thanksgiving but it is on the second Monday in October. So you actually could celebrate two Thanksgivings a year by just crossing the border. All in all, it is the greatest holiday this country observes, bar none, two days off with food and eating being the center piece of the festive atmosphere. It is also interesting that this holiday of holidays is blessed with the trinity of T's, Thanksgiving, Turkey and Thursday. This must mean something. And talking turkey, this country raises about 271 million turkeys a year with the majority of them being consumed on Thanksgiving. Gobble, gobble. So for the next several days I will watch my turkey slowly thaw as my mouth waters in the anticipation of consuming the moist meat trimmed with all the fixings. Have a Happy Thanksgiving...

Eavesdropping Expertise...

2008-11-17T12:04:00.013-05:00

I must admit I am an eavesdropper, a very practiced listener of other people's ramblings. I love over-hearing people talking, crying, fighting, teasing and just doing their personal business; and with the cell phone being such a monster conversation device these days it is very simple in this modern age to listen in, even though with the cell phone eavesdrop you only get one side of the conversation, which is sometimes more entertaining than the two way conversation. I was having breakfast at one of my favorite coffee houses, Viand, dipping my rye toast in my egg yoke and overheard two women talking. They were probably in their thirties both brandishing a style that was a little business, a little sexy. One of them started on a lament about her child who had run up a cell phone bill of over five hundred dollars. She had taken away the phone and the girl was irate and couldn't understand why? The other woman asked how she had run up such a large bill. Texting, buying ring tones and watching soap operas. Soap operas? the woman asked. Yes, reruns of the Gilmore Girls. Whole episodes on her phone? Why doesn't she watch them on television? That's what I asked her and she said, they're not on when I want to watch them. She knows we have TIVO but claimed it was easier to just watch her phone. I took her phone in exasperation and she ran to her room and slammed the door. You know, the woman said, I had to give it back to her because it makes me feel more secure when she's out with her friends. What did we do before cell phones? The woman lamented. The other woman paused and answered, saved a lot of money. The women both laughed and I chuckled putting a fork full of home fries in my mouth. The woman's phone rang and she answered it, hi honey, what's up? No you cannot stay over night, it's a school night. She hung up on me, the woman said to her friend. I hate cell phones, she said. Her friend laughed. My cell phone rang, I turned it off...

Last Leaves Falling...

2008-11-11T09:48:00.012-05:00

Early in the day on Tuesday I looked out my window and looked at a tree with just a few leaves left on it, it made me sad. At eleven o'clock the streets of the Upper East Side went crazy when Barack Obama became President elect of the United States. I opened my window and was amazed at the cacophony of horn honking, whistling and just plain old whooping it up that was going on. I decided to go out and get a taste of it, so I put on my coat and took a walk. I walked past bars where people were glued to news programs. I walked by a group of Obamaites who wore hats and held placards walking down Third Avenue shouting and whistling. It was quite an outpouring, nothing like that has ever been seen for anything political and the antithesis to the current economic disease that's spreading and exposing hot nerves of everyone who is watching the train go over the cliff economically. But as I walked to 79th Street in every bar and every restaurant there was excitement, something had changed; will it all be just a fleeting moment or will this moment rise above the fray and morph into a worldwide movement of going forward and not floating in a morass of greed, lies and corruption we find ourselves in? Who knows, but as I headed home to hear Obama's acceptance speech, watching cars with people hanging out of windows, thrusting their fists into the air chanting, Obama! Obama! Obama! something was different and all I could do was smile and think about the future and how it looked so much brighter than just hours before when I was looking at the last leaves on a tree...

Holtzer's Guggenheim Homage...

2008-11-04T10:53:00.007-05:00

I just happened upon this Jenny Holtzer piece that is now lighting up the Guggenheim on Friday nights from now until the end of the year. I hate to be redundant since I just scribbled an ode to the Wright house of art about four weeks ago but I couldn't help it and you'll understand it if you drop by on Friday night and take a gander. And as an aside, every first Friday of the month the Museum puts on an open party from 9pm to 1am complete with music and libations, it's well worth the $25.oo for non-members and is free for members. I should be getting a kick-back from the Guge for all the free promo I'm giving them. Anyway I digress, Jenny Holtzer isn't my favorite artist of all time, I mean streaming words can only get my attention for a couple of minutes not for 30 years. That said, I did appreciate this installment of the latest created babel by the Queen of Phraseology. It lights up the spiral of the Guggenheim with a riveting streaming of verbiage that I found had a koan like effect. Some of the quotes that float up the spiral include: "The End And The Beginning", "Could Have", "Children Of Our Age", and my favorite, "In Praise Of Feeling Bad About Yourself". As I stood on Fifth Avenue being enlightened by the spray of litanies floating upward a little boy walked by with his mother, he pointed up at the display and asked his mother, "Where are the pictures, mommy?" without missing a beat the mother said, "Inside the museum, honey.". I snapped my pictures and walked on wondering what kind of pictures Jenny Holtzer would paint if the world was without words...

Coco Chanel Pavilion...

2008-10-28T09:36:00.012-04:00

I decided to take a walk to Central Park to see the Chanel Pavilion, a free traveling art exhibit that has made stops in Tokyo and Hong Kong and after New York travels to London, Moscow and Paris. It includes 20 contemporary artists' work that were inspired by the Chanel Bag. I walked along the Sailing Pond taking in the autumnal beauty, up the hill to the 72nd Street exit, along the road, across the intersection and then the structure started to come into view between the orange, red and green leafy cacophony. The white and shiny structure, looking like a giant space craft that had landed softly onto a black carpet, was dumbfounding. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. It is a visionary statement by architect Zaha Hadid that transfers autumn bliss to space age milieu. The grounds are over run with men in black, wearing black train conductor hats that greet you at the entrance. They asked me if I had a ticket; I didn't, I was told it would probably be and hour to an hour and half before I would be able to enter the UFO, I mean pavilion. The line of people waiting was about a block long. Unfortunately, I didn't have two hours to wait so instead I just walked around the exterior taking pictures and wondering in astonishment how long it took to put the thing together and take it apart. The cost of such an extravagance must be out of this universe. Walking on the black muslin that is laid over the grass of Rumsey Field had an unearthly-like quality. I marveled for about fifteen minutes and then left through the exit and was wished a farewell by more men in black with funny black hats. I started thinking about when I could return to see the inside of pavilion and then remembered a Coco Chanel quote: "In order to be irreplaceable one must always be different." Different is an understatement. Coco would be proud. I turned back to look at the jaw dropping pavilion but it had disappeared behind bright foliage and ancient trees...

A Rose Is A Rose...

2008-10-18T10:39:00.012-04:00

There's a lot going on these days, an election that has captivated and exposed the best and worse this country has to offer, an economical meltdown that more or less has exposed the worse of everything financial: greed, over-consumption, executive avarice, people who were supposed to be masters of the universe, who were really just dwarfs of their own conspicuous consumption and have created a world of hurt for the majority of us. And besides these dour, depressing dualities of our society, there were some good things that I could do on the Upper East Side to take my mind off of them, like go to the Chanel Pavilion in Central Park, the Calder Show at the Whitney or the Liza Lou show at the L&M Gallery, not to mention a beer almost anywhere. What to do, what to do? I headed out for my walk, deciding to go to the Chanel Pavilion but before I got far I was stopped in my tracks by a rose in front of a Church that was blooming with all kinds of fireworks in the latter days of October. It held my attention for awhile. I went up and took a sniff, to stop and smell the roses, literally. It was a long languid sweet smell that made me forget the tensions of the political race that was coming to an end and the financial travesty that seems to be never ending. This smell was different, it was of the future, of time going on no matter what is happening right now or how much hope or horror that we are experiencing. It was the smell of redemption, restitution and reinvention with a soupcon of optimism. And a rose doesn't lie...

Marx Brothers' Mania...

2008-10-13T09:50:00.010-04:00

On a recent Walk Around The Block I found myself on East 93rd Street between Lexington and Third Avenue and came upon a gaggle of Asian tourists hovering around a building, taking pictures and poking each other and seemingly joking in Japanese. I stopped and wondered what it was all about? I asked one of them, hoping that they spoke English, what all the excitement was about? In stilted but well pronounced English he told me that this was the house where the Marx Brothers grew up. I was startled, why didn't I know this? I have been writing an on-going book entitled, The Obscurist Guide To Manhattan, and in my research I failed to find this obscure location. What am I an idiot, I thought to myself? I recollected my mania for the Marx Brothers in my youth; Chico, Harpo, Groucho, Gummo and Zeppo made me laugh so hard sometimes monkeys would fly out of my ass. I started to chuckle thinking about them (not the monkeys the Marx Brother). Oh, some of those quintessential humorous lines that made me laugh, except of course Harpo, but those honks were better than most modern day comic lines. As I looked at the house, I remembered some of those infamous quotes, like: "I drink to make other people more interesting." or "Before I speak, I have something important to say." or "I wouldn't be a member of a club that would have me as a member." I took some pictures of the building, and became as excited as the Japanese tourist brigade. I imagined all five Marx brothers running around the neighborhood reeking havoc. They were probably a motley crew; rabble rousing pranksters that kept things crazy. Thinking about them slap-sticking on the very stoop I was taking a picture of made me laugh so hard, well you know what happened next...

Ode To The Guggenheim...

2008-10-04T14:09:00.009-04:00

So you're finally back,

finally unwrapped.

it's good to see you,

the jewel of Fifth Avenue,

the scaffolding gone,

the paint job done.

so much bickering

and childish snickering,
about the color shade;
should it glow or fade?
would Frank Lloyd approve?
what's a Board to do?
with a dream design
that travels through time.
your spiral repose,
the shape everyone knows,
inspiring for decades,
relevance that never fades,
across the street from the Park,
you seem to glow in the dark.
everyone must have a picture,
of the nest like structure,
some people never go in,
which is not such a sin,
the majestic artistry
is all they need to see.
it is nice to have you back,
smooth and with no cracks,
all is right once again,
reunited with an old friend,
soaking up the Fifth Avenue light,
always silent and sublime,
Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim...

More Morandi Magic...

2008-09-29T13:13:00.010-04:00

It's a beautiful show, a friend who I trust told me, so I put a recharged battery in my camera and walked slowly to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It is the largest American retrospective of the tall and quiet Italian modern master, Giorgio Morandi, who lived from 1890-1964. The show is downstairs in the Met rotunda which is a very interesting place to view his work, walking around in a circle in different light viewing his simple but effusive art because that was exactly how Morandi practiced his craft, painting the same subject in different light. 110 pieces of work including his favorite oeuvre still life but including landscapes and several magnificent self-portraits. It is a show that is marvelous in its depth but also in the history of what is the greatest modern artist of Italy. Working in stoic indifference over five decades, not being swayed by all around him, Morandi by just doing what he did, certainly influence surrealism, futurism, minimalism and finally although many would disagree pop and abstraction. The pop reference is more easily seen with Morandi's revealing but simple still lifes but abstraction? This was influenced very simply in my mind by one of his quotes, so simple but a defining remark in art, simply, "Nothing is more abstract than reality." This quote stuck with me as I walked around these simply beautiful works twice. The still lifes not still at all, they seem to float and dance in ethereal light illuminating each simple figure with a quality of immortality. I left with a sense of peace that is hard to feel as the economy falters and our society is thrown into a morass that we have not faced in a generation. Morandi's magic is fulfilling and makes you forget the reality that is so abstract...

Zen Tea Party...

2008-09-22T09:27:00.011-04:00

Over the weekend I read in the New York Times about a guy who is 80 years old was retiring from being a Zen Tea Master. His name is Hisashi Yamada and he has been teaching the sacred ceremony of tea in America since 1964. There are two types of tea ceremonies, Thick Tea, which lasts four hours and is done in complete silence, and Thin Tea, where you can talk but it has to be about the ceremony. You spend most of the time on your knees. The article drew me in when I read that he had been teaching the tea ceremony at the Urasenke Chanoyu Center on 66th Street and on my many walks around the block I had never noticed this 100 year old carriage house that had been renovated in 1964 with original materials shipped from Japan and constructed by carpenters from Kyoto. From the web site photos the place looked exquisite, highlighted by four tea rooms that surround a garden. It's motto is "peacefulness from a bowl of tea". I walked excited to see the Center and maybe get some tea and some Zen while I was there. Unfortunately, the place is closed on Mondays. I admonished myself for not checking the schedule and took a couple of pictures of the outside. Disappointed that I got neither tea or Zen, I decided to walk to Central Park for a bit of tranquility and much to my delight I tripped upon a happening at Wollman's Rink. David Blaine the magician or illusionist or just crazy man was hanging upside down by ropes from a constructed scaffolding. He was going to do this hanging for 60 hours and that in this amount of time all kinds of hideous things could happen to him including, stroke, heart attack and blindness, not to mention pigeon shit, electrocution from a passing thunder storm and the sudden realization that the world doesn't look so bad upside down. As I watched this with amusement, wondering who comes up with these stupid stunts, I realized what I was looking at was not a crazy man hanging upside down to get some media attention but a human tea bag being immersed in the ether we call this world. I left savoring my Zen
moment...

Looking For Inspiration...

2008-09-15T10:15:00.007-04:00

I had not painted in over a week and I was feeling the pangs of needing to put something on canvas. The thing is I didn't have any idea what I should paint so I decided to go for a walk and look for some inspiration. The walk happened to be on Monday, the day the stock market dropped over 500 points. You could pretty much tell it was a black one because of the number of suits walking around pulling their hair out. And this was near truth on Third Avenue where I noticed a middle aged Brooks Brother wearing man waving at the heavens, screaming expletives. He would scream then he would walk stopping every two blocks to let loose his venom. I decided to follow the ranter to see what he would do next. He walked against lights daring cars to hit him and when they honked at him he lifted his hand in moral outrage. He loosened his tie and then pulled it up in the back making it look like he was hanging himself. He stopped at Starbucks but seeing there was a line screamed something I could not hear from outside and stormed out and kept walking. He got caught behind two nannies pushing carriages so he walked into 3rd Avenue to get around them and raised his hands at the heavens again looking at the nannies with disdain and charged on. I had a hard time staying up with him. He stopped suddenly at a deli picked a bouquet of sunflowers from a white bucket and paid a woman at an outside cash register. Buying sunflowers in his mood seemed highly unusual. She wrapped the flowers and handed them to the man who took them and continued his march dodging on-coming pedestrians. At 90th Street he stopped in front of Chase Bank and started pounding on the windows with his free fist, he then turned and threw the sunflowers into a trash bin. It was beyond bizarre. I stopped and watched as he jaywalked across Third Avenue and walked into the bar restaurant, Fetch, to drown his sorrows or quell his anger. I walked over to the trash bin and took the sunflowers out, thinking, one man's misery is another man's inspiration. I went home and painted them...

Hurricanes, Weddings, Tragedies...

2008-09-07T10:12:00.014-04:00

I walked to Fifth Avenue feeling the warm, humid air of Hurricane Hannah that was starting to kiss Manhattan. It always amazes me when what was a hurricane in the Caribbean heads north
and touches us with its wet embrace, posing no harm but still enveloping us with the casual sense of 'it could happen here'. A Katrina moment is a possibility for New York City and I knock on wood as I think that. There is a 7% chance a major hurricane will hit New York City this year, that's a Category 3 or more, and there is a 90% chance that one will hit in the next 50 years. That's according to the Everybody-Who-Knows-Anything-About-Hurricane-Bureau. So sooner or later it's going to happen. The Great Hurricane that struck in 1938 was mostly a non-event as has been every hurricane since. In 1991 Hurricane Bob struck and that's about what it did was "bob" and when in 1985 Hurricane Gloria hit I remember going to the East River during it and it was pretty fun to watch what little traffic there was dodging huge splashes because the storm surge made the East River flood onto the FDR. So as I soaked in the moist embrace of Hannah I remembered that truly something of gigantic proportion could strike New York City and what would be the consequences? As I strode on in this tragedy thinking, I looked up at a horse drawn carriage, standing at a church, bride and groom and entourage happy as happy can be, smiling as bright as light. I took a picture of them all, surely not interested in major hurricanes or the remains of a hurricane that was wafting the bride's veil. There are more important things to people than tragedies. The rain began to spill from the sky like a bride's blubbering. I was soaked before I got home but a dry towel and some watching of other people being soaked by the remnants of Hanna made me feel free and unencumbered by the fears of impending tragedies..

Labor Day Blues...

2008-09-01T11:13:00.013-04:00

It's a beautiful day and I'm not happy. Labor Day has become to be known as the last day of summer although summer is not officially over until September 21, but still the three day weekend brings about the nostalgic feeling of what happened since the Memorial Day weekend.
It's been quite a good summer weather-wise, no huge heat waves that raise the ire and the olfactory enhancement; there's been a fair amount of torrential rainfalls with echoing thunder, that have cleaned the air and washed the streets; and there has been plenty of entertainment out on the streets. It's always sad to look back at the past but how can you help but not. School gets back into gear, half-day Fridays end, the tourists head out of town and you have four months to finish everything you planned on doing this year and put off until now. As the hot days slowly dissolve into the autumnal, baseball ends, football begins, it leaves me wondering about the march of time. And in thinking about the marching of time I decided to take a Walk Around the Block to find an appropriate image that would express the feeling that I was feeling. It was bright and sunny, I clicked pictures of babies in strollers, kids on skate boards, women in short dresses, men in sear sucker suits, the splash of golden leaves on trees that are still green. Finally, there it was in front of me, playing a happy tune and surrounded by laughing children, an ice cream truck, selling it's delightful product to all takers. And there it was, The Very Best, printed ornately on the truck, because that's the kind of summer it was for me and what I was leaving behind and why I had the Labor Day Blues...

Riding A Bike...

2008-08-23T10:33:00.015-04:00

I was reading this story about a bike thief in Toronto, the police found over 2,865 bikes he had stolen stashed in different warehouses all over the city. Toronto being one of the most bike friendly cities in the universe was outraged and a lynching is being considered. As I read the story I looked out my window at one of only two crosstown street bike lanes on the Upper East Side, one going east on East 90th Street and one going west on East 91st Street. As I looked at the bike lane several bikers in bright colored biker clad went whizzing by, colors streaming; a beautiful sight and one that is becoming more and more common all over the Upper East Side. New York City has been slow in warming to bike riders but in this age of astronomic gas prices, global warming and traffic congestion, what better way to relieve it all but to ride a bike. Riding that two wheeled miracle that besides doing all of the above gets you out into the fresh air and some exercise is a simple solution a myriad of problems. It also provides the fastest way to get from point A to point B in the city. As I continued to look out the window a bicycle built for two with a father and daughter, pedaling in unison, flew by. To be more bike friendly the city has created car-less street routes on Saturdays in August from the Brooklyn Bridge to the East 72nd Street Central Park entrance; on September 7th the New York City Bike Tour will take place with routes from 15 to 100 miles that you can spin your wheels on and enjoy; and even more exciting, soon the New York City Department of Transportation will experiment with a bike sharing program, that is in existence in Paris, where at chosen transportation hubs throughout the city you can rent a bike at a nominal cost to use and then drop off at a another designated bike station close to your destination. I can imagine the city becoming a bikers paradise and as I continued looking out my window much to my amazement a unicyclist merrily floated by and the wheels of my imagination spun in reflections of riding a bike into the future...

Two Ugly Buildings...

2008-08-14T12:13:00.011-04:00

(Finally, after two days I was able to download these two ugly buildings, take a gander.)
(So ugly that I haven't been able to download the photos of them onto this blog for some reason, so for now you'll have to use your imagination, imagine ugly.) Anyway, it seems to me that after dealing with all the hassles that construction sites create for pedestrians and vehicles by having to walk around or through poorly built walkways or drive around double parked trucks and equipment having to deal with dust, mud and dodging the comings and going of trucks and hard hat butt cracks not to mention cranes that could fall and having to do this for almost two years on two consecutive Avenues, Third and Lexington on 86th Street and the construction site on Lexington Avenue creating havoc at the subway station not to mention the menace of at any moment a pane of glass falling down like one did off the Bank of America building last week. After dealing with all of these horrible hassles you might think that when they were done with these overpriced apartment buildings and co-ops that at least we might be rewarded with a piece of architecture that would be nice to look at or exciting to look at or actually add to the milieu of great architecture on the Upper East Side but no, what we get is a square brick building and square glass building, nothing more, nothing less. Two extremely boring buildings without even a small amount of interest in there appearance. They're ugly. All I'm asking is to put some excitement in some of these new Upper East Side buildings that are being constructed especially since we have to deal with so much as they're being built...

Silver Dollar Dreams...

2008-08-08T17:32:00.007-04:00

That's what I like about wandering around the Upper East Side, you never know what will happen or what you will find. As I stumbled along East End Avenue I noticed a shine in a small hose created puddle that was tinged with an oily rainbow. I caught the sparkle in the corner of my eye. I leaned down and came face to face with a silver dollar that was heads down. Although it was heads down, I picked it up anyways, even if there was some bad luck associated with picking up any coin when the head is down. I remembered once when I was out with my daughter, she was about five years old at the time, we came upon a penny that was heads down and she went to pick it up and told her it was bad luck to pick up a coin that was heads down. She thought that was dumb but didn't pick it up. We walked on and about twenty feet from the coin she turned around walked back to the penny lifted it up and put it back down. When she caught up to me I asked what she had done? She said she had turned the coin so the head was up so the next person who saw it could pick it up and have some good luck. I'll remember that for the rest of my life. The silver coin I had found was so worn the date was unrecognizable, most of the face was just shiny with no In God We Trust left to be seen. I looked around to see if anyone was looking for the coin, there was no one, and there were no signs on light posts with distressed pleadings for the return of the coin. I wondered if I should go to the police but the more I looked at the coin, the more I realized it was worth nothing, with much of the face rubbed away and there being a slash on the back of the coin. I decided not to turn it in. I flipped the coin and rubbed the face imagining this was some one's good luck coin that had literally been rubbed to the nub. I put the coin in my pocket and wondered if it would be lucky for me and then I started to dream lucky silver dollar dreams...

Ocean Dreams...

2008-08-01T09:55:00.008-04:00

On these hot, humid New York City summer days, when everybody walks and talks a little slower and the closest thing to a beach is tar beach. There's always the rivers. Carl Shurz Park on the Upper East Side is an oasis for sunbathers, pet walkers, garden admirers and those who can close their eyes and imagine that they are at the ocean. The East River does this a little better than the Hudson because of the fresh ocean smell that the tidal river sucks in from the Atlantic Ocean. I walked to Carl Schurz looking for that brief respite from the HHH (Humid Heat Hell). I had a good book and all I wanted to do was to enjoy an hour of ocean dreams while I read. I have a bench I sit on that is below the main walkway that runs over the FDR. The bench is close to the river where you can smell the brine best and look down at seaweed clutching boulders that the river laps over creating the illusion of being on a rock strewn beach. Sail boats, freighters, tug boats, barges, banana boats, yachts, jet skis, kayaks and the Circle Line stream past, sea gulls caw, and a lone loon continually dives for its lunch and coming from somewhere that I cannot see is the sounds of a bag pipe filling the ether and filling my ocean imagining mind with wistful loneliness and the yearnings for a long walk of beach-combing. I believed beyond a doubt I was on the beach and having a gaggle of women in bikinis lounging on the grass behind me was an added bonus. I sat there reading for an hour and was finally shook from my nirvana by the ripe smell of garbage from a garbage barge that
slowly chugged up the river. Never-the-less, the hour of respite was just what the doctor ordered for a sweaty, unbearable hot day. It was truth and testament that the Upper East Side with a little imagination can give many, many things to keep you inspired and at peace and even a day at the beach...

A Funny Thing Happened...

2008-07-25T14:50:00.005-04:00

I was going to the Turner show at the Met but halfway there on a perfectly glorious day I decided that going inside would be tantamount to a sin so I decided to go to Central Park and check out the line for Hair, playing at Shakespeare In The Park. I'm dying to go, I have declared this 'the summer of hair' and am currently growing mine to my ass. As I walked towards the Park on Seventy Ninth Street I decided to stop in at one of my favorite galleries, the Adam Baumgold Gallery; the place always makes me smile. The show was entitled, Road Works, and included over thirty artists, including such luminaries as Saul Steinberg and Mark Kostabi. It's hard to believe they could fit so much art in this small gallery. Most of the work was cartoonish and illustrative but all were levitating. Some made me laugh especially this piece I took the picture above of, it was untitled, by Heather Goodfriend. Just rabbits marching. I left the gallery with a chuckle in my heart. I walked on under glorious blue sky towards Central Park thinking about marching rabbits. The line in Central Park was too large to even attempt getting a couple of tickets to Hair. Oh well, I'll try another day. I sat down near Turtle Pond to catch some rays and believe it or not saw a turtle walk out of the reeds. First, marching rabbits now plodding turtles. I took a closer look and then walked back out of the Park enjoying my brief respite but now with mind obsessed with marching rabbits and plodding turtles I had a quandary. Then it occurred to me that it's the whole tortoise and the hare thing played out right in front of me. I decided on such a beautiful day it was better to be a turtle today...

What Next Louise...

2008-07-17T11:53:00.004-04:00

I was excited to get to the Guggenheim to see the Queen of the Art Scene, Louise Bourgeois's
retrospective. As I walked by the south side of the museum I noticed they are starting to take down the scaffolding that has hidden the Frank Lloyd Wright masterpiece for far too long. On the ground floor was a spider from Louise's "Maman" series and probably what she is best known for. As I read the opening statements about the show I was disappointed to see that the curators in their greater wisdom decided to go against Wright's inclination and make the viewer walk up the ramp instead of slowly floating down the spiral if you wanted to see the works of Bourgeois's work timeline from the beginning to end. I grumbled under my breath and began my plodding upward. The first of the works are the noble totems that represented Louise's friends and family way back in the 1940's. It's interesting to note that when the Guggenheim was finished in 1959 Bourgeois was in mid-career and already a world famous artist. Now almost a centenarian she is still creating masterpieces. Halfway up the ramp and the centerpiece of show is her, Destruction Of The Father, an installation bathed in crimson, a tableau that includes a table of soft sculptures that appear to be appendages and organs and in reality that's what it is, the back story of the piece as Bourgeois suggests is a father devoured by his children that he has tortured during their lives. Like all of her pieces there is always a little of her life included and her father wasn't exactly her favorite person. The end of the show is mostly "The Cells"; these are pieces that are constructed to be rooms that Louise describes as 'representing different types of pain'. They may represent pain but most are very beautiful in a stark kind of way. And at the top of the show are some of Bourgeois's most recent works that represent her going back to her roots of mending tapestries in the family business. The new work are sewn fabrics in dynamic ways to create calming aesthetics. As I stood atop the spiral looking down at the floor below and feeling a bit of vertigo I had an epiphany that perhaps the curators inspired by having to walk up the ramp, it was an important element that was represented and that was that a great life is like walking up a hill and looking down at the work that Bourgeois had created in the last century was staggering and then finally the realization that one of the greatest artists of all time is still amongst us is liberating...

Oh So Pure...

2008-07-09T13:35:00.012-04:00

It's always great to discover something new on the Upper East Side, especially if it is a new business with meditative qualities. As I was walking along 86th Street I looked up and saw
a grassy knoll on the side of a building. I mean real grass on the side of the building. It was very cool and I had no choice but to go across the street and see what this new piece of green architecture was. I walked into the open doorway to a smiling girl wearing a Namaste tee-shirt. She actually was the smile. She offered me a tour of the Yoga Center that I took and was very impressed with. The center is called Pure and is renowned in Hong Kong, Singapore and Taipei for its superior programming and excellent teachers. This is its first entry into America, which I find kind of interesting, why would they not open a space in California, home of all things new age? But they're here on the Upper East Side now and I can feel the calmness already. At the end of the tour I was given a couple of brochures that included a list of classes they offered, some of them were quite amusing:Bollywood Fusion, Multi-Intenso, MySore, Slow Flow, Upside Down and Yin Yang. It might be worth joining just to experience Bollywood Fusion; I have this image of a room filled with sexy Indian movie starlets. Of course, the final info I needed was the price and since it wasn't in any of the brochures I had a sneaking suspicion that it might be expensive and depending on what you think peace of mind is worth it might be. The price for a year is $1765.00. This membership fee let's you go to any class anytime all year round. For me meditating and contorting my body into all kinds of painful positions the price seems a bit much. I smiled at the smile and left the building happy to look from the outside in at this new member of the neighborhood. I hope that it brings those that can afford it the peace they deserve...

Art In Hallways...

2008-07-06T17:45:00.004-04:00

I have always thought that art is what you are inspired by and can be found almost anywhere.
Even in a bathroom, hey, didn't Duchamp make a toilet a piece of art? Yes, art is anywhere or the realization of art is everywhere and all we have to do is put up our art antennas to get it.
It's a zen thing, instant inspiration. So as I walk around the Upper East Side I take pictures of things that inspire me. This picture above is from a hallway in the Whitney Museum, it is not meant to be art, hell the place is filled with art so who is looking for art in a hallway. I am. And it is especially cool to find this kind of image amongst some of the greatest art in the world. So why is this light on wall inspirational? Because it created in me a change in thinking, a visual that captured a bit of creation. When I point things like this out to my daughter, she moans and groans with teenage angst and thinks I am a monster from Mars. That is my life. As I walk around the Upper East Side finding things that fascinate, amuse and beguile me I forget about the price of gas, the war in Iraq, the economy and politics. To be able to make a discovery and interpret it so that it inspires me is the reason I love living in the city and on the Upper East Side. It's the end of the 4th of July weekend and I'm looking out my window at at a tableau of people that have a lot on their minds. The economy is without rudder, the world being closer seems more confusing, we're warring in other countries that are becoming less tenable because back here things are faltering and there seems to be no one that understands it. That's why I look for art or inspiration anywhere I can find it because it's not out there on the airwaves or coming from people who are supposedly our leaders. We must individually recognize our artistic inspirations and our outspoken social relevance. It's surely not coming from talking heads on TV and that's why I am looking for art in hallways...

Madison Avenue Meditations...

2008-06-27T09:20:00.005-04:00

I headed down Madison Avenue towards the Gagosian Gallery to see the Girls exhibit by Roy Lichtentein. I took my time doing some window shopping, lolly-gagging and people watching. With school out there were many more kids on the sidewalks than usual all raw with excitement to have summer vacation (something everyone should have). At 79th and Mad. three boys with tennis rackets sword fought each other with a little more zeal than was needed. One boy with a tremendous blow knocked another boy's tennis racket from his hand onto Madison Avenue where it was struck by a truck and crushed. The truck driver did not stop and the boy dodging traffic ran to the destroyed racket lifted it up and the head of the racket flopped downward causing all three boys to laugh hysterically. I didn't quite find the humor in it instead imagining what might have happened. My scenario went a little like this: the truck dodging the racket crashes into another car that causes it to veer onto the sidewalk killing a half dozen people and destroying a storefront. My imagination running away with itself forced me to walk on and leave the laughing boys and their shenanigans. Before long I was in front of the building that the Gagosian Gallery is in but I decided not to go in and went instead to the Whitney where I went down stairs and had a small meal looking out at what is a created pond that was here a hundred years ago. It is pictured above. It was nice to sit by the ancient pond enjoy a cup of coffee and think about the beavers that used to wander around here with woodpeckers flying over head and frogs croaking. I fell into the reflection of the pond far away from walking down Madison Avenue that loomed above me. It was a brief but needed meditation...

My Keith Haring...

2008-06-21T11:04:00.007-04:00

The day was tricky, just the right kind of day to go see a show of Keith Haring at the Skarstedt Gallery on 79th Street. By tricky I mean it was sunny but showers were predicted so I was in a quandary, should I take my umbrella or not...I did. I walked to the gallery looking forward to seeing the art of someone I had met many times in the early eighties. It was then that while riding the 6 train in a dilapidated subway system covered in graffito without air conditioning overcrowded and dangerous that I saw my first Keith Haring. It was graffiti but not spray painted pandemonium and tags that were splayed everywhere. Haring's simple chalk drawings on black ad boards were cartoonish, entertaining and inspiring and they seemed to sprout up everywhere. They were the most thing on the subways. Liking them so much I wanted to get one but they were impossible to remove because of the glue used by the MTA system (the only thing they did right in those days ) was so good. One day I noticed one of the posters with Haring's art on it at the 96th Street station had a corner that was loose. I took my time and started to loosen the art from the panel, it took me about an hour and I was only able to salvage about half of the poster but it is a prized piece of art that I have hung in my home for over 20 years. It is pictured above. But I digress, it started to rain before I got to the gallery so having an umbrella was the correct choice. The show was heartening and made me happy like Keith Haring's early works made me. One of the posters from the subway made the show but I think mine is much better. The show is to commemorate Keith's 50th birthday if he were alive. The first time I met Keith was at the nightclub called Area, he was funny and full of energy. We recreated talked about art and laughed. After that night I ran into him many times even after he became rich and famous he exuded and energy that was precious and is much missed. The show at Skarstedt is joyful and a good representation of all that Keith gave to the world in the short time he was with us. There's even a piece of subway art but I must admit I like mine better. Outside it was sunny again I twirled my umbrella with my fingers and was glad to have been in Keith's presence again...

Papaya King Priority...

2008-06-14T11:29:00.005-04:00

Taking a walk to the Papaya King is ritual that I have performed for many a year, enjoying the Filet Mignon of hot dogs, the Papaya King frankfurter and a blended juice drink of my liking is a celebration of all things American not to mention continuing an age old tradition that started in 1931 on this same corner of Third Avenue and 86th Street. The history of the curbside eatery is quite incredible. A sixteen year old, Gus Paulos, a Greek immigrant, arrived in New York City in 1923 penniless but driven. He started working in a deli on the Upper East Side and within three years bought the deli lock, stock and barrel. With the success of the deli he decided to go on his fist vacation and headed to Florida and the beaches while there he imbibed in the local blended juice drinks and was hooked. He came home with the taste of exotic fruit juices still ripe in his mind. He sold the deli and opened his first juice store, The Hawaii Tropical Drinks, on Third and 86th Street in 1931, but with a store full of perishable fruit and nobody buying his blended drinks he hired a woman to dress up in Hawaiian costume and hand out the drinks for free outside the restaurant. It was a boom. The Upper East Side became addicted to the drinks and the rest is history. Gus opened places in Brooklyn and Philadelphia. In 1939 he did something as natural as smiling by putting the frankfurter on the menu mostly a homage to Yorktown's German population who frequented his restaurant and his wife who nursed him through a broken ankle he got while roller skating. In 1950 after a Brooklyn Dodger christened Gus the Papaya King the restaurant's name was changed. It has been frequented by the rich the famous and tourists from all over the world. The Beatles noshed there before they went on the Ed Sullivan show in 1965 and Zagat reviewed it as "the best, cheapest stand up lunch in the city". As I stood there biting into that perfect frankfurter and sipping on my papaya drink, watching people walk by wishing they were me, I lifted by papaya drink to the heavens and saluted Gus the papaya king ...

Hot, Hot, Hot...

2008-06-07T16:57:00.007-04:00

The hottest day of the year so I headed out to work up a sweat and take in some culture, some local flavor and some ray catching. I stepped out the door into the 100 degree weather and was blown back by the humidity. I took a drink of water from my handy water bottle before I took a step and headed towards Madison Avenue to go to the Whitney to see the Mapplethorpe Polaroid show. I've always liked Mapplethorpe ever since he lit a flame under Jesse Helms' ass in the Eighties by having a show that some described as homoerotic and received the disdain of every conservative living and not living. If only these self proclaimed art critics ever looked at his photos of flowers that are beyond the ken beautiful as were the photos of the naked men. The Whitney was cool as a refrigerator. I took the elevator up and walked down the stairs to the small show with a ton of framed Polaroids that were too tightly framed as far as I was concerned. I would have loved to seen the raw Polaroid edges instead of the pristine cropped photos. And the photos were of everything from a pair of shoes to portraits of Patti Smith. It was a small but dense show. I expected more but it was still interesting. I walked out of the Whitney into the wall of heat and headed for the East River to catch some sun on my milky skin. As I walked I ran into the First Avenue Street Fair and the fair air was aromatic with fried food, sausage and peppers and caramelized nuts. I feasted on it all and had an ice cold lemonade. This unexpected diversion was just what I needed, refreshment and sustenance. I walked on to the Promenade where I staked out a bench and took off my shirt, read and sipped on a brown bagged Bud. The light breeze from the river was soothing. The river traffic of tug boats, sail boats, tankers and jet skis was a visual feast. And then a young woman with a bag of bread crumbs sat on the bench next to me and started throwing the crumbs on the ground and before I knew it there was a flock of pigeons (flying rats) swarming, flapping their wings and covering me in their dusty musk. It rose the temperature of the place by at least ten degrees and rose my aggravation by twice that. I wanted to tell the woman it was illegal to feed the feathered fiends but instead just got out of there. I walked home sweating and in need of a very cold shower...

Cranes Falling Down...

2008-05-31T10:20:00.007-04:00

Anything can happen, anytime, anywhere. And it could be good and could be bad. As I took my morning walk to my local bodega to get my daily New York Times, Coke and scratch card, I heard a loud piercing and scraping and then felt the ground shake under my feet. Was this the big one? I looked up to see if anything was falling down, suddenly I heard screaming but couldn't figure out where it was coming from. I looked down 90th Street and nothing looked unusual. I looked around at other people on the street to see if anybody knew what was happening. People were shrugging their shoulders. I hurried back to my apartment to see if there was any news, as I arrived my phone was ringing and I was being simultaneously texted, both friends wondering if I was alright. The phone caller told me about the crane falling on 91st and First one block away. I turned on the news, New York One, and there was scrolling about the event but no new news. Outside I could hear sirens galore so I grabbed my camera and went for a stroll to the tragic scene. Police were already taking control of the area but still there were a lot of people camera phones in hand recording the event. Of course my camera's batteries were dead so after getting a peek at the devastation amongst the chaos. The fire department was there, the police were there and human rescue was also there. I was amazed at the reaction time of these brave people. I headed back not wanting to make this situation worse by being in the way. As I walked people with cameras and news teams in vans with huge dish antennas were rolling in on Second Avenue. Back in my apartment the news was frothing with the event. The pandemonium outside my apartment was becoming even more tumultuous,
sirens were still screaming and helicopters were pounding the sky above. I shut my window and knew this was going to be a big day in the neighborhood. The tragedy just beginning...

Gone Fishing Again...

2008-05-24T12:23:00.007-04:00

It's Memorial Day weekend and the beginning of the summer for most of us in the city, so I decided to take a walk over to the East River and have a dram of what is to come in this summer of Hair, (it's playing in Central Park this summer). I wasn't thinking about sweltering heat, pulsating humidity, sweating like you are your own salty shower, no I was thinking about scantily clad women, vacations to beaches I have never been to before and a host of icy exotic drinks at barbecues with friends and family. So I sat down on a bench in Carl Schurz Park and looked out at the East River that was as calm as a person on Valium and thought about the Brooklyn Bridge's 125 birthday party and the fireworks that I watched from this very bench two nights ago. I also thought about the artistic projects coinciding with it, there's the Telectroscope that is on display in Brooklyn that let's you take a peek to London's Tower Bridge and see in same time what's going on there, like peering into a tunnel and seeing the other side of the world. It's awesome! There's also the four waterfalls that will be created on the East River this summer by Olafur Eliasson that will be 90 to 120 feet high that will be lit at night splashing gigantically and like the Telectroscope are expansive to the imagination and will be amazing to see. It should be a great summer. I thought about all of this and was inspired to paint so I walked back home to grab my paint brush and paint another painting to be included in my "gone fishing" body of work. As I painted all I thought about was summer and when I finished the piece what I got is what you see above. Summer is a great thing to look forward to and it all starts this weekend. Enjoy the weekend all...

Holy Melotti...

2008-05-15T10:18:00.007-04:00

Sometimes you just walk into a place and you are transformed, changed, magically brought to a different place. This is the experience that I experienced at the Acquavella Galleries on East 79 Street. I had never heard of Fausto Melotti or seen his work and this was a great way to trip over it because it is his first one man show in New York City. It takes up four rooms on two floors and fills it all with marvels, passion and beauty that are an expression of a life well lived. I Started at the back room on the Second Floor as I was directed by the Gallery hostess. I looked, I stared, I smiled at the Sculpture No. 21 that is pictured above fascinated by the sparkling orbs caged by shiny bars, but what struck me like being hit in the head by one of those sparkling orbs from the sculpture was that this was not a sculpture made in the fifties or sixties that I presumed but was made in 1935. This was a time machine experience and would continue to be for the rest of the show. Fausto was born in 1901 and died in 1986 and this work stretches across that life like a moon bow, mixing metal, ceramics, wire, plaster and embraces music to its core. In the second room another sculpture, this a plaster figure standing about nine foot tall entitled, "Constant Man", stands as a solitary human form with an open palm stretched across the chest of the figure. It held me mesmerized, it is so simple, so powerful, so magical. The downstairs rooms are as explosively vital, too. The front room filled with some of the most beautiful sculptures you will ever see, an aesthetic of air, metal and shadows. The backroom with a wall of ceramics that are artistic, fragile and beautifully assigned with a array of other sculptures that capture your imagination, one of them entitled, Rain, stands in the back, wires exploding from above and falling and splashing onto the ground. That is one of the great things about this unbeknownst-to-me artist's work, it lets you imagine and play and you want to see more and more of it. I left the show feeling the more and more, strolled home completely caught up in the magical, heavenly world of Fausto Melotti...

Koons Eye View...

2008-05-10T09:53:00.004-04:00

Jeff Koons has been around for a long time creating his morphed popular art vision that I have both loved and loathed. He has a 27,500 foot studio and employs about ninety-five people to make art for him. I have never really respected his hands off approach. It was gray and sprinkling when I decided to take a walk to the Met and see his sculptures on the roof. I was looking forward to it knowing that the weather would keep people off of the roof garden. I entered through the downstairs entrance and paid my usual two dollars for the quick trip to the roof garden. The elevator up was packed but once on the roof there was plenty of room to move. I ordered a red wine from the bar and took a stroll around the three cartoonish sculptures that I wished were bigger, say more like twenty feet tall rather than the diminutive 10 they are. I wished there were more, too. It is always telling on the roof garden if you are looking more at the sculptures or at the view of Central Park and city scapes. On this particular gray day I found most of the people looking out over the park and taking photos of the view rather that looking at the sculptures. The three animated pieces: Balloon Dog, that is pictured above and that I found the most interesting; Sacred Heart wasn't very sacred; and Coloring Book a supposed page from a Winnie The Pooh coloring book that is presented like it would look if colored by a really bad child colorer, it is abstract and just didn't push any buttons for me. So I looked out on the park fresh with leafage and sipped my Merlot and then I looked up at the apartment buildings on the Upper East Side knowing that Jeff Koons owned an opulent apartment somewhere amongst the buildings. I imagined him looking down at the sculptures he had created and wondered what his view was like. From where I was standing the view of the park was a lot more impressive than his sculptures...

It's Wayne's World...

2008-05-03T09:55:00.007-04:00

When anger starts filling my veins like hot oil, art is always a way I can recapture my mojo, even if the anger is about a company destroying a beloved piece of art, see my last blog entry. Lucky for me one of the most affable of painters and one of America's most talented was having a show at the Allan Stone Gallery on East 90th, his twenty-third solo show at the eclectic gallery. A short walk I put on a light windbreaker to do exactly that since a breeze was up and the white pedals of street side cherry trees were blowing in the wind looking like snow on a sunny day. The Allan Stone Gallery an old renovated firehouse is an intimate space with a garden in the back that gives it an airy light. Wayne Thiebaud who is well known for his objects and still lifes that he presents in a pop imagery that is all his own, like Dine, but different, most of his work although oil on canvas has hints of watercolor imagery. This show deviating from his object oriented art is titled, The Figure. Drawings and paintings of people who seem to be from another time and age leaning more toward the Saturday Post covers of Norman Rockwell than of anything close to this jaded age. This actually gives the show it's life, a certain feel of a good time had and a reminiscence of a simpler time. His figures are exacting and daring in their simpleness. Most of the art was done in the 1960's which underscores that feeling of being out of time. I walked around the show a couple of times noticing small nuances that I hadn't noticed before and being so pleased at myself for noticing I decided to return to the Allan Stone Gallery in a couple of weeks to see if I can discover anything else. Happily, my stoked anger at the OZ moving company is temporarily stifled by Wayne's world...

Ripped Off By OZ...

2008-04-26T16:50:00.008-04:00

I started writing this at the airport in Reno, Nevada, taking my attention away from the slot machines that stand in waiting to take my last few dollars. I have spent the last couple of days at Lake Tahoe, dreaming, golfing and gambling not to mention eating, drinking and relaxing. I am headed back to NYC and the Upper East Side refreshed and full of a need to succeed. But when I get back to the city I get my mail and there it is, the letter from OZ moving that I have been expecting for six months. As I reported six months ago, I moved, and OZ was my choice of mover, a mistake I am still paying for today. What I expected was a check in the envelope of over 3,000 dollars for art and plates they had destroyed in a move that cost me double the price that was estimated and put me in a personally embarrassing position when I did not have the cash on hand that would cover the 15% tip of the new cost. "Testy" is a mild description of what the movers became when they found this out, dropping, tossing boxes in an embattled way so they could 'get the hell out of here'. And in this carelessness the destruction began, a recliner, picture frames, a cordial dish my mother gave me that served as a remembrance of her, some of these OZ did fix, but the worse destruction was one of my prized pieces of art by Marc Travanti, that has moved with me to London twice and moved five times in New York City before it was ripped by OZ on this recent move. This painting has hung in my home for almost 20 years. Travanti, who was in a recent show that got glowing reviews, www.brooklynrail.org/2008/04/artseen/enantiomorphic_chamber, is an artist of eclectic and brilliant inspirations. For the destruction of this piece of art,I placed a rather conservative price of 3,500.00. It was worth way more than that to me and my family. As I had bought extra insurance for just this kind of accident, I felt I could count on OZ to make amends. After six months, weekly calls, two visits and hemming and hawing that bordered on rude, finally I was getting a check. I opened the envelope and was floored when I looked at a check for $200.00 and a snarky letter from Nancy Zafrani the General Manager of OZ, saying that art was exempt from the coverage, which was never mentioned to me in the six months of emails, phone calls and visits by this incredulous moving company. She said that the contract was enclosed with the check detailing this exemption but it was not enclosed. My first thought was to sue, small claims and all that but the time to do that would probably cost me more than the claim and it would not get back the precious piece of art that they destroyed. So instead I decided to wage a campaign of my own using the $200.00 to create posters my minions will distribute on the Upper East Side and also use my writing outlets that includes two columns in international magazines and four other blogs to present the ugly aspects of OZ's dealings with this situation. I hope others that have experienced such disrespect by this moving company might join me. Their corporate headquarters are at 318 East 78th N.Y. N.Y. 10021. I must say this feels good getting it off my chest after six months of frustration and I have to laugh at loud at Ms. Zafrani final sentence in her "buzz off" letter. "We look forward to serving you again should the need arise." Yeah, right, Nancy...

Bad, Boring, Biennial...

2008-04-18T10:18:00.007-04:00

I have started to walk to the Whitney to see the Biennial show several times but have ended up being distracted by something else mostly a thought that I knew that the show was considered bad to terrible by everyone who I know saw it. Finally, I got up the energy to deal with it and what everyone said was more than true. It is the god-awfullest Biennial I have ever seen. It seems the Whitney has their head so far up academia's ass all they can see is shit. Beyond the general lack of new ideas a lot of the work was shoddily put together. The videos were astonishingly boring, it seems now that all you have to do is an interview, or a video of your summer vacation and it will reach the realms of high art. If this type of garbage is the highest spectre of the Whitney's expectation of art maybe the curators should spend a couple days watching YouTube or better yet the Jack Ass movies because they contain more examination of a subject that I would consider art than any of what is in this show. The installation pieces were atrocious. I guess raw lumber stuck together to resemble some sort of room is the spirit of the day. There were two artist's works that I did appreciate and saved me from throwing myself on down the granite steps of the museum. They were Charles Long's ghost like sculptures that had a fossil feel created with plaster and found garbage. They were eerily white and hauntingly beautiful. The other art I liked was by John Baldessari, whose Pop Art Images captured with a gifted mind and artistic flare were more than impressive. Beyond those there was nothing I liked much because I have seen it all before and done so much better. With my exasperation I headed for the basement bathroom and took the picture above which was more inspiring than what I saw at the show. And to it's own credit as I left the building the outside installment piece a reinvented turtle pond with a modern art flare that was once in this exact place centuries ago was very interesting and left me with the hope that art is not yet dead....

Spring Has Sprung...

2008-04-14T09:01:00.007-04:00

Although it began about three weeks ago, Spring is starting to realize itself now. Daffodils, forsythia, cherry trees, magnolias, tulips and all the rest of the fanfare of springtime flowers are blooming or sprouting and spraying their fresh pollen on the allergy ridden populace. While I was out for my first coat less walk of the seasonto enjoing the first warmish sunny day I overheard a couple walking and holding hands comment on the weather, the girl blushed, 'it's so nice out I feel like getting naked in the park,' the boy stopped, looked around and said 'which ways the park.' I chuckled as I walked by and pointed west and heard the girl say embarrassingly, 'Did he hear me?' I kept walking feeling the sun squirting through the apartment buildings on Park Avenue warming my face. I decided to head to Central Park just in case the opiate of the sun might really make someone strip down and dance in the Great Lawn. The Park was beautiful just on the edge of erupting in blooms and leaves, glowing with the buds that made it appear like it was an impressionist painting. People were lolly-gagging, day-dreaming, laying in the grass looking at the periwinkle blue sky and you could hear the faint melodious sound of a saxophone playing somewhere. The Great Lawn it was teeming with people throwing Frisbees, baseballs and just laying around. I walked to the middle of the Lawn sat down and looked south at Belvedere Tower and Turtle Pond and beyond to the Manhattan skyline rising up in the background like a glorious crown. I took a deep breath and reaffirmed that I lived in one of the greatest places on earth...

Gustave Courbet Day...

2008-04-04T19:50:00.008-04:00

The day is spring-like, the tulips on the islands of Park Avenue are sprouting and I've decided instead of going to the Biennial at the Whitney, where I surely would be disappointed, I would walk to the Met and see the Courbet show. 130 paintings of the "self proclaimed proudest and most arrogant man in France." And when you see that about half of the 130 paintings are self-portraits, the statement holds some truth. It's much less than that, but the show is top-heavy with his many self portraits in all of his imaginings of himself. Not that that is bad, the cheapest model in the world for any artist are themselves. But as I lolly-gagged through the exhibit because the beauty of some of the paintings are mind-boggling. Self portraits, portraits, landscapes, nudes, still life, animals, nudes, nudes... I'll get to the nudes later. To see a portrait of the poet Baudelaire who used to hide out in Courbet's studio dodging his landlord is priceless. But what I found to be Courbet's greatest subject were animals whether they be a part of a landscape or somewhat of a portrait in themselves. As he was a hunter his hunting paintings are inspiring. Having fans of the likes of everyone from Cezanne to Picasso in fine art the people that he might have had the biggest influence on are "pornographers" which with all it's negative references might be off-putting, but is not. Most of his nudes are lavish set pieces of curvaceous woman lingering outside. But a couple of the nudes which were privately commissioned are tastefully pornographic. With this in mind the Met seems to have set up the nudes room to capture this by placing a wall in the middle to delineate between the two and when you walk behind the wall it's like walking into a peep show, with drawings, paintings, photographs and a kaleidoscope-like-contraption that you look into to see a vagina that threatens one's own promiscuity. Through it all you are left to see a man who might seem arrogant but is truly a man who knew himself, he rejected the Legion of Honor in France, to be free and independent from any form of government. He not only knew himself he knew how to paint and forecast the future with a realism that makes your mouth water, your eyes search and your heart realize the truth in matters...

Tragedy Strikes Again...

2008-03-28T17:17:00.005-04:00

With cranes falling from the heavens and destroying whole buildings and killing and injuring people and cats beginning their lemming like leaps from high rise apartments (a guy was hit by one recently and was knocked unconscious) you never know when tragedy will strike. So when I stepped out to catch a little repast at a local eatery, Taco, Taco, I searched the skyline for any menacing metallic giants punctuating and polluting the skyline like wretched dinosaurs. There were none. Neither were there any flying felines. I crossed Second Avenue and entered Taco, Taco, and sat at an empty table. A waiter quickly asked me if I wanted anything to drink and I ordered a Corona sans the lime. It was brought to me post haste with a bowl of chips and salsa. I ordered the beef taco entree and sipped on the cerveza. There were about three other couples enjoying their meals and as I sat alone I took note of some of the conversation. It's a habit born out of boredom. One couple was talking about buying a new flat screen TV set, one was speaking loudly about Hillary Clinton dodging bullets on the tarmac and the other couple looked dreamily into each others eyes and fed each other tortilla chips. This encouraged me to eat a couple of the still warm hand made chips, dipping them in the homemade salsa, the perfect combination of tomato, peppers and spice. In what seemed like record time my food arrived and I savored the spicy, fresh Mexican cuisine. As I ate I heard the far off sound of a fire engine's siren but ignored it finishing my first taco with controlled zeal. As I ate my second taco the siren grew louder and more of them screamed in our direction. A waiter stepped outside to take a look and then quickly disappeared out of sight. The sirens were now deafening and the light show they were putting on outside alarmed me because if it was a fire it was close. More trucks came and all of the sudden a panic came upon me as the waiter came back saying the fire was right around the corner. I live right around the corner! I quickly stood, told my waiter I would be right back and ran out of the restaurant, looking at the pandemonium that was now 90st Street and Second Avenue. When I got to the corner I breathed a sigh of relief as the fire was far down the street from my apartment. But as I watched flames pour out of a window and firemen heading for the fiery sight it occurred to me again the capriciousness of tragedy. As a crowd began to gather I headed back to the restaurant relieved but saddened by someone else's tragedy. I sat down and finished my meal slowly and noticed the couple who were feeding each other earlier still looking lovingly into each others eyes. The other two couples talked on as they ate their food, none of them seeming to notice the commotion outside. I finished my food, paid my bill and walked home taking a last look at the fire that was still burning, thanking my lucky stars, gods, immortals and just good luck charms that this tragedy had spared me...

Wyeth's Winning Ways...

2008-03-21T08:22:00.010-04:00

There are times when you go to an art show and you can't get it out of your head. The images keep popping up either irritating or inspiring you. Jamie Wyeth's show at the Adelson
Galleries on 82nd Street not only inspires it squawks quite loudly. The squawks are the sounds of the sea gulls that are his main subject matter in this show. They are sublime, they are outrageous, they are disturbing, they are beautiful, they are enough for you to leave the show shouting Jamie Wyeth is America's greatest painter! Of all the superb paintings, The Inferno, is captivating, it takes you by the throat and shakes you until you say uncle. There is a video close by that shows Mr. Wyeth painting it. He talks about his inspirations for the gull paintings as he licks his brushes, rubs in color with his fingers, eye balls the scene from many angles, dabs, dips and drips with mastery all the while he has a globs of yellow paint on his face. The video is transcendent as are the paintings. Seven of the gull paintings are interpretations of the "Seven Deadly Sins", and I swear to everything that is holy, the eyes of some of these birds look back at you examining your purity of soul and judging you. This is a must see show. Jamie who is another chromosome fallen from the Wyeth artistic legacy, uses water colors in most of the paintings but performs some sort of alchemy so it appears to be thick oil paints. The paintings are mostly on paper and cardboard that punctuate the edgy subject matters and images. Nothing is wasted, every stroke even miscast ones come together collectively to create a unified weltanshaung. Upstairs where, The Seven Deadly Sins, are exhibited ,are also some portraits that Wyeth painted, including the one of Andy Warhol, above. Jamie had the great opportunity to paint at The Factory with Warhol and Michel Basquait. I could not imagine a more unusual trio, nor could I imagine a more interesting one. I left the gallery gulls squawking and images of such a profane nature in my head that I walked in the opposite direction of where I was supposed to be going...

Spitzer, Fall Out...

2008-03-14T10:14:00.011-04:00

Earlier in the week when I was out for my walk I passed the media circus that was parked in front of ex-Governor Eliot Spitzer's apartment building on 80th and Fifth Avenue. A lovely building tainted now. As they say the bigger you are the harder you fall, so Eliot will be hitting the ground like a dinosaur. Ah but, that story is already old, squeezed of all its juice by a media that is looking more like a monster than "the message" as McLuhan suggested all those years ago. Sometimes just walking can give you a fresh perspective, a new outlook, some positive in the negative and I just happened to find that after being reminded of the fallen, disgraced governor, who claimed to be pure as the driven snow. But enough of that, it's what I discovered on my walk that took my mind off of the Greek tragedy we are all witnessing. It was something old, a remembrance of a time gone by, maybe not a better time, but definitely a less jaded time.
It was a Fall Out Shelter sign attached to building on East 90th. These signs were originally created in 1960, some 48 years ago, giving people directions to cover where they could stay out of harms way of a nuclear explosion (yeah, right). The sign does resemble the radiation warning sign. The sign was created by a design company and some psychologists, who came upon the idea that yellow and black were the most recognizable and attention getting colors and the symbol could be seen clearly from at least 200 feet. The sign also had to be easily identified by not only English speaking people but non-English speaking and those that could not read at all. And so the design was cooked up and 400,000 outdoor placards were made and sent out all over the United States like the one above. You can get one of these originals on Ebay for about fifteen dollars. So, if I need the money I'll steal this one and if I was Mr. Spitzer if I saw one of these I'd head for it fast...

Buds, Kline, Buds...

2008-03-07T15:43:00.023-05:00

March is here and as I took off for a walk to L&M Arts to see the Franz Kline exhibit I could feel Spring in the air. The thermometer was tipping toward 50 degrees, the sun was out and on my way much to my surprise there hanging from a whole slew of trees were buds about to sprout. I was amazed, excited and relieved. Winter is actually at its end giving us reprieve from the horrors of darkness and cold. Day-light savings time starts this weekend. Happy Days! I took a picture of the buds just in case I was hallucinating and skipped on to L&M on 78th. I love Kline, his bold black strokes bounce off the canvas like superballs. The show is very small but several of the paintings have never been exhibited, Heaume and Black Star. They are both very striking but, Diamond, viscerally moved me and when I read the back story of the intrepid painting it rose to ranks of masterpiece. Diamond, the story goes, is a painting inspired by Kline's infancy. He painted from real life a diesel train that ran through the landscape of his childhood home in Pennsylvania. From those real life painting came this abstract painting and after learning of the train image I could not only see the black puffing iron horse chugging across the countryside I could hear it and feel it shake the ground as it passed. Back outside the spring day continued to heat up as did my spirit and when I got home I checked out the picture of the buds and lo and behold if I didn't see in the photo a Kline-ian image, the branches and buds the black paint strokes against the muted background. It might only be me spirited by Kline or it might just be Springtime...

Leap Year Mania...

2008-03-01T09:52:00.005-05:00

I love Leap Years, I've actually painted a picture with the title, Leap Year, it is above, it has a companion piece Non-Leap Year. There's just something about having a February 29 once every four years. It's like the disappearing coin trick. I have often wished like Superman I was born on a Leap Year and was officially a "leapling" and could be 25 when I was actually 100. It would be brilliant. I decided to celebrate and Take a Walk Around The Block on a very sunny February 29 and take in the air that you can only take in every four years. As I walked I thought about walking on a day that doesn't exist most years and it made me quite curious about the whole 365.25 days in a solar year that Julius Caesar at the advice of Sosigenes an Alexandrian astronomer created an extra day every fourth year unless of course it landed on a change of the century that was not divisible by four, so the likes of 1700, 1800 and 1900 were not leap years and 1600 and 2000 were. It gets more confusing than that believe it or not and this trickery was created in 1582 when the calendar year had lost 10 days to the solar year, so Pope Gregory XIII at the suggestion of his astronomer Clavius took ten days away that October so the day after October 4 it was October 15, and so the Gregorian calendar was born. Where did those days go? I don't know but I guess if you're a Pope or Caesar you can just throw them away like child's play. And speaking of child's play, another interesting aspect of Leap Year is that it is quite alright if a woman asks a man to marry on February 29, and in years past if the man refused he was fined or even sometimes confined, and I wonder after hearing that that 246 couples were married yesterday, 50% above the usual totals, if this old ritual is still something taken seriously. So love was in the air on this special day and I felt it as I headed down 2nd Avenue still wishing I was a leapling, savoring the extra day one step at time...

Shades Of Gray...

2008-02-23T10:37:00.005-05:00

I had read in the New York Times that it was a great show and being a Jasper Johns fan I was looking forward to seeing it although the title of the show, Gray, didn't inspire me much especially in the middle of winter at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. As I walked to the museum surrounded by gray cold weather I started getting even less excited. Johns the bridge between pop and abstraction is well know for his flags, bulls eyes. letters, numbers, maps and cross-hatching is appealing because of his keep it simple stupid attitude towards painting. When I walked into the show it was one thing and one thing only, Gray. Why should I have thought otherwise? It is a long, gloomy show that must have been downright depressing to curate or maybe not, I mean you just make a call and say give me all of your gray art. Although all the iconographic grayness i.e. the targets, maps, crosshatching and bulls eyes all were painfully, excruciatingly to look at,especially I have seen all the same in the muted and inspiring colors of John's real palate, there were some collage pieces that were more to my liking; pieces with drawers, spoons, plates, strings and other bric and brac that broke out from the foggy backgrounds and expounded on a grayness of the painterly moment. I guess I never believed Johns to be a gray guy and so seeing this display neither negates or punctuates his talents it just plays in the gray area where nothing can be judged, it just surrounds you in inertia. Back outside on my walk back home it was drizzling and I had no umbrella, a final reward for an attendance of something that never really turns me on, grayness...

Murder At 435...

2008-02-15T10:14:00.005-05:00

I wasn't going to write about this but after days of seeing, reading and breathing the news of the brutal bludgeoning of Dr. Kathryn Faughey at, The York, at 435 East 79th, I had to, not out of a sense of morbidity but out of being freaked out because that is where I lived for seven years before moving three months ago. To see the doorway I walked in and out of and the lackluster entranceway all over the papers, TV and anywhere else you might look (I'm sure it will be the New York magazine lead story next week) and the picture of the murdered doctor who I had seem hundreds of times but didn't know, it is just a little weird and I was just a little freaked out, so I must write. Especially since my thirteen year old daughter is totally obsessed with it because she believes it could have been her because being an elevator-phobe she had walked those steps so many times in her life. Although the stairs down to the basement were a less used path, making me think that whoever did commit this heinous crime knew the building and its escape route (could have it been a hit?). So my daughter being freaked out makes me even more freaked out and on that note I decided to call some old friends in the building and it was unanimous, freaked out, freaked out and more freaked out. And why shouldn't they be with a cadre of police and detectives marching in and out and a news truck parked permanently outside. Not to mention the quotes of the baritone doorman, Frank, saying that he was 99% sure he could recognize the guy, even though the guy is a murderer who is still on the loose and probably doesn't want anybody around that can recognize him. Frank was never a shy guy. How happy am I that I don't live there anymore? Need I answer that. But the whole sordid act and crime makes me again realize how fragile life is, that any second anything could happen and that in itself is the greatest reason to live life fully with no regrets. It also gives me pause to mourn the death of the innocent Doctor and her relatives, who did nothing to deserve this...

Discover Manhole Covers...

2008-02-08T13:20:00.002-05:00

As I was tripping along to the Whitney. And I really was tripping, I almost took a header on Third Avenue tripped by something sticking out of a manhole cover's pick hole. I saved myself with a one hand drop and pushed myself up so I was able to catch my balance. Not as good as the Eli Manning escape in the Super Bowl but hey I'm not paid a million dollars a minute. I looked down at the manhole cover and saw something not too many people in the city notice unless they are hit in the head by one of the iron covers when they come flying off in the depths of winter. That happens because of some kind of chemical reaction that I don't really understand. Anyway, as I looked down at the culprit for my almost disaster, I saw the country of its origin cast on it, India. It seems most of the manhole covers in the world are made in that country, but yet it seemed a bit surreal to see it emblazoned on a New York City manhole. Manholes which are the entrance to all things underground are everywhere when you start noticing them. Some of them Con Ed's, some the city's, some of them cable companies. Each one of these iron circular entrances weigh about 100 pounds, which if you took everyone of the hole covers in Manhattan would probably weigh as much as the earth itself. Manhole covers are usually round and Microsoft made that question a trademark of their interview process to try to find people who think outside of the box. "Why is a manhole round?" There were many interesting answers but the most straight forward one was, 'because manholes are round.' Another interesting thing about manhole covers is that in those great cities that host a Grand Prix event the covers on the city streets which the race follows have to be welded down because they will fly off due to the aerodynamics of the cars and the speed at which they race. As I stepped onto the ramp leading into the Whitney I noticed of all things another manhole cover. I looked at it in surprise and amusement and read the inscription, "In direct line with another & the next". I didn't quite understand it but I took a picture of it anyway. Yes sometimes this is a world of strange discoveries even if those discoveries are manhole covers...

Smith Sprays Sparklers...

2008-02-01T16:58:00.000-05:00

I did not know what to expect as I walked to meet a friend at the Gagosian Gallery on Madison Avenue to view David Smith's renditions of spray paint art, since he actually created all the pieces in the show in the 50's and 60's using the beloved graffiti elixir, acrylic spray paint that had just been invented. Yes, David Smith, the world renown sculptor could have been the first graffiti artist if he had done these on walls, sidewalks or subway trains. These works are transcendent, made way back when and still as current as tomorrow. The paintings are childlike and spiritual all at once. The large room upstairs is an ethereal holy land that you would expect to see monks walking around, saying their prayers, meditating on the meaning of life and death. All the works are dynamic in their imagery and simpleness, much like ancient cave paintings or the hand paintings of the aborigines. They are all on paper that have been spray painted over stenciled shapes and then joined and accented with splattering and small uses of brush work. The colors are simple, shadow-like with the pale off-white of the paper controlling the power of the images. They look very much like Smith's sculptures and capture the attention as well without the the three dimensionality. There are several sculptures peppered throughout the show. It is interesting to note that he was playing with this paint when he was in his 50's. He died in 1965 at the age of 59 in a car wreck in Bennington, Vermont. It would have been amazing to have seen what he would have played with in his later years. The show is curated by his daughter Candida Smith with Peter Stevens, Director of the David Smith Estate, needless to say they are more than up to the carrying out of this show. It is a show worth lingering over and as it flows through your being it will teach you more about a man's creativity and just plain creativity than any graduate art course could. I walked home with my friend musing over the Sprays of David Smith that set off sparklers in my imagination...

Eastside Billiards Baby...

2008-01-24T20:39:00.000-05:00

I used to play pool a lot. It was definitely a misuse of my youth but still it was always fun and provided some bucks when I needed them most. I was never involved in any pool hall brawls but I did witness a couple. Exciting stuff, pool cues and broken beer bottles and pool balls shoved into unsuspecting idiots' mouths. Good fun had by all. Recently I've felt the call of returning to the table to see if I had any skills left, so I set out on a walk that would take me to Eastside Billiards on 86th Street to meet a friend and go head to head in the game of pockets and felt. Is it billiards or pool you might ask? Well actually it's billiards the pool name was misnomer from the get go attached to the game of the gentry through association and from which billiard clubs and associations worldwide try to disassociate themselves from. It came about in ancient times when the billiard hall was a gathering place for betters to pool their money to bet on something, whether it was horses, games or cards. The rooms usually had billiards to play to pass the time between winning and losing your money, thus the name of pool for the ball and pocket game was born. It is from the name pool that the seamy reputation of the gentleman's and woman's sport was gotten. Eastside billiards isn't seamy but is a little tattered on the edges. It's a room of about sixteen tables and a modest bar that really gives you a good bang for the buck. The crowd is docile and well behaved. While I was there a grandfather was trying to teach two young cue carriers the ins and outs of the game. They were having a blast. My friend and I secured a corner table and began two hours of eight ball and two bottles of Red Stripe each. Some people say you play better when you drink but I would disagree. I got my ass beat bad. It was quite a humbling experience but it did not squelch my desire to play again. It felt good to be in a pool excuse me billiards room again and without the gagging smell of cigarettes stinking the place up it was downright pleasant. I left the place with my friend knowing that this would be a new weekly routine and I look forward to it...

Second Avenue Subway Blues...

2008-01-17T09:29:00.000-05:00

It's here and near. Being a person that never thought the Second Avenue subway would be built I am in awe of the sight of it as I walk around the block and watch sparks fly, legions of hard hats climbing in and out of holes that are lined with mammoth timbers, an army of back hoes, tractors, Con Ed trucks and various other vehicles all inside chain linked fences from 95th St. to 90th St. much to the chagrin of 2nd Avenue merchants who complain of the noise, the loss of business and the vermin infestation not to mention the mud and the urban scape that looks like a bomb was dropped. And this isn't even the tunnel being dug this is just the infrastructure that will surround and join the tunnel that is being dug seventy feet below the surface by a drill they call "The Mole" that is grinding through the bedrock of Manhattan quiet as a mouse. There will not be any dynamite or loud hammering just the slow movement of a humongous drill that nobody will hear or feel. That's miraculous! But still the controlled chaos above ground will certainly cause more than its fair share of blues and congestion as it slowly moves down 2nd Avenue and reaches midtown. There will be a lot of grumbling for the next twelve years but nothing is going to stop this juggernaut that will be finished in 2020 which is almost one century after the original 2nd Avenue line was conjured. It will cost approximately 17 billion dollars but that is an estimate that will surely go higher. It will start at 125th Street and travel all the way downtown. The stops on the Upper East Side will include 96th Street, 86th Street, where the Food Emporium will be destroyed and replaced by a subway station, 72nd Street and 63rd Street. As I walk through the maze that the above ground construction is creating I linger to feel "The Mole" burrowing below but I don't feel anything, just the usual shake, rattle and roll of New York City. I walk back through the contained chaos and wonder about what is ahead for the line that almost never was and wonder what it will be like to have a gleaming new subway running under my front door. It will truly a be an amazing day when that first train rattles down the track...

Rainy Day People...

2008-01-11T21:25:00.000-05:00

What a day, thunder and lightning and rain and more thunder and lightning and rain. I had the urge to walk in it. Coming from the Pacific Northwest, where the rain is thought to fall all the time, actually they get about half what New York City gets and having lived in London for six years where the rain is a cultural phenomenon but yet they still get less rain than New York (it's not the rain it's the gray), anyway the difference is in those two places the rain is usually a misty moist fog that permeates rather than falls while the rain in New York City falls in buckets and bounces off the sidewalks like ping-pong balls. A thunder shower in the city is like witnessing a torrential end of the world flood, but these types of rain usually happen in the spring and summer not in the middle of the winter. When I saw the first flash of lightning and heard the thunder and then saw the rain falling with thuds upon the street sounding like lemmings hitting the ground, it was a call to my rain loving heart. So I put on my trench coat and grabbed my duck umbrella and headed out. The rain must have caught most of the people outside by surprise because not a lot of them had umbrellas so they were ducking under awnings, covering themselves with their coats or as I saw one lady holding her shopping bag over her head like a Sherpa trekking in the Himalayas. Everyone seemed quite serious about it all but I could not help whistling and from where the tune came I don't know but it was an old ditty by America, the group, the title escapes me but it has the familiar lyrics, 'I've been to the desert on a horse with no name and it feels good to get out of the rain' or something like that. I found myself whistling and skipping over puddles the size of small clouds on Fifth Avenue. People looked at me as if I was a pink elephant. It was as dark as night and cars, buses and cabs with headlights on and horns blaring tried to feel their way through the monsoon. Small streams ran at breakneck speed to curb gutters. It was a baptismal paradise. It made me happy but even with my umbrella I was already soaked to the skin so at the Met I took a couple of pictures and headed home still whistling not able to get the ancient tune out of my head. At home I wrung out my clothes, dried my hair with a towel and stared out the window with a smile at the still falling precipitation...

Art Of Time...

2008-01-04T18:16:00.000-05:00

It's the New Year. Hurray! The thing about new years are that they make me think about the passing of time. And speaking of time I recently started writing another blog, Across The Universe, for followorion.com. I figure walking Around The Block on the Upper East Side gives me great experience to wander, Across The Universe. As I was researching my new blog I came upon a very interesting theory that created a bit of a quandary, a little inspiration and a lot awe. It had to do with time. It seems that some scientists in Spain are bucking the notion that space is expanding, i.e. there was a big bang and the universe is expanding outward in space (space was here before space) and is traveling zillions of miles an hour away from us. To tell you the truth this premise has never been understood by my feeble mind in lieu of the parenthetical above. And getting back to the aforementioned new idea, these crazy scientists think that it is not that space is expanding it is that time is slowing down! I can't explain this to you but it makes perfect sense and although it might seem similar to calling the Earth flat, I know that it is a correct premise. Don't ask me why, because that is a crooked letter? So what does this have to do with taking a Walk Around The Block on the Upper East Side, well, the Met has a small intimate show entitled, The Art Of Time, and after viewing the mega Rembrandt show,(that I will write about next time) I decided to stop into this little showcase of European time pieces. Intimate as it might be the show is expansive and beautiful and may I say it, timeless(sorry). Really, it was amazing, all the time pieces exhibited were stunning, from the melange of wrist watches, pocket watches, standing clocks, coo-coo clocks, astronomical clocks and regular clock clocks that stood like sentries protecting time. It was quite extraordinary and the historic details are tasty. Anyway as I walked out of the Met the whole time slowing down came back to me and I thought about my reasons for believing time is indeed slowing down. It was simple, clocks stop they don't go on forever infinity and beyond and surely everything ends so time will have to, too and this will happen when finally time slows to a stop and then that will be the end. It wouldn't be such a bad way to go. No apocalypse, burning hell and brimstone just silent death, no more ticking...

New Year's Cheer...

2007-12-28T16:49:00.000-05:00

Sometimes when you go on a Walk Around The Block, things go way wrong. I headed out to the Metropolitan Museum to see the Rembrandt show. I had my camera so I could take a few candid shots. Along the way on Third Avenue I came upon a street vendor who was selling 2008 party hats and glasses. I found them quite amusing so I stopped to take a photo. I took the one above and then was set upon by the crazy vendor, who screamed, that I could not take pictures of his property. I said, 'What?'. 'You cannot take pictures of my property! It is the law!' he screamed in broken English. I said very calmly,'This is Third Avenue and 84th Street, you do not own it, I can take a picture of anything I like.' 'You like! You liar! You know nothing! You aren't a lawyer!" I asked him politely to see his permit. 'You have no right to see it," he yelled half crazed. People were stopping, looking, gaping. I decided to leave. I walked on but instead of going to the show at the Metropolitan I went to Barnes and Noble for some new book buying and crazy vendor forgetting. After I finished spending my Christmas gift card I left feeling lucky. I stopped at a local magazine shop and bought a couple of scratch cards and actually won 25 dollars, but while I was there a man disturbingly drunk and irritated by something I was not responsible for pushed me and yelled 'Get out of my way you fucking asshole.' Surprised I asked 'what was wrong?' 'I'll show what is wrong. Come out onto the sidewalk. I like to fight. I've won three purple hearts. I was a Ranger in army.' I looked at him, wanting to say, if you are a hero and an Army Ranger you would not be acting like this? Instead I just shook my head as the cashier started yelling at him to get out. He left yelling something about my mother and leaving a scent of cheap booze. I actually at that time was about to jump into the fray. I've been in a couple fights in my life and my anger after the earlier vendor run-in and now someone talking bad about my dead mother almost got the best of me. But I calmed myself and noticed as I walked out the door the drunk growling at another passer-bye. I looked down and shook my head remembering my father's famous words, 'don't sweat the small stuff.' I walked on and will continue to into the New Year...

My Favorite Things...

2007-12-21T11:04:00.000-05:00

The holiday season is here and going out for a walk can be a magical thing, especially on The Upper East Side. Some of my favorite walks during the Yule Tide include walking slowly through the Christmas trees that are for sale on various sidewalks. I close my eyes and take in the aromatic pine smell and imagine I am walking in a forest looking to find and cut down my very own tree. Another great place I walk to take in the festivities is the Metropolitan Museum. The decorated Grand Hall is spectacular and you can enjoy it with out paying, just sit,relax and watch the people enter and leave and imagine what they do, taking special note of the din of the magical murmuring. Bloomingdale's is an extraordinary holiday destination. It is electric with excitement and you don't even have to buy anything, just take the escalator up and down and let the spirit and buzz send tingles down your spine. I also just like to walk down Madison Avenue taking in all the windows that are decked out like no other place in the world. And on the return trip I like to walk up Park Avenue taking in the lights that don the divide, jumping into any church along the way to take in the special and unique holiday decorations and lights. It's always been my practice that sometime during the season to stop into the Heidelberg Restaurant and Bar for a wheat beer. The decor is inspiring and the beer frosty cold. And in keeping with the enjoyment of holiday spirits during the holidays I also like to stop into any of the many Irish pubs in the neighborhood for a warm Irish coffee; for some it is egg nog but the mixture of Irish whiskey and caffeine laden joe with a little whip cream on top puts me in the holiday spirit before I finish it. Then there is always walking around markets in the area, to glide through and be lifted by the aromas; whether it be, Eli's, Agatha Valentina, or the Pickle factory they all make you happy and make the mouth water in anticipation of coming holiday meals. Finally, its always nice to come home and turn on the lights on my small tree and enjoy the spirit of the season in the warmth of my own living room and think about all that there is to be thankful for...

Johns, Dubuffet, Debauchery...

2007-12-14T15:34:00.000-05:00

The day after ugliness. The snow is gone, the icy conditions melted away so it is time to get out of the apartment and where better place to walk but to the Johns, Dubuffet show at the Leo Castelli gallery on 77th Street. I met a friend there. It's an old brownstone mansion that brings about a feeling of nostalgia especially after reading the article in the New York Times by John Stausbaugh "In the Mansion Land Of the 'Fifth Avenoodles'" A raucous look at the history of the Upper East Side and all that it was, is and probably will be. As I got into the two person elevator with my female companion it was so intimate that we had to fake the obvious sex scene. We fell out of the elevator laughing and were immediately sobered by the small but mercurial show. My curiosity of putting these two artist together was immediately solved. It was like two people having sex in a small elevator as much sensual as it was obvious. Their work together falls into a synchronicity that elevates both of them. Even though most of the Dubuffet pieces are from the 60's and 70's and the John's pieces are from the 70's, 80's and 90's, they all display a sense of humor and simpleness that lead you to recognize and then amuse and then reassess and then amuse again. They are two artists that are made to be shown together as I guess the geniuses at Castelli knew. We left walking down the three flights of stairs out into the sunny, crisp weather that heightened the holiday spirit. We walked up Fifth Avenue and I fell into an imaginative historic contemplation thanks to Mr. Stausbaugh's article. Back to a time when all the Upper East Side was meadows and swamps and the only way you were able to get here was by boat from the lower lands of New Amsterdam. It must have been a great trip as is the walk up Fifth Avenue with someone you like, taking in all the subtle histories that rise from the concrete like magical, erotic ether...

Let It Snow...

2007-12-06T15:18:00.000-05:00

I woke up at 6 am and felt restless so I put on my clothes and headed outside for a Walk Around the Block, without looking out to see what the weather was like. When I got outside it wasn't frightening but it was the first snow of the season to hit town. It was still darkish out but the dusting of white harmony made things glow. I headed to the 24 hour coffee shop to get a cup of burnt coffee to go. The streets were somewhat deserted so it was basically me and the snow and hot caffeine. I walked west on 88th street and suddenly without forewarning I slipped and fell on my ass but did not spill the coffee. As I sat on my ass a very nice stranger walked by and asked if I was alright, all I could do was laugh because all I could think about was that commercial about the elderly person that falls down and keeps saying 'I've fallen down and I can't get up' 'I've fallen down and I can't get up' which isn't really funny but it just makes me laugh, plus I hadn't spilled a drop of coffee. It was a miracle, so I sipped from the brown buzz nectar. And then I laid down and looked up at the brackish sky and building above and decided to do what is appropriate to do when you are laying in the snow, make a snow angel. I did and I cursed myself for not having brought my camera. I stood and admired my work and then walked on and started hearing the symphony of scraping shovels as shopkeepers started their citywide responsibility of clearing their patch of sidewalk, doing the dance of pushing the snow to the curb. It's a great opera in the dawnish hours. I walked by Ruppert Park and stopped to watch several early rising toddlers playing in the white fleece, some who it seemed it might be the first snow they had ever seen or touched. A snowball fight broke out between a gaggle of giggling girls, not a lot of the cold spheres met there mark most of them fell apart before they even arrived. I picked up a bit of the whiteness and touched it to my tongue, it was cold and tasted a bit like spearmint. I looked over the wintry scene and felt good about it mostly because it would be melted before nightfall and not be an ongoing slushy mess. I strolled along and whistled a wintry tune blowing out an icy steam that led me home...

Light From Heaven...

2007-11-30T10:28:00.000-05:00

A funny thing happened to me on my way to the Guggenheim, I didn't make it. Instead, as I walked by the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, I saw a stealth banner with art about a show: Provoking Magic, Lighting of Ingo Maurer. I knew the name but had little knowledge of this legend's work and being an interested lightofile (I've made a couple of lamps in my day) I decided to check it out. Phenomenal is light praise for this collection of way-out there lighting pieces, heavenly could be a description but I'm sure some people who believe in such a thing might not think it proper. I do. Ingo Maurer is a god. God of lighting, anyway. He creates a menagerie of work that displays light, tricks the viewer, changes space, augments design, interrupts time, makes you look, makes you look, makes you look in the picture book! It's awesome. His light not only throws light it throws light on light. Every room you go into is a new experience, a play, a narrative that is thrust upon you and the narrative ranges from the hilarious to the melancholy of a sitting room. There are fireplaces, tables, gold fish ponds, wallpaper, mirrors, sculptures, paintings all using light in vastly creative and outrageous ways. When you walk up the stairs you are literally watched by a pair of portraits of Mr. and Mrs. Carnegie whose eyes shift and who speak as they look down at you. And although the lighting is extravagant there is also plenty of consideration for the simple screw in light bulb, but what you perceive as an everyday light bulb is actually a holograph of a light bulb, one of them even has a holographic fly on it that changes places as you walk past. He has put lights on hat bands that strike you with first their beauty and then their humor. He has an egg swirling in a watery tornado lit with a crisp white light that is hypnotizing. Before I left I secretly took some photos from the hip not knowing what I was getting. Above is what I photographed, it is not of a single piece of Ingo Maurer's but the reflections of a room full of them and my ode de Maurer...

Art Is Everywhere...

2007-11-20T13:42:00.000-05:00

The day after Thanksgiving, I'm still more stuffed than the turkey. So I decided to take a Walk Around The Block to massage a bit of the bloating from my being. And since I'm feeling a bit slow I decided to keep it low by searching the sidewalks for a little chicanery. It's something I do to test my artistic acumen and my sense of humor. The great French artist Duchamp created the "found object" form of art. He found toilets, bikes, tools and placed them into the realm of the artistic and they became art. Myself, when I search the sidewalks, I'm searching for tableaus that stir my imagination. These tableaus consist of everything from tossed garbage to scrapes in cement to discarded gum. I even captured a puddle of spittle covering a dime that magnified it to a size of a quarter that was beside a giant water bug. The still life quality of this display inspired me to draw it but it just didn't look as good as the original sidewalk art. So I was out and about trying to get a bit of the gobble out of my bobble. I searched the sidewalk for anything that would capture my artistic eye and my funny bone. The first thing I came upon was two pieces of gum, different colors, that appeared to look like super dog, a super-hero that can stretch, bounce and blow bubbles and all this against a florescent blue background. I liked it so I took the picture above. I hadn't gone three steps when I saw what I am now calling "banana on the moon". It was a banana skin, that makes me laugh every time I see one on the ground because of the crazier than life pratfalls that come from slipping on one. So it had me at that. I took the picture and realized how much better it was than just a slippery fall; it actually looked like a banana on a half moon, hence the title. With these two images caught I headed home feeling lighter and happier and ready to start the holidays, realizing once again, art is everywhere...

Discovering New Things...

2007-11-15T09:46:00.000-05:00

Getting away from unpacking is my favorite pasttime these days and it has let me walk around my new neighborhood to get a feel for it and discover new things. Although I am only 11 blocks and a couple of Avenues from where I once lived and still on the Upper East Side it is like moving to another world, different personality, different things to see and eat and different things to discover. The first thing I discovered thanks to a meticulous friend is that you spell Ruppert with two p's not with one like I did in my last blog. The second thing I discovered was that the Second Avenue Subway is not an urban myth but a huge construction site right now running from 94th Street to 92nd Street that creates a maze of mammoth proportions forcing people to take elaborate routes to get somewhere that is causing quite a stir amongst the local shopkeepers, who place loud flyers of protest in their windows claiming the city has totally disregarded them in their plight dealing with the bold move forward to create more much needed public transportation. I understand their pain but as they say, whoever they are, you can't stop progress. I've also discovered a couple of great restaurants, including Taco, Taco and Delizia Pizza and become reacquainted with Rathbones an old haunt that still remains a great pub. On one discovery walk I took a turn on 88th Street and was excited to find a small gallery space that looked very interesting, unfortunately it was not open although there was a dog sleeping on the windowsill that looked up at me with a suspicious eye as I took the picture above. Was the dog the gallery owner or a piece of art, these questions haunted me because I was unable to enter Gallery 221? The small space had one large piece on the floor, a roller coaster looking ceramic sculpture that playfully captured a mood of carnival. There were also some staff-like ceramic pieces that hung on the walls. It would be hard to get two people in the place at least with the dog there, but size never was a detriment in my mind when it comes to art or showing art, so my curiosity was so peaked that it probably could kill a couple of cats although I would never intend to do such a thing even though I am allergic to the feline species. I wondered who the artist of the ceramic fantasia was and who owned the joint and if that dog could actually be a high-fillutin art dealer? These are things I will have to find out when I return. I left continuing my discovery stroll...

(Part 2) Moving In...

2007-11-08T09:35:00.001-05:00

So the moving men from Oz are gone, the price of the move was twice the estimate and I'm sitting amongst boxes I packed less than 24 hour ago feeling down and out. Two things not to have when you are moving: a teenage daughter, who sits around complaining about not being able to watch the Gilmore Girls while she packs one earring at a time, or a dog that barks through out the move between nervous pees and diarrhea in the hallway of the new digs. It isn't pretty. So now I sit on my broken barker lounger and peer at several art frames that are broken and one piece of art that is gouged. I am told that all of this will be taken care of and not to worry. But I do. As I start taking stuff out and placing it in foreign places in the new house, I understand why people say the three most upsetting things in life are death, divorce and moving. On the move out I got rid of a great deal of stuff I hadn't seen in years collecting a dozen yellow refund receipts from thrift shops and just tossing a lot of other junk. Now as I unpack I do the same. Out with the old in with the new. As I write this my dog is peeing on a box because I have not taken her on her walk. I climb through the maze of boxes and furniture, clean up the mess and put the leash on her and head out on my first walk around the neighborhood. I like the new location in the shadows of Rupert Towers. There's a park where children play, there's a hill that is hard to climb and will serve as good exercise and I'm closer to Fifth Avenue and the Museum Mile. As I walk the dog I realize I don't want to return to unpacking so I walk all the way to Central Park, my dog looking back at me with a 'where the hell are we going' look. I look back at her with an 'I don't know look' because I don't know...

(Part 1) Moving Out...

2007-11-03T09:49:00.000-04:00

So after looking at over seventy apartments, actually a lot of them would not be considered apartments in third world countries, and dealing with real estate people from hell and other parts far worse than that, and actually making moving arrangements to move from the much loved Upper East Side to the new enclave of fresh and new, Long Island City, that is one stop from Grand Central and gives you expansive views of Manhattan, on the last day before moving, having just started packing I see an apartment for rent ad in the New York Times. The apartment is on East 90th Street and for some strange reason it sounds legitimate. I make my daughter come with me for the eleven block walk. We arrive and agents and their clients are circling like vultures for the owner to show up. When she arrives she lets us in and it turns out to be the perfect apartment so I have to move quickly to get to the real estate office on the Upper West Side with papers,cash and certified checks, racing a dozen blood sucker agents and their clients. An elbow to the face stopped the closest agent to the door. My daughter threw a body block which wiped out another and we were off! The next morning after not sleeping,praying, meditating and incanting magical words, burning sage and screaming at all that makes the universe turn, I get the phone call and I'm in! What a blood curdling process. Now the moving out is in process and I just want to go to sleep for a year. There is a deep realization that all the crap I've accumulated over the years I should just throw away, it all seems pretty worthless. Bric and brack, albums, cd's, old computers (I still have an Apple 2E computer from the 1980's); heirlooms that are more like error looms; books, way too many books, that I will never read again; plates, glasses and silverware, I mean really, don't you need just one of all them?; pillows of all kinds, again one is enough, maybe three; and just tons of stuff that I have dragged home for some reason or another that I can't remember; clothes that I don't want to wear anymore, why can't I just walk around naked? It's endless and I'm in the middle of it and all I want is to beamed out of here to anywhere that is not cluttered with boxes and junk and doesn't involve moving out...