Archive for the ‘friends’ tag
Thanks to all..
Part of my Birthday celebration has been a vacation from on line life. After a couple of days in meat world, I’m coming back, so let me express deep thanks for all those great birthday greetings. I’m bowled over!
Tags: daily photo, friends, gratitudeRelated posts
Two trucks in two days….
This big odd thing was in front of my door today, pumping or flushing something underneath the street. ConEd sent it out, but I have no ideas for what purpose.
I’m back in the office, on what is usually a day off, trying to finish up some stuff before a teaching trip to Tennessee. Communication seems to be the watchword of the day, and we’re all struggling to come up with the right words to give shape to our plans.
Last night’s opening was quite nice, what with Lolita showing up, a quick dinner with her and my friend Lynne and then a surprise run in with another friend on the way to the subway. It all felt very civilized, and at the event I got to make the acquaintance of Napoleon, a kissy and excitable french bulldog. I’m hoping to get some more work done this weekend, along with getting my fridge cleaned out tonight and hopefully some laundry and other mundanities.
Lyn asked me about my feelings about the president last night. I couldn’t say much then, beyond not being over surprised. I do think that he needs to give up on the idea of winning over his opposition. They are too high on their bile at this point for him to even make a case. With the advent of Fox news, we now have a case where frothing yahooism has become a profit making business, where candidates can spend years amasing money and speaking past the government in a way that negates traditional notions of bipartisan governance. They make more money by yelling and sniping, without ever having to govern, to fix problems and deliver services. It is in the proposal for those fixes that all of the risk of politics resides. So Obama is hamstrung in some ways, because people don’t have to work with him if they don’t want and get more mileage out of their refusal.
Tags: daily photo, friends, my block, politicsRelated posts
Where to start?
Just had my first look at LJ in about six days. An 8am meeting at work today, so every time I look at the clock I can’t believe that it’s still so early in the afternoon. I bought lunch at 11:30 because I just couldn’t wait. And now I’m jonesing for a nap.
This is due in part to my efforts to finish a piece for an exhibition in in that’s opening tonight: http://www.annakustera.com/ . If you’re in New York City and feel like coming by, I’ll probably be there on the early side. After dropping off my piece last night I took this shot of a truck full of Richard Serra, probably destined for a Gagosian Show up the block.
I also took a trip to the Boston area this past weekend, and got to see some LJ folks there, including badfaggot and quirkstreet. It was a lovely weekend all in all.
Tags: daily photo, friends, making art, new york in black and whiteRelated posts
Keep coming back to it…
I don’t know why. It’s not even that good a picture. But out of the dozen or so I shot yesterday, I keep coming back to this one of Thor about to leave the theater after he and Mudcub and I saw The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, Terry Gilliam’s latest self portrait.
There’s something very sweet about it, even though the color is fucked and the seats and the back wall of the theater aren’t parallel. Last night was sweet as well. I got taken out to a delicious meal at Tabla, from their tasting menu, which meant that I didn’t have to decide about anything other than my cocktail, a method of dining I’m coming to appreciate. During the movie I to to share chocolate chip cookies made by my talented sister. And we basically had the screening to ourselves, with the exception of some six other people. I bet the movie is tanking. I also know I’ll be impatiently lining up to buy it in disc format. Like all of my favorite Gilliam movies, it flops around looking for an ending, as though Gilliam couldn’t quite bear to leave the world he so lovingly crafted.
It’s a plea for the imagination, at the same time being a gimlet eyed look at the havoc artists wreak on those around them. The “lies” of today’s digital film making are played off against the solid pleasures of theatrical trickery that live on the viewers faith. Christopher Plummer’s Parnassus is an honest mountebank who comes up against Heath Ledger’s empty charlatan. Tom Waits plays a maguffin. The frame is stuffed with beautiful tarnish to look at. All in all, my kind of flick, bilious and odd as it is.
Tags: food, friends, movies, Terry Gilliam, thorRelated posts
The last day…
Here it is. I’m leaving town for a couple of days, and all the preparation has somehow left me unable to wrap my head around the end of the year/decade/etc.
Let me just wish you the very best. It feels like so many of us have been crawling over the roughest of terrain. I pray that our way may be made smooth in the coming year. Let’s remember those that didn’t make it this far and give sustenance to those still with us.
Tags: friends, New Years EveRelated posts
Dan
Just received the news of Dan Simmonds’ (danbearnyc) unexpected death this morning.
People have already begun to testify to his great capacity for friendship and humor. I loved that he was also the guardian of the sort of glorious fey erudition that few attempt any more. He could be overwhelming, but never small minded.
In recent years he had made great strides with his health, which makes this even the sadder.
And he loved that damn bee.
Tags: death, friendsRelated posts
Still coming down…
Yes It’s snowing here in Brooklyn, and blowing. It’s piling up in the street because plowing doesn’t happen so much in the minor boroughs and certainly even less in our little particular back water. It’s not bad news. I’ve had a good day all in all, sleeping off the bad vibes of a brutal work week this morning until Lehigh licked me awake, and I got started preparing for company. The scattered, clumsy energy I seemed to have around me persisted today, as I kept knocking things over and spilling stuff into the middle of 2009’s last poker and cigar party at my house.
Folks arrived early, and I was at a loss given how utterly filthy the house was, and how I had only just begun to clean the most offensive spots when the bell rang.Luckily my friends quickly tired of my apologies and made me take it easy. After a couple of hours of play I began to unwind. I ended up losing a few bucks but won some good hands early on and had a great time, happily seeing Jeff, Ed, Scotty, Scott, Thor and Mud. Bears, cigars, poker, pizza, what more calming influences are there?
Tags: Cigars, daily photo, friends, poker, thor, weatherRelated posts
Dinner with Gregg…
It was a convoluted weekend, but almost every minute of it was spent in the company of interesting people. Yesterday afternoon, I dragged my soaked self into Veselka to have a dinner and conversation with my friend Gregg.
Even though our paths have crossed many times over the past twenty years, it was the first time that we’ve ever sat down and had a full talk. It ranged across what we’ve been doing professionally, through our daily lives to the struggles making things and organizing (when he told me scale of the program he chairs I was a bit overawed) to the very odd emotional valences of our particular moment. He helped me to acknowledge a feeling of loss and disruption that I feel has been lurking just out of the reach of my mind for quite a while.
His ambivalences were welcome in highlighting my own. And after we had talked for quite a long time, we both walked over to St. Marks Books, and pointed each other towards books of poetry that we had enjoyed. In parting, he gave me a copy of his new book, which is composed, quite beautifully, entirely of questions.
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Am I obsessed or accomplishing something?
I’ve spent about 9 hours out of the last 24 trying to sort out the mess of my contact list. Some of it goes all the way back to my Rolodex – which I haven’t used for a good ten years, but which is where many of these contacts got their start before they were entered into my various PDAs and then transferred from one OS to another. The last big problem was dumping everything off of my Treo into gmail and then from there to into my iPhone. Fields are in the wrong place, there are tons of duplicates, and every time I’d scroll through my phone to look for something, it would make me depressed. Somehow, last night I became determined to put it right, and today I’ve continued the work, hoping for that perfect synch some time in my future.
Going through old contacts of course brings up both puzzlement (Just who the heck is this person anyway?) and sadness. So many deaths. And even in the midst of the information midden heap we inhabit, where nothing ever seems to go away, it’s hard not to feel strangely apprehensive when the software warns you that “This action cannot be undone” as your finger is about to click the “delete” button for the second time.
As it is my head is buzzing with names and numbers, and I’m still not really done.
Tags: data, friends, organizingRelated posts
Say your prayers, villain!
Shoulders aching. It’s been a bumbling weekend. A little sketching got done. Things interrupted other things. Saturday’s weather was simply wretched: sloppy not snow not rain, falling so slowly that it didn’t count as sleet either. But its damp and cold penetrated everywhere, especially for under-dressed me. I finished up reading The Year’s Best Science Fiction 14, but it was probably wrong to read it all at one go. I think the editors favor a kind or story that hits very predictable marks, and by then end of the anthology I was too often anticipating the plot twists to b e able to enjoy the writing.
Lately I’ve been trying to gingerly re-approach the things that were important to me as a kid: science fiction and comics and it’s a little bit rough going with both. There’s so much out there, and as in everything else, so much of it isn’t very good. I left comic fandom in part because of fatigue over drawn out punchfests that padded stories into multi issue affairs with very little actual payoff. In trying to pick them up again I’m seeing the same thing at work.
Of course genres are only as good as their individual practitioners, and my sample has been pretty small, so I shouldn’t really leap to conclusions. Still I’m much happier reading obscure kiddie comics from the fifties than today’s superhero offerings. And learning more from the drawings, too.
The new book is Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us, which is the kind of light non fiction that I love, but which always makes me faintly embarrassed, like I should know all this this stuff already, should have read the tougher science books that he is popularizing here. Truth is, it’s like a science fiction book itself, with the bones exposed: post apocalyptic, right? I’m comforted by the notion of the earth being able to continue on its way without the noisome presence of human beings, and even though artists are supposed to be in the immortality business, making things to outlast ourselves, I’m happy to contemplate the oblivion which awaits all of my works.
Tags: books, comics, daily photo, fandom, food, friends, weather