Manhattan Predator

Posted on October 20, 2016 by Exile on Pain Street

To almost everyone’s delight, peregrine falcons have settled in Manhattan. There are currently about half dozen pair. Falcons mate for life. They adapt to city life remarkably well. There’s shelter and an endless supply of rats and pigeons to eat. They should’ve moved in ages ago.

This guy occasionally perches on a beam outside my office. I took these from different angles to get varied, more interesting, backgrounds.

I’m up on the 50th floor. It’s so high that mobile phone signals don’t reach us. We need repeaters installed in our ceiling. Helicopters fly by at eye level. No other city bird flies up this high. We never see pigeons or sparrows up here.

Early in the summer it’s usually a mother and an eyasses. That’s a baby falcon. They’ll perch on opposite beams and screech at each other. By autumn they’re on their own.

They are FAST. Peregrine falcons have been clocked at over 200 mph. I’ve only witnessed one departure. He spread his wings, dove off the beam and shot straight down towards the street like a bullet. He was gone in a blink.

I said ALMOST everyone is delighted. There are luxury apartments along Central Park on the Upper West Side that have tried to have falcon nests removed from their eaves—eyasses and all. Apparently, a dead rat or two can fall out and land at the entrance. To my complete delight, the tabloids laid into them as unfeeling, rich prigs so they backed off.

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Currently at the Gladstone Gallery’s 21st street space is Ugo Rondinone’s the sun at 4pm. The literature gussies it up as ‘a visual link between nature and the human condition.’ Yeah, yeah. Whatever. What I see is a room full of vibrantly colored stone sculptures.

What’s cool about it is you can weave between sculptures and get all kinds of playful angles and shades. The light pours in through a skylight and what you see depends on how the light hits them.

The sculptures seem haphazardly strewn about the room but you can detect some order if you stand the right spots.

I wish they had stuff like this back when I was still doing bong hits. Can you imagine this on hallucinogens?

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Sticking with Gladstone, this time their 24th Street gallery, is Matthew Barney’s Facility of DECLINE. It’s a recreation of his 1991 career-launching New York debut exhibit. The exhibit contains film and sculpture and, quite honestly, I found it kind of boring. The fun piece is inside this walk-in cooler:

Barney, a hulking physical fitness nut, created this bench press. The structure had a translucent interior skeleton but it’s mostly made of petroleum jelly. It needs to be kept cool or it’ll melt.

Don’t tell anyone but I poked it a bit just to see how deep the vaseline layer is. It’s pretty impressive. Barney is perhaps best known as ex-husband of Björk, who seems to have suffered a severe emotional breakdown when he left. In Black Lake, from her 2015 release Vulnicura she “sings”:

I did it for love, I honored my feelings
You betrayed your own heart, corrupted that organ

Family was always our sacred mutual mission
Which you abandoned

You have nothing to give, your heart is hollow
I am drowned in sorrows

Jesus, baby, take it easy. It’ll be okay. On a press junket in 2000 for Dancer in the Dark, Björk claimed making the film was “…like signing on to war, going to the Vietnam War. I believed I might die.” She’s a little prone to histrionics, to say the least. Can you imagine being married to that?

~~~~~~~~~~

Piotr Uklanski
The Nazis
Est. $500,000-700,000
Sold for $550,000

This is a giant work. It covered an entire wall. They’re stills from movies and television that show various actors portraying Nazis. It’s like Where’s Waldo for the Third Reich. I uploaded a high resolution pic so you can click on it and see how many actors you can identify. Can you spot the young Clint Eastwood? How about Werner Klemperer from Hogan’s Heros? It’s fun! Except the part about them being Nazis.

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Daughter hamming it up at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in front of Ellsworth Kelly’s Spectrum V. My girls make me laugh.

Jerks ruin it for everyone

Posted on September 29, 2016 by Exile on Pain Street

Two posts ago I riffed on the new internet kiosks dotting Manhattan. They provide free wifi and unfettered internet access. OF COURSE people took advantage.

As that titan of New York journalism, the Daily News put it, pervs were using them to watch porn. The service has come to its foreseeable conclusion. The kiosks still radiate wifi signals but you can no longer surf the web.

~~~~~~~~~~

bins

June 2, 1993

Had brunch on Sunday with Klinger. His place on West 4th Street looks bigger since his live-in left and took everything with her. He still has the mirror that looks like the MasterCard logo.

We walked a couple blocks to Boxers and got a table outside to watch the parade of humanity. When I first got to NYC that place was called Jimmy Day’s. Sinatra used to drink there. It closed, was sanitized and now it’s Boxers. It’s charmless.

Klinger got into a shouting match with a homeless transvestite with blue fingernail polish. Ellen from work walked by and stopped to chat. I’m sure she thinks Klinger and I are gay. She said she’ll finish her summer internship and return to Stanford in the fall and some other stuff but I got bored and stopped listening. Klinger and I flirted with the waitress.

Klinger suggested I get some 8×10’s made and try to land some commercial work. He said my face is just bland enough for it. He said one toothpaste commercial that runs nationally and I’m set. He wrote out a working resume that was all lies. He listed classes I’ve never taken and work I’ve never done. I protested but he told me to stop being such a pussy. That everyone in the entertainment industry lies.

After Boxers, we stopped in El Coyote and sat at the bar. He had to work in a restaurant in a couple of hours and said he needed a margarita or he’d never make it. The barmaid was enamored with me for some reason. I didn’t do anything to encourage it. She’s from Yugoslavia. Her teeth and fingertips were yellow from chain smoking. She has straight, shiny, black hair, like a Japanese girl. I couldn’t understand a word she said through her thick, Eastern European accent. She had a pretty face but smelled like an ash tray that needed emptying. I told her I loved the background music so she popped the cassette out and gave it to me.

Klinger was supposed to start work at 4:00 but we didn’t leave El Coyote until 4:10. He’s going to lose that job, too. He doesn’t give a damn. He’ll get another. I wish I could be more like that.

I walked down Broadway and at Bond Street there was a Beatles cover band playing outside an art gallery. They were promoting a show of Beatles photographs. I went inside and was immediately accosted by a gallery rep who tried to sell me a photo for $500. As if. I wanted to shoot pool but I was broke so I went home.

~~~~~~~~~~

The fam and I saw this beauty at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia.

Nari Ward
Iron Heavens
Oven pans, cotton and burned baseball bats

The oven pans reminded Ward of a starry night.

The bats ‘ground’ sky and earth. The cotton references the old South slave trade, but is also the material used for bandaging and healing.

Lots of messages and mixed meanings but, as is usually the case, this works for me primarily on a visual level.

You Only Live Twice: A 9/11 Story

Posted on September 14, 2016 by Exile on Pain Street

True story.

15 years ago…

On September 10, 2001, I was working in the graphics department of an asset management firm located in midtown Manhattan. My graphics colleague from the Atlanta office, Jose, was in town for marketing and branding strategy meetings.

As he left the office that evening, he told me about his plans to visit the observation deck of the World Trade Center the next morning before coming to work. Jose was an architecture buff. He was thrilled at the opportunity to see Manhattan from such a rare perspective. The weather forecast was for bright, blue skies.

The next morning, at 8:46 a.m., the first plane flew into the North Tower.

At 9:03 a.m., the second plane hit the South Tower. The tower with the observation deck.

Our offices were on a high floor on 6th Avenue and 46th Street. The employees gathered in the main conference room, which had sweeping, unobstructed views of the southern tip of Manhattan. We watched in stunned silence as one tower fell. Then the other.

It would be up to our manager to contact Jose’s family in Atlanta to tell them of the tragic misfortune. He was a young guy. Really bright. And so happy to be visititing New York.

At 11:00, Jose walked into our office.

He had overslept.

The hotel maid had drawn the blackout blinds—something he never does himself, preferring to rise with the sun. When his alarm went off at 6:00 a.m. the room was dark. He was delirious from being woken from a sound sleep. He thought he’d set his alarm incorrectly and that it was still the middle of the night, so he went back to sleep.

While brushing his teeth and cursing himself for having missed the chance to visit the observation deck, a special bulletin came on the TV. He sat in his hotel room, transfixed to the TV, not realizing we all thought he’d perished.

I hadn’t spoken to Jose in many years. I reached out to him this past weekend just to confirm I didn’t imagine this happening. It’s all true. He left graphic design and now works designing medical devices at M.I.T.

~~~~~~~~~~

I saw Springsteen perform earlier this year and sent a couple concert pics to my pal, Sharon Florin, an artist who specializes in New York City architecture and is a yuge Springsteen fan. She was inspired and made two fetching oil paintings based on the photos. That’s my photo on the left and her interpretation on the right.

I like the paintings better. The photos look too stark. Too ‘real’. I prefer the implied blur of the paint.

I am not the enemy, ladies.

Posted on August 29, 2016 by Exile on Pain Street

bins

April 6, 1992

Should I feel guilty about having fun at the pro-choice rally in D.C.? I believe in the cause wholeheartedly. It’s a matter of life and death. But Suzanne asked me to go with her and her friends and I wanted to seduce her. It was mayhem, as expected. The crowd was estimated at a half million people. How can they know for sure? Regardless, I think we got our point across.

I thought it was going to be a gentle, rolling sea of delightful bachelorettes but it was actually a raging tsunami of pissed-off political militants. There were portions of the rally that were downright anti-man. I felt like the enemy. I am not the enemy! I’ll tell you what it was a sea of: lily white faces. 100% Caucasian. Where was the minority representation? It’s their cause, too.

Planned Parenthood sponsored a special non-stop train there and back. I stopped at the Middle Eastern bakery on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn the night before to load up on snacks for the trip. I bought dried apples, cashews, dried bananas, peanuts, dried apricots, yoghurt covered raisins, some breads and a big bottle of water, the total of which weighed about 70 pounds. I got the gold medal for snacks. A fun, healthy, politically progressive combo. By the end of the day my body ached for a thick, undercooked cheeseburger. They all brought boring stuff to eat and glommed off my stash.

We got to the Washington Monument late in the morning. Bella Abzug spoke as well as the editor of Ms. Magazine and a bunch of other women. No men. None of them said anything new or inspirational. I was disappointed. You’d think a crowd that size would light their words on fire but each speaker was as boring and predictable at the next. Peter Paul & Mary sang “If I Had a Hammer.” Seriously? It’s not 1968, you idiots. Do something relevant.

We moved to the stepping-off point for the march and waited, literally, an hour before we could walk. It was that crowded. We were packed pretty tight and Suzanne started to have a panic attack so I told her to close her eyes and rest her head on my chest. I got excited. They had a bunch of boring, stock protest chants so I wrote this one on the spot:

2-4-6-8
I wish Bush could ovulate.

We finally moved and marched past the White House, which I’d never seen in person. It’s tiny. It’s like a toy model of the real thing. El Presidente made damn sure he was in Camp David for the weekend.

The march ended at the other end of The Mall by the Capitol Building. More bad speeches. Cindi Lauper sang a pretty song. There were a bunch of neo-hippies banging bongos, congas and drums with broken skins. At one point, Suzanne and I were sitting on a curb resting. I was spinning my web when, suddenly, bunch of them formed a drum circle around us and started drumming and chanting. There was some freeform interpretive dance that made me laugh very hard (inside). They resembled dying poultry.

There were so many different agendas being addressed that I began to feel disengaged from the core reason for the march. There was a feminist speaking (screaming, actually), calling for a new political party composed of just women, gays and minorities and with that voting bloc, they would take the White House this fall. Let me know how that works out, dreamers. Oh, and by the way, thanks a lot. Part of her speech was an attack on Middle America. You know, where my family is from. She screamed, “They don’t want US, so WE DON’T WANT THEM!” That’s a marvelous approach to our problems. Build those bridges, cupcake.

We got back to Penn Station about 11:30 at night. Everyone was exhausted, dirty and quiet. On the way up the escalator I thought the girl in front of me looked an awful lot like Mary Stewart Masterson. In the Times this morning, it said she attended, so I suppose that was her. Pretty.

I spoke to many, many people throughout the day and at some point in a conversation, I was eventually asked, “So, where did you go to school?” I like the look of disbelief on people’s faces when I tell them I’ve never stepped foot on a college campus. It allows me a brief respite from my self-loathing, which usually returns in fairly short order.

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There’s a great Stuart Davis exhibit at the Whitney. He’s one of my favs. He plays to my graphic design sensibilities.

On June 23, 1964, after watching a French film that ended with ‘fin,’ Davis added it to the painting on his easel before going to bed.

That night, he had a stroke and died in the ambulance on the way to New York’s Roosevelt Hospital. That’s how I’d like to go. Do the thing I love the most, go to bed and never wake up.

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Two from Christie’s contemporary art auction a few months ago:

Christopher Wool
And If You
Enamel on aluminum
Est: $12,000,000-18,000,000
Sold for $13,605,000

Jeff Koons
Lobster
Mirror-polished stainless steel
Est: $6,000,000-8,000,000
Sold for $6,885,000

That Christopher Wool is such a fraud. But Jeff Koons! What an innovator! Only $6 million?

Kidding. What does either piece mean? Anything? The lobster was interesting in that it looked exactly like an inflatable pool toy. You didn’t know it was metal unless you rapped it a few times with your knuckle.

Sittin’ stoned alone in my backyard

Posted on August 14, 2016 by Exile on Pain Street

110

Dear Trent Lewin:

Thank you for the ping. Very thoughtful of you. A few summer projects have prevented me from reading blogs, commenting or writing new posts.

First, my backyard performance art installation, Ode to Summer, opened in June.

Ode to Summer, 2016
String, canvas, a tree, tube steel

I tie one end of string to my right foot and the other end to a tree. I lay in my hammock—a Father’s Day gift—and by moving my right foot slightly from left to right, I’m able to rock myself gently to sleep. To wit:

Second, I read Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, which was a disappointment. To rinse that bad taste out of my mouth, I reread Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, a book I first read 20 years ago. I’d forgotten how beautiful and perfectly-written that story is. There’s not one wasted sentence. It filled me with melancholy and hopeless yearning for my youth.

Also, I wrote a book. I dared myself to do it. I took the journal entries I’ve posted here and many more that I haven’t and created a 75,000-word narrative. It’s currently being edited. Do you have any idea how much it costs to hire a professional editor to beat and thrash a manuscript into shape? It’s not cheap. I had to sell one of my rare books. I don’t know if it’ll ever see the light of day. I just wanted to prove to myself that I could do it. I did it! I’m pleased with the results. That’s what matters most.

Here’s a proper art exhibit, since you asked.

Nikki Rosato’s Inbound exhibit at the Seward Johnson Grounds for Sculpture is a sampling of her wall hangings and sculptures.

Her medium is paper road maps. Remember those, old timers?

She cuts away the land masses, leaving only the roads, boarders and waterways.

Only the linear forms remain.

It’s exacting, effective work.

For sculpture, the maps are placed over Lucite forms.

There was some mumbo-jumbo about the work being metaphorical for a personal journey. Get it? Map = journey. There was also some stuff about negative space and spatial counterpoints. As usual, I freely admit to lacking the intellectual capital required to see through to these metaphysical suppositions. The pieces were fetching and I respect the work that went into creating them. Isn’t that enough?

The many moods of Tillie.