James Welling / Dan Flavin / Christian Patterson / Me

james welling


dan flavin


christian patterson


me

go see CHRISTIAN PATTERSONs BLOG
and DAN FLAVINs RETROSPECTIVE

Mechanical Animals

Last Saturday morning I woke up in a strangers house somewhere near Coney Island. Its a convoluted story on how I got there and I'll save you from the details, mostly because it sounds a whole lot more interesting for me to only say, "I woke up in a strangers house somewhere near Coney Island" than actually give you the circumstances and what-for's and why's. Anyway, after leaving the mystery house I went looking for the N train to get back to Manhattan and found myself on Bay Bridge Ave., home to a menagerie of cast iron electrical tethered mechanical animals...

From five minutes in a Chelsea parking lot on 10th Ave between West 24th and 25th streets, NYC, where Andy is godlike.

after the rain ended last night, a walk

when not december, the sleigh is a '76 el dorado

today christmas came early. santa came by driving a beat up cadillac...you know the kind...an old white one thats half as long as a city block and begs for bull horns to be tied to the grill. come to think of it, did he have reindeer antlers duct taped to that thing? from a mile down pennsylvania you could see the cloud of black billowing out from behind him like a locomotive...it hissed and wheezed and rattled down the road...mustve thrown a rod somewhere north of here. the air smelled like burnt oil. when he pulled up he didnt say nothing but was grinning with a mouth full of gravel and grit as he threw a bottle into the backseat, its previous contents now hanging heavy on his breath. he reached into a dirty bag that was more matted brown than red velvet, and from it he tossed me this record before peeling off in a scream and squaw and blast of black exhaust with a honk honk honk that nearly drowned out a gutteral howl that sounded a lot more like a manic ha ha ha than a jolly ol' ho ho ho.

words...

flower power

NYC 11.18.06

umbrella

Found behind a red-tinted window in a Chelsea gallery, and yes it is art.

And by art i mean the umbrella installation, not the photo. more from this weekends trip to NYC to come.

Hadacol Christmas and General Dont-Let-Me-Die-Nervousness

Somehow with the fierce wind and spitting rain of Sunday came Califone from the west. You know CALIFONE. I wont stop talking about them and posting links to videos of them performing in man troughs. This year they released ROOTS & CROWNS, a fantastic record, and have done some touring with a frequent collaborator, film-maker BRENT GREEN. Green will show his films whilst califone provide a live soundtrack accompaniment. The music performed is mostly improvisational, yet knowingly cued in for the right moments to provide apropos sound affects. Green provides live narration for each of the films, adding an extra sense of spontaneity and improvisation. He had the quirkiest, quakiest, most frenetic, passionate delivery...like a schitzo beat poet meets a helium baloon sucking tom waits. He played a saw, too, and it all makes for an incredibly visceral experience. In the end, i cant decide which part of the show was better...the green films with califone, or just califone playing some of my favorite songs from their catalogue.

I really wish you all couldve been there to see it. For all our b'ham friends, califone is playing bottletree on the 17th and you shouldnt, shant, shall not miss it.

here is an excerpt from one of the films presented/performed from the other night, "hadacol christmas"
By:Brent Green/Nervous Films

JOANNA NEWSOM !!!

Here is the latest Marvelous poster design, once again for Bottletree...this time promoting the quirky-harp-strumming-baroque-pop-playing-Elven-like-sprite JOANNA NEWSOM. Her new record comes out tomorrow and we can't wait to hear it. I am a big fan of her first release, The Milk-Eyed Mender, but its not really Joe's cup of tea. We'll forgive him though because he did some really great illustration for this poster. For more on Joanna, go to MILKY MOON.

From My Window on a Rainy Sunday Morning

The rain is diluting the color this morning, stripping yellows and reds from the trees and washing them into the gutter like a painter's palette washed out in the sink. And yet the leaves are doing their best to resist- gobbing up the gutters and piling up as high as the curb, establishing a beachhead of autumnal color against a slick black street and cracking sidewalk. I'm sitting in my window with a hot cup of tea that has infused its delicate flavor with cinnamon. A few months back I decided to store a ziploc bag of ground cinnamon along with my tea in a small tin can because, well, I had no other place to put it. The tin seemed as good a place as any, and I didn’t imagine then that the cinnamon would seep through the ziploc and infect sir earl and lady grey. Fortunately, the result is quite tasty, as are the flakes of sugar clinging to my fingertips...the last bits leftover from the chocolate frosted doughnut i devoured for breakfast.

As the rain continues to fall an occasional car will swoosh through the street- the sound of tires through puddles is one of my favorites. My neighbor Steve is coming home from the drugstore, white plastic bags in one hand, and a sagging, broken black umbrella in the other. He is dodging puddles as if they were landmines, tiptoeing and hopping through the street as only an effeminate, elderly and uncoordinated overweight white man can.

Garrison Keillor is on the radio, and despite how wonderful the sound of his voice may be I cant help but wonder if I should replace his whispering with the drip drop of the rain to unmute the silence of the morning. I'll wait until after Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking and all the children are above average, and cold rainy mornings like this are so commonplace that they give Garrison ample opportunity to reflect and say in his hushed, watery and drawn-out nasal-whistling way, "Thank you, God, for this good life and forgive us if we do not love it enough." Because we don’t love it enough even though there is so much to love, with rainy Sunday mornings being at the top of the list.

The Man Up There

Tonight is clear and the air smells of Cold and Snow and Smoke and Fire and I've gone to the window to look at the Moon but I cant see it, but I know its up there somewhere big and full because I can see the table and chairs down in the courtyard, covered in dying blanket of red and yellow and brown. If it weren't for the moonlight I couldn't tell one color from the other and I wouldn't see the outlines of all the rooftops stacked up on top of each other all the way out to the river. Instead, I would only see myself reflected back and maybe someone out there would see me staring out and ask, "Who is that man in the window up there?" and that would make two of us.