Observations from the Coffee Shop 5.10

I tend save way too many links to articles I want to read later, sometimes I do read them and sometimes they just clutter Chrome until I delete them. The coffee shop is where I do most of my catching up so for the hell of it here is a selection from this week.

There was an article in New York Magazine about NYU Abu Dhabi, a satellite campus that opened in 2008. Their website says it was built because of "a common belief in the value of a liberal arts education" which isn't exactly something that comes to mind when I think of Middle Eastern states. It might have more to do with the $50 million NYU Chancellor Sexton pried from the UAE, a major reason Sexton is known as the Emir of NYU at it's New York City campus. What intrigues me is the new campus they are building on Saadiyat Island, a satellite of a satellite if you will, which is scheduled to open in 2014 and will be located next to the Louvre and Guggenheim, Abu Dhabi of course.

Last Sunday the Daily Mail ran a Piers Morgan interview with Lindsay Lohan. Normally I wouldn't have cared at all but the headline caught my eye so I saved it and ended up reading it. When I finished I quite literally pitied Lohan because the girl has absolutely no clue. In it she says she only did cocaine ‘four or five’ times, that rehab is a joke, and that she doesn't consider herself a heavy drinker. The interview than ran with copies of her six mugshots including the two for DUI. Morgan notes that the interview was done a few weeks before Lohan was scheduled to begin a new court ordered stay in rehab which will be at least her fifth visit in the past six years. Lohan also takes Adderall which, in my un-professional opinion, explains so much..

Also last Sunday The New York Times ran a story on the U.S. Supreme Court and how the Roberts' court could be remembered more for its pro-business decisions than upcoming social ones. It mentions a report in The Minnesota Law Review which ranked all the 36 SCOTUS justices since 1946 for their pro-business votes and found five of the current court's were in the top ten. It has all been very hush hush so you may not have noticed.

Along the same lines comes a column from The Huffington Post about warehouse workers who are suing Amazon over unpaid time, up to an hour, that they spend in security checkpoint lines at the end of their shifts. I love Amazon but maybe if they paid their workers a little bit more they wouldn't have to stop and frisk them on the way out. Amazon reported profits of $621 million in 2011, they reported an actual loss in 2012 but that was due to investing in new product lines.

So you see sometimes my thinking goes off in weirdly differing tangents. I didn't even mention that the Pulse Art Fair began yesterday or that the Frieze begins today.

Observations, Amy Winehouse

I've read and watched so many things about Amy Winehose in the past few days. Nothing I have seen says it any better than this piece by MSNBC's Martin Bashir and the video that follows it. The vid is an hour long but so worth watching. If you must just skip to 47 minutes and just watch "You Know I'm No Good." Damn she was good.

"Just a few hours ago, one of the world’s most talented musical artists was laid to rest, as the funeral service for Amy Winehouse took place in London. Amy Winehouse had only spent about seven years as a professional musician but her contribution to popular music already places her very near the top of her business.

Her two albums, “Frank” and “Back to Black,” sold more than four million copies. She won a total of 23 music industry awards, including five Grammys. It’s estimated that over the last three years, she made almost $20 million from recording and performing and all in such a short space of time.

I saw her twice and she had a voice that harked back to previous eras, somehow combining Motown, Soul and Jazz but all in modern form. Her tone was smoky, burnished with an old single malt whiskey – brought to fruition at an incredibly young age.

It was her sound, but sadly, it also became her life. She was a drinker, who by her own admission “didn’t know when to stop.” Her parents talked openly about her drug use and her father once claimed that smoking crack-cocaine had given her emphysema – a debilitating condition for anyone, but imagine its impact upon a woman whose work relied upon her lungs and voice.

There has been some helpful discussion about addictive behavior and how all of us need to understand that many such people are not criminals but are seriously ill and in need of care and support. But if you listen carefully to the lyrics that Amy Winehouse wrote – there is a universal theme that almost proved too difficult for her to bear – that happiness never lasts; that love, as she put it so expertly, is a losing game.

Amy Winehouse’s music was profound because she confronted some of the starkest truths of our existence. That’s some contribution and all in such a short space of time. Amy Winehouse was just 27 years of age when she passed away on Saturday."

Amy Winehouse - Live At Glastonbury Festival 2008

Observations, Amy Winehouse

If you know anything about music you probably know by now that Amy Winehouse was found dead today at age 27, a death in all probability related to drugs or alcohol. Whether I know the person or not I always have a rather melancholy reaction to news of this sort which wasn’t helped today by being surrounded by artist types that wanted to talk of nothing else. When I write a blog post I give it all kinds of tags some of which show in the sidebar and some that don’t. I remembered a ‘gotta meet amy’ tag with only one lonely post linked to it and I couldn’t quite remember what it was. What I found was one of my very first posts with every word as true today as when I wrote it, only now the ending isn’t possible. For my own reasons I thought I would re-post it and it follows below. I heard all kinds of shitty comments today but I did see one on twitter that best said how I felt, maybe her tortured soul has finally found peace.

"I was an addict. I *am* an addict. It’s a very hard thing to say but its true. It's something that, once you have been there, you never totally leave it behind. I have an addictive personality. It has taken many forms in my life from cigarettes to Ben & Jerries Cherry Garcia to, at times, sl. But its also left me with demons Ill forever struggle with. I left myself in a pit so black I never thought I would be able to climb out. I’ve spent a month in rehab and almost wrecked a car. The police found me sitting on the hood of my car in a ditch. I think I waved. I burned through a years worth of tuition money in a month. So in other words I’ve been to hell and I know what it looks like.

The memory becomes the backdrop that you forever look at your life against. Little things that bother other people I shrug off as nothing. Than I’ll blow up over something trivial because it sets off something in the deepest darkest part of my brain. Some people think I’m down right crazy.

I tend to use the word ‘karma’ now.

I’m thinking Amy and I have a lot to talk about …."

Amy Winehouse - Rehab

Observations from the Window 6.19

Father’s Day is drawing to a close but I need mention my dad tonight. Along with my brother and sister he keeps me sane yet I find it hard to write about him. So much easier to write about my mom but that’s just how it is. He was always the laid back one anyway so he will totally understand.

I know it couldn't have been easy trying to deal with me after my mom passed but yet he always did. As my life spiraled out of control he could have concentrated on the others but he didn't. For that I'll always be grateful because I know for a fact somebody gave him exactly that advice. When I was in rehab he visited every day, never complained, and truth be told snuck me cigarettes now and than. Now that's a dad.

Where my love of art comes from my mom my love of sports comes from my dad. That would seem obvious, and it is, but you have to understand it's as much a part of me as the art is. I can’t imagine my life without either of them. The sports yin to the art yang I suppose. He rarely if ever missed a field hockey game and always had something positive to say afterwards. He has a passion for Philly sports teams and a hatred of New York ones that somehow got genetically transferred to me. Sometimes it creates problems at the bar but that’s just how it is.

Because of my dad I can easily spend a day watching the bobber on the end of a fishing line and not care if I catch a thing. Because of him I like roller coasters, fast cars, and movies that go boom. I can change Foxy's oil on my own, discuss obscure 80's metal bands, and make the perfect burger.

Because of him I'm still around to write this.

Happy Father’s Day dad.

Bruce Springsteen - Thunder Road

Thirty Days of Truths, Day 20

My views on drugs and alcohol ....

The one I have dreaded since the beginning, really before I even started. It would be so easy just to say screw it and not answer this one. I don't even know where to begin with this.

I can start with my own litany of drugs. I have used alcohol and smoked since high school, had and addiction to cocaine, spent time in rehab, and had a few legal problems. I said had an addiction to cocaine even though I know that once you are an addict you always are one. I should add that I would die without caffeine and I have been known to smoke a certain herb that looks surprisingly like oregano. I seem to have a love hate relationship with drugs. I know I drink too much but I like to drink and I also know I shouldn't smoke but I have to admit it's my crutch. I have tried to quit a few times in the last ten years and it just doesn't happen owing to the fact that deep down I need to smoke, I need the crutch.

My views? I'm not so sure that I have any views on the subject that matter. I am far from the one to damn anybody for using any hard drugs because I've been too far down that road myself. But for now I don't let myself be around people that do use because I just won’t let myself be tempted again. Not that I haven't been offered some, I have, but not by friends or even acquaintances and so far I have reacted more with revulsion than with temptation. I lost two months of my life because of cocaine and rehab. Two months I barely remember and never am going to get back to that. I wouldn't wish it on anybody.

Yet I could give you a list of reasons I used coke, excuses actually. Excuses I would tell myself over and over again every day. People just didn't understand me, they don't have my problems, or my loss. I'm just using it to calm my head until I don't need it anymore and than I'll quit. I can still function, drive, and nobody seems to even notice. In my deepest darkest days I figured I was going to die anyway so why did it matter at all. And I believed every one of my excuses until it was too late.

And finally there is the artistic angle. This tends to cause more debate than any of the so called excuses do. When I paint I drink it's that simple, it's how I paint, sometimes I don't eat just drink and smoke and paint. When I was in rehab I had a therapist who tried telling me over and over that I only thought I needed alcohol to paint. He said that if I stopped drinking I would find that I was just as creative or even more so. Not long out of rehab I had my own final therapy in painting what I consider one of my best works. In the process I drank two bottles of tequila. The other side of all this is the fact that when I was using cocaine I didn't create anything. Not a painting, not a sketch, not even a single photo I know of. The artsie part of my brain just shut down so completely that I thought it was gone.

So there are my thoughts on drugs and alcohol if not my views. I’ll add a quote because I love quotes, it’s one of my favs, and it fits ....

"I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me."
Hunter S. Thompson

Except when they don't ....

30 Seconds To Mars - Attack

Thirty Days of Truths, Day 6

Something you hope you never have to do ....

You have to be kidding me. I actually thought hard about this one and in the end I had two answers. When I thought a little more I decided that one answer was more about death than about life and the question seems to be more about life so I scratched that one. Yes I'm going to just let that hang there but it's something I think I'll come back to in a separate post.

The thing I hope never to have to do is something I have done before. I never in my life want to spend another night in rehab. Again it's one of those things that you can't totally understand unless you have been there. Yes I needed it and yes it did its job but the withdrawal, loneliness, and the overwhelming feeling of being trapped combined to create a month of hell.

I suppose my personality didn't help. At the center I was in the idea was for you to socialize for support. My problem was I was at my darkest, deepest, anti-social best at that time so I ended up spending a lot of time alone in my room with my iPod for support. No computer and the only TVs were in the big common rooms which I tended to stay away from. I may be better off because I was there but I'll do almost anything to never be there again.

Now I'm already beginning to see a thread run through this project. As I said earlier it is something that I’ll just never put completely behind me. I have visions of one day being in an old age home thinking omg I'm back, that is if I make it to old age.

Life goes on.

Thirty Days of Truths, Day 3

Something I have to forgive myself for ....

What I did to myself now over seven years ago. More than that what I did to my family and friends in the process. I'm an addict, I'll always be and addict, and I have to live with that fact for the rest of my life. It's hard to explain to somebody that hasn't been through it but it's impossible to completely put behind you. It's a demon always lurking in the background, always waiting for a new chance. People will say I have put it behind me, that I have moved on, and I politely agree knowing full well I never totally will.

A semester's worth of tuition money, a month in rehab, and a summer of my life lost forever. Worse than that is the way I feel people look at me. No matter what they say I know it has to shade their opinion of me. It's pretty damn much to forgive and I'm not sure I ever will.

Yes I am an addict.

Observations from the Shore 6.26

A full moon over the ocean seems a fitting way to end my yearly sojourn to the shore. Actually, as I start writing this, it won’t be long and I’ll be seeing the sun rise again but I really should crawl to bed. I always totally hate having to leave here. It’s one of those times where you just think if your karma goes bad you may never be back. I suppose every vacation ends with those thoughts but sometimes I just get to damn morose for my own good. I don’t like good times to end because I figure the bad times are just lurking in the background.

I never did think about what I am going to do when i get back. But in the end I really didn’t need to. With the VQs here I realized one thing. In a short six months in the Village I may have changed more than I knew. I really can’t see myself going back to PSU, not even for my mountains. I just can’t see the two of them doing without me. OK now I’m laughing so hard I’m going to spit my beer all over my laptop. But honestly I can’t see leaving them behind because I enjoy every weird little moment I spend with them. Maybe one day I can be a VQ too, that is if I ever figure out how the hell they do it.

A few things did come out of this week. I didn’t do as much sketching as I wanted to but I seem to have discovered, or rediscovered, color photography. Not that I forgot it existed because I usually shoot in color, with a very low iso, and convert it to b&w on my computer. I love the shading and detail you can pull out in b&w. But I was amazed by the intensity of the color in the pics I was taking here and I couldn’t bring myself to convert them. (pics)

The other thing is a bit deeper and had me thinking most of the night. I’ve written before about my problem with cocaine and trip to rehab and I’m sure I will again at some point. It all started during a trip to Wildwood just after my mom passed away seven years ago. I have been up and down the south Jersey shore many times since than but have never ever gone back to Wildwood, avoiding it like the plague. That is until this week.

Ash, in her boundless wisdom, decided I needed confront the demons I saw lurking there and finally purge my brain of them once and for all. Of course neither she nor Chloe informed me of this evil plot because they just wanted to ‘ride the coasters’ and I fell for it. Now I love roller coasters myself but I hate boardwalks. On a good day the Wildwood boardwalk reminds me of some freak show out of Dante with a side serving of ocean. But I figured I owed them and didn’t want my senseless fear of the past getting in the way of their fun so I went with them.

I would love to finish this with a paragraph about the stunning catharsis that happened when I got there but I can’t. Not because I don’t want to but because nothing happened, not a fucking thing. I took some pics, road some coasters, and went back to Stone Harbor no worse for the wear. I guess it helped that the motel I had stayed at during that summer is now tourist strip mall complete with pink flamingos, Hawaiian shirts, and pseudo Caribbean nick knacks all I’m sure made in China. So it seems you really can go back sometimes.

I suppose this is it from the shore for this year. You’ll just have to go back to watching MTV’s version now.

Dead Poetic - New Medicines

Sara, part I

“One of the definitions of sanity is the ability to tell real from unreal. Soon we'll need a new definition.” Alvin Toffler

When you spend any amount of time in rehab you spend a lot of time thinking. Hopefully thinking about what got you there and what it’s going to take to keep you from coming back. Sometimes self-pity creeps in because this has never happened to anybody before and it wasn’t your fault in the first place.

The facility I was in didn’t allow TVs in your room. There was a big common room and they would do anything to bring everybody together. But being at my antisocial worst, the summer’s events hadn’t helped matters, I spent a lot of time alone in my room. Besides nobody was going to tell me I had to socialize.

My dad was always an avid collector of music and at the time my ipod was filled with 70s and 80s music. I would sit in my room for hours listening and thinking. Constantly thinking about my past, my messed up present, and my hazy unsure future. Wrestling with my demons that always seemed to be getting the upper hand.

Than one day Fleetwood Mac’s song Sara came on. As I listened I whispered to myself ‘fucking Sara’. And in an instant all my demons, torments, and hatreds had a name.

Sara ….

tuneage

the Mood

As long as I can remember it’s been called ‘the mood’. It comes from a time I was a little girl, yes I was, and was throwing a fit of some kind. My mom asked me if I was in a mood and it’s been called that ever since. It’s as if a dark cloud descends on my brain. It can build over time, so I have some warning, or it can strike without any warning at all. It can last for an hour, a day, or once a whole summer.

Sometimes when it happens I just want to left alone to sulk. Just be my anti-social self. Not talk to another soul and maybe feel a little sorry for myself. At its worst I just hate the world and everything around me. It seems to feed on itself and loves the darkest most depressing music it can find.

Once I tried to describe to a friend how sometimes I can literally see emotions in my head. Not just feel them but see them too. It’s really hard to explain. Almost as if somebody grabbed the contrast knob in my head and gave it a spin. That being said the whole idea of this post was to try and describe what I see when I am in my mood. Now I’m not so sure I can.

Other than a doctor friend of mine I have never tried to put it in words before. I’m not so sure it’s possible without seeming a bit crazy. But than again I have never been one to consider myself normal. I have never tried acid but, ill tell you what, it has to be something like this only in a darker way. Everything is clear and heightened but somehow darker. I guess I just can’t explain it. I read about van Gogh and sometimes wonder what he saw.

Maybe one day Ill paint my own Starry Night

tuneage

Addiction

I was an addict. I *am* an addict. It’s a very hard thing to say but its true. It's something that, once you have been there, you never totally leave it behind.

I have an addictive personality. It has taken many forms in my life from cigarettes to Ben & Jerries Cherry Garcia to, at times, sl. But its also left me with demons Ill forever struggle with.

I left myself in a pit so black I never thought I would be able to climb out. I’ve spent a month in rehab and almost wrecked a car. The police found me sitting on the hood of my car in a ditch. I think I waved. I burned through a years worth of tuition money in a month. So in other words I’ve been to hell and I know what it looks like.

The memory becomes the backdrop that you forever look at your life against. Little things that bother other people I shrug off as nothing. Than I’ll blow up over something trivial because it sets off something in the deepest darkest part of my brain. Some people think I’m down right crazy.

I tend to use the word ‘karma’ now.

I’m thinking Amy and I have a lot to talk about ….

tuneage