Observations from the Coffee Shop 11.12

This is another update of sorts. I've read a lot of memorials, tributes, and good-bye's since Lou reed passed away but two stick out and I wanted to share them.

The first is from The New Yorker and was written by Patti Smith. "Before I slept, I searched for the significance of the date, October 27^th, and found it to be the birthday of both Dylan Thomas and Sylvia Plath. Lou had chosen the perfect day to set sail, the day of poets, on Sunday morning, the world behind him." Smith also told The Hollywood Reporter, "We all owe him a debt. Most of us that owe a debt are not very happy to own up to it. Sometimes you like to imagine that you did everything on your own. But I think with Lou, everyone will stand in line to say 'thank you,' in their own way."

The second is from The New York Times, "The Real-Life Stories Told in ‘Walk on the Wild Side," and was written by Times culture reporter Guy Trebay. "That was the era of fun for fun’s sake, fun art," Viva said, referring to the world and city of "Walk on the Wild Side." "I have no idea what kids do for fun anymore."

Observations from the Window 11.27

A cloudy and cold morning in the Village as I went for my morning paper and you could just feel it, the first snow of the year is on its way. You know that feeling if you live anywhere that gets snow, the crisp calm air, the quiet. The city has its own version of the quiet, call it loud quiet. The horns and sirens are just as loud but they sound totally different, somehow distant. My sister tells me there is already a few inches on the ground where she is so it's only a matter of waiting here.

I never watch the Today Show but I have it on this morning for a very good reason. Scarlett Johansson is guest hosting and as I write about the weather she is, you got it, doing the weather forecast. She is guest hosting because she will be doing Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at the Richard Rogers Theater. I think I may need tickets for that even though I'm not a big fan of the theatre. Maybe Chloe would like to go but than maybe I should be saying I just love the theatre.

While I'm on the subject of entertainment, or girls, Lindsay Lohan's performance in Liz & Dick was evidently so bad it had twitter in an uproar. It got so bad Dan Savage tweeted "The mob on Twitter will have the decency to feel bad when Lindsay Lohan kills herself, right?" Sad but I only bring it up because my sister showed me this R.E.M. video over the weekend and Lohan happens to be in it. It's a rather fitting if disaffected video given R.E.M. no longer exists and Lohan's current reviews. The tune, which features Patti Smith, was released last year but the video just surfaced last week, that according to my new entertainment editor Kayla.

Lohan always did look good in black.

link

Published on Nov 15, 2012 by remhq
Directed by James Franco. From 2011 Warner Bros. Records release

11/29 update - So it seems Lindsay Lohan was arrested for assault last night at a club in Chelsea. Apparently after a disagreement with a woman in another booth she got up and punched her in the face. Troubled girl she may be but I can't help but like her.

Observations from the Edge 12.17

Today is D17, the three month anniversary of the Occupy Wall Street, the one year anniversary of the self-immolation of Tunisian vendor Mohamed Bouazizi, and the 24^th birthday of alleged wikileaker Bradley Manning. A strange karmic brew if there ever was one.

The schedule calls for an all day music and arts festival reminiscent of Occupy Broadway beginning at noon in Duarte Square, a mixed public and privately owned lot. Scheduled performers include Lou Reed and there is rumored that Patti Smith is to appear. If the Patti Smith rumor turns out to be true all my shopping plans are out but as of now she doesn't appear on the schedule. What happens after the festival is anybody's guess at this point. 

Trinity Church, now known as Trinity Wall Street, was founded in 1697 and now its Trinity Real Estate arm is the 3rd largest property owner in Manhattan with holdings valued close to $10 billion. It is the single largest land owner in lower Manhattan, even the NYSE sits on land it owns. The members of its vestry include high placed executives currently at or retired from Citigroup, Merrill Lynch, the insurance giant AIG, and the ever present Brookfield Properties. Under the Episcopal governing system this small group, many of whom aren't even church members, have complete control over Trinity's land holdings and thus the decision on whether or not OWS can use Duarte Square. Trinity Church has repeatedly said that they won't allow the occupation.

A forced occupation of Duarte brings with it a potential downside as any reports on event will note that the land is owned by Trinity Church and not the City of New York or evil Brookfield Properties. It is after all a church and a church that has previously supported OWS with free food and meeting places plus allowed the use of its bathrooms and WiFi network.

Many New York clergy members who disagree with Trinity have called on the church to allow OWS use of Duarte and plan on attending today's event. On Thursday they along with protesters erected a nativity scene outside Trinity that featured Joseph, Mary, Jesus, and a tent with a sign that said "there was no room for them at the inn, you have plenty of room Trinity." Over a dozen clergy members have said they will help take down the fence surrounding Trinity's part of the lot and thus risk arrest. Among them will be retired Bishop George Packard, formerly the Episcopal Church's chief chaplain and a decorated Vietnam Veteran, the Occupied Bishop.

"The story of Christmas starts with Mary and Joseph's search for a home," said Reverend Michael Ellick of Judson Church. "It's thus especially ironic, and tragic, that Trinity Church, one of the largest landowners in New York City, refuses even a tiny, unused piece of its vast land to OWS, which points to the same spirit of transformation that Jesus represented. This is truly a theological line in the sand."

Stay tuned.

Observations from the Window 10.27

I received a rather weighty package from Amazon yesterday that may signal the beginning of a cold weather reading binge, something I think my brain needs. It also seems to be the time to put Patti Smith's Just Kids on the shelf for a long deserved break. I first read the book back in April and have been rereading parts of it ever since, partly because I live near where so many of the scenes took place. But one part I have stayed away from is the end because it always brings tears to my eyes.

In late February of 1989 Smith saw Robert Mapplethorpe for the last time. In the book she shows the following note which she wrote to Mapplethorpe, but doesn't say whether she actually sent it to him than or was writing it to him in the book. If I should ever meet her that's the first question I'm going to ask.

Dear Robert,
Often as I lie awake I wonder if you are also lying awake. Are you in pain or feeling alone? You drew me from the darkest period of my young life, sharing with me the sacred mystery of what it is to be an artist. I learned to see through you and never compose a line or draw a curve that does not come from the knowledge I derived in our precious time together. 
Your work, coming from a fluid source can be traced to the naked song of your youth. You spoke than of holding hands with god. Remember, through everything, you have always held that hand, grip it hard, Robert, and don't let go.
The other afternoon, when you fell asleep on my shoulder, I drifted off too. But before I did, it occurred to me looking around at all of your things and your work and going through years of work in my mind, that of all of your work, you are still your most beautiful.
The most beautiful work of all.
Patti

Mapplethorpe died a few days later on March 9, 1989.

Like I said, tears.

Patti Smith - Paths That Cross

Observations on Art, The Muse

The muses of the ancients were divinities. In Greek mythology Apollonis, Cephisso, and Borysthenis were known as the three muses, the goddesses who were said to inspire works of art and literature. The word museum finds its root in the Greek word mouseion which was a place where these daughters of Apollo were worshiped. The mythological muses met their end in Dante's Devine Comedy which was inspired by his very earthly muse Beatrice Portinari who he claimed to have met when they were both 9 years old. From than on the muse has come to be known as an artist's source of inspiration, whether real or imaginary, and generally refers to a person who inspires an artist.

During the Renaissance the model for two of Raphael's most famous Madonnas was a Sienese baker's daughter named Margharita di Luti, who was probably Raphael's lover. In one of my favorite stories the painter Fra Filippo Lippi went in for a riskier muse relationship when he seduced a young nun named Lucrezia Buti and went on to live with her, using her as the model for several portraits including one of the Holy Mother. Renaissance muses were subordinate to their artists, bound to their sexual needs while the artists were free to do as they pleased.

Modern muses seem to be powerful and creative women in their own right like Georgia O'Keeffe who didn't just inspire photographer Alfred Stieglitz, but influenced the direction of his art as well. I could write all day about Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe, mutual muses and collaborators. They were in and out of each others lives and art for over two decades until Mapplethorpe's death from AIDS in 1989. People will debate till the end of time on whether Yoko Ono was good for John Lennon's music but nobody will ever debate the effect she had on him.

Than again artists and muses seem to traditionally take a toll on each other. Salvador Dalí's wife Gala shrewdly tortured her sex-averse and masochistic husband with her affairs and the dancer Suzanne Farrell, George Balanchine's astonishingly beautiful muse, married another dancer the day his divorce was finalized. Pablo Picasso met Marie-Thérèse Walter in Paris when she was 17 and immediately made her his mistress, sometimes having his chauffeur wait outside her school to pick her up and take her to the artist's studio where she modeled for countless paintings. Walter later bore him a daughter though he refused to marry her, and killed herself in 1977, four years after Picasso died.

So what do I think a muse is? Somewhere in the past or present is a person that comes back to you again and again in your thoughts and dreams. You may have barely known them or you may know them well but either way they left an indelible impression on you. I had a professor who used Carl Jung's animus when she described her muse and the idea works for me too. Jung described the animus as the unconscious male dominated part of the female psyche. In my professors description this core part of your being, part of your very soul, is projected to the other person and when you look at them you see its reflection. You want desperately to speak to it but find it impossible and so turn to the only language that works, your art.

In an LA Times article on the death of the muse UCLA sociology professor David Halle wrote, "The concept of the muse is part of the Romantic tradition and this is just not a romantic age.” I don't agree at all and I'll finish with the words that best sum it up for me.

Everything I did I did for you.

Observations on Art 9.1

A friend of mine posted something on Google+ in which she asked the question “do you think Black and White photography specifically has gained more than it has lost in the digital age and why?”

I had to think about the answer to that because it really is a hard question for me. The first affordable digital cameras emerged in the late '90s and the first Adobe program in 2003 so by the time I began to take photography seriously the world had already begun to change. I never had much formal training and only ever toyed in a darkroom but I did take a lot of analog photos with a pair of OM10s I own. It's something I would like to get back into someday but who knows if I'll ever have the time. I'm torn because my photos are almost exclusively monochrome but a large percentage are color shots I changed with software. The different methods of doing that is something I have in the back of my mind to write about and something that came up in the seminar I just took.

I first fell in love with
black & white when I discovered the portraits of Robert Mapplethorpe and the landscapes of Ansel Adams almost twenty years ago. To me color records the scene in front of you while black & white interprets that scene and there aren't any better at it than those two. Maybe this is a little arrogant of me to say but the way I feel is that a color photo is a photo but a black & white one is a work of art. I try to limit using software myself but to me software is just another tool to use in creating that work of art. I'm sure photography has lost something in the digital age but I also think it has gained just as much or more than it has lost. One thing I'm not quite sure of is if the ability to take hundreds of shots in search of that one great one is a good thing or if it takes away from the original composition of the photo. Than again I'm as guilty of that as anybody

Software isn't used in just digital photography today but all kinds and even without software a purely analog photographer has any number of ways to change a photo including film speed, exposure, and soaking time. So I guess my total cop out answer is you can't take the digital out of photography anymore than you can take the acrylic paints out of contemporary painting. One thing we both miss are the scents and smells of the old styles.

I don't know if I answered the question or asked more but thanks for making me think.

Observations from the Coffee Shop 8.4

Some random thoughts....

I have been back in the Village for only a couple days but I'm ready to go back to the shore. I wouldn't need much in the form of entertainment because I still have half my tequila, this has to be the first time I didn’t finish the bottle, and I only read one of the three books I took along. The sad thing is the one I read I already had before, "Just Kids" by Patti Smith. That leaves Maggie Nelson's "The Art of Cruelty" and Joel Sternfeld's "Walking The High Line" for a return trip. The latter is a big photo book I wanted to study and see if it gave me any ideas.

Guy told me just yesterday that I have no ass and I don't shake what I have enough. Guy doesn't know how close he came to being laid out but this time I just thanked him and walked away. Sadly this isn't the first time I've been told this, I rather like my ass tyvm. I'm thinking he must have been a Republican and speaking of Republicans, no I'm not ready to go there yet. I'm still feeling too good from the shore visit.

Why do some artists return to the same subject over and over? Watteau’s works often feature lovers in the last light of the day. Picasso was obsessed with the Minotaur whom he painted as a beast, a poet, a murderer, a murder victim, and others. Than there is German Renaissance painter Lucas Cranach the Elder who liked nothing better than painting beheadings or more precisely pretty women carrying severed heads. Try doing that today and you'll find yourself in a padded room at Bellvue.

I read an article in the Times last week that said women are more likely to sext than men. My thought is it's because women have a much more active erotic imagination than men who are too busy imagining minotaurs and severed heads.

The Phillies, 31 games over .500 and 8 games ahead of the Braves. Need I say more?

Ladytron - White Elephant

Observations from the Road 7.4

So my 4th of July weekend at home draws to an end with my return to the Village postponed until morning so I can enjoy my family, the Phillies, and all the leftover pig roast beer just a little bit longer. It was an awesome long weekend with just a touch of sadness at the realization that all we kids are finished with high school, really the realization that none of us are kids anymore. Still that can't take away from just how awesome a weekend it was.

I was so into recharging the brain that I didn't even bother getting myself a New York Times Sunday morning although I was tempted to get one later in the day just to sit by the pool and be a smart-ass. But I decided against it and played the good daughter, sis, and pseudo hostess all day. And a long day it was. Sunday began early, with the pig roasting on a hot humid morning, and it continued well into Monday morning with candles burning in the garden and a small fire on the deck. I finally crashed around 1:30 Monday morning and eventually found myself sleeping on the deck just like old times.

Dumb luck made the weekend just a little more special as my cousin Tess just happened to be visiting from the other coast. Tess is a year older than me and it has been years since I last saw her so Friday night the two of us and my brother went out to do some catching up. As I’m always thinking I came up with a photo idea involving Tess and her dad's totally awesome Ford Mustang that we shot on Sunday morning. Last I saw her the girl had tats but nothing like the complete body art she is sporting now and, just an observation, she looks hot. Looking at the photo later made me think that if my sis is my mini-me I might just be Tess' mini-me, just not so mini.

So in the end I did some swimming, some tanning (don't laugh!), re-bonded with my cousin, and spent a lot of time with my family. Along the way I drank too much cheap beer, ate too much pork, and accidentally fired a bottle rocket in the direction of a police cruiser that just happened into my line of fire. OK, so I wasn't the perfect hostess all the time. I did very little thinking about the Village, politics, or even art. I just vegged, recharged, and had pretty much the kind of weekend I was hoping for. I even added to my bucket list as Tess and I concocted a plan to cruise the left coast on Harley's one day.

Sometimes the t-shirts are right, life really is good.

Finally let me wish you a late happy 4th of July. Hope it was a good one with lots of alcohol and fireworks though I hope they weren’t combined in any way. That’s how police cruisers get shot up this time of year.

"Freedom is the right to write the wrong words." Patti Smith

Bruce Springsteen - Born In The USA, Live in Paris

Observations on Art 4.24

Anybody that knows me also knows by now that I have a love affair with black & white photography. It's something that I have had for a long time, long before I even started thinking about taking photos myself. I can even tell the exact time it started, the summer of 1996.


My dad has always subscribed to Rolling Stone and it was one of the first magazines I read regularly. The July issue in 1996 was the yearly summer double issue and had Jenny McCarthy showing her boobs on the cover. That may have been the reason I picked it up but something I found inside in ways changed me forever. In an interview of Patti Smith I found this quote, "When I perform, I can't say I feel like a male or a female. What I feel is not in the human vocabulary." I was so fascinated by the interview and quote that I combed my dad's massive vinyl collection and found her debut album.

More important than the music I found on "Horses" was the cover. A stark black & white portrait I just found stunning. The cover notes said it was by Robert Mapplethorpe so i did some more digging and my love affair with b&w was born. Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe were many things too each other - collaborators, lovers, each others muse, and lifelong friends. Through it all their one goal was to create art and they did just that through poetry, drawing, music, and photography. Mapplethorpe's photos are breathtaking, beautiful, and at times brutally graphic yet they seem somehow emotional to me, at one instant tense and at the next simply beautiful.

I'm not sure why this has all come back to me now. I think a major part of it was the realization that I live within walking distance of his 23rd street loft where Mapplethorpe did much of his work and Smith lived but a block away from here during that time.  I recently picked up a copy of the book "Just Kids" by Patti Smith which is her story the years together with Mapplethorpe. The book ends with their last days and conversations, as Mapplethorpe died of AIDs in 1989. In the back of the book are the lyrics to her memorial song for Mapplethorpe ....

"Little emerald bird

Wants to fly away

If I cup my hand

Could I make him stay?

Little emerald soul

Little emerald eye

Little emerald soul

Must you say goodbye?

All the things that we pursue

All that we dream

Are composed as nature knew

In a feather green

Little emerald bird

As you light afar

It is true I heard

God is where you are

Little emerald soul

Little emerald eye

Little emerald bird

We must say goodbye"

footnote - In February the J. Paul Getty Trust and Los Angeles County Museum of Art jointly acquired the works of Robert Mapplethorpe. The 200 artworks, 2000 photographs, 3,500 Polaroids and 120,000 negatives are worth in the neighborhood of $30 million.

Patti Smith interviewed by Tom Snyder in 1978. This interview is just classic.

Observations from the Road 1.22

When I got the bus this morning it was so effing cold, 12 degrees it said, and that's even too damn cold to smoke a cigarette. I know it got cold in the mountains but I never remember feeling this cold when I was there. Of course one can’t bundle up in parkas in the Village, it just doesn’t look good at all. The only other option is to wrap yourself in faux fur and look like a mongoose chasing a track rat down the street. Not that I haven’t seen this, I have, but damn if that’s going to be me.

Something the art geek in me thinks is important for you to know is the fact that I totally love the scent of color. So you are probably now wondering how color can have a scent but think about it. I get a head rush from a new box of crayons or the woody smell of new pencils. Painters will argue till the end of time which smells worse, oil or acrylic paints. I don't care who wins that argument because I like them both. Or maybe I just like the way my brain purrs after a day of painting and drinking Corona. Now don't even get me started on linseed oil.

After the Tuscon shootings I had wanted to write a post about guns and gun control but I never did. One thing I was going to admit was that I own a gun myself which is a long story that I'm not going to get into now. I haven’t touched it in years and I don't have it in the Village, which is kind of idiotic to add because if I haven’t touched it in years how was it going to get there? Besides just to apply for a handgun permit in NYC is $350 plus another $100 for fingerprints. Anyway I decided I need to do something so I am turning it in to get melted down or dropped in the tar pits or whatever it is they do with them. It may only be symbolic in a country as well armed as this but it’s something I think I to do it anyway.

On the bus home I was reading an article about Patti Smith in an old copy of ‘New York' magazine ("Remembrances of the Punk Prose Poetess"). It's a good article and worth a read and two things totally jumped out at me. The first is ".... an anti-feminist feminist icon who dressed androgynously, used dirty slang like William Burroughs, and argued that words like Ms. were “really bullshit,” as she said in 1976. 'Vowels are the most illuminated letters in the alphabet, and these assholes take the only fucking vowel out of the word miss. It sounds like a sick bumblebee, it sounds frigid.'” I like the way she speaks, sounds familiar to me. The second is just a quote from one of her band members, guitarist Lenny Kaye. “We’ve always had a little maxim, in our band, that the guardians of history are soon rewarded with history itself."

And where have you gone Keith Olbermann? Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.

Bullet For My Valentine - Hearts Burst Into Fire