one thing today

  nobody goes there anymore.  it's too crowded. - yogi b 

  I walked past the Pleasure Chest this afternoon. Jessie and Pierre came into mind.   I miss their humor.   For some reason, we had a holiday tradition of me getting P a Christmas present at the sex shop.   One year I bought him edible candy briefs.   He unwrapped the present and without pause, he said …  just my luck to be married to a diabetic.  

... good one.   

I have a lot of photographs of people I don’t know that belong with people who know them. Here is a newlywed couple who surely had children or brothers, nephews or cousins or friends who broke bread with them, had a cocktail with them, maybe some pigs in a blanket, pictionary. I’d gladly gift them this portrait of their jolly, well fed folk if only I knew who and where they were.   If anyone out there can steer me toward the road that leads to one of these currently unknown individuals, please do.    

  An old work colleague sent me this photo of way back when Tony B came in and played with us. He was a gem. River stone smooth warm   easy.   And to his right - that’s music mogul/maven koolest kool kat ever Phil Ramone. I told him he had the greatest resume I ever read. He worked with everybody. Name someone. Yes he did. His first show biz gig was stage managing Marilyn at Madison Square Garden when she sang happy birthday to JFK.  It's good to be reminded that we worked with a lot of top top top tier artists.

  Jazz on a Summers Day  … Newport Folk Festival ‘58. Spirited music ensued, people danced and smoked and laughed and drank and kissed and bit their lower lips on rooftops while kids ran round with swim tubes and cokes. They wore wide open faces we don’t wear anymore.  

  I volunteer at  Gods Love We Deliver.  This past fiscal year it   delivered 3,639,099 medically tailored meals to 12,783 individuals - a 30% increase in individuals served and 32% increase in meals delivered from the previous year. Ten thousand meals a day ain't nothing to shake a stick at. 

  ... I couldn’t pull up the word yesterday.   I walked along the shoreline and a lifeguard stopped me - please hold up a minute. My buddy is comin’ in on a jet ski.   I held up, as did the rest of the swelling crowd.   Jet Ski Man roared in onto the sand like Top Gun Tom, jumped off his metal stallion, stripped off his vest and whipped off his helmet.   A gasp rose up from his audience.   Body by Da Vinci.   Colgate grin. Mansfield hair.   Tres Barbie ooo la la phantasmagoric cinematic ga ga from the get go moment. 

Back from four days at the beach - the place that time forgets and sometimes brings up big stuff for me. Stubborn regrets, sweet recollections, little boys in gorgeous half light, hard, churning feelings, silence and clean sight and waves again and again over and over in and out thru high and low tide thousands of times each day.   most deer only enjoy four summers.    

Went to see Godards'  Contempt yesterday. Beautiful scenery, including Bardot, who, when sunglassed, looked a lot like prime time Goldie Hawn. The Film Forum is doing a Billy Wilder retrospective. It’s hard to believe how many great, classic movies he made. Dozens of them.   Peerless director success. I once worked with Liza and  kept a tight stopwatch on her.  She compared me to BW to her interviewer.   Liza Compared Me to Billy Wilder is the title of my yet to be autobiography.  

  This was my bad boy bar jacket.   I wore it out … and wore it out … when I went out late on the prowl for maybe twenty years. If that ragged thing could talk. Yup, over Bill and Dale, thru good times and bad, snow and sleet and male man hail. Sometimes the twain did meet ... and meet again, sometimes never ... over and over again. Twas the work and play of middle years end.   

 

This is a little West Village window with a big story behind it.   I heard it forty some years ago. I think one of Don’s friends masterminded the caper.   Maybe it was someone else's friend. Whoever it was decided he needed more light in his dingy place and what harm would it do to do what he did.   He took a hammer to his wall and created a modest window.   It remains there all these years later, thousands upon thousands of days of light entering a room that once upon a time was deemed too dark to accept.

  I visited friends in my hometown this past weekend. It looked very manicured, careful, affluent. We went to an open house at a home we hung out in a lot when we were kids. A big Tudor, nine kids, 3 severely   handicapped.   They had an indoor pool, Doberman pinchers,   a tennis court and a public phone booth. Not same old, same old. Dad was an obstetrician who sometimes wore his bloodied lab coat home. Mom was a removed baby maker. The kids ate a picnic table in the basement with the maids. It was very American Horror Story via Addams Family and The Munsters somewhere deep in the bowels of The   Twilight Zone .  They fucked up the renovations big time.  

  The rules of happiness are as strict as the rules of sorrow; indeed, perhaps more strict.   The two states have different densities. The lives of happy people are dense with their own doings - crowded, active, thick - urban, I would almost say. But the sorrowing are nomads, on a plain with few landmarks and no boundaries; sorrow’s horizons are vague and its demands few.   Larry Mc Murtry

  I spot Steve’s old Hudson street apt - he was Dolan’s boyfriend who had a cheesey Costco like Rousseau-ish   mural of his nude self on his wall that faced the sidewalk. He’s gone, Dolan’s gone, Manny and Ann and Dan and Carole and John - gone - all my buds I shared   life with almost a half century ago. O my oh mine. So live, that when thy summons comes to join    The innumerable caravan, which moves    To that mysterious realm, where each shall take    His chamber in the silent halls of death,    Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,    Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed    By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave,    Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch    About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams. William Cullen Bryant  

  Ran into Felix, my six year old next door neighbor   Hi Paul Hi buddy Thanks for the shells and the horseshoe crab. Which do you like more? The horseshoe crab.   It looks prehistoric, right? It IS prehistoric.   What you got in the bag? A box I’m gonna paint for a young girl I know.   What are you gonna put inside it?   I don’t know.   You should put in her favorite thing.   That would be her boyfriend. Do you think he’ll fit? No.  

  Meet Ben Murphy - one of the many 60s actors who were TV cowboys.   Pablo Luke Hud Butch Newman anyone?  In those days the small screen was full of ‘em - Chucks  and Clays and Steves and Clints .   Some of them died early, some of them made fortunes in southern California real estate. When I run into them on Me TV … I remember what I felt when I first saw  them on prime time nights before things swung wrong. American excitement, possibility, better is   straight ahead, who knows what’s a comin’ but it's gonna be fab.

  He seems like a classic new yorker but lives in Indiana. He's  an unassuming cool guy and advocates veganism. Joey Chestnut trains by fasting and by stretching his stomach with milk, water and protein supplements. After winning his sixth consecutive hot dog eating contest in 2012 by eating 68 hot dogs, he stated, "I will not stop until I reach 70. This sport isn't about eating. It's about drive and dedication, and at the end of the day, hot dog eating challenges both my body and my mind."  

Daniel Calder - from his 2014 show  Blackboards Vanishing Act  chalk, mixed media, 72" x 48"

  Go for coffee this morning Guy next to me at the counter   what does Katy Perry say? Tell me.   (singing) Cause baby you're a firework                     Come on, show 'em what you're worth nice one   Happy 4th, babe I spot a fab purple flower woman - is it real? me - yeah.  Do you know what it is?     No.  it’s so pretty it looks fake.   Nature does that I spot mom and Olivia, our year old most beautiful resident   Olivia ! Hi Did she like your trip? She’s become quite the beach girl  

  My 300th post  A mysterious commenter ask me to do …   10 Best Grove moments Swimming with happy Molly   Dancin with my nieces Bartender Kelly and the Candido connection   3 hour hang with Barbie John Asa and Ry at the table - talk, music, collage Slow dance with Daughter of Jamil Taking photo of Eliz dancing outside window dancin’ Backyard birds and morning beauty Early coffee on the stairway Sunken Forest

  July1st … my major malfunction yesterday was sleep. Couldn’t get enough of it. After pulling three bags to the ferry … I was wiped out. home. nap. eat. read. long, long sleep. I kinda feel like I don’t know what to do with myself now - here - after so much beach beauty for so long a time.