one thing today

Don’t think I’m gonna make it for the ball drop in 1:11:11 from now …   but am watching CNN in Times Square and remembering one new years a zillion years ago when someone we knew knew someone who knew someone who worked at Der Spigel magazine on West 43rd who didn’t mind that a gang of people they didn’t know showed up at their party.   I think we decided to go at the last minute cause we had nothing to do and no money.  We watched pickpockets snake through the crowd followed by old school club swinging cops who never caught  t hem.   The city was easy and ever buzzing and never frightening when we were sprouts in our twenties. It will never be that way again. Nobody is young the way we were young. That time is dead. But it was here and we were, too, and it’s a holy cow blessing now .  

  Out of the night that covers me,       Black as the pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be       For my unconquerable soul. In the fell clutch of circumstance       I have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeonings of chance       My head is bloody, but unbowed. Beyond this place of wrath and tears       Looms but the Horror of the shade, And yet the menace of the years       Finds and shall find me unafraid. It matters not how strait the gate,       How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate,       I am the captain of my soul. -  William Ernest Henley  

  I’m listening to JT sing Something in the Way She Moves - his bell clear sweet baritone, sweet steely steel guitar, his more than finger lickin’ good ax picking.   I met a lovely one over Christmas who never heard his music that’s followed me around since I was in school and I think to myself - what have I missed that is JT beautiful for the ages?   There’s probably a lot that could be an example of that great thing.  

I collect weird street cardboard. I made one change in this. It's better.  Show you tomorrow.  Maybe.  If there is a big clamor for it. 

  He leaves the message for me and squashes hope. It’s been a very long time since I got lit by a new face, body, words, possibility. But I am an old, wise man now.   I close out the message, think about it for a few minutes and watch  Abbott & Costello Meet the Invisible Man .

  I spoke to a real painter over Christmas and he suggested I check out Naive painters.   Naive art is  characterized by a childlike simplicity and frankness , and often there's an awkward relationship with the formal qualities of painting, for instance ignoring the traditional three rules of perspective. I have to explore the three rules of perspective.   If there’s anything cool to relate, I'll report back.   Painter Christmas guy also said it's not important to be a good painter. It's important to want to paint. 

  I had a concrete poem published in an anthology in 1977 - a letter I wrote to a friend about a mutual friend who jumped off the 23rd floor of her apartment building.   I couldn’t send it, so I ripped it up and it became the only poem I ever published - except for a couple of very embarrassing ones I wrote in college.  I gave the book to my deep and true niece Deborah who is the caring matriarch of our mega sized family now. Who knows who will read it and what will happen to it long years from now?  But it is passed on instead of buried in a box under my bed that I barely ever open.  We had ourselves a music filled merry C eve and day.    

  Come young braves Come young children Come to the book of love with me Respect your brothers and your sisters Come to the book of love I know it ain't easy But we're gonna look for a better day Come young braves Come young children I love my country As it dies In war and pain Before my eyes I walk the streets Where disrespect has been The sins of politics The politics of sin The heartlessness that darkens my soul On Christmas Red and silver On the leaves Fallen white snow Runs softly through the trees Madonnas weep For wars of hell They blow out the candles And haunt Noel The missing love that rings through the world On Christmas Now the time has come to fight Laws in the book of love burn bright People you must win For thee America Her dignity For all the high court world to see On Christmas Laura Nyro, Christmas and the Beads of Sweat 1971

  I'm looking thru family photos to give fam when I see them for Christmas ... group shots of various sisters, nieces, nephews, sisters, brothers, aunts/uncles, me, friends, babies, parental units, grand types before and after me  ...  and as a nephew said when I gave him a photo of a bunch of our tribe last christmas - of christmases long ago ... forty percent of us are gone but as someone smart once said ... we are gone for good when no one thinks or talks about us anymore.   That will be a very long time - long after I gotta pay electric bills and figure out if I want Chinese for dinner - before the inevitable happens and I finally see what's what or not.  I might paint this - the two people who got me here. aren't they fab? no money just beauty and sweetness and future. I wish I could hear their conversation - before the six of us were born and added joy and trouble to their lives.

I’m not gonna lie - sometimes it’s fun to lie, even though I’m too lazy  to do it much. When someone lies to you, have them pay a price.  Top them with something outrageous but possibly true. Tell them you’ve won millions in the lottery and ask them to keep it a secret. Before you tell them you had sex with someone famous you know they lust after, insist they don’t disclose it to a living soul. The only time a lie is a sin is when it leaves you blameless and an innocent person accused.

so I shot the two black signs on the street this afternoon and the second pic is a shadow in my living room earlier today I think I'm gonna paint the shadow thing in the middle of the split two black images and call the piece lovelight at first sight not sure what size I'm gonna make it.  wish me luck

  There’s not much stuff I wish I hadn’t lost along the way - thousands and thousands of days ago - some time,somewhere. One I can think of is the one and only trophy I won - Camp Dineen - Honor Camper - which basically meant I was a shy, quiet kid who didn’t give any authority unit any significant lip. I folded my clothes like an adult and didn’t complain about the bugs or bug juice.   I think if I could have anything I used to have - I’d choose the cufflinks I had as a very young kid, maybe ten. What did they look like - gold I remember, when and why did I get them, who gave them to me, what happened to them? A trophy and cufflinks aren’t exactly things you leave in a coffee shop or at the beach or under a tree. Where are they today? The cufflinks made me feel special, no one else had them - well, maybe my dad … I’m not sure. Maybe they were his and he thought them too fancy to take a fancy to. I loved wearing them and a white dress shirt by a fire - on a holiday - eating too many Pa

 

  The sun will shine on anybody with enough sense to get out in it. M. Buchanan

  Is there any better song title than "The Low Spark of High Heel Boys" 

Listening to burning down the house before I eat a hamburger. You can’t help but move your carcass when you hear it.   I saw Alvin Ailey the other night and the dancers were so beautiful - sleek and smooth and symmetrical and fluid and beastly strong and just the most lovely animals you’ve ever seen - like birds that can do way more than fly.  

 they got hitched 45 years after they first met .

  BY  WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS Turning and turning in the widening gyre    The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere    The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst    Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand.    The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out    When a vast image out of  Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert    A shape with lion body and the head of a man,    A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,    Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it    Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.    The darkness drops again; but now I know    That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,    And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,    Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

 

  I 'm in the mood to do a new painting.  I haven't attempted something abstract yet and for a while, I thought that was the way I'd go ... maybe riff on the above purple thing I photographed at a construction site in my neighborhood. But as days pass, I've grown less and less enthused about the idea. I scrolled through my Iphotos and came upon my favorite Lucian Freud painting. Snap! That's what I'm gonna do. There's nothing more juicy than faces.

Sartre’s Hell is other people  means  it is unbearable to exist subject to, awaiting, controlled by, and turned toward the Other's approval, judgements, and opinions . It describes an existence at the mercy of the Other, the Other's judgements, and the Other's accusing gaze.

A farmer was giving a friend a tour of his apple orchard which was adjacent to his pig pens. As they walked along, the farmer held one of his pigs in his arms and every now and then, he'd raise him up and let the critter munch on an apple while the two men conversed. After watching the farmer do this over and over again with his pigs, the friend inquired, "hey buddy, wouldn't it save time if you picked some apples and threw them on the ground and let your little friends eat on their own?" The farmer answered, "I guess so.  But really ... what's time to a pig? "  

Mary Kay Jordon was my first crush.  One morning when we were in the third grade, she exited a school bus in a green slicker surrounded by a sea of shorties dressed in plain old yellow ones. Zing went my  strings. My very own Little Green Riding Hood.  I also admired and envied her talent at winning multiplication table races in the front of the classroom, mastering the chalk and blackboard as if they were hers and hers alone, toiling away like no other, her shiny chestnut  tresses curtaining her sweet, determined countenance.  Every single time, she left one and all in her singular wake. Wow! What a girl.  Last week, a mutual friend told me she died last year.