one thing today

  I LISTENED TO THIS ON YOUTUBE TONIGHT AND A MAN WROTE THAT HE USED TO SING IT TO HIS DAUGHTER AND NOW HE SINGS IT TO HIS DOGS.  Many's the time I've been mistaken And many times confused Yes, and I've often felt forsaken And certainly misused Oh, but I'm alright, I'm alright I'm just weary to my bones Still, you don't expect to be bright and bon vivant So far away from home, so far away from home And I don't know a soul who's not been battered I don't have a friend who feels at ease I don't know a dream that's not been shattered Or driven to its knees But it's alright, it's alright For we lived so well so long Still, when I think of the Road we're traveling on I wonder what's gone wrong I can't help it, I wonder what has gone wrong And I dreamed I was dying I dreamed that my soul rose unexpectedly And looking back down at me Smiled reassuringly And I dreamed I was flying And high up above my eyes could clearly see Th...

  I feel so lucky lately it worries me some.   Frank Selak was a Croatian man who was known for his requent brushes with death. Selak's near-death experiences began in 1962 when he was riding a train through a cold, rainy canyon and the train flew off the tracks and crashed in a river. An unknown person pulled Selak to safety, while 17 other passengers drowned. Selak suffered a broken arm and hypothermia.  The next year, during his first and only plane ride, he was blown out of a malfunctioning plane door and landed in a haystack ; the plane crashed, killing 19 people.  Three years after that, in 1966, a bus that he was riding in skidded off the road and into a river, drowning four passengers. Selak swam to shore with a few cuts and bruises. I In 1970, his car caught fire as he was driving and he managed to escape before the fuel tank blew up.  Three years later, in another driving incident, the engine of his car was doused with hot oil from a malfunctioning fu...

  Jane Fonda was given the Lifetime Achievement Award at the SAG show last night. She gave the most beautiful, important acceptance speech I have ever heard.  Watch it on YT.

  There was an article about Lucas Samaras in the paper today - about his apt for sale. He died last year. My BFF Michael who died thirty five years ago loved him. He was his own art work always. Lots of self portrait Polaroids. I read his obit. One reader commented ... A nice reminder that besides the occasional slip-up like wrecking the planet, human beings are quite wonderful creatures.

  A cold cold afterenoon yesterday. Sak and I subway uptown to see a Wiseman doc from '69, Law and Order. He made more than thirty great great documentaries. I was reminded how wonderful it is to go to a movie with a friend and surrender to the dark theater and forget who and what you are and go where the screen takes you. Nothing like it. The power of light and dark and bodies surrounding while a story unfolds.  

  I think this is what I will paint next. 

 

I tried the first hour of Casablanca. I’ve never seen the whole movie. The only thing I can see that it has going for it is radiant Ingrid Bergman. She is stunningly natural and beautiful. She used her eyes more than her language. I’ve never liked Bogart. He’s always Bogart and that is wanting as far as a character bringing a story to life. Kiss me as if it were the last time - th ats where I signed off and watched a history of the Statue of Liberty.  

last night I was amused by how many guys were walking home to their sweeties with really appalling bouquets ... and how many of them will be met with bogus gratitude.  and then I recalled a Joni quote "romance is Gods way of showing us he has a sense of humor" and then - for some odd reason - I thought of the three times in my life when I felt like I was being honored ...  once when a friend was dying and he came by and I massaged him ...  once when I travelled to Italy for a friends wedding and she sat me beside her at her Sienna reception ...  and once on Obamas inauguration day when a friend at work invited me to her home for brunch on 135 st street and I shared the moment with her, her two sisters and her mother.   These memories stay and stay and are full with joyful replenishment. 

 

  It’s 2025 - forty six years after Stonewall - 46 - and gay men on dating sites are still disguising themselves - and very often in extremely goofy ways. It's silly and sad and unsexy. It makes me realize living in new york city is different than living in America - the supposed home of the free & the brave. I feel compelled to write them and say ...   stop the madness, please, for the sake of your fellow man and woman, kids and geezers, yourself. But I don’t. Reprimand is hardly whats called for - but I so want to tell them how silly it seems, how grimy and  self-hating it is. It kills agency and advances guilt, shame, fear.  

... my new next door neighbor Jean Michel doesn’t get my refined humor, not before I give him   a clue - with a smile or a cupped hand on a   shoulder. I ask him how his day was - and he says he’s about to work from home more often. I ask him what he does - retail for a French company -  which makes sense cause he’s from the land of ooo la la. I ask him if he cross dresses and he says do I what? Crossdress . Oh no - so serious face. I break the ice and make sure he knows I’m playing, giving it to him.   Maybe I'm  channeling dad - dumb American old white guy humor. I got a million of ‘em.  

  Could it possibly be true? Really? All these years?   I think maybe.   I think so. This is the first time in my adult life I’ve had big, neat, tidy, grownup closets. 5 of them. I’m thinking back. First hovel on west 10th - dreadful … check … then MacDougal ... crammed with crap ... Perry st … double check … shared it with Don who’d often leave half munched  ham & cheese on ryes in there … and then Grove st … small studio small nothing boxes and then here on west 16th for 32 years … bigger but still … I threw it in all together, shirts, socks, jackets, sweaters, shoes, laundry, humidifers, massage table, scarfs, ts, pants   - everything but the … so yeah, probably out of the closets and into the streets … and now, alas - I’m in the closets and loving it- able to leap tall piles of clothes & stuff in a single bound.   Better late than never.  

  I joined a new playwrights group last night that seems promising ... a colorful cast of characters and material - so going round the table:  Bob from LA, gay, bad ping pong birdie size wanna be pony tail high on his crown, look at me eyeglassed. Mike Sharp, married, kids, unassuming, smart, good hair, his play is about black cowboys  Richie is Vietnamese, a 4th grade teacher and actor - he read my 12 year old Blake and delivered.  Elliot is an actor, whale watching guide and a political puppet. He wears masks at public demonstrations. I asked him if he considered himself a human puppet and he answered gee Paul, I just met you . Jessica is serious and her piece was about fair housing in Yonkers in the 60s.  Ann works with puppets with Mindy who runs the group. She's got great skin and a look like that proverbial woman who transforms into a looker when she takes off her glasses and loosens her hair.  Michelle is an actor who came late and packed a wallop wi...

One of the most common reasons for having anxiety when things are going well is the  fear of losing something you enjoy . Your fear is likely rooted in an understanding that happiness can be fleeting and good things don't always last. You die.

I was trying to watch Kendrick Lamars halftime super bowl show and I just don't get it ... a group of grown ups bounding around the stage, running around flanking the star who raps about cars and a stupid feud and this and that and so fast u can't understand a thing and it's all nothing much as far as I can figure and I wish it wasn't so - cause what the world needs now is clarity. I switch to To Kill a Mockingbird. They invited Walter for dinner after Scout fought with him in the schoolyard. He asks for syrup for his meat and pours it and pours it over his dinner and Scout says what in tarnation are you doing and Atticus tells them its a sin to kill a mockingbird cause all they do is make music for us to enjoy ... they just do one thing ... they sing their hearts out for us. 

I’ve had a lot of people helping me this week … David my super with moving and hanging and things … a cable guy - so low key, efficient and easy company - he leaves me his personal cell # if I have trouble installing new, coming equipment  … a guy at the bank, lovely, just a security guy who enjoys his contact with peeps … haircutter - young and cool and telling me bout his girlfriend and how much he hates kids … smiling cab drivers helping me help a friend whos casted up for a while   … a massage guy with hands that should be insured and 100 per cent relentless diligence.    in my opinion - based on the this week - male helpers are friendlier and sweeter than female … just writin’. When eye rolling grumpy lumpy female workers are bad, they’re very bad ... with blank looks and false accusations and not one ounce of  “be here now”  … "now if you were listening to me, I was JUST trying to tell you” … I WAS listening to you and you WERE scowling a scowl that t...

  My old apartment is completely empty ex for an almost empty bottle of Windex. It’s been less than a week since I left it and now it’s unlocked. I like to go down and visit.  There’s something strange and special about an empty apartment. Besides the echo - it evokes a number of things for me. The past, the future, quietude, melancholy, loss, Last Tango in Paris - where Brando and the young French sexpot both check out a beautiful empty apartment and I think Brando rents it and they meet there and have wild sex and he makes her promise to never say or tell him her name and vice versa and it's such a wild fantasy, two nameless people flooring it again and again for good or bad underneath a night skyway in the City of Lights.  

  My new next door neighbor Paul G pops by once is a while. Last time he told me he had Malcolms photo albums. He was a resident of the building who Richard, another neighbor, told me “melted into his floor” one fateful day. This was years ago. He was found dead in his place after his adjacent nabe complained about a deeply offensive odor emanating from M’s hoarded hovel. David our super got in with his key and found the poor guy quiet as a mouse pissing on cotton. I didn’t know Malcolm well. He smelled of cigarettes and beer, he was alway scowling and his loud porn scared the young kids who lived under him. He had beady eyes, not much of a chin and a thin pointy nose like the end of an ice cream cone. He wore some kind of big something on a chain underneath his t short, like the size of a kitchen matches box. I always wondered if it was medical or diabolical, maybe a bomb or some satanic equivalent of a Catholic scapula.   So - back to the photo albums. Paul G was gonna toss ...

  Dorothea Lange photographed this stretch of U.S. 54 in southern New Mexico while she was employed by the Farm Security Administration. During the Depression, this highway was the west-bound route taken by many families who hoped to find work in California. Upon discovering conditions no better than those they left behind, they often returned east. In "An American Exodus" (1939), published by Lange and her husband, Paul Taylor, this image is accompanied by an observation made by someone they met in the field: "They keep the road hot a goin' and a comin' . . . They've got roamin' in their head." In the vernacular terms of the moment or in the timeless terms of the photograph, this picture is clearly an invitation to travel.  

There's a difference between living on the 6th floor and the second. more traffic and faces, the elevator door doesn't slam on the 6th. Yesterday two little neighbors boy, brothers, six and eight ... were carrying bags of cans and stuff to the basement. Steve on 2 opened the door and I told him ... the kids went trick or treating and all they got is all this junk.   As I left them on their way and said bye ... the smaller squirt said thanks for the candy.  Wow.  Brilliant. Irony at 6. 

  I am at home with my family. Night. Rioters outside the front door and windows shoot bullets  into our house. At first, it seems as though they are aiming for the main hallway light. I rush round and turn off all the other lights in the house. My best friend Sak is with us. They kill her.  The next day I spot my parents eating outside at the shooters' restaurant. I  rage at them ...  how could you how could  you how could you.