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May 31, 2008
Finally saw A Cock and Bull Story last night. I drew these pictures during it. I found it to be one of the more clever films I’ve seen in while. Leave it to the British to be literate and funny. I also dreamed I could fly last night. It’s been a while and it was good to dust off my wings.
May 30, 2008
When I finally get back to my loft, I find an enormous box at the foot of the stairs. It is addressed to me and of course the elevator can’t be found. I wrestle the thing up several flights and I feel like Buster Keaton, when I notice someone filming my progress. My whole building has been invaded by a company of film players. The actors are all over the building pretending that they live there. They are even pretending to live in my studio where I push the box and ask someone what’s going on. The Camera then comes through the corridors and up the stairs in one long continuous shot as the drama unfolds in real time. There are intimate acts and gunshots and people I know and people I don’t and everywhere is the set, everyone are the players. Reality and fiction are completely blurred and I end up with a fairly large scene in the movie. Apparently the climax of the picture is a big wedding party on the outskirts of town and the whole company and I are loaded up into coach buses and taken off to the location/wedding/reception. When we get there it looks like an Italy I know from the movies of the early sixties: a few new modern housing blocks in a field of brick rubble and tall grass. They’ve set up a tent and strings of holiday lights and a fashionable band that I don’t know, but I think I’ve heard of starts to play and we all eat and drink and dance in the intermittent showers that cast a cinematic sheen on all the edges of brick. I am no longer sure if I’m an actor, or a person; did someone get married, or make a film… anyway it’s a pretty good party.
May 29, 2008
I am on the campus of a modern university; so modern in fact, that it has a satellite campus…literally. They have built an enormous space station that serves as a quiet library to study in, etc. I’ve gotten it into my head to spend the night up there and watch one of the Star Wars films. When I get to the quadrangle with the space elevator, I find a pavilion displaying an exact replica of a soviet era atomic bomb. It’s all there, but the plutonium. I’m curious to see this once top secret object. An artist/engineer has set up an elaborate machine to render the bomb in various shades of molten silver. The silver is applied by a complex robotic arm with an old flibert head paint brush clamped to the end of it. I start talking to the artist and he convinces me to go get my video camera and document the process of painting the atom bomb in shades of silver and tarnish. As I head back to my room, a terrific storm blows up and all the students scramble. I take my shoes off and walk home in the puddles. I won’t take my camera out in the rain and I’m certainly not riding up to space in eighty mph winds. I’ll just watch Star Wars at home, or better yet get blown around the campus and wade in the puddles.
May 28, 2008
This is me on memorial day thinking about a possible new animation project and watching the fleet and the sky and thinking about the war(s).
May 23, 2008
Went to the fireworks last night. Got to visit old friends; both human and painted. Video should be appearing soon.
May 22, 2008
I walked around the Chelsea Galleries yesterday… in large part to remind myself why I don’t really enjoy Chelsea Galleries, but it was nice to duck into them when avoiding the spring rains that came and went all afternoon. When I got home I heard the sound of thunder in the gathering dark. It took me a few rumbles to realize it wasn’t thunder, but fireworks and I ran to the roof to see the sky, but most of the action was hidden behind the skyline. Tonight they’re shooting more for the Brooklyn Bridge birthday. Fireworks season is upon us. Even better than street fairs.
May 16, 2008
The killer is beneath me - maybe coming through the floor, maybe the mattress. I am being tossed around like a coin and the killer’s hands keep coming at me and I fend them off until I scream at the top of my lungs and awake. She says, “What was that strange noise you made?” and she imitates it and it sounds like a little blurp… a whimper… a small animal in distress, or as she puts it: “a little girl.”
“A Monster,” I say, still too asleep to explain that it’s a serial killer with a whole back story that is already fading in my consciousness. She starts to laugh at me and mock my mouse like sound that made it all the way from the terror of my unconscious to the comfort my waking bed… albeit without the volume. Hidden in that little whimper somewhere is the all the horror of life and death… or someone else’s idea of a joke.
May 13, 2008
Somewhere in Istanbul there is a wall around the ancient part of the city. The houses in the city were made of wood and have all rotted away. I suppose it was dry rot as Istanbul looks like the desert and the thing of it is that with out all the little wood houses against the ancient stone walls, the walls have started to lean perilously inward. We are part of a group that go to see the walls before they fall. I think how funny it is to care about the walls, when the city they once protected has already turned to dry rot. I invent a cocktail with milk and some strange exotic yellow liquor. You pour the liquor into the milk and it just gathers in the center of the milk like the yolk of an egg. I call the drink a Humpty Dumpty in honor of the walls of Istanbul.
May 8, 2008
After the traditional birthday lunch with my mom and her husband, I decided to walk back to Brooklyn. I’m always after a novel route, so I decided to walk east to where Moses parted the tenements (Robert, that is) and turned them into a maze of grid bricks like suprematists and abstract painting and Russia and Stalin. I’ve been in Stuytown and some of the other developments over the years, but I’ve never taken in this huge stretch of brick housing in one good walk before. My meanderings ran from Kips Bay all the way down to Chinatown. It was like visiting a whole “other” Manhattan. I was thinking to myself how I’ve never really seen it used effectively in mass culture. For a city that’s been so thoroughly pictured in t.v. and movies, it’s amazing to me that no on has seen fit to find what a great character this architecture might play in a story. It got me thinking… 
May 7, 2008
I am visiting the campus of some university and I go to the art department, which is in a large modern building. The ground floor is a well lighted, airy, white wall gallery. It is full of people coming and going to classes and studios upstairs. As an art show, someone has put an enormous real live black bull in the lobby. I know its art because it’s dressed in a well tailored orange suit. Someone asks me if I’d like to ride the bull. It’s very tame I’m told, but when I get on it of course starts bucking all around the lobby. Everyone scatters and I dismount. They apologize and ask me if I’d like to join a tour of the campus. I say, “I’ve already joined a taurus of the kick ass” No one thinks it’s that funny, but I’m self amused and I go walk my dog around the park-like university. I turn my head for a minute and she gets off leash and I run around for hours looking for the old dog. Seems there is a lake in the center of things and she’s gone swimming.
May 6, 2008
I was running around brooklyn to see a friends show and decided to bring my still camera and note pad and experiment with jamming together whatever I came upon. Someone was extoling the vitues of a buddhist teacher’s MP3s so I threw that in along with colin stetson and me muttering to myself.
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