THE BEST LAID PLANS OF MICE AND MEN...

There's the commercial on the television for CRESTOR...One of the whole onslaught of commercials brainwashing people into thinking that health is something that comes in a bottle...not something that is as simple as taking the stairs instead of the elevator..(there is a guy in my building who rides up one floor in the elevator...he WAITS for it, even if it takes a minute or two...)..
Anyway the commercial goes like this:

(Man and wife...affectionately clinging to each other....)

Woman: While we were building a life together...
Man (interupts): Something was building in my arteries...

WHAT?!

This is such a stretch I am speechless....I laughed out loud I couldn't believe this...I want to meet the person who wrote this...I can only imagine the brain-storming session involved in birthing this gem....

THE SICK OYSTER GIVES THE PEARL

And this dude definately ain't right...I got turned onto this lil' gem by my friend BETCH....I am curious to anyone else's interpretation....We have a few theories....enjoy "DRINKING OUT OF CUPS". (Not to be confused with another, more nefarious, youtube item...)

Never say NEVER........

Recently I was listening to the soundtrack from KILL BILL VOLUME ONE (Both are favs o' mine...), and there is this flute piece...I think shortly before or after Uma slices and dices Lucy....That is really beautiful...It's got some great Tiajuana brass in it( It's called "THE LONELY SHEPARD",awwwww)....Only to discover to my horror, that it is by none other than ZAMFIR!!! Of cheese-ball legend...I myself have used him as an easy laugh on occasion...You just never know when you'll be eating some CROW....

ANIMATOR.....IT'S ALIVE!!! (fiendish laughter...)

When I was a kid, my parents exposed us to alot of really interesting and unusual events, and artists, films, etc....to which I am eternally grateful...It was not your normal existence...All kinds of things were discussed at the dinner table...(something in and of itself unusual, as I later discovered from friends)....I often felt I was watching my own family when watching various films, like Merchant Ivory's Room with a View....) a multi-faceted, and eccentric group of personalities...

One of the things my dad would do, was take some of us to the Festivals of animation...These were movies at the local art houses (like the beautiful RIALTO THEATER) featuring short animated films from all over the world...There was even one of these that featured commercials from all over the globe....This cemented my eternal love of animation, and gave me a view of the world, and all the creative souls at work in it, that has never left me....Later, when I was inevitablly exposed to the BROTHERS QUAY, and their strange STREET OF CROCODILES...(very loosely based on Polish author BRUNO SHULZ's work of the same name- a masterpiece in its own right....whose career was sadly shortened when he was shot coming home after curfew one night by a nazi soldier in occupied Poland...), I knew that someday I would embark on my own animated work...(I have an idea for a short stop-motion piece in the QUAY vein that has slowly been gestating within me for some years...Even in grade school I remember toiling away, while one teacher or another droned on and on about something that meant nothing to me, on elaborate flip books in the margins of my textbooks (GOD!! How I wish I still had some of those...), later even obcessive-compulsively colorizing some of them....

While I have occasionally checked out Youtube for some "obscure" little gem, recommended by a friend, it was only a few days ago, remembering a film seen over a year and a half ago, while bartending at Mike Judge's animation celebration screening at the Moore Theater in Seattle, that I realized how a vast wealth of animation was just a click away via Youtube...(what an amazing site!!!). I started hunting down old favorites...some from my father's forays with us, and new favorite's, discovered while hungrily searching on the site....And a bonfire has been rekindled to my love of all impossible things rendered possible, via the amazing medium of animation....

Here are a few samples to send you down your own path to that incredible art:

RABBIT ,by Run Wrake: a brilliant allegory to greed, canabalizing old childrens illustrations by Geoffrey Highgam, and a soundtrack collab with HOWIE B(!!!), very hip...

MINILOGUE/HITCHHIKERS CHOICE, by some very talented guy...there are even remakes of this one by other artists that are really cool as well...

BALANCE, an old favorite, with the dark humor only a German can bring to these stories...again about that good old sin: GREED...

FATHER AND DAUGHTER, by Michael Dubok de Wit, if this doesn't move you, then there's a rock in the place where yer heart should be....(reminds me somewhat of TRIPLETS OF BELLVILLE, or is that just because of the accordion?...)

GOTTA GET MY ASS TO queens...

I have been spending a few days a week in Queens....I am helping a sculptor with her work....A mamouth piece to be sent to a show in Europe next month....It ain't a paying gig, but I get an oppurtunity to help a fellow artist, learn some new materials, and techniques, and see a part of NYC I might not see otherwise....It is a learning experience....And no one knows where it will lead me if at all, but you never know....










Right now we are attatching hundreds of bones to a steel armiture with a resin putty.....cool stuff, but if you don't wash yer hands every half hour....they can get nasty....(you can see some of the stuff on my hands if you look close....I had to clip my nails after the first day, because the stuff gets under there and won't come out no matter what....And I look like I've had a french manicure....fabulous as it was...









There are two cats they have out back, and they just whine nonstop for an hour straight, then the other one takes over for a while...no kidding, they work in shifts...!




Then it's home again on the M train to Manhattan....I love riding around Brooklyn and Queens, 'cause the train is above ground and you can stare out at all the great old buildings....awash in the waning sunlight....I am tired, but in a good way...

Early one MORNING.....(i went for a walk)

What could I have eaten or smoked or drank to cause such tossings and turnings last night? As it was I lay blinking at the ceiling for a good hour, tried
watching a movie to trick my mind into letting me go back to sleep, but nothing doing....
SO I got up and went for a stroll along the river to find a place to write a letter to LITTLE FRIEDA....




It was relatively quiet ,for NYC, and I got some time to just think....Near the bridge there is a small stretch of "beach"...nothing like the beaches I grew up on, but I'll take what I can get....And as I was poking around on it I started to uncover all sorts of interesting finds in amoung the rocks and debris, left by a receding tide...








...I started to wonder if this stretch of riverside was filled in to make these trails, as I was finding things that looked pretty old....bottles, the proportions of which you don't see these days....Old pottery, layers of tile, cement, and rock, like bits of the walls in the subway had washed away in a flood....Like the tides coming in, were scraping away at the layers of debris...slowly drawing out its secrets...







I have a deep love for the FOUND OBJECT, so it is instinctual that I poke around at the waters edge...And I always marvel at how nature, especially the ocean or a large body of water, can reclaim garbage, or flotsam, and sift it through its fingers, softening it's edges, fading its colors, and create something so much more alive upon depositing it back on solid ground.....









..Or it brings something to us we have never seen....Though, actually I HAVE seen these before...at a really cool shop in SOHO called EVOLUTION, where they have all sorts of fascinating stuff, like the penis bones from mammals (yes, some really do have then..), to glass from lighting strikes, to fossils millions of years old...And these weird lil' dudes...which look like something from a Geiger painting...but are actually seedpods from some tree or plant indiginous to the Hudson River Valley area....




Or my favorite: this delicate lil' piece of crap....of barely any substance at all....








THE RIVER GIVETH....and the river taketh away....

INSIDE a box.....

(work in progress...)



I've had a love affair with the BOX since I was small...I used to take the lids off of shoeboxes, turn them on their side, and glue cutouts inside to make lil' kid dioramas of haunted houses, graveyards...etc. I think this was something I picked up from my oldest sister....who was into a more refined version of this....

I've had many favorite boxes over the years, some lost to me now, others, much loved and disintigrated....Presents, with their inner cargo....a mystery until they are opened and then they become superfluous....




(present from sister suzie..)




I've become fascinated by them as a metaphore for the inividual...what goes on inside of them....seeing them as an object, rather than a container...They are endlessly fascinating....





(cabinet above my workspace)




When I was in my second year of college, I was introduced to Joseph Cornell, and the rest was irrelevant....His boxes were a revelation....Like the ones I had done as a kid, but elevated to the realm of poetry...beautiful in and of themselves....and any meaning was what you brought to them....(I found out later that he had an interesting life as well....including a relationship with a young woman, who eventually ran off with someone, and stole a number of his beloved box assemblages to boot...)...Every time I see one of his assemblages in a museum it is like Christmas morning, walking into our living room as a kid, and seeing the presents under the tree....I dream of owning one, some day....




(Marblized paper box from VIV)




Discovering a box is one of my not so secret pleasures: An old toolbox, an empty cigar box(though they are a bit too trendy these days...), an old rusty utility casing in an abandoned building...










or this old box, found in my present apartment, one of many things left behind by some long gone roommate....At first I thought I needed a missing key to open it until I figured out the trick to the hasps....and inside I found this....










An old SINGER sewing machine, begging to be fixed up and used, instead of forgotten, which it very nearly was...(and I mean REALLY old...)










There are many other definitions for a BOX (although I am still a sucker for the classic square or oblong variety) ...like this thang I got as a trade for services rendered to a very talented ceramics student, while at Penland in North Carolina...










The BOX continues to fascinate me...there is something that resonates with me....some affinity or symbolic association that I have yet to uncover....And like the truth, they sit patiently, waiting for you to come along and discover their secret....