THE PERFECT STICK!!!

NO, SERIOUSLY....I was walking along the HUDSON last week, and just happened to look down...and their she was....something about the form I guess...and it is as light as a feather like a bird's bone.....You just have to come over and check for yo'self....









I walked home with it...and was talking to my brother on my cell and accidentally snapped it in two as I was putting the key in my front door!!! So I painstakingly glued it together....like triage...I noticed that the tinniest bit of bark was missing so I went out into the hallway and found it!!!









I guess sculpture, or 3-d art has been in my bones since I was a kid....I used to take shoelaces and start tying knots in them over and over until it was one big knot-ball, just to see if I could get a cool shape outta it...see?








So, I have a cool idea for this stick, but I am unsure if I want to do anything to it.....It's so beautiful just the way it is.....(?)......

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....

ONE MAN'S TRASH......

As far as musical instruments go, the piano will always be my first love....Probably because I took it for about 8 years as a kid....I love the glassy quality of it....I actually have my own baby grand sittin' at my parents house in Olympia, Washington.....(the gift of my godmother, the gal my mother took piano from in Long Beach, CA., when she moved here from Germany after she got married to my dad...Irene Trepanier was her teacher, and therefore I inherited the piano when she died....ironically, I was the only one who kept up with the thing...).








The other day I was running late for work, and happened to glance off the 1 train where it comes up for air at 125th, and saw what looked to be some cool wooden structures lying on a trash heap, waiting for the pick-up next morning....I had no time to get off and investigate, but I wrote a reminder to myself so I'd come by after work later that night....
Of course they weren't anywhere to be seen when I made my pass after midnight, nothing ever is. RULE # ONE, when "dumpster diving in NYC: there are over a million people here, if you see something cool, grab it or hide it, or lug it home somehow, 'cause it WILL NOT BE THERE when you come back later"....BUT,I did find this whole trashcan full of piano keys....and started drooling. Something for a future sculpture or two...Anyone who know me, can understand what a find this is for me.
It was like finding a human leg bone or something..., because I know pianos fairly intimately, having been around them so much, but never had I seen one disassembled, into it's separate parts and lying at my feet...








SCORE!!!

There has been a tradition of "trash diving" in my family for generations...My grandmother on my dad's side: Valerie Shlichta, when my dad was growing up right here in New York, in Brooklyn, his mother found an old chair someone was throwing out. This amazing carved wood throne with lions a foot high on either side of you as you sit, carved out of some hardwood....She cleaned the big ol' thing up and had it reappolstered, we just called it "the lion chair". (My parents bug me these days with the morbid task of deciding if there is anything I'd like to have when they die...The 2 things I can think of are 1. The piano- that's already mine, and 2. The lion chair....

{PHOTO COMING SOON........}


Then there is this thang:




(Sorry for the bad photo..)


This thing is about 4' x 4'. And I found it one drunken night after carousing with a bunch of co-workers at a nearby bar after work....I can barely remember picking it up, but there it was staring at me from across the room the next morning (kinda like some guys I know)....I couldn't believe it! This is so me. I do not know what it will become, but it will be amazing...I just know it...If anyone knows what it is...tell me.



My sister Ginnie finds the most amazing shit too. There is always stuff being thrown out at her school....Like these cool old science models.....

{PHOTO COMING SOON}

....or this cool lab glass.....










So you can see how this runs in the family....







A few mornings later, Saturday...I am laying in bed, just letting the week wash over me, thinking...And I hear from somewhere up above the distant sound of a piano...a beautiful sound to me, always freezes me i my tracks...PIANO HEARD FROM A DISTANCE...Later it occured to me that I may have been hearing the last bit of residue, the soul of the piano laying discombobulated on my bedroom floor, as it floated off into oblivion...Who can say?


Stay tuned and see how these thangs are put to use....