GO

I'll be taking part in The Brooklyn Museum's  GO, along with 1860 other Brooklyn artists.  It looks like it will be kinda cool.  Basically, it's two days of borough-wide open studios.  Huge. 

Here's my GO page. 

They're looking for volunteers and voters, so go to the site and look around if you think you might be interested.  I'm not always crazy about opening my studio to the public as it's kind of disruptive and never life changing in a good (or bad) way, but this seemed like something special since it's so damn big, and I thought I'd kick myself somewhere down the line if I didn't give it a try.  So if you do decide to pitch in, I look forward to seeing you in September. 

Here's another Go Go picture to go along with the theme:

Go Go (2003), pastel, 14x15in.

Tornado in Brooklyn

Snapshot: guy rockin out on the corner

The other day, waiting to cross DeKalb at the corner of Flatbush. There's a guy across the way, holding an iPod in his hand, one ear bud in. He is skinny. Tall and veiny. Oldish, maybe in his fifties. Long, straggly thin whitish hair, with one of those dinky, crescent-shaped kind of cowboy hats. Hair past his shoulders and wispy. Sleeveless, and skinny jeans, white sneakers. He could be Johnny Winter's scarier, less healthy looking uncle. Or some kind of Southern rock cowboy ghost. Not sure he has all his teeth.

And he's rocking out, playing air guitar, and I can see he's singing along but I can't hear above the traffic. He's got kind of awkward, snaky Axl Rose kinds of moves, hopping up and down on the edge of the curb. Really getting into it. There, he's doing a solo. A lip-biting solo. There, a windmill.

To my left, there's a guy on my side of the street. Older black guy. He's got no music as far as I can tell, but he starts dancing and playing air guitar too, looking at the Southern rock cowboy ghost. I'm thinking, "This is getting bizarre."

So the light changes, I step into the crosswalk, and the gaunt Southern rock cowboy ghost guy snakes and gyrates into the crosswalk. He's got his eyes closed, so I can stare at him all I want, and as he gets closer I can hear him singing. He's moving slower now, grooving. An arena ballad? I don't carry a lighter. Anyway, I hear him and this is what he's singing:

"I'm all out of love, I'm so lost without you...."

Air Supply. Okay. Not what I was expecting, but damn, this is part of what makes this a great town. You rock on to Air Supply, Southern rock cowboy ghost guy. (Insert Dio devil horns hand sign here.) You. Rock. On.

two days in brooklyn

Yesterday, a fresh couple inches of snow on the ground. Went for a run in Prospect Park in the morning and rediscovered how dazzling white and brown can be. The sun looked like a pearl, or the moon, in the overcast sky. Today, almost all the snow is gone and the light is crisp and sharp, the sky that unbelievable blue, the buildings in sharp, sunlit relief; and the real moon is faint and pale in the low western blue.

More snow to come tomorrow night. Probably enough for some serious sledding on Saturday.

Bergen Street Comics

Bergen Street Comics is one of the sparkling new and charming little shops on Bergen between Flatbush and Fifth, and I finally stopped in on the way to the studio yesterday. Something for my wife had caught my eye, and of course I also found something for my son and myself. In the interest of the season, I'm going to keep those titles to myself for now, and just say that it's a great little shop, warm and welcoming, even to a big waterlogged slob like me stepping in out of the rain.

I will say that what I found for myself is 'The Hunter,' a graphic novelization of one of Donald Westlake's Parker novels, by Darwyn Cooke. I've had a scrap from the NY Times on my wall for months, from a review, and it had caught my eye because of the cool, three color palette, punchy black inking, and pulpy, noirish subject matter. A link to my B movie paintings that I thought I should pay attention to, especially since I think one of my projects in the new year will be some two-color linocuts.

Nice folks at the comics place, and I plan to go back. I just wish my son liked the fancy schmancy hot dogs next door. It's also down the block from Melt, where we ate for our anniversary, and which is not, despite my brother's fervent wishes, affiliated in any way with a gourmet mac n cheese place in Cleveland.

rainy lights

I'm loving the pics the iPhone takes. This is a shot on the way home from work last night, the corner of Fulton and the Flatbush Extension, looking west at the holiday lights in Fulton Mall. And below are some obligatory cameraphone selfportraits, taken in the studio.

Ohio, or alternate reality?

Nice visit to Toledo last week. Lots of good stuff. Family, of course. Nieces, nephews, ballgames. Saw Star Trek, and liked it. Great bbq from Cleveland, courtesy of my oldest brother. A couple visits to the zoo, where one of my nieces works. I grew up in Toledo, so it's always got those great memories, but it feels different and like home all at once, now that I've spent eighteen years in Brooklyn, longer than I've lived anywhere at one stretch, so that I can kind of see an alternate reality there, a road I could've taken and am not really sure why or how I didn't, except that I love New York too much. Whoa, that last sentence makes me dizzy.

My son gets the biggest kicks out of his cousins and uncles and aunts and grandma. He absolutely idolizes the youngest of the Toledo cousins, who's thirteen. At one point he says to me he wishes we could live there, but we'd have to go back and get the cat and the fishes. And I say we'd have to get our own house, but he doesn't see why we couldn't just live in his grandma's house.

Anyway, it was great to see everybody, and we're trying to figure out if we can get back some time sooner than December.

Idiot in the Intersection

Going home with my son yesterday, about five thirty. It's nice enough to walk for the first time this week, warmish but a little breezy, so we decide to skip the subway and enjoy the early evening air. My son wants to ride on my shoulders, so I hoist him up there. It's about a half-hour walk home from his pre-k. He's got a tootsie pop in his mouth and he's clutching his Bakugan carrying case. We are walking down Flatbush, crossing Atlantic Avenue, which is a terrible intersection -- you have to cross five or six lanes, always a ton of traffic, and the streets meet at an odd angle so you to be aware of cars making turns at unexpected places.

In the middle of the intersection, with my son on my shoulders, all of sudden there is someone next to me. Wearing: short red shorts, a wife-beater t-shirt, and...a rubber freaking pig mask that covers his whole head. He is right next to me, looking at me, maybe saying something but I don't think so. I don't remember him saying anything but he clearly wants my attention. I am, understandably, I think, a little startled, but I keep walking, of course. I'm looking at him for only maybe two seconds before I react, certain that this is a lunatic, that this is not a good situation, that this guy is not going to go away without a little help.

How do I react? I scream at him. "Get away from me!" It's a deep, bellowing, fierce kind of shouting yell, coming all the way up from my stomach. I might have pulled an oblique with this scream. I think I was trying to knock him on his ass with this scream. I don't believe I have made a noise like that since I played my last high school football game in 1986. I am absolutely as loud and big and deep and frightening as I can be. And pigboy runs off in the other direction.

When we get to the sidewalk, I take my son down and hold him in my arms. He's startled, confused, not crying. But I had frightened him with my shout and he'd screamed, so I hold him to my chest to make sure he's okay. And I turn back to see Idiot Lunatic Pigboy still playing in the traffic. Then I look past him to see four or five pasty young hipsterlooking idiots without masks and some kind of video camera on the north side of Atlantic. I am really angry and I think about crossing back to talk to them. Yell at them. Throw them through the Victoria's Secret window. They look like artschool jackasses, maybe. They look like they're having a good time. But I realize I don't want to confront them when my son is with me, don't want to make a bigger deal out of it in his eyes, and frighten him even more. But I'm tempted to go shout at them, "What the hell do you think you're doing? A guy with a kid on his shoulders in the middle of one of the worst intersections in the five freaking boroughs? And you think this is a good idea you goddam idiots?" I am tempted to threaten to crush their freaking windpipes with one hand. I'm angry.

But I turn and continue walking south on Flatbush, still holding my son, and I start to talk to him, calmly, warmly. "Hey buddy, that was weird. We sure scared him, didn't we? I don't know what he was doing, but he's a real dope, that's for sure. You okay? You scared? Yeah he's just some stupid guy in a stupid mask who thinks he's funny." And we talk about it a little bit and within another block he wants to go back up on my shoulders. And he's fine, he talks a little bit about how fast the guy ran away. But I can't stop thinking about these idiots, wondering if I'm going to end up on youtube or some such site, and my adrenalin is so high. And now I know exactly what it feels like to kick into big daddy protector mode. Yeah, hooray for me. Stupid freaking idiots. Just when you think you've seen it all.

Phillies are in town. The guy in the mask was kind of short. It was probably Shane Victorino.

on the stoop

On the way to the Whale Playground, we picked up a few DVDs at a sidewalk sale, a buck a pop. Space Chimps for my son, Mario Bava's Planet of the Vampires for me, Brothers Grimm for the heck of it, and the guy threw in a VHS copy of some Jules Verney movie I don't know, Island at the Top of the World, which I hope is somewhere in the same league as At the Earth's Core and fun stuff like that.