LABOR DAY is sneaking up and has just bitten me on the ass……we have a MASSIVE labor day show monday (9/1) with live music starting at 3pm

music all day and night on 2 stages, just like we did on bushwick open studios;

…..more or less -
further details asap

“>

and look what’s on the inside back cover……

i’m so sleepy. i guess the journey to the day i sketched that knocked me out. that and the fact that it’s approaching 4am.

editing is additioning sometimes -

this book was found some months ago. it was something i guess i was required to read, possible in sophomore year of high-school. i don’t remember. i imagine i re-read it in late 1983 while mired in joblessness, a recurring theme in my life. the character escaped from a prison he was doomed to be in till he died. i escaped from my prison by thinking i could make something out of nothing. this has something to do with math. really BIG math. i fashioned a business card from my rough sketch with a friend of mine who knew a thing or two about art. this is what the card looked like;

not having had any idea what i was going to do, i began to make things up. i had no idea what conceptual art was, but it sounded good. i figured that i could come up with a concept as i went along. i knew what was around me and i would have something else to say about that if given the chance. you might say i was full of baloney. i probably would not deny it, but i might say it was a baloney of such color and texture that you’d just have to see it, because after all, what is art and who is an artist? when i was a kid, i could draw “good.” that never made me feel like an artist. these type of questions will, on occasion, cause me moments of discomfort. i will forever wonder if the decision to work toward “artistic” endeavors will ever define me.

left to right - larry rivers, jack kerouac, david amram, alan ginsberg and gregory corso (with his back to the camera)

if you don’t know david amram, let’s say that he, when i met him here almost 2 years ago, was the person who told me that i had done the right thing. that upon entering this place for the very first time, he was thrust back to his youth. he told me that he felt like he just walked back in time to the way greenwich village was. to understand fully the implications of what he meant, go here; David Amram and read about him. as we spoke that first time, i revealed to him that i had another place in my past that he might remember. “what place was it?” he asked. “116 macdougal.” i answered. i saw his eyes flash. “you had that place? that’s amazing! your spirit is linked to an amazing past and it shows.” I had a place in the 80’s and 90’s called Scrap Bar. i like to say that punk had its last rights and wake there and metal and big hair bands got baptized there with MTV performing the services. (did anyone notice that i might have been a catholic at one point of my life?)…… it was, in a way, the antithesis of the beat generation, but not in a bad way. Youth and discovery are based on self indulgence, self inspection and self realization. in spandex or blue jeans, it’s all forward motion. The Scrap Bar website can offer a little insight into the time. Scrap Bar’s Myspace can offer more. Eventually, I’ll be adding more in the blogs located there (there’s 9 short, lead-up stories about Scrap Bar there right now), like when Alan Ginsberg walked down into the place as i was spray-painting flourescent lightbulbs and told me the history of the the Village Gaslight and why beatnicks and “finger-snapping” became synonamous. He spoke with excited reverence about his youth. About the age of awakening from the McCarthy era….that’s why this David Amram meeting was so wonderful. Twenty years after meeting Ginsburg, I’m in my new “home,” no longer where traditional NYC bohemia exists and another and possibly the last important link to the age of fearless creativity walks into my life and tells me “you’re doing good.”

This was a kind note Mr.Amram sent me a while back after i had spoken to him about the weariness of my journey. Being “out there” (out here)  has its low points, believe you me. He wrote it for me to put out there, so that’s what i’m doing;

Dear Steve,

Glad the New Yorker will give you some play

Goodbye blue Monday’s is an invaluable part of New York’s cultural scene. It is a mecca for young artists and their audiences to meet, develop rapport with one another.

It provides a showcase for some amazing talent. In an era where music venues are colossally expensive, this warm, family-type setting is affordable, charming and a perfect place to both do creative work and go to listen to new performers.

i often go there with my kids to hear new groups, and the two times i played there were truly gratifying. The owner and artistic director of the club is a modern day Medici for a whole generation of performers of all genres.

It is one of the places I take all my friends who visit New York who want to witness what is new, artistically excellent, innovative and truly entertaining.

David Amram

As i look at my calendar, i know i’m doing my job. Thank you David.

this is about turner classic movies and my continued need to revisit my formative years. and maybe rita moreno. no. definitely rita moreno. maybe as the short-term craps-out, my hard-drive scoops images, many black and white, and orders “more” and i oblige without argument. maybe childhood’s being party to “duck and cover,” the cuban missile crisis and the first live-televised murder (lee harvey oswald in a gritty police department basement) my default setting for warmth, reality, death and dreams is often in black and white. in the technological pissing contest labelled “progress and technology,” these memories pale in contrast to the skullfuck that human sensitivities took on nyneleven - the perfect blue sky, the already-torched south tower billowing smoke and the “surprise” as the reporter is trying to sort out the burning monolith on the right side of the screen, “thwappp” goes another airline into the north tower. this came from uptown, down the west side. this one was as live as jack ruby’s bullet. when it happened, as i gazed at the TV, it lifted me right out of my seat. america buckled just like old lee harvey on this one. that’s reality television.

oh childhood, to behold the trauma of mass-murder, live in color, on such a lovely day.

this 40-something couldn’t get enough of it. i’m sure there’s an illness associated with watching this stuff relentlessly and if there isn’t, there should be, but i’ll tell you now - it wouldn’t stop me. tracing the urban grid of NYC below the second jet, running from north to south, in the last moments before the second crash, reminds me of a sped-up film in reverse of the opening-credits of a movie that defined my tenth year on planet earth (this is possibly the bloodiest segue’ i ever wrote). the film begins as an overhead of manhattan, heading from the south end and heads north on the west side, eventually scoping down till it ends in a schoolyard….. all the while leonard bernstein’s overture plays along and later it joins steven sondheim’s lyrics to hold shakespeare together flawlessly, pitting jets (ha! - the link!) against sharks, joining tony and maria, bringing me back to rita moreno and the first stirrings of something going on “down there,” as i watched her dance while she sang “i love to live in america.” (40 years later i met her in a restaurant. if she wasn’t with her husband, i probably would have taken a shot and asked her out. that’s just how beautiful she still looks)
……did i mention that this is about west side story? it came out the year that the color TV appeared in the livingroom of our home on east 17th street in brooklyn. i marvelled at the NBC Peacock for the first time. the new TV was placed before a tangerine wall where danish-modern wall hangings (with tangerine accents) would dwell until we would move some years later. i have the exact wall hanging here at GBM. it’s like 1960’s IKEA. everything is a circle. i believe humanity is doomed to run around in circles. we might be getting smarter and smarter, but in the end we just still run around in fancier and more dressed-up circles. this isn’t an indictment about humanity. it’s just what seems to be. like shakespeare and the wall hangings in my parent’s apartment (they rented - we were urban nomads), we’ve moved from romeo and juliet to west side story. danish modern ’50’s and 60’s to the 21st century and returned to the same place. ask a Dane in the furniture business; they’d probably know better than me. i did have something to say about that movie other than miss moreno’s sexuality and i probably wanted to apply it to the world or human nature. i may have wanted to work from music and tragedy to history and power in the PBS documentary entitled “the war of the world,” and you can find it here; Niall Ferguson and the war of the world , though i think i had more on my mind than that. anyway, it’s important to listen to what he has to say. it even touches on the current hubbub about the DarkKnight movie and the Bush Administration. His thesis: Instead of looking at the 20th century as having been disrupted by two world wars with periods of relative peace before, between and after them, it is more appropriate to view much of the history of the century as a continuous bloody conflict that was interrupted occasionally for a few short, exhausted catnaps of relative calm. The only difference between what he says and what i think is that i posit that the same war’s been going on for thousands of years and it simply morphs into different theaters of death. it’s humanity’s need to have control over humanity and in the end there’s no control except for the big math, and the big math is without control. Of course, this opinion could change at any moment. just like the big math.

in between, i might have felt compelled to tell you how i got my stolen car returned last week and how it never went to california following the Joad family. it stayed in brooklyn, amassed a load of parking tickets, broke down and was left abandoned. they cleaned out everything inside the car that i owned and even vacuumed my dog maxx’s hair from the interior. they even stole the box of old russian books i had collected to give to a scholar friend of mine, which leads me to believe that maybe it was a gang of former KGB agents with no mechanical aptitude whatsoever who stole my car. they made it their own. they got real comfortable. i have to thank the toyota motor corporation for the timeliness of a certain automotive component’s demise. the engine has a “drive belt” that takes the power produced by the engine and sends it to wheels. of course, this is a simplification, but it’s the bottom line. years ago, this was a metal chain that lasted almost forever, but plastic belts are lighter, cheaper and easier to replace. this belt lasts about sixty-thousand miles and then it breaks and it renders the auto inoperable. a few blogs ago, when my car was initially stolen, i claimed that the odometer reads 152,152 and that it broke three years ago. i historically drive about ten thousand miles a year. do the math. i need to say, i am not complaining about Toyota on the quality and reliability of their automobiles. quite to the contrary, i believe they make, pound for pound, the best cars in the world. i believe american auto makers should be ashamed of themselves and should be humbled for their arrogance. what cars and motor-products were mockingly-called “rice-burners” by so many people in the 1960’s and ’70s have now grown up and kicked your asses. Auto makers in the US set the planned-obsolescence bar at about 125,000 miles. all that the other auto makers did was double that with lighter, more fuel-efficient cars. so my toyota needed a new plastic belt. see you in sixty-thousand miles. maybe. that’ll bring my car to 240,000 miles. that’s around the world ten times. but i digress…..

i was talking about a black and white childhood, color TV and west side story and the point i may have been wanting to make is that some songs are forever. “somewhere” is one of those songs. i used tom wait’s version of that song to close my Scrap Bar for many years. the word is, there’s moisture on one of the moons of saturn. maybe humanity can…

Lookee Here! it’s interesting. the passion over what seemed to be humor.

what would kurt do?

                       Goodbye Blue Monday!

                                     food to eat      

    Goodbye Blue Monday Wrap

Fried eggplant, mozzarella cheese, roasted red peppers.

    Grilled Veggie Pesto Wrap

 It’s like……mixed vegetables …uh…grilled and seasoned along with a touch of pesto

 Mom’s Leftover Turkey Wrap

White meat turkey w/stuffing and cranberry sauce - wrapped!

       Portabella Mushroom Wrap

Grilled portabella mushroom, spinach, and roasted red 

peppers

     Tuna Salad and Crispy Sprout Wrap

  It is what it is. Cool and refreshing

      Spicy Veggie Burrito Wrap

           Grilled vegetables, jalepeno, cilantro… yeowch!!!!

      Big Chicken Grande Wrap

            Grilled w/eggplant, roasted peppers & mozzarella

      Chicken Burrito

 Shredded chicken, rice, black beans, cheddar cheese

      Sesame Chicken Wrap

           Grilled w/ a mess of veggies in teriyaki –Stupendous!

           All wraps served with fruit and chips.

                                         $7

                     Ask us about our specials!             

the odometer broke at 152,152 miles. that was almost three years ago. the passenger side window had been shattered three times, the last time causing me to say “fuck it” and install a piece of plexiglass, form-fitted and secured to the car frame with gobs of grey and white duct tape. the side-view mirrors had to be replaced on a regular basis when i lived in manhattan because of trucks who needed to get past double-parked cars on narrow city streets. 1992 camry sedans didn’t have fold-in side-view mirrors. “crunch” would go the side-view mirrors.

“fold-in, side-view mirrors” sounds like a great name for a poem or short story i might have written in my first semester of college. it might be a story i’ll write next week or next year. it could be a country-western band with a break-out single of the same name. they, “the fold-in, side-view mirrors” would play the rodeo bar in manhattan and drink from pints of jack daniels on stage that would really contain strong-brewed tea and talk loads of trucker red-neck stuff to the audience. they might be described as, “of the country and the road, yet quirky enough to tickle the cynical.” two members, the lead guitarist and drummer would be from syosset, long island, but you’ll never know that. the bassist, from brooklyn; the pedal steel player, from iowa with the lead singer and acoustic guitarist the only member actually from the appalachian states. he’d say his name is lee joad. a few members of the audience would equate him with tom joad, the lead character of john steinbeck’s depression-era novel, “the grapes of wrath.” the book was an indictment against the big company farms that drove the tenant farmers from their homes onto the road to the other company farms that would pay them substandard wages when they arrived out west where they hoped for a better life. the depression and the “dust bowl” also had a lot to do with it. the book was about the horrible side of man’s nature as well as man’s search for dignity. steinbeck painted an ugly view of capitalism. imagine that. he won the pulitzer prize and the nobel prize for literature with this book. tom joad was portrayed by henry fonda in the screen adaptation of this story. jane darwell portrayed ma joad, tom’s mother. she won an academy award for best supporting actress. that’s showbiz. i look far west in my mind’s eye and somewhere out on the great american road is my 1992 toyota camry. it might be traveling the highway that the joads traveled when they had to leave their farm in oklahoma. perhaps the people who stole my car were looking for a fresh start. new car, new life. it’s so noir’; desperate, yet tinged with a pathetic touch of hope for the future. i like to believe, even if only for a second, that they probably found a young, abandoned dog tied to a lampost immediately after stealing the car and they hustled it into the back seat to join them on the road to discover america. maybe they even named him “kerouac.” it sort of makes it all seem destined-with-a-halo when that stuff happens, doesn’t it.

i sure don’t know where i’m going with this. there are days when things happen like this in my head - when there’s a mixture of hope and demonization in everything that everyone does and says and the hard drive in my head whirrs and clicks and makes me behave in muted rage or serene disgust. i can attach the way i feel to my personal situation as easy as i can to the american political situation, the economic world situation or the galactic time-gravity situation. i spent an hour today talking about how i believe that ronald reagan kidnapped william casey as he was headed to the senate to testify about his knowledge of the iran-contra scandal. what is most strange is that bob woodward (of “all the president’s men” fame) gained access to the “muted” casey and interviewed him in his hospital bed. he even wrote a book about it. and one other thing they don’t say - reagan visited him the day before he died. how about that! how do i know? it was in the new york times.

December 15, 1986

CIA Director William Casey is stricken during a routine medical examination at his office at CIA headquarters and rushed to Georgetown University Hospital.
There he underwent surgery for a brain tumor which left him incapacitated and unable to speak or communicate. He had been scheduled to testify to Congress on the Iran-Contra scandal the following day. Few people knew that he was being treated for prostate cancer.

(there are other reports that this occurance happened in the car, on the way to the senate - …….but the end of the story is the same;)

May 6, 1987 William Casey dies of pneumonia, never having recovered powers of communication. Security was tight for his funeral at St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Roslyn, Long Island. Portions of the eulogy made that night’s TV news. Bishop McGann scolded the deceased: “We opposed and continue to oppose the violence wrought in Central America by support of the contras. These are not light matters on which to disagree. They are matters of life and death. And I cannot conceal or disguise my fundamental disagreement on these matters with a man I knew and respected.” The US Ambassador to the UN Jeane Kirkpatrick countered the bishop, asserting that Casey had secured a “special place in heaven” by the priority he put on “supporting Nicaragua’s freedom fighters”. One of several associates not attending the funeral was retired Air Force General Richard Secord. The day before he had told the congressional investigating committee that Casey was a major instigator of the Iran-Contra operation.

still, other “theys” said it was in retaliation for that unsuccessful hit on reagan. whispers link john hinkley and mark david chapman to the machine that manufactured sirhan sirhan and james earl ray. i don’t know if they’re right about anything. i don’t know if they’re wrong about anything. i do, however, think that there’s a “they” and that’s enough to give me the willies (as opposed to the willie caseys, though it could be much the same thing). what i was able to glean from what the new york times doesn’t tell me is that casey, reagan’s election chief honcho, already the head of the CIA, wanted the gig as the NSC chairman. reagan said thanks but no thanks and casey got his panties in a big old bunch. the eerie signal i felt that made it seem true was, as casey lay dying in a CIA compound in Northport, Long Island, President Reagan flew to NYC, hopped a helicopter to the island and visited his old pal. As casey lay dying, old Ron said, “oh, by the way….i have these papers here….they’re your RESIGNATION PAPERS. how ’bout being a good little soldier and sign these.” (forgive me, i paraphrased heavily, but you get my point) now THAT’S hollywood. and one other thing- apparently Bill Casey was such a badass there was a senate vote some years later to exhume his coffin to make sure he was there. google william casey - he goes on for fucking EVER. and the question is, what does he have to do with anything? it was his decisions that could be woven into the very first crack tapestry. iran-contra; money for drugs for guns for freedom. this is probably one reason that the big math blessed me with ginger rogers. not to mention a Camry that will run on……….at least in my mind’s highway.