the moment after taking this photo with my subjects, maria from debutant hour and liv from huggabroomstik, i knew this would be the “opening” shot – for the flash of a moment, i’m papparazzi editor of a hifalutin blog whose world includes the doings in bushstuy, brooklyn;

don’t they look partyingly fabulous?
there’s a smattering of pictures here but an assload on our photobucket and either myspace or facebook.

…..and as i spent the two days among the performers and friends, it occurred to me that we have a wonderful music scene here.
no, better than wonderful…it’s…….fucking brilliant!

first, i need to shill for the next two days here at goodbye blue monday.
BAM’s “Sounds Like Brooklyn” happens here on Thursday and Friday.

this is the third year we’re part of it.
it’s a wonderful thing for brooklyn and our neighborhood.

however….,
i write with the inklings of a heavy heart. i feel the need to whisper, lest the piano that has graced the stage here for a good while, hears the back and forth from last night’s performers to me and eric-the-piano doctor to susan’s chats with franz the nic. the word’s out.
the piano, born in buffalo, new york almost a hundred years ago, is in trouble. it’s getting the heave-ho and i’m already feeling guilty about it.
i form relationships with things.
i have difficulty separating from my sneakers.
i am and have been very protective about this piano that rolled through the door one rainy night almost three years ago. (thanks, psychoperatic chanteuse julie and dan gower of ching chong song.)
this is an early photo;

i don’t even play it.
i put stuff on it. buddy hangs out on it.
it’s…..there.

…..everytime i take a picture of an act on stage, there it is…the piano…

…and it brings to mind the fact that it’s our second piano to go.
here’s the first;

which takes me back and moves me ahead all at the same time…..

as i listened to this, i realized they played here….back then

pipe shot first.
when i left my home friday morning to walk maxx, there was a makeshift memorial being arranged by some neighbors from around the corner. i asked a friend who was walking by if he knew anything about it. “they took some guy away there this morning. he died right there,” he said, pointing at the box.
“whoa” i said.
that’s about all i have when confronted with that kind of news.
better than “giddiyap,” i guess.

“he passed out and died in the cold,” he told me. “that’s what i heard.”
later that day other people told me that he was beaten by two guys with pipes.
“holy moses,” i said.
as the story was amped up, so was my verbal reaction. i got biblical.
that night, friday, the temperature was fifteen degrees.
we had four acts playing in the backyard and that box alight with holy candles in front of the store.. this is a photo of one of the bands -

i want to thank these guys (Team Goldie/Mediocre /the Andria Doria/Hunters and Runners) for showing up. i heard one guitarist proclaim while on stage “i can’t feel my fingers.”
rock on.

dubknowdub was here last week, loaded with loads of frequencies and stuff. great.
the electronic-blue-light-reflection on the guy’s mask was like icing on the cake.

peter evans played – he’s one of the best young men with a horn i know. this is a picture of what he sounds like when he’s hitting “those” notes;

there was also an expatriate one-man-stage experience by the name of robot cowboy.

these acts i photographed are testament to the joy that i experience here – i hear them when i see them – it’s like eating immediate-action drugs.
yeah, there are occasional bummers, but these too can be unending stories of horror and intrigue.
there was this political play here one night………..me and giancarlo were here and………

also last week, i went on my three-hour vacation and got photographic.
some were taken around jamaica bay, others at floyd bennett and a few fort tilden where i found graffiti growing nicely –

i also added new pics to myspace, facebook and photobucket here at the earth reclamation project, specifically….

maxx and his brown-rustness cozy among other nature of likeness;

and you know that whenever i approached the beach out here i communed with my loveline to eternity and the dearest of all to me…i called the planet and let her know i was here…….

we spoke about our relationship and came to the realization that the eight months we’ve known each other might as well have been eight years or eighty years.
we’ve been little planets of joy to each other since starting our communications.
we kept attempting to join our worlds but gravity repeatedly got in our way.
with calm resolve we wait for our moment.

she sang “hallelujah” a’capella to me from another time.
it took the heart out of me and put it on runway 24 and let it fly.

it’s still out there…….

this week i spoke to a friend who lives around the corner.
the dead guy, the subject of the cardboard memorial that began this note, died of a heart attack brought on by diabetes, drugs and alcohol.
the pipe-attack was a gritty urban kiss goodnight.
regardless, luis is breaknecking at various rates of mega-multi-hyper-speed, on levels of levels of time and space, everready to circle and park, for an eternal millisecond, on the courtesy ramp by the coffee machine out there on “the eighth-electro-plasma-ocean of the ninth dimension”.

seems i wore more chicken soup than i ate lately – twice in two weeks.
it wasn’t a fashion statement.
two containers, two days, two pair of pants.
at the exact same place – my front door.
the problem stemmed from my own behavior.
i wanted to put an otherworldly spin on this. i wanted to link a small tear in the space-time continuum, a phrase i gleaned from being an early and frequent Omni magazine reader.
i liked that magazine so much that i had a subscription to it for years.
it was produced by the people who owned penthouse magazine.
that was the magazine that told playboy magazine that it was ok for women to have vaginas and pubic hair.
i am from the age of skin mags.

when i started the warehouse business that begat this coffeehouse, i cleared a house that had thousands and thousands of these – every kind.
i sold them to a guy who sold them to anyone who walked by his place where the parking lot was here, under the big musical note at astor place and cooper square and lafayette street.
he sold magazines and porn movies on that street corner for years.
it was time to go when they built that big shiny building that wished it was part of a giant grand piano.

here;

gone;

…..but i was talking about little, double-chicken soup disaster, wasn’t i?

as i was fashioning this note, i was watching a live feed on the news. it was hank paulson’s prepared testimony before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. i couldn’t decide to laugh or put my foot through the TV.
hmmm. how could i outdo such televisionistic madness?
i dialed CSPAN.
CSPAN? what was i thinking?
they were playing a rerun of the ben bernanke’s grilling before the house this past december. i was transfixed.
here i was, writing a story about wearing chicken soup in the same place twice in a row while listening to the dark fantasy of wall street. it took the wind out of my baloney-woven sails.
the chicken soup story was this;
i couldn’t hold a leash, navigate the door keys and switch groceries from arm to arm without dropping something.
i heard that same story with bigger words and more excuses from paulson and bernanke.

this note began with garbage cans on my mind. we’ll get to them eventuality.
then again, maybe not.

a little ways down this note the images might make sense.
then again maybe they won’t.
that’s the way things are right now.

the photo above is a near-approximation of my thought process.
i don’t mind. i’m pretty ok with being scatterbrained.
i read somewhere that ronald reagan’s last years were his happiest.
i don’t doubt that there might be a connection to that hissing sound, my tenuous relationship with that lizard-guy who looks like omar sharif but sounds like eduardo ciannelli, my belief planet earth is going to hell in a handbasket, (a phrase i recall having google-linked a year ago) and the extraordinary relationship i’m involved in with a dear friend; a singular experience that makes me feel as lucky as lucky can be, where the dice rolled in the big casino seem to have landed on the point of the cube.

i need to temper my doom-ances with this;

……..a beautiful little nest.
my hope is for life and growth, regardless of humanity’s participation in it. as much as humans are part of nature, we’re also nature’s buzzkill if indeed that were possible.
this planet, if it had a voice, might say “huh? who’s counting?”
well, we are. we busy little bees.
it keeps certain members of us out of trouble while others of us are upping the score.
busy, busy, busy – that’s us.
we’re building and killing and saving and destroying and loving and hating and eating and counting and shitting and fucking and multiplying.
we’re animals in touch with whatever divine we can make up as we go along.
ain’t we a hoot?
i, for one human, am occasionally documenting.
i’m an expert occasional, half-assed, know-nothing – in the following pic, i am an experticus mossificationous………

then i become a rusticationous metallicous……

once, in my many conversations with that eduardo ciannelli-sounding guy (who looks like omar sharif), i brought this point up in defending humanity against their menu. (if you don’t know what i’m talking about, go here)
he said “that’s nice, however we don’t farm “that,” now do we?”
that’s when i first learned that we are “that” to “them.”

but i digress constantly…..and i ellipse continually…..
…..let me get to this note’s first words so i can dispose of them properly.

when i took the lease here, the most telling aspect of my broadway surroundings was this; there were no municipal garbage cans.
note, the link shows one of the garbage cans we’ve been getting out here.
there are trees in the background of this photo. that’s not here.
there were a couple of cans on the corners of broadway and dekalb.
from there to myrtle avenue, zero.
5-6 blocks of no trashcans or mail boxes.
up to a year ago, there were about four trash cans in that five-block-plus stretch. since then, i count fifteen trashcans between dekalb and myrtle.
we’re getting “used garbage cans,” not that i’m complaining.
i no longer have to carry maxx’s shit for blocks at a time.
for the life of me, the thought i had for this story went up like a puff of smoke.
i’m in my eleventh year on broadway, my fifth as a coffeehouse/venue.
i never considered photographically documenting this garbage-can history.
you’ll have to take my word for it.

in my last visit to gatewayland, i went all over and after my day – the beach at for tilden, the nuclear missile site, the paths and dunes, floyd bennett airfield, jamaica bay….everywhere i could think of in a three-hour time block. i went to new abandoned buildings and looked through other shattered windows.
i had a camera with a charged battery. boy oh boy.

i poured over the many images and noticed a recurring theme……

there seemed to have been many, many circles….

not that it was the plan, but there they were……

everywhere i looked…….

there, that’ll put a stop to it….for a moment.
maybe i need to go back to my glossary of mind and memory;
27. – Rehearsal – A cognitive process in which information is repeated over and over as a possible way of learning and remembering it. When it is used to maintain information in working memory, it is called maintenance rehearsal.
Had i rehearsed what i planned to write here, i might have a clue to what was on my mind, but keeping to spontaneous thought and action, sometimes you get the peanuts, sometimes you get the shells.
there, i used it in a sentence.
a few days ago, i may have rehearsed what i was going to write by way of the digitized images i took, but more than likely i am posting these pics with no distinct correlation to what i’m writing along with them.
there, i used it in another sentence that was a circular argument with myself.

how much circularness is running “around” in my my head?

i looked to the sea.
i stood straight and took a deep breath and hollered loud and long.
maxx jumped at my side, continually grabbing at my arms with his big dog jaws, alarmed at my behavior.
i’m sure my dog thinks that i’m “crazy as a loon” at times.
now, when i say that phrase, i wonder if i should thank johnny mercer for it. while watching a biography about him on TCM (imagine that), there was that line in “moon river” and there i was saying “hurrumph! so there’s where it came from….,”
ok, so maybe not, “harrumph.”
……..but holler and holler i did……i felt the vibrations rise through my stomach through my chest, straining through my throat and out of me, my head forward; ears, eyes and mouth stretching.
and i would do it again and again until i’m short of breath and i wouldn’t think for a second that there was no point in doing so.
belief systems die in a chapel of demolished pews….

the old hangar at floyd bennett airfield is where i first went crazy with my camera, causing me to devote a whole other photobucketworld to images in and around gateway national park and named it the earth reclamation project on my photobucket account.
i mean, i enjoyed pictures before this, but it flew off the charts once i was in that hangar….

i love decay; natural not moral or intellectual.
when i walk around here with my camera, i wonder if there might be a correlation between natural and moral decay.
america has a problem deciphering that stuff, especially scared, white guys. generally, the ones with the biggest problems are the ones who live under the illusion of power and control, but if fear and disinformation are the directives they operate under, rest assured, badness of most terrible degrees are stewing in the human climate, so hold onto to your hat.
there’s nothing beautiful about moral decay and anyone who makes an argument defending it might be a douchebag, but that’s just my opinion.
i mean, images of moral decay might be esthetically unforgettable but i don’t “roll that way.”

for example, my fixation involving footage from 9/11 back then wasn’t because it was a great movie, i recall it like an illness.
looking at archival film from nazi atrocities to abu ghraib are purely tragic. there’s nothing intellectually stimulating about inhumanity.
here’s an example – to me – of cloaking hate as “art” – i never heard of this till i found the image attributed to it.
i googled the words, “moral decay” and hit “images” and found bands, worlds of warcraft games, conservative images and a bunch of other stuff that didn’t work for me.
i decided on this because there’s no excuse for bad manners, something i believe might be at the crux of it all.

because bad manners beget this -

scared, pushy and belligerent white men who will doom us all because they forgot their lessons when they were young and unafraid, or were terrified all their life.
whatever the case, i find that the above image doesn’t hold a candle to this one;

natural decay removed more of the roof since i’ve been here last – really nice work there, elements.
much of this place is on that wonderful journey to “ever,” where i may have met a slat or two in a glimmer or a wink, way out there on the outer reaches of way out there.

i feel closer to the essence of time. i know for sure that molecules here have risen from their place and started that extraordinary journey, out past those places they talk about in science fiction books and movies; where i’ve made reservations to be again and again, glinting and sparking out on “the eighth-electro-plasma-ocean of the ninth dimension”.
you knew that was coming, didn’t you?
today, me and maxx headed out there camera-in-hand and started seeing new things and revisiting old ones.
i was getting my photo-finger groove-on when the battery started flashing that nervous, hurt battery-look, then the screen went black.
for the remainder of my time there i would click other images in my head.
you should have seen them. they were great. however……
i do have the pics i took and will season this wordsalad with them.
this small building below gave me the shivers.
it’s about twelve by twelve foot square.
as i was taking this picture, i was thinking about the hiss that’s forever in my head.

the one i write about.
the one that’s the sound behind the sound.
the one i’m hearing behind the music playing on the computer here, right now. the one that isn’t the whirrr of the hard drive. the one that isn’t the imperceptible sound of electricity running through the walls of my home. there is a sound to electricity, believe me.
con edison taught me that, plenty of times.
anyway, i decided to get behind the fence and take some more pictures like this;

the humm was a buzz and the buzz was alive.
i looked into the darkness where there used to be a window and saw old electric panels, then saw a decayed breaker panel with two new, grey wires. something told me that i was not in a good place. the buzz was loud.
the water from the big rain sang dangerous melodies in my head.
me and maxx moved on. quickly.
there were things that told me about how i feel right now….

then, there were places that had colors i wished i was wearing….

rust never sleeps, huh?
there’s more pics at the photobucket here…..

first, i discovered, “frankenstein jesus in the beach sand”
it started out as “frankenstein on the beach,” which made me think of philip glass for a second, then it morphed into “frankenstein jesus on the beach,” because a few weeks back, he (jesus) made it onto someone’s toast in florida.

i discovered “frankenstein jesus,” when i was photographing the dunes.

i was intrigued by the mixed textures in the sand.
it was an aesthetic buffet.
the beach gained about three feet of sand since last week.
the old weather-worn wooden pilings were buried.

this means the big tire is five feet+ underground now.
as i walked by the place i last saw it, i flashed to a scene from “harold and maude,” where harold makes a metal-press coin that reads “harold loves maude.”
they’re sitting at a pier.
he hands it to her.
she looks at it, smiling and throws it into the ocean.
stunned, harold is speechless.
“i’ll always know where it is,” says maude.

i had a banner day in the seaglass department. it was everywhere.
i found loads of it as i walked the ocean’s edge.
it was like there was a seaglass-harvest or an “everything-must-go” seaglass sale.
occasionally, i would stop and call my dearest friend’s name out over the ocean, but first i would look to either side of me to make sure i was alone.
i subscribe to the “one-bay rule,” whereby strangers won’t find me strange-er as i howl at the late afternoon moon, if you know what i mean.
i really let it wail. i’m a loud-mouth.
i counted almost thirty seconds on my initial howl/call.
i believe with all my being that it matters somehow.
oh, well.
i believe all sorts of things at all sorts of times.
i believe that the big math and all that goes with it gives me a universe of things to believe.
i believe luck hasn’t been on the side of haiti lately.
i believe scared white guys offer every reason why hope is in constant danger on this planet. don’t get me wrong, fear and hatred are equal-opportunity illnesses, but scared white guys have it down to a political science.

my dog is happy.
scared, white guys could learn from him.
but i digress…..

tuna salad. tuna salad…..a few days ago i found myself overwhelmed with the need to make a tuna salad sandwich.
it was all i could think about.
i cannot remember the last time i did this.
i needed to buy a head of iceberg lettuce and a tomato.
i needed to get an onion as well as a jar of mayonnaise.
i already had those little, individual cans of bumble-bee tuna – chunk white, you betcha.

this, in turn, drove me to the glossary of mind and memory.
this might be the first time in a year since i utilized the glossary twice in a row;
26. – Recognition task – A memory task in which one must identify correct information among irrelevant information or incorrect statements.
when this tuna salad sandwich thing happened and my recognition task program kicked-on, i found myself inventorying what i needed and what was not necessary like, “going to a diner and getting a tuna salad sandwich.”
there, i used it in a sentence.

this in turned caused me to make three more tuna salad sandwiches in two days.
i’m feeling much better now.

FROM THE GLOSSARY OF MIND AND MEMORY

today, with the mega-grey power-clouded sky and the potential for snow showers, i piled maxx into my car and drove out to floyd bennett field.
when the world around me mimics the TCM film-light that warms my room, i feel good.
maybe i’m not happy – don’t get me wrong, i’m happy to be – but greyness is a good.
a warmth.
a friendliness.
a noir’ signature that was carved into my heart at birth.

i drove down runway 24 toward the bay – i’ll remind you with a photo;



except i’d be headed toward the camera, not the same direction of the shot.
…..now, just paint the sky with waves of gray, accented with big, blusteriness and edge the air with blades….
maybe a little like this…



it was plenty cold. it was nasty and windy.
i had no fear of maxx running into trouble by way of dogs or people.
by the way, i was without my camera and felt awkward without it.
maxx was the happiest dog in the world. we walked to the bay’s edge.
there may have been sand on the beach, but it was underneath a bed of rounded stones and plastic everything.
and of course, i reached for the camera that wasn’t there so i could document it.
there’s a world of plastic floating in the pacific ocean twice the size of texas, but in fact, it’s everywhere.
the plastic is winning. the garbage is winning. the greedhounds are winning. the douchebags are winning……
and the grifting lizards are dining, but that’s OK.
i had taken photos of the sand at riis park a few months ago.
in my search for seaglass it had become apparent that there plastic bottlecaps and bic lighters everywhere i walked.
these pics were errant sandpatches forty or fifty yards from shore.



they say what’s hitting the beaches on hawaii and other pacific beaches make this look pristine….



note the little, brightly-colored pieces.
this means that your grandchildren will be going to very colorful beaches when they grow up.
oh boy.

the guy who discovered the floating island of garbage says that it’s near impossible to clean up because it’s growing at a rate faster than is humanly possible to clear.
that means they can’t begin to clean it until use of plastic ceases. period.
i’ve never been too much of a fan of plastic and will pare down the amount of plastic-containered products we sell. that’ll be my bit to live a better and kinder life and not hate myself the next time this guy’s on the
colbert report.

after getting past my oxymoronic tirade, if that’s what it was, i had to go shopping for some goodies for susan, the host of the bushwick book club because she was making “ice-nine” cocktails which required champagne, among other things.

it forced me to put an end to the previous note and move forward in this evening of this day of this life, but as happens often enough, as i entered my car, i had the radio tuned on to WFMU and as fate would have it, dave emory was just starting. i haven’t heard this guy in a long while, as i had been listening to less FMU because of my damaged antenna. the link here talks about the evening’s show. initially, it discussed a thing called the “M-fund” and then went on from there. it was sort of a “mixed bag” of terribleness.
i wouldn’t call emory a conspiracy theorist.
he’s more along the lines of an anti-fascist / anti-corporate theorist.
he tends to document everything he talks about to the point of dizziness.

no, that’s not dave emory.
it’s benito mussolini (with hair) and the link to the name is an example of emory’s work – this one is called “Uncle Sam and Il Duce” and it documents American banking and industrialist support for the world’s first corporate-fascist state: Mussolini’s Italy.
i don’t fret too much about the evils and machinations of the monsters lurking in the shadows anymore. not since i met that lizard guy who looks like omar sharif and sounds like eduardo ciannelli who put everything into perspective that day with the woman and those sharp, little teeth.
once it became simply, “a meal and a suit” issue, i drifted to a sense of “oh, well, all i need to do is live till i die.”
sometimes that’s all it takes, but i had to consider those aliens who scoop humanity up by the boatload and use us as batteries, but that’s another issue.
i reached some sort of saturation point when that guy and the bomb-lined crotch happened.
it caused me to remember things that would solidify the notion that we are at the mercy of things and people who might as well be the grifting lizards from mars. their agenda is beyond me and chances are, so is the U.S. intelligence community’s. so there i go – intelligence – again.

when i was working uptown in the late 1990’s until 2004, i knew a man by the name of john o’neill. i didn’t know him well, i didn’t know what he did for a living, but i had a gut feeling that he was some kind of cop.
this guy was intense.
oh, and i never saw him again after 9/11/2001.
he had just started his new job as head of security for the world trade center’s twin towers and it was a short time after that i would connect those tragic dots.
boy, was he in for a surprise, huh?
some time later (like, “in a lot”) PBS would produce this story, “the man who knew” about him.
some of this story centered on his investigation into the bombing of the USS ColeYEMEN ten years ago.
the late mister o’neill investigated only to get….no – you’ll have to watch the story and as you do, remember this word; intelligence.

but i digress(ed) –
this note started as i shopped for susan and the bushwick book club show where there was going to be songs about kurt vonnegut’s “cat’s cradle”

it’s a tragicomic novel about massive destruction, religion, human weakness and doom.
that’s the “broad stroke.”
it’s a book that’s like a bowl of chips.
before you know it, it’s finished.
that was my pitch for you to read the book.
the book was written around the time that i was getting post-surgical exams from doctor thomas matthew, the neurosurgeon who picked those bits of skull from my brains after meeting that chevrolet on the corner of avenue T and east 17th street in brooklyn on january 22nd, 1962.
i mention this because i still can.
someday soon, i might just humm, stare blankly and say something like “shit, i think i peed my pants. is it tuesday?”

the things KV wrote about then are things that are happening now, meaning that things don’t change very much, does it?
then again, the things charles dickens wrote about almost two hundred years ago haven’t changed either.
humanity is going to hell in a handbasket.
as i write this, i’m listening to the post-presidential press-conference with john brennan and janet napolitano and all i can say is, “uh-huh…”
both the shoe bomber and the underpants bomber’s unsuccessful bids were foiled by perspiration – nothing else.
take it from me.
this was a “lack of intelligence” by the bad guys, so “it’s a wash”
an intelligence wash.
there will not be an armpit bomber. maybe.

…..but back to the bushwick book club and the great piece written the next day in the greenpoint gazette, not to mention the pictures i took, some that you can see here, on facebook and even myspace. there’s even more on our photobucket, too.

matthew related his urine-mingling bathroom story and sang –

….and julie related her amazing story that i won’t tell you about because, well, you had to be there…..-

…. franz sang about “goodbye” in the nuclear sense…

and dan and rachel not only sounded brilliant, but looked…..tall. really tall.

i survived another evening newscast while putting this note together.
i floated in a pool of love and acceptance.

we’re all toast, buttered.

intelligence.
it’s what they had three months prior to 9/11. remember condi rice? the file said something like “”Bin Laden Threats Are Real”
what did you need, the flight numbers?
no. even with two years advance notice american intelligence blew it.

do you want to know what saved those three hundred people on that airline?
ball sweat, plain and simple.
persperation.
you heard it here and only here.
so thank that guys stress and his sweat-glands.

to put it into perspective, the cia and such are as competent as our banking system. don’t get me wrong. there are no doubt tons of good soldiers as there are good bankers. it’s the mechanism that’s become corrupt and there isn’t very much that could be done about that.
unless, of course, you want the senate to act as oversight.
that’ll fix it.
hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!

i wanted to shut up about this. i didn’t want to be another hollering nobody venting american rage at big idiocy in high places.
last night, jon stewart nailed it.
i felt better after hearing him rail comedic, but a day later i would stumble upon president obama’s post-einstein-motherfucker-intelligence meeting.
notice where i’m going here.
am i so….transparent?
i can’t write about it. it’s ridiculous. i can only type that title above. i can only wonder why no one’s been fired, arrested or killed. i can only ask who did daddy talk to? and who did the person who daddy talked to, talk to?
what’s so hard about that?
what the fuck kind of intelligence are we talking about?
who is the specialist-investigator-what that can find out this extraordinary question. why didn’t anyone ask daddy?
they just need to bring him over there and let him point.
simple.

i think i’m done.
the illusion of hope and change have glazed over in my mind. the sony trinitron that i found in the garbage two election-days ago sits dark atop one of our PA speakers downstairs. i wouldn’t want it to know.
it’s bad enough for one of us to know.