A few of my favorite things...

Last night I had the pleasure of seeing Rubens Ghenov's work in person and the artist too.
Viewing the work in person is important. There are a lot of subtle nuances in the line work but even better is the atmospheric
softness (or even meditativeness) of well, the atmosphere. The surfaces/places that the figures and shapes exist on have
an ephemeral quality. Thoughts, wishes, fatasies or prayers seem to where these places exist.
Whenever I look at art my brain tries to rhym it to something in the outside world. The interesting part is trying to figure out
what the reason for the rhym is. Here are some of Ruben's images, a John Coltrane clip (which is not a far stretch) and something of that rhym I mentioned.

Jackie Chan is looking pretty old these days.

Today I saw the billboard for Rush Hour 3. Jackie looks old and his kick looks lame. Too much Hollywood and not enough DRUNKEN MASTER!

Emily Noelle Lambert

Last night I had some drinks with Emily. She's really great and her work is too. I met Emily about 4 years ago at The Vermont Studio Center. Some of my fondest moments in nature were due to her. This one time we went for a long hike in the constant 3 ft. of snow late in a February afternoon. Then we got kinda lost. Then we started thinking about survival... or at least I was. We only had the moonlight to guide us and that was just enough. We made it back to base camp late for dinner, cold and tired. I was thankful that we didnt' have to resort to cannibalism.
So here are some works by Emily:

Standing Naked

At least every other day I stand naked in a room full of other naked men. What? - yes, it's true.
I joined a gym a few months ago or you might say that I joined a club. My first investigation in to this
new culture began with the actual exercise part which is fun once I got a routine down. How not to hurt ones self
is day one; how not to look like a dork is day two; how to benifit and feel good is day three... the rest is
just sweating. The real physical (and I would add psychological and maybe emotional) acclimantion happens
on the lower level. The depths of the dreaded locker room. The Locker room situation was the only cause for my
hesitation in joining a gym. For reasons I'm contractually unable to provide, I had to join one.
Do you remember summer camp? Out of all the awkward, pubescent moments in my summer camp experiences (I had
many at day camp) getting changed after swim was not one of them. Nobody cared. Nobody seemed to care anyhow.
Well nobody seems to care at the gym either.... except me, at first. Man, It's weird! Every body type, age, ethnicity, smell, personality all walk'n around nude hang'n out. As some of you know, I have particular squimishes about particular things.
First of all, that shit isn't sanitary. I put a towel down on everything as if I was at a nudist colony. I even keep a dust mask
in my locker for emergecy smell situations. I think this gym (a big chain one in fact) is considered really nice too, it's in Park Slope. But nobody seems to have a problem parking their naked bum on the benches. Do women do this?
The funny thing about this new world is that I'm getting comfortable with it. At first I thought the locker room scene
was all machismo but it's not (the free weight room is where all the testosterone is pent up). It's just people being
comfortable. The ancient Greeks and Romans invented this type of leisure. That leisure extended in to bath houses
and saunas. Here's a bit of interesting lingo about the sauna. The yiddish slang word for sauna, as spoken by many a
pop-pop Herman, is "Schwitz". As in to sweat, as in "oh god i'm schwitzing like a pudding".
Most of the jews in concentration camps during the holocaust were gassed in sauna-like rooms... in Auschwitz.
Pretty scary huh? Schwitz - Auschwitz.
Anyhow, I've gotten over the socialized group nudity of the locker room. I even feel better for it.

Poems

...more Ben Shahn

...more Ben Shahn

...more Ben Shahn

Killing time with Ben Shahn

I don't like most art. That sounds like a negative statement but if you like say, 49% of what you see, hey that's pretty good.
Like certain bands, some artists can do no wrong with me - that's an exception to the case.
If you're like me some sort of music or radio is always playing at home or in the studio. It shifts from background to forground seemlessly. Some audio is specifically special though. I like to think that I have a soundtrack to me... which happens to be my favorites. What if you had an art soundtrack or visual soundtrack to the story of you? As an artist I think about the making, the making and the making. When I look at art it's often with the skeptical, critical eye. The art I would want to be my visual soundtrack superceeds criticism... it just is becuase it can do no wrong. Ben Shahn is in that handfull of artists that I look to
as if the work was hanging on the wall in my home (I wish I owned more art). Anyhow here are some pics:

Part 4

The last battle.
Are you familiar with Magic Shell? Just incase, Magic Shell was cheap liquid chocolate that when poured on frozen substances
would become hard. Once when I was over, I think it was Duncan's house sometime towards the end of highschool, we got really high. Plenty of Magic Shell but nothing frozen to put it on.... except frozen peas. Do you see how this whole story of vegetables is coming full circle? The moment I spooned that chocolate covered hunk of peas in to my mouth I knew I was committing some form of sacrilege. It was wrong. Wrong like mixing oil and water, wrong like feeding your little sister doggy treats (sorry sis), wrong like licking a 9volt battery. I just didn't understand what exactly I was trying to do.
Fast forward to college. After years of too much coffee, pastries and cigarettes my body started to go on strike, the beginning of warning signs. I began to reflect on something profound I learned when I was 14 years old. Something my english/gym teacher told me: balance will be the most important and most difficult virtue to attain. He was right and still is.
These days I enjoy simple foods including vegetables. In fact, if I don't have a version of vegetable once a day I get all weird.
For all the amends I've made with veggies, string beans are one of my favorites.
Brussel sprouts however remain my arch enemy... cue in the sinister music... fade to green.


*check back soon. next is a mini Ben Shahn retrospective, plus some bonus images.

Part 3

Introductions, Sweet confections, Howie Goldman and The way of the roach.
Howie Goldman was my best friend during my adolescent years. During those years the
line-up of my friends looked like the theater marque for a borscht belt comedy jam.
There was Jacob Adelman, Jeremy Finkelman, Philip Klien, Jeffrey Katz and a host of others.
Soon those names would be replaced in highschool by Zulema Kanti, Rasheeda Blaloche, Tieffa Waldon, Clay Cauley, Jarmaine Gillis and more. The "Borscht Belt Years" were full of juvenile exploration, sex education, pyromania...ation and sweet confection. Howie had childhood diabetes. He was my best buddy and at times my greatest concern. I could fill a book
about our experiences together. Just to name a few for colorful illustration: The time we turned his entire house in to one giant fort made of furniture and blankets, the time we opened a casino in his basement, the time we set his room on fire, the time we bugged his parents room with tiny microphones, the time we dressed up as ninjas and beat eachother with real weapons, the time we formed a gang, the time we became blood brothers, the time I poured orange juice down his throat because he was in serious diabetic shock. A special one was the time we hunted cockroaches at night using battery powered water pistol uzi's filled with a mixture of water and bug poison; we taped flashlights to our guns, wore all black and carried water balloons for extra safety... these suckers were huge, think prehistoric times. We hunted for survival, not sport. Those were my favorite times.
Howie's diabetes required him to have lots and lots of sugary snacks in stock at all times, everywhere! His house was my playboy mansion. I didn't even know how to eat junk food. I would eat until I was sick, pass out, then do it again. The guilt wore off fast. I was in a new world now, the power, the glory... na, I just loved chocolate cupcakes. I remember going to Jeremy finkelman's not too long after and using the blender as a means of making a pastry power shake. It consisted of everything cake-like that could fit in to the blender. After one of those I had to be cut off. Sugar wasn't the only new concept in my life. Howie could cook a mean hot dog. Salted artificial meats was just the beginning, who would of thought potato chips came on the side! I was used to a slice of soy cardboard with watered down applebutter to dampen it... and that came on the side of something like dandelion weed soup. Just the smell of the hotdogs sizzling in the pan made me feel like me and Howie were cook'n up meth in a lab.
Eventually I hit burn-out and had to learn moderation. I had had enough of shoving 4 packs of gum in my mouth in a 4 minute period of time. My family life was suffering. Dinner was a joke. Vegetables were still my omnipresent
arch enemy... and would be for still some years to come.

Part 2

Popsicle Surprise.
I had no idea what desert was. I had no context to even compare sugar to sugarfree. I wasn't allowed to know that forbiden
fruit. Normal fruit was o.k. though.
I distinctly remember summer time in West Philadelphia. Kids out on bigwheels, bikes, stoopball
and sometimes when someone felt criminally ambitions the firehydrant would be opened. From a distance
time would begin to stand still. You could hear it a couple of blocks away... the ice cream truck is coming!
I knew we were on the side of being poorish. I thought that was the reason why my mom distracted me during
those moments. Who had the money for a $2.00 popsicle anyway? Especially when mom had the special ones
in the freezer. Those special green ones. Those special fiberous ones. Yes they had some sort of frozen "popsicle"
appearance but even then I knew something was up, I was not having quite the same delicious experience as the other kids.
I was eating frozen string beans for desert! This is where is gets very George Orwell, 1984. I was convinced that I was
eating a popsicle when really it was just a frozen string bean. I had no idea that in the secular world of sugary chemicals that the color green would taste like lime or fake lime or gatorade lime. Just like the novel 1984, "how many lights are there?", answer: popsicle string beans.

The Story of Me and Vegatables - Part 1

Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.
I grew up keeping vegetables very close to me, as in enemy close. Escaping the dinner table as a child always involved
smuggling my greens out of the kitchen by shoving them in odd bodily places. I had to be way more creative than just my pockets, that old trick. The food nazi was on to me and a frisking at the border checkpoint was not uncommon. Nazi is a bit harsh o.k. Probably even a contradiction considering my mom was a health food co-op hippie. I'm 32 now. Back in the days of mustard green muleing I was about 6, which made my mom about 26. There was no Whole Foods, no upper middle class Park Slope food co-op, no whatever the guys name is who is the young brittish chef that all the ladies are wild over...
Nope, we shoveled bulk amounts of tan colored foods straight in to canvas bags, which were tan. I have to admit though, the yogurt was delicious, mostly because I had no concept of what dessert was. That will be explained in Part 2.