I should send these to Ed Ruscha or something

For all y'all with iPhones you know that for some odd reason those people at Apple couldn't find it in their hearts to allow us to receive images in a text message. You can do just about anything else with your phone, but not this. An oversight perhaps, but it has led to a wonderful thing. Verging on the genius of some spam email names like Hope E. Esparaza and Hilario P. Mooney, the log in passwords to view multimedia messages are sheer genius. Here, in order, are the ones I've received:

what3limb
bin9barb
hear65west
hoax50veal
dame5fees
used92sill
doom8drew
vain36wink
pang1sags
tout07iced
grip57slip
get1span
bun7errs
hold8bind
hag5prop
raps3wire
puns54just
slow12edit
vows62gee
obey44slid

Things from the street

Here's another installment of brilliance I encountered over the weekend.
First at PS270:

Then in defaced ads in the subway (some of which I thought were great re-appropriation of materials):


Of course it all degraded into mustache drawing eventually, as everything does:
Though the last mustache barely made an impression on me simply because it was just so right.

Spring and a boner in the Upper East Side

I've recently begun some form of employment in the Upper East Side and have to say I really appreciate the blooming pear trees as well as the tulips which are finally showing some color all up and down Park Avenue. When you are contending with mostly concrete- or stone-gray, a little color and brightness really goes a long way.So on this glorious spring afternoon on my walk back to work, having shot this white-haired-tree-and-blue-sky-combo, I was looking up more than at my feet. In this city, this could prove a fatal move what with the uneven sidewalks, oblivious speed-walkers, ladies with carts or small dogs in jackets on leashes, cabs, cyclists, etc., etc., but had I not risked my life, I would have never noticed this dangling above eye-level. I must say that whenever I see something this out of the ordinary, my gut reaction is always to jump to the conclusion that it is an art piece. Once someone had left a box full of candy in the hall in front of the the gallery I worked at in SF; it sat there all day tempting me every time I passed it to steal a free Crunch bar or Snickers, but I never did because I was convinced it was under surveillance for some dumb art project and I refused to be a sap.

But really, what alternative to 'art project' is there when you see a bone security-locked to a parking sign hanging like some weird morbid phallus on East 78th and Madison? It certainly didn't get up there by accident.

Common Ground?

“What I liked about Wall Street,” Mr. Brod said, “was that it’s full of manic-depressives. There are a lot of artists who are manic-depressive. And there’s a lot of creative people in Wall Street.”

Read the story if you like. It ends with a poem.

Whoever on the road.
Whoever still traveling.
Whoever says whatever.
Whoever is dead.
Long live whoever.

An unusual view

SOFA TENTS AT THE ARMORY NY

4/14/09 (the anniversary of Lincoln's assassination); 11:30 am

don't use this art handler

Doesn't he know that white canvas will scuff?I'll file this memory away labeled "uncommon scenes in the NY subway." A story I heard second hand that would fit in this category: A man was eating a tuna sandwich on the train, messy (I imagine similar to the guy with the everything bagel in Eric's rant), dropped a little bit of tuna on the ground, picked it up and ate it. Now, I am a strong believer in the 5 second rule, but there needs to be some statute of limitations. For example: A potato chip that fell while you were watching sports at home: Fine - even if you have cats; A lollypop that dropped out of your mouth into the sand at the playground: Okay - if you rinse it first; tuna salad that you picked up off of a train floor that literally sees the bottom of millions of shoes that walk miles through dirt, dog poo and city grime everyday: Totally unacceptable - no matter what the scenario. That's my two cents.

It's not littering, it's a contribution to culture

I suppose this might be true for any city, but I recently was marveling at the sheer number of gum stains on any given parcel of pavement in New York. As I walked from my Vteer gig at the senior center, I scanned the sidewalk passing under my feet and found myself wondering what the average time span in gum age was on any given square of concrete (oldest piece vs newest, though maybe color and tackiness can identify the latter) and wondering whether that data could possibly be of use to anyone. "Where are my scientific contacts who can carbon-date the samples I scrape up from each gum stain so we can find out the precise historical moment to which it is linked?" I thought. "More importantly," I wondered, "What could one do armed with such information?" I guess my plan then would be to make a different kind of tourist map (not unlike the Maps of the Stars in LA...Maps of the Stains?) with which to tour New York. What a pain in the ass, both to make and to do. Forget it.

Maybe it's enough that there is mid-century modernist art literally at our feet everywhere we go. Some of the materials (gum, grime on concrete) might even date to that era. Who knows. It's like some crazy collaboration between litterers and time that resulted in an infinite number of abstract picture planes which we'd believe to be relevant to art history if they were framed right and hanging in the MOMA. Imagine:

"Untitled," 1955
Oil on canvas 60 x 88 inches

Brilliant.