I’ll have a gigantic winter tree series up soon. In the meantime, here’s a conceptual piece from the 14th Street subway station and the Life Underground series. I posted a few photos from here before. It’s funny how sometimes people post this stuff and just say “crazy.”

I am thankful for a year of mostly no work and having a lot of time to think and read and watch movies, but now I really need some work. My health is great thanks to a mostly vegan diet. I very much enjoyed the PeTA ad that got rejected by NBC. The heavy-handedness is getting a lighter touch. I don’t believe humans will ever be all vegetarians but I think we can maybe go for a more humane and healthy approach to food.

I added a couple more hundred CDs to the pile at Amazon.

Everyone knows how to win the mid-term elections except for Democrats.

I was up there earlier today and had a blast.

I really like this photo. Even though the composition is completely split in half, both halves are satisfying and normally, you’d see the top half with a sunset over it. Hmmm.

I got booked to DJ a party at SiP for a bunch of jazz musicians this Saturday night. DJing for musicians is sort of like compiling a slide show for photographers. It’s curating a museum show for artists! I’m flattered and nervous.

Sometimes I am here to make sure my blog hasn’t been compromised and then realize: well, I should publish something since my blog is fine and I am now logged in. Posting something will help me sleep. The twitter thing below will fill you in on the rest of tonight. Look over there. People are talking about Kandinsky.

At Lincoln Center yesterday, there was a graduation ceremony for Juilliard students. I found it odd they couldn’t turn the fountain on as part of the festivities — all those snapshots of parents and new graduates in their fine clothes and lint-free graduation gowns made lacklustre by some cost-cutting bureaucrat.

The refurbishing of Alice Tully Hall across the street is magnificently successful. Looking a little dangerous, right on the corner, a public bleacher with glass edges juts out of the sidewalk at a knife-like angle. Presumably, there will be pleasant jazz trios (avoiding hard bop and free jazz) performing at the base for lunchtime enjoyment. The roof that parallels over the outdoor bleacher now houses the new balcony area of the hall inside.

The glassed-in public lobby dovetails nicely with a Slavoj Zizek talk I heard recently. Zizek argues that new architecture for public performance spaces is a bonafide outreaching to different classes for dialogs in high-brow and low-brow culture. They have by necessity become these goofy institutional public/private spaces made special by good architects and well-meaning underwriters for the arts. Unfortunately, the café counter in this lobby only seems to be serving drinks and food directly before performances. (I could be mistaken.)

The hall itself is generally more woodsy than before and the acoustics are superior. I don’t like that the new seats lack a spring to make the seats raise by themselves when letting fellow patrons get to their own seats although the burgundy color works with the wood.

“One day I climbed up as fast as I could to the olive grove where I had carried out all these experiments, but I had brought neither my liquid machine gun nor the live rhinoceros that I would have liked for the prints, nor even some half-dead octopus. It was the only time when, as it did not happen to Louis XIV either, “I would have to wait.” –Diaries, 1960

The Chanel Mobile Art thing in Central Park deserves the Cool Prize.

(How many Obama trucks are cruising the streets of Manhattan today?)

I saw a series of BQ movies around the time they came out and they had a profound influence on me. I feel funny recommending them to people for fear they won’t get it. Their films felt out of place in the 80s and today I feel I would have to KNOW that someone was at least into puppet animation before I would recommend the BQ to them. I’m disappointed they haven’t been very active lately but then, in my eyes, they are completely self-fulfilled artists and who would blame them having already achieved artistic nirvana.