To Live is to Love is to Hate. Have you ever stood in front of a painting, turned the pages of the latest hot novel, or sat in an audience at Carnegie Hall, experiencing a conflicting mix of feelings, where both love and hate, create a toxic mix of ambivalent emotions as you looked, read, listened?
The renowned writer and author, Herman Melville said ” indifference is opposite of love, not hate. Hating art is like loving art.” It’s the same extreme emotion projected in a an upside down way.
That’s the way it’s supposed to be. You are Not supposed to be 100% clear while engaging in any artistic experience because that would be kind of boring? Right? Nobody wants it 100%. Yes or No. Easy to figure out. Mystery is key. A mixture of things to both love AND hate make it interesting, fun, edgy, create a story, spark our curiosity, essentially involving us like nothing else does. The yin and the yang forces necessary to life’s evolvement. And that is not a simple thing. It’s a bit of black and white, yes and no, up and down, that forces us to really get into it and feel the love/hate dichotomy that riles people up, makes them sweat, and sends them running to their therapists! Otherwise, what have you? Flat – lining into oblivion. “Dead Man Walking.” And who wants that?!??! We need to have that duality when engaging in whatever our art crush happens to be. Otherwise it’s easy to take it for granted, get bored, and loose interest. Not Cool!
Falling in love with a painting, a song, a poem, a story, a film, a dance, can feel like a powerful emotional rush, driving the need to engage in an extreme relationship with the object of your infatuation! The reason someone will pay 20 million$ for a painting, or develop a cultish obsession for a writer, I’m thinking about David Foster Wallace, Jack Kerouac, Hunter S. Thompson, for example, not to mention the obsessive crushes people get on rock stars and actors, creating fan clubs, on-line sites, stalkers, venting their obsessive emotions, that are indulged and stoked by the Technicolor images on stage and screen. The passions that the Beatles, the Stones, Elvis, Michael Jackson, Nirvana ,inspired in the past, certainly looked like love! Swooning teenagers screaming in the audiences, universally tells the story. The Love Story. But then, flip the switch, and you get Hate. The fine line, tightrope walk where Love & Hate get uncomfortably close in their emotional energy and feeling. Especially when it comes to art.
The hatred of an artwork, can be as emotionally charged if not more so as the love of it. Both require intensity of feeling. Hating & Loving, the dynamic duo, blending as one, a bipolar emotional cocktail, with the ultimate result being a feeling of Something whether —viewing, reading, writing, listening, thinking……. Superman & Batman jumping the Shark!
Bukowsky’s poem, “Nothing Subtle”, read twice will either break the stoniest wall, or add another brick to it. “There is nothing subtle about dying or dumping garbage, or the spider and this fist full of nickels…..”. Or E.E. Cummings’, “LVIII”, a quintessential love poem, a possible answer to telling your girlfriend how you Really feel. “Is there a flower (whom i meet anywhere)
able to be and seem so quite softly as your hair….”
Depending on who you are either poem has the possibility of evoking either Love OR Hate, as the poem is processed emotionally in that unique experience that art gives us. One’s identity confirms and affirms one’s feeling.
The large crowd always clustered around Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” masterpiece at the Metropolitan Museum in NYC, can’t stop staring, at the mesmeric swirls of color as they click click click on their iPhone cameras trying to preserve the memory of this work of art that is so hard to walk away from. The agony depicted in Munch’s “Scream” is paltable, it is cringe worthy at best. Hate or Love? I call hate on this one. It’s definitely not a pretty warm and fuzzy moment. “Scream” makes you want to cry and run away. But that’s great. It’s emotion. And that is a good thing when delving into arts’ caverns of love and hate. You will find both, living side by side, in harmony conflict. A duo of opposites. Revealing the dichotomy of life forces as experience teaches the individual as he grows. Pop art will inspire a lot of hate, as Jeff Koons did with me at his latest exhibit at the Whitney in Nyc. People Love to Hate Pop. They often don’t get it so it’s easy to hate. They link the hate 
often with ridicule and laughter. That’s fine. At least they are feeling something and that’s the point. Warhol’s art was ridiculed and mocked all, over town. That Campbell Soup can was absurd! After all it was just a soup can. Sure. On the surface. Of course ironically, it became the trademark that helped turn Warhol into a pop icon legend, while the haters watched him laugh his way to the bank! So you never know. Hating an art work can be a good thing. When Kafka’s “Metamorphosis”, was published, people didn’t know what to think! A salesman, his protagonist, turning into a giant insect, with no real explanation, it was so bizarre, so hated, so dark, that of course it became his major work, the novel he is known for, the book on high school reading lists worldwide! The story, brought to the surface dark feelings, and confusing messages, all symptomatic of Kafka’s own personal life story.
“A book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us” so said Kafka. He finished none of his novels and burned 90% of his work. “Metamorphosis” regarded as his seminal work inspire those conflicting love – hate feelings in any reader. His themes of alienation, physical and psychological brutality, quest, and transformation are the substance of his writings, fascinating readers for over 70 years. One can either love, hate, or a combination of both, Kafka’s take on life, and it’s effect on his literary work. But one cannot remain unaffected. One cannot ignore!
“Indifference and neglect often do much more damage than outright dislike” JK Rowling. She should know, waiting on the line for her literary blockbuster Harry Potter, to be recognized!
If the art has inspired ANYTHING other than indifference it has succeeded in cracking that emotional nut!
LOVE. HATE. The mirage where the train tracks appear to join as one in the distance, or the ocean and sky meet at the horizon.
The actor Robert Mitchum, in “Night of the Hunter”, tattooed his knuckles with the words Love and Hate, in the 1955 film. Pulp. Dark. Cool. Unforgettable!
Playing a psychotic preacher, he characterized themes of good and evil, as he flashes his knuckles as a trick to seduce women in the towns he visits, a predator using religion, with good and evil symbolism, as his ticket in, his entrance thru the doorways of womens hearts and cash. With the word LOVE, tattooed on one hand, and HATE on the other, he had his unique, convenient, creepy visual to back up his words. The common universal theme of good and evil as combative forces in religion, nature, and art, communicate an emotional feeling unavoidable for most of us. Mitchum, in the film, plays a character who is very aware of this power, and uses it to manipulate his naive victims, who fall for his preacher act, as he spins biblical proverbs while flashing his significantly labeled hands. A predator hunting his prey, using the themes of love and hate as his metaphorical bait!
Art can have this kind of power. The viewer, the reader, the listener gets pulled in, on the emotional level that exposes feelings, good and bad, through the magic and mystery of the sublime presence and power that art evokes! Emotional Q or “EQ” dominates and supplements us with an energy like no other! We experience our own version of a “Magical Mystery Tour”, as we visit unexplored artistic regions! Our EQ provides us with the perfect guide, helping expose and enhance our artistic feelings on the journey.
We see in the paintings and poetry of the genius William Blake, the spiritual power of his mind, translating, love-hate, good – evil, themes which permeate the great body of his work. Being a metaphysician, an alchemist, a painter, a poet, a printmaker, a visionary: he created his art from a very transcendental place, and it shows. Love. Hate. Blake “GOT” it! Supremely gifted with genius, and possessing a powerful connection to the spiritual world, he combined both painting and prose to transmit his messages to the world.
Yes, love and hate dictate the emotional overlap in the art world to the outer world. People being who they are, relationships get messy, and so it is with our relationships with art. Messy. There is rarely a clear definitive response, but when there is, it’s either one or the other. But both are related as the pendulum swings back and forth, like our reactions when faced with the Basquiet, the Lautrec, the monster insect of Kafka’s masterpiece, or the grotesque eviscerations of Francis Bacon’s men, Diane Arbus and her freaks, or Anais Nin’s narcissistic journals, Tennessee William’s anguished characters, Kurt Cobain’s angst ridden songs, Or John Water’s underground film personalities, the list goes on and on and on…….
We all participate in the dictatorial symbolism emoting from the very genesis of what art is, and when we engage, by either making art or enjoying art we become the welcome victims indulging this power, because it takes us into worlds we can’t experience in any other way! Love and Hate are kindred siblings, that inspire, horrify, disgust, repulse, embrace, adore, caress, shame, tranquilize, frighten, seduce, amuse, threaten, and often surprise!
Yes, Love/Hate – Dictate!
And
If invited-
We are always eager to attend THAT party!
The definition of a “flaneur” loosely stated is “the art of strolling”. A flaneur is an “idler, a man or woman of leisure, a street connoisseur, an urban explorer”.
The cities London, Paris, and New York are the flaneur’s heaven. Exploring by foot, at leisure, is not only enjoyable, accessible, and exciting, but is also a way to fill the creative well. One goes out with a blank mind and returns with an overflow of sensory information. The walk is not just a walk , simplistic in meaning , but a “gastronomy of the eye” as Balzac aptly called it! Getting out of the studio, the office, ditching the computer , is a welcome journey for the creative to go on, the simple stroll, becomes a hunt for jewels to fill the treasure chest of the mind !
In the mid 19th century, when the flaneur became a “thing” in Paris, it was associated with the lifestyle of the “dandy”, the idle rich with excess time on their hands to stroll the city’s streets at their leisure. Oscar Wilde, Baudelaire, and Gerard de Nerval, the French Romantic poet, who actually walked his pet lobster around on a blue silk leash, were a few of these “dandys”. When questioned about his unusual lobster walking habit, Nerval retorted, “why should a lobster be any more ridiculous than a dog?” Of course, Nerval was utterly and completely Mad! But an original flaneur in every way!
But what about photographers famous or otherwise? Watching, looking, recording strangers, wars, society, celebrities, buildings, faces, light, scenes, landscapes, the exotic, the banal, the photographer’s work in progress is an on going documentary of life as seen through the cameras eye. Certain Nyc photographer – flaneur’s , like, Diane Arbus, Vivian Maier, Robert Frank, Edward Steichen, Cindy Sherman, were always on the GO, walking the streets , looking for new material, and thousands of photos later, we get to experience the city as they did . In the film “Finding Vivienne Maier”, we are taken on this illusive mystery woman’s city walks, her camera focused ,watching, walking, and waiting for the photo she wanted. Robert Franks, in his “The Americans”, the dynamic expose of our society in the 1950’s, Weegee’s crime scene photos from the underground Nyc life, also pre 1970, Ron Galella, celebrity photographer, stalking his obsession Jackie O, up and down the city streets, Doisneau’s, iconic black & white, photographs of Paris, are spectacular records of the street life, and give us a view of early 20th century life we can only experience through photos such as his. Amazing stuff, stepping into a time capsule, that only the flaneur, armed with camera, or sketch pad, or journal, can give us, from his street perspective, up close, we get to see what he sees and that is a special experience. Diane Arbus’s freaks, her attraction to the atypical as her subjects, the circus freaks, the retarded child, the vagrant, the downtrodden, city characters she came across during her flaneuring in NYC, sealing her place in history ! The writer, Edmund White, cites French photographer Eugene Atget, as a “scientific flaneur.” “An obsessed photographer, determined to document every street in Paris, before it disappeared forever in the new construction looming in the future.” These flaneur’s armed with cameras, have the ability to document the city scape as it changes, is torn down, rebuilt, transformed over time, with the photographs left to document what once was. In Vivienne Maier’s stunning collection of thousands of NYC photos, now available in a book, “Street Photographer” one is given a historical photographic journey of a city that no longer exists.
Henry Miller, the charismatic novelist, spent his early writing life on the streets of Paris, with his lover Anais Nin, usually looking for a meal, but also gathering material for his banned book “Tropic of Cancer”, and the future tropics to follow. Miller is always walking the streets of Paris, from Pigalle to the Bastille, to Montparnasse, the Right Bank, the Left Bank, he covers by foot, every avenue, every “rue” of old Paris. Miller, the Brooklyn boy, writer in training, expat, soaking up the sights, the people, the language, living as a true “starving artist”, pursuing his dream, his walks taking him into Zola’s “Belly of Paris”, and giving the world his gritty life view in the pages of his often controversial, raw, rough, provocative novels!
provided by their walk! Van Gogh’s paintings of the potato planters, his sight holding them in his artist’s eyes, as he walked through the Dutch countryside, Utrillo’s cafe scenes, clearly from his meanderings through the winding Monmartre streets in his absinthe haze, Lautrec’s cabaret posters, his brothel paintings, walking with his infamous cane, that held a beaker of absinthe, or brandy in it’s hook, making his flaneur experience compatible with his drinking. The SITTER has a very different experience. One is stationary, compact, confined. Whereas the WALKER is movement, freedom, mobility, unleashed!” Transitory poetic in the historic” Baudelaire says. As only he could, using his poetic liscence freely. Yes, there is the possibility to “achieve transcendence” as you wander, walk, stroll stride, saunter the city streets. It’s the unexpected encounter, the surprise event, the sudden illumination, the street action, people, traffic, energy, all carry the flaneur’s ahead, around, and towards new sights, different views of old sights, and unfolds untapped resources of the mind that your walk inspires!
While Oscar Wilde, the poet, playwright, gay icon was serving his prison sentence in 1897, for sodomy, “gross indecency” with other men, he wrote a journal he entitled, “De Profoundis”.
In “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol”, Warhol, discusses in a chapter entitled, Time, his “So What” theory.
So fast forward to Today Speak, we can translate Andy’s “so what?” Into “whatever”. Right? Nothing is THAT important, that serious! Isn’t it all kind of blown up from that deflated balloon reality where it all begins? Light hearted, whimsical, fun, POP! The lofty, uber pretentious days can be historically interesting but in real time also a colossal drag!!!
And his art was like that. The pop concept, everyday things become artworks. A soup can, a shoe, a dollar sign, a cereal box, Marilyn Monroe, anything really that caught his eye. And his method of reproducing his art using silkscreen, so there was no possibility of ever running out of a painting with a one time sale. He was guaranteeing the infinite, removing limits, his eternal dollar signs multiplying with every copy the silk screen spun out. His photographic technique for his portraits of the jet setters he worshipped and who followed him around like the pied piper of NYC, were all inherent components in achieving his popularity and fame. He turned the boring stuff of life into something exciting and new. But only through art, and his cutting edge, off the grid lifestyle, that attracted everyone from the down and out in Beverly Hills types to the hoity toity silver spooners of Park Avenue. They all wanted to join Andy’s fraternity of pop! Membership guaranteed your POPularity , the ticket to Oz, the trip from dullsville to Crazytown, where everyone wanted to live in the psychedelic sixties!
But only the Cool could enter. And that could be anyone from his drugged out blue blood friend Edie, to his Factory drag star UltraViolet, to his best bud Samo aka Basquiet, Ingrid Superstar, and of course his telephone mate Bridgette, his alter ego earpiece from “The Andy Warhol Diaries”, his prime requirement is that they are funny and they entertain him. “Funny people are the only people I ever get really interested in, because as soon as somebody isn’t funny, they bore me.”
And boy, his pop art certainly fulfilled that need to be entertained, in it’s color, it’s whimsy, it’s humor, it’s cultural relevance, it’s 60’s iconography, they all integrate to promote his psychology, his pov, his kooky perspective, and he didn’t give a shit whether or not you dug him or not. Actually in his “philosophy”, he makes it clear that he goes for the opposite of the current reality. On purpose. His take on money is beyond the pale because it is sooo radical, he loves money, clearly his shopping excursions on Madison Avenue attest to that, but he also dismisses it and has a voyeuristic attitude toward the rich and famous people he associates with who 
clamour around his factory parties looking for the newest kick to amp up their boringly money infested lives. He sells his art with this kind of ambiguous talking point, sealing the deal, because hey it was the sixties, and if it was hip and new , and involved drugs, sex, and rock and roll, it was a hit! Andy managed to do all of this and then some. Capote got axed when he spilled the dirt on his so called friends in that hated tell all ” Answered Prayers”, taking him into a spiral of doom, as his friends banished him from their social circles, after he betrayed their trusts, in an embarrassing expose. But Andy does it differently because he philosophized from his own point of view about the generalities of people and situations without really getting specific, but you got the message! No harm. No foul. He managed to slide by, while Capote fell off and got stepped on.
That’s art! Get the message or don’t get the message! I look at Matisse’s “Woman with a Hat”, and see stuff, that you don’t. Great! So What? Why can’t everything be like a big SO WHAT? Why are we soooo concerned by minutia, the idiotic crap that energy is expended on daily, that’s of no real importance or substance, just time filling misdemeanors?
I can read the “Philosophy of Andy Warhol”, and still get new crumbs from the golden nuggets of pop isms, after the fifth reading, because it’s just one of THOSE books, but for me it’s also a genuine artist book written by the Master of Pop Art, an art legend that the hipsters of today have only read about in art class or perhaps viewed his Gold Marilyn at the MOMA, or strolled by that funky silver statue in front of his old office building in Union Square in NYC.
It was a time, HIS time, HIS generation, and HIS mark in history, a pop culture icon, the most famous celebrity pop artist on the planet! He once said , “everyone will be famous for 15 minutes”. It’s a universally known easily identifiable Warhol quote. Reality Shows of today prove his prophecy, as well as people’s personal Youtube videos, sex tapes, and the various computer resources available for publicity hounds seeking attention. Everybody seeks that fame Andy talks about , even if it’s fast and furious, the 15 minute in and out.
Writers and artists have always carried on a clandestine love affair between the pages and on the canvas. Life gets expressed through the visual, and the literal, and both genres meld as they influence and are influenced in a mutual admiration society giving to the world the unique perspectives through the combined literary and art expression. This is a blending of spirits, of like minded souls, and it’s pretty awesome! Check out “Just Kids” Patti Smith’s, personal expose of her artistic journey with her soulmate, the avant, underground, photographer, Robert Mapplethorpe. These two comrades in their artistic journey into the unknown, wandered through the East And West Village, in the 60’s and 70’s, searching, dreaming, ultimately knowing that their future was intertwined in the Netherlands of art, its pain, it’s passion, the fuel driving it’s undeniable rewards. She is enamored of the French poet Rimbaud, and her dual identity as both writer and singer is clarified by her own words, “Please no matter how we advance technologically, please don’t abandon the book. There is nothing in our material world more beautiful than the book.” There. She says it. And she means it. Her story, ” Just Kids ” is pure gold, for us pioneers, the writers and painters, who have walked the walk so to speak. If you are a “creative”, ignoring this book is a BIG mistake! Get it ASAP! It is a love story, a trippy art journey, and it also gives the younger reader a chance to experience a glimpse of the downtown hippie lifestyle of the past, far removed from today’s hipster world of tech, commerce, and astronomical student loans!
On the other hand, let’s go on a vastly different trip with Steve Martin as he takes us from North to South, literally speaking, from the authenticity and earthy Greenwich Village experience of Patti and Robert, to the cold culture where Cash is King, and art is a commodity of the pocketbook first, not the innate soul purity of “Just Kids”.
But getting into the nitty gritty so to speak one should start with “The Recognitions”, published in 1955, Bill Gaddis’s, lengthy, detailed, wordy, story of the life of Wyatt Gwyon, art forger, describing his craft of fakery, this book is an expose of the contradictions life offers in Wyatt’s counterfeit world where real is fake and fake appears to be real, and the perception as seen from the outside is everything, similar to viewing a painting, so subjective, yet coming from that intangible mix of the inner and outer mechanisms of mind and matter combined. In this fat novel, books and paintings are intertwined. The philosophies expounded by the characters release so much expertise and insight from the writers, artist, painters, business, point of view, that though a heavy read, it’s challenging, and it forced me to delve in with the persistence of a miner digging for gold in that pit of dirt. The results SO worth it!
There are many reminders of the indisputable link writers have with artists and vice versa. Witness Picasso’s best friend Max Jacobs, and the poet Appolinaire, known for his “AlCools,” devoted, bonded in their artistic life, in their Montmartre Bohemia, where eating, and sleeping came far behind creating, and dreaming. The true sustenance being, the preferred art of the subjects at hand, be it Satie and his classical Gymnopedies,Lautrec and his bordello posters, Picasso, and his circus paintings of harlequins and acrobats, or Valladon and her nudes. Perhaps it was Baudelaire and his absinthe infected poetry, or Jane Avril, friend and model for so many of Lautrec’s posters, celebrity of Montmartre, as star attraction at the Moulin Rouge, they all had a common goal -Art- the making, living, eating, breathing, the food they thrived on that kept them alive, and provided them with nourishment that no simple meal ever could!
Henry Miller, the novelist of all times, love him or hate him, he can’t be ignored! He was a self taught water colorist, which he claims was fulfilling, in a way that transcended his writing. Thousands upon thousands of watercolors, he produced joyfully, giving away randomly, at his will, to friends and fans. Talk about a writer – art love affair, Miller, epitomized this duality with his novels , his Tropics series, and his future essays, where he talks as if he’s sitting with us , about his favorite subjects like, art, writing, spirituality, people, Big Sur, Anais Nin, and Paris! In Big Sur, The Henry Miller Museum, is a unique dream place, a stone’ s throw from his old hangout Nepenthe, the former love nest of Orson Welles and his lover Rita Hayworth. It was recreated into a bar, restaurant, hanging off a cliff over the Pacific Ocean, a favorite hangout for Miller and his friends during his Big Sur years. The museum, a picturesque cabin, and the former home of his best friend Emil White, displays his works, paintings, and obscure writings, not commonly found in your local Barnes & Noble. Standing under the majestic Redwood trees, Pacific Ocean crashing below the rocky coast, this humble cabin holds a wealth of artistic bounty, that only the fortunate traveller is led to discover!
Miller’s watercolors are a spontaneous, pure, colorful expression of his thinking, always soulful and pure. In his novel, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch, he confirms his spiritual relationship to the Divine, as authority for the creative genius he has expressed through his prolific writings, his paintings, and his individual life story, from Brooklyn to Paris to California!
One of the most interesting artist stories in contemporary fiction is “Spending”, by Mary Gordon. A sexy, hot and spicy, page turner, depicting a tale of the relationship between a powerhouse commodities broker, who decides to collect her work while also being her Muse. It’s a lush, witty, sophisticated story of this complex relationship in which art and commerce meet and lead to an emotional quagmire. He spends and she spends and both of them achieve an ambiguous cocktail of experiences as they mix the artist with the money man.
The San Francisco Beats, hung at the Cedar Tavern, in Nyc with the ab – ex painters of the day like, Kline, De Kooning, Pollock, all sharing a similar life force, mutual interest and ambition. Rarely will you find a division. when people love painting, they usually have a fully stocked library as well. It’s a natural match.
So word on the Street is that people today would rather be electrocuted than spend 15 minutes alone with their own thoughts! I don’t know whether to laugh or cry at this bizarre yet clearly Orwellian statement. Ok. So for many people today, thoughts, represent pain. Pain that is so excruciating, that jolts of electricity, pulsating through one’s body, would be preferable. WOW! and WOW!
That even the mere idea, of alone time with that thing called “thoughts” is a weird concept, like out of a fairy tale from the 1970’s and before, you know when people actually HAD to think or they were really screwed! Thinking and doing were synonymous with producing anything of value. The empty-headed non – thinker was perceived to be either stupid or mentally deficient. Well, that’s all over.
Blaise Pascal. Don’t you just LOVE his name??? I do. No one has a name as retro-cool as that! But more than his uber cool name are his uber cool thoughts. Yea, because Blaise not only had no fear about thinking, or being alone, or creating, or sitting in his room with his thoughts, he blatantly advertised it, and said all kinds of stuff like:
one of those Oldie Goldie freakazoids who walks around gloating over the fact that they are computer illiterate like some kind of insane claim to fame, while people are thinking oh right you are really just either stupid or senile but Mostly you are freaking OLD! So, it’s called ” get with the program.” Get hooked up. Don’t have to like it. Don’t have to want it. Just do it, because. It’s a fact, that we are all living in an age of Assange melodrama, hookups, wired, electronically programmed and media mesmerized psyches.
Like why is everyone all worked up over Kanye’s rants? Is this really disturbing to you that he actually has an opinion, takes the stage and let’s loose? I mean, I am no fan of his music, really, not my speed, but ok, he clearly is on a venting mission, saturating the public with his thoughts while engaging the media simultaneously. Oh WOW, he thinks? He thinks in surround sound, Bose Sound Amped. It’s Verrry spectacular in its negative attention, creating dual intention, both of which he achieves. Game On! Mission Accomplished!
Everything is sooo fake today. The fake is real,the real is fake. Duh. Ray Bradbury, the author of one of the most famous books alive, Fahrenheit 451′ said that “people would rather watch TV, and that means the demise of books”, when literature goes straight to hell, and the screen rules, thinking tanks. Orwell prophesied this concept of the real/fake dichotomy when he describes Doublethink. ” Doublethink”, “when thought corrupts language, and language corrupts thought”
It’s an ultimate buzz kill because guess what?, dependence on electronics can be like being locked in the ShawShank prison,of technological dependence, with the main concern being, can I pay that Verizon, or Time Warner, Optimum, Vios, because you know all this stuff adds up! Or you take the chance of getting turned off, shut down, and subjected to the pain your intruding and excruciating thought will inevitably cause. The torture chamber of the mind. Your mind.
Ever heard of a painter who sat in front of his canvas with an audience cheering him on? Or a writer at work surrounded by crowds of adoring fans, waiting desperately for him to come up with his next clever phrase, or for the poet to deliver that perfect symbiotic one liner? hahaha. It’s absurd. It doesn’t happen. It’s a myth. It’s not real, Ginsberg wrote his classic HOWL from the depths of soulful angst, past misery, futuristic visions, and present fantastic dreams. An I phone, a computer, a tv, wasn’t involved. Just Ginsberg and his wild creative, original thoughts!
Look, Orwell, said it redundantly in his epic, 1984. The source of creative ideas, thoughts, not the distraction of things, and definitely not when technology monopolizes the individual, to the extent that sitting alone and thinking feels like punishment.
So, the next time you are in a gallery, or have a work of art before you, or pick up a book, or start arguing with your buddy about the words of that Ginsberg poem that makes no sense, ask yourself is this coming from ME? Or is these merely messages superimposed unto my mind through my constant hookup to the machines that I am communicating with all day, everyday? Am I hooked up to the distraction traction of Orwell’s fantasy? Is this the media or me?
Coney Island is hip and if in doubt there’s always Brighton beach. That’s the new hipster word on the street for Summer in the City. Hot times! Thank you Lovin Spoonfull! Thank you Lawrence Ferlinghetti, West coast’s answer to poetic genius! His Coney Island of the Mind is an awesome collection of his Summer of Love point of view with the Coney spin working overtime! Check it out! They are cramming the B the A the F the Q, anxious to hit the boardwalk and the gritty pebble filled sand of these two iconic Nyc legendary beach escapes. Oh Coney has the history of the proverbial cat where it keeps coming back to life, over and over, and Brighton, well is it really America? Whenever I go, I know I’m in Kiev, stepping down from the 75 year old steps of the elevated subway platform engulfed by the smell of knishes, the sound of Russian spoken , the sight of the old world shops and inhabitants of a NY village they have claimed as theirs and made it home. 
Coney is Pop Central! The dreamland of colorful, kitsch, whimsy, childhood fun of past memories, from Mermaid parade to Famous Nathan’s the Emperor of hotdogs, the Polar Bear clubs meeting place every New Year, and those frank photos iconic and so real of the under the boardwalk make out sessions, of the fifties when coney was the cool summer beach paradise everyone who was anyone escaped to whenever they could.
old cool becomes new cool only through hype and bullshit, word of mouth blah blah with a dose of the media megaphone thrown in for good measure.
The elite hop the jitney, and head for the Hamptons, or hop their Town car without a look back. But for the Brooklyn, Manhattan transplants who are young, voted for Obama, bearded, tattooed, fedora headed, skinny jean, techies, the Hamptons seems kind of square. Stuffy, old, and wayyyyy too rich. I mean these hipsters aka the young, the “are we gonna be able to get hired after we graduate?” kids, are shacked up 3 and 4 in an apartment, in order to make rent. Hamptons? Uh, isn’t that the Mecca of the Wall Street screw ups who basically have these hipsters in hock for life , with unbelievable student loan bills they won’t ever be able to pay ????? Like, really, are they heading for Hampton hell? Nooooo. It’s Coney, it’s Brighton all the way!
A quick train ride, transversing the hinterlands of avenue H,J,M, Kings Hwy, Sheepshead Bay, graffiti left over from the 80’s providing an entertaining view as the train takes you closer and closer to the seaside amusement park , that’s hard to believe still exists – a place soooo much cooler than the picture perfect, oasis, aka Hamptons.
It’s POP all the way, from that iconic boardwalk ingrained in the bowels of history, to the sparkling icy waters of the Atlantic Ocean.
Wall Street. The financial center of the world; a place where the counting of cold hard cash establishes it’s identity, making some people very rich and others very poor. This city we live in, the Capital City of the World, forces us to adapt to a chaotic, multi – dimensional environment, with a psychology of multiple personality disorder as status quo. That’ s some potent cocktail! I mean, who would figure that Wall Street with it’s history being in the backyard of the 9\11 nightmare, would 12 years later morph into a stunning reborn arena, where financial power, architectural panoramas, and intellectual prowess meet – and with some really bold, innovative artwork thrown in to complete this awe inspiring picture?!The kind of photo realism in it’s true meaning, where the reality cannot really be depicted accurately on canvas, but the artist wants badly to try to convey the awesome sights she is witnessing before her. New Yorkers, and the visitors who can’t get enough of this place, stumble upon these art come to life scenarios just by walking the streets, requiring nothing more than open eyes, and hopefully an open mind as well.
Like for example, those massive black steel sculptures adorning a small triangular park, a gasp away from the Federal Reserve Building on Liberty Street , fronting that quirky street known as Maiden Lane. Now it’s the Louise Nevelson Plaza. Nevelson is the penultimate success story, and the first woman artist to have a park named for her! How cool is that? This woman built her unique sculptures from steel and wood rejects of the city’s construction sites, gutters, dumps, wherever she saw a piece of wood or material that interested her, she used it to create her sculptures as she saw them, in her mind’s eye. Steel, wood, metal, whatever she could salvage, went right into a new sculpture, art living and breathing it she was on fire! Innovative, fresh, and beautiful, some painted black, others white, some silver, they are pretty amazing to see. These majestic figures, located in the plaza in downtown NYC, get your attention and hold it. Sitting on a bench, sipping your Starbucks, you feel you are in the presence of some great wonder. And you are. No question about it.
“When I look at the city, from my point of view, I see Nyc as a great sculpture” 
Stepping off the train on William Street, puts me at the corner of Pine, where the Chase Bank Plaza is located, but what my attention is drawn to almost hypnotically, are the huge Dubuffet sculptures, a tangled black and white maze like impression, fronting the bank as it’s welcome, clearly refusing to be overlooked, in spite of the Wall Street grandeur that encompasses it. It’s a Fatal Attraction for sure, reminiscent of actress Glen Close’s eerie legend statement “I will NOT be ignored”, from the popular movie. Easy Access. Profoundly elegant, bold, intriguing! In NYC, we can go to a neighborhood for one thing, and will often find something else. It’s that blend of art in city and city in art, a definitive quality that is just inescapable in Nyc. With so many artists leaving the city, and a superfluous of galleries catering to the wealthy, it’s a bonus for the people, the masses,that is most of us, to be able to just walk around and have the super giants of the art world accessible, street worthy, is pretty spectacular!
Keep walking, and when you hit Bowling Green, and the NY Stock Exchange, you will be met with the infamous Charging Bull! Everybody loves this cartoonish, exaggerated figure, symbolizing the optimism and prosperity that Wall Street represents. The tourists can’t get enough of this bull, the sculpture that artist DiModica snuck onto the barren streets of the financial district, in the middle of the night, making it his personal gift to Nyc. An”art brut” of his own making, DiModica, didn’t ask for permission to make his art known he just TOOK it! Now, standing bullish, grand, and gaudy, glowering at the streets, the crowds, defining the NY Stock Exchange, in it’s penultimate identity,symbolizing the economic thermometer of finance, as art welcomes One person it welcomes Everyone. All inclusive! Easy Access!
Yes, this is a changed place this Triangle below Canal, commonly called Tribeca, Wall Street’s best friend. Defined now by the artistry of great architects! The Freedom Tower, rebuilt into a positive, model of hope, uplifted from the ashes of an unforeseen tragedy, and now a symbol of success and beauty, creative genius, welcoming a new world, looking upwards into infinity.
Writer, screen director, raconteur, bon vivant, a personality like no other. Let’s call him John Waters, because that’s who he is. He used to drop in the Greenwich Village bookstore I worked in, during a past life, to check on his new book, browse, and inevitably he would attract autograph hounds and fans who recognized him. He was always very gracious and happy to oblige. A very cool cat!
So I had to check out his book “Role Models”. When I saw we had it stacked up on the main Info counter in the front of the store. It is autobiographical, and he shares with us a telescopic view into his private world, the one that led him to evolve into the innovative filmmaker, director, fashionista, author, hitchhiker, and pop culture icon that he is today! WOW. I read this book, calling it a page turner is an understatement, and saw the genius in just how deep still “Waters” run. I know. But it’s true because from his chatting about coming out in his home town of Baltimore, his celebrity crushes, his journey to the present, his show biz persona, his lust for literature, the reader gets him as a real guy and not just an obscure character in a literary biographical text.
So I love his chapters – Bookworm, and Roommates. The thing Waters is super passionate about is reading. His collection of books in his personal library is awe inspiring , thousands of choices, and he makes it clear just how book crazed he is, owning this obsession with pride! Check out his 5 top books! You probably never heard of them but trust me, you will wish you had!
Let’s just say I was delightfully, gleefully surprised, and happy to see this sexy message exposed publicly in such a commercial venue, projecting that rare combo of literature and lust.
people don’t read. Not like they used to. The computer has made them lazy. Bookstores have been closing like it’s the end of time in a Sci-Fi novel, and the epic Bradbury classic Fahrenheit 451 doesn’t seem so crazy anymore. Waters talks about how to him, riches aren’t about buying houses and cars and jewelry. Being rich to Waters, the guy who thinks outside the box, means he gets to buy books with a wanton freedom, never having to look at the price and discriminate. In bookspeak that means never having to give up a favorite choice, when you really want more. No need to choose through that hateful process of elimination. An impossible task for book people who love whatever their eye is drawn to, and if you read the first page without putting it down, guess what? You’re hooked! You have to have it. Love really is blind for the book lover set loose in his favorite bookstore. So yes John Waters, it’s good that you can afford to go crazy at the bookstore choosing what you want and not what you can only afford. That does make you really rich!
But back to this poster. The one about books and sex. If it isn’t it should be your new standard, your raison d’être, your mantra. This concept of books as aphrodisiac, is off the grid, kinda like, reminiscent of whoever it was who said that the Mind is the sexiest part of the body? The “sexy librarian” mystique didn’t come from nowhere now did it?
Maybe you don’t hang on Crosby Street at the Housing Works bookstore, an old school style bookstore still going strong in the Soho, Nyc neighborhood of celebrities, tourists, and people watchers.
As is true for many writers and readers they also love art. Either as creators, or collectors. Art and books are a match made in culture heaven. In “Role Models”, his chapter called “RoomMates” gives us a look-see into his roomies, and by Roommates he is referring to his art collection, the constant companions he lives with and considers his friends. He seems to choose his “Roommates”, based on personal instincts that have nothing much to do with the going popular trend or fad. He just likes what he likes, and takes it home to live with him. He is happy he doesn’t live with human beings and happier that the artists whose work he does live with are such an adaptable match for him and above all, doesn’t take up his “mental space.” Cy Twombly has always been one of my favorites, and after reading this chapter, I discover he is also Water’s idol. His attempt to describe what it’s like to “read” a Twombly painting is excruciating, because Twombly challenges with a vigor that disrupts and disturbs. It is an exercise in mind opening, head spinning, mind altering craziness. If you want to mess with someone. Put a Twombly in front of them and watch their reaction.
Everything cool for those of us who think outside the box is in this book. If you are living in the material world you won’t get him, but if you are one of the “special” ones, who exist in their own unique and original boundless life, removed from the matrix of conformist limitations and social expectations, it’s got it all! The movies, the sex, the fashion, the culture, the books, the art, and even Johnny Mathis. An all purpose manual for unique personalities walking their own path. Sheeple need not bother. They just won’t get it!
One of my favorite blogs is 
Us Boomer types remember Nyc was a place, where artists thrived, and grew on inspiration that came from living in an environment where raw energy pulsated the minute you stepped outside. It was a feeling that was both invigorating, as well as intimidating , the perfect combo for aspiring artists to do different unique things, like make art, make music, or make those ideas come to life between the pages of a novel, a poem, a dance. To stake their claim on that city that Never slept!
Nyc offered up a symbolic plate littered with dirt, graffiti covered subways, Bowery winos, Times Square hookers , and Union Square junkies, Washington Square folkies, and the hustler bars of the now mad glam Meat Packing District. Not the sterile, frigid, boring, redundant duplicity of businesses, all controlling, and infiltrating our city with the power of money that is accelerating the city’s artistic and cultural demise. Yea, Broadway is still lit up,but do you have 200$ to pocket a ticket? Culture has become a very expensive commodity where it once was a natural life force available for everyone, not relegated only for the wealthy. James Agee, author of in praise of famous men said in his Letters to Father Flye, his mentor, “the general verdict is that I can do a lot if I don’t write advertisements. If I remain convinced they’re right, I’ll croak before I write ads, or sell bonds, or do anything except write. Little writing as I ‘very done, and little confidence as I’ve a right to, I still feel that life is short and that no other earthly thing is as important to me as learning how to write. And for that you must have time!” Agee went on to write “Let us Now Praise Famous Men”. Check it out!
Today, do artists have the luxury of making statements like that and actually achieving it? In a city that used to be an artists paradise, the point of no return, Greenwich Village,a place the artist could live cheaply and devote himself to his art, where writers like Dawn Powell, Djuna Barnes, Edna st v Millay, Dylan Thomas, Jack Kerouac, Alan Ginsberg, Eugene O’Neil, Mark Twain, Thomas Wolfe, photographer Diane Arbus, and many more,made their mark as icons of the literary world forever . Well, none of them could afford to live in today’s Village. NYU owns it and it is EXPENSIVE! Today’s artists don’t live in NYC, unless they are in the minority of the wealthy class, but aside from that, that ” lovin feeling” is no longer here. That Real Thing has Vanished into the abyss of commerce and so called progressand leaving us with a counterfeit, that seduces with the allure of fantastically pricey dreams where celebrities ,models ,and Wall Street tycoons, abide in lofty penthouses and multi million dollar town houses and uber fabulous lofts sipping Veuve, taking the art out of the equation, and replacing it with the art of the $$$$.
Vanishing New York? Yes. Vanishing artists? Ditto. Because the left over artists still here are starting to flee. In a revealing book’ entitled, ” 
Beware of the gentrification, the sterilizing process, stripping Nyc of it’s personality, uniqueness, soul, and transforming it into the proverbial Disney-esque shopping mall. For an artist this is Not a good look. A city barren of small galleries, bookshops, music stores, dive bars, diners, small businesses, family owned shops, is not cool. This glass towered condo dominated, yogurt infested paradise might appeal to the hipster nation who don’t know any better or to the Nouveau New Yorker , but to the pioneers , the locals, it’s a royal bummer.
The hipster, trust fund babies, Wall Street climbers, celebrity bubble wannabes, cell phone addicts, 15$ cocktails slurpers, shoppers mall paradise automatons, Starbucks swamped computer mesmerized stool sitters, and tourists, the huge tourist mob crowding our streets, all eager, desperate, for a taste of the NY State of Mind. Except it’s really NOT. Now, it’s just a really glitzy, over crowded, obscenely expensive city, with a whole lot of entertainment, all yours to indulge in, if only for a very high price tag. You will be raiding the ATM, and it will empty out faster than you can say “dinner and drinks at The Gansevoort!”
And no, a CBGB would not survive today. or a Mudd Club. Too raw, too dirty, too rough, for the affected poseur trends that the young hipsters are besotted with today. After all they know today’s Nyc , the new cleaned up version. Because the truth is what Jeremiah document s every day in his on top of the moment blog! New York City Is REALLY VANISHING, and with it go the artists, that made their home here, thrived, leaving their footprints, their thumb prints, their DNA, from the days of the Provincetown Players to the Warhol headquarters at Union Square, to the 8th street Bookstore, to the Soho rookies, OK Harris, and Leo Castelli, to LeRoi Jones and Diane diPrima, the Beats, all earned their street cred here in the Art Capital City of the World when it was not only a possibility, but a dream expected to manifest into reality and so it did.
Today, NYC is about Reality, not the dream. The dream, these days, is about another New York, of yesterday, but the harsh reality of today’s New New York hits the ever expanding flock, the minute they begin their city march, subway bound, plugged in, automatons on the beat, fedoras cocked just so, eyes glued to the ubiquitous iphone, oblivious to the Vanishing Artist City before them, and what is forever lost.
E.E. Cummings. Poet extraordinaire. Long inhabitant of 4 Patchin Place, a tiny enclave in Greenwich Village, where he lived most of his life, writing poetry, next door to his neighbor 
EE was just doing his thing, that is writing poems the way he wanted to. His style, his ideas, his way of taking the inner and transmitting it to the outer, with his own concocted, kooky word play and conflicting images was not only brilliant, it raised his creative power to a higher level.
What IS that? Is he playing with all of us, or is he using poetry to stimulate our minds and force us to rethink, analyze, dissect and then form our own conclusion as to what exactly did we just read? A common phrase I overhear while gallery browsing, is “Oh my 4 year old could do that, or that’s art?…. Are they crazy”? When facing 
The goal for the artist should be to keep inspiration in high gear and continue to work. EE Cummings, in his tiny studio on Patchin place morphed into one of the most well known poets of the 20th century! Jackson Pollock threw paint unto his canvases strewn on the floor of his barn and made history. Edward Hopper looked out the windows of his Washington Square North studio and documented the solitude of the city in startling realism. Night Hawks, the painting inspired from his daily walks in Greenwich Village to his favorite diner, now so intrinsic to 
AmerIcan culture that Everybody recognizes it. William de Kooning helped make that new crazy art form, named abstract expressionism , more than just a fad of the 1950’s, but a serious new chapter in art, like cubism, impressionism, surrealism, pop, and there are so many more examples, that define the creative genius spawned from that supernatural gift, that says it’s Your making and doing and so what if people don’t get it now one day they will.