Pure joy, wonder twin.
4:06 PM :

Confession Time
What I tell people:
#1. I work out because I want to be heart healthy and feel more energized.
What I'm willing to admit:
#2. I lift soley because I want to look hot, and build even more muscle mass.
Next up gratuitous posting of personal snap shots, this word stuff ain't cuttin' it. I need hits damn it! Fucking hit whore. Newberry Award winners, what was I thinking?! I need nasty dirty xxx pics! I need to be blowin' up! whaa! I need Jacque Susann, I need a gay version of the Valley of the Dolls!
11:10 AM :

After reading this article about the Newberry Award Winners, the premiere award for the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children published in the United States during the preceding year. I started to remember those delighful, fun and powerful books that made being a beginning reader, a hell of alotta fun:
From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler- E. L. Konigsburg
Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing- Judy Blume
Old Yeller- Frank Gibson
Green Eggs and Ham- Dr. Seuss
James and the Giant Peach- Roald Dahl
Just So Stories- Rudyard Kipling
Treasure Island- Robert Louis Stevenson
Harriet The Spy- Lousie Fitzhugh
Stuart Little- E.B. White
All Encyclopedia Brown Books- Donald J. Sobol
The Chocolate War- Robert Cormier
Ramona The Pest- Beverly Cleary
The Outsiders- S.E. Hinton
The Pigman- Paul Zindel
4:02 AM :

Photographs lie, they are simply fragments of a larger truth. A viewer cannot 'know' reality from a print. Our relationship to the medium of Photojournalism is a bit like a bad but inescapable marriage in which one unhappy partner distrusts yet depends upon the other. Oddly enough we rely on these images to bring us the news of the world.
3:08 AM :

Thursday, January 25, 2001
The BBC started production in Manchester this week on the film 24 Hour Party People named after a track by Factory Record's band Happy Monday's. The film will tell the story of the rise and fall of the famed Ha�ienda disco, and the late 80s Manchester music scene. The Ha� was a huge converted warehouse co-owned by the band New Order and Factory Records' boss Tony Wilson. We will no doubt see a resurgence in hooded sweatshirts, smiley face t-shirts, New Order, Cabaret Voltaire, and Inspiral Carpets. Remember; a boomin bass, a smilin' face for a lovin race. Is it hitting you yet?
3:22 PM :

I'm not pondering the cultural significance of the Naked Cowboy, his dossier, corporate sponsorship and other such items that give a broader meaning to the term 'performance art'. Why does NekidCowboi give me a Joe Dallesandro as Little Joe in Andy Warhol's Lonesome Cowboys, kind of feel? Personally, I'm having a Sidney Poitier To Sir With Love, day, Lulu? Sing SHOUT Lulu, just a verse or two of 'To Sir'? I digress.... It's now Happy Hour in Paris, I'm sure the Djs are cooking up some delicious new tunes like 'Fused-Saving Mary (Tiimo Maas Remix) or 'Milk and Sugar's Higher and Higher' (Watched France2 today, get ready for jean jackets, ties, and drag racing to come back into style...did it ever leave? I'm looking forward to the return of Leather Tuscadero inspired fashions) I'm half starved, working my ass off, ooogling this Italian boy's zeit, and this zeit. I'm Failing to concentrate and complete a short blibliography on Caravaggio;
1. 17th and 18th Century Art Baroque Painting Sculpture and Architecture. Julius S. Held and Donald Posner, 1971 now out of print but purchased here for a small sum.
2. Durer to Veronese: Sixteenth Century Painting in the National Gallery.
3. Caravaggio: La Luce Nella Pittura Lombarda. Bergamo Accademia Carrara
4. Caravaggio E I Suoi : Percorsi Caravaggeschi in Palazzo Barberini.
1:16 PM :

Wednesday, January 24, 2001
It's barely light out, the city has dropped a scrim of blue and snow is expected. Steam rises out of the cavernous underground; red tail lights equal stop and go traffic. I would love nothing more than to ponder 'American car culture' but my brain hurts. Coffee, paper, man, coffee paper, female, coffee, paper, cell phone, coffee, paper; inventories of cars and their drivers. The buildings get closer driving north and I will soon disappear between the cracks, the urban loop turns me out on the highway heading toward campus. January, I have a fucking bad attitude this week, I'm not looking forward to lecture, giant packets of reading or writing. Honest, it's okay that the handsome boys in flannel jackets, scruffs and smiles seem so much more interesting. Wistfully, thinking of the Diner Pan Pan up by Harlem Hospital. An hour long flight is out of the question for waffles and hot chocolate. Ouch! The young hot Irishman with blond hair just smiled at me...baby, you are breaking my heart! Instantly I am cheered, popping a chicklet in my mouth heading to class.
10:38 AM :

Tuesday, January 23, 2001
mind fuck @ s u b c u l t u r e .com
4:54 PM :

My remedy for the the winter blaaahs:
Butch Baxter's Buff Boy No Fuss Apple Brown Betty
Ingredients
4-5 apples
(gala, grannysmith, fuji, macintosh, or asian pears)
4 slices of whole wheat, wheatless or crunchy health food bread
1/2 cup buttah
3/4 cup brown sugar
3/4 teaspoon cinnamon
2 tablespoon water
A healthy splash of cognac or port
Preheat that oven to 375.
Peel core and slice the apples, give those babies a splash of hooch (Cognac or Port preferred). Crumble or finely chop the bread up into crumbs, if the bread is too moist toast it beforehand, add the cinnamon to the mixture. Rub a 1 quart baking dish with butter then sprinkle liberally with brown sugar. Add alternating layers of sliced apples, brown sugar, and bread crumbs, repeat ending with bread crumbs. Thickly sprinkle with sugar and dot with extra slabs of butter. Sprinkle on the water. Bake @ 375 for 45 minutes to one hour until well browned on top. Extra minutes on the step-mill for vanilla ice cream topping. Enjoy this guilty pleasure, fresh to you from America's Heartland!
11:31 AM :

Monday, January 22, 2001
I talked to Josh tonight, he is one of my best and dearest friends, now in Pilots training for a major airline. The school is great, and even though the learning curve is 'high' he is managing to hold his own and not crash the plane. Good move! You can now feel safe flying the friendly skies! Laughing, we recalled our great times in Washington D.C.. Borrowing Trek mountain bikes from the base and heading into the city on hot summer afternoons, tooling around the belt way, that is eternally packed with snowcone stands, tourists and bureaucrats alike. We would start out at the Lincoln Memorial ride past the Korean War Monument to check out hotties and chubbers. Zooming out of the urban landscape we trek out to Washington's Mount Vernon Estate I wish I could say that we often held our egos in check, but we often got carried away, losing the slower rider to suffer near heat exhaustion. Damn, I miss him, but know we are each making our individual way. Time for a pre-bedtime listen to Art Tatum, some candles, a quick shave, shorts...I'm so very very sleepy.
11:33 PM :

Painting self into a corner. Words lose meaning: rebel, cinema, juvenile delinquent, artist. Some days, nothing comes, no vision, no focus and no damn inspiration. Perhaps the devil is that which appears to artists as nothing. Today, I would hit the corner bar, but I don't drink, I want to start. I put everything down and leave the studio, all tools and items away, stashed into their respective drawers and pockets. I walk past the Old Italian Restaurant to the SullyMan Market where Miss Shay (Hot Dice) the 50 year old stripper works, always good for a joke or a weird story, dispensing cigarettes, beer and lotto tickets. She looks particularly bad today, black eye from the beating her boyfriend gave her; affectionately known as "drunk asshole". I pour coffee, Goya I think, so dark, so bitter, so nasty and so full of grounds, but only 25 cents for a mug full of awful. I chide her about her shiner, telling her she needs to get off the bender. She laughs telling me to 'fuck off', for a moment underneath the electric glow of the Virginia Slims sign, I can see a little girl toothless and shy, now grown and sad. I walk the store aisles, browsing the various shelves of canned beans and slim jims, hoping for some freak to come in and raise a ruckus, hoping for some inspiration. I can hear the 'Price is Right' theme coming from the back room, and fluorescent lights buzzing, green. I leave the store with my mug of bad coffee, 11:59.
3:44 PM :

Once, an eerie visit to his home, now a deliciously dark birthday wish. Happy Birthday EAP.
11:27 AM :

Sunday, January 21, 2001
Seriously digging Jim Cory's work......
"satin-tongued, w/their eyes
full of scalpels
they go on living in underworld gameshow imaginations"
Jim Cory from 'Cory Is A Faggot'
and more thoughts from Jim Cory in his work
"Wuddayoomean I have an attitude problem? FUCK YOU!!!"
37 x 1 from La Petite Zine
9:13 PM :

Pow! Op goes the art, Op goes the fashion - Vogue magazine 1965. The Opulent Eye of Alexander Girard now at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum is a wonderful survey of 'that 60s designer' the one that designed for this company responsible for a now popular opulent modernist look. He liked to call himself a 'reasonable and sane functionalist, tempered by irrational frivolity'. I call him a genius, as Polly Mellon would say 'This simply erases everything'. Morris Lapidus, famed designer/architect of the Hotel Fountainbleau died Friday in Miami. Lapidus was post modern before there was even such an 'ism'. His style was rooted in the fantastic, combining his love for set and costume design with French provincial and Italian romanesque architecture. Organic twisting meandering curves, cheese hole ceilings, exposed bean pole supports, woggles, wiggles, and tall columns that end in a halo of light. Over the top, whimsical, glamorous, Floridian spaces, he worked outside the gray box leaving a legacy of curves and color.
8:33 AM :