Just a Friendly Game of Baseball

The day started as almost all of my good days in New York City start: with a walk over the Manhattan bridge. It's not that the Manhattan bridge is that great or anything, it's just that a journey over a fairly wide river has a way of clearing your head and making things seem a little more epic than they normally would. In this photo you can see a bunch of things: the Brooklyn bridge, obviously; a structure being built up next to it for Olafur Eliasson's forthcoming waterfall installation; a water taxi; the Staten Island ferry in the background; the Statue of Liberty. It's all run-of-the-the-mill but sometimes I look at these things and think: wow, there's a lot going on in New York harbor.

We met at the Shark bar, at Spring and Mulberry. I know I sound like a broken record about this but the taps are extremely clean at all times and you know what you're getting. It opens very early, so it was the go-to choice for meeting at 11am before a 1pm Mets game.

On the way to the subway to head out to Queens we ran into my friend the photographer Ben Pogue. Ben has shot all kinds of stuff for Uniqlo, The New York Times, V, and other magazines. It's not easy to find a great still life photographer and he is truly talented.

When we got to Shea Stadium we discovered that we had absolutely amazing seats, courtesy of the FDNY. Firefighters do not make much money in New York, but there are little perks here and there that help make up for it.

This guy was sitting up behind us. He had been on the job for 30 years or so and retired.

We enjoyed some delicious wienies and beers.

It was a trainwreck of a game—the Mets lost to Pittsburgh 1-13. Truthfully, I couldn't care less. I'm not a baseball fan, never have been. My parents are artists. I played some other sports here and there and pretty badly, but I never played baseball on a team and I never so much as played catch as a kid. Still, the experience of going to a game in the middle of the day was pretty frigging fun.

The Ghost In You

I believe I mentioned before that Pacific Standard and its way-better half have the esteemed privelige privilige privilege of being copy editors at the best zine on the planet. Now you too can attempt to be associated with Wooooo by submitting your best t-shirt design incorporating the signature penis-ghost logo in The (first annual?) Great Wooooo T-Shirt Competition.

Go here to see some of the entries so far, like the one above from Stephens of Stephens & Bower acclaim (apparently cats may be substituted for the Wooooo logo—makes sense to us). While you're over there, scroll through one of the most hilarious and engrossing blogs around.

Official rules and entry details are below this photo:


The Great Wooooo Design a T-shirt for us and we’ll give you nothing save the knowledge that you won The Great Wooooo T-Shirt Competition Competition officially copy-edited Official Rules:
When we flippantly announced "The Great Wooooo Magazine T-Shirt Competition" we failed to mention a few regulations.
Regulation one: Designs should be one color.
Regulation two: Whatever you come up with should be printable on one side of the T. Don’t get all tricky on us.
We already know you're smart—you read Wooooo.
Regulation three: Your design should somehow incorporate the Wooooo Logo: THE GHOST WHAT HAS A COCK.
That’s the regulations then.
As far as deadlines go, let's say…in a month?
Cool.

Send your entries to info[at]wooooomag.com

The first drive-in movie I ever saw.

In Flux

.
Emily and I went to the Chelsea galleries Saturday afternoon.

Mattia Biagi Rose Like a Phoenix from the Ashes at Anna Kustera

Jonas Mekas Warhol Series #1 from my favorite show of the day, From Fluxus to Media Art, at Maya Stendhal Gallery

24th Street

Also memorable: Gregory Crewdson at Luhring Augustine, Henry Darger at Andrew Edlin, Rodney Graham at 303 Gallery (mainly for the gigantic photo in the front room, which you can see on their website), and Marvin E. Newman at Silverstein Photography. Not a comprehensive sweep of the galleries but a few inspiring shows. Always a fun way to spend Saturday afternoon.

Come Rain or Come Shine

Despite the crummy weather Sunday morning, this weekend's flea market was the best yet—it's getting much junkier and there's a ton of weird old trinkets and stuff to look at. My brother got some really cool brahma bull-shaped salt and pepper shakers for $10 and I got some records. Also picked up this book as a little gift for my friend Gina, who just got engaged:

Some random things I am feeling right now.

.
.
Iiiii'm soooo sorry. When I started this blog I pledged (possibly silently inside my head, or during a status conference with my trusty assistant Fang, pictured here) that I was going to post something at least every weekday. But yesterday, I'm sure you noticed, I missed a day. I have a good excuse: my cable modem broke and I had to take it to the Time-Warner service center on 23rd Street. If a tourist ever asks you where they can see "some crazy New Yorkers, you know, how New York people are crazy?" and if you aren't fond of that tourist, tell them to go hang out in the Time-Warner service center. At one point, a woman who looked to be about one-hundred and seven years old was literally screeching at the receptionist/traffic controller, and when that wasn't getting her anywhere, she turned and looked at me, and I could see it in her eyes, her beady little eyes that have seen so much, that she wanted to throw her cable box at my head, hard. I managed a weak smile/eyebrow raise which seemed primarily to confuse her. "I...I hate this place," she muttered, trailing off. I nodded vigorously. She scuttled away.

So anyway, I have a good excuse for missing a day, but now I'm back up and running. Full connectivity restored. Beep beep.

Unfortunately right this second I don't have much to say, so for today's make-up sesh I will write a lot about a little, with another installment of Some Random Things I am Feeling Right Now. First up:

Push-ups. There was an article in the NYT awhile ago talking about how push-ups are pretty much the best exercise you can do, and while I retain roughly the same physical composition as Burl Ives, I have been hitting the push-ups with the fury of something really furious and strong. I have a rule that every time I pass the record room in my apartment, I have to do 20 push-ups and I'm up to about 120 a day.
This exhibition at Howard House in Seattle, by Eli Hansen and Oscar Tuazon. Not that I've seen it in person, but the photos on the website look really cool.

Above: Oscar Tuazon's Poulsbo (folded digital c-print, mounted on aluminum, 19.5" x 29")

This book by Adrian Shaughnessy. A lot of the stuff is pretty obvious but sometimes you need to hear those things so you have some back-up that you're doing stuff right. There's no technical information, it's all just ideas on how to set up a design studio or freelance business effectively. Stefan Sagmeister wrote the foreword and short interviews with Neville Brody, Andy Cruz, and others break up the chapters. It's also a beautifully designed book. Order it online from Powell's.

Café Bustelo. It's not easy to find a good cup of coffee in New York. (Anyone who thinks differently, point me in the right direction. If you're wrong, you will be dead to me, but if you're right, I'll buy you a delicious cup of coffee.) Luckily, the glorious bodegas of this city have an abundance of finely-ground, extremely strong, vacuum-packed Café Bustelo for your home brewing needs. You can always buy beans, but why? They're much more expensive and in general they're not much better, unless someone brings them to you from Seattle. I wasn't going to add this to the list but I just took another sip and realized how much I love the stuff. It also tasted a little bit like weed. Pacific Standard is proud to be powered largely by Café Bustelo.

Seltzer. While we're on the topic of drinks, let's really surround the story and add this to the list. I used to drink a lot of diet Coke. No, I mean a lot. I started having these weird heart palpitations and my doctor (who is the doctor in Super Size Me, thank you Sarah Honda) told me in his barely understandable accent—it's like having Keith Richards for a doctor—that I shouldn't drink so much and I shouldn't drink diet soda at all. I stopped drinking diet soda for good, and the heart thing completely went away very quickly. Thing is, I like to have a beverage by my side at all times, and fizzy beverages are particularly enjoyable. So I drink a ton of seltzer, which is fun and hydrating.

Vince Aletti's column in Interview. Aletti is (as far as I know) the foremost holder of knowledge on magazine photography and art direction and I'm really interested to see what he pulls out of his vault in coming issues. For May he covers Jerry Schatzberg, who photographed stories for Vogue, Esquire, Life, and others in the '60s, and went on to direct films such as The Panic in Needle Park.
Barbed wire stirsticks at the Cowgirl Hall of Fame. That's another semi-underrated spot. I'm not a fancy guy, I don't need the hippest place in town. They have a good selection of tequila, the food is good, and I've always had fun there. Among other cool cowgirl and Western memorabilia, they have a big display of different kinds of barbed wire. These are the stirsticks you get if you order a cocktail that requires stirring.

Previously:
Some random things I was feeling on March 24, 2008

I Know I Need a Small Vacation

Another quickie today as I am still overwhelmed with pesky "professional projects" and "deadlines." There are many great versions of the Jimmy Webb song "Wichita Lineman" out there—Glen Campbell, Johnny Cash, Dwight Yoakam...The Fatback Band—but I love this one because The Dells' singing is beautiful, and it has all the epic elements of a classic Charles Stepney production (he was the one behind Rotary Connection, and legendary production for Minnie Riperton, Ramsey Lewis, and Earth Wind & Fire, among many others).

The Dells Wichita Lineman/By the Time I Get to Phoenix MP3

Responsible Abstraction

Jen Graves, art critic at The Stranger, has a good audio interview with Geoff McFetridge on the occasion of his year-long exhibition at Seattle's Olympic Sculpture Park. Here's a little video intro:

The Low Road to Victory

This morning The New York Times editorial board (who endorsed Clinton) has this analysis of yesterday's political race:

The Pennsylvania campaign, which produced yet another inconclusive result on Tuesday, was even meaner, more vacuous, more desperate, and more filled with pandering than the mean, vacuous, desperate, pander-filled contests that preceded it.

Voters are getting tired of it; it is demeaning the political process; and it does not work. It is past time for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton to acknowledge that the negativity, for which she is mostly responsible, does nothing but harm to her, her opponent, her party and the 2008 election.

Read the rest here.

Maureen Dowd's op-ed is also worth a look.

Soliloquy Of Chaos

Today I'm introducing a new series at Pacific Standard wherein on days when my life is nearing TOTAL CHAOS I will post a series of completely random images from the vault. Pacific Standard is nothing if not image collectors, and over the years a hard drive and ten big sketchbooks have been filled to near maximum capacity with stuff I've found or scanned for photo and graphic inspiration, or for no reason than that they somehow grab me. Might as well start sharing them.

I don't know where this is from—I've had it since high school. I think it might be a still from Dennis Hopper's The Last Movie, but I'm really not sure. For some reason I love this image and have held on to it. When I was in college a friend of mine started a band called Mental Bullring based on this image on my wall.

This is an ad that I grabbed from the extraordinary selection of images available online through the British Library archives.

This is a record that Keith Haring designed for some Princess who had a party and wanted to sing the invitation. I think I clipped this out of one of my mom's magazines in the early '80s. Wish I could find the record, I've never seen it.

This is from a photo shoot for the July 1968 issue of American Vogue. Diana Vreeland sent Veruschka along with stylist/designer Giorgio di Sant'Angelo and photographer Franco Rubartelli to the middle of the desert in Arizona with a bunch of fabric and told them to make a fashion story out of it.

The Vogue story has influenced a ton of subsequent stories (like this one from Pop magazine several years ago, photographed by Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott) and ad campaigns by Missoni, Calvin Klein, and others. It's interesting to see images from the sixties and track how they've been re-discovered and recycled. I don't mind it as long as the new thing is good enough to justify itself.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I spent a lot of time in the library at Parsons when I went back to school there. I always came back to this book. The book itself is boring as hell but there's something about the check-out card that I really love—"The search for the robots" typed out on this beautiful antiquated, analog thing. I don't know, I don't have time to explain it right now but I think it's cool. I scanned it and printed it out really big.

This is from another book I got at a library sale—Bill Brand't London Boy.

This is a picture I got of a cardinal in our backyard (there are actually two—if you click to enlarge you can see the other one at the lower right).

I can't remember where this came from but I think we can all agree it's pretty kick-ass.

And finally, this week's theme song:
Gang Starr Soliloquy Of Chaos MP3

Sunday Morning Coming Down

This weekend was kind of nuts (kidrobot party at Knitting Factory on Friday, national record store day, my man Joe Newton's party Saturday night) so it took every last shred of will to roll out of bed and stumble up to the flea market bright and early Sunday morning. The best of the four records I picked up (net total: $13) is Danny O'Keefe's Breezy Stories, produced by Arif Mardin and chock full of heavy hitters such as Donny Hathaway, Bernard Purdie, Hugh McCracken, Richard Davis, Dr. John, and Airto Moreira. This is a more soulful outing than the first two records (which I wrote about previously) and only makes me more excited to find the rest of them.

Danny O'Keefe Magdalena MP3

Photos from the liner notes by David Gahr

Space Oddities

The Monorail and the Space Needle opened to the public 46 years ago today as part of the 1962 World's Fair. Eddie Carlson (shown here holding an early architectural model with Senator Warren G. Magnuson) designed the Space Needle, along with John Graham Jr., Victor Steinbrueck, and John Ridley.

Much more info at historylink.org.

Record Press

The Los Angeles Times website has a brief article and slideshow on Wax Poetics books (Anthology Volume 1 and Cover Story are already in stores, and there are many more on the way). As I mentioned before, I'm designing a new book for them, and recently they brought me on as senior art director for the magazine (starting with issue 29) along with art directors Josh Dunn and Freddy Anzures. I'll also be managing visuals for the brand as a whole during what promises to be a really busy year. Probably the biggest development will be the launch this summer of a new digital store, wherein you'll be able to download the kinds of music covered in the magazine—kind of an iTunes for crate hounds. Stay tuned to waxpoetics.com for more info as everything unfolds.

Plan, Steal, Drive

This show looks good:
Karin Weiner: Plan B
April 17—May 27, 2008
Opening reception Thursday April 17, 6-8pm

ZieherSmith (click for more info and images)
533 West 25th Street, NYC

Above,
Karin Weiner
With A Deep Attachment To Nature, 2008, mixed media collage, 22 1/2 x 22 1/2 in.
Night Maneuvers, 2008, mixed media collage, 22 x 30 1/8 in.

Put That Record Back On

Here's the trailer for I Need That Record: The Death (or Possible Survival) of the Independent Record Store, a new documentary that covers...the aforementioned, through interviews with Thurston Moore, Ian Mackaye and other curmudgeons who get it.



More info here.

Grand Archives

The Seattle Municipal Archives started a Flickr page:

Click here for more.

It was bright

I mentioned that we saw the Brendan Fowler show last Disaster/first BARR at Rivington Arms the other day, which consists of both visual artwork and audio in the form of limited edition BARR and Disaster records, some of which are handpainted and might put my kids through college someday. Hey, you never know. You just never know.

Here's his video for "The Song is the Single," which I find oddly mesmerizing and even sort of relaxing. (Quicktime file, opens in a new window.)

Download the song and the video at your leisure courtesy of Kill Rock Stars. The show is up through this Saturday, April 19, if you're in NYC and want to have a look-see.

Misty Mountain Hop

I almost forgot, I also found this really cool postcard at the flea market—in fact this is probably the coolest thing I picked up Sunday, and it was only 25 cents. It's a postcard of Franconia Notch, NH, but the photograph side is a flexi-disc (a very thin record). When you play it on your turntable it tells you about the White Mountains. Or at least I assume that's what it does; it's a 78 and the hole is too small to fit on my turntable. Still, it's cool to look at.

Emily and I camped near Mt. Lafayette a couple years ago and took the tram to the top. New Hampshire is definitely in my top five states.

Mt. Lafayette is the hill where Bode Miller grew up, and there are tons of posters of him around the lodge. Bode just won his second overall FIS World Cup championship and edged out Yakima's Phil Mahre to become the winningest American ski racer of all time.

Lindsay Vonn won the women's overall this year, making this the first year that Americans have won both titles since Mahre and Tamara McKinney did the same in 1983.

Hello Brooklyn

The scene was much quieter for the second Fort Greene flea market this Sunday, even with an extensive and entertaining story on the front page of the Times style section. The lack of competition meant a somewhat righteous haul: Enter the Dragon and Barbarella soundtracks for $1 each (!?), plus The Cincinnati Kid, Buck Rogers, and a slow burning 1977 disco record on De-Lite called Made in U.S.A.

Lalo Schifrin The Human Fly MP3 from Enter the Dragon

We met up with Chad and Christine, who bought a really cool skateboard deck, four wheels, and a sketchpad from Deadly Squire. Afterward we got brunch at Flatbush Farm. I had Toad in the Hole, bacon, a side of hashbrowns, and a pretty great cup of coffee by New York standards. Emily had a pancake with some little cooked fruits. A good and nourishing time was had by all.

I believe Habana Outpost opens again next weekend which means solar-powered Cuban sandwiches, corn on the cob, and Six Point will be on Sunday's post-flea agenda from here until the end of time as I currently know it.