A LITTLE OF THIS, A LITTLE OF THAT

IMPRESSIONS OF GRANT’S TOMB, WINTER

Yet another place near home I finally got around to visiting. My friend Kate’s in town, so I took her and and her friend Allison when we had some spare time. What a strange place, all morose and majestic. No one there except us and the staff in a vacuous hall with a tremendous dome ceiling and the ambient hum of fans stirring the air. One of the park people was eager to share information on the Civil War, that event most Americans forget happened or have no idea even occurred.

A LIFE IN BAGS

Living in a neighborhood filled with seniors, it’s fairly common to see ambulances on an almost daily basis making some kind of emergency call on my street. No too long ago I was headed towards the subway and passed this apartment where a crew was clearing out the contents, which was basically bagging everything for trash and tossing it out the window. It was obvious someone died, as the bags were filled with personal items, letters, personal items and slew of old medications. What was left of a life was headed for a landfill.

NIGHT GALLERY, EAST VILLAGE

BULLSHIT

Plastic pretty much lasts forever and I make a point of reusing water bottles as much as possible, in fact there’s a whole door shelf in the fridge full of them. One of my quirks is keeping bottles like these from trips I take overseas, kind of like a poor man’s souvenier. Now companies that push bottled water in cities with perfectly potable tap water are absolutely contemptible when few take into account the incredible amount of unrecycled material that ends up in landfills every day. American corporations who produce this stuff are bad enough, but this one from when I was in London is simply vile with this unsubstantiated directive that basically exists to ensure people will continue to spend money and waste resources for no reason whatsover.

42ND STREET, PORT AUTHORITY

There’s something oddly disconcerting about a For Sale sign for pups that merely shows photos and says nothing descriptive. It’s like an advertisement for meat.

DUANE HANSON

A retrospective of some of his work from the 70s at the Van De Weghe gallery has this kind of fascinating quality that his work seems to take on after a few decades have passed. There’s a sense of the era here that’s eerily immediate in a way most things only seem like artifacts, as if these are actualy people somehow teleported from the past into this century. I don’t understand how waxworks exist when fiberglass sculpture like this is infinitely more superior in its realism.