When You Were Mine/Mitch Ryder

Call Me Animal/MC5

LAST CALL

LAST CALL, a photo by Michael Macfeat on Flickr.

From Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad part two

"I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable greyness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamour, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmosphere of tepid skepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that of your adversary."

From Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

"The fascination of the abomination - you know. Imagine the growing regrets, the longing to escape, the powerless disgust, the surrender, the hate."

The Yardbirds/The Shape of Things to Come

I woke up with this song in my noggin today.

Positively 3rd Street

My hands hurt, they look like they belong to a club fighter, I am getting in shape but my body hurts, I haven't been west of 5th Street in weeks or north of Lombard. I am a dull boy and I got nothing for ya.

John Lennon/WORKING CLASS HERO

Here's Bryce Harper with blood dripping down his face. from Bleacher Report

Here's Bryce Harper with blood dripping down his face.

That's not eyeblack: Bryce Harper had blood dripping down his face in the 8th inning of Friday night's Nats-Reds game - cut above his left eye. So what the heck happened?

Via the Washington Times' Amanda Comak on Twitter:

"Harper took his frustrations out on the wall, w a bat. Davey said the bat came back & hit him. May need a stitch or 2, may be out few days."

Guess that's better than pulling an Amar’e Stoudemire and punching a fire extinguisher.

Via the Washington Post's Adam Kilgore on Twitter, Harper needed 10 stitches:

'Bryce Harper had a golf ball-sized lump over his eye, clumps of blood in his hair. 10 stitches. "I'm fine," he said. Wants to play tomorrow.'

But Harper suffered through his worst night as a pro Friday night: 0-5, 3K, 5 LOB. To add insult to injury, Davey Johnson benched Harper in favor of Xavier Nady as a defensive replacement in the 9th inning.

Unrelated: Bryce Harper got a haircut, cut off his rattail.

Another half a million things wrong with Dirty Jersey

10,000 reasons that New Jersey is fucked the fuck up. What it's not?

Beserker from Clerks

The Cuyahoga Conumdrum

The Cuyahoga Conumdrum, a photo by Michael Macfeat on Flickr.

More from Wasted Rita

http://ritabored.blogspot.com/

The Little Engine...

tub kiss barred by twostrikes2003

tub kiss barred

by twostrikes2003

http://www.flickr.com/photos/71417976@N00/with/7159729438/

OUT TO LUNCH

OUT TO LUNCH, a photo by Michael Macfeat on Flickr.

I received this from Donna Czapiga today...

I received this email from Donna Czapiga today about an artwork by and an email she received from from Bill Walton.

I showed this painting at the Crane building way back when, whenever that was. It was a crude effort to duplicate West Main 101, page 93 of Bill's little book. I absolutely loved that piece, and would stare at it for hours in my studio. Just before the show, literally the night before, I added the gold linear cross element to the painting, and then decided to include it with the 11 other paintings in the show. The group of work was called, "I've never really had the chance...." "....to explain exactly what I meant"
Bill came to see the show and later sent me this email. Obviously it meant the world to me, since I still have the email.
Later, I retitled it FBW, before I knew he was sick.
I thought I would share this with you.

donna,

i need to apologize for my inability to pay attention to why i was at your opening. i get side tracked in no time.
plus that person with you didn't help......
i went back and and looked at the work and the title about
not being able to say what you wanted ------
brings to mind the idea that we show it because we can't
say it.....
it made sense to go back and look at the work without all that activity.
just paying attention to one or two of the paintings was the best
for me....
good to see you and james - as always....

billw

Modified Bill Walton Memorial Color Theory

Modified Bill Walton Memorial Color Theory with Black Vertical, a photo by Michael Macfeat on Flickr.

The original Bill Walton drawing that was appropriated to make this image used a piece of electrical tape as the vertical element. When I print this image I will use the tape in the same way.
Below I have recorded some interactions that Bill and I had in the year proceeding his death.
It is a testimonial to Bill's unique personality and is a reflection of his importance to me as a person and the influence that he continues to have on the way I think about art.

FOUR OR FIVE THINGS I THAT I KNOW ABOUT BILL WALTON

1) It had been a while since Bill and I had spoken to each other. I spotted him getting in his truck on Second Street just below South Street. I was happy to see him after all that time and I walked up to him smiling. "What's going on Bill?" He replied, "Nothing. I'm bored. All of my friends are dead." I said, "No they aren't. Let's go get a cup of coffee. I'm buying."That moment marked the return to our custom of frequent communication.


2) Bill explained to me that if he continued to be as frugal as he always had been, he had just enough money to get him through the next six years. Frugality was not a stretch for Walton; he had always been averse to pulling money out of his wallet. He mentioned that his daughter wanted Bill to move in with her. But Bill couldn't imagine being a financial burden on his children or and couldn't bear the thought of losing his own independence. He declined her offer. Bill then revealed his master plan, one that I found quite disturbing. He said that at the end of six years, when the money would run out barring no unforeseen disaster, he would drive to Island Beach State Park in New Jersey, park his truck and walk into the Atlantic Ocean and never return to shore. Essentially he was planning on giving himself a burial at sea while he was still alive. On one level it is an act of suicide. Bill saw it as a rational and unemotional decision born of practicality. It was a topic we visited on several occasions. I would attempt to dissuade him and Bill steadfastly dug in his heels. I planned to talk to his family about it at some point but I had six years to do that, I am a natural procrastinator and I was in no hurry to betray Bill's confidence. I did nothing but wait. It was the easiest thing I could do under the circumstances. Although the topic would come up every couple of months, the argument would dissipate quickly. I knew that he would only get annoyed if I talked too long about it. I also knew that Bill was a hard head and that he was at least as stubborn as I was. Fate intervened. His plan and my intervention became moot points.


3) I knew Bill Walton well for over 30 years but not quite as well as I thought. I was under the impression that he was the same age as my step-father, who was 65 at that time. It wasn't until the last year of his life that Bill ever mentioned his age. At the time he was 77 years old. I couldn't believe it! How could I be that wrong for that long? We had spoken to each other thousands of times before I knew how old he was! He wasn't hiding the fact, it just was never pertinent to the conversation. Bill was an extremely vital person despite being 22 years older than me and he was much more energetic than I ever was. He constantly shifted his focus between sculpture, women, dancing the Tango and fly fishing. He thought nothing of driving cross country by himself for the sole purpose of observing the American landscape that he loved and honing his fly fishing skills. His art would be there when he got back.


4) Walton invited me to his studio on Spring Garden Street to see his new work. Most of the works were sculptures consisting of objects in boxes. The boxes contained multiple examples of one type of object, for example, a box full of dowels all cut the same length or multiple tubes of paint. The boxes were made of either cardboard or wood. He explained that he had been working in the studio steadily for decades and he had much more work than he would ever have an opportunity to show. He considered the boxes of materials sculptures, of course, but he was at the same time packing the things that he had no intention of using again. It was a deliberate way for Bill to limit his physical vocabulary yet continue to work. This strategy of quitting and continuing at the same time was the material manifestation of Samuel Beckett's statement, "I can't go on. I"ll go on." He wasn't packing the works to move to another location. His studio had been in the same building for years and had no intention of ever moving it again. As far as he was concerned he only had six more years of making sculptures anyway. The boxes were quite small and rather inefficient as a relocation aid and he only made them when he was inspired to do so. There certainly was no urgency to the project and he worked on drawings and sculptures during the same time period. The boxes were a gesture, a finality, a commentary on the way he had been marginalized by the art system. They were an expression of the futility of making new work when an abundance of objects already existed. In recent years he had been customarily overlooked by a culture industry that took him for granted and ignored or downplayed his importance as an influence on so many younger artists. He could not, of course, predict that in two years time his exhibition pace would increase considerably. Unfortunately death intervened before he was allowed the respect, critical acclaim and financial reward that he deserved in life.


5) One of the last opportunities I had to see Bill before his health impeded his ability to drive, he told me that he had recently been pulled over for reckless driving. According to Bill, the police officer was an extremely attractive African-American woman with close cropped hair. She was considerably younger than Bill although he never said so. He was 78 years old at the time and there are no 78 year old police officers in Philadelphia so she must have been. One day Bill was driving to his studio on the southern edge of North Philadelphia and he must have pulled some bonehead move in his truck. Bill's driving was suspect for as long as I knew him so I am in no way implying that his recklessness was the result of his age. When the officer came to the window of the truck to talk to him, he was smitten by her looks which he gushed over throughout lunch. Bill could be quite charming when he was inspired to make the effort. He engaged the woman in a conversation that far exceeded the usual length of a traffic stop. He jokingly suggested that she arrest him just so she would handcuff him and put him in the back of the police cruiser. As he saw it, an arrest would force her to spend added time with him, perhaps enough time to persuade her to go to dinner. He wasn't kidding about this either, he was truly taken by this girl. He told her of his love of the Tango and offered to teach the dance to her. I wasn't there to verify the story but he gave me enough details for me to deduce that it was an extended conversation. Even though she declined his offer of dinner and dancing he had the impression that she was interested in him. If he could just speak to her again he might be able to wear her resistance down. Then he informed me that immediately before he picked me up for lunch he had been driving around the neighborhood where he first saw her, breaking all manner of traffic laws in the hopes that she would pull him again. It wasn't the first time he had gone on this mission either. He had been racing all over the neighborhood for weeks in the hopes of seeing her again! 78 years old and he was still trying to seduce a cop!