5cense

398 ✝-ing Houston no problem down to Canal, grafing relingos a ✝ fluxus isle o man for our madhatter fables of reconstruction

looking west over a ghost pier to Lackawanna terminal

Dear Inurnet,

Still taking vantage of unseasonably warm weather to tick off more streets in the name of Maphattan ... gettin ur done, might even finish 'fore we split town for xmas, vamos a ver ...

Maphattan route for 12.18

Covered a few stragglers missed on our last walk, then all the way west (into a cold wind) to Pier 40 ... where once we made this vid walking round the perimeter w/ Krishna:

.... #40 now freshly painted + paved + u cant circumnavigate the perimeter like we used to on our river runs. Ravers just then (~9 a.m.) disembarking the «Hornblower Infinity» after partying it up all night ... sum remained, still dancing, steaming up the windows of the docked yacht ... overheard 1 exiting say «i'm pumped to go to work now ...»

... past Vito Schnabel's studio, who we just saw coming out of his father's tacky pink palace on the last walk ... past Film Forum + the club of Gilda Radner (a.k.a. Rosanna Rosanna Danna) on W. Houston (renamed in her honor) ... past the park on Houston (a.k.a. Howstin) + 6th where once we saw Tim Robbins playing street hockey ... used to also see Kate Hudson a lot in this hood, w/ that dude from Black Crowes, or pushing a stroller solo. Past the grand-ma+pop 1-stop shop where we used to mail our packages + pick up random things when lived us in the hood—«Something Special» ... on that section of MacDougal always closed off to cars ... a few doors down from where Patti Smith lives/lived... not that we fans, only know cuz had us friends that lived next door. Down Houustin, zippering in a few stray streets in for completeness sake.

street art on Mott, off Howstin

 

walking the dog past Parisi bakery

 

shadows on Howstin

 

graphing relingos on foot

 

this relingo = a wedge of park tween Howstin + 1st

... speaking of relingos, forgot to mention on the last walk that E.V. = king of empty-lot-cum-community-gardens ... if u cd call them that, mostly full of jank + funky junk ... surely not much edible growing.

relingo lot #49

... over to where Howstin + the relingoished wedge o park tween Howstin + 1st murge @ 1st ave ... the oregin of the nown universe u cd say ... (1, 1). Past Katz (where whatshername faked an O), that knish shop, Mercury Lounge, etc... tropo landmarks + haunts to mention. Howstin really a mess these days, all ripped up + cobbled w/ metal plates. As we've said, Manhattan ever a work-in-progress ... 1 big reconstruction zone ... the mob leveraging our tax $$$ @ our inconvenience ... leaving ever scaffolding eye-sores

Sisyphean plane (under a Man Ray kind a sky)

 

fables of the reconstruction

«I fell asleep + read just about every paragraph
Read the scene where gravity is pulling me around
...»

bar on other side of Howstin

Looping back on Stanton ... to where it turns into Prince + the L.E.S. churns into SoHo.

«Down the way the road's divided
Paint me the places u have seen
Those who know what I don't know
Refer to the yellow, red + green

Maybe he's caught in the legend
maybe he's caught in the mood
Maybe these maps and legends
Have been misunderstood
»

the «Bunker» @ 222 Bowery where Burroughs lived + many others crashed + partied ...
(here's sum of the things found inside by John Giorno after Burroughs died).
Mark Rothko also rented this space (an x-YMCA)

Eyes flicker in R.E.M. when look us up into the glaring white sky... Maphattan a dreamachine, triggering songlines as we wander, hitting harmonics ... cris-✝-ing a zillion alturnate paths, sum our own ... en otro lugar + tiempo, footprints still m-pressed ... zig-zagging to deconstruct + revisit ... accumulating to 1 day become nostalgia (from the Greek nostos-'return home’ + algos-‘pain’) ... the Nostos section of 'SSES" 'SSES" "SSEY' saving us for later ...

looking up on 1 of our favorite streets—Jersey (tween Bdwy + Lafayette). The tip of the red/gray bldg beyond where David Bowie + Iman roost

After coming back from Nairobi in 2009 we worked in these parts ... @ Prince + Bdwy ... sum good lunch places a comer (¡el año en que los carritos de tacos finalmente afloraron!), pero demasiado turistas ... + the only place ever we got stuck in a hellevator, seriously ... worked on the th floor like in Malkovich. Our lexicon coaleSESSing still, distilling, ever reforming into a holding patturn to re-emerge in x-isle chi sà dove, forse becoming a Raft Manifest ...

back on the way west side

Around 2006-7 worked us on Varick ... 1 of our favorite areas to work in the city. Where the bicoastal CEO (family man from California) OD'd ... found dead w/ our death-rock co-worker who never showed up for work again. Good PR covered it all up.

1 of our old after-work haunts—Ear Inn ... the oldest bar in NYC (tho many make this claim). Plaque out front marks the original waterline in 1766 ... before Manhattan shoreline expanded landfill-wise. Sum artists bought it in the 70s + since regulations didn't allow removing old historic signs, they simply turned the B in Bar to an E .... hence the name

 

street art? o cosa pubblicità?

Past what they (Scorsese + location scouts) called «Terminal Bar» in After Hours (1985)—in reality now the Emerald Pub ... + sure enuf—a✝ the street—the beehived Teri Garr's mod apartment. The loft of Kiki (Linda Fiorentino) to come later in this post ...

puncturing Chinatown

 

Jay Maisel's massive crib on Bowery + Spring, which he bought for $102,000 in 1966 + now worth a reported $30-50 million. The once cool art (that presumably he allowed or at least tolerated) covering it now mostly junk ... perhaps w/ the xception of ...

 

... past the Bowery Poetry Club + the ghost of CBGBs. Even what remains on Bowery now gone in spirit.

xing Bowery onto Rivington

 

Freeman Alley

Stopped for lunch @ Freemans ... hidden away @ the end of the above alley. Cool atmosphere but not-so-good food + service.

inside Freemans

... ironically mostly vegetarian, tho stuffed animals + parts lurking in all corners.

... continuing along Rivington ...

synagogue w/ hexagonal swastika?

 

empty lot where another synagogue stood before collapsing in 2006

 

wall on Ludlow + Rivington that we used to take a photo of w/ every issue of Sleepingfish—from 2004-2008—until they painted it black (+ kept it that way) ... the ATM sums it up

 

further east off Rivington

 

ABC NO RIO ... notorious squat/art space/punk club

... then looped back west on Delancey, past the Bowery Ballroom... to Kenmare (that post-Rome we pronounce «ken-mar-ay») to Broome ...

SoHo scene (the white bldg next to the sky blue 1 where Heath Ledger OD'd in 2008

 

apartment that Igby's stepfather (Jeff Goldblum) keeps for his affairs,
where most of the movie Goes Down (+ ever notice the in Ex?)

 

Wooster + Grand ... the lowest point in Manhattan, most prone to flooding, near The Drawing Center

 

remnants of Little Italy ... nostalgic or foreshadowing?

... also passed the bar used in Donnie Brasco + Godfather III + other Litttaly landmarks («where so + so shot so + so») ... otherwise what little Italian remains engulfed by Chinatown.

LES Sin-a-gog seen better days

 

Hosiery shop on Ludlow

 

John Cale + Lou Reed's pad on 56 Ludlow

... we also used to live on Essex, between Hester + Grand ... around 2006. In the building that used to house the original Guss's pickles. Where our upstairs neighbors used to breakdance + play volleyball listening to Foghat at all hours + our hasidic landlord too wimpy to do aNYthing about it (FIT student whose daddy paid a years rent up front).

further down Ludlow ... + here's the same (unfaded) wall from a shot we took in 2006:

 

same wall as above in 2006 ... (+ here's more shots of this stretch of Ludlow in the snow)

 

back along Grand (far from grand)

 

as opposed to a P.M. pharmacy?

 

Kiki's apartment in After Hours (red bldg)... the snow on the ground is fake, the corner occupied by another film crew (guess Howard st = convenient for movie making) ... the industrial fan for
blowing snow

Besides ever reconstructing itself, scaffold-shrouded Manhattan often feels like 1 big movie set ... its beauty self-perpetuating its own demise in a vicious cycle. Trop exclusif pour commun folk/artists

Switching back from streets to written pages ... still going thru our books end of year—no te preocupes, u wont find any «best of» lists here—just getting a grip on our To Read pile in prep for nomadic walkingabout in 2015. Finally we can actually fit it all on 1 shelf now:

our To Read Shelfie on Dec 19, 2014 (for comparison, the same shelf in April 2014 ... not including the overflow stack on the floor)

... i.e. what u can expect us to talk about here come 2015 ... at least the 1st part of it. What filed us this week under read:

> The Original Alice: From Manuscript to Wonderland by Sally Brown—about the making of Alice in Wonderland. Our mom sent this to us a while back while we researched 'SSES" 'SSES" "SSEY' ... she has it in her head that our brother (the other ½ of Chaulky White) = a reincarnation of John Tenniel ... came to her in a vision @ sum holistic spa in NorCal where she saw the Chesire Cat smiling down upon her. The book talks more about the relationship of Charles Dodgson (a.k.a. Lewis Carroll) to «the real» Alice ... the subject of @ least 1 movie ... seems the inspiration essentially the same as what led Nabokov to write Lolita.

vispo spread (before + after) from The Original Alice

> The New Manifesto of the Newlights Press—not so much a book as, well, what the title implies ... the chapbook itself adhering to the book-making principles which it advocates, cranked by hand on letterpress. The laid out words intresting insight into publishing + what it means to make book objets ... preaching what they practice.

from the The New Manifesto of New Light Press

> Fluxus Island by Franticham—where Franticham = the combined force of the dynamic duo, Francis Van Meale + Antic-Ham, the power couple behind Red Fox Press + where Fluxus Island = a manifest of sorts of what the fluxus movement means to them, w/ plenty of illustrative examples of course.

from Fluxus Island

> untitled (has a drawing of a whale on the front) little chapbook by Jon Carling—not even sure how this came into our possession, but sum fine illustrations, mostly of animals + whatnot.

by Jon Carling

> Tarp Coding Parameters—again, not sure where we got this—an architecture manual by Pratt students ... has sum interesting images + essays, like: «Deleuze and the Use of the Genetic Algorithm in Architecture» (by Manuel DeLanda) + «Computational Labyrinth: Towards a Borgesian Architecture» (by Léopold Lambert).

from Tarp Coding Parameters

> Instan by Cecilia Vicuña—a speciel book that we've let our eyes wander in here + there. Vicuña gives dynamic form to letters + language ... down to an atomic level, like Feynman Diagrams—letters + words colliding + reforming like particles, articles + penciled prepositions curving + verbing a ✝ planes + pages. Evidently she wrote these tween NYC, Buenos Aires, Santiago + the Southern Andes (where we found ourselves this time last year).

from Instan (hard to appreciate detail even w/ contrast cranked)


 > 399 > Intersecting Indonesia in Preparation for the Next Life + new year


5cense

[  (ɔ)om.Posted 2014  derek white  |  calamari press   ]