Starbucks Lovers: Katherine & Angel

Sunday May 19^th at the Exchange Place Starbucks Angel proposed to Katherine and Katherine said yes.

Cold, rainy, and fog… quiet… late afternoon turning into evening. Stir It Up by Bob Marley kept repeating through the sound system speakers. The manager, who was pacing by the entrance, apologized to the few patrons drinking their beverages here on this dreary day, about the Reggae classic being played on a loop. A couple is going to get engaged here, he explained, and they want this to play in the background… the song ends, begins, ends, begins… time passes… finally a group of very well dressed young folk emerge out of the parking garage from across the cobble stone street.

They were Jehovah Witnesses, coming from the Stanley Theater, in Journal Square, where every Sunday the denomination congregates for services. Close to 20 of them, a very nice looking bunch, dressed in their Sunday Best, young. They’re wearing wonderful clothes and they’re all enthusiastic… everyone knows what Katherine is about to find out.

The group forms a long line at the register. May I take your order, says the young woman at the register, garbed in apron, cap on her head.

The song  changes to Marry Me by Train (contemporary soft-rock, unfamiliar to me). Angel is a tall fellow, wearing a gray suit; Katherine turns around to face him as he gets down on one knee. She’s shocked, takes a few moments before she begins to understand. Their friends form a semi-circle around the couple, cameras and phones are aimed. He takes her hand and slips the ring on her finger.

She’s embarrassed… there’s a pause… in a tear-choked whisper, she says yes, then crouches down to hug her husband to be…. applause… cheers…. There are tears, mostly the girls, but some of the guys are wiping their eyes, even the cashiers and baristas are touched…

It was all planned of course – walking into Stir It Up, the proposal coming during Marry Me – Katherine is obsessed with Starbucks, which was why this proposal, here, today, was so unexpected. This was just supposed to be some Post-Stanley Theater coffee, just any other Sunday. Her friends selected the Exchange Place location, because it has the best view of the Hudson and NYC.

 The rain and the fog obscured the splendor of Manhattan and the mighty river between us, but we joined the Jehovah Witnesses in witnessing Angel proposing and Katherine accepting. Love again anew, love again acknowledged, love again shared.

Donald Trump in Washington Square Park

Well, there’s always a first time. Donald Trump. Had the camera out on sunny day walking through Washington Square Park, a great day to shoot pictures. I had to replace the disc shooter and the new one has a zoomier lens, so these shots were from a distance. Not bad. Trump though. Distasteful from any distance.

A crowd had gathered around – several yards from but still around – a smaller crowd clustered near the Washington Square Arches. Dollies, microphones, cameras – familiar filmmaking accruements to us all. You see a lot of small films, student films I reckon, probably not requiring a permit, in this park but I can’t recall a large crew, not a big time TV Reality TV Show.

I had the camera out. Is that Donald Trump. It’s him people murmur– I was not the only one taking pictures. Every phone has a damn camera in it. You can’t buy one without one. More people were taking pictures than not taking pictures. There was a small outbreak of Trump shots on New York area FB yesterday. Celebrity Apprentice. Well, I’ve heard of it. I’ve seen no more than five minutes. I avoid television but it’s impossible to avoid completely.

 

 

He was playing the harmonica. They were playing bluesy guitar – I didn’t see a guitar player so I assume it was pre-recorded – and Trump gyrated while blowing a few notes and the smaller crowd being filmed, part of the show, laughed and applauded. Then there was a long pause and then another Trump gyration. His harmonica playing was real. Sometimes I yell out Build a Set. Film crews are funny. They say war is a long stretches of tedium interrupted by flashes of intense violence. Film work resembles that structure. Getting all the mechanics right – from the equipment to the actors – then Action. Then it’s over. Sigh, relax. For that moment there’s the behind the camera (including crowd control) and there’s the in front of the camera, and after that moment, there’s just people there, waiting and doing, a team. Trump is always Trump, Trump is always the star and everyone treated him with deference. The existence of his celebrity has given them work, why wouldn’t they show deference. His celebrity enables ratings and advertising rates and that funds the show and their salaries and Trump makes the most and this system only works because people need something to watch on TV and Trump captures their eyeballs.

Taller in real life than I would have guessed. I had to read the Art of the Deal for an article I wrote early on, when that book was new. I was writing for a retail trade publication and ghost wrote a column for a wholesaler, or jobber, who would buy wholesale lots then resell them to retailers. The concept was his art of the deal. He was an interesting guy, Trump not so much. I find him arrogant, not exactly an original observation. The man came from money. His father was a real estate mogul in New York and his son was born into wealth, has no other apparent aspiration other than becoming wealthier and pretends he is a raised up by his own boot straps self-made man. He’s a self-made celebrity, that’s undeniable. The book was insipid, the story I wrote was almost a parody of the book and that’s about all I wanted to know about Trump. Trump had another agenda. From Marla Maples, the Iyvana Divorce, the garish development projects – he’s got one in J.C. don’t you know – the Howard Stern appearances (always funny) – you cannot escape this guy. I try not to pay attention. The media and consumers of media had the opposite attitude. And, here I am taking up pictures of him for the Blog.

Someone born with his advantages, why the arrogance. His self absorption is pathological. The spat he had with Obama – the birth certificate nonsense – had racial overtones that were blatant and Trump clearly relished. He has no regard for those less fortunate and never recognizes that the advantages he was born into. A multi-billionaire son of a multi-millionaire? What isn’t despicable about him? What is the appeal of this guy, why does he have more fans than Sharon Olds?

I’ll never know. I’m just thinking SEO. Donald Trump in Washington Square. Google Alert automatically alerted. More hits, more blog exposure. I was just testing the new lens, just taking pictures. I’m not encouraging our use me/use you society. Swear.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

New Platform, New Pay Phone

 

 

I’m calling from the platform. I’m using a pay phone. I’m about to get on the train, I hear it coming. Good Bye.

 

 

No new pay phones, you say. Guess you haven’t taken a N.J Transit Train lately, at least one that stops at one of their new platforms. Over the last few years, part of the shovel-ready stimulus spending I think, NJ Transit renovated several of their outlying stations in our Hinterlands. This phone was in Ridgewood, New Jersey and was even being used. There are still reasons to use a pay phone. Pre-renovation – which included construction of entirely new platforms – there was no pay phone on this platform before. Now the new platform has a new pay phone.

 

 

I wonder if the number of new pay phones in the United States number in the thousands, hundreds… dozens? Less? I even wonder about the word new. Is there a factory still making pay phones, or are they just refurbishing old ones? Those cast metal pay phone shells are built to last, survive all weather conditions. So many pay phones have removed. The transit system is one of the few sanctuaries left for this last century form of public communication, especially new ones and I wonder if the new ones are entirely new or are the old shells being recycled and refurbished.

 

 

 

I’m on the wrong platform. I’m waiting for the wrong train. I’m headed in the wrong direction. I need to call again, I’m going to be later… much later.

Olivia Grove

 

The relationship between abstract and primitive art is well known but that doesn’t mean all the stories have already been told. Olivia Wilber (last seen here) had a rare appearance as an art vendor at Creative Grove. She admitted to being jet lagged, having just returned from a week long International Art Festival in South Africa. Luckily, participating in a mediation even that was part of the Friday Festivities enabled Olivia to cope with time-change distress.

 

 

 

 

The similarities between abstract and primitive were readily apparent. Olivia has gained fame as a video painter, creating paintings that are as much performance art and visual art. She projects video on to a surface, then paints that surface. A Video painting was alongside a piece of tribal-art inspired art, which was shaped like a Zulu shield but was actually a skateboard, she said.

She uses only natural pigments, which she purchases from a San Francisco Specialty Arts Store, which is why her colors are so lush and more evocative of primal feelings and urges that seem to resist verbalization.

Another abstract work, with a suggestive figure in white surrounded by moody, darker shades, was alongside the table. The background seemed to be an apartment, flowered wall paper, melting alongside tendrils that resembled veins or nerve strands. This more overtly emotional painting more clearly contained her twin abstract and primitive influences within one frame.

 

 

She was showing her “woodwork” at Creative Grove: all the paintings were on wood panels. Why wood? It’s not like her current phase is now wood, rather they were the easiest to display. She explained the paintings were heavy, thus more resistant to the wind, gusting off the Hudson, squeezed between buildings and often wreaking havoc at Plaza events.

Fine Art by Olvia

 

 

 

Bohn Towers

 

 

The parts are equal to the sum of the whole... or is that the other way around. Robert Bohn works in collage and found art, and he’s assembled an accumulated collection of work that is both self-contained gallery and installation. Some of the pieces started on wood, others as something else than attached to the wood, which are panels (plywood) I think, the panels assembled into boxes, segmented into the three sizes, then stacked upon one another to form towers, two, two towers of art, haphazard amalgamations of objects, graffiti, and illustrations.

 

 

The towers acted like lint brushes in Bohn’s studio, accumulating completed projects – the oldest piece dates from 2007 . According to Bohn, the boxes helped organized the workspace. Geometry can be efficient, but that efficiency was not just organizational. Soon boxes were not way to remove clutter; they became art in and of themselves. Bohn started adding art – drawings and doodles, graffiti scrawls, spills and splotches of color – as well as things – a rake, magazine pictures, a friend’s shirt, a discarded chair and a plumber’s helper topping off the tower as a spire. “When I formed the boxes, they became easier to work on, I could go from panel to panel,” he said

 

The illustrations and various what not acted as connective tissue between the various pieces. Back to the pieces and the whole. By highlighting the similarities – the thematic links – between disparate pieces, the connective tissue became a distinct organism. It’s Alive! The boxes became their own art, without delegitimizing the individual pieces, and then the boxes became towers… and the towers came to Creative Grove as interactive sculpture.

 

I kept thinking of abandoning adolescent. Aside from the fact blocks making up the towers recall building blocks that children play with, there are lot of spooky images, disembodied and grotesque, forlorn houses. Intensely obscure autobiography is also present – an abstract painting on a pillow case that Bohn said was the one from his teenage bed – that I got an end to childhood vibe, a farewell to a phase of the artist’s life. There’s a lot on anxiety in the individual pieces, moody colors, a reality that twists and unnerves. Fear and apprehension is often suggested. We recognize the rake that is no longer the rake and we wonder why.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And yet, the entire piece, the towers, viewed as a whole, is fun. As a whole, what might have seemed unnerving may still be uncanny, but they no longer disturb. Horror show becomes fun house. The juxtapositions, the connections, intentional and unintentional, amuse, make you smile.

 

 

 

The odd wooden structures – they were hooked to sandbags so they remained impervious to wind –made this edition of Creative Grove distinct. The Bohn Art was the tallest structure at the plaza, higher than then the vendor tables, ending above even the tops of the canopies. Many of the people, going to and fro the PATH, passed the towers by. A lot paused though, lingered, mildly gawked, at the weird dichotomy between the part and the whole, the component and the cumulative. By collecting his work in this manner, the artist created a dialog with his own past. A farewell perhaps to a period of work, but the farewell had become as much of a distinct work as the work presented.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bohn towers subvert assumptions we have about art. Yes, the collage, the combination of found art and illustrations – part and parcel of the calling of the collage artist – makes us question context and memory. Bohn is also commenting on presentation of art and our culture, what our debris tells us about culture. By manipulating cultural flotsam through illustration and personal memoir, Bohn has made an art that sums up the parts while simultaneously shattering the whole.

 

 

 

For More Robert Bohn see here.

 

Clear Reflection

 

 

Jersey City isn’t just an isthmus twixt Manhattan and continental New Jersey and by extension, America, it, like the rest of New Jersey, is a below sea level (oh come on, topography police, stay with me here) swamp. Rainy couple of days left a nice puddle in of the few remaining grassy lots. Soggy, ready for another wave of dandelion blooms. Nothing but blue skies and sunshine now. And, captured within the dark waters of the puddle is our world, that very same sky and caution children crossing sign and pennants swaying in the soft spring breeze, new used cars for sale, like a photograph, clear as a mirror, although not real the resemblance to reality remains undeniable, until we delve beyond appearance.

Affixed Sculpture

 

Saw this on second street, a new addition to Jersey City’s very clever and obscure street art exhibits, the ongoing project of anonymous conceptual, if expressionistic, street artists. I’m calling this affixed sculpture, because it is sculpture that is affixed, in this case to the street sign.

The upper piece is some primitive, logo/tattoo inspired deal, clever enough and reinforces my contention that Keith Haring may be the most influential 20^th American Artist. Beneath that painting on wood though is another wood sculpture that is a little less obscure

 

 

 

A robbery – a purse snatching (or hold up, some kind of robbery-based crime for sure) – is etched into the surface of the wood, a child’s doodle depicts (the victim’s eyes are X’s. Along the side of the wood is a faux zipper, the zipper tag being an actual one that doubles as a key chain, on which authentic house keys dangle.

 

Rainy morning. Saw some art. Then I thought about society and how our humanity often struggles against aspects of that society, just as other aspects of that society enable that same humanity to survive… purses which we carry items we think we need, keys to homes where we think we’re safe. Then the rain, then the unfolding of my day, same as yours.