There’s a silver statue of Andy Warhol in Union Square. It’s temporary as far as I can tell, but if you ask me, they should install it there permanently.
I moved to New York in 1986 with my now ex-girlfriend, an aspiring fashion designer, whose first job was with a designer named Isaia.
Not many people remember Isaia anymore, but at the time he was very well known and quite influential, featured in all the magazines and carried in the best stores. Part of my ex-girlfriend’s job with Isaia was working part time at the infamous Fiorucci store on East 59th Street which had an in-store Isaia boutique. She would report back to Isaia about what was selling and what wasn’t, how the customers were responding to various designs, and so on. A lot of celebrities shopped there and my ex would often come home with stories about having seen or helped this one or that one. Once a month or so, Andy Warhol would come to Fiorucci, Polaroid slung around his neck, to hand deliver a stack of Interview magazines, and if you were at the right place at the right time, you could get yourself an autographed copy. My ex was in the right place at the right time, but being too shy to approach one of her idols, she let the opportunity pass. “Next time,” she promised herself. But, of course, there never was a next time because a couple of months later, Andy Warhol was dead.
(Only two years later, at the young age of 35, Isaiah was dead, too, but that’s another story for another time.)
Less than a year after Andy Warhol died, I landed a job with the Stephen Sprouse. Not only was Stephen a friend of Andy Warhol’s, but his studio was in one of Andy’s former “Factories” on the third floor of 860 Broadway, overlooking the spot where the Andy Warhol statue now stands. This is where I worked, in a small corner of a large room, separated from Stephen Sprouse’s desk by a metal locker. Somewhere I have a Polaroid of my desk, but if I start hunting through all the shoeboxes of Polaroids I have, I’ll get get lost for days.
Whiffs of Andy Warhol could still be found in the space. The vestibule just outside the elevator was still painted silver, a column next to my desk had a hand graffitied crown drawn by Jean-Michel Basquiat. An area in the back, by the service elevator mainly being used to store bolts of fabric, had previously housed a makeshift private gym and penciled on the walls were measurements tracking Andy’s progress.
While cleaning up the studio one day, I found a loose paint splatter on the floor. I might’ve thrown it away, except I thought it was kind of neat. Several colors of paint dripped on top of one another and peeled cleanly from the wooden floor, forming something like a vinyl sticker, only entirely too dusty to stick to anything. A few days later, Stephen asked if I had come across a paint drip, describing in detail the one that I had found. There were plenty of paint drips on the floor, and it would’ve been easy enough to peel up another one, but something about this one was special to Stephen and thankfully I saved it.
When Stephen’s business closed — that particular incarnation of it, anyway — I continued to work there for about six months, helping to tie up loose ends and to pack up the last of Stephen’s things, bringing some of it to his apartment, and sending some of it to storage. The paint drip wound up being put in an manilla envelope labeled “AW drip”, and filed away in a box that was ultimately stored along with a host of other things in a Pennsylvania barn. On my final day at the studio, I went to the corner of the room and peeled a paint drip from the floor for my own souvenir.
I was unemployed for a while after that. I picked up a couple of jobs here and there — mostly things I was completely unsuited for — but devoted most of my time to starting a rock and roll band and making art. At some point, I painted a picture of a fish. It was fairly large, about 45 inches square, and right in the middle of the fish’s eye, I glued the Andy Warhol paint drip. It worked perfectly. A girl I knew fell in love with the painting and offered to buy it. Being sentimentally attached to the drip, I tried ungluing it before selling it, but the painting just didn’t look as good without it. Oh what the hell, $200 bucks and it was hers. Less than a year later, the girl got kicked out of her apartment and she left the painting behind. She was still in contact with her former roommates, however, and was determined to get the painting back. She never did. A year or two later she killed herself. Hopefully there’s still some magic left in that fish’s eye and the painting still exists somewhere.
Deborah recently posted on Facebook that I’ve been learning “Yakety Axe”. The attached picture shows the inspiration for that endeavor.
Around 1989 or so, I saw a 70′s era Gretsch Country Roc in the window of Chelsea Guitars in Manhattan. At the time, I didn’t know such a thing had ever existed and looking it over gave me what can only be described as a perverse thrill. I had just started a band with my old art-school chum, Brian, playing post-punk/pre-grunge greasy East Village country-glam, and to me, the Country Roc’s Texas-via-Brooklyn western drag was a perfect fit. (Although Gretsch is now it’s owned by Fender and most of its guitars are manufactured in Japan, the company was founded in Brooklyn and once upon a time occupied a building at the base of the Williamsburg Bridge. Gretsch is long gone, however, and the building is now, you guessed it, a luxury condominium.) In any case, the price tag on the guitar was astronomical — seemed so anyway to this art-school flunkey. (Even today I’m not sure I’d pay what they were asking — though I might.) I used to live just a few blocks from Chelsea guitars and it was all too easy to pass by the store every day and pine until, after a few weeks, it was finally sold.
Fast forward to a few years — and several guitars later — with a little more money in my pocket I bought a similar guitar called a Roundup that a newly resurrected Gretsch had just re-issued. By this time, however, the band was on the verge of collapse and although I loved the guitar, I only ever played one gig with it and, eventually, in the whirlwind of a classic post-breakup grand purge, I took it to a local guitar shop and put it on consignment.
So it goes.
In fact, I sold off almost every music-making device I owned except for a Les Paul and a Marshall half-stack that I held onto for purely sentimental reasons since the ear-splitting volume of such a combination served no practical use. (The amp had two settings: Off and Loud.)
Eventually, the Marshall was sold and the Les Paul found it’s way under the bed. I picked up an acoustic guitar somewhere along the way but between hand surgery, and a couple of motorcycle accidents, I drifted away from guitar playing all together.
But life goes on my friends and after a four of five year sabbatical, I’m back in the saddle. After noodling around with the Les Paul for a while (not as much fun without an amp) and then getting my chops back on the acoustic, I found myself suddenly overcome with the pressing need for “That great Gretsch sound.” After hunting around for a little while — not too long, since, as I said, it was pressing need — I replaced the my old Roundup with a Gretsch Chet Atkins signature model 6121.
Of course, an electric guitar isn’t much good without an amp, so with one thing leading to another, this Brooklyn cowboy set himself up in that department, too.
Have guitar will travel.
Got up early yesterday — early for a Saturday, anyway. Although Deborah had to work, I was up first. I made coffee and then drank it, wasting time reading news stories on the internet, while Deborah got up and got dressed for work. When she left, I left with her. “What are your plans?” she asked.
“When have you ever known me to have plans?” I said, half-joking. Maybe more like one-quarter joking.
I rode the bus with her and hopped off near the Brooklyn side of the Manhattan Bridge. “I’m getting out here,” I said. “Maybe take a walk over the bridge.”
I don’t know what time it was, exactly, only that it was after nine and before ten. I often take the Manhattan Bridge when I ride my bicycle to work, but I’ve never walked over it before. Pedestrians and bicyclists have separate paths, with the pedestrian walkway on the south side. The Brooklyn Bridge can be seen a little further downriver. It’s under repair and it’s middle was wrapped up like sore finger.
I’m used to the bicycle side buzzing with with commuters during rush hour — road-racers whizzing past in brightly colored lycra suits, their opalescent sunglasses glinting in the morning sun, hipsters on fixies in threadbare T-shirts and skinny jeans with one pant leg rolled up, old men taking it slow on rusty junkers, women sitting upright on dutch bikes with baskets front and back, regular Joes on street-battered mountain bikes — but the bike side seemed relatively quiet this Saturday morning.
During the week the Manhattan Bridge doesn’t seem to be a very popular bridge for walkers. At least not compared to the Williamsburg Bridge’s social scene, or the Brooklyn Bridge’s swarm of tourists. I was surprised, then, that there were so many people on the bridge at nine o’clock on a Saturday. Joggers mostly, with tourists a close second. Anyone not jogging had a digital SLR in their hand — although that didn’t necessarily make them tourists. After all, I had a camera with me, too. Then again, just because I live in New York, doesn’t mean I can’t be a tourist in my own city now and then.
Whenever I stopped to take a photo, there was someone nearby who stopped to see what I was shooting, and then took a minute to decide if it was worth their time to shoot it too.
Once over the bridge, I kept walking. Through Chinatown I pretended I was back on Hong Kong, which was easy to do. I strolled up Mulberry Street, past the fish markets, stopping here and there to marvel at some strange fish I’d never seen before — most of them on ice, but some swimming in containers. I stopped at a small tank of live cuttlefish and stood there for a minute or two before looking down to see that I wad standing over a barrel of live bullfrogs, each one the size of a coconut. A dozen pair of glassy eyes poked out of the murky water, looking to me for salvation. “Please take us back to the pond,” they seemed to say.
When I was a kid, I once collected an entire civilization of tadpoles from a pond near my old middle school. The tadpoles were way too easy to catch and it was hard not to get carried away. With over a dozen in my bucket, I took them home, put them in a small pool, and went back to the pond for more. Some had already started to die by the time I returned home, so after dumping the second batch into the pool, I made my third trip a little faster, though by then the tadpoles were harder to find. Ultimately the pool was black with tadpoles in various stages of development. My father was aware of the endeavor to a small degree, I probably asked him for the bucket — “Goin’ to catch tadpoles, dad” — but when he discovered the scope that this science experiment had taken on, he made me take them all back to the pond. I had originally hoped to watch them grow into frogs, but the rate at witch they were dying was distressing and I kind of wanted to return them to the pond, anyway. We filled a few buckets with the tadpoles and my dad drove me to the pond, waiting in the car while I unceremoniously dumped them back to their home.
“Are people going to eat you critters?” I said to the bullfrogs. They didn’t respond, didn’t even blink.
Honestly, I’m not in any position to judge someone for what they eat because after walking for several miles, I stopped in a McDonalds for some food. I had passed a couple of street fairs along the way, and almost got something to eat at each of them, but I was tired and wanted to sit down — a poor excuse, I know. No sooner did I get my food than I remembered reading about the Happy Meal Art Project. An artist named Sally Davies has been photographing a McDonalds Happy Meal for several months, documenting its decomposition — or rather it’s lack of decomposition. Six months into the project and the food looks exactly the way it looked when fresh. No odor or mold, the only change is that it’s rock hard.
Not much of a change judging by my meal which seemed to be half-petrified already. The bun was stale, the french fries were cold and hard. The so-called meat might as well have been sawdust and Elmer’s glue. I’d be better off eating bullfrogs.
I sat near the front window and watched a homeless man beg for change. He was sitting on the sidewalk near the doorway, rattling some change in a worn out paper cup. A few people handed him loose change, a few quarters here, a few quarters there. He seemed do be averaging about fifty cents a minute until a young girl who was leaving McDonalds with a coffee in her hand gave him a dollar. He pulled a makeshift folder filled with looseleaf composition paper from out of his grimy backpack, found a blank sheet and halfway down, toward the left side, simply wrote the number one. In the fifteen minutes or so that it took me to eat my food — or half of it I should say since I couldn’t finish it — I realized he’d made more than the price of my value meal. Next time I’m tempted to eat at a McDonalds I might just sit down in front of it, instead.
My parent’s with the cake made by Deborah’s friend Lindsey of Elegantly Iced.
I guess you could say my father was a Navy brat, but in reality he didn’t move around that much. My grandfather was Commander of a destroyer during WWII, and there’s only so much following the family could do. They lived in Key West, Florida for a stretch, but after the war they settled in a sleepy little town called Beachwood, New Jersey, and that’s where my dad lived until leaving for college.
My mom grew up in Newark — about 65 miles north — and a far cry — from Beachwood. Now while you’ve probably never heard of Beachwood, you might have heard of Newark — New Jersey’s largest city — perhaps for no other reason than that Facebook’s head honcho Mark Zuckerberg recently pledged a gift of 100 million dollars to Newark’s school system. (Sure, the timing of his donation — the mega billionaire’s first public act of philanthropy — just happens to coincide with the opening of an unflattering movie about the Facebook founder and therefore can easily be construed as damage control, but a hundred million dollars is a hundred million dollars.)
My mother often speaks wistfully about her childhood in Newark. “It’s a shame,” she says, referring to her hometown’s subsequent decline. Whether or not Newark’s ongoing struggles can be attributed to six days of rioting in 1967, my mother sees it as a watershed moment in the city’s history. Maybe she’s right, I don’t know, but I do know that the city she describes in stories of her youth no longer exists. Then again, neither does the small town where my father grew up.
My parents decided to have their 50th wedding anniversary at the Beachwood Community Center located next to the Beachwood Yacht Club on the banks of Toms River. My father’s brother still lives in Beachwood, with his family, and while at the party my aunt and cousin told me stories about two drug busts on their street this past summer. “There are five summer rental houses on the street,” they said. “And they don’t care who they rent to.”
My father’s other brother, Tom, an artist with a long graying beard and one lung, told us stories in between breaths from his oxygen tank. He looked down the bay at the nicely re-built boardwalk that follows the shoreline and described what it used to be like: “It didn’t used to be up on stilts like that,” he said. “It used to be right down near water level and it meandered in and out of the woods. We used to go running down that thing stark naked in the middle of the night and go skinning dipping with the jelly fish.”
It was a beautiful day. The yacht club was hosting a regatta and windblown sails could be seen through the community center’s bayside picture windows. A group of my father’s childhood friends, referred to as “The Beachwood Gang,” had a table to themselves and were reminiscing about childhood sailing antics. My mother interrupted their stories as she brought me around to re-introduce me to everyone. I recognized some people by sight while others I only recognized their names. “This is Tommy Walsh,” my mother said, introducing one of my father’s more notorious friends.
“Oh sure, hi,” I said, “I know you, you’re my godfather.”
“That’s right,” he said, “I did a good job, didn’t I?”
I’d met the guy maybe twice in my life.
“Sure,” I said, “You’ll get no complaints from me.”
“I remember when Jamie was about three years old,” my mother said, “and you said to me, ‘Are you still calling that kid Jamie?’” (As opposed to something more “masculine” like Jim or James.)
“I remember,” he said. “And are you?”
“Yes.”
Tommy rolled his eyes and then turned to me. “And you? What do you call yourself?”
“I call myself Jamie.”
From the way he shook his head at the travesty, you’d think I was a boy named Sue.
Can you see me in these pictures? Look closely.
I’m the twinkle in my mother’s eye. Actually, no, the twinkle is probably my older brother, but you get the idea.
You probably thought these pictures were a mid-century ad campaign for toothpaste, but no, they’re selections from my parent’s wedding album, taken way back in 1960. Fifty years ago. Fifty years! Although the actual date of their anniversary already came and went last month, Deborah and I will be going to New Jersey to help them celebrate this momentous event tomorrow — which is why I’m posting these pictures now. (Not because I spaced out and missed the actual day or anything like that.)
Since, for obvious reasons, I wasn’t able to attend the wedding — and judging from the photos it was a fun shindig — I’m looking forward to being there tomorrow.
Happy Anniversary mom and dad!
Over 15,000 boring, unflattering, out of focus and/or embarrassing pictures, were tossed into the virtual garbage pail when I decided to finally begin organizing my photo library over the weekend. I’ve been watching the past ten years of my life flash before my eyes in thumbnail-sized morsels. Despite my attempt at an unsentimental approach, I’m still left with a bloated collection of over 20,000 digital pictures. I would have even more than that if I’d been more conscientious about backing things up over the years. As it is, some of my best photos have been lost to the heartless whims of finicky hardware — my old-fashioned mind’s-eye memories the only thing left to remember things by.
