meditation on a sketch from my roof

Labor Day Morning
A thinly painted gray skyline over a light blue wash of sky. Distant car horns. Landmark skyscrapers. Burnt umber filled tenement buildings in single brushstrokes. Church bells. Silhouetted water towers. New Yorkers still asleep or out of town. Yellow ochre indicating trees + olive green for leaves. Canary yellow haze. Sun in viewers eyes. Sirens. A pigeon lands beside me. Air conditioners' wight noise. Garlic wafting from local restaurants. A plane overhead. Sky sound. Allow to dry. Noon.

a single man anew

I watched A SINGLE MAN in bed with my pregnant partner, in our studio apartment the other night. She's 18 weeks in the making, and feeling her feelings. Sometimes when I lay next to her, or spend the day with her, my senses are heightened too. As if I have a closer relationship to nature vis-a-vis her energy. Late in the film, when the protagonist, (Colin Firth's character), quotes Aldous Huxley on experience, ("experience is not what happens to a man, it's what he does with what happens to him)," I get the feeling I never understood the meaning of experience. Like I'm starting over, and learning things for the first time.
Feeling and seeing everything differently—relationships, beauty, existence, etc.
I was moved by Tom Ford's movie. Albeit superficial, glamorous and homo-erotic, but most of all, a powerful love story. I was intrigued by how it conveyed a love relation from a romantic man's perspective, one who is battling with his notion of what life should be vs. what is actually presenting itself. Among other messages, a theme of acceptance and appreciation for the little moments in life. Like gaining awareness while laying next to your lover watching a movie.
Recently a friend who's wife is 7 months into a pregnancy, said they were mourning their relationship together, because it will never be the same once the baby arrives.
Another friend, an older man and a father of three, sent me "a thought for today," in an email. It was a quote from Jon Kabat-Zinn, the founder of the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine.
"When we stop trying to force pleasant feelings,
They are freer to emerge on their own.
When we stop trying to resist unpleasant feelings,
We may find that they can drift away by themselves.
When we stop trying to make something happen,
A whole world of fresh and unanticipated
Experiences may become accessible to us."

coming nearer to the summer solstice

"We are coming nearer to the Summer solstice, the highest day of grace, the highest day when the sun energy, the life force, prevails on this planet.
Let this be a day that you leave something behind, some elementary pushing habit, some ego habit, something that keeps you away from your soul, from being victorious.
Sit down and asses how much you have gained.
May each one of you practice the grace of God, and become the grace of God. May you become the true teacher of the coming humanity. May God bless you. May he prevail through you. May his grace be your grace.
Sat nam."
-Yogi Anonymous

spring thawing

Upstate
Awaken in brightness to the sound of morning doves, I gazed out the window to see them. All I could make out were pine trees powered by sunshine reflecting off the pond. I noticed insects on the glass, fixed as I was, trying to make sense of the landscape. I studied the bugs for a while from my bed as they roamed around searching for a way out or something. I thought about killing them, freeing them, then not interfering. They gravitated to sunnier spots and buzzed erratically. Through a spider's web outside the window, my eye spotted a robin combing the ground for worms. Upon hearing the woodpecker it occurred to me I was half asleep and that the bugs were OK. They weren't trapped or dying to get out or anything. They were just responding to their surroundings, in accord, aroused by the sun.

february

People lose gloves, inevitably.
They drop out of pocket-books and pockets.
Between apartments and farmer's markets.
Season after season.
They're left stranded.
Abandoned.
Mishandled.
Ignored in corners on stairs.
In drab backs of cabs,
While tipping on fares.
At the theater.
Near parking meters.
Flattened.
Trampled.
Over man-holes in SoHo.
As you know.
Lost.
Divorced.
Independent, relatively speaking.

permitting mettā

I fell out of headstand in yoga class the other day, and rolled over onto the mats of the persons practicing in front of me. I had been nursing a cold and breathing inconsistently through a runny nose. My concentration was challenged, and I uttered "Jesus Christ!" unconsciously as I toppled, and then apologized to the folks I nearly fell on. Embarrassed, I crawled back on my mat and into child's pose where I silently lectured my ego for letting me get carried away in over ambitious variations of the pose. Neck pain and humiliation set in as I answered the instructor when she came over to ask if I was alright. "Ah-huh," I replied. But I was hurting. Instead of leaving I decided to finish the class since it was winding down, preparing for relaxation pose.
Lying on our backs, the instructor began a Dharma talk about mettā, loving-kindness. But my mind was arrested, battling for relaxation and stuck questioning how I let myself get injured in yoga. I was able to let go of the pain a bit and my thoughts caught up to some of what the instructor was saying. She was suggesting sending mettā to the people in Haiti as a whole; to those that are struggling and suffering, as well as to those that have gone on to another plane. I visualized the earthquake victims' bodies streaming over us, passing through the room, on their way to their next lives.
It occurred to me that this was what death was like; the act of losing a faculty to a natural occurrence. When it was time to come up to sit, my neck was stiff. Temporarily discomforted, I thought of how many people in Haiti lied their after their lives were ravaged by the quake, unable to move, praying. There was no getting up for a moment, only empathy.

il simbolismo dimenticato della forma architettonica, o il resistibile attentato a silvio berlusconi

by Manuel Orazi

Tutto nasce e muore a Milano, in Italia. Il fascismo è stato un movimento milanese e poi nazionale (e a Milano è morto Mussolini subito dopo la fine della RSI, Repubblica Sociale Italiane). A Milano è nato il boom economico italiano degli anni ’50, a Milano è scoppiato il ’68, le Brigate Rosse negli anni ’70, Bettino Craxi e l’unico Partito Socialista di destra del mondo che apre la crisi diplomatica cogli alleati USA negli anni ’80, infine Tangentopoli e “Mani pulite” nei primi anni ’90 subito prima dell’avvento del Cavaliere.
Silvio Berlusconi è talmente milanese che da sempre ha come proprio simbolo aziendale il biscione, l’antico stemma della Signoria dei Visconti (quella del regista Luchino, per intenderci) che è ormai diventato il simbolo della città di Milano.
Che Berlusconi sia stato colpito da un folle in cura da dieci anni per problemi psichici, non colpisce tanto per il mancato funzionamento del servizio d’ordine (che come tutto ciò che è organizzazione in Italia, è da operetta) ma per il simbolismo che esso evoca. Nessuno aveva mai cercato di colpire un leader politico con un souvenir: in questo caso, un modellino del Duomo di Milano, la cattedrale che anticamente era il simbolo della coesione sociale, laica e religiosa, di tutta la città - tutto il contrario cioè di Milano 2, il quartiere che costruì negli anni '70. Ecco questo gesto assurdo e violento del signor Tartaglia (“non sono nessuno” continua a ripetere alla Polizia) va considerato anche per gli inevitabili effetti simbolici, che Berlusconi infatti ha colto subito: dalla macchina si è rialzato in piedi, come Farinata degli Uberti, con uno sguardo allucinato. Non sappiamo se il suo declino sia appena cominciato, ma certo lui stesso sa che tutto finirà a Milano.

The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form, or The Resistible Attack Against Silvio Berlusconi

Translated by Daniela Veronesi

In Italy, everything is born and dies in Milan. Fascism was a Milanese movement before it became a national one (and it is in Milan that Mussolini died shortly after the end of the “Repubblica Sociale Italiana”, the so called Italian Social Republic which ruled in Northern Italy between 1943 and 1945). Milan is where the Italian economic boom started in the 50's, where the student movement exploded in the late 60’s and where the Red Brigades flourished in the 70’s. Milan was the home of Bettino Craxi, the leader of the only right-wing Socialist party in the world that opened diplomatic crisis with US allies in the 80’s (connected to the hijacked Italian cruise ship, the Achille Lauro, where a US tourist was shot). Finally, Milan was the setting of the corruption-based system of “Tangentopoli” (“Bribesville”) which was investigated in the early 90’s, leading to the decline of political parties like the Socialists and the Christian Democrats, just prior to Silvio Berlusconi entering politics.
Prime Minister Berlusconi is so Milanese that as an icon for his business and emblem for the city of Milan itself, he adopted the snake (“il biscione”), the old coat of arms of the noble Visconti family, (reigning over Milan from 1277-1447; the same lineage that the filmmaker Luchino Visconti descends from).
The fact that Berlusconi was struck during a public appearance last week by a disturbed man with a ten year history of mental illness is surprising not so much because it shows how security services failed (which is typical for whatever is “organized” in Italy), but rather for the symbolism it evokes.
No one ever tried to hit a political leader with a souvenir: in this case, a little statue of Milan's Duomo, the ancient cathedral that was once a symbol for the social cohesion of the city, both secular and religious – all entirely opposite to "Milan 2," the district built by Berlusconi in the '70's for happy and wealthy families. This absurd and violent act by the attacker, Mr. Tartaglia ("I'm nobody” he kept saying to police), is also to be considered for its inevitable symbolic effects, which needless to say Mr. Berlusconi recognized right away: after being taken to his car, he got back up on his feet, like Dante's Farinata of Uberti, looking around with an hallucinated gaze. We don't know if his decline has just started, but for sure he himself knows everything will end in Milan.

autumnal sun days

I celebrated Indian summer last Columbus Day weekend in Catskill, NY, making small landscape paintings of barns, trees and rusting leaves.. achieving this one on my iPhone.

summer

Woman on the Beach, Ditch Plains, Montauk NY

i always wanted to meet lawrence ferlinghetti

I'm sitting in a park in the West Village where I sometimes stop to write and collect my thoughts. This evening got dark early due to a day that was gray and half rainy. My seat is on a dry bench under a lamppost where my writing hand's shadow is cast across these words. I think about changing my seat but keep on jotting anything automatically, including notes to self; buy newspaper, pickup laundry... The fountain in the center of the park, or rather 'square,' is gushing, keeping a rainy-day-effect, as traffic rushes up Avenue of the Americas. Church bells from Our Lady of Pompei across the street make the square feel more like an authentic piazza. Seated proudly on an opposite bench is an older, sea-fairing-like man with a hat, white beard and pipe, leaned back with his legs crossed, taking in the place. He seemingly has time on his hands and doesn't fit in the urban landscape.
I always wanted to meet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. I once read how Tom Waits took his copy of 'A Coney Island of the Mind' to the City Lights Café in San Francisco where Ferlinghetti hangs out, and left it for him to sign, and the author obliged. I'd like to do the same. We share things in common, the poet and I. He was born in Yonkers. I grew up there. He's an Italian-American whose last name rhymes with spaghetti. He lives on the west coast. I'm left-handed. He was born in March, 1919, and wrote a great piece a long time ago, called "The Old Italians Dying." When I would sit down to eat as a kid, my Nonna would always put the fork in my right hand.