Dusk or Dawn

Last night, I attended the East Bay Press Club's awards dinner, and the tenor of the evening was what had I expected it to be. More of a wake than a celebration. Several of the award winners had been recently laid-off or taken buyouts. Many of the conversations revolved around the grim future of journalism.

It'd been about five years since I last attended the dinner, and the turnout this time was noticeably smaller. There were many more categories, such as for best online news site, graphics and multimedia presentations, which meant pretty much everyone there won something. That also provides me with a nice segue to the title of this blog entry.

While the signs all around us tell us this is the end of an era, the hope I heard from several journalists last night was that it might also be the start of something. What that might be, of course, no one has any idea. Whether that new something would provide a decent living for journalists or support in-depth reporting and writing, also no clue. No one was even sure if there'd be a next something beyond what exists today. And what exists now means a lot more unemployed journalists.

But there was still hope. One former colleague was diving into multi-media and excited to break out of the newspaper mold. There's also this great article in San Francisco magazine this month about the green shoots sprouting around the region. Hyper-local journalism. Nonprofit outfits.

Then again, I've also heard several reporters talking about getting out of the biz for good, which would be totally understandable. It's hard to come up with a 5-year plan much less a 6-month plan these days.

So are we looking at a dusk or a dawn? No answers last night, only questions and lots of beer. But hope hasn't died yet.

My Jeff Koons Moment

It doesn't get much cuter than this, now does it? This is my dog Zim Dollar (good looking but essentially worthless) surrounded by fallen cherry blosoms in Prospect Park. Zim was good enough to pose to for this picture. All in all, he's a pretty good dog. The only annoying habit he has is that he basically follows me everywhere I go in the house. If I get up he gets up if I go back to get something he goes back with me, my friend Doug says it may be because he still confused by all the moving we've been doing and thinks he's going to be abandoned. Sera? In any case he didn't follow me around like this when we lived in Brazil. Prospect Park has been a bonanza for Zim. He can run free before 9:00 a.m. in this field not too far from the house and he can also run free at night. One thing that's changed since I left town is that you can walk through the park 'cause it ain't crazy after dark no more. Well, the other night I biked around Prospect Park and on the northeast corner there were a lot of large gentlemen just standing by themselves in the bushes _ smoking herb I suspect, but no one bothered with me so whatever.

Prospect Park is alot more relaxed than Central Park and Brooklyn in general is a lot more relaxed than Manhattan: they don't really shovel the snow off the streets, some dog owners don't even pick up their dog's poop. But I saw something in the Daily News calling Park Slope the new Greenwich Village. They said it in a derrogatory way, but in many ways it feels to me like the West Village used to feel in the late 1970s _ forget about it nowadays. There's just this happening feel I like, the times have certainly changed there is a more young professional vibe and big emphasis on families, maybe not as many artists, but there's nice mix especially over by the South Slope where it blends into Windsor Terrace.

I was going to write some boring stuff about banks and executive compensation but I'm just feeling the spring vibe too much to get indignant and I'll save that for another post.

How Much Art Can You Take?

When I was just a lil youngin' thing, back in the day, I actually managed to get into CBGB. That was pretty impressive since the drinking age back then was 18 and I was only 13. For all it's reputation, though, CBGB was pretty much a dump. Sure you could see great bands once in a while and you could usually find Joey Ramone making out with some skinny pimple-faced chick he just picked up, just because he could and because she looked just like him. But it wasn't much of a place on an off night _ usually some prog rock band from New Jersey playing for five or six friends and relatives. The first night I went there was this band playing called The Mumps. They were getting pretty good reviews around that time but I didn't learn their back story until later: The singer Lance Loud had been part of the that proto-reality show "An American Family." The show followed a family around and filmed them and showed the compacts on Public Television in the late 1960s or early 1970s or something. During the filming young Lance managed to come out of the closet on TV which may or may not have been a good thing, I seem to remember hearing somewhere he committed suicide but I may be wrong.



Anyway, you can imagine a 13 year old kid at CBGB to watch the Mumps live and I was pretty excited. The only thing I really remember though was this song that went "How much art can you take? How much art can you take? How much art can you take?" Each time he sang the lines he enunciated them a little differently but you get the point.



I myself have a very high tolerance for art. My wife, who is playing Carol Marol for me in these pix, may not. Oh she likes art and all, but when she was growing up on the farm back in Bahia, her father used to say, "Daughter, stopping doing art," by which he meant stop fooling around. For him art was a fool's game. He may be right in the country. But, as someone once pointed out to my wife, in the city, fools can make a lot of money with their art. My wife is especially fond of Basquiat and Kiefer and Dali and has at various points in her life threatened to purchase a canvas by one or the other, without a fraction of the funding needed to do so. When she sees art she doesn't like she'll often say something like: "I wouldn't want to have that in our living room," or "why would any one want something like that in their living room." I've tried to explain to her that not only do you not buy works by Kiefer, Dali or Basquiat unless you're mega-rich and that the sole purpose of art is not to decorate the living room. It's something to think about and that's what you take home with you, anyway that's what you do if you're po'.



Which brings me to the recent art show "Street Art" featuring my friend Linus Coraggio plus Ken Hiratsuka, Paolo Buggani and, yes there were even a few works by, Keith Haring. We have a big painting by Linus up in our living room that he gave us as a wedding present and if you walk outside our house you maybe able to glimpse a bit of it. This may be where my wife derived the idea of art as something you put in your living room. Linus doesn't do many paintings though, mostly he does sculptures, mostly chairs and more recently motorcycles, choppers to be specific. In the 80s he used to weld forks and stuff to street signs. Ken chisels things into rocks and in the 80s he chiseled these Mayan-looking (to me anyway) patterns into sidewalks around the city. If you look on the wall in the picture of Linus and Ivandy you can see this really awesome photo of Ken standing in the ocean chiseling a pattern into a huge rock as the waves wash over. He's this really solidly built Japanese guy and he just looks marvellous in the picture. Linus once told me a story about how one time Ken had some bad mother push over his motorcycle outside a redneck bar somewhere. Ken was unfazed he just said in his heavily accented English, "A tough guy, eh?" sound a lot like the sensei in Karate Kid. By end of the night Ken and the tough guy were fast friends and drinking buddies.

Paolo Buggani I had never heard of before, but I really suggest you check out his videos on YouTube. He is a self described "Fire Artist" with a fondness for roller skates. There's some particularly good footage of him dressed up like a dragon fending off bottle rockets with some sort scepter-like thingy.



All of this art, and some of the wine, got me to explaining to my wife how wierd the whole event was. The street artists had finally made it to Soho, only Soho was no longer Soho. Chelsea is now Soho, sort of. I tried to explain the transformation of Soho _ which I touched on a little in an earlier post _ and started to explain how Keith Haring and Basquiat's Samo stuff just started appearing out of nowhere in the 1970s and how exciting it all was. And how I first discovered Linus' work at SUNY Purchase when I was walking around the student's studios and his was the only one that impressed me. He wasn't there, though. A little later I was talking to some students I had met there and asked if they had heard of him. One of the students replied, "That fucker, he stole my bicycle and welded it into a sculpture." My wife then pointed out that there were some Keith Haring's on the wall, which I had failed to notice. They were apparently originals drawn in chalk on the black paper the MTA often used to cover subway bill boards between advertisements. They were mounted and framed behind Plexiglas. "Hell, to authenticate," I thought to myself, but I appreciated them nonetheless.

I tried to make sense of the crowd. There were some people who looked liked they'd been in Soho forever and many looked like David Byrne. Others looked like Marcel Duchamps and others still seemed newer to the scene. Others I couldn't really figure out where they came from but everybody was nicely dressed. I told Linus how weird it was on so many levels and he said, "I know, tell me about it."