Ayveq the Walrus

Photographs of Ayveq, which, curiously, I have never uploaded to flickr.

Harry J. Aleo, the colorful and plain-spoken horse-racer, real-estate dealer, and baseball player (baseball player!), died over the weekend. Although I knew him from the signs in his 24th–Street storefront, he had led, by all accounts, a rich and sincere life.

I will never recover from that first shock of seeing a Reagan poster in Noe Valley.

I began taking photographs of these, which I call Unhappy Bicycles. See the slideshow of this neglected and picked-apart bicycles of Manhattan.

Alberto Manguel is a fabulous author and a writer of breathtaking skills.

His book (full title: Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World) does not directly answer a question that pops into my mind almost every day: why do bananas from the street vendors always cost a quarter? His methodical research and vivid writing have brought me a more clear understanding of the supply chain and shenanigans of getting a banana to the cart. Last week I tried a short red banana, a different variety from the standard Cavendish, and found it surprisingly difficult to eat. After having eaten at least a banana a day for decades, I am completely accustomed to the specific taste and texture of a particular banana; this Red Banana (PLU 4236) took me by surprise.

The editorial is a reprise of themes from his book, written with a more moral tone than the book itself.

… the Cavendish is the only banana we see in our markets. It is the only kind that is shipped and eaten everywhere from Beijing to Berlin, Moscow to Minneapolis.

By sticking to this single variety, the banana industry ensures that all the bananas in a shipment ripen at the same rate, creating huge economies of scale. The Cavendish is the fruit equivalent of a fast-food hamburger: efficient to produce, uniform in quality and universally affordable. …

In recent years, American consumers have begun seeing the benefits — to health, to the economy and to the environment — of buying foods that are grown close to our homes. Getting used to life without bananas will take some adjustment. What other fruit can you slice onto your breakfast cereal?

But bananas have always been an emblem of a long-distance food chain. Perhaps it’s time we recognize bananas for what they are: an exotic fruit that, some day soon, may slip beyond our reach.

From Wikipedia:

Just after "I Fought The Law" became a top ten hit, Bobby Fuller was found dead in a parked automobile near his Los Angeles home. The police considered the death an apparent suicide, however many people still believe Fuller was murdered. The investigation was botched from the start. The scene was not taped off and no fingerprints were taken from the scene. A witness also had clamied seeing a Police Officer throw a can of gasoline found at the scene into the trash.[1] Police later changed the cause of death to "Accident". He was found with multiple wounds all over his body and covered in gasoline leading many to speculate that the perpetrators fled before they could set the car on fire. He is buried in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park (Hollywood Hills) in Los Angeles. Dead at age 23, Fuller barely outlived his idol, Holly, who died at 22.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is a beautiful poem. Wordle, an online application that creates art from type and text, reminds me of the first java applet I wrote. (Yikes! I can't believe that is still taking up disk space!)

The title of the exhibition might as easily have been Sounds, rather than Animals: the sounds of an absent cat, of tools on their racks, or deadened (or amplified) pianos, and especially of animals becoming extinct -- all these sounds played an important role in the pieces. The Waffle Bicycle broadcast the adhan, the Islamic call to prayer, from loudspeakers mounted to a massive modified bicycle. The bicycle has all of the necessary ingredients for making waffles, from the live chickens for producing the eggs to the refrigerated whipped cream for topping the end product.

I first encountered Tom Sachs's work in the infamous Barney's Nativity display, and more recently on the cover of Dana Thomas's Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster. I am still uncertain about my grasp on the intersection of consumer culture and art as Tom represents it, but I enjoy the very visceral presentation of his work in the gallery setting. Tom brings a lot of surprisingly frank and violent ideas to his outwardly-calm pieces, such as the wood block with King Heroin burned onto gold leaf.