Spring Awakening

Spring has finally sprung in New York.  The worst winter in the last 20 years was topped again this year and its finally over.

Standard Hotel beer garden with a bunch of jen's women's health mag peeps past present and future including art directors from various places

diggin this South slope bar zebra wall paper

my floozie pockets.  but if i made these into shorts the pockets would be halfway to my knee making me the most conservative floozie-with-shorts-showing-pocket-linings

Spring Awakening - acrylic on wood 2015.  I finally painted this thing I thought of last spring.  I have to photograph this properly sometime.  I painted it with pink pearl iridescent paint so it doesn’t photograph well and looks better in person.  The first painting in a lifelong series.  My awakening.  The flowers are Trillium and grow in the forest where I grew up in upstate New York.  Growing up everyone thought they were endangered and illegal to pick (common mistake but not true).  When was your spring awakening?  When did you “see” for the first time?

John's wife Masako's brother and his gf came to NYC so we showed them around a few days.  This is a mandatory DUMBO shot of the manhattan bridge 

Brooklyn Bridge park, brooklyn bridge, jane's carousel, the new world trade center all seen here

an evening at Floyd's on atlantic avenue, where a dollar gets you 10 plays in the juke box and they have a bocce ball court.

We ended up playing the winning team of the last game and there were a few Frenchies.  We won so then Akira was feeling good and challenged them to another game for beers and we lost but international friendship beers were had.

my birthday ballon finally decides to join the party after 6 weeks.

Akira and Masami are both Jazz and classical musicians.  They played a bunch of open jam sessions while they were here.  Here they are at SMALLS

Masami wow'd the crowd, especially since you don't see that many jazz flute players.

It was also the night of 1001 cocktails.  Foo led the way around his east village joints.

the night ended in a second dinner of Japanese food and Village Yokocho

after the night of 1001 cocktails we took a leisurely afternoon walking around Williamsburg.  Stopped by the Cotton Canday Machine gallery and spotted Joe Sorren, pop surrealist/low brow painter extrodanaire painting stuff for his show.

view from that park in williamsburg

Akira got to play at Kitano in midtown.  Smalls was full of mostly music school students but Kitano was many many levels higher.  You definitely need skills to play at Kitano.  Caveat, being in midtown, the cliental is older and and overall lamer so that means they have a jazz vocalist on every song and for jazz purists vocal jazz is not the coolest thing all the time since it often panders to that midtown clientele that want to hear something "nice"  It seems like if you want a real down and dirty jam session you still have to haunt the nights of NYC after midnight.  A kind of reverse keeping the riff raff out scheme, keeping the affluent midtown crowd out and letting the riff raff jam away.  Akira is a great piano player.  If you want to see them play they live in Osaka and play around there all the time.  Akira Matsumura

Masami's hanko, which is her last name and necessary for any kind of legal document in Japan.  They are starting to have exceptions to this though, especially for foreigners, like I got an HSBC account in Tokyo and they didn't require me to have a hanko.

old and new.  The New York Public Library in the front, Bank of America building in the back.