1st of june

A reggae dancehall club at the back of an African clothing store off Atlantic Avenue Brooklyn.
The bartender throwing petrol on the barbecue.

A crocodile eating a white rat.
A baboon masturbating, ejaculating and licking its fingers while Hispanic American schoolchildren pounded the glass and went hysterical with glee. Their teacher ‘s plaintive weak voice.

Vultures have no voicebox yet they are termed gregarious because they gather and stay in groups of up to 25.

A murdered drama student found in a ravine, we had been in that park.
Her pixie face picture still on the lamppost by the subway. 10,000 dollars reward.Her poor family

Gibbon Island.
The Unisphere and the worlds biggest architectural model for the second time. Thunderstorms.
Dieter Roth again.

Critical Studies Fellows of the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Programme:Part One
Daniel Quiles “Avalanche 1970-1973: Between Public and Publicity”
Sarah Caylor “Authot(itarian)ship:Authorship in Photography.”
Jennifer King “Sculpture in Three Acts: Michael Asher in Munster, 1977/1987/1997”

Asking Joe the V-bar bartender what the new Morrisey album is like.

Poughkeepsie train to Dia:Beacon. The biggest most perfect gallery I have ever seen.
Robert Ryman’s whitepaintings.Hanne Darboven’s chilling monotony, digital patterns and cold mountains of the same thing.

The Hudson at Harlem etc.
Mother and two small boys on the train, “They found a planet that’s ONLY a million years old.”
“Is it in our solar system?”

Throbbing bin liners, the rat swarm back and forth from the building site to the rubbish piled in front of the apartment block.
The Donnie Darko boy surviving a global ice storm.

The nuns at the airport.

vulture, bronx zoo

Unisphere

panorama architectural model of new york city

sunday 6th of June 2004

Ghostface Killah and Cormega

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at the knitting factory.a totally alive and supreme gig.really really made you feel like a radiant hiphophumanbeing.i bought cormega's new album and have been playing it back to back all day.

drank with shane in some bars in the east village,he hid a note for a girl in dublin under the jukebox the last time he was in there because its her local and shes coming home soon and he fancies her,but last night he couldnt feel the edge of it when he went to check it was still there. i told him id go back with a knitting needle and fish around for it. we played some songs on the jukebox anyway and went to another bar with a black and white photo booth thats real photos, not digital garbage,and we got some taken but they were too good to tear in half (two each) so we had to get another set taken.came home on the subway at 4am and people were going to work, the city smeltof bagels. tonight i found a whole section of battery park i didnt know was there it was amazing like stepping into an ideal.the grass looked perfect, like perfect grass and it seemed perfumed.it really was fantastic and right at the end there were Lousie Bourgeois's eyes sculpture, one of my total favourites of hers.

June 11th
I can knit, I have a degree in knitting and I worked in Paris as a designer for two years. How I got into knitting was, in second year at school, I got a prize and I spent the book token on a book called Wild Knitting.It showed you how to make all sorts of crazy stuff, like knitted ice lollies and cigarettes and bikinis, it was totally riding a post punk wave and it was one of the best books ever, it totally influenced me to want to make great stuff to wear. Anyway, my mum was a knitter and all her sisters and my granny knitted on an industrial scale, one arran jumper a week for a wool shop in paisley for a fiver each and also my auntie Anne knitted arran jumpers for an irish company that used to attach labels to the garment saying “hand-knitted by the fireside of……………………” with a spinning wheel on it. Anne got a sweater sent back to her once because they complained it stunk too much of cigarettes.It was Anne who gave me a bag of odd bits of wool that started me off and I made my first garment, two rectangles sewn together with abstract shapes and stuff woven in. I ended up selling that thing to Tracey McFarlane who sat beside me in Italian and was a huge Debbie Harry fan.In 2000 I made a public art piece called Woolworld which linked three islands I had visited, Tasmania, Newfoundland and Fair Isle, three siginificant sites for traditional knitting or wool production. Wooloworld has been re-activated to include a New York section and generally I wanted it back because it felt relevant again.
http://www.hamandenos.com/woolworld/woolworld.html
The reason I want to make a New York section is because its trendy here to knit, in fact, the first week I was here I found by accident this shop called “Get Knitting” one flight up on sixth Avenue in the west village… and when I went up this woman was right in my face going “ARE YOU HERE FOR THE CLASS???” and im like no but I looked past her and could see all these people sat round a table and all the peripheral woolly gear, and it was really odd.She wouldn’t let me in the store to browse because, I don’t know she had to start her class or something. I made a mental note to go back to the shop and see what they had but then I never needed to go back because similar little knit-boutiques started appearing in all sorts of locations, one in my street even, called “purl” , one I saw after some Japanese sushi walking down avenue A called “knitting new york” and so on and so on.the reason these boutiques are so enticing to me is because in Glasgow it's very difficult to find any kind of place that sells wool, the craft has completely declined there. There it was pragmatic and cost effective to knit. Here it's aspirational.
So, given that I am making a new knitting piece in response to the vultures at the Bronx zoo, I decided to actually go and investigate this place I saw in a newspaper called “The Knitting Place.”When I arrived at the knitting place it was a life-style shop with wool and I spent quite a bit of time there having coffee and reading such books as “Stitch and Bitch”, “Traditional Arran and Fair Isle Designs” and “Afghans for the Home”
Stitch and Bitch had a pattern for a hello kitty mobile phone holder and wristbands with “Geek” on them.
Kind of dreary, not like what Wild Knitting had to offer, in Wild Knitting they showed you how to tear up plastic bags to make yarn.
But the book did have a good reference section, specifically some on-line stuff and some yarn stores in new york. Also, in The Knitting Place,they had these books which were like the holy grail when I was at college, “A treasury of knitting patterns” by Barbara G. Walker, I had it and lost it years ago I couldn’t believe it was there, so I got one, and some bamboo needles and a crochet hook.
Then I went to School Products.co on Broadway which was a great yarn store, a bit more realistic, decent yarns at normal prices, not like little fluffs of fluff for fifteen dollars. And the woman was really grumpy but cool and gave me a pattern for a poncho and I bought enough of this beautiful brown Italian merino wool to do what I need to do.

I just got home after being out for some noodles in little korea andwhen I was walking back I saw chloe sevigny on 14th st and 2nd avenue. She was wearing white dungarees cut into shorts.she looked me up and down.
Ronald Reagan buried today. I have that 80s song in my head, “We don’t need no Re-Ron.”, the one that came out when he was running for a 2nd term. The man who’s administration tried to class ketchup as a vegetable so they could save tax dollars on school dinners.
In Bukowskis poem “born into this” he cites a nation where it’s cheaper to die than to go to the hospital.
And last night I saw “Born into This” the documentary about Charles Bukowski, directed by John Dullaghan.It was really superb, I really enjoyed it, as a film it totally spanned decades, lots of footage from the 70s and very intimate. Bukowski’s perseverance was really moving.I just really liked him in the film. At one point, his widow talks about how much he hated Mickey Mouse, because he only had three fingers, he was a mouse and a “soul-less piece of crap” and he had so much power as a symbol, “he sucks you up and he gives you nothing back.” One of Bukowski’s early champions described him as a kind of anti-disney salvation.
“I think that Raegan, like no other American deserves the honor of being the first person embalmed at Disneyland……..Ronald Raegan is the man who destroyed America’s sense of reality.” Tom Carson “Death of a Salesman” published in The Village Voice.
The New York Times was criticised for not displaying adequate reverence and tone and space to the death of Reagan.
Watching some of the state funeral on tv was quite an experience. To hear the utter bullshit and drivel that was coming out of people’s mouths, the hi-jacking of the event as an opportunity to propogandize,and mythologise what Americaswas, is and can be, everyone spoke sugary revolting language, apart from his daughter who spoke about Alzheimers.

detail from a painting by Tal R from Denmark, at LFL gallery West 24th st.June 2004

blue chicken foot object from Brooklyn museum permanent collection

June 15th
Saturday I went to The Brooklyn museum to see specifically the Patrick Kelly retrospective. Patrick Kelly was a fashion designer, working in couture and ready to wear who was from Mississippi. He completely by-passed New York in his career trajectory,saying he was “too black and too unusual” to make it there…. a model friend bought him a ticket to Paris and he was an almost instant success, becoming the first American to be invited to join the Chambre Syndicale du Prêt-à-Porter, the governing body of the prestigious French ready-to-wear industry..His career in paris only spanned five years however because he had died of AIDS in 1990.
I remember Patrick Kelly’s work when I was at college, it was the same era. I didn’t really get his work then, he worked a lot in figure hugging jersey and animal prints, he was totally about a form of glamour I didn’t really appreciate then I was more folky. But what I did get always and really loved was the way his work was photographed and the models he used, slinky black girls, really metropolitan and angular and making great shapes in his garments, people like Grace Jones were his muse and in the video of a catwalk show at the museum, there was a real baby Naomi Campbell wiggling all crazy fantastic in a swimming costume.
He used the I heart NY motif a lot and the Eiffel tower. He appliquéd buttons and bows to things in ways I found really ugly back then but on seeing them again I was gob smacked at the wit, grace and politic of his work, given that he took a lot of source inspiration from an incredibly un PC collection of black memorabilia.It really was a stunning show putting the dresses beside the source objects.
He was carrying a black doll at an airport once and an African American woman came up to him and said “oh where did you get that doll, Id love to get one for my daughter, but really, I don’t think she would play with a black doll.’ And Patrick Kelly took that to heart and was always very proud of his vast collection of black dolls, his aunt jemima dolls, his gollywogs, his paraphernalia which inspired him to make dresses with huge buttons sewn on them like fields of gollywog eyes. He always wore trademark denim dungarees referring to cotton pickers from the south and made garments from humble and poor materials such as bandanas sewn together. He made dresses from denim too before denim had really been used beyond working clothes and jeans.
There are quotes on the wall from people like Spike Lee endorsing Patrick’s collection of stuff, saying something like how its important to cherish these objects because they are reminders of a time when the black man was considered sub human in America and people must never forget that.
Bette Davis was a huge Kelly fan and there was an amazing picture of Kelly bringing a huge home made apple pie to the table where she is sitting wearing a red dress of his.I really wanted to take some decent photos in there but I couldn’t because the guard was on my case, so I took some sneaky ones.
Patrick Kelly’s main source of inspiration were the Southern women in his life and a quote I really liked was about how when black women in the South dress for church on a Sunday they look just as fierce as ladies wearing Yves Saint Laurent.

I also went to The Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine, I think the biggest Cathedral in America. It’s an amazing place, up in Harlem on Amsterdam Avenue, it’s a bit higgledy piggeldy in there somehow, its really charming because of that, there were some great organs just standing about in odd places and a 20 million year old crystal. Right at the back in a tiny chapel is the last sculptural piece made by Kieth Haring before he, too, died of AIDS.
I walked home down through Spanish Harlem. Its so humid it makes everything weird colours and bizarre, it makes you feel lumpen. Then I jumped a bus and got into a conversation with a young guy who had a dilemma about making a cut off point about dating girls of a certain age. He was 23 and didn’t want to date below 20. I told him life was too short to make rules up like that.
Saturday before all this I was all keyed up to go to a Plastikman gig in Williamsburg, I found the warehouse thing at midnight with a Xerox on the door saying the FDNY hadn’t granted a licence so the gig was moved…back to my old street in the west village. So I jumped the subway back there and ages later was stood in the queue behind this couple. The guy was lecturing her basically on his awesome trip to Tokyo and I couldn’t help but overhear all the awesome details, I had to leave the queue when he started describing the fish market, it was all just too awesome, I went across the street for a beer and when I came back I was behind some young Russian guys and the queue hadn’t moved in forty minutes and the tickets were 25 bucks, five dollars more than advertised as well and the bouncers were kind of aggro. I just gave up waiting, it would have been a great gig but I couldn’t be bothered, Id squandered two hours trying to see Plastikman and that was enough.At one point I did a rough head count and there was potentially three thousand dollars worth of people stood there, it would have been so cool if en masse everyone had just went home in disgust at being treated like shit, to see thousands of dollars just walk away from a venue.

patrick kelly's dungarees and bags from the paris boutique

some of the memorabilia he collected