LADY CORONA

Mother nature has taken her revenge.

For whatever reason, we are living with a pandemic that is more threatening than lethal at this moment... a moment that can change on a dime, or not at all.  A warning perhaps?

Mother has managed to clean up the air and water in certain places as a result of her virus.  Was that the point?  To tell us to get our act together and stop wasting her beautiful resources?  To remind us that we are as fragile as the land she gave us to live upon?  To tell us to forget all the extraneous things that we think we need, in lieu of that which we really do?

For now, we have to live with this and make some hard choices.  
So I dub thee, Lady Corona.

THE CANALS OF VENICE, BLUE INSTEAD OF BROWN.

I had a second image here which was censored and removed.  Interesting.  It was images of THE AIR OVER CHINA, BEFORE AND AFTER COVID-19.

EDIT DEAK

My first day of Art Criticism class, SVA, fall of 1980.  My teacher's hair was a raspberry red bob, and she wore a girl's sailor dress.  Her accent was eastern european, and she insisted that we hold class in a nearby Blarney Stone.  She asked us all to write a brief critique of a piece of art we had recently seen.  We all sat silently, some with a beer in hand, some with something stronger or nothing at all.  Starving art students don't usually have liquor budgets.

When we finished, she read each one aloud, and then told each student that their writing was not an art criticism, and explained why.  When she finished mine, she told the class, that this was a good piece of art criticism.  Then she asked who wrote it.

This was the beginning of what was to be a long and adventurous relationship between myself, and my mentor, Edit DeAk.

Edit introduced me to the world that was to become my home for the rest of my life.  A world of artists, writers, performers, designers, and generally acutely individual humans of every sort of stripe which were to make up my view of the world.  She took me to the Peppermint Lounge when her friends the Bush Tetras were filming their video for Too Many Creeps.  I didn't want to be in the video because I didn't like what I was wearing.  But I still see Edit in the video every time it is played somewhere and smile at her face in dark red lighting or the lack therof.  She took me to club Berlin when it was on Houston and Broadway, and told me to say my name was Maripol so I could get in.  I did.  She introduced me to John Howell, the editor of Live, a performance art journal, who was the first person to publish my writing.  She hired me to be her assistant and I spent hours every week in her loft while her then roommate Rene Ricard and Keith Haring drew things on huge rolls of paper on the walls.  She filmed me walking across her rooftop after telling me to "walk like a woman" and corrected my walk by showing me how.  The list of moments is endless.  So much of what I understood of life came from her unusual way of thinking.

Eventually I went off on my own... took a job with Diane Von Furstenberg who became my second and only other mentor.  What a remarkable couple of women to show me the ropes of adulthood.  I wish I had paid more attention back then, as the lessons of just watching how they functioned in life were amazing.  

But it was Edit who had my heart.

Over many years I would run into her at openings and events, and she would always introduce me as her most brilliant student.  When we lost her not too long ago, I wish I had been there... something intervened to prevent me.  I'm sure the memorial was filled with brilliant minds, and creative geniuses as she had a habit of knowing them all.  I would not be the brilliant one in the room... but perhaps the closest to a daughter she never had.  

The child of a radiant child.

Love you madly Edit, wherever you may be.

WHERE THE COLORS LIVE

Taking photos of places is important to me.  To remember where I had been, how beautiful it was, and how much I wanted to feel that place again, and again, and again.  But what to do with tens of thousands of color photos of beauty... for exhibition I prefer my black and white photos... my tintypes... but where should the colors live?

Getty.  I uploaded many of them to Getty's istock for use by people in need of stock photography.  So if you go to GETTY ISTOCK you'll find my photos.  I keep adding more about once a week or so... depends where I fly to... where I travel... and sometimes I shoot food and plants and little details of things - stuff.  But mostly beautiful places.... xo

SOMETIMES/OFTEN . . . KNOW/THINK

Sometimes/often I spend more time in the air than I do on land.

Sometimes/often it gives me a prespective on the world that most only experience on occassion, if at all.  Sometimes/often I spend time speaking with people I randomly run into -- all over America.  Sometimes/often they tell me things that are very personal because they know/think they'll never see me again.  They tell me about their relationships, how much in debt they are since they bought their new house, which candidates they believe in, how little they have[not] traveled around the planet, how many times they've driven to Des Moines this month, and why they love their dogs so much.

Sometimes I wish that more people had the same opportunity that I do so they would stop making assumptions about people they do not know.

CAPULETS AND MONTAGUES

I was engaged at 16.

A child madly in love, and so was my Romeo.  His smile broke through the thickest of storm clouds and his eyes sparkled diamonds of happiness.  We were in love at first sight, over the front counter at the Yacht Club where the Montagues held court.  But I was a Capulet.

The Montagues did not want us together, for reasons I did not fully understand at the time. I assumed it had something to do with being a Capulet, which was a very troubled family.  They succeeded in luring him away with a long hiatus in Europe, at exactly the time that I had moved to NYC, to my tiny apartment on East 5th Street between 2nd and 3rd Avenues.  I would awake each day to see the drag queen across the street in a long pink chiffon robe, having her morning coffee and cigarette.  He would awake in Corfu.  I was changing, and think my inability to speak up for myself was part of the sacrifice I made to become an artist in NYC.  He never did understand my changes, even though they were mainly superficial ones.  Pink hair does not a stranger make.

So the trip to Europe was the expected straw.  There was never an official break up... a returning of a ring, or a broken promise.  He just slipped away.

One day I realized he was no longer there and felt that I had died.

I recently spoke with a member of the Montegues who told me that our demise was part of a long and drawn out plan on the part of his parents.  It had been plotted, and carried out, with the unspoken threat of disinheritance.  

I was engaged at 16... and by 18 was without Montegues, or Capulets for that matter.

Film still from Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet. 

CLAUDIA

It was Claudia's birthday a couple of days ago.

I'm not exactly sure when we met, but my first recollection was in the 1980s, when Marcus Leatherdale was shooting me for his "Hidden Identities" page in Details magazine.  I knew his roommate was Claudia - she was well known amongst our friends - but we had never met.  

At some point after the shoot, from a back bedroom, Claudia emerged.  Raven hair, in a black silk robe, cigarette in hand, not really looking toward the studio, but not looking away either.  Just a magnificent ghost in a doorway down the hall.

Years later we became friends.  She roomed with my friend Christina in an east 14th street apartment.  I remember visiting one day and her boyfriend at the time was practicing doing tattoos on an orange.  She and Christina vacated that apartment some time afterwards when there had been a fire in the building and everything smelled of smoke.  Christina returned a leather coat to me that I had leant her - the smell of burning wood never left it.  Eventually it went off to the Salvation Army for someone else to give it a try.  

One day we all lost Claudia to the ether.  For many years she was MIA - Marcus moved to India, but he would visit NYC from time to time and we would always inquire of each other if there was any news of Claudia.  One day I saw her on the subway.  She didn't recognize me.  She didn't see me.  She didn't see anyone.  My heart broke.

Years passed.

One evening I went to one of Marcus' openings at a gallery in Chelsea.  And there she was.  All I could see was my friend, so I ran to her and her arms opened up like a heart.  We held each other for a long time.  Claudia was back.  Over the next few years, she got herself clean, got a job, got a home, got into college to finish her degree in creative writing, graduated from a masters program, married our dear friend Amos, and today is in Paris for her birthday.  

It leaves me speechless at times.  Until she calls me for coffee.  And then we never have enough time for all the talk collected up between visits.  Now when I miss my friend Claudia, it isn't because she is missing - - it's because she is busy living.

WITH SHORT CONCERN AND LONG ON QUESTIONS

This is my third or fourth blog, as I'm quick to abandon them and then regret the loss of something well written in my memory.  But then with short concern I imagine that it only felt well written after a hot cocoa with cointreau.

So with sober laptop and more sober recollections, I have managed to surface a few thoughts worth typing out... the unfortunate thing for you lot, is that I may well abandon this one too.  Crossing fingers and streets to hope I might stick around for a while... I might finally be old enough to have the patience of time.