Larryosan's blog

So far I have bought 3 baby gates for the apartment which Stretch still manages to get through and we have started to bring him into the same room with the girls. Right now Stretch and Sadie are the first to start working things out, which means Sadie hissing at him, Stretch chasing her and then more hissing then some judicious hiding by Sadie. But she is more dominant and I think will work things out a little faster. Stella on the other hand is being a total drama queen with much hissing so much that she starts to drool and now in the chase have broken at least one item. But we are going to make this work, by hook or by crook. It just takes more time, or at least that is what I keep telling myself. I joined the bulletin boards of the ASPCA which is the primary animal rescue/protection group here in the US and tried to get some help but their discussion boards are proving not to be much help. My friend has kept us on the same track and I guess again it is just patience and time. At least the girls are getting along better.

Today is my 55Th birthday so I am celebrating with some friends over to our place for dinner and possibly a movie if we can do that. We might go see Hellboy II which we saw the first one and enjoyed a lot. My brother saw Batman and said it was all that the hype made it out to be, so I do want to see that. Generally I am not a big blockbuster person except for certain movies, like the Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter and for some reason I really liked the old Arnold Schwarzenegger movies. There are a lot of movies I haven't seen due to laziness which some day I will get around to viewing. I like movies with a story, action is OK sometimes but I don't think special effects make a production they just add to it, so if the story sucks I don't care how much technology you put into it, it will still suck.

I find as I get older I seem to becoming a bit of a crank, as you can see by some of the things I say about where NYC is headed culturally and socially. Diversity is not just a "nice" idea it makes for such a more interesting and enjoyable place to be, the white-bread quality of New York is just boring. And yes, young well off couples with kids have their place, they just shouldn't be the totality of the milieu around us.

ta ta for now

So we adopted another cat "Stretch" and have been slowly introducing him to the household. Well the girls Stella our youngest and Sadie our first adoptee who is 8 are not happy. Sadie handles things a bit better, she whacks and hisses but Stella is beside herself and is reacting as if Stretch is killing her even when he is just approaching her. Now Stretch has been very good making approaches and then patiently backing off but it is wearing thin and Stella is just not adapting yet and is still acting as if he is the worst thing that has ever entered the house. So today he lost patience and whacked her and chased her around and poor Stella pooped on the floor and I had to put her in the bathroom to calm down. He isn't being mean or even trying to hurt her, I watched and his ears were not back and he didn't seem to have claws out, but I think he has had enough. And all this drama is not going over well with the alpha lady of the house who finds it very unerving. So I don't know what to do but I am going to ask our cat specialist lady what to try next.

I decided to visit friends in upstate New York in Ostego county which is near Coopers Town New York home of the baseball hall of fame and museum and all that good baseball stuff. But we don't go there much and we stay in our friends country home which is small farm house and a couple of barns. I will post some pictures later, my camera and my new asus eee don't seem to get along very well so I am working on my friends mac. I am trying out my new fuji finepix s700 which I  bought awhile ago but haven't used much and am trying to learn how to use it properly. I have gotten some shots I like and am feeling much more comfortable with it. We went out to view some fireworks and I got a couple of interesting shots out of that and out of an outdoor fire we had where we made smores. For those of you who don't know what that is, it is a marshmallow cooked over the flame of the fire, squished between two graham crackers with a piece of chocolate with it. The hot marshmallow melts the chocolate and the crackers hold the whole thing together.

I am not really much of a country person, I like all the birds singing and the trees and the relative quiet from the city and everything is very pretty. I don't like the sulfur smelling water and all the bugs and flies that are all over the place inside and out. So roughing it is not my cup of tea. I think roughing it should be when you go down to a one or two star hotel. Not that I hang out at those places much either. But we missed our friends and they missed us so it was time to do some driving get out of the city and head into the wild upstate. Of course they also have such things as Walmart up here so there was a bit of shopping spree with much better prices and all that and I was able to find a nice sago palm for my desk at work. As I sit inside a converted storeroom with harsh fluorescent and lousy ventilation finding a nice plant was very important to me. I am on the lookout for a nice peace lily which is supposed to be very good for improving the air quality, and that is one of my goals. A nice plant to improve my emotional outlook inside the office and also one that helps my physical environment.

Writing about my cousin really helped clear my head and I am coming to some peace about my work situation so I think this trip was actually just what I needed, country life or not. And it was a good deed for me to agree and make this happen. It is hurting our vacation fund a bit more than I would have liked, especially with the gas pricing but hey you only live once.

ta ta for now

Well I am actually feeling much better about all the issues I have raised about the passing of my cousin. I think it was the trip home that spurred all this introspection and aroused some unfinished business for me. As I was told in an email, Danny lived a rich and full life and I think he left a wonderful legacy of both what he did and who he was. I am not necessarily done thinking about these things but for now I am taking a break. There is life to be lived, art to think about and things to do. Thank you teejaybee for your kind thoughts and I am glad I wrote what I wrote. I am not a big fan of confessional writing or over-sharing and I don't feel like I did something cathartic but put down my thoughts in writing helped me sort out a lot and just admit a lot of what was floating around in my head.

I do want to share about my friend Steve who should also be honored and celebrated. Both these guys were exceptional people who I am so glad were in my life.

ta ta for now

I looked over my last bit of writing and have been thinking on the subject on how much we can know people or how much we should know them. One of the things that bothered me at Danny's funeral was people who went to me and asked about stories from when Danny and I were younger. Now I know that I was under a great deal of stress but for the life of me I felt like I had no real memories of Danny even though our lives were so parallel and we spent a great deal of time together. My stories and memories goes back to being under 7 years old and times the family went off to the emergency room for those typical boy type things boys do that get us into trouble. Danny tried to be superman from a couch to a top of a step and missed enough to cut through his lower lip or the time I was pushing him on a tricycle and ended up pushing him through a giant glass pane that miraculously missed hurting him or anyone else. We were the flag boys who were at elementary school to raise the flag in the morning and to lower it at the end of the day. We had adventures together, lost our virginity around the same time and just lived lives that crossed and crossed again. Yet I felt that I barely knew him. I guess it bothered me most that other people had insight to him and his life that I never knew. Stories I didn't know and for some neurotic reason I felt left out. The truth of the matter there are limits to how much we know anyone, and I believe there are healthy reasons for this. But in the throes of grieving I felt left out and missing something important. And of course I couldn't help but compare him to me a dangerous path to depression. I am not really a petty person but my depression reduces me to a form of self indulgent pettiness that I don't think I would find very attractive in anyone else. So I have to take this by the horns and accept the reality of the situation. While this writing is about me, but in the real world this is about Danny and the end of his life and the effects of his passing on the world. I have been very close to his family, his wife and I also went to school together and we were friends as well. I was around for the birth and major passages of his kids and I care deeply about them all. But now there is very little I can do for any of them but be there in some nebulous form as support and this frustrates me to no end. But I think too it is a deep neurotic need to be too much in their lives, beyond the proper boundaries, as if my involvement gives some validation to me. And that just isn't right. And it isn't something I will do but still have the feelings. Still I wish I could do more.

I hope you look up Danny's obits and check out a bit of his art. He was an interesting guy with great taste in art and a great eye for things on the horizon. His collection of neon is amazing and probably one of the finest private collections in Los Angeles. Even how he accumulated some of the pieces are great stories in of themselves.

As much as I have written there is so much more and should be as I can barely scratch the surface of someone as complex and complete as Danny was. And I am glad I am taking the time to do a little writing about him now.

ta ta for now

Lest you the reader think that I am simply doing a self absorbed spiel on my sorrows I want to share a small bit of the measure of my cousin Danny. http://blog-omotives.blogspot.com/2007/01/artistprankster-danny-finegood-loses.html

This article was one of dozens about him and the one of the marks he made on the world. I don't necessarily think it was the most important but it was the most visible. He changed the iconic Hollywood sign to spell Hollyweed and changed it on a few other occasions. Danny was an artist and person interested in the world about him, he combined the two to make his comment on current events in a way that was interesting and evocative. I loved Danny like a brother, I was the youngest of 4 sons and Danny was six months younger than me and we grew up together. Danny was something that I definitely did not see myself as, he was "cool" in so many ways. He also had the life that I felt was golden and I was quite envious of him, his relative prosperity, his ease with people, his travels and his seeming constant sense of success in his life. Marriage, home, family business these all seem to flow to him. But I was not jealous as he never had that "self entitlement" that you find with so many of the scummy yuppies in New York or elsewhere. He was always generous and kind in a modest way and was always very nice to me and made me feel good about me. I never understood his thinking that I was anything special but I treasured that about him. I know after people die there is a tendency to forget their faults and elevate all their positive attributes but with Danny, his faults were of the truly forgivable sort and his inner decency just overwhelmed the other stuff. So it was a tremendous shock to me to find out about his illness late in its progression and when I sped out to Los Angeles to see him, his physical condition left me stunned and in tears. The final big moment I had with him was to rush him with his wife to the same hospital where my father had passed away. I was not happy about that but we had no choice and I understand the place was much better than before, but the emotional reverberations were killing me. And the last time I saw him, he had remarked that he had trouble dealing with the random nature of events that were happening to him in that place. I did get to say goodbye but it seems that I am not healing as I would have thought.

Danny was special to me and I discovered to so many others and they knew him in ways and times I never had and got to see sides to him I will never get to. As I said before, family is important to me and Danny was very close family.

I don't really know why I am writing this, I am not saying it is to share, I guess in some ways it is about putting my thoughts down in way to confront them. I have said these things before to other people and the spiral of feelings is still spinning my core into some other place.

ta ta for now

After returning home from my trip to Los Angeles it has been suggested to me that I look for a grief counselor or group to deal with the death of my cousin and my friend about a year and half ago. Although I have been grieving both of them I have to admit that in fact I do find myself being very negative and feeling as if I am in a down portion of my long term depression cycle. Not something that I am unfamiliar with, as this is my lot in life. The cycles used to come faster and the bottom was deeper and seemed to last longer, I now have many more emotional tools to deal with this condition but right now or for awhile I have been somewhat unhinged or off balance. Part of it is the situation for me at work which was very positive for a moment and then the rug was pulled out and the situation went down quite rapidly and now we are being moved to new offices and I am going to be in an internal office with no windows in a room with a former friend who I can't stand now and the feeling is quite mutual. So I am not a happy camper, but that is beside the point, it is the fundamental issue of my loss that probably has been at the bottom of my current malaise. The feeling of lack of control which the death of my cousin and friend and the feeling of no power at work too is very frustrating and disturbing to me. I feel pushed along on the wheel of life with the passage of time and the approaching finality to life of others in my life and the positioning of me on that road trip to oblivion. I am of the school "do not go gently into the night", I hate the idea of my own demise and non being and the fear of no legacy scares me as I am frightened of being forgotten and unmourned. Having no kids with no continuity into the future bothers me a lot now as I get older. While I enjoy my art work it sets no mark in the world, it changes nothing and brings me no closer to some mythical greatness that would make some impression on the now and possibly into the future so someone will remember who I am or who I was as if this is monumental to the world, It is to me, and that my cousin who was six months younger than me and my friend who was my age are both gone scares the bejeesus out of me and disturbs me greatly and I feel at the same time the mournful loss of both of them. I missed out on my cousins life near the end, only to be shocked by the physical changes his illness wrought upon his body and the vulnerability of his condition. I got a little time before I took him to the emergency room to the hospital where his life ended. This was my previous real trip home, the next trip was to his funeral. My friend at least came to new york to visit the hospital so I could share his changes and share his life for that short time and his passing was also very difficult. The most painful part is as much as I could do for both of them, it all seemed so inadequate and I feel so pained and forlorn.

ta ta for now

Going on a trip to Los Angeles the place I was born and spent half my life and now I am about there to having spent more of my life away than there. It is always a strange experience to revisit ones home town when you haven't lived there for years, all that T. Wolfe stuff about never going home again and all that. I have these funny dreams from time to time that have me driving or walking through various neighborhoods that seem to be from my growing up in Los Angeles but the little bits I do remember are from what I can gather recollections of all the places I have lived. I do relish the fun of driving  a little bit, being a kid from LA meant that driving was part of ones rites of passage into adulthood and adventures usually started with driving somewhere. Adventures, losing ones virginity all that good stuff. I didn't lose my virginity in a car but a road trip was the beginning of that episode in my life. And some of the more interesting adventures I went on with my late cousin had to do with driving. Oddly I just learned that one of my age peers a fellow I knew from high school just recently passed away, the last time I saw him was at my cousins funeral which is also the last time I was in Los Angeles and is also the basis for some angst about the trip. There are still emotional reverberations from that time. I would not be me if were not the case.

I am also thinking about the next stage of my life, retirement, though I still have a few years to go, not that many as I would like to think. The question of where to live and what to do and what friends I really have, a question that bothers me as I don't really have that many close friends that I hang with. I have always been a solitary individual who was surprised to even be married. I am social enough and a friendly person but lack some quality that leads to bonding with people in ways that I leave me wondering about myself. I enjoy the relationships I have on-line, and am not a hermit just existing on-line bereft of any human company beside my wife but I do come close. The sad neurotic story of my life.

I guess that is one of the things that really bothers me about my losing my cousin as we were close but not close as I wish we had been, I wish I had been able to be there for him in more ways in the last phase of his life, I miss the opportunities I gave away to get to know him better or to share more time and life with him. We had so much history together throughout our lives, I was there during various important moments of his life, new wife, new houses, kids and even to some extent I did participate in the ending of his life but still I feel lacking. But it doesn't change my facile ways, I am no closer nor do I seek out anymore closeness or bonding than before. The human condition as a series of circumstances and happenstances as we lurch from moment to moment defining our lives. I am ever dissatisfied, forever on the verge of disappointment even as I feel great gratification with my minor triumphs. That is part of defining who I am and this is partly prompted by going back to the city of my origins.

I am in a melancholy mood, no matter.

ta ta for now

So now I am walking everyday and you can see my route which doesn't change., So I walk past the same places see the same things everyday but I don't. The river changes depending on the weather and the time and tides, boats come and go, the people on the promenade come and go and the flowers are blooming at different times. But best of all I notice the slight changes in the light as the season changes and how even with small variations of my starting time the light hits the buildings and the water in slight variable manner. As the old philosopher says, you can never go into the same river twice. So I start off with deja vu but in fact I am not seeing the same thing everyday. Photography has changed my perception of the world and the sensibility of light around me, and I look for those variations in the world for me to soak in as I travel. I want to see the differences I concentrate on the sensual experience of my walk. Yes health and exercise are at heart of my walks but it is the sensual experience which drives me. Sometimes I carry my camera sometimes not, though even there I take pictures again and again of the sunsets which still manage to move me. I feel a spiritual connection to those first plaine aire artists taking their easels out to the world to paint the light and the world around them. Those old guys who sat in the South of France to paint the light and harbors over and over again just to find the quality that moves them even if they have to paint the same scene over and over again calling them study number x through study x +y if you know what I mean. You keep diving into the moment just to see if you can find just one more element. Like sitting at a meal just licking the plates or sipping the dregs from the cups to see if you can get that last bit of taste or perhaps some new little taste. Isn't that what we do, taste the world and then describe the world to others through our pictures our writings our paintings, the list goes on. My teacher would say we are answering questions posed by the art, I don't know I am still learning.

Don't you sometimes wish you had that neurological disorder where you could taste the colors perhaps having beef sunsets or broccoli sunrises. Your dinners tastes blue or the chicken feels like it has spikes on your tongue. I would be interested in scrambling my sensory apparatus for short periods of time, and please don't mention drugs that was a time and life ago. And I am a drug tested employee, but theoretically I would find this fascinating.

Oh on the news is another crane collapse in New York City, it is bad enough that the greed has creating a soulless new New York which will only be the playground for the wealthy but they have to kill us to get there.

ta ta for now

That is how long it has been since I quit smoking, now this may seem to be very good but I haven't even hit my usual 3 year quit cycle. I am hoping and working on this being the final cycle and I have written about this before but I thought it was worth noting if only as a marker in my life.

I am very happy to report that I have now sent out poster size pictures to parts of America and to Australia where I am happy to say they were well received. To me size does matter at least when I am envisioning scaling things up or down. My fantasy is to have one of my pieces up on the side of a building in one of those major sized murals. But for now I am content with what I have been able to accomplish.

My goal for this summer is to visit a number of museums and galleries if possible. I need to see more art to recharge my batteries. And I have a wonderful book on photography that was a present that I should start seriously going through and studying the elements of the works inside to help me absorb some of the issues involved in creating something I like in this medium. Even photoshop works usually for me have to start with an interesting image, I don't really make up stuff from scratch though there are some great digital artists I have met that can do that. But for me I still want or need to have something that catches my eye.

You know I wrote this whole post about asking you the readers what you are about, of course the usual suspects answered and I got one new response from someone I hadn't heard from before but it is frustrating to me to not get some dialog going though it could be argued that we are indeed having a dialog through our images and videos and audio file. Still I am left a bit frustrated. I also had lots of ideas for posting this week and almost all of them have left the building.

Oh those of you who still dabble on flickr I am having lots of fun exploring my statistics which is an interesting feature they have, primarily from the referring URL which for me is primarily flickr and images.google.com so I look up the search terms that are used to find my works. I wrote before I showed up heavily on some pornographic search terms though that is not the nature of my images, it was due to comments left by one of my contacts. But now I find that if you search for "top ten male models" one of my images shows up, or "male beauty or male model" and again there I am. Pretty good for a middle aged guy who feels a bit flabby in life.

ta ta for now

Those darn medical numbers again

Done with school, summer is now in session. And if you look at my pictures I now have up pictures of my final art project, the "thingasaurus" which is my representation of some type of animal creature. I was told that is was truly a larryosan type creation. There were some real kick ass creations from the kids but as I used to say about my acting, "I may not be a "star" but my acting is definitely my own". So this may not rock the art world but is truly me. A certain whimsy factor and some different approaches to the subject matter.

As I said before I got an A in programming and who knows how I will do in the art class, but as I said in a letter to the head of the art department that this part of school has been the most gratifying. I really love how the art classes have made me feel so good, full filled and happy. In fact the last conversation with my previous art teacher Mr. Haske who by the way can be googled, "Joseph Haske" is really interesting. He said when you go to art school you join another family that includes Rembrandt and van gogh, you may not be as famous or even talented as they were but you are now part of that legacy and part of that conversation. they are now one of your families. It really stopped me and sent a shiver up my spine. I told his how important it was to me to be able to talk to working artists, no matter what level my involvement was, in that it gave me a sounding board for these issues that are common to all artists. I needed that element in my life. As I do here, to express the things that trigger new thoughts or problems I want to address in my art or writing or however I wish to express that element of creativity that resides in me.

ta ta for now

I have taken a bit of a break on doing my postcards to the point that Amiko thought I was stopping. I had to write that in fact I wasn't but just having other things to do right now. I am very happy and pleased to find out that I got an A in my flash programming class, something that I felt was beyond me but wanted to try it out anyway. I find it hard to think like a programmer, or at least like my buddy who is one at work. But the way I wrote my programs was to think of each part as a little machine that I linked together to build the bigger machine. I kept thinking in terms of types of circuits that I learned about when I studied to be an electronic technician. And it worked well enough to get me through the class and do very well. Now I have to finish my sculpture class which has also been a challenge as I don't really think in three dimensions and it is extremely difficult for me to envision that way. I have two more projects to have finished and one class to do it all.

I hope you like my latest offerings on my photostream. I particularly like my self portraits with the postcards sent to me by Amiko and TomSwift46 both of which were very interesting and I wanted to show how much I liked them in a way that had my larryosan stamp on it. I think I did that and got what I wanted.

I also have some stuff from a dance performance done at the World Finance Center Winter Garden which is celebrating its 20th anniversary with art projects. This piece was done with local people one of whom I know so I went to the last two performances and quite enjoyed the work. I posted a few more pics up at flickr than I did here but put more thought into the titles here and posted my video here, I probably won't at flickr.

I look forward to the summer, I hope to take more outdoor pics, make some more postcards and in general spend this time in some form of creative activity.

ta ta for now

I am a very lucky guy, so far I have gotten cards back from Amiko and now from TomSwift46. One set were fascinating in their artistic intent through painting, the others very smart and funny through design. I am both honored and happy to have begun and have been the recipient of this artistic dialog. I see lots of very young talented kids at school doing their art and go back and forth about my offerings. But it really doesn't matter whether or not I ever decide that question, as my teacher says, in the creation it is the art, the finished work is simply a piece of artistic work. The value of my "art" is somewhere between worthless and priceless. For now it is all priceless to me, primarily as it is what the process of creation does for my life. That is truly right now where the value of art is for me.

ta ta for now

Last night I went to see "Waiting for Hockney" the story of a young man who spent 8 years on one piece of art and went to great lengths to meet David Hockney who he was convinced would understand and appreciate who he was and what he had done. At the end I told the director and producer that I thought they had done a wonderful job telling the story, it was suspenseful and engaging and fun. While the story was centered on the world of art, the underlying theme was the need for validation for our endeavors. At one point one of the people said, everything we produce is valued somewhere between worthless up to priceless. Now anyone who has read my writings you know that I spent a great deal of time wondering about my own validity by looking to image views and views of my body of works. As if numbers could provide the measure of the quality or worth of my product. Well that was what this young artist was caught up with, though he had higher aspirations than me, actually finding a way to have David Hockney take the time to view his piece of art and relate his views on the work itself. I won't tell you how it turns out, though if this movie comes to a theater near you I would urge you to see it.

I haven't sent out any postcards lately, I am nearing the end of the school semester and I am working hard to finish up my school work so I can get good grades. As I have said before, I love school, especially my art classes. I even went to the length to write the head of that department to let them know how much I have appreciated the instruction and intellectual stimulation I have gotten by members of the art department. I have enjoyed my computer classes but it is the art class that really rocks my boat. Even if I don't always feel confident to be able to do the work.

If you visit my pictures here or on flickr, (same name by the way larryosan) you will notice that I have lots of flower pictures. The winter here was not hard, but it was long and it seems that spring has just exploded with trees loaded down with flowers, large swatches of color along the roads and in all the planters near public spaces. I have just loved all the color so I have been snapping away, I use a particular technique pushing my camera zoom all the way to get those in the flower pictures. It has been pretty gray outside for this week, but it is still beautiful with lovely soft white diffuse light everywhere. Even the most mundane of views seem wonderful to me right now.

My sculpture teacher gave me a bunch of art magazines a small box of old postcards and stamps and we won a couple more tickets to movies from the Tribeca film festival so life is good.

ta ta for now

Amiko Postcards Rock and I Rule the Amiko Collecting World. Or So I Say!

Other than the fact that I am attending a couple of movies I don't really have much to say about the film festival. While I enjoy watching movies and after taking a number of acting classes and doing a bit of acting my tastes have become a little more stringent over the years, I can't claim any great knowledge of movies. I am going to see "Waiting for Hockney" and "A portrait of Deigo" both in the documentary area which is what I enjoy these days. Last year I saw a movie about Sam Wagstaff which was fascinating. I have also seen an updated Zatoichi which was a real treat and very interesting as I used to go and see the original Zatoichi movies at a little theater called the Toho La Brea with my brother who turned me onto Samurai movies and I have some posters from that period from Zatoichi and the Assassin with a son series, "Lone Wolf" I think it was. Not the bastard version they butchered for American screens. I loved the cinematography of those films, the countryside and the period costumes and the various characters. I also got to see a move called Planet B Boy which was a documentary about dancers from around the world. It was shown on this giant outdoor screen they set up behind the World Finance Center and show movies for free. Very cool and I got some nice pictures as well from the experience. With all the building in the area, the festival is showing more movies out of the area, that is ok I think overall the whole thing is kind of nice for everyone.

The other nice thing is how spring is just popping out with new plants abounding planted by our local conservancy and the trees are filling out, it is just life renewing after a very long winter, though not a harsh winter it just dragged on and on.

ta ta for now