The war, or something, has been very good to Washington, DC. There are construction cranes everywhere, if seems, and new glass-skinned buildings are blooming almost everywhere. If there was ever a panic about being too close to the White House or to the Congress or to anywhere in DC that might inspire some nut with an atomic bomb, those days are now gone. You should come here and buy a place to live. It's nice. There are lots of young people with small dogs and small children and it is affordable with most apartments starting in the low 800s. And if there is to be terror here, at least it will be quick and probably painless.

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He was just a guy, just a guy falling down, little by little, falling away, a piece of unfinished business.

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What does it mean to be a part of everything around us instead of just being a casual observer, a remote engine, taking in selected pieces and overlooking everything else? What is it like to participate in full instead of being detached, lost in some interior monolog? Maybe it would be too overwhelming, too much information coming at us too fast to understand; I'd like to know what it would be like anyway. I'd like to know what it would have felt like to have been among the first to experience the garden in full, to be in a place where everything was always new, always different in subtle ways, always amazing and sublime.

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It is said that rust never sleeps. If that is so, then to me it is obvious that while its awake rust is busy being creative on many levels. It makes ever changing art with texture and with color and with suggested shapes and tones and then eventually it destroys what it has created and what was once solid becomes, over time, nothing but dust. If you have the patience, you can witness the entire process from beginning to end. And if you are observant, you'll eventually notice that the rules that pertain to base metal also apply to all of us as well.

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Still Life with Pissoirs. This one is very old style and maybe that's why I like it. What we have here is basic functionality. No glitz. No add ons. Just the facts, ma'am. The most outrageous "neccessary" I've had the pleasure to use was at a dance club in New York a few years back. The gentlemen stood back from a cascading water fall, a sheet of flowing water that entered about a foot above one's head and emptied seamlessly about a foot from the floor. It was a rediculous waste of city water, but was impressive and offered a memorable, if not entirely dry, experience. They don't make them like they used to, or more to the point, probably, I don't go to where they are installed anymore. I'm too busy to be wowed by a urinal. Just give me the facts and let me go on my way.

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If I had my way, everyone would drive a red car. They're easy to see. And everyone would live in pink buildings because I think they look cheery and people who live in them must be in a good mood as they head out to get into their red cars to go to work or drive to the parking lot, or zip along on the highway to another state. If everything was made simpler like that, people would'nt have to think so much. There would be fewer choices, sure, but the choices would be easier to make: this red car or that red car. There would be more time to think about other things like "When was the last time I phoned home?" On the downside: Valentine's day wouldn't be special at all. It would be just another red/pink day, just like any other.

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Well, at least he's up front about it. You have to admire that fact.

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She said: "In any crowded public space it is likely that there will be one person who is crippled by dispair; another will have given up hope. In that same place, however, there will be someone who has discovered real joy for the first time; someone else will have found the courage to live life as truely it shoud be lived: with love. As for you, you will find yourself somewhere between these other people, suspended, waiting for a signal, ready for whatever comes next."

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Rain, New York, 1971

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17th Street, NW hardly looks like the nerve center of a war machine

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Kent State, 05/04/70

Something profound changed on 4 May 1970, for me and for lots of other college aged kids then. The massacre at Kent State demonstrated in a very real way that, yes, it was possible that America's young men could be ordered to shoot dead other unarmed young men and women and that the young people with attack weapons would follow those orders. The kid gloves were off. We were now at war with each other. The Kent State deaths followed the murders of Rev. Martin Luther King and of Robert Kennedy, but these murders were of grown men gunned down by other grown men. It was somehow different that the National Guard, made up of young people not much older than the students at Kent State, could shoot down their own, no matter where they stood regarding the war in Vietnam, or anything else for that matter. I can't think of any other like incident that was as appalling as the murders at Kent State because this was not an act of crazy people or of terrorists; the shootings were from neighbors or friends or cousins or brothers. This was an act of nightmarish insanity. This was American eating itself alive. This was the corner that we should not have turned, but did.

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George Washington has the most visible and, I think, best designed memorial in the country.

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