Look, all the balloons and bunting are gone and the country’s getting down to business. The inauguration is over, right. But can I help it if I’m still excited? This post as been clotting the hose for me all week — I haven’t been able to think about anything else until I got this thing out. So forgive me if it seems like old news, it’s just too amazing to let it all go …

We spent the night before the inauguration in a federal judge’s chambers *right* next to the White House. The chambers were in the Court of Federal Claims, which is attached to Dolly Madison’s house, right next to Lafayette Square. Here’s a map.

This is the (blurry, crappy, yet panoramic) view from our window:
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So, I have a cold. Or something. And it effing SUCKS.

I’m on day 5 (or so) of this weird illness that appears to be using a random symptom generator each morning. Today, I practically need to take direct snorts of menthol or pepper spray or sulfuric acid just to smell or taste anything, and it feels like I’m sucking in a quarter pound of sand every time I open my mouth to take a breath, only to erupt in a wheezy coughing jag when all I wanted was some sweet, sweet oxygen.
But lucky me, formerly-DC-but-now-LA-based artist — and apparently very funny dude — Zach Storm has my remedy. In 20 easy steps, Zach has the cure for the common whatever, and I love him for it. Here we go:

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The Obama administration’s really well known for their use of amateur video, citizen journalism and Internet social media. And they’re also really well known for doing their homework ahead of time, too.

I was at my friends Damon and Katie’s last night, as were producers from several major TV networks. Apparently they are being mandated to generate “cutaway footage” of pro-Obama inaugural parties on Tuesday night — just folks in their homes whooping and hollering and celebrating.

So when Brian Williams or whoever says “and here’s what’s going on in Washington tonight,” they can show handmade footage on home cameras. This footage will also be shown on Jumbotron screens at Inaugural balls around the city — showing the suckers who paid $500 bucks for a ticket that there’s a good time to be had for free.

So the producer set up a little camera and said “I’m taping some ‘live footage’ right now. Grab that Obama cutout and get some music going and let’s look lively.”

Somebody put Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing” on the karaoke machine and a party full of folks sang loud and tumbled around, dancing with a life-size cardboard replica of Obama. I was one of those people.So if you happen to be watching sometime Tuesday night, keep your grapes peeled. I’ll be the guy with the Obama sign bumping his head on the rafters.

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You may have heard by now that an airplane made a stunning, safe crash landing into the Hudson River this afternoon. Here’s the plane’s flight path from La Guardia, created by Flickr user Imjustsayin:

I saw this from my office window, sort of. Aircraft go up and down the Hudson River all the time, and I remember looking out the window and thinking “Man, that plane is kinda low. I wonder what’s on Twitter?” and then going back to my computer. A fw minutes later I saw a post about the crash and thought “is this for real?”

Then a bunch of my co-workers came right up into my office and started pointing out the window. A building blocked the view of the plane itself, but we could see the ferry and police boats moving around. I work for a cable company, so you know every screen was on CNN moments after that.

Whenever anything bad and big happens in New York, everyone thinks the same thing: “Oh God. Is it another terrorist attack?” The feeling is sudden and irrational, but very powerful and VERY real. And the more people around, the more it’s magnified.

Our CEO’s security guy used to be in NYPD counterterrorism. That guy ALWAYS knows who to call. He made a quick call and told us it was a bird, then said “I know this sounds messed up, but really, this is the best body of water in the world for a plane to crash into. They got the NYPD port right down there, and those ferries comin’ back and forth to Jersey all day long. They’ll be on it fast.”

And they were, too. It’s so amazing, how everyone was saved to quickly and with so few injuries. I stood there, looking out my window like the thousands of New Yorkers who had a view, and all I could do was fantasize about helping. I had this vision of yanking off my tie and diving into the drink.

Instead I stood there and fidgeted with my pen, then went to a meeting. Nobody could really pay attention either. Someone from our office was on the flight. She was fine, like everyone else, just taken to the hospital and treated for a 3rd-degree case of cold and wet and terrified.

It’s a beautiful impulse, really, the human impulse to get involved. It means we care about people that aren’t in our immediate circle. It means that even in a town teeming with dirt, money and murder, at some level we’re all on the same team.

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Flipping through my Flickr contacts, I was chuffed to discover that our lad Poster Boy has been collaborating with another practitioner of imprompru aesthetic interventions, tape-slinger Aakash Nihalani:



There are more on Nihalani’s website, under STREET ART > COLLAB.

Chances are, if you have working eyeballs and have been around northwestern Brooklyn or lower-mid-Manhattan lately, you’ve seen Aakash Nihalani’s tape-cubes. The things that I enjoy about his work are things that I myself gravitate toward in my own art-activity: bright colors against dull city surfaces, and simple gestures which serve to highlight and elevate small details that would otherwise seem insignificant. (And I also, obviously, have an affinity for colored tape as an artist material.)

Here are a couple of videos that I found of Aakash in action:

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I snapped this piece of street art at the corner of Keap and Hope streets on the way to the subway a while back. It’s gone now — but I love stuff like this: poppy, sloppy, drippy, heavy-handed. So good …

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There were two good things about my apartment in Virginia:

The rent was only $175 a month, and Brad the landlord never came over. Ever. Or so we thought. This seemed ideal at the time, as I was using the living room as a painting space in addition to training live chickens to play keyboards in the living room. The less company, the better.

But like so much else in the world, the good and bad parts of that situation were horribly entangled.

We’d moved into the place in a hurry in the dead of an unusually cold winter – which served to keep the smell down.

But along with spring rains came this smell. This creeping, gnarly smell would wind its funky hand into the house and right into our nostrils like filthy phantom fingers picking up a bowling ball. It reeked of sloth and despair – powerful and pungent and musty all at once, like manure without any of the fertility or any potential.

You’d think you’d drowned it out or think it went away, but it was just always there, a brown undercoating that informed colors and flavors and wormed its way into your freaking dreams. Sometimes a homeless teenaged kid would sleep on our back porch under the window. One rainy morning I heard him say “Oh GOD it smells bad out here.” It happened whenever the air was especially humid, right after a rain, or on foggy mornings.

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At some point in late November, I just put on the sweatpants and got real, real comfy. And now that I’m ashamed enough of my self to take them off, I’m a little scared that my skin’s grown right into the fabric.

Creatively speaking, mind you. I’d no more wear a pair of sweatpants than a terrycloth diaper with a pair of crocs.

But the fact is, I just up and quit writing in this blog for a long, long time. And you know what? It felt pretty great. No pressure to post, no trying to strip-mine my life for something interesting to write about. Just getting on the subway and thinking about nothing at all, just taking it easy.

If somebody had told me back in November not to post so much as a pixel until after Christmas, I’d probably have been more prolific than ever. But that’s not exactly how it worked out.

It wasn’t an intentional layoff at all. But I think a number of things accumulated and ground me to a pretty effective halt. Here’s a few of them:
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