It will be you, Seven. In another twenty years.

Stan obviously you must meet this person you encountered at the post office. He is a kindred spirit, whether he speaks gobaldy-gook or not. Your mystery versus his.

Perhaps he is one of your relatives, seven who floated down here for the divine spirals. I am curious about the invented languages... I checked at the PO and it turns out he is a high number, recent vintage arrival.

When I first got here in 1986 we had less than 300 folk, now it's over a thousand. Not that Fingernails is the perfect place to squat. But the breeding frenzy drives the herd into the furthest corners now.

Well it's balmy and bright here today. I'm watering the dust in hopes of a blade or two of grass. At night the air is rich with a scent of wood incense and peaches, indefinable freshness of mysterious tiny things pushing forth into life.

In twenty years, Lex, I will be dust.

Seen any coyote lately, S'tan? I hear there is an overabundance out there recently.

All the coyote have moved to Provincetown.

Yes, Bobby, but they all tell me that is because of your resemblance to a tasty rabbit.

Binky, Pearl and Beauregard scare the coyotes away. Esp. Binky he is turning feral and vicious!!! He will do badly in the kennel as I'm travelling...

There isn't a Goodie party. Foxy got pneumonia and the schedule went off... and now Romy had to leave town for family things.

Oh well I'll go see all the doctors and hairdressers and fancy restaurants though not knowing where my next meal would come from...

We manufactured our lives
In this New York. Not knowing when our
Next meal would come we knew it would be in a
Fancy restaurant if we just wore the right clothes
And trusted our wisecracks. And beauty we knew
Was just a matter of the right angle and lighting

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No Goodie party at the garden on 2nd Street?!
Boo. Better to do it sooner rather than later. The hideous building that took five years to build right across the street from the garden is now open for 'Luxury Rentals'. That means any party that is thrown at the garden will run in to noise complaints by people who shouldn't even be living on 2nd Street. Or else they will all be walking across the street to be voyeurs.

Anyway, the old town could use an influx of your energy.

I am safely now back in FIngernails after gritting my teeth through my entire bloodie stay in the olde shitasse towne.

Did more people move to NYC or what in the last six months. I could barely walk down the sidewalks... completely unacclimated now to being in crowds, and suffering humanity walking on my heels and bellowing at each other over the traffic or into cell-phones...

I had fun for about 3 days shopping, then I started imagining I'd never get out, red alert and the bridges and tunnels shut down like on 9/11/2001.... and what was I thinking, is my house safe and I kept thinking --
WHAT AM I DOING>>> WHY AM I HERE>>>>
WHY BOTHER>>>

Everyone I spoke to is having landlord meltdown stories. Sad but ultimately boring: WHY FALL FOR THE CON? The real estate maket there is DEMONIC.
As in banal and stupid money-grubbing, not the interesting iconoclasm of S'tan Demonic.

I'm having a solar hot water system put in...
Turns out the Federal Gov't has woken up and will subsidize the job at 33% rebate!... The plumber today told me everyone he knows is doing it... with the price of gas and propane going up
up up and no end in sight.
There's nothing like being "off the grid!"

That's another thing about NY ... the hideous interconnectivity of services. Too much out-of-control-reality there for me anymore.

Sorry guys if I missed seeing you.
Now you'll just have to come see me.

The Goodie girls will be out here I think this summer, and we'll have a party then...
with We, Ourselves and Thee online.

Love,
S'tan

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Bravo! You got it right honey. I don't miss all those things about NYC. I love living somewhere else or is that " elsewhere" ?

Or maybe we just grew up and realized that city life is for the kids.

Like 7 said, NY can use an influx of my energy. Exactly. Key words being: USE -- MY -- ENERGY.
Of course it can USE USE USE, and what does one get back. The specious pleasure/status of 'making it' in Hell.

NY was always an uphill struggle but there was always MORE fun and moments of success... always new creative interesting people gravitating there. But now I don't even think it's for kids anymore Bobby. Unless they are rich rich rich.

I had/have rich friends and poor friends there. Everyone had landlord issues, but nothing like now. The poor get poorer... I even have a friend who IS a landlord, and she's depressed about it. Faced with raising rents on people, friends she know can't afford it. Facing $1700 a month for a place 9 stops out on the L train. Because of taxes, insurance, bullshit all through the roof.

I can't blame my last landlord for selling that little old cute loft dump on 26th Street for $5 million and moving permanently to
Aspen. He got free and now I realize,
so did I.

xoxoxoxo LOVE!!!!

I wonder what artists living and working in London, a city far more expensive than NYC, would think of this thread. What would Justin Bond say? I've been having the "New York is too expensive to survive as an artist" discussion since 1988. Granted the scale is much bigger now, and the Guiliani years stole things that may never return. Yet I am still here after all this time, striving to carve out my own little niche in the creative landscape. Listening to the sound of crickets in some peaceful country abode is a necessary now-and-then. But as an artist my muse still lies in the towers of this stinky, unnatural concrete Hell. So, for better or for worse, here I stay.

At the center of it all is the love affair one has with Manhattan. Are you still in love or not? Once the romance leaves your heart, the marriage is over. But as you sign the divorce papers remember that it takes two to tango. I guess I'm just not over having Sweeney Todd on Broadway or the latest Martin McDonough play or The Armory opening or the Westminster Dog Show Finals or Antony & the Johnsons at Town Hall or Happy Valley or the World Famous BOB's shaking tits all just a 5-minute cab ride away. Or the ocean a short train ride away in summer. Hell, I still get flutters hearing traffic outside my window and seeing the Empire State Building lit up in the night sky while watching my dog play. Maybe it's fantasy. Maybe it's addiction. Either way I still dig it.

I kept thinking Bobby was writing me but it's you!
I am glad for you and there is no doubt NY is Fun City.
But when circumstances force you out there is something else at work that you see.
Bobby and I both had to go because there were too many factors working against us there.
Living in an apartment all your life can be a drag... I almost left ten times and planned for this so I am done, its imperatives seem immaterial and a relief to ignore.

You also have to ask yourself, how much work do you get done every day on art. How often do you write. I'm just saying think about it and add it up.

Survival is tough, always was, and as you say yes now it is worse. Every day another strata of people can;t make it there. The middle class leaves,which includes most working artists.
But! f you are rich you do not haveto consider survival. Surviving in NY is another kind of life.
When you are a freelancer and suddenly you can't make it -- what are you going to do, have a roommate at 40?

I have been reading Hunter Thompson on the death of culture and he calls them "greedheads." The rule of Moloch started in the 80s and this is the grand denouement, for me anyhow. I came I saw I conquered. Then I got fucked.

Bobby has been 'out' longer than I have. He and I came to NY at exactly the same time. We are the same age and fled under the force of deleterious circumstance. Now we both are out -- it feels great, expansive. Being a consumer of culture in other ways. Reading... For me, it is really something powerful to have Bobby be supportive.

The town just makes me paranoid, the last months there were a nightmare of greedhead landlording... That film, "The War of the Worlds" is an apt metaphor. Something inhuman you can't communicate with that sucks your life blood. For 30 years I could find inexpensive commercial rent. Now you have to buy @ 1/4 Mil.

Yeah, it's an addiction baby and a good one: The Con That Is New York.
I love the past I had there.
I hope you are able to survive there a while longer, not be driven off
by the greedheads, can choose to go (if ever).

love xoxoxox S'tan

My darling S'tan, you know it so well. I agree with eveything you say. When I return there now, it seems like a slow motion dream to me. The New York City that I live in in my memory is better than the real version now. But it thrills me to think about the new young kids that succeed in coming to the city and finding a safe niche to survive in. It means there is hope. I don't want to think that it's over for Manhattan, just that it's tranforming itself into another great period of exciting artistic expression, which may take awhile, with a lot of sand papering until it's smooth and beautiful once again.
But I also think the entire planet is going through the fire too.
As Bowie said " Changes.."

Working on this new solar installation I am talking to alot of salt-of-the-earth guys, plumbers, propane gas guys, etc. Everyone is talking Apocalypse. No-one can believe the prices being thrown at us... Copper pipes are up 300% for example. All resources are becoming scarce and very expensive. Yes Bobby, the whole planet IS under the fire.... One guy diatribed about bombing Iran, and NO he wasn't for it... It is really something to see these types going liberal... AND solar! They all congratulate me on getting solar electric 16 years ago, though back then they would have been smirking and calling me a nut. The electric company used to come to my house every few months and try to *talk me into* going on the grid. Dumasses, now they are all trying to get up to speed.

Solar water heating is so easy and efficient it is a no-brainer. There is no reason at all to use oil-based products to heat water!

http://www.omega2000group.com/product_info.php?products_id=54

Some people will tell you i"  costs $10K to start up, but I've googled and got the figures down to $3K with install. Plus the State now gives you the 30% tax rebate.

http://www.emnrd.state.nm.us/emnrd/ecmd/SolarTaxCredits/SolarTaxCredits.htm

This is for N.Mex., but I think every state has something like this now.

When working people are paying a week's salary for their monthly gasoline use, they *suddenly* realize something is deeply fucked and wake up " o the real world... We have to stop raping the planet, she can't and won't take it anymore.

The sun on the other hand is Appollonian, detached, generous, inexhaustible.

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"He Struck and Missed"

Storms lingering over the mesa, all my desert flowers getting a soaking
to wake at dawn unnaturally lush and brilliant... Drive 20 miles south and it's wind-blowing dusty-storming, rain-clouds skitter off to head north and linger over the dammed lake, and suck up bucketfuls to drench my mesa.

When it blows too violently or rains torrentially, my phone is full of static, or dies. I'd had no telephone service for two days.
One and a half miles of line just to service my house, I don't think they bothered to bury it too deep. Just in case a few more folk move up here. Well it took eight years for them to get the phone up here, and it's been another eight and not another soul's shown up... so bury the damned lines already.

For repair I call "Valor Telecom" -- really one of the worse phone companies in the USA.
When Garrett and I accidentally overused the dial-up, and a bill came for $1300., they only reduced it to $700. This was after about twenty screaming cursing phone calls and they still cut off the long distance. Who cared anyhow, because ha ha we discovered Zaptel.com and their 1.9 cent a minute thank you deal...

But Valor's servicemen are totally great pioneer-like dudes, roaming the hills and mesa and arroyos, seeking out the little stranded wires that bring the lonesome freaks back into civil-eye-zation. How many times has Eduardo come up here and found the spot where the road-grader slashed the line - again. Or once dug up a quarter mile of line, looking for the spot a packrat or jackrabbit gnawed.
Today he spent at least 6 hours stomping up and down the mesa and wouldn't take a soda or a beer.

He told me lightning had struck the switching box down at the end, where my line branches off solo from the other folks. He fixed that charred box, but still I'm not getting a tone.
He checks out the box on the side of my house, and calls me out to show me its black charcoaled interior.
"Someone's been barbecuin'," he laughed. I was stunned...
lightning had danced all around the mesa two nights ago, but nary a flash by the house. Or so I dreamed.

Even worse, when we check all the phones in the house, two extensions are working... but the third, my pretty retro wall-phone next to the pink bathtub... there's a faint fan of black charcoal all around it.
I lift it off the wall... the back of the phone is melted and burnt.

I felt like I did the time the enormous Penitente crucifix I'd placed on
the altar in Stephen's church flung itself at me, and I ducked it by a hair.
Once more had the Wrath taken aim at me - and missed.

I could have been luxuriously wallowing in the tub - just about my only luxury lately - a nightly big tubful of spring water from the aquifer - chatting away nonsensically on the deadly phone. Been fried in an instant. Probably blown up the gas hot water heater too.
And the cats astonished. And my friends going,
Oh S'tan, she loves to be alone... doesn't matter if we don't hear from her for three months. Meanwhile the cats would go truly feral and finish up eating me before taking over the mesa.

S'tan my darling, it all sounds so amazing and powerful out there. I keep you in my thoughts and rituals to the Goddess. You sound clear and sharp and fully awake I must say. It is my birthday and I am sizzling like hot wire myself. And Neptune has gone retrograde...uh oh!

sending you love and kisses. xoxox B.

Lightening, I think, is the state flower. When I was there last September I was caught on a 7,000 foot elevation ridge in one of those storms. Spent one hour running down it with lightening exploding the mesquite on either side of me. I was hoping it didn't have a taste for the electrically charged video cam in my pack. Devilland. And I laughed with that just-escaped-death-again exhaustion at the bottom of the ridge. I think that lightening just likes being close to the spark in your heart S'tan.

eeeehhhhwwww cher fantasiste distingue, let's not get hit by lightning.
Sometimes you don't die but sizzle on in a hideous state, paralyzed, etc...
I heard of a woman who got struck out in the desert and crawled out
2 miles and cannot speak a full sentence anymore.
I am sure it's the State Flower for her... grave.

Walter de Maria's "Lightning Field" sculpture--

http://www.lightningfield.org/

$250. to sit in a little room and see the 400 aluminum poles go zip-zap...

Happy Birthday Bobby! Sizzle badizzle and razzle dazzle on!

Being alone on the mesa is fantastique but once you get off, this place is not that great. Many of its denizens are nightmarish. You cannot believe how they drive.

Today I counted TEN ROADKILL
in the half-hour drive to work. Gore every three minutes. Cat, dog, rabbit, raccoon, skunk, rabbit, jackrabbit, cat, dog, dog...
Once I actually saw some charmer SWERVE TO HIT A SQUIRREL.
Apparently they consider it a sport... and unmacho to tie up their pets.

Yesterday one idiot in a F-150 pulls out onto the highway with his dog happily leaping all around... Cars are careening and screeching and trying to avoid the dancing dog...
the guy just drives away and leaves
his pet wagging his tail in the middle of the road.

The other thing N.Mex. dickhead drivers like to do is play chicken.
You're zipping along and up ahead you see someone waiting to pull out onto the highway.
They wait until you get close to them, THEN they start pulling out at fucking
TEN MILES AN HOUR so you have to deaccelerate from 70 to 30.
Look at their faces, they're grinning with sadism as you shriek and curse and honk.
They want you to hit their shabby car so they can sue you for a new one.

My last 18-mile stretch of road before home is nicknamed "Blood Alley"... decorated with roadkill, and those cute flowery crosses
that show where human gore prevailed, and a fanciful cop or two going 90 and ignoring
the other Corona-crazed speeders.

Blood Alley has again earned its illustrious name --
at 10 PM last Monday evening a young State Trooper came round a blind bend without his seat-belt on, and flew through the windshield as his black-and-white plowed into a DEAD COW lying on the roadway -- that some thoughtful previous traveller had left behind. Not that you can call anyone from Blood Alley. It's a cell-phone dead zone.

"Though the officer tried to avoid the cow, his State Police car struck it and rolled over several times, ejecting him onto the roadway.

"A northbound Nissan Ultima then struck him, and the driver of that vehicle remained on the scene. He told investigators that within five minutes another northbound vehicle, a Jeep SUV, came on at high speed and struck the officer again, dragging him some distance, and then fled the scene."

The officer had served a tour of duty in Iraq and was still in local active duty reserves in the Marines.

Brought down by errant beef on the hoof and a pair of out-of-control gas-guzzlers.

Adjunct article: "Loose livestock on highways cause 700-900 accidents per year in New Mexico -- primarily mule deer, pronghorn elk, black bear and mountain lion cause fatalities."

This article was embellished with a horrific image of the hind legs of a deer sticking out of
a windshield, at just such an angle you knew it was face to face with a defunct motorist.

Let us not forget however a sometimes greater terror: WHITE PLASTIC SHOPPING BAGS...
those small flimsy things fly across the road constantly and stick in the cactus and
trees everywhere... and send me into a swivet when I'm driving late at night.

I had just watched "CRASH" again, twice, on a Cronenberg kick -- when this accident was in the news.
Violent choreography well-visualized, a seat-beltless victim cannonballing through a windshield. We all have this fetishism for the car, speed, traffic accidents...
but can't admit it. The car cannot be given up. No matter how much gas costs, we
have to speed at 70 MPH to go wherever...
"the modification of the human body by technology," seems how cool --
as long as you end up just modified.

Just to consider this 27-year old Dad of two, handsome young Hispanic shot out of
his primo vehicle...tangling with beef, battered twice by crazed gasoline engines...
after surviving the blood-for-oil nightmare. Shot out onto the haunted maelstrom made of the curves of Blood Alley's free American roadway.

The next day there are chalk lines and arrows and encircled shapes on the death-spot...
here's where the cow was, another shape, a leg? a circle for a head...
the asphalt glittering broken glass spectacular in the morning sun.
Already the pathetic cross is up, covered with flowers.

Two days later I'm driving out of town around 5 PM, there's what looks like 100s of cops in full dress blacks standing out on that bloody bend. As I head south I pass dozens more cop cars, all heading for the next-to-the-road memorial service, as it turns out.

So this week the Police Blotter is full of reports of calls made to police on that day that were never answered.
Well what the hell, just another bunch of the same overdoses, same wives beating the same old husbands, crank calls about people smoking pot, and needles in the shrubs at Long John Silver's. And Espanola's "Foremost Drunk" hassling people again at Lowe's SuperSave.
Was anyone going to speed to save their sorry asses

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ah real life, merlin remembers. no fashion news? no gossip about who is dating whom? no art news? just the local police blotter?

you are in the middle of no where.