She says how good it is

to finally meet you, how

she listens to your bells

every time you enter your front door.

“Bells? I don’t have any,” you say.

You aim your keys, your keys only

at the turn of the door. She must

be listening to another tune.

like a little range of volcancitos,

plates shifting thirty-one times a day

the bull is gaping

eating all the sun without chewing

still as a snapshot

it sounds like rain

around me, no water

only the clicking cascade

of fifty tourist’s cameras

I can hear prehistoric greetings

gassing out of his fixed caricature

“Where is your time machine?

Did you bring the grandchildren?”

daguerreotype, 5×4 inches

Artist Alex Podesta’s loses big rabbits in studio fire.
Posted by The Times-Picayune March 20, 2008
By Doug MacCash
Arts writer

It was a very strange sight. On Tuesday afternoon, 10 of artist Alex Podesta’s mannequin-like sculptural self-portraits lay on wooden pallets near the loading dock of the ArtEgg Studios — the old American Beauty warehouse on Broad Street. They were smoke-stained from the fire that had broken out in Podesta’s studio the night before, and wet from the sprinkler system and Fire Department hoses that had prevented the blaze from spreading to the other 49 studios in the 1892 structure. Read more.

Select Alex Podesta’s category on the left to view more of his work.

gentrification
remember, way back in seventh grade, when you liked nirvana and started wearing flannel a whole four months before anyone else in your class? remember how mad you were when, four months after that, everyone liked nirvana and wore flannel? you hadn’t yet learned about the theory of thesis/antithesis/synthesis, but you wondered why everything always had to get popular, why nothing could stay cool.

you see the new neighbors at the fancy new brewpub down the street, and instantly despise them. you hate their roadkill hairdos, fierce jewelry, coaster-sized sunglasses and distressed denim. you’ve seen the crate and barrel and pottery barn boxes they put out on their front porch, and you know that their denim is the only thing that’s distressed about them. you’re sure that two years ago they were wearing abercrombie and living in ardmore. two years ago, you were the first white person on the trolley in the morning and the last one off at night. so, it turned out that you were gentrification’s westward hoe. to be fair, though, you didn’t move out here with any manifest destiny in mind. at the time, your friends and family all thought it was manifest insanity.

the new neighbor girl blinks her black-lacquered eyelids and says, “maybe we don’t actually have to get an alarm. i’m just going to be really nice to everybody on the block, and then they’re not going to want to rob me.” you’d like to roll up your newspaper and swat her with it. you hear the guy talking about the “awesome, totally ghetto bar” that he’s just discovered. the more he talks, you realize that he’s talking about leroy’s showcase lounge. when you first moved to the neighborhood, you described leroy’s to your friends as “this 70’s blacksploitation bar, where samuel l. jackson could totally bust out of the bathroom firing an oozie.” the first time you walked into leroy’s, the needle scratched the record and the place went silent… not literally, of course, but if there were a needle, and a record, it would have. and now these isn’t philly, like, the new williamsburgh? posers are touristing about in your bar, acting like they were the first people to ever cross the threshold of the showcase lounge! who started this whole ghetto living is the new white belt trend anyway?

though, really, you’re a little happy that this new brewpub is here, that there’s somewhere that’s not leroy’s to go. you read one alt weekly article that cited the pub as an indication of the ’hood’s changing demographics. some of the local squatters protested out front for a couple days, but it kinda reminds you of college. the smooth, chrome-o-riffic surfaces disorient you at first. your eyes are used to faultlined sidewalks and nests of garbage, and all this silky metal and minimalist geometry confuses you. all these white people confuse you. you wonder if the old neighbors—that’s what you call them, but you mean the black neighbors—are at the brewpub. then you wonder if you would even recognize them, if you saw them somewhere other than on your street. sometimes you say how you doin’ to the old neighbors, and they say how you doin’ back. but even when you do, your eyes are focused forward, like you’re walking a tightrope.

two of your old neighbors saunter past the pub and take a gander inside. you see them shaking their heads and rubbing their jaws, and you overdub the “naw, man, i don’t think so.” you know that they’re probably going to roll on down to leroy’s, where (maybe because it’s actually a time-space portal to the 70s) smoking inside is still allowed. you wonder what would’ve happened if they had come in, what you would have possibly talked with them about—the plants that aren’t growing in your yards? the fact that the brewpub raised nearby house values by 20 percent? philly’s burgeoning murder rate? the new neighbors’ welcome mat, which says beware of cat and is covered with cute kitty paw prints?

you order another pale ale—hey at least the beer’s good. no longer leroy’s dubious lagers, which were always for some reason served with a straw, and not a normal straw either but one of those coffee-stirrer thingies. you wonder, who is my neighbor anyway?

Control Panel . 2007 . Gouache on paper . 10 x 7 “

I had given them to him on a whim two weeks earlier. Bodega orchids are the heart of New York City, the intersection of the exotic and the common, the expensive and the disposable. They are the one-night-stands of flowers. Love ‘em and leave ‘em. But Stephen kept them going.
He moved them from the windowsill to the table and back, to give them the right amount of sunlight every day. He added sugar to the water, and delicately plucked the sepals off as they turned yellow and curled up. The flowers lost some of their luster, but the leaves maintained a waxy green, like a Goddamn Crayola crayon. (more…)