Cold Comfort Saints

Above and just below, frigid figures on St. Thomas' Church on 5th Ave. at 53rd St.


Below, looking warmer in spite of the snow, the spires of St. Patrick's Cathedral two blocks south.


[ St. Thomas Church Statues ]

Alwyn Court Detail

Alwyn Court detail revealed by Christmas morning's even light.  Note the pine cones and ornaments at the bottom, above.

A Curse on Rupert Murdoch

With the world up to its neck in a cesspool of evil, and not a lifeboat in sight, I've been forced to take supernatural measures, to pray like hell for a Vicious Christmas Miracle and conjure Dark Forces with an assortment of hexes, curses and spells, to serve my enemies the slow and painful justice they've earned!

The target of my first curse is Rupert Murdoch.  Seldom has the gift of life been squandered with the gusto spent on this evil pile of flesh.  On to the cursing!

Please groan the following chorus (of two anagrams for "Rupert Murdoch" generated by the Internet Curse Server) over and over while you read the curses below: Cur Turd He Romp, Rec Duh Rump Rot

- May the withered, flaccid remnants of his sex organs get slammed in a car door.

- May the used toilet water that irrigates his diseased flesh back up into his head and gush out his grotesquely hairy ears and nose, leaving tiny dingle-berries of toilet paper hanging in their hair trees.

- May those same nose hairs braid themselves overnight, snake around his neck while he snores, and strangle him.

- May his progeny grow to hate him even more than they already do, and succeed in their plots to shorten the time he stands between them and his money.

Viagra Angel & Murdoch

- May his festering crotch itch so severely that he takes a table fork to it while under the spotlight at the holiday dinner sponsored by his venal lick-spittle minions at Fox News, the NY Post and the Wall Street Journal, all dressed in grimy elf costumes to make him look more human.

- And while I'm at it, may all those evil elves, from Roger Alies on down to Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, catch the same case of crotch cooties, and scratch them so furiously that they churn themselves up into an angry white tornado of skin dust, that whirls off across the plains and erases half the Bible Belt before it leaps into space to scratch itself against the sun and, like dried cat crap placed at the business end of a particle accelerator, explodes in a poof! of particles that scatter across a half dozen backwater spacetime dimensions, the sewer pipes of Creation, and be flushed down the drain for good.

Or at least until my dark mistress, the Savage Queen of Curses, decides that Creation is a little low on evil.

Landmark Galleries

Window displays were a disappointment this holiday season until I took a look at Landmark Galleries, on 57th St. west of 6th Ave.

The big window, below left, reminded me of fair/carnival booths with dishes and figurines you can (supposedly) win by tossing coins onto them.  Except that the figurines here are much higher class, at least according to the price tags, which also include artists' names.

And the subject matter here is racier than what you get at a fair.  From the Viagra Angel on top, to the milky Louis XIV cleavage clock above right, to the innocent-as-Roman Polanski tableaux below right, everything needed to furnish the lecher's living room is here!


And who can resist the innocent "artist at work" scene below?  So innocent that even the saintly San Pio -- the bearded figure to the left who looks evil only because he's been dipped in silver -- isn't paying attention.

Anselm Kiefer at Gagosian

Did she know before she arrived that her hair would match?
A friend read a review -- I assume A Spectacle With a Message, Roberta Smith, NYT -- and requested a report.

The show does feel like a spectacle -- the huge, unpolished vitrines could just as well hold the remains of a crashed alien armada.  And a few things look like they came from space, like the hanging garden of ghostly sunflowers (below right) Smith calls "mysterious creature-plants."


Above left, a leaden barn full of leftover Nazi salutes.  Above right, the giant ghost flowers probe cracked earth.

In spite of the scale of the show and the huge amount of calculation and manufacturing that had to go into it -- not to mention the eight or so guards who add a slight Fort Knox feel -- it doesn't feel overblown, and some of the pieces still have the raw energy Kiefer seems to shoot for.  The show, at Gagosian's 24th St. outpost, closes this Saturday.


Above left, a nice ad hoc roof on a twig mountain at the bottom.  Above right, an exploding glass shard wedding dress, raw as student work.

Like an unheated, slightly creepy museum

St. Regis Surface

The front of the St. Regis, on 55th St. at 5th Ave., from before recent work started.  I assume the crew, which is applying a paint-like coating, knows what it's doing, and the surface will be sublime as before after a little weathering.



[ St. Regis in my first Building Faces post: Faces of New York ]
[ St. Regis Street Steam ]