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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I’m talkin’ X-Acto knives and rubber cement, y’all!

This Friday, December 12th, 2008, Civilian Art Projects in Washington DC opens their last show of the season, entitled Media.Mix: 21st Century Collage.

They were nice enough to invite me to participate, thanks in part to my friend and former roomate Steve Frost, an excellent artist who has work in the show himself.

Sadly, I won’t be able to make it down for the opening, so if you’re in the DC area, go and represent!
If you do plan on going and want to pretend that you’re me, these are the new collages about which you’ll need to make up something to say in art-speak:

I recommend heavy use of the word “recontextualized”.

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I was pleasantly surprised by the reactions to Jeff’s previous post about my artstuffs — a belated thanks to everyone who reblogged or contacted me for more info — so I thought I’d share a few pics from my most recent outing.

(More after the jump.)

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If you’ve read this blog for any time at all, you’ll know that me and David are suckers for brightly-colored comic-themed street art. Particularly if there’s a visual non sequitur involved. Like this poster I saw plastered around the streets of Philadelphia this weekend.

It’s an image of Marvel’s Doctor Doom charging toward the viewer with the phrase “Well, at least things can’t get any worse” superimposed over top in bright pink text …

Pretty much perfect, I think.

Although it contradicts the Simmermon family motto, which I swear I am not lying about. My dad always says

You know, Jeff, we have a saying. “Things go on like this for a while, and then they get worse.”

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During the time that I was in Royal Quiet Deluxe (chicken band), I was invited to a large dinner with the Reverend Al Sharpton. Everyone had to go around the table and describe who they were and what they did. I was neither an accomplished member of the community in Norfolk, nor was I African-American. Everyone else at the table was both. I just kinda ran with a description of the band.

It did not go well. At all. In fact, the evening rippled throughout my life for about ten years, causing tremendous embarassment in a comic book store this summer.

Here’s a video of me telling the story on stage at The Moth:

I think I’ve just about milked this chicken band thing for all it’s worth now …

You can see the companion to this story here:

Royal Quiet Deluxe, Chicken Band

A story by The Moth’s Jim O’Grady here:

Jim O’Grady on “Respect”

And a story by The Moth’s Juliet Wayne here:

Juliet Tells the Tale of ‘Mannequin Dan’

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