Happy Monkey Year 2016

Monkeys are tricky.

Move fast.

Move with bananas, otherwise you'll be pelted with monkey shit and that shit stinks.

image by tristam de quatremere

Tristam De At Galerie Graf - Paris - 2015

My boy Tristam De is having a show with Steven Darmont January 22 at Gallery Graf.

The opening runs from 6-9.

The location is 33 Rue Notre Dame de Nazareth near Republique.

If I was in Paris, I would be there. Quincee a New York___

RIP Tristam Diquatrostagno

Drunk in Moscow, Not Idaho

In 1994 after a month long limbo in Penang I traveled from Malaysia to Paris on Aeroflot thanks to money wired by my loving mother to the Citibank in Penang.

The Kuala Lumpur-Karachi-Dubai-Moscow-Paris flight time to Moscow totaled about 24 hours. None of them were comfortable in the flimsy chairs of the Soviet era jetliner. More like lawn chairs and a fog hung over the the celing from AC condensation. After the meal not a single member of the flight crew entered the cabin.

Disembarking at night in Moscow, I discovered that my connecting flight to Charles De Gaulle had been delayed until the following morning. A Norwegian couple with whom I had traveled from Kual Mumpur were in a similar predicament and I said, "It's 10PM. What are we going to do all night?"

"Drink wine." The husband pulled out two bottles of wine purchased at the Dubai duty-free. Their flight had also been cancelled until noon.

"I have two."

"And my wife has two."

We opened the bottles and sat on the floor surrounded by hundreds of stateless travelers trapped in the aeroport. Some looked as if they had been in this limbo for weeks, if not months. We finished the wine and a refugee from Afghanistan sold us a bottle of vodka.

"I here one month. Can no go back Kabul. No go to Paris. My brother live there. Now this my home." His name was Jameer.

The vodka was homemade. The liter lasted longer than the wine. Several other Afghans fleeing the civil war joined Jameer with other bottles. They spoke in dialects. Dari adn Pashto. After two bottles of the gut-burning samogon I spoke in tongues an finally lost consciousness from the overdose of hard spirits and lack of sleep.

I awoke.

A gray dawn.

Moscow.

"Russia.

Not Idaho.

"Your flight is now." The Norwegian husband shook me hard and yanked me to my feet.

"I don't care. I want to stay in the aeroport. Life simple here."

"You have to go." He and his wife escorted me to the plane.

"Bon Voyage." I saluted them at the door of the Airbus.

Stepping on board I rejoined civilization and I stumbled down the aisle to my seat. The expression on the other passengers' face gauged my drunkenness better than a breathalyzer. No one wanted me to sit next to them. I fell into an empty row and buckled up for take-off.

Several hours later a stewardess shook my shoulder.

"We are in Charles de Gaulle Aeroport in Paris."

"Already?" I was the last passenger on the plane.

"We've been on the ground for fifteen minutes."

"Great." I rose to my feet and trudged out into the terminal. The time was 8:30. It was Bastille Day or 'le Quartoze', another day of wine ahead.

In July of 1789 Paris seethed with anger against Louis XVI and the ancien regime of the nobility.

The prison's most infamous guest was the Marquis De Sade, who shouted from the ramparts on July 2, 1789, "They are killing the prisoners here!"

The unrepentant sodomist was transferred 'naked as a worm' to the insane asylum at Charenton, but the fire had been lit and the on July 14 hundreds of workers gathered in the neighboring Faubourg Saint-Antoine seeking to seize the gunpowder within the Bastille.

Mythically recounted in Dickens' THE TALE OF TWO CITIES a tumbril loaded with casks of wine axle an axle on the Rue de la Roquette and wine flow down the gutters to be consumed by impoverished Parisians. The shadow of the dreaded upper-class Bastille prison loomed over the narrow street and someone shouted, "A la Bastille."

The Swiss Guards within the fortress defended the battlements against the mob. Mutinous royal Bourbon troops armed with artillery. The commandant surrendered the prison an freed its seven captives.

When Louis XVI was told the news in Versailles, the king asked an aristocrat, "Is it a revolt?"

His friend replied, "Non, mon Roi. It is a revolution."

Within three years after the Storming of the Bastille Citoyen Louis was sentenced to death and guillotined in Place de la Concorde before thousands of revolutionies.

I emerged from the terminal and sped in a taxi from CDG Aeroport to Paris. Traffic was light into the City of Light. THe exit lanes were cramped with vehicles as they had been for decades carrying Paris to le Grande Vacannes ie 7/14 go 8/14.

Atop Montmatre rose Sacre-Couer.

After the 1870 Commune had been quelled the Catholic Church had erected the Temple of Repression to remind Parisians that the Church ruled the Hearts and Minds of France, not the call to the ramparts by a perverse Comte.

The new Bastille.

My friend Tristam from the Musellmen Fumants waite at his apartment.

I wasn't tired, only hung over. That afternoon we watched the military parade on the Champs-Elysees.

That night we partied with friends.

I drank to Liberte, Egalite, and Fraternitie.

Hundreds sang Le Marseilles.

I cried each time.

It was good to be out of Moscow.

People drink too much there, then again so do I.

A bas le Roi__

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Much more to come__

Malpracticed English

>Most writers pride themselves in the mastery of their written language. Words strung together to create a world accessible to the reader. The nuns of Our Lady of the Foothills taught their students the proper spelling, hyphenation, capitalization, word breaks, emphasis, and punctuation with the aid of a yardstick. Mistakes in orthography were punished as ruthlessly as the Inquisition seeking out heretics, however the sisters didn't recognize the shift in the language for the children of the 60s.

Isn't became ain't. What was replaced by huh. Fuck could be used as a noun, adjective, verb, and adverb. No one has ever replaced 'and or but' with fuck, although George Carlin came close.

Marsha, the woman across the aisle from our store in the diamond exchange, constantly bemoans the lack of couth in the spoken language of New Yorkers.

"Animals."

She is right and I avoid the lexicon of bad words in my writing. It's one thing to be vulgar and another to know when to be vulgar, however a greater problem has arose in my writing style, for a French painter, Tristam Dequatremare, commented on my story about choosing the young Jacques Negrit for the door of the Bains-Douches in 1982.

"SOUVENIRS /SOUVENIRS! PETE, send me your texts when there's some french in it before editing , your orthography is awful."

I had to look up 'orthography'. I agree with Tristam. My writing is an abyss of malpracticed English, but I love moidering da Queen's language.

Apres tout je suis americain.

By the way.

Tristam's paintings.

Adorable.

58 and Gaining Ground on a 100 - 2018

Yesterday I celebrated my 58th Birthday with my nearly 2 year-old son Fenway Smith and his lovely mother Mam Pechdee. The location was the Full Moon Bar on Jomtien Soi 12. Beer beer and more beer. Mam decided to drink a little lo khao daeng or red rice whiskey. The local medicinal alcohol medicine reacted a little too strongly in her lithe body and she won the most drunk of our family, although I came a close second. Fenway was the designated baby. Cold sober to the bone. Best Wishes to friends, fiends, and family.

Tristam Dequatremare photoshopped by head onto Richard Burton's body in the promotional photo for the film THE NIGHT OF THE IGUANA.

Susan Lyons was even sexier in BABY DOLL.

William Klein and I by Tristam

In 1994 I am in Moscow doing a fashion shoot with Shalom Harlow. We are at the beautiful Goum department store next to the Red Square. Suddenly I scream, "That's here that's here !!"

My team look at me trying to understand, "That's here, right here that William Klein did one of his picture".

They have no idea what I am talking about, and I am so excited I can't explain, i just recognize the exact spot where Bill shot 40 years earlier. For me it is mind blowing. I had never thought that Bill's images, or any images, could be so engraved in my memory! Just to be sure I ask Shalom to move a bit to the right, and i take the picture for the fun, very eager, once back to NY, to compare it with the original.

Finally today, fifteen years after I took my image, i just compared and i can't believe how close i was from Bill picture, but more than that, i am puzzled that i could even recognized that wall and those stairs. I guess it was the crossing of the people, the light falling on them and the silhouettes coming down from the stairs.

Strange, probably my strongest homage to the photographer that has influence my entire approach to photography.

Photo by Stephane Sednaoui

Amazing how one image can be printed in someone's head