The People of The Porch tell me that their street was landscaped by the same guy who designed Central and Prospect Parks. Uh-huh. The dumb hick from Norfolk, he'll believe anything. Like that he's a second away from total renal failure.

I had to squeeze in a visit to Coney Island before I returned to Norfolk (okay, I was ordered to.) It's an amazing place. Too bad all the things that make it unique--garish hand-painted signs, cheesy rip-off arcades, the Turtle Boy, crowds of fat sweating working-class New Yorkers--will disappear soon. The developer has articulated a vision of an East Coast "Bellagio". What is it with developers? Give stupid, venal people money, and they'll lay waste to the world.

Haven't gotten into Manhattan yet, but Brooklyn's providing plenty of sketching opportunities.

Spelt, tempeh, kashi...those kinds of words abound here. It was called "Second Time Around", which wouldn't have been at the top of my list for restaurant names, but what do I know? Two women next to me were jabbering about the theater business. One of them actually said "I wear many hats", and she wasn't talking about her wardrobe. I had forgotten how solemn these people can be about their "craft". Come to think of it, I just don't care for solemnity about anything. Life is too chock-full of pratfalls, avalanches of rotten garbage, random bowling balls falling from the sky, Rube Goldberg machinery tottering in Watts-Tower like accretions, mud and guts underfoot, to justify being solemn about anything. Leastways, that's my take on the whole mess. That's another thing--why do some people have to have "takes" on everything? Why can't they just think about stuff? Time to say "bah", I suppose... but I forget how this started. I had a really nice time walking around Park Slope. The wrap I got at the café was wonderfully studded with fresh cilantro. Can't separate good from bad, can you?

Two interesting things happened while I was sketching this idyllic scene in Prospect Park. First, a large elderly Jewish man strode into the scene. While I was hurriedly including his entrance, he took a seat in the pavilion (that's also him on the left). Shortly after, a woman sat down next to me. She looked a little haggard, but otherwise very conventional. She watched me for a few minutes, then asked, "Do you know Jane?" "I don't think so," I answered, and after a moment she added, "Jane draws too." My first inclination was to say, "Oh, that Jane," but I didn't. She waited another few minutes, and then said, "Do you know what oral sex is?" Once again, I considered saying, "Oh, that Jane," but once again restrained myself. Instead, I said "yeeah...", and it came out exactly the way Kramer said it when Crazy Joe Davola asked him if he was afraid of clowns. Like a child. It must have been the right answer, though, because she got up and left. This is the kind of experience that sketching in Norfolk just doesn't provide you.

No, Steve Buscemi never emerged. Neither did Jennifer Connolly. Or Maggie Gyllenhaal. Or Caroline Kennedy. I'm beginning to think this Park Slope thing is a big hoax, played on us yokels from the sticks, for the amusement of the cognoscenti (that's Italian for "prostitute"). Thank God I've been to the Big Apple a few times, and had the "street smarts" to only pay the guy $20 for the bench seat across the street from this building.

This here was made back in the days when sculptors were sculptors, and not some skinny hippie kid who would put a crimp in a sheet of kor-ten steel and call it a day (got a ticket to the Serra exhibit at MOMA!) My trek today was through Prospect Park to Park Slope. Park Slope, it dawns on me now, gets its name because the freakin Park is full of freakin Slopes. If you got ahold of some National Geographic or maybe Nova footage of one a them spiky fish that puff up when they sense danger, and then made a loop of that footage and sped it up real fast, that's what my feet are like right now. But did my New York pals tell me about the mountaineering aspect of this walk in the park? No, they did not. There probably sitting up their in they're little cottages in the woods laughing there heads off at my throbbing feet. Well, if their's any justice in the world, they're laughter will wake up the baby. And I will sleep just a little bit easier tonight.

This is a building Amanda has painted before, which is why it doesn't look right unless the sky is Kavanagh Green. See hers here.

That's Amanda on the right, sketching her little heart out. The more sharp-eyed among you will notice the Dancing Crabs tableau, recently vacated by shy shopkeeper. I could have spent weeks sketching in Chinatown. Except I really couldn't. I would have been driven mad by the little women sidling up to me chanting, "DVD, DVD, DVD, DVD...." A few blocks down Canal Street from this quaint little scene is Pearl Paint, 5 ramshackle floors of crack for the artist. On the watercolor floor, a man who looked and talked just like Milton in "Office Space" advised me that Schmincke is the brand to buy and Winsor & Newton is crap. So being from Virginia, I dutifully bought some Schminckes with a month's salary. Later we ate a Thai restaurant, joined by Amanda's husband Jimmy, who generally sees to it that Amanda has the influence of an adult human in her life. Laura started hitting the Thai beer, and got stinking drunk and insisted in singing "We are Siamese if you please" from The King and I at the top of her lungs. A good time was had by all.

Returning the favor. See a highly flattering portrait here.

Chinatown marketing strategy: place crabs in a "dancing" position to make them appear more delectable. Who wants couch potato crabs when they could have prima ballerinas? New York's an amazing place for sketching; I could have spent a whole day at any of the places we visited. And we never even made it to Red Hook or Coney Island. I'll have to come back, as soon as the restraining order is lifted.

(By the way, this represents my first use of my super-cool new Schmincke watercolors. It was like painting with caviar. Sort of.)

So when Laurelines showed up Saturday, we all went to Chinatown to sketch. While Laura chased little old Chinese ladies around the block, Amanda and I went scouting, and came across this amazing little store that sold paper replicas of all kinds of merchandise. Paper sneakers, paper boomboxes, paper cell phones, paper suits & ties, paper canned goods, even a paper air conditioner! We rushed back to get Laura so she, as the grownup, could verify that we weren't just imagining this place. Being from North Carolina, Laura chirped to the shopkeeper, "These are so charming! Are they for parties?" He looked at her and said, "No. Funeral." Being from Virginia, I chimed in, "Wull, can we buy them anyway?" Amanda shook her head and pulled me away. "Forget it, Walt," she said, "it's Chinatown."

Amanda tells me those are condos over there. Like I believe her. The interesting thing about this scene, which you can't see, is that someone has created a little park on the edge of the canal (I'm sitting on one of its benches) (not literally this moment, I mean, I'm sitting at Sue's house right now listening to her infernal wind chimes--they're so loud and insistent, they've set up a drumbeat in my head that I can't ignore, I can't, I can't--okay, where was I? Oh yeah, I meant to say I was sitting on that bench on Saturday. Okay, let's continue, shall we?) with nothing to be seen except this pile of old factories, the elevated train tracks, and a huge scrap heap with monster-like cranes tossing giant prickly mouthfuls of scrap at each other (see Amanda's sketch if you don't believe me.) So I guess the park-builder's hope was that people would wander down here and spend an hour or so contemplating how man* has made a huge mess of the planet, and if so, I commend him or her.

*and you gals too, with your tupperware parties and whatnot

I don't mean me. Dumbo's a place. See Amanda's version here. More to come.