I’ve never really seen myself as an artist. I feel more like an image-engineer or a haphazard philosopher. I work on a conceptual basis in an ever-expanding range of media—from oil paint to stained glass and performance art. Recently I made a stuffed animal of a giant earthworm and meditated in the middle of Times Square for 24 hours. My portfolio makes no sense. I grew up between San Francisco and Florence, Italy. My background is in digital design, but my heart has always been with analog media. I moved to New York last year for my MFA in figurative painting at New York Academy of Art. We paint nude models from life every day and memorize all the bones and muscles in the body. It’s awesome. I’m learning the “rules” so I can break them better.

Light and sweet, please, I say to the counter gal at the Italian bakery down the street from me in Astoria. If you're a New Yorker, you know what's up. Milk, 2 sugars, Bunn brewed coffee with that orange handled carafe, that tastes better than any bougie coffee you could think of when coming back from a 6am street shoot in FiDi, and suffice it to say, I know bougie, and coffee. I've had my fair share of cups of coffee over the years. When I was a printing apprentice with Chuck, who was from India, the bodega across the street made his coffee like the kind he had living in India... half a bag of sugar, 3 creams, splash of coffee and a Marlboro Red to go. I'd have the same, sans cigarette.

We live in an era where the world is curated, filtered, and increasingly generated by artificial intelligence. From the perfect Instagram photo to AI-generated influencers with flawless faces and "ideal" proportions, it’s becoming harder to distinguish what’s real — and even harder to love what is. But here’s the truth: You are real. And that alone is revolutionary. In a digital culture that pushes perfection, being unapologetically, authentically yourself — body, mind, and soul — is a radical act. Your stretch marks, your quirks, your emotions, your laugh that’s just a little too loud — those aren’t flaws. They’re fingerprints of your humanity. And no AI, no algorithm, can replicate that.

I was a composer for five years before I had any formal musical training in harmony, rhythm, formal structure, orchestration, and notation. From 1970-75 I blissfully created works without “knowing” what I was doing, and in one case, created an orchestral piece by writing out the individual instrumental parts before the score, which, trust me, is about as ass backwards as it gets when it comes to the practicalities of music composition. There was something, though, about these early years of being unfettered by rules and strictures that fed my sense of freedom and wonder at not just the sound of music, but also the way in which music notation could be represented on paper.

A song is a recipe. It’s not a fixed thing to be reproduced like a grainy copy of a copy of an old document. It should live and adjust with whoever is cooking the meal, a new dish every time. 

There once was an entire think tank within the fitness and physical therapy communities regarding proper posture. More than a few different course would pop up promising to get anyone into the absolute correct posture. But not only aren’t there many—if any—courses or classes featuring this as the main topic, artificial intelligence within a Google search has even jumped on board to verify the consensus that there is no one perfect posture position (say that 5 times fast). Let’s explore what got us in this predicament of poor positioning in the first place. There certainly are a myriad of bad postures out there and it doesn’t take a trained eye to often see who is a culprit.

I am dying—not denying that dying is something I’ve been failing to do  for too many years, falling in tearsand sweat. I am like a spider needing...