Adolph Gottlieb - Apaquogue

Adolph Gottlieb - Apaquogue, 1961

I saw this piece, not for the first time, at the Fort Worth Modern a few days ago, and something about it hooked me on this visit.  One of the values of art.  It doesn't stop talking.  The voice is always there, and we don't hear it until our ears and head and heart are aligned right.

I went to the Modern for quiet.  To touch pieces in my mind, and to wander about them in my body.  To settle out some noise, and clear my head for my own creative needs and get some parts of stories onto paper (yes, actual paper.)

I have an odd practice with art - well, relatively odd compared to what most people appear to do in museums.  Maybe they just do it less obviously than me.  I walk up close; I step back; I wander side to side; I come 'round to one edge and walk past with the art in 'my peripherals;' I tilt my head back and forth and up and down.  I know the artist saw the piece from a thousand angles while working on it, and I guess I'm trying to retrieve a sense of that dynamic.  How did he or she perceive it when approaching it cold? When coming back after days of frustration with it? While fighting with one stubborn mix of color or of tone or of texture.  What did the artist love and hate about as it loomed in front?  What did the artist see as they turned and walked away, maybe for the last time?

On that visit, this piece in particular rang - insistently - so many of those bells.

I saw the beach road the piece was named after.  I saw the sun coming up again and again as he processed things, as he saw the piece come into definition, maybe even before paint came to canvas.  I saw the grasses along the shore moving in the wind.  But ... I also saw flotillas of boats racing toward a beach that was covered in landing craft and tank traps, enmeshed in chaos, under the heat of sun and the harried glare of signal lamps. There was, on the one hand, the calm of Gottlieb's Hamptons vista, but also my own brain's insinuation of years of war coming to a head on Omaha Beach.

I wasn't there.  I've never been either place. I don't know the inherent truth of those places. I only know what I brought, and what my brain splashed onto the canvas in response to what was already there.  

Gottlieb owns what lives permanently inside the fibers and pigments of Apaquogue.  I own, for now, what I brought on Sunday.  I'll continue to own traces of it, even as my viscera settle.  On my next visit, I may have different filters and perspectives that will interact with the permanence of Apaquogue.

I know people - plenty of people - who don't "get" modern art. It's too stark, too bare, too inhuman.  I understand the words they use and the context they move within, but I don't "get" their "not getting." It's a harder dialogue, to be sure, at times.  Perhaps we have to be quieter for modern art and we have much less quiet than we used to in our daily lives.  But that's of value to me.  When I go to the altar of art, I have to bring my own quiet along, and make good use of it.  Then I leave and the quiet lingers long enough to bear fruit.

Rilke says that “Love consists of this: two solitudes that meet, protect and greet each other. ” I think we can say the same about art, modern or not. Even there, the divide between creativity and intimacy is paper thin.  Even there, we meet and give birth to new things.

" ... I feel more fellowship with the defeated than with saints ..." - Albert Camus

The amazing Lucinda Williams: NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert

"Am I too Blue?" - Lucinda

... actually, I know I'm not - 
and it means all the world to know ...

Lucinda Williams' soft and lovely "Ventura"

Time keeps on slipping ...

I used to be very much an activist.

Then I had kids - twins, wonderful twins that have been two of the three best things in my life.

My life was filled with them, and with trying to occasionally sleep, and with pretending I could keep a rickety, ramshackle marriage in one piece around them.  I couldn't, by the way. 

They're grown now, and very independent and I'm happy for them.

I've always felt the need to be a writer.

But then life, and family and trying to keep a career going (and a lot of energy just getting one started), and staying busy with church, etc.

I wrote, but very slowly.  

Now, the hands of the clock are pointing me toward those things I didn't do, or haven't done enough.

The activism can't wait. The issues, fires big and little, are just too numerous to ignore, to put off til I have more energy and more time. I may not have hope to share, but I by God have stubbornness.

The writing can't wait.  The words, if I don't let them out, start burrowing and boring their way out of me.

I'm tired of telling myself - lying to myself and others - that we should have patience, that the time will come,  that eventually the right things - the things we should and could do - will work out. They won't unless we work them out.

The time won't come by itself.  Just won't come.  Dark forces and the status quo conspire day after day after day to keep moving "the time" away.  

We have to go and get time and bring it to us.  It's not going to come otherwise.  It will always be " ... soon ..." and never here.

It's the only way for us to fly like eagles.

Enough lies from the Right about Charleston

This murderer said "You rape our women and you're taking over our country. And you have to go."

Just before he started shooting, he announced he was there "to shoot black people"

But ...

Rand Paul says this is about "people not understanding where salvation comes from."

Rand Paul is a liar.

Steve Doocey, Fox News, says this is about guns not being allowed in church.

Steve Doocey is a liar.

Alveda King, Fox News, says this is about abortion.

Alveda King is a liar.

E. W. Jackson, Fox News, says this is about hostility against Christians.

E. W. Jackson is a liar.

Lindsey Graham says this is about hostility against Christians.

Lindsey Graham is a liar.

Rick Santorum says this is about hatred of religious liberty.

Rick Santorum is a liar.

Liar, liar, souls on fire!

Some coolness from Ansel Adams, at the start of what could be a long, hot, angry Summer

Cedar Trees, Winter, Yosemite National Park, 1949

Trees and Cliffs of Eagle Park, Winter, Yosemite, 1935

Oak Tree, Snowstorm, Yosemite, 1948

Oak Tree in Snow, Yosemite, 1933

"And what rough beast ... slouches toward Father's Day to be born ..."

I’m terrified of becoming my father. No hyperbole.

The one piece of advice that my mother gave me more than any other was “Don’t become your father.” It was actually more than just advice. It was a plea.

I never was like him; never have been like him.  I really didn’t need any prompting.  Other than being very intelligent and having high thresholds of pain, there were very little similarities between us. I saw to it.  He was a living, breathing example of how I didn't want to turn out. Unfortunately, role models didn't get a lot better with my mom, or either side of my extended family.  Lack of empathy with others, wallowing in self-pity, and sunken into a family lifestyle that was destructive and dysfunctional – they were everything I didn’t want to be.

It wasn’t hard to jettison the extended family when I was still a kid because my family began moving around the country as my dad changed jobs.  I also made virtually all of them angry when a letter I’d written to a cousin made the rounds while we were still in high school.  Basically, I’d told her I was worried that she was going to get sucked into the family’s ways, and maybe never find a happy, stable life for herself. I was a teenage pariah the next time our family went to visit, but that suited me just fine.

My mom died about a year and a half ago, and I honestly expected my dad to crumble.  She was our conduit to him, and his conduit to the outside world.  I figured he’d hidden himself away for so long and so deeply that he wouldn’t be able to function.  I was wrong.  I knew that their relationship was terribly toxic, but had always thought that my mother was the one drinking most of the poison. Clearly, it was being shared more equally than I imagined.  As he came out from under the shock of her passing and the burden of their relationship - as he went through his own detox - I met a man I’d never seen before, and really a man I still don’t quite recognize.  

He can still be irascible at times, but in a year and a half, I haven’t seen any indication of the level of cruelty and self-pity that had defined him for as long as I’d known him.  It’s not that he’s been trying hard to be a better person, struggling with his darkness and occasionally falling back on it. It’s like all that darkness was lifted.  

He’s reasonably personable, interested in other people, able to converse on things of interest to both, and even capable of reaching out in kindness.  I wouldn’t call him warm, at least not particularly.  He’s not some jubilant, transformed Ebenezer Scrooge.  He’s just suddenly a relatively decent - or at least innocuous - guy.

It doesn’t erase things I know he did years ago, things I’d have confronted him with had I not promised his victim I wouldn’t.  He’s different.  He’s a man I don’t recognize, yet do recognize.  He lives in his own Uncanny Valley and I visit him there.

In that valley, I'm seeing more of him in me and me in him.  Not a lot.  I’m not saying I’m looking in a mirror or feeling a great kinship, but I’m sensing a shared humanity for maybe the first time, certainly the first time in decades.  That “more like me” however, is a hook that sinks deep into my skin and tugs and tugs.

When I first found out two years about a horrible thing he had done decades ago, I’ll be honest, I wanted to kill him.  I wanted to crush him into dust and ash and blow him into history.  But I had promised his victim to not even bring it up with him.

If I couldn’t do that, I wanted to find a way to absolve him, but that was also outside my powers.

I thought maybe time would take care of things.  After all, he’d been diagnosed with slow-growth lymphoma years earlier, and had succeeded in stopping its growth, albeit not vanquishing it.  I figured the clock would tick down, he would make his peace with the world and I, his only son and chosen legal executor, would make peace with him, and the day would be over.

And now it’s been seven years.  It could come back any day, racing through him like a fire in dry grass, or it could be kept at bay for another decade.

We talk more and we have better conversations than I can ever remember. They’re not fantastic conversations, but they’re also not like pulling a rusty, salt-crusted chain across a wound.  Still, I watch for the wolf to peek around.  

Worse than that, I listen for the rustling of seed pods: those pods in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.  There’s very definitely a part of me that fears, as we develop a kinship, that I’ll morph into something horribly similar to him.  Or maybe I’ve already done it and it’s gradually starting to show through the veneer of my social persona?

It terrifies me and leaves me wary in interacting with my own son and daughter, both of whom are now adults.  I know I wasn't him, and was never similar to him, but through their growing up, and even since, I was probably hampered by my struggle to avoid him-ness.  The more I've struggled, the more I've kept a lowered profile with them.  I don't have the plague, but I don't want my children to catch it from me, regardless.

To be fair to myself, I know I’m a better person than that.  Everyone tells me I’m a better person than that. 

The knowing and the feeling have always been two different things, though.

Breast augmentation - "You won't recognize yourself!" - Not the way they do it, you won't.

Here are some very crudely and minimally edited before and after images from one specific patient to illustrate.

The first: with the breasts covered by the grey bars, it's already extremely obvious that the intent is to start with an uncomplimentary before picture.  I think it's very hard to tell it's the same woman. The only real clues they're the same are the moles on her stomach.

(The final image has a link to the YouTube video this was taken from.

In the second, the post-op breasts have been (very) crudely superimposed, matching up shoulder line and scapula. I only adjusted for distance from camera, not differences in skin tone, etc.

In the original before-after below, you see the full effect of the implants ... and the lighting ... and the makeup ... and the hair ... and the glasses ... and the slight change in posture, etc.

Sure, it can be argued that the significantly larger implants "gave her the confidence" to do other things more flattering for her appearance.  But that's some pretty hefty bucks for a cosmetic makeover that still doesn't include all the other changes. 

It's fair to ask "What does it matter to you? You're just another guy who has to have an opinion about everything."  Yeah, there is that. I do love having opinions and telling people about them. At the same time, I'm very fine with people making their own decisions. Washington is already too busy minding women's businesses and bodies for them.

I was just astonished by the overt and, I think, egregious differences between the before and after.  Pure marketing, but then, I've always had a bone up my ass about marketing, which is probably my biggest motivator here.  I've got no business telling women what they should and shouldn't do with their bodies. I still get a little annoyed sometimes, however, at the $13 billion/year cosmetic surgery industry that markets better lives through changes in surface appearances alone.

Anyway, my soapbox is tired of me standing on it - and I'm getting hungry, so that's all.

Curious what it would look like to ride on the outside of the Space Shuttle boosters? Wonder no more:

Unbelievable Footage of Exploding Plants - because, yes, I'm trying THAT hard to avoid editing

"For the sake of a single poem ..." - Rilke

For the sake of a single poem, you must see many cities, many people and Things, you must understand animals, must feel how birds fly, and know the gesture which small flowers make when they open in the morning.

You must be able to think back to streets in unknown neighborhoods, to unexpected encounters, and to partings you had long seen coming; to days of childhood whose mystery is still unexplained, to parents whom you had to hurt when they brought in a joy and you didn’t pick it up (it was a joy meant for somebody else); to childhood illnesses that began so strangely with so many profound and difficult transformations, to days in quiet restrained rooms and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, but it is still not enough to be able to think of all that.

You must have memories of many nights of love, each one different from all the others, memories of women screaming in labor, and of light, pale, sleeping girls who have just given birth and are closing again. But you must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open windows and the scattered noises.

And it is not yet enough to have memories. You must be able to forget them when they are many, and you must have the immense patience to wait until they return. For the memories themselves are not important. Only when they have changed into our very blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves only then can it happen that in some very rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them.

"Fame" - David Bowie, 1975

Ahh, air travel - the fun, the luxury, the comfort ...

How it was ..

How it is today ...

Might as well "Go Greyhound"

... hell ... just ship yourself UPS for that matter.

"Unsuffer Me" - Lucinda Williams from her West album

of the waves

mist fell the first night
we fell with it, salt drops sweet on your cheeks
hints of charred oak and corn mash

the waters floated us
its salt with our salt
soaked in bourbon and blues
until we were empty of alcohol
and full of sunrise

the waves rose to us
we rode them
you and me and me in you
then we slept and dried
and burned ourselves
til the sun pounded in our ears

when it falls again
it will draw us down
out of the light
and into the liquid
smoky, salty, bourbon seas
and we will rock like we did.

on the waves

"Here Comes the Judge" by Pigmeat Markham, 1968 - is this a precursor to rap, a decade ahead of it's time?

"Ramblin' " - Ornette Coleman, one of the founders of "free jazz" & a native of Fort Worth

Sinatra, Martin & Davis singing "The Birth of the Blues" w/ Johnny Carson

Twilight Zone: The Monsters are Due on Maple Street - How the right wing hysteria machine works