Try to disappear

My mother’s standard answer when complimented on her cooking was, ‘I just use good recipes.’ As though, with the right recipe, tasty food just makes itself.

I though it was her English reserve talking, the ‘don’t blow your own horn’ approach I tried to overcome as performing songwriter, where self-promotion is part of the game.

But from here, staring down a new year, I’m rethinking my mama’s humble pie.  Where would any of us be if we didn’t have good recipes?

Georgia O’Keeffe, moving west to paint, spent her days exploring the desert terrain.  Her recipe involved observation, thought and constant application of paint to canvas.  After all, those vistas, vivid to be sure, don’t exactly paint themselves.

‘The cliffs over there - you look at it and it's almost painted for you, you think. Until you try.'

Georgia O’Keeffe

Walter Murch, film editor on movies like The English Patient and The Godfather, Part III, describes his recipe for achieving invisibility in his work.

‘I will keep on working until I can no longer ‘see myself’ in the material. When I review my first assembly of a scene, more often than not I can still vividly (too vividly!) recall making the decisions that led to each of the cuts. But as the scene is reworked and refined, it reaches a point, hopefully, where the shots themselves seem to create each other: This shot ‘makes’ the next shot, which ‘makes’ the next shot, etc. In this way, the Walter Murch who decided things initially gradually recedes until, finally, there comes a point where he has become invisible and the characters take over, the shots, the emotion, the story seems to take over. Sometimes - the best times - this process reaches the point where I can look at the scene and say, “I didn’t have anything to do with that - it just created itself.”’

Walter Murch, In the Blink of an Eye

I gather, from these artists, that none of them think good recipes are substitutes for hard work and creative flow. My mother’s comment about cooking nicely joined O’Keeffe’s ode to ‘try’ with Murch’s acknowledgement that excellence lets you disappear.

Recipes are road maps and measuring tools.  Between setting out and calling it a day, there’s work, play, patience, judgement - every painstaking facet of art. The recipe gives an artist a familiar structure within which to dare.

Here's a very good recipe for relationship to anything and anyone you love:

‘Always wave goodbye until they can't see you.’
Regina Brett

Because your loved ones, human and created, need your fond attention, until you disappear.

Happy New Year!

Photo credit Alfred Stieglitz, Georgie O'Keeffe

Botox lullaby

Tis the day after Christmas
and all through this place
not a feature is stirring.
I’ve botoxed my face.

I’ve Stepford perfected
my vacuous stare.
I’m grimacing blandly
my inner despair.

My wrinkles are smuggled
all suave in my head.
They carved out a living
but now they’re quite dead.

Come anger, come jealousy,
plunder, conniption.
Come playfulness, happiness,
wonder, conviction.

Come shed your suggestion
that Botox is rape.
Oh ravaged emotions
dream not of escape!

Your passion is pointless,
your impotence funny.
My flesh has suppressed you
by medicine’s cunning.

I silence your sirens
with Stonehenge’s call.
Pass away.  Pass away.
Pass away. All.

Photo montage Susan Weber

Chron us

My nephew drives his invention, pictured here, around southern California, for no apparent reason.  Were he selling busses, boats or amusement, he’d have the perfect schtick.  Crazy contradiction gets our attention.

His cousin, new college grad, went from cap and gown to shirt and shoes in a day, writing code for a midwest start-up.  He loves his job but sometimes wishes he’d majored in design, a place he gets lost in.

Losing track of time while cramming it with pleasure is what artists do.  The problem being, of course, that unless there’s somebody minding the store, monetizing all this pleasurable time, artists starve for lack of food - or recognition.

Venues stocked with savvy patrons did not seem to be a problem for early jazz musicians.  Nor did time.  Charles Hersch explores the role of time in the emergence of New Orleans jazz.

‘A defining feature of slavery was its near total control of the slave’s time... Emancipation held out the promise of, so to speak, time recaptured, but sharecropping and routinized industrial labor monopolized time in a particularly dehumanizing way.  Improvising musicians controlled time and how it felt - for what is music but sound unfolded in time? - and created a variety of experiences (rushed, languid, tense, or relaxed) with the rhythmic figures they played.
Charles Hersch, Subversive Sounds

Musicians who tinkered with time in rhythms that challenged long established norms found a willing audience in the beleaguered workers of New Orleans.  Jazz was escape from and revolt against oppression.

‘In this liminal state, individuals exist both ‘in and out of time,’ as if the clock were stopped as timepieces become useless or a hindrance to the flow of activities.  As a contemporary jazz musician once said about the trancelike ‘groove’ created by good jazz, “it’s about feeling like time itself is pleasurable.”’
Charles Hersch, Subversive Sounds

Time is not so pleasurable when monopolized by the boss, unless that boss is muse or spirit.

‘I came upon a photograph in a book; it was a small statue of a woman... But she had no face.  She was crowned with waves of water, covering her head, overshadowing the face.  It was her entire body which spoke, her breast-belly body, a thick bulb rooted, pushing up a halo of water, the water which moved within me.  I’ve been looking for her face ever since.  I had then, and still have one essential prayer: “Show me your face.”’
Meinrad Craighead, The Mother’s Songs: Images of God the Mother

Yesterday my phone rang as I hunted down gifts at the mall.  My family wanted to know if I’d join them for lunch any time soon.  Jaded by the numbing assault of ten thousand consumer items blinking and winking their wild desire for my cash, I wanted to interrupt the time warp of shopping.  But I still needed smart socks from Dick’s and a book from Border’s.  What to do?  Drive home in my busboat of crazy contradiction?  Tinker with a day’s rhythm, shrug off the new (old) oppressor: stuff?  Prove I’m an artist, not a drone?

A funny thing happened on the way to Dick’s.  I lost the impression I had to be there for any other boss save the muse.  Art had its way with me.  To this end, time and I eloped, by busboat, to the Aegean archipelago.

Photo credit razielthomas

Word is

Words can be toys. Children’s books bank on the likes of those who thrive on words like mugwump and quoz.

‘The idea that language is beautiful and strange and that you can play with it is very appealing for children, and also very important.
Catherine Bohne

Words can be tools. Educators serve the tool-like qualities of words. They give us lawyer, doctor, scientist enthusiasts of orderly abstraction. Or artist grunts who lay down guns and pick up pens of battle.

‘When Oliver Stone returned from Vietnam, he enrolled at New York University, studying on the GI Bill. He's been wrestling with those experiences for years, expressing his feelings through a trilogy of motion pictures about Vietnam.’
Bill Moyers Journal

Celebrities crouch behind impotent words, betraying and braying impossible breaches of honor and love.

'I have let my family down and I regret those transgressions with all of my heart.’
Tiger Woods

Words can be travesty.

Sometimes words are like music is to a child with Asbergers.

"The music somehow evoked a world in which I felt at home, as opposed to the real world, which I did not feel at home in."
Tim Page, Pulitzer Prize-winning music critic

Words can be salve. Friends in foreign times. Anchors in storm. We keep words around on shelves and blogs and owners manuals just in case the world dissolves and leaves us frail and speechless as the wind.

Word is not all, it is some. It isn’t enough; it’s often rough approximation. Sometimes poets get it right by accidentally bothering to try.

Photo credit Victorgrigas

Imagination dust up

‘You don’t start at the top if you want to find the story. You start in the middle, because it’s the people in the middle who do the actual work in the world.' 
Malcolm Gladwell, What the Dog Saw

A painter friend asks, ‘why paint?’  I answer, ‘because you must - and it brings you comfort.’ Now, Freud and I slipped ‘why pain?’ into the equation first time around. Why indeed.

Peter the Great, my poet friend of large heart, sent me an article about Springsteen, Brubeck and company - the peak parade - receiving honors at the White House. At a reception, Clintons H. and B. toasted their greatness. Bill included a story about hanging a signed song chart for Blue Rondo a la Turk Brubeck had sent him on his music room wall. Peter liked this especially because he’d basked in a Brubeck concert as a younger man. I like it too; imagine the rich and famous pinning the rich and famous’ masterpiece to the wall. Intoxicating stuff.

I asked Colleen what her dream job would be. She combines dance and yoga in her drug-prevention work with at-risk kids. ‘Pretty much what I’m doing right now,’ she said. ‘I love dancing with kids. You never know what they’ll come up with.’

At the aforementioned East Room reception, Springsteen said this about his honor:

‘It's an acknowledgment that you've kind of threaded your way into the culture in a certain way. It's satisfying."

And then there are the people in the middle, like my painter and poet and dancer friends and me, who thread our way into the culture less publicly.

Colleen and I’ve been touring together in Lorain, Ohio, doing residencies with first graders who are learning to read.  I’ve heard John McCutcheon credit his work in schools with preparing him for the concert stage (he figured seventh graders were as good as a bar’s best patrons for honing his act).  Since I’ve put that stage on hold for now, diving into schools full tilt, I’ve discovered a wild truth quite the opposite of McCutcheon’s.  The craft I honed in front of adult audiences prepared me for this, the real story.

You never know what kids will do, but in one way, they don’t surprise you.  They do themselves, really well.  This is a life enhancing drug like no other, with side effects you may be unprepared for.
Imagination dust, seeping into every pore.

Photo credit Hans Lachmann

A few grains

A younger man approved my then long hair, telling me he wished women wouldn’t cut their hair the minute they reached a certain age. 

Approving his approval, I kept it long awhile, perishing the thought of looking middle-aged.  I decided to cut and run from the vanities one fine August day among the gnarled stumps of an abandoned cherry orchard.  Thrusting shears into the hands of nymphs who cut their own and each others’ hair at the merest provocation, I was reborn.

Since then I’ve shorn my coif ever shorter, sometimes feeling more artsy than elderly, other times not so much. The crone goddess stalked me still, until a couple of nights ago when my dear old mother visited me in her June Cleaver garb, a dream I told my sister...

'I dreamed I was sitting at the dining room table with you and Dad and Mariah and Mom. We were smiling and talking, Mom had flesh on her bones and her hair was brown. Mariah was young, in blond pigtails. I went over to Mom's end of the table, gave her a big hug, told her I missed her and we all missed her and loved her and I'd thought she'd died, but here she was with us. She just kept smiling her beautiful smile. She was wearing a beige cardigan and plaid Scottish skirt, maybe pearls. Hugging her sideways as I looked across the table at you guys, I felt Mom smooching my cheek continuously, like a happy child. I said to you sisters, 'this isn't real is it?' and Mariah, grinning back, said, 'nothing's real, Susie!' We all seemed to think that made sense. I woke up, thinking of love.'

 If nothing is real, then everything might just as well be real.  My sister’s take on the dream gives an artist pause.  She said:

'I'm listening to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. He talks about reality - how we can't really take it in - we take a few grains of sand of it and that's our reality. There's so much - so much.'

I guess that’s what art does.  Excavate, death defy, populate the world with seers.  There are muses, in pearls, waiting to smooch us unabashed into the light.

Painting by Paul Gauguin, La Baignade

Swiss minarets notwithstanding

Here’s the church.  Here’s the steeple.  Open the doors and see all the people.  Child’s play back in the day, with not a minaret to be seen.

Nearly 58 percent of Swiss voters put the nix on minaret building and the kibosh on religious tolerance.  Of course, it’s never that simple.

My heritage is Swiss.  I grew up high on its famed neutrality, sobered in time by the knowledge of Swiss banks looting Holocaust victims.

The Switzerland I’ve loved is pure.  I’ve hiked its alps, wandered its valleys and worked its farmland.  I’ve hugged its wondrous terrain by cable car, hiking boot and utterly punctual train.  Tilted a bowl of warm milk to my lips in a mountain cabin rocked by June blizzards.  Sung with Tante Anna.  Laughed with Hans.  Had a crush on Peter. Skied with Otti and Ernst.  Church bells and cow bells everywhere.  Not a minaret to be seen.

Wouldn’t it be comforting to knit the inconsistencies into an emblematic wool scarf just now.  Self-preservation so deeply moves us all, preceding love, consuming trust. Religion holds scant sway and no amount of logic makes us holy.

What shall become of a world were mercies languish at the feet of terror, our only lonesome vote: our art?

Photo credit Roland Zumbüh, Sankt Martin im Calfeisental