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

Command the poises

History is art, because story is art. Able writers interest us in world events by framing them in story.  And by the way, you and I are world events. 

The Harding Affair: Love and Espionage During the Great War tells the story of Warren G. Harding’s 15 year affair with Caroline F. Phillips.  Of their fiery correspondence, many of his letters remain. The book is a fascinating juxtaposition of personal revelations and global political events. In the heightened patriotism of World War I, Phillips’ German sympathies threatened her personal safety and Harding's political solvency. When she was suspected by the nascent FBI of spying for the enemy, Senator and future President Harding sent her this cautionary plea:

‘You have the intellect, the soul and personality, please command the poises befitting your superiority.’
Warren G. Harding

Sometimes lives of the past can dwarf our ordinary lives, but it’s worth remembering that we know these people through story. Boringness has been edited out. Even primary sources, letters in Harding’s own hand, were sculpted by the author. Ordinary and extraordinary lives, framed and pondered, reverberate through story craft.

This week, Young Audiences of Northeast Ohio asked me to represent myself and 60 artist colleagues for a television interview. Grappling with how best to explain my storytelling work in schools, I wanted to ‘command the poises’ - an artist mantra so aptly penned by Harding. A kind friend sent me these words just before the interview:

‘You are smart, sharp and a role model. You'll be terrific.’

Thus bolstered, I stepped before the cameras. I had a hunch my audience would glaze its eyes at concepts like ‘arts/curriculum integration,’ so I looked my interviewer in the eye and reenacted an Ohio & Erie Canal digger of Harding’s era. I became humble Italian-American Tony, one of my fourth graders’ favorite immigrant entrepreneurs, plying his enthusiasms with twinkling grace. What better way for students to frame, absorb and remember the past?

When story happens, large or small, nerves give way to art, preparation matures into performance, boringness vanishes and the rest, they say, is history.

Photo of Warren G. Harding and Carrie F. Phillips

Be the air

Critics have dismissed Paul Gauguin as an artist who could not draw well, and knew it, who therefore turned to a more primitive style of expression. Noa Noa: The Tahiti Journal of Paul Gauguin was the never published companion catalogue to Gauguin’s French exhibition of 60 paintings and block prints completed in Tahiti. The public of Gauguin’s day judged his work harshly, the same work that later left Pablo Picasso in Gauguin’s thrall and fetches millions in today’s market.

These strains of a master’s tortured past were the stuff of two mini-lectures last night in the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Ingalls Library. As I listened, I remembered Stephen Colbert pointedly asking Tom Campbell of the Metropolitan Museum of Art what makes art “art.” Who decides what’s worthy? Campbell explained that trained experts determine the authenticity and significance of older works, but he had no words for what makes art good, or bad.

Last night, surrounded by a tacto-visual repast the librarians had laid out for us - clippings, postcards, prints and the like - we heard muffled cheers erupting from adjoining offices. Who knew, the CMA staff watches Wednesday night football?

Our hosts explained later that the museum had just learned of a much hoped for acquisition for its collection. “What is it?” we asked. “Can’t tell you,” they answered, beamingly mysterious. We’d have to wait, like everyone else, for the morning paper.

My mother would have loved this story. Then again, she most likely listened in, her beneficent ghost haunting us calmly in that still space. Jane Sylvia Hewes Weber was painter, librarian and mother. She plied shelves at home with art books and dragged her kids and grandkids to museums, including this very Cleveland museum. Thanks to the librarians and Gauguin’s fragrant works, I now know where to find my mother when I miss her too much to ponder. There, on the walls, in the spaces of art she found worthy even as she found her own efforts wanting. Undaunted as the wild Gauguin, she painted on canvas and upon her progeny’s lives with a certain brave innocence. She let us be seers and seekers; she bade us be air.

Her ghost, with a nod to Monsieur Gauguin, inspired these lyrics once:

Watercolor on my shoulder. Watercolor in my hair.
Watercolor on the border, water in the air.
Promise me to be the water. Promise me to be the air.
Susan Weber, Air

Public Domain painting, Paul Gauguin, In the Waves 1898

Dylan agape

Why do boys and girls in schools I visit want to help me pack up when I’m finished telling lavish tales? You know, stories that take us places. There’s a certain reverence to the kids’ soft gestures as they stow my props and paraphernalia. Their desire to lend their service to the magic touches me.

The story goes that when young Bob Dylan asked his Newport audience, ‘does anyone have an E harmonica?’ a cacophony of well-aimed mouth harps flung from pockets hit the stage around him. Late last week, the elder Bard of Hibbing brought this home.

I witnessed my first Bob Dylan concert at Canton’s Memorial Civic Center Thursday night. Never underestimate the power of witness.  In the course of 14 songs and three encores, I was in a state of squeaky clean, ‘I thought this didn’t happen ‘til the life hereafter’ grace.

Tell me how this happened to a lyrics lover who didn’t understand a single word of the show. My brain was not particularly involved in the night’s proceedings, except for a punch drunk awareness that what I never thought possible was happening then. In a wooden stadium seat on a wet November night in downtown Canton, I was unconditionally sated by a work of art.

If any member of the band had called out in need of anything I had to give, my feet would have levitated me to within throwing range. No question. So this is the sublime power of art. Ever since my visit to the great beyond made manifest by six elegant maestros, I’ve heard a sleek internal beauty ask the best I have to offer.

The children understand agape.

Public domain photo, Bob Dylan 1963

Ripeness is all

I once stepped out of my comfort zone into an acting class taught by Scott Plate. Asking his students to journal about their experiences, he promised to read every word. Now, Scott may not have been as overjoyed as Susan who, to her surprise, began to richly dream, and freely add the findings to her journal.

The dreams were more vivid and complex than usual, my sense and sensitivity at full tilt. A gift, I thought, that just when assigned the task of introspection, dreams should surface, ripe with illustration.

Bill Moyers recently aired an interview from 2004. He asked Maurice Sendak, author illustrator of ‘Where the Wild Things Are,’ how he calmed his own demons.

Art has always been my salvation. And my gods are Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Mozart. I believe in them with all my heart. And when Mozart is playing in my room, I am in conjunction with something I can't explain. I don't need to. I know that if there's a purpose for life, it was for me to hear Mozart. Or if I walk in the woods and I see an animal, the purpose of my life was to see that animal. I can recollect it, I can notice it. I'm here to take note of. And that is beyond my ego, beyond anything that belongs to me.
Maurice Sendak, Bill Moyers Journal

Sendak took comfort in art as he ventured into public television.

Like coming here today, I was anxious about this. Would I be all right? And I have a little tiny Emily Dickinson that I carry in my pocket everywhere. And you just read three poems of Emily. She is so brave. She is so strong. She is such a sexy, passionate, little woman. I feel better.

So what did the 75 year old writer want to be when he grew up?

My big concern is me and what do I do now until the time of my death. That is valid. That is useful. That is beautiful. That is creative. And also, I want to be free again. I want to be free like when I was a kid, working with my brother and making toy airplanes and a whole model of the World's Fair in 1939 out of wax. Where we just had fun... I want to see me to the end working, living for myself. Ripeness is all.

Sendak’s invocation of ripeness reminds me of the vivid dreams that lined up with my acting class back when. And my vivid dreams now.

By day, I’ve left my comfort zone to make a video about a sensuous song, It Falls Away. At night, dreams sway luscious in the branches, or squish beneath my midnight ramblings.  I’m not so sure about the comings and goings of dreams.   

I used to think imagination preceded art. If dreams run rampant, haunting the day with their memories, that’s inspiration, right? If feelings are ripe, it’s time to create something. Yes?

Except that maybe it’s the other way around. Art comes first. Dreams, and vivid intrigue, follow. As Sendak mused, ‘when Mozart is playing in my room, I am in conjunction with something I can't explain.’

This berry bears our artist mission: get our souls away from the languidly familiar, out onto the fertile plain where dreams chase us down to captivate our longing. Each act of art, whether absorbing or making it, is birth and death and depth perception in between.  It's where the wild things are. It’s where the master placed his benediction:

Men must endure their going hence, even as their coming hither. Ripeness is all.
William Shakespeare, King Lear

Artist candor

‘We have an anti-semitic president.’

Not the kind of thing my sister and I expect to hear the cardiologist say as he listens to our dad’s heart.

My sister’s Israeli, occasioning the doc’s statements of certitude on Arab religion (violent), universities (substandard) and government (violent and substandard).  Oddly, my Jewish sister is left to defend Islamic beliefs subverted by unscrupulous leaders.  The Gentile physician ignores her completely.  The middle east is defibrillating; Koranic teaching is the culprit.  Case closed.

Somehow I’d expect a more nuanced approach to political science from an educated man.  Which only shows my unsubstantiated bias toward the belief set of academia.  As though more intellectual tools and exposure equals broadmindedness and curiosity.  Surely medical science refines itself by embracing more, not less, rational evidence.

A friend of mine circulates ernest emails pitting wise conservatives against pompous liberals in couplets of rectitude:

If a conservative sees a foreign threat, he thinks about how to defeat his enemy.
A liberal wonders how to surrender gracefully and still look good.

I shake my head as I hit delete, thinking that as long as there are voters who practice black and white thinking, we’ll have politicians who pander to them.  This, the unctuous underbelly of democracy, encourages gladhanders to exploit the us-them battleground.

It sometimes feels like hopelessness incarnate.

Enter, artist.  Ply your nuance.  Encourage doubt.  Eschew the easy answers and web-ready glib gloss besmirching your and my and everybody's lips.  As one artist philosopher of the day warns,

The end of the world came and went while you were on Facebook.
Dan Piraro, Bizarro

While you were on Limbaugh, Colbert, CNN, Fox, Hannity and Dowd, clouds of intelligent uncertainty passed you by.  Art is where we explore certitude with a double edged sward.  Slice question marks into the self-righteousness belly of the beast.  Generate beauty, lots of beauty, to remind us all of our capacity for love.

Hear the remonstrations of the muse:  ‘Paint me.  Make me real.’

Photo John T. Bledsoe, Library of Congress

Fellowship of the rope

‘In each of them, we find the amalgam of the child carrying old wounds and the adult who has learned to cope with a world oblivious to his or her individual dream.’
Jennifer Weil, Old Town Playhouse

These are words flung out to a waiting audience by the director of Gene Abravaya’s new play, The Book of Matthew Liebowitz.  Words to secure our ascent up a fictional mountain of contiguous words, astutely drawn characters and a well conditioned ensemble.

And why do we, audience or artist, entertain metaphors of mountaineering, with our own lives already rife with challenge?  Why explore, discern, respond to created worlds?  Charlie Houston, veteran climber, put it this way:

You're surrounded by beauty. No matter whether it's a storm, or a sunny day, or clouds, or not, the mountains are simply beautiful. I've never been a great climber. I'm just a competent climber and I know my limits. But I love getting out and doing it.
Charlie Houston, Bill Moyers Journal

Just ‘getting out and doing it’ for the beauty is impetus behind many a climb, fuel for exhaustive preparation and try.

But there’s more than solo gratification on the line.  Actors, musicians, writers and their audiences - even in the heady free fall of oxygen-lite extroversion - pull themselves together and upwards by means of what Houston, no stranger to death defiance, called a ‘fellowship of the rope.’

You knew that your life was in the hands of somebody else, and his was in your hands. And it made you climb perhaps more carefully. You didn't push the envelope quite so hard. But it also gave you a feeling of... there was an emotional or a psychological bond between us... at least as important as the physical bond. And that's why climbing with rope is... To some extent, it's more dangerous, because if one man pulls, slips and pulls you off, you're both gone. But on the other hand, as happened in our case, the fact that we were roped together saved all our lives.
Charlie Houston, Bill Moyers Journal

I’ve experienced this invisible tensile strength with musical companions, on stage, in studio, at rehearsal; a bond like no other.  Why climb creativity's sheer slopes?  Summoned by beauty, lured by dream, secured by interdependence, we do it in search of home.

I’m reminded of lyrics I wrote once, not yet calling love the rope, but knowing it full well.

Set out to climb impossible mountain.
Could not be done.  I did not care.
Set out to climb impossible mountain. 
I thought I’d find my dreams up there.

Top of the world, you are alluring. 
I can’t deny your mystic slope.
I hear you scream your warning. 
Echo of madness, echo of hope.

Set out to climb impossible mountain. 
I changed my mind, I turned in my tracks.
Set out to climb impossible mountain. 
Love took me home and home took me back.

Susan Weber, Everest

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Photo Felicity and Phillip, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0

The people's largesse

A little girl, maybe seven, ploughs into me on her way out of the girl’s locker room.  ‘Daddy!’ she calls into the empty foyer of our local pool.  ‘My dad’s got my bag,’ she tells me.

‘Maybe he’s in the boy’s locker room,’ I offer.  ‘We can call him from the doorway.’  We both try.

‘Daddy!’

‘Anybody in there have a little girl?’  No answer.

So we head back to our locker room with me listening to the girl’s steady stream.  ‘I already have my suit on but I need my bag to put my clothes in,' she points out.

By the time we’ve got on goggles and caps and I’m saying her dad’s probably waiting for her on the pool deck, I notice the girl is studiously ignoring me.  She’s gotten a grip on worry and gotten in touch with something her parents taught her.  Rules.

Ah yes, ‘don’t speak to strangers’ and ‘don’t speak to kids who aren’t supposed to speak to strangers.’  In our rush to fix a problem, we’d both forgotten rules and roles and business as usual.  Strange woman.  Dutiful child.  Zero trust; all hallowed rules.

There are times when our great need, or loss, or even greater love temporarily interrupts the who’s who of trustworthy others.  After 9/11, it’s often noted, a national, even global suspension of distrust between strangers took effect.  Safe distance gave in to compassion and kindness.  It reminds me of cherished reunions with my family, whose Weltanschauung could not be further from my own.  I’m not the only one who loves her kin far more than she misjudges them.

I admire the girl swimmer’s resolve to ignore the stranger lady, as her parents told her to.  I told my little boys the same back when, to keep them safe.

But for grown ups, I’d welcome a person of stature to challenge us all - we the rule followers who curl up in our cozy sense of who belongs and who is never to be trusted.  Lead us not into self-preservation and other-ignoring but toward a role model our seven year olds may one day embrace.  A future where pundits and pols and the overlords who own them are shamed by the peoples’ relentless courage to include.

When such a leader emerges, I pray the stones we throw will miss their mark.  Long enough for us to awaken and think, as adults, for ourselves.

And with each other.

Hold Your Hand | Revolution Pie & Friends

Elsewhere I’ve tracked the rational act of making this video.  Here you’ll find the visceral exposé. 

I’ve been Paul Fresty’s friend since our paths crossed in a songwriter circle many moons back.  Suddenly last summer, my imperious muse bade me go see Paul’s Beatles cover band (Revolution Pie) perform for a crowd of groovers and shakers.  Beatlemania was palpable as the stars, settling over the lovers of magic like a sweet dream.  My hand knew not whither to aim the lens in the midst of this wide angle lovefest.

What you see here, to the sound of one fine band and its devotees, is how one of those Beatles tunes moved me.  To film it.  To seek out images worthy of its joy.  To combine, revise, revisit, refine - and finally send it all up to the webiverse for you and your fond friends. 

Anyone who’s edited video knows you floss your ears many times with the audio tracks...

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Michelle Obama's alleged red blotches

Dear Kim,

I've been so involved in citizen politics lately that I've barely read 'Style & Taste.' Your piece about Michelle Obama caught my eye because I like your writing and sense of fair play.

I admire Michelle Obama's confidence, graciousness and devotion to the good of the country. It's nice that she cares about her appearance and enjoys clothes shopping. But for me, that's a footnote.

If she wants to hire a stylist, that's fine. Maybe the bloggers will critique the stylist from then on -- or Michelle Obama for hiring the wrong one! My point is, fashion is an art form we happen to wear, so art critics naturally pay attention to prominent people. But in a society where class is equated with wealth and the wealthy often lack class (ie. the gilded parachute), perhaps we could let Michelle be Michelle, enjoy her individuality and focus on the good work she wants to do.

Thanks for writing,
Susan


photo Craig ONeal (cc-by-sa-2.0)

To my family, the morning after

Indian summer, from a bare back porch.

This morning, I did two things. Clean the house. Ride my bike.

While I cleaned, I thought of the family I came from and grew into. Our diverse ideas. The choices we make. I considered how the events of the past 24 hours would be met by each of us.

I was moved by John McCain's concession speech, especially his call to come together for the sake of the country.

I urge all Americans who supported me to join me in not just congratulating him, but offering our next president our good will and earnest effort to find ways to come together to find the necessary compromises to bridge our differences and help restore our prosperity, defend our security in a dangerous world, and leave our children and grandchildren a stronger, better country than we inherited... I wish Godspeed to the man who was my former opponent and will be my president.
-- John McCain 11.4.08

Like a good family. Like my family, where love is stronger than differences. But I wonder if Senator McCain was calling for more than live-and-let-live. He seems to consider the problems of our time too big for only half a population to manage.

Then I rode my bike to Forest Hills Park, the wild old Rockefeller estate on a bluff overlooking Cleveland. I never know whose path I'll cross over there. Strangers by foot, by bike, with and without dogs, with and without companions, accents, ipods, canes. Just about always with smile. A goodly number of geese surround a small lake I can picture the Rockefeller family picnicking by on a day like this. Now it's here for the common folk, clearing our minds the day after the first black family is invited to live in the great white house.

I want to do my part to mend what's broken in the world. I don't know what this will mean, but I thank John and Barack for taking the high road last night. I think this is the one we'll need to take now. I thank them for the leadership. And you, for inspiration.

In the end, then, what is called for is nothing more, and nothing less, than what all the world's great religions demand: that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Let us be our brother's keeper, Scripture tells us. Let us be our sister's keeper. Let us find that common stake we all have in one another, and let our politics reflect that spirit as well.
-- Barack Obama 3.18.08

photo acaben (cc-by-sa-2.0)

Web 3.0 mandate: time = life

Time is money. So the saying goes. But this one's aging fast.

A body's alloted time is finite and therefore rather precious. Until we come up with anti-death serum, this part won’t change. But when it comes to equating time with money, much has changed already.

Old think

Remember Titanic? That film took a lot of time to make. People time, coordinated by the director, James Cameron. We used to equate the hours of human life consumed in the making of an epic film with great value. We forked over money (earned with hours of our lives) to see Titanic, told our friends to spend their time-money on it and, in some cases, repeated the cycle until we decided to spend our riches elsewhere. A simple formula, really: human life (in hours) it takes to make Titanic translates into human life (hours devoted to getting the paycheck) consumers are willing to give up to have it.

New think

Enter Web 2.0 with media-rich social networking. It’s all about time. Post a video of your baby laughing on YouTube and the time you put into it (relatively speaking, zilch) can yield high viewing time by YouTube fans. Except for the cost of web access, money is irrelevant here. Lots of time is spent in a lopsided spiral. You spend a pittance of your finite life on your baby’s video debut. Millions of baby lovers and laugh addicts spend their finite life hours to see and spread it.

Looks like time doesn’t always equal money anymore. Now small time investment can translate into big time return and every PR guru is out to figure what meme will stick and how to nurture the knack of predicting the next viral spiral.

Artists are not immune from old-think or new-think. We of little money can be smugly proud of using precious ‘time’ making unique masterpieces while our materialistic friends spend their ‘time’ getting all that money which must be spent on useless toys that weigh down the tree-lawns on garbage day. But (secretly) we might like to find an easy way to take the Zeitgeist by storm whereby zillions of appreciative time-owners line up to purchase our humble creation with time-extravagant ready cash, and tell their friends to send us even more money.

Ah, how very hypocritical of us. We claim time is more precious than money, but don’t care to share this gift of time. Consumer money would save us time. We could spend less time scrounging around, more time creating masterpieces. In the end, artists can be just as fond of the idea of time=money as anyone else and welcome the internet’s promise to get us both.

Newer think

Web 3.0 is coming and, politics willing, hope is on the move. We’ll live to see the hive of social mediacs move too. One thing we’ve established is that as long as we’re peering at a bunch of pixels, we’re not grazing the isles of big box emporiums that fill our time and space with junk. It doesn’t appear too likely we'll up and abstain from the wonders of the web, addicted as we are to its virtues. But all is not well. The internet is a great place to put your nonrenewable time stamp unless you happen to derive pleasure from all your senses, including a sense of responsibility for a life well lived. Observers decry the multiple screen sucking ploys that steal our precious time.

The future I see is this. Artist-geeksters reinvent what’s possible online, underscore the finitude of hours, emphasize the sensual breadth of experience and keep in mind the worth of time. In short, we celebrate time as the new wealth. CEOs cease to duke it out over the biggest wad of cash; their reputation will rise and fall on how much they enhance stakeholder time. We’ll see this attitude reflected on the ticker tape, replacing the blingfest. Hey, once the roof’s sound, the body’s whole, and the kids are OK, what’s the point of the gilded life?

Time is the new currency. Though some are slow to notice, money’s lost its luster.


public domain painting Willy Stöwer

Wallstreet smirk

When regulators took over mortgage finance Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac this month, they eliminated $12.59 million in exit payments for executives Daniel H. Mudd of Fannie Mae and Richard F. Syron of Freddie Mac. The executives will now get a combined $9.43 million upon their exit.

The Washington Post with its giant DC circulation may be able to slide mention of this monetary peccadillo into the beltway news without fanfare, but how does it play in Peoria? Tales of yet another incredulous stunt by the mega moneyed do not the happy rustbelter make.

But if we could take a moment and reflect upon the stress of Freddie and Fannie ex-execs who, between them, have nearly thirteen million dollars less to retire upon than they had planned upon, perhaps we'll feel less put upon. For all we know, as we sputter on about small oil sticker shock, Mr. Fannie may be auctioning his condo in Tahiti as Sir Freddie maxes out his credit cards to fuel the yacht.


public domain painting Paul Gauguin ~ Deux Tahitiennes, 1899, oil on canvas, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Palin pales

The liberal mainstream media set me up. I tuned in to hear a speech by a spitfire self-starter with maverick creds surpassed by none. Instead, I heard talking points dressed in hocky ma shucks.

It was embarrassing, as a woman, to see her squander her talents by pandering to a mean spirited conservatism. She lied about the Democrats' middle class tax cut.

"How are you going to be better off if our opponent adds a massive tax burden to the American economy?"

She lied about the Democrats' renewable energy policies.

"America needs more energy. Our opponent is against producing it."

She insulted citizens who take responsibility for their communities.

"I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a "community organizer," except that you have actual responsibilities."

She ignored her party's distension of the national debt and generous tax cuts to the well-to-do.

I was led to believe 'maverick McCain' would rattle the cages of his grand old party with a young, vibrant, new-thinking dynamo running-mate. Come to find out, with the glibness of Guliani and the vainglory of her new elitist friends, Miss Congeniality only finds it necessary to embrace the protectors of their own narrow perspectives and swollen purses.

Let the vetting begin.


Image uploaded to Commons by Ranveig licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0

Wisdom of insecurity

If we must be nationalists and have a sovereign state, we cannot also expect to have world peace.

If we want to get everything at the least possible cost, we cannot expect to get the best possible quality, the balance between the two being mediocrity.

If we make it an ideal to be morally superior, we cannot at the same time avoid self-righteousness.

If we cling to belief in God, we cannot likewise have faith, since faith is not clinging but letting go.

-- Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety (1951)

Hmmm....

They cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
-- Barrack Obama

Pessl re Dylan

'Artist' can’t make even the briefest public appearance without extensive baggage. The next time you’re at a party and someone asks what you do for a living, boldly say artist, then sit back and watch the jolting effect that little word has upon a conversation. Above 14th Street, you’ll be offered money, food, some tips on where to find free lodging. Below 14th Street, the person will smirk, dutifully ask “What kind?” or appear to start swallowing an egg, which is a disguised yawn. You’ll get a hug in the Midwest. In Santa Monica, you’ll get “sweet” and an invitation to go Rollerblading. In certain parts of the country you’ll get tied up and thrown into the back of a pickup truck, and no one will ever hear from you again. But every now and then, the word perfectly explains a certain person.
-- Marisha Pessl

Ms. Pessl's piece about “Bob Dylan: The Drawn Blank Series,” must have cost her a gold mine of focused attention. She shares her savory perceptions like a spread at a lavish party.

Observations about Bob Dylan are hardly rare. He's an intriguing being.

From the beginning, he’s been a mixed medium artist. He’s never been a straight linear person. He’s had a whole lot of miscellany.
-- Christopher Ricks

There's the bard himself in all his glorious miscellany. Then, the legions who honor his every word, sound, brushstroke. Witnessing his effect on these observers and their works about him, you begin to glimpse the power of a single person capable of silencing every naysayer within and without for the sake of his salient virtue.


photo Walt Campbell

Digital aplomb

She understands her future,
loves the gradual warmth
of the new brain marinade.

Befriending time,
she tells the countess
of caffeinated mediocrity
to leave her shoes on the stair
before coming in.

Youth is beautiful these days,
thanks to structure
evolved by kindly geeksters.

When time is ripe,
she ventures into its elegant mist,
exhales and evaporates.

Chiming.

Sammy

This little boy
points at my guitar case
on the frivolous preschool carpet
keen to be knighted
sir latcher of latches.

He kneels into the task
studious
remembering the groove of
slide
latch
click
each movement his personal best.

When the day comes
that he is master of projects
that change the way
we think and ask and thrive
it will have been music
that once answered prayer
of his fingering mind.

Verbiage

the Poets unbraid it
with punked up graffiti

the Pundits rebuke it
with bludgeons of grandeur
and voices of silt

the children reclaim it
their tongues on the throttle
their minds on the guttural
pulse of unknowing
in backward progression
from silence to sound

Artist re artist

You almost have to be full of yourself to be an artist, right? As in

I'm special.
I have something important to say.
The world needs my _____.
I owe it to the universe to live out my (stellar) trajectory.

Once you get enlightend about your status as just one of the gang, do you give up or hunker down? This is all pseudo art, after all. Real art is real life, however you live it. Charles Kuralt ambles by (he's dead of course -- artists are not immortal, dear) to ask about the scooner you're building in your parched yard or the bicycles you fix for neighbor kids who can't afford bikes, let alone repairs. You'll be humanly interesting for a minute, inspire somebody to get off the couch and weed the potatoes, but you won't see yourself Rolling-Stone blow-dry-air-brushed anytime soon.

Which leaves you with this. When the magnificent artist brain fits back inside the cranium, you start to see straight again. The bones that broke under your spectacular youness get strong and dear and appreciative of stuff like bird conjugations and orange rinds.

John McCain suggests his wife enter a topless beauty contest

This is how you get a rap for being a prude: rowdy guys leer at Cindy McCain and if you find her husband less than honorable for putting her in their sites, you (presumably) lack a sense of humor and adventure.

The same dynamic plays out in the litany of mega-artsy outside-the-boxers from New York to Hollywood who want you to 'lighten up! -- a little sex in the city never hurt anybody.'

A brave new citizenry will (soon, if it isn't here already) figure out how to make what is both creative and respectful of the human spirit trés cool.

Cindy McCain looks like she is smiling away in her roomy work shirt and crossed wrists on that biker rally stage, but like Laura Bush, Hillary Clinton and so many politico-wives through time, we'll never know what she's thinking or who's neck she's secretly wringing.

My visit with Sarah

Twenty four hours ago I might have been pleased with myself for groping my way to pen and pad through the work strewn room at 4 am.

But that was before Sarah.

It was a visit I dreaded and desired since hearing that my friend's granddaughter had lost both optic nerves by a gun badly handled. I'd last seen Sarah in passing, as she kissed her granny through the car window, her bleached bangs screaming wild. The way news of family filters through friends, I knew her as the wayward child. What would I, mother of sons, think to say, or do, in the presence of this newly blind young woman?

She was resting, down the hall, as we came and sat and wrapped our hands around wet glasses. Her mother's even keel belied her taut vigilance, bound to the sudden, changeable winds. What choice did she have in a home with a child who wasn't always keen on living?

Someplace within the lull of our murmurings, Sarah had joined us. She was curled in a bundle of gray hoodie, jeans, and black converse sneakers. We talked around and past her for awhile, swirling our best intentions her way like dervishes on tiptoe. When we lighted on braille and her new teacher, the tools came out and Sarah showed us the fingerwork she'd practiced.

It was really Sarah who broke the ice. "Show Susan the notebook, Mom -- maybe we can do the thing with random pages." I inched toward the lovely girl with auburn hair and dark glasses, starstruck by her grit and grace.

So we did the drill. She took each page I handed her and went to work, tenderly teasing the alphabet from tiny bumps, accepting me like the great aunt who passes through town on business. But this was not my business, it was hers, and she had her plans.

"After I learn the braille, I want to get good at cane walking and how to cook and do laundry so I can help my mom around here. I'll probably go to school in Pittsburgh -- I think it will be good to meet some other blind people. I don't know anyone who's blind."

And neither did I, but now, it seems, I do.

Something in Sarah reminds me of Dave, best friend of one of my boys. Dave ROTC'd his way through college, served and blogged his way through an Iraq tour and ended up, miraculously, alive. Both of them exude a sort of ironic alertness to the present, tense as it may feel from the fallout of choices they did and did not make. Their words carry the intelligent lilt of skepticism; their humor takes you in stride.

Her mom brought her a crisp new dollar, which Sarah began to fold and crease and fold again as talk turned to watches that speak and pills that dull the relentless pain of bullet wounds. Maisie, the golden mutt, bellied up for scratches on the braided rug. Voilà! Sarah's origami creature, a wee elephant that couldn't be spent in a million years, landed in my palm. "Every waiter says the same thing when I leave a row of these on the table," she says, pleased and weary. "I'll never be able to spend that tip."

It was time to go, my pachyderm a gift to cherish, a parting sack of chocolate eggs in shiny foil tucked in Sarah's pocket. We stood and hugged and said the normal things. "So good to see you, Sarah."

And Sarah said, "good to see you too, as the saying goes."

New Yorker 7.21.08

I reserve the right to be as offensive as I want in my cartoons, and to exaggerate however I please -- but I want my cartoons to work, to be good cartoons. A cartoon that fails to communicate its message in a way that readers understand is nothing more than a bad cartoon.
Daryl Cagle political cartoonist

If The New Yorker wants to get into the political cartoon business, it ought to hire some political cartoonists.
Ted Rall Association of American Editorial Cartoonists

If you're spending time on this, it must be summer!
Signe Wilkinson editorial cartoonist

Now that we've had our group fainting spell over the latest New Yorker cover, our bloggers exhausted, our pundits redundant, our analysts spent: this might be a time to wonder... what was that exactly?

Did all the huffiness and bilge amount to much besides the artist (what's his name?) getting a boot of notoriety and the rest of us (who are we again?) lavishly spinning our spokes?

Will a single voter change course because of this picture? Will the bungled satire cause two exhaustively scrutinized citizens to thicken up their skin against the muddy season? And if they do, so long as they keep their bright minds on the prize, this apparently being our collective inalienable freedoms to frazzle ourselves silly over words and pictures if we want to, what's the harm in that?

Sunseeds

I'm at a hospital or rehab center, visiting family. Simultaneously, I'm in Greece or Isreal with O & N, my niece and nephew. One wing of the building is noticeably run down; it's where the welfare patients live. I want to fix this, eying the foyer to the wards, wallpaper stained and peeling. I could pull down that paper, fix and paint the walls. I have skills in this work. Surly the authorities would approve. I consider getting permissions as I shrug off the fact that tackling this job will keep me inside for days.

O & N clamor for the great outdoors. I feel them pull my hands and laugh and clown around me. I reach like a woman obsessed for a peeling corner of pink flowered paper and rip away a good sized chunk, blinking with equal satisfaction and dread. As I wonder if the institution might finish the job, a couple of nun type characters show up, nod their approval, leave the completion to me.

The foyer has modest walls and painted ceiling. It opens into a giant hall with infinite ceilings that, lo and behold, are plastered with more flowered paper. Walls and ceiling have cracks and grooves begging a professional's hand. Away I peel into the vast hall, vaguely cognisant that papered walls need endless scrubbing before the paint goes on.

The place takes on a dingy feel, a musty smell, a hopeless sound of muffled laughter as two Israeli bikers rev up along the sparkly sea with its blinding sand reflections. I hope and hope, against all evidence, for rescue, working wildly, perplexed by my choices.

In the end, I wake up, panting, aware. My bondage to pink fading flowers never was nor evermore shall be.

Womb II

Once upon a cell, you did divide. You piled up cells unthinking, happy to comply with nature's plan. But even in her womb, your mama's booze, your dad's cigar, your older brother's angst took shots at you. Or maybe you were met by gentle souls who jellied up your appetite for calm.

Infinite possibility flooded by finite mitigations nobody planned so precisely as to ready you for this, life on the outside.

I call it second womb.

Once here, you would build your perfect womb -- your well stocked home, diversions and routine -- to serve more cell divides. But with second womb construction and maintenance, scant time leaks out to lube your passage into the wilderness you're bound for the minute ovum joins sperm.

We're conceived as cells. We grow more cells in utero, and once outside we pad our cells with matter no one asked for. We form thick walls around the impetus, the spark of life, the only part of us that's born to thrive.

Can't buy me love

"What consumer culture does is to privatize people. It makes them focus on their own personal well being. And not just material well-being. Why shouldn't people be concerned with their material well being? But they see in acquisition of material goods a kind of self liberation, a kind of upward rise socially, and a kind of freedom. And to the degree that consumer culture captures your imagination, you lose a social imagination. You no longer see yourself as part of some kind of collective."
Steve Fraser on Bill Moyers Journal 6-13-08

You get one chance to be proud. This can elude you, but don't be discouraged. One day, or sleepless night, it may come to you without the slightest provocation. A sense of pride in yourself, your place in society, that has nothing to do with status or consumption. A sense of human worthiness.

Still, trouble will come as messengers barrage you with one request: that you lift a wad of money out of your workshirt, stick it into the seller's fist. Marketeers lavish you with images of actors pretending to be incredibly satisfied with stuff.

Monks and shamans warn against selling your soul for the coinage of the realm. They sound so quaint and angry, quite the opposite of your suave superself out to buy the world and rest content in the lap of acquisition. Now you have your toys and baubles, your sleek car, your sleeker game console. You can live forever in the cosmos of your dreams. The hustlers cherish you you you my child: so important as statistic, insignificant as self.

But are you worthy, sister? Are you satisfied? Do you stealthily resist the huckster parade, blunderbussing you in its tractor beam?

Let the junk mail flutter down the ad soaked street. Let the superheroes flap their capes and flex their talons at your new found sight. Deny them any power to impress you. This is a great day where dead men walk and manic women lay aside their cloaks of unbelonging. Proper ladies take up megaphones to bleat their poetry at the lawless night. Image consultants weep themselves to sleep and the sweet elves of tomorrow tuck them in with fierce communal pride.

Everything youtube

So I was testing the capabilities of iMovie before plunging into more robust video editing software. Showed it to a few people I knew to get some feedback before posting it on YouTube, yesterday. Today, 1,690 views and counting, I'm surprised by something happening (as I cruise around YouTube gathering inspiration and toolkit ideas) beyond me. Makes me wonder what's going on in the lives of the people who take the time to look at it. Here's the flick... enjoy! (and leave a comment, so I'm not left completely clueless...)

Suckerpunch

It's one of those memories that only comes when a fresh wound conjures the ghosts. A bully on the school bus bound for Loveland Elementary pulled back a fist and belted me in the gut as he strode down the isle. I couldn't breathe at first; I sat in mute confusion, blinking. Who was this kid? Why did he attack me?

I recently learned that my friend once endured unthinkable brutality by a stranger. Her rage has festered, dank as its cave, poisoning the well. But now she stalks the demons, hunting down the details of her attacker's horrific childhood. She throws it all at the sun -- the rapist, her self-blame, systemic failures that breed violence, day in day out.

Her relentless pursuit invokes my courage. As a woman, as a citizen, as a mensch.

I have choices. If I want to, I can see the bombings of 9/11 as a cruel attack that had nothing to do with me or anyone I know. I can condemn Jeremiah Wright for saying our nation of imperialists provoked the bombings. I can ridicule others who denounce torture as a sanctioned government response to terror. I can define patriotism as unquestioned loyalty to a system that produces humanitarianism -- as well as bullying, rape and torture.

Or, I can dig. Not because it's a citizen's fault for being bombed any more than a woman deserves to be raped. I would dig to understand the broken system of have and have-not, victim and aggressor, remembered and forgotton. I would dig to unearth a lie that grows lethal in the dark -- the lie that blames the victims and ignores systemic origins of abuse.

In the end, no matter how distant the memory, it's up to the little girl to decide, with her lunchpail clutched to her sore belly, staring out the window at her new found knowledge of the world.

Buffalo

Diane: I listen to Buffalo every single day. It has shaped my character.

Susan: Can you elaborate?

Diane:

I can elaborate in that
I wake up each day
as a person
who feels like a mat
on which people walk
but the strong voice
in the song
and the strength of the beat
makes me feel my spinal cord
has much more give
and I want to go out and live.

Listen to the hoofbeats here.

j.o.y.

When did you last fall in love? Remember -- waking to desire that flowed into your daily ritual, no feeling too mundane to capture the light of this new love?

Love found. Love cherished. Love tamed and groomed in friendship, family, sacrifice and gratitude. The secret we don't always want to hear is that we are creatures of desire. If we tamp it down with civilized love, we are contented, perhaps, but our bellies growl for the deep wild pleasure known as joy.

I can't think of a form of entertainment that brings joy. But art, whether you pour it out or drink it in, is the elixir of your passionate self, multiplied by swirling image, potent metaphor. It's the dance of you in exceptional pivots and reels, breaking your trance into a million blinking stars.

Listen

The world is awash in sound, much of it humanoid.

No matter where you go on this planet, you will most likely be visited by the sound of civilization within the hour. If you live in a people zone, you can become a lazy listener, passively tuned in to human sounds (or anthrophony) -- talk honks cussing roaring gushing burps ringtones soundtracks laughtracks cheering bleeps booing sobbing and of course the ever present amplified placebo that is sold in the name of music.

Imitation music abounds. It is often called 'music' because of the look of the people who make it -- divas with microphones pressed to their lips, bands populated by suave hipsters. Musicians, right? Only if they teach you to listen.

Like anyone else with a humble guitar and a handful of lyrics I once fancied myself a troubadour bound for stage and glory. The friendly people who clapped at my act, I understand this: they reared me. I am forever in their debt. One day I left that stage to take guitar lessons from Michele Temple of the band Pere Ubu. This woman set me to the task of listening. In time, she sent me to the cable-snaking gear jungle of Adam Lake to relieve him of his starburst Fender Telecaster with a Zoom pedal and scribbled instructions on the care and feeding of my new exotic life form.

People tell me I "went to the crossroads" in 2003, from which I returned to voice my sonic rain of poetry and electrons. This sounds dubious to me, as though I sold my soul to the devil who taught me a trick or two about the arrangement of sound and cypher. I don't buy this since the devil cannot hear to save his life. Isn't he the incessant whisperer who saturates the atmosphere with blather?

The only roads I took to with my tele and my strat were crossings where a poet lets her conscious mind unravel, where passions of a lifetime filter through a new kind of song. If she is patient, and lucky, she may acquire the capacity to teach, lobe by lobe, the errant will to listen.



photo by Bruce Jennings

Dame Cognito

Why is my underslept gray matter punch drunk the morning after a concert?

Doubts ensconce themselves in the boudoir of Dame Cognito. In pink lamé, she drapes her curves across my spongy couch as one by one her suitors kneel and bow. These are pudgy little men who promise bells and baubles made of compliments and preen. Bored, my noble madam does her nails in deepest purple; she ignores the manikins and looks at me.

So, she asks again. I scrape the sludge out of my dredger.

You thought your show was over
when the stage went dark?

With this my handsome lady reels into a laugh that would uncouch her.

You are mad (she frankly whispers)
you are mad to be an artist
there is no reprieve
this mind of machination
is your gift and your despair

Wear it bravely, mavin,
wear it boldly and enchanted
and exotic in your hair.

There is movement like a cancer,
there is healing like a balm.
You are present you are absent
you are song.

With this I take my smudgy pencil out of my jeans pocket and a crinkled store coupon too shiny for words. I would lay them at her feet. Make me sane, I say. Make me normal like the women who are happy.

Dame Cognito's purple toenail flicks my pain aside.

You are as normal as they, she mutters.
they as mad as you.
Somewhat sleepier perhaps,
or better actors,
who can say?

They spend a lot of words on wallpaper and gardens, I suggest.

So do you --
refurbishing unconscious thought
for public consummation.
This is risky
and embarrassing
and strange.

I sit dazed, considering. Normalcy. Not in my timeline?

You are captivated
by the sounds that would be born.
Lilliput adores you.

Play the cords that bind and set you free.



photo Britters Szatala

Semi quaver

Music welcomes everyone.

You don't have to be gorgeous, hip or suave. Music asks you to be authentic and maybe a little bit crazy. It takes a kind of deranged love for your instrument to press on until anyone besides your loyal friends will listen.

People do listen to exceptional music in any genre. It reminds them of something. It remembers them to love. Strange love, desperately wanting to cohabit the molecular space of an other. Truthful, vulnerable trust of atoms smashing. Kids know this. Teenagers surely know it. Old people -- I think they do too. It's the vast middle earth of our lives that deflates love, dispenses it in cannisters.

Enter music. Throbbing sound waves crash against our ear drums into self. Legions of composers juxtapose intensity-duration-pitch -- endless variations of the vibratory muscles of our minds. This, when executed skillfully, unfetters our desire for the wordless union.

Some praise the lyricist for haunting images or exquisite rhyme. But words, in the signature of music, are also sounds that break the barrier of thought. Songs don't speak, they sing. They're less tasted by reason than swallowed whole by desire.

Certain music sweeps you off your feet in a ball room crammed with strangers you could love if you were younger or older or merely intrepid enough to feel. The tipping point between caution and candor is a billion angels dancing on a pin. And the pin -- you know it anciently -- is extraordinary music that will touch you like a hand along your spine. This is the pin pulled out of your elaborate headdress. The pulling lets the mind relax. Its raw heat tumbles down your shoulders into hurt and laughter as you slip into the world.

Leadership

I think we have to rethink the concept of "leader." 'Cause "leader" implies "follower." ...I think we need to appropriate, embrace the idea that we are the leaders we've been looking for.
-- Grace Lee Boggs, Bill Moyers Journal

This interview is worth watching -- I recommend it highly!

When I can devote myself to the pleasure, I'm going to dig into this as well.

There are cells in my brain, sleeper cells, awakening to this exceptional woman's clarion call.

Rock solitude

I’m a performing songwriter who craves solitude and adores the stage. Fronting my rock band feeds all that.

Monet’s Orbit is the name of my new CD. It’s a distinctive sound imbued in the songs we play. Monet’s Orbit is my bandmates, my audience, myself and all our respective muses.

Until recently, solitude was hard to come by. Making a CD -- my mind was a swamp of details. When it was done, acres of psychic real estate opened up. This is where the muse lives, where songs erupt and evolve.

Surprisingly, there can be a lot of solitude happening in performance. At our best, our shows create a transcendent space for musicians and listeners. Solitude is where you ask who you are, what you love, what you want and what you’re going to do about it.

In my case, rock music answers those questions well. I grew up playing classical piano, then took up the acoustic guitar, followed by electric guitar. Rock feels more native to me than classical or acoustic guitar based music. But my classical and solo acoustic roots inform the rock songs I’m writing now. Acoustic music honed my lyrical side, classical immersed me in sonic complexity. I give all that to the genre of Rock, this majestic ode to life. Passionate and humble, both.

Inspiration is humbling because the only part of it you can take credit for is being prepared to receive it, then keep running until you fly. Here I am with my Strat, writing a song that seems to have a pulse and purpose of its own. Here we are performing for an audience that amplifies the intensity of the show. Inspiration is humbling -- and electrifying.

If you ask me about the relationship between my experience and my imagination, I’ll say you’re talking to a person who sleeps in her tree house, swims in the rain and wonders out loud if literature’s best characters have souls. Imagination and experience are one. Don’t be afraid to befriend them relentlessly. Separate them at your creative peril.

I remember the first time I performed a song of mine in front of people. I was so nervous, I had no voice -- gasped out every note. That’s kind of a metaphor isn’t it, when you’re silenced by your own fear? I love the positive impudence of rock. It pushes fear aside, will not be silenced.

I swim almost as fervently as I create music, and there’s a synergy between them. Practically speaking, rock musicians schlepp a lot of gear. So fitness helps. It’s a physical job, before, during and after the show. Swimmers breathe deep, so do singers. Swimmers desire the water; musicians need to play. Both practice discipline, but the payoff is huge. There’s a community around a pool, a locker room, a clan of water rats not so different from musical kinship.

One thing that motivates me to expand the audience for this music is the response we have noticed so far. People use words like positivity and connection. Anything that strengthens our best impulses gives us more freedom, and a lot less fear.

Fighting absurdity

I don't spend any time thinking about what I am or what we do means. I spend my time doing it. I focus on the task and try to do it as best we can...

I think that, if we do anything in a positive sense for the world, is provide one little bit of context, that's very specifically focused, and hopefully people can add to their entire puzzle that gives them a larger picture of what it is that they see.

...this is how we fight back. I can only fight back in a way that I feel like I'm talented. And I feel like the only thing that I can do... even a little bit better than most people, is create that sort of that context with humor. And that's my way of not being helpless and not being hopeless.
-- The Daily Show's Jon Stewart, Bill Moyer's Journal 4-27-07

Mr Dime

You sometimes see your friend through new eyes when the shutter speed stretches out over time. Back in the Concord Coffee days, I was singing treble clef; you were up there with the bluegrassers, high and whiny like the wind. Gold pans in our patient hands, we sifted well through chicken scratches, flummoxed chords, believing there was treasure in the wild.

They say silver turns to fuzzy globules in the hold of a ship lost at sea while gold coinage gleams as the day it was forged. A rather risky method of detecting counterfeit but no far cry from the performer's gamble with time.

Listening to you last night, it was clear to me the years have brought a luster to your holdings. Your definitive essence speaks through your taut frame and intelligent glance out over the proceedings; your amber toned guitar fills in the crevices of your deepening voice; your listeners, we lucky ones, rise up to grasp your thoughts without a drop of vanity between us.

The best part about your show, for me, was the certainty that this man I know so well has found a way to voice his goodness to a world broken and afraid to be.

Hank, God rest his soul, is likely proud, with just a touch of envy on his wings.

Mother T

In this life we cannot do great things. We can only do small things with great love.
-- Mother Theresa

Piccadilly circus

I value accomplishment. It feels normal to create a thing of beauty. Or, am I merely programmed to succeed?

I don't have my mom here to ask how it was for her as she pushed her last starling out the door. She was 64 by then. This astonishes me. She didn't need to work and she didn't have the internet to just go ahead and publish her masterpiece, Random House be damned. I'm wondering if her blue moods took hold on this desperate hydroplane toward revealed beauty.

The coupling of work to public attention to measure worth is a theory many an artist ponders to her dying day. My mother, if she did let it go superficially, may have harbored its sails and anchors deep in the underbelly that plagued her unremitting as she pulled into the dank unknown.

A writer, by nature and culture, is one who stands outside the mortal beast and with her stylus pokes its hide to let contagion in. It would make sense for her to give no credence to rumors of praise or neglect from the world she visits with her scepticism.

But sense is rational and common. Consciousness intuitive and rare.

Some will tell you all of us are born to be artists. If this is true, where do some find the grit to claim their inheritance while the rest make things that challenge nothing and no one? Could I lay down my stylus filled with ink, invisible to many, indelible to me?

Make way for the butterflies

The children sleep in separate beds, one bed at Mommy's, one at Daddy's. Separate bedrooms. Separate dreams, save one -- the dream of reconciliation.

These children are like any of us, caught in struggles we don't understand. One such struggle -- the estrangement of our body from our spirit -- finds our body irked by the spirit's piousness, the spirit scandalized by the body's joy.

So the children, you, me, our gentle selves, pack our pajamas, wishing. If only Mommy could bend, just a little bit, to see what Daddy's talking about. If only Daddy could listen and try something Mommy's way. If only they could get along. If only.

Mom and pop turn to us in the midst of another royal ballyhoo. Some absurd look about us makes them drop their scorecards, ink smudging their rude cheeks. Oh. The children. We almost forgot.

Let me tell you a story about my spirit body split. Like you, perhaps, I want to know how I feel about the boy who shot the innocents last week. Do I hate him? Is it pity? Disgust? Rage? Sorrow?

I feel an ancient sorrow for the people he killed. But when I try to take the pulse of my response to the killer, I feel...

Some have compared the shooter to a suicide bomber. Both are ideologues for whom human life has no value. Both chill me to the bone, but there is no bone. No marrow. No sinew. No blood. In the face of their murderous certainty, I feel only ice white fear.

Spiritual purists and worshipers of the senses are doomed to everlasting strife. Both define themselves by their martyrdom. The body politic finds the effort of self-discipline unconscionably harsh. The extremist extinguishes the sloppiness of hedonistic culture with a bullet or a bomb.

We, abandoned children, make no sense of our emotions, benumbed by tummies so damn full, no butterflies alight there. Traumatized by spirits that have lost the urge to play.

Largesse

Victory is what happens when ten thousand hours of training meet one moment of opportunity.
Coach Jason Hill, Beachwood High School

A certain student earned his 'exemplary young man' moniker yet again over the past year and a half as he transformed himself from a rather likable teddy bear to an affably self-assured lean mean competing machine. Last weekend he completed his first ever Olympic-length triathlon in two hours and twenty six minutes, exceeding his own, his teammates' and coach's expectations. Hearing him exude pleasure while consuming post-race calories momentarily washed me clean of the grim tragedy of Virginia Tech.

A swim workout can sometimes cleanse my wounds in this world gone mad. Lately, though, with images of 32 precious students and teachers etched on my retinas, I can barely make out the Coach Hill quote that hangs over the pool deck.

Last night I saw Miss Potter, a film about an artist spurned by mother and world. When Beatrix loses the love of her life, she withdraws to her painting space to drench her sorrow in creation. Her images of bunnies grow dark as crows peck at Peter's blue coat and bloated guppies swallow up the sweet green frog. 'I must leave this house,' she tells her savior, Milly. Beatrix escapes to the countryside where her grieving mind and hands embark on endless hours of training. In time, with earnings from the most widely published children's books of all time, Miss Potter rescues 4,000 acres of rolling farmlands from developers, preserving them for the British people.

The question of this mournful day of innocents downed is ever, 'why?' The shooting, the disregard for life, the horror? The constancy of atrocity worldwide, pulled down around my senses, numbs my strumming hand. Ten thousand hours of training, coach -- why bother, when the shooter's aim can maim another child?

In a race between good and evil, firepower obliterates fairness. But it doesn't win. Your lily pad, your cabbage patch, your cotton tail, your puddle duck, your fifty yards in fifteen seconds flat -- your hope within the madness.

Victory. Another name for love.

Mrs. Monet

Our minds are familial search engines. They know our clan, flash point quick. They feed us reliance, surround our doubt with possibility. Thoughts remand, remonstrate, remember. They play our questions like loquacious kin. Search ignites vast comfort within the complicated otherness of nature. She steps into the sea with brush and pallet, turns to her childhood coastline, carves her darks and brights into the work the waves can't have.


by Claude Monet Wikimedia Commons

Killing me softly

The soft drink industry gets rich delivering recipes like this to your blood: carbonated water, caramel color, natural & artificial flavors, phosphoric acid, aspartame, potassium benzoate, citric acid, potassium citrate, caffeine, acesulfame potassium, calcium disodium edta.

The American Heart Association tells us this about you:

The human heart is one powerful pump, propelling six quarts of blood through the 60,000 miles of blood vessels in your body -- twice the distance around the world.

How does Big Cola get you to contaminate your insides with its brew? Ask me. I just quit.

My addiction started when I worked night shift in the ER. Cola tasted better than the oil slick they called coffee. I took my first swig and never looked back.

For a few years now, my doctor's had this annoying habit of suggesting I lose the caffeine-aspertame dependence. Better for the bones, the brain, the heart, the kidneys -- there's no part of the body it's not better for, according to the doc. But my friendly neighborhood addiction told me otherwise. Denial ruled.

Until the first day of Spring. Finally, something clicked. I read about Fosamax, a drug you take if your bones begin to waste away. The side-effects of Fosamax broke through my denial. A split second of mental clarity said, if you take a powerful chemical with potentially gruesome side-effects to counteract other powerful chemicals that erode your bones, you are insane.

This reminds me of our national Big Oil fixation. We love our SUV! Of all the vices, how could this one kill us? Our survival instincts have been bullied by habits we picked up like a can of pop on the midnight special. We don't like the voice of rationality -- the eco nut with his wishbone shaped stethoscope -- asking us to breath deep.

Until this fine Spring day, a feeling in our bones, a shot of innocence, an inkling of self-determination.

Much obliged

It comes out of nowhere, and it feels like you've stepped out of yourself. Oh man! That's the best part about singing!
Mary J. Blige, Rolling Stone 1018

I probably think too much. I can be slow to act, relentless with perfection. I'm frivolous with smiles, though, and lavish with ink. I gravitate toward kindness and admire the humble soul. I'm patient with old people and charmed by certain felines. Integrity holds me in her trance; I value her suggestions.

Every now and then in song, like Mary Jane explains, 'I'm gone. I've lost myself.'

And found myself in every creature living.


photo by N Gallagher

Pricey habits

Luckily, I've always thought of myself as a musician more than a guitar player. Since I'm always changing as a person and my tastes are always changing, that is reflected in the ways I approach my instrument. I never feel like I'm running out of ideas, because it is clear to me -- music is infinite.
-- John Frusciante (The Red Hot Chili Peppers), Rolling Stone

If music is as infinite as the inventive mind, the same could be said of the lyric edge of song: poetry defies boundary.

When songwriters say they've hit a dry spell, there's an air of longing in their words. They miss the keen aphrodisiac, the fire, as they putter about the house, keeping up appearances. Originality feels so good on. Rehash tastes like dust.

I spoke with a former fan of mind expanding drugs, a holy father of the sixties, who reassured me it was OK I'd never done any. Never have I sought absolution for my cognitive extravagances: listening, waiting, watching, risking.

These indulgences cost nothing but time. And patience.

Their side effect is art.

Post dramatic breath

Spent from sheer elation, my essence stretched around the open air of careful minds expanding. There sits my audience a breath away from sentient cousins once removed. Its members know but dare not name a certain yen for meaning. Some of them ignore the pangs. They reach for comfort food, the confluence of friends and conversation. Heady stuff, this syrupy concoction brings them high without a whiff of expectation.

There are questions in the songs my band and I infuse into the smoke-free wonderland of sound. We are not gods and goddesses; we only whirl the orb within the dervishes' devotion. Few embrace the madness in the songs but these emerge eternities the wiser.

The nether realm entrusted to a troika such as our emancipates the neurons ever after, nature's soft impressions in the snow.

What -- again?

Yes, again. Happily. Because of the lovely encounters with good people this process brings me. Take this conversation with John, an elderly gentleman at the pool.

"Would you cast a vote for me, John?"

"Sure, I'll vote for you. You know that Mitchell's Icecream? They won an award for their store. I didn't think much of their icecream until they won the award. I went back and tried it and it was pretty good!"

Sanity bastion

Ninety nine percent of all live rock concerts are stupidly and dangerously loud... It seems the height of folly to have a musical concert be so loud one needs to wear earplugs to mute it and then hear it with the sound messed up.
Bob Ludwig, Recording 9.06

Music is not my quintessential sonic form. First comes silence. After that I'm fond of wind and water, birds and bugs do a nice soundscore and the human voice intrigues me. Music has a tendency to mess with my neurons. I never was a background music lover.

Music gets to me completely. I create it out of self defense. I have a useless mental filter. Bad music -- lacking soul and depth -- does not engender boredom in my psyche. It's more like sitting my brain cells in a waiting room with a TV set on soaps, no place to hide. Excruciating.

I want to enshrine Bob Ludwig in the sacred halls of musical integrity. No need -- with mastering credits including Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, Velvet Underground, Sly and the Family Stone, Steely Dan, the Police, Eric Clapton, the Rolling Stones, Dire Straits, Nirvana, the man is already there. I once assumed the point of pulsating rock concerts was to merge the listeners into a gelatinous mass of frayed ganglia, a kind of communal electro shock treatment. But if the music isn't good enough to transmogrify individuals into world class citizens, making it louder won't help.

Are we all ad-slingers on the lost highway, riding techno bare back? No. But the voices in the wilderness are few.

New Year Resolution USA

The average weights of American men (191) and women (164) have increased 25 pounds since 1960. And according to one study, in 2003, Americans' 223 million cars and light trucks burned an extra 39 million gallons of fuel for every additional pound of passenger weight. So Americans are using almost a billion gallons of gasoline more each year than they would if they were as (comparatively) svelte as they were in 1960.
-- George F. Will, The Washington Post

Storytime

I carry secrets in a baby basket. The day care kids appreciate the stuff I bring -- it seems to strike their fancy.

The cooking pot belonged to Tante Liny, who stood for hours, I imagine, stirring berries from her bushes. I can see her labels scrawled in foreign markings on the jelly jars she gave us. Gooseberry, current, raspberry sweetness from the sides scraped smooth. The lid is blue enamel, rusted in the dips and scratches. Am I not, a storygirl, enamored of this pot?

The knitting needles are my mom's. She once decided she would knit her man and children each a cardigan of wool from Nova Scotia. Deers and antlers come to mind, pine cones and snowflakes interwoven on the sleeves and backs and pockets of her intricate design. She labored and she loved and warmed us in the sheep's soft magic. Her patterns soothe me still.

The purple pouch of velvet is a gift from one dear friend and there's a wand of silvery ribbons from another, sisters who evolved with me through motherhood to worlds within the moment. Friendship permeates the tales I tell.

I cover up the basket with a loopy zigzag afghan made by Glenna. Projects, like the ones you do in day care, were this woman's middle name. How many newsprint Christmas trees did her Julie, my-best-friend, and I spray paint in Glenna's basement? Nowadays from Memphis Avenue to E 140th her easy kindness gleams at me from variegated faces.

You've only one known chance at love, a chance that lasts a lifetime. You're inclined to get it right when Aphrodite's angels travel with you.

Rules to live by

In life, nobody gets no trophies for winning. So what I've come up with is you live, and you love what you do, and you do it well, that's success. But at the same time, nobody wins life. You never see nobody jump out in the middle of Peachtree Street and say, 'Give me my trophy!' You don't win! You live and you learn, until it's over.
-- Young Jeezy, Rolling Stone

Jeezy looks good in his arm long tatoos and diamond wrist band, tucking his thumb in a low slung belt buckle. Atlanta rapper getting shot at by the Rolling Stone. Star studded famester standing tall.

One frigid Sunday my photographer takes me to the lakefront to reproduce a photo shot in August when the air was hot. The plan is simple -- he sets up the shot with his subject, moi, coated up for winter. At his sign I shed the layers, step bare feet and arms into his frame and plunge my brain into the fantasy of summer. Voila. Click click. Suit up, load out, drive home.

Sometimes life is funnier than fiction. The exact spot of the earlier shot has ceased to exist. A huge sign says DO NOT ENTER, but, doubting this, we peer beyond the boulders in our path. Nature rears its evidence -- one Erie storm too many wrecked this dock.

Cameraman and diva set up camp a little ways along the shore. Wind devours us like an ice belching dragon; our fingers freeze; our nostrils stream. The man behind the camera sets his sights. The woman leaps and dares her feckless muscles to respond to ancient memories of the sun. Exhausted by...

'Battery exhausted!' he's announcing as he clamors down the boulders to her bag. Together fearless artists -- I'm above them now, out of body picturing the pair -- prod the batteries from wee compartments. Numb fingered miracle accomplished, the bold ones soldier on.

Once again the perfect shot's a poofy breath away as gray waters crash against the pier. And once again, the battery's exhausted. Impossible! She charged it full this morning. But the camera never lies -- it is too cold to say the everready's ready. It lives too far from summer to comply.

We pack it in, load away, spin the wheels to home without a pixel to our names. I ask you brother Jeezy, are we happy? Did we win?

You lovin' what you do?

Sure.

You got your trophy, sister. Run it in.

Setting

When Kathy says, 'I like the settings of your songs,' she borrows from a theater world of furniture and lighting, chandeliers and sofas, creaking boards and thunder. She conjures atmosphere and texture, everything (besides the script of words and notes) that brings a song to fullness on a stage.

How wise, this knowing maven.

Musicians who deny we're 'acting' -- with a mild disdain for thespians, who trick us by pretending -- forget that acting is the purest form of being; it is song eluding silence, it is truth escaping numbness, it is life unmasking death.

Setting is organic to the fever of a song emerging skyward with a sinner in her arms.