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.

Tepid skin

Despite all the controversy surrounding the veil, the woman behind it remains obscured. The debate has fixed our attention on her body or her face instead of herself, her freedom or her subjugation, her rights or their denial -- instead of who lives behind this portable wall and the moderating role she has often played in the Islamic world.

Farzaneh Melani, professor of Persian literature and women's studies at the University of Virginia

Troll the MySpace nation if you want to see the masses clothed in veils. Digital reality fixates our attention on selected features and ignores the rest. Avatars in busty-babe or handsome-hunk regalia never quite reveal what needs revealing. Why should they in this voyeuristic scape?

Walk the streets of Cleveland, Lakewood, Shaker Heights -- again you see the veil. America the beautiful is thickening the distance from the plexus to the epiderm. Our bowls of jelly jiggle when we laugh. What's more daunting to the human form, this roly-poly camouflage or yards of flowing burqa cloth?

Have you seen a live show lately? Tell me there is freedom in the land when audiences stoical and mute behold a panoply of artistry on stage, malaise ensconced in tepid praise for stunning feats of physical expression.

I'd love to see us slip outside our shadows. The concept of 'the veil' as something only worn by Muslim women blinds us to our formidable walls.

Wonder be

My brain homes in on words and music like the swarm of germinator bees returning to the hive. Sweet buzz of creation -- my lustful predilection for the muse. No two honeys taste the same. Unique as the composer's dream.

What is the role of music genres? Quell the chaos -- satisfy the need to know -- squelch the innuendo? Hard. But true.

Radio promoters, says a friend from California ("he should know") distill your style into a coded text the gurus scan to cull the honey hopeful sent by fools who drink the madness of the rose.

Entourage

Man, haunted by the world, acts. ...The works of the arist... must be interpreted as modifications of the world.
-- Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation (Sartre's Saint Genet)

Sometime in my youth I read the Goethes and the Kants, played the Kabalevskys, trembled in the shadows of Monet -- and lost my nerve. Great Art had come to call and Cinderella's nasty sisters told the prince to try another hovel -- this one held no candle to his flame.

There is great art -- a world class museum here is spending millions to house it more comfortably -- and there is the endless tide of ornaments the experts' hall of genius has no use for. If you're no Rembrandt, if the muse who taps your sholder is a char maid and the art you make has all been done before -- why bother?

Because you are haunted, says Ms. Sontag, by a world that can't forget you. The incompleteness of existence asks you to make love the only way you can -- body, mind and soul. You may decline, treasures buried, will intert. Or, you can modify the world.

Who will rule your love life? The tastemaker? The genius meter? The millionaires who fund museums? Or you, the country bumpkin with your sleek bewhiskered coachmen driving Cindi to the ball?

Contingency plan

Nothing reveals man the way war does.
-- Oriana Fallaci, journalist (1929-2006)

Having never lived a war, I can't test the writer's theory: war, the ultimate revealer.

I have seen people die, in ERs, in hospital rooms, at home. Tragedy in peacetime -- mourners flee the scene into a grueling sameness fed by ghosts of plenty.

I hope Fallaci's theory is ultimately proved wrong, that war becomes a phantom in our nomenclature, that depictions of war's grit and grandeur fade from gray to black. That humans turn to art and thought and openness to paradox to crystalize their deepest doubts and dreams. That sorrow need not marry pointlessness to give its shadow to the shape of life.

I wonder this: once art and culture rise to their revealer role, do war and war's accomplices reluctantly stand down?

Heartland security

On the corner of Fairmount and Green there used to stand my heart. I didn't want to see the twisted branches laced into a heart against the winter sky -- cliché abandoned me when I became an artist, or so I claimed. But when I waited for the light to change a million times I failed to not look up and see, unerringly, that kindred shape against the gray.

With summertime I took my heart on faith. A flush of green obscured the tree's design but I drove by unworried.

One day, my heart, my faith, was whisked away. The tree was gone, a mound of dirt remaining. Great wells of nothing gaped at me like traffic lights that yammered in the wind.

What was the point, this massacre? Who had stolen virtue from the womb? From whence betrayal this obscene?

Time that followed brought its erie changes. Shiny stanchions black as oil erected overnight began their vadaresque intrusions. Metal beams shot out across the roadway. Lights were hung that dwarfed the feeble fixtures they replaced.

I find myself imagining a stuffy room of conscience bound officials taking stock of dangers on their turf, calling in the experts -- upgrades recommended, moneys allocated, papers signed and notarized, security assured. Civic leaders meet the starry night with conscience clean, virtue spent and not a thought for what they lay to waste.

I drive along from time to time beneath the deadly safety.

I mourn the photograph I didn't take.

Aboriginal enactment

Wake
take a pee
sleep
wishing day break speedy.

Walk the ancient hallways
European old New Orleans.
Kids in smudgy faces
wound with grins
politely let you pass.

You need the door
but doors are blocked or locked
or leading down to rail-less stairs
you ask the office workers
and the dean of hope
the pale clerk in rimmed glasses
people nudge you
one by one.

Women speak from beards and heavy braids.
Their skin is earth.
They parley Boston and New Amsterdam
the street is only motion
yeast arising
termites hatching
rubies boiling
workers oozing royal jelly
to their future queen.

You find your music store
pour it in glass bottles
which you leave behind.

Language in a vacuum.

Sontag

Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It’s all about paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.
-- Susan Sontag

Sarasponda

Experts say how sound effects the brain. Dissonance annoys it. Concord sends it purring to the couch. Igor Stravinsky's 1913 debut of his Rite of Spring, a case in point. Anarchistic sonic structures plunged the hearers' brains into a vat of neural chaos, followed by rebellion in the park. Sirs' and madams' canes and elbows bloodied up the lawn.

Sound is more like touch than cool abstraction. Sound waves burrow into open ears, excite the neural pathways to the brain. Here ensues a politics of nature, conservative and liberal at odds. The brain abhors the new, stores wine in ancient skins, tames the shrew with slews of rules and regs.

The enemy of sameness is the muse. Her work implores the snoozy brain to reconsider fondness for the lounge. With stealthiness and cunning Venus mollifies the comfort seeking neurons which, relinquishing their guard, allow the unexpected birth of a new child.

Most of us are ravenous for quandry. This scares us if we've lived too long in sameness. Enter art, the zenith of cognition, the subtle blend of homeliness and dashing, the beautiful extravagance of focus, the tender recognition of the new.

Art. The gaudy stranger at the gate.

Ramses one

That's how it is. Everybody says they like creativity, but when the chips are down, it's three people.
-- Christopher Reynolds, musician-songwriter-teacher

Christopher is featured in today's Plain Dealer (circulation 356,286), an expansive piece about his creative work. As usual, a brush with Chris is a breath of authenticity. I remember meeting him 10+ years ago at a CD release party for a compilation we were on. Even then, his version of a small talk was something like 'what is the state of your soul?' -- garbed in cloth less static.

With Christopher we peer at truths through infrared lens until we see ourselves reflected back, vaingloriously weary, trumpeters of wisdom on the airless dune, but somehow not so lonely as before.

At 45 he's far too young to be so wise but age, like freedom, has no rule but honesty and neither one enjoys a backward slide. I told him once my favorite song of his replayed a childhood ride in a red truck with a favorite uncle -- or was it grandpa? I think I understand the joy I felt in that. It's like he says in the paper today, creation boils down to three, regardless of the madding crowd as Ramses II parades across the Nile:

Thou and I and wheels of expectation.

Touch-me-not reunion

Ideas swarm like bumblers.
Tiny gilded trumpets
glitter on the wind.
A dozen pair of human lights
strain their beams
into the lair of shiny ripe.
Michelangelo's unprecedented pleasure
finger perfect yearning
sprung to life.

Nuff said*

Leaving before we complete our mission would create a terrorist state in the heart of the Middle East, a country with huge oil reserves that the terrorist network would be willing to use to extract economic pain from those of us who believe in freedom."
-- George Bush, at a GOP fundraiser in Lancaster, PA

*Mick left his extended comment list of why war in Iraq is wrong. Not sure if he's admonishing George Bush or this blogger, who posted the quote in disbelief ~ that a president who supposedly represents freedom can warp its meaning so completely. Regular readers of this blog read the 'Nuff said' in that context. The photo illustration of our oil addiction underlines this. Maybe I'll dispense with subtlety when it comes to the war in Iraq where the stakes are high and every vote against it counts. Thanks for posting your list, Mick.

Apparition

It's rude to rouse your lover in the street.
Better charm with virtue
lure the dazzled beast
into your ritual of blindness.
Some think we see the face behind the
politics of culture.
These would be the daftest of the batty.
I once assumed
the food of life is sight,
revelation steaming in a pot.
But ladles hung like rafters in my belly.
Stainless steel is useless.
From the fog
emerges madness
with a lantern in her hand.
Her eyes embolden you,
her chosen view.

Mr monday

Poor Carl -- there you are minding your own business = minding everybody else's -- and the web buttinskis exploit your exposé. Now you're the brunt of blogland. Says one blogboy of your report:

Honestly, it cheers me up every time I think about it, let alone watch it.

We've slumped to this, have we?

I'm working on a music video with a film artist. Music's what I know -- recording and live performance. So I'm asking old questions of new media. What gets left in, left out? Is everything artful in the right context? Can anything be compelling to the right audience? Composition, framing, texture, focus, perspective...

I watched 2 chinese students lipsync the BBoys. Saw the scientist dudes shoot off a couple hundred coke bottles. The bulldog riding a skateboard -- saw that too. Laughed. Admired. Here they get my last hurrah, there they go, into oblivion.

Is the measure of an art work the desire of humans to pay attention to it, stand in awe before it, wonder how another human could accomplish such a thing? Is the charm of non-art how superficially it grazes the skin of 7,942 bloggers for maybe 3.8 minutes?

I want to know what it feels like to step out of your footprint, turn to look, see it fill with strangers' sighs.

Portico

Have all the great songs already happened? Is today's songwriter mootly barking up a non-tree in a pantheon of lesser gods? We are a tribe of ubiquitous song. The digi-sphere loads us down with sound and should we listen for content... hmm...

Should we listen for content?

Maybe songs are evolving from containers of truth to parsecs of individuality with no pretensions of greatness. Hearers don't intend to be moved within so much as swept along on a trail of amorphous comet clusters, bathed in sonic light.

Visage

Sometimes truth yanks me skyward to its natural parapet from which I view my life unfolding as a gossamer veil on drifting sanded limbs of lush toned beauty. This, not the shuttered hurt of the flood plain, is my birthright, one I've yet to fully embrace. Once I do, there is to be no stopping me from knowing what I know.

The first brush of immortality tastes like hyacinth.

Divatrance

Ear drums grafted into songs slung on pony hides that slide into the last galaxy on polished hooves. Who are the trapezers who pay 5 bucks to hear three people beat up a frenzy? How do we fly out over the ramparts with them, hover on the mist? We are descended from dinos, ancestors of birds -- we fly in our dreams by the cells of our past. DNA remembers. The pterodactyl heard a hit on the song parade last Friday when the static on the mountain leaned just right into the wind.

I want to know when humans tuned their guts on academic side shows, when songs became ditties and hymn singers yawned in the pews. I yearn to hold latch keys between ten digits, blue glass that shatters on the hard rock hall and makes you fidget your scruffy dance toe until you want to sanctify the wrinkle in your eye.

Handbaskets

Yesterday I caught a radio piece about online 'museums.' The hook: do online collections qualify as museums? The Museum of Fred features thrift store paintings from the collection of Fred Beshid. Another site displays scans of skate park IDs.

Students of Museology like to quote Mirriam-Webster's (online collection of) definitions:

museum: an institution devoted to the procurement, care, study, and display of objects of lasting interest or value; also : a place where objects are exhibited

Fred, sniffs the museologist on air, can hardly be counted on to enlighten us about art. It's the old high brow low brow debate with intrepid interneteers chafing at the experts.

Today the paper reports another debate. This one's about whether the present collection of global conflicts qualifies as World War III. Newt Gingrich and George Bush say it does. Academics ponder various definitions.

When people today talk about World War III, what they mean mainly is that there is a great threat or ideology that transcends national boundaries and brings nations together to fight it.
-- Jennifer Delton, associate history professor at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, NY

We live in a world of war, rather than a world war. But nothing's connected. The world is so regionalized.
-- Donald Miller, history professor at Lafayette College in Easton, PA

The world war is a war not of nation-states, it's the rich against the poor, it's men against women.
-- Donald Goldstein, professor of public and international affairs at the University of Pittsburgh

What do the low brows say? Ask Talia, who's 2 and too young for college. She lives in Nahariya, Israel. Her parents, wanting to calm her, say the bombs are only falling eggs.

When two rockets suddenly landed back-to-back in the distance, Talia offered her own analysis: 'The Eggs are breaking, the eggs are breaking.'