Music of our time(s)

When I was coming of age, radio was segregated and racist. It was also -- music stations -- in the hands and imagination of the DJ's. So the white DJ's starting playing music they'd heard on black radio. And white kids started to dig that sound. And there was the generation of cross musicians, which was the birth of Rock n' Roll. And it changed everything. While it lasted... before the corporations bought the DJ's and choose what to play and what not to play, there was this explosion of incredible music. Where ten years before, it had been, If I'd know you were comin, Ida baked a cake, and How much is that Doggie, in the window?, There was Revolver, and The Mother's of Invention, and the Incredible String Band, and Jimmy Hendrix, and Country Joe and the Fish, and Gracie Slick and Jefferson Airplane, and Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison and the Doors... oh, and Motown, and Percy Sledge singin, When a Man Loves a Woman... Now, to find good music, not preprogramed corporate shit, you go to Indy bars. Still there. People still making real music. Just go live. Turn off the radio. Buy the CD's at The Fire. And tell your friends what you heard. ...though, the segregation seems to back full force. Fuckin world we live in.... I don't know... We go'in backwards faster than we go'in forwards.

#236 Derelict ship on an asphalt sea

12.5x13.5  weathered plywood fragment, roofing paper, coil spring, acrylic on composition board

#235 The Human Foot (a poem)

don't matter, it's all gonna be lost....

don't matter/Ginsberg/ it's all of it/gonna be lost. this line from a poem for Amiri Baraka by Diane Di Prima—I feel as something that marks our time. The absolute end of Romanticism. What in Shakespeare was perhaps a trope of sublime irony, had become a defiant refusal that mortality should have the last word. At least speaking for myself, there's no place for poetic hyperbole of the sort that would mask the transience of, not only our individual lives, but our time as a species on this planet. It lurks there as a question. A provocation. What do we make of this... or more to the point, what do we make of what had been so close to the heart of poets and artists for so many generations? Another stage of mourning beyond the death of God. All of it. One of the most intense moments of my life came several days into the Cuban missile crisis. If you didn’t live through that, it would be inconceivable the sense of absolute end-of-world. I had friends who flew to South America because they believed the radiation that would encircle the northern hemisphere might spare them in the south. I went to a faculty recital—a performance of Bach’s unaccompanied sonatas for violin. The hall was almost empty. This too, will be lost, I thought. All of it. The Greek tragedies, the Sistine Chapel… Bach. All of it will be lost. The trope of mortality in art, of Hazlitt’s ‘Fame’… all of it. We had passed through another portal of human consciousness. I was majoring in art. What then was the point? This may have been one of the things that turned me from painting to pottery. Functional pottery. Handcrafted dinner ware. To enrich our daily lives in the here and now. All of it gonna be lost. The things of the world no less our selves. The trope of creative immortality is as dead as the gods.

#49 Forgive us Teddy, for We Have Sinned

The essence of the sublime

Balancing rocks

#223, #231

#223, 8x11 pen and ink. #231 Pencil and ink study: skull, c-3 vertebrea, phanges (hand), mandible, tib-fib and foot.

#229 Sphenoid bone Finished

Ink watercolor acrylic, cutouts on canvas

#228 Sphenoid bone, anterior

Ink, watercolor, acrylic

Bones, foot & skull

#226

5.5x8.5 ink & water color

Pelvis, anterior     bones

Lost & Found

Does this explain my fascination with Found Things?

Things missing... a rock from Walden's Pond I've carried with me for 42 years through 19 moves, a pair of sandals, a few other minor odds and ends. Prompted me to search through 10 gal storage boxes I haven't looked through in years. There went the afternoon.

Newspapers... the Kent State Shootings, the first MOVE house shootout, the fireman with the body of the toddler, Oklahoma City... lot of others.

Family photos... two that go back to 1860 something.

Love letters from my father to my mother before they were married. Missing in action letter to my aunt... uncle killed over Germany, 1945, tail gunner in a B-17. Photo of me on his lap in 1944. Air medal and Purple Star.

Letter on Luftwaffe stationary to my mother and father from family friend who was one of those who liberated Buchenwald.

High school graduation class picture from the student newspaper... for years, I wasn't sure whether I graduated in 1960, or 1961... it was 1960.

Letter from Scott-Foresman, that they were publishing a letter I'd written to a friend in a reading workbook (describing the 1957 Ruskin Heights F5 tornado that destroyed our neighborhood), and paying me $10 for the rights. Photos of my pottery... has it really been 36 years?

A snapshot I thought I'd lost: my then wife, me and the Vespa 150 we'd ridden, from Wichita, Kansas, to Michigan on our way to Philly, loaded with gear for the trip: September, 1964.

MS of my two novels (they each went through more than 8 drafts--thousands of pages), and poetry going back more than 40 years.

Ribbons from division first prizes, Kansas City Science Fair, 1955, 56 ( was an avid hunter and collector of fossils, spent many hours researching them in the Linda Hall Science Library in KC. So much more, lost along the way.

What if I'd lived a settled life in one place? I'd have to open a museum.

Drawing Table in my New Room

Burn the drafts!

A recurrent problem exposed with each move: what to do with the accumulated drafts and discards and works-in-progress--boxes and file drawers and binders filled with hundreds--nay, thousands... many thousands of pages--writing that goes back more than 40 years (most of it, from the last 27 years). Why do I save this stuff? Do I harbor secret dreams of donating it to some University Library? 63 volumes of journals. Some 2 million words. Do I imagine anyone will ever want to read them? That there are of any value to anyone but me? And then, really only the journals and finished work that are of any contemporary interest.

Oh you young writers and poets, in your 30's and 40's and 50's, what forests will be felled to fill torn cardboard boxes, brittle dessicated file folders in your basements, closets and attics? Or do writers and poets now store it all in distant binary cloud banks and thumb drives... or those smart phones I see you holding at your readings?.

What a jolly funeral pyre all that paper would make! My poor sons, having to wade through this stuff. I think, one more move will be enough to convince me to fill a half dozen blue recycling bins and be done with it.

@223, 224, 225

Insane Idealism of Obama

If your model of the role of the Chief Executive, and that upon which you craft both policy and strategy, is that of the ultimate mediator, such that advocacy is reserved for what remains when possibilities for negotiation have been exhausted, with the assumption that what has survived the grinder of compromise is, at this stage, the last and final responsibility of the President to explain, defend and push through to completion, the origin of policy will always be in the hands of others, whether from the legislative branch, or from agencies within the Executive branch itself (military, justice, surveillance), and of even greater consequence, will depend entirely on those who have been accepted as legitimate partners in this elite, extraordinarily limited dialog.

There is clearly no place for assuming even a rhetorical place for something like The American People, not even for Richard Nixon’s semi-mythical “Silent Majority. This is the reading I keep coming back to for Obama. A powerful, almost delusional idealism that sees the compromises he works to mediate, as representing, maybe the best and only possible representation of the national interests of the people, such that, he’s stopped cold at any critical examination of what this in fact comes down to.

I think this is a kind of insanity.

I don’t know how else to explain his opacity to the larger political reality; even a self-defined political pragmatist like Nixon saw the necessity of invoking the pretense of representing more than the interests of power that surged around him, but also, even if it was mostly rhetorical, like Presidents before him, cast himself as the one figure in government who was also the people’s ombudsmen and advocate. I see nothing of that in Obama… not a sign. There is something strangely out of place in how he operates—a neglect, if not a repudiation of what was once a central pillar of Presidential image and power.

I don’t imagine he thinks of it like this, but it’s as though he’s recognized this for what it largely was, part of the spectacle, a myth that it’s possible to dispense with—if you are a serious realist, which is how Obama seems to see and describe himself—a realism that disguises that essential, pathological idealism: his belief that working out compromises between the elite will ultimately work out for the best of all possible worlds.

#230

20x26.5 Acrylic, red and black string on weathered composition board Emergence

Spiritual side of Sexuality

The question came up on another blog, would you like to stop being queer if you could. Raised some interesting thoughts. My answer: No. No. And No.

I feel most whole when I feel something closer to a balance of male and female desires. My spiritual center--not as in, bisexual. There's too much of the male side, my body is too much male--and loving men, being able to sexually love men, better keeps that balance.

Sexual desire is pretty complicated. It's more than physical. It's cultural, political (yes! Sex in a patriarchal tyranny is political!), and also, spiritual (not supernatural spiritual...more the the way Freud used the word 'soul' to designate the whole complex of psychic and bodily life). The imbalance of male to female became for me a source of recurrent depression, chronic anxiety, self-loathing. Accepting the female side--giving it more say, more power, made it possible to reclaim something I'd lost in adolescence--the ability to love men.

In that way, my long coming out was part of my spiritual growth, and even, I think it's not too much to say-- a product of that growth. A process that is far from finished. So, no, I wouldn't want to give that up for anything. The journey is far from over.

Of all the thought I've given to writing and rewriting the narrative, trying to understand and explain the long years in between, this brief reflection rings more true to me than anything I've come up with yet.

The (rich) Noah's Arc Syndrome

It's the part in Hedge's piece about the belief of the rich that their wealth will insulate them from coming disasters that I see as more and more, a driving force in the funding of climate denial, the marginalization of the poor and everyone else, the militarization of police. This is sub-rational. A collection of ideas and beliefs and attitudes that coalesce into an unarticulated political agenda. The Noah's Arc syndrome. I've been watching this happen for decades!

Soup.. dinner on my Faerie Alter

#219 October Morris Park

Social Life of Genes

There is so much amazing stuff in this ariticle, I have to post a link.

#218 Atmospheric

24x22" Acrylic on composition board

#217

Self-Portrait 30.5x26 Acrylic on Massonite

#216 The Storm Contained?