A Peaceful New Year's Eve

Well, well

my first post of 2010!

And what an odd evening.

What did I do this evening?

Nothing. Slept through dinner.

Later, I solved a Sudoko puzzle.

At 11:30 walked the dog around the block.

The holiday lights were still up.

A few homes were having parties.

All quiet with a slight snow softly falling.

The old dog eager and playful.

We came around with a dusting

on our coats, at peace with the new year.

Came inside to make this post

then sleep some more.

Terrifying realities

It must be frightening to live in a world where you are positive there are no muffin cups and baking muffins in one of those things you love to do.... And in the store your hair-brained ditzy daughter says "but we have several boxes at home." And you say, "No, we don't have any, I know what I am doing! You can be sure of that!"  And you get home with the new box of muffin cups, and when you go to put it away, you open the cabinet door and lo -- there are three unopened boxes. That must scare a person right down to their slippers. Enough to push all four boxes behind the olive oil spray and close the cabinet door and never mention it again. At least until the next time you think there are none.

Christmas Prep: The Whirl, the Blur, the Pause, the STRESS!!

Here is a link to this column, posted as text on this blog a few years ago

Of Annual parties and dumpster relations

Today I am asking questions about friendship.  This is the season where a certain sort of party-giving person might give a party and invite their friends.

I have never been much of a party person. I have days when I can work a party room like an insurance salesman- charming even strangers, cajoling and connecting. Other days I sit in the corner nursing coffee or alcohol without saying anything unless directly spoken to....  I think this is a fairly common failing.

In advance of a party where I don't know anyone but the host,  or where I haven't seen or spoken with anyone there since last year's party - I work up a great deal of dread. Over the years in a changing life, one can accumulate annual parties where your only existing connection with the other party-goers  is a memory of a past connect that may be decades old. You don't know them anymore and they don't know you - but someone keeps inviting you for old times sake, or for the sake of a memory of friendship past.

But you can't recreate a friendship that has died with party small talk. There isn't time in a half a minute of conversation to catch someone up on the nuances of a year of your life or to understand their life in return  and when those un-communicated nuances pile up over decades between people - what you have is no longer a friend. What you have is an acquaintance.

Then there is the question of what is a friend. That's not as simple a question as the teenagers think it is. I am  not talking about having 2000 "friends" on YouTube or Facebook. That's a study in volume not nuance.

Then there are folks who use you as an emotional dumpster. For instance, if someone calls you up over 18 years only when they need to vent about their boyfriend, spouse or children misbehaving - is this a friendship?  If you call me up and invite me to watch you clean your house, (yes I actually have had two different women do this repeatedly), and a part of the conversation is the various fun things you have done with  other folks you know,  (usually couples you and your husband know) and you wonder why I don't call you - well enough said about that.  If you call me up indignant that I have not stopped by in ages - and you don't even know where I live, despite the fact I have invited you over....   well, I have philosophical enemies who know me much better than that and who are a lot more fun.

If you have never read my blog - if you don't even know I have a blog -- are you my friend? Since I am a writer, can you really know me?  I am a a charming performer, but when I am no longer on, I am really rather a recluse.

Then what kind of friend am I? I rarely call anyone. I am a recluse. I am, at this late age, no longer interested in talking about how I FEEL. I have learned its what you do that really counts. And what do I do? I forget people's birthdays, often fail to appear at parties, abruptly stop returning phone calls. Often I have my reasons. If you want to know why, ask.

I suspect I will spend my elder years in a tiny eldercare apartment, playing bingo in badly decorated dayroom with people who can't remember my name and I won't be able to remember theirs either.  And then friendship will be like skating - moving smoothly through a bingo game with a wry nod and a smile, living in the present moment, until tea or the next meal or bedtime.

I am not sure what I mean by any of this....

10 AM poetry reading not too early for Doris Henderson fans!

When I heard Doris Henderson was giving a reading from her new full length poetry book called "What Gets Lost," at the Danbury Library, I was excited. I am a big fan of poetry of the surreal, and poetry with a sense of humor and Doris hits the mark on both counts. When I heard it was a 10 AM reading on a Saturday, starting just as the library opened its doors,  I wondered if the usual suspects would manage to be up and out of the house that early on a Saturday. I made sure to arrive early and sat down with poet Bob Taylor in the front row, didn't look behind me until later.

At the end of this wonderful, energetic and funny reading -- the best I have ever heard Doris give -- I got up turned around and realized there were over thirty people in the room who had been pin quiet listening to her read. And they were not shy about buying a copy of her new book either. It's an oversized collection from Antrim House - an inch at the spine with a $19 price tag. Great cover art as well.  Click here to read the publisher's page on this book and some poetry excerpts

At the end, there were questions. Someone wondered where she got her ideas.  Doris mentioned that she kept a notebook where she wrote for at least ten minutes every day, sometimes much longer. The writing was a completely  unedited "free write" of whatever comes to mind.  She said that later, sometimes a long time later, she would go back and find in those writings, the start of a poem....    Hmmm might have to try that!

POEM: The Matrix of all (from Inverse Origami)

The Matrix of All rumbles at critical mass,
a macro-synaptic storm
in cascade
in perpetual toss

Opposed and opposing:
heads-tails
crest-trough
light-dark
alph-nul
the perception of water and thirst

---

---

from Inverse Origami - the art of unfolding
--- Mar (Mistryel) Walker, © 1998
Puzzled Dragon Press

Standards, formats, codes - how do new solutions arise..

this is a column I wrote for a newspaper in another state (it's long since closed), appeared in a 1990 edition of that paper. The editor then used to yell out that he had a hole on the editorial page, how large the hole was and how much time I had to write a column to fill it.. What a rush... 

Codes,  jingles and new solutions

Drive anywhere in the continental United States and the radio jingles sound just like the ones at home. It's the same with building codes.

"What? Who's building radio codes? The Government?" asks my Uncle Henry who has placed the 20-odd parts of an old electric fan motor on a clean cardboard on the floor in front of him. They're arranged in meticulous arching rows, like a movie audience with Henry perched on a concrete block in the middle, all knees and elbows pointing a square can of three-in-oil at them like a gun.

"The government gets into everything these days, except balancing its budget," he says, polishing a bearing ring on his green coveralls, and re-adjusting his orange cap askew.

Radio jingles are kind of like building codes, I repeat. Henry squints at me quizzically.

I tell him it's the format. Format radio: they only place certain songs over and over again -- only cuts from proven hit-makers. The station guarantees the play list; the advertisers guarantee the money. They buy their little jingles on tap -- same notes different call letters all over the country.

The only problem is that new or off-beat music doesn't get played because it doesn't fit the format. It's only heard on college stations or on PBS or maybe on WMWV which has its own tossed salad format. (Or did back in 1990)

"Uncle Henry," I say, "Did you ever stop and consider that tucked away inside walls all over the country, are two-by-four studs, and they're all exactly the same distance apart wherever you go?"
My uncle scratches his chin, looking gravely concerned. He's not one for offbeat music, but he read this statement about two-by-fours to me out of a newspaper a while back, and he considers it his side of the argument.

One of his favorite themes is how the government, the world at large and TV in particular are trying to make us all the same. Not in a big way, but by tellings us what to do in a million little ways -- sneaky-like, they conspire to drain that spark of creativity right out of us.

I guess I 've been listening to Uncle Henry too long. Yes, there's plenty to be said for standardization, cheap goods, mix and match replacement parts. It makes things easier and often safer. There's even the comfit of that familiar jingle 1,000 miles from homes.

But when one way of doing things becomes an accepted standardm or even worse, a legal code, what happens to innovators? Innovators are a valuable natural resource, like lake shores or national forests.

Town codes are important and they may protect Uncle Henry from himself, but the may also deprive the world of some outstanding or novel or just place cheap and serviceable building technique that he might have invented. Maybe it's unlikey but who knows?

Hey, even the town of Conway plants its feet and refuses to follow some standards handed down from "above." We don't take state bridge money, according to the town engineer because if we did, we'd have to overbuild our bridges in a very expensive way.

He didn't just accept a given. He looked at the facts and really thought about them.

It's codified engineering, as opposed to creative engineering, that says tertiary level sewage treatment has to cost a lot when Ken Kimball of the AMC suggests letting silage corn do the nutrient removal for free. No technological wonders, no fancy chemicals. Just some plants growing in the sun. I like it.  It's not in the engineering books, but it makes sense.

What about those people in Colorado who've been building houses from old tires? And the guy in Arizona who used empty glass bottles filled with sand instead of bricks to build his home. When the dessert wind blows over the mouths of the bottles, the whole house must howl softly - a jug band lullaby.
You might not want that, but it's a sample of the marvelous diversity and imagination of our kind. He hasn't got a neighbor for miles, so he's a little nuts - so why not?

If an unconventional structure meets setback requirements, is screened from the neighbors and has an engineering calculation or two to prove it won't collapse on its owner (and isn't to godawful noisy) why shouldn't a man be able to build it?

Now don't misunderstand me. Much as it pains Henry to hear me say it, there's a long-range benefit in all these codes - but FLEXIBILITY is the thing that can keep them useful -- and keep open the possibility of new solutions.

We are a foolish lot, we humans. We clear cut and dig up and mow down and dam up everything in sight. We even built a strip in North Conway in the lap of some of the prettiest mountains anywhere.
But the Zone Board of Adjustment is asking the Planning Board for changes  to non-conforming zoning rules that will give it some flexibility.

Can that same kind of consideration go into building codes so we can make allowances for Yankee eccentrics and innovators and for poverty that sometimes mandates a shortcut or two?

Building codes like three-acre zoning can be used as a form of social engineering to exclude the poor. In Connecticut I heard of a family whose home was condemned and they had to move out because it didn't have plumbing. It didn't matter that they had nowhere else to go or that they had to go on welfare once they were separated from their garden and ther chickens.

Maybe that's not likely to happen in Conway, but it's important to know it does happen. I guess that's why the planning department fights so hard about the wording of its regulations.

Uncle Henry takes off his hat and shakes his saggy head. "You got to fight it," he says.  He gets out his trusty Stanley measuring tape - the kind that disappears with a clatter when you press the button on the side. "measure those," says my ornery uncle pointing to the studs inside the garage wall.

Well, the rest of the world may building 16 includes on center, but needless to say Uncles Henry is a little off, by exactly the same small measure every time on purpose. That's the way he is...

Ambient Music Meditations: Water Callings

Here is a brand new ambient music video, cooked just this morning. Click on the photo to watch it on my YouTube channel. I have a feeling this is one of those things you'll either love or hate.

The basic singing track was recorded in Garageband. The track was duplicated and altered over and over both in that program and in iMovie. I kind of like the wavy plaintive effect... It vaguely reminds me of birds or whales calling to each other...

The video is of the stream at the entrance to the Stamford Nature Center.

distance hills and snow

Cold is on my mind right now. The inside temperature here has been hovering around 66 degrees for more than a day.  Maybe it's because the radiators haven't been bled in a decade. Or maybe the furnace isn't what it used to be. I imagine the effect will get worse when temperatures outside grind lower. Gotta check it out.


WOOL-PULLERS: The first year I spent in Maine, I lived in an apartment over and antique store. The landlord said it had "some" insulation. What that really meant was, I spent as much on heat each week as I spent on the monthly rent -  despite keeping the thermostat at 55 and wearing thermal underwear all the time.  Wording can be so tricky. We hear what we hope for, not what is actually said.....

Poetry: Mark McGuire-Schwartz - SURREAL!

Flying over rooftops with an alarm clock

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A post from December of 2009. Poems by Mark McGuire-Schwartz are quirky and a bit surreal, like eating pickles and pistachio ice-cream, then going to sleep and having a strange dream. I like this sort of thing apparently as  I have published seven of his poems in Bent Pin Quarterly.

"If your poems were paintings, based on their style, what painter would you be? Are you more Norman Rockwell or Miro?  Rembrandt or Picasso?" This is my stock question during Wed Night Poetry's Q & A.  It's a question that leaves many poets scratching their heads,  but  Mark gave me a truly fitting answer.

"I would be Chagall" he told me, reminding me that I had asked him this before.  Marc Chagall's  odd visions enchant and disorient at the same time, and often show people flying over quaint rooftops, or barnyard animals with luminous eyes hovering at some impossible angle...

Mark has a quirky reading style as well, featuring his self-effacing charm and an alarm clock or two. You can hear him read his work at the Monday Poetry Series t the Stamford Town Center Barnes and Noble. It's this coming Monday and it starts around 7 p.m.

>>>>>Mark has a new chapbook from his own Oy Vey Press... It's called  "Loss and Laughs, Love and Fauna." Sure the tittle is a little surreal, just like the poems it contains.  I got my copy during his reading last week at  Wed. Poetry (which is now meeting at the Blue Z Coffeehouse in Newtown), and I am enjoying it very much.

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Mark had quite a few poems in Bent Pin during its run. The archive was down for a while but is partially restored:
Here is a list of his poems with links where available in the new Bent Pin Archive:

McGuire-Schwartz, Mark -- 4/2007 NEW LINK Title: Black Coffee
McGuire-Schwartz, Mark -- 4/2007 NEW LINK Title: In Death
McGuire-Schwartz, Mark -- 7/1/2007 NEW LINK Title: Turkey Club
McGuire-Schwartz, Mark -- 10/13/2007 NEW LINK Title: What I've Been Before
McGuire-Schwartz, Mark -- 1/1/2008 NEW LINKTitle: 25 Short Poems
McGuire-Schwartz, Mark -- 4/1/2008 Title: "Is Them Things Called Stars?"
McGuire-Schwartz, Mark -- 7/1/2008 Title: Coatless 
McGuire-Schwartz, Mark -- 11/10/2009 Title: Heartless  

Visual Metaphor: the Appearance of Seeing Beyond

This mirror hangs over a booth at a Brookfield diner called Rickyl's, and reflects the ceiling far behind the viewer.

At first glance the strange shape of its gilded paper mache frame makes it difficut to read its spacial position, and it's easy to see it as some sureal portal into another room rather than what it is - a simple, flat mirror.

Rickyl's is tucked away at the four corners area, behind Roccos. They offer great granola pancakes

--- Mar Walker

De Kooning's 'Woman I': perception or projection... scary either way

Standing under the brooding, dissatisfied gaze of Willem De Kooning's Woman 1 is a little unnerving. I was afraid of her in 1988 when I first saw her towering over me at  MOMA - New York's Museum of Modern Art. In the intervening decades, I've met a few women with the same expression, so I find her even more disturbing now.
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De Kooning painted Woman I from 1950 to 1952, so this work is nearly as old as I am.  She is larger than life size. When I first met her, those  huge eyes stared across a room which contained only non-objective paintings, so she was the only readable figure present. Yet she didn't seem out of place at all.  Dekooning built her with frenzied brush strokes and scumbling. Although he worked and reworked this painting obsessively for 18 months, the immediacy, the energy,  and the manic quality remain.
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Woman I is an amazing creature -  powerful, imposing, possibly malevolent, lost. Her great glaring eyes are intense and somehow, well, vacant. The top of her head is turban-like and  her long straight teeth are exposed in a lipless grimace. She has huge round shoulders, voluminous bullet breasts, and yet a delicate turn of ankle on parted legs. She's seated solidly with one leg forward and the other stretched sideways and backwards, as if she were trying to decide on a course of action.
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The brush strokes around and through her document passion, anger, vigor -  yet she seems solid and impassive, unresponsive to De Kooning's sustained spasm of creation. According to reports, he abandoned her after 18 months, as if in all that time he couldn't figure out how to please her. Later an associate Meyer Schapiro, convinced him the painting was finished.
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Every part of the painting's surface is full of vigorous bright brush strokes of thickly applied paint.  The idea of Abstrast Expressionist 'gesture painting' was to transfer the raw state of the artist's psyche directly to the canvas without the intervention of any preconceived notions of style or convention - either moral or artistic. Yet over 18 months, previous spontaneous expressions were being edited and superseded by more recent spontaneous decisions by De Kooning.
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A series of photos by Rudolph Burckhardt  shows Woman I at various stages  -- versions "no less compelling" according to Thomas Hess, than its current incarnation. Apparently she started with breasts bare, raised arms, head tilted back in a very spacial room with a clearly drawn window and objects in view beyond it.  Then the woman, the chair she is seated on, the window and a lamp - dance in and out of sight  - until, finally it's only the woman and the turmoil.
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If you are recoiling from this image, today in 2009 - remember when it was first shown in 1953, it caused quite a fuss on two counts. First the general run of folks thought De Kooning's Woman I was shamelessly vulgar, at least compared with June Cleaver and the passive demure wives of television. But it wasn't only Joe Public that hated it. Other Abstract Expressionists thought it was a step backwards -  a betrayal of the avant garde because it was representational and De Kooning's marvelous crazed woman could be clearly seen.
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De Kooning's rebuttal on his Women (and I think he painted four series of works called Woman)  was this: "The Women had to do with the female painted all throught all the ages, all those idols....It did one thing for me: it eliminated composition, arrangement, relationships, light -- all this silly talk about line, color and form -- because that (the woman) was the thing I wanted to get hold of...."
Frankly, after all this time, she doesn't look willing.

-- Mar Walker

We are getting old, but do we have think about it in advance?

The Blindness of Spring

We grow like the scent
of  gardens in soft rain,
in sweet perpetual increase.
----
We revel in sunlight
refuse to contemplate the dark,
view winter premonition
with aloof disdain.

This is a poem layout from my old Metaphoratorium website and it lived on several versions of my websites dating from around 1998 or so.....  --Mistryel (Mar) Walker

the delicate warm poems of Claire Zoghb

Last Thursday at New Haven's Institute Library, I heard Claire Zoghb read her poetry.

Hers is not a poetry that slaps or shocks. It is as unpretentious and human as an embrace, as welcoming as a smile, yet it's not a sappy sentimental sort either.  For this reading, Ms. Zoghb read from her first full-length collection, Small House Breathing, which took the 2008 Quercus Review annual book competition. These poems sit on the threshold - where one culture knocks on the door of another in a friendly way, and is welcomed.

Her gentle, quiet-but-knowing style of delivery complemented the words - the poems and the person being of one whole cloth, the one the essential expression of the other.

She has a new chapbook, Dispatches from Everest, to be released by Pudding House Press on a schedule to be determined. Her work has appeared often: Yankee, Connecticut Review, Connecticut River Review, Caduceus, and CALYX, and in  Through A Child’s Eyes: Poems and Stories About War and Eating Her Wedding Dress: A Collection of Clothing Poems, (the last two are anthologies).

She's won a lot of awards:  she won the 2008 Dogwood annual poetry competition, was awarded two Artist Fellowships from the Connecticut Commission on Culture & Tourism, and there were two Pushcart nominations.

If you have a chance to get to one of her readings, drive a bit, walk, ride the bus. Arrive, sit back, enjoy.

Ms. Zoghb lives in New Haven where The Institute Library can be found at 847 Chapel Street, New Haven, CT.  There is a poetry reading there each third Thursday. The Institute Library is a membership library and it is seeking members. For $25 a year you can borrow whatever you like and keep it as long as you need to. You can even mail it back.   Though membership involves a fee - the monthly poetry reading is free.

-- Mar Walker

Poet, Playwright Allan Garry - difficult truths, well-crafted poems

Allan Garry brought the realities of his past life to the Wednesday Night Poetry Series this past Wednesday night. He read well, spoke well, brought a balance of darkness and light to bear on the difficult subjects of war and death.  (He writes about other things as well.)

Garry is a Vietnam veteran who recently returned to writing after a long hiatus. He served in a morgue in Vietnam, searching bodies for ID, trying to honor the lives of men he didn't know, trying to make sense of random slaughter, preparing the bodies for their return home. He began writing in college after his discharge, but stopped, only starting up again in the last few years.

 He is, he says, experiencing the benefits of 18 years of therapy to recover from his experiences with war and with Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. Much of what he had to say is so very current, with the endless treadmill of duty tours in our present wars.

His new play Gathering Shells, co-written with Crystal Brian, (who also attended the reading) has  been produced at the Long Wharf Theater and the Little Theater in New Haven, CT,  and will be produced at the  Abingdon Theater in New York on Dec. 3, 4 & 5.  Admission is free; seating is limited. For more information and tickets, call 203-582-3500.

Garry's poetry has been published in The Red Fox Review; the Pennypaper, Curbstone Press and Helix. He has read his work at Wesleyan University, Yale University, Trinity College, Connecticut College and a number of other venues as a winner of the Wesleyan University Honors College Connecticut Poetry Circuit. New poems will be appearing in the forthcoming issues of The Connecticut River Review, Connecticut Review and Avocet Review.

He doesn't have a chapbook yet, but his well-crafted poetry will surely find a home. If you get a chance to hear his work, don't miss it...

-- Mar Walker

Bent Pin - my lit E-zine closes - but archive of past pages is online

Photo by Richard Nethercott:

My lit magazine online, Bent Pin, formerly Bent Pin Quarterly, has closed.  The problem is computer-related. Either software degradation or upgraded OS 10.6.2 incompatibilities with iWeb 08 or perhaps  hard drive sector  corruption or SOMETHING, caused the files that contained the editable nugget of Bent Pin on my computer to transform into a chaotic mess, missing page titles, running text down the side of the page, disappearing text or text boxes, missing titles or authors of works, missing artwork.... The back-up was in the same condition, BUT the previously published ezine pages on my iDisk are okay!  I don't know why this happened.  The problem in iWeb is, all my sites are in the program and I cannot find a way to update one site without the others. I have no desire to upload this confused mess and obliterate the archive of beautiful pages which still exists online.

I guess I could swat my head against the wall a few times. I could curse and swear, eat a gallon of vanilla, drink rum, or throw things, maybe just wallow.But I am not going to do any of those things.

 the archive is at:  ______

UPDATE Aug 22, 2011 The archive and index are both moving - visit http://bentpinquarterly.blogspot.com

The photo (taken over a decade ago by a friend, Richard Nethercott ) of me looking through a sculpture in the Aldrich Museum's outdoor garden, sums it up well.  Right now I am trapped behind big impenetrable artifice of technology that is not working right at this time.

-- Mar Walker

Emptiness and effort - the ambition thing...

On the subject of ambition, I prefer to take a bit of a sideways view of things.  That is to approach via two seemingly incompatible but related ideas.

The first is emptiness -- desireless, nonjudgmental equilibrium, the one point which is the same as  expansive diffusion, nothingness. The simple contentment of sweeping or weeding or sitting or breathing, walking. Attentive, mindful awareness without judgement. This is not a religious statement or a new age statement. Just a way of thinking about being.

The other idea is effort that is expressing a deep unrelenting need to tweak and refine, which requires judgment and differentiation, to improve something, a painting, a bit of writing, a line of music, to bring it into alignment with an ideal, either internal or external.

What made me think about this is, the other day, I was sitting in a coffee shop and happened to be talking with the daughter of friend, a quiet girl in her late twenties. She was knitting, and seemed very content to be doing so.

"Everyone tells me how I really need to focus right now, to figure out how to earn a living, to make progress now on something, that I am at the age where that is what I should be doing," she said adding that she just wanted to be, and to be knitting.

Tell them you are a Buddhist and are into nothingness, I said without thinking at all.

Now, I have to backtrack because contentment is good for contentment, but perhaps it's not that good for achievement. This is a concept that is not in favor right now in the age of instant soup.

You can meditate everyday on being a musician or a writer,, and you might be feeling very contented about your affirmation. But if you don't actually sing, or write or whatever it is you hope to do - then you are not that thing at all, no matter how content you feel about it. A quote I like is "Affirmation without discipline is the beginning of delusion." (from Jim Rohn as quoted by Tony Robbins on Twitter). To be really good at something does not involve a magic incantation. There is in fact, no such thing as magic.  To be really good at something requires effort and intelligent self-evaluation over a fairly long period of time. Another word for that is discipline.

Yet contentment in the moment is a valuable thing. I think there is a place for both emptiness and effort  in a balanced life.  There is a quote I like, that I think speaks to the relation of these two things, and thought I am not a Christian, and am not a theist, that quote is from a bible verse. (Ancient literature and mythology generally contain some truth, but is is human truth...) The quote is "Having done all, stand."   So here is where contentment and effort meet.  Do the work, prepare - while being in the moment, standing still.

-- Mar Walker

.Read a poem on the same topic: http://mmw113.blogspot.com/2009/11/poem-wannamakers-rising-from-inverse.html

Robert Honeysucker, Danbury Concert Chorus & Strings, composer Maxim Vladimiroff shine in world premiere of 'Walden'

This time lapse picture shows composer Maxim Vladimiroff adjusting his music, as members of the Danbury Concert Chorus find their places for the second half of last night's concert. It was a world premiere of Vladimiroff's  new work Walden, the Poetry of Nature for baritone soloist, chorus, string orchestra and piano. The work was commissioned by the Danbury Music Center and its music director Richard Price.

A teaching conductor is a wonderful thing and Danbury has one in Price, who understands that people enjoy music more when they know something about it and know what to listen for as the music plays. With a new or unfamiliar work in concert  -- how does this happen?  His solution is simple: play it twice, with a little commentary illustrated by musical examples, wedged in-between.

That was how Walden was presented last night at St. James Episcopal in Danbury, and it's well worth hearing many many times. It may well be a true masterwork of this composer.  It's the kind of composition where the sound is so beautiful - the sonorities alone can tear up the eyes and transport.  The baritone soloist was the extraordinary Robert Honeysucker, the chorus was the Danbury Concert Chorus, the strings sections were from the Danbury Symphony Chamber Players, the pianist was the composer himself.  During the first performance, Honeysucker read the text before each of the six movements of the work - (Spring, The Motions of a Sail, Nymphea Odorata, Autumnal Colors, Leaves and What Beauty!)

While all of the performers got hearty applause after the work was first heard - when the composer was brought up, the whole audience cheered, whistled, and stood up almost as a body.  Vladimiroff, an unassuming and personable soul, who has worked for three different churches in the area over the last decade and taught herds of children besides, has a lot of appreciative fans, including his mother (Tattiana?) and father, (Sergei Vladimiroff, a concert pianist)  his wife Leisa and two sons, Damien and Luca who were all in attendance to cheer him too.

But then it was time to learn a little something about the piece - Richard Price reminded us of his philosophy and brought Vladimiroff up to talk a bit about Walden.   As he mentioned each concept Price lead the chorus in an example from the work.

After a very animated intermission, the house fell silent to hear Walden played as a piece, without any reading of the text between movements. And here the arc of the work could be taken in.  And somehow in this last performance, Honeysucker was carried away with the work and delivered something marvelous and transcendent. The chorus too, having already performed it well  - had lost their nervousness and let go with truly solid gorgeous performance, as did chorus member Patricia Scharr who had a short section of solo notes. Everything was just right.

Three other wonderful choral works graced the program - Choose Something Like a Star by Randall Thompson, Shenandoah arranged by Donald Erb and Swansea Town by Gustav Holst.  It was a great night, and played to a packed house. People were standing in the back, and close parking was hard to come by. Thanks to all who contributed. It was a wonderful show.

Want to commission a Vladimiroff original or arrange piano lessons: http://VladimiroffMusic.net

-- Mar Walker

Books: The Adderall Diaries, Stephen Elliott in Bethel, CT

Friday the 13th, 2009.
   Stephen Elliott, author of The Adderall Diaries, is reserved, a compact man with interesting tattoos and a slightly tenorish voice - a man easy to picture as a masochist. He read his clean, brisk prose last night in puffy suburban Bethel CT (at Molten Java at 102  Greenwood), with a quiet voice as  even as the surface of his narrative.
questions:

   He read three sections in all, fairly conservative sections of the book, and took questions after each. The audience seemed very interested in the memory aspect of "memoir."  Elliott said his some of it was taken from writing done as journalling at the time the events were occurring, so the details were not drawn from distant memory nor imagined after the fact,  but were written down fresh from the experience itself. He said he'd done of lot of editing and that the writing in its present form was many steps away from the first writing.
   The audience also asked how difficult it was to do the the kind of extensive self-revelation that The Adderall Diaries contain. Elliott said that getting used to revealing your secrets was a gradual thing, and that he'd previously written several novels where he used material from his life. He compared the process  to a transvestite's coming out. First, Elliott said, the man puts on a dress when he's home alone. Then, after a while, he puts it on and wears it out for a quick trip to the store.  A few months latter, he's out dancing in it, and can hardly remember when just putting it on was a big deal.

odd fly buzzes in the ointment:

     Elliott's  reading was interrupted in the middle by the owner of the neighboring bookstore (at 104 Greenwood Ave). (The bookstore folks own the building where the coffeehouse and the bookstore are located.) She'd been sitting in the back, waiting for him to mention books for sale.
   She interrupted to announce officiously that there would be no book sales, as Molten Java's lease had a non-competition clause with the bookstore.  Of course Molten wasn't selling the books, the author was.  For her part, she had no copies of his book to sell in her store.  So it seems her only object was to thwart the income of one author selling directly to his public, and to piss off people who had formerly been her customers.
    After a final section of prose was read, the company left the coffeeshop and went to the pizza parlor across the street where we ordered pizza, and drinks, talked and many of us bought a book directly from the author. Art will out, landlords notwithstanding.

-- Mar Walker

POEM: Intensive care (from Inverse Origami, 1998)

Intensive Care

It's you, there, under the sickish lights
the mint walls, the turquoise bedpans.
Strangers with syringes interrupt
your feverish sleep.
your pale familiar face and matted hair,
your tubes and tethers.
Come home. Just come home.

---

 

from Inverse Origami - the art of unfolding
--- Mar (Mistryel) Walker, © 1998
Puzzled Dragon Press

Bent Pin: The familiar discomfort - Foster Trecost & MarkMcGuire-Schwartz

The familiar unhappiness is often more comfortable for human beings than making a difficult extended change.  This week we have one humorous poem about a couple aware of their own peculiarities, and a bit of flash fiction where the narrator is seemingly unaware of his own slightly sadistic pleasure in the discomfort of those around him. The works are Thoughts At The Table by Foster Trecost and Heartless by Mark McGuire-Schwartz.

The incomplete Bent Pin Archive can now be found at http://benpinquarterly.blogspot.com   Unfortunately this page is not online as yet.

-- MM Walker

What art can reveal

Writing prompt: If you joined the circus, what act would you most want to perform?

If I joined the circus I would certainly not want  to be the fire-eater. I already have enough heart-burn for two or three people.  The trapeze is too far off the ground, the fat-lady and the bearded lady are both unjustly reviled by many. The face painters have to listen to bratty kids , the knife thrower can never get enough insurance and the bareback riders wear little tutus that ride up their behinds.  Putting your head inside the lion's mouth is fool-hardy at any age.

If I could join the circus today, I would be the snake charmer. So many things are hidden, uncoiling their motives only when poised to strike. Like a skillful snake charmer, I would use a little music, a metaphor or two, a little color maybe, to coax a smooth, indifferent reptile out into the light so  its true nature can be examined.

-- Mar Walker

Dog and Cat Kiss: Interpretations differ - what's your take?

Many folks look at this photo and see a pretty little dog and cat kissing. What we see depends a lot on what we expect. I live with these two characters and what I see are two rivals inspecting the competition.  My pets are companionable but not affectionate with each other, and are often jealous of, or at least very interested in the attention or tidbitts the other gets. In this photo, I think they are checking each others cheeks and breath to see if one has eaten anything the other has missed, checking each others physical status and mood. This sweet little kitty often bites the dogs ears, lips or toes to drive her out of a spot of sun that the cat wants for herself.  The dog, who is aware that direct aggression on the cat is not an option within this pack, for her part will secretly steal the cat's food whenever she has the opportunity.

We often find it necessary to anthropomorphize or romanticize animals, especially when describing them to children, but they have their own agenda and motivations which differ greatly from our own.  This is the cause of a lot of injury.  A child assumes this is their beautiful stuffed toy to hug and drag about by an ear or a limb.  The cat, dog, rabbit, hamster responds with teeth to this attack, ends up euthanized, not beause they were evil or dangerous -- but because their owners were irresponsibly ignorant of their needs and nature.  When any dog is left alone with a small child and injury results it is most usually the fault of the supervising human being. If you own a gun and your toddler shoots someone with it, you are negligent and you get a fine. If you own a dog, and someone is injured, you might pay damages, but in the final tally its the poor dog that pays the price for your lack of objective knowledge about nature.

-- Mar Walker

iPhone App Art with a homecooked sound track

Yes, is true that I like to fiddle around with materials and with technology. This is a video slide show of art made on an iPhone. Click on the photo to watch the video.

ARTWORK: The slides were created in SpinArt a $1.99 cent IPhone app.
MUSIC: The sound track is made in three distinct tracks each recorded driectly into iMoive HD (the old iMovie) For one track I used "mouth percussion" on another I smacked the TV remote against a lamp, on a third I improvised a tune (me singing). Then I manipulated each track using IMovie's audio editor applying pitch changes, delay and reverb i varying proportions and doing a little graphic equalization until the three tracks together had a sound I liked. It's short so give a little listen....  I kind of like the effect even though it's different from both my acoustic songs and from the classical music I used to do.

-- Mar Walker

Poem: Wannamakers Rising - from Inverse Origami

This is a poem from my first chapbook, Inverse Origami - the art of unfolding. (Puzzled Dragon Press 1998) It's about the progress of personal growth.    Wannamakers is or was a big department store in downtown Philadelphia.

---

Wannamakers Rising

We'd like to rise
on the gliding stair
of effortless progression
a smooth escalator ascent
over a receding panorama of display.
More often we grope blindly
up sweaty
closed stairwells
steep and demanding concrete
followed by
emergence.

---

from Inverse Origami - the art of unfolding
--- Mar (Mistryel) Walker, © 1998
Puzzled Dragon Press

/

Repackaging the familiar for a novel view

Anything, no matter how plastic, ubiquitous or overstated, can be framed purposefully to evoke something different or new.  This photo was taken at night, with a phone, while waiting in line for the drive-up window....

As I was writing the graph above - I  saw a very clever  TV ad by American Express that uses this 'reframing' idea. In it,  more than a dozen or so common scenes and/or objects were reframed as smilie faces or smilie frowns. The audio featured a gorgeous cello line, no shouting or flashing, and many of the changing pseudo faces required watching the screen intently.

The process was oddly involving, surprising, delightful - intriguing even, more than most shows these days.  I have a better impression of the advertiser for mounting such a clever ad campaign.   Reframing is a neat trick. Well done.

-- Mar Walker

Gertrude Stein: The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

A Cubist Memoir

 A response to Gertrude Stein's book "The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas"

Gertrude Stein is a cubist name dropper! After introducing herself to readers as one of only three true geniuses in her acquaintance, she, as Alice B. Toklas, drops the name Gertrude Stein one to fives times on nearly all of the 252 pages in the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. While it is autobiographical, it is most certainly not about Alice B. Toklas, who 'sits with the wives of geniuses.' Instead it is Stein's own extremely self-reflexive cubist memoir which comments on itself, calls attention to its own materials and production processes, is obsessed with surface, is cyclic rather than linear and offers simultaneous views over time of both its own structure and its autobiographical vignettes. A genus? Yes, indeed.

As Stein clearly states, she is interested in surface versus interior, the outside of things as differing from the inside.  "She always was, she always is, tormented by the problem of the external and the internal," she says of herself on page 119. So with a wink, she writes, with the name and voice of her companion, her own story, dotes on herself as her lover and companion would and tabulates her own talent's progress in the voice of her mate.

Besides surfaces of name, there is also the narrative's surface - what was done and what was said, told with "the refusal of the use of the subconscious," and without emotiveness.  In this way she allows readers to make intellectual conclusions about the emotional nature of the narrative rather than offering a directed vicarious experience of it, so that experience of her life in print is essentially intellectual and analytical rather than emotional. Of writing this way she says "...that listening to the rhythm of his (the dog's) water-drinking made her recognize the difference between sentences and paragraphs, that paragraphs are emotional and the sentences are not."  --- In order for this to be so, one must detach from immediately experienceable emotion in any one sentence, so that the emotion becomes apparent only after the whole of the paragraph is perceived in the mind.

Stein's narrative is not linear but cyclic and gives one the feeling of moving ahead and at the same time going back. Stein was a friend of Picasso and Juan Gris and notes Marcel Ducamp's "Nude Descending a Staircase: on page 113.  It was not surprising to see it mentioned, as it had already come to mind by the second or third time the dinner where the painters sat opposite their paintings was described. This odd familiarity caused a hasty look back to see if I'd lost my place and was rereading the same paragraphs. The same thing happened in other places: the incident where Maitisse gets fried eggs rather than an omelet, the description of William Cook driving a taxi and of Gertrude Stein driving a car for the American Fund for the French Wounded, and the many returns to Paris. Each mention seemed familiar, out just a little off from the last time, with sometimes more and sometimes less of the incident visible, like one of the iterations of the figure's limbs as it descends the stars and seems to move, in Ducamp's painting.

Stein hints at her fascination with lulling repetition and the glint of surface: "It was this summer that Gertrude Stein, delighting int he movement of the  tiny waves on the Antibes shore, wrote the Completed Portrait of Picasso."  In the end, the tide of surfaces recedes and leaves a bit of truth dry on the shore. Stein admits many had badgered her to write an autobiography. In turn she badgered Alice B. Toklas to write one instead.

"About six weeks ago Gertrude Stein said, it does not look to me as if you were ever going to write that autobiography. You know what I am going to do. I am going to write it for you. I am going to write it as simply as Defoe did the autobiography of Robinson Crusoe. And she has and this is it." (pg. 252)

 Of course, like Defoe's work, it is about a stranded traveler and his companion. Yet it is about quite another thing than it purports to be and it glides along tongue in cheek, a surface cleverly concealing and revealing simultaneously.

--- Mad Mar Walker

Original date: Sept. 2003

Bent Pin: Poetry & Fiction - Jess Del Balzo & Bonnie Thompson Enes

Table dressings and undressings that didn't come off, so to speak. Here we have some novel metaphor by Jess Del Balzo in her work "What does one do with a butter swan anyway?"  and Bonnie Enes in her poem "Hermaphrodite" which features some lush words about tabletop lilies.   The page decor is a bit out of season but fall is rather blah this year so why not....

NOTE: The incomplete Bent Pin Archive is now found at http://bentpinquarterly.blogspot.com but this particular month is not as yet online....

-- MM Walker

James Moffett: The Universal SchoolHouse

What is the role of education in society? James Moffett addresses this question in his controversial book  The Universal SchoolHouse in which he proposes the abolition of compulsory education in the United States. This book created a stir when it came out back in 1994 and is now out of print.  You can still get a copy on bay, alibis, at amazon etc.

Mr. Moffett's proposals are innovative and represent the kind of "out-of-the-box" thinking he hopes would be engendered by an ideal education; but there are many pragmatic and philosophical matters that will prevent any widespread embrace of his proposals.

In the opening paragraphs he begins his assault on the status quo with a handful of assertions and assumptions:

• 1) Compulsory education is the antithesis of the democratic ideal of freedom and should be abolished.
• 2) Education is currently delivered via "agents of the state" and is somehow sinister and repressive.
• 3) The production of an educated workforce for the maintenance of commercial venture is a less than lofty goal.
• 4) Standardization through a common curriculum is in no way to be desired in public education because it will have a detrimental effect on future citizens by stamping out the capacity for diverse thinking, which might be considered a survival contingency for that society as a whole.   
• 5) Current educational practices will in only a few decade, be considered primitive, obsolete.

Compulsory education verses freedom for minors

    If compulsory education were suddenly abolished in the United States as is advocated by Mr. Moffett, its chief result would be not be freedom from restriction and standardization.  Its end would be freedom from knowledge for a large portion of the next generation. Without compulsory education, future citizens would be free indeed - free to be as blissfully ignorant as their parents would allow.

    In fact his proposal would result in completely disenfranchising those who are already least likely to get a good education from the current system. For parents with resources and a commitment to educate their children, home schooling or private schooling would be options. For their children, little would change. But children of parents without either time, concern or finances would have six or seven extra hours a day to soak in all the rebellious angst they could get from a peer culture largely created by inherently avaricious corporate enterprise in the media of television, movies, music, and music videos. This diet of sexuality and spleen could be supplemented with intellectual excursions into the whinny politics of victimhood, via "talk radio," and a certain strain of performance oriented poetry where being a victim is rewarded by a higher score - and also by the undocumented web sites of various Internet pundits (like me) whose notion of the term "credentials" stops with a photo ID drivers license.

Agents of the state or flotsam on the tide?

    Really, I cannot see teachers as agents of the state as Mr. Moffett implies. I could easily see them as a too-willing professional in-group committed to the current prevailing fashion in "educational" thought and further influenced by the goals of local parent-teacher organization. Sometimes teachers seem to inadvertently indoctrinate students with the prevailing popular "ism" of the day as if it were a verifiable scientific fact or a moral imperative. The approach sometimes seems to be one of "mission" rather than inquiry.

    The possibility of diverse thinking and originally on the part of teachers is hampered, partly by curriculum but also by the need for a sanitized "political correctness" in the face of bullying, lawyer-brandishing parents and school boards.  If teachers are agents of the state they are somewhat hogged-tied lot.  They do remarkable work despite impossible demands for documenting paperwork and endless blame heaped on them by parents - some of whom regard the public school system as a convenient baby-sitting service, and an demands for homework as an imposition. While I agree that this arrangement is repressive and perhaps sinister, the "state" is not the only culprit.


Goal - the educated worker or the well-read lay-about?

    What exactly is wrong with educating with an eye to the needs of business as long as that is not the only consideration?  Everyone needs to earn a living or generate capital in some way or other. After all, if we all planned to spend our welfare money on Heidinger and Prost - who'd pay taxes to support us?

    The ideal of a free democracy and of an informed, involved citizenry originated in the Greek city-states. There, the well-rounded citizen was quite free indeed to develop his intellectual capacities as a sort of intellectual parasite - supported as he was by an enormous population of slaves.

    We do not however, live in a pure direct democracy like a  Greek polis. We live in a representative democracy with a capitalist economic system.  Is an educational system to serve the development of individual alone?  Does it not serve the society as a whole?  When teachers are in demand, do universities rally to produce them? When engineers are scarce - is it wrong to find that programs to encourage an interest in science and math pop up suddenly at the elementary school level?

    I expect that somewhere later in Mr. Moffett's book, I will find more references to the spiritual development of the individual in order to provide the most contingent value to the society as a whole. And that society's economy does not run on educated sincerity alone. Avaricious enterprise loathed and maligned by many, (including me), has an important place. Without it economies fail.  If it need s workers who can read and write good English, perform basic math and who actually show up for work when they say they will - are these capacities so at odds with freedom or "spiritual" development? Freedom from what? Self-discipline?

In this economic climate - it's a lot easier to see that those sometimes onerous jobs, now notable by their absence, do contribute something. But a versatile, self-empowered individual educated for change rather than a magic disappearing career at Bear Sterns, (may it rest in peace)  might weather the economic storm and find meaning in something other than a job. Hmmm.


Melting pot or soup pot...

    Mr. Moffett seems to feel that standardization through a common curriculum is in no way to be desired in a public education. He asserts that it has a detrimental effect on future citizens by stamping out the capacity for diverse thinking, which might be considered a survival contingency for that society as a whole.

    Yet common instruction in no way guarantees a common outcome. One assignment generates as many odd lines of thinking as there are students. Common material does not guarantee common conclusions.

    It is true that a healthy, viable capitalist democracy requires both structure and freedom. It wants order and knowledge as vital underpinnings to generative chaos. Where does a society's general, common knowledge come from?  Where do we get our ideas about what behavior is acceptable when we are not at home? In this era of fragmenting demographics, where there will be no majority only substantial, multiple minorities where commonalties of culture, language, ethnicity, religion, deportment, attitude, intention and assumption can not be assumed; where do we learn how to act? School? Church? Music Videos?

What exactly will hold us together as a society if a common core of learning and experience is no longer provided by the public school system?  In reality media sources in television and video games now provide part of that core. Watch cartoons with a child. There is a lot of moralizing and moral framework set out in cartoons. Yet without schools we'd have an over abundance of superhero myth and too little of practical day to day life experience inherent in the daily discipline of homework.

    When considering the merits of compulsory education for such a society, in fact for any society; a balance must be sought between the need for an educational core that lends itself to societal cohesion on the one hand and freedom for individuals on the other. Both are needed.


A note on the likelihood of systemic change

    Unlike Mr. Moffett, I doubt that much will have changed in structure of our public educational system in the next couple of decades. In fact it has been two decades since his book first came out. It's more of the same in public education. Our system features a multi-layered structure of authority which is  incredibly resistant to the kind of sweeping changes Mr. Moffett envisions. 

    On a unit by unit basis, each of thousands of school systems across the country is a purely local phenomenon governed by a locally elected school board. Naturally local boards are steeped in prevailing local politics. These boards are held in check by squabbling voters. Just try changing your school's sex education policy to see this effect in action.  School boards are also notoriously jealous of their power, and are quite unlikely to vote themselves out of existence

    In addition to local forces of inertia, there are state and federal mandates and funding incentives, all of which require reams of documenting paperwork. These are beyond the per-view of local boards to repeal. Indeed, these sometimes overbearing demands for local spending were not crafted by a single mind for a single purpose. They represent a haphazard crazy-quilt of educational policy, sewn together item by item, by congressmen and senators in a series of unwieldy political deals. Undoing any of these mandates is an equally arduous process.

    Finally, besides the local governance, the state and federal regulations and funding incentives - there are the national teachers unions, which are well financed and armed with attorneys.  Often it seems that the positions taken by large unions have more to do with the union's need to maintain its power, than with the philosophical visons of its more forward-thinking reformers.

-- Mar Walker

Document 183 CD bash at Stella Blues Bar

Document 183, a four piece folk rock band had their first ever CD release party at the Stella Blues Bar in New Haven a few weeks back.  What a great night this was!  And I am not talking about the free pizza, the friendly bartender, or the Stella Blues Bar ambiance, though all of that was great.   It was the music that was most memorable.

The band's lead singer and ace songwriter is  poet Alice-Anne Harwood. AA has a gorgeous, lush voice that can be alternately: saucy or loaded with soft intimate nuance or suddenly big as brass - always loaded with emotion.. This is a voice you will remember. Dana's integral harmonies and keyboard work plays against it so well, as with John on guitar or percussion, and Tiff's bass -  it makes an intricate and involving sound.  Their new release is a five song CD called Italicized which was produced by Pierce Campbell - so you know the balance and  sound are perfect.  It will cost you just five bucks -  the same as an iTunes download -- and it is so worth it...  To hear a few of their incredible original songs - visit  myspace.com/document183

Bent Pin: Christina Hoag, Jim Harrington - murder & mayhem!

OLD POST about my dead ezine:

I've put a new page up on my E-zine Bent Pin, called "death's messengers" Both works on the page highlight damaged human beings caught in undertow of  their own narratives.  The Target by Jim Harrington is a short fiction on the death-for-hire theme.  The other is an experiment by a news writer from AP. about "your average run-of-the-mill drug murder in Los Angeles." The work is called LA Doggs by Christina Hoag. The style is something she calls "Minific" which she says is short for Minimalist fiction. She defines that as a story told in words - nouns and verbs, as opposed to sentences.
   Read their work on Bent Pin
The photo in the background (above) --  I took that in a drug store. It's an inexpensive Halloween decoration.  With a little cropping and digital tweaking it looks pretty spooky. I have another more editorial picture  featuring the same item hanging in front of boxes of junk food....

-- MM Walker

A Poem & Digital drawing regarding the "Heaven's Gate" cult suicides

Heaven's Gate was a religious cult a bit sci-fi in nature.  The believed a UFO hiding behind the comet Hail-Bop would "beam"  their purefied beings into another, better realm. First of course, they would have to shed their mortal bodies by putting plastic bags over their heads after eating poison tapioca pudding.

Religious delusions haven't changed much since I wrote the poem below. Since the early 1990s we have seen countless religiously motivated killings in the form of suicide bombers, the 9/11 attack, abortion clinic bombers and doctor shooters.  Cult suicide is a tremendous waste of human life and potential. Of course it can't occur without blind faith. Heaven's Gate followers believed these things because their LEADER told them so.  Just one more little reason to never subscribe to a religion of any sort.

.One-Way Portal -

As Earth’s mechanical eyes scan

this not-so-empty darkness, her restless

children ache to dance down galaxies,

chase cosmic winds on callused primate feet.

Unsatisfied as voyeurs, 39 webheads queued

at Heaven's Gate, backpacks at the ready,

humming at the window, eating tapioca.

They clutched plastic, vacuous and opaque,

waited for data retrieval, personal uploads

facing unrecoverable error, depression

deferred in bunk-bed suburban stillness, escape

velocity for the purple-shrouded dead.

They hardly knew their Mother.
Bury them in her darkest loam,
rich compost of stars.

April 6, 1997
©1997 M. M. Walker

-from Inverse Origami - the art of unfolding
--- Mar (Mistryel) Walker, © 1998
Puzzled Dragon Press

  I was thinking about the ever expanding galactic structures of space and the even more convoluted eddies of the human mind when I drew this. As with all my digital drawings, it has been manipulated electronically in a host of programs over the years.

Freight St Gallery Poetry Salon: Eccentric, Entertaining

I have never spent a better $5.  What did I get?  A wonderful poetry open mic hosted by Victoria Munoz, and Terri Klein with eccentrically costumed poets: The classic Beatnik Poet, Archy the CockRoach (of Archy and Mihttabell fame), Gengas Kahn in a pointy hat, Dirty Bob, Sylvia Plath, etc etc etc


The night began with Fabulous Fiddlin' Dan Gardella's sureal act, where in an eccentric, spontaneously choreographed performance, partially done from a 55 gallon steel trash can, he displayed his creative showmanship outfitted in a Mad Hatter type mask. (He looked like an animated musical Jack-In-The-Box in the trashcan.) You simply could not stop tapping or stomping to his infectious rhythms.

At intermission, there was another concert - a half hour of Daniel Stevens, a truly incredible classical guitarist who played, among other things, Usher Waltz by Nikita Koshkin,  based on Poe's story the Fall of the House of Usher. Then Victoria joined him for a few flute and guitar duets.  (She also has some oil pastels up at the gallery.)  Subsequently Edgar Allen Poe had a new funeral. Poe's corpse was played by Dustin Byrne  one of the Gallery founders.

There were also Halloween cookies, cider,  a tasty homemade-like apple spice cake brought at the  Flour Garden Bakery in Woodbury. Merlot, coffee, fruit and cheese....  a raffle, a costume contest won by Dirty Bob (the photo didn't come out....)

One of my favorite costumes of the night was Terri's costume as Archy the Cockroach, based on the Archy and Mihttabell stories.  She had extra arms sewn into her all-brown costume.  (On the left you can see her shaking hands with her other arms...)  Victoria wore an authentic Day of the Dead shirt featuring skulls labeled as famous poets.   Gengas Kahn, owner of A store called Shock n Awe, had a pointy leather hat and a huge fleece-lined suede coat. Jack Beasly gamely performed some Hip Hop song lyrics even without his musical computer setup.  Joan Pavlinsky came as Sylvia Plathe in a "Death is an Art" Apron and pearls, Robin Sampson as the beatnik poet-in-black with angled black beret,  Dirty Bob, better known as Alon,  from the Duo XponX,  had hideous stringy hair and WWII pants tied with a coarse rope. There was someone from Goshen dressed  in period Victorian? garb, though I don't know who her character was.  For my costume I used the classic white sheet with a few holes.   I read my ecology horror poem, Ecotechnicon in as erie and energetic voice as I could muster, as I waved my ghost costume around. Sorry no photos of this part.

So next time you hear about a poetry salon at the Freight St. Gallery GO!!!!  It is an event not to be missed.   Check out http://freightstreetgallery.com.

Two videos below give you and idea of Dan and Daniel's talents:
http://www.youtube.com/v/QTWpXs1pKec&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0    http://www.youtube.com/v/BdD9tPROkV8&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0