SONG: Elves On Expresso! (a fractured Xmas song)

Elves on expresso! was my Facebook status on Dec. 23rd. Someone commented that it sounded like a song title. So I agreed and wrote the song. 

ELVES ON EXPRESSO
- mad mar writes a new song on Dec 23, 2011

1) Kids are getting greedy
shopping lists are getting dense.
Everyone's fretting and getting tense.
Break out the eggnog, break out the rum,
when they ask you what you want
just play dumb dumb dumb because
the ELVES are ON EXPRESSO
OH NO they're over the top
ELVES ON EXPRESSO
NO NO NO
they just can not stop!

2) The sesason is unreason, expectations and illusion
buying, wrapping eating, salesmen in collusion.
Kids are full of GIMMES. Bills are all unpaid
parents under misletoe hoping to get ___ (you know!)
ELVES ON EXPRESSO
OH NO they're over the top
ELVES ON EXPRESSO
NO NO NO
they just can not stop!

3) So The relatives are coming, so the bank will soon foreclose
put on your santa hat and sparkly reindeer pantyhose
sweep out those killer dustballs, let that brick of fruitcake shine
you could always lock the door and drink holiday wine!
the ELVES are ON EXPRESSO
OH NO they're over the top\
ELVES ON EXPRESSO
NO NO NO
they just can not stop!!

Song from the Molten show: I bet it all on you

Well I can't say I was in good voice here - NOT. But it seemed to go well, nonetheless.

My Pathetic Holiday: CHRISTMAS BE GONE!

Christmas is over and I for one am glad. I'm not so much grinchy, as totally irreligiously flummoxed by a season I find artificial and demanding.

To move things along next year,  I want to invent a product called Christmas-Be-Gone.  Perhaps an aerosol spray or tins of loose scrub powder.  Not sure what the fragrance would be.  And it certainly couldn't be guaranteed since Christmas is like the damn flu and return:s each year.  I'd like it to be a product you could spray around the house and no one would bring you awkward presents or heart-burn cookies or worse insist you visit a church.  That shouldn't stop us from visiting each other or enjoying the seasonal lights, the concerts, or the beauties of winter.  ---- BUT if only it would stop me from revisiting the follies of gift-giving disasters past. Take this year's: which I could easily title "My Pathetic Christmas Day."

This year Maize declined to have people in and instead asked for a particular present  -  a trip to the Mohegan Sun on Christmas day.  Not for a show, just for a little slot machine action.  It's not my idea of fun, but she doesn't drive, and my gift then, is to take her there and back which is two plus hours each way.

Christmas morning came under a dead-pan sky and we were on the road. A planned stop at O'Rourke's in Middletown was kiboshed by the fact they were not open, or not open for breakfast at any rate. So we just drove on.  We arrived, had sweetish food-court muffins and java, then Mazie sat with the slots and I sat reading a book, 3rd Degree from the Woman's Murder Club Series by James Patterson. I felt it was pure formula pulp. The characters seemed flat and the prose sort of blah. (I couldn't get the voice of the TV  actress who played the lead character out of my head and I think that was problematic somehow, oh well.)

Then after an hour and a half Mazie abruptly announced she wanted to go home right away and didn't want to stop until we got there. (It might be she was out of sorts from eating Xmas cookies the evening before.)  On the way back I got a bit lost (flummoxed again) used the gps which routed me some odd way of just highway driving.  When we got home, naturally I felt compelled to finish the book I wasn't enjoying. And so it was  I gave a dud of a present on a dud of a day, and ended up reading a dud of a book (at least for me), and driving for 5 hours mostly on highways.  We decided it was not a plan we will ever repeat on any subsequent holiday.

Bring on the middle of January.

Abstract made in web-based browser programs

It's Xmas eve and the days are moving fast toward years end.
This picture was begun while sitting at Molten Java in Bethel this past Wednesday night. I connected to the web over the wifi and usedg Deviant Art Muro to make a few sketches. This was further processed later in Picnik

SONG from the Molten show with weird visual effects

This performance by Mad Mar Walker (me) was filmed at the Molten Java send-off benefit on Dec 18, 2011, in Bethel CT. Since it was filmed in portrait rather than landscape AND since my head looks like a bowling ball with bad hair - well, I thought I'd just distort the heck out of the picture and give people something slightly less disorienting to look at.... 

METHOD: In iMovie HD - I used the Crystalize effect to make large cells, followed by the Edge effect, mirror effect, bloom, then n2 and exposure adjust. I exported it from there as an .dv file and used the new iMovie to turn it into an M4v file. whew... I left the sound naked as the day it was born. No effects there at all, gravel old age and all.

THE SONG:

This one dates back to when I was going out with my future husband and I was in my early twenties.

Lay On Down And Die

a song by Mad Mar Walker


Verse 1)

My love rents from a cold water baroness who
sticks to his pay check like gum (shit) on a shoe
on payday, she stalks him like a bloodhound dog
but after lunch why she'll be lost in a corn mash fog

REFRAIN:

So you and me go down to our favorite spot
in the grave yard beneath the pine trees
where it never gets too hot

We'll read the tombstone poets smell the flowers, get a little high
and when were too happy to move
why we'll just lay on down and die

Verse 2)

You had yourself a rusted out Chevrolet car
you drove it one night right thought the window of a bar
Then they could not find you for 17 days
when they did were mumbling dirty words
and your little eyes were still glazed.

REFRAIN

Verse 3)

For your birthday I brought you buttered rum, Jamacian red
You smoked and you drank till I was sure you was dead
but when it comes to chasing round after me
you're ever ready like that famous flashlight battery....

REFRAIN

Molten Benefit Bash - this Sunday Dec 18 Noon-10pm

Woohoo it's a nice line up for Sunday's music Marathon at Molten Java in Bethel.  (That's the existing Molten Java at 102 Greenwood, near Bethel Foods. (In the new year it will move to Dolan Plaza, 213 Greenwood.) For $5 you get a free cup of something and some great tunes!

Here's a link to a writeup of the event: http://www.ct.com/entertainment/music/shows/wtxx-local-musicians-throw-a-housewarming-party-to-celebrate-the-new-molten-java-in-bethel-20111213,0,7546758.story

Here's the linup of music:

Molten Java Jazz Trio 12-1:30pm
Marc Huberman – 1:30-2pm
Mar Walker – 2-2:30pm  <<<<<< me - ha!
Joey Vee – 2:30-3pm
The Hip Replacements 3-3:45pm
Seth Lefferts and the Side Effects 4-4:45pm
Amanda Bloom 5-5:30pm
Neil Corday 5:30-6pm
My Dad's Truck 6-7pm
Michel Rae Driscoll 7-7:30pm
Phoenix Tree 7:30-8:15pm
J.D. Hill – 8:15-8:45pm
Mr. Happy Cloud 8:45-9:15pm
Burnkit2600 til closing

Psychological Spaces: Alone, Not Alone

A public place is a place of odd and unexpected possibility.

In a busy world where so many things demand attention and there is always a list of things to be done - sometimes a public place is the only place where obligations can be briefly set aside. It's also a place to be a participant with others in a kind of silent, noncommittal way. Often it's a place of watching, reading or waiting. Sometimes it's a place of writing.

Sitting in a public place, you  have company, yet you are by yourself. You are with the crowd, but not in it. You can feel lonely there, but you don't have to  - with a little imagination, you can also feel your place as a member of our varied human menagerie.

Here, you can quietly observe or discreetly ignore the gaggle of humanity around you. You can chronicle it all  - just in your head, or with a camera or a laptop, a drawing pencil and sketchpad, or with a pen and a pocket notebook.  Or you can sip your java, ignore your cell phone and revel in this small zone of tranquility. 

This, of course, makes a glaring assumption: you have money for coffee, a cell phone and/or any kind of peace.  When 11 million people have lost their homes and half the working age population has given up looking for work - that's not a good assumption. 

If you are homeless, for sanity's sake you have to carve a private space out of a series of public or shared spaces. I think that's why so many choose to live in a car, (assuming you have one of whatever vintage) - because a car offers the privacy of a door and a lock. 

You can't hide out there forever though, and inviting public spaces offer a respite. Of course I have made another assumption: that store owners and citizens aren't complaining and getting non-buyers tossed out for loitering. 

My how the mental furniture around here has changed.....

This phone-photo was taken from the second story of the mall, looking down into a sitting area. It was fiddled with digitally in Picnik. 

Small, colorful works at Art & Frame

There is an interesting Small Works show, around 200 pieces from 80 local artists, up through January 6, 2012 at Art & Frame in Danbury. That's on Route 6, (60 Newtown Road),  in the same plaza with Camomile Natural Foods.  I wasn't going there, just walking by, and the display caught my eye, lured me inside.  The works are various, with various prices, and the atmosphere was soft and friendly as opposed to austere and sterile.  I liked being there looking at the art. You can find their website at http://www.artandframeofdanbury.com, and their facebook page at http://facebook.com/ArtandFrame .   I noticed three Alberettis two by Robert and one by Mary Lou, all with a nice well-touched feel. Check it out. Made-in-America too.

Sun, blood and darkness - a digital pic

Title:  Sun, blood and darkness. This digital abstract bit was originally an MS Paint file. It's last facelift was in Picnik. I have a feeling this little file should actually be big, wall-sized like a Pollack. If I could print it out onto canvas, I'd have some extra brush work to add since this file is small.

There is this sporadic, insistant intermingling going on in this picture. of the red and yellow, of the beige and black. For me it bespeaks the relentless stippling of ideas and culture. There is always disturbance and spillage.

Past, Present, Future Wedpoetry stuff...

Wednesday Night Poetry is prepping a few changes for the new year, so I thought I'd post one of the 2006 series posters I made, (click on it for a larger image) as an excuse to gab about it a bit.

Snow And Ice -- This past winter  Wedpoetry was canceled at the last minute at least four times (it might have been more)  for bad-ass storms that made travel hazardous.  So this winter, the series is going to take a winter break starting after its meeting on Dec 14th. through January and February. The first meetup of the new year will be March 7, 2012, when the all new 2012 Wednesday Poetry will begin.

Coming soon -- Tomorrow, (Nov 30)  is a Leonard Cohen themed open mic, followed by a workshop.  Next week (Dec 7), the feature had to cancel , there will be an open mic but the rest of the evening program is still to be determined.  The feature  On Dec 14, the last meeting of 2011, there is a four-person panel discussion called Putting Your Poetry Collection Together!  Panelists include Brad Davis, Leslie McGrath, Claire Zoghb and  Faith Vicinanza. During the open mic - it;s Grinch Night.

Changes in offing for 2012 are still up in the air. The group will likely be meeting in a different venue, and format may change a bit as well.  To mark the change, all entries on the wedpoetry wordpress  website have been archived to a site called http://wedpoetrypast.wordpress.com.  So if you have a link to a reading you did there that now is broken - just slip the word "past" into the address and it should work.

POEM: Surface Substance Entropy

A bit of a mood here. Photos of reflections, or where one can look into and out of a building at the same time, taken in CT New Milford, Danbury, Bethel and Georgetown. An improvsed singing track over a keyboard track, a tap the metal mug track - all recorded in Garageband, sound effects added in both IMovie and Garageband. The poem was recorded using the Iphone OS Voice Memo app..

The Poem:

SURFACE SUBSTANCE & ENTROPY

Blue light, evening sky, red arches
frame black branches in reflection or white arches.
or grey shadow of arches and brick. Look through; see beyond the glass.

Notice the distorted view, the glass rippling
with unspoken memories and caught between
looking at the surface and looking through the surface

to another surface, to distant reflections
of that which is behind us --
far away, removed but present.

See into the room, see past the room
as the branches wave, reflecting unseen winds.
Sometimes the trunks of trees become what they are not.

They lift their hidden deadly power, tangled and electric.
The squares of constructed sky reflect cloud
until the pains are broken one by one.

The tenderest green leaves soon turn to barest vine,
and on the car, a curveture of glass
reflecting the ubiquitous trees.

On the horizon the peeling paint continues, and
in the glass, under the sky dome, blurred
with the speed of going, the goodbye waving

Tabernacle of Bees

Have you been a true believer at one time but not so sure anymore? Think the idea of hell is pretty revolting? Ever wondered that religions contradict each other? About all the wars committed in the name of religion?  Ever read up on the sordid back-histories of various religious movements, reformations, new age fuzzies or even the papacy? Do you enjoy poetry?  Tabernacle of Bees might be of interest.

 I originally announced this book in October of 2009. But  conflicting edits proposed by a writing group I belong to, followed by several computer deaths and some other odds and ends, frooze me into a state of indecision about how to proceed. However, recent developments have cause me to act. So finally two years later, in November of 2011, I'd like to annouce TABERNACLE OF BEES, a small book of poems which represent a journey from dogma to doubt and beyond, is now available from Puzzled Dragon Press. It's a short book, just 14 poems, but offers a lot to ponder.

POEM with artwork - after Jay Defeo's The Rose

Cosmic Super Nova, Mountain, Flower, Nirvana

on Jay Defeo's the Rose 

 

On top: The Rose, Bottom:
my response to it

At the start was a vague idea

 about climbing mountains, the forms,

 the form   of mountains

It became   a mountain of paint

a canvas 11 feet high,
8 feet wide, 11 inches deep

A mountain eight years long.

There were brushes for painting it up, 

slathering on the peaks

Knives for carving down the crevasses

making symmetric straits and canyons of implosion

hacking away material

to get down into the mythical center

of this inverse starburst..

Cleaning the brushes

sharpening the knives

day after day, month after month

year on year, the daily wrestling

the readiness to cascade to the center 

of toil her commitment leading deep, 

and growing deeper though glistening white

Like the expansion and contraction 

of a universe And those opposing planetary forces

the building up and the wearing away, 

 the building up the carving down into 

 the building up despite the erosion of sharpened steel 

 in her own two hands she shaped it with 2300 pounds of oil paint.

And when it was done it lurked behind a wall

like a dormant volcano 

or a lover you no longer want as a roommate

and she refused to paint for years

Later she painted smaller-sized botanicals, 

little but weighty abstracts as if the literal enormity 

had gone out of her.

Eventually the mountain went down the fire escape 

They took out the window took out the wall 

to get it out of the Filmore Street studio

to let it unfold in public view 

let it flower, this endless road

this journey of making

the name came late,

The Rose, 

a concentric flower

petals, arrayed around a center
of daily sweat followed by stillness

its silvery shimmering a monument 

of whites of lights and highs accented 

by shadowed abyss, this human reaching 

for meaning reaching and collapsing

 into the event horizon of art

c MM Walker  2011
written for a Free Poets Collective reading  celebrating the Women Beat-ear poets, writers and artists, held at Broad Street Books in Middletown

Update: It's on display at the Whitney currently http://whitney.org/Exhibitions/JayDeFeo

Dan DeRosa - good memories linger

Tonight at Weds. Night Poetry we will be remembering a local poet, and a former WNPS host Dan DeRosa - funny warm young man. I kidded him once that he had a dangerous smile which if trained on the polar ice caps would melt them right away.  That was after he had smiled at someone sad at Molten Java and they lit up like a Broadway marque. His smile told people it was okay to be themselves. He was everyone's friend or brother. Had an uncompromising positive attitude and great compassion towards the autistic and everyone else too.


When he graduated from Western CT State University in 2009,there was a graduation party (see photo at the right) and then at the end of the summer WNPS held a good-bye party for him, as he was off to grad school in Florida. For his going away present - he got to be the poetry feature for the evening. During the open mike portion we roasted him with poems and stories.

For my part, I wrote him a song, "Dangerous Dan" I had it up on Youtube at that time but later took it down because I was a bit horse the day I taped it and hoped to make a better version. I never did naturally. So here is the original verison once again from YouTube. The lyrics are posted below also. Dan died suddenly of cardiac related problems at only 33 years of age. He was a man who embraced life, took it on his own terms, who cared for everyone around him. May we all live even half as well.

 Dangerous Dan 

Dangerous Dan is going away to Florida
Dangerous Dan is leaving this cold state behind
He's going where the water's rising
he'll do well and that's not surprising
Dangerous Dan is a man still in search of his life.

Dangerous Dan is driving the road to his future
and being a poet, he's mapping it out verse by Verse
Life's a poetry slam of four score ten
Practice, edit, the do it again
Blend it into something inspiring no matter the score

Dangerous Dan has a smile like a bright summer day
His smile tells the world You can be who you are
He'll poem on some other page,
Dangerous Dan is turning the page and we'll see
what he will be

Dangerous Dan is going away to Florida
The King of Haiku will soon be expanding the form
We'll miss his wit and that dangerous mouth
 Think of us when you're in the south
Let wisdom guide all your rhyme
You can come back anytime.

POEM: Discovering Home (from Inverse Origami)

Discovering Home      

--- a poem from Inverse Origami

 I used to live in the front entry
       with the hall table and a mirror
       reflecting latched glass doors
       leading inward, heavily curtained
       I dreamt in shadows, vague confusing rooms,
       a twisting maze opening into light
One day, unexpectedly
I came out from behind the doors
       introduced my self to me
       stepped in as
       the doors opened
to living space, a country
       of dangerous mountains,
       temperate forests, prairie grasslands
       rippling; full oceans
       frothing to universal currents.
I am one
       with this geography
       it matters to me and I to it
       here I embody magic
       lead turns to gold daily in my hands
       in the hands of those around me.
now the entry is for guests
        the curtains are drawn back,
        the door, ajar,
        so visitors can wander
        see the sights
leave delicious word-maps
       to their own countries.

c) 1998, MM Walker

This is a poem from my 1998 Chapbook "Inverse Origami - the art of unfolding" Most human beings have capacities far beyond what they see of themselves everyday. Sometimes it takes a while to discover all the various people you contain - and who you might be, could be, will be. And to honor even those aspects you choose to hide..... The photo is a digitally finesed picture taken in a dark room where lights hung behind heavy curtains. Only after fiddling with the settings was I able to see the unknown woman sitting there in the dark. I hadn't realized there was anyone in the picture.  It seemed a match for the poem.

Musical Marriage Proposal Seen At Molten

When you visit small locally owned venues, you just never know what might happen. I joined a friend for dinner last night at Molten Java, and we gabbed long enough so that a pair of musicians appeared and started setting up some interesting equipment.


Anna and Mike who may at times may call themselves, The Kitchen Sink Boogie or The Connecticut Vanilla Beans,  play a mean blues blend.  The instruments and voices have a nice back and forth conversational quality.  Sometimes one sang, sometimes the other - often doing music by blues greats, with an occasional harmonies, and some original songs thrown into the mix. Anna plays a Kirk Resonator with a flashy, silvery plate over the guitar's opening. Mike bends an all-electric with a whammy bar, a well-used slide and nice amp effects.

Then came the second surprise. About halfway through the evening, Mike began to sing an original song to Anna, and suddenly the lyrics said (more or less)  "I love you Anna B. I love you Anna B. I'm asking you to marry me....."  Then Mike stopped and presented Anna with a jewelry store bag and inside it was a box with an engagement ring...... Looked like a yes to me - a happy ending or rather a new beginning.

Gift-mas has arrived at the Danbury Mall

Oh come on! It's not even Thanksgiving yet!  Halloween is barely over and Santa is red-clad and ready for sales! He's already frightening shy children at the mall, and taking wish lists as the stores hope for some business after a quite few years of bleak. This child looked a bit reluctant to even look at Santa. These photos were taken yesterday, November 10th. This is surely the earliest sighting I can recall.  The mall however, despite seasonal decor, was pretty empty, and this was the only visitor for Santa, there was no line. Maybe he was a test run.....

Pale Blue Dot: Carl Sagan Day

I'm posting the video below for Carl Sagan Day,( a day late but posting it nonetheless) It's courtesy of MadArtLab.com and http://youtube.com/RogerCreations where I ran across it.  In it you can hear Carl Sagan's own voice on of his most famous statements about the earth. The photo to the right is a Voyager photo on which the statement s based - where the tiny speck inside the circle is the earth, and us, and all we have ever known.

Made with web-based browser programs

This new abstract was made completely with web-based browser loading programs on a Chromebook with a Chrome operating system/Chrome browser. These programs are web/browser-based and completely free.  If you have raged that illustrator or painter cost so much. Give them a try. DeviantArt Muro,  Pixlr and Picnik and others.

We need a Constitutional Amendment:

Let's amend the constitution:

PROPOSED AMENDMENT: Pay and benefits for the elected legislative branch must be set once a decade by national referendum. There shall be no interim raises, no government funded healthcare, and most especially > no retirement plans for elected or appointed congressmen and senators unless they have served in office for 20 years.

What do you think - can we get it passed in 50 states?

We need to invert the power distribution in this country. Siphon it off from our egomanical congress and senate and take it to ourselves via NATIONAL REFERENDUM!!!

What we take for granted 'til the lights go out....

Here in the modern lands, we've built out lives around a long thin strand of wire and the invisible stream it delivers to us, to our homes and businesses, to our necessities and our amusements, to our comforts and our endless devices.

When the wire breaks we are lost, transported instantly to another world where our daily lives are changed. Instead of a four lane highway - we travel a narrow, unfamiliar foot-path. Everything slows. Everything is dark and getting colder as we fumble for matches, candles, batteries.

At home we learn to work the curtains and furniture for maximum passive heat gain.  We drag out kerosene heaters, stoke flames in the fireplaces we usually ignore, break out sterno stoves long packed away, put on mittens to grill food on the back deck, pack a few perishables in a cooler  - if we are lucky enough or clever enough to have any of those things.

We go to bed early, get  under the down comforters, get up early to drive off to a warm diner for hot food, head to the fire house for water to flush with, to the store for something to drink. We drive to get warm, to charge the phones - if we can find a gas station that has power.

This storm brought so much quiet on Saturday night. It was beautiful and tranquil - it unnerved our cat no end. She seemed to be listening for familiar sounds that had vanished. By Sunday afternoon though, the roar of a neighbors generator could be heard and the traffic noises began to creep back into our hearing. The sun crept back also and most of the snow has entered the watershed already.  We can see the lawn but not by the back porch light. We have been without power since Saturday afternoon.   It's Thursday afternoon and utility bashing has become all the rage.

First our mayor, who in my opinion has been in office too long, has made no less than five robo calls each of which imparted some useful information, but each of which whined about CL&P, a handy scapgoat in the face of next weeks election.  In a gas station yesterday - I heard more complaining about CL&P - why did they have to import crews from Georgia, grumble grumble, why don't they just hire more people right here. Now think about this for a minute: if they hired enough regular employees to cover special emergencies when 800.000 people have no power for two weeks -  what might the daily charge for electricity rise to?

Let's face it folks - the utilities WANT TO SELL US POWER. They want to hook us up as fast as they are able.

Then in the grocery store a woman who had moved here from New York City, said she thought there was something wrong with Connecticut. There, finally I had to agree - but what is wrong with Connecticut electrically speaking is also what is so right with it - all our lovely trees and our crazy tree hugging loving populace, many of whom moved here from New York because of the state's lovely trees..  This early snow clung to leaves everywhere, dragging down any tree with a weakness, and some that looked hearty as ever before the storm.  Many here even sue towns and utilities over tree cutting . Too many of us say no way, not our tree.....

The moral is, trim up in the summer or shut up when the lights go out. I love the trees too. Nobody wants a bare blacktop world. But a little electric is nice too.

Poem: The Uses of Nature (from Inverse Origami)

the Uses of Nature

Down at the interplanetary 2nd-hand nature boutique
I’d like to buy the night sky. I'll take the round full moon,
and put it in my pocket so I'll always have a coin.
I'll pick the stars, every one. I'll put some in my hatband
I'll put some across the shoulders of my coat,
and I'll stuff the rest up my sleeves so I'll
finally be luminous and amazing.
And when I am tired of being admired,
I'll take the darkness that remains and slip it over me
and become invisible so I can rest.

But look! There are lovers there under the night sky
clutching nothing, clutching everything in each other.
What will light their way when I have the moon?
What will hide them when I have the dark?
What will they wish on, when I have every star?

Hey! I could divide the moon into quarter acre lots,
and they could get a variable rate mortgage
with giant balloon payment and health insurance
and chain themselves to jobs they hate for 30 years to pay for it.
I could portion out the stars, one to every house,
An heirloom,a family treasure kept in a little box on the mantle
taken out as a conversation piece to impress visitors
I could pour the darkness into pint containers
and have it delivered to people's doorsteps
I think there's enough to go around....

----------------

by Mar (Mistryel) Walker
10/95, POEM 27 - From Inverse Origami - the art of unfolding  - c 1998

I am posting this because I read it Friday evening.  (it's 12:36 am Saturday) I read it last night really I guess, during a Google+ hangout. One poet was from India another from UK. etc etc. I just looked in, and was surprised when they called on me to do a poem. I had no work within reach so I did this one - an old stand-by from my chapbook that I have slammed with in the past. I have it memorized but I forgot changes I had made to the beginning of it.....

Obsolete tech devices as canvas and frame

I painted this abstract (above) in an odd place - inside a dead Sharp Personal Organizer, "512K" which, for a short  time many years ago, was invaluable. (Click on the picture to see it even larger - I think it makes the size-transition well) Of course, every darling is brief in the tech world and the planet is littered with abandoned, non-functioning gizmos. Painters - recycle! Below you can see it insituo - in the frame and substrate.

Poetry in disguise at Halloween party

Pictured above, are the crazy folks at the annual Halloween thing at Wednesday Night Poetry,  missing are Faith, (a devil) Victoria, (a pizza delivery girl with a pizza) Ernie in a bandana with a pirate spyglass. And T.G. as herself, with Tess, as herself.  We can't forget Tess. I had 'em wondering, including Tess who barked at me in my head-covering Egor mask, I tried to talk very low pitchwise, and sit not like myself, no leg crossing or sitting on my feet.  The whole bit  seemed to upset Tess no end - the cues were too confusing I guess. Poor puppy.  

I read a short spoof of a poem in my ultra low-pitch, threatening Egor style:

Mouse traps
Hickory Dickory Dock
Little mousie ran up the clock
The clock struck one
And Mousie did run and run
until she was done dun  da dun, dun da dun da dun da dun

A poem on a drawing: Free Space

From the archives:

Free space,

defined by what it's free of...

the grace, the drape, the liquid

air, where shuffling gauze

gives way, writing the bend

of torso, an ambition of words,

of space, of not often enough

exploring, hiding

or not hiding,

the cloth that tells

betrays the careful

covering and uncovering,

the moving and falling,

the piling of layers taken

away, removed as

we find our - silence.

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-- a poem and drawing by Mar Walker aka Mistryel

This is an extended doodle, and all of the words of the poem appear in the drawing. I drew this during a lecture at a conference on metaphor and the book ta few years ago.  It was done in a little leather book that is very small. The medium is pencil. I have boosted the contrast to make it easier to see.  It is one of a handful of  small works where I have tried to combine drawings with words....

Dancing under a dark sky

From the PuzzledDragon archives: 

This is a picture where music is integral to the subject. You can't dance unless someone or something is piping out a tune...

This work is an oil pastel/water color I did in 1992 while I was in Maine and its lovely hills are visible in the background. The guy in blue with the hair was a very odd fellow named Peter Smith who used to wear fingerless billy idol gloves and who could talk just like homer simpson. Go figure.  The fellow in the brown tee shirt is waving his arms despite his girth. He was based on a rotund neighbor named Rob Puncheon. I tried to create vivacity here with the motion of bodies, stars, sky and grasses. Even the seated figure on the far left seems as though she might jump up and join in.  The only static being here is the pensive onlooker on the right. And the picture is really hinges on her. There is all this joyful motion and one sad bit of pensive melancholy. Ah well.

This was moved from the gallery blog, where it was a Jan. '07 entry

Coming home - for some it's not easy or simple

 from the archives of the Puzzled Dragon:

 

Tim O'Brien's book, The Things They Carried 

A few years ago in October was a series of  local events on the book, as a part of  the "One Book, One Community" series including a visit by Tim O'Brien.  That's why I've reposted this bit - I have changed my blog name several times since posting it originally.

DEATH AND THE FUNHOUSE MIRROR

To clearly see ourselves whole, stripped of the polite social mask, is at once privilege and nightmare. Tim O'Brien's self-reflexive novel The Things They Carried offers a soldier's view of the Vietnam War, but also a view of how a man's socially sanitized vision of himself can break down during war.  More than this, O'Brien takes readers on side trips, where they can feel a portion of what he felt, where they can envision their own disintegration.

After describing in a dozen different categories the things they carried with them, O'Brien the author tells us this:

"For the most part they carried themselves with poise, a kind of dignity. Now and then however, there were times of panic..... when they twitched and made moaning sounds and covered their heads and said Dear Jesus and flopped around on the earth and fired their weapons blindly..... In different ways it happened to them all."

It is a rare thing for me to fall speechless after reading a novel. Some of this novel is like Lock-tight and stays around when it is no longer convenient to remember. For instance the passage where the medic in grief and rage shoots a baby water buffalo to death one small divot of flesh at a time making sure that it is alive and suffering.  Or the repeated references to the Lemon tree, the light and the explosion, the clean-up.... Despite the amazingly different content, this book bears a great structural resemblance to Gertrude Stein's Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Like Stein's book, it discusses itself to death, one chapter discussing how the previous chapter was written, discussing if any of it is really true.  The book also uses Stein's device of the endlessly repeating iterations of cubism. Many scenes first appear in a slice, then in part, reveal just a little more, then the full version then recede, but never completely.... This cycling structure, Stein's "little waves"  lapping, lends itself to the material in that it mimics the soldier's inability to let go of the experience of combat in Vietnam, just as O'Brien the writer could never let go of it.  It also mimics the reoccurring nightmares of Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome and the mind's inability to let go of this self-disintegrating experience. This whole structure is  echoed in the chapter "Speaking of Courage" where Norman Bowler drives around and around the lake after returning from the war, unable to stop driving or thinking about the shit field by the river and Kiowa drowning and Bowler's failure to rescue him. Then in the next chapter we discover maybe it was O'Brien the writer who let Kiowa disappear in the muck. Maybe it was true, maybe it was a story. How Steinian. One of the oddest chapters is "Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong." In this chapter O'Brien the writer effectively shows an aspect of war rarely discussed with non-combat veterans: that for some soldiers nothing in life will ever be as physically thrilling and challenging (nor as traumatizing) as survival, will never involve as much of their instincts, not as civilized beings but as cunning animals, tribe members, ritualistic hunters.  This is usually only hinted at in much war literature. By couching it in a double fiction, showing the transformation as a fable that supposedly happened to a women in a pink sweater, O'Brien both externalizes this transformation and at the same time, frames how easily, how steadily civilizations slips away from even the most innocent and loving.

--- M.M. (Mar) Walker author of Inverse Origami - the art of unfolding, editor and writer at the  Puzzled Dragon and former editor of Bent Pin Quarterly originally written in November of 2003 .
Previously  posted on all my variously named blogs, puzzleddragon, MMW113, etc etc etc

Returning to be ignored?

The troops finally will leave Iraq. How will they be treated? Will there be jobs? Not yet apparently. Will there be healthcare through the VA or will that be gutted too? Have their homes been foreclosed while they were gone?  How many lives have been disrupted and then changed irrevocably?  War takes a bitter toll even on those who can walk away.
Click here for the LA Times on the withdrawl announcement

(below a note on the vicious Stop Loss program,  from last January)
 You can tell there is an unspoken caste system in the U. S.
 Here is how you can tell:

When the economy took a dive and the feds had to bail out so many giant financial corporations, the lobbies and lawyers screamed that contracts including big bonuses to CEOs CFOs COOs, traders etc, had to be honored. Start breaking contracts and Western civilization would crumble, according to the bankers and their lackies in government.  When the fed finally got busy and put some restrictions on bonuses - the banks couldn't pay the TARP back fast enough.

But, WHAT ABOUT OUR SOLDIERS WHO SIGN A ONE YEAR CONTRACT for military service - but then the U.S. engages its "STOP LOSS" program and they aren't allowed to leave, sometimes having to serve a second or third term against their will. Their contracts are broken, and they have no legal recourse. So a contract with a banker is sacred. A contract between the Federal Government and a soldier isn't worth the paper its written on.....  (See Stop-loss policy entry on Wiki)

Of course a whole list of American Indian tribes could have told us this.....So according to U.S. practice -- If you are a well-connected banker the government will go broke to protect you and your contracts are sacred.(Unless of course there is a populist outcry of VOTE THE BUMS OUT!) If you are just a foot soldier, or an Indian Tribe, historically the government says, screw you. Obama may have fixed the first part - but he hasn't gotten around to the second part yet....Check out this NPR story about a  soldier the army wouldn't let go --  who is going to get a court marshal because he wrote and sang a song protesting the Stoploss program. The military actions against this soldier are unAmerican.

SCAN fall sale reception

The Society of Creative Arts of Newtown had an opening reception for its fall holiday show Friday evening. Lots of artists, a few local pols, everyone with cider or wine, noshing on fattening snacks and wandering in isles of art. A nice time, lots of great stuff to see and buy if you have a few bucks to spare. Ends tomorrow at 5. (10/23) Might be bargains!
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"We are all connected" - the Symphony of Science

I am 60 years old this week, and less isolated than I have ever been. More than ever I know that all of you out there are part and parcel of this world, or which I am also a part. I feel the small speck of life that is me, is in relation to all the specks that are, in a very basic way.   The music in this video is a part of a series of videos from http://SymphonyofScience.com - watch the video and checkout their website.  I think it expresses how I feel in many ways.

Honoring The Women Beats

Helen Peterson

Yvon Cormier

An event called Women Beat Era Poets/Authors/Artisits: A Celebration, took place at Broad Street Bookstore in Middletown, CT on Sunday. Like most women during the 50s, they were a bit under-exposed, and despite their own rebellions they seemed overshadowed at the time by their outlaw men.  I have to admit I enjoyed listening to their work.
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 Poet Yvon Cormier who organized the event, asked to me read poems representing someone, and I chose Jay Defeo - a visual artist rather than a poet, who now in retrospect is considered one of the definitive American Abstract Expressionists.
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Joan Kantor

Colon Haskins

For the occasion I put together six poems, five so called found poems gleaned from her own words as found in a lengthy oral history interview with Defeo conducted around 1976. The last was a reaction poem to her monumental one ton painting, The Rose which was eleven feet high, eight feet wide, 11 inches deep and eight years of effort long. It's now owned by the Whitney Museum.
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Dolores Lawler

Mad Mar Walker

The former Poet Laureate of Long Island, George Wallace was suppoed to read Janine Pommy Vega. He was unable to come at the last minute so Dolores Lawler read Pommy Vega's work instead, as well as some some Denise Levertov and some of her own. Helen Peterson, co-editor of the Waterhouse Review read Diane DiPrima, Joan Kantor, author of Shadow Sounds, read Hettie Jones, Yvon, who organized the reading, read Mary Fabilli and Colin,Haskins, who's put out a whole slew of fine poetry chapbooks and started the Free Poets Collective among many other ventures, read Elise Cowen.
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Robin Sampson

Sympetalous

 I only have two pics from the open mic, Robin Sampson and Sympetalous.  I have video but give me a month or two to sort that out.

According to the press release: This event is proudly presented by the FREE POETS COLLECTIVE, IN COLLABORATION WITH BROAD STREET BOOKS & CAFÉ, The Wesleyan Bookstore. The next Free Poets Collective event is Farmtober on 10/22, 1-4 at Fort Hill Farms in Thompson, CT

Noticed: ratio of for sale vs help wanted ads

This morning I am adding a tiny inexact comparison to the list of ways I guage the health of the local economy.

It's a measure that may or may not be invalid in these internet days. Perhaps it's a measure that says more about the future of newspapers than the future of employment. In your local paper take a look at the want ads in yesterdays paper, the Sunday paper which traditionally has the larges want ads section of the week. Look at the section labeled For Sale.   Then flip over to the section for Help Wanted.  One seems significantly larger than the other.

Let me make a sweeping surmise:  Because the one is so slender, the other has increased. People without jobs or if they have jobs, without raises,  people who can't move on to a job or a better job, want to raise cash by selling things. Cars, houses, stuff. If you charted the ratio from 2007 to the present - I wonder what the arc would look like......

Now that's the economic explanation. There might be another way of looking at this. Perhaps as the baby boomer generation are retiring or getting cash strapped through job loss, they are trying to selling things to downsize their bills, downsize their debt.

Demographics or economics.  Who knows. Maybe a little of both. Might be a third or forth way of looking at it, or a fifth or sixth.  Conjectures at least, are free.

Hairs on Fire - with an oil pastel technique

From the archives:

HAIRS ON FIRE! Not really. This is an oil pastel I did while working in North Conway, New Hampshire.  I often find the faces of people I know creeping into my work. I guess because I have had to look at them and their features are familiar. In my mind there is some facial resemblance to a fellow named Burns who was a planner there. (It's not much of a likeness.)

One of my favorite things to do with oil pastels is to lay down thick color then draw back into it with some handy implement or other. Sometimes the first layer is scraped, then a second color is heavily applied and scraped into revealing some of the first color. When I took a drawing class at Western Connecticut State University, many years ago, I remember learning to draw into  heavy pencil marks with an eraser. This is where I got the idea of removing material as a way to form the picture. 

Post Script 10/19/2011 - One of the reasons I reposted this at this time is, I recently read how Jay Defeo formed The Rose using sharpened knives as much as brushes as she cut back into the layers of paint and scraped and hacked to remove material to form the topography of the painting. Very cool stuff.

Guns as Inheritance: Passage or Portent?

From the archives:

I haven’t been able to think clearly about guns since my ex-husband shot me in the behind with a pellet pistol 30 years ago. He actually said those classic words - “I didn’t know it was loaded.” 

He said it in an uncharacteristically high and nervous voice as he was wringing his hands. My ex kept that gun in our over-the-junk-store apartment for the unbelievable purpose of shooting wasps, and he was actually quite good at it.This isn't on my mind at the moment. 

Right now, I am troubled because I was witness to an odd ceremony last weekend. A grandfather, a relative of mine, gave a pistol with a holster and ammunition to his 14-year-old grandson. It was not a toy. He talked about not being around much longer and wanting someone to have it. He helped the boy strap on the belt and tie the bottom of the holster around his leg. Showed him how to load it. His segment of the family takes periodic Sunday afternoon outings to a shooting range at grandpa’s behest. 

While I understand the idea, this last gift is a bit disconcerting. Adolescents don’t live in the same world this 78-year-old grandpa did when he was coming of age. After Columbine and other recent school shootings I can hardly believe anyone would think this was a good gift for a teen. 

Though this boy seems smart and sensible, he is a teen. The young seem to live in a world of exaggerated response, always testing the limits and forming the brain circuitry. A young teen’s world is up and down in a day. Their triumph and despair always seem life rending. I hope his parents had the good sense to store it out of reach.

No doubt guns have several iconic meanings in American culture. The giver of the gun was a guardian-of- freedom type, a wanna be militia man with twisted but good intentions. For him and for many conservatives and libertarians, guns represent a sacred trust by which we remain free, though the federal government runs amok, though invaders from abroad or from Mars descend. To the frontiersman or the hunter they are a tool to dinner, triumph, survival. To the egoist, validation. To the vigilante and the sociopath, gunfire is the bark of the archangel. 

As a wounded pragmatist, to me guns will always represent a pain in the ass and an unanswered moral question.

---- Mar Walker
December 4, 2006

Duct Tape Improvisations

From the Archive:

A few weeks ago, on a rural/suburban road I noticed a pitiful mailbox that had been hastily repaired. It’s a simple, stubborn fix, born of a determination not to let the wreckers win. That’s a sentiment my father would have appreciated.

We lived in the middle of a long dark stretch of woodsy road, and our mailbox often fell victim to the excessive exuberance of youths with unsafe levels of testosterone and beer in their veins. Once, a family who lived four miles away called to say they had found our mailbox, crushed to sheet metal, and tossed onto their lawn in the middle of the night. It was the fourth time that summer our mail box had been assaulted. Once it was blown to shreds with an M80.

In response, my father fell to clenching his teeth and muttering down in the basement. He had something more substantial than duct tape in mind. For weeks he worked to construct an impenetrable mail box fit for the great age of the vandals. He added steel plates to the ends of a heavy gauge steel pipe. One plate was mounted on a heavy spring so the Mailman would have to pry it open to insert the mail. What my father had in mind was Roadrunner and Coyote. In particular, the scene where Coyote raises his baseball bat, but the Roadrunner suddenly steps aside. Coyote, swinging for all he’s worth his a big rock instead of Roadrunner. Cartoon shock waves travel up his arms until his whole body shakes. My father planned a stealth execution of this script. He intended to wrap the steel pipe with a regular, vulnerable-looking mail box to lure the villains. Unfortunately he died before he could put the thing up. I often wondered if the extra stress contributed to his early death.

In Dad’s reckoning, making needless work for someone else, was a theft of their time and effort. “Don’t make work for you mother,” he was always telling me sternly. We put up the steel mailbox for a few months without its stealth covering. As fate would have it, a plow knocked it over. Though the plow driver apologized, the original vandals were never found. Now, twenty-five years after the great steel mailbox caper, I wonder if somewhere, somehow our vandals have mailboxes of their own, and a baggy-pants, spiky-haired teen with ear buds dangling is unknowingly getting even for Dad with a quart of green slim or a quarter-stick popper.

---- Mar Walker, 12/3/2006