Unexpected sights: wild mix & match

The other day, a drab day, I saw a wonderful eccentric sight in the grocery store, that cheered me immeasurably. It was like I had moved to some  Caribbean island nation on perpetual vacation. Or as if the sun had suddenly emerged from deep fog. What I saw, was a pre-occupied grey haired gentleman (or perhaps rascal) with a beard and sandals who was sporting a wild wild shirt. I loved the sight so much I had to take a picture, though I took pains to not show his face to preserve his privacy. Thank you so much dear sir, you made my day so much better.  I left the store humming.

Poetry at New Britain's Museum of American Art

On April 17th, 2011, twenty poets read poems on paintings that were hanging at the Museum of American Art in New Britain. The poems were all written specifically for painting the museum had on display. Behind the podium was a large slide show of the paintings - so that as the poet read, the listeners could see the painting that inspired the poem.

This extravaganza was dreamed up and arranged by Colin Haskins (the CT Beat Festival & The Free Poets Collective) in cahoots with the very congenial museum staff. Particulars of the reading were fussed with by a few busy ladies from the free poets collective. I will be adding a few shots the readers are below, in the grainy manor of my phone. I wrote a poem for the occasion on a Georgia O'Keeffe painting in the museum's collection, that I had never seen before - of New York and East River, a surprising subject for O'Keeffe.

It was a wonderful event, really wonderful and I got a great poem out of it, well I like it anyway:


East River from the 30th Floor of the Shelton Hotel, 1928
a painting by Georgia O'Keefe

New York morning panorama
Center stage: blue wedge of river
of tugs and steamers
barges, buoys
gruff handlers yawning,
a days work taken on,
busy already at dawn

On its banks: A greyed up city of squared rooftops
synchronous to the horizon
aligned with smoke stacks and chimneys
ingrained with streets and avenues
a structure of shelter, housing:
the sleepy and the busy,
the languid and the industrious,
the despairing and the inspired alike

Here is a vast city as smooth as the velvet petal
of a white flower filling a picture frame
Or a row of desert bleached skulls
empty and eyeless, cast like dice
yet full of various purpose.

A city ready. egalitarian a city welcoming the day
a city that history will alter
as a painter alters a canvas
one layer covering another
visions and revisions
in this accented high-rise air
waking to this earnest tenement light


Written for an ekphrastic Event of the Free Poets Collective at the museum of American Art in New Britain CT, April 12?, 2011 subsequently included in Visions and Verses? an Exile Press/Free Poets Collective publication

April Fools Poem: "Rest Stop"

A Poem for April Fools Day.

Rest stop 

Pavement, road gravel, dirt dry throat

     heavy lids, dizzy routine. A hunger and thirst to see,

purple hills, a thread of river, the spit of a falls,            

                                the grandmother's smile, a wink, a grin,

          a future, another 24, another ten,

                                            breath into, breath, out of .... breathe.

                                        Get up, start up, try again

Memorial Concert for Sergei Vladimiroff, pianist, woodsman, grandpa

This post was updated on April 7, and April 12, 2011.

A musical tribute and celebration of the life of Sergei Vladimiroff of Brooklyn NY took place at the Valley Presbyterian Church in Brookfield CT on Saturday, March 26.

Players included  Natalya Shamis (violin), Bonnie Aher (violin), Zarchary Paranyuk (cello), Maragrita Nuller (piano), soprano Patricia Hulber, and Sergei's son Maxim (piano). The program, which was played with great skill and deep feeling, included Tchaikovsky's prelude "Autumn Song" Opus 37, "If we live in the spirit" by Clement W Barker, the Largo from the Sonata in C Minor (BWV 1017) by J.S. Bach, two Rachmaninoff works "Moment Musical" Op 16 #1 and "Daisies" Op 38 #3 and finally Sonata for violin and piano in F minor by Eugene Ysaye.

In addition Sergei's two grandsons dedicated performances to their gandpa - Damian on guitar and Luca on piano - both displaying the musicality and feeling of fine beginning musicians. During the Remembrances many spoke of their fond memories of Sergei including Tatyana his wife, with Max translating from the Russian.  Sergei  "would have clapped very loudly," one of his grandsons said of the performances.

Concert pianist, woodsman, showman, grandfather - Sergei died in the midst of living - of  a sudden heart attack while riding the city subway on his way to the beach on March 15, 2011. He was well known in this area as a concert pianist, having performed at the Danbury Music Center on quite a few occassions. For the past ten years he served as organist at First Church of Christ Scientist Katonah.

The official bio:

A native of Klintzi (Ukraine) Sergei Vladimiroff spent his childhood in Saratov, a major port on the Volga river. He began studying piano with his mother, and later became a pupil of Dmitri Serov. While a student at the Saratov Conservatory of Music, he met Tatyana, who at that time was attending Saratov State University. The two of them married in 1962, and a few years later moved to Sochi, a resort town on the Black Sea coast. Sergei worked as a pianist in the local Philharmonic Society, and Tatyana became a TV commentator and producer. They had two sons, Maxim and Frol. During the last decade of his life, Sergei worked as a ballet accompanist at the Steffi Nossen School of Dance in White Plains, NY, and served as an organist at the First Church of Christ Scientist in Katonah, NY. He gave a number of solo piano recitals at different venues, including the Danbury Music Centre and the Valley Presbyterian Church.

He is survived by his wife  Tatyana, two sons, composer Maxim Vladimiroff (and his wife Leisa), of Brookfield, CT and Frol Vladimiroff of Sochi, Russia, and two grand sons Damian and Luca.

Besides his musical endeavors, Sergei was an avid woodsman who loved life, loved to keep moving. He enjoyed leading his grandsons on hikes though the woods, and also taking extended hunting expeditions to wilderness areas. "His hunting trips could fill up a whole chapter," his son Maxim said this week. "Everything he did, he did with great enthusiasm. He will be greatly missed."

The  70 minutes from memory recital Sergei gave on his 70th birthday with photos.

A News Times  review of Sergei's All-Russian-Composers program from Oct 2008

Read about a joint concert with Sergei and Maxim

A Review of an All Chopin program Sergei played in 2007

Painting: Anyone

This is my 501th post on this blog. Woohoo!

Humans hold many kinds of commonality - via inheritance as well as history. We are connected over centuries by the tranmission of handed down culture as well as hand me down genes. We have a common animal nature and energy that expresses itself in countless individual ways. We are many and one. Any one.

The materials here are watercolor pencil and gesso on paper.

Books: A Moveable Feast by Earnest Hemmingway

Seared carp with butter and brandy

If Earnest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast is about surface, then the surface in question would surely be a well-appointed dinner table. While obsessing in detail over the delights of Parisian food and liquor, Hemingway casually carves up both friends and acquaintances. They are just another course, really, in this buffet view of life in Paris.  However, like the smooth surface of soup in a tureen, this work's pleasant reflectivity conceals a few lumps. Hemingway uses careful manipulation to make readers think well of Hemingway even while he is poking at other writers. He skillfully brags about his own character in the manner of a good novelist, by showing rather than telling. He shows us, by his own example that what writers say is not to be trusted, nor taken at face value, that surface does not equal truth.

Hemingway spends some 16 pages openly skewering Gertrude Stein. He says her companion was frightening, that Stein was badly dressed, that she craved public recognition for her work but couldn't be bothered revising it, that she was repetitious and lazy, that she prattled endlessly, that she badmouthed any writer who had not already spoken well of her work, that she was so competitive she should couldn't bear to hear about acclaimed writers, that she was an egoist, that she resorted to “dirty easy labels” for others.  After thus dispatching “Miss Stein” handily, Hemingway tries to leave the reader with a good impression of himself. The chapter ends as he spends a part of a very long sentence recalling a speech she had made defending one of the painters. After trashing her for 16 pages, he vows to “serve her and see she gets justice for the good work she has done." Then Hemingway quotes himself in a conversation with his wife: “You know, Gertude is nice, anyway,” he says.  Gee, what a magnanimous, forgiving, always-fair kinda guy.

In the chapter “Shakespeare and Company” Hemingway presents himself as someone who craves books, yet who has enough integrity that he would worry about getting right back that afternoon to pay. In the chapter “Hunger was Good Discipline” he shows us Hemingway, a  man who never complains and who would rather learn the benefits of hunger than borrow money, even to eat. Of course  later on, we see  that in truth he is a betting man, one who would take money he'd collected for charity purposes to help a fellow writer, and lose it betting on crooked races.

He uses the same strategy with regard to marital fidelity. He presents himself as Hemingway the loving husband in several stories. In one, the painter Pacin offers him one of his beautiful models. “Do you want to bang her?” he asks, “She needs it” but dear good Hemingway goes home to his “legitime." Yet, towards the end of the book he offhandedly talks for a page about how complicated it is to have a mistress and a wife.

He implies that he is a trusting man and a gentleman in the chapter on “Ford Madox Ford and the Devil's Disciple.”  Hemingway shows himself inwardly irritated and disgusted with Ford, yet outwardly polite through Ford's “cutting” of Hilaire Belloc, and the long discussion of who is a gentleman. Though Ford insists Hemingway would only possibly be considered a gentleman in Italy, in the end we see he is a propagator of falsities, and has passed off the devil's disciple as a poet.  Hemingway humbly apologizes for passing on this misinformation to someone else. Maybe he is a gentleman after, all a reader might conclude.

Hemingway's Paris memoir was his lush answer to Stein's oddly stark and chatty book, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas which tells everything and shows little.  While his work is ostensibly a memoir, it is interesting to note that the following disclaimer appears on the copyright page of the Touchstone edition of A Moveable Feast “This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.”  Both works skip across the surface of life in Paris like stones across the Seine.  Both feature multiple episodes of dining, of leaving and returning to Paris, of things not said.

However, any writer almost always has a reason for including a vignette about the main character. Hemingway is a clever man and a skilled storyteller who is essentially telling his story his way. He knows very well that things stated plainly are not nearly as memorable things deduced from stories and dialog. This is the pattern in A Moveable Feast. He openly makes unfriendly judgments about other writers, but stays the likable protagonist by imbuing himself with noble qualities implied through action and dialog. When joining Hemingway's moveable feast, - let “Tatie” pick the restaurant; you can trust him to order something delicious, but be sure - with Tatie and every writer - to examine the subtext with a skeptical eye.

- Mar Walker

written 12 October 2003

Poem: Unmask (from Inverse Origami)

Unmask

the fall of your soft eyes,
so suddenly slumped and weary.

This weight,
a whisper,
a formless something
hinted at.

I have stepped
unthinking around it,
my words,
waxed brick
brittle and waterproof.

Unmask,
gather your chaos
and conjure the thing itself by alchemy:

sweetness
from the tin-acid taste of emptiness.

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

I just realized I still have a lot of work left to do as I have only half of my chapbook, Inverse Origami online. This this is the 13th poem in the book and it appears on page 19. After this one, I have 17 more to put online.

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

the drawing was not a part of my book.