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

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.