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