Do That

I have a long list of things to do, but I break it out into discreet units so I don't get overwhelmed. Tuesday I need to paint 144 linear feet of gallery ten feet high. That's 1,440 square feet, but mostly it's roller work and I can do that, not quite a piece of cake. Gallery White is a forgiving color. I top off all the containers with rain water, a month's supply, easy, when a bucket is empty, I'll start melting snow. The shape I'm in. Standing in the pouring rain, if it makes things right, the wall street side of town. Water to burn, change in your pocket, and a kind-hearted woman. Stubborn love, like a large rock tied to your leg when they throw you in the deep end of the pool. I'm no doctor, but that monkey might be real. I'm not particularly paranoid, but at first light I was walking to the outhouse and there were a couple of crows in a dead poplar, off to the side. They didn't even interrupt their conversation. They must have a kind of lanolin in their feathers, they look like shit but they shed water. First light, I'd taken out a New Yorker, because I wanted to read a book review, but I ended up just watching the crows bitch and moan about the weather. I'd ask them inside, but they always poop on the sofa. Crows are not good companions, they're always complaining. I'd rather be alone and listen to the drone of rain on the roof. I don't need an excuse. Funky, funky, but cheap. Now and then there's a fool such as I. Not that I'm an Elvis fan. I endured way too much of that with my Mom and sister. Warm day, shirtsleeves mid-January. The hill is slick with rain and I walk down very carefully. Needed to go to the library, stop at Kroger, but I first went to the pub for the noon beer I allow myself every once in a while. Barb, the owner, is there, Kori, and Christine. There's a light out, over the bar, and it's driving Barb crazy, so I go and get the step-ladder, change out the bulb, and get my beer for free. Kori doesn't quite understand my relationship with the pub. The owners always sit with me and buy me drinks. Everyone knows me by name. D and I hang difficult objects for them, it's a pub, for god's sake, and there are lots of interesting objects, some of them not designed to hang from the walls. What threw Kori off today, was I said to Barb, jeeze, I know where there ladder is, and she didn't. Maybe it's a guy thing. I always locate ladders and flashlights when I first enter a building. I actually carry a flashlight in a holster on my belt. How often do you want to be in the dark? I'm not really obsessive, but I lean in that direction. A goodly time at the library, because I was on my own schedule, I could read the blurbs and consider. I settled on some early Nabokov short stories, I hadn't read some of them, and a book about paper. Sometimes I lie awake and wonder where the years have gone, usually I just go to sleep. Stopped back by the museum to chat with TR. We talked about doing an opera, and I immediately thought about Sappho. I'd like to do an opera. Though I actually hate the combined arts, they always involve way too much compromise. But I'd welcome the chance to work with TR again. Read more...

Harvesting Rain

Hard rain wakes me, four in the morning, I get up and put out a couple of five gallon buckets to collect wash water. It's supposed to precipitate, in one form or another, for the foreseeable future. A good thing, as the leaf litter will saturate and the danger of fire will dissipate; and unlike the former truck, the Jeep has windshield wipers that actually work. This weather system, it has everything to do with the jet stream, is coming in from the south. Uncommon but not unknown, usually weather here comes from the northwest. I listen to it long enough to realize I won't go back to sleep. It's warm, in the forties, but some of the precipitation seems to be sleet which dances a nice tune on the metal roof. A small fire is all I need, to chase the chill. I put on the Cello Suites, Rostropovich; Bach is sublime, mystical, stirs things I didn't know I had. I listened to the Edgar Meyer transposition for double bass in the main gallery recently, and it was thrilling. The old bank was vibrating. Some notes were so low I didn't really hear them so much as feel them. A penchant for moments like that. Usually involving Bach and being alone. Not that I wouldn't rather be nestled neatly but that I realize my limitations. I'm essentially bogus. And un-improvable. At the end of a day all I have is a string of words. Usually no one says anything, and I accept that. Not unlike a tree-frog asked to identify itself. One more drink and one more cigaret. Damn, I nail myself, there's nothing I can't reveal, but there are some things I can't say. D spent all day working on a data base, I piddled at patching and started sanding. Found a new tobacco pouch on line and D ordered it for me. I may have to run to town tomorrow. Pains me, but I neglected to think through the food-for-three- days issue. Supposed to be in the 60's this weekend, so I won't need a fire, which rules out a pot of beans or chili. The seafood lady at Kroger agreed to get me some salted cod and I can hardly wait for some codfish cakes. Maybe next week. It's a ten pound box (wooden) and will easily last me through the winter. I love them for a weekend brunch or for dinner anytime. One winter on Cape Cod I ate them every day for weeks. Night fishing for cod off the beach at Nauset, I'd bring home 3 or 4 ten-pounders, fillet them out, and store them in the freezer. Bake one, with a smear of mayonnaise and a squeeze of lemon, salt and pepper, let it cool, flake it out, caramelize an onion diced fairly fine, mix with enough left-over (important that they be left over, otherwise the cakes fall apart) mashed potatoes, roll them in bread crumbs and fry in peanut oil. I usually have a fried egg on top. This is damned good. I fed them once to a great cook who had passed out and slept on the sofa, after a meal of rolled and pounded something stuffed with something, and way too many bottles of wine, and she declared it the best damned thing she had ever eaten. Kind of a captive audience, when you think about it, she didn't know how I felt about her getting drunk and sleeping on my sofa. I didn't care, I keep new cheap toothbrushes in a jar over the kitchen sink. Read more...

Naming Things

The new waitress at the pub is Kori, I finally see her name writ on a note for me to pick up lunch for the ladies at the museum. Kori is Kora is Cora, means maiden, another name for Persephone, daughter of Demeter, queen of hell. A derivation. I wonder what her parents were thinking. Or not thinking, maybe just heard the word and liked the way it sounded. My daughters were named after goats, but for the grace of god they're not named Black and Decker. We tended toward paired names, as we tended to acquire breeding stock in pairs, don't get me started on that, we had our reasons, following some early failures. Briggs and Stratton. Night and Day, Ryobi and Suzuki. If I'd ever had a son he would have been Plumb Bob. Thank god I never had a son. There's a kind of mud I call 'shattered', without getting too far into personal vocabularies, is just that frozen crust where you break through to the mud underneath, and it oozes out. I can't tell you the number of times. It climbs up the legs of your jeans. Anyway, Kori is a lovely person and she tapped me on the back, to make sure the order was correct, and I explained to her that this happened, time to time, that someone from the museum would call, with an order, because they knew where I would be. It all seems too familiar, but such is life. Some things are patterned. Grammar and syntax, I get it now, syntax is the train and grammar is the track. Commas are just small towns in the mid-west, where you snag a mail bag. Museum Board meeting at noon today, Pegi was in a panic and D spent the morning preparing. I brought some of the bad Chinese food home. I make better fried rice. Patched and repaired all day. Tomorrow I'll sand everything, refill the plastic anchor holes, of which there are a great many, and break out the painting supplies. I think I'm staff on Saturday and I might have a chance to get into the Carter filing cabinets that no one has ever gone through. I'm beginning to feel the need to organize all the Carter material, but I refuse to do it on my own time. The museum needs to get a grant to allow me to work on the archives for a year. I'd still install shows, because I love doing it; it's such a hoot, wearing white cotton gloves and handling art, doing all the math, hammer-drilling into the walls of an old bank (concrete as god intended), and the endless problem solving. I love solving problems. My strong suit is that I can visualize almost anything. I build houses in my head, on weekends, as a game. Post and Beam houses that involve complicated joints. Generally speaking, if I'm not reading or writing, I'm imagining a complicated joint. A habit I developed early. Look at a schematic of one of the trusses in Westminster Hall. No one, still, knows how they work. We assume certain loads, the way they're carried, but this was 1393-1397 and Hugh Herland worked it all out in his head, the greatest feat of the Middle Ages. He more than doubled any span that had ever been attempted, and it still stands, though some of the timbers are rotted and there's cause for concern. 68 feet, and the previous record was 28 feet, which was why you had rows of pillars, dividing the central seating area from the side galleries. His vision was a Grateful Dead concert in which there were no bad seats. I don't travel, except by car, I don't believe airplanes actually work, I think it's a smoke and mirrors thing, so I'll never go to England and see the real thing, but I've taken the virtual tour many times, and I have photocopies of the structural components. I've studied this roof for 40 years; nothing strange that I'd want to spend a couple of years studying the archives of a minor regionalist painter. I've watched frogs for a couple of years, Pileated Woodpeckers: anything worth doing, as the saying goes. I'd rather spend three months befriending a crow, that she would trust me enough to eat out of my hand, than I would all those hours of meetings. How do I say this? When you meet me, you know what you're going to get, an ass hole out in left field. I guess I pride myself on that, where I stand, the ridge, high ground. Read more...

Losing It

Beyond control. You know there isn't anything to be done. I usually scream a few expletives and throw rocks at a tree, then put on my boots and slog up through the mud. It isn't even that bad, because it's above freezing, and it slows you down. It's doesn't matter whether it takes me ten or fifteen minutes to get to the house. I have my mud-room chair, my slippers, the kindling for a fire. By the time I stop to consider my dinner options, get a drink, roll a smoke, I'm calm, in my sweats. The setting sun was orange bands. Something out of a movie. Strings in the soundtrack. A lonesome cello. I'm careful not to lose it in public. I couldn't stand being locked away. So if someone's shear stupidity, or a situation, or inclement weather, messes with my schedule, I adjust things, as best I can, and rant in the privacy of my personal space. Alliterative bastard. I make several curses that would live in the history of curses. Call paternity into question. Question who's Mom that was. I have tobacco everywhere, I need the vacuum. There. I said it. What I need is a null set, { }, or at least some quiet so I can think this through. I spend a good bit of my time thinking through various constructs. Especially a day like today, I gathered and hauled trash in the morning, and in the afternoon I took off the vinyl signage for the upstairs show. I've modified a cheap paring knife for this chore, with a slight bend in the tip, which allows me to lift a corner of a letter so I can grip it, and not damage the surface. Got the last of the paintings off the walls, the ones that required two people, and I had only waited on those, because D was busy with other things, for TR to be around. I like working with TR because he has to rethink everything, and you can actually watch him do it. Sometimes his solutions are better than what I had in mind, and sometimes they're not. If they're not, I say so, but if they're better (he's a bright guy) I fluidly adopt his recommendations. And he's funny. He and D get going sometimes, and I have to stop what I'm doing and go listen to them. Half the shit they banter about, I don't have a clue: popular culture and technology have left me far behind; but they can be very funny. It's my Dad's 93 rd birthday, and I resolve to talk to him, but they misplace their phone and almost never answer. So I call every hour and finally get Mom, talk with her for a while, and finally talked with Dad. I have to yell now, because he doesn't hear, but he sounded ok and someone is making him cornbread. As long as he has cornbread he's a happy camper. There was a small turkey breast in the remaindered meat section, speaking of cornbread, and I bought it ($1.98) because I wanted some stuffing, and some sandwiches would be good. Dried it off and rubbed it with a little maple syrup, then with a dry mixture, I don't know what's in it anymore, a lot of dried chilies, garlic and onion powder, various herbs. Remember, any single slice isn't going to carry that much of a potent crust. Made a cornbread and apple stuffing that I baked in a buttered Pyrex pie-pan because I wanted a maximum heat to surface area ratio. Made a decent gravy from bacon fat and chicken stock, thickened with flour then reduced. Lots of black pepper. Anyone should eat so well, I see another dinner, in the leftovers, and at least two sandwiches. For less than four dollars. Four meals. I don't know why I'm so good at this. Actually I do know. I left home as soon as I could, not because home was bad, but it was too comfortable, and I sensed a world, out there, that would engage me more completely. And that has certainly has been the case. But suddenly there was no one there to cook, Mom, and if I was going to eat, on a tight budget, I damned well better learn. And I did/have, my ribs are as good as any in the world; it's been said, about my London Broil, that it could actually change the face of history. I don't believe that. Say what you will. It's just a piece of meat. Read more...

Collective Remembrance

Amazing how many of us on the crew for "Les Troyens" remember it as a pivotal event. But of course it was, we merely pulled off the impossible. Of course, we were working 100 hour weeks at the end, napping in the house while Sara C rehearsed the orchestra. There was a Greek diner around the corner where we could get breakfast any time of the day or night. I have a few photographs, not of that show, but what must have been the same year, when, on a day off (there weren't many) a bunch of us went out to the Watertown Arsenal, because the Opera Company stored scenery there, and I had a key. There was a chain hanging from a hoist, way up in the ceiling, Ted Harper had come up for a visit, and took some shots of Fritz swinging like a maniac. We took the house organ apart, so we could erect a statue of Athena in the organ loft, it was, as I remember, 24 feet tall. Everything, for that show, was huge. On the final Sunday, when we did a matinee of the first opera, and then an evening performance of the second; after the matinee, we just opened the stage doors (Kim remembers the alley) and pushed the first opera out the door. Literally. Never have so few done so much for so few. The shop, an old brewery, was in a bad part of town, but there was a barbeque joint "You Can Beat My Meat, But You Can't Touch My Sauce" on the way out, the Green Line, as I remember. We took a dinner break and worked into the night at the shop and one night I finally said I was going to get some ribs, did anyone else want in. They all did, but feared for my safety, and I told them not to worry, going into a barbeque joint in a bad part of town was something I could handle. I looked like the village idiot, covered in paint and spray foam, with splashes of low-fire silver solder on my shoes, took the Green Line back a couple of stops and walked the half-block to the store-front. An ethnic mix that didn't look friendly, but I ask the guy at the counter, Randall, about the ribs, and he explained his process, I explained my variations, and we ended up cooking together, on a couple of occasions. Not the only time I was called to task for being white. After the first time, I had an armed guard, when I went to pick up ribs and slaw. I'd call in an order and Randall would have a gang member meet me at the station. Things evolve. Epicanthic folds. Sideburns. Too much time in the wasteland. Put away a few more painting, then patched an area where we had Velcroed some small etching plates to the wall. The adhesive they use on Velcro is aggressive and leaves gouges in the wall, but sometimes it's the only solution. The crew that's going to do the demolition and re-paving in the alley, was around for part of the day. There was a manhole cover, cemented in place, and D and I had wondered for years what was under it. The crew had to know, so they went at it with chisels and three-pound hammers. There was nothing, there wasn't even a hole; there had been something, obviously, but the hole had been filled with concrete and the manhole cover slapped back in place. I'd thought I might be able to drive all the way in, but I got 150 feet up the driveway and realized that wasn't going to happen. Had to back down, load my pack and the canvas bag with what I could carry and leave everything else in the vehicle. Not supposed to get too cold tonight, thank god, because there are gallons of liquids. I carry in orange juice and whiskey, butter and cream, a couple of frozen Thai dinners, yogurt, and a gallon of drinking water. I try to remember to bring in a one of those tube pouches of something, every time I shop, so that I could survive an ice storm, eating red-beans and rice, or instant mashed potatoes, and other things that only require water and heat. This morning I was walking carefully around the top of the driveway, because I didn't know what the footing was like, B was leaving at the same time, and asked if I wanted a ride down, and I told him no, that I preferred to walk. I was already in that mode, you know, where you consider every step, and stop, to look around. Read more...

Surface Tension

Something about the day. Overcast and the air heavy with moisture. I eat the last of the grits, with butter, cream, and brown sugar. Nestle under a blanket on the sofa, rereading George V. Higgens, "The Friends Of Eddie Coyle". I don't think anyone has ever written dialogue better. The way the characters are revealed by what they say is incredible, masterful. And, if you've ever lived in Boston, it is spot on. We all talked like mobsters. I kept a rented room on the Cape, and if I could squeeze out a day from the opera schedule, I'd go down, walk the beaches, collect mussels and clams for a steamed dinner, and maybe letterpress print a broadside in the print-shop I maintained in the basement of a general store. A blur to me now, I remember almost being killed by a press we were moving into the basement. It took out a door-jamb, but I had nimbly stood aside. More luck, than anything else. The story of my life. The first time I went into a Japanese restaurant I was with a Japanese lighting designer, and he knew exactly what he wanted, every time after that, when I went into that restaurant, they deferred to me, as if I knew what I was saying, despite the fact, as Bobby told me later, I was ordering fish eggs with glue. Tangled up in blue. Freeze-up on the river, in the lee of an abutment is not a bad place to be. After lunch, that old Elvis stand-by, peanut butter and bacon on toast, I read Robert Kaplan's excellent "The Nothing That Is", A Natural History Of Zero. Then spend a couple of hours with a field guide to animal tracks and scat, refreshing my memory. Winter is the season of tracks. Above freezing, and the edges of the driveway puddles thaw. It's a track extravaganza. I have a stump to sit on there, with my ethafoam pad; I look at the tracks and look at the pictures in the book, try and figure out who is which and what was happening. One of the most interesting set of tracks today, was a young rabbit, over near the head of the driveway, and they simply disappeared. It took me a minute to realize it had been taken by an owl or hawk. For dinner I just roast cubes of butternut squash and sweet potato, swishing them through a warm seasoned olive oil; I can eat this with just my right hand and hold a book in my left, but even though I'm careful, wiping my fingers on pilfered napkins, I do get the occasional oil smear on a page. You eat about a thousand meals a year, I eat 192 of those with other people, mostly lunch with D, call it two hundred, which leaves me with 800 meals at which I can read. That's a hundred books a year. I read fiction, non-fiction, and poetry is equal measure, so there's no telling what I'd be reading where. I probably lean toward non-fiction at the island, eating, because I keep a running list, and then to gather reference material while I'm cooking, because you have a moment here and there, and the smells of cooking ignite my brain. I remember odd thoughts I had during the day, one thing, how do you do a zero set, brackets with nothing in between? Read more...

Mud

So many freeze-thaw cycles per season here, that living as I do, mud becomes a fact of life. Tracking in muddy ice and snow. I keep chair near the back door in winter, a stiff brush, and a pair insulated moccasins I favor as house shoes. As soon as I come in the door, after kicking both feet against the steps (6x12 timbers), I take off the work boots with crampons attached, slip on the moccasins, take the boots back outside and bang them together, then sweep up the mess I've made inside and throw it outside while it's still frozen. This confines the zone I need to mop to a small area that I can usually clean with a couple of napkins. I'm a saver of napkins. They serve a triple function for me, so I can absorb their cost to my foot-print. I use them to blot the migrant dribbles of soup, then dampen them, to mop, where I make a mess, then dry them, over near the stove, and use them to start fires. I bring home newspapers from the museum, and anything else combustible, to start fires. I have used bad poems to start fires, but I usually feel guilty later, so I try not to do that very often. I have some coal, which I don't generally have, because it's even messier than wood, a laden truck took a curve to quickly on the river road and I was able to fill a five-gallon bucket in just a couple of minutes. Pieces from golf-ball size to base-ball size. Burns very hot if the bed is properly laid. I might start keeping some around, for holding a fire overnight. I cooked some rice last night, just so there would be some left-over rice (fried rice is better with left-over rice) then today I caramelized a yellow onion and a red bell pepper, fried the cubed loin chops in hoarded bacon fat, mixed them together, stirred in the rice, and that stringy scrambled egg. This was so good, with that Mango Chile sauce, I thought I was weeping. I just have a cold in my right eye, but it was a good meal. Certain selective exaggerations. The world is in an uproar, and danger is everywhere. News from outside the bubble. Moral scruples. Cymbals, not drums. Read more...

Les Troyens

Forty years ago, with the best crew in the world, we did this opera In Boston. Berlioz. The Met is doing it currently, and several people email that they're listening and remembering. Esquire Jauchem was supplying us with state stamped Lebanese hash and we were pulling off the impossible. The opera had never been done in this country precisely because it was impossible. It's two operas, actually, the destruction of Troy, then Dido in Carthage. I have a pirated recording I play once in a while. I was on stage, in a little skirt and a short sword, so I could help destroy Troy. If you've never been involved with something like this, you can't imagine what it's like backstage. Chaos at a level several steps beyond anything you've ever experienced. It was the "T" year, we did "Tosca", Beverly Sills' last "Traviata", and "Les Troyens". Several of the crew went starkers, we just slept in the aisles of the theater. The Orpheum, backed up to the Combat Zone. We used to slip out the back door and go to a bar where we could get a sardine sandwich and a ten ounce draft for a buck. I still make those sandwiches. A flat tin of sardines in oil, dumped on a piece of bread, with a slice of onion. It's very good, though you need to keep some mints around. The crew was fantastic, we'd worked with the scenic designers for years and we'd built these huge sets in forced perspective. I rode in the Trojan Horse, riding with eight or nine kids dressed as adults, that spilled out of the horse upstage, replaced by members of the chorus as they moved downstage. It was right at the edge of believability, the whole experience. Most of us retired to the Cape, afterwards, and didn't speak for several months. Catatonic. We'd walk on the winter beach and hum a few bars, acknowledge each other with a wave of the hand, but we had been moved by the experience and it was hard to face ourselves directly. The myriad failures. What I mean. Read more...

Some Thoughts

When the leaving is hard. The only one left to know. Crossing boundaries. I suppose I do make judgements, it's part of the condition, but I'm careful to not step on toes. I need new shoes, so I understand that. I need a haircut, I need to trim my toenails, I need to ferret out those black hairs that grow on your nose as you get older. What's that about? Did you read about those very old fossils from Australia? Remembering a snatch of music, a rock anthem, Neil Young, The Dead. Moved in ways I don't understand. You are only what you feel. Lost in my mind. Wisdom is all I need. We can start moving forward. Lost in my mind. Lost in my mind. Buffalo Springfield. Heroes And Villains, oh wait, that was The Beach Boys. Confusion is a natural state. You don't remember who you're talking to. Love the one you're with. If you can't be. Love the one you're with. On the bus. Catch me on the bus. Kiss me on the bus. Remember? I love audio hallucinations. Add a cello and I'm gone. John and Carlos. James Taylor, what did Miles say, he sounded like a blind black boy. Midnight special. Shine your ever-loving light on me. I like it when you shake it on the line. Love's a game and I'm not playing. Say darling, say. Hush little baby. Somebody said don't act too smart, somebody said you're so naive, say it out loud, alone and sick and proud. Underneath the moon. Might as well be myself. All the words we've left unsaid. Into dreams. Finally back to sleep, then awake again when the sun rises above the opposite ridge. I had to make a run to town for supplies, so I stopped at the museum, to wash my hair (hot running water!), then got a much needed haircut, went to the library, did my laundry, stopped at Kroger for whiskey, coffee, cream, and the ingredients for another pork fried rice. Stopped at Roosevelt Lake to arrange my pack, roll a smoke, and watch the resident geese deal with the frozen surface. I don't feed them anymore, they're dangerous. I still collect left-over rolls and crackers from events at the museum (and other places), but I strew them over a flat space, off the road, that had been used as a staging area for logging trucks harvesting timber damaged in the big fire a few years ago. It's always gone the next day. If I took all the food scraps from the pub, maybe 55 gallons a day, and dumped then in that place, they'd be gone the next day. Doesn't it seem more logical to recycle waste that way? Then the animals shit more and fertilize the trees. It actually got above freezing, the driveway was messy, walking in, and for an hour there was drip from the eaves. But the sky is clear, and it cools quickly, as the sun goes down. I start breaking icicles into the bucket of snow I'm always melting. Almost pure water. H2O is one of the few things that expands in both directions, as a gas, and as a solid. Tom I filter everything, I don't think unusable is a necessary defense. Hello, are we still awake out there? Read more...

Patch and Repair

The endless saga, though this time I'll be doing most of it by myself. Pulled hardware this morning and that always leaves a little miniature volcano. The second pass around I tap each one of these in, then I make a pass with a eraser, to get rid of the pencil marks, then a pass around with filler. Plaster anchor holes require two fillings. Next Tuesday I'll sand and refill as necessary. It's mindless work and the time flies. Lunch with John Hogan himself, and then right back to work. Put all of the smaller painting back in the vault, they go into bins, back to back, face to face, and there's another bin for medium paintings (medium, in this case, being not wider than 36 inches). Well have to re-hang the huge Carter "Let Us Give Thanks" because there's no place to store it. It's 92 inches (height, always the first number when talking about the size of paintings) by 100 inches, in an extremely heavy frame. The piece is awkward to move, we have to get it back upstairs, and it doesn't fit in the elevator. Everything else is fine leaning against the walls inside the vault. I spent some time clearing space. Handling art all day. I had to carry in juice, bread, eggs: and it was the first of the freeze-thaw days for the driveway; so I have to be careful where I step: I mean, I have to be careful anyway, but I was carrying eggs. Which allows me a wonderful dinner of the last of the grits, with a perfect egg on top, and a piece toast slathered with butter and jam. Doesn't take much to keep me happy. I'm a cheap date. I had John Hogan laughing so hard he sputtered. He'd asked how things were going with the alley project and I told him we were ready to break ground, that I didn't know any particulars, there's a Board Meeting next week and I suppose they'll decide some things. I have nothing to do with the body politic. I handle art and fill holes, the rest of the time I read and write, but I have learned to tell stories, to organize a stream of thought, and John actually did ask about the alley, and as it happens, I did have a story. We're fixing to spend 85 to 100 thousand dollars on the alley, to make it a green space, and it's a cool idea, and could be lovely, if there wasn't a bar next door, but that's not the issue. When I got to work, I had noticed there was some wind-blown trash inside the temporary barricades that block off traffic. After I got shed of my pack and whatever else I was carrying, my coffee, a scone, while I still had on my coat, I went back out to pick up the detritus. I surprised a guy, I suppose a homeless guy, taking a shit in the shadow of a large electrical cabinet that powers The Esplanade. It's twenty degrees, and this guy has dropped his drawers to take a shit. I don't know what to do. Is it a crime, who cares? I gave him five bucks and told him to go to McDonald's. His frozen shit I'll throw in a dumpster later. The snow-shovel would be the appropriate tool. If I was going to design a hundred thousand dollar outhouse, it would be much more swank. I just stoked the stove, and I think a nap is in order. Read more...

Moving Things

Started the day loading out Mark's paintings. He came to get them because they open in another show on Monday, which he's helping to hang tomorrow. D brought his slightly sick daughter to work (a cold), and she went to lunch with us, first time sitting at a bar. She amused herself almost as well as my younger daughter, Rhea (who actually disappears), and it was nice being around a kid. After lunch I took down the print show, and got them all downstairs; D was going to load them in the rental van after I'd headed home, on my winter schedule. From three until a little after four we loaded out the eight wall panels into a low-boy trailer in two batches and sent them over to Pegi's studio. Some of the Cirque people helped and it went smoothly. I always shudder at moving awkward heavy things with people who don't know what they're doing, but we got it done. We now have a new storage area. For the sound system on a cart, and a portable bar, which we'll design and build. I didn't need anything at home, though I felt a bit guilty about not carrying something in to the house. So it was just a light pack, a couple of books. The walk is getting easier, and I love the way walking-in mediates between town and country. I leave the house in winter, all the components for starting a fire are right there when I return; I keep those stations of the cross stocked. And now I turn on the new heater, over where I write, and I am, as they say, a happy camper. Interesting: if I flush a toilet or urinal three times a day at work, I double my water use. It's crazy, all the nutrients wash away, AND I double my water use; the logic defies me. Three in the morning and the dog pack was back, which isn't all bad, because I needed to stoke the fire. They'd cornered a coon on the compost pile, but none of them are fools, they must have gotten the memo about coons and rabies, so it's a stand-off. I'd replenished my store of throwing rocks and scattered the dogs, the coon slipped off, down the path to the graveyard, and quiet was restored. I've found a perfect bed of throwing rocks, in the flood plain of Mackletree Creek just before it flows into Roosevelt Lake. Fines are consistent, considering all the variables; but the angle of the creek bed, the degree of fall, is nominally the same; and the funneling effect of the bed itself, given a hard rain, tends to drop a particularly sized rock in a specific place. I've walked this creek bed for half a mile, and the same size rock occurs upstream, jumbled in debris, but there's a stretch where almost every rock is the same size. I can half-fill a five gallon bucket in just a couple of minutes. They're sandstone and shale, palm-sized and three-quarters of an inch thick, and the edges are all rounded, from the tumbling, so they don't cut your hands. They tend to sail, but at twenty-five feet that's not an issue, and they fit my hand so well. They're a joy to skip. A life-long interest in slingshots and throwing rocks has uniquely prepared me for the apocalypse, talk about low-tech: a pocket knife, an inner-tube, and a pile of rocks. I can make a kind of bread from cattail flour, and I've seeded certain wet areas with watercress. I hoard bean seed, as a matter of course, and I could live on acorns and roadkill until I harvest a crop. Survival is not the issue. It's the reason for survival. Sartre, all those existentialists, are correct, questioning the foundation. I'd rather die than live in this world, or I 'd rather live in this world than die. A choice you have to make. Read more...

Striking Shows

We worked on the schedule for taking down the shows, in the three galleries where work changes, last Friday, and I made some notes. Mark Chepp is picking up his work, because it's in another show next week, and D is taking Art's print show back to Athens on Friday, and finalizing the big print show, from The Kennedy Museum's massive collection (everyone is represented), that we'll install in the main gallery in March. Means that on Friday I can un-hang a million dollars worth of Carters and get them in the vault. Probably all I'll do that day, wear cotton gloves and move slowly. Pegi is going to take all of the panels from one of the two storage closets (it's physically impossible, spatially, to use more panels than are stored in one closet) and that's going to give us some seriously needed storage space. Moving the panels over to the studio is problematic. They're very heavy, and awkward. A sandwich of framing, with a sheet of three-quarter inch plywood on each side, carpeted, with oak trim, and a base that's a six-inch cast iron pipe welded to a flange, which we marry to the floor with set screws. We use them to divide space, create bays. Pegi can use them to create dressing rooms in the basement of the studio. I want to get these shows un-hung, because there's a huge amount of damage, and I want to patch, repair, and god knows, everything needs painting. I'll paint more, in the next eight weeks, than you ever will in your lifetime. And cutting edges, Janus, Jesus, excuse me, the pilasters are Gallery White but the flat surfaces are Cubist Gray. So do you wait a day and tape the line of demarcation, or do you just cut the line by hand? Anymore, I'm good enough with a one-and-a-half inch tapered brush, if I want to get the job done, I just cut it in by hand. A pain in my right heel, a stone bruise; I was very careful, walking in tonight, shortened my stride and considered every step. I have to re-awaken to this routine. Considerations. And did I mention it's cold? 14 degrees when I get up from a nap (sleeping is all naps, below 20 degrees, because I have to get up and rekindle the fire, stay awake long enough to stoke and damp down the stove); roll a smoke, get a wee dram of whiskey, and read an excellent article about a pickpocket in the New Yorker. I go back over what I'm writing here, take out a few commas, aiming toward transparency. Language is so slippery. Trish said today, that "she didn't care to work Saturday" which meant that she would work, as in 'I wouldn't mind to' but sounded like she couldn't possibly. Colloquialisms. I've lived so many different places I'm not shy about asking someone what they meant, even if I come off looking like an idiot. If I'm carrying something heavy with someone, I really need to know whether they're saying yes or no. We just need to work out a Cargo Speak, a Patois, that allows at least limited communication. Starts with sign language, point to something, then mimic the act of lifting, then say "lift". 1, 2, 3, LIFT. In some ways, this is the entire history of civilization. You have the 1, 2, 3; the meme toward a vocal utterance, and the collective horse-power to move a very large rock. You don't need zero until much later, nouns are easy. Verbs and tense are the logjams. "I will have done that by this time tomorrow" is a fairly complex concept. At it's most benign, language emerges as a help-meet toward getting things done, at the other extreme it emerges as a battle-axe you use to behead anyone who doesn't agree with you. Read more...

Strangeness

Weird. In winter, at night, I pee in a large plastic coffee can, and then the first time I pee in the morning I throw it out and rinse the can. I was standing at the back door, putting on my jacket, and there was a owl, puffed up like a feathered football, still as a statue, with head tucked, neckless, into the top of it's body, perched on a low branch of a Sassafras not fifteen feet away. At one in the afternoon it's still there. Every time I get up I go over and watch it for five or ten minutes. I've never studied an owl before. I've seen a great many of them, but never one for this long. In Florida, fishing the tributaries of the St. Johns River, we'd see them, under the tree canopy, on the lowest branch, hyper-alert, pivoting heads, hunting from a tree stand. In Colorado they were prey to eagles. We had a resident owl, that I never saw, on the Vineyard, that drove me crazy at night, endlessly hooting. One time, with the girls, I think we were in upstate New York, we'd exited some highway somewhere for gas or food, and there was a huge dead owl in the road. I stopped to pull it off and took a couple of feathers before I cut it open for the predators. They're on the wall, with several other feathers from specific birds I remember. My walls are ridiculous. I post things there, to remind me of moments I would otherwise forget. Late afternoon, I have the house warm enough to shave and wash my hair. Emmylou Harris, singing a duet with someone, then I have to turn off the radio because I want the silence. Sinking deep into cold. The walk down tomorrow will require care. A few days ago, when the temps were briefly above freezing, some water formed, turned to ice, and then it snowed. The snow has crusted over, a few inches thick, and under that a layer of ice, the footing is treacherous. You have to take small steps and punch down with the crampons, using that third leg as a crutch, to prevent falling; I'm sure the Jeep is buried in snow and ice, still, I will get to town tomorrow, probably late, because I need some things, and I'll hike back up the hill, with a modest pack, tomorrow evening. It's what we do, not a big deal, living on the fringe. I have an alternate ego, to whom I occasionally ask questions, you might call it an internal dialogue, but I'll be puttering about and I'll say something out loud, ask a question. What? And I answer myself, though not with a prepared script. I'm really good off the cuff. Read more...

Dead Calm

The quiet is of that absolute variety. I did suit-up and go for a walk on an old logging road, then back the other direction, to the top of the driveway to see if B got Josh's (son-in-law) big new Dodge Ram safely down. Looks like he had a bit of trouble, near the top, but that he made it. By the tracks I see he took the truck down Saturday, then walked back in, then a newer set of tracks where he hiked out this morning. An hour later he came over for a cup of coffee, having seen my tracks, from where I had looked at his tracks. My reconstruction was correct. Said he went down (through seven inches of snow) in four-wheel low, first gear, fighting for control. Years ago I made a similar passage, had to stop at the bottom and smoke a cigaret until my normal heartbeat was restored. Told him I wasn't going to join the party tonight at Drew's place because I couldn't bear the thought of hiking back in at one in the morning, in the cold, with crampons, a walking stick, and a flashlight. It would be nice to see the Upper Twin gang, but not tonight. A little more snow forecast, and a little more tomorrow, but B said the roads are in decent shape, so I should be able to get to work on Wednesday, though it is supposed to get bloody cold. I'll need supplies, including some meat, which is always available at reduced price after a holiday. I've been eating a lot of roasted vegetables and I'm craving fatty meat. There should be some remaindered lamb. A lamb stew sounds good, with parsnips and onions, potatoes and carrots. I put together a crock-pot of stone-ground grits, to start before I go to bed. Perfect, for this weather. I only have three eggs left, so I'll need to carry in a couple of dozen. On Thursday, I think, because on Wednesday I'll need to bring in a bunch of other things, and eggs require a free hand. I buy large brown eggs and wrap the cartons in bubble-wrap, held with rubber-bands, and walk especially mindful. I'll make a pork fried rice on Wednesday, because it sounds so good, and I need a one dish meal when the weather turns like this, so that I'll eat enough. Tom and Lauren sent a Mango Chile sauce that would be great on this. Grits, lamb stew, and pork fried rice should get me through the week, if I can safely ferry in the eggs. I love making that stringy scrambled egg as the last addition to a fried rice. Winter survival mode, it's just eight or ten weeks: long underwear, a set of sweats, and a bathrobe; soup; access to a decent library; a mop handle for beating off wild dogs, crampons. You just have to take things slowly, think through what you need to do. I have a shopping list broken down by weight, strikes me as perfectly natural. I'm boiling snow for drinking water, decant into jugs when it's cool, and I add a pinch of sea salt to a gallon, because it is so flat, but it serves me, for making coffee or tea. I also tap a wet-weather spring, halfway down the slope, where the water is so cold it takes your breath away. I keep a gallon in the fridge, to swig when I get up in the night. Read more...