Seedy Side

I've been around strippers most of my life; and guys who noodled large catfish from underneath logs, dug huge snapping turtles from mud banks: a living is where you find it. Myself, I negotiate a middle ground, somewhere short of illegal. Work early as the AC is out and the museum is way too hot, 84 degrees. I poke around for a while, Terry comes over and we figure it out. 78 degrees when I closed up, should be back in the range tomorrow. Then carried art work upstairs, pretty good stuff for early in the game, some world class abstract ceramic wall pieces. Wash a bunch of champagne flutes from the wedding reception. These don't like to go in the dishwasher, two more wedding receptions in the next two weeks, so we don't put the tables and chairs away, and I'll probably wash, by hand, 400 or 500 champagne flutes in that time. I bought a baby-bottle brush to clean them with, and it's the perfect four-dollar tool for the job. It's so good to see Sara, and now our offices are together; we could just shout, back and forth, like Pegi and Trish do, at the other end of the office space. But Sara hates it as much as TR and I do. It's so feed-store. TR taps on the wall (my alcove doesn't have a door) with his ring, and Sara just calls my name. So much more civilized, and that matters even to me, who uses an outhouse and collects rainwater, goes for weeks without a full-immersion bath, and no longer attends events that require any further attention. I'm only a complicated guy by extension, actually, I'm fairly simple. My left foot has been bothering me a lot, a broken digit, and the fact that the little toe on that foot wants to curl under the toe adjacent. I subscribe, mostly, to a scenario where these things play out. Broken toe, right, little toe ducking under the next toe, right, I don't care what my feet look like, I just want to be able to walk. Dead mouse in the house, I can tell by the smell. I have a lot of mouse traps, so I don't always find a dead mouse right away. Leads to the dead mouse in the corner problem. You know me, one thing leads to another. A sneezing fit, I think it's my subconscious telling me I don't agree with myself, but it just might be that my house is very dirty. Thank god I don't have any pets, a family of blue-tailed skinks, but they hardly count, they stay mostly hidden. Nothing with hair. Now I'm pissed, wrote the preceding last night, but then my phone was out and I couldn't send, and the damned thing is still out tonight. Frustrating, being at the edge of the various grids. Art coming in all day and I end up walking up and down stairs several dozen times. Some nice work, it's going to be a hell of a show. Several people I know pretty well, and there's the usual chat, when you've not seen someone yet this year. The opening is June 15th and I have about 10,000 things that I need to get done. And two more wedding receptions, did I mention that? Stripped the signage from the gallery wall, hoping I can just touch up the paint, but as it's red (the most difficult color to paint walls) it probably won't touch-up well and I'll need to paint that wall, and the other signage wall, in the entry. Add it to the list. Kim sounds like he might be up for doing a set of songs at the pub. We'll go over early, before many people are there, and use the front room, where people mostly read the paper, couldn't be more casual and I think he'll be more comfortable there. John Hogan, himself, wants to hear, and I'd like for Justin to hear him. I don't know anything about song writing. I think Hunter and Garcia probably represent the pinnacle. I had to stop at Kroger for something, butter, and The Grateful Dead were on the house speakers, "Ripple", which is a great fucking song. I actually dawdled in the baby-food aisle, so I could hear the whole thing through. It's a perfect song, I have maybe 12 versions of it, including one, from, what is that place? Red Rock? in Colorado? that goes on for a long time. Garcia could take a lyric apart, explore every element, then slowly reconstruct the original idea, better than anyone ever; his guitar playing talks. Like Bach in the Suites, and several saxophonists I've known. Just another way of speaking. Like we need one, as if language wasn't confusing enough. Clear-air turbulence, no wind to speak of, not a cloud in the sky, then, on the way home, I'm struck with these sharp winds from the side. Suddenly it's like driving across Kansas and I slow down. The traffic, such as it is, backs up behind me, and I pull-over several times, to let the impatient ass-holes around, I'm gesturing out the window, and docenting the drive home. I'm rarely in a hurry, it's normal I'd spend ten or fifteen minutes at the lake, and I needed to clean my windshield; I keep an old cup I found on the side of the road in the bed of the truck for this purpose. The motor in my power washer doesn't work anymore, so I have to turn the wipers on and splash water from a cup to clean the windshield. I need to do this because the sunlight is refracting oddly off dust in the corners, and I'm seeing things that aren't there. I struggle with this. As you might imagine, me and my demons. The nature of reality, what I had thought, what you thought you were hearing. Three things, right? make a list, any three things become a list, THEREFORE, but I'm just covering my ass here, if I'd mentioned three things recently, that'd be the record. Mostly I fall silent. What I think of as the middle path. Read more...

Background Noise

B came over, wondered about my truck, which was in a slightly different place as it had rolled backwards when I'd tried to start it yesterday. He had a battery charger in the print shop, so we pulled the battery and put it on charge. Nice conversation about a poetry conference he just attended in northern Ohio. Stephen Ellis was there, one of the great writers working today. B read a piece on friendship and solitude that I'm anxious to read. He's playing with Ronnie and Kevin at the pub on Thursday evening and I'll probably stay in town to hear them. B said they're doing some Robert Johnson. I need to get a new CD player/radio but I finally do get mine to play some Skip James. I do love those Delta Blues. Though I don't listen to music much anymore, I still hear it in my head. It's not just the solitude that's required for me to write, but the absence of background noise. Increasingly drives me crazy. Tripping the breaker for the fridge seems extreme, but then I think about Proust and realize I'm not that extreme. Kim will be here, a week from today, and I'm sure I won't write that night either. Language is a mystery. When B came over I was reading essays about Wittgenstein. Who does that? I was actually enjoying myself, submitting commas for review. Meaning is what you make of it. The entire grid must have gone down yesterday, because Pegi calls and says the AC is off at the museum, which means that either a breaker or a fuse tripped, but it's a holiday and I'd already been drinking so I didn't want to drive into town. I call D and we decide tomorrow morning is soon enough to tackle the problem. I'm pretty much on call 24/7 but after the incident a few years ago when I found myself at home without knowing how I got there, I will not drink and drive. Though my horse, as John Wayne said, knows the way. Speaking of horses, I do need a newer vehicle, that I can trust, and I'm looking, I'm a couple of thousand short, which isn't a problem, because I can advance myself that on my Visa and be paid off within the year, no foul, but I don't know what vehicle I want. If not a pick-up, then at least a hatch-back, because I have to haul things. Nature of the beast. Hauling. Months without an 'r' I have to haul water, pollen and leaf-litter would mean filtering rainwater through an old tee-shirt, and, eventually you run out of old tee-shirts. Did I mention that the water from town is green? Seriously. I transport wash-water in five gallon pickle buckets from the pub and they are white plastic, I mean WHITE, and city water is always tinted green. When I leave a bucket alone for a month or more, which is fairly often, there's a precipitate, and I wonder what that shit is. I'd rather drink water from a wet-weather spring. Rather drink rain water. Rather drink piss, filtered through a sheep's fleece. Chlorine, it drives me crazy. Just saying. A list is merely three things. They don't even have to be in order, just three things. Read more...

Fluid Dynamics

I claim the window seat. Shotgun. Black Dell is unhappy, it was 86 degrees inside when I got home and I had to run the AC for two hours before I could write. A minor problem, but the most recent issue of The New Yorker was in the mail box, so not a big deal. Seasonal change to my rhythms. Any change manifests itself equally along the spectrum. I find myself staring at the river, but I'm not watching the river, I'm thinking about dependent clauses and where I'd put the commas. I was, then, I mean. It was several days ago, now, and I had just gone down for a smoke; two strings of barges were passing, going up and down, in the wide curve, west of town, below where the Scioto flows in and forms a sand bank. There's a protocol, for river boats and barges. I don't know the language, but I recognize the sign. It's like that, mostly. Sometimes you can figure it out. A string of barges, called a 'tow', though they are pushed, going upstream, pulls to the left, from their point of view, to allow the tow going downstream the right of way. I've got this. I've watched it many times. There must be a certain slip to steering a tow downstream, a drift, because the tows going upstream grant them a lot of leave-way. Also, the tow going downstream is really booking and the tow going upstream is laboring against the current, so there's a logic involved with whom gives way to whom. There generally is, a logic involved, otherwise we'd all be stopped dead in our tracks. Now people want to visit me, but I fear they'd be disappointed, I'm just an old drunk in a tree-tip pit. Counsel argued that I might be a historic landmark. It was an interesting day in court, the judge actually agreed with my parsing. I love it when that happens. Maybe we could meet on some neutral ground, the soccer field at the high school, or the pub. The pub would be perfect, we could drink Irish Whiskey and close the place down. Nagging at me, Glenn said I left almost everything out, and I wondered about that, what was left out. There was a guy in Janitor College, Sven, he was a numbskull, a total loser, but we loved him for his Mohawk and the fact that he played the banjo. He thought everything was pre-ordained. I didn't bother arguing with him. When you consider the great sweep of things. Every intention of going to work, but my truck wouldn't start. Nothing for it but to call Pegi and have her apologize to Sara. First day accepting work for "Cream Of The Crop". Over 90 degrees, and the power goes out, then the phone. B is off the ridge and I feel positively marooned. Do what I always do in situations like that, read. A New Yorker came yesterday, so I read it cover to cover, then back to the article on the Bernoulli family. A bunch of geniuses, and they didn't all get along, arguing over whose solution to a difficult problem was the more elegant. I had to run the AC for a couple of hours to get the temp down to 79 degrees. Thorny problem with the parents. They've decided that they can't live with my sister, the one place they can be physically comfortable, and are going to move to a small, ground-level apartment. This is completely crazy, as they are ancient, frail, blind, and can't get around. But they're adamant about it. I'm staying out of the argument, because I'm here, and all the rest of the family is there. They did sell their house, for less than 50% of what it would have sold for in 2008, so, after, bills, they may have a few thousand, plus whatever retirement and Social Security. Enough money, maybe, but someone has to take them to doctor appointments (once or twice a week for one or both of them), and bring in all their supplies, and Mom can't see to cook anymore. To their credit, maybe they can make it work, for a while, and maybe that's all they want, a chance to go out in their own nest. I can't get down there before mid-June, and I've got to get a vehicle, and I've got a line of credit I can use. D will find something, he's always looking at vehicles for sale. One develops a proclivity, a nuisance, at first, but then you get used to it. That clatter in your brain. 'Wow, that CRV is a good buy.' Also, how having a title might influence things. "Fluid Dynamics" is a good one, because it actually directs the flow. Suddenly everything is plastic. Che Guevara quoting french poets, I mean, really. A joke, right? the way things flow. Read more...

Late Reflections

Systems fail. We can use our diagnostic criteria, stress-failure analysis, whatever tools, to study the failure, after the fact, but we often don't see it coming. Relationships. A yo-yo, then the string breaks. We're defined by our failures, Success is fairly easy, keep your nose clean and show up for the job, sometimes you have to dress the part, but it isn't difficult to not make waves. You just stay still and wait your chance. You see this most clearly in large reptiles. I remember fishing with Dad once, we were stake-poled over a bed of blue-gill, catching more fish than seemed humanly possible, and there was a trio of otters that had slicked out a slide down into the river. An alligator had set up point, maybe twenty feet away, hoping for a meal, I could just see his eyes and the front tip of his jaw. The otters knew the gator was there, flew, in the face of it. The danger was part, though they weren't really in danger, otters are very fast and change direction quicker than any creature in creation. The alligator never had a chance. Made a lunge, but we all knew it was futile. The otter danced away. One more cigaret and a drink for the road, though I'm home, and don't have to drive, thank god. 3:56 in the morning. All I have are questions, I don't have a single answer. Apa Sherpa has summited Everest 21 times. Couldn't do much at work because of the wedding reception, so looked at a lot of pictures, Velazquez, the bodegones, kitchen scenes. There's one "Old Woman Cooking Eggs" that I looked at for a long time with a magnifying glass. An amazing painting. Somewhere I had read the phrase 'Bernoulli Effect' and I had no idea what it was, except that it was a term from fluid dynamics, so I took the third book of my 1911 Britannica to work and read about the Bernulli family; Swiss, and generations of them were world-class mathematicians, discovering various calculus. I know where I read it, a book on geomorphology I got off the library sale table for a buck. I didn't know much about geomorphology. The 'Effect' is that pressure decreases as the velocity of a fluid increases. You can think about that concept for a while. It might be why fines drop out of running water in a very systematic manner. I tend to run questions of fluid dynamics against the grader ditch on the driveway. Something tangible. That incredible delta where Mackletree creek runs into Roosevelt Lake, where I find my skipping stones. Magma, propelled by very hot gases from below. We're talking diamonds here, very hot and a lot of pressure, then things erupt and you're left with what was created in the previous state, diamonds scattered everywhere. They don't get re-melted, because they're beyond any temperature you could achieve. A crystalline lock. An old-school bonding. And don't forget, I'd gleefully obfuscate myself into oblivion. Read more...

Cello Suites

Mac mentioned a book that I had read, and that occasioned me listening to Rostropovich and then Edgar Meyer's transcription for double bass, which takes most of the night. I shouldn't be doing this, because I have a lot to do at the museum, but I have to listen to Casals playing from the manuscript copy of Anna Magdalena (not Mary's) copy. For my money, this is the greatest music of all time, and we have Casals to thank. It was lost, considered an exercise, when he found that copy in a music store in Barcelona. There's another version, transcribed by Bach's student, Johann Peter Kellner, in 1726; Anna knew his soul, Johann just heard the notes. I listened to these versions side by side, once, in Kansas, and there's no comparison. No musician ever plays these suites in order, and I wonder about that. I can play them in order, because everything is pre-recorded and I can set up a play list. You should listen to them in order. It's a whole other experience, not the player, but the composer. I can play with this, because I have the time, and I love Bach, among all other mortals. The Sixth Suite is my absolute favorite piece of music. Defined as we are, that Modigliani, the Sixth Cello Suite, a particular passage from Pynchon. I surprise myself in what comes to bear. I thought I was going to write about making a perfect cup of coffee, as the sun came rolling over the ridge, but I'm back on the Cello Suites again. I'm the victim, in a way, of a viral conspiracy, the way meaning comes to bear. Never before has it been necessary to draw a distinction between the real world and the natural world. A problem of definition. I've been up all night, listening to the Cello Suites, and now I have to go to work, we'll pick this up tonight. Worked like mad until noon. Panels down and stored, bonnets put away, then, while the decorators were starting, I made three passes along all of the walls: pulled the hardware, erased the pencil lines, filled all the holes. In the folk show, I used a lot of pan-head screws in plastic anchors, which leave fairly large holes. Adrian sent Pegi a message saying that I was very good at my job, then, today, the bride thanked me for getting everything ship-shape. I'm just trying to stay on schedule, for the second half of this big turn-around. I've been reading about commas, people send me articles and printouts. After lunch, the decorating was reaching a crescendo, and I don't like crowds (of strangers) that much, so I retreated to my office, read about commas, read some of Mary's letters, read a really good essay about Jacques-Louis David. At five, after work, I needed to haul garbage over to the dumpster behind the Cirque building, which is two doors down from the back door to the pub, so I decided to stop for a pint. Libby thanked me for the bubble wrap scraps (it was a large bag) and said that she's saving them for something special. I didn't ask. John Hogan, himself, was sharing a pint with a couple who are patrons of the museum, and the woman, whose name escapes me, asked me about pate (because my pate was mentioned in a flyer for the "Cream Of The Crop" opening). It was a nice conversation, you don't get to talk about pate that often, and even if you do, it's often whispers behind programs. Read more...

Appraised Value

Finally got the appraised value of the Carter nudes from Franklin, in NYC, he pegs them at around a thousand dollars each; and the catfish drawing at $650, which, if the museum wants to sell, I'd buy. It could still be in the show, which I'd call "13 Nudes And A Catfish". An intimate show, for a small gallery, but dynamite in terms of impact. The nudes are fantastic and the catfish is over the top. What the line captures. I keep going back to those last nudes Modigliani painted, the genius of line. That "Reclining Nude" from 1917, at the Met, is maybe the greatest painting ever. I have a reproduction thumb-tacked to the wall, I look at it 8 or 10 times a day, some nights I sleep with her. Adrian, the Director himself, a Brit running an American Folk Art Museum, drove up to get the show, with a young helper, thank god, and we had them loaded and back on the road by noon. Lunch, then started cleaning the place, which resembled the scene of a young war. My feet hurt and I finally stopped working about four and sat down for the first time. D will be pissed when he finds out we have to take down the wall panels, because they'll probably have to go right back up, ditto the pedestals, which I stashed in the theater. We have to put all the bonnets away. I haven't stripped hardware, and I might not have a chance. I think it looks pretty cool. I'll have worked 13 straight days when I get next Monday off, and, as it happens, Kim will be here that afternoon and night, on his way to an F1 race in Canada. I told John Hogan a bit about him, that he'd be bringing his guitar, and John said to bring him and his guitar over to the pub. That'll be up to Kim, the guitar part, but we'll probably go over anyway, for a draft and a shot of Irish, get Sara and Clay to join us, Sara met Kim when we were installing the Wrack show. She'll remember him as the guy that, literally, tied everything together. He remembered how to lash, and none of the rest of us did. I took Libby, at the pub, a large bag of bubble wrap scraps, she loves popping the bubbles, I think she rolls on them, but I don't want to fantasize. And she always gives me a fantastic smile, when I give her a bag. Like she knows the value of things. Tom, and bubble-wrap. Read more...

Whatever Reason

Usually D is completely oblivious to the flirting that goes on around, even if it's directed at him, but he's convinced there's a spark between Marsea and me, which there is, a tangible, quantifiable connection. And the Romantic in me is not quite dead. A woman who breaks her wrist carving a 300 pound block of alabaster is more interesting than most, and I love her body and her hair, and the way she smells, did I mention that? something floral, peonies or lilac, with a trace of musk. The dry-down is fantastic. D said I should quit the museum, move to California, and pursue her with all my wiles. Which I had thought about, before he even mentioned it. But I'm set in my ways, and it's difficult to imagine compromising my time. Arrogant and stupid, but there you have it. Yes, of course I'd rather nestle my head between her breasts, no place I'd rather be, but I have to finish this paragraph first. Which makes me a bad bet, in terms of a relationship, or any boat that might float not being alone. The hours of solitude I require can not be compromised, I just can't do it without hours alone in the woods: tree-tip pit, morels, that funky smell from a backwater. Sorry. I lost myself. What were we talking about? Goddamn Whip-O-Wills. Right. Those Olmec heads. Todd saw the Rembrandt show in Cleveland and thought he'd never paint again, why bother? it had all been done. But it's never all done, drunk as a skunk, five-thirty in the morning, I still see that, it's never all done. I don't even require closure, I just want a couple more hours of sleep. Which I got, and was almost late for work but still the first one there. Three pieces left and one of them requires that I 'build' a box which I do by going to the UPS store and buying their largest double-walled box and taping the flaps upright to increase the depth. This requires a lot of tape, because the box is going on the road. Still not happy about the tape situation. Even the heavy-duty brown packing tape, formerly the bane of our existence (we hated to it on incoming shows) isn't sticking well. Yesterday we resorted to strapping tape, a heretofore unthinkable act. The box worked well. The piece had a handle on top (34 inches tall) and to secure the piece I made a false top, with a slit for the handle, that rests on styrofoam legs I glued into the inside corners and that ties the piece in place. False tops, as we call them, are handy in this business. The other two pieces, one in cast concrete, the other a carved sandstone piece, both weigh close to a hundred pounds, and D and I agreed that they should just be shrink-wrapped in blankets, so that the guy on the other end could actually feel what he was picking up. Three-thirty or so and I'm done, the first step (except for the physical loading) in the impossible schedule. Load the truck tomorrow morning, then clean all my clutter out of the gallery. I need to find/see that couple that seem to make their living off cardboard, selling cardboard as scrap, which maybe grosses $10 a hundred pounds, because I've got a lot of cardboard scraps kicking around, maybe not 100 pounds, but worth ten minutes of their time. A gallon of gas, a cheap six-pack, however they factor their time. I couldn't retreat to my office, because Pegi and Trish were yelling back and forth, and Gretchen was there, Trish's daughter, and one of Pegi's students, and there were several conversations going on, none of which I was interested in. I went to the basement and sorted hardware. Wanted to stay in town, hear Jack Vetter play at the pub, drink Irish whiskey with John, but I remembered I had started writing you, last night or this morning, and I couldn't wait to get back home and see what I'd said. Read more...

Not Knowing

Or suspecting that you know enough when you really don't have a clue. Justin is off on his cross-country ramble and Astra is being deported. The face of change. Sara will be back, next weekend, when we start accepting art for the juried show, and D has his MFA, so the dynamics will be different. I'd like to keep my job, for a while, if that's possible, but the politics are so stupid that I may have to move to Kansas, assume a new identity and become a mason. Which I could do, being flexible and alone. Invent a background and drop a few names. Beyond a certain point, I might even believe myself. More likely I'd end up in that spare apartment above Kim's garage and he'd deny that I was there. What happens is that we disappear, die, or otherwise removed from the scene. Moved to Australia. No forwarding address. The outback somewhere. I heard he loved goats and lived in an Airstream, the desert somewhere, must have been the southern hemisphere, because the constellations were different. I think when this next show is installed, I'll leave for a week or two, go somewhere, do something, I'm finding the situation mundane and the people boring. I'd rather fish for trout in the Niobara. Spend some time in Nebraska. Power was out last night as a powerful line of storms hung in Adams County (where my power comes from), with attendant hail and flooding. Got to work early because it was another big important day and I needed to study the playing field. D came in, thank god, because someone in Bev's family had died and TR had to sit at the desk. Worked out fine, D and I work better together than anyone has a right to, and as were wrapping a piece we'd call out the condition to him. Three pieces to wrap tomorrow, then organize things, and start cleaning up for the event on Friday. They're decorating for that after we close on Thursday. Tight schedule. An artist friend came in today, Marsea, born here but relocated to California, in town to visit her dying mother. D and I made her laugh, we spent a delightful half-hour, and it was a welcome break. She'll be back to see Sara and I'll see her again. I hadn't kissed anyone in a while and I'd forgotten how close you have to get to do that. I could feel her body heat and liked the way she smelled. D and I pushed hard until four-thirty and he had to leave. Trish wasn't in today, and Pegi left early. TR looked at me, said that we were the only ones there again. Cool thing I noticed when I was closing down the museum this evening. All the hanging hardware is still on the walls, I'm not going to have a chance to get to it, before the first wedding reception, so instead of art work, they're going to have hangers for the art work. It's a Minimalist installation. There could even be labels, for the pieces that weren't there. I like this idea a lot, an installation in which the label becomes the issue. I could do this show in one of those couple-of-week periods when nothing is in the gallery upstairs. A sneak installation. I'll start working on the labels tomorrow. I like who I am, it's not a specific position or anything, just that sometimes I'm more comfortable. Read more...

Unidentifiable Sounds

Shrill cry of something, maybe a cat, pierces the night. Never a dull moment. I put on my headlamp and grab the garden rake I keep by the back door, it is a cat, a feral monster I wouldn't ask to my wedding, squaring off to a battle atop the compost pile with a raccoon. Fuck their turf battles. I break up the fight and send them scrambling. They both hiss at me, but I have a six-foot reach and a strong desire to get back to sleep, there are times the natural world is a pain in the ass. Today needed to be a real push, just TR and I, and we needed to get over half the show packed. I was early, so walked over to Kroger and got a Cheese Danish, made a pot of coffee, and surveyed the scene. TR got there at ten and we started packing. Lunch break at Toro Loco, and we finished at four. 31 works in 22 crates. 60 pieces in the show, but most of the rest go in bin-boxes, cake. We can take Monday off, TR can take all day off, I may go in for a while, putter. I need to do my laundry and go to Big Lots, actually, I need to go to Wal-Mart, only because I have a gift card, but I'm not sure I could face a crowd. We worked well together, moving right along. TR has a steep learning curve, and he called attention to some of the sounds (musicians are always hearing things) we were making as a matter of course. The various tapes, the shrink wrap and flat twine pulling off the roll, the grunts and expletives. The museum is pleasantly trashed. I like this transition phase, it shows a workmanlike clutter. Normally, we would just close the gallery until "Cream Of The Crop" opened, mid-June, but we've become an event hall, and there are three more events before we open the next show, so we have to clean everything up, and act like we're not doing what we're doing. Installing the single show that generates the most money in any two year period. I'm sure there's some logic involved, but it escapes me. They only keep me here because I know more than anyone else, and I mop better than God. It's not even a closely held secret. Last year they just gave me the trophy, I was inscribed 12 times in a row. The Modified Chevron owes a lot to Pythagoras. The Golden Mean, anyone could have stumbled on that, the way you fiddle with your hands. I'm only pointing out the obvious. Read more...

Ever Been

I need a new pile of rocks, I've thrown all I had at one thing or another. There's a perfect spot for collecting throwing rocks, where Mackletree Creek runs into Roosevelt Lake. Actually, several hundred yards upstream, where the fines fall when the spring torrents rage. Almost every rock is the same weight and it's just a matter of finding the ones that fit your hand. I can collect a five gallon bucket of them in ten minutes. A little further downstream there's a zone where every rock is a skipper. I've been known to skip rocks for an hour, when I was particularly perplexed by something. I still have a good right arm, though I could no longer play third base. Language is fraught with difficulty, wanting to say a specific thing and not having the exact words. It's why we have all these poetic forms where one thing means another, the way symbols serve in painting, the haunting overtones in Bach. I want to talk about the representation of the real, but I'm not ready yet, I might never be. Looking at pictures for over a year, thinking about it. Narrowing the focus to four artists: Rembrandt, Vermeer, Caravaggio, and Velazquez. The nature of reality is called into question. What is real? I have an objective reality I share with other people, Kim talking about traffic flow in Tallahassee, the availability of morels in Minneapolis, the snow pack in the Coastal Range; and these things are observable, viewable from the outside: there was, actually, twelve feet of snow in Telluride that winter. Not a joke. I go back to sleep for a couple of hours then go in early so I can shave and wash my hair. D shows up and we go get the Saturday burrito. We had been promised that we wouldn't have to do any clean-up during this huge turn-around, but all the museum tables and chairs were out, the garbage cans were over-filled, and there were tablecloths and skirting everywhere. Took us until noon to deal with that, and one of the garbage bags burst all over me. Fortunately I had my dirty laundry in the truck (never did get to do my laundry) and I was able to change into dirty, but not soaked in garbage juice clothes. TR joined us for lunch, then took the desk, we brought up all the packing, and the cardboard, and the various crates and bin-boxes. A bin-box is just a very sturdy cardboard box we can interleave and pack full of similar sized paintings, makes the transport safer. Discuss the problems, and there are several; late in the afternoon, we actually pack the three large paintings that were problematic, as they'd never been packed before and we knew they'd take some time. None of the new tapes stick. This is a real issue, because in the seven or eight years I've been at the museum I've used hundreds of rolls of tape, and, I have to add, before D can post something, that I'm actually tape-challenged, in that I can never start a roll and it defies me in other ways, resulting in hair loss and some tissue damage. The problem is that the 'new' packing tape doesn't stick to cardboard, which is ludicrous, cardboard is what it's supposed to stick to. I'm in disbelief and tongue-tied. D allows that he'll come in Tuesday, and TR and I are working tomorrow, a Sunday, the first of several Sundays I need to work, we should be fine, getting this show to the next venue, installing the next show, which is huge, and making pate. Just a couple of things I need to do.  Read more...

What's Said

I would never say anything that's not true, that's at the heart of it. Not that I don't make mistakes. Most of the morning talking about museum security. A serious upgrade is in the offing if the big capital campaign goes well, though this is not a great time to ask people for money. In the afternoon D and I took apart a few of the display cases in the artifact gallery so he could clean the insides, I painted the Richards gallery. There's still some ghosting, the residue of the (new) adhesive from the vinyl signage, and I'll have to get a second coat on those areas. A dinner, I think it's a fundraiser, at the museum today, 5 to 7, people arriving at 4, live music, the usual chaos. I'm the default Chaos Manager, putting out a lot of little fires. It's interesting work because it's never the same. Doing theater prepares you for this kind of job. Any of a dozen people I've worked with over the years could do what I do, most of them trained in theater, and the rest are from that set of people that tend to do everything themselves. Design and build a house, do all the wiring and plumbing yourself, grow all your own food, brew beer, make wine; all of those things, and ten thousand beside, prepare you to solve the problem at hand. The actual issue. I came straight home, 30 minutes and some change, turned on the AC, because it was too hot for Black Dell, and leafed through several books that have arrived recently. Linda sent "Tinkers", Tom and Lauren had sent a couple, and I made the mistake of going to the Goodwill Bookstore. I can't resist cheap books that I might read; I put a board across an empty aquarium and started another pile. Read more...

Dappled Light

They mowed the verges on Mackletree today, with a pickup load of prisoners to pick up trash, and it is a thing of beauty. No matter which way I come and go, for the next week, it'll be lovely. The two miles or so that Mackletree runs through the State Forest is one of the most beautiful roads I've ever seen. Rarely ANY traffic, and I often stop, sit on the tail-gate, and roll a smoke. Did some prep work for the main gallery change-over, scrounged some more cardboard, bought three different kinds of tape, to conduct my tape experiments. In the afternoon the decorators for some event tomorrow night came in, to set up tables and decorate. I had to get them a few things, then retreated to my office, anabasis (a good book by Zenophon of that title) is a habit of mine, to escape the confusion. I wrote a book titled that too, as I think about it. I like it, I reread it recently, because a reader was rereading it and commented in a message. The publisher left out a section, I remember agreeing to that, but I don't remember what section, I must have a manuscript copy of it somewhere. The book is beautifully letter-pressed, a handsome thing, but I was under the influence of Pound then, and I tended toward the opaque as being somehow meaningful. The last decade, I've tried to be clear. It's at least as difficult as fiction, what you need to include, what you need to leave out. Strikes a nerve, is the best way I can say it, like a tap on your elbow. The funny bone. Even the earliest of the Velazquez paintings are dynamite, 1618, that old lady poaching eggs. Bodegones they were called, kitchen scenes. So real it infringes on our sense of reality. Everything just so, defying paint's inability to actually speak. Attention to detail. Something Chuck Close learned from Sargent, the gestural quality a single loaded brush-stroke adds to the trail of a gown. Once you start looking at things with a magnifying glass, you are well and truly gone. I keep one on my desk at home, one in my backpack, and one in the center drawer of my desk at work, and I use them all everyday, to look at something. The world is theater, over the top. Astra was explaining her deportation, Barb sat with me at lunch, said that John would be in, after work, and I agreed to go over for a beer. Which I did. John stood us to a couple of Irish whiskeys, we both have cheap tastes, Paddy, rot gut, in a field now populated by a field of designer drugs, and he told a great story about finding a WW1 hand grenade. Life doesn't get any better than this. Read more...

Distractions

Lovely day, cool morning, and they had mowed the verges of Upper Twin Creek Road; just a swath, maybe three feet wide along either side. It's beautiful when they do this, maybe six times a summer. It glistens, glows in the dappled light. So I leave early and drive the long way around, slowly, pulling over for the one car that overtakes me. I'm easy to overtake, on back roads like this one. Blackberries are set, abundantly, the canes bending under the load, and there's another beautiful plant, Trillium-like, if not just an actual Trillium that I don't recognize. I stop and pull one, to ask B what it is, the man knows his plants, before I remember he's out of town, at a poetry conference upstate. It'll keep. I get to work so early, that even after going below the floodwall to eat a monster sausage-egg biscuit, then shaving and taking a sponge-bath at the museum, I still had almost an hour to read before Pegi got there, and she's always thirty minutes early. My current museum book is a biography, not really a biography, just a long monogram, time-line and what we know, of Velazquez. The color plates are chronological, which is helpful. To my eye there aren't many players for the pile, and it depends on who I'm looking at right then, Rembrandt, Caravaggio, Vermeer, and Velazquez. It's all about the light. I'm actually a modern art person, I love abstract and color-field paintings, but this conflict, between the real, and the painted surface, interests me. First off, my shot across your bow, is that it's just a painted surface. It's not reality, it's a print, and what do you make of that? And secondly, is the nature of reality such a fluid thing? I love that quote on his tombstone, in Seville, "Al Pinet De La Verdad" which I think means, more or less 'Painter of the Truth' which would certainly be true. Art is mediation, it's purpose is to strip away the world, leave you with an answer. In "The Rokeby Venus" it's that reflection, more than anything else, that's vague, and what you wanted to see clearly is not accurately defined. I had a moment in the afternoon when I almost lost it. Bev had called me down, from upstairs, to look at a piece of artwork someone was curious about and had brought in. Trish was downstairs, overseeing the ironing of some tablecloths, and had decided she was as much an art historian as anyone, which may or nor be true, and was limping over on bad ankles to examine a bad print, poorly framed. As soon as she opened her mouth I walked away. She's somehow enabled to talk about art because she's a secretary at an art museum? Maybe so, but if so, not a club I want to belong to. That's harsh, but true, as Mark Twain famously said, I forget exactly, if they'd take me, i wouldn't want to be a member. Read more...

Night Life

There's a raccoon under the house and I don't want to deal with it. Chances are it'll be gone by the time I need to go to work, if not I'll shoot it then and haul the carcass down the road for the crows. Speaking of which, I had an odd encounter with a Turkey Vulture the other day. This is the ugliest god-damn bird you're ever likely to see, and I still don't understand what was going on, the specifics of the situation. There must have been some carrion involved. People on Mackletree keep chickens (and ducks and turkeys and other more exotic birds), they're always in the road, and there's a certain attrition, so there are dead birds, which several of us stop and throw over onto the verge. It's all about dignity. And I was driving home, slowly, weaving through the birds. At the abandoned sawmill, where the grass is lush, the chickens were pecking at seed-heads, and I stopped, to study their technique, and there was a Turkey Vulture, acting like a chicken, strutting around with its wings folded in. That bald head and red wattles looked like something from Dante. The chicken from hell. Bosch. We made eye contact, and he was like, oh fuck man, be on your way, I have business here. It was a defining moment. You just have to leave some things alone. I know a stripper with a cocaine habit, I have a friend that robs people for a living. I can't change anything. A sense of helplessness. But the world, channeling Beckett here, goes on. Let's grab an RC cola and a moon pie. Stop, get a drink, roll a smoke, slow down. The world moves too fast. Read more...

The Schedule

Counting today, if I work 10 days in a row, I figure to keep things under control, then a couple of days off, then another push. Stripped hardware, patched and repaired the upstairs galleries, at the end of the day I sanded, ready for paint. Interrupted just once, by the roofer guys that one of the board members had sent over to check our EPDM membrane roof. The good news is it's ok for a few more years, it does need some 'cosmetic' work, which should just be a few hundred dollars, but a new roof would cost 40K. I get into a nice space, taking care of the galleries, no one bothers me, because they don't know how to do the things I'm doing, and they don't want to know how. Taking off the vinyl signage today, I was giving a little lecture (to myself) on glue types and vinyl thickness, when the ever vivacious Naturalist from the state forest came in. It was her mother who had bought Bear's daughter Kara's very good stippled drawing from the high school show. I had several questions that I'd meant to ask her, the next time I saw her, but I was in my patch-and-fill mode and kind of zoned out. I'd stashed Kara's drawing in Sara's office, and when I went in to get it, I was shocked, I'd forgotten TR and I had spent some time cleaning out the space, it actually looked like an office again, and not like a store-room. Art work tends to end up in Sara's office, it's a natural flow, either toward or against accessioning. There are other places that I could use, but her office is convenient, now that I'm at that end of the hall, and she and Clay are away for six months of the year. Read more...

Almost Fiction

Needed to make a run to town, but didn't, blew the day off. Read art history, some short stories. Made a nice tuna salad that I ate on saltines, some olives and cheese. One hand free for the book. Scanned through some New Yorker articles. Read a book about loneliness, as there was a discussion about it on the radio yesterday. I spend more time alone than anyone I know, but I'm rarely lonely. Reading a John Sandford novel, or one by Lee Child will always raise my spirits. I almost have to be alone to write, and it's not a pretty operation, bedeviled might be a better word. Read myself writing about Mississippi, in a file from the new-found drawer. Wish I had documented that experience the way I have life on the ridge. I always thought that book would be a fiction. "On Three", another of the manuscripts stolen, was completely non-fiction, unrelentingly. I understand that there's a dog-eared copy of one of the nine sections of that book, somewhere in Texas, that people are made to read at gunpoint. I hope to find a copy in the drawer. I wrote that book very fast, maybe a month, three or four completely edited pages a night, and a page, for me, is 42 lines, single-spaced. I write in 10 point Arial, it's a great font to work in, because everything is so clear, but I hate it as a book face. Always and still prefer old-style types for book work. I'm a serif guy, what can I say. Scotch Old-Style, or Garamond, some of the Caslons, they're beautiful faces. Arial sucks, actually, but it's extremely, what's the word, clear, uncluttered, and it aids me in my attempt at punctuation. Do all of us have those little smeared tracks of bug shit that look like commas? There are a couple of places on my screen where a period of bug shit, is perfectly willing to fill in for anything I might come up with. D could come up with an argument, about intent, but I actually chose to keep things as vague as possible, what you thought you meant is close enough. Read more...

Nothing If Not

Caravaggio moved toward the real. It's the light, I think, and a simplification of subject matter (not polysemy, a clutter of symbolic crap). Not unlike Greg Brown singing about common things. Canning beans, or lusting after someone's ankles. For the last decade or so, I've tended to stay on the sidelines, see how things play out, before I say anything. Everyone is sensitive to criticism, it's a given, so you need to be careful about what you say. Usually I don't say anything, the safest route, but occasionally I have to say something, because of a transgression so grievous, and it usually gets me into trouble. People are so sensitive. I wouldn't deal with them at all, but you have to, to keep a foot in the world. I'm the perfect antidote or candidate for being a hermit, only stirring from my tree-tip pit when I needed whiskey or tobacco. Food is easy, I just eat acorns and jam, the occasional roadkill, wild mustard, a flour I make from cat-tail root. And I comment, when things reach a critical mass. When or how the rest of the universe operates, I don't have a clue. I assume some things. A system at play. I understand the theory, but I get no feedback, none. I get three or four messages a week from Kim, otherwise I go for days with only the occasional flyer offering a cut-rate on a cruise, or a pamphlet offering advice about Medicare. A data bank that knows nothing but my age. Most deaths, after 65, are a result of falling. I get it, falling is dangerous, I have places where I anchor my hand, set my nails, other places where I just let go. Read more...

Something Later

Three or four things happen at once: a massive clap of thunder, sheets of lightning, a wave of rain, I lose power (I keep a compact fluorescent light on, downstairs, to guide me when I need to pee), and I wake up, confused, not remembering my senior prom. Wait, it's coming back, Sandra Harper, her Dad was a fireman, she had a great taut body and told me that if I went away, to do a season of Summer Stock, that our relationship was over. I left the next day. Staccato drumming on the roof. I got up and put on the headlamp that Howard sent, I keep it on my nightstand, which is a cable spool my daughters decorated with text. Wearing a headlamp tends to focus your attention. What you're looking at. I write some words, in my crabbed hand, isolation, insulation, invitational, something else I can't decipher, maybe inviolate, but it could be almost anything. Text is become twitter. I noticed this strongly today (yesterday, now) because everyone was using electronic devises. I was just drinking a beer and wanted to go home, fuck a bunch of distractions. It was getting loud at the pub, tuning instruments and a bunch of adrenaline junkies that biked down the hundred miles from Columbus, a yearly event, god bless their calves. The rain picks up. The blackberries needed this, I foresee a bumper crop. I may have to can blackberry juice. Confusion has a name, everything has a name, right? polysemy, an ugly word, but there it is, a multitude of things. Awoke on the sofa, well after dawn, with a sky so overcast that it hardly mattered what time of day, still raining, and the green wall that surrounds me was vibrantly clean and dancing. The power was off in the night, I knew because the digital clock was flashing, but was back again when I finally stirred, so I turned on Black Dell to get the time, and noticed that I had started the first couple of lines of this block of text. Which brings us more or less up to date. Except for the several hours I spent looking at pictures, mostly Velazquez, thinking about his body of work. How it moves from the symbolic pictorial into the absolute real. Caravaggio had broken this ground in Italy, and I love them both, but the "Rokeby Venus" is the most stunning thing currently on my radar. Looking back, I think the word may have been 'involute' because I remember noticing a piece of cast iron trim on a old building. Tying up loose ends. Because Bastion is French, his using the word 'fuck' in every sentence isn't offensive, because it sounds like 'folk'. His current thing is that he says he's from Texas, and that we don't recognize his Texas accent. Like I say, he's very funny. He's clearly French. Read more...

What When

Endlessly talking logistics concerning the upcoming switch-over. All three of us guys at the museum. In the afternoon we talked through the entire condition report. Watched D, the new MFA, designing the membership brochure. We decided to have a beer after work, Bastion and Whitney would join us. It was fun, Bastion is French and very funny, the two of them are a striking couple, and both very bright. Still, rain forecast and I needed to stop at Kroger and get weekend supplies, and despite the fact that John Hogan himself had graced us with his company AND was playing and singing tonight, I just had one draft and shagged it on home. Circuitous sentence. I enjoy constructing them, they're an important part of the paragraph or the block or whatever I am right then thinking about a particular piece of text. I left out the comma, I thought about it for nearly an hour. A drink and several smokes, the answer was no comma. The reasoning being that continuity of thought superceded breath. I don't know why, I just stuck it in, and now I take it out, fucking commas can mess with your brain. I have independent evidence. Heaven forbid music was the cause of it all. The collapse of civilizational society. Everyone seems to be listening to something all the time. I don't get it. Not listening is so much better, a large percentage of what I hear is bugs and birds. Read more...

Iteration

I see myself on other people's screens, can't help but notice, these people are reading me. I'm just a janitor but I'm ok. Sara called with a janitor story that made the news, an immigrant that didn't speak English, got a job at Columbia University, night shift, and eventually a degree, in Classics. D got his MFA, thank god that's over, and is very tired. Being physically exhausted is a part, it seems, of the process. Any given week, a couple of days, I'm exhausted, when I can't sleep, and get up to write a couple of more lines, and that leads to several hours of serious contemplation about the human condition. Not that I expect a degree. At a certain point, nothing matters. Boone Coleman died, he owned most of the fertile bottoms in this area of the floodplain, and his heirs, all rich, don't see the need to work so hard. Some of the soybean fields are laying fallow. Which is cool, laying fallow. Especially in this one case, where an entire field, it must be twenty acres, is gone to wild mustard. You'd have to see this to believe it. The background, what you can see of it, is dark green (spring, the word green doesn't mean much) and the flush of yellow blossoms is off the scale. Really off the scale. Yellow to the tenth degree. It's a flood, an overwhelming avalanche. Not unlike that first acid sunrise. I just remembered that. I was on Cape Cod and someone, I don't remember who, sent me a drug that wasn't illegal at the time, and the sunrise, over the bay, was spectacular. Yellow is not my favorite color, blue is, but an entire field of yellow is something else. Read more...

By Extension

Something fairly painful. Like maybe you'd barked your shin on the edge of a bookcase, going out to pee, or stubbed your toe. Whether or not to drop a comma doesn't seem like a big deal. Coming out of Cincy, to the east, there's a diner I like, where you can get a good bowl of soup, and fried pickles. I stop there, whenever I pick up artwork, because the owner's daughter is a raving beauty and the soup is really good. Like something you'd fix for relatives. Chicken and noodles on mashed potatoes. A gravy to die for. Usually people die for better reasons, but a perfect gravy might be reason enough. Dawns on a beautiful day, severe clear, nearing full leaf-out, even the black walnut. I must have planted 100 of them in Missip. Their roots release a broad-leaf herbicide, to protect their mineral rights, so a stand of them is very park-like. In an old pasture I didn't need any more I planted 1000 yellow pines, not loblolly, and I'd like to see those today. I've planted trees everywhere I've lived, and it would be an interesting road trip, to visit them, see what survived. I generally add the extra comma, because I hear all this in a spoken voice, and now that I don't use line breaks as a form of punctuation, I add them for the speaking voice. Letting the line wrap was a great liberation for me, I didn't have to be so prissy anymore (just me I'm talking about) and I could build blocks of text. Tutored by one of the great minimalist, in language, of this generation, who offed himself, on my watch, and left behind five books, of which I hold the manuscript copies. I didn't ask to be put in this position. One of those guides had climbed Everest four times that year, talk about a record. A matter of course. Achieving the summit is a big deal, but maybe not, one Sherpa has done it over twenty times. Read more...

Survival Training

I have a problem with stupid people, I don't want to be around them. They bore me, and I want to shoot myself rather than talk to them; but you'll be in line somewhere, or waiting for someone, and find yourself talking to a person who uses words that don't exist. Conjugates verbs in strange ways. My first thought is to strike them with a blunt force object, a baseball bat or a bowling ball, but I usually just talk about the weather, whatever safe subject I can find, and stare straight ahead, as if I was deranged. People usually leave me alone. I've only ever been in two fights, the first I went down quickly, the second I broke his arm with a 2x4. But stupid people drive me over the edge. I like good conversation. Spent all morning and into the lunch hour with the elevator people. An interesting group, the boss of the company that got the contract, the boss of the security company that has to upgrade things that have to upgraded (since we'll no longer be grand-fathered), the state elevator inspector, and a board member who had recently installed an elevator using all of these same people. So the inspector, a woman, was telling everybody else what needed to upgraded, and to what level. Interesting, everybody taking notes. There are seven things that have to be done before the elevator guys can start, the parts are eight weeks out, the work itself will take six weeks. We have a window to do this in September and October, get May and June out of the way first. The high school show comes down tomorrow, and I have to cut a lot more cardboard, to pack the folk art show. Sharee had a reception and presentation in the theater, with finger food and punch, the back hallway is trashed, but it's not a big deal. There's another single mom working-for-food-stamps person that's taking care of the bathrooms and the floors. I don't like her mopping technique, but who am I to criticize, we're talking mopping, I don't know whether to be happy or sad. That I'd raised mopping to a new level, the Modified Chevron had become an issue. I steer back from this. Whatever praise. You know it's a good stroke, you can feel it in your wrists. Just saying. I ordered several books today, then got a couple in the mail, and I don't know where I can start another pile. All the spaces are filled. Make a note to congratulate yourself. What you achieved, and so on. I put no store in anything that can't carry the weight, check my record on this, but there's no room for another pile. Read more...

Never Nothing

If you're attuned to sound at all, any change is enough to wake you from what had seemed a solid sleep. With the windows open, I'd fallen into the insect drone of pre-dawn, when an isolated whip-poor-will got very close and it was like a bugle in my ear. I shut the window and turned on the radio. The dew was dripping from the upper roof onto the lower, and that provided a staccato rhythm. Drown out whatever. Sometimes the natural world is just too much. When was it, the other day, I was walking over to Kroger to get cream for our coffee, and the blackbirds were everywhere, singing the second part of the common wolf-whistle. I had to laugh, but I didn't want to appear an idiot, so I almost choked to death. I can count without conscious thought, 117 repetitions before that fucking bird flies away. Time divided by iteration. I could go crazy, but it's easier to crank up The Allman Brothers and lose track of whatever it was I was thinking about, the way a particular painter portrayed light. I'm thinking Rembrandt here, you can imagine whoever you please, Vermeer, even Van Gogh. Receptionist was a no-show and I had some things I wanted to look up in the library, so I sat at the desk. Rereading Michael Gruber's "The Forgery Of Venus", which is a great book, and I wanted to read about and look at pictures by Velazquez, ditto with Canaletto (who had a lovely written hand) because he painted so many bridges in his pictures. I love bridges. In Venice, of course, but also when he spent time in England. Finally got a little book about Teosinte, the wild grass that became corn. So my reading is rampant and eclectic, which is how I like it. One of Canaletto's bridges is held together with a hog-chain system very much like what was used on steamboats. Steamboats had a lot of rigging, damping the vibration. Canaletto is not much for capriccio, which in painting circles is 'made up stuff', he pretty much painted what he saw; the views are still, in some cases, essentially the same, and he is the consummate draftsman of architecture. You could recreate buildings from his paintings, down to the ornamental detail. Velazquez is often miraculous. The "Rokeby Venus" blows my mind. Spain was so deeply Catholic, that you didn't do nudes. But he'd spent some time in Italy, and there were all those nude statues, and there were models willing to pose. Read more...

Going On

Power was out most of the night, woke me when it came back on about four this morning, but I just rolled over and went back to sleep. Big rains over night, but the driveway was fine this morning, and into town in time to shave and clean up. TR had the Cape Kids in the morning, then had to take his Mom to the doctor; Pegi left early, to go to a conference with Sharee. I puttered around. Cleaned the theater. The piano tuner, Jerry, came in, looking for some of the hard rubber dampeners he uses on adjacent strings when he's tuning; and his glasses, which he was convinced he had left somewhere on the property. We searched for an hour. Unless something is going on, I usually just read from four until five. D and I learned years ago not to deal with art after four in the afternoon, you get sloppy. We break the rule all the time, but, as the staff reference librarian, there's a fair amount of work-related literature I need to read. There's a lot of crossover stuff, in addition: almost always something that I started reading about at the museum, usually a show that's long dead and gone, that I continue to have an interest in. I usually read this part of my reading on Saturday or Sunday morning, at home. Over an omelet, I could teach a good art history class. About what I like, I can be quite lucid (about what I don't like, I can be quite lucid), I can talk about product, and method, in equal degree. Which is a thing, you know, a divine intervention, I'm just looking at some pretty flowers. Fuck a bunch of history. Bonnie Raitt, "I've put them all behind... it's been you, right down the line." I'm listening to these Swedish sisters singing perfect California English. It's weird, nuanced, held together by a drummer, and the harmonies. It's like Woody singing about the dust bowl. And those Dolly Parton notes. I have Goya on my knee. I'm looking at the most difficult of the paintings. He was over the edge, Balthus was, sweet crazy Medi, all of the artists I've ever known. A tendency toward the extreme. Not that they were making a point, so much as they were saying something about the way things were. I trust the narrative, when it's given free reign. Most of my friends are crazy. In a recent survey I was judged the winner in a survey of a person having strange friends. I won. And I didn't even enter. Read more...

Specific Detail

I was asleep. You can't really fault someone for dreaming. Horses cutting caracoles. They woke me. I wanted to get up and go write, as I've been doing lately, but I fell back asleep. Another dream, involving that luscious Madonna. Finally did get up, brewed a double espresso, made an three-egg omelet with cheese and onions (caramelized), slab of toast with horseradish jam. Have to run the AC for Black Dell and there's a harmonic set up between it and the fridge, compressor music, it sounds a lot like church music and isn't half bad. Lounge around all day, listening to that, reading art criticism. Couldn't get started writing, so I took a walk out the old logging road. Blackberry blossoms are raining off and the fruit is forming, a couple more good rains, there'll be gallons of them around the house and along the driveway. Blackberry harvest is announced by seeing B walking up or down the driveway, a gallon milk jug with the top cut off, hanging around his neck, looking every bit like the Japanese Hermit, with a silly smile on his face. He developed a technique of marinating meat, leg of lamb, a whole loin, various wild things his brother traps, that I shamelessly started using, in blackberry juice. It can carry a very heavy spice load, I use three or four varieties of chilies, in excess, but I've learned they mostly cling to the outside, so you control the relative heat by the way you construct a bite. "Constructing Bites" isn't a bad title. Titles, generally, spiral into meaninglessness, sometimes they offer an entry, sometimes they just obscure what's being said. I don't trust titles anymore. I don't trust anything anymore. I never did say anything about anything, my hands are clean. Being obscure is just a way of hiding. There's a long history of this, consider most writing, the visual arts since the 16th century, fetish objects since the beginning of time. We admit collusion, but seldom reveal ourselves. Those small ceramic artifacts I collect, they're just a way of factoring time. Most things are a way of factoring time. Amselm Kiefer's work, by the nature of the materials, is designed to fail. A painting of his, still wet on the floor, fetches a million dollars. The molten lead doesn't adhere, the straw molds, the feathers fall off. Soon, you're left with a blank canvas, which may have been the point. I like his work, actually, if I had a million to throw around. I'd rather hear Jerry Garcia, one last time, if I had my way. Read more...

Exactly So

Yes, Linda dear, it is just the act of observation, and that, only because I slow down enough to see. My powers of observation are nothing special, but I'm rarely in a hurry and that allows more time to study the particular. We've never talked about this, directly, but it is a Zen attitude. Not something I ever approached directly. I sort of fell into it as a matter of circumstance. Your children are born and other people die. Some of them kill themselves. If we use today as an example: I'm looking at the Munch book and Mac emails, Sara calls, you make a comment (the embedded Linda) it's overwhelming, really, if you just pay attention. I'll make this as personable as possible, what used to be called a letter, where you expressed some aspect of yourself to another. I'm having trouble with commas again. I have to get up in the night to pee and I often can't get back to sleep. I'm writing more and reading myself less because I can't install a new printer because the CD port on my black Dell is dead. It's like that, or something. I like writing you directly. Like I say, I fell into it. How many people do you know could demand an explication. I know five, and you, Linda, are one of them. Read more...

Never Did

Didn't lose power, this time, because the front didn't get violent until it was well off to the SE and my power comes in from the NW. Rolling thunder, sheets of lightning, rain in discreet waves. I get back up, roll a smoke, get a drink, and sit in the dark. The thunder woke me, the way sound shakes the house, the base line. I put on Edgar Meyer, the Cello Suites, I'm nothing if not indulgent, and there's something about listening to Bach in the dark, with flashes of lightning, and rolling thunder moving off to the leeward, that leads to an introspection. Call it positive denial or 'need to know' but it's a very real thing. I have this in check. Three moves from now, you'll see how I achieved another stalemate. I rarely win, but I rarely lose, it's just something I learned to do. You could argue it was something I smoked, or drank, or otherwise ingested, but I hate to lose and I'm never proud of winning. Winning is always losing. Consider the odds. Not unlike something you'd imagine, once in a blue moon, when things were perfectly clear, a rare occasion, but something that occurs, now and again, but I could have won. I played to a draw only because it drew less attention. It's better to appear slightly stupid, a more believable character, than to always be the winner. I was staff today. TR at the desk. My phone was out at home, so I logged onto AOL to check my mail. I have the Messer book on Munch open to the full-page colorplate of "Madonna", there are a lot of them, this is the one that's at the Munch-museet in Oslo; and I get an email from Mac wondering if I'd seen Munch's "Madonna". It's a magnificent painting. Check it out, she's smoking hot, it's the one from 1893-94. Nice coincidence, Mac asking. Read more of Mary's letters, she'd finally had her hysterectomy, and was in the midst of a very long recovery. Boring, but nice little nuggets here and there. C sold 16 paintings at an exhibit (this was 1952) and I know he sold more the 48 the year before. Safe to say they were doing all right, but you wouldn't know it from Mary's whining. I haven't read any fiction in a while, which is strange for me, but I've sure been burning through the non-fiction, and because of poets I know, reading a lot of poetry. I'll hear something on NPR (I've always done this but it's become even more time consuming) and I'll make a note, then, later, make an effort to find out about whatever it was. The whole landscape of finding out about something has changed so radically. You can see the roof of my house on Google Earth, my fucking driveway; next they'll have stealth drones that can look in windows, see me pleasuring myself with cookies and milk. Munch painted (not the correct word, because he worked in so many mediums) a lot of vampires, also hob-knobbed with Ibsen and Strindberg, also worked on the edge of nervous collapse. Did break-down, 1908, and there's a great full-length portrait of his shrink. This period, 1880 to 1920, in terms of the art world, engages me completely. Representation was out, physiological insight was in, and expressionism burst onto the scene. Representation had ruled the roost for thousands of years, and suddenly, we had to deal with Van Gogh, and Balthus, for god's sake; the Impressionists, Picasso and Braque hit their stride. A complete shift in the manner of seeing. What is signified. I keep coming back to that. I could explain what I mean, over a pint at the pub, but it's more difficult, in the light of day. It involves both the iconic and the mythic, where you draw the line, and it's not a simple demarcation, but a gray zone between the two. Sara called, at the end of the day, as I was sure she would, and we agreed to work another extra day, the three years D has been pursuing his MFA I worked an extra 120 days, you know, filling in, and I don't begrudge that, I roll him cigarettes, and argue, just to keep the dialog alive. But this whole MFA thing is bullshit, a marker in a senseless game. Read more...

Writing

I was writing very well and then this book of Skip's appears in the mailbox. I swore I wasn't going to start on it until the weekend because I knew it was a black hole. But it's suddenly very hot and I have to run the window AC until the temp inside gets to 81 degrees or my black Dell is very unhappy, jets taking off the deck of a carrier unhappy. Very loud. Samara calls and we talk about fat people fucking, and what a strain that must put on a bed. I can say anything to my daughters, they can no longer be surprised. And finally it's cool enough to write. This book of Skip's is the cat's ass. I peeked, "Sheer Indefinite", you have to own this, he's one of the best writers writing, some of his work stops my heart. After writing I read him for another hour. A man with his hand on the pulse. He plays with language constantly, shocks and surprises. Heady stuff. Museum was a zoo of kinder-garden kids and their handlers most of the day, TR and Klaire (the intern's intern) handled most of it, Pegi and I holed up in our offices. I switched between reading Mary's letters, reading more about Munch and looking at pictures of his work. Strange guy, strange work. In the afternoon I sorted hardware and started a list of things I'd be needing. It's an odd list, but I've done this local show three or four times now, and I know we'll need monofilament line, several kinds of tape, plastic anchors for the drywall, maybe a box of those screws that have a washer pre-attached on the inside of the screw-head. Good for keeping a very light matted drawing from leaping off the wall at a clap of thunder. Monolithic buildings shake, the energy has to go somewhere. This is not a metaphor. My new cubby of an office has no view of the outside world, but I can always tell when a squall line is moving through. I usually walk into Pegi's office, to see what's happening, she has the only 'outside' windows, except for Sara's view of the alley, and base my plans on what I see. Have a draft at the pub, or hurry home, always an issue. I'd rather have a draft, with Juan of the two beauties, but he was either lost at sea or arrested by the FBI, and the storm clouds are threatening. Read more...

Small Stuff

The receptionist was a no-show, and rather than listen to any bitching, I took the desk. Fine by me, I wanted to read about Munch anyway, following last night's sale. First I looked at more Modigliani paintings. Beautiful portraits of Jeanne, his last and truest love, she, though pregnant with his child, committed suicide the day after he died. When people complained about him painting pubic hair, he is said to have responded, "Naturalia non sunt turpia" which teases out as 'Natural things are not bad in themselves'. Hadn't realized Munch worked in so many mediums, there are thousands of lithographs, etchings, block-prints, often studies for or from paintings. Anonymous sent me a link to a good article on pate. There was a recipe for a 'Country Pate' that's very close to the formula that I use. I had to actually look at the calendar, to get my dates straight, because Kim is stopping by for the night of June 4th, on his way to a F1 race in Canada, and I didn't know when I was going to make 4 pounds of pate, but I see I'm penciled in to specifically NOT come in that Saturday, the 9th, when the wedding that fucked the schedule happens. So I can make it then, make a note to get some money from Trish, and bring an extra five gallons of water from town, for the clean-up. I need to make an extra pound, to take to the pub, and I always give B some. And I want some, so maybe I should make six pounds. It wouldn't dirty any more pans. The timing is way better this way, I'll age the batch for five days under pork fat. Not everyone likes this, and I'm not an arbiter of tastes, but the people that like it tend to cluster around the source and gorge. I like it, or I wouldn't make it, mostly on saltines, my medium of choice, with black olives and gherkins. It's good enough to repay the cost of production. In that I have to clean the kitchen afterwards or ants are suddenly a problem: it means that I needed a day, and I have it. But I also promised Sara that I'd make some for the unveiling of the new Carters, which I now see as a separate operation. A small batch I can make with one cast iron skillet, a bowl, and the blender. Amazing restraint, not using another comma, which as Flaubert famously said, could easily take up a day; empowers me, in an odd way, to take up a day making pate. Funny, how things play out. I'm famous for something most people don't like. Go figure. Read more...

Looking Back

May Day. A sudden stillness. No wind, no rain, but a certain heaviness. The air is saturated. When I go outside to pee, the moisture clings to me. Four in the morning, but I made the mistake of coming fully awake, so I make a pot of coffee and read the Candy Section of "Gravity's Rainbow". It's one of the funniest pieces of writing ever. I remember Mac reading it to a bunch of us, maybe thirty tears ago, and we were all rolling around on the floor. As a Shakespeare scholar, and your run of the mill genius, he read with gusto and precision. Looking back, I've been read to by some of the best. Diana reading that wonderful chapter of the book she wrote about traveling alone, when she visited us in Colorado and we were castrating lambs. Skip and Steven reading poems, sitting around Joe Napora's kitchen table, Harvey reciting Lorca in perfect Spanish, Linda channeling Emily. A good run. I read back, over a couple of pages, because several people mentioned a particular post, and I wondered what the matter was. It was a good page, I see what I was doing, I understand the response; I write a lot of pages. I trust, when a select set of readers call attention to a specific post, that it had popped out for some reason, and I'm always interested in what that reason was. In this case, as is often the case, it was attention to detail. I've gotten good at describing things, not really surprising because I tend to look at things closely, and noticing detail is the name of the game: the stems in an oak leaf do look like the veins on the back of your hand. It's not arrogant, is it? to say you saw this coming? The narrator becomes a character and then there is a narrative. A story. That time Roy took me to a road-house in Cruger, a delta town, with a road-house painted purple. I was the only white person there. The blues were transcendental. As I live and breathe it was a mind-altering experience. Power was out when I got home and a magnificent squall line moved in from the NW, all the weather groups except for snow, earth-shaking thunder and almost enough lightning to read by, hail, sleet, rain, a tremendous display. I could get out, the next morning, yesterday, but the Mackletree was littered with branches and leaves. Early enough for ablutions, made a pot of coffee, served Pegi when she got in, and talked for thirty minutes about human nature. Gathered the trash and hauled it away, stopped by the hardware store for a packet of utility-knife blades. Coverts had blessed me with some cardboard boxes. Upper-end mattresses come in sturdy boxes, triple-walled, double corrugation, and I'll be using a utility knife often, in the coming weeks, cutting shipping panels for the Folk Art show. Lost another page, to a brown out, last night, when the temps climbed over ninety, and everyone turned on their AC. I need to work on a laptop that operates on a battery that I can solar charge or plug in, depending on what's available. Now I'm confused, because it's the next day, and I've lost my thread. Dawn is breaking, and the fucking Whip-O-Wills are going crazy, it's a madhouse outside, frogs and bugs and birds. I have to disassociate myself before I can even make a pot of coffee, it's raucous and intrusive. I should consider a cork-lined room, probably what my friends would call 'protective custody' but I'm not sure that's correct. Protecting who against what. Read more...