PHIL'S WAR

My stepfather Phil served in Korea as a teenager. A kid.
It perhaps has become a cliche to speak of the “Greatest Generation” but he was certainly of that group. For one thing, he almost never spoke about his time in the army. He certainly never, ever talked about combat.

While succeeding generations - including my own, of course - parade the minutiae of their lives in whatever public forums bring the most attention, those of Phil’s generation believed in a kind of stoicism that seems alien to us now. I can’t help but admire this bravery in the face of horror, knowing as I do the much-studied and discussed darker manifestations that could lurk behind the stolid masks.

Early in the last decade he spent several months suffering through illness, countless hospital stays, surgery - to remove more than half of his colon. He came close to death. Weeks went by with him nearly unconscious, suffering infections, an NG tube up his nose and down his esophagus, his mouth and throat raw and irritated.

He had survived Korea but a young surgeon nearly killed him by planning an unwise operation to address a bad infection. Luckily, the surgery didn’t happen and Phil was transferred to a hospital in Cincinnati and many more weeks later managed to make it home alive. In the aftermath of all of this trauma, however, he became depressed. Who wouldn’t? This also lifted gradually.

It was some time during the year that followed that I paid my mom and Phil a visit and a surprise unfolded quite suddenly. Phil went into another room and returned with a small box. He handed the box to me and told me that he would answer any questions I had about the Korean War. The box contained only a small collection of things. Many were Korean artifacts taken off of dead soldiers, one soldier’s horribly distorted body frozen forever in two rather disturbing photographs. One photograph showed the deceased’s family, the human face of those who suffer from the loss of even one soldier.

I asked only a few questions.

Years later when Phil was back in the hospital, at the beginning of the end, he regaled my then girlfriend and I (she a nurse in that place) with some surprisingly bawdy tales of his adventures with a buddy on leave in Japan. This was before the second tour, before his mother died in a car crash that he survived, before Korea and his initiation into the real Hell of humanity. Not the phony Hell that religious zealots invented to keep us all in line, but the Hell that we make out of our own unwillingness to get along with each other.

Table Talk

About five or six years ago, a friend and former professor of mine in St. Louis recommended a book in a letter to me. He wrote that this little book, "GUSTON IN TIME: Remembering Philip Guston", was the best book he had ever read about what it means to be a painter. I quickly went out and bought this book and I agreed with my friend Ed.

Feld was originally from Brooklyn but eventually came to Cincinnati to teach at the University of Cincinnati. He was a novelist, poet, teacher and critical thinker.
He died of cancer in 2001.

When Guston, arguably the greatest American painter of the modern era, unveiled a new series of paintings in 1970 at the Marlborough Gallery in New York City - paintings of cartoonish Ku Klux Klan figures riding in old jalopies as opposed to the elegant “abstractions” he had become famous for - critics and friends alike attacked him harshly. Ross Feld wrote a review that spoke positively and insightfully about the new work. Guston wrote him a letter of gratitude and before long a friendship developed.

Last year I was summoned to a house here in Cincinnati to look at a small decorative job. This house belonged to a Dr. Feld. The ringing doorbell woke a young man who ushered me in and then promptly went back upstairs. I noticed a poster for Ross Feld in an adjoining room. Over the living room fireplace was a poster for Guston’s show at the Marlborough Gallery. I took my notes for the job and before leaving I yelled upstairs to the young man. He peeked downstairs at me. I asked if he was any relation to Ross Feld. “He’s my father” was the reply. I expressed my condolences and told him what this book had meant to me.

When I returned a couple of weeks later for the work, I met Feld’s widow. I told her about my experience with her late husband’s book and about my love for Guston’s art. She kindly listened and then proceeded to tell me a few wonderful tales about visiting the Gustons in Woodstock on many occasions. The Felds were much younger than the Gustons.

After wonderful meals - Guston loved to cook and loved food like he loved alcohol and cigarettes - she and Guston’s wife Musa would leave the two men in the kitchen, where they would talk for hours and hours about art, life, history, philosophy and who knows what else.

I would have loved to have been there.

People Make Art

Seeing people make art for the sheer joy of it is always a pleasurable experience. The critic inside me takes a nap and the tourist takes over, looking and listening and smiling.

I taught college art courses for nearly a dozen years and occasionally someone would show up in class with a natural ability to move into the visual arena, without the hang-ups and pre-conceptions that most beginners bring with them to school.
One summer I had a whole group of such people, and the work they produced brought a thrill to me, both as an artist and a teacher.

My daughter made extraordinary drawings and paintings as a toddler. Most little children have this innate talent. Many of my daughter’s paintings were visionary and she knew exactly what she was painting. As she grew - past kindergarten age - she increasingly felt the need to have her renderings “look Real”. With this came the frustration of limited drawing skills and eventually the cessation of this activity entirely.

It reminded me of the story of Adam and Eve and the birth of self-consciousness.

At the sidewalk painting festival, my favorite paintings were the one comprised of many squares filled with drawings /paintings by youngsters, and the painted cars. What better use for a car than to paint it. Some day, hopefully, all cars will be turned into art.....and
recycled scrap.

Small Wonders

To see my mom, on the eve of her 81st birthday, holding my niece's nearly newborn son is one of those brief but wonderful moments that arise suddenly out of nowhere and seem to embody all of life in a little vignette of wonderfulness. And like dinner on a Friday night, it is as quickly over as the dimming daylight of the Indian Summer.

The Mystery of History

At the renovated Memorial Hall in downtown Cincinnati this past Sunday,
Bill Clinton made a brief appearance in support of the Senatorial candidacy of Lee Fisher.

When seeing someone like Clinton in person, the weight of history and memory and celebrity and notoriety converge into a heightened moment of shared excitement.

He was able, in a few minutes, to convey concisely and clearly what the midterm election is all about. That is his gift - love him or hate him. It was a pleasure to hear the penultimate “player” of this game speaking so plainly, using football metaphors in a way that sounded somehow not corny, but, rather, exactly to the point.

Politics has been described as “blood sport”. It is a game of power and one-upmanship and ego and bravado blended into a deadly gumbo whose main ingredient is money. Oh, yes, and public service.

Whatever we may think about politics, the laws and amendments that pour forth from Washington, D.C. have real world consequences for citizens from all kinds of backgrounds. They can cause people's lives to improve, to stagnate, or to suffer. They can cause young members of this country to go into harm’s way and possibly die for just or for phony reasons. Politics is a game of very high stakes and consequences for Americans like my teenage daughter, who have so much living to do in the future that I pray is theirs to have.

CAR pt.4

The Community College across the street decided to do construction work on their main parking lot this week, the first week of primary classes. So the streets around me are crammed with traffic and honking horns and cars are parking as far as the eye can see.

Naturally, there was a wreck. Yesterday morning. No one was hurt but traffic was tied up in both directions on Ludlow Avenue.

I have a glorious history of car wrecks. One day last winter I was desperately in search of someone to fix a bad tire, on a cold, gray, snowy winter late afternoon. I turned left into a mechanics shop and became transfixed by the apparent lack of humans or lights on there. Then: the thing, the seconds, the harsh moment of realization that you have truly screwed up as you witness the pliability of time and perception. The impact happens as if in a dream and there is a nano-second of pause before you realize that this is, in fact, really happening.

I slammed into the left front fender panel of a young girl’s car. She went off the road and over a street sign which wedged itself between the white snow and the underside of her white vehicle. I got out and apologized profusely. She looked shocked. She called her boyfriend who she was to pick up down the street at the community college. The cops came. Before I left I handed her a twenty dollar bill and asked her to please go have dinner on me. I told her again how sorry I was for inflicting this on her a week before Christmas. She was unhurt. My bumper was smashed.

Two weeks later while driving my daughter and her friend to her mom’s house, I hit a intense patch of ice and slid into a fire hydrant, knocking the damn thing clean over.
Chloe’s friend Lily started to laugh and I squelched that immediately. I looked around the snow covered neighborhood and decided to move on. I parked in my ex-wife’s driveway while the girls went in to retrieve something. There was a knock on my window. I looked out to see a local policeman staring at me. I lowered the window.
“Knock something over?” he asked me. "Yeah, I was just trying to call the police," I lied.
He told me to report it to my insurance company and left smiling. The ice, the ice got me
off the hook.

The H Man

As a young kid I loved monsters and scary things in general, especially the old black & white Universal films and the then-current wave of movies arising from expanding fears of aliens and nuclear weapons. The Day The Earth Stood Still was the best of the lot and it remains today as potent as ever.
Recently I watched a film that had also etched itself into my young memory as one of the more terrifying and disturbing science-fiction movies. It turned out to be terrifyingly boring. A dumb script, poor pacing and wooden acting gave me another of those realizations that youthful memory is often not merely softened but also distorted by the passage of time.

Still, there is something wonderful about The H Man, a Japanese film released in 1958. It’s burnished colors surprised me because I remembered it being in black and white (which may have been simply due to the fact that color had not yet made its entrance into TV-land). It looks like many of the movies of the period filmed in Technicolor. The nightclub scenes are almost a parody of Las Vegas at the time: risque dancers and a jazz band and gangsters with greasy hair and smirks behind their cigarette smoke.

This film was made just over a decade after the United States had dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan. And yet here we have American style ruling everything and monsters, created from sailors exposed to intense radiation, roaming the streets and sewers and melting anyone they come into contact with.

It’s all very odd and, in spite of its campiness, quite intriguing.

PORCH

In this small place that I call my home, I’m still able to open a door and walk
into a screened-in room that looks out over trees and a bit of yard. There I can carry a cup of coffee or something stronger and sit for a moment in a transitional space, between inside and outside. When the weather is right, a slight breeze becomes icing on the cake, a delightful, transcendental bonus.

The steady rise of our automobile culture chased away front porches, which naturally invite neighborly conversation, gossip, glances, snooping, awareness.
The rear screened-in porch is an extension of the home into the outside but not necessarily into the neighborhood - in the sense of belonging.

Still, it’s a wonderful refuge (when the weather isn’t as hellish as it was the summer of 2010). Sitting in the porch late at night the darkness becomes an ocean in which we float, our eyes gradually adjusting to the expanding swell of a different, nearly monochromatic world. The songs of insects washes over everything, interrupted by the occasional siren or the hum of distant traffic.

In the morning this porch is the welcome face of a new day.

Until the cold settles in.

More Fun Facts

More fun facts:
The United States accounts for 41% of the arms sales agreements in the world. Russia comes in second with 17%.

“In 2003, more than half of the top 25 recipients of U.S. arms transfers in the developing world (13 of 25) were defined as undemocratic by the U.S. State Department’s Human Rights Report: in the sense that "citizens do not have the right to change their own government" or that right was seriously abridged. These 13 nations received over $2.7 billion in U.S. arms transfers under the Foreign Military Sales and Commercial Sales programs in 2003, with the top recipients including Saudi Arabia ($1.1 billion), Egypt ($1.0 billion), Kuwait ($153 million), the United Arab Emirates ($110 million) and Uzbekistan ($33 million).
When countries designated by the State Department’s Human Rights Report to have poor human rights records or serious patterns of abuse are factored in, 20 of the top 25 U.S. arms clients in the developing world in 2003-- a full 80%-- were either undemocratic regimes or governments with records of major human rights abuses.”
- World Policy Institute Report: U.S. Weapons At War 2005

666

Ok, here’s a fun memory.
I can remember quite explicitly the first time that a true awareness of Death and its consequences came upon me.

I was about ten or eleven years old and riding in the back seat of my mom’s car.
It was early evening and warm outside. I was slumped down on the seat, almost reclining ( who wore seat belts then....?), when a broad and deeply personal thought took over my entire being.

The thought was: “When we die our life ends and we never come back. Never. Never.”.

The notion of dying and time rolling over and over and yet we remain forever dead and gone....played in my head as the car slowly rolled down a hill.

This hill was in Middletown, my childhood home. The thought was profound and chilling.

I found this hill on Google Maps. The address that enabled me to get the best view of where this incident took place was: 666 Aberdeen Drive. That’s right -
666.