2011

2011.
Well, peace on earth and someone leave me a will.
Yeah.
Let’s gather up some sheaves and paint the town red!
I say to thee: don’t mind the economy....after all, we are mostly water.
They say we come from stars after all.

2011.
Global warm my heart, baby.
Let’s all jump on the Peace Train.
Fireworks and nothing works like love.
Oh, yes, it’s a long road to Coronado.

2011.
New Year.
New.
Year.
Hey, baby.
I hear thunder!

Why It's Hard to Laugh During the Holidays

Every year I tell myself that next year I will go away for the holidays. Go where?
Well, who knows? But every year I threaten this....telling the wind all about it.

I’ve been doing this for decades. Many people love the holidays and I say: bless their little hearts. Children love the holidays and I was once one of ‘em. I loved them too then.

Here’s what I did after coming home on Christmas eve from a family get-together: I watched Werner Herzog’s “My Son My Son What Have Ye Done”. It’s about a guy’s descent into madness as he practices the lead part of Orestes in an ancient Greek drama. Orestes kills his mother, and the movie character imitates this and uses his uncle’s sword on his mother.
This is fun holiday fare. Hey, I’m a movie buff.

Some of us in the middle of the world, especially Librans (if you believe that stuff), seek balance. When confronted with too much saccharin sentiment, we (me) reach for the opposite. Hence the Herzog.

Most people don’t respond well to this. It spoils their enjoyment of the endless festivities. They see the one (me) injecting cynicism, black humor, sarcasm, or any other manifestation of “darkness” as a spoiler or a buzz-killer.

I suppose I’ve gotten better - or is it quieter - during this time. When my daughter was young it was a wonderful thrill to witness her excitement, to see her open presents. Now she’s a teenager. Enough said.

So I watch my film alone and when I am with others I smile and enjoy myself.
I feel the love and the happiness that we are alive. Then I go home and get all
snuggly warm in bed and open “The Last Night of the Earth Poems” by Bukowski.

CHRISTMAS

Somebody help me, please. No, on second thought: when it comes to religion there is no help for me. I don’t get it. I’m no atheist. But neither do I believe the prevailing myths.

Perhaps even more than politics, religion brings out the best and worst in people.
The hypocrisy and violence perpetrated in the name of religion is well documented and very much alive all around us. The sincere charity and caring and healing done by religious people is also a reality, past and present.

Tradition is important. However, when tradition blinds one to the present.....then what? What do we do? When tradition causes one to act in ways that directly contradict some of the tenets of that same tradition.....what then?

What would Jesus say if he was alive today? Would he be horrified at the ways he has been turned into a celebrity of faith or used for shallow political advantage?

What is Christmas, exactly? I’ve never quite understood. I still don’t. The obvious crassness of the buying/shopping frenzy is nothing new. But what is it? Jesus was a mystery man. From what I have seen and read, nearly everything known about him is apocryphal. The history of the holiday is as varied as history itself and succeeding generations have changed and altered its significance. The date itself may have to do with the winter solstice or the supposed moment of Jesus’ conception or many other ideas put forth over the centuries.

I do love the lights and the trees and seeing children have fun.

I suppose that Christmas for me is seeing an old and close friend successfully donate one of her kidney’s to her ailing daughter this past weekend.

Christmas is helping a client and now friend - who is fighting breast cancer - hang up some sparkling things last night(including two cherubs I re-painted gold) in her glittering living room, drinking some wine and trying to make her laugh, and steering the conversation away from the side of her that is tinged with old-fashioned racist Republicanism. Christmas, I imagine, is seeing her as a person who is suffering and who needs to enjoy life......as we all do.

Silent Snow

Silent snow.
This year it has come earlier and more frequently than in recent years. It’s not
even the official start of winter yet.
The nincompoops will point to this as a refutation of Global Warming. They always seem to be the least well-informed among us and incapable of even noticing the ways in which the weather has already begun to behave oddly.

Silent snow.
I do love snow but I hate to drive my car in it.
One cannot deny its beauty, softness, strangeness and the wonderful way that it
dulls colors and creates a seemingly monochromatic environment.

I always loved Pieter Brueghel’s Hunters in the Snow.
It is a perfect image of a snowy winter world.
We haven’t changed. Humans haven’t changed. Brueghel captured our follies and misdeeds and loves and joys and labors and laziness and cruelty.
He did this in the sixteenth-century.

Silent snow.
Students wait for the bus as they do everyday. I peer down on them from across the street.
Their dark forms against the white ground recall Brueghel’s masterpiece. I wonder who they are, where they live, who their friends and family and loves are. Most, but not all, are quite young. They are on a quest. They are
hunters in their own right.
Hunting is in our DNA.
Not always....for food.

Jan & Joe

Jan: Why do men have so much trouble with commitment?

Joe: Who has trouble?



Jan: A lot of men do!

Joe: How many is “a lot”?

Jan: Are you trying to irritate me?

Joe: No. I just think it’s an unfair question. You can’t simply lump men together
into this big blob.

Jan: I never said that men are a blob.

Joe: Why can’t women accept their age?

Jan: What!?

Joe: See? It’s annoying to be lumped together with countless others.

Jan: I was just saying that a lot of men find it difficult to commit to one person
and they have the wandering eye.

Joe: You never look at other men?

Jan: Sometimes.

Joe: See!?

Jan: I look at Chanel handbags but I don’t pursue the purchase of one.

Joe: I’m quite faithful my dear.

Jan: I know you are.

MUSIC

I learned guitar from my brother who was four years older than me. I traded a trumpet for my first guitar. I must have been about fourteen. I had been taking piano lessons since I was eleven but this was a truly golden era in the evolution of rock-and-roll and I was all for it.

One time I auditioned at a local bar, in the middle of the world in Middletown, Ohio. It was called Dana’s. I was shy, insecure and had a lousy voice. Other than that I had a lot going for me. I played some Neil Young songs and a rarely played Rolling Stones song called “No Expectations”.

During the second song, I remember seeing the owner, Dana, presumably the one who was supposed to be listening to my audition, walk outside. He remained there for the rest of my short set. I finished, packed up and left and that was that.

I have continued to compose and play music for over forty years now. One discards illusions about where and when and how and why and how much.......as the years pile on. It’s enough to do something that you love. My fifteen-year-old daughter has introduced me to an entirely new generation of musicians who make wonderful recordings, full of life and poetry and love - far from the bland, annoying realm of popular radio and, especially, away from the incessant repetition of once good or even great songs now turned sour from endless playing day after day, decade after decade and mutated into the wretched “Classic Rock”.

Music, like painting, is a search, a dance, a walk uphill, a struggle with better angels. It is art and art slips easily out of the grasp of those who would rigidly define and limit its possibilities.

Infrastructure

Many of us endure and/or complain about the constant roadwork that surrounds us when we endeavor to bridge two separate locations in our motor vehicles. It’s frustrating to us because we have become accustomed to speed and efficiency in all aspects of our lives. We’re impatient. We hate the delays.

The road pictured above was worked on for many, many months. A new bridge was constructed farther down the hill. Yet - like many roads I have noticed lately - it has been revisited by the road crews. The newly paved black top has been dug up, the orange cones set in place again, the heavy equipment hauled back into place. Is this a problem stemming from the age of the pipes underneath? Is it poor workmanship? Who knows? The temperature is now about 50 degrees colder than it was when these guys finished last month. It doesn’t look like too much fun out there.

Way back in the twentieth century I owned a house for a few years, here in Cincinnati. The antiquated sewer system beneath the street my house sat on was dug up and repaired three years in a row. Completely black topped and then torn up again. We in the neighborhood started an annual picnic in August that we named Sewerfest. It seemed better to find humor in the situation rather than defeat and despair.

America’s infrastructure is aging and crumbling and, like the aging and crumbling empire that we seem Hell-bent on becoming, all signs point to increasing numbers of road-blocks, closed lanes, heavy machinery, traffic delays. The car has changed our social reality over the last century and now it lumbers on as a convenient but out-dated mode of transportation and one that increasingly makes
the trade-off much less easy to take.

fall

the first snow fall
it’s no longer fall
i hope she doesn’t fall
when she walks her dog

the flakes fall
and my memories fall
and the wishes fall
like ice crystals

time for lunch
and coffee

it’s really winter

again