1954

I was born in 1954 and I remain transfixed by the 1950’s in America. I get the feeling that I’m not alone in this fascination. What the hell is it?

In this photo I’m posting I am so dapper and the furniture surrounding me is completely au courant for the time. I have that marble table in my living room today. It’s completely cool. 

I try to fathom my obsession with things of the era, like Peter Gunn, New York painters of the 50’s, jazz of the era, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Route 66, Marilyn, Tennessee, Jack.......it goes on and on. My hindsight sees an explosive innocence fused with revolutionary fever and poetic intelligence raised on the streets of New York City.

In my little Middletown it was the drip, drip, drip down of culture causing my mom to put that tie on me, to buy a white leather couch and Danish chair and sleek, minimal marble coffee table. I love it all.

The snobs who prefer the centers of culture do not understand that the universe vibrates in large bands of experimentation and accumulation and transformation and that even in the hinterland of America the bee-bop bing-bang of earthly metamorphosis arises in ways unexpected and unknowable.

Hard Times

The rich get richer and...well, ain't the story always the same, in different eras and places and among different kinds of people?
The struggles of the long-suffering and the newly-made poor aren't stories for entertainment or validation of national greatness. It's tough out there. Maybe it always has been.
The top guys at Goldman-Sachs and Fannie Mae made hundreds of millions of dollars in personal profits by devising schemes they knew would probably ruin the lives of many - many people who only wanted to fulfill a dream of owning their own home. These guys remain unpunished and in fact retain their seats at the table of government regulators.
I spend 50 bucks at the grocery store and come home with little to show for it and I wonder how my daughter will make it out there.
I sometimes work for millionaires who quibble over the price of my work, even though it pales in comparison to other baubles - like the $5000.00 built-in coffee maker.
Recession or Depression or Compression or Transgression...it's tough out there.


photos by Ben Shann and Dorothea Lange

BUSY!

Busy, so busy, phone, return number, call back, busy, call, ring, message......i'm busy, will call back, leave number call busy number, return, where?
Busy, no money but busy, return huh? can't reach phone who called, what?
Busy, still busy, oh forgot to call you sorry was busy, hmmm? say, how busy it is yes now I am in the midst of.............................................................................................

FREEDOM

In high school I discovered the writings of Jiddu Krishnamurti. I’m thinking now of his book titled Freedom From the Known. Great title. I haven’t read his work much in the past twenty-five years but his influence has never waned.

Lately I’ve been doing small paintings whose primary subject is a house image.

I’m working in acrylic now, after decades using oils. I know how to use them fluently now and they suit my need for hyper-activity - speed painting. I don’t think it over, don’t ponder, peruse, wonder, worry, meditate. None of it! I paint. That’s it.  

I have no agenda and don’t care about what others may think. More than anything I’ve done in a while these paintings seem to be about: freedom.

To be free from the known is to glide along the pathways of existence without the burden of thinking about the experience. Thought thinks thought and we get wrapped up in the sticky web of thought. It takes a certain kind of trust to get through; trust that your accumulated knowledge (and wisdom?) will present itself without the need for thinking into it.

This kind of freedom is such joy. It is like flying.

That doesn’t mean that it is all positive, wonderful, smiling Buddha-stillness. The dark blob in these paintings is the ever-present Negative, Death, Misfortune, Pain, Sadness....that accompanies all of life by necessity. I welcome it!! Don’t give me cutesy-pootsie!! There is no state of utter Happiness devoid of Suffering. That is fantasy. 

Guest Writer: Poet Edward Grayson

WORD

Somehow my word 

changes meaning

from mind to hand

to another

brain.

Solid and easy thoughts

get tilted, adjusted,

twisted and

distorted

along this pathway.

Somehow

my word mutates,

escalates

then explodes

uncontrollably 

in the reception.

Here

my word

remains the same 

as

always.

There

it is 

no

longer

even my

word.


Edward Grayson is the author of Plane Field Sightings.

Star of Remembrance

For the past four or five months or at least for a helluva long time around here, the sky has been gray, cloudy, often raining. We are all sunlight deprived. Today it is in the mid 60’s with a crystal-clear blue sky.

So, I come home and go for a walk. Not far up the hill I decide to walk next to a Jewish cemetery that rests on a curved hillside. I notice a gravestone that - for some reason - I have not noticed before. 

It has a name: “Star of Remembrance”. A loosely drawn sketch of a child holding a doll is engraved in the stone accompanied by these words:

“In memory of the 1,500,000 Jewish children who were murdered during the Holocaust”.

The pure blue sky could hardly be bluer. The wind is warmish and soft. I am so happy to be out in the sun and walking. I am so glad that it is not raining. But here I stop and I am drawn into this sweet little headstone, memorializing something so hugely monstrous as to be incomprehensible. 

Monsters do not exist in hidden or alien worlds or in the waters of deep lakes....they live among us. Humans become monsters. Humans may never stop murdering each other. Nature gives us the ability to commit murder but also the intelligence to think about our actions. The insects do not seem to have this consciousness. We do.

When children are murdered the entire world shrinks in size and everything is diminished even more than when grownups are killed by other grownups.

This little carved slab was dedicated on the anniversary of Kristallnacht in 1993.

1, 500,000 little souls are remembered below the bluest of skies in the season of rebirth and regeneration.

BOOKS

Libraries are sacred institutions and when their budgets get cut I get riled. I’ve been told that the Cincinnati library is one of the best in the nation and not too long ago was considered by some to be the best. Recently they have reduced the amount of books on shelves in the main library here, for whatever reason. There is a lot more empty space everywhere. Space for chairs, tables, plants....whatever. I don’t understand this but who am I to know what’s behind it. I still love libraries.

A public building devoted to the storage and dissemination of knowledge - what could be better than that?

Books have power. Lately, the electronic books have been elbowing their way into the world, bit by bit. I understand their convenience and don’t feel too threatened by their arrival. I believe that the printed book will survive and exist side-by-side with it’s digital cousin. If this turns out to be false and printed books go the way of the typewriter, then the world will be a sadder place for it but life will go on.

Someone gave me an old, cheap bookcase recently and I painted it and placed it in the corner of my living room. I brought books in from my bedroom and there - instantly - my place was transformed. There in the corner is a new friend, a warm and familiar pal of seemingly unlimited learning and information and emotion.

This winter I finally discovered Carson McCullers. I knew of her writing but for some odd reason I never took up that exploration. Once I read a collection of her short stories (The Ballad of the Sad Cafe and other stories) I had to keep going, on to The Heart is a Lonely Hunter  and Reflections in a Golden Eye. Her musical cadence and often odd structure and characterization point to an enormous poetic gift for truly magical storytelling. Today’s New York Times has an article about musical artist Suzanne Vega and her new play devoted to McCullers. I don’t know why I am so late to the party but isn’t it wonderful to know that the world is endlessly filled with stuff to discover, to enjoy, to take inward and outward  

on the ceaseless journey of living.