Illusions

One of the books that my father checked out from the library using my name was Illusions by Richard Bach. I learned that one pretty fast and it wasn’t as challenging as Ulysses was but I felt like since it was so easy it must not have meant so much. That’s obviously not true.

I breezed through that book not because it was easy but because I was a kid and I didn’t think anything it talked about was impossible. I wasn’t tainted or jaded as we become when we’re older and for me the idea of vaporizing clouds was an easy one to accept. Flying too for that matter.

Decades have passed since then and I’ve read that book plenty and I recently reread it just again. I was struck by how much I took the book to heart and how it absolutely shaped me as a person and defined a great deal about what I think and have thought since I was a small child.

I’m not sure if you’ve ever read anything by Richard Bach and I’m sure his work isn’t monumental literature but I am also sure that his work is important. To me it is, at least, and that’s enough. The opening passage from Illusions is just great and I loved the grease-stained pages reproduced for the thing and it looked like a real journal to me. The story of the little creatures that cling to the rocks is still an important idea that I’ve never not held in very high esteem and I figure it’s nice to post it here for you and for later.

“Once there lived a village of creatures along the bottom of a great crystal river. The current of the river swept silently over them all–young and old, rich and poor, good and evil, the current going its own way, knowing only its own crystal self.

Each creature in its own manner clung tightly to the twigs and rocks of the river bottom, for clinging was their way of life, and resisting the current what each had learned from birth. But one creature said at last, “I am tired of clinging. Though I cannot see it with my eyes, I trust that the current knows where it is going. I shall let go, and let it take me where it will. Clinging, I shall die of boredom.”

The other creatures laughed and said, “Fool! Let go, and that current you worship will throw you tumbled and smashed across the rocks and you will die quicker than boredom!” But the one heeded them not, and taking a breath did let go, and at once was tumbled and smashed by the current across the rocks.

Yet in time, as the creature refused to cling again, the current lifted him free from the bottom, and he was bruised and hurt no more. And the creatures downstream, to whom he was a stranger, cried, “See a miracle! A creature like ourselves, yet he flies! See the Messiah, come to save us all!”

And the one carried in the current said, “I am no more Messiah than you. The river delights to lift us free, if only we dare let go. Our true work is this voyage, this adventure.” But they cried the more, “Savior!” all the while clinging to the rocks, and when they looked again he was gone, and they were left alone making legends of a Savior.”

It’s simple, of course, and it’s nice and it’s important and I like it very much.

This Is What Salvador Said.

“I am painting pictures which make me die for joy, I am creating with an absolute naturalness, without the slightest aesthetic concern, I am making things that inspire me with a profound emotion and I am trying to paint them honestly.”

What Matters Most

Some good conversations have come up after the post I made just before this one and I kept thinking of the perfect Bukowski line [and subsequent book title] ‘What matters most is how well you walk through the fire.’ This is as good of a mantra as you could have, I’d imagine, and I think that it’s sort of been ringing louder and louder as I’ve been thinking about the whole art thing. And it’s not just art but it’s literature too and, most importantly, it’s about life in general and as a whole.

Everybody has their own fires to walk through and what’s hard to you might be easy for me. What’s hot to me might be breezy for you. What’s art to you might be crap to me and what’s good solid work to me might be kid scribbles to someone else. I mean, really, I can’t hardly navigate through until the end of some of Allen Ginsburg’s writings. And I know plenty of people that find Salinger more ponderous than poetic. It’s all subjective, of course. And all we can do is just do our very best work and leave it at that.

But, in the interest of being contrary and while we’re on the subject of Bukowski, I cannot understand how anyone could ever just simply dismiss Bukowski as being little more than a misogynistic drunk. Have you ever really read any of his work or is that just some point of view you learned to express is your Womyn’s Writing Workshop?

[Why does all of this stuff always get me so goddam excited anyway? Sorry. Sort of.]

Is That The Moon Or Something Somebody Made?

So I’ve been considering the definition of the word Art a lot lately since I’ve been working on this new project. The thing is being called One Thousand Thousand and the idea is to create one million pieces of art. All original, done by hand, and without any mechanical reproduction. It’s the same exercise that we’ve been doing for years now but it’s suddenly become official and proper and it’s coming along nicely so far. [The link goes to a gallery of 35 recent pieces that were all done on the same day. I've probably done as many as 150 or so pieces in one day but I forget for sure. Either way, you have to do that many if you'll ever get close to doing a million.]

At any rate, I’m posting a portion of those finished pieces to Etsy and am having a go at selling them off for a buck or two. I’ve never really spent any time on Etsy and I didn’t know too much about it save for the things I learned from Cybele.

If you don’t know the site then I’ll leave it to you to check it out but Etsy is supposed to be a place to buy and sell only handmade products and items. The other permissible items that you can sell there are either vintage things [at least 20 years old] or supplies that are used to create art or handmade items. But whatever your art is, painting, knitting, using odd materials, collage, sculpture, photography, jewelry making, knitting or candlemaking or whatever your art is. And that’s a really cool concept for sure and there are some very, very cool things there. Very cool.

But I’m realizing pretty quickly that there are some really crummy things there too. And the art section in particular is really overrun by some just awful stuff from people that claim it’s art and call themselves artists and it just drives me crazy. And this isn’t something that is unique to Etsy at all. I’m not saying that. I’ve felt the same way about major gallery showings on down to mail art websites like the old, awesome Nervousness. [Is that thing still going?]

Bottom line is that there is just a lot of bad art out there and there are people that encourage it and even pay for it. Tremendous sums, in fact. But I think it’s just because they don’t know what art really is. It’s just some imaginary and unrealistic concept in their head and they probably never took too much time to really think about it too hard. Or maybe I’m just over thinking it myself. [Probably both, I'm sure.]

Still, all you can do if you feel the way that I feel is to just not let it get to you and remedy the perceived situation by producing what you believe is good solid work and hope that it evens out somewhere down the line. It’s kind of like Karma, I guess. The negativity and hurt and suffering is cyclical and the only way to right those things is to choose compassion and take the higher road and create lovingkindness every chance you get.

And to art again; I have always thought that anti-art is somehow closer to what True Art should be or really is. I appreciate the anti-art, anti-product, Fluxus, Futurism approaches a great deal. Those philosophies have been important to me lately and have inspired a lot of the things I’m working on as well as the outlook I have as of late and I really appreciate the definition that George Maciunas gave for what he thought the differences between art and anti-art really were.

This is basically what he said:

Art existed to “justify the artist’s professional, parasitic and elite status in society, he must demonstrate artist’s indispensability and exclusiveness, he must demonstrate the dependability of audience upon him,
he must demonstrate that no one but the artist can do art. Therefore, art must appear to be complex, pretentious, profound, serious, intellectual, inspired, skillful, significant, theatrical, It must appear to be valuable as commodity so as to provide the artist with an income. To raise its value (artist’s income and patrons profit), art is made to appear rare, limited in quantity and therefore obtainable and accessible only to the social elite and institutions.”

He also said that anti-art and the Fluxus approach was,

“To establish artist’s nonprofessional status in society, he must demonstrate artist’s dispensability and inclusiveness, he must demonstrate the self sufficiency of the audience, he must demonstrate that anything can be art and anyone can do it. Therefore, anti-art must be simple, amusing, unpretentious, concerned with insignificance’s, require no skill or countless rehearsals, have no commodity or institutional value. The value of art-amusement must be lowered by making it unlimited, massproduced, obtainable by all and eventually produced by all. Fluxus art-amusement is the rear-guard without any pretension or urge to participate in the competition of “one-upmanship” with the avant-garde. It strives for the monostructural and nontheatrical qualities of simple natural event, a game or a gag. It is the fusion of Spikes Jones Vaudeville, gag, children’s games and Duchamp.”

Again, I don’t think he covers it completely and I know he contradicts some of what I’ve said. And, most importantly, I know there’s no right answer here. But what I do agree with completely is that I think it’s so lame for people to take themselves so seriously about the things they produce and create. I think that as soon as you start worrying more about copyrights and watermarks than you do the whole process of catharsis and creation then it’s not only pretty sad but it’s also, to me at least, absolutely ridiculous. The entire point of Art and making art in the first place has been missed.

In pretty much every gallery show I’ve ever had or been a part of my work has sold out. Completely. This isn’t me being arrogant or cocky or boastful and I swear on everything that it’s not. I’m not even implying the work was good or even worth it either. But it’s more to say that the work has always been priced to sell. I’ve always been of the mindset that I’d just simply not like to take the pieces back to my place at the end of the day and I’d like to not live with them anymore after a point. For the 52 Weeks project there was a provision in the contract with the gallery that if every single piece didn’t sell then we wouldn’t sell any of them at all. It was an All Or Nothing Clause and the point was that either they would all have to go and the emotions attached would be exorcised along with the work or the whole thing would stay completely intact where you’d have to make room to keep living with it.

I guess what I mean to say is that I have always made, and I continue to make, these things [my art] to either get something out of me or to share something with whomever might come along and listen. One or the other. And by choosing prices that meet the financial abilities of the average human being is just a way to actually accomplish those two things. If I charged three grand for every little piece I made I’d be sitting in a boring museum of my own work and nobody would hear a word I was ever trying to say.

Adding some super-crazed prices to your work is just bullshit, really, and when I see some mediocre piece that has this zany-high price tag I instantly feel like it means the person that made it only equates money with value. Either that or they feel like that’s the way to really prove to everyone else that they are a ‘real artist’ and that their work is important. This is what galleries do for the most part and it’s all hype to create a profit. Or whatever. I don’t know really what I mean to say exactly. But I know what I mean for sure.

So I guess I say go ahead and make contrived pieces of crap using imagery that’s as overused as the goddam Golden Arches. Throw in words like inspire and breathe and hope. Add some fairies or angels or anything with wings and toss in some doll heads and antique typewriter keys just for good measure. Then, for the love of all that is good and true and sacred, be sure to scan it and then run off a few copies on your inkjet printer and sell them as limited prints. Give it a French name so it sounds ‘fancier’ and more high-brow. And you can call it whatever you want. It’s art. You’re an artist. Fine.

But I am too and I have a different opinion about it and I might be wrong or I might be right or I might be neither or even both. I have no idea what I’m talking about even. I guess it is what you say it is and it is what you make it out to be and it is all dependent on how it touches you or speaks to you I suppose. [And that's something different for everyone I guess, right?]

Ugh! [YAWP!]

Emerson said, “Give me health and a day and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous.” I guess I’ll leave it at that. If that’s cool with you.

[Pardon me for my rut.]

Obituary

I had always sort of considered what I’d like to have written on my headstone when I am dead. It’s a big thing to consider and I have always refrained from having any text tattooed on my body after all of these years because I can’t quite come up with something perfect enough. Although I suppose that with a tombstone it might not matter as much since a tattoo is something you have to live with for a while and a tombstone is something that you get to make other people live with.

Charles Bukowski always was one of my favorites as far as epitaphs were concerned. His just says, “Don’t Try.” It beats hell out of Keats’ any day. And another favorite is the one that Bernoulli chose for himself and was a nice play on his Miracle Spirals as well as his belief in reincarnation. It reads, “Eadem mutata resurgo” which is translated from Latin to mean, “Though changed I shall arise the same.”And how can you not love Royal Tennenbaum’s inscription? [Go see it if you haven't.]

What I have so far would be nice to use on opposing sides of the thing and that way, depending on how you felt about me when I was alive, you can choose to be reminded of the good or the bad.

This is all of it so far:

A quiet man, not given to law, quarrel or wrangling, not vitious, but pleasant, neat and spruce, loving mirth in his words and actions, clean in apparel, rather drinking much than gluttonous, prone to venery, often entangled in love-matters, zealous in his affections, musical, delighting in baths and all honest merry meetings, or masks and stage-plays; easy of belief, and not given to labour or taking any pains, a company-keeper, cheerful, nothing mistrustful, a right virtuous man, often had in some jealousy, yet no cause for it.

Or, on the other side of things is this bit:

The man was riotous, expensive, wholly given to looseness and lewd companies of women, not regarding his reputation, coveting unlawful beds, incestuous, an adulterer; fanatical, a mere skip-jack, of no faith, no repute, no credit; a goldbricker, chronic malcontent, spending his means in alehouses, taverns, and amongst scandalous, loose people; a mean lazy companion, careless in the emotions of others and not careful of the things of this life or anything religious; a mere atheist and an unnatural man.

This is adapted from a 17th Century book by William Lilly called Christian Astrology. It’s somehow supposed to be how the planet Venus can change people depending on where it was when a person was born or something. And I have no idea why I was even reading that in the first place.

[I'll keep you posted on the developments and the final edits.]

Some Small Things.

This is what we did the other day.

35 more little mixed-media mini-canvases. I plan on doing at least 100 more tomorrow.

[If the embedded thing doesn't work the link is just HERE.]

Connection And Reconnection.

Addendum to the entry just before this one:

Just shortly after those things happened I get a great, brick-house beautiful email from Brandon [another Hospitality Club guest-turned-friend] who I have not spoken to in over two years easy. And later this evening as I check my mail I get news that Nes has finally been given the Spouse Visa she had been waiting over a year for. She got the news just before leaving Tucson for Diamond Mountain.

I never check my email much lately and I almost never use my Yahoo! account. I just happened to be at home and I had some time to kill so I fooled around online and decided to check my mail. That’s when I got the email from Nes asking if they could stay with me for the night as they were coming down from the mountain to see a show at the Rialto. It’s a freak thing that I ever even checked my mail that day. Seriously, I have over 150 emails in my inbox.

Continue reading »

The Distance Between Locations.

It took 3 Years, 341 Days, 11 Hours and 10 Minutes for my $20 bill to reach Texas. Today, after all of that time, someone found it.

Today my great, good [Bodhisattva] friend Nes [and her perfectly kind and wonderful husband Ed] has popped back into my life after at least a year.

[I will take these unexpected things from a bit back into my past as some sort of sign.]

Let Me Tell You About My Mother

My biological grandfather died shortly before I was born and by then he had already left my family and married another woman who had just given birth to their newborn son. He died alone in a single car accident on a Missouri road after he lost control of the car and he slammed into a tree. Before he died he drank a lot and one of the main stories I remember hearing about him was when he decided to load the kids into the car and take them to the carnival. These excited little kids [my mother included] never knew what hit them when they realized that they were lied to and they were being dropped off at an orphanage. [I'm not making this up. I have photographs to prove it.]

My Grandmother Constance remarried as well and the man that she married was the man that I consider to be my true Grandfather. I also consider him to be the greatest man that ever lived and still to this day I am humbled by him to the point of near worship. [Maybe not actually worship but something pretty close to that at least.] He taught me about Art and Stupid Bunny and pancakes and how to be nothing but loving and compassionate and that in being those things I could almost never go wrong.

When I was a small child my mother and father got divorced. The deal was that my mom would work [in factories mostly] to support the family while my father went to medical school and worked part time as a paramedic for the fire department. This plan seemed to work okay for a while but soon after my father graduated from medical school he apparently decided upon a better plan and chose to leave for some nurse. He left my mother with me and my kid sister and with no money aside from a $5 bill that he left on the table with a note. And that was it. [And he apparently swiped my library card too but that's another story.] Leaving like that can only just suck for the people you leave behind but he left at a time that was and still is simply inconceivable to me. Just before he left my Uncle Cornelius drowned. He was on some float trip with his friends and one of the girls that was there was pregnant. She got a little too far out in the current and was unable to stop herself from being pushed away and under. My Uncle Cornelius went out to get her because that was just what he did. That was just how he was. And he did manage to save her from drowning but he was unable to save himself. They didn’t find his body for over a month. The time my father chose to leave was just then as my whole family had given up hope that he was even alive. They lessened their prayers by then and this time they were simply praying that they might just find his body.

Not too long after that [maybe just a few months if I recall correctly] my Uncle Alphonsus was murdered. His full name was Alphonsus Andrew McHenry III [most people called him Andy and his closest friends sometimes called him Al] and he had just given birth to his new son Alphonsus Andrew McHenry IV. While he was in the Navy he served on the USS Jason and I am named after my Uncle Andy and that ship.

Not too long after that my Grandfather died from cancer of the everything. And shortly after that my Grandmother died of heart failure.

My mom did the very best that she could under those awful and inconceivable circumstances of having your whole entire life just wiped entirely out in one fell swoop. She became an alcoholic and just couldn’t cope as well as she wanted to and I ended up being babysat quite a bit by my surrogate uncles. These were mostly bikers who owned tattoo shops and smut shops and dive bars and who were involved to the point of immersion in the pornography industry. I spent a lot of years in porn shops and tattoo parlors and bars. I saw some things that most people shouldn’t see and I knew a lot about things you shouldn’t know a lot about. On the converse I learned a great deal about the things that are truly important in life. Both of these facts contributed in, for good and for bad, creating a sense of fearlessness and detachment in me that has both helped and hindered me at times in my life. [And I don't regret a moment of it really.]

Years later my mom went through AA and became sober and she rebuilt her life from scratch. My sister and I never wanted for anything and although we were probably poor by most standards it never really seemed that way to us. At least a lot of the time for sure.

As I get older and I consider what my mother went through during that time I’m not sure how she ever even coped with it all. I hypothesize in my head about how I would feel if, for example, the top five people you love the most in life were taken in some horrific and unexpected manner. Gone. How would I handle that? How would you?

[Can you even imagine yourself ever being that strong?]

I went through the same things as she did, I guess, but I was only nine or so and none of it all really sunk in for me then. [And sometimes I doubt if it ever really has even fully sunk in. You know?]

I look back on my own life and all of the wonderful and awful turns it sometimes has taken, and surely will take in the future, and I always can’t help but feel even closer to my mother.

I love her more than I can even say and beyond the fact that I truly do love her I feel like I like her even more than that. And that’s pretty cool to me. I think most of us love our mothers because we almost have to but it makes me feel really great that I just like my mom so well. I think that she’s cool and funny and that she has one of the kindest hearts of anyone I know. I’m proud of her for what she managed to live through and for how she managed to ensure that my sister and I lived through the same. I feel like she did a pretty good job of being a parent and more often than not when I find myself feeling pretty good about myself, for some reason or another, I find that such a characteristic that I seem to somehow possess [and maybe even admire within myself] can somehow be directly attributed to something that I learned from her.

[I just wanted to remind myself of that is all. Again.]

Brown Corduroy Blues

I was down to limited resources with regard to my clean laundry situation and one of the only freshly laundered things I had were these brown corduroy Levi’s and I decided to go with them. I knew they were clean because they were neatly folded and on the shelf in my closet where I keep some of my folded clothes. And they were there, I know now, because they were not supposed to be used anymore this year. After temperatures reach 100° it becomes an act of daring or foolishness to wear corduroy pants in the middle of the desert.

Eight Verses for Training the Mind

Composed in the twelfth century by the great Tibetan Buddhist teacher Geshe Langri Tangpa [1054-1123], these teachings are an important guide for understanding human behavior, learning to relate to one another while offering compassion  unconditionally.

You can read these eight simple teachings aloud as meditations, if you’d like:

May I consider all beings precious.

May I always respect others as superior while attaining self-esteem.

May I face my inner darkness and turn it to good.

May I be moved with compassion for the pain behind the spite others may show me.

When I am hurt by others, may I forego retaliation while always fighting injustice.

May I reckon those who betray me as sacred teachers.

May I offer joy to all beings and secretly take on their suffering.

May all beings and I be free from ego concerns of loss and gain.