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.”

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.]

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.]

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.

Soon We Will All Be Gone.

Normally I’m a big enough optimist and I don’t think many people that know me would say that I was dismal or down or depressed. I’m not. I’m mostly facing the bright side of things and I try not to let a lot get to me. I say that as a preamble to mentioning this NPR story that does almost make me feel depressed. The high school I went to was, I’m pretty sure, the oldest West of the Mississippi River and it is just about one of the coolest buildings ever and it’s one of the schools that is on the list.

I can’t even stand the idea of the thing being torn down and just looking at pictures of it makes me feel nostalgic. The building had these old-school phones in each room that could be dialed out to other rooms. It served as a room-to-room intercom system and whenever we’d skip class and hang out in the attic upstairs we’d have somebody call us up there if we were missed.

My old high school in St. Louis

I’ve also been working on my genealogy a lot lately. [A lot.] Maybe that’s why I’m hyper-sensitive to this sort of thing right now. I’ve been really nostalgic for the past and at the same time it actually makes me feel a little bit less connected than I’d expected it would. I heard so many people say how that when they really started defining and determining their ancestry it would tend to make them feel more connected somehow. It sounded reasonable enough and I expected that the same might be true for me. It mostly wasn’t.

It’s just so goddam touching and sad and lonely reading some 3-inch obituary in some newspaper from 1849 that describes the life of someone I am somehow related to. The newspaper is as faded as these ancestors themselves and I’m learning that memories are like newspaper clippings sometimes. They are nice to have access to should you feel like you need some measure of the past to look back on but they get old and torn and you can forget about them entirely when they fade out of your view. This urge to gather together these moments is real enough for me and I do work hard enough at doing it and I often wonder what the real point of it is. I’m finding also that once I’ve collected these things I really don’t know what to do with them afterward. I can pack them back up into a box with a lid and label it and store it up there on the top shelf.

I’ve also got a stack of death certificates from members of my family. It’s this reminder that life is horribly short and that more often than not the things that you have done in that life will scarcely be remembered or they won’t matter much if they are. I guess that things obviously just die off or fade away and regardless of anything else I truly thought that I’d be used to that by now.

[This isn't me being depressed at all. This is just some admittedly sad observation and I've already begun reminding myself of the lovliness that happens almost constantly.]

Secrets Shared

[Previously shared with Carl and James Joyce and me.]

• he dreamt of obscurity, but his vain attempts at effacement would only succeed in refining and polishing a self he had lost long ago.
• once she told him a story about a white knight, and a princess that didn’t need saving. am i the knight? he asked her. no, she answered. you’re the person i’m telling the story to.
• stay, he asked her, not meaning forever.
• you’re so beautiful, he said, you’re so beautiful. she closed her eyes, and whispered to herself, i know.
• she made no mention of recent events, and how he might be the force behind them.
• he imagined holding her wrists, and not letting go, until he was done.
• she calls, only to know that he is there. and it pleases him.
• when he told her that he needed her, he meant that he needed her to desire him.
• what you lack in experience, he grinned menacingly, you can make up for with enthusiasm.
• he explained himself to her. not through what he said, but by what he refused to admit.
• she reminded him of a place that he was almost sure he would never see again.
• she was not foolish enough to attempt to save him from himself, despite his obvious need for grace.
• do you practice that smile of yours? he asked. which one? she smiled back.
• you’ll never know me well enough to know what it is that i really need, she wanted to say.
• he watches her apply, wipe off, and reapply her lipstick, yet again, and licks his lips at her compulsion.
• she asked for more, but she wouldn’t take what he had to offer.
• i’m not sure you’ve turned out to be the man that i thought i was falling in love with, she said, but you do have your moments.
• stop thinking, he said. you stop thinking i’m thinking about you, she replied.
• she was unwilling to substitute fascination for trust, or beauty for sincerity.
• you used me, she told him, and then laughed at her assertion.
• her face was made more beautiful by wisps of hair which he would brush from her cheek.
• they held each other, dreaming together, but their dreams were not shared.
• you could stop, she said. and do what? he asked. something else, she said. he threw up his arms. that’s exactly what i was doing before i started doing this, he said.
• you’ve found the right words, she said, it’s just that you never quite discovered the right order.
• there’s nothing left, is there, she said. i think there’s a pop-tart in the cupboard, he said.
• i was so wrong, he said. that doesn’t mean that now you’re right, she said.
• she saw, in the distance, a place where she didn’t hurt. but she couldn’t tell whether she was looking ahead, or behind.
• she wanted answers to questions he did not understand.
• i think i love you, he said. is that what you think, she said.
• she wondered why the shortest possible distance between him and his dreams was straight through her.
• i want to be in love with someone like you, he said, holding her closely, and laughing.
• she told him that she wanted him to leave, but forgot to mention when she expected him to return.
• i still love you, he said, to no one.
• she knew him, because she knew his failings.
• just because you can’t love yourself, she said, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t love me.
• at the point she understood his motives she no longer understood her own.
• each time, they acted as if the ending were near, forgetting that it was already over.
• she stopped longing for him when she stopped belonging to him.
• you’re always clinging to clichés, she said. you may be right, he said. but you have to admit, it’s better than talking in riddles.
• don’t worry. we’ll still be friends, he said, even after you don’t want to talk to me anymore.
• when he told her he had waited too long, it was then that she knew that she loved him.
• she would close her eyes and imagine herself as someone else, someone who possessed him.
• avalanche, she said to herself, using a secret language that only she and he understood.
• (it’s not the way you toy with my affections), he said. when did you learn to speak in parentheses? she asked.
• they would read the personals together, feigning humor, making mental notes.
• she kept the love letters he had sent her, to help mark the passage of time.
• when i try to remember what we had, he said, all i can really remember is what we wanted.
• all of my thoughts are of you, he said, and of the way you would hurt me time and again.
• sometimes, it feels as if we’re repeating the same mistakes only to forget the ones we’ve already made, she said.
• you’re not like her, he told her. that’s right, she said, i’m still here.
• he stole her heart, and kept it in a box, by the bed. she found it, one day, and asked him what it was. oh nothing, he replied.
• she forgot that the only way to love him was to make him fall out of love with her.
• it’s as if we were interrupted at some point, she said, and then we never quite got back around to finishing our story.
• he couldn’t love her, not even enough to stay away.
• we could try something new, she said. i thought you already were, he said. what was his name, again?
• you think i like this? he asked. i don’t think you know anything else, she said.
• do you love me? he asked. i’m not going to write a song about it, if that’s what you mean, she said.
• he thought of the special face she made only for him, and all the others.
• i don’t know how i could live without you, she swore to him, on a stack of travel brochures.
• she almost believed it all, until he told her that he believed in her.
• the world may not revolve around me, he said, but i could go supernova at any moment.
• i can forgive you for being unfaithful, he said, but not for being indiscreet.
• the present is just so many possible futures, waiting all together, in a crowded room, she told him, as she moved away.
• because he reminded me of someone i used to be, she told him.
• she wasn’t able to forgive him for what he hadn’t done.
• you’re the one with the steering wheel, she said. i’ve just got the pedals.
• sometimes, you make me feel like christmas, she said. and other times? he asked. the rest of the time, she said, i remember how you forgot my birthday.
• do you ever wonder if we’d be more in love if we’d never had sex? he asked her. no, she said, of course we’d be.
• i suppose i should have known that when you told me you needed your space, that you’d find it in somebody else’s closet, he said.
• she gave of herself once more, to show him how cruel he could be.
• she never knew what it was that brought him back to her, or if she had anything to do with it.
• tell me about him, he said. in a lot of ways, she said, he reminds me of you.
• if you always knew how it would end, he said, you might have at least saved us both the trouble.
• if you’re very quiet, you can sometimes hear the stars, she said. you’re not listening to the sighs of stars, he whispered, but to the impossibility of desire.
• you’ve made all those promises before, she said. the least you could do is come up with some new ones.
• can we role-play? she asked. who do you want to be? he asked. i’ll be her, she said, and you’ll be you.
• he never knew when to stop, she said, but i suppose that was part of his charm.
• i don’t really see how your need for closure necessarily entails fucking me one last time, she said.
• do you have one for me:

If you have one that you’d like to contribute please do send it along.

Board Books

I’m getting excited about some of the ideas and inspiration I’m feeling lately. I’ve got my kitchen all cleaned and organized in preparation for moving in there and just making art. I really work well when I’m standing up at a counter top.