Here is a new drawing, a work in progress. For the first time there is a real effort to put some of the keys and rods where they belong–to learn how things work together. There’s also “post-production” work with the tablet’s photoeditor, experimenting with selective focus and “mood lighting.” All of this is in the service of making the final drawing of the series more genuine, and all that jazz.
If March goes well, it will be chock-full of drawings of saxophones and jazz combos and portraits of major jazz musicians. In that spirit I kicked off March with a drawing of a saxophone of a friend of mine. No poetry, no “value added” distracting ancillary material–just a saxophone, a hint of the stand it rode in on, and some counterbalancing background.
This is the first Valentine’s Day since 1988 that I wasn’t part of a couple. Naturally I feel a little strange. The strangeness transliterates into the above page.
valentine-ku for the once-loved
the hole in the heart
is another heart. it makes
sense and yet doesn’t.
Better times are ahead, though, Friends. Happy Valentine’s Day to all!
THREE YOGIS
The world tells one big story
However, many subplots lie doggo
Regard him who observes by looking
Enjoy a pic-a-nic basket with undotted i
Enfold your unself in a tale of thronged Siddhis
I hope Hanna-Barbera will take this all in good fun, and not as copyright-infringeable territory. After all, they cheerfully “borrowed” characters from THE HONEYMOONERS for their Flintstones and Rubbles.
Yogi Berra is a national treasure, whose “You can observe a lot by looking” is a good first lesson in portraiture. Long live Lorenzo Pietro Berra!
I was going to work “A tale of three Siddhis” into the poem but I have a quirkish aversion to including a word in the body of the poem that is also one of the words of the acrostic–not that I haven’t violated that stricture from time to time.
*****
My younger brother Brian is Nifty-Great today. Well, RHYMES with Nifty-Great, anyway. He and I rebonded in brotherhood yesterday via yardwork and bulk trash hauling. Long live Brian Clemens Bowers!
So: Once upon a time an unyoung man packed up a portion of his belongings and left the magical land of Verdantia, and shortly after found himself in Bottomofanashtray City. It was important and necessary that he do so, but one of the consequences of the move was a sense of dislocation, similar to that sung about by Tony Bennett in the lovely ballad “I Left My Heart in San Franscisco.”
This is only the first page of a long chapter. One does not experience loss of place in quite the way one experiences loss of a loved one. The place, presumably, is still there. But just as “a river is never the same,” “you can’t go home again” becomes more and more true the longer the away-time is.
There is evidence that a subatomic particle can be two places at once. (Google “double-slit experiment” if you’d like to know more.) And we certainly feel another location when we send loving thoughts to a bereaved friend. “Somewhere over the Rainbow/Way up high” is where we may feel we belong. If you want to go there in a charming way, use keywords “over the rainbow” “Iz”–and tell Iz that Gary sent you.
Good night, Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are. You too, Mr. Durante.
Confession: I drew this in about fifteen minutes using a graphite stick and the seat of my pants. I then almost used a bogus meant-to-intrigue title, “Unavoidable Implications,” with the intention of having people see things that weren’t there. Well, I’ve been Phony-Baloney before with such fudging, and I may well be again (I only hope it’s not as cut-and-dried Phony-Baloney, though), but not this time. This is a tone study, and it emanates as if chiming, so “tone chime” it is.
For better or worse, here is the final version of a drawing I’ve been working on for more than three weeks. It is based on an illustration accompanying an acrostic poem, “Spectral Sanctums,” I wrote late last year. (Interested? Here is a link: https://onewithclay.wordpress.com/2014/12/30/spectral-sanctums/ )The illustration was of a smaller scale, 8-1/2″ x 5-1/2″, and had no cutlery nor stoneware on the placemat. This one’s 22″ x 30″, the largest-scale drawing I’ve made since the 80s. Here’s a photo Denise took this morning of me holding the drawing:
My working title for this drawing was “Homage to Bruegel.” Pieter Breugel the Elder had painted landscapes and peasantry and then let you know what was REALLY going on via the title; thus “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” has the requisite elements of ploughman, shepherd and fisherman vying for attention while poor doomed Icarus’s legs are all that can be seen as Icarus plunges into the sea. Analogously, I have a fork in much smaller scale off the placemat and seemingly on a different trajectory than the place setting. It is meant to compound the “what’s wrong with this picture?” incongruity of a dinner setting against the Cosmos.
But Denise instantly upon seeing the drawing came up with a title that I like much better, so “God’s Dinner Table” it remains.
Tonight PBS took us to the New York Metropolitan Opera and a performance of THE MARRIAGE OF FIGARO. You don’t need subtitles to be able to tell there’s a whole lot of Silliness going on. And yet Figaro and his antics have been gracing stages worldwide for more than 200 years. So I find to my considerable comfort that Silliness and Staying Power are not mutually exclusive.
Here I’ve done something quite Silly. The title’s two puns, there’s a Pathet-ically obscure reference, a human Mickey Mouse wears Mickey Mouse ears and a tie festooned with Minnie Mice, and there’s nothing but name-dropping in the lower right hand corner. But: there’s tricky asymmetric balance. There’s a pulse in it of letter size variance and oddly “coincidental” alignment. And there’s a relaxed unforcedness to it that implies an omnipresence of freedom. There’s subtler stuff I won’t describe but I hope will be discovered. So it exists and I deem it worthy of a viewer’s attention. A few days later, though, I may well wonder what the Hell I was thinking . . .
thyme out
there’s no such thing as the Pathet Lao
howbeit Romeo where art thou
yet SPICE invigorates sweet & tart
mercator fibs but o boy can he chart
enticed inducements wave & dart
tie min
tandy, jessica/novak, kim
ian, janis & hendrix, jimi
elfman, danny or elfman, jen
One thing Clark Gable and Jackson Browne have in common is the nonuse of their first names. Wikipedia says they were born Clyde Jackson Browne and William Clark Gable. Another thing they had in common was their alleged scandalous involvement with movie stars. Mr. Browne was with Daryl Hannah and Mr. Gable was with Loretta Young. Ms. Hannah has alleged that Browne physically abused her; Ms. Young alleged that Mr. Gable fathered her child. One story has been discredited; one has not.
Both of these fellows indulged in derring-do. Jackson Browne wrote one of the greatest protest songs of the 20th Century, “Lives in the Balance.” Mr. Gable flew combat missions in WWII.
And why do I put myself in their company? Well, my hair is straight and used to be brown, like Jackson’s; my moustache is semi-sparse, like Clark’s. All three of us did some time in California. None of us is 99 and 44/100 % pure. And all three of us have had a woman close to us die before her time.
But that isn’t it. Not really. The thing is, Jackson Browne and Clark Gable both possess a quality I want. They have both been Champions, and so I wish to be. I’m not a Champion yet, but I’m encouraged by my Champion’s Training of late.
No need to wish me luck, Friends. If I have it in me to be a Champion, Luck is something I won’t need.
A week ago my dear and wonderful friend of more than twenty-four years, Karen Wilkinson, was alive and well. Friday she was stricken and felled by a brain aneurysm. Monday they removed life support and, I infer, harvested what organs of hers they could use.
While she was still not technically dead, I tried feebly to do creative things. Here’s what I did on Sunday the 4th:
The would-be poem seems finished but is not. After Karen died, I tried again, and wrote what I intend to read at the Caffeine Corridor poetry event tomorrow night:
fiddle away over and out
there was this girl in a jeans skirt in the spring of 1990
librarian glasses and face and demeanor like talia shire in rocky
but with a violin that spoke for her
boldly stepping into the sound of the livingroom band she’d just joined
and the girl and her fiddle turned three needy guitars into contrapuntal gold
at times trumping them with platinum
years later “roller derby queen” by jim croce reached new heights
when during the instrumental the sound crescendoed
and the fiddle did a trick of stringzipping into the stratosphere
followed by a beat of complete and magic silence
followed by the resumption of the raucous rollicking sound
the girl and her fiddle went with her piano-playing pal to jazz camp
and they grinned and grinned on their return
elsewhere in 2007
much of the band went to a cabin near grand lake colorado
played and played and sang and danced and snored and hiked and played and played
the promised moose never showed but the music flowed and made all all right
and the fiddler bent and swayed with that music and folded her excellence into it
her face focused transcendence
her rosined bow a dervish
sometimes she’d take the fiddle away from her chin and sing
because she wanted to hold voice-hands with the rest of us
and through a miracle of wishful thinking and overdub
i hear her voice and fiddle now together
One with Clay, Image and Text 