Category Archives: Stories

Genuine Shenanigans; Accept No Substitutes

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graphite drawing

Freedom to get up to all kinds of nonsense: one of the great perks of being a kept woman . . .

Playtime is such a necessary and fabulous thing! I am undoubtedly one of the most fortunate people on the planet: I get to have the run of my entire silly imagination and the opportunity to document it as much as time and crayons will allow. So off I go, playing like a little kid chock full of Super Sugar Blasters, not knowing in the slightest what will emerge from the madness.

That’s the fun of the whole thing.

Sure, sometimes even the pampered grassfed, free-range artist gets a chance to do a project that requires a certain gravitas. Heck, even gets an itch to do one. But really, what’s the fun of being an artiste if everything I do has to be serious? I think you know me well enough by now to figure out the likelihood of my acquiescing to a creative calling if it were an all-business sort of proposition. Oh, yeah.

Much rather draw dragons. Paint giant insects taking over the world. Sculpt gargoyle faces and build neo-Baroque furniture. Assemble pseudo-robots out of mannequin parts and small appliances (Francine, where are you now?). Design and sew evening gowns out of trash bags and plastic doilies. Sharpen the pencils again and make up stories about, say, a cat that’s figured out how to get the fish out of the aquarium but not gotten so far as to figure out how to get herself back out of the aquarium after making the catch. Kind of like being an artist who has begun to figure out how she prefers making her art but still isn’t clear on what to do with it once it’s made.

Guess I’ll post some drawings again, for a start!

graphite drawing

Every gift comes with a few dilemmas, it's true . . .

Grandpa had a Cabin…

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The capacity for joy can be learned, I’ve seen, through dedicated and deliberate effort. I, however, was trained up in it the easy way. It was inculcated by immersion from birth in an atmosphere of kindhearted comfort seasoned with large healthy doses of shameless tomfoolery. It was a pervasive and soul-deep thing as well as an attitudinal election year ’round, but in my clan, was also enhanced by something akin to Happiness Boot Camp, in summertime especially. Because Grandpa had a cabin.

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At the mossy feet of the evergreens . . .

Gramps was a carpenter, a fisherman, and an old-fashioned Norwegian immigrant with great love for simplicity and the outdoors; of course he would build a cabin. Despite a part of him that was a devoted hermit, he had at the same time surprising powers for subjugating that tendency. This started, no doubt, with his surviving those greenhorn immigrant days out east with a great boost of prankish help from his good-naturedly nutty roommates–and from there it escalated to marriage, six kids, and a flurry of grandkids following that, and culminated in this would-be hermitage of his in the woods being co-opted at intervals by invading gangs of laughing, larking relatives.

By the time of the family cabin follies, Gramps and Granny and their tribe had long since moved out to the west coast, settling north of Seattle, an area having comforting commonalities with Grandpa’s home turf in southern Norway. It lent itself neatly to cabin crafting. Gramps built his modest A-frame in the fir, cedar and alder-rich woods along the Skykomish River, establishing in the act a one-building family compound tailor-made for training up growing grandkids in the arts of relaxed rusticity and genuine jollity. Grandpa had a cabin, and there we all got lively lessons in love.

Sometimes the love was more focused on its patience component than a bunch of wriggly kids might accept readily. After all, being in western Washington, time spent at the cabin could easily be bathed in torrents of gloomy rain that held the thrills of outdoor play in abeyance for unpredictable stretches of time. Then all of the adults penned in with us had to teach us various diversions for passing the time of our indoor captivity. The worst test of patience was with the “facilities,” for although the cabin had electricity and running water from early on, those were dedicated first of all to the kitchen, so for some years we all had to use the outhouse when in need. I, for one, dreaded even the traipse through the slug-infested wet grass and the dewy clamminess of a deeply shaded summer morning there, let alone the dark emanations of the dank two-holer.

But inside the cabin, all was snugness and warmth. The wiring gave us both light and baseboard heat, and the beautiful old iron wood stove amplified both with a crackling belly when well fed. We, in turn, were well fed and began our sous chef training under Granny and the moms and aunts, learning to pitch in with anything from goulash to fish head soup or more ordinary summer picnic classics. When the dads and uncles were on duty they taught us the outdoor chef’s arts of grilling burgers and dogs or, when Gramps had led any fishing expeditions, cooking up a handsome meal of cutthroat or salmon on the barbecue. If the rain tried to intervene, why then the grill got pulled under the porch roof overhang or into the carport/boat shed, and the stewing and brewing continued merrily in the kitchen while non-conscripts evaded cooking duties by reading, playing board and card games, drawing, and piling up toys with the youngest cousins, up where the toy stash was kept in the sleeping loft’s side attic. Sometimes it was entertainment enough just to joke around and be silly with the rest of the cousins up there where it was set up like a low bunkhouse, single beds lined up under the peak of the A-frame and covered with old cowboy-decorated sleeping bags and scratchy army blankets. When things got a little too rowdy, the downstairs grownups could always shout us over to the loft railing and give a little warning to back down the decibels a little.

Now, this is only a little of the indoor fun to be had when we weren’t all tucked in for the night and listening to Gramps’s magnificent snores shaking the cabin from foundation to peak. Probably the best of all were those rare nights when he Got In A Mood and entertained the youthful crew with a glimpse of a grandpa they otherwise never knew existed. In everyday life, you see, while he was generally very kind and patient and willing to teach us how to bait a fishhook or mend the roof shingles or row his little rowboat, he also had a little bit of what all children see as inscrutably proper grown-upness and so wasn’t as likely as our parents or even Granny to crawl under the furniture and make ridiculous faces and do other really overtly silly things. Except when he got that rare itch.

Only a few times do I remember Gramps clowning outrageously, so when he did we all took notice and it was a wild party indeed. He might grab a comb from one of the kids and tease his tonsure straight up into a perfect circus performer’s hairdo, laughing like a loon, and then out would come a secret stash of old tin toys that did mechanical tricks. Or a harmonica, a simple squeezebox-style accordion, a fiddle–none of which any of us shrimps had the remotest idea he could even identify, let alone play–and then he’d play a lively folk tune or two. Meanwhile, of course, after all of us kids had pulled our jaws off the floor, we got in on the loopy laughter, sang along with tunes we didn’t know, made Gramps’s and anyone else’s hair into wilder and bigger cartoon hairstyles, and whipped ourselves into hysteria until I’m sure that the nearest neighbors in their fishing cabins were cowering under their beds, certain they were under a Cold War attack.

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He didn’t fiddle around often, but when he did . . .

Those were probably the only nights at Grandpa’s cabin that we didn’t all lie awake ’til all hours whispering and giggling or trying to synchronize sleep between his bellowing snores, because he completely wore us out with laughing. There were many participants, and Granny and all of her children made plenty of contributions to the entertainment, not all that much more genteel than those nights–but after all, it was his place, and at that place some strange and wonderful things occurred that could only have happened there.

I haven’t even begun to tell you of the beauty of that spot and its true out-of-doors pleasures, the way that the air around there always smelled of blackberries since the vines grew more wildly and fiercely than Sleeping Beauty‘s formidable brambly defenses and there were always wet blackberry leaves fluttering all around us, then the sweetness of the lavender-white blossoms, and then the fat, juicy berries bursting with their purple inky wine. I haven’t let you in on the secrets of the surrounding tree-thick roads, the empty lot that Grandpa finally bought and filled with a grand vegetable patch, the abandoned neighboring cabin we cousins “remodeled” in the woods. Or the glorious river, cold as icicles in midsummer, rocky, glittering, and full of secret delights. All of those things and more were part of our learning how to have a joy-filled life, and all because our Grandpa had a cabin.

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Is there any more magical place?

How I Learned to Love the Dreaded P Word

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[No, shame on you, not that P Word. Practice.]

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Apparently I was napping when the expected dose of wisdom was being handed out . . .

Is it somehow backward to say that if I learn by doing, the only way to learn to love doing something is to do it? Maybe it just proves that I’m kind of backward myself, for having taken such a large long chunk of life to figure out that that’s how it works. I’m not only a late bloomer in a multitude of things, I’m late in getting around to figuring out that I’m a late bloomer. Dang it. Tautologies and conundrums galore! (Wow, sounds like an imprecation to be screeched by a mediaeval-looking cartoon villain.) All I’m trying to say is that it took a lot of practice for me to learn to love practicing.

No doubt this self-evident truth dawns slowly because most of us are (I certainly are) born with a predisposition to (a) despise and evade anything that seems compulsory, and (deux) only experience can teach it to us. Talk about an irritating logical loop.

It is generally only out of desperation that I will finally buckle down and do something I’ve been artfully putting off, denying the existence of, and otherwise refusing to accomplish. I’m so busy worrying about making blunders that I refuse to even try. I’m so fond of being glued to my gilded divan and being fed chocolate-covered miracles by my adoring fans (okay, sitting on my backside, half a-snooze at the kitchen table, and licking the ice cream spoon until the finish is coming off of it) that I hate to break up the scene by becoming <shudder> an active and productive citizen. I’m resistant to change, stubborn and ornery, and always–like most of my creative compatriots in the arts, I gather–pretty well convinced that every artwork I produce is my last ever, that I will have lost the power to imagine, let alone do, any further works, and that even the stuff I’ve so far produced is only marginally non-heinous.

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I let the tools stare at me balefully for a goodly while.

Then, happily, I snap out of it. What a load of hot steaming hooey, I say to myself. [Roughly translated for your delicate sensibilities.] Most of the time I am actually able to do all of the foregoing in a shorter span than it takes to regale you with it. But there was that time in grad school . . .

Now, I’d even, driven more by economic reasons than good sense (but what the hey, it made a good substitute in the instance), taken three years off before grad school when my undergraduate studies concluded with my emergence clutching that wonderfully engraved Testimony to my glorified uselessness to a needy world: a Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Arts. As a matter of both principle and fact, I can honestly state that Art is indeed truly and meaningfully useful in the deepest of ways. Not, however in the way of, say, lining up salivating employers eager to avail themselves of my fabulousness in exchange for the quantities of money required for paying off undergraduate loans and frivolousness of that sort. Nor, while I’m being truthful, in the way of my improving the world greatly by waving around my magnificent diploma, no matter how sweeping and balletic the gesture (and whether physically or metaphorically).

Given my intellectual–oops, I meant academic hiatus, how very Freudian of me–you might think I’d come bombing into my graduate studies not only itching to get to work but stocked up with a mile high mushroom-cloud-in-the-making of spectacular new arty ideas and plots. Partly true, that. Unfortunately, I was still the same insecure, change-impervious, action-free action figure as ever, so what did I really do on arrival? Same old same ol’. I got straight to work making verrrrrry slow progress at producing a dainty little handful of drawings pretty much like all the drawings I’d done in the previous, oh, four years. Not exactly making me want to bound gazelle-like over to my first quarterly critique session and wow my prof with this pusillanimous production. I knew that the only sensible response to the presentation would be, in the words of the great art critic Clement Greenberg, “Yikes! Are you kidding me?”

Okay, I made that last part up, but I’ll betcha dollars to donuts that he was dying to say it from time to time.

My continued ability to collect graduate assistant cash to pave my way to another commencement party being dependent upon my actually doing some Graduate Studies, I sucked it up and went in for the fateful critique. Well, it’d probably be fairer to call that session therapy, or maybe just a brisk boot in the posterior, than a critique session, given that the art in question was not only rather questionably art (being sort of ripoffs of my own earlier work) but nigh unto negligible in numbers. Didn’t take too long to peel through with the insightful commentary, if you know what I mean.

But there was, wedged somewhere into that compact transaction, the seed of an idea. My mentor-advisor-prof mildly indicated that this evidence of my not having thought of or attempted anything other than what I’d done many a time before was just a little . . . unimpressive. Verging on enervating. Wrapped up in a stale tortilla. She was a gentle as could be, but didn’t sugarcoat it much. Great lady.

Without resorting to actual tantrum throwing, I got in a funk, a sulk, and finally, a fit of disappointed melancholy tinged with sulfurous ticked-off-ness. Reexamining my self, my work and my motives a bit, as you might hope. I know that old adage about the definition of insanity/stupidity/unrealisticositudinousness being Doing the Same Thing Again and Expecting a Different Result. Oddly, it had not entered my skull before that this might apply to the making of art, indeed to making art in an academic setting with the expectation of being evaluated as an artist worthy of an advanced degree. Silly me. At least it did come up at this late juncture. Better than never!

Knotty problem, simple solution: since doing things the usual way obviously wasn’t working, try doing things in an UNusual way. Me, I had to reduce it to a syrupy-thick extreme to test its full effectiveness (or mine), so I set myself the task of trying to do as much as possible that was the clear opposite of what I’d been doing. No point in being wishy-washy about it anymore. I’d been working strictly in black and white for a long time. So I worked all in color. My works had been small or moderate in scale, so I headed for larger formats. Slow work meant few finished pieces, so look-out-world, I was going to work fast (no avoidance, wasting time, or overthinking while in progress) and make More Stuff. Subject had been mostly still life with a twist, and definitely inanimate object-oriented. Time to try all figurative. Heck, I’d always avoided faces even when I did figurative work, so I decided to do variations on head shots pretty much exclusively. And so forth.

The upshot, as you can imagine, was a true shakeup of my predictable world. I had to come into my classrooms after hours and take over the space because there simply wasn’t enough room in the allotted grad student studio hovels, let alone my rented digs, for pinning up pieces of paper that were fast heading toward 4×20-foot, then 9×20-foot murals. The instant I determined to Go Big it was almost impossible not to get in a fever of production, drawing at all hours, with and on anything I could get my hands near. I raided the end-rolls at the local paper production plant and made trips to the big city to buy photographers’ backdrop rolls and strap them to the top of my old station wagon for the 2 hour drive home, rain or shine. I used up all of the pastels, pencils, pens, crayons, used cosmetics and condiments I could find to make marks and stains with, and then started drawing in a drybrush ink-wash style with house paint. My studio allotment did come in handy, because there was no possible place to cram all of the drawings I was making into my normal storage hideaways. I used any and every tool I could find at my disposal and grinned like a madwoman (as a madwoman?) over the wild newness of it all. Of me.

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When everything is called into action, everything becomes both worn and beautiful . . .

I’ve gone on long enough that you can easily guess the conclusion. At the end of the second quarter, my critique in the same 20×36-foot gallery that had been the site of that dispiriting time spent trying to read some interest into the small handful of pitiful drawings the quarter before–well, accounting number two found my teacher and me perched in the same room but with the four walls all plastered floor to ceiling, end to end, with new, colorful, living art. All great? Hardly. But all invigorating to me? Oh, yeah. My mentor really did look a little faint when she came in and I’m sure was looking for the correct room, since this was obviously the work of a different person. And it was.

It didn’t make me into an instant superstar, able to leap tall easels with a single bound and more powerful than a museum-full of Old Masters. It made me, instead, into someone able to remember why I’d felt compelled to make art in the first place, and aware for the first time that there were a multitude of methods, techniques, tools and concepts I’d barely known let alone tapped. It also made me into a very slight persona non grata in my immediate circle of family and friends when they all got called into service to install these monsterpieces with me for my thesis exhibition (“Ever thought about being a miniaturist?” “You want me to get on what ladder and hold up the side of a piece how tall?”), but that’s a story for another day. The story here is that the act of practicing on a grand scale truly woke me for the first time to that incredible frisson of adrenaline + joy that real practicing can give. That puts all of the bad days of unsuccessful practice right into the shade.

Surely ‘Tis Better to be Bombastic than Merely Bumptious

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graphite drawing

As my music teacher once told me, "if you make a mistake, be sure to make the same mistake again, and with real conviction, when you get to Verse Two."

No one will be surprised to hear that as a kid with no sense of direction, space or straightforward western left-to-right/top-to-bottom reading I never did master reading music. Apparently I was a pretty decent prevaricator and persuader, though, because I faked my way through my five years of piano lessons by conning teachers and friends into playing my assignments for me up front ‘so I could get a feel for how they worked’–so I could phony them up by playing primarily by ear when lesson time came around again. Not to say that this flim-flam actually made me a good player. I had the decency to stop taking lessons when I was old enough that the act was wearing as thin as a starlet’s underwear. My teachers deserved to work with students with a certain amount of potential, after all. But I learned lots of fun and useful things from them in spite the inevitable moments of frustration and drudgery inherent in beginner’s practice. Not least of which was that the root not just of learning, but of potential innovation and variant excellence is the Mistake.

This is not meant as license for licentiousness–free rein to make egregious errata just for the lazy-ass or mean-spirited fun of it. But there’s a great difference between tripping on the invisible banana skin and bounding around boisterously without regard to the laws of gravity just to see how much I can liven up a dull funeral service. There’s a yawning gap between plonking a wrong note in the heat of a performance and sabotaging a poor defenseless deceased composer because I don’t care enough to learn her work properly. Despite my inability to make head or tail of those dots on a score, I did earnestly try to learn the proper notes right through by however devious the means.

I can neither confirm nor deny that the keyboard biff-ery that inspired the above gem of guidance regarding consistency of form used to disguise a melodic pratfall in any way improved upon the intended character or direction of the piece. Can’t even remember what I was playing. But you can be sure that the technique offered was a face saver, if not a life-saver, many a time after. Sometimes it’s just best to own up to my impressive capacity for fallibility right off, and enjoy a good horse-laugh at my own expense along with all of the other merrymakers in the room. Sometimes, though, I would rather take a page from the Bluffer’s Guides and adopt a meant-to-do-that nonchalance. There’s only so much I can take of being the unintentional class clown. Part of me dreams of Emma Peel sang-froid, a fantasy that however insanely unreachable is yet not easily quashed.

After all, it has served as the inspiration, time and time again, for all sorts of larger than life ideas, stories, poems, artworks and practical on-the-spot excuses, and who among us does not need those! Dogs, however voracious, can’t be expected to digest every available hunk of homework; traffic cannot account for the vagaries of my inspired life behind the wheel at every moment; and certainly the good taste and etiquette handbook, no matter how comprehensive, simply doesn’t have the capacity to cover my every gaffe and blunder in thought, word and dork-dyed deed. So thanking my lucky stars, and my long-ago mistress of pianistic peregrinations, I will continue on my hapless yet happy way, pretending to know what I’m doing in life while covering my blunders with bluster and the best imitation I can give of correctness. Whatever that is.

graphite drawing

What I MEANT to say was . . .

Brightening Our Days with Scary Stories

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The news and indeed sometimes our own everyday lives provide plenty of stories of sorrow and horror and True Crime, which is–oddly enough–precisely why I like a good fictional tale of dread, doom and destruction. It’s such a relief to remember how to detach from dark and grotesque and terrifying things and even to laugh at them. But I’m mighty squeamish, when it comes to the real thing or even a too-good simulation of it, so slasher movies just don’t do the trick for me. I do need the remove and control that reading or visibly stylized and artificial images provide.

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Something is amiss in the conservatory . . .

It’s why when it does come to film I love the Alfred Hitchcock classics of suspense, or the genteel Gothicism of movies like Bunny Lake is Missing, Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte, and Gaslight. I avidly read the yarns of Roald Dahl and Edgar Allan Poe and Saki and their ilk, and bask in a good Henry James or Robertson Davies ghost story. I thrive on the dark-tinged fantasy of Edmund Dulac and the witty weirdness of Edward-too-good-to-be-true-named-Gorey.

Oh, yes, I’ll happily digest the terrors of a good contemporary thriller novel or the occasional modern fright-night movie, but I’m a sucker for old-school drama, it seems. Even in music, I can find lots of vicarious thrills and scare tactics in a great modern film or TV score and there are some current composers that excel in this (Danny Elfman, are your ears burning?), but my heart never ceases to lean back toward the bejeweled darkness of Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain and Saint-Saëns’ Danse Macabre and, if I’m in the mood for cinematic music, perhaps one of Miklós Rózsa‘s classic romantic scores.

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I am haunted enough by my own spooky imaginings . . .

It’s a fine thing to have the worlds of imagination in which to safely plumb and defeat all horrors and terrors. So I do like to indulge the urge myself with stories and poems and artworks of the brooding and twisted or the cheerily perverse and demented sort whenever I need reassurance–or just want to share the twinges a little.

  • photoWhat better way to find comfort on a drearily dark day than to curl up with a bit of artistic darkness?

Be Not Afraid of Me,

Unless You have a Good Reason

I buried the various body parts

in secret locations around the state,

reserving the heart of him I hate

to pin on the board for a game of darts,

and when it was thoroughly pierced and minced

I put on my favorite dress and heels

and danced a couple Virginia reels

before I washed up the room and rinsed,

then took the mincemeat left of the rat,

put it in the kiln for a nice hot burn,

where it made a fine glaze for a lovely urn,

and filled it with daisies, and that was that.

You might think I’m a teeny bit callous, cold,

rejoicing in vicious destructive acts,

but perhaps you’d relent if you knew the facts

and the rat’s true story at last were told–

but worry you needlessly? I? A shame,

when it’s highly unlikely by any stretch

of imagination you’d be a wretch

of such magnitude and incur the same . . .

now let us sit down for a cup of tea,

our own snug little tête-à-tête;

don’t worry about what you have just et,

unless you have reason to fear from me . . .

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So what's the score on horror? Do we close the book on beastliness? Oh, no, there's ALWAYS so much more . . .

Smile and be

What looks like a smile

From this distance might

Be the bared fangs

Of monstrous threat

Or then again might be

The hateful grin

Of rigid death

So much to read

Out of a single smile

But all I need to know

Is, do I keep on

Going toward it

Best of the Very Worst, or How I Rose Above Personal Mediocrity to become a Self-Made Above-Average Character

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”]digital drawingThe ever-inspiring Nia, photojournalist of all things sweet in Istanbul and wherever her travels have taken her, has tagged me with the honorable task of reviewing my short (thus far only, I hope) history as a blogger and passing along the challenge for such introspection and resurrection to some fellow internet trapeze artists as well. As one who has always prided herself, if that’s not too extravagant and approach to it, on being comfortable with her place in the middle of the pack, so to speak, in the universe, it is a tingly and cheering surprise when anyone tells me I’m otherwise. I mean, I knowI’m special, wonderful, and adorable and all of that since people I love and respect tell me so in my real life, but I am also fully aware that the rest of the planet is absolutely brimming with equally special-wonderful-adorable creatures in that sense. I’m also well aware that nothing I have done, made, said or been has shaken the foundations of reality or made me rich or famous, nor is likely to do so–and I really am okay with that!

So to be singled out as worthy of mention in this my new endeavor is flattering, frightening and flummoxing all at the same time. But mostly it feels really nice! It is a fine affirmation that my ego, smiling broadly at me in the mirror, is not so far off-kilter that my average-and-ordinariness cannot be seen by others, too, as maybe something a little shinier and more compelling than they actually are–or perhaps even edging upward over the years and efforts somewhere a tiny bit closer to excellence. Complacency, no, never, I hope. But isn’t it nice to get that sore shoulder once in a while that comes from cheerily patting oneself on the back?

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Buckets of bouquets to us all!

I would like to offer the same supportive and enthusiastic back-pats to the following fellow toilers in the fields of blogdom:

Ted Griffith, who braves the blogosphere with wonderful photographic art despite frequent disclaimers of intimidation and inexperience apparently quite similar to my own;

Madeline of ah-lum-dahp-dah, daring adventurer and journalist (with great humor and compassion) of her experiences around the world at an age when I still thought it was incredibly gutsy to say Hi to a stranger at a boring reception;

Fellow unreasonable optimist Jared at Lexidelphia, poet and commentator on such useful things as mustache characteristics and the importance of being an impertinent little upstart when questions ought to be asked;

Milady Hannah-Elizabeth of The Last Classic, writing a remarkably insightful and thoughtful rumination on life with all of its ups and downs;

Beautiful Desi of The Valentine 4, whose ability to calm the stormy seas around her with wisdom and humor and passion are a great example to us weaker-willed souls;

Aaron Leaman, who like the rest of us hard-working arty types, starts with Nothing and makes Something–in his case, artful and thought-provoking photos, vids and texts.

Jack Campbell, Jr, of This Average Life, a guy that just happened to post today on the selfsame theme I had chosen for the day, with a unique twist. I think that qualifies as good taste in ordinariness!–or something like it . . .

My Fellow Bloggers: Should you choose to accept this mission, you will only need to revisit and link to 7 of your all but forgotten posts, linking to them, and then pass this mission/challenge on to 7 other bloggers . . . here are my own responses:

#1 Your Most Beautiful Post (in your opinion):   Another Kind of Safety (or, better yet I hope, something yet to come)

#2 Your Most Popular Post (per stat views):   The Supercooled Liquid that is Far More than Smoke and Mirrors 

#3 Your Most Controversial Post (per reality):   As American as Whaaaaaa . . . ???

#4 Your Most Helpful, or “How To” Post:   Happiness may be Ephemeral, but It’s Sure Worth the Effort

#5 Your Most Surprisingly Popular  Post:   I Hereby Crown Myself Mistress of the Mess-ups and Guru of Good Intentions

#6 Your Post That Didn’t Get the Attention It Merited:   Be Still and Listen, Thou Big Dope

#7 Your Magnum Opus (post you are most proud of):  I’m hoping like crazy that if there’s an individual post that’s “best” it is yet to come. What I’m really proud of is finally getting up the nerve and the gumption to actually join the blogosphere and persevere at it. And all of the rest of you that commit to this humbling and exhilarating and inspiriting task should be equally pleased to be in this weird and wonderful company!

colored pencil on paper

This little piggy cried, "Me! Me! Me!" all the way home . . .

Please pardon my wallowing in self-congratulation for a moment. Whee! Whee! Whee!

Friends Well Met in Cyberspace

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We have constant reminders of the dangers lurking around the dark corners of the webiverse, and indeed we would do well to heed all such warnings. But I have seen that the obverse of that coin is equally impressive and far more enlightening and cheering: cyberspace is full of fantastic people and inspirations, and I don’t have to go far to find them. The kindness of strangers is quickly transformed into wonderful streams of affinity and even deep friendships when we have the ability to find so much common ground despite the physical, cultural or temporal distances between us.

Case in point: ceciliag, author of the exquisitely artful and personal blog The Kitchens Garden. I saw, without surprise, that today she had received a much-deserved blogging award for her marvelous work, and was delighted, because in the short time I’ve followed her blog I have come to see her as an inspiration, a mentor and even a friend. That’s the beauty of this concentrated contact we can develop with wonderful people whose shared insights and arts move us to do more than merely hang about the fringes basking in their gifts, and actually get to work on our own, howsoever we can! What I saw with surprise, and gratitude, was that C had generously passed along the award to other bloggers, and included me. I will of course try to narrow the field of my admired cohorts enough to pay the gift forward, because others besides ceciliag have strengthened, entertained and inspired me as well. She must know that I would gladly have included her in my own list had she not been the one ‘tagging’ me!

award tag

The purpose of the award is clearly to reinforce the ties between us in this remarkably friendly and creative world of blogging, and also to introduce us to more new connexions that we haven’t yet known to enjoy. Along with the fine mandate to share with you some links to other blogs I know you’ll find delightful, I am tasked with telling you 7 things you don’t know about me. Finding 15 bloggers whose work I admire and think deserves recognition is easy (though keeping it to only 15 mightn’t be)–but since I’m so boldly non-secretive a person, I may have to fish around a little to think of any things everybody doesn’t already know about me. So first, a blogroll of other worthy persons whose blogging efforts I hope you’ll support and find as delightful, provocative, educational, witty, touching, and/or flat-out gorgeous as I do.

Ad Alta Voce

Cherry Tea Cakes

Claudia Finseth

Closet Cooking

Draw Stanley

In Search of My Moveable Feasts

Just a Smidgen

Little Brown Pen

My Little Norway

My Open Source Life

Plate Fodder

Roost: A Simple Life

Sustainable Garden

The Last Classic

Tinkerbelle

And now, as if my dear readers haven’t already heard enough blather about me, here are seven things you might not have known.

1  I consider ginger root the Universal Donor. I can think of hardly anything that can’t benefit from the addition of ginger in one of its many forms.

2   I have something a little like the earworms people get when a pop song (or, among people I know, a movement from some classical piece) gets stuck in their head for a day or week–but mine is a permanent repetitive tune. My personal theme song, I guess. At least it plays in variations sometimes, thank goodness, or I’d go batty. Or have I already?

3   Once, long ago, I got to make a commissioned artwork to be presented as a gift to the Bishop of El Salvador.

4   The shelves on my desk have a miniature found-science collection of bones, bugs, bird nests, rusted hardware and seed pods.

5   I have a horror of telephones. Yes, it has a good latin phobia name too. But what do we phobics do to get over it–call each other???

6   My ability to raise one (either) eyebrow sardonically once garnered me the nickname “GP” for reminding my teacher of Gregory Peck’s expressions. I don’t think she meant it as a compliment, ‘specially if she had any idea that my sense of irony was mostly aimed at what I thought was the absurdity of her teaching style. Mea culpa.

7  At various points in my life I thought I’d study to be a pastor (that was clearly before I started developing into such a heathen); a marine biologist (all that scientific knowledge started to get in my way); an architect (oh, yeah–a dyslexic who can barely do grade-school math). Turns out I wasn’t really cut out for any sort of well-defined path.

Which brings me right here! And I can definitely say I couldn’t be more pleased with having landed among you. It challenges more different aspects of my personality and self-image than pursuing any of the aforementioned would have done in my case. And it lets me keep up the hunt for my vocation, if I have one, with a dandy support community that often drives me down previously unknown and unexpected paths of fun-filled mystery. So thanks, and here’s to all of you, not just those on today’s list!

photo

Bouquets to all!

Correct Me If I’m Wrong (and I Never am . . . )

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spurs & windmill photos

EVERYTHING is research, no? Put on your spurs, head into the wind, and file this, baby!

I think of life as one big information-expedition. Whatever we do or sense or observe gets filed for future reference. Some things are instantly obvious candidates for the Circular File, yes, but everything else should potentially be of interest in one fashion or another. Call it ‘learning from experience’ or fodder for future tall tales to the great-grandkids or simply useful stuff to know, I can’t think of anything that doesn’t, shouldn’t or can’t inform the future self if stored and processed thoughtfully.

Anu Garg‘s wonderful resource website and newsletter A.Word.A.Day (http://wordsmith.org/awad/) is full of marvels: offering the etymology of a word (or more) each day, it seeks to broaden not only our vocabularies but our exposure to and, hopefully, understanding of the history, culture, politics, religions, biology, biography, and so forth–not only of our immediate surrounding population and geographic areas but all of the world’s intertwining ones as well. In addition, the site includes quoted wisdom, pathos and humor from great thinkers and writers. Today’s quotation was one that especially resonated in me:

A writer — and, I believe, generally all persons — must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art. –Jorge Luis Borges, writer (1899-1986)

I’ve long felt that, whatever other good bad or indifferent qualities I impute to my life experiences, they shape not only how I think and act afterward but also what directions my creative life is bound to take. I have not even remotely achieved the Buddhist ideal of absolute presence in the moment or a fully and minutely examined life. In my case, though, I attempt most to apply that special rigor to the sensory experiences of my existence, since it is the use of the senses in interpreting and expressing my thoughts and ideas as art that gives me my best self-expression in its broader meaning.

Thankfully, my immediate circle is famously patient with such things. When my partner and I go for a walk, he is enjoying the movement and the tour through a place. I am spending some of the outing walking right along with him, but it’s usually interrupted from time to time by my stopping to investigate and/or photograph whatever intriguing distraction has caught my Miss Magpie eye. I call our walks ‘interval training’ on my part, because while my spouse has continued at his regular pace and I’ve been playing amateur researcher-inspector-scientist, the gap has widened from arm’s length and I must either speed up a little or hit a dead run to catch up for another bit of close-up strolling. Whether it’s now stored in my digital memory as a snapshot or not, whatever caught my attention is filed as quickly as possible–preferably while I catch up to my walking partner, since he may well have continued our conversation without noticing that I’d dropped behind and it would make for some disconcerting non-sequiturs indeed if I interjected with commentary on the beetle wing I just hurriedly stuffed in my pocket or the Art Deco cornice I paused to photograph.

Certainly I have found the digital mini-camera a boon when it comes to those fleeting moments of ideation and inspiration. More often than not, it’s long after the fact that I find the meaning and particular interests in whatever had diverted my attention, frequently because, upon seeing the photograph I’d hastily taken, I’m now noticing something new of interest. That’s usually when I spot similarities of appearance or type, or affinities that put this new tidbit into the context of some story I’d intended to tell or that make it a ‘good fit’ for grouping with other found treasures in my endless stream of visual-mental comparisons and meta-matches, these usually leading to yet another story or stream-of-consciousness ramble. Thus go the meanderings of the trackless mind.

The special appeal, for me, of such unplanned and serendipitous findings is that nothing goes to waste. There are no Wrong Answers in this class. Mistakes and griefs, misfires and tragedies, ugly things and scary things and unbelievably stupid things all have as much possibility for conversion into a good story or a fine piece of art as any happy or pretty thing can have. Even MY mistakes and griefs. With a bit of perspective, at least. So, whenever I can unfurl from the fetal position after having been hit by or created a disaster, I teach myself yet again to spring up with the cartoon-like enthusiasm of those eensy-weensy Olympians popping over the vaulting horse, throw my hands triumphantly in the air, and yell, “I meant to do that!” and then do my best to incorporate the most useful elements of what’s left of me after the experience into an even better me.

Or at the least, into a pretty cool piece of creative art.

aquarium photos + text

It takes some courage, to be sure . . .

And it’s particularly helpful to remind myself that, even if I’m not quite up to that task, maybe the Artist character that I play could do it . . .

“It’s Complicated” with Orange

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blurred taxi photo

Any color is fraught with meaning, and all relationships are fraught, yet . . .

Maybe it’s a little odd, my having an eccentrically complex relationship with that simple secondary color. Not that I dislike it; the fabulousness of a flaming sunset at the end of the day is hard to argue, and a spectacular orange koi is a worthy showstopper. Lots of things I really admire, even crave, are orange in fact. After all, the orange fruit and all of its showy tangerine and kumquat cousins are pretty, cheery, and refreshingly delish.

But orange still has some slightly off-putting associations for me that keep it as a color generally restrained from entering my go-to list of favorites. The aforementioned fruit might even share in the blame. I’m sure I’m not the first kid in history that thought oranges and mandarins exceedingly tasty except for those pesky un-chewable and indigestible segment membranes. But I may have been in the minority when my solution to that problem was to bypass them, not by spitting empty membranes out indecorously or rudely refusing to eat the food proffered by my kindly parents, but by squirreling them away in my cheek and not swallowing them. Clearly it can’t have been a particularly delicious solution, since the least desirable part of the treat was what remained the longest, but apparently I was too prim and simplistic to have thought the whole procedure through. Further, how I intended to cope with the skeletal remains in the long term if I wasn’t gutsy enough to just spit and throw them away I cannot quite imagine, but clearly the extended timeline was an abstraction beyond the scope of a person of my then so limited life-experience. All I can say is that the experiment was short-lived. When I arrived home after a whole morning’s outing and, on being parentally interrogated about my assumedly pleasant adventures, remained mum, a quick investigation revealed the impacted concretion of orange-leavings jammed up like snus by my gums. I was given a quick course on the proper technique for eating a whole orange section, which to my dismay involved actual swallowing and digestion of the part I didn’t much like. Ah, well, I managed to overcome my disappointment and learn to love the fruit in a slightly more grown-up fashion after that.

Though we are taught at a reasonably young age to watch out for those mercilessly careening yellow and orange cars that make up the majority of the (somewhat heedlessly) speedy American taxi fleet, I’ve certainly never been directly menaced by one–and there are times when there’s no more welcome sight that one hustling to my rescue when it’s wanted. Still, l have moments when the color, seen just peripherally on the move, gives me an instinctive urge to throw myself headlong into a safe ditch or behind a brick building. It might at least prove highly entertaining to those nearby, but it makes me just a bit more paranoid than it ought to when I’m on a city sidewalk.

Another youthful experience that may have colored my feelings about the color orange involved my initial foray into fashion. The first time my parents let me choose my very own garment, the object of my affection was an orange coat. Not just any orange coat, mind you, but a pint-sized, short-length, fake fur trenchcoat-styled warmer in brilliant Safety Orange. You know the color: they make road cones that color to keep you from driving your pickup truck into the sinkhole that just swallowed Highway 2. The warning tape quarantining an anthrax zone is that color. Deadly toadstools warn off marauding fauna with that color. And I chose a coat that was not only that color, but loudly and proudly so in plush fake fur. I must assume that it is the clearest possible confirmation of my parents’ unswerving and unconditional love of their offspring that they not only allowed me to have the coat but to wear it and be seen with them in public. Though children can reasonably be said to look cute in pretty much any old thing they do or do not wear, I think it’s also fair to say that no color has yet been invented that was less likely to flatter my skin tones, let alone give me the air of sophistication I imagine I was expecting from the thing.

That, however, is just what is so odd about my orangey-astic feelings. I felt myself a modern and cosmopolitan woman of distinction in that coat. My adult recoil at picturing the silliness of it in no way matches the love that I remember having for that ridiculously orange fur blob of a coat. No sight is more pleasing than that of a friendly orange taxicab pulling up to the curb at my command. My irritation at eating something with the flavor and consistency of strapping tape in no way diminishes my craving at certain times for a luscious juicy segment of a perfectly simple ripe Navel orange.

I’m complicated that way.

“Siete tutti testimoni!” (You’re All Witnesses!)

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[Ed: including to my bad pretend Italian]

monotype 1982

. . . the question is: what did we just witness?

Once upon a time in an Italian bar/cafe, there was a bit of a dust-up. A woman spray-painted into clothes that could conceivably be construed as the work uniform of a Professional sort of woman was becoming very vocal in her criticism of the bartender who would not fill her order for a drink refill. As it was still quite early in the forenoon and it was perfectly evident to even the least astute detective in the place that she had already quaffed quite a number of drinks, the knowing grins around the room were clearly in support of the barman’s side of the difference, but that interested la dama not at all, if she was capable of noticing. This was highly unlikely, given how much energy she was devoting to berating and abusing the barman and impugning his humanity, his virility, his lineage, his bartending skills, and anything else she could think up to fling at him in epithetic form, all the while storming back and forth as though onstage in her own melodrama. I, for one, didn’t need to know any real Italian to know either what the situation was or how graphic her language. Finally she did decide to appeal to the cafe patrons for support in her cause, and spun around, all wild hair and spandex, screaming “Siete tutti testimoni!”

And indeed we all were witnesses. It’s just that she failed to realize we were witnesses not to any crime or indignity being perpetrated against her but quite the opposite, had witnessed her being a noisy louse, a jerk, e una idiota estrema.

Keeping a low profile with our badness and stupidity is never easy, no sir. Keeping a secret, always on the verge of impossible; otherwise there would never be any big deal made of it. But we all have plenty of times when we’d far prefer no one were paying us any attention. Don’t tell me you’ve never said or done something dopey or rotten and then fervently wished the earth would open up and swallow you. If that were so, your halo would be blinding the rest of us and eventually you’d be shunned and banished from the general company, because tolerably ordinary mortals make mistakes and have faults.

What wouldn’t any of us give to have our own permanent magician’s assistant devoted to diverting the universal attention from our every slip and slight! Lacking that sleight-of-hand, though, we continue to make our every faux pas and fumble right out in front of everybody, and even those failures seemingly accomplished in private tend more often than not to be exposed with astonishing speed. If we were to be visibly dirtied by our every inward flaw, we would look like nothing so much as a whole race of ambulatory mud pies.

graphite drawing

So many ways to get into trouble . . .

The Age of Communication, despite sounding like the cheery promise of more perfect interaction and dialogue between us, has instead mostly created a false sense of remove and anonymity within which many people shed their garments of civility and openly abuse the supposed cover by being ever bolder and more crude in exercising their own imperfections with great abandon, all the while excoriating others whose flaws don’t match their own. Trolls, flamers and lurkers abound.

This isn’t, of course, new. Criminals and miscreants of every flavor have existed since the beginning of recorded time. We merely update our approach to use these newer electronic tools in order to make our awfulness easier to enact or to use new methods that seem to offer better cover for our creeping nastiness.

A fellow blogger recently ‘went public’ with the exposure of one such despicable attack, made via a “comment” on her blog that was nothing less than a vile spewing of personal hatred in the form of threats against her and her child. One can, I imagine, debate endlessly about cause and culpability if one wishes to wade through the possibility of such an attacker’s being non compos mentis or under duress from such-and-such mitigation–while we’re all demonstrably fallible we like to think no real, healthy, normal human would do such a thing to another let alone do so before the eyes of the world. Why and how, however, seem to me to be less helpful questions to ask first than “now what?”

No matter how much we’d like to sweep ugliness under any available rug and forget it, it doesn’t cease to exist–nor do we, however unwittingly or inadvertently or driven by whatever illness or desperation, cease to create more ugliness. The question remains, where do we go from here? Lady Macbeth and all the rest of us know that What is done cannot be undone, so how do we move forward?

Recent events have nagged me into puzzling more than usual in this vein lately. The hideous mass murder in Norway a mere few weeks ago was a terrifying reminder of the ever-present ugly underside of human nature. Americans have been publicly obsessing over how to acknowledge and commemorate the decade-past monstrosity of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Crime waves go up and down but as seasick as they make us we never seem to stop them.

The blogger who published her attacker’s wrong, it seems to me, was wise. She knows that there is a much larger community of people that choose kindness, thoughtful discourse, mutual support and what we believe to be a fundamental good among us that can’t be destroyed by the bad. That we will rise up and, each in our own way, say so when we see someone saying or doing horrid things or being terrible is the only reasonable recourse–silence is complicity or at the very least, acquiescence. And so I must stand with my fellow blogger, and with all my fellow believers in a certain kind of peace, and say to all enemies of that peace that hatred and violence of any kind are not welcome here. In the ether, or on the earth. Not anywhere

Weird and simplistic and naive as it sounds, I think the only way to stop people from doing really evil things is to make them want to stop doing them. [Huh??]

I am making no miraculous proposals here. I own no magic potion, know no transformative incantation, have no universal antidote to hatred and cruelty and incivility. But what I am beginning to learn at this ripe old age is that only by making the first incremental move toward a solution do we have any hope of finding or creating a solution. The only such move I can see that’s feasible for non-magicians is to confront and oppose meanness and wickedness when we see them. Merely standing in open defiance of what we believe is wrong is all that some of us can do, but we surely must do it.

So even though I abhor wallowing in public maundering over unchangeable griefs and agonies past and will not likely take a lot of visible action in response to the 9/11 anniversary or the Norwegian rampage, I will resist the witness-intimidation tactics of both my own passive don’t-get-involved nature and that of the would-be wrongdoers out there and say, Choose better. Being a jerk or worse yet, an openly abusive or cruel or vicious person, has no place among real people. Deliberate kindness and goodness are actually meant to be the norm and should be practiced. Sounds childlike, maybe, but I just have to stand as witness to this.

We’re all witnesses.