Category Archives: Thinking Aloud

Quietly, Now

Posted on by
Reply

Yesterday’s electrical brainstorm calls for a moment of reverent nothingness for recovery.

acorn photo

In a nutshell . . .

When I have had a flood of frenzied and frazzling thoughts, it’s a benison, a grace, to take a deep breath right down to my ankle-bones and think blessed nothingness for a goodly while. Excess must needs be remedied with open space, with quietude, with letting go. Namaste. Sometimes the noise and frantic activity go on for long bouts and the need for respite and renewal borders on desperation. Other times, I’ll get that blast of craziness out of the way fairly quickly but it still leaves me limp and needing repair, and then a simple meditative breather will suffice for regaining equilibrium–until the next hyperactive think-spasm occurs. I’m certainly fortunate not to battle the extremes of high-and-low fought by the bipolar and the super-passionate alike (though not in like manner, of course), being able for the most part to readjust the balance of my world with a mere pause to refocus and salvage my scattered composure.

Happily, it doesn’t generally require a complicated or expensive methodology, this regrouping need of mine. Sometimes, as today, a time spent quietly doing simple household chores begins the winding-down process. Always, a calming glance or touch from my partner does much to further the soothing. Mostly, I’m just learning the gradual bit of wisdom that comes to us all with age, if we’re lucky: let go. Stop pushing, stop racing, deliberately quiet the mind by removing distractions (or myself from them), and let the sweet silence of the senses envelop me.

From that small acorn will my great shading oak tree of stability and peace grow.

a ReSounding ValeNtine to eXuBerant advocates

Posted on by
5
Digital collage of two handmade collages

What are we searching for?

What need have I of inspirations of my own when I’m being diligently hand fed meaningful resources by those around me?

In response to my musing on the Muse, or substitutions for one in absentia (https://kiwsparks.wordpress.com/2011/08/06/titles-without-tales/), XB writes and asks what moved me to begin blogging in the first place. Short answer: XB.

The longer and more precise answer is that those kind souls comprising my Support Group–loved ones, fellow artists and writers, and those standing ready with the occasionally required kick in the hindquarters–made me do it. There are those who will say that that’s a typically long-winded way of saying the Devil Made Me Do It, but I like to think their motives were altruistic, regardless of what anyone thinks of my output. After all, there was the now-famous critique of a gallery installation of mine, and I quote, If I had stuff like that, I’d burn it. Since that came from my very own Gramps, and I knew that he had zero sense of irony but that, well, he loved me, I feel certain that there was no hidden agenda in the remark. Purely observational. In point of fact, my grandfather would have burned the lot of it without a second thought, but luckily for me he didn’t have his hands on the stuff. Turns out, it simply made me consider more seriously my audience, if any. Granny, viewing the photos of the installation from the other side of the table, loved it. Bless her soul.

My grandmother, let’s be honest, would have loved my work if it were the closest thing to excrement produced by anything other than a mammalian digestive system, because she so closely associated it with me, whom she also loved. I think she really did get a kick out of the art installation in question, aesthetically speaking, but it was irrelevant in the context of the moment. What I was beginning to figure out was that there are as many filters, as many reasons for liking or disliking what an artist does, as there are electrons in the known universe. And that’s counting the town of Electron, Washington. I was also starting to understand that I was compelled to Make Stuff (pictures, poems, stories, sculptures) without regard for whether anyone else would care or not, would like it or not. This was a very useful realization, as freeing as that period when I discovered that if I made larger quantities of stuff, it wouldn’t matter as much if the same percentage didn’t turn out the way I wanted, I just had more to recycle.

Meanwhile, ambling back to the main question (all roads do lead to me) the concomitant bit of info seeping into my lizard brain was that it did matter to and please others that I made my art and that I shared it. So far I’ve never forced anyone to look at or read my work, unless you count teachers required to evaluate assigned things. Thus, I’ve become more comfortable with the idea that if something I do catches someone’s interest, they will likely come willingly to gaze and, if I’m especially fortunate, to make it a communal experience by responding to it as some of you have here.

Which all loops conveniently back to why I’m blogging. I’ve long been happy to haul out the artwork or haul visitors to where it is, if invited (or if a blank wall is foolishly left near me when I’m on a tear). But my friends, family, and other supporters are far-flung in the physical world and we all have remarkably scheduled lives. So when some of the same gang began to suggest that I consider sharing via a more “portable” and less time-constrained medium, the internet, it started to seem like a good idea. Further, when I began to notice how much more I enjoyed the compulsion to write and draw and whatnot if I actually practiced in a slightly disciplined way, not to mention that I sometimes even got noticeably better at it, then blogging at last appeared to be a logical outlet. I acquiesced. Here I am, forty-some posts into it and scratching my head in wonder.

In another completely unsurprising development of the sort that makes me slap myself in the forehead with an appropriately gobsmacked expression, I got a quick reminder that my attraction to art-making is inextricably intertwined with the urge for storytelling; that storytelling is one of the most basic and universal forms of communication; and that I meet and come to know yet another round of good and encouraging and inspiring people via this medium of ether-wandering. From my Oz correspondent at ‘the wuc’ (http://thewuc.com/) to my longtime friend and artistic supporter Mark who shoots me responsive emails from Edmonton, AB, to this morning’s surprise blog subscription from a high school address in Kathmandu, Nepal, I gain strength and hope and camaraderie and ideas. And this morning, from XB right here in my neck of the woods, I get the impetus for a whole new day’s blog entry.

So thank you, XB, thank you spouse and parents and siblings, Jimmy Dale and VN and my personal Dragonfly, and Candas, and so on ad infinitum. This blog’s for you.

lilac and apple blossom photos

With continued gratitude . . .

Never fear, though, while I do indeed have a soft squishy marshmallow center, I also blog because it’s a socially acceptable place nowadays to whine, vent my spleen with unseemly rants and generally behave like my crusty curmudgeonly exterior wants to do. Just a little caveat, my dears, lest you forget whilst I’m busy drizzling the much-deserved honey on y’all.

Pontius Pilates, or Why I Only Exercise Out of Guilt

Posted on by
Reply

Three guesses, my friends. I’ve tried. Not as sincerely as necessary, apparently, because it never ‘took’. I just haven’t found that magic needful item called genuine motivation, let alone gotten any joy from the thing called athletic pursuit. I’m absolutely unable to come to grips with how people get pleasure from exercise.

Never did.

Yes, I get the payoff part, but it’s only by forcibly dragging my horrendously unwilling carcass through the misery of the activity part that I’ve ever been able to even glimpse the answer to that part of the equation. As it happens, I will admit to always having been that classic playground target, the weenie. I am sufficiently strong and graceful–just–to not topple over in a severely mortifying heap of near-death simply from attempting to stand up from a prone or seated position. Possibly I’d still do the human-origami thing if heavily medicated or, okay, actually nearing death, but gimme a break. What I’m saying is more that I swim in the mainstream of the ever-popular Last Person Chosen for every team. And with good reason, mind you. I never kidded myself that I should be bumped up higher on the roster. Got no skills, no nacherl-born talent, no passion for it all. As the deep right fielder for the Bad News Bears* I would be benched in .006 seconds. In right fielder capacity I at least approach minimal lawn bowling skills, but really, not so much. That would be too much like utility in the athletic performance department. Even considering that mad skills for the bowl-o-rama are somewhat less helpful on the baseball field than a hapless weenie might vainly hope.

I found my moments of being nominally adjacent to modest, passable skill in a couple of Physical Education instances. It was only by gritting my teeth through the years of garden-variety youthful humiliations ranging from the mere catcalls and snide showoff-ness of insecure high-level school hotshots that, as usual, are low-level schoolyard bullies to being demonstrably stinky all on my sweet self’s own. My Moments, unfortunately, were also in areas of athletic endeavor that could be easily construed as marginal and/or distinctly useless in the way of getting one, say, a scholarship or a smidgen of popularity. While I was never hungry for the latter, it could possibly have saved my parents a buck or two if I could’ve latched on to the former before high school matriculation.

Not a lot of recruiters drool after modestly successful junior high football kickers (female), nearly-good dilettante archers, hurdlers and high jumpers that jump only So High, and swimmers whose main skill is subduing strugglers in Life-Saving 101. And of course it would have been pointless, since as I may have previously averred, I simply dislike sports-related stuff of nearly every kind. So I’d have a bit of difficulty maintaining any scholarship anyone was dopey enough to bestow on me, don’tcha know.

I will continue to press myself to overcome my natural aversion to motion and activity. I’m aware that my chances of continued living, let alone healthy and happy living, depend on my acquiescence in that, and lord knows I’d love if I accidentally found something healthful that I liked doing along the way. Anybody hear the Exercise Good Fairy flitting nearby?

photos + text

Only getting frightfully old will exempt me from working toward physical fitness, so maybe I'd best just make peace with decrepitude . . .

* Bad News Bears: a film I will happily admit to never having willingly or knowingly seen even 2 minutes of, but that I know from secondary sources to be an appropriate reference point for my own grotesque ineptitude on the baseball diamond. If you need further confirmation of my level of baseball skill and knowledge, feel free to ask any person that has had any contact lasting longer than the aforementioned 2 minutes with me and I’m quite certain they can vouch for me on it.

Titles without Tales

Posted on by
2

 

graphite on paper

One of Our Best Operatives is Missing . . .

As both a visual and verbal storyteller, I’m bound to come up against the stubborn blank wall of imagination empty on occasion, if not often. Long ago I began using the trick of “forced randomness” to fill in the blank until something more substantial would either emerge from the resulting prescription or I’d get a welcome brain-wave from another source to rescue me. As I learned, it’s simply making the first mark on the page that’s generally the hardest part: once there’s a mark, whether genuinely random scribble made with the blessed No. 2 pencil or a slightly gibberish-tinged line written in exasperation, I now have something to respond to, to edit, to like or dislike or build upon, in whatever way I’m moved to do. The response may be disgusted continuous pressing of the Delete key or furious “unscribbling” with the big bad eraser (a tool I find I rarely use for actually erasing). If that’s the case, why then, I can work to divine just what was so unsatisfactory to me about the initial move I’d made and then there’s probably fodder in the facts enough to get me started on something more useful, more personally motivated.

If, on the other hand, I see the seeds of utility and interest in that first foray, I’m often well served by turning the whole process into a good healthy bout of problem solving. That’s what real creativity is to me: my flighty little brain’s attempt to figure out what’s missing from the world, real or not, and fill in the blanks. Blank page, blank canvas, blank silence. Aside from beautiful and meaningful moments of personal zen, I’m driven to fill them with stuff that intrigues and feeds me.

Sometimes I’ll use external means to try to force motivation. I might pick up the first book or magazine I see, crack it open to the first page my fingers find, point to a spot on the page, and tell myself that whatever word or image I land on has to serve as my starting point, the guide for making Mark One. I might look out the window and whatever moves first within my view has to be the source. Any of the old standard repertoire of such tricks will likely do. But perhaps my favorite is to give myself a title or an over-arching concept that could conceivably serve as the framework for a whole series of artworks, chapters, stories. I think of it as my “Mr Booktitles” approach, named years ago in honor of a school of “acting”, sometimes embodied by very famous and very popular actors speaking every line of dialog or soliloquy or narration as though it were a stand-alone title from a very badly written book, a method that still keeps me astonished these particular actors–or the writers and directors that should be forcing them to do better–can get hired and admired. Go figure. But the fatuous title approach has served me reasonably well, so I guess I mustn’t criticize. All I do in the instance is create my title and use either the text or the artwork to try to flesh it out, give it some meaning.

The graphite drawing above came from just such an approach, and ended up being the first in a series of five or six drawings that “illustrated” different parts of the “story” represented by the title, a sort of post-Cold-War spy adventure that never did get written and for which the present artwork illustrated, ultimately, the nonexistent prequel to the never-happened story. Not that I wouldn’t write the actual story at some point, but it wasn’t necessary to have it in hand as impetus to get some work on the page in another format. Who knows, it may be that the illustrations had to exist in order for the story to ‘need to’ happen at some point. If that isn’t convoluted enough, I don’t know what is. But at least it gave me a useful jumping-off point for a series of works that remains something of a favorite among my audiences and yes, with me too.

Rosy Outlook

Posted on by
2

 

ruffly-roses + text

Every sign of growth and newness brings new hope . . .

Somehow, sometimes, a bad thing can be a good sign. Like the third day following surgery, feeling pretty lousy. So perfectly fits the expected pattern that despite the awfulness of watching my loved one’s pain and exhaustion, it’s oddly reassuring to me. Strange, no? Kind of the way this screwy world can work, with funny, breakable characters like us in it. We see and feel hurt that we dread and yet can find promise in it. We look for the expected outburst of anger or depression, the need to scream vituperation at the gods, and a weird calm descends and what emerges instead is a single blink of zen, that sense that something new and right will come of it all in the end.

oil painting on canvas

Peace conquers all darkness . . .

There was a time when I had a project deadline for a painting and there wasn’t a glimmer of hope that I would finish it in time. A lot was riding on the outcome, and my life outside of the studio was not exactly providing either inspiration or even enough contentment and comfort to help me fake it. So I decided the only alternative was to take my frustration and anger out on the canvas. Since the subject and treatment of the painting were wide open, what better way to find catharsis than in the virtual reality of art.

I’m sure you know where this is headed: I got into the studio late at night, frazzled and feeling pretty desperate and certainly hot under the collar, and planning to take out all of my aggression and madness in making a wild, dark, slashing abstraction that would act as a personal bloodletting, maybe give me a cool high-intensity painting that would start me on a useful new artistic path, and get lots of that pent-up grotesquerie vented. No surprise to anyone that’s ever had the slightest brush with pop psychology, a few hours after I dragged myself into the studio, I produced the most floaty, peaceful, candy-coated painting of ethereal sweetness that I’d ever managed to produce, possibly after as well. Didn’t fire off my moment of impending doom into a monstrous painting; I dealt with my darkness by making a world of safety and joy to swallow it up instead. From grimness, growth. And yes, it became the impetus for a series of idealized abstract landscapes that still remain among my most gentle-spirited works to date.

Boston rose photos + text

From the dark earth, newness emerges . . .

Rants in My Pants

Posted on by
3

Yeah, yeah. I get that itch and I just gotta scratch it. Clearly, I’m not much on keeping my feelings to myself. Secretive? Uh-uh. Obviously I’m not paranoid about my privacy. Got nothing worth stealing but the loves of my life, and they are all masters of their own destinies thankyouverymuch. The skeletons, if any, in my closet would likely bore the socks off of any self-respecting archaeologist, and any idiot that puts in the effort to sneak a peek into my nekkidness, physical or spiritual, will get the severe eye-poke he she or it deserves without requiring any action on my part beyond existing in my infinite beauty.

Then again . . .

photo collage of blue/white images + text

The unmapped life is full of wonderful surprises . . .

What I could never have designed for myself or expected as a reward for my humble personal resources is a life history marked by the remarkable and filled with the fabulous. To take inventory of the amazing things I have experienced and the outstanding people whose paths I have been privileged to cross is to stand in awe of my incredible good fortune and all of the odd and pleasing presents it’s tossed in my circuitous life’s wanderings. Here’s a little inventory of some of that funny life o’mine in the form of a list, in no particular order, of things I have or have not done, for good or ill. I guess we all do this sort of self-inventory from time to time because such reflection is an intriguing way of finding out surprising things about each other and, more than that, about ourselves.

Here goes.

Things I Have Done:

*   Been bitten by a pony
*   Exposed a thief by revising a public swimming pool’s accounting system
*   Captured a bird by using a veiled antique hat
*   Canoed the Kickapoo River
*   Designed/sewn a ball gown out of plastic trash bags for a special party
*   Used an arc welder—very briefly and ineptly, to be sure
*   Seen celebrities at airports and discussed tuna sandwiches with one TV star
*   Forgotten very nearly as many things as I’ve learned
*   Grown vegetables
*   Been president of a theatrical organization
*   Helped rebuild an old toilet by custom manufacturing obsolete parts for it
*   Changed tires
*   Been the pianist for a wedding and for a theatrical production
*   Attended a formal banquet in a foreign palace
*   Told lame jokes
*   Been served coffee by a famous symphony conductor
*   Gotten stitches for a hockey injury
*   Drawn pictures
*   Drawn a crowd
*   Drawn butter
*   Drawn a blank
*   Slept with my hairdresser (okay, my husband cuts my hair)
*   Won a Best Actress award
*   Won a safety-orange knit dickey
*   Fallen through a ceiling and hung by my armpits from the joists
*   Rooted plants from cuttings
*   Grilled shark
*   Had an allergic reaction
*   Taught university courses in art, English (writing) and learning strategies
*   Ice skated on a frozen lake
*   Stage-managed a national convention
*   Practiced archery
*   Delivered a homily to a chapel full of theologians and religion professors
*   Darned socks
*   Made dinner for an internationally famous cookbook author-editor
*   Carved alabaster
*   Run lighting for a professional ballet performance
*   Created a computer cataloguing system for a library
*   Disassembled and reassembled an ellipsoidal reflector lamp
*   Played guitar
*   Fried eggs
*   Worked as a temp in a software company
*   Served on a jury
*   Danced onstage at the Opera House
*   Photographed dead flies
*   Shaken hands and exchanged greetings with a reigning King and Queen
*   Driven a shuttle van
*   Attempted Bikram yoga
*   Written and produced a one-act melodrama on commission
*   Taken Chinese calligraphy lessons
*   Slept on a tall ship                                                                                                         *   Glazed a window
*   Been the subject of a midnight police raid on the wrong house
*   Won a baseball trivia contest without knowing a thing about baseball
*   Composed a song about a pony (not the one that bit me)
*   Gone snowshoeing
*   Seen a Blue-crowned Motmot in the wild
*   Fallen in love

Then there are all of the Things I Haven’t Done (yet, anyway):

*   Won a cash lottery
*   Had a dental cavity
*   Owned a four-legged pet
*   Broken a bone in my body
*   Been to Asia, Australia/NZ, or Antarctica
*   Learned a second language (some will say I’ve not yet mastered a first)
*   Eaten escargot
*   Written a bestseller
*   Visited all of the states in America
*   Cured cancer
*   Gotten skillful at any sport
*   Truffle hunted
*   Been able to understand and/or believe what politicians are talking about
*   Milked a cow
*   Danced gracefully

*   Lived overseas longer than a few weeks at a time
*   Mastered the marketing skills to sell my artwork and writing well
*   Been chased by a badger
*   Looked attractive in yellow or orange clothes
*   Died
*   Played golf
*   Decided to have children
*   Swung on a trapeze
*   Competed willingly
*   Overcome all my fears and anxieties and inhibitions
*   Made glass artworks
*   Had an audience with the Pope
*   Been arrested
*   Successfully raised Himalayan blue poppies for more than one season
*   Figured out how to get square pegs OUT of round holes once in
*   Knitted (except my brow)
*   Gotten irrevocably bored
*   Hybridized a plant
*   Studied marine biology
*   Piloted an aircraft or any boat larger than a rowboat

If I were to do even a tiny portion of the latter list, imagine where the remainder of life will take me. Oh, yeah–you can’t, nor can I. It’s the whole wacky and delightful point, isn’t it. There’s just no way to guess where the next turn in the road will lead. That’s how an ordinary broad like me managed to get to this point in life. Coo-wull.

As American as Whaaaaaa…???

Posted on by
1
Digital collage of eagle, flag, baseball, etc + text

So much for inalienable rights . . .

So the husbandly-personage and I were talking about Libertarian ideals and as usual, the conversation drifted as we meandered the miles homeward through another hot afternoon. I think you know enough about me already to guess that I’m generally less than hot on talking, or even thinking, politics. Always a topic for argument, disagreement, divisiveness when I’m out of the safe environs of my own little twosome. Even within it, occasionally. And I just plain don’t relish conflict at any level. When it comes to politics, that’s also occasioned by its being one of those few areas in which I am admittedly cynical and tend to lack my usual annoyingly perky attitude of perpetual be-nice-ness that assumes all the best of all humanity. I think when it comes to civility and unselfishness, ours is a race of creatures ill-suited to follow our best instincts.

Which is to say, I think a great many political systems, even democracy for cripes’ sake, look fabulous on paper. There are lots of admirable aspects not just to democracy but to constitutional monarchy, to communism, socialism, even anarchy, not to mention a whole slew of sub-categories within each. And don’t get me started on all of the world’s religions and pseudo-religions and cults, which I may have mentioned in crankypants moments I find are often freely intermixed with political, social and more personal beliefs to the point that I’m quite convinced few (any?) living beings have any clear concept of what any of the aforementioned means by definition, let alone in their originators’ intended forms, any more.

The problem–you can see where I’m headed–is that despite the beauty of many ideas’ intentions, they are very seldom enacted with anything near the purity of heart they might require to actually work. We Homo pseudo-sapiens just have a tremendously powerful tendency to do things to please and satisfy our personal inclinations. We work hard to define wants as needs, to translate privileges into not just constitutional rights but, by cracky, as pretty much divine rights and Not To Be Messed With, Dammit. It’s in this world that, while I think most thoughtful persons will agree that focusing on anything other than actual driving while driving is potentially dangerous not only to the persons in the vehicle being driven but to any others sharing the road and its vicinity, I still had this afternoon the not-at-all-uncommon opportunity to look over at the next lane and watch a driver assiduously texting from behind the steering wheel without the remotest indication that he was worrying himself about whether that was risky for him, let alone aware that we were in a car not one metre distant from him and hurtling along at the same mad freeway pace.

This is the same world where plenty of people know perfectly well that it’s an iffy proposition to suck tar and nicotine into your lungs but do so willingly and regularly and are quite content to share all of their available leftover smog with nonsmokers’ adjacent lungs without even having to be asked for the gift*. *(In this setting, feel free to assume I’m using the Norwegian version of ‘gift’, in which language the word means poison.) It’s the same world full of people well-versed in the basics of their home countries’ and counties’ laws who are still completely willing to flout and break those laws if and when they think they can get away with it.

Crotchety? Oh, yes, I certainly am when it comes to assuming people will do the right thing if left to their own devices. But I’m not exactly sure there’s any cure for that, least of all within any political, legal, religious or social system we’ve yet discovered, and even the most would-be benign autocracy slides off into murky territory and rots from the inside without a great deal of delay. Am I dark-minded enough to say It’s Just Our Nature? Just the way we ARE? Sounds like a quitter talking, at best. But yeah, there’s an element of defeatism or even fatalism involved when I see how far we’ve come along the ol’ human timeline, how many Golden Ages have crashed and turned to ethereal gnat poo in how many stupendous civilizations, how often the stubborn and unsanitary insanity of self-interest has brought down the greatness of the moment . . . well, fill in the blanks yourself. I told you right up front, now, didn’t I.

Meanwhile, I would like to reiterate my longtime belief, what perhaps you could almost legitimately call one of my few real articles of faith, that the majority of people are weirdly, strangely, pretty good at center. Go figure. That’s the basis for my muddle-through theory of salvation–well, continuity. It’s simply that, no matter how awful and disgusting we’ve managed to be as individuals, let alone to one another, and this also on a global level, despite the number of massive historic failures to succeed in being simply ongoing nations and cultures, somebody always seems to carry on. How improbable! How bizarre! How heartening. Okay, alla youse guys, I guess that means we have to soldier on in our own limping, screwy, fatheaded mortal way. If every one of us manages to be just a little bit less self-centered and, what the hey, less often deserving of placement in the time-out corner of life–well, I think we might have a shot.

Senility isn’t a Second Childhood If You Never Left the First One

Posted on by
Reply

It’s pretty simple, really. I’m planning to carry on a long tradition (I won’t name names) of remaining not just childlike but completely immature in every way possible. That way no one will catch on as I slide on down into full dementia.

One of the things that makes this so wonderfully easy for me is artistic license, naturally. But another is simply that I’ve never shaken the innocence of the young and naive twerp and am happy to continuously wallow in my ignorance and the fantasies it engenders. I’ll try to be a realist as far as required, sure, when it comes to stuff like keeping my teeth brushed and taxes paid and not subsisting entirely on quiescently frozen treats, no matter how alluring that may be. Beyond that, no promises.

photos + text

What good can come of being overly adult when there's still so much mischief to make?

I can pull up the ol’ Big Kid Underpants with the best of ’em, but much of the time I don’t really see the point. Far preferable to frolic the halcyon meadows of silliness for as long as I can get away with it.

parakeets in car + text

If you're not ready to just jump in and hit the road, step aside!

Too responsible or distracted by Real Life to get on board with that? See you later, pal!

Stories without Words

Posted on by
Reply

I may have mentioned–some few blog entries ago–that the visual world is full of stories for me. It’s not just me, though. You’ve heard it plenty yourself: “A picture is worth a thousand words.” There’s no end of people inspired to find tales, ideas, inspirations of every kind in things seen, in the real world and in all sorts of visual images, and what we like to imagine they mean, or could mean. So have at it. I give you now a digital collage and know that no one else will see precisely the same collection of Stuff or relationships between the things collected here exactly the way I see them. You might guess why I put some of this together in a single image, maybe even could see some of my motivation more clearly than I do myself (you shrink you), but the fun of the whole thing is the same as what I love experiencing when I have an art exhibition: seeing my own work through others’ lenses and knowing that they always bring something different to it than I did either in looking at the finished piece or in revisiting any part of its birthing.

digital collage of Things

All these things together . . .

Every sighted person “reads” the world through his or her own filters, and for the most part, that’s good. It’s not only what helps us to be ourselves fully in the world but what gives us a large measure of pleasure in existence: we can create the world in which we find ourselves as well. Imagination and interpretation are colorful ways of coping with reality and reshaping it as we go. We can be horribly misled by our crazy or wrongheaded or under-informed explication and conceptualization, and that usually leads to trouble of one sort or another (not least of all making one be a chump, a dimbulb or even a full-fledged jerk). But really, isn’t there a lot of fun in just giving ourselves a moment of fiction to stretch our boundaries and enlarge our existence in some small measure?

Mr. Mussorgsky Makes Good Medicine

Posted on by
4

Since I mentioned the mystical powers of restoration held by food and music and art, I suppose I should fill you in on a couple of details. I will begin with my youth, when a day home from school on account of germ infestation was made tolerable by only two things: Mom’s serious talent for coddling, and the range of treats she willingly provided in order to speed the healing of an underage invalid. While I was swooning dramatically on the living room couch, bereft of sisters (they had the nerve to flounce off to school without a thought for keeping me company in my miserable state), I was given the choice between some prized medical treatments to speed my cure.

My selections were usually as follows: macaroni and cheese, preferably neon orange and from a royal blue box–this was long before I’d discovered the delights of Amy Sedaris-inspired artery-destroying deliciousness of the sort I make nowadays–accompanied or followed by Green Jello. Apparently, there is always room for it, because after ginger ale and soda crackers, that was the first thing I craved, and it had to be green, though I don’t know exactly why, even after my body was in a state of complete food rejection.

Meanwhile, there needed to be distractions to help me survive the long hours of my desertion and recuperation. The best possible, and this will date me among all of you tender readers who have to Google “LP” to know that it doesn’t only refer to Licensed Practitioners, was to listen to favorites from among my parents’ record collection. When I was well enough, it was a real delight to lie on the floor with my sisters in a darkened living room and listen to the recording of Basil Rathbone reading Edgar Allan Poe stories, but sans strength and sisters both, it would be music I chose.

High on the list would be David Oistrakh playing ‘The Swan of Tuonela‘ or perhaps Dvorak‘s evocative ‘New World Symphony’, maybe (if I had the energy to laugh along a little) Saint-Saens‘ ‘Carnival of the Animals‘. But probably my favorite was to get my catharsis from my good friend Modest Mussorgsky in the form of ‘Pictures at an Exhibition‘ and especially the wonderfully histrionic ‘Night on Bald Mountain‘. In fact, the first LP I remember buying when I got to college and didn’t have access anymore to my parents’ collection was an album with ‘Pictures’ on it.

The hut on hen's legs, graphite drawing

Baba Yaga by moonlight, or in a darkened living room . . .

It’s obvious from the aforementioned, if it wasn’t in every way so before, that I’ve always had a fondness for the dramatic in music, whether it’s some fabulous ethnic dance-demanding stuff or my old friends the story-based symphonic pieces or Russian choral riches with the basses fine-tuned by some necessary quantity of good vodka (whether they drink it or I do doesn’t necessarily matter, I suppose). In any event, I was very pleased a couple of years ago when my good friend Alvin commissioned me to provide the “missing” illustrations for ‘Pictures at an Exhibition’ when he was premiering his wonderful new arrangement of it with slides of the original set of artworks by Viktor Hartmann that had inspired the piece in the first place.

On this note, I suggest you make all haste to your nearest music collection, library, or other source of great storytelling and refresh yourself with a plunge into Mussorgsky, the tale of Baba Yaga, Edgar Allan Poe’s delectably dark yarns, a nice trip through Dvorak’s comforting cloudburst, or if you have other storytime favorites in music, art or written form, go to them and immerse yourself in their magnificence yet again.