KURT VONNEGUT b NOVEMBER 11 1922

"That is my principal objection to life, I think: It’s too easy, when alive, to make perfectly horrible mistakes." Deadeye Dick

"Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance." KV

i held off reading vonnegut for a long time. by the time i got to new college, noone was reading him & he wasn't being pushed by anyone on the faculty. i think i picked him up when i got back to p'cola from my unfinished time at new college. during my first year at the outrigger i read most of his work. i think i was ready to appreciate his cynical sense of the absurd human condition. the outrigger had a way of opening you to that position. that, & the idea of humanity fading idiotically into the ether while existence on earth continued unconcernedly on. the great human commentator, george carlin, had a bit about earth just shaking off mankind's contaminating & destructive presence & getting on w/things w/o us. carlin & vonnegut seem like two peas in a pod & i suspect carlin stole his material from vonnegut like woody allen stole material from henny youngman. so it goes...

CHARLES DEMUTH b NOVEMBER 8 1883

"these are pictures
of crude force.
Once at night
waiting at a station
with a friend
a fast freight
thundered through
kicking up dust.
My friend,
a distinguished artist,
turned to me
to protect his eyes:
that's what we'd all like to be, bill,
he said. i smiled
knowing how deeply
he meant it." from "To Asphodel, That Greeny Flower" WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS


it was demuth's b'day this week. i wanted to commemorate it w/this quote from bill williams that i couldn't completely remember. so while i searched it out, i had a couple of days to reflect on demuth's generation of gay artists, the ones prior to stonewall. if the post-stonewall generation blazed w/celebratory triumph that sputtered out in the face of aids, demuth's generation simmered w/repressed anxiety that sputtered out w/each sad unfulfilled death. it's true that they left us w/their art but what a painful thing that creation must have been. while the experience of the lafayette baths must have been exhilarating on a personal level, putting it down on canvas must have been excruciating. back then, who knew what might be considered "obscene" & fictionalizing a clearly gay moment by claiming its location to be "turkish baths" wouldn't necessarily keep the cops away from the studio. powerful male erections weren't usually depicted in the art of the time. even the hetero-master, picasso, had to put his erections on minotaur figures.

of course, "crude force" may well result in these dichotomies, impulsive desire surging forth but subdued by beauty. yes, charlie, that IS what we all want to be.


"Search the history of American art," wrote Ken Johnson in the New York Times, "and you will discover few watercolors more beautiful than those of Charles Demuth. Combining exacting botanical observation and loosely Cubist abstraction, his watercolors of flowers, fruit and vegetables have a magical liveliness and an almost shocking sensuousness."

ROBERT FRANK b NOVEMBER 9 1924

"When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice." Robert Frank


i was fortunate to see the most comprehensive retrospective of frank's work, moving out, at the time at the national gallery when i was in grad school at uva in 1994. i knew about his connections w/the beats & maybe had even seen his film on the rolling stones. mainly tho, i was drawn to the pictures.
the early ones were stunning in their sense of spontaneous composition. he'd captured "moments" perfectly, as they unfolded or revealed themselves as tableau. i don't get the sense of an "outsider" peering into some foreign culture & revealing its truths. i've always felt that frank was very much INSIDE the american experience, that it was his experience as an american w/other americans we get in the pictures.
the later "sloppy" pictures & collages show me the same thing, tho he's working from a more universal experience in them. years of personal triumphs & tragedies are accumulated in the pictures & presented in such a way that they address a larger audience w/specifically personal concerns. their simplicity undermines any convoluted solipsism.
i come back to "sick of goodbys" over & over, it's artifice resonating w/sorrow & pain & forgiveness. another time, it reveals triumph & tenaciousness. or again...




"I was looking at Robert Frank’s photograph Sick of Goodby’s in his book The Lines of My Hand. Moments before I had been listening to a Johnny Cash song called I Wish I Was Crazy Again. Then I thought of the goodbyes in the book to old friends caught once and for all and never again to be seen in life, and I was struck by the intensity of the sadness of life and its redeeming qualities as reflected in these moving photos. With Johnny Cash as well, the desire to see it all again, to go out one more time into the wild flame only to be burned up forever and never be seen again except in these farewell photos, is moving beyond description. The photos speak of an acceptance of things as they are. the inevitable death of us all and the last photo – that last unposed shot to remind us of our friends, of our loss of the times we had in a past captured only on film in black and white. Frank has been there, and seen that, and recorded it with such subtlety that we only look in awe, our own hearts beating with the memories of lost partners and songs.

To wish for the crazy times one last time and freeze it in the memory of a camera is the least a great artist can do. Robert Frank is a great democrat. We’re all in these photos. Paint dripping from a mirror like blood. I’m sick of goodbyes. And aren’t we all, but it’s nice to see it said." LOU REED


more reflections on frank.

BENTO BOX ROX

i bought ann a bento box. she says she gets comments every day from various work folks about it. it's not a truly traditional bento box(i almost got her one of those)but it's colorful & she likes colorful things. i'm not having much trouble filling it every day as you can see.


FUJI APPLES, LAURA CHENEL GOAT CHEESE, WASABI PEAS, CRACKERS



PORK LOIN TERIYAKI & BROCCOLI SLAW W/MISO DRESSING



HUMMUS W/PITA BREAD, CRACKER SNACKS, PEACHES





CHEDDAR CHEESE, CHOCOLATE COVERED ALMOND COOKIES, PICKLED CUCUMBERS, CRACKER SNACK



PINEAPPLE, LAURA CHENEL GOAT CHEESE, CRACKER SNACKS, SWEET RED BEAN PASTE PASTRY

JONI MITCHELL b NOVEMBER 7 1943

"The last time I saw Richard was Detroit in '68
And he told me all romantics meet the same fate someday
Cynical and drunk and boring someone in some dark café
You laugh he said you think you're immune
Go look at your eyes they're full of moon
You like roses and kisses and pretty men to tell you
All those pretty lies pretty lies
When you gonna realize they're only pretty lies
Only pretty lies just pretty lies"

she deserves all the accolades: during a stretch in the 70s, she put out an album a year & each one was an absolute triumph of musicality & lyric genius. she topped the seventies off w/her tribute/collaboration w/the inimitable chalie mingus & never enjoyed the commercial success of that one remarkable decade again. i don't think she cares. she's continued to follow her own muses, & tho her voice isn't a startlingly original & supple as it once was, she still does ok. it couldn't have been easy making it in the testosterone driven world of pop music but her achievements simply cannot be denied. happy b'day, ms mitchell(or, as james taylor called you, bony joni).

ALBERT CAMUS b NOVEMBER 7 1913

"On the poop deck of slave galleys it is possible, at any time and place, as we know, to sing the constellations while the convicts bend over the oars and exhaust themselves in the hold; it is always possible to record the social conversation that takes place on the benches of the amphitheater while the lion is crunching the victim. And it is very hard to make any objections to the art that has known such success in the past. But things have changed somewhat, and the number of convicts and martyrs has increased amazingly over the surface of the globe. In the face of so much suffering, if art insists on being a luxury, it will also be a lie."
- Albert Camus, "Create Dangerously" in Resistance, Rebellion & Death

HICKORY WIND

GRAM PARSONS b. NOVEMBER 5 1946
he died from a drug overdose in a motel room in joshua tree on September 19 1973. he was 26 years old.

on one of the first desert trips ann took me on, we found the spot in joshua tree where parson's loony, tho somehow admirably principled, manager
had burned parson's stolen body. we didn't find it right off but ann was oddly determined to showcase her desert tracking skills. we circumnavigated a large(i mean, HUGE)rock formation once or twice & couldn't find the marker but ann was undeterred. she found the simple cement slab in a shaded area up close to the rock. there were various "contributions" to the simple marker from other intrepid travelers & groupies, all pretty mundane & expected & not worth mentioning. the feeling i got, out there in what is now my favorite american desert landscape, was simply loss, like standing on a mountain & watching a canyon burn.

it's not clear what parsons would have done had he lived but he contributed to making country cool to a lot of tight-assed hippies who had been sneering at it & dismissing it as counter-revolutionary. i can't say that he got me playing hank williams songs back in high school(an old album bobo had did that for me) but i don't doubt he touched some other kids that way. he gave us emmylou harris. he was a beautiful young man who burned away under the clear desert sky of california.

"It's a hard way to find out
That trouble is real
In a far away city
With a far away feel
But it makes me feel better
Each time it begins
Callin' me home
Hickory Wind
Keeps callin' me home
Hickory Wind "