BirchLane.net
January 2003 (note; not finished but I need to wake up tomorrow at 4:30 to catch a 6:00 train to NYC; so I just want to get at least this posted for now)
Thursday 30
Someone Writes. I made two new friends on Tuesday. (Note: I post this because it makes me happy and it helps to demonstrate how the internet can connect people in a positive way, in a way of love and peace and understanding; I think Jouke would understand this--and could write much more clearly about it than I):
Burke writes:
Two days ago, and I met our first LJ friend IRL. cinemama
emailed us saying that he would be in, of all places, NEW HAVEN and wanted to know if we might want to meet for lunch. We were elated! For those unaware, mylastsigh is a phenomenal photographer. His insight and craft are both subtle and powerful. His themes are deceptively simplistic. And simply stated, he loves his hobby. And this is before I even met the man.
We make plans to meet at a local favorite Thai restaurant (where, unfortunately, the waitress always knows I'm going to get veggie pad thai. But it's sooo good! What can I do?). I pick up cinemama from work, find a parking space miraculously close by, and walk to Thai Taste. Cinemama fears that she has given him vague instructions as how to get there. "Go past the museums... and, um... you'll see the hotel. But the restaurant is below the hotel." She's usually quite good at directions, though.
As we walk briskly to the restaurant's steps, I remark, "I have no idea what he looks like." She responds, "I know what half his face looks like." I glance at a man with camera around his neck as we walk by. "Burke?" he asks. We are happily stunned!
We exchange happy hellos and greetings and quickly get out of the subzero cold. The weather is dry and brutal. We gather into a corner booth and begin to get to know each other.
Mylastsigh is a person who is very laid back and very easy to talk to. He is friendly, intelligent, unpretentious and genuinely interested in what you have to say. I admire him because he is bold to act. He tells us of his work in the publishing and printing industries, his encounters with other people from LJ, photographic excursions, the talent he sees around him, and his honest desire to get talented people's work out there to be shown and seen.
Just spending a long lunch with him, I found myself encouraged to act. To take charge of my talent and to produce something of and from myself. Not for profit, but simply for expression. Mylastsigh has this strange and simple encouragement about him. I left our lunch happy and positive - a feeling that stayed with both of us well into our evening. It was a wonderful time.
...It was such a great experience that cinemama remarked that perhaps we may lift our moratorium on meeting people from LJ.
Thanks,for making our day! We hope to see you again before too long. After I said goodbye to Michele and Burke, I visited the galleries and museums at Yale University. (more to write)
Wednesday 29
The State of the Hamburger. Daryl's confirmation class served dinner tonight at a local homeless shelter. Last night I taught him how to make meatballs: (add recipe)
Tuesday 28
The Return of the Father. (and something damn it)
Monday 27
Out of Love. This is my mantra. Everything I do I do out of love. I need to remind myself of this. Everything I do I do out of love. Out of love. Out of love.
Sunday 26
Super Bowl Sunday. A my 30th High School reunion, which was two years ago, many people said they thought I would grow up to be a famous athlete. What happened?
Everything went right. Just when things looked blackest for The Rams, a 5-8, 145-pound junior named Bruce Barone had his moment of glory and it brightened up the gloomy morning for the Blue & Gold backers. Minutes into the second half the fans along the sideline began to cheer when he hauled in the kickoff at the eight, raced up the middle of the field and, just as he got in heavy traffic, cut to his left and sped down the sidelines for a 92-yard touchdown scamper. It would be a game that everyone connected to The Rams would remember.
Something happened. But what? My poetic resume would read as follows:
Newspaper Boy
Janitor
Lifeguard
House Painter
Gardener
Warehouse worker
Tobacco farm laborer
Antique Refinisher
Department Store Clerk
Art Gallery Assistant
Picture Framer
Insurance Salesperson
Writer
Photographer
Newspaper copywriter
Magazine Promotion Director
Magazine Marketing Director
Poet
Marketing Specialist
Marketing Director
Consultant
Pizza Delivery Man
Marketing Director
Printing Salesperson
Printing Account Executive
Vice President Sales and Marketing and
Poet and PhotographerI am thinking about all this today on the drive to Stratton. I am taking Daryl and two of his friends snowboarding. Have two years past since I last skied here? Two years? I went by myself that day; a few days before I was to start a new job. I haven't been back until today--Super Bowl Sunday. Two years: Danielle was junior in high school; Daryl had not yet grown a foot; I was not yet being treated for depression; Betsy and I were not yet in marriage counseling; 9/11 was unthinkable; our country had not yet declared itself a nation of unprecedented strength and influence. I don't know whether to feel confused and depressed about where I am in life or proud that I have surmounted so many challenges and tribulations and have experienced so much that is positive and met many good and loving and interesting people.
Saturday 25
Out of Love. No, not as in "I have no love."
Rather, as in "Do what you do out of love."
John Lennon said, "We've got this gift of love, but love is like a precious plant. You can't just accept it and leave it in the cupboard or just think it's going to get on by itself. You've got to keep watering it. You've got to really look after it and water it."
Friday 24
Art School Girl. A graduate student in photography at Notre Dame posted this quote in her journal for me today:
one day i received from a photographer a picture of myself which i could not remember being taken, for all my efforts; i inspected the tie, the sweater, to discover in what circumstances i had worn them; to no avail. and yet because it was a photograph i could not deny that i had been there (even if i did not know where). this distortion between certainty and oblivion game me a kind of vertigo, something of a "detective" anguish; i went to the photographer's show as to a police investigation, to learn at last what i no longer knew about myself.
-roland barthes, camera lucida, p.85
Thursday 23
Becoming What We Are. An essay written by Robert Anton Wilson:
If you stroll through a large art museum, you will notice that Van Gogh does not paint the same world as Rembrandt, Picasso does not see things the way Goya did, Georgia O'Keefe doesn't much resemble Rivera, Salvador Dali looks like nobody but himself, and, in general, no world-class artist became a "classic" by doing what somebody else had already done or even what everybody else in his/her own era did.
And in science, the names of Einstein, Dirac, the Curies, Bohr, Heisenberg, Schroedinger, John Bell etc. live on because none of them took Newton as Holy Gospel: they all made unique and unpredictable innovations in basic theory.
And, in case you think this applies only to "arts and sciences," consider the most successful people in industry. Henry Ford did not get rich copying Fulton's steamboat; he made a car so cheap that anybody could afford one. Howard Hughes produced movies that nobody else would have dared to attempt, and then went on to revolutionize the airline industry. Buckminster Fuller did not copy the cubical form of previous architects, but invented the geodesic dome; at last count, over 3OO,OOO of his buildings existed, making him the most visibly successful architect in history. Steve Wozniak did not copy the computers of his day, but invented one that even an "bloody eejit" (like me) could use (and even enjoy!) Bill Gates created new kinds of software. Etc.
We all need constant reiteration of these truism because we live in a world where a multitude of very powerful forces have worked upon us, from birth through school to work, attempting to suppress our individuality, our creativity and, above all, our curiosity -- in short, to destroy everything that encourages us to think for ourselves.
Our parents wanted us to act like the other children in our neighborhood; they emphatically did not want a boy or girl who seemed "weird or "different" or (Heaven forefend) "too damned clever by far."
Then we enter grade school, a fate worse than Death and Hell combined. Whether we land in a public school or a private religious school, we learn two basic lessons: 1) There exists one correct answer for every question; and 2) education consists of memorizing the one correct answer and regurgitating it on an "examination."
The same tactics continue through high school and, except in a few sciences, even to the university.
All through this "education" we find ourselves bombarded by organized religion. Most religions, in this part of the world, also teach us "one correct answer," which we should accept with blind faith; worse, they attempt to terrorize us with threats of post-mortem roasting, toasting and charbroiling if we ever dare to think at all, at all.
After 18-to-30+ years of all this, we enter the job market, and learn to become, or try to become, almost deaf, dumb and blind. We must always tell our "superiors" what they want to hear, what suits their prejudices and/or their wishful fantasies. If we notice something they don't want to know about, we learn to keep our mouths shut. If we don't-
"One more word, Bumstead, and I'll fire you!"
As my mahatma guru J.R. "Bob" Dobbs says, "You know how dumb the average guy is? Well, mathematically, by definition, half of them are even dumber than that."
"Bob" may have the average confused with the median, but otherwise he hit a bull's eye. Half of the people you meet do indeed seem dumber than a box of rocks; but they did not start out that way. Parents, peers, schools, churches, advertisers and jobs made them that way. Every baby at birth has a relentlessly curious and experimental temperament. It takes the first third of our lives to destroy that curiosity and experimentalism; but in most cases, we become placid parts of a docile herd.
This human herd all started out as potential geniuses, before the tacit conspiracy of social conformity blighted their brains. All of them can redeem that lost freedom, if they work at it hard enough.
I've worked at it for 5O+ years now, and still find parts of me acting like a robot or a zombie on occasion. Learning "how to become what you are" (in Nietzsche's phrase) takes a lifetime, but it still seems the best game in town.
Wednesday 22
A World of Grief. A story from Sunday's New York Times, entitled "In a Small And Dark Art, A World of Grief:"
he artist Hannelore Baron often remarked that she was afraid of large things, so she practiced small art, making delicate collages of fabric and spidery drawing, and strange, dark wooden boxes tied up with rags, wire and string. But within that small art, she managed to confront the largest things — personal tragedy, the nightmare of history, the body's frailty and the origin of art in human spirituality.
Two exhibitions, at Senior & Shopmaker Gallery in Manhattan and at the Neuberger Museum at the State University of New York at Purchase, present the main body of Baron's art: more than 70 works accomplished in less than 20 years, from 1969 to 1987, the year she died. Beset by bouts of depression and cancer, she worked continually, even during her final illness, and what stands out is not just her originality but her supreme tenacity.
For a Jew in Germany, there could hardly have been a worse time to be born than 1926. The Weimar Republic's facade of normalcy was disintegrating, and by the time Hannelore was 11, she had seen the family's house in Dillingen, near Luxembourg, ransacked by a mob on Kristallnacht and her father savagely beaten. She never forgot the sight of his bloody handprints on the wall, the last vision she had of her home. After that, the family followed an all-too-common pre-World War II scenario of border crossings, separations, forged identity documents and finally permanent exile, managing to come to rest in the Bronx, where Baron eventually married and had two children.
During an exhibition of her work in Chicago in 1982, Baron objected to the gallery's use of her biography to illuminate her art. "I would rather think from a much larger scale," she wrote in a letter at the time. But her childhood cast a long shadow across her life, and as it made normal life emotionally impossible — claustrophobia and severe anxiety prevented her from holding a job and often immobilized her — it made conventional art, or art concerned primarily with formal beauty, equally impossible. As she revealed in unpublished interviews with her son, the print dealer Mark Baron, her art was an attempt to contain personal grief and find a truth that transcended it, what she called "the message."
About the time she graduated from a vocational high school for textile design, she began making her first sketches, of landscapes, and gradually moved toward abstract painting. But these approaches could not convey her overwhelming sense of the world's danger, fragility and pain.
The method Baron worked out looks for all the world like a marginal outsider's style, although it betrays the influences of Paul Klee, Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko, among others. Her drawings include abstract scratching, bits of languages, one of which appears to be Greek, crude figures, often female, and graphic symbols — especially stars and crosses.
These elements are arranged in ways that suggest meanings never fully disclosed. It feels as if we are being asked not so much to understand a personal communication as to decipher fragments of a lost language and perhaps resurrect an entire civilization. Baron often combined these drawings in collages with scraps of faded and torn fabric, increasing the sense of fragility and lostness. She had no idea such mixed-media collages were possible until she saw the work of one of her art teachers in the 1950's. Once she did, she moved inexorably toward this disjunctive medium of remnants and relics.
Her box constructions serve as reliquaries for this secret language, surrounding it with the dark tones of the personal history she sought to play down. As she said in the interviews with her son, "It's as if a feeling or a sentiment has been put in the box, and it's tied up, and that's it, and now we go on."
Baron's boxes inevitably bring to mind those of the assemblage artist Joseph Cornell, roughly her contemporary. Yet they contain all that Cornell leaves out. Where Cornell's are precise and entrancingly particular, with each element in its place, like dreams and memories in a well-ordered scrapbook, Baron's constructions are dark, damaged and rough. Many of her earliest boxes are made of found wood, scraps really.
The later boxes she painted black or decorated with colors that resemble blood. She sealed many of them, using everything from nails, wire and string to ragged pieces of cloth. The contents of the ones that can be opened are indecipherable, some resembling playing pieces for "mysterious games that have no rules," as she put it, some smaller versions of her collages.
Cornell's work seems to say that our memories — or the fictions that memory can weave — may be elegiac and full of longing, but they can survive intact in the face of history's crimes and the body's ruin. Imagination and art provide a kind of haven. Baron's boxes seem to say that nothing survives intact. And what persists, in the psyche and in art, is at best a tenuous, incomplete intuition of an enduring certainty, broader than any individual's life or collection of memories.
Baron never said what that certainty was, even when asked point-blank by her son. It may have been nothing more than the certainty of death, as deliverer and as enemy. "Everything I've done is a statement on the, as they say, human condition," she insisted, "and my way out has been to make a protest through my artwork." The language of her protest was, to paraphrase T. S. Eliot, hieroglyphs, faded colors and fragments shored up against ruin. It is a language all the more eloquent for its nearness to silence.
Lyle Rexer is the author of ``Jonathan Lerman: Drawings by an Artist With Autism,'' just published by (Braziller)
Torn Flag, 1977, wood, cloth, ink, tempera, and
paper on wooden box with hinged lid,
9 3/4 x 13 1/2 x 12 3/8 inches.Tuesday 21
Photo Club.
Monday 20
Dreams.
Sunday 19
A Modest Proposal.
Saturday 18
When.
Friday 17
A Box of Art.
Thursday 16
New Friends.
Wednesday 15
New York City.
Tuesday 12
Something Happened.
Monday 13
Sadness.
Sunday 12
Greater Works.
Saturday 11
Memory.
Friday 10
Cruel Month.
Thursday 09
More Than Music. this from her.
Wednesday 08
Walking Meditation. Found these below links here:
Great links on walking meditation from Chris Corrigan:
Insight Meditation
Vipassana walking meditation
Walking meditation practice and metta
Walking and mindfulness meditation
Zen walking meditation
More mindfulness
Burmese Buddhist walking
Thich Nhat Hanh on walking meditation
Tuesday 07
The Book of Color. Inspired by her peacefulness.
Monday 06
Restless. Maybe it is because it is January; I am not sure I like January; maybe January is the cruelest month and not April: I am restless and need to find some peace of mind.
Sunday 03
Epiphany. I church today, our minister talked about how it is possible for us to see/experience an "epiphany" all the time. It talked first about the birth of Jesus and said there was the epiphany of the star, the epiphany of the child, the family and the dream. He said we can find, see, and experience an epiphany in the richness of the ordinary day. At night I read this:
"The conception of heaven that emerges from the peak-experiences is one which exists all the time, all around us, always available to step into for a little while at least." -- p. 66.
--Abraham H. Maslow, "Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences"Saturday 04
Still Shoveling Out. Here at Birch Lane:
Friday 03
Angels Watching Over Me.
Or, The History of My Four Hour Trip Home
Navigating Through 78 Dark Miles of Blizzard Conditions
And The Distresses That May Attend Said Person
When Windshield and Wipers Become Covered in Ice
And When One Mile From Home on Birch Lane
He knows the semi-truck will not make the turn
Whereupon it slides toward the writer
Within One Inch of Writer's Window and
Most Spectacularly Writer Steps on Gas and Car
Swerves Away from Monster Truck, This All
Happening in a Blink of Eye and in Relation
To Angels Watching Over MeThursday 02
Diversify. Today I learned that my friend in Canada, Terry Palka, is featured here. Photo below was in an issue of Birch Lane.
Wednesday 01
Reminder to Self. In the book, Balancing Life By The Rule, Debra Farrington shows us the difference between self-help and spiritual growth in her article on creating a "rule" to guide everyday life, based on Christian monastic rules. Contrasting a rule with a New Year's resolution, she says that the latter is based on what we think is wrong with us (too fat, too poor, too tired, etc), while a spiritual rule grows from a desire to become more fully what we were created to be.
For New Years Eve we went to see "The Two Towers." I loved it. And tonight we are going to watch (again) the dvd of "Fellowship of the Ring." I find it amazing that he filmed all three at once; technically an incredible feat of vision and orchestration.
I left the movie, though, feeling a bit depressed as it made me think of mans inhumanity to man and our current world situation. I would be lying if I said there are nights when I cant sleep.
