JUST SAID NO TO HIERARCHIES

howdy!

I must withdraw my interest in the workings of the world that do not directly play a part in my life. That Obama has shown his hand I can't worry over any of it. I held out with a little confidence in Obama I wanted to have. I trusted him because I wanted to. I forgot, however, that he has to behave as required by the .0001% that rule. When he became president, he became a member of their club.(I'm your puppet.) That's all. I'm disappointed by him. I understand that the republicans are tripping him up in every nit-picky way the lowest mind among them can think up. In the end, he bends over for the republicans. Democrats continue in their spineless ways since the beginning of the Reagan Revolution. Since the beginning of Reaganism (Ayn Randism) democrats have conceded to the right wing unto encouragement, put down the red carpet for them. The democrats are taking us to police state, but like Ralph Nader said in the election campaign of 2000 that the republicans will get us there faster. The republicans are showing it too. The Boston bombings showed me the city police are now trained and practiced in taking charge of urban populations.

air bellows rock formation

I came to the mountains in 1976, a time when the oil corporations were shutting down independent oil companies and gas stations by what they called the Oil Embargo. We are not in the hands of people who make decisions in our interest. That time is long past over, if it ever was. We, the American people, are on our own. Government preys on us, does not protect us. What is labeled Defense is actually Offence. I feel sorry for every poor clod who joins the military believing he's "serving" his country. Going through what they go through in jungle and desert warfare for tax free corporate profiteers is dispiriting to the troops when they finally get it, minus a pair of legs. I did my Navy time in the time of the draft knowing this to be the case before I went in. It was sail the seas and play military for two years or take that much time in prison. I picked the Navy for the ocean. I longed to be on the ocean. I think it really sucks, though, to be born male and have no choice but to go through military. I was one of the examples of why the draft is self-defeating for the military. I don't like living by military rule. Not that I'm afraid of them; I don't like being one of them. I don't like their culture. I don't like adhering to a false belief system because it is expected. It is outside the military too, but the military is the core of that kind of hierarchical thinking learned from the Catholic church, which by now everybody knows aint what it's held itself up to be.

jackson pollock was in whitehead

I've refused to live my life in hierarchical work conditions. In the last year at the College of Charleston corporate recruiters were talking with seniors with job interviews. I didn't even want one of them to see me. I turned my back to that kind of thinking very early in the life, in childhood. I saw the republican recessions in the 50s and saw the advance of corporate influence such that to sign over for a job in a corporation I give up all my rights that are guaranteed an American citizen. I like those rights. I'm not signing over my basic rights and I'm not kissing ass of all the men on the ladder above me, none of whom I respect as an individual human being. From very early on it was a guiding light that I never live by hierarchy. I would live among and work with people I respect. It has been my way of life to work for an individual with a small business. I seldom made anything more than minimum wage, and then temporarily. I chose not to participate in the money making game because I did not want to shut down my self for a job, for money, for Mammon. Not that I think in Mammon terms, but that's the bible name for the god of money. Everybody knows it. And everybody knows Mammon is not a benevolent god. The US of A is on the verge of finding out how fickle Mammon can be. I've spent my life using money as immediate gain for immediate need. Paycheck to paycheck, as they say. How else in the working class? I never worked for a corporation or a factory. Worked for the state of SC for a year and learned all I needed to know about that.

roadside sculpture in sparta

In retrospect I can see I've lived my life as close to person to person, individual to individual as I could, hanging on to that connection with humanity, the other people in my life. Taking a high powered job takes one away from the world of people who appeal to one's heart and forces one into a world of people that don't give a shit about you in any way you look at it, except maybe sexually, until the next one comes along. A world of pretend. A world of continuous climbing. They never get tired of it. It's like their emotional vibration is wound up so tight they can't live without that tension. It takes that degree of tension (stress) to keep the pretend going. It's for the paycheck, and sometimes for the neurosis. In my early job years I had a crappy job and after a couple weeks the boss asked me why I was working there, I said, The money. Response: If that's all, then why don't you leave. OK. It was a moment, like about all moments, when you can't say what you're thinking, I wanted to say, What? But I didn't care. The feeling was mutual, as it usually is. Because I won't work for a factory, system or government, it has kept my job opportunities humble. That's what I wanted for myself. I did not want to be high up over anybody. How else but in the laboring class. I came to the mountains to do hard work, to labor body and mind. I can't even estimate the number of post-holes I've dug with a hand-held post-hole digger and how many miles of barbed wire fence I've stretched. I've done some dangerous tractor commandeering, enough to teach me that when IT happens, it's now, not a ten thousandths of a second from now, but now. By the time you realize what happened, it's in the past. The second experience with IT learnt me. I wasn't going for strike three. End of working with a tractor.

barn windows in whitehead

I was something of a spiritual idealist diving into my own humanity that I'd not valued sufficiently before. I was going by a premise of my own that manual labor would work off the anger within that had been a problem all the way along, to the point that I finally caught on it was in me, not out there. It is said awareness is the first step toward healing, and my experience affirms it so much I take it for granted. To come back around, I think I'm coming into an awareness that it does not serve me, my understanding, my life, my reason for being, my mental health to go on paying so much attention to the fake human beings we call celebrities, both Hollywood and DC. It can be said of DC as David Hockney said of Hollywood  in his film, "Scratch the tinsel in Hollywood and you get brighter tinsel." He laughed from seeing in his mind's eye a simulcast slideshow of several examples of his meaning. Over a period of years in California he gradually drifted away from the tinsel, spending more time at home focusing on the people close to him. He took a step deeper within going back to Yorkshire over a period of three years to stay with his sister and live in the house and neighborhood he grew up in. Going home, you might say. Going within. I'm feeling that impulse to withdraw my attention from the fake people and focus it on the people around me, the people I live among, my friends. That's my "real world." In the first half of my life, I have to say I did not value others. In the second half it's in others that I find value. I learned true values in the mountains.

 

 

    


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SEEING DAVID HOCKNEY A BIGGER PICTURE THE MOVIE

all photos by tj worthington

This is Saturday, my day of rest. I refuse to do anything but be at home with no agenda, no schedule, no thinking about something to do. I write this as part of my rest. I do the equivalent of rest when I'm writing to you. I'll be exhausted when it's over and may flop down for a nap, will probably put in a movie, Ai Weiwei's Never Sorry. I've had to shut down to activity. A couple weeks of not having a moment with a state of mind able to quiet down to read in a book for awhile, or pick up a brush and mix some colors. I've let myself get caught up on one thing after another, none of it objectionable, and by today I need to sleep til noon (done), watch a movie (done), talk with Carole on the phone (done), and now am settled into writing the day's open letter to you. As always, I have nothing to say, but keep on writing and eventually something gets said, maybe. Doesn't matter, we're flowing free today.

Last night I watched a brief (1 hour) documentary, David Hockney: A Bigger Picture, (2009). The film maker Bruno Wollheim spent three years filming Hockney talking about his painting while driving or riding in a car, at home, and painting. It advertises itself with a quotation from the Sunday Times of London, "an unqualified, life-enhancing joy from start to finish." I didn't think of it as that all the time watching it, but in retrospect seeing that description I can say it is well said, though I wouldn't have said that while watching. It was far too interesting, dwelt in the depth and breadth of Hockney himself as an artist and as a human being. It really is a joy of a film, but not dramatically. Joy is not a word I would have come up with, but it fits. It truly is life-enhancing. Hockney is somebody who has spent many years in intense study of art. His paintings are the findings of his study. Each painting learns from the ones that went before.

In the time of filming the documentary, Hockney returned to Yorkshire, England, where he grew up, from Los Angeles, where he spent much of his adult life. He is in his late 60s here, and painting landscapes of Yorkshire outside with big easel and an assistant to hand him things like he's a surgeon. He paints fast. He was working toward a show at the Tate. He made an image for the Tate show that took a whole wall, 30 thereabouts 4x5' canvases that fit together into one big image of a tree, some trees around it and a small red barn. He talks about planning the piece, working it out and why. During the times Hockney is talking, he is talking to his friend of many years with the camera. It's like he is talking to the viewer. It is a Hockney work of art, itself, in that his agenda as an artist is to include the viewer in the work, painting from a viewer's perspective. Sometimes during indoor interviews, a long mirror would be standing on the floor beside Hockney to show the camera and the man holding it, the one being talked to. His collection of canvases of the Yorkshire countryside are as beautiful as if David Hockney painted them. They have air, they breathe, they have life, they have light, they have dark. He even painted in the rain and snow. Monet, the next century. It can be said of the film what can be said of Hockney's work. It is a moving picture portrait of Hockney by someone who knew him and appreciated where Hockney the artist is coming from.

I hear a towhee, the calico bird, sing in the distance. It is a quiet time with the sun's rays slanting through the foliage in advance of the gloaming. It's so quiet I hear the crickets in my head like they're outside. I listen closer and they're inside. Listen closer and they're outside. Listen closer again and they're inside. Then the inescapable conclusion: it's both. Maybe. It's inside, for sure. Maybe. Doesn't matter. I like the sound. It is a comforting sound, the sound of summer in the mountains. It beats all to hell the sound of horns, tires and breaking glass. I just now heard the sound of a dove taking flight, a squeaky vibrato sound unique to the dove. A turkey hen is walking down the edge of the road, entering the zone of a birdfeeder and is walking on around the house, checking it out. One of the beautiful sights in nature is the flight of a wild turkey. They set their momentum in motion flapping big wings, then they're gliders. They glide as far as they want to. It's odd to see how a bird that big can fly so gracefully. They're birds. Flight itself is grace.

 

 

 

 

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A MESSAGE FROM DAVID HOCKNEY

david hockney, day pool with 3 blues

If someone were to say that some kinds of art,

like a painting by Rothko, are representations

of inner states rather than outer appearance,

I would answer, so is everything else. Someone

once said to me while we were talking about

Cubism, Isn't Cubism about the inner eye?

I said, But that's all we have, that's all there is.

There isn't actually any other kind.

                                         ---David Hockney

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