IT IS WHAT IT IS

tracks in the snow

Six inches of snow in the night. Cold, dry ice crystals make the slightest incline slippery. I went out to take seeds to the birds and slipped every step. Took a walking stick to feed the donkeys. Jenny wanted to smell it, feel it with her lips, take it with her teeth, thinking it might be something to eat, the handle the size of a carrot. I've carried a stick among them enough for them to know the stick is not a threat. I don't hit them or threaten them with it. It's for my balance. The donkeys stayed in their den until I went out to deliver their morning hay. Snow on the ground shows me the exact spot in the stream they go to for a drink of water. Later in the day I looked at their meadow from the road, saw the trails to and from the watering hole. They walk on trails. The meadow has trails going every which way. I find it curious so many of the four-leggeds walk the same path until it becomes a trail and remains a trail from then on. In the years I went on long walks through mountain forest, I walked on deer trails. It doesn't take long to find one. The other animals use their trails too. I've seen cows make trails, and now am seeing donkeys make trails. I wonder about trails in their original habitat, northeastern Africa, and see them everywhere. I think there are five hundred, more or less, of the original donkeys left. The people there eat donkeys and live in post-colonial poverty. The donkeys will last about as long as the mountain gorilla, the African elephant, the polar bear, the fish in the sea. It won't be long before the humans have a chance to learn how to exist on a dead planet, the ideal we've been aiming toward collectively throughout my lifetime. It's not just the corporate fisheries emptying the oceans, it's also the people eating fish in restaurants all over the globe and at home. Me, when I buy a tin of sardines. 

new project

My mind has relaxed from the rush of visualizing construction of the new project. I've written about the construction itself, though have not yet mentioned purpose. The construction is a three-legged stand to suspend a rock above the ground. Initially, the three sticks of wood were the aesthetic consideration without the rock. I wanted to lean three lines together such that they would hold each other upright without supports or any kind of hardware. Three boards, two notches, done. Ideally, in a place it would never be touched or swiped by a dog's tail. My test was to stand three lengths of wood in relation to each other, supporting each other. It has to do with a present fascination with triangles.  Every way I look at this model, all the way around it, it makes triangles. The white line that holds the elements together, itself makes a triangle. All the way around it I see three triangles, including the white line. I don't care if someone looking at it fails to notice the triangles, which are there for aesthetic structure of my own, it's purpose, it's reason for being. A lot of people get through their lives without understanding the meaning of life. In like manner, some will see the triangles a theme, some will not. The rock is there for the weight, to keep a tension in the single line of quarter inch white nylon rope that holds the legs in place, to pull the three boards tighter together, an assist to free-standing, the downward pull of gravity. The rock's role is purely functional. A bowling ball would do. But I like a rock better. The rock becomes the focus of interest framed by the stand that holds it aloft. Since living in the mountains, I have come to see every rock, itself, a piece of sculpture made by God, by way of chance and experience, Like snowflakes, no two are alike, even gravel in a driveway, big rocks dynamited from a bigger rock, ground by rock-crushing machines into small chunks. 

new project

In my own personal symbolism, I think of a straight line, a square, masculine, and a curved line, a circle, feminine. For several years I painted round things in square and rectangular frames. Balance. I mean masculine and feminine like in languages, le and la, I think of a triangle the blend of a square and a circle, the child of the square and circle, a balance of both. First, there was one, then there were two, and from three onward it's infinite. Three represents the many.  In this construction I'll call Hanging Rock, the straight lines of the boards and rope make a network of masculine lines to frame and support the feminine, the rock, Mother Earth. I think of lines as mind, the conscious mind, and the rock the subconscious mind, feeling, intuition. The mechanics of this project is the masculine aspect, cut, measured and fitted together by mind. The suspended rock I'll call the subconscious, the force holding conscious mind together, the feminine, gives shape and definition. Therein I find the balance of masculine and feminine, le and la, in a simple object of rock and wood. Therein is what I'm saying in the piece, balance, the feminine and masculine, the yin and yang, interdependent, one whole. My first consideration for something outside where several people will see it, is to make it as interesting to a man's eye as to a woman's eye. Call something art and the men in the world I live in pay it no mind, see it without seeing it. The women will give it a chance and look at it aesthetically, liking it or not, say, Somebody might call it art, but I don't see no art about it. I want both the man's eye to see it and the woman's eye to see it. They will see what they see, art or not art, but they will see It, call it what you want. Calling it Hanging Rock will relax the mystery of what it is. It is what it is. Plain.  

jack and jenny, yin and yang

My feeling is the masculine eye will see the mechanics of it, all the mechanics out in the open, part of it. I feel like the man's eye will see the boards, treated 4x4s, familiar, masculine, as well as the way the rope holds the thing together and suspends the rock. The rock will be familiar to the masculine eye. No what-is-it mystery about it. It's three boards, a rock and a rope. I feel like the feminine eye will see the whole without much interest in the mechanics. And women appreciate rocks, largely, in aesthetic ways men largely don't see. The rock suspended provides a point of tension for everybody. It's a subconscious feeling that a rock does not belong in the air. A rock belongs on the ground. A suspended rock plays with the automatic assumption from a lifetime of experience that a rock belongs on the ground. If someone were to ask me what it's supposed to be, I'll only be able to answer, it is what it is---three boards, a rock and a rope. My feeling is kids will like it. I gave one of my favorite paintings to the library, red, yellow and green bell peppers, asking them to hang it in the children's section. I wanted the kids to see it. I like for kids to like my paintings. A kid liking it tells me it's real. My first clue it is attractive to the masculine eye was Justin liking it, taking an interest in the mechanics right away, raising and lowering the rock, getting a sense for how it works. Aesthetically, it's cool with him if I want to call it art. I can call it anything I like. He'll call it three 4x4s, a rock and a rope, which is how I want him to see it---it is what it is. There is nothing it is supposed to be. To my eye, it is triangles and a suspended rock, what it is. I wanted it to say something about the mountains. That it simply is what it is, not pretending to be something it aint, just plain, is mountain as a fiddle tune. 

shadow on the snow

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MEN AND OPINIONS

ellsworth Kelly

I woke this morning entertaining the question of how many centuries it will take for men to heal from several millennia of the male role being about war, killing and being killed. I've always disliked the song Onward Christian Soldiers. Marching as to war does not define the spiritual path for me. Yesterday I saw in some brief video an image of soldiers marching in a parade. Such images disturb me deeply. It tells a belief system I don't believe, can't believe, won't believe, and really don't like being subject to. I especially don't like our time now when our corporate government attacks poverty stricken, defenseless countries for the profits of oil corporations, jet fuel, ship fuel, automobile fuel, keeping the stock market going, then loses the war against people with no allies, using weapons taken from dead American soldiers. It's shameless, but it's how police state functions. The prophesy for our time has been fulfilled like a checklist up to the big war that will make survivors round the globe set the determination to be done with war. That's the day I have waited for all my life. I dread the war that gets us there, but like it's said, All's well that ends well. Maybe. I'm not so sure about that, but it sounds good. Its like saying the end justifies the means. Not necessarily. I take them both for self-serving self-justification. All these old bullshit beliefs about the glory of killing and the glory of being killed will fade into history with nationalism and patriarchy. I celebrate it because it's not far away. It doesn't mean the solution to all problems, but it's a solution to a major problem that creates millions of other problems in its wake.

 

 

alex katz

 

I project that men will heal from a culture of obedience training for men. I ask myself what is the problem with men up in years. It seems like their brains atrophy and they go nuts. But I don't think that's it. From childhood, a boy's mind is atrophied. Little man gotta grow up and be a big man, carry a gun, shoot people, get drunk on power over women and children, define any sensitivity to others feminine, thus unworthy of consideration. In the masculine mind as it has evolved unto today, the feminine is outside consideration, not a concern, stupid because women don't know nothin. Art comes under the feminine. It means paying attention to something besides the crosshairs. Shutting off the feminine ultimately shuts down feeling in oneself. In the soul, we have both, or neither, depending on how you want to look at it. To shut down the validity of half of one's self is ignorant to start with, dumb as hell to carry on and just plain stupid to live with. A man gets up toward 70 and a lifetime of believing in obedience over conscience makes an ideologue of the negative mind; hence, Faux News. I've had to tell a few of my friends over time, Rush Limbaugh is not information. Growing up in a world of boys becoming men, I learned at a certain point, late teens, that it is important to have opinions. I tried it. I've finally come to see that opinions are the same as nothing. Someone who used to be a friend made me so tired of his own opinions being fact and everyone else's opinions nonsense, that I called him one day on his superior attitude, which I'd learned many years before was a defensive mask. He turned, walked away and has had nothing to do with me since. I mentally pumped a fist in the air and said, Yes! It's been over two years and I've not missed him a minute of that time.

 

robert indiana

 

We were both of anti-war mind. I went to the 1968 march on Washington over Viet Nam, like it mattered. The next day I learned it did not matter. That event was the beginning and end of my involvement in anything political. He went to U of Tennessee and was involved in demonstrations there, his moment of glory placing a flower in a National Guardman's rifle barrel. I remembered seeing on the front page of the newspaper in that time a photo of a guy at U Tenn with the same color hair putting a flower in a rifle barrel during a demonstration. I've often wondered if that had been him ten years before I knew him. My figuring is it was the hip, cool thing to do and hundreds of flowers were put in rifle barrels. Hippies thought flowers were so cool. They are, but not used politically. His self definition is, "I'm a revolutionary." It was another moment in life of controlling my face so laughing my ass off inside doesn't show. Our "friendship" was much like the friendship between van Gogh and Gauguin. Watching the film, Lust For Life, with Kirk Douglas and Anthony Quinn, directed by Vincent Minnelli, 1956, I found van Gogh's issues with Gauguin's arrogance very much the same as mine with friend. His two songs are: Anything you can do I can do better, and Whatever it is I'm against it. I laughed seeing the relationship between van Gogh and Gauguin so familiar it was like a reenactment our story. His opinions of himself are quite out of line with what the people around him observe. As one who never learned to trust opinions, my experience knowing him so many years has trained me to give no value to any opinion. It doesn't mean I don't have opinions aplenty. It means I don't value them. I write opinions here, and I speak opinions talking with friends, but I don't believe them, don't hold them dear as Mine.

 

rufino tamayo

 

Isn't it curious: Mine as possessive, ownership, connected to self, and mine, a deep dark shaft with tunnels under the ground. I'm wondering if the cold dark mine makes an image to define the possessive mine. Among the first things we teach babies is "mine" and the next thing is "share." Does this mean I need a miner's lantern to go into what I mean when I say mine. I see a cd case for Santana I call mine, because I paid for it and I possess it. Is it that the idea of ownership mine could be a root system into my own psychic interior made of dark tunnels? I'm thinking that since they are the same word, there must be some connection. It's awfully easy to make a connection, which makes me suspect I'm bullshitting myself. However, I look at possessive mine the way a baby uses it, holding the blanket close to her heart, "Mine." Those roots go straight to the heart, encase it like a net. Then we grow up into the world of everybody having opinions, and the opinions I hold dear to my heart I call mine. A network of root-like shafts around my heart like a net around a glass ball. Much of our language comes from pre-logical times. whoever called a deep hole in the ground a mine might have seen inside self a deep dark place where memories of experience lurk. Yet, in other languages the words are not the same. For me, that settles it. I'll take it for two different approaches to the word as two separate words for reasons to be found in the evolution of language. Somebody can answer that question easily, like somebody can answer where the lightning comes from. Just a passing curiosity around the nature of the ego, which looks awfully much like a net around the heart.  

 

 

tony smith

 

 

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WOODY ALLEN: EXISTENTIALIST IN NEW YORK

woody allen

I'm still in the spell of this evening's ongoing film festival event, Woody Allen: A Documentary, released in 2011, directed by Robert Weide. Woody Allen is the Bob Dylan of film in my generation. Like Dylan, his beginning was extra good, he stood out. Before he started making films, he was one of America's funniest comedians in his youth. Then he made very popular silly movies full of existential humor. Then he made Annie Hall, Interiors, Manhattan, and a long list of others, many of them classic American films the day they were released. The silly went away overnight. As he explained in Manhattan, he was tired of writing silly television comedy when he had so much more to say. I heard a critic say of Interiors that it was deep and heavy. Yeah. Not everything in life is comedy. Tragic stories happen too. Though Interiors was a story that took the viewer through sorrow, sorrow is a legitimate human feeling. Artists go for the range of the human scope, not what appeals to corporate sponsors. It's our place to keep up with the artist as much as it is the artist's place to keep up with us. I recall something I heard or read in an interview with Bob Dylan some years ago when asked what a certain song meant. Dylan said, It's my place to write them and yours to figure them out. These are surely not the exact words, but it's the part my sorry memory retains. Woody Allen, in his mid seventies during the filming, had the same attitude. He makes the films, puts them out there, some people like them, some people don't.

meryl streep and woody allen in manhattan

The only parts about the documentary that failed to get my full appreciation were the critics. This one, FX Feeney I think was his name, I took for so limited he fell into the Pauline Kael slot for me, the Hollywood critic of late 60s, early 70s. I found I disagreed with her taste a hundred percent of the time. I don't deny Feeney some fair insights, but he didn't hold my interest much. He was too affiliated with Hollywood, Academy Awards, red carpet glitz for my taste. In my personal film watching, Hollywood only figures as films to avoid. Hollywood is corporate glorified television. I like independents. Woody Allen is the ultimate independent. It was told that he goes to the producers, tells them he has a movie to make, and it's on. He doesn't even have to give a brief of the plot unless he wants to conversationally. In a way he is the Shakespeare of America in our time. Allen writes his films, acts in them and directs them. His films are as particularly American as Shakespeare's plays are English. Shakespeare made silly comedies in his beginning years, grew weary of them and wrote serious dramas in the history plays and tragedies. Allen's history plays were stories of the contemporary upper middle class of Manhattan. In my own personal taste, Crimes and Misdemeanors is my favorite Allen film. I see it his Hamlet. In Shakespeare's time the belief was that we pay for our sins. In Allen's time, not necessarily.

woody allen

Somebody insightfully called Woody Allen the Albert Camus of comedy. When you see it, it's almost too obvious to mention, but I doubt I'd ever come up with that insight on my own. Absurd is Allen's view of the world. A line from one of the films, maybe Hannah and Her Sisters, Max von Sydow says in a kind of Shakespearean monologue, an aside to the audience, "If Jesus came back and saw what was being done in his name, he would never stop throwing up." Max von Sydow in Allen's film was a nod to Bergman. The Allen period that satisfies me the most is the time of making each film an American version of a given great director's film. My other favorite Allen film is the one critics slam and call his worst, Stardust Memories. He played with Fellini's 8 1/2, the story of a director having a difficult time with women, the result of his own infidelities, driven to introspection and self-doubt of himself as an artist. One of the many aspects of Stardust Memories that took hold of me was the way he brought forward the feminine beauty of the women in the film. Early in the film, neither one is what I'd call stunning. Nice looking women. As the film goes along, they become more and more beautiful. By the end, Charlotte Rampling became the Venus of now before my eyes. She became a vision of beauty, and by then we knew her humanity too.

charlotte rampling in stardust memories

 

 

Woody Allen appreciates the feminine like few film directors I can think of. He likes a woman's mind, how women think, how women feel, and especially explores what really is the feminine. Allen finds the truly feminine that has nothing to do with makeup and fashions. He finds and brings forward the grace in his actresses. He appreciates the feminine especially sexually, which he does not deny, but uses in the telling of his stories. The women in his films are not just roles, but complete human beings, even the incomplete ones. In a way like feminist writer Germaine Greer, Allen is always looking for the authentic feminine in a woman, and he finds it, brings it forward in full appreciation. This aspect of Allen's films was not touched in the documentary of his life in film making. Allen's appreciation of the feminine stands out for me in Allen's art form along with his humor and insight. Actually, I found it odd that the people who put the documentary together failed to bring up Allen's appreciation of and respect for the feminine as expressed in his films. Allen's women have a feminine grace seen in few films that are not French. He also looks at the nature of the people in this world with a cold and sympathetic eye. From his start in show business he was carried along by his amazing talent. He said in an interview for the film, "After all these lucky breaks, why do I feel like I got screwed somehow?" Hearing him say that, I thought it as good an illustration of Allen's world view and comedy in a one-liner as could be found. He is the master of the one-liner.

 

  

woody allen with hair

 

 

 

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