A LOT OF HIGH-SOUNDING WHATEVER

pulpit by tj worthington

I've finished the most recent project and fixed it in place. Made it from parts found over a span of the whole time I've lived here. Every element is something found. No part has been altered except the four wood blocks have been sanded. The little bird at the top was a gift from 45 years ago, a souvenir Christmas tree ornament from Peru. It's a memory of a friend who left the body 35 years ago. I've kept it amidst a collection of found things. I would not have included the bird in the piece if it were going to an unknown buyer. It was going across the road for my friends Lucas and Judy. The bird is in the family, so to speak. The bird is hand-painted wood, not plastic, made in Peru, not China. The box, shelf, I call it the frame, came from the old Dr Grabow pipe factory's wood-working department for making boxes and displays. I think this frame had to do with a display having to do with Dr Grabow pipes. It's made of nice cedar wood and its back is a finish plywood. It's put together with staples, which I like all the better, the very simplest construction: four pieces cut 6 inches long, two pieces cut 41 inches long, a piece of plywood for the back, done. I believe it's original purpose was to hang horizontally. I like it better vertical. This frame has been in the house at least twenty years. It stayed in the room full of my someday-I'm-gonna found objects. Now is the time for realizing the potential I saw when I picked it up and brought it home. Some are the skeletal remains of tree stumps and roots, small, easily carried, wild shapes. 

 

 

 

Next project is to go at a section of pine stump with tempera paint. Only the core remains. It stands upright about two feet. Might stand it atop a stool. Thought I might paint the flow I see in the lines and shapes in the wood. Not to anthropomorphize it or make it look like fish jumping out of water, but to celebrate its own abstract essence, use it for a canvas of itself all the way around, remembering while applying the paint that this is the core of the tree's being, it's what is left of a tree long returned to soil. I will honor it as the relic of an individual tree that once lived. I see trees in the world of plants as the fully individuated plant form. This next piece will celebrate the tree's individual essence. Now is a good time to gather the found things and play with the potential I saw the day I picked up each one. I'm bored of painting inside the lines. It feels, anymore, like filling in the spaces in coloring books. It's a skill. Now I want to bring together art objects I've found along the way, old wood in the forest, even things found at the dump. I have a piece of wood beside me on the left. It is a chip of wood maybe four inches long, about two inches wide. One side is old and fencepost gray, the other side is the inside of the wood where it was ripped by a splitter. This piece broke free and fell into the bed of the pickup unnoticed while somebody was cutting firewood. Wood unloaded, taking the week's trash to the dump, sweeping out the back of the pickup. Within the hour, TJ backs up to the unloading place, went to unlock the trunklid and saw this chunk of wood at my feet, one side old and weathered, the other the raw interior, totally different texture, yin and yang of the same thing. It has found a place among the rocks I stack. This moment it has a small round rock on top of it, and it is standing on a largish white rock that is standing on a smaller black rock on top of a square block of wood. It's good for stacking. It has the earthy color of the rocks, just a different shape, and two sides.

 

god the mother

 

I like using things anybody else would throw away, or already has thrown away. This dark brown tree branch with the two arms upraised was found I don't remember where. It was already old and dry when I found it. By now it is dry to the bone. It soaked up the first coat of tung oil. Before the tung oil it was gray, old gray wood. Two coats of tung oil and it turned to coffee color. I loved it. Of course, goddess would be black. Original mother would be a black woman. I've seen this piece of wood hundreds of times looking for something else. It has been floating about waiting for its day. I felt celebration in it, like Ruth Schowalter's Jubilee pictures of joyous soul in celebration. I wanted it to be an upward feeling. The day I held it to the rectangle of cedar frame, it felt like a puzzle piece fell into place. I wanted the arms to rise up from the top of the frame, and they did, almost a reference to Minoan bull horns. I wanted something between the hands. I thought of a ball first. A little too cliché. I saw the painted bird suspended from a copper wire like a child's toy. My mind immediately took it for a reference to Jerzy Kosinskis's novel, The Painted Bird. Here, in this piece, the bird feels more to me like the lightness of life, the individual soul, goddess/god playing with it like a mother with a baby. I don't mean for any of these allusions and references to appear so that somebody else would see them. They make a story for me in the creation that helps me feel the flow of the piece, that pulls all the parts together into a whole. The flow of the piece, the feeling in it, is for the viewer. The other is back stage, the mechanics of it. I think of these three rectangles something like individual images like tarot cards that have no established meaning; you interpret the image's meaning for yourself. Like a totem of three images. I have my own interpretation. Everyone who sees it will find their own meanings for the images. Or not.

 

god the father

 

Next is god the father. He may look like somebody in the Restaurant at the End of the Universe. Who is to say God looks like he was born in Norway? Thor maybe. Krishna told Arjuna if he could see Krishna as he really is, Arjuna could not survive the experience. Who is to say god the father doesn't look like a knot in a log? Who is to say god the father can be seen? Anything visible is a representation, a symbol, a likeness. I figure if I'm going to represent God visually, physically, it could be everything and it could be nothing. I can pick any old thing. A knot in a log. It's an image of the growth process, evolution, life, spirit, god. Not looking for logic. Looking for association. Even that doesn't matter. I like this representation for looking like Confucius with a chicken head. Like there is Hanuman the monkey god, I've an idea this whiteman God that Michelangelo and John Milton articulated is the whiteman god. Pictures of Jesus made in Mexico are very different from ones made in Austria. Buddhas made in India are very different from Buddhas made in Tibet, Thailand, Japan. We so obviously shape the image of God as a projection of ourselves, you see Jesus pictures in cheap frames in discount stores, a white American guy in a red, white and blue gown. I can't completely de-anthropomorphize God; scriptures do say we are made in God's image, whatever that means. It suggests some anthropomorphic resonance for me, though I don't know how much or in what ways. In the rectangle at the bottom of the totem images is a man, possibly a preacher, leaning on the pulpit praying. The maple squares are like talk balloons in cartoons, though without words. They are like sticky-paper notes, statements with no words. God speaks in silence.    

 

praying man

 

 

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CARNAGE THE MOVIE

     roman polanski directing carnage



Have just finished seeing Roman Polanski's 2011 film, CARNAGE, the second time. I go into a Polanski film a little apprehensive of what I'm getting myself into. He has an edge that is borderline unsettling. His films make me feel uncomfortable, yet at the same time I sit in awe of Polanski's artistry. By the end, I'm blown away by another Polanski film. This one had the Polanski edge from start to finish. I laughed all the way through it, while it was no comedy. Two middle class couples in New York City. Jodie Foster and John C Reilly were a couple, Kate Winslett and Christoph Waltz the other couple. Winslett's ll year old boy hit Jodie Foster's boy with a stick requiring dental work. Foster, a conscientious middle class white woman on edge wanting to make the world better, Africa her focus. PC to the max. Her husband, John C Reilly, is a working man, a man full of white man opinions. Winslett's husband, Christoph Waltz, is a slick-tongued lawyer. They start their visit talking about the boys fighting. Each one had a different opinion on the matter. They started with coffee and advanced to liquor. The drama followed.


If you saw Polanski's Chinatown, you remember the scene where Roman Polanski, himself, acting a brief role, stuck a switchblade up Jack Nicholson's nose and pulled it out the side. Unforgettable moment in film. The unforgettable moment in this one is Kate Winslett puking, delivering a copious hurl onto the coffee table, a direct hit on Jodie's Kokoshka coffee table book, out of print, can't be replaced. A little later we see Winslett with her head in a bucket puking some more. She was overcome by a severe case of nervous tension. Evidently, Carnage was originally written as a play. Characteristic of a play, it all happens in one space, a New York apartment. Also characteristic of a play, it was brilliantly written. It was also an acting tour de force for every one of the actors. My respect for every one of the shot way up. Kate Winslett I found on the verge of average in Titanic, but since then she has become an accomplished actress. In Carnage she's placed opposite Jodie Foster and impressed me as never before with her talent as an actress. Jodie Foster became so real in her character, as she always does--the reason she's a great actress, it felt like I was watching this event happen through a keyhole in the door.


I noticed several Pinter phrases and ways of making verbal observations. They were not like imitations of Pinter by any means. Pinter has become the language of the modern man and woman in our time. He was the Shakespeare of London in his time, the last half of the 20th Century. I'd like to see Jodie Foster in a Pinter play. She was noted for her acting in her beginning, Taxi Driver, and became an obsession of that guy Hinkley who shot Reagan. She became a big star right away. The Hinkley ordeal messed her up a bit, but she came out of it whole. I liked her in Follow The River, an average movie, but she made it better than it otherwise might have been. But I have to say I appreciated her acting talent in Carnage more than in anything I've seen her in. Maybe I fully appreciated her the first time. She portrayed a frustrated white middle class woman to what I'd call perfection. I've seen women I know express their frustration in the same body language, same attitudes, same explosive urges too inhibited to go all the way. In the beginning, everybody was happy and putting on their best. By the end, facades had fallen away and it turned out everybody was miserable.


The interior decorating in the apartment had quite a lot to say visually about what was going on. Squares and rectangles everywhere. Sharp corners pointing every which way. Everybody was showing their pointed edges to each other. Using a mirror is one of my favorite Polanski stunts. In one scene we're looking almost straight into a mirror and don't see the camera. He used a rectangular mirror quite a lot for an added depth to what we're seeing. I felt like it was a visual tour de force as well. It was a directing tour de force too. Like every Polanski film I've seen before, this one is a work of masterful artistry. The playwright's name is Yasmina Reza. Evidently the play was written for London. It was filmed in Paris, but Polanski made it New York. I didn't think I could like any film of his better than I did The Pianist, the story of the Nazi occupation of Krakow, Poland, when Polanski himself was 8, making a visual feast of a film with a powerful story.


He was 8 when his parents were taken to concentration camps. He escaped by chance and worked with the resistance. Set on his own, an orphan suddenly, he became the man he is now, one of the great film makers of the last half of the 20th Century. Sharon Tate was his wife of one and a half years when Charles Manson and some others on acid killed everybody in the house, made a spectacle for the news, one of the most heinous of crimes. Manson got the name evil from the nature of the occasion, and will probably never be let out of prison. Polanski has said he wishes he'd been there and had died that night. He said the murder changed him deeply. Before, he was optimistic, and after, lives in pessimism about the nature of humanity. Polish/American writer Jerzy Kosinski wrote an account of the Manson slayings in his novel Blind Date, as seen in the mind's eye of someone who would have been there had his luggage not been lost by the airline. He had to wait overnight before he could make his transfer to Los Angeles. Polanski has been through a lot, especially growing up in Krakow in the heat of WW2 an orphan. It gave the artist in him a depth he might not otherwise have had. Like Dane director Lars von Trier, Polanski can plumb the depths and isn't afraid to go there.


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