Never Ask Why

(In progress: for inclusion in my continuing series of essays...)

Remember your mother's answer to that question, Why?--usually uttered in that whining tone you never knew, as a child, could be so aggravating?  Of course, her answer was...

"Because."

Or perhaps the more elaborate form: "Because I say so."  

Your mother was wise enough to understand that the question is unanswerable.  Which is why you should never ask it.

Or perhaps, more accurately, it is answerable only in partialities, little glimpses of a truth so large as to be unknowable.  

Why did I sleep so poorly last night?  Well, I did eat that blue cheese at dinner time.  I had a contretemps with my wife.  I was uncomfortable in bed.  There was that racket outside, on the street.  I have some inner turmoil going on, about where exactly I am in my life, and what direction I might need to take.   I'm harboring a complex of hidden fears and doubts that I haven't yet begun to unravel, nor have wished to.  I'm worried about money.   About tomorrow. About what I did or didn't do yesterday...

You see what I mean.  It's endless.

The problem with the question, Why, is that it can be paralyzing.  The answers bounce back and forth in the mind like those shiny steel balls in a pinball game, ricocheting against the rubber boundaries and impediments, triggering bells and flashing lights without achieving anything but a rapidly accumulating score.  Well, with maybe the occasional insight along the way--an insight soon forgotten in the melee.  

The question takes me right into my head when I might more profitably be searching for the answer in my heart.  If it occurs, as it does sometimes, in the act of writing, it's almost sure to block the flow.  You may be as irritated as I am of the by-now tired cliche from the Nike commercial: Just Do It.  But it does, in its own annoying way, have something useful to say to me as a writer.  It's a useful--if, yes, annoying!--answer to those who tell me that they "want to be" a writer.  If I "want to" feed the dog, the dog will surely starve to death before too long.  If you want to be a writer, write.  

I wonder whether scientists ask themselves the question, Why?  I'd rather believe they ask the question, How?  Which is to my mind a broader, more generous, more inclusive question that does not ask for the narrow, reductive, explanatory answer, but opens up, instead, to a multitude of possible--and possibly conflicting--answers.  I do know that for me, as a writer, Why? narrows the field of possibility.  Perhaps that's why I gave up writing mystery novels many years ago.   In a mystery novel, you have to be interested in "motive."  It's the convention.  But even when you get to solving murders, I suspect that motivations are far more complex than mystery writers would have us believe--and eventually unknowable.  

(Any thoughts on the question Why? out there?  I'd love to hear them.  This is still, clearly, as I mentioned, a work in progress.)   

Sunset...

... last night...



... from our balcony in Laguna Beach

Thank you!

Thanks to your interest, this June has been a record month on The Buddha Diaries, with readership up impressively since last month.  I'm not sure whether Facebook and Twitter have anything to do with this, but I do know what a pleasure it is for me to be able to publish something (nearly) every day, with the knowledge that there are readers out there who are interested in what I have to say.  Thank you!  And please stay with me... and, if so moved, pass on the word!  

Art Rounds

Ellie and I did the art rounds last Thursday, covering at least two of the several gallery clusters in the LA area--Culver City and Chinatown. I have to report that it's a distressingly desultory scene right now, with few visitors in the galleries--at least at the time of our visit--and dealers generally agreeing that things look fairly bleak from the sales point of view right at the moment. But there's always the art...

I won't attempt to cover it all. There's some pretty indifferent stuff out there, and as I have said before I'm happy to have taken off my critic's hat: I can restrict myself to work that had a particular resonance for me. First, though, for anyone in the area who might be wondering what to see, let me quickly point you towards two good shows: a fine collection of "Drawings (Broadly Defined)" at Cardwell Jimmerson Contemporary Art--a museum quality show that includes some standout artists; and "I Am a Bird Now", a zappy and intriguing fusion of collage, painting, sculpture and wall work...



... by Antonio Adriano Puleo at Cherry and Martin.

The paintings that spoke to me more personally and directly, though, were those at Suzanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects and Roberts & Tilton. I loved the installation of Whitney Bedford's paintings...

(lower picture: “Frantic / Frantically”, 2009, oil and ink on panel, 22” x 26”. Courtesy of Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects. Photo credit Joshua White.)

... of underwater volcanic eruptions, which combine the bold application of oil paint with the intervention of intricate moments of fine ink drawing. Set, for the most part, against the horizon that is a conventional element of landscape painting, Bedford's powerful, turbulent "eruptions" of brushy color have all the appeal of drama and the intimacy of narrative. The paintings succeed in borrowing from both the raw emotional intensity of Abstract Expressionism and, in her backgrounds, the more neutral power of minimalist abstraction. They are visually exciting, even as they remind us of our planet's vulnerability and its seething, unseen core. She has certainly found a new way to expand one of art's lasting traditions: the engagement with the natural environment.

On to see new work by Andrew Schoultz at Roberts & Tilton. (Ellie and I have an earlier painting of his in our living room, much admired by guests and cherished by ourselves.) Schoultz's highly complex work tells us something about the possibilities of painting beyond its traditional value of providing visual pleasure. He engages us in an extraordinary spectrum of experience, involving myth and archetype along with contemporary economics and environmental issues. In these latest paintings...



... aside from his familiar blend of intricate line drawing and explosive field of proliferating image, he brings in a collage element of finely shredded currency bills and, if I'm not mistaken, other financial documents to engage the eye and tease the observing mind with oblique thematic references to the power structures of this world we have created. Elsewhere, ubiquitous architectural references evoke those structures themselves, whilst pathetically degraded natural elements like blasted trees (the paper fragments, I observed in this context, are cut out in the shape of thousands of tiny leaves) suggest to this observer the damage wrought upon the planet by the human addiction to commerce and economic gain. Schoultz clearly offers no answers in his paintings, but he asks us to engage in the complex philosophical narratives of a world on the brink of madness, and hanging on by a mere thread to intelligent control.

Chinatown, then. Here's a photographic diptych from the series "Room" by Carrie Yury at Sam Lee Gallery...



Yury's split portraits of near-nudes bring to mind, in part, the grisly 1947 Black Dahlia murder (the victim's body was cut in half,) as well as those many erotic nudes that populate the pages of art history books (the Rokeby Venus, the Ingres Odalisque, Manet's Olympia...), that on the one hand celebrate the female body and objectify it. Playing on that theme--with a (literal) twist--Yury confronts us with the disturbing proximity of erotica and pornography, healthy sexuality and exploitation. Her naked figures turn away even as they offer themselves to us; they are personalized by the detail of objects that surround them, yet distanced by the camera's voyeuristic lens. I found the pictures provocative and uncomfortably beautiful at once.

Right next door to Sam Lee's, at Solway Jones, you'll find an enchanting collection of hand-made musical instruments, ranging from the Zen-like simplicity of Robert Wilhite's gongs...


... to the practical whimsy of William T Wiley's "Debilslide" guitar ...


... to the primitive/high-tech combo of William Leavitt's "Analog Synth" synthesizer...


... and the technological sophistication of Reed Ghazala's "Species Device"...
A number of these instrument makers are artists of established reputation in other media--Bill Wiley as a Northern California-based painter, sculptor, printmaker and installation artist; and Bob Wilhite, based here in Southern California, as an artist, designer and performance artist of many years standing. Aside from the purely visual aesthetic pleasure of looking at these strange and beautiful objects, the visitor can enjoy the eerie quality of their strange sounds--the single note of Wilhite's beautifully crafted one-key piano, for example, or the clunk-clunk of musical clock whose two "hands" strike the sides of the glasses in which they're placed. One of Ghazala's pieces collects energetic forces from remotely ambient movements--a passing truck or bus, an airplane overhead--and converts it into other-wordly sound.

Michael Solway himself delighted us with an informed tour of the entire installation. It was with particular pleasure that he reminded us of the article in the previous day's New York Times about the 9,000 year-old flute. It seemed like a great context for a show exploring both the primitive and the most recent and sophisticated of humanity's ways of making sound.

Michael Jackson: Thoughts For the Rest of Us

Coinciding with my work to put together this little book of essays about the survival of the creative spirit in a world gone mad with commerce, the sudden and premature death of Michael Jackson last week is another sad reminder that success in the commercial world is no guarantee of satisfaction and fulfillment.

I have to say that I know virtually nothing of Michael Jackson’s music; and what I think I know of him as a boy-man has been gleaned, over the years, from media reports that are notoriously geared to the more sensational aspects of his life than to its realities. Even so, the trajectory of his creative life seems clear, and sadly familiar in its outline: early success—amazingly early, in Jackson’s case—and adulation; a childhood fraught with demands, expectations, and outright abuse; huge financial returns—and equally huge losses; a troubled adult life, in which substance abuse and a self-destructive eating disorder become methods to deal with the unremitting pain of having to live up to the persona one projects; paranoia, caused by the constant prying of the media, and suspicion of friends and family alike…

It’s not a new phenomenon. Even before the Romantics came along with their tragic view of the artist as one living at the edges of reality, bordering often over into madness, the reputation of the reckless, drunken, death-defying poet was established. And it’s true, I think, that certain creative minds are driven to test the frontiers of the human mind and the limits of human behavior. Imagination is a faculty that enables the mind to run wild, to shake off the shackles of mundane reality and take us to places never before seen or dreamt of. Insanity is not so different, perhaps. It might even be, as some have suggested, that the artist’s creation is a—more or less—controlled form of insanity.

Curiously, though, it seems that success, for the creative mind, is as hard to cope with as is failure—and that both are equally illusory. The meteoric life and death of superstars in the past century—from Dylan Thomas and Sylvia Plath to Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, and countless others; a constellation now joined by Michael Jackson—is testimony to the unhappy truth that the return for one’s creative work is never enough. The appetite to be seen, heard, recognized, rewarded is, for some, insatiable; and the insecurities of those who experience these returns are no less—perhaps even greater—than those who strive for them without success and agonize over their supposed inadequacy.

The lesson that I suppose we all must learn if we are to survive as artists, writers, musicians—creative people of all kinds—may seem like a cloying and irritating cliché: the only lasting, satisfying reward, if we can find it, has to come from within. No amount of adulation from the world out-there will do it. No amount of material comfort, no fortune earned is enough. We will still want more. We will still look at the work we do and feel that it’s not good enough. We’re actually convinced that we are the frauds that others fail to see.

The hard part is to be able to experience that inner satisfaction without the complacency that is, for the artist, a kind of death. The life of the artist is the life of the exploring mind, which needs the edge of adventure to keep it moving forward into the unknown. For Michael Jackson—more than for the rest of us, I suspect—that particular Middle Path was a painful and daunting one, and eventually an impossible one to follow. I have to honor him for having danced it as he did, with verve and grace, as a gift to his fellow beings.

Clearing the Clouds... and...

A fine quote from Marcus Aurelius, gleaned from the excellent pages of today's New York Times Book Review: "A limit of time is fixed for thee, which if thou dost not use for clearing the clouds from thy mind, it will go and thou wilt go, and it will never return." It comes in a Reading to Live: a review of "The Whole Five Feet"--the length of the full shelf of the Harvard Classics, 51 volumes of indispensable reading.

Otherwise... I invite you to consider the truly frightening column by Nicholas D Kristof, It's Time to Learn From Frogs. It bodes ill for our species.

Obama, Government, and the Ungovernable

Perhaps I shouldn't have been, but I was frankly surprised by the response to the piece I cross-posted last week to my Huffington Post site. It was called, if you remember, "When Do We All Grow Up?" and its subject was the kind of foot-stamping impatience with which progressives of all persuasions seem to be greeting Obama's first six months in office. Responses to my thoughts ranged from "Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!" to angry resentment and rebuttal.

Don't get me wrong. It's not that Obama is--or should be--above criticism. Don't count me among those who believe he can do no wrong. I am equally skeptical of those who invest the man with messianic qualities. But I do believe that criticism can be productive and supportive, if offered in the context of the bigger picture I was attempting to invoke.

When the critic allows his or her particular point of disagreement to become central and exclusive, though, the criticism soon becomes narrow-minded, parochial, and destructive. Thus, if I allow Obama's immediate resolution of the extremely delicate Guantanamo problem to become the exclusive yardstick by which I judge his performance, the sine qua non, I risk trying to bathe the baby while I watch the bath water drain away--to pervert an already overused metaphor. If I disagree with him on one, or two, or three issues, must I give up on him altogether and, worse, descend into dismissive vitriol?

The problem is that all-or-nothing progressivism plays into the hands of those who would destroy Obama at any cost--as they attempted to destroy Bill Clinton in the 1990s. While Clinton was able to hang on by the skin of his teeth, remember, it was at the cost of being elbowed further and further to the right in his political agenda. The divisiveness that results not from honest argument, but from anger, resentment, and bitter accusations of betrayal, lends both credibility and power to vitriol from the other side.

One of my respondents suggested the analogy of someone we'd hired to do a job and who should now be taken to task for failing to do our bidding. I prefer a different analogy: I see the President less as a hireling, and more as the captain of a sports team, to whom we've chosen to delegate the responsibility to make decisions in an ongoing series of ever-changing, unpredictable situations. In this analogy, we risk being the complacent armchair quarterbacks.

Then, too, the history of our recent decades should remind us that it's easy to sit back and whine about "the government," as though it were some evil, alien entity separate from ourselves. In doing so, we forget that the government is us. It's a compact between ourselves and those we have chosen to represent us. My point, to put it in a slightly different way, is that in each furiously riding the hobby-horse of our individual freedoms and in demanding that our individual needs be met, we fail on our side of the compact: we become, in effect, ungovernable, even as we blame it on the government.

I realize that my readers may not do so, but I still count myself a progressive. If I had been able--had the society in which I live made it even halfway possible--I would surely have voted for Kucinich. Given the realities of who we are as a society, my question is this: Do we really want to nitpick our current Democratic President to shreds, and clear the path for another right-wing ideologue to follow him--whether in four years, or eight? We complained quite bitterly about the ideological rectitude demanded by the other side. Do we want to sacrifice our own ultimate goals to another brand of ideological rectitude?

I think it's possible not to abandon our ideals and to exercise our right--our duty--to question policies we judge to be wrong-headed, all without losing sight of the big picture. I voted for Obama because I believe him to be a thoughtful man with all the right intentions; because I believe that he does have a firm grasp of the big picture--what Bush Senior dismissively called the "vision thing." I did not vote for him because I thought he could fix every problem in our society within six months, no matter how pressing; or that he would say nothing that I disagreed with; or so that he would take uncompromising stands on every issue. I voted for a man I thought would work, with whatever circumspection might be necessary, to achieve a more just society for us all.

Michael Jackson: A Brief Elegy

I watched the sunset from our balcony last night: had Michael Jackson watched the sun go down the night before, I wondered, without the first idea it was the last he'd ever see? I know next to nothing about the boy-man and his music, but felt sad for him that so obviously a gifted a human being should have been given to live so evidently a painful life. I'm not a believer in afterlives, but should we be granted further opportunities to get things right, I wish him one of greater peace and happiness than the one he just concluded. Without media.

This guy...

... likes to visit on our balcony. He likes to tease George, and poop on our outdoor furniture. Here he is, resting from the exertion of those daily chores. Click on him, you'll see what a rascally character he is.

Adultery

I found myself enjoying a good laugh at Governor Mark Sanford's expense yesterday, when his somewhat clumsy email professions of love were read out over a national television channel. And I realized even as I laughed that it would have been equally embarrassing for me if my own clumsy efforts from many years ago had been read out. Love letters are hard to write without seeming coy or seamy (as I remember, mine tended toward the latter!) and they are clearly intended for an audience of one--a one who reads with a less than objective eye.

But this is not about literary skills, but rather about a deeply human drama. It's easy to laugh at a public figure in the predicament in which Sanford has placed himself, especially one who has made a point of touting his own moral probity and taken every opportunity--for political reasons--to impugn that of his fellows. Sanford has not been reluctant to make his opinions known about the sexual exploits of figures as diverse as Bill Clinton and Larry Craig, and his hypocrisy, now exposed, leaves him more vulnerable to mockery than he might otherwise be. Add a hefty dose sanctimonious, religion-based self-righteousness to the mix, and you have an excellent source of harmless hilarity.

Except that it's not really harmless, even when enjoyed in the privacy of one's own home. The Governor himself is hardly affected by my schadenfreude, but from the karmic point of view it is surely no merit to be making hay of the human failings of others--especially when they are failings that I myself have indulged in the course of my life. My laughter, sadly, is not about the person who provoked it. It's about me. And while I don't want to get too sanctimonious about it myself, it does not reflect well upon my character. To watch a man trying desperately to rescue some part of his life--his job, his future, his marriage, the trust he has built with his children and his friends--from the ruinous results of all too natural sexual urge is honestly no joke.

Compassion, not laughter, would be the more honorable--and more Buddhist--response. And I fear my laughter was not of the compassionate kind.

Noteworthy...

So Nixon thought that "abortion is necessary [...] when you have a black and a white." Hmmmm. So much for Obama!

The Giveaway

(In process. An essay in my continuing series. Your thoughts are welcome... Oh, and Gary: thanks!)

My friend Gary Lloyd, the artist, stopped by yesterday. I have known him since the early 1970s, when I walked into a gallery to see his show and was appalled by what I saw. This was before I’d had much exposure to what contemporary American artists were doing; I had learned about Picasso, Braque and the Cubists in school. I knew a little about the Expressionists and the Surrealists, and I loved the intricate, poetic work of Paul Klee. But that was about as far as I had progressed in my acquaintance with art history. Gary, at that time, was working with a variety of media, and his gallery installation included such things as axes struck into the gallery wall, strange, unidentifiable objects jerry-rigged out of cardboard, glass and duct tape and smeared with thick coats of petroleum jelly, jars of oozing stuff that seemed to be still growing… I was confronted, brutally, with that familiar old philistine reaction: THIS IS ART?

I have always had one way to deal with things that poke unwelcome fingers into previously unexplored places in my mind and leave me nonplussed: I write about them. I was still primarily a poet at that time of my life, so I went home from Gary’s exhibition and wrote a twenty-five page poem. It helped me to… no, ”understand” would not be the right word; it helped me come to terms with what I’d seen, which left, along with the emotional turmoil of outright, furious rejection, a hundred different ideas and images racing through my mind. I had to radically rethink my world.

That was Gary’s first gift. I returned it in the form of the poem I had written, and was delighted when he responded to it with enthusiasm—and with a challenge: Let’s make a book together.

We did. The book was called “Bob Went Home”—its title taken from words I’d found scrawled in childish lettering in one of the pieces in the show: “When I was a small boy, Bob went home.” It was a piece of text that was at once extraordinarily mysterious to me—who was Bob? Was he responsible for all this dreadful mess? Was this his broken pencil and his ink-stained book? Why did he go home? Where did he live? Were his mother and father waiting for him? Had he done something wrong?—and at the same time strangely familiar and comforting, as though I myself were Bob, or had been, as a small boy. My poem, in a sense, was all about the Bob I had once been: clumsy and uncomfortable with my own body, forever making unintentional messes, lonely and unsure of who I was.

“Bob Went Home” had an axe handle for a spine. It had a corrugated steel cover, severely dented by the heel of a wielded axe. Its pages were made out of roofing paper and cotton pads, thick cardboard slices slimed with Vaseline and stapled together under grease-proof paper and covered with wire mesh. The printed text—my poem—was legible only if the “reader” engaged in constant contact, constant manipulation of the physical object. It was an ungainly mammoth of a book, and Gary and I spent a good few weeks assembling multiple copies, a few of which reached the hands of collectors and the display case of at least one museum.

It has been a good long while since Gary and I have been in contact, but we had lunch together a couple of months ago and vowed not to lose touch. And then, the other day, he came over with a gift, an art work he had made back in 1978, “Chomsky’s Boat.” The piece is a construction assembled out of four large, musty tomes—directories of world writers—lined up on a rough stand made of skinned tree branches and hollowed out in the manner of a dugout canoe. If it’s “about” anything, it’s about modern communication systems and primitive ritual; about the weight and heft of things, and their fragility; about paper and books and wood; about the lasting and the ephemeral, the physicality of the material world and the intangible, evanescent quality of the intellect and the human spirit.

It is a wonderful gift. And it gave me an entry point for this essay I have been planning to write for some time now, a kind of coda to the book I have in mind. Because, in this commercial world I have been thinking and writing about, the giveaway is the ultimate gesture of the artist, the spirit of generosity that, I believe, is at the heart of the creative impulse.

It’s not easy. The notion of professionalism—and, indeed, commercial success!—is a seductive one. Most creative people I know would like nothing better than to earn a decent living doing what it is they love to do. We have been tempted, too, by the seductive promise that if we only “follow our bliss”, reward will surely follow. Sadly, experience will teach us otherwise—not all, perhaps, but the vast majority of us: the rewards are anything but financial.

For a writer like myself, the outcome of this predicament is no worse than the hurt feelings and disappointment that go along with the familiar rejection slip. There is at worst a hardcopy to be filed away; and most of us, these days, are content to file our stuff away on hard- or external drives, or in cyberspace, where they cause no pain or inconvenience. For the artist who accumulates years’ worth of canvases or sculptural work, the problem can get to be a serious practical one of maintenance and storage.

Art works, too, are much more tempting objets to assign value to. Lined up there, on the racks, they remind their maker of the long hours that went into their making, the cost of materials involved, the price commanded by an (obviously far inferior!) work by a friend or neighbor. Their very thinginess seems to suggest that they must be “worth something.” But what? The unpalatable truth is that the heartless law of the market applies even to art works: they are actually worth nothing but what a ready and willing buyer will pay for them.

The giveaway provides a surprisingly satisfying answer to this particular agony. I know, because virtually everything I have written in recent years has been a giveaway. What I have written, I have posted on my blog for anyone to read, for free, at any time. In the past—and sometimes even still—I have been paid by magazines for articles; I have been paid for catalogue introductions by galleries and museums; I have even sold a few books off the shelves of Barnes & Noble. And it’s nice to get the paycheck. It’s very nice. It’s a kind of validation that satisfies the ego even as it swells the pocketbook, even if only by a little. But I was never able to count on it, let alone make a living.

The reward for the giveaway is very different, but in some ways more satisfying still. A part of it is the freedom it allows. For me, it means I can write what I damn please, without submitting to the whims and biases of an editor. And the experience of giving comes with the pleasant feel of having committed an act of generosity, no strings attached, no expectation of return. The return, if it does come—in the form of response from a reader, praise, or even gratitude—is the proverbial icing on the cake.

But then it’s easy to give something away that has no shape or substance, and can be reproduced an infinite number of times without sacrifice to its integrity. It’s much harder, understandably, to give away a painting or—as in Gary’s case—a sculptural work that is unique, and dear to the heart in the way an object can be. One artist of some note demurred when I spoke about the giveaway: it was, he thought, a disservice to the artist’s standing in the art world, one that threatened to diminish the work itself by undercutting its value. I wondered, though, in response, what kind of value a work might have, when left in the studio racks or in storage for years on end. I have been the fortunate recipient of a number of gifts over the years, and value them no less for the fact that they were given. Perhaps more so, given the added value of mutual affection and recognition.

A final, scatological thought, if I may be permitted. A good part of the successful creative process consists in maintaining a flow of thought, image, medium… A backlog of output/product/waste can easily stop up that flow. The giveaway is one way to flush out the system, creating physical and mental space for the next effort. Give it a try, it might just work for you.

Scary Beasts

I tuned in last night to Animals Behaving Worse, a program in the PBS "Nature" series that I had started watching the night before. I had been amused by the antics of thieving baboons and marauding black bears falling out of trees...


... and was expecting more of the same as light entertainment before lights out. I had not expected the dark turn the narrative took. Instead of cheerful buffoonery, I was treated to the spectacle of scary creatures.

Hitching rides aboard the modern transportation systems we humans use to navigate the globe, it seems these fellow living beings have found ways to relocate and adapt to new environments with frightening ease. Take the case of the coqui frog...



... arriving in Hawaii from its native Puerto Rico and proliferating wildly, depriving Islanders of sleep with their incessant, high-pitched croaks. Seems it would take the arrival of the dreaded brown tree snake ...


... (originally from Australia and other spots in the Far East and now terrorizing Guam, thanks to military transport) to control them--a solution devoutly NOT to be wished.

Add to this mix: the huge and rapidly expanding population of Asian carp ...


... from East Asia, now infesting the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers and threatening the Great Lakes; the Africanized bee--called the "killer bee"--ten times more persistent in the pursuit of intruders on their nests and many times more lethal with its sting; and the plague of red fire ants from Brazil; and you have a sense of how scary the migration of species can be. And these are but a few examples of many. Click on America's Least Wanted Species and the larger picture begins to emerge.

One thing is clear, however: that the most territorially invasive, the most rapacious, the most destructive of all species is our own. We set the example for our fellow beings on this planet, and are scarcely in a position to complain when they follow in our footsteps. The irony is that they might well outlast us. The bees and the ants, the cockroaches and the flies (save that one executed last week at the hand of our president!) may inherit this planet and continue to populate it for eons after our extinction.

What's the lesson of the dharma here? To be respectful of all other living beings, perhaps, and not to assume superiority, as we have done these many centuries. To learn from them the skill of adapting to the environment, rather than forcing it to adapt to us and to our needs. To live in harmony with other species, and with others of our species, and with demands on the environment commensurate with our needs, and theirs. You'll maybe see others; that's my list.

The Wisdom of Metta. Again.

I have been discovering once again, as I contemplate the events in Iran, the challenge of practicing metta. It's easy to send wishes of goodwill and compassion to those with whom I agree and sympathize--those seeking to throw off the yoke of oppression; and much harder--though just as important in this practice--to send an equal measure to the oppressor.

And yet the practice is extraordinarily rewarding. It confronts me with the honesty of acknowledging how little I know, how little I understand of these affairs. It confronts me with the disturbing belief that, whilst I abhor violence, the reality is that violence does seem, to some, to be the only answer. The dreadful irony is that, in Iran, both sides seem to think so--those who look around them and see intolerable oppression, and those who believe that the social order must be protected at all costs. I am, of course, naturally inclined to take the side of the oppressed. To breathe, to send goodwill to the oppressors, to wish them happiness runs counter to this instinct. It's a real struggle, in which I am helped only by recalling the wisdom of Thanissaro Bhikkhu: if they, too, found true happiness, the world would be a better place.

I may stand accused of wishy-washiness rather than wisdom, as is, in this crisis, our President Obama. Voices to the right and voices to the left have been clamoring for strength, decisiveness. They have forgotten, perhaps--or choose to ignore--the recent history of American "strength"--which often looks all too much like weakness--and its clearly counter-productive outcomes. Consider Vietnam. Consider Iraq. Consider the numerous smaller adventures in Central and Latin America, where we have put a heavy finger on the right (read anti-socialist) side of self-determination. We have been too often on the wrong side of history.

And the results of eight years of Bush belligerence should not be so easily forgotten. Our last president and his cohort of neo-cons would surely, now, be loudly proclaiming America's condemnation of the "evil" oppressor. We should remember their record, soberly. What the practice of metta teaches, in part, is the humility of having to recognize that "I" am not always right, and that compassion can be a more effective strategy than confrontation. Which does not make it easy.

From Iran...

... so much tragic video. Here's one that touched me: a peom? a prayer? Take a moment to watch.

The Fresh Air Fund

Speaking of reaching out (see below...) please be aware of the current dollar-for-dollar matching fundraising drive by The Fresh Air Fund. You'll find a permanent link also in the right-hand sidebar of The Buddha Diaries, always close to the top. They are also looking for HOSTS to help get summer respites for inner city kids. It's only the children of this country who will determine its future. I am doing what I can to help today... Will you join me?

Reaching Out...

Here's another piece for the essay collection--still in draft form:

THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS

… and then I fell into the blogosphre.

It was, yes, like Alice through the looking glass. All the rules changed. I was in a different and delightful world, where anything was possible.

Here’s how it happened. It was November 5, 2004, the day I woke to the realization that the American electorate had once again chosen George W. Bush to be President of the United States.

I was appalled. By this time it was clear that the man had lied and cheated us into a disastrous war, not of necessity but of his own choosing. Katrina had not yet arrived, of course, but it was already clear that he was out of his depth in the most powerful office in the world. If his reaction to the attacks of 9/11 had seemed, at first, appropriate to a country in a state of shock, he soon showed signs of disturbing immaturity. You only had to hear him attempt to muster an answer to a reporter’s question to realize that the “commander in chief” was barely in command of the English language, let alone the national and international situation for which he was responsible. The most charitable view I personally could summon was that he was an affable buffoon, a little boy awash in the proverbial sea of troubles.

And yet he had been re-elected. It was, at first blush, just another demonstration of my individual powerlessness, a reflection of the feelings I had all too frequently experienced about myself as a writer. My voice seemed to go out into an echo chamber. No one was listening. So what could I do? I could sit around feeling sorry for myself and angry at my fellow Americans… but it seemed like a poor option, to surrender.

Otherwise, there was only one thing that I knew how to do: I could write. So I turned on my computer. (What a gift this machine has been to writers of all kinds, but that’s another story!) I turned on the computer and, in some way that remains a mystery to me, I was guided to the Blogger. I read an invitation to start my own blog. I was intrigued. I followed the prompts, not knowing where they would lead me, and gave “my blog” a title. It was “The Bush Diaries”—a title that came to me without the benefit of thought or reflection. It arrived. I wrote it down. I started my first “post” in the form of a tongue-in-cheek letter to the president.

Out of this was born a blog that became, and remains, my daily writing practice. I did realize, after two years working on “The Bush Diaries,” that I had grown weary of waking up with Bush in bed with me every morning—as I planned out what I wanted to write that day—and the blog morphed seamlessly into “The Buddha Diaries,” which continues to this day.

I said earlier that my discovery of the blogosphere changed all the rules. Until that moment my power as a writer, eventually, rested in the hands of others. I have always known at heart that writing is by definition an act of communication, and that only one half of its potential lies in the hands of the writer. The reader is the other, indispensible element. For this, I had always been dependent on the editor of a magazine or, in the case of books, on an agent and a publishing company to bring the results of my work into the hands of a reader. And to attract the attention and the collaboration of these intermediaries was, believe me, no small feat. Ask any writer. Well, ask any artist, too, who has tried to find a gallery…

So this was the changed world of the blogosphere. I could write something every day of my life. I could publish it as I wished, without modification or approval from any meddling editor. And, I soon discovered, I could attract readers. I could get response. I could, in a word, communicate. What more could any writer ask for?

Well of course there’s always the more. There’s the “book.” Even though now, thanks to the wonders of the computer and the Internet, it’s entirely possible to put out a book and market it oneself, there’s always the elusive prospect of that best-seller, that gleam in the eye of every writer, that brings with it critical response, perhaps even acclaim, perhaps even financial return on the work that has gone into the writing. Not to mention the door that one success will open to the next publication, the growing readership. Who among us writers does not strive for such an opportunity?

Still, recognizing that these optimal results are available only for the fortunate few whose writing skills prove marketable, I’ll settle for the more intimate pleasures of the blogosphere, thankful for that small but, yes, growing coterie of readers who follow what I write, and taking heart from the fact that I am a bit more than the voice crying in the wilderness. I’m able to reach people. I’m able, sometimes, to touch their lives.

Reaching People

I realize how much I want to reach people, to share some important part of myself with others. I understand now that my early career as a teacher must have been motivated at some deep level by this impulse, but I was never a teacher in the conventional sense. I did it for years, but I never felt at ease in the classroom. Since the age of twelve I had known I was meant to be a writer, and as I came to acknowledge after years of uncomfortable self-delusion, classroom teaching was no more than a way to make a living. Academia was never my true home.

I have been talking a lot recently about this book of essays that I want to put together, written over a period of thirty years and all of them touching on this issue in one way or another. There are so many creative people out there, doing things they were never meant to do in order to make a living, or to support their "real" work in a cultural environment whose gauge of success is unremittingly commercial. As I see it, all creative activity arises from that desire to share oneself with others--a desire that is too often repressed, with dire consequences for the individual psyche.

In this context, I had a useful conversation yesterday with a literary agent. I had sent out a few query letters describing the book and its intentions, and received from this one agent the invitation to give him a call. His point was clear and simple: to make a success of a book about surviving in the commercial world--and to reach the readers I wanted to reach--I'd need to get commercial! His website included a long, detailed questionnaire about marketing plans, as a primary tool in attracting the interest of publishers. And I realized as we talked that it's not about the quality of the idea, nor indeed about the quality of the writing; it's really about being able to demonstrate to publishers that the book has a ready-made audience out there waiting for it, and a system in place to ensure a successful publicity campaign.

As a result of listening to the wisdom of this agent's experience, I'm thinking a whole lot differently about how to go about "reaching people." One thing he stressed was the importance of having venues to promote the ideas to a variety of audiences, which is something I have given much thought to in the past. It's a different kind of teaching, a kind that I have much enjoyed on those occasions when the opportunity has presented itself--a one-shot chance to tell a group of people, as I say in one of the essays, "who I am."

The trick, of course, is to find the venues. One of the ideas that appeals to me is offering a workshop to students in fine art and writing programs that would introduce them to their most powerful weapon in the creative arsenal, the mind. It's a weapon that can famously work either for you or against you, and it's most frequently omitted from the curriculum--with the result that it's too often left to its own devices and works negatively. There's a simple technique to discipline and train it to do those things I want it to do--to focus, concentrate, and generate new ideas. It's a technique whose rudiments are easily and quickly taught and easily demonstrated. It's called meditation. Given just an hour, I can show you how to do it. After that, of course, it's up to you to put it into practice. I'd have loved it if someone would have shown me how to do it fifty years ago. Or forty. Or thirty...

So I'm working on a letter to send out. It feels good to me. It feels like an opportunity to share some important part of what I myself have learned. And it's the simplest of ideas, sometimes, that turn out to be the best.

Any takers, out there?

When Do We All Grow Up?

(An invitation: in a moment of sudden and inexplicable insanity, I signed up yesterday to Twitter. Let me know if you Twitter too. We could "follow" each other...!)

Okay, I do understand where they're coming from, this growing chorus of liberal critics of Obama. Like them, I'd wish for him to take many stances and promote many policies that have not yet been forthcoming. I want a public health care option. In fact, I'd rather go for a single payer system, nation-wide. I want equality for every citizen, no matter what their sexual orientation. Gay marriage? Of course! Gays in the military? Way past time. I'd like nothing better than to hear a strong voice in opposition to the power of multinational corporations, financial institutions and insurance companies, and I'm all for strict regulation of their activities. I don't trust any of them. I want an end to the depressing saga of the Middle East, and peace between Israel and the Palestinians. I want Guantanamo closed. I want us OUT of Iraq, RIGHT NOW, and I do NOT want us getting any further involved in Afghanistan--but I also want the Taliban and other extremists to be disempowered and neutralized. Oh, and yes, of course, while we're at it, I want to see an end to totalitarianism in states like Iran and North Korea.

All these things I want. But let's for God's sake not be childish. Let's not stamp our feet and pout because we're not getting EVERYTHING we want THIS INSTANT. We've gotten ourselves into a huge, stinking mess, and it has taken us collectively years--well, decades--to do it. Is it not a trifle disingenuous for us to expect this one man, Obama, to step up and wave a wand to get us out of it all at once?

Let's be honest. The problems that we face right now have been a long time in the making, and they result from choices we ourselves have made along the way. Was it not we voters (not me, of course!) who decided back in the 1970s that we did not like paying taxes, and elected Ronald Reagan to cut them for us (though even He, the Great One, remember, in fact did the opposite!) Have we not spent years protecting and insulating ourselves from the rest of the world--its disease, its poverty, its hunger and other deprivation? Have we not allowed the bigoted and the blindly religious to determine policies toward everyone the least bit different from ourselves? Have we not worshiped at the illusory altar of "strong leadership," while we ourselves do everything to subvert it? And, out in the world, have we not been at pains to promote the myth of "a strong America," as we stomp around in heavy military boots? Have we not listened without the benefit of critical judgment to those who shrieked hysterically about "socialized medicine"? Have we not bought in, endlessly, to those who would sell us snake oil, or promised us a free lunch? Have we not eagerly grabbed, ourselves, at easy profits, idolized false prophets, and celebrated empty notions of success? Have we not raised celebrity above substance, our own material comfort above that of others?

Did we not expose ourselves to the ridicule of the world by impeaching a president for a minor sexual indiscretion? And electing--and, incredibly, reelecting--another of inconsequential intelligence and clearly limited understanding to the most powerful office in the world? Did we not allow ourselves to be lied to, cheated, and led by our noses into an unnecessary and painfully costly war?

And now, as though in recognition of all this, we may have half-way repented, electing a man who sees things differently, who acts with forethought and circumspection, who wisely recognizes limits--both his own, and the country's--and is willing to listen to the opinions of others rather than spout his own agenda. (And Bill Maher wants "more Bush"!) We have elected this man, and now feel entitled to berate him for not providing an immediate resolution to all our problems.

What children we all are! How lacking in patience, foresight, and forbearance! How incapable of seeing anything beyond our own immediate needs. How gimme, gimme, gimme, NOW! I look around and I wonder, for God's sake, when do we all grow up?

A Quick Note

For a fascinating piece of site specific art, check out this great example from Houston, TX. I guarantee it's worth the click...

The Road to Happiness

First, the disclosure: Dr. Barbara Wright has been a friend and inspiration for at least fifteen years--since I started my meditation practice with the Laguna Sangha, the little sitting group of which she is a prominent and knowledgeable member. That said, I have been meaning for some weeks to talk about her newly-published book, "Metta: The Map, the Formula, the Equations," in which she lays out the ideas she has been putting into practice in workshops and teaching sessions.

A clinical psychologist of long experience, Barbara has devised a comprehensive strategy that adapts the teachings of the Buddhist dharma to the resolution of personal issues and interpersonal relationships--including conflict. Part interactive board game, part motivational therapy, part self-improvement practicum, her "Metta" is an innovative guide to the multiple ways in which the dharma provides valuable lessons in the way we live with others and ourselves. It engages participants in the process of working through the all-too familiar blocks of ignorance and delusion in order to reach a place of compassion, harmony and happiness.

The book version--which comes with a copy of the "map" she has created to chart the intricacies of human behavior and communication--leads us through the theoretical construct on which her teaching is based, (the "formula"), supporting it with a variety of case-book examples that offer concrete illustration for each point in the plot. I'm not sure, honestly, that the complex "equations" to which she reduces each problematic situation she addresses, add greatly to my own understanding of her thesis. But then my devoutly anti-mathematical mind tends to recoil from anything that it has trouble grasping!

That said, this is a challenging book for anyone engaged in the fundamental search for happiness in their life. It is filled with wonderful moments of humor and unexpected insights and, above all, with the spirit of compassion it embraces as its underlying principle. More than simply a guide to improved communication skills, it suggests a useful matrix for the spiritual life so many of us seek. Those interested can get more information at Metta4All

The Artist Louise Bourgeois: A Film Review

She comes across, in interviews, as the epitome of the crusty old dame, alternately courting attention and dismissive of questions--especially those she considers to be stupid or irrelevant. Like many artists of her standing, she is self-involved--one might say self-interested--to the point of obsession. At 97, Louise Bourgeois remains feisty, querulous, supremely confident of her destiny as an artist. And there's no question but that she has reached a stature achieved by few others in the past century.

All this becomes apparent in the film, Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, The Mistress and The Tangerine from which you'll find a short clip here. (Zeitgeist, by the way, which produced this film, puts out some fabulous movies about artists, a couple of which I have mentioned previously.) I'm a bit uncomfortable with its occasional effort to reduce this extraordinary woman's work to the outcome of her personal life story: it is, as she repeatedly tries to stress, both independent from that, and much bigger.

That said, as I see her work as primarily about deeply human pain and suffering; about the isolation to which we are all, in our very essence, condemned; about our relationship with objects and spaces in the external world--and with other people--and the hidden fears they provoke; about our distorted body image, our innate fear of freakishness and the grotesque; about time, the passage of time, and memory--and the inevitable distortions that memory brings with it. In short, it's about the human psyche, the interplay between the conscious and the unconscious minds as we struggle with the often daunting, sometimes overwhelming realities of life and death.

Certainly, in her work, she draws on life experience. Born in time to be aware, as a small child, of the horrors of the first World War, from which her father returned with injuries, she grew up in the shadow of his blatant infidelities--perhaps the cause of her mother's withdrawal and the sense of abandonment she suffered in her early years. It's clear, in the presence of her work, that the fear, the grief, and the anger of that childhood experience are powerful emotional drivers of her creative energy. In poignant installations, which the viewer is allowed to glimpse only through small windows or cracks, she evokes the always partial, often frustrating image of the little girl on the outside of the tenuous marital bond between her parents, and her own mystifying presence in the world, as if as an unwanted outsider, always the voyeur.



In a variety of media, too, ranging from bronze and marble to clumsy stitchery, she recreates both the awkwardness and strange beauty of the human body, as though to plumb its troubling enigmas. Fascinated by the natural world, she is attracted to its spookiest manifestations: the spider, clearly, is the image most closely associated with her name; in the plant world, it's the phallic forms and fungoid presence of mushrooms that appeals:



The Zeitgeist film, by Marion Cajori and Amei Wallach, offers an impressive overview of the Bourgeois oeuvre--more wide-raning and diverse that I've been able to indicate here--along with the close-up portrayal of the artist herself. It's available on Netflix.

And, Yes, More...

A final weekend installment...

Sunday proved to be the first clear, sunny day we've had in weeks here in sunny Southern California. It was a pleasure to see that glint of sunlight once again, on waking. We had begun to wonder if we'd ever see it again. A good day for the drive out to Topanga Canyon, to make good on a promise to visit a friend's studio. It happened, also, to be Open Studio day in Topanga, so she had a good crowd of visitors while we were there.

Having seen Rachel Holloway's paintings only online before--as you'll see them if you click on the link--we were delighted to have the chance to see them "live" in the studio. Here's one we liked a lot...



(not very well cropped on my cell phone)... which gives a sense of the way in which she blends plein air landscape painting with a contemporary painter's understanding of abstraction. Working--surprisingly, at this scale and with this density of image--in watercolor, she opens up a wonderful sense of space by the inclusion of up-close foreground material and, in this painting, with the power lines draped from where we stand, as viewers, way into the distant hills. Their effect is also to draw the eye into the picture, bringing us along with it, and focusing its impact.
Then, too, there's a really interesting thing that happens when you move up closer to the surface as you lose the pretext of the landscape and your eye gets more involved with the marks than with the image. Here's a detail from a different work that will give you a better sense of what that means:


Originally from England, Rachel works out of a long tradition of English landscape, making it very much her own. We had a delightful visit with her and her husband, who was a student at the same college as I at Cambridge--though I have to confess I was there a good number of years earlier. With an amazing variety of skills, they have built their own house in the canyon--she as designer, he as builder, and live comfortably among the wildlife there; Matthew, we discovered in somewhat gory detail, has learned the art of decapitating rattlesnakes when they invade.

From Topanaga we drove down the the Pacific Coast Highway and followed it way north through Malibu, Zuma Beach and Trancas, turning inland and up a mountainous road with very lovely glimpses of the ocean to reach the home of another artist friend, Lita Alburquerque, who was celebrating her husband, Carey's birthday with their annual "Pasta and Poetry" bash. We have known Lita for many years, but this was the first time we had made it out to this very remote area where they live. I can't imagine how they manage the commute to get into town, as they frequently must, to work: though the drive is a beautiful one, it's also long and winding. I'm sure they're rewarded, though, by the joy of living in a grand natural environment and the peace that goes along with it.

It seemed to be our day for Brits. Those helping Lita and Carey celebrate included, to my immense surprise, a man who had attended the same "public" (read private) boarding school as I in Sussex, on the south coast of England. We were even, pretty much, contemporaries there, give or take a year or so, and shared some common memories of teachers and events, like the five-mile cross-country course with its steep hills and the thirteen dikes (water-filled ditches that we had to forge, breaking the ice in winter) as we approached the finish line. We did not know each other at the time, but had some mutual friends, including one who was later killed by Indians on an Amazon adventure, and another--with him at the time--who was the son of a famous British composer. As if that were not surprise enough, there was also a fellow Geordie at the party--and a fellow poet, now living here in Southern California. (A Geordie, by the way, is a person born in Newcastle, a Tyne-sider. I'm absurdly proud of being one, even though I spent only the first year and a half of my life there!) And an old Etonian, from a neighboring Cambridge college to my own--though of a very much more recent vintage than myself.

We enjoyed good pasta, excellent wines from Italy, and had all brought poems to read--a rare occasion, these days! We are too busy, too caught up in the speedy passage of time to enjoy the slow pleasures of poetry. Here's the one I took to read. I wrote it a few years ago, but it still felt fresh and right:

Echoes

Sometimes I hear his voice
in mine: my father's turn
of phrase, a sudden, plaintive
note, a particular tonality,
a hint of affected modesty.
I hear it when I read a line
aloud, or start to preach
my version of the gospel.

Sometimes, more startling,
I hear my own voice in my son's:
a raising of the timbre to sound
a note of protest, indignation,
the anger carefully concealed
behind a conventional politeness
or a charming smile, the quick,
ingratiating deference of tone.

And thinking this, I wish now
I had heard my grandfather,
who died before I could recall
his voice. From his stern picture
I imagine it firm, but gentle,
the master copy of the voice
from which my father's
was imprinted, and my own.

And I hope now, too, to live
for long enough to hear in Joe,
my grandson's voice that echo
of the generations, father down
to son; and perhaps not least
for him to recognize in his,
when he is grown to manhood,
some echo of the sound of mine.

A good crowd, excellent company, a great celebration! Actually, all in all, a pretty darn nice weekend--even though it did mean staying in town.

More Art...

I have some serious catch-up to do. It has been a busy weekend, and I took a vacation from The Buddha Diaries yesterday, so I may go on a bit today. Be patient.

I left off, I think, Friday night, after our visit to the Los Angeles County Museum. Saturday, we went out for a morning cup of coffee in neighboring Atwater, where we sat outside on the sidewalk with George, despite a heavy mist that bordered on a light drizzle. Our annual June gloom has been much wetter and colder than is usual; most often, at this time of year, we get a marine layer of cloud in the morning and expect it to burn off by the middle of the day. Not so this year. The clouds have brought with them an unusual amounts of moisture, and have refused to burn off, lasting through the afternoon and on into the evening. This English weather is the cause of severe depression in large numbers of Southern California natives.

From coffee, on to the Farmers Market on Sunset Boulevard in the Silver Lake/Echo Park neighborhood, where George and I had to wait patiently in the drizzle whilst Ellie did some shopping. It seems that the local fire trucks gather here in large numbers on a Saturday morning, parking in a line down the middle of the street while the fire guys disappear into the market for their morning coffee. It may be something of a public relations gesture, too. They obviously go out of their way to be friendly, inviting small children to take a look inside their cabs and chatting up the locals.

Just noting what happens in our part of town at weekends, when we're normally gone...

We lazed around with newspapers and books for much of the afternoon, then joined up with our daughter and her friend for dinner at the remarkable Fatty's Cafe in Eagle Rock. A first-rate vegetarian restaurant, Fatty's is the avocation of the artist Kim Dingle, whose wickedly funny and disturbing paintings of scrappy little girls...



... have earned her a distinguished international reputation. Kim gave us a warm reception and had a great corner table waiting for us, and recommended "the best Sauvignon Blanc" she'd ever tasted. It was, indeed, a first-class wine (with an interesting new glass stopper), and the vegetarian plates were excellently prepared and tasty. Take my word, it's a great dinner stop for anyone in the Los Angeles area--well worth a commute from any part of town.

During the jury selection process for the recent personal injury trialon which I served as a juror, I ran into the artist Daniel Brodo, who invited me to his opening at MorYork Gallery--not far from Fatty's in the Highland Park district, a hub of vigorous and adventurous galleries that show artists still young--or foolish!--enough to be ready to take risks. (Check out the Northeast Los Angeles Arts Organization.)

My friend Daniel--whose work I had not known previously--shows an apparently simple but in fact highly complex installation, constructed entirely out of sheets of cardboard, joined together to form a string of uniquely-shaped, irregular polyhedrons that snakes through the gallery space like some giant, ungainly serpent...



The piece is called "My Luck" because the shape of each element in the chain is based on the differential between lotto numbers picked by Daniel over period of months and the actual, winning numbers. Don't ask for further explanations--it's too much for my small, distinctly un-mathematical brain--but the whole effect is a cheerful reminder of the role of chance in our lives, and of its odd, unpredictable realization in the physical world. You don't have to understand too much (I hope!) about the process to get the feel of the thing when you share what space its impressive presence allows you as you twist and duck around it.

MorYork is remarkable not only for Daniel's exhibit. It's a huge, hanger-like space that looms far back beyond the exhibition space the occupies about the front quarter of the building. Venture further back and you'll find yourself in an insanely cluttered fantasy-land of assemblage art, the domain of the gallery co-owners Bob Breen and Clare Graham. Clare, as I understand it, is the one responsible for the creation of the literally hundreds of objects, large and small, that are crammed together, higgledy-piggledy, with narrow paths between for the bemused, bewildered visitor--objects created out of an infinite variety of obsessively collected items: bottle caps, jigsaw puzzle pieces, chains and cages, Scrabble boards, bones and doll limbs, religious icons...





(Sorry, my cell phone pictures can't begin to do justice to this spectacle!) Clare clearly belongs in the great tradition of obsessive assemblage artists as diverse as Tony Duquette, who created those way over-the-top California angels; Simon Rodia of Watts Towers fame; the artist Noah Purefoy, creator of a mind-boggling acreage of environmental work in Joshua Tree, California; and lesser-known, self-taught artists like Grandma Prisbey, whose Bottle Village is sadly deteriorating--all of whom have now gone on to their justly rich rewards in assemblage heaven, where a paradise of junk must have awaited them. These jackdaw collectors have an eye for beauty where the rest of us see only kitsch or junk. As for Clare, I'm hoping to follow up with him in the near future.

A final stop for the evening at Kristi Engel Gallery, kitty corner from MorYork, where we enjoyed more sculptural installation work by Rebecca Ripple--the small white letters embedded at the apex of each of these...



... spell out "Me Please"--or, of course, "Please Me"... a paradox the comments wryly on the the image of those gauzy, Catholic-school uniform skirts and the wormy growths that emerge from beneath them, all gathered in a gossipy gaggle that asks us to place ourselves in the uncomfortable ground between feminist freedom and traditional attitudes about gender. Ripple's "God"...



...is a funny, furry, vinyl-leathery, shoe-type thing that works much bigger, in the mind, than its small scale. Who is God? What is She? Why do we put Him/Her on a pedestal? Ad infinitum.

So that was Saturday. I'm not too keen on long blog entries, so I'll stop here, and think more about art--and poetry--when I get to write about our Sunday.

ART...

I promised some art talk today, based on our visit, last night, to the Los Angeles County Museum, so here goes:

First, there was the big current exhibition, Pompeii and the Roman Villa: Art and Culture around the Bay of Naples.


It's a spectacular exhibit, beautifully installed, but I need to say right off that I enjoyed for different reasons than those I had expected. First, I saw it more as a decorative arts show than a fine arts show. You might get a sense of what I mean from the installation shot, above. The Romans were great admirers of their Greek predecessors, and much of the sculptural work is derived from those sources. Hard to explain, but it doesn't quite have the edge and vigor of original art work. It's beautifully crafted, much of it--and the Romans clearly produced some superb craftsmen. And yet, for me, there's an element of--what? genius? originality? personal vision?--that hits me in the gut when I'm confronted with a brilliant and inimitable work of art. So I settled for enjoying it all as a wonderful display of arts decoratifs, and really, what's wrong with that? From the sculptural interior and garden furnishings to the often magnificent wall paintings that graced the opulent villas of the wealthy artistocrats of the period (we're talking, for the most part, 1st century BC and the 1st century AD; the eruption of Vesuvius was in 79AD,) we get a fine overview of the out-of-town life of privileged Romans in Pompeii, Herculanium, and neighboring areas.

And this was the second aspect of the exhibition that I found particularly rich in both intellectual and emotional impact. It's impossible, I think, to walk through this exhibition without imagining the people whose portraits--either in stone or paint--gaze down at us from two millenia ago. Here's a bust of Julius Caesar; we contemplate his features with the awed realization that this what the man looked like. There's a lovely glass bowl or a silver drinking chalice; we can almost feel the two hands that cupped it in our own. They seem, despite the intervening centuries, so strangely close.

Thus, for me at least, the exhibition was provoked a profound and moving reflection on the passage of time and the imponderable question of mortality. The people who lived among these objects, "possessed" them, valued, or in some cases worshipped them, were overtaken by the sudden sweep of death in the midst of life. Yet curiously you can easily get the impression that they live on in the stillness and silence of a museum exhibition far from where they lived and died. Is it because of the incompletion of their lives that their spirits seem unable to abandon the artifacts with which they were surrounded? Or is this just fanciful projection on my part?

Perhaps the latter. No matter, it was this feeling that brought the exhibition to life and gave it the charge it might have lacked, as I suggest, as "art."

I did, though, get the familiar art kick from an ancillary exhibition that has received far less publicity--Eleanor Antin's Classical Frieze. The pun is, surely, wryly intended, because the end product of Antin's work is a series of large-scale, freeze-frame photographic images culled from carefully staged tableaux vivants--witty riffs, if I may put it thus, on the Age of Enlightenment's Neoclassical Romanticization of Classicism. Two of the images are included in the Pompeii show, and another two in a separate, adjacent gallery--too easily missed!--along with a marvelous video documentation of Antin's process.

Choosing sites that evoke the opulence of those Roman villas, Antin coordinates the skills of actors, costumiers, set and prop designers, and make-up artists to recreate deliciously decadent scenes that poke mischievous fun not only at those ancient Romans but also at the excesses of our own times. Here's "Petronius" ...


... a tongue-in-cheek celebration of wealth, excess, over-the-top eroticism and sensuality and unabashed hedonism, all in the context of a ritual suicide (center right: sorry, not a great picture) that suggests the spiritual rot at the heart of luxury.

I actually loved this work, completed by Antin, appropriately, in pretty much the span of the Bush years. Her vivacity and her sense of fun combine with a painter's feel for color, texture and composition to create images of endless visual interest with the kind of transparency of intention that needs no interpretation or explanation. Though small in the number of works included, her exhibition is one of the more delightful experiences you'd expect to find around Los Angeles this year.

One of the special pleasures of having hung up my critic's cap, some years ago, is being able to write freely about friends. It has been a while since I spent time with Eleanor Antin--though I'd like to think we are kind of old friends. It's a bit different, though, with Marsha Barron, whose work we saw later in an exhibition at LACMA's Art Rental Gallery, in the company of two other artists. Marsha is a friend, and a regular at our artists' group meetings, and we're lucky to enjoy a couple of her drawings in our own home. Her contribution to the show--a row of small drawings with charcoal and low-key pastel colors--is a tribute to the power of modest means and an intensely personal vision. And by "modest" I don't mean small in any way--despite the scale to which she restricts herself in this series. By "modest" I mean clean and unpretentious, consciously not-arty, honest, without flourish or excess. Here's a poem I wrote about Marsha's drawing, some years ago. It still feels right:

The line proceeds directly
from the heart, through the hand,
to the white surface of the paper,
with all its swkward pauses,
its hestiations, its sudden jolts
and turns, uncharted passages
through anger, fear, and pain;
or then, long, elegant moments
of inexplocable clarity. A spindly,
long-stemmed thing succeeds
in not quite being a flower;
a chunky, volumetric shape,
in not quite being a vase:
objects that never were, nor
will be, but in the mind's eye,
now here, on paper, startling
in outline, an inner darkness
translated with fierce precision
into the real world of here-I-am.

Enough for one day. More art, I expect, tomorrow...

Saturday in L.A.

Today is one of those days when I have too much to write about. We are "in town," instead of spending the weekend at our Laguna Beach cottage, as we usually do. Which means, as usual, that it's mostly about art. But first...

A RACIST (?) DREAM

I was in the unlikely position of being a member of a football team (American, that is,) an all-white team slated to play against an all-black team. It was, it seems, a secondary event, in a side stadium, whilst the important game was being played in the larger, adjacent location. Well, we were pretty darn scared. The opposing team were all these hulking black guys and we were at a considerable physical disadvantage. Warming up as we ran up and down a set of stadium steps, we decided we were going to even the playing field. We would soften up the big black guys by bashing their big, shaved heads with rocks before the game. (Apologies to my fellow non-violent practitioners, I'm just reporting a dream!) We collected some nice round rocks that we thought would serve the purpose and prepared for our plan. I laid my hands on a particular rock (which I actually have, in "real life") that is painted all over with a lovely natural scene of leaves, flowers and birds. I wondered whether this was an appropriate rock to use, and worried about just how hard I should hit the bald, rounded head of one of my opponents. Too gently, and it would not have the desired effect of leaving him stunned; too hard, and it would leave him unable to play altogether. A delicate line to walk...

So maybe you shouldn't believe me when I tell you I don't have a racist bone in my body. My subconscious mind betrays me!

Anyway, then, awakening from this dream, I made the trek to the bathroom, where I heard the dread sounds of...

A RACCOON ATTACK...
... on the fish pond outside our bedroom door. I rushed to the door and in the dim light, through the glass, I spotted the culprit perched on the stone ledge. (Pictures taken via I-Phone, the morning after.)


The ledge was soaked, and I guessed the critter had actually been floundering around inside the pond in his (or her, why not?) attempt to grab the fish out from under the slabs of rock beneath the water. The raccoon lumbered off as I opened the door, and headed down the steps that lead from our little Buddha garden...


... to the fence that separates us from our neighbor and the gate down to our main back yard.


The ever-vigilant George...


.... meanwhile, had woken from his slumbers in time to realize what was happening, and leapt down off the bed to perform his manly (well, dogly) duty, dashing out into the Buddha garden with yelps hysterical enough to rouse the neighborhood. It seems that the low-voltage wire (you can see it in the picture) we installed to deter this kind of attack on our six friendly fish did not provide the intended shock last night. We'll need to have it checked.

Here's George, investigating the scene of the crime this morning:


I have much more to say, paricularly about art; but later, perhaps, after breakfast. See you then...