Pixels and pixies

This is a digital sketch, one of a series, I did for Faith Vicinanza for a Hanover Press book called My Not Quite Blank Book, which contained writing prompts. I can't recall if this is the version they used, but this quirky version is my favorite. Yes I do not believe in angels. But don't those wings look too furry and fake?

MUSIC: The Holmes Brothers at Ballard Park

Last Thursday, I enjoyed an outdoor show at Ballard Park put on by CHIRP, (usually they are on Tuesdays). It was free, the weather and the music were good. The Holmes Brothers , Wendell and Sherman Holmes and Popsy Dixon, are originally from Virginia. According to their press relase, the band originally formed in 1979, and it doesn't hurt that they have a lifetime of stylistic knowledge to draw on. They play heavy on the blues with fabulous vocal harmonies including a sort of quavery falsetto, a little rockin' jazz, tasty guitar licks, and a bit of country. There were many toe-tapping fast-moving songs, with a few glacially slow and subtle songs. And yes, this group may have some grey hair, but so did much of the audience, including me!

One nice feature of Ballard Park is its small size. You can park in town, walk into the park, walk out Through Ballard Green Apartment's parking lot, walk down towards Maine Street walk back up Maine Street and go into the same park entrance as before, and still hear the music. A concert and exercise too!

A Bic pic - doodling again....

This pair of characters is now pinned to my bulletin board. It's drawing with a Bic on a little scrap of blue paper. I digitally eliminated the color.

The man seems to be studying something in the distance, the woman is evaluating her next move.Or perhaps they have just returned to their car to find it has been vandalized and are looking around to see who might be on the scene.

Or that is the story I tell myself about them. So much of our relations are like that.  Someone who hardly knows you is looking at you, telling themselves a story about you, piecing together your motives, your history, or pretending to someone else that they see you clearly.. It may or may not have any relation to reality, and may also be diametrically opposed  to the story you are telling yourself which also might have little reality to it.

"Alas poor Yorick -I  knew him well" - but did you? Hamlet gets away with saying that because he is speaking to a skull.....

Disappearing into light

This photo, of some glass hung in a window, is a tad over-exposed, and forms of the glass bottles are barely discernible against the backdrop of a bright day. To much illumination and things get very hard to see. I think this happens with people also. It's difficult to see the flesh and bone, foibles and fragility against the backdrop of interesting work - which may mean something completely different to each viewer, and something else entirely to the artist

Litany of the car - my trail of debris

Cars - the personal space you travel in. We get attached to them. Well I do. I don't imagine I'm alone. We see the passing show from the front seat of our cars, the darkness illumined in halogen glare, the passage of time ticked off in miles.

I haven't had much luck with cars over my 40 plus years of driving. (Yes indeed - I am old as dirt!) I started my car career with a little white Chevy I bought from my Grandmother when she got a new car. Then I got married, and when that car started falling apart, we had an old VW bug and a huge Ford Van. In the breakup, I got the bug, he got the van. When the bug developed some bugs, my father took it.. He used it to fiddle with an experimental carburetor he was trying to build from plans in Popular Science Magazine.

I got something called an Astra, a used three-door hatchback. it was a little car I liked a lot - but my Astra was totaled nearly head-on by the student president of the local high school's Safe Rides club who was driving her daddies brand new caddie. I saw her coming around the corner in the middle of the road, and yanked the wheel to the side. As she hit me I could see her look of horror and HER HANDS IN THE AIR!!!! Idiot. I was lucky I lived through it. Afterwards she indignantly accused me of speeding. The nice policeman had to walk her back along the 100 feet of skid marks the caddie left after it hit my car....

Then came the Blue Renault - a five door hatchback that I bought new (my first) and paid off. I drove that car for several years and moved to Maine with it. In Maine its chief flaw was this - the heater and the defroster were crap. When my mom got rid of my by then late father's Plymouth Duster, (which had a fabulous heater) I took it and gave the Renault to my cousin's boy (who later totaled it during his first year of college)

The Duster had its own set of oddities. There was something mysteriously wrong with the onboard computer. I went through four of these. Though some tragic flaw in the design - when it rained (Snow and ice were okay) the car would not start unless I got out a HAIR DRYER and dried the computer casing. So for a year and half I carried a 50 foot orange extension cord and a hair dryer every where I travelled. Traveling home from Maine, in Massachusets town - on a bleak day when their were multiple accidents in that town because of conditions - the duster and I hydroplaned into a Mass Electric truck - which was completely undamaged.

I was carless for a time after that, and once I took the plunge again, I had a white honda civic hatchback for 11 years. What a great little car that was!!! BUT - in the end (no pun intended) - it got rear-ended in front of the Brookfield Craft Center by a giant red pickup truck, driven by a volunteer fireman. So much much for my great little car.

I bought a used Ford Escort wagon, a 96, that threw a rod six months after I bought it. i paid $1,500 to have a new engine head put in - but the repair left some metal fragments in one cylinder - and after a few weeks it started making a terrible grinding noise. There went another $1,500. It was never right after that. And neither was I after wasting that much money.

After a while I replaced it with a 2003 Toyota Echo a car I really loved driving - I had it for three years, then an idiot in a magenta jeep rear-ended me at a stop light. I was completely stopped - he was going 40 while yaking it up on a cell phone. JERK. I remember how wistful I felt when I learned it was totaled, when I went to the body shop to clean it out and say goodbye.

I liked that Echo so much I got another 2003 Echo. It wasn't quite the same but It worked well until this year. Frankly, I have had my calculator out. I have spent $1,105. on my car since January.

Despite this, Tuesday morning it refused to start. It clicked spastically while sounding anemic. It's already had TWO NEW BATTERIES, new front brakes with rotors and new front tires THIS YEAR and alternator belts replaced and the subsequently readjusted. It went all the way to New Haven Monday night so if its surly little alternator was working at all it should have charged. I asked the mechanics about this twice. I was assured the alternator was working. I have a love hate relationship with this car. There is NO love involved in my relationship with the dealer's service center.

So, I rolled it out of the garage, down onto the street to get the 13-year old car, (which still RUNS) - into the garage. I left the Toyota on the street. because I simply didn't know what to do. Saturday morning I discovered it had been hit by a passing car. The street was littered with headlight glass from the other car. My car sported a giant dent, and a street-side front tire bent all out of whack ( with attendant damage to the tie-rods, steering assembly etc etc.. SIGH.

Lucky though, while the nice lady cop was writing up the accident, a tinkerer from down the street was walking by with his granddaughter and their dog. He is now the proud owner of a new project -with full disclosure of its odd problems. At least doing the work himself he won't have to pay some pricy mechanic. He managed to roll it down the hill.... So at least I didn't have to pay to have it towed...

That's a lot of scrap metal I have left behind - I'd like to know the tonnage and multiply it by the number of drivers in the world.. I think we need more trains. .

Drawings: two dancers in motion

The figure in motion - that's one thing I am always interested in catching in a drawing... I envisioned these as a matched pair, and lines do seem to go well together.

Mixed Media: Blue Tears, an oil pastel

This work, drawn during my brief residence in Brownfield ME, (1991?) is done with oil pastel & water colors on paper. I love the huge blue tears.

OIL PASTEL: contemplating nature

This oil pastel and watercolor on paper shows a poet i knew in Maine. I imagined him thinking about the various wonders of nature. The mountain becomes her knee.... etc. This was years and years ago when I made this drawing. A little stormy sky, a bit of visual play, a little mental/hormonal steam....

2 Poems relating to immigration in different ways

A friend asked my opinion on illegal immigration - at this time I have only a few posts on the topic and I thought I would add these poems to the list. All of my posts address very specific narrow points within in the subject and are not conclusions but more points to to mull over.

The first poem points to the irony that the children of immigrants - us - now seem so willing to say - 'go away.' The sentiment 'give me your tired and your poor' is really on the rocks these days.... The argument is a strawman really though, as always some were rejected, and many were reviled. Getting in was not assured in the days of Ellis Island either nor was being welcomed.

the get away
Published in the A First Tuesday in Wilton Anthology 2005

Outside
=============
a locked gate waiting.
Socked-in, Statute of Liberty's
harbor gone grey
Ellis Island, your sentimental
push-button displays,
sepa-toned icons, a memory
of distance and desperation,
clutched burlap bundles, dented
suitcases, hand-written name tags,
befuddled seekers, almost home.
Now, you welcome
only tourists. Neon bloodies
your halls of remembrance:
no-vacancy - no-vacancy - no-vacancy

CLOSE THE AIRPORTS!
CLOSE THE BROOKLYN BRIDGE!
The children of the children
of the formerly oppressed
want to seal the borders
with invisible force-fields
with infallible alien-detection devices
and declare:
CLUB AMERICA - MEMBERS ONLY!

So, take back your tired and your
poor, your huddled masses yearning
Give them a cell
with room service, limited menu
meticulously kept steel bunks.
Stop - Pack up
Fold your love of freedom,
tuck it in. Fold your sweat up
with your dreams. Forget
about your son in Cincinnati.
Do not pass Do not collect
Go directly Go back
=============
Outside

This second poem takes to point of view of someone who has settled here, someone who came from a country we were once at war with.

The Price of a Welcome Mat in Freedom Land

Published in X Magazine March 2003

A soldiers wife revisits the wall of war
runs her fingers down stone
panels of chiseled names
a melancholy Braille
searches 'til she reaches his name
her long remembered mantra.
"where are you now?" she asks.

Another soldiers wife, an immigrant,
trembles at the long black wall
with its bunting of flag
studies the endless names
tries to remember their young faces
smeared with dirt, mouths grim.
"Was it you with the hand grenades
was it you with the flame thrower?" she wishers.
"Were you the one who burned my mother's house
and sent my beloved to a nameless grave?"

She thinks of their son
in college in New York City
She thinks of her job, her apartment,
sighs ambivalent.

DRAWING: Face #16

This is another sketch while at a poetry event. Usually I am not drawing anyone in particular, just reacting to what is being read. Sometimes it's faces, sometimes just forms. This is a digital cut from a page in one of the little writing books I sometimes bring with me to those events. It's cleaned up a bit to make the paper brighter, and a signature was added.