August 31, 2011
March 17, 2010
Bending Spoons
By Mary Hannington
All day I have had the feeling that I’m outside of my body watching my life unfold.
My surroundings have become so surreal that I can’t believe I’m a part of them at all.
It’s terrifying!
I feel like shrieking.
I wonder if I’ll EVER have the life I want.
One full of passion, simplicity, creativity…
Peace = Bliss
Not now, so full of the hateful spider web of complexity.
Weaving and winding, ever tighter round my limbs.
I feel like a cat that wants to claw, scratch and hiss.
Get out of my way! Get out of my way!
I see madness scuffle by, rambling nonsense.
I’m so needed, TOO needed and yet I need.
But not like them… not hopelessly.
I can latch onto logic.
Carbon, nickel, cobalt, adamantine thiol, superparamagnetic, hard drive…
Others grasp and miss.
Steal lamps from hotel rooms.
Then call someone I love a thief.
Splatters on the floor that I must clean up…
It’s madness to whom I sacrifice, it feels cruel to succumb even for love, for decency.
DON’T CALL ME ATLAS!
The load on my back may be too much. I might crumble.
Oh god! Oh Buddha! Oh great Pan!
Open up the tunnel; let me see the light and travel far from the voices.
It’s me, it IS me and they should (can?) only be distant echoes in my life.
Fuck off you carbohydrates!
I can turn you to sugar!
I have the secret script, it may read a fairy’s tale, but it ends in reality – one of my choosing.
February 19, 2010
The Drive
By Mary Hannington
Cement sprawl scarred by mega highways.
Mountains loom up.
Loom by.
Moving, scraping.
Suddenly dropping to foothills, I fall.
Flat valley.
Dwelling scattered.
Like strewn wreckage.
Rows of workers harvest the fields.
The smell of sea air…
Crashing ocean waves…
Let freedom reign.
I smile and scream BODY SURFING!.
Horses…
Curly bare oaks.
CYPRESS TREES!
A truckload of hay is spraying its load.
Green, green, green.
Spanish moss.
Oh, the colors.
America, this country! Beautiful.
Too fast.
So high.
The mountains move.
Opening up just for me to see.
Tears.
Such joy!
I wish you were here.
This highway is forever and ever.
December 07, 2009
The Sleep of Reason
By Mary Hannington
Any magazine-cover hack can splash paint around wildly and call it a nightmare or a Witches' Sabbath or a portrait of the devil, but only a great painter can make such a thing really scare or ring true. That's because only a real artist knows the actual anatomy of the terrible or the physiology of fear... I don't believe anybody since Goya could put so much of sheer hell into a set of features or a twist of expression. And before Goya you have to go back to the medieval chaps who did the gargoyles and chimeras on Notre Dame and Mont Saint-Michel. They believed all sorts of things -- and maybe they saw all sorts of things too...
- Pickman's Model, H.P. Lovecraft, 1926.
I haven’t done much creating and I feel like I want to go back to painting again, but I don’t know where to start.
What I have been writing of late feels more like destruction than creation and sometimes you have to step back to see real truths.
I don’t like myself much right now.
A hard-shelled creature laughing in the face of madness…
I’m meant, I hope, to be of a softer shell, but the creative process sometimes takes one to an abyss. Self-preservation must bring you back or you don’t survive, but that insulation doesn’t allow the necessary myriad of ideas to flow.
A catch 22, but sometimes to open up even a crack is to explore too much.
Goya is a favorite painter of mine and he described the creative process in the above etching as something altogether maddening.
“The sleep of reason produces monsters.”
These etchings were a series known as Los Caprichos done during the French Revolution when Goya was studying not only that movement, but the ludicrous behavior of man and his superstitions.
Irrationality.
Goya, born in 1746, worked hard at being the best at his craft. Because of the times he had to rely on royalty and the wealthy to supply his paint. It was the lead in this paint that is believed to have caused him to finally slip into that abyss and not come back.
What I admire Goya for most is not his macabre black paintings, though I once did an homage to them, but his paintings of the royalty that were his patrons.
He married the court painter Francisco Bayeu’s sister and Bayeu’s entrance into the Royal Academy of Fine Art are what helped land Goya his first job. That of designing tapestries to cover the cold and bare stone walls of palaces. These tapestries usually depicted a life of leisure – banquets, hunts and entertainment.
Thus he kept the aristocracy warm.
He later painted their portraits with anything but warmth.
He was the court painter for Charles III, Charles IV and later, though his painting The Third of May clearly shows his disgust with the war, the conquering French monarchy.
It was a time of enlightenment in Spain that ended with the reign of Ferdinand VII in 1814 and the Spanish Inquisition.
Though Goya painted his wealthy friends and intellectuals with some emotion. The faces of the family of Charles IV in the above portrait appear vacuous. The splendor of their clothes and jewelry is minute in detail, but set in the artist's studio where he paints from behind. It’s as if Goya is presenting them to us from his point of view.
All pomp and luxury, but not much else there.
His" The Nude Maja" shocked Spanish society, but rather than cover her he did a second painting of her clothed. Both paintings were confiscated during the Spanish Inquisition.
Just before descending into madness and covering his walls with the black paintings, he completed a series of horrifying paintings on tin, one of which depicts the ill treatment of the insane, who at the time were kept untreated in prisons. Perhaps he knew where he was heading?
He died in exile in France.
Despite the times he lived in he enjoyed a freedom to be that I have not felt in some time.
He said what he wanted to say in his art despite what went on around him.
That he ended up painting dead babies, mutated humans, witches and skulls… scenes of madness and horror. That he did this alone on the walls of his villa is something I understand.
He saw all sorts of things too.
August 04, 2009
dhs office trip # 7
By Jessica Care Moore
the homeless man gives my son a dollar.
i am hiding.
hoping to not look like i'm doing well.
doing well doesn't
go with the chairs at this office.
i am thankful and embarrassed.
the same day i was booked for a show in paris,
asked to be in a film being shot in harlem in the summer
and booked for a keynote at another college.
my son's health insurance was cancelled by the state.
and the daycare said i owe them three grand and i
have to pay it so my son can register
for the new year.
the daycare lady is asking me if i have a job
again.
i am a famous, recognized poet and writer.
i have performed in south africa.
i am an apollo legend.
remember me?
i was on the cover of the metro times last month?
the cover of african american family when my son
began here in the summer. his pic on the inside.
my photos are in full color and six feet tall at
the museum of african american history.
i am one of the women of a new tribe.
i am on exhibit, on display.
always, on display.
exactly what does being a legend pay?
i need some w2's for this life
king's father says he wants a dna test.
i'm told my son is apparently from an
affair with a rapper
i used to love..
so why am i calling
you for
winter sweaters?
this is madness, i tell myself.
in order to receive help from the state
you have to be working.
my writing is my work. i can't have my
son 24 hours a day and write and create
new work.
question marks float on top of the head
of the case workers?
herbie hancock plays in the background
this is the music i brought into this place.
never leave your music at home.
never leave your music at home.
they only play the tv on one station
in the lobby
the sci fi channel or something.
sometimes there are cookies full
of m&m's
king, don't touch the cookies baby.
i made up a job because my job is not a job
i made up a job because my job is not a job
and apparently told them i made too much money
that doesn't really exist.
so now i will be allocated twelve dollars
a month for food.
my 1st husband calls me by mistake.
in the middle of all this..
we laugh about reading poems for 20 years.
our son, my earth son cracks jokes
about him getting old.
we are elders and we still young
says kevin powell.
this is a thankless job, weldon irvine
would whisper in my ear at the
schomburg before he killed himself
a few years later.
thankless.
thankless
thankless
thank you
thank you
thank you
thankless thankless thankless thank you thank you…
joni mitchell to drown out the moment
mariah carey anita baker jennifer hudson
and yeah, even that new beyonce song.
if i were a boy.
thank you
angels past lover’s ex-husbands
rappers dj's producer’s basketball
players guitar players novelists
philosophers. painters. bullshitters.
haters. liars. oh. the liars. bless you.
industry intellectuals that will never
get it.
all you deep mutha fuckas
thank you
mos
for telling me it was honorable
to live my life
travel the world
and when people ask what i
do
i simply say
i am a poet.
thank you kweli for being there
when i needed you.
thank you roger guenevere smith
for huey and the head nod
to ossie for the elbow in my arm
and that smile
thank you ma nana for buying
coats and uncles for shoes
and daycare.
moore family.
i have more family.
i was born a moor. (on screen)
i'm headed to la for some shows.
i have to stop crying and write
this show.
this is not a show.
this is my life
god.
this is my life.
this is my life
my blessing
my gift.
gotta gig in nati while i
was writing this.
my january rent
thank you
daddy god past lover’s
present lover
got your text baby.
i'm okay.
thankless thankless
thanksgiving
no thank you
said the abused turkeys
no thank you
for your slaughter
in the name of giving
in the name of family
this is what i have to
give.
i'm eating poems today.
i'm thankful
i'm humiliated
i'm embarrassed
i'm surviving
i'm surviving
i'm writing
odetta just died
you can't stop me
no, you can't stop me.
this is my job
dammit.
this is my job. u know?
i am a mother. give me my check.
amen
amen
amen.
a woman.
a poet
thank you
thank you
thank you.
i'm hiding all the turkeys
in my backyard next year.
then how u gonna give thanks?
some gotta die for you to be
thankful?
i miss you
yale
richard pryor
tom moore
miriam makeba
sekou sundiata
weldon irvine
joseph
rosa parks
you can't find them
you can' t find me.
we are busy writing
we are busy confusing
your paperwork with real
life
my lover says he talks to
me in real
life
the internet is an illusion
people addicted to illusions
though?
thankless thankless
world.
not me not me not
me.
notmenotmenotmenotmenotmenotmenotme.......
not
me.
June 05, 2009
Confusion?
By M. Hannington
For more than 30 years I have meditated and practiced Hatha yoga.
Breathing in the joys of my life and blowing away the bad, the anger. I can relax my third eye, feel my other two (no longer needed) sink back in their sockets, and make my hands as lifeless as an empty pair of gloves. The breathe slows pushed gently in and out from the stomach, heart and pulse faint and stress streams away through the hips, thighs, then calves and out my toes.
In this state I feel a great connection to the Earth and everything on it. There is great peace in this knowledge - to know that my actions today will be felt and why the wisdom of this “Tao Te Ching” saying is so profound:
A good traveler has no fixed plans
and is not intent upon arriving.
A good artist lets his intuition
lead him wherever it wants.
A good scientist has freed himself of concepts
and keeps his mind open to what is.Thus the Master is available to all people
And doesn’t reject anyone.
She is ready to use all situations
And doesn’t waste anything.
This is called embodying the light.What is a good man but a bad man’s teacher?
What is a bad man but a good man’s job?
If you don’t understand this, you will get lost,
however intelligent you are.
It is the great secret.
If you are going to explore you can't have a timetable, if you are going to learn you must throw away pre-conceived notions, and to really create is an instinctual process. If you are open to all things, you will automatically follow the right path and teach with your actions.
Lao-tzu, a contemporary of Confucius, wrote the Tao Te Ching in the sixth century and my copy is well worn, warped from long sessions spent with it and a steaming tub. Its translations are second in popularity to the bible and mine is a favorite by Stephen Mitchell. Tao means The Way and in 81 short chapters the book shows how the Master (a practitioner of the Tao) by doing nothing or wu wei accomplishes everything. It applies to raising children, sexual love, government, business, ecology, and just plain living.
What to make of an ancient book that at first glance seems to be offering as its main treatise a paradox?
Practice not doing,
and everything will fall into place.
Great athletes understand this concept better than anyone.
When a baseball player is on a hitting streak or golfer can’t miss, they refer to being in “The Zone”. They are no longer thinking about their swing or making adjustments, it just happens.
The same goes for artists. I didn’t really learn to draw until I stopped looking and DEFINING what was in front of my eyes, but let my hands reproduce what was REALLY there, the light and shadow.
It was a Zen Buddhist, a professor of life drawing that taught me his “way”. I would draw for hours and he would come and take my shammy cloth and wipe it away. It was the act of drawing life and not the drawing itself that was important. He taught us the patterns of life; how the wrist and the arm could draw perfect circles, that the study of anatomy was unnecessary to understanding the human form in a visual way.
No one person is the same.
His studio with its soft light, simplicity and hovering Japanese kites was one of the most peaceful places I have ever been.
In the 1980’s I was looking inward. My paintings were abstract expressions of what I was feeling. Expressed in horizontal and vertical lines and rendering my emotions into small areas of tension on a broad canvas. They would later become black paintings, where only texture and a slight shift in color or gloss whispered of my joy or darkness or pain.
The nineties were a huge period of growth; animation, technology, special effects and film let me explore and create in new ways that I’d never thought possible. Everything I had learned and studied in the eighties came into play for the first time. It was as if I could do anything I opened my mind to... in The Zone.
But I never forgot my minimalist past.
I was in San Francisco in 1992 and a married friend took me to a swank new bar that had the murals of some hot new Neo-Gauguinesque painter. They perhaps thought the hip, artsy place that they had discovered would impress me.
I wasn’t exactly comfortable there. My favorite hang at the time was Honest? John’s Bar and No Grill, which was run by former convict John Thompson and had missing linoleum tiles on the floor. A dump, but full of great characters and far more real than the opulent SF bar could ever be.
Not realizing I was being rude, I commented that I wasn’t into the new primitivist artist (flavor of the month) and at the moment I was still in love with Minimalism. The man’s wife was visibly crestfallen and my friend ridiculed my admiration of Ad Reinhardt, who I had discovered on a recent trip to MOMA in NYC.
"Oh no, not the man that does the black paintings?"
I could stare in marvel at those late 1960’s black paintings with their slight shifts in texture and tone. I completely understood his path to ever-simpler expressions. It was so like my own. He was one of the kindred spirits that shouted out to me and made me say, “Yes, he gets it!”
When people see some things as beautiful,
other things become ugly
When people see some things as good,
other things become bad.Being and non-being create each other.
Difficult and easy support each other.
Long and short define each other.
High and low depend on each other.
Before and after follow each other.Therefore the Master
acts without doing anything
and teaches without saying anything.
Things arise and she lets them come;
things disappear and she lets them go.
She has but doesn’t possess,
acts but doesn’t expect.
When her work is done she forgets it.
That is why it lasts forever.
Ad Reinhardt’s minimalist path had taken him to painting a black square. To him the most nominal form of expression.
In following the Tao life is stripped of complications, in harmony with the world you can just be without trying. It is easier said than done and I'm on and off that path constantly - losing my way to find it again.
Never more than at this time have I felt more in sync with the world. Though I won’t see it in my time, it seems possible that one day the population of this tiny blue dot in space will stop struggling for what they can’t have and realize what is.
In reading the third chapter of the Tao Te Ching, I see for the first time, in what seems like eons, these principles being applied in America and it suddenly seems like a new world where anything is possible again.
If you over esteem great men,
people become powerless.
If you overvalue possessions,
people begin to steal.The Master leads
by emptying people’s minds
and filling their cores,
by weakening their ambition
and toughening their resolve.
He helps people lose everything,
they know everything they desire,
and creates confusion
in those who think that they know.Practice not-doing,
and everything will fall into place.
The above photographs were taken from the 3030 Press book "New Photography in China".
May 17, 2009
Compression
By M. Hannington
To think of time—of all that retrospection!
To think of to-day, and the ages continued henceforward.
Have you guess’d you yourself would not continue?
Have you dreaded these earth-beetles?
Have you fear’d the future would be nothing to you?
Is to-day nothing? Is the beginningless past nothing?
If the future is nothing, they are just as surely nothing.
To think that the sun rose in the east! that men and women were flexible, real, alive–that everything was alive!
To think that you and I did not see, feel, think, nor bear our part!
To think that we are now here, and bear our part.
To Think of Time - Walt Whitman
May 09, 2009
Wild Is The Wind
Wild Is The Wind
Listening to this song gives me shivers...
David Bowie is one of the most influential musicians of this last century, surviving 40 decades, while constantly reinventing himself to fit the music of the scene, yet somehow still managing stand out amongst the rest. This 1981 video directed by long-time collaborator David Mallet in its stark black and white and slowly moving circle emphasizes and seemingly isolates the strength and emotion of Bowie's voice.
"Wild Is the Wind" is a song written by Dimitri Tiompkin and Ned Washington. The track was originally recorded by Johnny Mathis for the 1956 film Wild Is the Wind, and later covered by Nina Simone on the album Wild Is The Wind in 1966.
David Bowie recorded his version of the song in 1976 for his album Station to Station.
In December of 2008 MOMA held a one-time retrospective of Bowie videos assembled by MoMA Associate Curator Barbara London and Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore. The list is below complete with their links on You Tube.
“John I’m Only Dancing” (1972). Directed by Mick Rock. 2:49 min.
“Jean Genie” (1972). Directed by Mick Rock. 4:02 min.
“Life on Mars?” (1973). Directed by Mick Rock. 3:55 min.
“Heroes” (1977). Directed by Stanley Dorfman. 3:27 min.
“DJ” (1979). Directed by David Mallet. 3:58 min.
“Ashes to Ashes” (1980). Directed by David Mallet & David Bowie. 3:33 min.
“China Girl” (1983). Directed by David Mallet & David Bowie. 4:03 min.
“Blue Jean” (1984). Directed by Julien Temple. 3:17 min.
“As the World Falls Down” (1986). Directed by Steve Barron. 3:41 min.
“Fame 90″ (1990). Directed by Gus Van Sant. Edited by Edouard Lock. 3:33 min.
“Jump They Say” (1993). Directed by Mark Romanek. 4:00 min.
“The Heart’s Filthy Lesson” (1995). Directed by Sam Bayer. 4:58 min.
“Dead Man Walking” (1997). Directed by Floria Sigismondi. 3:49 min.
“I’m Afraid of Americans” (1997). Directed by Dom & Nic. 4:25 min.
“Survive” (1999). Directed and produced by Walter Stern. 3:29 min.
April 07, 2009
Black Statue of Liberty
By Jessica Care Moore
Editor's Note:
See Jessica perform at the Apollo Theatre this weekend.
March 26, 2009
I Howl
By Guardian of the Galaxy
"Howl" by Allen Ginsberg
YouTube Link
I howl
At the ruffle of the curtain, at the unexpected movement of light;
I howl
For ghosts I have known; for the minds and backs and bodies and arms and legs and footprints of a generation, brothers and sisters in green, brothers in arms; for countless, nameless, faceless comrades in arms for whom there were no parades; replaceable pieces of a fighting machine;
I howl
For those who knew not what to do but correctly did as told;
I howl
For my medics;
For those dead and for those dying, for those trying, for those lying, and for those unscathed while repairing the dogs of war; for those who did not die repairing the cogs of war;
For those who escaped the belly of the beast while fighting a war no one cared to fight in a place no one cared to be in a time no one cares to remember while, at home, people watched on T.V. or slept deeply at night.
I howl
For those who sleep deeply at night.
I howl
For Dox, cut for 20 bucks on his way to the PX;
I howl
For Mongoose, Army brat, fluent in Deutsche, signaling the alert, later swallowing 46 hits of blotter;
I howl
For Chin, rock climbing, and slipping;
I howl
For Garman who, home at Christmas, shot his wife’s lover;
I howl
For Brown, goofy bro, goofy 'fro, later found in his home town floating face down;
I howl
For Mon Dieu, dealing drugs then, dealing property now, but in Amsterdam;
I howl
For Rhames, morphine in one pocket, LSD in the other, injecting the wrong one;
I howl
For Kish, solid stalwart Kish, tending a B&B in Vermont;
And for Smith, Smitty, snug at home on Tobacco Road;
And for Dinger Hubinger who, against great odds, found comfort at home;
And for Cherry, browner than Brown, hitting big in the big town;
And for McDonald, Hendrix freak, strawberry farmer now;
I howl
For Gamble, all tubes and bags now, gambling at a red light, wedging his VW under a tractor trailer rig;
I howl
For Freitas, ahead of the game, the point-master, the spirit, the ghost, my unscathed brother. Unscathed!
I howl
For other brothers and sisters, fighting other battles as history yawns and sleepwalks down familiar halls.
I howl
For all for whom there was no parade.
I howl
For me because I can.
I howl
For you because I should.
I howl
For all who are not safely homeward bound.
I howl
For ghosts I have known.
I howl
At the ruffle of the curtains and the unexpected movement of light.
I howl!
For more of his sports and science work you may find him here.
"Howl" by Allen Ginsberg
YouTube Link
I howl
At the ruffle of the curtain, at the unexpected movement of light;
I howl
For ghosts I have known; for the minds and backs and bodies and arms and legs and footprints of a generation, brothers and sisters in green, brothers in arms; for countless, nameless, faceless comrades in arms for whom there were no parades; replaceable pieces of a fighting machine;
I howl
For those who knew not what to do but correctly did as told;
I howl
For my medics;
For those dead and for those dying, for those trying, for those lying, and for those unscathed while repairing the dogs of war; for those who did not die repairing the cogs of war;
For those who escaped the belly of the beast while fighting a war no one cared to fight in a place no one cared to be in a time no one cares to remember while, at home, people watched on T.V. or slept deeply at night.
I howl
For those who sleep deeply at night.
I howl
For Dox, cut for 20 bucks on his way to the PX;
I howl
For Mongoose, Army brat, fluent in Deutsche, signaling the alert, later swallowing 46 hits of blotter;
I howl
For Chin, rock climbing, and slipping;
I howl
For Garman who, home at Christmas, shot his wife’s lover;
I howl
For Brown, goofy bro, goofy 'fro, later found in his home town floating face down;
I howl
For Mon Dieu, dealing drugs then, dealing property now, but in Amsterdam;
I howl
For Rhames, morphine in one pocket, LSD in the other, injecting the wrong one;
I howl
For Kish, solid stalwart Kish, tending a B&B in Vermont;
And for Smith, Smitty, snug at home on Tobacco Road;
And for Dinger Hubinger who, against great odds, found comfort at home;
And for Cherry, browner than Brown, hitting big in the big town;
And for McDonald, Hendrix freak, strawberry farmer now;
I howl
For Gamble, all tubes and bags now, gambling at a red light, wedging his VW under a tractor trailer rig;
I howl
For Freitas, ahead of the game, the point-master, the spirit, the ghost, my unscathed brother. Unscathed!
I howl
For other brothers and sisters, fighting other battles as history yawns and sleepwalks down familiar halls.
I howl
For all for whom there was no parade.
I howl
For me because I can.
I howl
For you because I should.
I howl
For all who are not safely homeward bound.
I howl
For ghosts I have known.
I howl
At the ruffle of the curtains and the unexpected movement of light.
I howl!
For more of his sports and science work you may find him here.
Editor's Note:
I have tried to imagine war.
I have tried to imagine what a twenty year old kid, a soldier, must of felt hearing shouts of "Hey, hey green beret how many kids did'ja kill today."
The stab...
Leaving one horror to come home to another.
The madness of Ginsberg's poem, written for mental patient Carl Solomon, comes close. Oh the agony of Guardian's lines...
...there was no parade.
Imagine...
Robert Dennison, a chopper pilot in Vietnam who started his tour on September 1st, 1967, and died September 1st, 1967. He was in the service for 12 years, yet only made it one day in Vietnam.
Robert Dennison Johnson
And Jimmy, who forgot he couldn't even trust babies...
"They saw a three-year old little girl on the road. And his friend ran ahead, without thinking, to pick up the baby there on the road, all alone on the road. He picked up the child and she was wired. She exploded, he exploded."
A woman's tale of how her brother's friend lost part of his arm in Nam, was wounded with shrapnel and was never the same, from "Do you believe in magic?" by Annie Gottlieb
Press play, close your eyes. Can you imagine?
March 22, 2009
Thrust
By M. Hannington
March 05, 2009
Anti-Industrial Revolution Digital Artist?
This is National Film Board of Canada's darling Theodore Ushev's animated film short titled Drux Flux. The official synapses of which is below:
Partly figurative, partly abstract, Drux Flux is an animation film of fast-flowing images showing modern people crushed by industry. Inspired by One-Dimensional Man by the philosopher Herbert Marcuse, the filmmaker deconstructs industrial scenes and their terrifying geometry to show the inhumanity of progress.
The inhumanity of progress?
The stark beginning of this film with its decaying industrial environment set against the sounds of creaking metal and footsteps is effective and impactful. The quick cutting images quickly sweep us into an old factory of rusting gears and chains. In this mixed media piece, photographic images mix with animated images and starkly horizontal and vertical graphics, blending order with a chaos of human and industrial images. It takes us back in time to the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution with men in tams swinging sledgehammers and the use of the worker as propaganda in a distinctly communist style.
The filmmaker is Bulgarian and this genre often shows up in art from eastern bloc countries, but why he is belaboring (an apt word) an industrial revolution that provided jobs to those immigrating away from communist exploitation to live the, in this case, Canadian dream? This is a digital artist after all who is using high tech equipment to express his dismay with all that industry. If he wishes to free the factory worker from their misery, he must consider those village girls that have migrated to the cities in China to make the chips that power his precious equipment.
Ironic?
My grandad immigrated from Scotland to work in the foundries of Detroit. My mother's family came from the Eastern Bloc and lived on a dirt poor farm where an acre of pickles netted the family of nine a hundred dollars at the pickle factory. She remembers the stained hands and the aching back of her childhood. She also remembers the pain of being sent away to Detroit to live with factory working relatives because her mother could no longer afford her care. My grandad wore his tam and sweated in a Ford Factory, where he was paid handsomely. He saved his money and used it later to spoil the grandkids.
Who was better off?
Marcuse, writing in the 60's, would argue that we are slaves to consumerism. Controlled by advertising, we work more hours than we have to in order to BUY happiness. This cycle of work/buy makes us one-dimensional and unable to think for ourselves. Give Mary an iPod that will shut her up. No, I don't think it will. Working for a living and progress allows me this box that I can write and create on, it allows freedom of expression to the world.
Yes, a lot went wrong during the industrial revolution both here and in communist states, but why bring it up now? It's as if to say look at the crumbling factories, we were right!
But progress hasn't crushed humanity. In America we have voted for a different path and said out with backward thinking. It may not be the revolution Marcuse was hoping for, but it hardly supports his theory that we are slaves without voices either. Thanks to progress and the ongoing digital revolution Ushev has his too. Everyone can listen and watch it on YouTube or not, it is your choice.
March 01, 2009
Ice Cream Man
You can get lost in the world that this song paints, be brought to tears and never understand fully what it means. That's pure Tom Waits.
The first time I heard Tom Waits it was 1989 and the song was "The Piano is Drinking". I remember thinking anyone that can write lyrics like that was my kind of guy. I wasn't much into the blues then, in fact I wasn't into the blues at all that would come later, but this was something different.
I later bought the CD "Small Change" released on vinyl by Electra in 1976. It is still my favorite, though Mule Variations released in 1999 by his label Anti is probably even better experimentally with it's use of noise as part of musical composition. Being less than a decade removed from a fine art degree I suspect that my main attraction, outside of having grooved on one of his songs, was the cover art. I was a nut for Diane Arbus and the shot was so like her voyeuristic style.
Listening to "Small Change" was like falling in love with someone new and different. It was exciting and heady, funny and sad in a Waitsian way that is like no other and it had surprises too. Surprises are what make a fresh relationship so alluring and I was smitten.
The first song I played was "Tom Traubert's Blues", which I remember I listened to twice, it was enough to hook me. The next? "Step Right Up", which was written in 1977, was the kind of jazz scat that I liked and was right out of that 50's Beat thing that I loved and I didn't really appreciate Tom Waits until I saw him do it live.
His lyrics on the downtrodden and desperate would be akin to somehow finding wit and insight in a Walker Evan's Dust Bowl photograph. His best blues song here, for to me despite the elements of Jazz, vaudeville and alternative he is first and foremost a blues singer, is perhaps "Bad Liver and a Broken Heart" The line at the end at the end of the song illustrates that uncanny facility with words.
And I'll see your Red Label, and I'll raise you one more,
And you can pour me a cab, Christ I just can't drink no more,
'Cause it don't douse the flames... that are started by dames,
It ain't like asbestos. It don't do nothing but rest us... assured,
And substantiate the rumors that you've heard"
It gets me every time.
I hear you Tom, it ain't asbestos.
He said, "Mostly I straddle reality and the imagination. My reality needs imagination like a bulb needs a socket. My imagination needs reality like a blind man needs a cane."
I understand what he means now, but back then it was a process and it was people like Tom Waits that taught me how to think outside of the box. That I could do anything I wanted, that I didn't need to follow rules. That in fact breaking them was essential to learning your own style of art, which at the time was to become experimental animation.
It was Tom Waits that led me to see "Down by Law" and to look at film in a way I never had before. Through Jim Jarmusch's minimalist eyes. It also introduced me to the chatty Roberto Benigni and started a love of foreign and independent films that has never left me.
I can go to Tom when I'm sad and ALWAYS find a kindred spirit. I can live in the places he creates with his lyrics and escape for a time. I can laugh with him and be kicked by him, because most of all he reminds me of the passion that is involved in creating real art. The pain, love, fear and joy that can only come from your heart and in your own voice.
Tom said on collaborating with wife Kathleen Brennan, "Kinda like borrowing the same ten bucks from somebody over and over again." Thanks Tom for lending me that same ten bucks over and over until I had thousands.
One of the funniest scenes I ever guffawed for in a film was the I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream sequence in "Down By Law" with Waits, Roberto Benigni and John Lurie. Where a childrens' rhyme so wonderfully breaks up the monotony of four prison walls. And if anybody needs a laugh there is always this scene from Jarmusch's "Night on Earth", scored by Waits with Benigni at his verbose best.
Johnny Walker might not put out the flames, but laughter almost certainly will. With Tom Waits you can always count on that too.
Tom Waits 2008 "Glitter and Doom" Concert
Have a listen...