Moving into different digs this week and so do not know when I’ll be peering in again. While I was shuffling and purging I found this note in an old note book...it is legible and no misspellings, so I did not write it. (hah, Lonnie!)

Not so much an urgent plea... the tentative nature of this is more of a reminder than a mishap. But it seems like an appropriate symbol of the relocation-orientation.

A short while ago I received a kudos nod in the form of the sunshine award from Catherine.
She writes an eye-candy of a blog, A THOUSAND CLAPPING HANDS. It is easy to imagine her to be the most genteel blogger out there. Actually Blogger is a coarse name for what she does.... and a she must have impeccable taste, she picked me! (just part of her great link-list)

"...amid a flock of pigeons that I think of today as being like so many slaps in the face, whereas they seemed to me at the time like a foretaste of a thousand clapping hands." -Jean Cocteau

I am suppose to say things about myself, but I reckon you know enough, and I will pass the award on at a later date as I need to put the computer in a box.

Simple Rhyme For a Gentle Bottle Cap
Snag art is here, popped off and left for dead.
Rusting, rusting into dust,
How can a bottle be so clean
When the cap seems so mean?

from When Sword Swallowing Does Not Impress

BELL
He went and came, he beat his hands together, he ran from rope to rope, he animated the six singers with voice and gesture, like the leader of an orchestra who is urging on intelligent musicians.

...

He was wholly absorbed in spurring on his bells, all six of which vied with each other in leaping and shaking their shining haunches, like a noisy team of Spanish mules, pricked on here and there by the apostrophes of the muleteer.

All at once, on letting his glance fall between the large slate scales which cover the perpendicular wall of the bell tower at a certain height, he beheld on the square a young girl, fantastically dressed, stop, spread out on the ground a carpet, on which a small goat took up its post, and a group of spectators collect around her. This sight suddenly changed the course of his ideas, and congealed his enthusiasm as a breath of air congeals melted rosin. He halted, turned his back to the bells, and crouched down behind the projecting roof of slate, fixing upon the dancer that dreamy, sweet, and tender look which had already astonished the archdeacon on one occasion. Meanwhile, the forgotten bells died away abruptly and all together, to the great disappointment of the lovers of bell ringing, who were listening in good faith to the peal from above the Pont du Change, and who went away dumbfounded, like a dog who has been offered a bone and given a stone.

from The Hunchback of Notre Dame -Victor Hugo

Movement.

I sit by the fireplace as it flickers highlight and shadow with inspirational scenes.

Dana and I had walked to the tip of south Manhattan. Our heads are hanging over the cement pier so all we see is the choppy water. The water sparkles with fallen stars. An animation of birds flying upward. This transforms into feathers sifting downward, fitting together in that complicated Escher-like geometric way. I get dizzy and look up in time to see the Circle Line Ferry way off turning into the sunlight. The glittering sun hits each flat square pane of glass, sparking a flash, one after another in a kick line routine. As though each passenger were twinkling a bright idea.

Drivers travel on the expressway in the northeast, hi-way in the south, freeway on the west coast.
Riding in a car as a chain of thought.

Most of the crew sat in the back of the Hong Kong taxi. Usually it was Lonnie, brave soul, that sat up with the driver. This was 1996. One of us asked, “What do you think about the hand-over?”
It got real quiet and the cabbie looked around for a hidden mic. I leaned over the front seat and asked, “Hand over, what hand over?” late rI realized with limited english,, he may have thought we were attempting to rob him.

Once I saw Fidel Castro driving a Dolly Madison truck. He was eating a cupcake that had broken open accidentally.

Dropping letters into a mail box, one afternoon, three nuns in a Rambler stopped by to ask if I was a post man.

Burl Ives drove by in a green VW today. He didn’t look very happy stuffed in there like he was, so I didn’t try to brighten his day by waving hello. It’s great when I see folks that aren’t around any more.

Car memory with a college student genré. I'd see them, eight or ten stuffed into a rusty Duster barreling south bound on thirty-eight toward Daytona Beach on spring break. I reckon I was waiting for the day I’d be one of them. By the time I hit graduation age I couldn’t have been farther from their reality.

I Just Step Up and Stand in the Air.  -Nijinsky

Inside a repro of Lenny's hall of mirrors.

He reproduced himself with so much humble objectivity, with the unquestioning, matter of fact interest of a dog who sees himself in a mirror and thinks: there's another dog.  -Rainer Maria Rilke

I look in the mirror and say to myself, Can it be you once played Romeo? -Bela Lugosi

Let us be grateful to the mirror for revealing to us our appearance only. -Samuel Butler

...Sister and I would sit in the attic with the dull winter light glancing in through the mutton barred glass. Staring at each other until we took on another form. So deeply frightening neither could move for fear it may be real. Years later I came across a passage of Dylan Thomas describing the same thing. Mr. Thomas called it Invoking The Devil. I knew immediately what he meant...
     -from Script for a Practicing Artist and an Unfinished Life.

sketchbook / cover # 45

Why do you have such bad handwriting, when you can draw so well?  -Chloe

I get energy and inspiration from working on something completely different.
Want to costume idea? Illustrate a mandala.
Want a book theme? Sculpt the Mona Lisa (Ann ...)
Color story? Take off your glasses and make the lines disappear.

again...
"Hey, Lonnie! I just found and old scrap file named cities, in my writing ... it’s spelled wrong."
"Well, if it were spelled right, we’d know it was a forgery."

...good luck will rub off when you shakes hands with me...
 -Bert  And we thought that was only coal dust.

It’s time to shuffle and purge, again.