STONE is what it’s made of.

We found St. Peter’s square to be a rock growing out of the water. Settling on grand, but undecided as whether or not to fully emerge.

Pause for a blur of ingenious riot of costumes.

The Venetian Carnival trip was couched around shooting long exposures w/ a 120slr. We dressed as dark whirling Dervish + spun on top of a canal bridge at midnight under the hazy street lamps.

We awoke on a stone bench in the morning mist lost on the island of St. Peter’s. Carnivale was over. KB looked great in long johns + a tux shirt w/ the collar up + the french cuffs down to accommodate his lengthy arms. He carried himself like a dancer + when he stopped he always looked as though he were posing.

Those images are vividly burned into my mind because the film had not advanced.

There isn’t proof any of it ever happening.

 

7/8

He stirred his oatmeal, stubbed his toe, and had a nagging feeling of missing an appointment... years ago.

You can watch and wait for water to boil, it will only take time. You will need 3.10 minutes. 

Below is a recipe for ‘no time for breakfast.’

0 eggs

0 olive oil

1. Do not turn on an oiled pan to medium heat.

2. Do not scramble egg till frothy and pour into pan.

3. Do not flip over sink in case of error.

4. Do not fold in half.

5. Finished.

To turn a situation into a happy ending you may have to look at it a long time. Walk all the way around it. A big problem could mean a very long walk. Try it on without expecting it to fit. Throw it out and see how it lands. If it will only be just what it is, stubborn and unchangeable, then let it go. Sometimes there is not a happy ending.

-jahh / Parallel Chances Tend to Neglect

8 • Don’t move my constant. 

The solstice Maine heavens were held completely crisp + still, untroubled by electromagnetic waves. In the dead of night, a startling subatomic rumble echos through the dark, ending w/ a clutching the inside your throat. In forest blackness there lurks a claustrophobic dread. A rabbit cries for its life + looses. When all is quiet again the silence is ten times as deep + opaque. 

Field stones that were sled over decades ago became the low walls that are boundaries, trails + points. i believed through some keen higher power a mystery could be solved by backing up, up + away one could behold an epiphany in the stone lines created by the walls. With just the right aerial view some gigantic cryptic message would make known the secrets we have been asking for millennium.

     

Stalwart midnight treks revealed the snow turning silver under the spherical spotlight. The luster ricocheted through the bare trees, making birch shine. Surroundings became silhouettes plunged into the inky blackness. i imagined each soul down to the tiniest critter opening one eye as my shoe popped + crunched passed. Then closing slowly, feeling no threat.

     

i became mindful of the night sky while living in Damariscotta. Northern lights are big theater. The heavens shifted into their familiar winter pattern, sitting still long enough you'd be rewarded w/ a shooting star. i had won the a prize at the end of the day when i felt complete by looking up, + getting lost in the vertigo. 

     

When your choices are limited completeness is simple.

jahh / Script for a practicing artist + an unfinished life.

From even the greatest of horrors irony is seldom absent.  -H.P. Lovecraft 

Believe nothing you hear, and only one half that you see.  -Edgar Allan Poe

• If you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.  -Friedrich Nietzsche

• Am I walking away from something I should be running away from?
•  -Shirley Jackson / The Haunting of Hill House
• 
  

• I knew nothing but shadows and I thought them to be real.
•  -Oscar Wilde / The Picture of Dorian Gray

Dream; i am riding on a train that is in a perpetual right turn. i realize it’s on a wheel, of sorts, caught in going circles. i end up on my doorstep at a suburban sprawl house. Reaching for the door handle my male springs out of the door, pacing, totting in place + impatiently questioning.

“Do you want to go running?”

“No, I want to go eat.”

i worked in overtime + overdrive during my out times. i have had white-outs, but i never lost a decade. These white-outs have afforded me the knowing that if i have worked through layers + layers of emotional mud, i didn’t know about it. Sometimes + thankfully, the upheavals expected lay dormant through denial + have gone undetected.

It’s curious how things were, how they are, how they could be. People in our lives that aren’t there anymore. The way time travels. Simple twists of fate. Some times they happen in an afternoon, 
YOU CAN SEE THEM HAPPENING. 

Another time it takes years to pull your attention full circle.

At some point you’ve lived long enough to recognize the cycles in life. What folds back upon itself. What wheels around again, + again. It’s interesting to see the circles we chose to close, which are left open, what ones filled up + frozen solid w/ memories.

  Yet, we really never know what the next day will drop in front of us.

   i see a full circle, your circle.

  There is  a dismal attempt to put pieces back together again. i know that it is impossible.

   One of those wicked deja vu days.

One of those, you think you know how the day will go days —  then as simply as can be — someone phones up + rings into a time that you thought was past years ago. + thinking that it would never be, cant be, + will never be - could be here now. If you were only brave enough.

i wrote a lot more than i got down on paper. 

You know how things take flight + circle, spiral up  again + again so high up there that they become unimportant or evaporate until the next time around.

This is theater no one sees. I perform my task, coloring walls with a stream of sweat and consciousness. Or, a river of consciousness. Some days are green. All green. Monochromatic within the subtleness of every corner of that hue. The edges try to creep into blue or spread into  an olivey yellow smear. But I wrangle it, keeping it within the circle of my minds eye. It is a game I play with the chalk color. They have inherent needs to become something that I may not want, and I reserve the choice to let them rule my thumb or keep them under it.

-jahh / Minotaur - there is a shadow of a monster on the front porch  -pg 15

You have to learn the rules of the game.

And then you have to play better than anyone else.

-Albert Einstein

Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward;

they may be beaten, but they may start a winning game.

-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The dogs are throwing themselves down on the bare floor, rolling their eyes + groaning Lurch-like. Yes, it’s moving time again.

  

Excuse me.

i just popped over from Theme Thursday. And it seems i’ve set a theme and not responded to it. 

Hoping this will suffice. 

Minotaur / plate #20
Seeing clouds as a fingery low moving mask of smoke racing through the deluge of watercourse is where images become the skeleton of a nightmare.

Yes, the water came down during the dark time. I hurried out at first light to check damage or if all had been spared. The lilt of the rain forgave some of the walls leaving them dry, soaking the facing walls and smearing chalk beyond recognition - yet, still interesting. Looking deliberate, softening the drawing into morphic shapes with more possibilities than the original  state. Is  this formed by another? A message shaping up from another pedigree force? Perhaps next rain will work through this smudge to expose an image sharp as arrows. 

Let  smudge be smudge -  just so, I’ll be satisfied with this question, waiting for the chance of an answer.

Drawing leaves behind evidence. 

Some times people like you more.

Some times people like you less.

Action and reaction are equal and opposite. -Gertrude Stein

Choose a subject equal to your abilities; think carefully what your shoulders may refuse, and what they are capable of bearing. -Horace

All men are equal before fish. -Herbert Hoover

William of Occam's Razor
The principle states that one should not make more assumptions than the minimum needed.
=
One should not increase, beyond what is necessary, the number of entities required to explain anything.
=
All things being equal the simplest solution if often right.

...I would have to add that all of the religions today seem archaic and dangerous. -Joey

Drew would have to also add,
I don't think god is in heaven anymore, that was a long time ago.
=
A quandary.

A semiretired backdrop tool, that has been to the paintbrush hospital way too many times.


76 

In Hong Kong workers mopped up behind us w/ the reek of benzene as though we were stinky americans. There was an amazing lack of unemployed citizens + dirty smells. Early morning in front of the five star hotel we were forced to stay in, we could wouldn't help notice men on their knees scrubbing the white lines on the street using acetone + a toothbrush.

Describing the aroma inside the elevator left us competing for superlatives. This bouquet of sweaty chrome landed somewhere between spicy incense + unpopular feral swine. 

jahh / Script for a practicing artist + an unfinished life.

auspicious / suspicious

i have been accused of not liking blue.
Totally untrue.

i am the first to say we must be friends with all colors.
Though, now that i think of it there is a certain hue of blue that rakes on me like nails on a blackboard. It is that awning, or soda-can blue. Really, not to be confused w/ the potent cobalt that comes out of a tube, there is something different about that...

But, in design work i created a beautifully complete color story for an underwater installation w/out touching blue.

i just thought this was interesting.

98
I sat on the subway heading to who knows. To my right sat a young business associate in a stiff navy-blue pant suit. She looked practically normal. That is, until she pulled a legal sized zip-lock bag out of her brief case. It was stuffed w/ half used lip sticks. i’m not good at the guess-how-many game, but i’m saying it was far too many for a lifetime use of one person.  Rhythmically + staccato-like, she grabbed out a tube, pulled off the cover, screws it up to see the color, ‘tsks’ disgustedly, recaped it + clutches for the next stick. She does this over + over + over + over again, till she has seen + disregarded each color. She’s having an audible imaginary talking-to w/ a peer.

You can’t make this stuff up.

Make room for more WHITE paper + sharp pencils.

78
One of these December nights, I was awakened by the jazz station I listened to for white noise. The man behind the microphone was crying and stuttering. I couldn't understand what was happening. Was it a sleepy fog of twisted sound or a disaster at the radio station? I peered below, over the edge of my loft bed just as Guffrie jumped up from his cot to his 6’6” height.
“Oh, my god...” He reeled with his hands to his head as the TV crawler announced the assassination of John Lennon.

Walking up to Central Park the following Saturday you would have merged with other overwhelmed city dwellers.Talk became hushed tones. A bitter cold was blowing in. At the band shell Imagine played and a memorial silence was obeyed. Afterward, the paper had Yoko saying she had seen John’s face smiling down from the sky. She can see things like that. On the walk home it began to snow and a lightness filled the air.

jahh / Script for a practicing artist + an unfinished life.

53/54
...and as a custom he always took an uncharted street home.
He was entranced with radio games and truck gimmicks. Colored glasses that turned the landscape into a novelty scene. What is most vague? What is most uninteresting? One late afternoon he rode half way across Kansas with a set and clear conscious. He passed that peculiar water tower with obscure graffiti. As it shrank from life size to a spec in his rear view mirror he felt himself mentally backing up.

Plan ‘C’ found him being assistant to an artist. Tedious. He was entrusted to stretch and make ready canvas. This yoga-monkey-man task left him mental time with cunning thoughts. While sizing fabric he would under paint geometric shapes with gesso. Perhaps a large X, stripes, or a single block letter. After the applied final coat of white paint was dry and ready for the artist’s paint, a hint of his mark remained. This was subtle graffiti at its most tasteful.

jahh /  Parallel Chances Tend to Neglect

Plead as you might - she will not bite.

She will pick up a wiggly worm + feign to eat it,
+ down milk to hear her tummy slosh for chuckles,
She will digest a worrisome quasi-candy,
Even throw a slobbery Frisbee for her dog Knuckles.

Of all this there is not a woe,
Unless, of course, you serve her a wrinkled potato.

(photo: any resemblance to a messiah, is purely accidental)

Did someone loose a lawnmower?

Mysteriously, we have all lost things and found other’s stuff.
i do not like this universal swapping thingie.
i’d like to have back the things i have lost over the years before i get too old to remember of what use + in what designated project.

Jaw of a horse. i lost Bucky three or four moves ago.

A roll of fabric, that was a heavy canvas weave + the warp was a fine gauge wire copper. So when the cotton was burned out, what was left behind was an incredible apocalyptic looking cloth.

A very old charcoal drawing, executed on gray paper of the head of a young girl copied from one of the old masters.

Isn't it weird how we find things lost?

i excel at pretending i’m somewhere else.
No biggie.
Just sayin'.

133
We were somewhere between San Francisco and our Santa Barbara destination. Your hands full of hose. Looking up in mischievous impatience, you catch my eyes and raise an eyebrow sensing a question.
“...I just never thought I’d see you siphoning gas from a strange car outside a biker bar in the middle of the night...”
“You think I was never a teenager?”

89
It was short walk from the apartment on Union Square to the village sandal shop that was run by Hells Angels. There is nothing more noble than a kneeling Angel as he traces your foot and asks,
“How long do you want the straps?”
I had an idea I wanted them very long, but didn’t know how to say without seeming like it was a lot of trouble. I imagine it was Kyle that broke my indecision by interrupting,
“She wants them to wrap up her legs and around her waist twice.”
The angel tilted his head up with a confused complexion,
“How would that look...”
Kyle pursed his lips, raised an eye brow, turned on one heel and began searching the notice board. The biker lumbered to his feet and embarrassingly asked if they could have the twenty-five bucks in advance.
I still have those simple leather Grecian sandals. In some places they are brittle from sea water and there’s a bit gnawed from Maine rodents that aches my heel when I wear them. But then, every pair of shoes has a story.

All of those Z Z looking guys have the choice of impersonating Santa or Bikers.
And ... I am wondering if, as children, future bikers used the card & clothespin trick on the spokes of their Stingray (with banana seats!) to get the Hog sound they would future fall in love w/ ...

His mother swore he would never enter a draft of any kind.

Hinesfortothen, he never caught a chill, was not used as an editor, nor shot by a speeding bullet.

Butyetasnow, he had managed to end up here.

-Some of My Best Friends

Lunch with Minotaur - repeated here

plate #8

In the past, not having the emotional equipment
to deflect it / it ran through me.
The painted faces accuse and mock but no longer damage. In this particular illusion, the labyrinth turned ware house is set for a late night critique. Painted faces all around and torches everywhere. A nudging voice asks if I brought a sack lunch.
I got that it would be a very long trial.

There is no satisfaction. Only a glorious dissatisfaction. There is no final touch that makes a work perfect. It will always remain perfectly and clearly unfinished. It is that absolute motivation that keeps one moving on.

i’ve had Donovan’s voice in my head on + off the last few days.
Mellow Yellow is such a sticky tune.

The road to the City of Emeralds is paved with yellow brick.  -Frank

Follow the yellow brick road. But don’t run into that back drop!

Blue is the male principle, stern + spiritual. 

Yellow the female principle, gentle, cheerful + sensual. 

Red is matter, brutal + heavy and always the colour which must be fought + vanquished by the other two. 

-Franz Marc (don't you just love this guy?)

... and though she’s not really ill,
there’s a little yellow pill...   -Kieth + Mickey

Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a
yellow spot into the sun.   -Pablo Picasso (talking about himself again.)

Amber Aureolin Papaya whip Buff Chartreuse Citrine Cream Goldenrod Ecru Olive Flavescent Flax Fulvous Gamboge Golden poppy Golden Green-yellow Stil de grain Beige Hansa yellow Icterine Blond Vegas gold Isabelline Arylide Chrome yellow Jonquil Khaki Lemon Chiffon Lime Maize Metallic gold Mikado Mustard Naples Navajo Old Gold Apricot Peach-yellow Pear Saffron School bus yellow Sunglow Tangerine Urobilin .. want more?

Well, as these things go i was looking for one of my favorite signs placed early one morning on the dirt road into the Renaissance Fair (Black Point Forest/Novato). Something about the ...to the end of the earth being closed because of dust-off ... when i came across this rat thingy that was taken when we worked in Hong Kong...

Ok, so i continued looking + found a handful of WIP images of paintings, some looking finished, from the
95 painting in 95 hours series that was done for the 95th anniversary of major (meaning expensive) department store. i must say the stack was pretty amusing, even now, + i do remember the audience outside the window liking the ongoing live display work.

But before i start scanning + send this into the ether ... i reckon i need to ask Lonnie if it’s okay to show this, after all this time.

i don’t know why not.
Lonnie? Are you there?

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

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.

-The Hunchback of Notre Dame -Victor Hugo