Rock and Roll, Ouch!

Rock and Roll, Ouch!

Why my correspondence will drop off a little for awhile - except possibly for a few pieces that are already “in the can.” It seemed akin to watching The Rolling Stones or some other aging rocker band. One minute you’re sitting on the edge of your bed listening to your iPad, the next you’re slip-sliding-away as your socks turn traitor and send you slamming away into something called an L2 Compression Fracture. A neat dance step that was so much fun that you repeat it a couple of times a couple of days later, until you find yourself flat on your back at the LaGrange Memorial Hospital - I think, it was one of the hospitals associated with Northwest who, yes, beat Purdue a couple of days ago - hospital days get foggy, all the drugs, etc. 

So I’m laying there complete with wristbands with your name and ID declaring you a Fall Risk. Happy Valentines Day! 🧌

So I am home again, here on the couch, not being able to do anything worthwhile, just being a pain in the ass. Everyone is being sweet to me. Christine brings me great food, Stand-in sister-in-law Chris drives me around to docs when needed, Smitty pitches in by pretending to like watching basketball on TV.  Vito occasionally licks my face. So I am trying to concentrate on getting better, and saying “Thank you” a lot, lest they all rise up and carry me out to the curb with the rest of the trash.

I cheer myself up by watching earthquakes and live action wars on TV, on the premise that “things could always be worse.” 

So in the words of Bobby McFerrin, “Don’t worry, be happy!”

❤️‍🩹 ❤️‍🩹 

Fragments

 If I want to trace the prehistory of “fragments” they are probably older than the little white notebook that I talked about in the recent “Through Screens” post. Well, I suppose the history could lead back to Snowhill Church in Springfield, Ohio. Google tells me that the church started life as Snowhill United Church of Christ, and after a variety of ecumenical mergers, closed its doors on November 17, 2017 after 133 years of services. That was a couple of days after I celebrated my 69th birthday, but I must admit that oh, maybe 7 or 8 decades have passed since Snowhill had been the Olduvai Gorge of my “Fragments.”

Over the years my folks dutifully hauled us off to church services at Snowhill, encouraging us, no doubt, to at least consider some relatively traditional type of theology. I will not speak for either of my siblings, both of whom eventually ended up “Churched” as one might say in the South. But that is not what I took away from Snowhill. Instead I remember the programs. Those, at the time, mimeographed and folded papers that told you what the readings, psalms, etc., would be used for the service.  And the pencils.

OK, now hang with me here for a minute, probably because my memory gets a bit hazy. The Wall archeologists disagree on the specifics here. One school remembers folding chairs in the sanctuary during this era. However, another group holds out for more traditional pews. Neither mentions anything about angels dancing on the head of a pin, nor takes a firm position on the question of the possibility of an extended family for Jesus, wives, heirs, movie producers, etc.

Yet the schism is important for this discussion as both schools of thought specifically agree on the presence of those little yellow golf pencils that one was supposed to use to write on the little yellow envelopes into which one placed your offering - name, amount - whatever adults wrote on the envelopes. I never knew. The traditional pew school advocates the traditional notion that the envelopes and pencils were stuck to the back of the wooden pews.  The folding chair school chooses to ignore the origins of either the pencils or the envelopes, asserting that such a choice was in god’s hands. Hmm, yellow pencils, yellow offering envelopes. Could be something there, but we’ll have to come back to it.

The point is that, driven by the sin of theological boredom, I used the pencils to trace lines between the words in the programs, creating designs. Get it? Small designs within the larger design of the whole page? Smaller designs within the whole? Fragments!! OK. A bit of a stretch, but entire disciplines spring from such reasoning: Archeology, Theology, Design, Art History.

Now, in the name of full disclosure, I must admit that I am doubtful that any of the text above can trace a direct line from my agnostic childhood reveries and scribbles to the images I have chosen to call “Fragments.” But I set myself the task of tracing the ancient evolution of these contemporary images, and that was the best I could do.

A far more likely inspiration is the time it takes to do any of the contemporary images. Yes, we are talking hours and hours across days. And here there may well be a connection to the ancient Snowhill images - the mind does wander: Is this really the pattern I want to use here? Colors! So many colors. Why did I pick up that marker? What other colors might work better together? Especially if I chose a different design for this part of the image! I could do that. I could make a separate smaller version of that particular part of the big image with different designs and colors.  But, artistically speaking, how could I make it clear to someone else what I was doing? Ah, frame them together!

And so:

Fragment #1

Through Screens

 [This is the great grandchild of the little white notebook. The old record player and the stack of randomly selected classical records have been replaced by a variety of Pandora playlists. The lists do favor instrumental and mellow designed for “nighttime, slowdown, go to sleep” used like lullabies - shut up, close your eyes, go to sleep.

If I were to decide why or how this work differs from works we might find in the little white notebook, I would point to six decades of reading all manner of books, of performing characters on stage, of lecturing to thousands of students in dozens of classrooms. To learning, in all those venues, to better link words to feelings and to more accurately share those words and feelings with those who might encounter them.

The technology - my iPad - allows me to blend those Pandora tracks with tracks from an app called  Naturespace: Holographic Audio. It has tracks with rain, distant trains, thunderstorms, etc., all comforting sounds I recall from my childhood, late at night, sans AC, through the screen in my bedroom window. So without further ado:]

Through Screens

They have the most magical powers.

Through their transforming mesh

Distant trains are sensed

Seeming near, but out of sight,

Revealed by rumbles on the rails.

Lonely whistles echoing

In and out of tunnels

That promise hidden mountains.

Quiet rain provides muted syncopation

Floating light above

The rumbling bass of thunder.

Tires hiss across blacktop

Muting memories of

The clop clop clop of shodden hooves

And the tired creak of gleaming carriages.

The gusts which dance before

A storm, strained through the screen,

Carry the incense of fresh mown meadows.

Turned earth in yearning simple gardens

Fulsome furrows in prouder fields.

The faint and teasing fragrance

Of brave first flowers, heads flung

Aloft into late March, early April.

I lie, eyes almost closed, but not.

Ears straining, wishing for the wisdom

Of the quiet little creatures of the night.

The masked raccoon, the scurrying mouse

The dirt-streaked mole and the tiny vole.

The barking dog and stealthy cat.

The much maligned, but so refined

Acute perceptive senses of the rat.

The seeming endless cicada’s call

Survives the grotesque first contact

With the misshapen musician, clinging

To rough bark, hidden in the dark.

Thick clouds roll across the moon

Causing us to hope again

That they foretell the magic of,

The majestic composition of,

The music of the night.

Creative Crossovers

I think my first clear memory of the phenomenon was when I was in  7th grade, so maybe I was 12 or thirteen. I came home from school and put a stack of classical records on the turntable. The notion of a “turntable” may need a little explaining for those of you born after 1960 or so. Time was when if you wanted to listen to more than about 12 minutes of recorded music without interruption your only option were “LPs.”  LPs were vinyl records about the size of a medium pizza. (Which are making something of a comeback. “Everything old is new again.”) You would then put an “automatic changer” on your record player which would drop a record on to the turntable when one was done, and start playing the next one. You could load 4 or 5 up this way, and depending on the quality of your set up, listen to a fair amount of music before things began to slip and distort.

Anyhow I put a bunch of classical LPs on the turntable and began to write freeform verse in a little white 5x7 notebook. As the music played- I scribbled really, really freeform verse. I just kept writing until the music ran out. Then I closed the notebook and probably went to make myself a sandwich. Yeah, time also was when you would also make a sandwich all by yourself- no fries. Maybe chips. I still have that little white notebook somewhere, at least I have “discovered” it several times while changing homes, offices,  jobs, loves, lives and wives. No content that I’d really care to share, but now some 60 years later I better understand how one creative piece of our brain can easily slide a bit sideways into another medium.

I now do it more consciously, and it is my intention to share a couple of separate posts with you. One is verbal, very similar, at least in process to the creation of the little white notebook. The other is visual and deals with my current activity blending , chopping, what have you of drawings and photography.