4 posts tagged “art”
See the sly boy's face...
Between the thicket of two pines...
Look up, see the sunshafts...
Busting through branches, through leaves and tangle...
Of maple fronting elm fronting maple...
Move and the whole damn show changes...
The light hops through new gaps... made for you only...
The boy is gone...
And what charges this display?
The hard and solid forms we know by name? Or the gaps in between?
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See the sky beyond... on high, lines of snaky clouds...
Their bellies painted orange by the sinking sun...
The spaces between those misty, moving formations... they, they are the artists
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The boy runs with a bit of bark...
"It's rough," he says... the devil boy and his comments...
Yes, yes it is... see the grooves and the cuts of it...
The spaces animate the touch of it...
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Water tumbling down our throats...
Filling then fleeing that otherwise empty pipe...
On warm days you feel the cool down to the core...
Now in tighter... beyond the discernment of the eye....
The space of our body cavity... of our gaps atom by atom...
What's our animator? Our place in it all?
Our space -- within and beside you.
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What every composer knows - note by rest by note...
What the philosophers use as a rule to learn by...
What charges mother and newborn between the gaze...
The pause before uttering the truth...
The charged air between bodies attracting...
The knowing without the mind thinking...
The settled grass after the breeze dies...
We are not taking space as much as
We are space...
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We are ruled by a vastness unnoticed...
See it... see space... offer up to it...
Lose it and regain it... ride on it...
Space creates the living... and, yes, suddenly death has purpose...
The exhale to the birth breath...
It was a gift... unexpected... and unaware you needed it until it was there.
The best kind of gift.
Lunchtime in downtown StP. The tension of a work morning at a terminal screen raised the anxiety level.
Where was the relief?
It came in the form of music.
Everywhere you turned the notes came at you - on a course to soothe.
From Mancini's Pink Panther theme to Brubeck's "Take Five" to Dylan's "All Along the Watchtower."
The songs were different but they all plucked the same chord within.
You found yourself noticing the friendly nods of the musicians to those who went by.
You smiled at their understated "thank you" as the passerbys dropped money into the plastic coffee can or the saxophone case.
It was a gift, by God.
A few bucks wasn't nearly enough in return.
Tell me if you uber-amateur musicians have this experience.
I pick up the old axe (well, it's a cheap Fender acoustic so maybe axe isn't the right word)... maybe pocket knife.
Anyway I pick up the guitar and start playing. The finger, lacking any sort of callouses, feel the burn of the strings. The buzz in the notes is, well, very apparent.
I kick into a song and immediately muff the chord change. Try again, the botch comes a little later. Progress.
Then I go for a little lead riff. Just a major scale, pick around it a bit, see what happens. It's going nowhere. I cring when I slide one fret too low. There's no spontaneity whatsoever.
So, to make myself feel better, I play a few of the old songs. "Roxanne" (that early Police tune) ... a couple of the easy Beatles tunes. Then I try "Hey, Hey, My, My" (the version with the Johnny Rotten lyrics, even though I'm not playing electric). I'm stunned as I can't even pull off the early note sequence.
I stop and look at my hands. Wonder what's going on in there. I want to blame the guitar (like the ballplayer looks at his glove as the ball runs through him).
Yeah, that's it ... blame the guitar. It's a piece of junk. No wonder I couldn't play well.
If crappy music is coming out of it... it must be a ... Chitar. (see left).
Yes... this is the reason why I can't play the music as I did as a 20-year-old, when I had time on my hands and practiced like a kid with nothing better to do.
It had nothing to do with me -- it was the damn guitar.
And then I looked at my hands again... and smirked. And played some more without judgment. It was fun and then the kids called.
I put it down and figured it would be August before the strings would be plucked again. Sound familiar?
Went to a graduation party in Monticello, Minnesota.
The American Legion Post 60 hosted the little event (cake was sweet, the drinks were plentiful).
Outside the hall sat a sculpture dedicated to one Elmer Cole - a man who clearly served his country well. It's a metal piece of an eagle holding a salmon in it's clutches.
I'm no art critic, not by a long shot. But it was done in what appeared to be large metal sheets fashioned together. There were gaps here and there in the sculpture.
Cool, I thought.
But as I snapped a frame or two I heard a frantic peeping of what sounded like hungry little birds.
I looked up into the eye of the eagle and saw a bit of straw and twig sticking out ... and moving slightly.
And then a grown blackbird came swooping down, landing at the back of the eagle and disappearing. She was there to feed the hungry mouths within.
A couple of regulars at the legion hall said birds have nested in the eagle since the piece was first place in front of the hall four years ago.
My photographic skills were not sharp enough to grab the bird entering or exiting from the steel bird (and I couldn't justify hanging around for another crack at getting the shot -- lest I wanted to be branded anti-social).
As impressive as the artwork might have been, the birds nesting in a bird was even better.
