All Hallow's Eve

It's been an exhausting month at the hospital and I've written few posts: it always seems that it's one in the morning when I sit down to write and my brain is tired. People ask me about the studio: was it violated? Did someone buy the whole thing as an installation piece?
And tonight was Halloween at the hospital and I was the duty chaplain. Halloween is traditionally the night when we are slammed with traumas and weird things happen: Princess Leia comes in epoxied to Frankenstein's monster, that kind of thing. And you're probably wondering: What did happen? What has Fred left out?
And I'll tell you.

packing up

As all should go well, and it should go well, we now have a home in Durham, a fine home, a home with warmth and a yard and a great upstairs room and with a studio in the back yard: a place where we can spend the next decade or so - whatever our time in Durham - and work and create and play and entertain and live and love; and a place where the kittens can gambol and romp and practice kitten kindness with each other; all in a neighborhood where we can walk and stroll and linger and journey and saunter and jog and lag behind and leap ahead. And it's a dizzying pace to go but long over due. And what can I say right now: I have a cat sleeping on my shoulders making it uncomfortable to sit here and type. And I have to be at work in a few hours. But the weekend comes and Joe and I will have a beer or two at Twain's tomorrow - all being well. Meanwhile Colorado is about to go down two games in the World Series to the Red Sox - the team that stayed in Boston (I root for the team that left Boston).

Come visit my studio this weekend

Above you see a photo of how the exterior of my studio looks right now. I've arranged the boxes in two stacks on either side of the entrance. This makes it a narrow passage. In the middle I've placed a stool with some blocks of wood and a paint covered mason jar. A piece of clear plastic tubing crosses the aperture at eye level, and boxes that are still folded cross over the gap at about 6 feet. I've intended that no one should get inside: unless they remove the stool and sidle in. I hope that they don't. Inside I've put all paintings against the wall, except for this one, that I did tonight. No one should see it - except people looking at this blog.
Saturday night there's an opening for someone. Typically the gallery owner turns on the lights in all our spaces - like someone might come in and buy something. I'm having nothing of it. For one thing, such a thing is unlikely. So I've constructed an environment that discourages entry. You can look from the outside - but you can't enter. On the floor are two Pellegrino bottles. There is an open box of books in my wing back chair.
I swear I know that someone, intending well, will go into my space and tun on the light. If they do, would someone go there and turn it back off - If you can't reach the switch don't worry. There is I have to stand on tip toe. If the stool and blocks of wood and painted mason jar have been moved from blocking the gap, put them back. No one must get into this space. The only person who can get into the space is the person who undoes the work of the person who opens it up. Don't worry about getting things perfect. You've joined in making the art work. All I ask is remember: lights out; stool in middle of the gap between the stacks of boxes. Put the mason jar on it and the blocks of wood. Hopefully you won't have to do this. I suppose that the show starts Saturday at 7:30 or so. The gallery is right next to Fellini's on Sycamore place. My space should be obvious.
Thanks for your help.

I can't wait to see Jami this weekend

Here's Jami last May at the Decatur arts festival. It is possible that she will write and complain that this picture is a bad one; I agree that this picture (like any picture) fails to give the full sense of wit and insight. I think that the one in front of Keat's house does that well. I do like this photo. What a wonderful smile.
After 19 days of living apart, I'm flying back to Durham.

My dad's camera, which I appropriated long ago

My dad bought this camera in 1956, when he was in the army, stationed in Germany. Originally it came in a leather case: it had a thin leather strap and hung down at waist level. I have photos of dad with this camera, in its case, standing on a boat crossing Lake Lucerne.
Originally it had a light meter that was as big as four sugar cubes. This meter no longer works. It still has a flash attachment that fans out beautifully - but the cable that connected it is gone. I remember dad using the flash once, at Christmas. It seemed like a great deal of difficulty.
Eventually I came to have the camera. At some point in the 70s it fell out of favor for instamatics and other 35 mm cameras.
I've noticed though that when I use this camera I get pictures of singular quality. It's a 35 mm range finder with a 50 mm lens. Online a web review my friend Bob read referred to this camera, an Agfa Ambi Silette, as "the poor man's Leica."
It's out dated technology, yet my digital camera can't do this simple thing: click the shutter the instant, in focus, I press the button. With this camera true enough I do have to focus, and there's no telephoto (how I wish my dad had bought the lenses back then), but when I click the shutter, the picture is snapped. I know what I got - accounting for the vagaries of film development and if I got the aperture right. Compositionally I know what I have.
One thing with my digital is that I've often watched the photo I wanted to take come and go from my view finder while I wait for this thing to click.
The sad thing is that the Agfa's days are numbered: film is being produced less and less; the black and white that is used today doesn't compare to the black and white I bought 10 years ago; and labs do indifferent work.
Mechanically this camera is a wonder: an excellent lens, a great German camera, and there's no battery. Imagine no battery: too many things are dependent on battery power. The Agfa symbolizes for me being off the grid. If I knew how to develop and had a closet sized lab, I could produce my own photos from start to finish.
Painting is off the grid, as is drawing. The art of existence, as Kierkegaard talks about it, is off grid as well.

smoke pouring out of a box car door

I discovered this as a book mark in a book recently. I was reading Ricouer's Conversation and Critique - a book length interview about his life and the development of his thought, when I came across this newspaper clipping. I had clipped it away because just as I opened the page to it, Dylan's song Idiot Wind, which has the lyric "smoke pouring out of a box car door", was playing. I turned the page and almost in time with the music there was the image. It's a harsh song saved by Dylan's implication of himself: that he as well is an idiot, lucky enough to be able to feed himself: and that thinking of what might have been, he feels so sorry.
A lone soldier on the cross.
I'm fascinated by trains. My studio is near the tracks and every time a train goes by I go outside to watch. Trains continue to be romantic images to me. When I lived in New Mexico the train tracks often paralleled the road. Driving along I would see a train coming and I could tell how long it was - no trees or hills obscured it. Sometimes I would catch up with a train as it flew down the road.
Night time is when I find trains to be most mysterious: only a few lights define a massive shape moving through space. The train is almost invisible at night, yet I can feel the heaviness. In Europe one of my pleasures there was riding from Prague to Budapest. Even though it was a bit uncomfortable [the dining car didn't go - as the conductor told us- and we were forced to jump off the train at a border station and retrieve some drinks and food before the train left the station] I enjoyed sitting in our compartment and watching the towns go by, very slowly in Czech, and then, passing through Slovakia, gaining speed into Hungary as we followed the Danube. We passed quickly through rich farmland.
How nice it would be to still be able to ride the rails here. Amtrak counts only in the northeast. If I could take a train from Decatur to Athens or to Macon or Covington, that would be more of what I'm thinking of.
Next year in Chicago I may take the El to the Art Institute - it seemed so brisk running into the city next to the interstate. What must it be like inside?

eschatological banquet

I was looking at these photos from the Oakhurst bar-b-que festival last August, taken when I'd been back in Decatur for a day, and, since Joe, my friend and colleague, was there I was looking to see if I'd gottten him in anyone of these. I would have to say that that would be shadowy. He may be there in the top photo on the right, or even further back in the shadows. What I'm considering is a further reflection on Bakhtin's study of Rabelaisian carnival: the importance of eating and defecating - all accompanied by laughter in the broad vein. Joe was vilified for sending a scatological e-mail on our last day on campus. He had to apologize and listen to a moral lecture on how adults behave and what decorum needs to be maintained. As I've read Bakhtin I've seen Joe's act in a much richer light. If there was any fault - in terms of carnivalesque - it was that he used e-mail instead of bringing it into a more feasting atmosphere. I think he was more right than wrong - especially since there'd been an experiment on campus with carnival: an experiment that did not venture enough into what popular and folk forms might already exist on campus, and instead ventured more into sketch comedy. What was being turned over? What leveling of hierarchies occurred? In terms of this attempt at carnival, Joe's claim that he'd taken a shit in every room on campus, was more spot on. In terms of carnival being a vivification of the regenerative properties of the heavenly banquet: You can't spell eschatology without scatology. I think that that might make a good Latin motto - except you'd have to look for a different word play: something like "non feceae non fecundium."
If I were working on a carnival, I would put such a feast right in the middle of things. For our little reform school there is a certain irony: Calvin hated Rabelais [ they were contimporaries], and to Rabelais, Calvin would be the very dry and humorless authority figure he targeted with Gargantua and Pantagruel. And perhaps our attempt at carnival symbolized the tension we feel in the PCUSA now a days: that something old is dying and something new is being born. That is the central purpose of carnival: to provide room and liberty for the disestablishment of the old order to disintegrate and out of its ashes the new order to be born, through the vehicles of laughter, feasting and enjoyment of the grotesque (and understand the grotesque not only as physical shapes but as to natural quantities and types of speech).
Right now I'm considering how to invest my upcoming ordination service with elements of carnival.

Stained glass

A vestige of AMC's existence as a Baptist hospital is the chapel, along with its stained glass windows. This one is my favorite because of its creedal elements: a mystical or tailsmanic belief in the Bible qua "holy object." As you can see various white people in robes are scattered around this apparition on a rock - it is a close encounter of the third kind. What we encounter in this image is not Jesus but the Book. Jesus is just a part of the Book. The Book has all the answers; and when you follow the Book you can pick and choose - you're not limited to Jesus and his example. For instance you could say that certain dietary regulations are in force for belonging to the community of faith. Or that no one can work on Sunday. Now someone might say, "aren't you being hard on Baptists?" and I respond that I grew up among these people. My understanding was that the Bible was superior. Sure there might be a picture of Jesus (all blue eyed and day-glo anglo) praying in the garden or gazing at you. But the chief message was "if you don't do what the Bible says, you're going to hell." Jesus shed his blood and was better than all the rest of us: so if we didn't buck up, he'd tell on us for sure.
What is without argument is that the message of this window privileges the Bible. There is no mention of Jesus. And who is the Bible addressed to? White people, who speak English - the lingua franca of God's approval.
Now one oddity is that none of the people in this window are looking at the same thing. It may be that the artist used stock figures from other scenes - kind of like if a person used clip art to make a nativity. The woman on the left, who reminds me of the actress Hope Davis, is looking directly at us - which is a good strong device to bring the viewer into the picture; but then the old guy on the right is looking ambiguously at the beam of light. Also Hope is pointing at the youth in the middle, who is looking somewhere over our left shoulder.
I think the woman in the wimple on the right is looking at the Bible. It's almost as if these people had gathered around a rock and a Bible had thumped down to earth between them. I do have to say that the rock it has landed on is well done. (Years ago, someone asked me how I paint rocks, and I said that if the rock is small enough I pick it up with my hand and paint it on a table, letting the top dry completely before painting the bottom)
What is this picture saying? We were standing in line for a gladiatorial tourney and this book, with a title page in the middle, landed on this rock, trailing golden light behind it. For all the theatricality of the entrance of The Bible, I can't get over how unimpressed, how unmoved the people are witnessing it. They're just standing stupidly around, not really relating to each other, almost oblivious to what's happened (a giant book has landed from the heavens onto this rock! Doesn't that freak you out!? Why do you look like you can't wait for this to be over?) - which may be the message of the window: this is the Church.

Hey Beautiful

john the baptist

The Chicago Art Institute is a wonderful museum, but it lacks one thing - or if it has it, I didn't find the room or place on the wall where it was. It doesn't have any Brueghel paintings [or Bosch ones for that matter - its late medieval and renaissance holdings are slim, now that I think of it]. But it does have some things: among them this wonderful beheading of John the Baptist. John's leaned out the window and become decapitated - which was very agreeable of him. Note Salome standing off to the side, like she's picking up some groceries. She's a long way here from Strauss's naked temptress doing a tango with the Baptist's head in fin de siecle Vienna. That's what you get in medieval painting: not much sex but lots of violence.
I wanted to find a Breughel or a Bosch because I knew that with them I'd find examples of the carnivalesque and the grotesque. I invite you to do google image searches for them. Here are two the most fervid and frenetic (as well as caustic and laughing) minds that have ever painted a painting. Between 1480 and 1569 the time was ripe for the carnivalesque, and these two exemplified it in paint.
Painting like this is what needs to be taught on PBS painting shows (as well as painting like Jasper Johns or William De Kooning). People should demand their culture give them rich complex food that demands being ripped off the haunch and dipped into vinegary sauces of mystery. Instead cold, prefabricated slices of the most undistingushed and questionable food are placed before them for consumption and the only mystery is how people can consume so much of it and not keel over from boredom. We are a country on the verge of inventing prosthetic brains because the necessity of nature is imposed upon us.