Painting

A couple: Adam and Eve; Paolo and Francesca; Laurel and Hardy. Frick and Frack - who were they again? Cain and Able and Ted and Alice; Bonnie and Clyde. The place: Hope Springs Eternal; the crossroads of Vice and Virtue; the friendly skies.

It continues to rain here in Durham

Rain falls unabated Durhamward from cumulonimbus formations aloft above, soaking earth and human - all creation is drenched. Water beads on every surface and the air is moist to the touch. And underfoot is a comfortable give in the ground and a smattering of mud on your shoe, dug into the tread and flecked along the margin of the leather and the sole. The woods are quiet but for the branch to branch coursing of the water dripping finally to the ground.
In time the wind picks up; the clouds clear away; and parts of the ground dry up: the sidewalks, the street, the high patches of bare earth. The creek remains swollen with muddy moving water, indifferent to the meandering of its banks and for a time free to explore along the road and into the forest.

I can't find a photo of the academic nude except for this one where it is on top of the calling of st. matthew. Placed in this way though, it calls into question the roles of private and public.

I believe that people can comment again

I had made it more difficult to comment, but now I think that people can comment again. Too much blog spam in response to one of the subject words to my 'billy the kid on mars' entry. I believe the word was alien, which elicited spam before (and I'd forgotten).

History/Probability

In a week I'm talking with the examinations committee here to join this presbytery and then I"ll meet the COM the next day. What will be the upshot? I'll be here, perhaps as a member at large. I'm a minister without portfolio. As an artist I have a portfolio, as well as a ministry. But how to pursue it?
How can I convince people to give me sums of money that will fund my project? I'm calling it "big paintings for the Church." What "big paintings for the Church" will do is provide churches with large paintings, perhaps conventional canvas paintings, but I can see a function for other genres: spray paint for instance - what if churches tagged their communities: they could drive their volvos and buicks and step out in their suits and dress clothes and plaster billboards with slogans like "rogue state" and "What the F**K would Jesus Do." My favorite "the dead in Christ shall rise - come see us this Sunday." Of course I won't tell the committee about my ties to the zombie wing of the Presbyterian Church.
Anyway, I'm thinking "big paintings for the Church" will do fine. I'll start by simply painting one painting for one church of reasonable size. However this will take support from people who share my vision for Art in the Church. Tubes of cadmium red and flake white don't grow on trees (except at this superfund site in Missouri).
I also have big concepts for the Church - concepts so big, so enormous, so vast - well I got nothing, at least right now.
I will say this: in Pierre Boulez's Repons, on a Deutsche Grammaphoe recording, on track 3, 1 minute and 43 seconds into the track, the most wonderful piano phrase occurs. I've played it again and again, driving in the rain today, where Durham is still under drought restrictions, in the rain driving down 147, where I've occasioned to repeat this phrase so much that I missed my exit and found myself at the airport. It goes: dot ta de da da da dot te dee da di di di deh di di deh. It would make a wonderful intro to a radio show, such as are heard on NPR, where I would answer people's questions about art and spirituality and cheese. People could come visit me and tell me about their experiences with painting, yoga and wenslydale.
Two days this week rain has come down in buckets here in Durham. Beautiful.

Something written

Here's something I wrote 10 or so years ago on an old Underwood typewriter displayed in the special collections room of this library I worked at.

"Change, mutatis mutandis, assumes ordinary means,
mundanely maintaining status quo anarchic relations static
in its inexorability, till nothing is the same as memory
serves to remember; the past, unrecognizable in its odd
costumes and customs, alienated from the artifacts
of the human condition, used and spent, becomes the shibboleth for
nostalgia, marketing and disinformation. If anything, the
examination of some of these artifacts, in their husks, as it
were, reveals a rich variety of pursuits, at times seemingly
negligent of the recognized clamor of the times, and at times
infused with irony: how small the mistakes of the past
seemed in their nativity, great goods abused and evils
nurtured--as today might be seen in fragmentation of
society, stratification of culture and re-emergence of
violence, ideological and unconscious together.

"What once were follies become worldly wisdom, masked by
consensus and commercial approbation. Hegel, saying that
history occurs twice, the first time as tragedy and the second
time as farce, finds ratification in post modern gilded age
quandaries: the second house, the celebrity lifestyle, the third
family, and the car, plastic and mediocre, appealing to loves of
surfaces. What surfaces is what we cannot escape: the lapsed
moral fund of another generation's dreams, spent on margin and
moonshine, comes calling again in our very public privacy, our
predilection for the errant detail, the chivalrous minutiae of
politics.

"Note the lapsed insignia of our epic bygonnes: the scattered brick,
the rusticating masticators, and the off-bloomed rock garden
bouquets. And the purchase, a seen unsighted, for sure, eyes of
time holds the past enjambed and blank versus a present
obliquely irresponsive to urgings, proletarian and urbane. Again
the incredible abomination insinuates itself among the dinner
guests, suited sleek and polished, conversant in controversies
and consultant of swat, based in our own dark regrets. Inanition
under God, with libertine injustice furrow auld, as our forfeiteers
fore-swore unhsaven ears ago broad fort a knewn Haitian, that
that that that that which might be become that furture known
and absolved of perfidy, by any other name, a saint among
sinners, a haint among hinnners, We've found our lost coin after
alla nd what's valued demurs to some baser coinage, always and
ever more extent in the back ways of history.