Living in a Hopper

SUBHEAD: Edward Hopper's painting "Western Motel" has been built and occupied in a museum.

By David Pescovitz on 22 November 2019 for Boing Boing -
(https://boingboing.net/2019/11/22/sleeping-inside-one-of-edward.html)


Image above: Painting "Western Motel" by Edward Hopper 1957. From original article. Click to enlarge.

As part of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts' "Edward Hopper and the American Hotel" exhibition, the curators have created a brilliant installation and visitor experience that's seemingly made for Instagram.

They built a physical version of Hopper's above painting "Western Hotel" (1957) and offered overnight stays inside the artwork. The overnight packages sold out very quickly. The New York Times' Margot Boyer-Dry was one of the first guests:

Every detail here was inspired by Edward Hopper’s 1957 painting “Western Motel,” which has been brought to vibrant, three-dimensional life. The only thing missing is the mysterious woman whose burgundy dress matches the bedspread. But that’s where the museum guest comes in.

I was the second person to stay in the museum’s Hopper hotel room, essentially becoming its subject for a night. (Before it sold out through February, the room cost anywhere from $150 a night to $500 for a package, including dinner, mini golf and a tour with the curator.)

My time there was short — a standard stay runs from 9 p.m. to 8 a.m. — and awkward. I had traveled all day to reach Richmond, and these pristinely basic quarters were the main event. Ultimately, it reminded me of every other hotel room I’ve ever stayed in...

Ellen Chapman, a Richmond resident who stayed the night before I did, was more focused on the novelty of an art overnight. “I’ve always had that childhood fantasy of spending the night in a museum,” she said. “The remarkable part for me was waking up, drinking my coffee and looking at this amazing exhibit right next to me.”

Every detail of Edward Hopper’s “Western Motel” has been brought to life at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, where you can spend the night https://nyti.ms/34a1vl1

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What's Better than Seeing a Hopper Painting?
(https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/21/arts/design/edward-hopper-virginia-museum.html)

By Margot Boyer-Dry on 21 November 2019 for theNew York Times


Image above: Museum visitor viewing  "Western Motel" installation that is rented out as a hotel room within the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. From original article. Click to enlarge.

Behind a pane of glass at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, a wooden bed frame anchors a sparsely decorated motel room. Vintage suitcases have been arranged at the foot of the bed, and light streams in diagonally through a window, just beyond which a green Buick is visible, parked in the foreground of a mesa landscape.

It looks like the setting of a painting, and it is. Every detail here was inspired by Edward Hopper’s 1957 painting “Western Motel,” which has been brought to vibrant, three-dimensional life. The only thing missing is the mysterious woman whose burgundy dress matches the bedspread. But that’s where the museum guest comes in.

I was the second person to stay in the museum’s Hopper hotel room, essentially becoming its subject for a night. (Before it sold out through February, the room cost anywhere from $150 a night to $500 for a package, including dinner, mini golf and a tour with the curator.)

My time there was short — a standard stay runs from 9 p.m. to 8 a.m. — and awkward. I had traveled all day to reach Richmond, and these pristinely basic quarters were the main event. Ultimately, it reminded me of every other hotel room I’ve ever stayed in.

The “Hopper Hotel Experience” is the flashy centerpiece of “Edward Hopper and the American Hotel,” an exhibition featuring about 60 of the artist’s hospitality-themed works, including paintings, sketches and early-career cover illustrations for the trade magazine, Hotel Management.

Also on view are 35 works by other American artists exploring travel in America across time and medium, from Robert Salmon’s 1830 painting “Dismal Swamp Canal” to a 2009 photograph by Susan Worsham titled “Marine, Hotel Near Airport, Richmond, VA.”

Leo G. Mazow, the show’s curator, said he intends the Hopper room to do more than just generate buzz. “So many people say, ‘Well, Hopper’s about alienation.’” But for Mr. Mazow, Hopper’s themes of “transience and transportation yield a particular type of detachment,” which the hotel experience explores.

Hopper’s painting career coincided with the period when automobile production and expanding highway infrastructure made travel possible for a broader range of Americans.

A lifelong New Yorker, Hopper and his wife, Jo, took several extended road trips, during which he painted common elements of American life: hotels, motels and guesthouses; lighthouses; restaurants; city streets and interiors. His quietly dramatic depictions of those spaces and the people in them came to define an American aesthetic.


Image above: Ellen Chapman, a resident of Richmond, Va., inside the Hopper room at the museum. She said her stay fulfilled a childhood fantasy. From original article. Click to enlarge.

Painting a Panorama on Sphere

SUBHEAD: Artist paints detailed image of street intersection somewhere in Japan onto a sphere.

By mark Frauenfelder on 28 October 2019 for BoingBoing -
(https://boingboing.net/2019/10/28/artist-paints-a-panorama-on-a.html)


Image above: Still frame from video below.

This is a spherical painting of a street intersection somewhere in Japan. I don't know who the artist is, but the effect is amazing.


Video above: All views of Japanese intersection painted onto a sphere. Note manhole below where feet of viewpoint. See (https://www.youtube.com/embed/wAFucPpHO8U)
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Crypto Puzzle Craze

SUBHEAD: Will puzzle artwork be the next crypto-currency trend to go mainstream?

By Tyler Durden on 30 December 2018 for Zero Hedge -
(https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-12-29/will-these-puzzles-be-next-crypto-trend-go-mainstream)


Image above: "Amir Taaki and Cody Wilson" portraits embedded in a crpto-puzzle painting solved in 2014 with a prize of 3.5 BTC (BitCoins). Click to enlarge. From original article and (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=661781.0). Note this "painting" is derived from a photo of the two founders of "Dark Wallet" - a system for hiding the identities of BitCoin owners. See (https://www.wired.com/2014/04/dark-wallet/).

The cryptocurrency mania that drove the price of a bitcoin to $20,000 last year has come and gone, leaving a legion of deeply disappointed marginal buyers in its wake. But anybody who still believes in the long-term promise of crypto - and is looking to pick up some coins on the cheap - should try their luck at a crypto puzzle.

What's a crypto puzzle? Put simply, it's a burgeoning genre of artwork where viewers race against one another to solve a puzzle embedded in the picture.

Whoever wins is rewarded with a purse of cryptocurrency.

Though the phenomenon first emerged in 2014, when @coin_artist, the pseudonym of Marguerite deCourcelle, created Dark Wallet Puzzle, the first known cryptopuzzle, Business Week claimed in a recent feature about the trend that cryptopuzzles are still thriving - with buyers even paying hefty sums for pieces even after they have been solved.

Marguerite deCourcelle lives at the peculiar intersection of Bitcoin and art. Under the pseudonym @coin_artist, she’s credited with inventing the crypto-art puzzle, a genre of images hiding complicated ciphers that reward the first solver with a walletful of virtual currency. 

he most famous of these is an @coin_artist oil pastel from 2015 called Torched H34R7S, the final work in a series known as The Legend of Satoshi Nakamoto. Depicting a ­turtledove, chess pieces, and a ­phoenix surrounded by flames, the painting incorporates symbolic references to Bitcoin’s creator, as well as to Shakespeare and deCourcelle’s personal life.

An anonymous person solved the riddle in 2018, unlocking 5 Bitcoins, at the time worth about $50,000.

DeCourcelle started the Bitcoin-art-puzzle phenomenon in 2014 with Dark Wallet Puzzle, a painting of two leading crypto anarchists that hides a key. It led to a 3.4-Bitcoin reward. "I created it after realizing that without a third party litigating how money moves, that money could be ‘pulled out’ of anything," she says.

The result is a strange amalgam of the crypto and art-world universes, as crypto puzzles are beginning to "enter the mainstream through galleries, museums, international exhibitions, and even video games." In a way, winning crypto purses from solving these visual puzzles isn't that much different than the process of crypto mining - the only difference is that humans are solving the puzzles and not computers.


The Whitney Museum of American Art is planning to display its first crypto puzzle next spring. Until recently, most hidden-crypto-key artworks had been known only to nerdy collectors, their images circulated on websites such as Reddit and BitcoinTalk. Now they’re starting to enter the mainstream through galleries, museums, international exhibitions, and even video games. Many of the puzzles are also getting a bit easier to solve, giving more people a chance to crack the code and claim the coins. Some collectors are buying the art even after the puzzle has been solved and the ­digital currency extracted.

This spring artist Andy Bauch showcased “New Money,” a collection of mosaics, at the Castelli Art Space in Los Angeles. The patterns in the pieces, which were made of thousands of Lego blocks and included a 4-by-9-foot horizontal triptych, contained clues to troves of Bitcoin and other ­cryptocurrencies. "How seemingly arbitrary art prices are, and seeing crypto prices fluctuating wildly, I was curious,” Bauch says. "Will the ­cryptocurrency I put in this art appreciate? Will the art itself appreciate regardless of the cryptocurrency?"

Three of his works have sold - one of them for $14,000 - though the virtual coins hidden within one had already been taken before the show began. Per the unspoken rules of the ­crypto-art crowd, Bauch had posted photos of the works online, where anyone could view them and try to ­decipher their riddles.

The pieces are also getting some high-­profile attention from the art world. The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York plans to show a 16-millimeter film by Jennifer and Kevin McCoy that offers clues to a Bitcoin address.

The first solver will be named as one of the official donors of the piece, a distinction that can be resold or traded. At Bitcoin Art (r)evolution in Paris this fall, some 1,000 visitors in the course of a week viewed 40 works from @coin_artist and others, organizer Pascal Boyart says. He plans to embed crypto-art puzzles in his murals in the city’s streets.

Image above: Detail of crypto artwork by Nanu Berk from an article about her thoughts on the new art industry. From (https://medium.com/blockchain-art-collective/crypto-art-is-no-easy-calling-heres-what-artist-nanu-berks-really-thinks-about-the-industry-7c5e84663614).

As the genre gains prominence in the mainstream art world, DeCourcelle is finding new ways to monetize the concept, including digital puzzles that resemble video games and selling pieces to collectors who are looking to own a piece of crypto history.

DeCourcelle, who has an art degree from Eastern Oregon University, made the final piece of The Legend of Satoshi Nakamoto series when she found herself suddenly single and parenting two small children, living in a rented room at a friend’s house with no steady means of support.

She spent four months working at night, during her boys’ naptimes, and between freelance projects to finish the painting, for which she’d already pledged 3.5 of her own Bitcoins in prize money.

She survived in the meantime by selling the original Dark Wallet Puzzle painting for 10 Bitcoins, or about $3,000 at the time.

"I just wanted a piece of that history," says buyer Brooke Royse-Mallers, a Bitcoin investor and avid crypto-puzzle-solver. "The history of Bitcoin’s evolution and my evolution with it, I guess. That painting helped me learn more about the technology without being a coder."

Though most crypto puzzles aren't worth much, DeCourcelle says she's been offered as much as $1 million for her work over the years. That should give remaining crypto entrepreneurs hope: If they're dissatisfied with the retail price, they can try packaging it with a visual puzzle to boost the price.

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Jigsaw Dali

SUBHEAD: Artist uses jigsaw puzzles, with the same die cut pattern, to make these surreal mashups.

By Rusty Blazenhoff on 11 November 2018 for Boing Boing -
(https://boingboing.net/2018/11/11/this-artist-uses-jigsaw-puzzle.html)


Image above: Horse meets train in surreal world. From original article.

[IB Publisher's note: There are more images  by Tim Klein in the Boing Boing site's article, as well as a photo essay of the artist's embroidering his car with yarn in hypnotic detailed patterns ASwee (http://www.yarncar.com/).]

Oh boy, I think I have a new hobby. I've just learned that you can combine puzzles, that have the same die cut, to make really awesome pieces of art. It had never occurred to me that manufacturers of mass-produced puzzles cut different puzzles of theirs in the same way, making the pieces interchangeable. It makes complete sense, of course, but my mind is still blown!

I learned about the art of "puzzle montage" from one of the readers of my inbox zine, Marcia Wiley (she's the gal in Seattle who's fixing up that cool old Checker Cab). She was visiting the Bay Area and we met up for the first time this past Friday. That's when she told me about her friend Tim Klein, who makes incredible puzzle montages. I'm excited to share his work with you.

In an email exchange, Tim told me that he learned about puzzle montages from the man who first made them, art professor Mel Andringa of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, "As far as I know, he and I are the only artists ever to pursue it seriously. And I think he's moved on to other things nowadays, so I may be the sole surviving practitioner."

And this is what Tim shared with me about his process:

...By selecting pieces from two or more compatible puzzles, I assemble a single "puzzle mashup" with surreal imagery that the publisher never imagined.

Sometimes the results are merely chuckle-making, such as my combination of King Tut's burial mask with the front of a truck, which I call "King of the Road".

But my favorite montages are ones in which the whimsical is tinged with something a bit deeper, such as "The Mercy-Go-Round (Sunshine and Shadow)", in which a fairground carousel whirls riders around a church from the light to the dark and back again -- or "Surrogate", in which a strange hybrid of beer can and teddy bear opens its fuzzy arms and tells you to "consider yourself hugged".

[editor note: "Mercy", not "Merry"]

The imagery in jigsaw puzzles published nowadays tends to be very busy, often consisting of densely-packed collages constructed with Photoshop. But for my purposes, I favor puzzles from pre-digital years, when the picture was typically a photograph of a single subject, such as a galloping horse or a ballerina or the Empire State Building.

As I visit thrift stores and garage sales in search of vintage puzzles, I sometimes feel like an archaeologist, taking great pleasure in discovering and "reconstructing" strange, shattered images whose shards have been languishing in suburban game closets for decades.

Take a look at some of his work (click to embiggen) and then go here to see the rest and to read Tim's notes about the specific pieces:



Image above: King Tut face on tractor trailer grill. From original article.


Image above: Summer invades winter during global warming. From original article.


Image above: Church goes far to attract worshipers. From original article.


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American Indian influence on R&R

SUBHEAD: Native musicians played an oversize role in shaping American popular music.

By Charles R. Cross on 18 January 2019 for Yes Magazine -
(https://www.yesmagazine.org/peace-justice/how-native-culture-helped-shape-rocknroll-20190118)


Image above: Photo portrait of Link Ray - Native American R&R hero. From (https://www.thegearpage.net/board/index.php?threads/eastwood-offers-up-link-wray-tribute-model.1507088/).

It’s a guitar riff that’s only 30 seconds long and simple enough that Link Wray came up with it while playing at a sock hop. He repeated the riff several times when he recorded the 1958 single “Rumble.”

That two minutes and twenty-five seconds of guitar nastiness inspired countless guitarists who followed and helped shift rock away from sock-hop chastity toward an edginess of danger.

One of the many parts of the history of “Rumble” forgotten is that the song was banned from the airwaves for a time because it was feared this instrumental—with no words!—might incite youth violence.

Steven Van Zandt, of the E Street Band, called “Rumble” “the theme song of juvenile delinquency.”

“Rumble” contains one of the killer riffs in all of rock ’n’ roll and essentially marks the invention of the power chord, but one of the secrets of the song’s history is that Link Wray was Native American.

His ethnicity, like that of many Natives who made contributions to music, was left out of almost all his press. The documentary Rumble: The Indians That Rocked the World, which airs on PBS starting January 21, addresses the larger contribution Natives made to music.

It’s an important story with many layers that involves both the human and cultural genocide that came with European conquest.

The film showcases a lot of musical talent, though the legendary Wray is arguably only the fourth greatest Native guitar player—after Jesse Ed Davis (who played with Taj Mahal, Jackson Browne, and John Lennon), Robbie Robertson, and Jimi Hendrix.

I’m a biographer of Hendrix, and he was proud of his Native background. Wray’s “Rumble” was one of the first songs Hendrix learned to play.
'
He almost certainly had no idea of Wray’s background, just as most casual fans didn’t know about Hendrix’s genealogy, which included Native roots on both sides of his family tree as well as his African American ancestry (and many Hendrix fans didn’t know that his song “Cherokee Mist” was in part a homage to his grandmother).

Wray’s history also surprised Robbie Robertson. “‘Rumble’ made an indelible mark on the whole evolution of where rock ’n’ roll was going to go,” Robertson observes in the film. “And then I found out [Wray] was an Indian!”

It could be argued that Robertson, a Mohawk, is one of the most important rock musicians of all time.

Backing Bob Dylan with the Band when Dylan went electric, Robertson played an essential role in shifting popular music from folk to rock, but even his ethnic background was almost never talked about in the press.

Cultural appropriation is the central theme of Rumble, which pairs short bios of a dozen Native musicians with commentators who explain why so much of this story has never been told. “Our peoples were part of the origin story of blues, jazz, and rock of American music, but we’re left out of the story consistently from the beginning,” says Native musician Joy Harjo.

Within colonialism, and within the slave trade, music was seen as a threat, which is why plantation owners banned slaves from owning drums, a prohibition that often was also applied to Natives, as well.

Rumble does an excellent job of explaining how the histories of African slaves and Natives were intertwined, as slave traders bred male slaves with female Natives from tribes they conquered.

This is one of the most horrific chapters in the history of the United States (and part of the reason Hendrix had Native blood, as do many African Americans).

Music has always been central to Indigenous culture in North America, but it was often taken away by a U.S. government seeking to control. “[Music] was seen as dangerous,” says historian John Troutman. “Singers and dancers were incarcerated for performing this music.”

The film asserts that the Wounded Knee massacre of 1890 began with the killing of Ghost Dancers.

“It was cultural genocide,” observed the now-deceased Native activist and musician John Trudell.

The career of Buffy Sainte-Marie, born on the Piapot Plains Cree First Nation Reserve in Canada, shows how both Natives and women struggled to be respected as musical artists.

Sainte-Marie tells how she succeeded when she started off with folk music, but as soon as her songs became overtly political, and anti-Vietnam War, she was banned from radio.

Even White male superstars like Johnny Cash found that they lost their platform when they spoke or sang about the plight of Natives.

 Cash’s 1964 album Bitter Tears: Ballads of the American Indian was boycotted by radio. Cash responded by taking out ads in music trade papers shaming radio (lore has it he was later adopted by the Seneca Nation to honor his activism).

Cash’s now-iconic album came out long before the age of social media, which now quickly serves to draw attention to many incidents of overt racism.

When headdresses became fashionable at music festivals in the last decade, a few festivals responded by banning them.

Powerful deterrents have been shame hashtags and social media infamy. Musician Pharrell Williams sparked a Twitter firestorm after he wore a headdress on the cover of Elle U.K. in 2014.

He defended it saying he had Native background, but that didn’t calm critics like Indian Country Media Network, which argued that “having an American Indian ancestor or relative isn’t a license to use that relative’s culture spontaneously and without context.” (Williams later apologized.)

Rumble addresses these topics and more, and despite the importance of the story, the documentary falls short in places.

While most of the commentators are Native, a number are not, and the contrast is confusing as it leaves a viewer wondering whether their tribal affiliation was mistakenly left off the title card. For example, Martin Scorsese is not who you would expect to see in this documentary.

His comments lack the insight that activists like Sainte-Marie bring, but clearly he was brought in simply because he directed The Last Waltz, which is hardly a qualification on the level of the ethnomusicologists included, many of whom are Native.

And when it comes to Jimi Hendrix, his adopted step-sister Janie Hendrix, quoted extensively—saying things like Native background is “part of who you are, and what you want to respect and represent”—is not blood-related to Jimi, which the film implies.

There are plenty of Native Hendrixes who could have spoken instead, and this appropriation is exactly what Rumble rails against.

Nonetheless, Rumble centers on an important lost part of history, a history rooted in a different, less socially aware America. The times, we hope, have changed since Wray started, though we’ll really know there has been a shift when Wray finally gets into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Rumble is ultimately about the power of music to transcend. When the Native band Redbone perform their hit “Come and Get Your Love” wearing headdresses, in a song that uses Native rhythms and puts them into a context that is appropriate and not exploitative, it’s powerful.

Redbone scored a top-five hit with the song, which includes a tribal beat and a classic guitar riff.

Their moment onstage, in traditional dress, feels like triumph.

“Come and Get Your Love” is also, like the rest of the music honored by Rumble, just plain great rock ’n’ roll.


Video above: Link Ray plays "Rumble" from record album "Slinky! The Epic Sessions '58-'61".  From (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucTg6rZJCu4).



Video above: Keith Secola & His Wild Band of Indians perform on stage live in 2008.  From (https://www.secola.com/) and (https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=4&v=XnZUkVf1yFA).

[IB Publisher's note: My first direct experience with American Indian rock & roll was with Keith Secola ans his Wilds Band of Indians at a Blue Heron Festival in Chautauqua County, NY in the late 1990s on a July 4th weekend. I was recording sound and captured much of the band's live performance. It was much like the performance in the video above. I made a CD of the recording and have shared it with many people. These guys were a lot of fun to hang out with.]

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A Very 1960's Christmas

SUBHEAD: Fifty years ago, Christmas in New York came with dead bodies, fringes, patchouli and Jimi Hendrix.

By Staff on 25 December 2018 for Alternet.org -
(https://www.alternet.org/2018/12/very-1960s-christmas/)


Image above: Jimi Hendrix living in the Drake Hotyel in NYC in 1968.  From (https://www.thatericalper.com/jimi-hendrix-at-the-drake-hotel-in-new-york-city-1968/).

Christmas in 1968 was the first I would spend apart from my family. I was a cadet at West Point, and my parents and sisters lived in Hawaii, and I couldn’t afford to fly there for the holidays, so I called a woman I had been seeing in the city and asked if I could stay with her. To my great relief, she said yes.

She was a nurse who worked nights and lived on a bombed-out block of East 2nd Street, between Avenues A and B, as I recall. I took the bus to Port Authority, grabbed the shuttle to Grand Central and took the Lex to Bleecker Street and walked east. It was around freezing, and a stiff wind was blowing.

The further east I walked, the more deserted the streets were. Her block faced husks of deserted buildings and empty lots with Houston Street just beyond. It felt like a landscape out of some kind of post-apocalypse movie — boarded-up doors and blown-out windows, a few cars up on cinder blocks with missing wheels and tires, empty lots piled with derelict mattresses and broken furniture and plain old garbage.

Even in the bitter cold, the street stank.

But not as much as the entryway of her building. I smelled it the minute I pushed open the door: that sickly, sweet, somehow thick odor of death. It mixed with the smells of frying grease and garlic and peppers and onions and got stronger as I went up the stairs.

I turned onto the third floor and knew there was a body behind one of the doors. Her place was on the fourth floor, and when she opened the door, I asked her, don’t you smell that? I know, she said. The Puerto Ricans are always cooking stuff in this building.

I threw open a window to flush the smell out of the apartment and looked up the number for the Fifth Precinct and called them. A couple of beat cops showed up an hour or so later, and after them came a truck from the morgue. They hauled out the body of an old man who had died alone in his apartment a few days previously.

After they left, I went downstairs and propped open the front doors, and over the next day or so, the smell of death was gradually overtaken by the odors of fried food and cheap wine that had been spilled by winos trying to escape the cold. It was four days until Christmas.

She was a few years older than me, and we didn’t have a relationship as much as an arrangement. In the afternoons, we would lie around on her narrow bed in the front room watching a black and white TV until she had to put on her uniform for work, then we would venture out into the cold and dark New York winter and meet up again when she came back sometime after midnight.

I’d usually pick up something from one of the bodegas on First or Second Avenue, and we’d eat a late dinner in her kitchen and drink some wine and go back to bed.

The temperature dropped into the 20s on the day before Christmas, and with the wind blowing through the cracks around the old tenement windows, the radiators in her place struggled to keep up. We huddled under a pile of blankets and quilts until she had to go to work.

She had a later shift that night, so it was 9:00 by the time we bundled up and hit the street. I walked her over to the bus she took up First Avenue to Bellevue Hospital. I had read in the Voice that there would be a Christmas eve poetry reading at St. Marks in the Bowery, so I headed up Second Avenue.

Inside the church, it was a real old-fashioned beatnik scene. The place was crowded with long-haired East Village characters wearing long woolen overcoats and their old ladies in raccoon coats they’d picked up in the second hand shops on St. Marks Place. Someone was passing out cups of red wine at the door, and everyone was in a festive mood.

Up on the altar at the front of the room were several real beatniks: Hubert Huncke, known as “Huncke the junkie,” who was famous for his ability to scrounge up the scratch to feed his habit while staying out of jail; Gregory Corso, a diminutive pinch-faced guy with a cloud of curly hair and a mischievous smile; Ed Sanders, famous as an “investigative poet” and one of the Fugs, who ran the Peace Eye Bookstore, where he published “Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts.”

I took a seat on one of the pews several rows back from the front. They began playing a tape Allen Ginsberg had sent from somewhere upstate for the occasion, reading his poetry in his distinctive cadences, cheerful no matter the subject matter. Ginsberg’s chant was filling the church when I smelled a woosh of patchouli oil to my right.

I turned just as Jimi Hendrix slid in and sat down next to me. He was wearing a black hat with a wide brim and a fancy hat-band and a furry fringed vest and feather boas and a big silver belt that rode low on the hips of his bellbottoms. With him was an entourage of gorgeous young women chattering excitedly. Jimi sshhhed them.

We sat there for the next hour listening as East Village poets cried out in political protest and in celebration of sex and pot and Buddhism and the vegetarian lifestyle. Gregory Corso read a poem that managed to be angry and funny at once, and Ron Padgett read, and from Warhol’s factory Gerard Malanga read, and then there was an intermission.

Hendrix and his crew stood up and left, and I thought they were gone for good, but they came back and sat where they had been before, and Jimi shhhhed his entourage again when Ed Sanders took the mic and read a bawdy poem about a motel room.

Then Ed read a poem he had published in the Voice earlier that year when one of the Voice’s best writers, Don McNeill, had died unexpectedly. It was a sad, beautiful poem that captured something about that year, 1968, in its celebration of the death of a man who had covered the descent of hippiedom from pot and rock and roll and be ins into speed and smack and murders on Avenue B.


Image above: IslandBreath publisher Juan Wilson lived in a 4th floor walk-up apartment at 620 East Sixth Street between Avenue B and C in NYC in 1968 while attending the Cooper Union School of Architecture. 

Ed finished reading, and everyone sat silently for a moment, and then it was over. Hendrix stood, and in a rush of boas and fringe and patchouli, he was gone. He had sat there listening to poetry for at least two hours, and he never said a word.

After that night, I never listened to his music the same way again because I heard in his lyrics the rhythms of that night, his beat allusions to “happiness staggering down the street footprints dressed in red,” while “the wind whispers Mary.” I mean, how could you not hear his debt to the Beats amongst his brilliant guitar licks?

Hendrix was a poet who went out on a frigid New York Christmas eve to listen to poetry. He would be dead in London a year and a half later, but on that night in 1968, at the end of a year of protests and turmoil and war and assassinations, he was happy.
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Egomania and Bad Taste

SUBHEAD: Trump hangs ‘Tacky’ fantasy painting of himself with former GOP presidents in White House.

By Maxwell Tani & Tracy Conner on 14 October 2018 for the Daily Beast -
(https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-hangs-tacky-fantasy-painting-of-himself-with-gop-presidents-in-white-house)


Image above: Painting by Andy Thomas of "The Republican Club", with the addition of Donald Trump. A print now hangs in the White House. From original article.

President Trump’s latest addition to White House decor is a kitschy fantasy painting that shows him relaxing with Republican presidents of the past—an update to a best-selling image commonly found in tourist gift shops and online galleries.

The print, “The Republican Club” by Andy Thomas, could be seen in the background of a photo tweeted by 60 Minutes, which aired an interview with Trump on Sunday night.

It shows a slimmed-down Trump sandwiched between Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon, directly across from Abraham Lincoln. Teddy Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and both Bushes are also in the imaginary scene.

Amateur art critics sneered on social media that the artwork was “tacky,” “a travesty,” or “blasphemy.” Some said it looked like the political version of the famous “dogs playing poker” painting.

But one person was thrilled to learn that it was hanging on the wall of Trump’s office—the artist himself.

Thomas told The Daily Beast that Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), a fan of the artist’s work, gave the print to Trump.

“He had actually given a me real gracious call to tell me how much he liked it,” Thomas said of Trump. “He was very complimentary. He made a comment that he’d seen a lot of paintings of himself and he rarely liked them.”

The painting is the latest in a well-known series by Thomas that depicts past presidents from each party hanging out together. Thomas’ first, which was finished in 2008, included Republicans—minus Trump—playing poker. A subsequent portrait showed Democratic presidents playing pool.

When Thomas decided to add the current president, he said, he found “Trump hard to paint” because of his skin tone and smile, but made him the center of attention anyway.

He said that as far as he knows, no other president has his artwork. He said Issa has both the Democratic and Republican prints hanging in his office and commissioned a portrait of himself from Thomas, who also paints cowboys.

“He’s a really friendly guy and he said, ‘If I get a chance, I’m going to show this to Donald,’” Thomas said.

Still he never expected Trump would call to thank him and was shocked when his wife told him he should be home at a certain time for a call.

“You can’t imagine how happy that made me,” he said.

Thomas stressed that while the painting with Trump is getting the most attention, his presidential art is bipartisan. And he said he didn’t want to discuss his own political views.

“I challenge people to look at the paintings and see if they can figure it out,” he said.

Other cosmetic changes Trump has been made to the White House have also been panned, with detractors calling them “drab” and “gaudy.”

In an effort to make the West Wing less of what he described as a “dump,” last year Trump redecorated the Oval Office with gold drapes and gold-hued upholstery.

And to ensure no one forgets about his electoral accomplishments, a map of results of his 2016 victory is hanging in the West Wing.


Image above: Born in 1844, Cassius Marcellus Coolidge first painted dogs playing poker in 1894. This one is titled "A Friend in Need". From (http://www.warmunart.com/story-dogs-playing-poker-painting-series/).

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Stroboscopic Easter Eggs

SUBHEAD: As part of the celebration of spring we present these painted animated Easter egg designs.

By Rob Beschizza on 25 March 2018 for Boing Boing-
(https://boingboing.net/2018/03/25/mesmerising-stroboscopic-easte.html)


Image above: Eggbot inking a boiled egg with stroboscopic pattern on an Easter that appears animated by video frames. Still shot from video below.

"No computer graphics tricks were used in this video," writes Jiri Zemanek of Czech Technical University in Prague.

Various patterns are generated in MATLAB using mathematical equations similar to ones describing Spirograph (or harmonograph) and Phyllotaxis. The patterns are calculated in such a way that when rotated under a stroboscopic light of suitable frequency or when recorded by a camera, they start to animate. It is kind of zoetrope---early device for animation. Eggs were painted using EggBot (designed by Bruce Shapiro as open hardware and available as a kit from http://www.evilmadscientist.com/). To draw on eggs, we used standard permanent markers and an electro kistka with bee wax followed by dying. Eggs are rotated at a constant speed, special for each pattern, by a brushless motor.

Video above: "Eggstatic - Stroboscopic Pen Patterns for Easter Eggs". From (https://youtu.be/JfajQ4_hSN0)
aic paint".

Here's more: "This apparatus creates stroboscopic patterns on an egg covered in photochromic paint"


Video above: "Eggstatic 2 - Laser Drawing Stroboscopic Patterns on Eggs". From (https://youtu.be/rIgpqlrj-G0)

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Walking on Lava

SUBHEAD: Promotion of collected writing from the Dark Mountain project by one of its editor's.

By Charlotte Du Cann on 11 September 2017 for Open Democracy -
(https://www.opendemocracy.net/transformation/charlotte-du-cann/under-volcano)


Image above: Writer and artist Robert Leaver in his performance ‘Crawling Home’ in New York. Photo by Larrey Fessenden. From original article.

On a mountain in Wales in the teeming rain, we sit in a yurt packed with people, the five of us, on hay bales, dressed in black suits and bowler hats. One of us has a pack of cards up his sleeve, another an African folktale, another a guitar and a song by Nick Drake from the 1970s.

I have oak leaves in my hatband to signify an instruction circa 600 BC from the Sibyl who once guarded the door to the Underworld in the ‘Campi Flegrei’ outside Naples.

A link to the pre-patriarchal ‘uncivilised’ world, she guides a lineage of poets to the territory under the volcano where all deep transformations take place: Virgil, Dante, T.S. Eliot, Mary Shelley, Sylvia Plath. Denied immortal youth by the autocratic Apollo, her desiccated body kept in a jar, only her voice is still left for us to follow.

One of us, Dougie, stands up and invites the audience to take part in a demonstration of two figures from the ancient world: one is Chronos, the inexorable march of linear time; the other is a young man with a lock of hair over his forehead, who intervenes and interrupts him. His name is Kairos, and sometimes ‘Possibility.’

We’re giving a performance called ‘Testaments of Deep Time’ to introduce the work of The Dark Mountain Project—itself an intervention into the linear narrative about ecological and social calamity. As the rational world attempts to control the consequences of its dominant storyline, cracks have begun to appear.

Through those cracks, archaic, indigenous knowledge, hidden for safekeeping against Roman and other empires, slips through, and fleeting glimpses of another future reveals itself.

This encounter, we know, is what changes everything.

Dark Mountain was launched in 2009 to challenge the contemporary lack of response by culture makers to ecological overshoot in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. Its manifesto was called simply Uncivilisation.

Many people picked up this gauntlet, recognising it, not as a challenge to a duel but as an invitation to explore a territory yet unmapped.

This invitation has led to collaborations with writers, musicians and artists; 12 books and five festivals; a year-long theatre workshop in Sweden; teaching encounters in the mountains of Spain and the moors of the West Country; and performances built around the celebrations of the solar year by the River Thames and the ancestral wilderness of Scotland—and now in Wales.

What distinguishes Dark Mountain from grassroots Earth-defending organisations and progressive movements is that it is a creative response to prevailing crises—and lacks an evangelical agenda to fix them.

The project’s manifesto can act as a frame, but there is no drive to act in the space that frame creates—no pressure to shut down power stations or convince your neighbour to stop flying, or your community to reduce its carbon emissions.

Instead, it provides a space that has room and time in it, where the 24/7 broadcast of progress can be switched off and other voices apart from the mainstream can be heard; it gives an opportunity to look at things differently, and for other slower realisations to occur—for interactions, connections and deep thought as a reader, listener or contributor.

‘Are you against environmental activism?’ I was asked recently by a television researcher. ‘No,’ I said ‘We’re not against anything. It’s a conversation not an argument. We’re a creative network.’

‘If this manifesto has travelled further than we imagined, one explanation is that it has helped people to get their bearings in a world where the thin, shiny surface of prosperity has cracked. Trying to make sense of our own experience it seems that we put words to a feeling that others shared... a feeling that there is no way through the mess we find ourselves that doesn’t involve facing the darkness, and being honest about the scale of the unravelling that is under way, and the uncertainty as to where it will end. A feeling that it is time to look down.’  Dougald Hine from the Introduction to the 2014 edition of Uncivilisation.

This rallying point, the agreement to ‘look down’ and acknowledge that we sit on a crater’s edge rather than a firm foundation, not only creates a different literature but also nurtures a very different feeling towards that literature and those who write it.

If there is one shared response to the contacts made by people towards the project it is the sense of relief and comradeship in a world where a possible eruption of the status quo is manifestly denied.

However there is no mantra or belief system to take refuge in here. Dark Mountain is a collective work-in-progress, initiated by ‘recovering journalists’ disillusioned by the green movement and its timid approaches toward change.

It doesn’t offer a road map for a sustainable future but can offer you a place by the fire, an opportunity to dig beneath the distracting surface of industrial late capitalism; to produce work that asks the question, ‘how can we reclaim the voice and body of ourselves that has been suppressed by civilisation for millennia. The deadline is never far away.

The fact is we all know that “the boat is leaking and the captain lied” as Leonard Cohen once sang; we know the statistics about climate change and acidified oceans and decapitated mountains. The news that the numbers of kittiwakes on St Kilda have plummeted or that the ancient trees of Sheffield have been felled pains us. We don’t numb out that pain, nor do we indulge it in the see-saw of hope and despair.

We know the Earth is not an abstract concept of environment or ‘nature’ and requires a very different relationship, one that wrests the material of life out of the hands of the ‘quants’ and economists and gives it due respect.

The question we face is always: what do you do when you know, when you allow yourself to see and feel what is shut out by the broadcast of progress? You can’t keep writing conventional love stories and detective novels, hoping that Hollywood will get in touch.

What kind of literature and art does this awareness produce? A diverse body of work that does not fit neatly into a monocultural, corporate bookshelf or gallery wall.

Inspired by the inhumanist poetry of Robinson Jeffers, its voices do not come out of a narcissistic and alienated highbrow culture, discussed by the chattering classes of Boston or London, but from a library of stones, from the desert and forest hermitage, from conversations around convivial fires.

This space is existentialist, ringed as it is by urgent questions about what kind of human being can be so numb or so dumb in the face of catastrophe; its tone is elegiac rather than triumphant.

In many ways it returns the artist and writer to their original function, as people who push the edge and keep the door of possibility open. People who embody and stand by their words, for whom those fiery brimstone fields are home.

It’s in this spirit that we’ve created a new work called Walking on Lava, taken from our first ten hardback journals as a showcase introduction. Following their shape it is made of work of contrasting voices and genres—poetry, flash fiction, essays, artworks, photography and interviews—and structured around the manifesto’s ‘Eight Principles of Uncivilisation.’

Here are Robert Leaver crawling along Broadway in New York on his hands and knees; Christos Galanis shooting a thrift store copy of the Iliad in the New Mexico desert; and Emily Laurens sweeping the brown sands of the Welsh peninsula in honour of the disappeared passenger pigeon and the millions of species now becoming extinct—testimony, encounter, protest art and praise song of a different kind.

‘I imagine the people I have seen on Broadway, and maybe the world over, feeling a weight on their backs, in their hearts and souls. Maybe this weight is the burden on modern life, the burden on being conscious in a world gone mad. Crawling seemed to be a way to maybe show compassion or solidarity, to make a metaphor of this collective burden we all share. Instead of crawling I could have curled up in a foetal position in perfectly chosen locations. But this crawl was never about surrendering. I went down and kept moving, kept pressing on as so many humans are doing every day. The idea has always been to keep on, to get through this journey, to make it home safe and sound.’ Robert Leaver – Crawling Home.

What happens when you get bitten by a squirrel, or when you return to your homeland now crawling with bulldozers and fracking trucks?

When the story you were told by your teachers and parents is broken, when the Earth makes contact with you, you may stumble upon art with a different kind of attention: a feral stew of roots and road killed pheasant in the highlands of Scotland, a dreaming woman carrying a horse in her womb in Cornwall, a meditation on graphite in the winter-wet Cumbrian hills.

Kairos, the daemon of opportunity, had a shaved head, meaning that you had to grasp the moment that faced you, for once the light-footed one had disappeared the chance to see in all-at-once-time had also gone also.

There are only so many opportunities to sense the volcano that rumbles beneath us. Rarely do we find the way to the cave where the Sibyl sits, or pay heed to those who struggle to return from the darkness of the Stygian lake.

We live, as Marshall McLuhan once noted, in a third world war of narratives, of competing controlled ways of perceiving the world, all of them hostile to people and planet. In the quiet, in the depths, in the wild places, in the struggle of our hearts, writers and artists—those who have always kept a true link to the wider, wilder world—are forging another story.

We hope that Walking on Lava will show how some of that new collective tale is unfolding.

Walking on Lava – Selected Work for Uncivilised Times is edited by Charlotte Du Cann, Dougald Hine, Nick Hunt and Paul Kingsnorth and published by Chelsea Green.

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Can we live without progress?

SUBHEAD: Living without the hope of progress didn't stop the ancient Greeks from creating great art and philosophy.

By Kurt Cobb on 2 July 2017 for Resource Insight -
(http://resourceinsights.blogspot.com/2017/07/can-we-live-without-progress.html)


Image above: Painting by Raphael of "The School of Athens" done in for Vatican 1509-1511. The most obvious characters are in the center, Plato and his student Aristotle, founding figures of Western philosophy. From (http://study.com/academy/lesson/the-school-of-athens-by-raphael-description-figures-analysis.html).

[IB Publisher's note: The question works better upside down. "Can we live with progress?" The answer appears to be "No!" It's been our excuse to chew op the world. Remember General Electic. The corporation that devised and built Fukushima Daiichi and put the reactors almost at sea level and the placed backup generators in the basement? Their adage delivered on TV by Ronald Reagan was "Progress is our most important product".]

To a person alive today it is hard to fathom that the ancient Greeks regarded themselves as living in an age of decline.

These are the people who gave us the philosophers Socrates and Plato, the playwrights Sophocles and Euripides, the mathematician Pythagoras, the scientist and polymath Archimedes, and the first person to formulate atomic theory, Democritus.

These are the people who designed and built the Parthenon and created the sculpture we so admire today in our museums. And yet, the ancient Greeks believed that the Golden Age, a period of unprecedented peace, prosperity, and cultural achievement, already lay deep in the past.

A friend recently asked if we who are alive today could bear to live in such an age. Our modern lives are premised on the idea that tomorrow will not only be different, but also better. He said this attitude has made us inattentive. We feel we don't have to pay attention to the details of life because we know their destination in advance, namely, progress.

In the sciences we speak of progress--greater knowledge, better instruments, new investigatory techniques, more comprehensive theories. But we rarely speak of progress in the arts. We tend to believe that art changes, while science advances. We do not think of James Joyce's novels as new and improved versions of Thomas Hardy's. We simply say that they are different.

Can we imagine an existence in which tomorrow may be different from yesterday, but may not necessarily represent an advance? Can we imagine a whole lifetime of such days? And, perhaps the most vexing question of all: Is it possible that we have actually been living in such a world without knowing it?

This question, of course, begets another one: What do we mean by progress? Generally speaking, we are offered the following metrics: more people living longer, healthier lives and enjoying greater material prosperity year after year (that is, ever increasing per capita consumption).

We may also be told that our knowledge of the natural and social worlds is growing rapidly and that this knowledge is part of the reason for our prosperity.

When speaking of progress, we tend to leave out the side effects--some of them very dangerous--such as climate change, toxic pollution, soil erosion, fisheries collapse, species extinction, and myriad other ongoing environmental cataclysms that have the potential to destroy our civilization.

To contain our anxiety we tell ourselves that this is the price of progress. The politicians ask,"Which would you rather save, your jobs or some obscure species of fish?" Of course, the predicament we face is not so easily dismissed.

Another friend pointed out the disconnect between the United Nations' recent announcement that world population will reach 9.7 billion by 2050, up from 7.5 billion today, while the organization also warns of the devastating consequences of climate change for world food supplies in the future.

Might not billions die of malnutrition and hunger before 2050 arrives as climate change continues to move faster than we have previously estimated?

And yet, the news is filled with predictions of fantastic leaps forward in artificial intelligence, robotics, and biotechnology without reference to the dangers we face--both from these fields themselves and from our environmental problems--that could put an end to and even reverse what we call progress.

One of the world's most prominent climate scientists, Tim Garrett, believes that our economic system simply cannot bring about the emissions reductions needed to stop climate change. Economic activity and carbon emissions are too closely linked.

This is just another way of saying that the idea of progress is embedded in the social and economic system, and that we cannot attack carbon emissions without attacking the idea of progress itself. Here is the question Garrett is really posing: If the progress we've made since the beginning of industrial civilization only leads to a complete reversal of all our supposed gains in the long run, can we really call what is happening progress?

And so, we must ask: Could we live in a world in which the idea of progress is abandoned?

Could we stand the thought that tomorrow and the day after that and the day after that might feel endlessly the same, our personal power neither increasing nor diminishing--or worse yet, possibly diminishing somewhat over time.

Living without the hope of progress didn't stop the ancient Greeks from creating art, architecture, literature and philosophy that we still admire and learn from today. Could humans once again learn to value change without demanding that it be progress? In truth, our fate depends on the answer to that question.

 • Kurt Cobb is an author, speaker, and columnist focusing on energy and the environment. He has been a regular contributor to the Energy Voices section of The Christian Science Monitor and is author of the peak-oil-themed novel Prelude.

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Just for Fun!

SUBHEAD: Growing up near NYC I was a fan of 50's doowop music. People actually did this music on the street then.

By Juan Wilson on 4 July 2017 for Island Breath -
(http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2017/07/just-for-fun.html)


Image above: Still frame from video below of group singing MMMbop.

Have a great holiday where ever you are. I'm not talking about patriotic fervor of loyalty to American militarism. I mean just have some fun than lightens your step and makes you smile. I stumbled on video below plowing through YouTube last night, and it has made me smile and laugh several times.

These guys are having real fun. My daughter Laura saw it and emailed me:

"I love to see how happy people are sometimes when they sing or play, love that feeling when you can't help dancing and laughing as you perform, then you know it's some good healing medicine!"

MMMbop Doo Wop version is a cover of the song written and performed by Hanson.  The artists are Kenton Chen, Luke Edgemon, Matt Bloyd, and mario Jose (vocals), Conrad Bauer (guitar), Adam Kubota (bass), Andy Sanesi (drums) and Scott Bradlee (piano).


Image above: MMMbop Doo Wop version.\ YouTube logo for full screen.  From (https://youtu.be/iEejfq1KhkU). See also Scott Bradlee's (www.postmodernjukebox.com) for more period music recreated today.

Lyrics to MMbop
Written and performed by Hanson

Oh oh oh oh oh
Yeah
You have so many relationships in this life
Only one or two will last
You go through all the pain and strife
Then you turn your back and they're gone so fast
Oh yeah
And they're gone so fast, yeah
Oh
So hold on the ones who really care
In the end they'll be the only ones there
And when you get old and start losing your hair
Can you tell me who will still care
Can you tell me who will still care?
Oh care
Mmmbop, ba duba dop
Ba du bop, ba duba dop
Ba du bop, ba duba dop
Ba du, yeah
Mmmbop, ba duba dop
Ba du bop, ba du dop
Ba du bop, ba du dop
Ba du, yeah
Said oh yeah
In an mmmbop they're gone
Yeah yeah
Plant a seed, plant a flower, plant a rose
You can plant any one of those
Keep planting to find out which one grows
It's a secret no one knows
It's a secret no one knows
Oh, no one knows
Mmmbop, ba duba dop
Ba du bop, ba duba dop
Ba du bop, ba duba dop
Ba du, yeah
Mmmbop, ba duba dop
Ba du bop, ba du dop
Ba du bop, ba du dop
Ba du, yeah
In an mmmbop they're gone
In an mmmbop they're not there
In an mmmbop they're gone
In an mmmbop they're not there
Until you lose your hair
Oh
But you don't care, yeah
Mmmbop, ba duba dop
Ba du bop, ba duba dop
Ba du bop, ba duba dop
Ba du, yeah
Mmmbop, ba duba dop
Ba du bop, ba du dop
Ba du bop, ba du dop
Ba du, yeah
Can you tell me? oh
No you can't 'cause you don't know
Can you tell me? oh yeah
You say you can but you don't know
Can you tell me? oh (Which flower's going to grow?)
No you can't 'cause you don't know
Can you tell me? (If it's going to be a daisy or a rose?)
You say you can but you don't know
Can you tell me? oh (Which flower's going to grow?)
No you can't 'cause you don't know
Can you tell me?
You say you can but you don't know
You say you can but you don't know
You don't know
You don't know, oh
Mmmbop, duba
Du bop, du
Yeah, yeah
Mmmbop, duba
Du bop, du
Oh yeah
Mmmbop, ba duba dop
Ba du bop, ba duba dop
Ba du bop, ba duba dop
Ba du, yeah
Mmmbop, ba duba dop
Ba du bop, ba du dop
Ba du bop, ba du dop
Ba du, yeah
Mmmbop, ba duba dop
Ba du bop, ba duba dop
Ba du bop, ba duba dop
Ba du, yeah
Mmmbop, ba duba dop
Ba du bop, ba du dop
Ba du bop, ba du dop
Ba du, yeah
Can u tell me? oh
No you can't 'cause you don't know
Can you tell me?
You say you can but you don't know
Say you can but you don't know

Another video I watched last night was the kind of music heard acapella from young on the tenement streets of the Lower east Side on New York in the 1960s. In the 50's the singers were teenagers. Now they are older. The video below was recorded 8 August 2014 on a New York sidewalk.


Image above: Unidentified doowop artists sing "Wonderful World". See more at source http://www.tinuonline.com).From (https://youtu.be/qW025ccPx5M).

(What a) Wonderful World

Written and performed by Sam Cooke

Don't know much about history
Don't know much biology
Don't know much about a science book,
Don't know much about the french I took

But I do know that I love you,
And I know that if you love me, too,
What a wonderful world this would be

Don't know much about geography,
Don't know much trigonometry
Don't know much about algebra,
Don't know what a slide rule is for

But I do know that one and one is two,
And if this one could be with you,
What a wonderful world this would be

Now, I don't claim to be an "A" student,
But I'm tryin' to be
For maybe by being an "A" student, baby,
I can win your love for me

Don't know much about history,
Don't know much biology
Don't know…(fade away)

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Sculptures from the Anthropocene

SUBHEAD: Once lost, do the wonders of our world just get forgotten and cease to mean anything to us?

By Glenn Morris on 12 June 2017 for The Dark Mountain -
(http://dark-mountain.net/blog/sculptures-from-the-anthropocene/)


Image above: Sculpture #1 From Anthropocene series by Glenn Morris. From original article.

Our tenuous hold on life – framed, as it were, within our doctrine of ‘living in the moment’ – seems all the more fragile when one considers the sheer inability displayed by the human species to understand and act on the threats now posed to society.

The damage wreaked on our environment by the emissions of toxic chemicals, habitat destruction and the paradigm of ‘growth whatever the cost’ continues, and yet for world governments it’s still business as usual.

From an early age (birth to be precise), our education is designed to rule out informed interrogation into the order of things; subject matter is fed to us purely to equip us for the world of work. The idea that people could live and thrive in an alternative construct of society does not even get discussed, unless it is past cultures which are conveniently described as ‘primitive’.

The receptive brain of a child soaks up all it is told; by the time the few with enough imagination to challenge the perceived wisdom voice their thoughts it is too late, they realise they can have any colour – as long as it is black.

As a child, my mother took me to London’s Natural History Museum and, like most children, I was spellbound by the huge dinosaur skeletons – their vastness, their teeth and claws, the sheer scale left me wide-eyed with wonder; and yet, despite the obvious power of these creatures, we were told at school that they were weak and died out very quickly, whereas humans were highly successful, they invented tools, grew food, and, above all, were ‘civilised’.

I believed this. In reality, modern human time can be measured in a few tens of thousands of years (with only the last 200 years witnessing the destruction of the environment on a major scale, to the point where the future of humanity is brought into question), whereas the dinosaurs, that weak, ill-equipped species, actually existed for around 160 million years! To my way of thinking, that’s pretty successful.

Seeing these vast vestiges of past life standing still on display in a museum setting, and seeing how we, as humans, view ourselves in terms of time and our place in the world, led me to the area of creative activity that I am currently working on. Humankind now faces the end of an existence in which the planet’s resources can be plundered, destroyed and polluted with complete abandon.

It would be easy, as is often done, to blame individuals; in fact, the simple truth is that the current way society is organised is based on growth and profit – the environment, the life with which we share the planet, and indeed people themselves, come second to these objectives.

Most people find it impossible to imagine a society that is fundamentally different from that in which we now live – we are told that people are ‘naturally’ selfish, it’s just progress or ‘we’ve got to move on’.

Why must we believe this? It is interesting to consider than when the Palaeolithic hunter-gatherer societies made the transformation into the Neolithic, agrarian societies, this did not happen over thousands of years – it was a matter of a few generations.

To change society into a form in which we grasp the concept of what it is to be human and how we live alongside each other in a mutually happy and beneficial way can happen; it just needs people to understand that this society is flawed and cannot be allowed to continue. I say again – it is not the people but the model we choose to live under.

As I write this, a brief radio news item tells us that scientists have reported that two-thirds of coral on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef have now been destroyed – bleached and dead as the water temperatures rise. This was quickly followed by some sports news, then probably forgotten by most listeners.

Once lost, do the wonders of our world just get forgotten and cease to mean anything to us? I have never seen a coral reef, but I certainly want it to continue to exist, as I do wildflower meadows, elephants, honey bees, butterflies and indeed, numerous life forms that are now threatened with extinction.


Image above: Sculpture #2 From Anthropocene series by Glenn Morris. From original article.

Imagine for a moment the Palaeolithic hunter; he is hungry, his sense are heightened and acute to a level we simply cannot imagine, he looks out onto a landscape untouched by human activity: rivers full of fish, unimaginable numbers of birds and animals, the air clear and scented with the nearby plants – that is his normality.

Would he be troubled by the past or future? What we see today is our reality; if we have never heard a corncrake or seen flocks of lapwings, can we be expected to regret their disappearance?

Do young people, shackled as they are to a life of screens, social media and the importance of self, trouble themselves over coral reefs or the decline of butterflies? Do they need to?

What they experience is their normality. But I am worried, very worried that our senses have been cauterised and the sheer beauty of life is ebbing away and; in the end, it will not be there even if we want it.

I am fortunate in that my working life has allowed me to spend considerable periods of time over many years living in remote areas, predominantly the Arctic.

Through living with the Inuit, still – to some extent, a hunter-gatherer culture– one gets a profound sense of the importance of our connection with the land and animals that provide the means of survival; furthermore (and this seems to happen only after a relatively long period of time), living in a place where human figures are mere specks within a vast untouched landscape, a true wilderness, gives one a clear and deep sense of just how insignificant we are.

To journey through a wilderness with an open mind and for a long enough period of time can allow a person to begin to experience a different level of consciousness which, in ‘normal’ life, would not be attainable.

Some years ago I was nearing the end of a 400-mile journey across Greenland’s vast ice cap. I had pulled a loaded sledge containing my food, tent and fuel, but little else for comfort or entertainment. I had one companion.

After 40 days of grinding labor across endless ice fields, mountains and crevasses, I saw the fjords and mountains of the west coast; by this time we had virtually no food and I knew the feeling of hunger.

The reason I mention this is because as we left the ice and entered the Arctic rocks and tundra, at the point where the ice sheet meets ‘land’, I had an overwhelming feeling of connection and ‘oneness’ with the hostile terrain I found myself in – it seemed somehow linked to my inner self; I felt hardwired into the landscape, liberated, and was seeing my surroundings through the eyes of a wild animal. It was a truly wonderful feeling which, sadly, dissipated soon after we finally reached a small town on the west coast.

I felt later that this power of connection to nature, the environment and landscape would have been normal for early hunter-gatherer cultures, so much so that they would not have reflected on it any more than we might on other human responses such as sadness, love or pain.

The current human condition, particularly in the western world, gives little opportunity and virtually denies people the ability to engage with nature and the environment.

The fact that beauty, wonder, happiness and the profound feeling of what it is to be human can be obtained without cost, and simply by engaging with our world, does not sit well with market forces or with companies trying to sell happiness through acquisition.

Our society has now reached the point where scientists are describing the beginning of a new epoch – Anthropocene. The actual geological strata is being affected by the production of plastics, concrete and radionuclides.

This, alongside continued and increasing production of carbon means that the human species is successfully and relentlessly destroying the agar jelly of its own petri dish. Society has now reached a state where the majority of people have, not out of choice, ceased to have links with or engage with nature and the environment in a meaningful way.

Why are we not seeing mass worldwide protests against a society that is leading us by the hand, willingly it would seem, to an existence that, at best, will be irretrievably damaged or worse, terrifying and dangerous?


Image above: Sculpture #3 From Anthropocene series by Glenn Morris. From original article.

As a sculptor, these questions and concerns constantly flow through my thought processes and subconsciously, or even consciously, guide the chisels, drills and clay of what I do.

My chosen materials– stone, metals and earth– and the means of construction– fire and the impact of hammer against stone – also seem to bring something of the land into the work.

I have been privileged and lucky enough to feel and have intimate contact with the beauty of our world, but sometimes feel that I am shouting at people who are moving towards danger through sound-proofed glass.

I make sculpture because I feel happy working in three dimensions but, moreover, it is the way I feel best able to explore my inner concerns and the way humans have become so entirely self-absorbed and inured to uncomfortable and incontrovertible evidence of damage to the very things that sustain us.

My most recent works set out to confront and explore the way in which we view our past as a species, and our relationship with time itself. I am interested in how we erroneously see ourselves as indestructible.

The three figures constructed under the generic title of ‘Anthropocene’ form part of a wider group, designed not as sculptures to be seen close up, but within a landscape, or even ‘unseen’. They were assembled and placed in remote, often mountainous or moorland settings, and left in situ.

I did not mind whether they were seen or not; if they were seen, then ideally it would be from a distance. Although the figures are three times life size, and at close quarters have a monumental sense about them, they rapidly become insignificant, even invisible, once any distance is put between them and the viewer.

I tried to imbue both a sense of power and sadness or melancholy into the figures. I wanted all to have qualities of dark industry as well as extreme vulnerability.

In his recent book The Great Derangement, Amitav Ghosh examines the inability, of literature and politics to embrace and grasp the enormity of the catastrophe that awaits us, and questions how future generations will look back on our response (denial?) to this.

I feel that artists should be dealing with the unspeakable, using this conduit to communicate in a visceral way that sometimes only art can.

Climate change – like warfare, pollution, starvation and the alteration of the planet’s surface – is a symptom of how our society is organized; until humans realize that a system based on growth and profit will ultimately self destruct, then we can expect ‘business as usual’ as we herald the dawn of the new epoch.

All photographs are from Glenn Morris’s ‘Anthropocene’ series. The sculptures are made from recycled timbers and forged iron.

• Glenn Morris‘s work is inspired and informed by the beauty and harshness of the environment in the far north, and by our relationship and response to the loss of things that possess beauty in any form. He works predominantly in stone and mixed media, using traditional carving techniques. The forms and works tend to follow two or three lines of exploration: the sensual and feminine, the masculine, industrial form and more objective comments on things environmental. He has a first class degree in sculpture and has had work exhibited in public areas and also at the Royal Academy. glennmorris.co.uk

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Radicle and Rhizomati

SUBHEAD: In ancient times herbalists were called the rhizomati, meaning ‘root gatherers’ or ‘root cutters’.

By Lisa Fazio on 17 May 2017 for Dark Mountain -
(http://dark-mountain.net/blog/radicle-and-rhizomati-notes-from-a-folk-herbalist/)


Image above: Painting "weed Wife" on section of oak burrby Rima Staines 2013 (www.rimastaines.com). From original article.

Hierarchy
Power structures establish various systems to ensure the organisation of interrelationships and the distribution of resources throughout a group, community, or ecosystem. In human terms, these systems become our tribes, societies, and civilisations. The dominant power structure in the Western world at this time is capitalist, colonial, and hierarchical, with resources being distributed (or, more accurately, hoarded) from the top down.

Before capitalism, many of us who have descended from the nations of Europe have a cultural history of feudalism or some other social-ranking hierarchy. Feudal society is the rootstock of capitalism. One of the primary differences subsumed from this medieval power structure by early capitalism was the waged exchange of labor.

The feudal peasants were non-waged, that is, not paid in monetary currency for their labour. Instead, they were paid by an exchange of resources such as land, shelter, and farming rights. Both capitalist and feudal hierarchies were architected to direct and control the circulation of currency from those at the top, who are the elite and few, down to those at the bottom, who are the poor and many.

Capitalism depends on unrestrained growth and production, the manufacturing of material goods, and the extraction of resources to meet these ends. Colonisation, the imperious expansion of geographic, cultural, and political boundaries becomes requisite — with all its cruelty and overconsumption — as a result of this excessive and continuous reach to sustain the unsustainable.

When contemplating the quagmire of obstacles and institutions within our capitalist society that interfere with the equitable and just interchange of currency and access to resources, I find myself motivated to explore less oppressive economic, social, and political human relationships.

In doing so, I have become aligned with that ever-gallant and hopeful group of folks dismissed as unrealistic dreamers.

We ‘dreamers’ always hold fast to the truth that the wilful designation of creation and power can be delineated into a network of horizontal or lateral functions that make greed, conquest, and competition unnecessary and invalid, except in extreme conditions.

In the words of Larry Wall, creator of Perl, the open-sourced computer programming language: ‘There is more than one way to do it.’

Perl, and Wall’s band of merry hackers, revolutionized the internet with a coding script that encourages other programmers to interject or hack, as they say in the business, their own design style and innovations that contribute to improvements and success for everyone using the network.¹

These internet wizards built the bridge between those of us who simply want to use the internet and those who actually understand it.

I personally am not remotely skilled in the exotic language of programming or the strange tongue of capitalist economics. As one called to the path along the hedges, in the woods, the fields, the gardens, and all the green, untamed and untrailed places, I have found another way to do things in learning the ways of the world beneath the dark shadows of treetops and in the soils with the rooted ones.

As a folk herbalist practising in the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains of New York State, I live remotely, keeping a distant participation to some degree (perhaps never enough?), in the mainstream rush and panic of daily life in the ‘real’ world of productivity, competition and corporate time sheets.

My work with others, however, brings me into direct contact with the consequent ills, both physical and emotional, of life within the overworked, overstimulated and ‘red in tooth and claw’ system.

My long hours and days gathering and growing the herbs to share with my clients, family, neighbours and friends feels like a different world or alternate reality in contrast to the interface I must make with the civilised world of offices, fluorescent lights and concrete.

While I truly love all parts of my work, this polar interchange always clearly elucidates for me the distinct difference between the world of unruly winds and wild waters, and the tame and burning filaments of electricity enslaved within the lightbulb.

Much of my herbal work is spent with a shovel, basket and clippers as I dig and gather roots, leaves, flowers, bark and berries that are prepared into teas and other herbal formulations. I make every practical effort to harvest from local sources. This requires me to be tuned into to the seasonal cycles and growing patterns of wild plants.

I also grow a variety of herbs in my own garden, and have become acutely tuned into conservation and ethical harvesting techniques that ensure the long-term survival and proliferation of our wild medicine plants.

This art and practice of traditional herbalism has deep roots into the history of every culture on earth. These roots have twisted, turned and intertwined throughout thousands of years of human civilisation, often being lost and forgotten as the quality of our communal engagements and our narrative with the world has placed humans on top of a hierarchy that centralises power into an above-ground, rootless, disembodied, hegemony.

That said, I think it’s important here to acknowledge that hierarchies occur naturally in wild communities, especially in herd animals, and that hierarchy is not always played out as an oppressive power structure. It can be an excellent tool for ensuring survival, protection and the health of a herd or community when based on consensus, synergy and cooperative principles.

Becoming radicle

Radicle: a rootlike subdivision, the portion of the embryo that gives rise to the root system of the plant
— biology-online.org

Radicle describes the first part of the seed to emerge after germination that subsequently becomes the primary root. Radicles and the roots they become are a most powerful natural force that, as every city sidewalk knows, will crack and divide concrete. The soil depends upon these mighty revolutionaries to deeply move, turn and aerate the surface of the planet so that life can ascend from it. Plants ‘know’ that in order for productive growth to be sustained, they must first set their roots and begin to make contact with the vast and nutritious field of minerals and essential microbes within the substratum.

Plant roots have many different and effective growing styles, but my favourite are those that are rhizomatic. A rhizome is actually an underground stem that is rootlike; it spreads horizontally, sending out shoots and creating a lateral chain of connection where new sprouts can emerge.

Rhizomes are non-hierarchical and extremely resilient because even if you dig up one part, the other sections will continue to grow and proliferate. Rhizomes have no top or bottom, any point can be connected to any other. They can be broken off at any point and will always be able to start up again.

Their network can be entered at any point; there is no central origin. And because there is no central regulatory force, rhizomes function as open systems where connections can emerge regardless of similarities or differences. Freedom of expression exists within a rhizome.

Rhizomes, therefore, are heterogeneous and can create multiplicities, or many different roots, that are sovereign but still in contact and communication with all other parts of the system. This is in contrast to, for instance, a tree, which has a central origin or trunk from which all of its roots and branches emerge. Disconnected from that source, they are no longer in direct contact with their growing system.

As author and storyteller Martin Shaw writes about ‘the rhizomatic universe’ in his book A Branch From the Lightening Tree:

The rhizome is a plant root system that grows by accretion rather than by separate or oppositional means. There is no defined center to its structure, and it doesn’t relate to any generative model. Each part remains in contact with the other by way of roots that become shoots and underground stems. We see that the rhizome is de-territorial, that it stands apart from the tree structure that fixes an order, based on radiancy and binary opposition.

Learning methods and cultural philosophies have been inspired and developed from the patterns observed within rhizomatic root systems. One such concept was introduced by philosopher Guilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst Félix Guattari. From their book on the subject, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia:

As a model for culture, the rhizome resists the organizational structure of the root-tree system, which charts causality along chronological lines and looks for the original source of ‘things’ and looks towards the pinnacle or conclusion of those ‘things.’

A rhizome, on the other hand, is characterized by ‘ceaselessly established connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles.’ Rather than narrativize history and culture, the rhizome presents history and culture as a map or wide array of attractions and influences with no specific origin or genesis, for a ‘rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo.’ The planar movement of the rhizome resists chronology and organization, instead favoring a nomadic system of growth and propagation.

In this model, culture spreads like the surface of a body of water, spreading towards available spaces or trickling downwards towards new spaces through fissures and gaps, eroding what is in its way. The surface can be interrupted and moved, but these disturbances leave no trace, as the water is charged with pressure and potential to always seek its equilibrium, and thereby establish smooth space.

Examples of rhizomatic patterns exist throughout the living world and include plants such as ginger, crabgrass, violets and, my favourite, wild sarsaparilla (Aralia nudicalis). In human terms we can see many examples of rhizomatic systems, such as we discussed above about Larry Wall and the internet, even amid the context of complex societal hierarchy. New economic and environmental models of power such as permaculture, bioregionalism, and re-localisation are designed to work as horizontal, cooperative, synergistic, and non-competitive systems.

The Rhizomati

Rhizome: A continuously growing horizontal underground stem that puts out lateral shoots and adventitious roots at intervals.
— Oxford English Dictionary online

Herbal medicines are, and always have been, a rhizomatic source of the equitable and lateral distribution of basic needs that seeks not to hoard, commercialise, and capitalise on healthcare or to dole it out only to those with access to the necessary currency. Herbs themselves have not escaped the thralls of patriarchal conquest.

All of our modern medicine was founded on the insight gained from the common people and their unwritten relationship with the medicine of the plants.

Many of the early European physicians gathered their knowledge from village herbalists, often women who could not read or write (as the patriarchy forbade them). These women are rarely even mentioned in the published literature of medical history.

An example can be found in the book written by Dr William Withering (1774-1799), the man who is said to have ‘discovered’ the medicinal use of foxglove.

The very first page of his book makes a short mention of a village wise woman who used it in a formula for dropsy: ‘I was told that it had been a long-kept secret by an old woman in Shropshire, who had sometimes made cures after the more regular practitioners had failed.’

The village healers were not elite or favoured by the ruling classes, and in fact were historically perceived as a threat. Their healing work was focused on the direct and intimate needs of their local community, which they frequently sought to empower and support. Traditional herbal medicine was not motivated by profit nor was it sanctioned by the overculture.

In our current times, herbal medicine and plant-based culture has re-emerged in many forms and I perceive it is in a major cycle of transformation.

Many call it the ‘herbal renaissance’ and it’s not clear yet what the trajectory will be, as the world seemingly changes at the speed of light.

However, the core values remain inextricably connected to the interdependent place-based character of the village healer and his or her reciprocal conversation with the wild and green world.

Our ancestors in healing, the long-ago plant people, were in service to their human community as well as the medicine allies they harvested from the hedges. These plant people often lived on the edge of town and worked as not only healers of physical sickness, but also practitioners of spirit, shamans of the village soul, and knowers of, or in old English ‘cunners’ of, the ‘wort’, or herb.

Some were called wortcunners. Some were called magicians. Some were called witches. There are many different types of herbalists now and in the past. In ancient times — interestingly! — they were called the rhizomati, or by some sources, rhizotomoki, meaning ‘root gatherers’ or ‘root cutters’.

The rhizomati were rhizomatic practitioners of underground and lateral energy patterns as found in the plant kingdom. According to Christian Rätsch, ‘the rhizotomoki still spoke with the plant spirits…’ He adds:

‘These root-gatherers observed the gods sacred to the respective plant. They made use of the moon’s energy and knew the particular oath formulas for each plant. Witchcraft medicine belongs to the spiritual and cultural legacy of the rhizotomoki.’

Rätsch asserts, therefore, that ‘witchcraft medicine is wild medicine. It is uncontrollable, it surpasses the ruling order, it is anarchy. It belongs to the wilderness.’² Anarchy and wildness, in this sense, are not instances of chaos, mayhem, or lack of a system; rather, it is a system that is self-organised, organic, self-regulated, and impervious to oppressive external control mechanisms.

The rhizomati were carriers of traditional healing knowledge and have emerged at various points in time. In fact, as would a rhizome — going underground for a time and sprouting their legacy up to the surface in another place or time. Renowned modern-day herbalist David Hoffman has compared herbalists of our time to the Greek ‘rhizotomoi’ who held a very special place in the hierarchy of health-care practitioners during ancient times. He asserts that, now as then, herbal healers ‘breach so many realms.’

It is important to understand that the rhizotomoi were not merely the garden labourers that grew the plants, nor did they have the status of academic physicians who dispensed already prepared pills and formulas.

Hoffman says: ‘They were people who knew the plants, knew where they grew, knew how to cultivate them, knew how to collect them appropriately, knew how to make the medicine, but then also knew how to use the medicine in the context of the people’s needs… they were herbalists.’


The legacy of these herbalists has carried their medicine bags into the vernacular, or kitchen, gardens of the past few hundred years in Europe and North America.

Such gardens belonged to people of any class, and provided subsistence food and medicine to individuals and families. These communal plots were stewarded by the rhizomati and provided a local source of plants and seeds, were designed to meet the natural rhythms of the seasons, and were small enough to adapt to changing local conditions.

They were places ‘in which “herb women” and rhizomati, root gatherers, are a key source of plant materials and seeds, and garden innovations are shared among peers—family, neighbors, friends—rather than distributed by a central authority.’³

Today’s root cutters, root gatherers, folk herbalists, plant charmers, and the like, face unknown challenges as the trail leads into the future of a global, capitalist economy. Herbal medicine has become increasingly mainstream and, will no doubt, continue to be commodified and profiteered at some level.

The overculture has made many recent bids to commercialise, exploit and restrict the use of plants by the people. There have been recent regulations enacted that limit the ability of herbalists to maintain home-based businesses, thereby restricting access to local products and serving the burgeoning corporate herbal industry.4

That is not to say that there is not a place in our health-care system for phyto-physicians that work with herbs allopathically. Plant-based preparations have already found a place in mainstream bio-medicine as a complementary modality, a method of prevention, and as a tool of synergy to potentise pharmaceutical protocols.

However, this does not concede the necessity of the decentralized, community focused, and client-centred practice of folk herbalists. The modern rhizomati are a source of resilience and empowerment for our society and world, thanks to their interface with plants and people.

This resilience will come not only at our resistance to capitalist exploits, but in our ability to establish rhizomatic, horizontal and local systems of vital sustenance, imagination, and community.

Change and dissent are enacted on even the simplest, most humane level when we just become aware of equitable alternatives to our dominant power structure. This I believe to be true well beyond the realms of herbal medicine practice. It has implications for our homes, businesses, communities local and beyond, schools, food production, the arts, and developing technologies.

The key to the door of social justice and change is the knowledge that there are other ways to do it — as well as in the courage and innovation of those that are willing to imagine more than one possibility.

May the rhizomati live again and may we all rise rooted!

Footnotes

1. Silberman, Steve, Neurotribes, New York: Avery, 2015
2. Müller-Ebeling, Claudia, Christian Rätsch, and Wolf-Dieter Storl, Witchcraft Medicine: Healing Arts, Shamanic Practices, and Forbidden Plants, Rochester, Vermont Inner Traditions, 2003
3. ‘Vernacular Gardens’, Wyrtig.com, For gardeners with a sense of history, 2015. Accessed February 18, 2017
   
4. For more on these regulations or the cGMP laws: A Radicle blogspot. FDA cGMP compliance open source project. aradicle.blogspot.com, 2015. Accessed February 18, 2017

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