OM-8/31/2014 High Expectations, Failed Perspective

Aleathia says:

I realized this morning after a long, hard night at work that I can only do as much as I can do.  I place a lot of expectations on myself to be the best that I can be.  This leaves me with a severe character sometimes and basically makes me "unfun".  I think I put these expectations on my 12 year old and in some way it doesn't allow her to be a kid when she needs to most.

The tween years of childhood have been difficult for me.  She is distant and then close.  I am important but not important.  I am confused.  There is no straight lines to draw, no dots to connect and this is hard on a person with expectations of herself.  Sometimes I will just have to let go and leave it to the hands of fate and keep a watchful eye knowing I may not be able to control the situation.

In the end most everything works itself out.  I have to believe this.  I have to remember this or I will live out my days in anxiety and a self-imposed misery that does not need to be there.  Basically, shit happens.  I have to learn to step over it.

Quills and Frills-8/30/2014 Aleathia Drehmer, Poetry

Aleathia says:

Today was supposed to be writing prompt day but as the end of summer will have it....we didn't get our shit together.  Maybe next week!

Instead, I will leave a new and challenging poem that I just wrote.  It is rough still, maybe a bit raw, but it is all I have to give right now.

A Quiet Place to Hide

Three perfect lines

cut superficially through

the surface of her skin

in the dark light

of a tree house

far from home.

The knife is stolen, 

a secret, for now,

something innocent

at the time, something

hauntingly curious.

It begins this way.

Small lies, small thefts

and a way to balance

the things she can't

yet understand.

Life is difficult

in a changing girls body

               dysmorphic thoughts

   an aloneness she loves

                               and hates

       simultaneously.

She wants to see

what it is like

in the controlled chaos

in the place where she

has few secrets to keep.

I know I don't know her

just as my mother

did not know me.

I starved and binged myself

to hide and transform and feel alive.

Food was my blanket, my secret

in plain view, my sadness

that I had no place to deposit

but inside the pit

of my aching stomach.

I didn't dare share

these shadowy feelings

just as she doesn't share 

them with me.

This may be

the only thing

I understand

of my child;

the only thing

that truly scares me 

in the end.

Aleathia Drehmer 2014

Art Bomb-8/29/2014 Franz Von Stuck

Aleathia says:

Recently I saw a post roll by on my friend Beto Palaio's Facebook page of an artist named Franz Von Stuck.  This artist is pretty intense.

Franz Von Stuck (1863-1928) was a German Symbolist/Art Nouveau painter, sculptor, engraver, and architect.

He designed beautiful engraved door plates like this one.

Von Stuck also worked in plaster casting.  His most memorable being this one of Beethoven and another of Medusa.

This painting of Frau Feez is what really caught my eye at the time. I just love the sensual look on her face and her bedroom eyes.  I like the circular framing inside the square and the tender softness of her appearance.  Much of the other work that I looked up is very dark and menacing, but has merit as well.  Take some time and look Franz Von Stuck up for a larger selection.

Foodies-8/28/2014 Street Food

Aleathia says:

This week I found a cool cook book tucked back in the stacks.  Susan Feniger's Street Food looks at cultural cuisine that you can find at street vendors.  These are foods you would have to wander around to find in the heart of a communities cultural center.

There are some exotic wonderful foods in this book.  If I weren't running out the door for vacation I would put a recipe or two, so you'll just have to find this book at your local library or book store and explore it for yourself.

Lit Bits-8/27/2014 Ralph Waldo Emerson

Aleathia says:

We could all use a little Ralph Waldo Emerson sometimes.  I tend to not be a huge fan of proper poetry as I have grown up writing free verse, but this little gem speaks to me.

Compensation

Why should I keep holiday,

When other men have none?

Why but because when these are gay,

I sit and mourn alone.

And why when mirth unseals all tongues

Should mine alone be dumb?

Ah! late I spoke to silent throngs,

And now their hour is come. 

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Let's Go Somewhere-8/26/2014 Seabrook Beach, New Hampshire

Aleathia says:

I am a fan of beaches...or maybe it is better to say I am a fan of the ocean and its byproducts.  I can do without the glaring sun, the sunburns, the sand in my bathing suit, and throngs of people.  I love a good brooding beach, the kind that writers dream about, that makes you want to walk for miles mesmorized by the sound of crashing waves and seagulls.  The kind of beach that requires a sweater.

This is Seabrook Beach in New Hampshire.  One summer when I was 11 my mom and her boyfriend Tony took me with them to spend the week.  It was an amazing time.  I spent long days walking the beach, playing with kids, making sand castles, and picking shells that I would not be able to take home with me.

I had my first ever summer love.  That summer they were dredging out an area of the shore and we sat on the jetty and watched thousands of gallons of ocean floor sand pile up on the beach.  There were loads of nasty looking creatures and mystical giant purple sea cucumbers that the workers would pull out with their gloves so we could see them.

This was also the same summer that my crush and I went "rafting" on our new Budweiser rafts being shy and making twinkly eyed chatter at one another as we drifted out on the current into the ocean.  His mother became a speck on the beach and we worked hard to try and swim back to shore without drowning.  I was scared to death to lose the rafts my mother had just bought despite keeping them hindered our ability to swim.  I didn't find out until my mother saved us by swimming out that his mother did not know how to swim and was afraid of the ocean.

I felt at home there cradled in the immensity of the ocean knowing it was filled with wonders and dangers and possibility.  I have thought of that beach every summer for the last 30 years.  I have never been back.  I think it is time.

Music Monday-8/25/2014 Milk Carton Kids

Aleathia says:

I was driving to work the other day and NPR had The Prairie Home Companion on and the featured musical guest was The Milk Carton Kids.  I only got to hear a song or two before I arrived, but I liked it.  It reminds me slightly of the best things I loved about Jason Molina and Bon Iver's first album.  In essence, it is right up my damn alley.  So, please enjoy NPR's tiny desk concert series featuring The Milk Carton Kids:

OM-8/24/2014 Pema Chodron, Smile at Fear

Aleathia says:

In the last week or so my thyroid has been malfunctioning which causing me to have a host of problems especially extreme fatigue, unwarranted depression, increased irritability, body aches and an inability to concentrate.  It is very frustrating.  It renders very small problems into unfathomable mountains to scale.  This is hard not only on me, but on my family.  It is hard to explain to them what is going on.  It is like life exists in thick walls of jello.  It is hard to move through.  It is sticky and unpleasant.  It is hard to see reality through this veil and everything seems like a burden.  A tiny pill changes these symptoms.  I have to jump through the hoops to get it and will most likely have to wait until Monday before I can get in to see the doctor and get blood work etc.

Again, Pema Chodron helps.  Enjoy her talk on smiling at fear and living from the heart.

Quills and Frills-8/23/2014 Aleathia Drehmer, Short Fiction

Aleathia says:

I putting a story up that I wrote in 2011.  I'm not sure anyone has ever seen it really.  It has flaws, I'm sure.

My Heart Keeps Remembering

Tosha leaned forward in the darkness of her room.  Her emptiness hung there like a butchered duck in the window of the shop in Chinatown where she and Bruce had stopped to gawk at its ugliness.  He picked San Francisco for their honeymoon.  She thought it simple and too close to home, but he had dazzled her with hidden sweetness and a gentle understanding to the things that made her purr.  Why was Tosha thinking of that duck in the dirty window and the sounds of languages she would never understand? She could not fathom why, not at this moment.

Now, she was in Oregon, alone, submerged in Portland with its lushness, green haze and one way streets that drove her crazy before Bruce showed her how to navigate her frustration.  The city opened up to her then with Bruce by her side dressed in a smile that was never less than genuine.  Tosha considered herself to be mostly unlucky in this world until he found her that day on the walking bridge in the Japanese Gardens.

It was spring and Bruce saw her under the blossoms of the cherry tree, chestnut hair framing a solemn mouth, imagining what it would be like listening to her heart beneath his ear.  Her eyes were down cast, she was watching the koi do their intimate dance beneath lotus pads.  Bruce walked slowly, quietly and came onto the bridge.  Tosha hadn’t heard his shoes scuffle the wood mesmerized by the world inside the world she was living.  Bruce stood next to her with his pinky touching hers.

Tosha felt a sudden warmth and looked at this man’s hand sharing a space that was reserved for lovers.  He was a stranger and yet, she had no objection in the silence between them.  She couldn’t bring herself to behold him gazing back to the water, but the koi disbanded, forcing her to lift her eyes to his.  He stared at her with such conviction. She knew there would always be something between them.

Alone in this night, with Bruce underground only three days, Tosha couldn’t find reality to be any sort of comfort.  She slid from the bed looking out the window.  The moon was a wafer shy of full and mocking her.  Tosha found her arms sliding into her coat, her feet into the loafers she wore for gardening and her keys in her hand.  The doorknob felt cold in her palm as she turned it.  She drove her old Volvo through town and when she finally stopped the engine quiet, she was in front of the Japanese Gardens.

She stood at the gates that were closed like her newly damaged heart.  Tosha shook their solidity until the bars rattled like a ghost story.  She remembered they had found a hole in the fence a long time ago and had snuck in to make love on the sumptuous grass.  Tosha ran with arms pumping and legs burning against the chill of the moon-filled night.  She prayed it was still there, that one flaw in the park, that one chance to get him back.

Breathless, Tosha stopped at the torn seam in the fence.  She removed her coat to fit through but the years found her less agile than she once was as her skin scraped raw across the rough edges of the chain link.  She didn’t care about anything right now except the bridge where she first understood the meaning of existence.  Her legs carried her in the sparse light of the moon until she saw it in the distance.  Her breathing heavy still; her heart bursting through her ribs with expectation.

She removed her shoes feeling the faded, worn wood beneath her feet.  It was strangely powerful as one foot fell in front of the other until reaching the apex of the bridge underneath the cherry tree.  Tosha couldn’t see the koi in the dark, but she stared into the water regardless.  A gale swept across the gardens livening her skin with goose bumps and an overwhelming feeling that Bruce was here with her.

Tosha felt that warmth again and she couldn’t look for fear that she were dreaming.  She couldn’t risk the disappointment in discovering her insanity, because she felt that warmth like an undeniable truth. Her head turned without opening her eyes at first.  She coaxed them slowly and beside her was the pale, translucent outline of her dear Bruce just as young as the day she had met him—so handsome, his smile a thing to start a war over.  Tosha leaned into this light, putting her lips to his, legs trembling beneath her and the world dropping from her vision.  She still loved him.  She still wanted him always beside her in silent confidence as the keeper of her sweet tenderness which no one else could see.

The wind came again, harder this time, shaking the cherry tree with unmitigated violence, its bare branches like nails against a chalkboard, and he was gone.  Tosha froze in her disbelief, in her unwillingness to let go, in her cold and selfish grief, remembering how a smile changed everything that ever was or will be.

Aleathia Drehmer 2011

Art Bomb-8/22/2014 Sewing

Aleathia says:

Let the Sewing Begin!!!

I finally bought my sewing table.  Now to figure out how to work the damn thing.  I'm going to be a project making fool.

Foodies-8/21/2014 YumWok, Pittsburgh

John Says:

When I was growing up in the suburbs of Pittsburgh the most exotic take-out food that we had was pizza.  I didn’t get a chance to try Chinese food until I was a freshman in college.  It was my good buddy, Kristofer Collins, who initiated me.  We used to lunch/skip class/both at Yum Wok, this Chinese joint on Craig Street in the Oakland section of the city of Pittsburgh.  My first foray into Chinese food was a basic Chicken Fried Rice (hold the onions).  What I had was a glorious mix of chicken, scrambled egg, pea and carrot.  Douse that shit in soy sauce and I was in heaven.

I thought Yum Wok style Chicken Fried Rice was the standard upon which all fried rice was made.  I was sadly mistaken.  It can be made a number of ways.  I’ve had it a number of ways, with shit like sprouts and mushrooms and peppers, etc..  But never like that again.  As they say it’s never as good as your first time.  For years I craved the Chinese food of my intellectual awakening.  I figured since I couldn’t get Yum Wok style Chicken Fried Rice anywhere, I’d make it on my own.

So I present here the John Grochalski version of Yum Wok Style Chicken Fried Rice. WARNING: this meal is meant for two people with the idea that one will be having themselves a nice lunch the next day, or that the two of you will feast like Romans.  Or I guess you could invite a friend and make it dinner for three.  Also…I hate onions, so include onions at your own risk.

Ingredients:

1.5-1.75 LBS on boneless, skinless chicken breasts cut into small cube-like shapes

egg (I used about 1/3 a carton of egg beaters because of cholesterol and i won't go back to my insane doctor).  2 or 3 eggs should do the trick

2 cups of rice.

frozen peas and carrots.

Olive oil and/or non-stick cooking spray.

Basically what I do is this:  I cut the chicken into cubes and cook in non-stick cooking spray until no longer pink in the skillet (I’m a germaphobe so maybe I cook the chicken until it browns…but that makes it dry so….).  While the chicken is cooking I make the eggs in a small skillet (scrambled) and cook the peas/carrots according to the directions on the bag.  I have a rice cooker so while chicken/egg/peas are cooking the rice is cooking separately.  If you don’t want to drive yourself nuts feel free to cook everything at individual moments, or do it all at once like do, shouting at your wife and cat and neighbors for peace and serenity.

Once the chicken is cooked I remove it from the skillet.  I use either non-cooking spray (PAM) or enough olive oil to coat the skillet.  If you have a good skillet you can get away with the spray.  Mine sucks so now I need to use olive oil.  Once the oil/spray is heated….add the rice.  It should start frying immediately.  Move the rice around and let it get coated/fried…maybe a minute or so.  Then add the chicken, eggs, and peas and carrots.  Let it all get nice and hot together.  I used to put some soy sauce on while cooking but now I leave that until I’m sitting down so that I can gauge how salty I want this mother.  If you’ve done your job correctly the Chicken Fried Rice should look like this:

Mmmm….just like being back in college and wasting my money fucking around instead of going to class.  Enjoy!

Lit Bits-8/20/2014 Stephen King, Sinclair Lewis

Aleathia says:

Some of you might groan when I mention Stephen King.  Go ahead.....(collective groan)...and do it. Stephen King was very important in my childhood.  He was the gateway drug to reading in earnest.  My grandmother had stacks of his books in her table by her chair in the living room.  There were also lots of Harlequin Romance novels, but I digress.

When I was 10 I was still reading children's abridged classics that someone had bought for me for my birthday.  I blew through those rather quickly as they were under my reading level, so my grandmother handed me Pet Cemetery.  I read it with hunger.  It was thrilling and scary and I felt like I was reading grown up material.  From there I moved through many of his works in rapid succession.  In those early years, The Shining was the crowning jewel.  It changed the way I looked at character transformation and the way I looked at the effects of alcoholism and cabin fever.

Most everyone has seen Stanley Kubrick's film version of Stephen King's book.  I remember being excited to see a moving film adaptation.  I wanted to see the fears of my imagination in motion.  I was wholly disappointed.  It had nothing to do with the main ideas of the book.  The parts that were most poignant were not developed and hell is Shelley Duvall isn't the worst actress on the planet.  Jack Nicholson was great, but he wasn't the Jack from the book.  He was playing his usual wicked warped self pretending to be this character.

For weeks now Michael and I have been in discussion about Stephen King.  He usually bad mouthed him while I held fast that his work was important and moving despite how fast he seems to be able to pump novels out.  Can we bag a writer for having a process and formula that works?  Writing is like a machine.  It needs constant work and constant fine tuning.  If you don't use the machine it breaks down.  King is a man who is persistent and diligent about his craft and this allows him to be very productive.

The argument in the house was more about Kubrick's lack of vision for The Shining compared to King's creation.  I thought I was going to be hanged from the gallows for saying Kubrick's film was shit.  Michael thought I was incredulous.  Don't get me wrong, Kubrick is an amazing director and his ability to capture beauty and angles are hard to beat, but in The Shining he had it all wrong.

Michael broke down this week and picked up The Shining at the library.  He was amazed at the differences and could now understand what I was speaking of in relation to Kubrick.  I had a very large inside smile at this.  Normally, I have little to add to a conversation.  I know a little bit about a lot of things, but have never been one to consume all the information about one particular thing.  I don't have that much attention span. But in this case, I knew what the hell I was talking about.

Since the book was in the house I thought I would read it again.  It has been 30 years since I read it, but it stayed with me.  Reading it again as an adult is much different.  I have life experience behind it.  I've had my own child; I've lost people to death.  I can understand these concepts more readily.  I am less like Danny Torrance in the sense that I understand the bad things I feel.  On the horizon of the end of reading The Shining will be reading Dr. Sleep which is the follow up book.  I wanted to step to the novel with a fresh memory of The Shining.

I'm happy to say that I have created a monster.  Michael has since read Stephen King's Joyland and is now reading the insane epic Under the Dome (over 1000 pages).  What I love most about this conversion is that he understands the beauty of Stephen King.  He creates characters, develops them lovingly, like no other. His characters stay with you.  You love them and hate them.  You find pieces of them inside yourself.  That is the power of a great writer...one who can touch a wide audience in personal ways.

It feels good to read King again.  Life can't be filled with serious literature all the time.  It's good to be a kid again.


John Says:

A few years ago an old friend turned me on to an American author whom I’ve always known about, but never bothered to read.  Sinclair Lewis. 

My gateway drug was Lewis’ 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here, which is a satirical look at the rise of fascism in America quick on the tails of a populist uprising.  I say satirical but the book is far more harrowing and dangerous.  I was reading It Can’t Happen Here right in the heat of the post-2010 mid-term election heyday of the Tea Party.  To say that the novel mirrored what was going on in 21^st century America at the time would be a bit of an understatement.  After that I as pretty well hooked on Sinclair Lewis.  In him I found an American voice almost some one-hundred years old, whose subject matter resonated within the times that I was living.  Reading Lewis was almost prophetic.  That, or America has always been fucked up, afraid, xenophobic, illiterate, and prone to overzealous brutality mixed in what that ever-smiling go-getter attitude.

I was a bit disheartened this past week while the wife and I were out used book shopping.  I’ve been reading a library copy of Sinclair Lewis’ Dodsworth in one of those beautiful yet burdensome Library of America editions, but I wanted the novel as a standalone in a cheap paperback edition.  No dice.  There were other Sinclair Lewis novels in the dusty used book shops and street kiosks, but I’d read most.  It was the usual: Babbitt; Main Street.  One of the book vendors cased me scanning the hell out of his selection and in lieu of taking me for a thief he asked me what I was looking for that day.  Dodsworth, I said.  I got a small smile and then a chuckle.  Sure he had a copy of Dodsworth.  He had a nice hardback copy of the book.  Only it was at home.  Sinclair Lewis doesn’t sell, he told me.

I was taken a touch aback.  How could Sinclair Lewis not sell?  Especially here in 2014 America where his themes of overt and blind capitalism and materialism, his insightful skewering views of the modern American worker, the capitalist, the industrialist stood up to the times some ninety years after he wrote them?  Had we no sense of self-reflection?  Too afraid to stare into the eyes of our own hypocracy gazing back at us from decades before?  For here was a voice we needed to be hearing and reading and ingesting right now.  Really?  Was all I said to the book vendor.  My wife and I moved on.  No Dodsworth.  I’d be sticking with that Library of America edition after all.

So for you uninitiated I offer a small biography/bibliography of one of our great semi-lost novelists, Sinclair Lewis:

Lewis was born in Minnesota in 1885.  He studied at Yale and later worked as a newspaper columnist before becoming acclaimed for his novels.  Sinclair Lewis is the author of some twenty-one novels as well as several short stories, plays, poems, and articles.  He is best known for the novels: Main Street (1920), Babbitt (1922), Arrowsmith (1925), and Elmer Gantry (1927).  Lewis was the first American writer awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature (1930).  He died in Rome, Italy in 1951 due to complications from alcohol.

Check him out if you haven't had the chance.  Re-read him if you can.

Let's Go Somewhere-8/19/2014 Pacific Coast Highway

Ally says:

“The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.” – G.K. Chesterton

I don't like flying. For two reasons:
1) something that heavy should not be able to stay in the air for that long traveling at that speed (engineering is scary) and
2) I feel like you miss all the really good stuff.

Obviously this is not an option when I go overseas because I have neither the time nor the money to take a steamer across the Atlantic (...that reminds me - there is this really great book by Seth Stevenson called Grounded: A Down To Earth Journey Around The World that you should really read if you have any interest in this sot of travel.) but it is a possibility when we travel in the US.

I did a cross-country trip in 2007 the details of which would be far too long to include in a post here. And then last year I drove from LA to San Francisco. My husband was invited to do a poetry reading in Long Beach and it just so happened that we had vacation scheduled. We usually went to New Orleans at that time but figured, why not, and hopped a plane to LA.

We took the Pacific Highway 1 all the way from LA to San Francisco - a whopping 8 hours and 400 miles or something like that. We managed to get lost only one and a half times (the half only because the sign was covered and the ocean wound up on the wrong side).

The Pacific Coast Highway is listed as one of the top 500 Drives of Lifetime by National Geographic and it does not disappoint.

We started out in the early morning from Long Beach (which by the way doesn't believe in tea. You really need to get on this Long Beach. Not everyone in the US drinks coffee.)

As you head into Big Sur you'll come across the Bixby Canon Bridge

Which his unbelievable high, like hand shaking as you're driving sort of high. Just high. So high.

If you're a Kerouac fan than you already know the meaning of  Big Sur in Kerouac lore. It recounts the time Kerouac stayed at Lawrence Ferlinghetti's cabin in Big Sur. It's a heavy book, as Jack was battling both public demands and his increasing spiral into acute alcoholism. 

“The empty blue sky of space says 'All this comes back to me, then goes again, and comes back again, then goes again, and I don't care, it still belongs to me”  - Jack Kerouac

Along the way you'll also run into these guys:

This is from the Sea Elephant Viewing Area - located about 7 miles north of San Simeon.

San Simeon takes you right into Monterey, the beautiful city of John Steinbeck:

There I was witness to a controlled burn:

and from there it's just a quick drive to San Francisco where your journey ends here:

California is an amazingly beautiful state. If you have the chance, take the drive. You won't be sorry.

Music Monday-8/18/2014 The Beatles

john says:

Though I’ve been procrastinating in making my post-Beatles Beatle Album, aka The Black Album, based on the song line up as suggested by director, Richard Linklater, and actor, Ethan Hawke (a link to a short explanation and track listing for the “album” can be found HERE), I have gotten around to listening to a number of Beatles solo albums on my walk to work in the morning.  Reacquainting myself with Beatle solo work got me to wondering which of their solo album is pound for pound, song for song, the best solo Beatle Album.  I came up with this answer:

Yeah, yeah I know: George Harrison’s brilliant post-Beatles, tension releasing All Things Must Pass.  And if he hadn’t put all of those jams on the album this would be a different blog post.  Keeping those jams in mind I have to go with McCartney’s 1973 release Band on the Run.  It’s a fantastic album from start to finish.  Pure rock.  Pure Pop.  The album is fun.  It’s melodic.  Band on the Run is a Paul McCartney greatest hits album on its own.  If you don’t believe me check the title track, Jet, Bluebird, Let Me Roll It, and Nineteen Hundred and Eighty Five.  Hell, even John Lennon had something good to say about Band on the Run in his 1975 Rolling Stone Interview:

“Band on the Run is a great album. Wings is almost as conceptual a group as Plastic Ono Band. Plastic Ono was a conceptual group, meaning whoever was playing was the band. And Wings keeps changing all the time. It's conceptual. I mean, they're backup men for Paul. It doesn't matter who's playing. You can call them Wings, but it's Paul McCartney music. And it's good stuff. It's good Paul music and I don't really see the connection.”

Band on the Run was also made under duress.  Two members of Wings quit before the recording.  The location of the recording (Lagos in Nigera) was corrupt and militaristic.  Paul and Linda were robbed at knifepoint.  Lyrics and demos were lost/stolen, the recording equipment was subpar, and according to the geniuses over at Wikipedia, Paul even suffered a bronchial spasm from too many smokes.

Band on the Run is not without its share of hokey moments.  The album does move into stereotypical, critical McCartney territory.  Some of the lyrics are bad.  To this day I still don’t have a clue what Jet is about.  The suffrage movement?  It can be schmaltzy at times, although Picasso’s Last Words (Drink to Me) is Paul at his schmaltzy/avant garde best.  But if you’re looking for the closest thing to a Beatles album as done by a solo Beatle, Band on the Run is a sure bet. 

Paul McCartney has had a rather pleasant late-career creative resurgence.  For further listening check out: Flaming Pie (1997), Chaos and Creation in the Backyard (2005), Memory Almost Full (2007), and New (2013).

Quills and Frills - 8/16/14 Ally Malinenko, Aleathia Drehmer, Kristofer Collins

Ally says:

Emma Sings in Church

We take our seats in the church,

here for the noon day free concert

that they’ve been offering for 75 years.

It makes me wish the churches back home did this sort

of thing and then I remember that if they did

I wouldn’t be free at noon on a Tuesday anyway.

My weekdays belong to someone else.

I fidget, squirming in my seat

like a child,

behind me the pipes of the organ shine.

When the musicians come in I start.

They are all so young,

long hair and nervous smiles.

You can see the energy wafting off of them.

I look around the packed church,

my husband and I are the youngest people here

but we are not young,

not like these girls

who tuck their violins under their chin

fingers quivering with so

much potential.

When the soloist comes out,

her voice otherworldly

exactly the way Handel would have wanted

I feel something shift in me,

and for a moment I wonder if I will make it home

or if my plane will fall out of the sky.

I look at the program.

Her name is Emma,

this small girl full of so much sound

that I can feel myself breathe it in.

It tastes like buttermint and time.

It tastes like all that life

still ahead of her

begging to be filled.

For a moment I remember what that felt like

and then I close my eyes

and beg it to stop.


John says:

I’ve known Kristofer Collins for twenty-four years.  To put that on an understandable level I’ve known only my parents, brother, and intimate family friends for as long.  Kris and I met outside our geometry class in 1990.  Ah, to be wee lads again.  At the time he was on the staff of our high school literary magazine (he would eventually become the editor), and I was a fat and lonely kid with literary dreams.  What makes the stuff of friendship?  I don’t know.  But Kris and I formed a bond in high school that was solidified into a lifelong chum-hood in college, and has managed (albeit with some lumps along the way) to last into our 40s, that glorious time of family sickness, prostate exams, gray hair, and sore bones.  Here’s a sample of his work from the book Make-Out Party, an experiment in poetry where the last line of a poem is suddently the first line of the next:

i

pomes popping out all over

town infested with summer

jump my bones like a feud of

flowers are mondays all over

the world the same as my monday

is the earth just jelly

between yr weepy toes

sometimes writing pomes

is strange as this strange

as yr heart's lub dub

ii

as yr heart’s lub dub
speeds yr soles purple
is the new sky my good
friend a foreigner
you don’t speak the
language of office supplies
you don’t know the artist
but his name is hanging
west of the crumbled town

One of the great parts about knowing Kris for so long is that I’ve got to sit back and watch the guy develop as a man and as an artist.  What had once been dreams to him back when we were skipping classes to drink coffee, wander Pittsburgh, practice our Beatles impressions, and think we were the only people ever to discover Jack Kerouac, have now become realities.  Kristofer Collins is a true indie/small press renaissance man.  He is the owner of DesolationRow Records in Pittsburgh.  Kris is the author of six books of poetry: King Everything (Six Gallery Press 2006), The Book of Names (Low Ghost Press, 2008), The Liturgy of Streets (Six Gallery Press, 2009), Last Call (Speed and Briscoe), Make-Out Party (Coleridge Street 2013) and Pennsylvania Welcomes You (Coleridge Street 2013), which can be found in bookstores in Pittsburgh as well as HERE. He is also the publisher/editor of Low GhostPress and its smaller offshoot Coleridge Street which has published yourstruly, as well as The Trolleyman by Bob Pajich and The River Underneath the City by Scott Silsbe

Aleathia says:

Here is a poem from last November's poetry a day challenge:

Redacted Ideograms

We are born
into these slips of flesh—
a self-containing casket
taking a possible century
to decompose.

All the while
remora taking from us
silently leaving us
unawares .

The one life we have
eclipsed by daily minutiae
and bills to pay.

We miss the bigger picture.
We miss it all.

Aleathia Drehmer 2013

Art Bomb-8/15/2014 MoMA Etiquette, Graffitti

john says,

While there is a lot to be written about art, I’d like to take a little bit of time to write about art museum etiquette.  Art museum etiquette in America is practically dead from my point of view.  It used to be that one went into an art museum and experienced the same quiet reverence that was given to lesser places like religious establishments.  This is no longer the case.  Now walking into an art museum is like walking into controlled chaos or a street fair.

Cell Phones and Tablets: Cell Phones and Tablets should be banished from art museums.  I never remember being allowed to take pictures of the art.  But because of the prevalence of these digital infestations museums have given up and slackened their rules.  They’ve allowed for “non-flash” photos to be taken.  Instead of being able to stand in front of Vincent’s van Gogh’s Starry Night or Picasso’s Three Musicians in quiet contemplation, I am now surrounded by dozens of people posing for selfies in front of a work of art.  And don’t even get me started on these kinds of assholes….

SILENCE:  When in the hell did the art museum become a mall?  Cell phone chatter.  Tourists shouting.  Know-it-alls loudly expounded on the history and meaning of each piece of art.  You aren’t a docent Mr. Art Genius, so shut the fuck up.  Kids crying!  I try and try to understand people with children.  But if you’ve taken the time and spent the money to see a Modigliani, why in the hell would you take a screaming and wailing three year-old with you?  You’re just ruining your own experience and the experience of those around you.  Go to the zoo instead.

Bored Kids and Pushy Parents:  Don’t bring older children/teens into an art museum if they don’t want to see art.  There’s nothing worse than walking around an art museum and having to hurdle bored tweens pressed against the wall playing on their cell phones, or dodging a standing teen updating their Facebook status about how much this sucks.  And you pushy parents: maybe it should be enough that you got your kid to acquiesce to the art museum.  But stop interrogating the poor bastard.  Excited mother: And Joeys what painting is this?  Joey (bored tone): Christina’s World.  Mom: And who painted it?  Joey: Andrew Wyeth.  Mom: And what year did he paint it?  Joey:  I don’t know.  Mom:  Joey, I thought we went over this at home.  Joey (shrugging, walking away).  It’s Saturday……leave the kid be.  Let him discover art on his own instead of instantly making him hate it (and you) with this Spanish Inquisition.

Well…I’ve gone on for too long.  Overall, going to an art museum can be an enriching and enlightening experience.  Let’s just get back to a modicum of respect while we’re walking around with the masters.  Right now in NYC at the MoMA there is a fantastic exhibit on the prints of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec that is a must see….provided you can get Randy Newman’s Short People out of your head while you’re walking around it.

Ally says:

“The greatest crimes in the world are not committed by people breaking the rules but by people following the rules. It's people who follow orders that drop bombs and massacre villages.” 
― Banksy, Wall and Piece

I’ve always been a fan of street art. Both living in NYC and traveling in Europe I’ve gotten to see my fair share of it:

Sunset Park Brooklyn 40's 

Sunset Park, Brooklyn 40's

South Slope, Brooklyn 18th 

South Slope Brooklyn 15th St.

Park Slope, Brooklyn 9th St.

London

East London

East London

Vienna, Austria

Vienna, Austria

Vienna, Austira

When they tore down 5 pointz in Queens, it was a huge loss. We went from this:

To this:

Not really what I would call an improvement.

Probably the most famous of all street artists is Banksy. If you don't know his name, you might recognize his work:

 Seems they think they've found out who Banksy actually is but we'll see if that even sticks.

In the meantime, since his work gets taken down and painted over as quickly as it gets put up, you can always watch Exit Through the Gift Shop. - a great "documentary" about a a French shopkeeper's attempt to befriend the legendary artist.

And remember - not all art hangs on the walls in a museum. And not everything in that museum is really art. I've never really understood why advertising screaming at me from every corner is commerce and accepted, and yet a little piece of art that might make me smile while I'm waiting for the bus, is demonized and illegal.