Art Bomb-10/31/2014 Ghoulish Gary

Aleathia says:

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!  In honor of our frightful American tradition of Halloween I have decided to spotlight the art of Ghoulish Gary who is a master of the macabre when it comes to art.

"His award-winning illustrations and designs have also appeared in popular magazines such as HorrorHound, Famous Monsters of Filmland, heavy metal magazine Revolver and beloved pop culture rag Royal Flush; on DVD releases for Anchor Bay’s Hilarious House of Frightenstein box sets, cover artwork for Arrow Video’s re-issues of Tobe Hooper’s LifeForce, Jeff Lieberman’s Squirm and Wes Craven’s Deadly Blessings. He’s worked in the music industry creating packaging for vinyl releases of Death Waltz Records They Live soundtrack, WaxWork Records Re-Animator release, Glass Eye Pix’s “radio plays for the digital age” Tales From Beyond the Pale; and gig posters, T-shirts and album art for bands including Misfits, Tiger Army, The Brains, Ghoultown, Electric Frankenstein and The Creepshow. "

Here are some of his ghoulish monsters:

Lit Bits-10/29/2014 Denise Levertov

Aleathia says:

Here is to a long week that is about to get infinitely better by morning.  Please enjoy a poem by Denise Levertov called "The Thread"

The Thread

Something is very gently,

invisibly, silently, 

pulling at me--a thread

or net of threads

finer than cobweb and as

elastic.  I haven't tried

the strength of it.  No barbed hook

pierced and tore me.  Was it

not long ago this thread

began to draw me? Or

way back?  Was I

born with its knot about my

neck, a bridle?  Not fear

but a stirring

of wonder makes me

catch my breath when I feel

the tug of it when I thought

it had loosened itself and gone.

Quills and Frills-10/25/2014 Namaste Yoga

Aleathia says:

I have been going at this blog nearly six months with a post daily.  That is a break neck, whirlwind thing to do.  Recently with all the things going on in my life both at home and at work, it has been harder to keep that commitment.  I am generally an all or nothing sort of girl.  I either do something full throttle or shut it down.

Today I did yoga for the first time in 2 years.  There have been many excuses, but most of the time it has been laziness or the desire to curl up on the couch with Michael instead.  Who would pass up human connection for yoga?  At this time, Michael is working a lot and gone often.  This leaves empty spaces that for some reason I have a hard time filling except with work.  I have had a great lack of focus and  I have not been tending to the inner workings of my "soul".

I ordered my favorite yoga series the other day, Namaste, and after a grueling 30 minute aerobic exercise that had me running from attic to basement to find my yoga mat, I finally put the DVD in and got started.  Oh man.  There is nothing like the soothing series of plank, up dog, child's pose, cat lift, down dog, locust, cat lift, hero's pose.  Rinse and repeat.....many times.  I feel like a million bucks.  The Earth Series episode is my favorite and I will most likely be on this one for months while I try to limber up my muscles and stretch out all the stress and damage I have done in the last few years.

Which brings me back to this blog.  I'm not going to go break neck and post every day.  It leaves little time for anything else.  I think I have established a small following so now I will post when I have something to say.  My fellow compatriots will post when they have something to say as well.  Hopefully, we will fill in all the days, but if there are weeks when we don't , so be it.  Happy Weekend!

Lit Bits-10/22/2014 Frank O'Hara

Aleathia says:

Yes.  Winter is coming and through the summer I longed for this time when the world gets crisp and cool; when everything turns on its true nature to somehow work against you.  Like a reflex this weather makes me long for spring.  I love the in-between times.  I love the palpable feeling of change that tips the scales so slightly.  So in light of that feeling you will receive a poem by Frank O'Hara.

Francis Russell "Frank" O'Hara (March 27, 1926 – July 25, 1966) was an American writer, poet and art critic. Because of his employment as a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, O'Hara became prominent in New York City's art world. O'Hara is regarded as a leading figure in the New York School—an informal group of artists, writers and musicians who drew inspiration from Jazz, Surrealism, Abstract expressionism, action painting and contemporary avant-garde art movements.

O'Hara's poetry is personal in tone and in content and described as reading "like entries in a diary". Poet and critic Mark Doty has said O'Hara's poetry is "urbane, ironic, sometimes genuinely celebratory and often wildly funny" containing "material and associations alien to academic verse" such as "the camp icons of movie stars of the twenties and thirties, the daily landscape of social activity in Manhattan, jazz music, telephone calls from friends".O'Hara's writing "sought to capture in his poetry the immediacy of life, feeling that poetry should be "between two persons instead of two pages."

The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara edited by Donald Allen (Knopf, 1971), the first of several posthumous collections, shared the 1972 National Book Award for Poetry.

(bio from Wikipedia)


Aus Einem April

                       We dust the walls.
                       And of course we are weeping larks
falling all over the heavens with our shoulders clasped
in someone's armpits, so tightly! and our throats are full.
      Haven't you ever fallen down at Christmas
          and didn't it move everyone who saw you?
              isn't that what the tree means? the pure pleasure
of making weep those whom you cannot move by your flights!
              It's enough to drive one to suicide.
And the rooftops are falling apart like the applause

of rough, long-nailed, intimate, roughened-by-kisses, hands.
Fingers more breathless than a tongue laid upon the lips
in the hour of sunlight, early morning, before the mist rolls
in from the sea; and out there everything is turbulent and green.

Let's Go Somewhere-10/21/2014 Session's Woods

Aleathia says:

There are times in our lives when we go places that seem pretty benign.  Just another wooded path, just another waterfall, just another lake.  In general, most of us take life for granted and believe we will always have another opportunity to revisit these same benign places over and over again with the people of our choosing.

This is not always so people.

In 2008, Chloe and I went to Connecticut to visit my mother for a week.  It was filled with the usual hurry up and wait cycle that was my mother.  She was notorious for taking 2 hours to get ready to go somewhere and then what should be a 20 minute trip somewhere would turn into an all day project. It was chaotic waiting.

That year she took us both to a local walking area called Sessions Woods.  I had lived in Connecticut a long time, had traveled there many times as an adult and never remember going to this place.  It was beautiful.  It was a walk with my mother and my child.  Three generations of women getting back to nature.

Here are some photos from that precious time:

Music Monday-10/20/2014 The Monkees

John Says:

I rarely watch television.  In the last month I’ve had the television on for maybe two minutes, and that was to get the weather and ogling the mini-skirted anchors on the Weather Channel. If I weren’t so lazy I wouldn’t canceled the cable by now, and saved the wife and I $90 a month.  But last week I was home from work.  I had lunch going and boredom overtook me.  The wife and I put on the TV to find something to watch while we ate.  MTV had a Fresh Prince of Bel-Air marathon going.  I laughed at the program despite myself.  But then it hit me….MTV was now doing marathons of programs that were on when I was young.  Good old Fresh Prince had joined the ranks of golden oldie marathons along with I Love Lucy, the Honeymooners, and Happy Days.  It was time to check my Geritol and Ensure stock.

When I was a kid MTV aired a marathon of a television show that rocked my world.  On February 23, 1986, MTV aired a marathon of The Monkees television show.  I had never seen The Monkees before.  I’d only heard of them via the oldies station that my old man forced down my throat in the car in lieu of me and my brother getting to listen to anything contemporary.  I only knew of Davy Jones from his episode of The Brady Bunch.  To say that I was transfixed was an understatement.  Before me were four cool guys, who drove a cool car, lived in a cool pad, had zany adventures, and sang cool songs that sounded an awful lot like my beloved Beatles.  In next to no time Micky, Davy, Peter and Mike would become synonymous for me along with John, Paul, George and Ringo.

That marathon started a resurgence for The Monkees.  Soon the Monkees were being broadcast in syndication nationwide.  The group reformed (sans Michael Nesmith) and toured to sold-out shows across America.  My twelve year old self woke up by nine or ten every day that summer to watch The Monkees and sit there with my boom box ready to record, from the TV, whatever song played during the show’s ubiquitous montage.  By summer’s end I had a tape full of Monkees songs along with snippets of the show that I would listen to over and over again until RCA wised up and began re-releasing their albums on record and tape.

One of the things The Monkees get slagged off for is that they were a manufactured band created for a television show.  And while that may be true it discounts the contribution that the band made to their recordings in the studio.  From the first album there were songs written by members of the band, and members of the Monkees, primarily Michael Nesmith and Peter Tork, contributed to the music on the albums.  Most specifically The Monkees were at their most band-like on their hard-fought-for third album, Headquarters.

Headquarters was released in 1967 and was the first Monkees album to feature significant songwriting and instrumental performances by the group.  The Monkees sang AND played on the album.  Michael Nesmith and Peter Tork handled the guitar work, and Tork handled the keyboards and pianos.  Micky Dolenz took his place behind the drums, and Davy Jones handled all other percussion.  Bass was provided by Chip Douglas, a former member of The Turtles, who was asked by Nesmith to produce the album.  Seven songs on the fourteen-song album are either written or co-written by one of The Monkees, and one song, No Time, was written by all-four Monkees but credited to their sound engineer Hank Cicalo.

Sadly the experiment in turning Pinocchio into a real boy didn’t work.  By The Monkees fourth album, Pieces, Aquarius, Capricorn and Jones, the collective group was heading back toward entering the studio as individuals to dub their voices over pre-recorded tracks, or to simply add their own instrumental part to a song selected and/or written by one of The Monkees.

OM-10/19/2014 Chogyam Trungpa, Love and Loneliness

Aleathia says:

"I don't think anyone can fall in love unless they are lonely"--Chogyam Trungpa

Art Bomb-10/17/2014 Hiroshi Sugimoto

Aleathia says:

This week I thought I would take a little break from the artist series I was doing to feature a photographer named Hiroshi Sugimoto.

Hiroshi Sugimoto was born in 1948 in Japan.  He has been a photographer since he was in high school.  Throughout his career he has mainly worked in black and white.  He states that his work looks at or tries to express the transience of life.  He says it is about the conflict between life and death.

In 1976 he started working on his Diorama series:

By 1978 he had moved on to photographing drive-in and state theatres with the screens glowing white:

1980 marked the beginning of his Seascapes series.  These photographs are so transient and transparent that they are mesmerizing:

In more recent years Sugimoto has done some exciting work with his Lightning Field Series:

You can find the complete listing of Hiroshi Sugimoto's work here

Lit Bits-10/15/2014 Alice Walker

Aleathia says:

When I was younger, in my 20's, it was very exciting to embark on a world of literature that was not chosen for me.  I could read anything I wanted in my spare time that I could not when I was a full time student and working.

I set out to read names that I had heard of, names new to me....one year I even read book solely based on their covers to try to find new writers out of my comfort zone.  At one point I decided that I was going to read every book on the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction list.  I own almost all of these books and have read about 1/3 of them.

One of those books was "The Color Purple" by Alice Walker.  Yes, I know, the Oprah movie.  The book is so much more than that (you might always hear me say this). Alice Walker is a stunning writer with a lot of soul, but I'm not here to praise that novel.  Many before me have done this.

At the library book sale I was fortunate enough to come across a collection of Alice Walker's poetry from 2003 called "Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth".  These poems were written at a time when she was staying in Mexico.  The world was in upheaval then after 9/11 and Walker claims a deep sadness about the state of our country and the planet as we all did.

Until I Was Nearly Fifty

Until I was

Nearly fifty

I barely though

Of age.

But now

As I approach

Becoming

An elder

I find I want

To give all

That I know

To youth.

Those who sit

Skeptical

With hooded

Eyes

Wondering

If there really

Is

A path ahead

& whether

There really

Are 

Elders

Upon it.

Yes.  We are there

Just ahead

Of you.

The path you are on

Is full of bends

Of crooks

Potholes

Distracting noises

& insults

Of all kinds.

The path one is on

Always is.

But there we are

Just out of view

Looking back

Concerned 

For you.

I see my dearest

Friend

At fifty-one

Her hair

Now 

An even

Steel.

She blushes much

& talks

Of passion.

It cannot be

For the bourgeois

Husband

I never 

Liked.

I thought life

With him

Had killed

The wild-haired girl

I knew.

But no.

There she is.

There she goes.

Blushing.

Eldering.

I too talk

Stunned

Of love

Passion

Grace of mating

At last

With 

My soul's

Valiant twin.

Oh youth!

I find

I do not

Have it in

My heart

To let

You stumble

On this curve

With fear.

Know this:

Surprise alone

Defines

This time

Of more than growth:

Of distillation

Ripeness

Enjoyment 

Of being

On the vine.

Let's Go Somewhere-10/14/2014 Ireland Dreams

Aleathia says:

This is somewhere in Ireland.  I could sit here and look out to the sea forever.  Ah...dreams.

Music Monday-10/13/2014 Kate Wolf

Aleathia says:

When I lived in Seattle the possibility of finding great music at the Salvation Army was pretty great. I found a double album by a woman named Kate Wolf.

She was an American Folk singer from California who rivals Joni Mitchell for one of the most beautiful female vocalists I have ever heard.  She died at the age of 44 from a long battle with cancer. It is hard to find her music around.  I have looked.  She put out 5-6 albums before her passing and there are about that many posthumously published albums as well.  There is something beautiful and sweet and pure in her voice.  If you see her work around, snatch a copy up.

Across the Great Divide

Eyes of a Painter

OM-10/12/2014 Taking Life for Granted

Aleathia says:

Over the last three years I was lucky enough to have the love of my life home with me all the time.  I was lucky enough to have a wage that could afford to make this happen.  It gave us time to grow our new relationship.  It gave him time to heal from the death of his mother and his best friend.  It allowed him to be there through the deaths of my mother, cousin, aunt, and several friends/co-workers.  I am not particularly sure where I would be emotionally without his great big heart next to mine.

Recently he decided he wanted to go back to work.  He wanted to contribute and get back out into the world.  This is a great thing.  We could always use the money these days with a house and the bills that go with it.  It would be nice to take a real vacation in the future instead of state side camping.  So out he went looking.  He was hoping for something part time and thought that was all he might get in today's tight economy.  It was less about the money and more about being a productive human being.

Michael found a job at Walgreen's....full time straight out the gate.  He went from being here all the time to hardly being here.  I have to say the whole household went into a sort of withdrawal.  The dog went on a hunger strike and I suddenly had no idea what the hell to do with myself.  All my days were filled with conversations between the two of us and now the house was silent leaving me to converse with the dog.  This is a particularly quiet, one-sided monologue at times.

What I realized is that I had taken for granted that he would always be there when my heart and mind needed him.  I took for granted all the things he did around the house that I had stopped noticing until I now had to pick some of them back up.  I was having a hard go of  "enjoy the time we have" because I was feeling very abandoned.  I know, grow up lady, you're 41 years old.

Michael is happier working and he smiles more and who can argue with that?  It all works out in the end.  It has been a rough few weeks adjusting.  I had always thought I was a bit more open and flexible than this.  Some lessons are learned the hard way.

Today's message is to remember not to take all those precious people in your life for granted.  Don't take the time you have with them as something that will always be there.  Love the time you have. Gather up the small moments.  Use the time apart to build your own life up and enjoy those things you do solo.  Love your life.

Quills and Frills-10/11/2014 Oscar Varona

John Says:

In the fall of 2007 a man by the name of Oscar Varona, from Madrid, emailed me in regards to a pathfinder I did on Kenneth Patchen.  That emailed turned into several emails, turned in to an almost-decade long friendship, in which Oscar and I have shared our views and thoughts on everything from writing to art to relationships to internet porn to politics to you name it.  In short, the guy is a class act all the way. 

Oscar is also a fantastic artist as well.  He is the author of a book of short stories Tremolo (2003), and he has been published in several journals including: Mondo Kronheca Literature, Metazen, AscentAspirations, and Groenlandia.  Oscar was also an editor of Madrid’s own Delirio, a cultural journal that ran from 2009-2012.  I’ve even had the good fortune to publish Oscar Varona in an issue of Pittsburgh’s own The New Yinzer when I acted as a guest editor back in 2009. 

Aside from writing Oscar Varona is also one hell of an artist.  His pictures and collages have been exhibited in Madrid.  You can read a wonderful interview with him HERE at Jung Katz, and see some more of his art HERE as well.

Art Bomb-10/10/2014 Egon Schiele

Ally says:

Egon Schiele: Portraits opens at the Neue Gallery in Manhattan today. As a huge fan of his work, I'm beyond excited to see this exhibit.

In 2013 I went to Austria and visited the Leopold Museum which has an impressive collection of his work. 

Schiele was a protege of Gustav Klimt, this guy:

who famously painted this;

which is also in Austria, which I also saw and which also goes down as one of the most amazing art experiences of my life, right up there with seeing The David, the Sistine Chapel and Olive Trees by Van Gogh. The painting is huge, takes up an entire wall and is hung against stark black really off-setting the gold. Jaw-droppingly beautiful.

But back to Schiele....

Schiele's short life (he succumbed to the Spanish Flu at the age of 28) was none the less incredibly productive and like all good artists, mired in scandal. While living in Bohemia he was arrested for soliciting a girl under the age of consent and, when they arrived at his home, the police found and confiscated what were considered pornographic work.

  

Pretty racy for 1912. While imprisoned for 24 days he created an impressive 12 paintings. 

In 1914, he wished to marry Edith, a wealthy socialite, mistakenly assuming that his long time girlfriend, muse, and model, Wally would be fine with that. She left him and he created 

Death and the Maiden:

By 1917 he was a most prolific artist, at the height of his career and had 50 works accepted into the Secession's 49th Exhibition. 

By 1918, he was dead. His final works were sketches of his wife Edith, who died of the Spanish Flu just three days before him.

The Neue Gallery will have on showcase 125 paintings, drawings and sculptures.

Foodies-10/9/2014 Egg In A Hole

Aleathia says:

It seems to be this time of year that gets me a bit on the melancholy side.  Maybe it is the waning of light or the sense that everything is settling down to sleep that gets me going just a bit dark.  This is the time of year when holiday foods start getting made, when we break out the crockpot, when we make soups and stews and roasts.  I LOVE this time of year.

Despite my love for these things it weighs heavy on my heart that my mother is gone.   She was the one who taught me how to cook.  She gave me a love for being in the kitchen.  I often cook with her in mind.  I did even when she was still alive because through all of our tumultuous relationship food was the one thing we saw eye to eye on.  We loved to cook and loved a good, strong cup of coffee.

This morning I awoke to temperatures in the 30's.  My kid already off to school, the dog nestled in his chair, and Michael walking out the door for work.  I felt particularly alone.  So I decided to make Egg in a Hole.  I believe it is a British sort of dish.  I think they have something similar but maybe call it by a different name.  My mother used to make these for us in the mornings when it was just me and her. She was most often hung over, but I loved those mornings when I had her all to myself; when we would talk over coffee and I could see glimpses of the person she really was inside.

I made myself some Egg in a Hole to push away the dark.

Two pieces of large sliced bread
Butter
2 eggs
Salt and Pepper

Make a hole in the center of each piece of bread.  A shot glass works perfect for this, but if you don't have on take a tablespoon (one for measuring) and make a half moon indentation, turn the bread and do it on the other side.  Push the bread circle out.  Repeat for the second slice.

Place a good slab of butter in a frying pan and melt it.  Place the bread in the butter for thirty seconds and then turn it over.  Crack an egg each in the center of the holes.  Do this gently so the whites stay mostly in the hole.  Dash with salt and pepper.

You will need to wait a good bit for the egg to set up before you flip it.  The whites should start to congeal on the non-cooked side before flipping or the egg will fall out.  Gently turn and then cook to the desired yolk.  I like my eggs over medium.  The fun is in cutting off pieces of the bread on the outside and dipping it in the yolk....but you eat it how you like it.

Here's to you mom.  Thanks for all the great mornings.