Walking on Thin Ice

latest creative activities (with photos)

Haven’t blogged much, but I’ve been active. Here’s what I’m working on lately. Got some art, some photos, and some prose (subject to change) from our project - CRIMINAL…

First, my recent art. I’m showing two alignments - not yet sure which end’s up.

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Here’s something from the 270 page mess of CRIMINAL:

I was in electronics school for radar in Memphis in the Navy. I never used any of it. The only thing I remember was the Navy taught electronics backwards from civilian life. Current flows one way in civilian life, it flows the other way in Navy theory.
  At Memphis while waiting to be assigned to class, I was working KP in the kitchen when President Kennedy was assassinated. Every American my age knows what they were doing when Kennedy was killed. I was mixing up 30 gallons of red Jell-O at the time, and I cried in the Jell-O.
  Kennedy’s the one who offered hope to the country. Countries always need hope. He had style; he said things like, “ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country.” Kennedy appealed to the best within us. That’s the only time I’ve known of a politician besides RFK who seemed to care.
  I know Kennedy was just a politician and he stole the election with Chicago, but he still offered hope. Plus anyone who did LSD and slept with Marilyn Monroe in the White House can’t be all that bad. I cried when he died and I cried when John Lennon died, and that’s it. I didn’t know anything about politics back then except that he defeated Richard Nixon, and Richard Nixon was bad. For a seventeen year old, that was a decent amount of political knowledge back then.
  One odd thing about working in the military kitchen: the scrambled eggs were powdered, but they would sprinkle them with little bits of broken eggshells just to make the men think they were real. No lie is too small for the military mind.

Memphis was serious school. Electronics classes eight hours a day. My brain was occupied. I did well. I always do well in school situations. If there’s a situation that has a set of rules, and I can figure out that set of rules, I can do well if I want to. Life doesn’t have any rule books, though. That’s probably why I’m still not famous. Art and poetry may have rules, but I’ve never learned them. And what ones I’ve been told about in retrospect, I’d already broken. I tend not to do well in games which require herd mentality like life, art, poetry, success and in-crowds. But I sure have come a long way by flouting them.
  In one stupid moment in the babble of a class, somebody pointed at me and said, “Zap. You’re sterile.”
  The class coincidentally went silent just as I replied, “Ping. You’re pregnant.”

And some recent photos from the neighborhood:

Stairs to Where?

Paint the World

Green

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mish mosh

“We need more stuff to eat,” Smith says as he cleans the kitchen table. There’s an onion, a clove of garlic, a half bag of peanuts. He picks up garlic skin, sweeps crumbs into his hand.

“I know,” I say. “But I’m tired of going to the market. I’m tired of cooking, too. I need someone to feed me food pellets. What I really need is for my mom to come down here and cook for me.”

“Yeah, but then I’d have to talk to her, before and after.”

“Not my mom. She’d be happy just reading a book.”

“No. They all expect human interaction, social intercourse. Maybe we can keep her in a cage.”

“Fine, as long as she has a book.”

“We’ll put a pile of really really good books outside her cage, just out of reach. Turn the spines so she can see how good the books are. Maybe tie a string to them so we have them close enough so she can touch them, then slowly pull them away from her. We can leave one really good book close enough for her to get, but we’d make sure it’d have blank pages.”

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I’m spending most of my writing energy revising Smith’s biography, CRIMINAL. This is the 11th round of editing with many more to come.

I’m spending less time on MySpace and blogging because I need to focus on this writing project.

Here’s a passage I particularly like:

We were poor folk, but we ate well. We had our own garden. We had beef, pork, rabbit, chicken, goose, infrequent duck and frequent venison. We ate chicken eggs, goose eggs, duck eggs. We churned our own butter, had our own whole milk that was at least one quarter cream on top.
  I roamed several hundred acres. Forty were ours. I knew where every apple tree was. I raided the garden, ate the raspberries, ate raw peas in their pods. I sliced a dug-up potato and cooked each slice over a fire I made. We had a fruit cellar. Mom canned peaches and pears. She dyed the pears green and red and pink and yellow. I’d steal a jar, and I’d have to eat the whole thing. You can’t leave a half jar. Evidence.
  Up in the attic of the fruit cellar, I found boxes of old magazines from the thirties and forties. Colliers, Liberty, Saturday Evening Post. I tore out advertisements and played with them. I still do, only now I call it collage. I’d still rather have an old advertisement than a new thing.