Pages 42 & 43 of work-in-process Reset - collages & fotos by Smith

Did six more collages last night — that leaves only four more blank pages to fill of the 54. This nightly collaging of one to six collages has become addictive. The two nights I couldn’t work due to friends and poetry left me a little unsettled because I didn’t get my nightly collage fix. when I finish the final four, probably tonight, I’m going to experience withdrawal because I have to take some time off to finish Criminal and I have to find more books and magazines to cut up before I start on book two.

My Chicago paper-making artist friend suggested I should title the book of collages Portable Crime Scene — since I’ll be doing several books, think I’ll call them all that: this first one will be Portable Crime Scene Vol I - Reset. I’ll become a cultural franchise just like CSI.

Lady and I drove to Toledo to be two of three featured readers at Tuesdays Collingwood Arts Center poetry reading hosted by poets Michael Grover and John Dorsey. Poets are an odd lot - we drove two hours there and two hours back so we could each read 20 minutes of poetry. And no money involved, except for money going out along the way for gas and food — although Michael did buy one of my books, I suspect out of charity so we wouldn’t go home empty-handed.

Except it’s never empty-handed when one gets to read to a new audience. We read from a stage in an old fashioned theater with plush seats and a balcony.

I think I gave my best reading ever - finally comfortable enough with myself and the words to let them slow down, give them some room, and the occasional verbal oomph when needed. Finally have my mojo back, and then some. It was taped so may appear on the internet at some point.

Pages 44 & 45 of work-in-process Reset - collages & fotos by Smith

The internet - sometimes it seems it’s basically programmable interactive TV for one on a laptop, a small screen for a small audience for small bucks.

Anyway for big bucks, here are the top 10 TV shows that bring in the most advertising money per half hour. These ten shows rake in 31.88 million dollars each 30 minutes of programming, or 1.063 million dollars per minute of broadcasting — more than most the world’s citizens will make in their life time.

We watched the first episode of Lost on Hulu.com last month to see what all the fuss was about and decided we didn’t need to continue. I’ve missed every episode of other shows on the, although I did watch the first two V mini-series, thought the first one fairly decent, the second weak.

We still have no TV. Last TV I had was mom’s and when she died in 2005 I gave it away.

01 - American Idol - makes $8.1 million every 30 minutes
02 - Two and a Half Men - $3.1 million per 30 minutes
03 - 24 - $3 million per 30 minutes
04 - Grey’s Anatomy - $2.8 million per 30 minutes
05 - V - $2.8 million per 30 minutes
06 - Desperate Housewives - $2.7 million per 30 minutes
07 - Dancing with the Stars - $2.56 million per 30 minutes
08 - Lost - $2.53 million per 30 minutes
09 - Survivor - $2.22 million per 30 minutes
10 - CSI - makes $2.07 million per 30 minutes.

list from
huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/10/the-10-most-lucrative-sho_n_493745.html

Pages 46 & 47 of work-in-process Reset - collages & fotos by Smith

pages 38-39 of work-in-progress Reset - collages & fotos by Smith

44 collages done, only 10 left to do before the book is filled up. Going to take some time off when I’m done because these have obsessed me and I’ve gotten no other work done. Think I’ll finish the final clean-up of Criminal - A true story of armed robberies, stolen cars, alternative art, mainstream poetry, underground publishing, robbing the cradle, and leaving the country and get some letters out to literary agents before I start the next book.

Lady says the collages are getting better as I go along. These 44 so far are an interesting mix of contradictions — text and images, color and black & white, intricately cut-out and crudely chopped, positive and negative, beautiful and ugly, funny and serious, created and actual. It’s not easy to interweave such separate visual philosophies into cohesive wholes.

My poet brother-in-law asked if there were any theme to all the collages. Had to say not really. I cut out and use anything that appears anti-establishment, concerns moral and spiritual growth, is odd, surreal or absurd, is especially beautiful or shocking — perhaps I’m nibbling at the extremes, use anything that tickles the mind, the heart, the spirit, the soul, that nudges them onto a better, wiser, more moral path. And of course anything that insults Republicans — although how does one actually insult a group of people with no morals, no conscience, no good, no honor, who worship nothing except greed, power and bigotry.

Anyway, 44 created in 13 days works out to 3.4 collages per day. Me the output king of Cleveland.

pages 40-41 of work-in-progress Reset - collages & fotos by Smith

pages 36-37 of work-in-progress Reset - collages & fotos by Smith

Synchronicity — sometimes the lines are woven so cleverly, it’s got to be a clue.

A friend and I jam a couple times a month — my words, his music, me not knowing what he will play, he not knowing what I will say.

Yesterday as Lady and I were leaving the Great Satan Wal-Mart, Lady glanced over and saw my friend sitting with some store managers. We went over to say hi and saw blood flowing down his face, a woman holding bloody napkins to his head.

The area where they keep the store shopping carts was empty, so our friend stooped down to reach through the low under-hang to grab a cart and either didn’t duck enough or stood up too soon and put a serious gash in his scalp — over two inches long and deep enough to unsettle me, and I’ve had many a deep cut.

So Lady drove the car home and I rode with him to the emergency room. The ambulance guys, the check-in folk, the nurses, resident and doctor were all friendly and helpful, and the whole process only took about three hours (it could have been much much worse).

I didn’t actually do anything except hang around to give a friend someone to talk to and pass the time, but I felt useful, that I was doing something decent outside myself. We drove him back to the store afterward to get his car and followed him home just to be sure.

It made me wonder - what’s the chance of a friend needing a friend in a random store and for that friend to walk by by chance just at that time? I’m a totally free will kind of guy, but sometimes things are so intricately interwoven you have to wonder about fate, destiny, the fact that we and it and everything are all tied together in an intricity of chance, dance and romance.

The remarkable portion of this was an older black woman saw this happen and rushed over to help him immediately. She walked him inside the store, held napkins to his bloody head as she chastised the store for causing the injury. She stayed with him until the ambulance came, and gave us her name and number so he can follow up and recover the time and money he lost due to the store’s negligence.

A further note - the store employees were all helpful, kind, interested in hearing what had gone wrong, and never showed any evidence of annoyance or trying to avoid their responsibility. Of course now their lawyers will take over and all the good may go out the window. But for a few hours, something bad that could have been much worse was made tolerable by a lot of basically decent human beings acting together rather than separately.

Sometimes things flow. I’ll have to blog about some of the angels who appeared from nowhere to help Lady and me in our various travels and then disappeared.

After all this, we drove out to my mother-in-law’s 60th birthday dinner celebration where I ate good food in a fancy restaurant and watched the other nine guests drink copious amounts of seriously expensive alcohol. Then after dinner I got stoned so I could play too. It’s still somewhat odd to think that my 60 year old mom-in-law is four years younger than I am . . . my father-in-law is five years younger . . . her three brothers are 34, 36 and 38 years younger . . . in fact, her 84 year old granny is only 20 years older than I am - maybe I should be dating her.

page 38 of work-in-progress Reset - collages & fotos by Smith

pages 32-33 of work-in-progress Reset- collages & fotos by Smith

I keep giving openings to the Fool Killer and the Dork Patrol - last night I accidentally did two collages upside down in my sketch book - pages 1-31 right side up, 32-33 upside down, 34-35 right side up again. Oddly enough I didn’t get upset with my stupidity - it’s just a book and folk can turn it upside down for two pages, give em some physical and mental exercise — maybe I can market it as an exercise book.

Found a reflection of my life philosophy in a game of Solitaire. The cards were looking bad, going nowhere, and a little voice within said “it’s only a game, kill this one and start anew.” But I kept on, I endured, held on long enough that a single card play turned over another card which lead to several more and wham bam cascading damn the game was done and I had won.

In life I expect shit, failure, missed connections, misread signs, misunderstood words — but while expecting this worst, I keep hoping for the best. And it’s surprising and amazing how often I get the good.

My motto’s probably Endure and Ensure; endure the shit, ensure survival for another day of endurance.

pages 34-35 of work-in-progress Reset- collages & fotos by Smith

page 22-23, 24-25, 26-27 spread of work-in-progress Reset - collages & fotos by Smith

Lady looked at my cut-out collage stash and said that I cut out symbol, meaning, metaphor while she goes for color, beauty and composition. And she is exactly right. She could add I also go for the absurd, the surreal, education, and anything anti-establishment as well.

Anyway, here are yesterday’s six collages. That makes 30 small collages past eleven days, 24 to go. The remaining collages will take more time because I’m getting low on collage stash. It seems I need 20-30 potential pieces of paper for every image I use — and that is seriously heavy front-end search / research time. Plus my creative brain has used up most its joy juice, need time to rethink, resee, recharge.

pages 22 - 27 of work-in-progress Reset- collages & fotos by Smith

pages 20 - collage & foto by Smith

Folks don’t realize how much work and time are involved in collage.

A small paper collage with three or four pieces of paper can take hours and hours because . . .

First – you have to find source material such as old books, old magazines, newspapers, found scraps from the street etc to cut up.

Second – you have to page through page by page looking for words, phrases, images that appeal to you which you crudely rip or cut out broadly.

You have to invest a LOT of time cutting out your selections. Most of mine are intricately cut out following the lines of the image, although others are crudely cut out in rough strokes and used as is.

This cutting out step happens two ways - cool interesting stuff you’re pretty sure you’ll use you cut out immediately, while other images you leave as is and cut out when you decide to use them. Intricate is best because you can plop the processed image into the collage to see if it works — unfortunately this method takes up the most time because you spend tons of time cutting stuff that’s never used.

Third – you need to choose from your ever growing collage stash which piece/s to use.

Fourth — you must glue it in, and it almost never goes in the way you had it originally laid out because the glue’s sticky and the paper fights for the easiest bonding, not the best.

Fifth – you need to decide if what you just added works, makes it better, makes it worse, finishes it, or totally fricks it up.

All the steps above take much energy because they involve creative decisions and hour after hour of creative decision drains the body more than the same hours of manual labor — having spent much of my life doing both, I know this.

Sixth – repeat steps one through five endlessly until the images blues, the scissor fingers cramp, the glue is stuck to everything, and you’ve ruined whatever you were working on.

Seven — display finished collages to folk who are way busy with their own lives and may or may not have the time to glance / evaluate / appreciate IF they have said implication to glance at them in the first place.

And finally step-rule eight — never EVER make any money on said creations while at the same time have money steadily going out for glue, paper, paints, tools, material.

I’ve been making collages and assemblages since 1965, and outside a few friends and constant reading, I can’t think of anything that has brought me more pleasure. It has also given me the most interesting pool of fellow poets and artists to swim with, and has brought me a measure of local fame.

AND, my odd life, my poetry, my art, my publications has brought me an additional reward — my wife Lady K first noticed me through all the above.

page 20-21 spread & page 21 of work-in-progress Reset- collages & fotos by Smith