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WALKING ON THIN ICE

Lady’s Frigging Awesome Halloween Banana Bread

Why Halloween? Cuz I made it on Halloween. That’s why.

Loaded with fruit (including apples!), this gooey mass bakes into one hell of a hallowed treat:

LADY’S FRIGGING AWESOME HALLOWEEN BANANA BREAD

1/2 C butter
1 C brown sugar
2 eggs
2 C flour
3 t baking powder
1/2 t salt
3 enormous bananas
1/2 C raisins
1/4 C dried cranberries
1/2 C apple sauce
1 large apple, peeled & cut into various sized chunks

Preheat oven to 325 F. Mash bananas and reserve. Cream butter and sugar. Blend in eggs. Add bananas and applesauce to butter/sugar/egg mixture and blend. Add dry ingredients. Blend. Add raisins, cranberries and apple, and blend by hand. Pour into loaf pan and bake approximately 60-80 minutes, until knife inserted into center comes out without any ectoplasm attached.

The slices taste really good with butter.

big sky storm comin’




Big Sky October 30, 2010 Cleveland, Ohio – fotos by Smith

Some may wonder where the anti-Tea Party anti-Republican anti-Corporate pro-vote pro-progressive pro-liberal blog of horrible headlines I’ve harvested is that I threatened to write yesterday.

Well I wrote it, read it, and didn’t like it. It was nasty. Vitriol. Clever too, which didn’t help. Decided why do I want to add to the bad vibes. Heck with it.

So I’ll just show dark clouds, and say storm coming November 2nd.

Vote. There are some bad people out there trying to get in.

19th peoples’ art show & wall eye


from the 19th Peoples’ Art Show at CSU – foto by Smith

Here are some shots of art hanging at two of last night’s openings at CSU’s the 19th Peoples’ Art Show (in which Lady and I each have a piece) and the Wall Eye Gallery’s Skulls & Revolution show inspired by the peoples’ protests going on in Mexico.

This will be a final pleasant respite before I blog my collected political headlines from the past ten months over the next three days in anticipatory fear of this Tuesday’s election when the fundamentalist flat-earth Christians and the Tea Party anti-democracy thugs win three to five congressional seats (plus who knows how many seats lost to the Corporate house slaves known as Republicans) and begin to destroy even more of what little democracy we have left in this country. But now that I think on it, this is a good thing — our system is beyond broken, little more than a three-card Monte pyramid scheme crap shoot orchestrated by the corporations to fleece the world’s sheep, and the sooner the rich are seen as obviously in control of everything and destroy even more of our world and lives with their greed and thoughtless selfishness, the sooner moral, decent, intelligent folk will rise up against them and try to take back our planet and governmental systems — or what little’s left of them.

The foto of Christ with my face was taken by poet photographer ceramicist friend Jim Lang.

For potential prudes and censors, that is an actual plant root over the man’s groin, not genitalia (of course the question is moot considering the phallic two-guys-on-either-side-of-a-mirror bronze sculpture.

(Some folk are wondering if I’m trying to get kicked off MySpace by showing edgy art fotos – no I’m not, I’m just trying to remain true to my artistic ideals; but if I were to be banished from MySpace, it certainly wouldn’t be much of a loss for me — but in case they do deep-six me, come on over to Lady K’s and my main blog at WalkingThinIce.com which has 2,034 posts from June of 2006 posted in 10 countries on three continents, with around 5,000 fotos as well).

I apologize for not getting the artists’ names of these pieces — it is not right to post an artist’s work without crediting them, but my brain was slower than my ethical compass last night because the night went so fast with so much art and so many artists. . . you couldn’t spit without splattering some serious talent.









shots from 19th Peoples’ Art Show at CSU – fotos by Smith (except for the one Jim Lang)



shots from Skulls & Revolution at Wall Eye gallery – fotos by Smith

good guise


1999, detail, 2010 assemblage & foto by Lady K

Wise Guide

I don’t work for the bad guys
I work for the good guise

~ ~ ~

Tonight, Friday, October 29th,
Lady and I each have a piece of art
(foto of Lady’s above, mine below)
hanging somewhere in the vast wallness of the
19th annual Peoples Art Show
Cleveland State University
Art Building
2307 Chester Avenue
Cleveland, OH 44115-2214
216.687.2103
Opening Reception 5pm to 8pm

They typoed the title of my piece, labeling it
Backside the Mirror in Tarnished Rain Land
somewhat less twisted and more gentle than my
Backside the Mirror in Tarnished Brain Land
everyone’s an editor


Backside the Mirror in Tarnished Brain Land, 2010, 55″ x 31″ x 4″ – assemblage & foto by Smith

bones beneath the barn


no better thn wth others – foto by Smith

Spring Cleaning

We’ve been chasing bad weather
cleaning feathers in the attic
finding bones beneath the barn
looking pastward to the antics
which brought us to this turn
moving left to glimpse the glow worm
dancing right to paint the clown
dipping down to glance the slow yearn
growing old ungraceful noun
singing larks dipped in aspic
savory certains curtained low
no matter our present aspect
to stop we must first go slow
live now before the hereafter


everyone welcome – foto by Smith

mathman


for rot – foto by Smith

Someone complained in a post that the 10th dimension “partial n-derivatives on n+1 dimensional space” math which shows how to fold the universe’s 10 dimensions down into our four dimensions of length, width, depth and time was ununderstandable, so I left them this little new math lesson example.

~ ~ ~

Mathman

1 + 1 = me
2 = 2 = me
all + all = me
0 + 0 = me

all math seems to have the same answer

~ ~ ~

Now I must go do yesterday’s dishes to earn today’s feed.


life – foto by Smith

the city record


The City Record – foto by Smith

While unsuccessfully looking through the June 9 issue of The City Record Official Publication of the Council of the City of Cleveland for something to cut out for use in a collage, I discovered what I’d construe to be a bit of flim-flam two-step soft-shoe skullduggery: every single item discussed or approved by council was handled either as an “emergency ordinance” or an “emergency resolution.’

I believe (but do not know) this is because there are different rules involved when voting on emergency measures, since by definition “emergency” implies a lack of deliberating time. I suspect emergency rules allow for faster voting, fewer words, and less transparency — but that could be just the inner political cynic that life has turned me into talking.

There seem to be a lot of emergencies — we’re talking 37 large pages with three columns per page of small print in this report of at least 150 emergency measures. Since this is a weekly report, it means we’re talking 21 emergencies every day of every week. I knew city life was fraught with peril, but really.

But City Council only meets once a week, except during the summer when they meet but once a month. That means during their once a week sessions they have to process 150 items; and during their once a month meetings they have to get through 600 to 750 items. I don’t see time for a lot of discussion or analysis or depth involved here; perhaps that is where the ’emergencies’ arise.

Curious, I checked these emergencies out – most deal with buying stuff and paying people off and giving the rich and corporations more of our tax money, while the remainder deal with such mundane emergencies as issuing a “permit to the Lion of Judah Church to stretch a banner on Lexington Avenue between East 70th & East 66th Street for the period from June 18, 2010 to July 18, 2010, inclusive, publicizing “Focus on the Family” and other kiss the babies and support our troops politicizing.

The financial emergency ordinances have some odd language in them, like the first one they took up — “An emergency ordinance authorizing the purchase by one or more requirement contracts of Microsoft licenses for the various divisions of City government, for a period up to three years, with three one-year options to renew, the first and third of which are exercised through additional legislative authority.” Hmmmm, they have to vote later on the 1st and 3rd renewal, but not the 2nd? Why would they stipulate skipping the second year?

Do people really talk and think in words like these? If they do, maybe that’s what’s wrong with the system, we’re letting the dunderhead obsessives run our city with their thick fingers, obfuscating wordings, and hive mind.


low rates no loitering – foto by Smith

red things


men’s room mirror Aribica coffee shop – foto by Smith

summer cup on autumn table – foto by Smith

burning bush – foto by Smith

red X – foto by Smith

leaf, leg – foto by Smith

Three drawer rust – foto by Smith

geocreativity


Marrakech Lady – foto by Smith

(I didn’t finish my blog yesterday; I left out this data)

I’ve been much more productive since we’ve been back, poetry-wise.

2006 (the year we left the country for 31 months of living out of backpacks in foreign lands) I wrote 13 poems, most before we left the country.

2007, 3 poems;

2008, 8;

2009 (the year we returned to the USA) 24;

2010 = 72 so far; 25 in the past 3 months alone. For me this is way way above average, and some of the poems are even good.

Also did 58 new pieces of art this year.

To counterbalance this, from 1975 to 1985 I wrote zero poems (drank, did art, committed adultery, and had adventures instead — of course once I started writing again I still continued with the drinking, art, adultery and adventures, so it wasn’t their fault I’d stopped writing).

My new productivity comes from being back here in America, living in a language I can understand, in a country I know the basic dynamics of, and being immersed in the local poet/artist communities and their attendant interactions and feedback.

It also comes from having traveled and lived in 10 countries on 3 continents for 31 months amidst languages, cultures and customs I did not understand. One stores up a lot of creative juice potential walking such paths.

Been back here for 20 months now. It is faster, more stressful, colder, and way more expensive living in America, but it do stir the creative juices.

Here is my favorite poem from our travels, one of my three from 2007. . . I still remember the moment of the poem, us walking out of the ancient walled city of Marrakech, the red bougainvillea flowers falling from the trees all around us, the ground covered in already fallen Jacaranda purple flowers — a horse and carriage full of overweight white people driven by an Arab clattered past us and Lady seeing them said disgustedly, “How colonial.” The tourists were amazed we were actually walking alone in such an unsafe neighborhood — of course it wasn’t unsafe at all, merely had a paucity of white skin (meaning zero % except for us).

Marrakech at dusk
Purple petals on the ground
Red flower falling





Marrakech flora – foto by Smith