AD.

WALKING ON THIN ICE

mass mind in bloom of blossom, or rabbit run?

August 30, 2013 No Comments

There’s a lot not right in the world . . . sea, sky, land, weather, TV, pop music, potable water, plants, critters, us. And we have it in us to make many things less worse just by stopping being such pricks about money and borders and ceilings and greed and getting ahead.

What’s the sense of winning it all if it’s all dirtied in the process?

Fool killer comin’.

If we don’t clean up our room on our own, Mommy Earth just might do it for us. For example there’s these Texas rabbits that just hop and eat and flux all fine and dandy until they flux once too often and suddenly there are too many rabbits and not enough food and and even less flux space and much much more stress and WHAM rabbits develop a nervous disease and start pulling their plug all over the place until there’s enough space to do it all over again, and again, and again.

One way or another, things get set back in order.

Rabbit Run

There’s a cult of African ants
who construct arched hives

But only when populous enough

Until then,
they specialize in false starts

When enough exist

not enough workers
or enough pushers
or enough grasshopper guards

but simply enough ants

Mass mind kicks in
and arches arch

Pre-mind arches arch up and over
till over

Mass-Mind inserts keystone

Why do more ant units = keystone logic?

What evolutionary advantage accrue arched ants?

No Ant Popes?
No Arch Ant Conservatives?
No SubCult MassMind McDonald franchise?
(tho believe too late for latter prevention)

Ant politicians must be one happy critter:
For once it IS quantity
NOT quality

The Texas rabbits I understand
They reach critical population density
They develop nervous disorder
They die
Make room for daddy

Which are we?

Mass Mind in bloom of blossom?
Or rabbit run?

— Smith, 1997






fotossmith

slick wet red juice oozing down across thick yellow mango moistness

August 29, 2013 No Comments

happiness spell – fotosmith

The first two weeks of Lady’s and my “taking-up” consisted of me appreciative of the sex but telling her we had no future due to the 27-yr age gap.

She ignored me, just as she’d ignored my GO AWAY unwelcome mat outside my door.

One day after she left, I discovered a plate with a circle of sliced mangoes with a scoop of pomegranate seeds in the middle, slick wet red juice oozing down across thick yellow mango moistness.

I thought “Aha, a love spell if I’ve ever seen one” and gingerly carried it into the bathroom and flushed it down the toilet.

Didn’t do no good. In two weeks she had a key. Two more she’d moved in. Five months later we married the day after her divorce and four months after that we left the country for 31 months of foreign lands.

It’s near time to start book two, write about all that.

One of my favorite memories is Lady jumping on the outside of a train in Poland that was leaving the station without us . . . she clung on the side hanging from the roof of the car, her feet dangling below the open door, her too-heavy backpack pulling her down, me running along the concrete platform behind her trying to lift her and her pack into the car. Finally got on and in our seats and I start wondering if we’re on the right train because everything is in an unknown language as she tells me she’d broken a fingernail and I’m amazed it wasn’t her neck.

Anyway I found a small folded note (see fotos) on the floor of the nook, opened it, and found this happiness spell in Lady’s handwriting.

So maybe I was right about the pomegranate seeds and mango.

A Simple Machine

No mango from the shadow
No ghostings from the closed
But kisses for your shoulder
I certainly do enclose

I dance about your shadow
Re-hang in velvet drape
Your renovated altar
Your greatness to relate

From former fog I scurry
To your two as one
What gestates in ambiguity
Becomes footnote to bronze

– Smith, 2005


happiness spell – fotosmith

Harmony of the Forest

August 29, 2013 No Comments

Harmony of the Forest

I’d like to grow trees everywhere where they are to be. Lots more places than now. I see trees being grown and growing so tall. So tall, like primeval forest. Trees securing part of our future and our future making a compact to help them grow.

When I creep into the wildness of what is fundamentally our story as children, the forest is there, God’s gifts to we.

Sure, there are wolves among the trees, but one can build shelter, and the wolves are no longer threatening. Rather, soundtrack to listen to at night. Wolves finding footstep in the paths. Wolves ascending wherever wolves ascend to thrall and yowl, drunk in the blue on the gold of the well-hung moon.

When one goes between two sheets of trees, trees on either side of one, or even in a thick of trees, trees in front and back and to the sides of one, it’s an entering into laden air. Oxygen bathes nostrils and calm claims brain. Silver sounds of birds filigree around like ornaments describing water.

Bees hang honey in the trees. When you see a fringe by a field, it’s a refuge for their nests. That’s where they tidy themselves into combs. At day they descend to garland fields with business.

If a bear finds a bee nest, that’s a good meal for the bear. The bees bear it for the bears. Bears are beings that we can feel we might be when we are out in the woof of the wild.

The new primeval trees can start here. We’ll plant them in the watersheds, and they’ll hold in the water, they’ll hold in the humus we all need to grow our nests healthy in ways that compost and patter and nurture and invest. The best investments, trees and bees, wolves for night song, birds for day, bear paws of the sweet, stung zest.

~ Lady

20 yrz ago 2day has a lot 2say

August 27, 2013 1 Comment


front & back cover Interzone, 1993 – fotos Smith

20 yrs ago I made a 4.25 x 6 inch book of 24 collages for my dead brother Cat and gave it to friend and art impresario Art Feldman. Art died 10 yrs later and his 2 box collection of me was donated to SPACES gallery by his children. Decade later SPACES has a storage garage sale and gives the boxes to me. How sweet it is to see with my double-decade older eyes stuff I did 20 yrs ago and gave away.

Here are a few pages from the book.

You can see in the 6th picture I’m still losing the 100 excess pounds I put on drinking 5 gallons of cheap white wine a week.









selected pages Interzone, 1993 – fotos Smith

3 Chiplis at Museum of Contemporary Art

August 26, 2013 1 Comment

“I Can’t Quite Focus” by Jeffry Chiplis
neon, argon, steel
50 x 53 x 4 1/2 inches, 2013

Here are three neon & argon sculptures by Jeffry Chiplis in the group show “Everything All At Once” curated by Liz Maugans in the Toby Devan Lewis Gallery at MoCA (Museum of Contemporary Art) which opened last Saturday and runs from August 24, 2013 — October 13, 2013.

This is quite a feather in his cap, especially when added to his commission for the “Land, Lake, Sky” sculpture installed last month at the new Cleveland Convention Center and his one-person show at the Butler Institute of American Art in 2010.

I’ll be putting up a foto montage of the show and gallery talk in the next few days at agentofchaos.com/chiplis/index.html.

All neon and argon tubing used is reclaimed from dead Cleveland businesses and buildings.


“The Show-off Chameleon” by Jeffry Chiplis
Argon, steel
21 x 29 x 5 1/2 inches, 2013

“An Invitation to Dine” by Jeffry Chiplis
neon, argon, steel
38 x 38 x 6 1/2 inches, 2013
Collection of Rick Cassara
– fotos Smith

yoga pillow w/ glitterball

August 25, 2013 1 Comment

yoga pillow w/ glitterball

I see these as compostions, camera paintings, where seeing is more than meaning, tho meaning seeps thru.


leaf leak

shadow bloom

warp speed

lastnight

today

tomorrow

future

past – fotos Smith

Sex Complex (the song)

August 24, 2013 No Comments

yoni woman – foto Smith

Today’s special, recorded yesterday — Sex Complex (the song)

A fun 4:02 bounce.

Peter Ball music, recording; me voices, words

Sex Complex (the song)

The beast of sex is most perplexed
The way it works a circle jerk
Make my move from need or love
Or wait to see what could could be

Never understood what’s bad, when’s good
An alien thing in theroried string
When say is now but means not yet
And yet somehow the wet wants pet

 For the beat of sex is witch’s hex
  A curse for worse makes sex complex
  Should I start a fire or shovel ash?
  Winner’s ring or out with trash?

But like the cat with coming purr
Quick claws scratch my human fur
So I’ve decided to have mine removed
No more excited, just calm, demurred

Since human mind cannot be read
It’s better blind with said unsaid
My limbic lust descends to dust
Human sage waits calm offstage

 For the heat of sex is witch’s hex
  A curse for worse makes sex complex
  Which the course of doubt simply reflects
  And waits for fates for introspect

– Smith, 8/23/2013 (chorus by Ball & Smith)


lingam man – foto Smith

JUST SO SOME HOWS

August 24, 2013 No Comments

JUST SO SOME HOWS

Somewheres somethings somehows take the best of
live and let live and our duty towards ourselves
and one another, and don’t sacrifice one for the
other.

Somewhere, some how and some hows, in parsing
lines that shift. Rules from experience tempered
by flow.

We can do transformations on a pocket to turn it
in and out and in and out such that it is OK from
the turning. So I can think and think and know
when it feels OK to stop, or when I should talk
and talk and stop and resume what helps or just
lay there for a while. Help that way.

When I turn just so, if I turn just so, I feel that
it fits, clay on a wheel, turned just so… clay created
into something satisfying, even beautiful.

There are rules, sure, but pots don’t have to be
the same. Pots come into their own as they are,
according to the current of the moment.

Does water have memory? Is the memory the channel
through which water flows? Does water remember
being frozen, being cloud, falling as rain? Is water
always new again and new again and new? Is water
our substance by which we know newness,
purity and endurance?

~ Lady
(revised 8/24/2013)

Raspberry pickers & the 23 dwarves

August 23, 2013 No Comments

Raspberry picker – foto Smith

Do you know the 23 names of Walt Disney’s seven dwarfs from 1937:
Bashful, Doc, Dopey, Grumpy, Happy, Sleepy, Sneezy, and the 16 suggested but unused Jumpy, Deafy, Dizzy, Hickey, Wheezy, Baldy, Gabby, Nifty, Sniffy, Swift, Lazy, Puffy, Stuffy, Tubby, Shorty, and Burpy.

Add in 1912’s Blick, Flick, Glick, Plick, Quee, Snick, Whick.

1961’s Huckepack, Naseweis, Packe, Pick, Puck, Purzelbaum, Rumplebold.

1965’s Axelrod, Bartholomew, Cornelius, Dexter, Eustace, Ferdinand, George.

1987’s Biddy, Diddy, Fiddy, Giddy, Iddy, Kiddy, Liddy.

1991’s Grouchy, Klutzy, Lazy, Sloopy, Smiley, Tubby.

1993’s Blossom, Critterina, Marina, Moonbeam, Muddy, Sunburn, Thunderella.

2001’s Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday.

2007’s Jeremy, Terrence, George, Gurkin, Spanky, Embele, Lenny.

2009’s Gorm, Knirps, Niffel, Quarx, Querx, Schrat, Wichtel.

2011’s Bashful, Doc, Dopey, Grumpy/Dreamy, Happy, Sleepy, Sneezy, Stealthy.

2012’s Butcher, Chuckles, Grimm, Grub, Half Pint, Napoleon, Wolf.

2012’s Beth, Coll, Duir, Gort, Muir, Nion, Quert, Gus.

– from Wikipedia.





Raspberry pickers
Lady made her 1st raspberry jam last night
fotos Smith & Lady