THE BIG HUG

 I suppose doctors need to maintain that glass wall of professionalism between themselves and their patients. Maybe it's a part of their training. It sustains their image as people in possession of special, arcane, almost mystical knowledge and gives them a protective screen behind which to pursue the science--and the art--upon the rest of us so greatly depend.

Or is it we, the patients, who create it? It's always "Doctor This", "Doctor That," never a first name, which feels peculiar to a person of my age when most of their fraternity and sorority are half my age of less. Especially in a culture where first names are thrown around without a second thought.

My own Kaiser doctor is just back from maternity leave. She is a lovely woman, smart, knowledgable, caring and--dare I say this?--quite beautiful too. It occurs to me, not for the first time, how strange it is to have so formal a relationship with a woman who has such intimate, sometimes even embarrassing encounters with my body. So when she stepped into the examination room yesterday morning to see me for the first time in months, I could not help myself. I said, "It seems like so long since I saw you, I feel like giving you a big hug."

I forget what she said. "Why not"? "It's allowed"? "I'd be delighted"? So I stood up with great delight and put my arms around her and gave her a big hug--which she quite comfortably returned.

I was enjoying this lovely moment more than I can say when the telephone rang in my pocket. My doctor stepped back with a laugh and said, "Go ahead. You can answer it." I looked at the screen. It was Kaiser. A nurse, with a follow-up inquiry after my eye surgery last week. Then my doctor's phone rang. That was Kaiser, too.

So the professional world won out, as I suppose I should have expected. The magic was gone, the spell broken. I'm left wondering if I'll ever find the moment to give--and receive!--another such hug. And I wonder if I'll ever dare to call her by her first name...

OLD CODGERS

            Is a month already? Our “conscious aging” group of old codgers met again yesterday for our monthly Zoom session. It warms the heart to see these faces of men, some of whom I have known for 30 years. The bonds between us have been strengthened by the common experience of sitting together in similar circles of men, no holds barred, feet to the fire, unafraid to confront the dark side of our natures. At a moment in the history of humankind when so much masculine energy is misdirected along hideously destructive—and self-destructive—paths, it is good to remind ourselves that it can be healthy, strong, compassionate, loving and creative.

            Our conversation turned, last evening, to children and grandchildren. How much joy the latter bring into our lives! How we love their energy, the freshness of their imagination, the unquestioning openness with which they receive our love and send theirs back to us! We spoil them, of course, because that’s our job. But they spoil us in equal measure in return.

            We have a more complex relationship with our children. They can be the source of infinite pride, but also of great anxiety and grief. In today’s deeply troubled world, the self medication of addiction of all kinds—drugs, alcohol, work—can bring great suffering into their lives, as well as those around them. What loving parent can avoid entanglement in their child’s suffering? Our deepest wish is for them to find happiness in their lives, to embrace the infinite possibilities of independence, to fulfill the immeasurable potential we saw glowing in their eyes as children. And yet so many of them—am I right to say “these days”? Is it any different from the way it always was?—end up deeply troubled, unable to take responsibility for their lives, losing the battle against the chaos that invades them from all sides. 

            The difficulty is to let them go. They are no longer our children. We are unable to take care of them even if every parental instinct tells us that we can, and must. Sometimes we must even take the most painful path of all and, yes, abandon them…

            I had not meant to get so serious and gloomy with this post. I had meant to celebrate friendship, mutual love and admiration, gratitude. I had meant to celebrate the fortitude and compassion of my friends. Which I do. With apologies for my detour into the dark side… 

            But then no, no apologies; we can take this into our hearts; we can deepen our lives; we can learn and yes, even at our age, grow from the community of lived experience; we can share the love.

 

THE ANOMALY

Sometimes I write "book revoiews"...

! picked up a copy of “The Anomaly” by Hervé le Tellier at our local bookshop on the basis of rave reviews and touted best-seller status (“more than a million copies sold world-wide”!)  I should have known better. It turned out to be what’s known in the lit biz as a “novel of ideas”—look it up if you care to—too clever by half for its own good and, in my own opinion, much too “French” (with a pause to apologize to mes amies and mes amis).

Okay, please overlook the scare quotes, the parentheses, the elliptical asides. My own version of too clever by half. But I did actually dislike this book quite a lot, and dislike is always a good reason for me to start writing. I’d describe is as a meta-novel, given that, in part, it’s a novel about someone supposedly writing a novel called “The Anomaly.” (I would not want to read that one, either). The anomaly in question is the story of an Air France flight from Paris to New York which encounters a meteorological supercell so intense as to cause a “divergence” in which the plane, along with all its passengers and crew, duplicate themselves, one reaching the other side of the Atlantic three months later than the first.

An ”interesting” premise, for sure. An intriguing idea. But from there we descend into a complication of characters who, for me, are devoid of both interest and humanity. They read like “ideas” of people, useful to the author in pursuit of his big “idea”, rather than actual, engaging human beings. Perhaps this is appropriate, because while they start out as sketchy human beings they rapidly turn out, with their others, into what our rapidly (and so secretly! National security is at stake!) assembled team of scientists begin to call “simulations.” 

Oh, dear. The FBI gets involved, along with all the other super-efficient American security experts. Arrests are made, for top security reasons, of members of the flight that landed three months earlier, who are cheerfully (or miserably) going on with their lives. Passengers and crew of the second arriving flight are immediately quarantined (in deadly secret, of course) in the vast hanger of a US Air Force base. The President of the United States is informed. Teams of the most brilliant top scientists and psychologists are assembled. Leaders from every major religion—rabbis (conservative and reform), archbishops, prelates, imams—are brought together (in secret!) to discuss the deep religious implications of the event. Interviews are held. Arrangements are made for the victims of this fictional plot to meet their others. Somehow they must learn to get on with their lives. Some do. Some don’t.

Meanwhile, as news leaks out, the media become involved. We are privileged to participate in endless discussions of the meaning of the anomaly from the literary, philosophical—epistemology! The nature of reality! Does it exist? Of course not!—religious, social and psychological points of view. Not to forget politics, This is, after all, the US, as seen from the other side of the pond. Everything is touched upon, nothing is examined in anything other than rather pretentious cliché. Nothing gets resolved. A third flight appears on the horizon, another planeload of passengers and crew…

Oh, please. Spare me. Spare yourself. I’m just glad it’s all over.

PETER SHELTON

(I promised some thoughts about my friend Peter Shelton's work in my recent post about our studio visit there. Here's making good on that promise...)

            I’m not an art critic. I think I never was, in the true sense of the term, even though I contributed reviews to national magazines for many years. I was a “flaneur”, a “boulevardier.” I wandered around the galleries, looking for something that resonated in some way with my own views, my own interests, my own feelings. I chose what to write about. I never considered it my responsibility to represent what was happening in the galleries in my home town to the world at large. It was, and remains, all personal.

            That said, one of the great pleasures I have enjoyed along the way was being able to visit an artist in her or his studio, where I come to understand much more about who they are from interesting conversations as well as from the environment they have created as a working space. Some are almost unbearably neat, others (for me) pleasingly cluttered. And everything in between.

            So it was last week with an old friend, Peter Shelton. As I wrote a while ago, I had imagined a huge, open space, hospitable to the scale and ambition of his work. The view from outside of an almost block-long warehouse with a high industrial gate seemed to promise a confirmation of my guess. Once inside, though, what I found was something quite different. Subdivided into numerous rooms connected by congested narrow corridors, the vast space was reduced to something more like a rabbit warren than an art gallery. Art works—some finished, some still in process—mingled with the machinery of their making: hoists and chains, scraps of metal destined for some later application, fiberglass molds cast aside or ready for new castings. The jungle of a sculptor’s restless imagination.

            There was a good number of completed art works that Peter had temporarily installed wherever there was space available, with the intention of inviting people in to see the latest developments in the work. I was reminded of what had attracted me to his aesthetic in the first place—its insistent reference, beyond abstraction, to the human body. Heads, torsos, limbs, internal organs, all in various stages of distortion, some quite painful, others calm, serene. Swellings, excessive elongation or contraction, intestinal evocations in odd shapes and sizes—if you pay close enough attention you can actually feel these pieces as though parts of yourself. 

            Like the human body, too, almost all have what the artist refers to as “orifices”—cavities such as we all have and use as natural, if sometimes unnoticed, even embarrassing parts of our day-to-day existence: pores, ears and nostrils, navels, urinary tract, rectum…             

            These important, sometimes hidden, sometimes prominent features of Peter’s work  draw my attention in part, of course, because , well.. I have them—as do you. As even a human baby knows, they are a source of fascinated exploration. They seem to draw the exploratory fingers inexorably toward and into them. In part, too, they call to my attention because they are the way in and the way out. They lead into the interior darkness, the mystery within, perhaps, you might say, the spirit of the piece. In some of Peter’s larger works they might be quite small, little openings at the corners, tiny but vital imperfections in the otherwise smooth, imperturbable surfaces. They invite (don’t touch!) the curious finger to explore their depths. In others—like, say, a massive donut shape—they are the dizzying vortex that summons us within. 

            The human body, Peter’s work suggests, has its own peculiar beauty. Its surfaces are smooth, infinitely appealing, complexly curving everywhere, inviting the caress—if only, in the case of fragile sculptural surfaces, the visual caress of the eyes. But the body is also vulnerable, subject to painful, sometimes lasting wounds. Peter and I have spoken of this before and he makes no secret of the wound that significantly affected his life as a child and persists in his artistic vision to this day: his father was the victim of a sniper’s bullet in the Battle of the Bulge in World War II, receiving a head wound from which he was five years in recovery and from whose effects he never fully recovered. Peter’s sculpture heals no physical wounds but, to anyone who spends time with it, is balm for the aching soul.

            Much of what I saw in Peter’s studio, including quickly sketched ideas on tiny note pads moving, some of them, to framed finished drawings, had to do with proposals for work in public spaces. Some of them are completed—we are lucky to have “sixbeaststwomonkeys” (Peter’s titles are typically unspaced, uncapitalized strings of words) outside the Los Angeles Police Department building on Spring Street—many fell victim to the vagary of committees along the way. Public art inevitably exposes the split between the artist’s vision and his sense of integrity and the whims of sponsoring agencies who have their own ideas about what the work should look like. From what I understand, Peter has largely given up on trying to resolve this issue; and more’s the pity because whether it “understands” it or not, the public has much to learn—perhaps by simple osmosis—from this artist’s vision.

            It’s with a great sense of privilege and gratitude that I experience studio visits such as this one. It’s an act of generosity on the part of the artist to invite me into the space in which his or her ideas take form and go from a tiny scrap of paper to a fully-formed work of art. Without wishing to get pompous, I do I think of studios as sacred spaces where miracles—at least acts of prestidigitation—are performed by men and women who have the overweening audacity to want to share their vision with the world. Good on them, I say. We should all be thankful for their grace and generosity.

            

HANDS

            We were a small group, yesterday, for our Sunday meditation, but I had a deep, deeply pleasurable sit. We sat together in silence for an hour, and afterwards moved quietly on into another hour of conversation. How lovely to talk, to listen, to delve into increasingly rewarding depths, to explore shared thoughts, feelings, experience…

            Our conversation led, at one point, to the subject of hands. I described the meditation on the hands that I’ve recently been practicing—by myself, and in the company of my other small sitting group. I start with the breath, of course, bringing gradual attention to the whole body. In the head, I pause to alert the attention to the sense organs—the ears, the mouth, the nose, the eyes. 

            When we reach the hands, I start with their physical properties, pausing first at the fingertips with a focus on the fifth sense, touch; and dwell for a while on the subtle bone structure of the fingers and the hands, their articulation, their power, the opposable relationship between fingers and thumb, the controlling function of the wrist.

            With full and sharpened awareness of the physical properties of the hands, I move on to what I think of as their triple function: to reach out for and grasp; to hold, to cling on to; and release… I ask myself (not searching for the answer, the question is enough in itself), what am I grasping for that causes me suffering? What am I unnecessarily, sometimes desperately clinging to? And… what can I release, what can I let go? If answers arise in the form of insights, I remind myself not to cling even to those!

            I have found this to be a rewarding, fruitful meditation. It sounded good to my friends as I described it, and my description led us into a wonderful discussion of the hands. I recalled my father’s hands, the strong, slender fingers of an accomplished craftsman, a fine carpenter and turner of beautiful wooden bowls; the hands he raised at the altar, or made the sign of the cross over his congregation, in blessing. He believed strongly in their healing power, the laying on of hands. With them, too, he would bless the food at the start of each meal. He took great pride in his skill at "carving the joint" (it had a different meaning in those days--a joint of meat on the bone!) And how cleverly he worked with his fingers to roll his own smokes (not what we'd call a "joint", these days!)

            What a richness of association we discovered, the infinite uses of the human hand: to stroke and caress—or slap and spank. To work—the calloused hands of the farm worker, the tender hands of the nurse. To feed ourselves, and tend to the other, multiple needs of the body. To shake hands (in the days such an act was still admissible! Sadly, now superannuated by fear of the virus). To salute, showing respect. To point, in accusation or inclusion. We thought of the politician with his audience; of the conductor with his baton, the musicians with their vibrating stringed instruments, their flute and oboes, their brass and their drums.

            We thought of how we make art, skillfully, with the brush or the palette knife; and the role that hands play in the paintings and sculptures humans have made for so many centuries. Red hands on the walls of ancient caves. Fingers reaching out for each other in Michelangelo’s act of Creation. Hands raised in blessing in images of the saints. The tiny, fat fingers of baby Jesus, the tender hands of his mother, Mary. Hands nailed to the cross. We thought of the devil finding work for idle hands; the thrill of masturbation that I learned as a boy was a sin.

            We thought of language—not only the sign language of the deaf, but how the hands appear in idiom or metaphor: give me a hand, lend me a hand. Hands across the water. Churchill's victory sign, cigar and all. (I wonder if its origin was the cheeky British version of the American middle finger, two fingers delivered underhand? FU.) It has now morphed into the international peace sign. Yes, and of course the middle finger itself. FU. Hands up, hands in the air, surrender (hands pointing the pistol, the rifle!) The iron fist, the velvet glove, the open hand. The hand of cards, dealt out by the dealer. The magician’s clever hands, hiding, palming, revealing. The palm of the hand held up forcefully: stop! The hand beckoning, pointing: come! Go! Hand on heart. Hand in hand. Holding hands…

            I’m scratching at the surface.

            Together we thought, what a wonderful book awaits the writing. Such a richness of function and meaning and association in our human lives. I envisioned such an undertaking. Would I still be able to find the energy and commitment to write it? Here I am, already engaged in a project that is surely and intimately related: connection. We use hands, of course, to physically connect. We reach out to each other. And here, this is one small chapter already written—a chapter that could expand into a series of chapters, a whole volume unto itself. Just imagine!

 

DROPPING NAMES

            The past few days have been a time of reconnection with the art world. I stopped writing articles and reviews for national magazines several years ago, in part because I had become more engaged with my own work, my own vision, my own ideas. I started looking at the world through the prism of what I was learning from my meditation practice and the Buddhist dharma. What for years had been blog posts turned into essays, and essays into collections that came out in the form of books. “Persist” was the first of them, followed by “Mind Work”, “A Serious Conversation With Myself,” and “Slow Looking.” I was discovering, too, that what I was seeing in the galleries I frequented no longer engaged me in the way it used to. There was, in my judgment, a kind of art school sameness to it all, a display of competence and adequacy that seemed to me no longer accompanied by the passion, curiosity, and commitment to the new that had excited me in my art writing days.

            Then the coronavirus came along, and I no longer ventured out to the galleries at all.

            I say this because I ran into my old friend Peter Shelton a while back, at the memorial for Roland Reiss, an artist and friend who had affected both our lives. The two of us, Peter and I, two Peters, were among the speakers at the memorial, and I was moved by what the other Peter had to say. We talked afterwards. I said I’d like to get together again one day, perhaps for a studio visit; it had been twenty years since the last time we’d had that opportunity.

            There followed a few months of silence from both sides, as tends to happen after such a meeting. Promises get made and no matter how well intended remain unfulfilled. But then a couple of weeks ago an email arrived from Peter with an invitation, and I emailed back with a suggested date. I was pleased to have something finally on the books and looked forward to my visit. Ellie, too, was keen to join me, to see the latest developments in his work. The day arrived, and we set out.

            It proved to be a long trek to Peter’s new studio. Well, “new” since twenty years ago. He relocated to Boyle Heights, a community to the east of the city of Los Angeles, once a Jewish, now a Latino enclave. New territory for us. Trusting to the car’s navigation system, we got lost. Took the long way around. A very long way. But in compensation we got to see parts of our city we had never seen before, so the detour was not without its interests. Plazas, streets crowded with pedestrians—you don’t see much of that in our great city sprawl—shops and cafes spilling out onto the sidewalks, every sign and advertisement in Spanish. A bustling, almost festive atmosphere, with diminishing fears of the coronavirus epidemic. A welcome return to human intercourse.

            When we finally found it, Peter’s studio looked like an immense warehouse, protected by a security gate which his assistant, Veronica, came to open for us. A sculptor of expansive vision who makes often massive works, he needs the workspace. But stepping inside, I was surprised. I’d have expected a huge open space. But no, it’s something of a rabbit warren, with rather narrow passageways between clusters of quite small rooms, almost claustrophobic. A clutter of machinery and hoists, art works in process, molds and models everywhere. The first room we come to is dominated by a massive “donut” anchored to the walls above our heads. Other finished art works set out, in so far as possible for display in a relatively confined space. Peter has it set up for a few days to invite people in. I’m attracted to a number of big framed drawings on the walls, along with a plethora of other, less formal and less finished drawings, ideas for sculptures sketched out in visual form… In drawings you can often glimpse the artist’s mind at work.

            But I intend to write about the work another day. It’s work I have always felt attracted to for reasons I’ll explore when the time comes. In the meantime, the studio visit proved important to me in a quite different way. We talked. Talked about the art world and its fickle ways, its fads and fancies, its callous narcissism and its occasional cruelty, its forgetfulness of dedicated artists in the rush to keep moving on and, more and more in recent years, its heartless commercialism. Peter is well-known, well-connected, and has an endless supply of anecdotes and friends—many of whom we share in common. So our conversation was a welcome reminder of the privilege and pleasure of my having known so many of the studio (and post-studio!) artists who, since the late 1960s, have been the living beating heart of the world in which I’ve lived and worked.

            We dropped names. Dozens of them. Too many to count, still less remember. Dropped them in a good way, not to impress each other but to share memories. Though I knew none of them well, I had the good fortune to meet and write about many of that generation of young Turks who arrived on the scene in the 1960s, seizing the reins from the first great wave of specifically Southern California artists: John McLaughlin, Lorser Feitelson, Karl Benjamin, Frederick Hammersley, Helen Lundeberg. The new generation, born like myself in the 1930s, included the so-called Light/Space artists, the likes of Robert Irwin, James Turrell, Helen Pashgian, DeWain Valentine, Peter Alexander, Billy Al Bengston, Craig Kauffman, Fred Eversley and others; but also painters, Ed Moses, Ed Ruscha, Joe Goode, Ron Davis prominent amongst them. Sculptors Michael Todd, Lloyd Hamrol, Roland Reiss. And Tony Berlant, painter in scraps of colored metal. Some of them I came to know. I visited their studios, wrote about their work, held them in awe. I myself also visited, as many of them did, the “couch” of that extraordinary therapist/guru whom many of them shared, the late Dr. Ed Wortz, whose understanding of the workings of human consciousness and perception was an important philosophical and aesthetic source of inspiration to a generation. 

            I knew the next wave of artists better—not really separated by a full a generation, but those who came along five or ten years later, inspired not only by the artwork of their elders but by their ethic, their dedication to the studio, to their individual vision, to their work. When I started writing there was a flourishing community of these artists. Ellie opened the Ellie Blankfort Gallery to offer exhibition space to some, because galleries for contemporary artists were few, exclusive, and hard to interest in untested work. She showed Gary Lloyd, Lita Albuquerque, John Lees (now super successful in New York), Martha Alf, Colleen Sterritt, Jim Morphesis, Scott Grieger, Daniel Cytron, Carole Caroompas, Masami Teraoka… Los Angeles was teeming with brilliant artists whose studios I’d visit and whose work I’d write about for national magazines: Gwynn Murrill, Guy Dill and Laddie John Dill, Carlos Almaraz, Ron Cooper, Michael Brewster, Ulysses Jenkins, Jon Peterson—and the Peters! Peter Lodato, Peter Erskine, Peter Shire and of course Peter Shelton; I always had a soft for anyone who shared my name! Peter Plagens, too, artist and long time author and art critic, who remains to this day a frequent visitor on my Facebook page, holding my feet to the fire for my frequent lapses of logic in matters social and political. His friend, teaching colleague and one-time studio mate, the brilliant Walter Gabrielson, was another artist whose work Ellie showed in her gallery days. And I’d be remiss in failing to include that host of women rebelling at the time against the hitherto male-dominated culture of museums and galleries: Judy Chicago, Nancy Buchanan, Eleanor Antin, Erika Rothenberg, Suzanne Lacey, Wanda Westcoast. Some of these pioneers I knew in person, some of them I was glad to write about. Their successors in today’s art world are legion, and many of them I’m happy to count among my personal friends.

            I was privileged, too, in the late 1970s, to receive a Rockefeller Foundation for a study of the life and work of one of the leading African American artists of his time, Charles White. He was a trusted ally in difficult times while I was Dean at Otis Art Institute, and became my friend and mentor in the year before he died. It was in the course of my study of Charlie’s work that I discovered for myself the shameful reality of (my own!) and institutional racism in America—in this instance in the academic world as well as in the art world: I soon found out that the traditional means of research (in previous studies, articles in academic journals and reviews in newspapers and magazines) were inadequate; my study had to be supplemented by travel for first-hand interviews with people I had barely heard of, if at all. I felt honored to be warmly welcomed by Black artists and art professionals throughout America, on Chicago’s South Side, in Harlem, Jackson, Mississippi, New Orleans. I was introduced to a world I never knew existed—a world that is only now, in the past couple of years, gaining the long overdue attention of the American “art world” at large. Along the way I met Harry Belafonte, spoke to Sidney Poitier and Romare Bearden, and visited Jacob Lawrence in his Seattle home. What an adventure! What a privilege! My own world expanded, immeasurably. (While I'm dropping names, the now deservedly famous Kerry James Marshall was among my favorite students while at Otis--a protegé of my friend Charlie.)

            Over the years I also met and sometimes worked with artists whose names are internationally celebrated and whose place in the history of art is secured: Claes Oldenburg, R.B. Kitaj, Betye Saar, David Hockney. Also Ed Kienholz, one of only a handful of Southern California artists who earned international acclaim. I never met the pivotal French artist, Yves Klein, who died so young back in the early 1960s; but Ellie did, and I felt I knew him because we lived for years with his gift to her of a small painting in his famous IKB (International Klein Blue); we connected years later with Rotraut, the artist to whom Yves was married in the years before his death, and I worked with her on a catalogue text for her own art.

            I drop all these names—and there are so many others that passed between us as we toured Peter’s studio—not to boast but to remind myself of my privilege, my good fortune, and to express my gratitude. So many artists touched my life. Their vision enriched my way of looking at the world, they gifted me with their friendship. Some of that older generation, the ones in their eighties like myself, have already left this planet on their next great adventure: Peter Alexander, DeWain Valentine, Ed Moses… Others, sadly, are showing the ravages of age with memory loss, even dementia. Others, like Peter, ten or so years younger than myself, are still producing some of their best work.

            I feel an affinity with so many of these brilliantly creative people. Some continue to show their work in noted galleries, their names respected, their stature undisputed. Some of them have fallen victim along the way to the unkind vagaries of the art world, achieving moments of immense success, then falling back into relative obscurity. Still others, no less brilliant as artists, in my view, have struggled to achieve or maintain a measure of visibility, vying for gallery exhibition that is hard to come by especially now, some thirty or forty years later, when art schools have been churning out their MFAs for decades into an overcrowded art scene hungry for next marketable talent—chewing them up and spitting them out as soon as collector interest fades. I sympathize with their predicament; the publishing world is no different. But still I count myself amongst the most privileged, amongst the very fortunate, to have been able to indulge my compulsion to keep writing, as they to keep returning to the studio to realize their vision in such a multitude of ways.

 

A GIFT

We received a gift. It arrived in a sturdy, weighty box in the mail from Taos, New Mexico. Unwrapped, we discovered a baker's dozen of secondhand books (well, probably third or fourth-hand, discards from some library dump), all unopenable, sealed tight, hiding their secrets forever, converted from their literary origins into the makings of a work of art. Included in the package was a fistful of velcro stickers and a template, indicating precisely how they should be installed on the wall. A book painting, in other words: Like this ...

Our good friend Gary Lloyd has been using books as the material for his art for many years--all 50 years, in fact, since we have known him. I have a special reason to be grateful to him, because it was thanks to him that I embarked on my long career as an art writer. I was new to "contemporary art" back in the early 1970s. I'd learned about Picasso and Matisse along the way of course, as a part of my general education. The Surrealists. And so on. But that was pretty much as far as I'd got. So I was um... shocked when I first encountered Gary's work at a small gallery in the San Fernando Valley. A total mess, I thought. Jars oozing disgusting stuff, an axe stuck into the wall, words scrawled on surfaces all around, books desecrated, vaseline smeared all over everything....

I was offended. So I went home and--I was a poet in those days--wrote a thirty-page poem. It was my attempt to come to terms with my discomfort and reach out and understand that which I did not, by putting it all in words. Somehow, I no longer recall quite how, my poem reached the artist. He read it, liked it, understood what I was trying to do, and said, "Let's make a book together." So we did. The result of our efforts was "Bob Went Home", was a big, clunky thing with a hatchet handle for a spine and broken wooden school rulers for edges, a galvanized steel cover dented with the back of an axe, and pages printed with the words of my poem in blue, gooey ink. The pages themselves were made out of every imaginable material, cork, felt, asbestos (!) Some of them were screened with tight mesh, making the text hard to read. You needed to interact, be physically engaged, to give it your full attention. So this was my first book experience with Gary. (There's a copy in the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum, I think. And we sold a number of other copies, who knows where. This was 50 years ago!)

So Gary has a long history of fascination with books, their content as well as their heft, their physical presence. "Jane's Fighting Ships" was a major theme in that first show. Ellie and I also have one of his "pages" (I think this one is a page from Jane's Fighting Ships, altered back and front...

It was made long ago. We also have a more recent work, a version of his "Chomsky's Vessel" series, books hollowed out to form a primitive canoe and crimped together tightly with a chain...

So this new piece, this gift, fits in with a long history--of Gary, his work, our friendship. The front cardboard bindings of the books are covered with his familiar, closely written handwriting, a long, discursive pseudo narrative that wanders from personal history and the purpose of the piece itself to the threatened disappearance of the bees and the battle of Gilgamesh. I have not yet--forgive me Gary--been able to read the whole text. But maybe it's intended to be read as I have begun to read it, not only as an extended narrative, but spottily, hopping here and there to clusters of printed words. 

An artist whose aesthetic embraces not only genuine artistic issues (here, for example: what is a painting? What can it be, if not oil on canvas?) but also issues of pressing importance to a rapidly changing world, issues having to do with the meaning and means of contemporary media and communication systems, the ecological threat of man-made climate change to the planet, war and peace, the very future of humanity. These are just a few of the real challenges his work addresses--and invites us, in our turn, to address with him. He invites us constantly, too, to participate in his work; in this case I was simply provided with the materials and the instructions, the act of construction was mine alone. And I still have work to do, interacting with the text. It will take me many visits, a long time...

There's a big part of Gary that is the eternal schoolboy who scoffs at all the rules and delights in making the kind of mess that I describe in writing about that first show. Even wrecking things--like books. He's an iconoclast, always tinkering, making things or unmaking them, just to see how they work. Or if they work. His imagination is boundless, endlessly optimistic, endlessly engaged, and essentially joyful. I am happy to have had him as my friend and teacher all these years.

So this is my way of saying: Thank you, Gary, for this gift. Ellie and I are happy to have it in our lives.

OBLIGATION

Like my literary hero Michel de Montaigne, I am interested in observing my flaws with an attentive and critical eye and noting them down when I find them with as much honesty as I can muster. In the past few days, in meditation, I have been focussing on my sense of obligation as one of the sources of suffering in the way in which I have chosen to live my life. I do things, too often, grudgingly, because I think somehow I ought to, when I could instead embrace them as acts of generosity and sources of pleasure.

Take yesterday, for instance. Ellie asked me to join her in an excursion to a couple of galleries she wanted to visit, because the exhibitions interested her. In part because of the still-pervasive epidemic, it has been easy for me to surrender to my reclusive instincts--a kind of laziness that prompts me to stay home and get on with my work (so I tell myself, anyway) rather than venture out into the world and discover new things. So somewhat ungraciously, I'll admit, I agreed.

We set out. The experience of driving in Los Angeles, these days, is not a particularly pleasant one, and this was a rather long drive through city streets clogged with the usual Saturday crowds. It did little to improve my mood. Ellie offered to do the driving but I declined. I am a bad passenger, I reminded her, and am more comfortable in the driver's seat. Our destination, when we reached it, also looked unpromising; all closed up and shuttered with barred steel gates. We tried a neighboring gallery, where my worst fears were confirmed: more boring art. 

By dint of dialing the phone number given on a note on the door, we managed to gain access to the show we had come to see--an exhibit of 160 square monochrome paintings by our friend Marcia Hafif. Lined up on three long white walls of a vast gallery space, they document the gradual, nearly--well in fact totally--imperceptible progress of grays from black, at one end of the scale, to white at the other. Their surfaces, when studied up close, are not actually monochromatic. Composed entirely of short, vertical brushstrokes, they seem to allow light to travel through, suggesting surfaces below surfaces below surfaces. Standing close, the difference between one painting and its neighbor is detectable only in its tiny surface flaws, not at all in its color. To notice the subtle change in color you need to stand back and look at a row of eight or ten paintings, ranging from dark to ever so slightly lighter. Stand back further and the progress becomes more obvious. Stand in the center of the gallery and turn slowly and you can watch the whole progress: black, through countless shades of gray, to white. Or, if you so choose, the reverse: light to dark.

It's a remarkable, obsessive and eventually monumental work of art, this sequence of paintings, involving unimaginable labor to create all these near-identical paintings with meticulous attention to detail, for our friend Marcia a two-year long meditation on the ever shifting relationship between light and dark. For the attentive and willing observer, it's an engaging and rewarding task to follow this artist's peculiar and demanding vision. I found myself moved not only by the work, but by the memory of our extraordinary friend.

Our outing turned into a gallery tour, with an extension to a handful of the few galleries that still remain in the area of southern La Cienega. To my surprise, we were treated to at least a couple of interesting shows, one a reminder of the old hard-edge pre-World War II tradition of Southern California; the other an exhibition of the jaunty, expressive and engaging abstract paintings of Tomory Dodge at Philip Martin Gallery. We stopped on the way home at David Kordansky Gallery where we had fun with the (mostly) large, florid canvases of "Plants and Animals" by Jonas Wood. And finally enjoyed a good turkey sandwich lunch at the Sycamore Kitchen, a few blocks north on La Brea before heading home in an unexpected rain shower.

My fears and resistance notwithstanding, it was an enjoyable and rewarding day. As I sat for my meditation this early morning, my mind returned to re-examine that old sense of obligation I have been observing, and the suffering it brings not only on myself but, worse, on those around me. I think to find its origin in what I heard so often repeated in my Christian childhood: "We have left undone those things we ought to have done; and we have done those things we ought not to have done." The words come from the Morning Prayer in the Book of Common Prayer, and I must have heard them hundreds if not thousands of times. They lodged in my consciousness and have remained there ever since. They still resonate with grim accusation.

It's the "ought" that I act upon. Which would be fine, I suppose, if it did not carry the weight of obligation and arouse, at the same time, my natural, instinctive spirit of revolt. It came clear to me this morning that I would suffer less from this old pattern of behavior if I learned simply to substitute for that burdensome sense of obligation a different spirit: that of generosity. I may still not "want to", but I will do this thing--whatever it may be--not because I ought to, but because I choose to be generous rather than self-serving. Which accords, of course, with the Buddhist teachings to which I aspire, and in which generosity is one of the "six perfections", the paramitas. A goal to work for, then. Still so much to be done...

HIATUS

I guess I have been on hiatus--unplanned and unintended. It's a week since I last sat down and posted an entry here and I have been struggling, stupidly, with a nagging sense of guilt. Well, not guilt exactly, but the persistent feeling of something left undone. So here I am. Sitting down. Thinking...

It's not that there has not been a lot to say, more that I've lacked the time and energy to say it. More distressing, to be honest, is the lack of motivation. That bothers me. It leaves me wondering whether my writing days are done, and that's a strange, unfamiliar, and uncomfortable thought for one who has made a daily practice of writing something, somewhere virtually every day.

Here's what: Last Thursday, a week ago today, my son Jason arrived from Iowa for his annual long winter weekend's visit in normally balmy Southern California. It was unusually cold for the first couple of days. Sunny, glorious, but cold. He settled to the sun. We had some good walks together--a favorite occupation--along the cliff in Heisler Park and up at the Top of the World. We enjoyed some Mexican food at his favorite Mexican restaurant here. The climax of the weekend, dinner-wise, was a fine meal at our local Belgian restaurant, the Brussels Bistro, where we indulged in an order of fresh oysters followed, improbably, by another of escargots. An odd combination, you might say. Well, yes. But it was fun. our weekend's fun was further enhanced by a bottle of Belvedere vodka and another of Monkey's Shoulder bourbon (Jason's recommendation). Not to mention a few bottles or wine. 

So there was that. Then our daughter, Jason's half-sister Sarah came down with her son Luka on Friday afternoon. I love to see the family connect. It doesn't happen often enough, with Jason living in Iowa and his brother, Matthew, way off in the UK with his family. We missed having all of us together in the flesh, but managed a reunion with Matthew and his wife, Diane, courtesy of Facetime. Would love to have had our older grandchildren, Alice and the twins, Joe and Georgia join us, but they are off in various places, living their lives. 

I have to confess that I have less energy to expend than I used to, and the weekend left me both physically and emotionally spent. To complicate matters, there has been the disaster unfolding in my native Europe, events that suggest unfortunate comparison with the war years of my childhood. It pains me to read and hear about this vile, unnecessary repetition of that brutality, and to watch the distressing new advance of autocracy not only in Europe but in my own adopted country too. The experience has been draining, filling me with anger, frustration and despair. May these words prove the start of a return to the keyboard, at the very least. I take a measure of comfort in putting it all down in words.