The Tears of Things

MERRY REVELERS

Flower Arrangement and Photographs by Catherine King.

Four more views here.

A Year's-End Sermon By Jim White

10 Miles To Go On A 9 Mile Road

They tell me miracles abound now more than ever, but I don't care.
They say it's better to be blessed than it is to be clever, but I don't care.
'Cause I got 10 miles to go on a 9 mile road, and it's a rocky rough road, but I don't care.

For life's nothing if not a blind rambling prayer,
you keep your head held high,
a'walking and a'talking 'til the power of Love deliver you there.
The power of Love deliver you there.

You don't get nothing for free, 'less of course you steal it,
at least that's what the people say.
The sad irony of Love is how so seldom you feel it,
yet it's all you dream about, night and day.
From the splinter in the hand,
to the thorn in the heart,
to the shotgun to the head,
you got no choice but to learn to glean solace from pain
or you'll end up cynical or dead.

Me, I got 10 miles to go on a 9 mile road and it's a rocky rough road, but I don't care.
For life's nothing if not a blind rambling prayer,
you keep your head held high,
a'walking and a'talking and a'talking and a'walking,
'til the power of Love deliver you there.
The power of Love deliver you...THERE!!!

Sometimes you throw yourself into the sea of faith,
and the sharks of doubt come and they devour you.
Other times you throw yourself into the sea of faith
only to find the treasure lost in the shipwreck inside of you!

There ain't no guarantees, none of that nonsense like on tv,
just gotta roll the dice, and take your lumps.
You're gonna get yourself knocked down, so better learn to stand back up,
for those who dwell on disaster let sorrow be their master.

Me, I got 10 miles to go on a 9 mile road and it's a rocky rough road, but I don't care.
'Cause life's nothing if not a blind rambling prayer,
you keep your head held high,
a'walking and a'talking 'til the power of Love deliver you there.
The power of Love deliver you there.
The power of Love deliver you there.

Copyright 2001 Luaka Bop, Inc.

[Also highly recommended: God Was Drunk When He Made Me.]

Who Do The Sri Lankans Think They Are, Anyway -- Presbyterians?

by Jerome du Bois

Ten days ago Jeff Jarvis posted about religion in the public square, calling it "And God Rolled His Eyes." It ended up as a debate between he and Hugh Hewitt, with summaries and comments on other blogs, and the post expanded into three parts and hundreds of comments.

At the end of the first part, Jarvis writes:

Since I am getting links to this post from both Hugh and Glenn Reynolds and -- considering the topic -- there may be new readers here who haven't been subjected to my bio before. So, in the interest of transparency and context: I'm a Congregationalist (not of the UCC flavor but, yes, liberal); I'm co-head of my small church's board and I teach Sunday school and occasionally get wrangled into giving a sermon (to which I have subjected my blog readers). My smarter sister is a Presbyterian minister (I was raised Presbyterian). So I am a Christian and I do not feel under attack in America. I feel free in America -- and I am grateful to both God and the Constitution for it. [My emphasis.]

About forty comments into the first thread, I posted this one:

Jeff:

Jerome du Bois

Now, compared to JJ and HH, I'm microblogospheric, but that doesn't change the question. And nobody said nothing about it. They all just rolled over it. So I brought it home to highlight it here -- for the Jews, to whom we all owe so much, if only we examined history.

I know I don't owe the Presbyterian Church jack shit. Did you know that the Presbyterian Church has chosen to divest its portfolio of investments in companies that have significant dealings with Israel? The main cat's paw is Caterpillar. (I predict the P.C. will be the first to find a way to formally canonize Rachel Corrie.)

Should we now expect to see photos and video of Presbyterian Church leaders chaining themselves to the giant front landing gears of the C-130s loading Caterpillars for Sri Lanka, even though the machines' only purpose is to turn chaos into order? I think not. That takes balls and ovaries, and these twits ain't got none. It's cold out there.

As for the Sri Lankan government idiots, they are forbidding 60 able-bodied men and women from helping them out because they are active Israeli Defense Force soldiers. They will allow the doctors and nurses in -- and all the medicine and other necessities, too, of course -- but don't they know that most of these doctors and nurses, and almost every other Israeli helping hand, is a former member of the IDF?

As Jesus said, "We are behaving like insects." No, wait, that was Douglas Coupland.

Jesus said, "Why are you people acting like such assholes?" No, wait, that was me.

One more time. Jesus said, "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me."

And I say, may the hammer of divine justice fall upon all who stay any honest helping hand extended toward the innocent, dead and alive.

[I haven't linked as I should, but I'm sick and angry, and this stuff is easy to Google. As Hieronymus Bosch, LA Police, said, "I'm sorry, it just seems to me that sometimes the whole world is a homicide victim."]

The Several Stupidities Of Thomas Hirschhorn

Are you human,
Or a dud?
Are you human,
Or d'you make it up? -- Alison Goldfrapp

by Jerome du Bois

Now, what I want are, facts:

1. Thomas Hirschhorn, 48 years old, is a Swiss artist, a self-identified leftist, with Swiss citizenship, born in Bern.

2. He has lived in Paris since 1986.

3. He objects to the political existence of Christoph Blocher, a 63-year-old Swiss politician and plastics billionaire, who lives in Switzerland.

4. Blocher opposes Switzerland's entry into the European Union.

5. Blocher, whose Swiss People's Party is the largest in the country, opposes unlimited immigration.

6. Blocher has been politically active since 1977, a dominant force since at least 1986 (to quote the BBC), but only last year received an official position as Minister for Justice and Police.

7. And it was only last year . . . Well, let Alan Riding of Monday's NYT report it, in an article called "Dissecting Democracy, Swiss Artist Stirs Debate:"

No one paid much heed last year when the Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn stopped showing his work in Switzerland to protest a right-wing populist's entry into the government.

Got that? The guy doesn't live there, hasn't for eighteen years, but he objects to one politician there, so he won't exhibit there anymore. So There. But that isn't enough for Hirschhorn. In fact, this was at least the second step in his campaign against Blocher.

8. Two years ago, from Paris, he managed to finagle (the equivalent of) $200,000 from Pro Helvetia, the foundation that oversees the Swiss Cultural Center in Paris, to mount his current exhibition on "home territory," so to speak. (Michel Ritter, director of the Center, helped him get the grant. Hirschhorn is not taking any money from the project.) So There again.

9. As a result, the Swiss legislature slashed $1.1 million from Pro Helvetia's almost $40 million budget. It was later restored.

10. Mr. Hirschhorn hates democracy, a concept he doesn't even understand, and he wants it to go down.

11. Despite his reputation as a socially-sensitive artist, responding empathetically with his environment, Mr. Hirschhorn is a self-loathing European, a ripe dhimmi.

Okay, those last two need to be established, so I will.

As part of the exhibition, which Riding characterizes as a "biting critique of Swiss democracy," there's a play based on "William Tell." In the play,

an actor impersonating a dog briefly raises his leg as he passes a poster of Mr. Blocher. In another scene, a man is ordered to vote, even to thrust his head into the ballot box, before he is seen "vomiting" white foam onto a chair using a spray can.

Oh, don't worry about the chair: it's covered with duct tape, as are all the chairs, and much else in the space. It took eight people three weeks to make that fecal-colored mess. The exhibition also

questions democracy, at one point presenting the actors as inmates in a mental hospital. "I don't know why some people die of hunger and other people throw away food," one says. "I don't understand why you wage war to make peace," says another.

These are paid adult actors reciting an adult script, remember, not ten-year-olds musing around a campfire. I can't see democracy shrinking before these statements.

The exhibition's poster

shows a naked Iraqi in Abu Ghraib prison before an armed American soldier accompanied by the slogan "I [heart] Democracy!"

Just the image to use for a critique of Switzerland, right? (Are we sure this guy isn't an American artist?) But think about it: how much attention would he get if the poster showed Blocher, or a Swiss flag, or anything Swiss? Ho-hum. So he whips out the latest sensation as a shortcut for attention, then tries to twist history into parallel:

They said I was suggesting Switzerland tortured people," Mr. Hirschhorn said. "In fact, I was drawing a parallel with William Tell, who rebelled against Austrian occupiers. My point is that democracy does not start and end in Switzerland. Does it make sense to have a lot of democracy in a tiny Swiss canton and not in Africa, Asia and Latin America? Democracy only makes sense if it's universal. That's why I ask, is it legitimate to torture in the name of democracy?

If anyone can make logical connections between the last three sentences, please comment or email me.

He's right about democracy not starting and ending in his home country, though he has an amazingly distorted view of Switzerland's importance:

It's the one [democracy] I know, and it is the one held up as a model to the rest of the world.

Sure, that's the first country that springs to my mind when I hear the word "democracy." Is this a European mindset? And this is what he thinks of his country:

One of Mr. Hirschhorn's metaphors involves tiny electric trains that travel through mountains covered in duct tape. "Swiss trains link the cantons, but they go round and round," he explained. "They link Switzerland to itself, but not to the world." Another construction shows tunnels carved through mountains. "We like to think we are geniuses with tunnels, just as we are geniuses with democracy," he said. "But it's not innate. It's a matter of need."

The final scene in the play perhaps best captures Mr. Hirschhorn's concerns about Swiss democracy. At the end of this "William Tell," recalling the creation of a democratic Switzerland seven centuries ago, the six actors sit on a sofa and chant, "We are free, we are free, we are free." They then curl up under a large poster of William Tell and fall asleep.

But wake up, there's a couple of points I want to make, using facts 2, 4, and 5 above. It's all about immigration, which, in Europe, means it's all about Muslims.

Mr. Hirschhorn insists that his target is not Mr. Blocher, but what he represents. "Blocher is not a dictator," he said, "but he legitimizes Swiss xenophobia, isolationism, nationalism; he legitimizes the feeling in Switzerland that all these foreigners want to come and take their money. He is a dangerous populist.

But what he calls xenophobia could be alert self-interest. What he calls nationalism could be pride in a stable, safe, free country. As for isolationism, such a notion is as silly as his train metaphor; if any country is connected to and aware of the world, it is Switzerland.

As for "populist," here Hirschhorn betrays his elitist leftism. He would rather have a command economy because you can't trust the collective judgments -- called "voting" -- of the unwashed masses. He thinks people are too stupid to determine their own destiny, and will still follow demagogues like obedient sheep. (Think Orange, Tommy boy.) I believe he's lived in France too long; some of their elites, like the newspaper columnists, bray the same stinking thinking.

Which brings me back to fact 2 -- He's lived in Paris since 1986 -- and claim 11:

"Despite his reputation as a socially-sensitive artist, responding empathetically with his environment, Mr. Hirschhorn is a self-loathing European, a ripe dhimmi."

All around him, every day in France, he can see the daunting results of the kind of immigration he's pushing for in Switzerland. In the case of France, all those foreigners did want to come and get their 1000 euros a month. And they did, and he lives in it every day. Three days ago Robert Spencer at Dhimmi Watch posted long sections from a Chicago Tribune article about the future of Islam in Europe:

"The French are scared," said Tair Abdelkader, 38, a regular at the tented mosque whose light blue eyes and ebony beard are the legacy of a French mother and Algerian father. "In 10 years, the Muslim community will be stronger and stronger, and French political culture must accept that."

By midcentury, at least one in five Europeans will be Muslim. That change is unlike other waves of immigration because it poses a more essential challenge: defining a modern Judeo-Christian-Islamic civilization. The West must decide how its laws and values will shape and be shaped by Islam.

Thomas Hirschhorn must be cool with all this. But when the Muslims run Europe, not only will he be out of a profession, as the new culture ministers laugh in scorn at his every proposal; he will be redefined as a lower form of human.

Duct tape won't help him then.

The 56th Best of Me Symphony, with Camille Paglia

In the beginning was nature. -- Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae, first sentence.

by Jerome du Bois

Gary Cruse at the Owner's Manual has posted the latest Best of Me Symphony. He pairs each of the twenty entries with an appropriate quotation from Camille Paglia, my favorite writer by far, and one of this century's smartest people. I would like to add one more powerful passage of hers -- with a brief addendum -- in light of yesterday's gigantic earthquake and tsunami nightmare in East Asia.

I'll set the tone, about the true nature of Nature, with this pungent quote from Nietzsche, from Beyond Good and Evil:

"According to nature" you want to live? O you noble Stoics, what deceptive words these are! Imagine a being like nature, wasteful beyond measure, indifferent beyond measure, without purposes and consideration, without mercy and justice, fertile and desolate and uncertain at the same time; imagine indifference itself as a power -- how could you live according to this indifference! (p.15)

And here is Camille Paglia:

Everything is melting in nature. We think we see objects, but our eyes are slow and partial. Nature is blooming and withering in long puffy respirations, rising and falling in oceanic wave-motion. A mind that opened itself fully to nature without sentimental preconception would be glutted by nature's coarse materialism, its relentless superfluity. An apple tree laden with fruit: how peaceful, how picturesque. But remove the rosy filter of humanism from our gaze and look again. See nature spuming and frothing, its mad spermatic bubbles endlessly spilling out and smashing in that inhuman round of waste, rot and carnage. From the jammed glassy cells of sea roe to the feathery spores poured into the air from bursting green pods, nature is a festering hornet's nest of aggression and overkill. . . . Nature is the seething excess of being. (p.28)

Atlas shrugged yesterday, and tens of thousands died. But we humans, too, are part of nature; we, too, strain at the leash of life for more life, for better life. We don't just survive; we flourish.

And so another tectonic shift happened yesterday, in the Ukraine. The ground under Putin and the past is now shaking and uncertain, and another fifty million people begin to turn toward the West, and greater freedom and prosperity.

So let us mourn the dead, and then, afterward, celebrate the victory of the Orange Revolution.

Nothing can stop us, no matter how much the Earth rocks our world.

The Gospel of Judas Thomas The Twin Of Jesus Of Nazareth

The Twin, 2003. 30 x 48 inches. Acrylic and pen on Arches paper with collage.

by Jerome du Bois

This piece -- part of my "Not Only Words" series -- was inspired by the Gnostic gospel of Thomas, the legend (which I learned from Harold Bloom) about Jesus having a twin, and a ten-year immersion, long ago, as a born-again Christian. The I figures in this piece have been separately cut out and glued in two rows to the fuschia background, as you can see from this enlarged detail.

One version of the Gospel of Thomas says that

the Kingdom of God is within you and without you, not in buildings made of wood and stone. Split the wood and you'll find Me; lift the stone and I will be there.

I no longer believe that Jesus was God, but he was probably the best of us, and he summons the best within us.

And one of those things is courage -- the courage to laugh at death. Tomorrow, in the Christian story, a particularly cruel, thirty-three-year human arc begins, redeemed only if one believes in resurrection. If one doesn't . . .

In the very center of this piece I have printed, glyptically, in hot pink gel pen, this sentence, which is engraved on Marcel Duchamp's tombstone:

D'ailleurs, c'est toujours les autres qui meurent.

In English:

Besides, it's always the others who die.

The best laugh from the grave I've ever heard. We're all in this together.

As I've written elsewhere, I am the ultimate sucker: I believe in people. Not divine intervention or salvation. We must save each other.

We can.

SHADES OF JOY

Flower Arrangement and Photography by Catherine King.

So Long, Steven Den Beste

by Jerome du Bois

Steven Den Beste, the long-essay genius who piloted USS Clueless for three years, has retired from blogging. David from Rishon-Rishon called my attention to comments Den Beste made on David's blog, responding to a post by Nelson Ascher. Ascher posted:

According to Glenn Reynolds, Instapundit: HOWARD OWENS has returned to the blogosphere. Who's next? Steven Den Beste?

and Den Beste weighed in on Rishon-Rishon comments. He explains with his usual pungency:

You can forget it. It's not going to happen. I've been suffering for years from a genetically-caused degenerative disease. For the last year or so, the only way I was able to continue posting was by taking increasing doses of very powerful stimulants. (Understand that they were palliative; there's no cure or treatment for the underlying disease, and no one knows what causes it. The only reason it's known to be genetic is because it is found in family lines. In my case it was my father's family.)

That's not helpful when it comes to encouragement.

Before you go read the rest, which you should, relfect with me, especially if you're a blogger, on the bolded part.

I know I should have commented more there. Hell, I didn't even have him on my miserable blogroll.

I think I need to comment more, as I sail around the blogosphere, especially when something rings my bell. It's the least I could do for this guy who taught me so much.

Marching Into The Radiant Future / A Grain Of Salt

by Jerome du Bois

Do you want to know who The Burning Man is? I'll tell you: The Burning Man is Viktor Yushchenko.

Coincidentally, a couple of days after I finished Martin Cruz Smith's stunning new novel, "Wolves Eat Dogs," Vienna confirmed that a Dioxin derivative -- TCDD, related to Agent Orange -- poisoned Ukrainian Presidential Candidate Viktor Yushchenko. I've been waiting but, so far, as far as I know, no blogger, literary or otherwise, has taken advantage of the multiple sad convergences offered by these two events to update some tragic truths, so I will. These are the tears of things.

It pivots on poison, and poisoning. In Mr. Smith's new novel, his incomparable protagonist, homicide investigator Arkady Renko, rides (on a motorcycle!) straight into the heart of radioactive Chornobyl (to use its Ukrainian spelling), to solve the murders of two Russian industrialists. Among his clues: grains of cesium chloride, which look just like grains of sodium chloride -- salt -- except that the former, if you step on a single tiny grain of it with your bare foot, or sprinkle one tiny grain on your pork chops, will kill you from the inside out in less than two months.

Do you know what happened at Chornobyl, dear reader? I know, I know, it was almost twenty years ago; I was very vague about it myself. This big world, our own preoccupations, distracted us. Now Mr. Smith reminds us, in two vignettes. These are fictional, of course, but you can look it up, and Mr. Smith is renowned, in his last six novels for sure, for accurate research. In the first excerpt, Ukrainian nuclear scientist Alex Gerasimov, drunk on samogon, a dangerous Evacuation Zone liquor, describes the "accident" itself:

April twenty-sixth, 1986. The setting: the control room of Reactor Four. the actors: a night shift of fifteen technicians and engineers conducting an experiment -- to see whether the reactor can restart itself if all external power for the machinery is cut off. The experiment has been performed before with safety systems on. This time they want to be more realistic. To defeat the safety system of a nuclear reactor, however, is no simple matter. It involves application. You have to disconnect the emergency core cooling system and close and lock the gate valves."

"And what did our heroes say when Moscow asked, 'How is the reactor core?' They answered, 'The core is fine, not to worry, the core is completely intact.' Moscow is relieved. That's the punch line. 'Don't worry.' And here is my toast: 'To The Zone! Sooner or later, it will be everywhere!' Nobody's drinking?"

Oh, we're drinking, all right. Pass The Macallan, please. Ahem. That's better.

Later, Arkady has an erotic encounter with Dr. Eva Kazma, and afterward she recites this part of her dolorous history. Eva said:

"Every once in awhile I remember this thirteen-year-old girl parading on May Day with her idiotic smile. She's moved out of her village to Kiev to live with her aunt and uncle so she can go to a special school for dance; their standards are rigid, but she's been measured and weighed and has the right build. She has been selected to hold a banner that says, 'Marching into the Radiant Future!' She is so pleased the day is warm enough not to wear a coat. The young body is a wonder of growth, the division of cells produces virtually a new person. And on this day she will be a new person, because a haze comes over the sun, a breeze from Chornobyl. And so ends her days of dancing and begins her acquaintanceship with Soviet surgery." She touched the scar [on her throat]. "First the thyroid and then the tumors. That's how you know a true citizen of The Zone. We fuck without worries. I am a hollow woman; you can beat me like a drum. Still, once in a while, I remember this fatuous girl and am so ashamed of her stupidity that if I could go back in time with a gun, I would shoot her myself. When this feeling overcomes me, I go to the nearest hole or black house and hide. There are enough black houses that this is never a problem. Otherwise I have nothing to fear. Were you ambitious as a boy? What did you want to be?"

"It's the only thing I'm sure of."

I'm sure of a lot more things, but this is a tragic truth, isn't it? Probably a million Ukrainian citizens, mostly kids and teenagers, farmed out unsuccessfully over the Soviet Union after the accident, were poisoned, irradiated, sterilized, transmogrified! -- in the most callous manner imaginable: so that the Soviet May Day ceremonies would proceed smoothly.

The Russians allowed it to happen. And Putin's puppets visited a similar horror on Viktor Yushchenko: they allowed him to live in chronic pain, and with a deteriorating body, for the rest of his damaged life. Now he will burn, inside and out, as his organs fail, one by one. They may as well have salted him with cesium.

There's something particularly evil about using debilitating Dioxin, instead of lethal nicotine or ten dozen other untraceable drugs that would lay you down into the big sleep, to transmogrify a handsome man into what looks like a plague victim. Now, after reading "Wolves Eat Dogs," and seeing this brave man's ravaged face on television day after day, I will remember Chornobyl, and I will remember that one may smile and smile and be a villain, and slip some hell into your soup, or your drink, and change your life forever.

It could happen to you.

BRUSHFIRE

Flower Arrangement and Photograph by Catherine King.

Telling It Like It Is and Getting Down to What Is Really Real

by Catherine King

I got an encouraging e-mail from a fellow blogger yesterday -- Jill Fallon, who runs the blog Legacy Matters. I so appreciate your concrete and straight-forward communication, Jill. Your wonderful website bravely acknowledges life and death issues with eyes wide open. It's reassuring to hear from another human who realizes we're dealing with mortal stakes here.

I also need to extend appreciation and apologies to Lynn Sislo at Reflections in D Minor. Lynn, I was really moved by your kind words several months ago. Please don't mind how my blogging etiquette is woefully inadequate. Your thoughtfull words meant a lot, especially at that time when you so presciently sent them.

Somehow, it means much more to me when I hear from a blogger. As I' ve been telling Jerome, about the only people I actually trust are bloggers who use their real names. It is so legitimizing when a person is willing to stand by their heartfelt words with their own John Hancock.

I don't know if Jill or Lynn get ugly threats from their readers, as we do at The Tears of Things, but I know they understand that an ethical writer steps out into the firing line when they start posting their true feelings on the internet.

People can get really ugly, I'm telling you people. (You know who you are). It sure would help if we could just acknowledge that funky fact. I remember when I was going back to college to get my Masters, being surrounded by psychology students, who were supported by everyone else, it seemed to me at the time, in the assertion that "everyone is just doing the best they can".

I almost took it personally. Everybody but me loved and trusted everybody else. It felt as if everbody but me was willing to deny that People can be dangerous, violent, homicidal psychosociopaths. And these were Psychology students, who should be well aware of the complexities of the Human Spirit! People who would become doctors and take your money for telling you that everybody in the whole wide world is just doing the best they can!

Oh, really? Did we live in the same world? Do we?

I have some tough, but loving, words for those beautiful, earnest souls out there who are still going out every day and doing their best at all times:

Bless you. Don't ever stop, but please be advised that almost every single other person you will ever meet is only fucking around, just getting by, cheating in the dark . . .

Sorry angel, but it's true. Which doesn't mean that you're not Beautiful and True. And that's always good.

More Trash

by Catherine King

In my last posting, I mentioned "violent nameless ones," and the "putrid potshots of secret spineless little things."

As if on cue, within six hours, out crawls the simperingly sadistic Ian A. Wender, an artist, he says, at Holga's. Pretty fast on the keyboard, there, Ian. You better not be getting obsessed, loser.

In long, unsolicited e-mails, Ian tries desperately to impress my husband with his vast reading skills (and a lot of other things, too-- weird!). Well, he may be reading but he's not comprehending. Now it's getting rather wearing for me because I have to refer Ian back to the very introduction of my post, wherein I clearly stated:

I can tell that some of my most violent (about art!?) and cowardly critics aren't familiar with some of my earlier work. The vicious nameless ones would hold their tongues, for all the influence they'll have on me.

What part of "hold your tongue" do these venomous toads not understand, I wonder?

Photography by Catherine King: Meet My Collaborators

by Catherine King

Before I introduce my pure and gentle friends, I feel it necessary to take out some trash.

Some of our blog's most appreciated readers have enjoyed my flower photography in the spirit with which it is offered. I'm glad to pass on the beauty and joy that the flowers so generously give to me. These people get it.

It's bizarre, however, the way my flower photography brings out palpable rage, even hatred, in other, and always anonymous, visitors. Enraged by flower pictures? I'd say anonymous, and pseudonymous, have some issues. As if beautiful flowers were an affront to civilized people in our genteel society.

The offense here might be my flower photography, but then again, it might be me. Yes, as Jerome has long contended, it's probably not really about the flowers. It could just be that there's something about me that makes some people want to -- well, I won't go there. That would explain a lot, and I've sure got the experience -- and I won't go there either -- to support that theory.

I can tell that some of my most violent (about art!?) and cowardly critics aren't familiar with some of my earlier work. The vicious nameless ones would hold their tongues, for all the influence they'll have on me. They obviously haven't seen, read or figured out that Disappearing Woman, Wicked Woman, Sheela, and most especially Standup Woman, all embody aspects of myself. Each of these women is totally herself. Each inhabits her space completely, so densely that she is impervious to the putrid potshots of secret spineless little things, or even the blustering threats of Bellowing Giants, for that matter.

My life is so full and glorious right now. I'm in love and I get to do whatever I want 24/7. Jerome and I spend hours many days just sitting around, enjoying the flower arrangements, and talking about the World, and Life, and Art. No doubt some people will find this an enraging tidbit. Good. That's why I share it with my gentle readers.

Some people can go ahead and hate me all they want, if that's what they want. I'm used to it. But let it hereby be known that I'm as happy as can be, and Jerome and I are going to keep on doing art and writing whatever we damn well please. Something else that the vicious nameless ones obviously haven't seen, read or figured out is that there is no substitute for the exhiliration of standing by your own words and images. It's fun!

It's fun, and we relish every moment, having paid our dues, many times over, oh so long ago. Only real people who stand behind their work with real names deserve respect, and only the strong survive as well as we do. Jerome and I have done lots of hard work, sustained over time, and produced a beautiful body of work, of which we're really proud. All signed with our first and last names. Nobody can take any of it away from us. There are those who want to. Deal with it. Make your own art, build your own blog, Impotent Idiot.

Let's see, is that all the garbage to be dealt with for now? Good. Now we can get to the point. Enough of the hard-to-love humans. It's time to examine some more pure forms of being -- what my photography is all about. It is subject-driven, and my subjects are my gracious nonhuman collaborators -- the generous green beings and the ghostly orbs . . .

Toward the end of this summer, Jerome suggested that I take up flower arranging. It was not a frivolous suggestion. Of course, for me this meant just diving in and trying it, unencumbered by the bother of taking floral design classes. I did check out some definitive books on arranging that were especially appealing, discovered some looks that I liked and others I didn't.

I was enthusiastic but also intimidated -- the cut flowers seemed so precious and delicate. They hadn't grown on me yet, so their beauty seemed exclusive and elite. At first I'd buy a bouquet, clean and fluff it up a little, then kind of let the stems go where they wanted. See FLOWER POWER, for example.

The power of these green beings is subtle, but irresistible, I discovered as I handled them, grooming every stem. Within a week of my starting to arrange flowers, they had already, gently, worked their magic on me. It was evident as I handled their defenseless green bodies -- like beautiful, nonthreatening aliens.

As I held them, they started to communicate with me and get under my skin. They vibrated in my hands and their green power started flowing through me. I felt a blissfull serenity when we touched. My new friends were teaching me their language. They told me that they glow best with an uncontrived presentation.

Now that we were intimate, I could try more things with my flower arranging. It's important that each arrangement be distinctive, not just pretty. Some aren't really pretty at all, but all have a compelling immediacy. Each arrangement tells something unique that I feel must be captured before it dies. (Perhaps my favorite so far is FLORALROYALE. Witness the swirling energy).

The photography, you see, just naturally grew out of the flower arranging. The arrangements would live forever, with the click of a shutter. And these are full-framed photos; I don't crop, and I'm very proud that they are uncropped -- because, remember, these compositions are collaborations.

Oftentimes, when Jerome and I download a flower photograph for the first time, and just a huge corner of the maximum size comes up on the screen -- well, the power-packed, million-petalled, green-haired, spiral-tendrilled image is so gorgeous we both gasp in wonder!

In fact, we have had such interest in the photos that soon visitors to The Tears of Things will be able to buy large prints of my flower arrangements. I'm working on getting maximum size right now, because that's how they look best. I want to be able to offer about a 20" x 30" matte print -- the size we find so breathtaking. More to come . . .

My second area of photography -- spirit and ghost photography -- must really raise issues with just about all of our readers. Why? Because, in spite of their compelling beauty and captivating uncanniness, okay, and unprecedented, almost unbelieveable, boldness, no one ever says anything about the paranormal photography. It's been 2 1/2 years now. Jerome and I are beginning to become convinced that there is some telling psychological resistance to the entire subject of the mortality/immortality of the human race. (Or at least the small sample who visit the blog.)

Well, actually, two whole people have had something to say. One guy e-mailed me a few months ago, interested in our orb photos and saying that he'd also captured some in a remote graveyard. He asked if he could share his pictures and asked me what I thought about orbs.

I didn't get back to him. I'm basically a posting blogger, having done dialogue to death in previous incarnations. In this case, I had nothing to say because the guy should have known that there are hundreds of orb sites for enthusiasts to talk with each other. A few sites have some interesting scientific theories about the energy sources of orbs and their electromagnetic qualities. After all, the orbs were really there in actuality, so they had to have some physical qualities, now and then, as they visited from other dimensions.

These more scientific sites were helpful to me two and a half years ago when I started photographing orbs. (Crowd of Witnesses; Roomfull of Phantoms.)
At that time -- at all times -- I have to wrestle with my own findings, according to my personal tradition, so other people's metaphysics were, and are, of no use to me. Questions and issues of our mortality and immortality must be worked out mano a mano.

When one begins to accumulate a such a compelling photographic archive of orbs and other anomalies, one quickly becomes convinced that they are ghosts and spirits. Something uncanny was there, and it felt more like the dead than like anything else, such as extraterrestrials or angels.

They really are there, okay? and they feel like the dead. That's all I can say with assurance; anything else would be speculation. I suppose that's what they do on the orb site chat rooms -- speculate to their heart's content. What Jerome and I do is make art from our ghost photos -- presented with all the mystery, and the sensitivity to their message, intact.

We have this stunning, growing archive of wondrous images, which any viewer can see, anytime, by clicking on The Tears of Things banner, which is continually updated. Are not every one of these images beautiful? Moreover, each one is important, representing, as it does, evidence of the immortality of human life. Beautiful, Important, always there in Abundance? We think they cover the Earth, as ubiquitous and enchanting as our other collaborators, the flowers. So we have to continue capturing the orbs, and likewise, as artists, we're compelled to make art out of them. It's what we do.

HIGH SHAG

Flower Arrangement and Photography by Catherine King.

Brad Kahlhamer: He Walks In Ugliness

by Jerome du Bois, with Catherine King

[Preface: Accentuate The Positive

Since the beginning of this blog, some of the comments I've received around the blogosphere, and via email, complain that I am angry, bitter, and, to quote a recent local yokel, "negitive." Not so. Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer laid it down in 1945:

You've got to accentuate the positive
Eliminate the negative
And latch on to the affirmative
Don't mess with Mister In-Between.

I'm angry, you bet, and rightly so, but not bitter. Bitterness implies stingy attenuation and retreat. Screw that. The world only moves forward. Me, too. As for negative . . .

Is it negative to uphold human dignity, the upward glance, evidence of hard-won optimism?

Is it negative to object to the degradation of women and children?

Is it negative to decry depictions of decapitations in current art?

Is it negative to condemn the celebration of superficiality, so that the cowardly and shallow may hide from the heartbreakingly significant?

Is it negative to point out technical incompetence, especially when its perpetrators are proud of it?

Is it negative to ask for some goddamn respect for the human being, the human condition, the human future?

But I don't mess with Mister In-Between. Unless he gets in my way, and most especially when he's old enough to know better . . . to be better. You hear me, Brad?]

At the time it seemed so cinema," he said. "It was only after a few weeks, when I couldn't get away from the lingering smell of jet fuel and bodies, that the reality really hit me." -- Brad Kahlhamer, 2004, reflecting on September 11, 2001.

A friend of mine said something horrible recently: ''I'm just so over 9/11.'' . . . I don't live in New York now, though I used to, and I understand fully that for those who do, such an attitude may seem blasphemously insensitive. But it wouldn't shock me if the attacks and their iconographic halos were soon the stuff of magazine ''in-out'' lists. In: ''Fahrenheit 9/11.'' Out: 9/11. -- Walter Kirn, The New York Times Magazine, September 12, 2004.

Walk In Beauty. -- Navajo maxim.

I first saw Brad Kahlhamer's work on the cover of Flash Art, July-September 2001. Ah, life was good back then, kicking back on our pile of pillows in front of the television, leafing through the new slick stack of art, fashion, and culture magazines during that beautiful summer, pre-9/11. And then, five pages in, I came across the full-page ad for his Deitch Projects Show, "Almost American." How I fervently wish this image was online, especially since it carries yet another charge -- going beyond my 2001 reaction to it -- now that I've re-examined it, and the cover, and the interview -- in light of Kahlhamer's current show at SMoCA. (More images here.)

The ad is simple: a full-bleed color shot of the artist in his studio, photographed from about eight feet behind him. A big guy in paint-spattered khakis, cut-off sweatshirt, black rubber- sole shoes, long black hair. (Probably a Native American; the "Big Eagle" on the cover is a clue, too.) To his left a tall wide window with part of the New York City skyline visible; below the window, his can-cluttered, rag-festooned paint cart. A large vertical painting hangs before him (stacked sound system amplifiers), and to his right, facing him and the light pouring in from the window, is his model, I suppose: she looks Native American, long black hair, slim and barefoot, wearing a simple shift (which she slightly, lightly lifts with her left hand). He holds her chin up with his outstretched right arm. Copy on top right, all caps: Brad Kahlhamer (in white), and below it, Almost (red) American (blue). Deitch detergent logo in lower right.

As soon as I saw this scene, in 2001, a Navajo word -- belasana -- rolled round and red into my mind from my long-ago year as a reporter on The Rez: it means apple, red on the outside, white on the inside.

Why the insult? (It isn't racial, by the way, not in my citation. Let me be clear, I mean that he is a superficial hypocrite, cheapening his heritage: Luke Warm. Or, as Catherine says, "Red on the outside, yellow on the inside.") Was I being unfair? I didn't know anything about the guy, after all. Well, add implied misogyny to the cliché cover eagle and the stereotypical studio scene. The guy looked like a sellout and a bully, too. I didn't read the interview inside, but I examined the three paintings. Basquiat was bad and way overrated, and these were bad Basquiat. Like a painter with advanced Parkinson's, still trying, still trying.

Skanky, strung-out, black-outlined jittery balloons float like once-happy faces over paint-squeegeed canvases. "US Girl Band Near Their Moon." I hate the word "girl" as applied to women. "Sacagewa + Friends," with blood splattered on Catherine and my Indian heroine's face. Misogynist, I thought. Later, this intuition would be confirmed. And he manages to uglify the baby javelina, one of the most endearing creatures in the prickly Southwest. (Catherine describes them: "Like little trapezoids with legs.")

So I didn't bother with the interview, conducted by someone named Michael Cohen, since my opinion of Flash Art's tired pomo obfuscation was quite low, and I set the magazine aside. Now, though, let's read the introductory paragraph, for both the reader's and my own edification (good luck):

Exploding and imploding the myths of the American Old West, Brad Kahlhamer has recently emerged into the front ranks of contemporary New York painters. His jagged cartoon lines and swirls of earth-colored pigment reconfigure painting as an open-system able to encompass multi-ethnic and street cultures from Native American iconography to Zap comix. In an era poised between capitulation and diversity [what does that mean?], Kahlhamer has left the recycling of previous abstract styles behind him. Instead he rummages through the dust-bin of history to organize jagged intellectual rushes which encourage viewers to reconnect with social roots and identity.

Still awake? One more quote, about his influences:

My graphic styles have been influenced by many sources: comic artist Gary Panter's sketch books, "Maus" author Art Spiegelman's politics, Henry Darger's episodes, along with the Drawing Center's 1996 Plains Indian drawing show.

Again, this was 2001. Years passed, didn't they? Yes; three. And some of us grew. But now we have fresh tears, and more to come.

In early October, Catherine, checking out azcentral.com, came across Kahlhamer's SMoCA show. She began reading, and when she read the sentence that begins this piece -- "At the time it seemed so cinema" -- she started to seethe. It was those two twee words --

so cinema

-- that made her want to grind her teeth. I'll get back to that wormy phrase, curled in the pulpy core of Brad Kahlhamer's soul.

So I read the azcentral.com article, checked out the SMoCA site, Googled his images -- and then, remembering, I dug out the Flash Art article-interview. I read, looked, reread, ruminated . . . chewing the dry pulp of this man's life. And then we took in the exhibition at SMoCA.

It's called "Let's Walk West." Yeah, let's walk, man, see what we can see.

[Because I have, Brad. This belagana, this white guy, walked the desert between Scottsdale and Mesa dozens of times, years ago, long before you even left for the City you didn't deserve or appreciate. I've lived in hogans and teepees, I've done vision quests, sweat lodges to make you faint, I've choked the peyote down right next to the Fire Tender, I've seen the otter skins dance in the long lodges near Black River, Wisconsin, I've wrestled with the eagle on the South Dakota plain, and I've seen the shadows of the bears swiping their paws at the drummers. I have stood outside the hogan north of Window Rock in the very shank of the night, night after night, rubbing my face with stars they were so close, a reassurance in a darkness so fat, deep, and bowel-freezing one could believe in everything. What do you know, belasana? What have you learned in your walk?]

So we walked the four walls of his hideously similar skull-heavy scribblings, his shredded eagles, his dessicated "girls," ("fear of girls' moon," he scrawls creepily), his skeletal selves, his anemic skies, his braids -- attached to almost everything -- made of lazy commas . . .

At one point hours later, while discussing the show at home, Catherine burst out with: "My eagles would soar in the bluest sky!"

This guy's eagles look like strung-out tweakers, which means they fit right in with the rest of his figurative depictions, whether animal, vegetable, mineral or, saddest of all, human. Brad Kahlhamer -- Ugh, Jr.'s, alter ego, I hear -- makes everything he touches, draws, or paints ugly: men, women, children, animals (javelinas!), birds, music, cacti, the sun, flowers, mountains, the desert itself. He honors not a single eagle feather as it should be and has been for thousands of years -- as a symbol of maturity and farsightedness. (Catherine says, pointing to the eagles and the javelinas, "His hand makes no distinction between feathers and fur." She's right; just go look.) The human face, the human hand, the human soul all look the same to him: twisted rags, toss them in the corner.

Even the human skull, the crown on the throne of everything that makes us who we are, and a sobering reminder of our mortality, gets no respect at all from this shallow man, even though you can see he's got one in his studio to draw from life (just lying on the floor, too! there's a photo in the catalog). On one wall of this exhibition we see 164 crappy watercolor drawings of skulls slapped up side by side, interspersed with pen scribblings and spiderwebby idiocy, as if everything ripped from Kahlhamer's fevered, one-track brain, and poured onto the drawing pad, should be carefully caught before it reaches the floor.

"No photographs," says the headphoned attendant, when Catherine raises the camera. Of course not; should we take off our shoes as well? Genuflect? Where's the spittoon, by the way? Hey, lady, come back here . . .

Kahlhamer has also made a big deal about straddling two horses -- Native American and white middle-class -- and, honoring neither, he renders both into a stringy glue of flying black braids and empty-eyed, open-mouthed balloon-shaped heads trailing withered bodies, floating in blasted, inhospitable landscapes. Being biracial, or even being biracial and adopted, is no big deal nowadays, and, after all, he is a middle-aged man.

He also makes a big deal about being inspired by the 1996 Plains Indian Ledger Drawing show, and the Heard Museum dutifully lays several out for display at SMoCA. The first thing you notice is how thoroughly he has ignored them, since they are neat, coherent narratives, sad and dignified.

But after that, nothing. I haven't been able to find out, for example, what Mr. Kahlhamer's ethnic or tribal background might be. He doesn't mention it. He doesn't refer to any other Native American art, either, past or present. I myself am not familiar with a lot of Native Ameican art, but Catherine is. She handed me a book from her collection -- Anasazi & Pueblo Painting, by J.J. Brody, 1991 -- that quite clearly shows a wide range of abstract and representational art going back to 1000 BC.

Kahlhamer could have benefited from perusing this book. For one thing, most of the people depicted have full, and graceful, bodies, with arms and legs and hands and feet, unlike most of Kahlhamer's ungainly creatures, who seem all head, and ugly, empty heads, too.

By coincidence, December 5th's NYT Book Review, art section, carried this reference, which I'll quote in full:

When European settlers first pushed westward across the Appalachians in the late 18th Century, they encountered geometric and serpentine earthworks on a monumental scale. Local Indians could tell them nothing about the origin of these mounds, and Romantic Europeans, reflecting the prejudices of their times, assumed there could be no tie between the ingenious "Lost Race" that erected these structures and the contemporary Indian population. Actually, as a team of scholars under the direction of Richard F. Townsend makes clear in the handsomely illustrated Hero, Hawk, And Open Hand: American Indian Art of the Ancient Midwest and South (Art Institute of Chicago / Yale University), the link was direct, and the remarkable objects excavated from the system of earthworks -- reflecting complicated trade routes and folkways across the Midwest and South -- are the earliest North American art. The streamlined "birdstones" and "boatstones" (weights for spear throwers) from the Archaic period (circa 6000-500 BC) would have delighted Brancusi. Among the Hopewell artifacts cut from sheets of mica during the "Woodland" period (1000 BC to AD 1000) are a heart-stopping talon of a bird of prey and an outstretched hand with bent thumb and elongated fingers. In such luminous objects there is, as the book notes, "a suggestion of communication between the human community and the world of spirits beyond."

Now go examine the "talons" of Kahlhamer's eagles. They look like coat hangers, unable to grasp even a blade of grass. And consider the human hands as well. Do they look competent, supple enough to make guitar chords?

And what does he have to say about the world of spirits beyond? Back in 2001, this is what he had to say about shamanism:

I am interested in ideas of belief [!]. Spirituality could imply organized religion, vortexes, or robed dwarfs. This year I was able to visit Jerusalem, a sundance in Green Grass, South Dakota, and Vegas. All these places can offer relief or they can provoke. I'm interested in how religious ideas are transplanted into a modern world they don't work in -- a spiritual version of the Beverly Hillbillies. Right now I'm really just beginning to take the steps towards a fuller understanding of shamanism, a primitive term if I ever heard one.

(I'll get to the bolded part in a moment.)

You don't have to be Jewish or Lakota or Nevadan to be insulted by this dismissive flattening of behaviorial categories. People on their way to Vegas wouldn't be happy being detoured to either the Holy City or Green Grass, SD. Nor vice versa for the others. Notice also how he handles volatile, vital ideas with long tongs: "I am interested in ideas of belief."

This was in 2001. Then the dreadful day came, and he was there, he was right there in the middle of it, and you can read his reaction in the first epigraph above: duuuhhhh . . . it seemed so cinema. Just like his buddy Art Spiegelman: I don't like it; what do I do? waaaah! I know, I'll make believe it's make believe -- cinema, in a word, sooo cinema.

Then, not long after, this 45-year-old man left NYC and moved into his parents' winter home in a retirement community in Mesa, Arizona, and began painting again in the converted carport.

And his new paintings don't look much different than the pieces in the "Almost American" show, or those, here on this Google page, in between 2001 and now. It's as if 9/11 never happened.

Now, I don't expect everyone to mark the event in every artwork; but I'm suspicious of any artist for whom 9/11 looms no higher than a speed bump. And what did he say? Oh, yes:

I'm interested in how religious ideas are transplanted into a modern world they don't work in -- a spiritual version of the Beverly Hillbillies.

Instead, a newly-minted spiritual version of the kamikazis jammed their murderous way into a modern world they don't work in, smashing it right in his face . . . He was there . . . He . . .

Wait a minute. Hang on. Where's that Flash Art ad? I found it, and I looked again closely at the window that opened out into the New York City skyline. Oh, man. I dug out several magnifying glasses. Oh, my God. Oh, you bastard. One was there, right there, one of the Towers was framed in the right side of the window, close enough to fill nearly three-quarters of the tall window.

Damn, he was there that day. He looked out that window. Nobody knows how many people, trapped in those burning hells, had to jump that day. He must have watched some of them falling. And then the towers themselves.

And then he goes home to Mom and Dad's empty trailer, begins to scribble, splatter, and squirm -- takes some desert walks, maybe -- and lo and behold, these terrible paintings are the shaman's offering.

Sham man. So cinema. And no artist, Deitch stamp notwithstanding.

BOUQUETIOUS

Flower Arrangement and Photograph by Catherine King.