OLD ART, NEW COPY

My father is the only person I can recall ever using the word “damnedest”. And he used it a lot, especially as regards me. “I’m doing my damnedest to get you interested in building soap-box derby racers,” he would complain. Or, “I’m trying my damnedest to understand how you could mistake the oil reservoir for the gas tank on the goddam lawn mower!” And then he would wait for a response, which always baffled me because it seemed like a perfectly enclosed statement, about which not much more needed to be said. Occasionally I would try a look of sympathy for his plight, even once shaking my head in a “kids today! What are you gonna do?” gesture, but that only seemed to send him deeper into damnedesty.

The fact is, I have never done my damnedest. It’s a concept that eludes me, like neutrinos, or a Gingrich presidency. If I had been able to do my damnedest, I might have made more progress through this vail of tears, although I have it on good authority that the far side of this vail of tears is not a place you should want to be in any hurry to reach.The only difference I can see between undamnedested me and others plodding through said vail, albeit far ahead, is the amount of money we have accumulated. And the thing about the getting of money, as we all know but I’m going to say it anyway because it bears repeating, the only thing it buys is the desire to have more money. And that leads to obscenities like having a half-million-dollar line of credit at Tiffany’s or owning eight houses. Eight houses! The only possible benefit John McCain can possibly derive from owning eight houses is the ability to look down his nose at the poor forlorn loser who only owns seven houses. And you just know it eats at him in the dark of the night that there are people out there who own nine houses.

I didn’t arrive at my current saintly state unbesmirch’d. As my friend Chris, who has appointed himself the Jiminy Cricket to my Pinocchio, will tell anyone who comes within earshot, I was once as upwardly mobile as anyone. I didn’t seek out reduced circumstances; they fell into my lap from a great height, like space junk. But I have embraced them as my own, which is pretty much the only option open to me. If I ever doubt the path that has chosen me, all I have to do (just to bring full circle the larding of this post with Republicans) is look at the face of Mitt Romney and know that I am a happier man than he is with his millions upon millions of dollars and his sacred garments twisted as he does his damnedest to become President.

COFFEEHOUSE PEOPLE

I'm going to tell you about a dream i had last night, but don't worry, it’s not the kind of telling where you nod in fake interest but inside your head you're stabbing your eyes out with a virtual fork, a dull one. The actual story of the dream is only incidental. I was bustling about my typical dream-y business, engaged in some mildly boring but distressing activity, pretty much the same as my waking life, which my subconscious apparently felt I hadn’t gotten enough of, when who should make a Special Guest Appearance but Sir Paul McCartney! And I say it that way because he was actually greeted with applause from the audience (there was suddenly an audience!) which he graciously acknowledged. Then he offered me a bit of advice which, sadly, I don't remember in detail--it was something along the lines of “why don’t you put on some pants?”-- and although it sounded kind of condescending, I said, "thank you, Paul McCartney!" to which he murmured "Don’t call me by my full name; it isn't done." That's what he said, "it isn't done." And that was it. My dream sort of fizzled after that, because how do you follow a walk-on appearance by a Beatle?

The irony is that Paul was my least favorite Beatle, by a mile. I always thought of him as simpering, and too eager to moon at the camera. I even preferred Ringo, especially after I later learned that he was a fantastic drummer, and he wasn't just hired because they felt sorry for him. I know I couldn’t have booked John, I’m not at that level, and I should be grateful it wasn’t, say, Stephen Tyler or Michael Martin Murphy, but couldn’t it have been Ringo? I should have confronted Paul about “The Long and Winding Road” or “Rocky Raccoon”, but I didn’t think fast enough. After all, I was SOUND ASLEEP, people! Jeez.

THINGS

This is from back in the 80’s, so you can’t really blame me for being callous. We were all callous back then, and when you’re all callous, nobody’s callous. I think that’s called Shrodeborgmeyer’s Law. I don’t think of dogs as things, of course, especially Australian Cattle Dogs, of which this is one. He was a human being, albeit an irascible one, taken to viciously biting anyone not in his immediate family, which made walks a whole lot of fun. He could also dart his tongue into your mouth faster than any woman I ever met, although with strikingly different results. And that sums up the 80’s for me. Except for the white stuff.

MARGARET'S GROCERY, VICKSBURG, MISS. (WARNING: THIS PICTURE HAS ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO WITH WHAT FOLLOWS)

You know when you’re trundling the trash can full of a week’s worth of god-knows-what down the driveway and it hits that seam in the concrete and stops you with a jolt and sends a shock wave through your arms to your shoulders  and makes your head whip back and your teeth rattle? Just as it has every single goddam Monday night for the last five years? And it makes you so mad you think about running to the pet store and buying the cutest little puppy in the world and flying to wherever it is that Sister Wendy lives and giving her that cute little puppy as a gift just so you can hurl insults at the puppy and make Sister Wendy’s face crumple and burst into those pitiful nun tears and right before you leave you also squirt Heinz Extra Spicy Ketchup on her wimple for good measure? And you also give her the finger? And slam the door? Well, that just happened to me.

MY CHAUD AIR PAINTING

Meaning I didn’t paint it en plein air. It was cold today, and I’m not the sort of person who makes sacrifices for his art. Like, I wouldn’t cut off my ear for my art. I wouldn’t cut off my ear for any reason, unless I got really really hungry for dried apricots and there were no dried apricots. Now if human sacrifice were still legal, I might make that kind of sacrifice. I still have my list, I believe. But where would that get me, art-wise? Unless I was doing a red painting. I could see it then.

A SMALL DOSE OF TALKING HEADS

ANOTHER BY CINDY WOODS

This is her faithful friend, Ronda. I have a fond mental image of Cindy barreling down the sidewalk like a maniac in her wheelchair, Ronda trotting after, no doubt prepared to pay off run-over pedestrians.

IT'S OVER

And thank the Baby Jesus, not a moment too soon. All that bonhomie, both real and faked, underwritten by corporations, christmas carols now best heard on tv commercials, frenzied women trampled to death at the doorstep of the crappiest of crap purveyors, all of us given a free pass to buy buy buy without having to give a thought to the real cost of our consumer rioting because it’s all been given an aura of righteousness by a myth about a bitter, spiteful deity who sent us a nice boy so we would like him better.

I don’t exempt myself from this churlish diatribe. I have been personally responsible for Apple’s inflated bottom line. I sit right now in a semicircle of the very latest technology, knowing full well that I could easily do what I do with a five-year-old beige tower, but I’m as easily smitten as anyone by the siren call of merchants of every stripe, the ones who have now assumed the title of “Job Creator” and demand that the health inspectors be banished from their squalid kitchens and the tax collectors be given the bum’s rush so that they may get on with their amassing of wealth, which they use primarily to speculate on what other job creators will do with their wealth, and place their bets with no regard to the small countries whose economies collapse as a result.

Don’t mind me. Just cleaning out the pipes. Clearing the decks for the next holiday promotion to come down the rails. Hmm. I wonder if Apple is going to come out with a Valentine’s Day iPad?

FROM CINDY WOODS

CINDY WOODS ART 4 U

THIS MORNING'S SKETCH BY CINDY WOODS

ANOTHER CINDY WOODS

YOUR CINDY WOODS SKETCH FOR TODAY

TODAY'S CINDY WOODS

With a very few notable exceptions, Cindy's drawings always brought a smile to my face. Her simple lines, while sometimes deceptively childlike, always evoked real, living human beings. I know this ventriloquist.

CINDY WOODS SKETCH FOR CHRISTMAS

It would be Scroogey of me to buck the tide, so Merry Christmas, everyone.

TODAY'S SKETCH BY CINDY WOODS

This is her friend Bill Hayes. Some of us fellow sketchers visited Cindy a few years ago--well, more than a few now--and as we walked down the hall, we recognized several of her favorite subjects, including Bill. We felt like we already knew them, and we did.

CINDY WOODS

I’m thinking about Cindy Woods today. I always think of her around Christmas time, maybe because of her drawings of her housemates with charmingly cockeyed Santa hats. Cindy was a more talented and more courageous artist than I will ever be; she was incredibly prolific, and her art was and is meaningful in a way that no one else’s is. Her eye was pitiless, and the honesty of her vision granted her subjects a sense of dignity and humanity. Her drawings say “I see you exactly as you are, and I love you.” What a tremendous gift for them, and for us.

Cindy drew on a drugstore notepad with a #2 pencil. She didn’t matte and frame her art and hang it on sterile walls for people dressed in black to pose in front of. When she died, three years ago, her sketching friends vowed to put out a book of her work, so the rest of the world could see what we saw. Since we were, and still are, mere humans, that never happened, but I’m going to make weak amends by posting one of her drawings here every day for a while. And I encourage you to visit her website, http://learndaily.blogspot.com/. Just pick any of the months on the archive list in the right-hand column. I promise you your time will be well-spent.

FROM MY GIRL-WRESTLER PERIOD

I’ve lived long enough to gain an insight into every aspect of how life works except one: how hard would it be for whoever is charged with inventing English-language equivalents of words in languages whose letters look like random collections of twigs, and in my mind’s eye it’s a little bald-headed guy on a stool with a green eye-shade and no pants on, but that’s just me--no, no, not just me with a green eye-shade and no pants on, it’s just me making the conjecture--how hard would it be, I say, for this guy to make the English equivalent sound like the word it’s representing? For example, the other day I was mentioning a Vietnamese soup to a friend of mine--well, a former friend--a soup clearly and unambiguously spelled P-H-O, and I pronounced it “foe”. Well, this former friend looked at me like I had just taken a pair of tongs and placed a steaming turd on his plate. I suppose I should be grateful that his look included the tongs; he thought that much of me, at least. He stared at me thusly for several tension-packed seconds, then said, “Oh! You must mean FUH!” And then raised an eyebrow, to convey a reappraisal of me that included the possibility that I have started hanging out with tea-party types and watching NASCAR races from my La-Z-Boy recliner. Leaving aside for the moment the dubious reasoning for naming any foodstuff “fuh”, why in the world did No Pants Guy decide to call it “Pho”? Did he know me as a child and has devoted the rest of his life to planning a way to humiliate me? Wouldn’t be the first time, if so.

Now look. I was going to devote this blog entry to a dissection of the sub-prime mortgage scandal and instead squandered it on a discussion of “fuh”. I guess there won’t be a GED equivalency credit for this one, huh?

SUNDAY MORNING TALKING HEADS

SENATOR WARNER DROPS BY CAFE STELLA

And I, knowing you lot would be too lazy to get up early to see him, having stayed up late carousing and peeing in the bushes and whatnot, attended and recorded. He was there to speak to a retail merchants association, so most of what was said was along the lines of Title C-47a depreciation requirements are bleeding us dry, so it sailed right over my head, conveniently. My knowledge of retail merchandising is limited to: sometimes I buy stuff. However, a high point for me was when some of them started complaining about Obama’s healthcare initiative, and how resentful they were. Warner, who is not a doctrinaire liberal at all but a pragmatic business type, spoke in defense of the plan, saying he voted for it not because it’s perfect but because doing something was infinitely better than doing nothing. And the way things work is, you try it and see what works and what doesn’t, and then you change the things that don’t. Duh. Or it would be a duh if the people who are charged with seeing what works were pragmatists like Warner, instead a bunch of pinheads who define “what doesn’t work” as anything with the name Obama attached to it. Another interesting thing Warner said was one way to start to free us from the grip of political polarization that is paralyzing us right now is for each of us to find one person in the opposing party who is reasonable, sensible, open-minded, willing to compromise, and support them. Something to think about.

Yesterday a friend, in a discussion of similar topics, brought up the old quote, “cometh the hour, cometh the man.” I’m 90% sure she was not referring to a sexual timetable, but to current events. Okay, 65% sure. Well, the time hath cometh. It’s hereth already.  Whence cometh the man? Or the little lady, as the case may be? They’re fucking lateth!