“Artspeak!” – Converse like a Critic!

Fun post.

Was sent this link recently.

It’s just too good not to share  …  click  ‘here’.

…  hee-hee …  enjoy!

The Philanthropist … (another short story)

(Dear Canadada Readers: here’s another edit of an older ’story’  – would appreciate any feedback…. good, bad, indifferent – Thanks! – c)

I sat in the small audience with twenty-four other representatives from various Foundations at the Adopt-a-Village symposium. We quietly listened to a well-built black man in his early forties talk about starvation, mal-nutrition, malaria, military intervention, the heroic efforts of the Canadian Red Cross and the overall generosity of the Federal Canadian food banks. He talked too of the urgent need for family planning. As a humorous aside he mentioned that his hotel rate in Gobi was “a whopping” $3.00 U.S. per night.

As he spoke his large body flowed with a natural lilting of the head. He gently swayed from side to side like a contented elephant. His hands swept passively through the air and his long brown fingers would slowly unfurl. From time to time he would lazily scratch his head, or place his left hand inside his jacket and press, caress, his chest. His hand would go to his shirt collar and he would absentmindedly tug in discomfort. At one point his palm was turned out to us and I was startled to see how very white it was. His voice was melodious and soft. Low, deep, and sonorous. His entire body energy seemed to reflect a well-tempered contemplative individual. The overall body movement, the overall picture, was, to my watchful eye and curious mind, very appealing, and basically sexual.

I tried to concentrate, and listen. I tried to really listen to this whole black person talk as he moved so gracefully through such confining and restrictive white space. I listened acutely for the half-truths, and the half lies, listening to see, if this sexy massive man knew the difference himself between the politically correct white lies and the simmering elusive black truths.

He spoke well, with a polite firmness, yet with the craft of a well-versed and artful diplomat. As I said, he was good. Very good.

I found I could resist no longer, I had to speak to this big man. Investigate. So I asked one question after another. I wanted to get a sense of our private dialogue, the potential of our own undulating intimate rhythm. I wanted to see how he would answer me, if he would answer me, or just answer the question. He was very good. It was hard to tell exactly. Precisely. Yet, even so, his manly earthy charm was riveting. As he walked by me to answer yet another question from the audience I caught a whiff of his sweet smell body sweat. I lapsed completely from the job at hand and could only think of his black body on top of me. Laying over me. Lying beside me.

As he passed by I noted there was a gentle flabby jiggle at mid-section beneath his khaki coloured shirt. The tip of his tie twitched. And that made me vaguely uneasy. (If his people are starving, then why is he so well-fed and so well-dressed?) But I scoffed at my superficial assessment: he had obviously pruned himself for this important fund-raising presentation, and yet, there was something else, something else.

The man oozed. That was it. He just oozed sensuality. It was sheer and feral. Potent with potential.

I wondered about my white woman lust for this hulking black man. I noticed that he didn’t come too close to me. I flattered myself to think that he too felt our toxic sexual sub-current, our sultry sub-text. No other woman in the audience conversed with him as much as I did, except perhaps that hen-pecking frau in the back who kept after him about proper accountability, zealous Christian missionaries, unpredictable cycles of agriculture and the diminishing cleanliness of the water table. She spoke forcefully with a kind of condescending marmishness. And after her last question, I deliberately softened my inquiring voice, and almost spoke in a whisper. He smiled at me. Several times.

Towards the end of the presentation, he showed a beguiling slide of a sun-baked riverbed with a scraggly patch of cultivated maize growing in the sunken hollow. Beside the maize a bent old man with porcelain white eyes stood in a colourful mustard sarong. He was barefoot and leaning on a wooden stick. He gazed quizzically at the camera. Two small hairless children were freeze-framed as they played happily in the foreground with what appeared to be a tiger cub. A well-shaped and well-groomed mature bejewelled woman sat near them on the ground holding onto a gigantic water gourd, laughing at them. It was a pleasant picture.

I asked the Adopt-a-Village representative where the seeds had come from so that this rock hard farmer could plant his precious maize crop. He started to tell me that the genetically strengthened corn seeds were supplied by the Agricultural Ministry funded by various global bio-pharmaceutical Foundations like ours but then he stopped, and said, “Oh, you mean these people,” as he glanced quickly over his shoulder at the simple family portrait. “The Matsi carry their own seeds, they always have, from generation to generation.” Suddenly his large open friendly face snapped shut, and he did not meet my eye that time as he moved forward to the front of the room clicking rapidly to the next slide.
He had inadvertently slid from the script, and he knew that I knew it.

I instantly understood. The photograph was just a prop. A sophisticated yet ‘primitive’ sales tool for this global charity gambit. None within the photograph had known why their picture had been taken. They had no idea that their simple traditional lifestyle would now be used to raise cash. Their frozen visages were merely an eternal testament of ‘backward’ global poverty. A celluloid image to trade with the First World. It was equally as clear that they would never be the immediate recipients of any kind of global assistance. And by the look of it, they didn’t really seem to need our life-altering charity.

I looked again at the sexy black man as he moved stealthfully along the side of the wall selling his Adopt-a-Village concept to well-heeled, and isolated Canadian philanthropists. And, yes, suddenly I experienced a massive earthquake of doubt. He was not one of those stone faced and timeless self-reliant nomadic people. No, he was far too well-trained, well-educated and totally dependent on our Western commercial ways. Our money, my money, fed him and kept others like him in Gobi hotels at $3 a night U.S.

His effusive black charm instantly vanished, his skilful sonorous voice no longer seduced. He was just like any other polished floor-flusher. As I stood to leave, I did not look back at that handsome smooth talking hustler. How foolish of me to think.

But, I did pick up one of the well-designed four colour glossy brochures strategically placed beside the front door for the Adopt-a-Village programme. It was still an appealing idea, all things considered. Perhaps not all the money, I reasoned to myself as I hopped into the Benz, went to the well-organized administrators and skilled fund-raisers. There had to be some kind of trickle-down effect otherwise the whole scheme was just a fraud. And that couldn’t be true, now could it? I would make the recommendation to my Board, I decided, driving up Yonge Street, that we grant a provisional small endowment of $500,000. According to the brochure, that would be enough to care for 5 villages of 500 inhabitants for 5 years. That should do.

As I sat at the red light the sweet smell of that sexy black salesman lingered on in my nostrils.

Seeing ‘Patterns in Nature’ … a random taut

Recently finished reading  Marshall McLuhan’s collection of essay’s & lectures compiled by his daughter,  ‘Understanding Me’. That guy was so far ahead of his time it’s kinda mind-boggling.

But also encouraging, cuz if HE could SEE and understand back in the 1960’s & 70’s what was going to happen to children of mass media , so CAN we project & understand what will happen to our grandchildren in the next 30 or 40 years, with a little cogitation … no?

Example, he talks a lot about PATTERNS, recurring patterns, and  how our minds not only SEEK them, but MAKE them, neurologically.

This got me thinking …  Here a a few images to amplify this notion.   LOOK at these images and what do you SEE – ?

Collectively – they kinda make the  mind go ‘whoooop’.

Words can’t really ‘get there’.

It’s a visual RECOGNITION of similitude.  They show ‘a pattern’.

It’s a visual TRUTH.  Something we haven’t quite been able to articulate properly.  Something we haven’t quite GRASPED.  Yet.

Do you SEE what I’m saying here -?

While musing on this whole notion I stumbled upon some art work by Mrs. Brown’s grade 3 students.  They too were asked to explore  ‘patterns in nature’ …

That’s the first image in this post. Nice & natural, and TRUE, ain’t it?

(p.s. FYI, the image beneath the water droplet depicts man-made debris floating around our planet.)

The Dustbin Artist … (another short story)

I had just finished my grocery shopping for the week and was driving out of the parking lot when I espied several empty picture frames leaning up against a pile of rubbish. Ever on the look-out for nice frames for my own paintings I stopped the car, went over and took a look. There were three of poor quality and one of better quality with an oil painting in it.

It was not a particularly GOOD painting. It was very amateurish in technique.  The colours were way off for ‘realism’. There was no real skill in it.  It lacked the sophistication & painterly pretense of a ‘serious’ artist. No, it was essentially a private piece, heart-felt & honest, and I liked it.

The mountain range, the clouds and the overwhelming conifer forest were rendered with a kind of attentive knowing. Nature was the larger focus of this simple untutored work. The little misshaped log cabin, massively disproportionate to the overbearing landscape, was the only human element in it. In fact, the cabin was the only clue that Man was even there at all.

The painting had a strange resonance with the ‘familiar’ from both ‘European Alpine landscapes’ and ‘the Canadian Rockies’. Yet, overall, the subject matter seemed more a reverie, or a remembrance of another time, another era. The ‘old world’ and the ‘new’ were colliding within the mind of the painter.

I doubted that it was a Real Place in Time & Space – though it might have been. It seemed more a place of longing, a fantasy piece, a desired place of gentle solitude among the magnificence of a Grandeur Design.

In the right-hand corner was the artist’s signature, H.Goebol, a european name. Who was this? Hendrick? Henrietta? Howard? Helena? Was ‘H’ a retired untutored lumberjack or a pining European maiden stuck now in suburbia?  Hortense? Harold? Heidi?

And why was it in the dustbin?

Was the artist dead? Was it in the rubbish as a result of a ‘clean up & clear out’ by uninterested relatives? Or, did the artist just tire of their own effort? Were they discouraged? Beaten? Had they given up on their dream, their longing?

I loaded the piece into the back of my car.

Goebel’s work now hangs in the guest bedroom at the lakehouse. It is visible to the eye every time anyone walks down the hall.  It continues to beckon, to invite, to welcome all in.

Goebol.  H . Goebol.  Dustbin artist.

The Walk-about … (another short story)

It had been a long time.

She lifted the catch on the garden shed and went in.

The shed had been built in the earlty 1980’s by her then industrious 60 year old farming father. He had used salvaged boards from the now long-gone sheep barn to give that sturdy little hut its authentic character. (He  had even recycled the door catch from the defunct sheep pen. ) The air was dank and  musty, smelling of small creatures.

Filled with antiquated artefacts, the building seemed a shrine to another era. Rusty coon-catching leg clamps,  fishing rods with  noisy hand-cranking reels, rubber hip waders from duck-hunting days, an old school-house desk with deep initials etched in it: dust covered all. Fractured bird-houses with bottoms, sides and tops missing were abandoned, piled up  in the corner. Even so, these little homes, once built by her dad, oozed matted nesting materials. Likely mice or chipmunks, she thought, as she lifted two of the better ones to the window.

A vast assortment of tins,  and glass jars of nuts & bolts, screws, nails, metal clasps and hammer-ready ‘what-nots’  lined the barn-board shelves on the window wall. All these things, she thought, as she peered & poked around, all these things are the ephemera of Father. Wooden saws, metal seeders, electric egg hatchers, tomato cages and an old-fashioned rotating-blade grass-cutter stood in the corner. All waiting for re-use.

An  immaculately-bound straw-bale leaned against the broken hatch of a disintegrating wire chicken coop.  On the walls, hand-twisted Virginia-creeper vine-wreaths (with pine cones decoratively stuck into the mangled hoops) still hung where she and her sisters had put them some 35 years ago.  The shed was full of memories. An old oak dresser, stripped of finish, balanced on three feet beneath a fanciful wall fresco of vines & leaves. Beside it stood a mismatched bundle of empty picture frames.  She didn’t remember painting that wall. She wondered which one of her sisters had.

Walking over to the broken six-paned window she looked out to the now mature mixed forest woodland.  Their shaggy growth effectively muted the distant rumble of that now busy country highway.

She looked hard at the wood face.

A few of the large lower branches on the older pines were stressing the trees. A number of the straggly hard-wood maples also needed trimming.

Glancing back into the shed she saw a good hand-saw hanging off a hook. She saw tree trimmers leaning against the wrought-iron garden chair with the broken seat.  She could see a pair of nibbled workman’s gloves stuffed into a cracked clay pot on top of the dresser.

After flapping the gloves against her leg to lose the obvious, she tested the teeth of the saw with her thumb.  Good enough. The tree trimmer hinge needed tightening and grease. She did that with an adjustable wrench that she found on the barn-board shelving.  She then squirted a few drops of oil from the greasy oil tin onto the taut bolt.

Ready:  she left the shed …

… and slowly began her walk-about …

‘The Gilded Beaver by Anonymous’ – - – - 10th Anniversary Celebration!

“…mystery surrounds this erotically charged novel ….the ABC’s of Canadian fine furniture design and production…” – Ottawa Citizen

“…like good wine – rich, complex, pleasingly acerbic…a dance of intellect and eros that expertly unfolds …and closes with panache…” – Jim Bartley, Globe & Mail, Toronto

“…a psycho-sexual tug of war in the world of design…” – Spring Book Review, Globe & Mail, Toronto

‘The Gilded Beaver by Anonymous’

LOOK FORWARD

IMAGINE, dear reader, if you will, that we are in the year two-thousand-eight-hundred and ninety-seven.  2897 A.D.

We are watching an old man. His name is Wong. He is carefully removing the tattered remnants of decaying cloth from an ancient and fragile black walnut chair frame. As he gently brushes the dirt and grime from the back of a brittle marquetry panel, an inscription is uncovered in a language that he does not know. Close by, there are two numbers beside each other, pencil written by two different hands. One is relatively recent, the other an ancient script.

1997 / 2336

Wong’s experienced fingers caress the smooth worn-out carving on the shafts of the weakened legs. He discovers that the once dramatic and voluptuous human figurines at mid-section are oddly without hands. He has never in his long years of restoration seen this kind of mythic imagery. One leg had been professionally pinned and well repaired long ago. Wong quietly admires the subtle and skilful craftsmanship of his talented predecessor of 2336.

He stands back to study the piece. Puzzled.

Again he examines the intricate marquetry panel. Once beautifully done, it shows a small mouse nibbling on a cherry seated on a burled wreath of pine cones beneath a sprig of mistletoe. Wong’s index finger thoughtfully touches the adjacent inlaid antler image, trying to understand. Some pieces of the original ebony stringing are now missing.

He looks again at the overall shape of the chair frame.

He curls his fingers around the knuckle on the armrest. It had originally been crisply carved by, and for, a delicate hand. But the overall size of the chair was uncommonly large. And there was something being told by the taut stance of that back leg. And why was the wood hoof on the front cuffed with what seemed to be some kind of beaded bracelet? Again he looks at the fading antler image, damaged by time through exposure to raw sunlight.

Slowly, ever so slowly, the long lost mystery of Origin began to reveal itself to the ageing Master’s Eye. This strange decorative art object was North American, late-twentieth century, of that he was certain. As for the rest of the intricate details of its engaging story, who had so artfully made it, and why, that, he regretfully knew he would never ever know.

He chuckled, returning to his work. Nature still managed to keep some of her creation secrets from the prying sharp eye of her attentive white haired apprentice. “

…

Winner of the Hamilton Arts Council ‘Best Fiction Award’ in 2000, ‘THE GILDED BEAVER by ANONYMOUS’ was first printed in a Collector’s Edition of 800 Numbered Copies. In celebration of this title’s 10th Anniversary, ACORN PRESS CANADA is offering an EXCLUSIVE opportunity to ‘Canadada Readers’ to purchase this work significantly below the List Price  of $79.95 for an amazing  $48 Canadian !!!  Price ALSO includes global shipping & handling!

Dear readers, only 122 copies remain in stock. This is truly a Collector’s item …

If interested in owning your very own piece of  ‘Canadada’ – please send an International Money Order for $48 (Cdn funds) (- available at your local bank or post office – ) to ‘ACORN PRESS CANADA’ .  Mark envelope as follows: –

Attn: ‘The Gilded Beaver by Anonymous – 10th Anniversity Offer’.

ACORN PRESS CANADA

17 Main Street, P.O.Box 1425

Waterdown, Ontario, Canada, L0R 2H0

Remember to mention in your cover note – with your return address – that you are a ‘Canadada Reader’, then kindly allow 2-4 weeks delivery. This offer has been arranged ONLY for this  10th Anniversary Celebration and runs ONLY until December 31st, 2009. The Gilded Beaver by Anonymous’ is ONLY available at this price via CANADADA.

NB: First come, first served -  while quantities last.

… phew … how was that – ???

Love & kisses,

Canadada

The Decorative Peasant … (another poem)

… from my vantage boudoir point
of West of Centre -
or Left of Centre -
or Right of Centre -
depending if you politically gaze
on
or out
or in at -
I watch the continual
movement, surge
ebb and flow
of urban, suburban, rural
humanity
course along the young blood
of this my Canadian civilization

My own beating heart heaves
harmoniously
alternating panic with patience
adjusting to nuance of mechanic
and organic insurgence

…

waiting, I peel
a plumb purple grape
plucked from the cluster bounty
of my small garden
and pop its full bodied ripeness
into my mouth,
then, absentmindedly
crave that mysterious
envelope of skin

But the shocking discovery of
that succulent pulp voluptuousness
disorients profoundly
my hap-hazard analytical
watchful
Being

-    for a brief instant
the Centre shifts    –

LIFENESS ripples rapidly
down to the scarlet tips of
my budding toes

I gaze outward again
to regain my bearings
and yes, all is as it was before
(All was is as it is was before)

I furtively pull out another grape
from the clipped cluster
and methodically
peel back
the hardened weather-exposed
encasement of purple epidermis
and once more pop
that fleshy perfect orb inward
to taste again
n-wow-ness …

A Fertile Imagination … (another poem)

means
a willingness to
x – plore
the seemingly meaningless

It demands neutrality -
a suspended judgement during
daring quixotic questing. For with
questing comes understanding

as shape shifting synaptic valuations
stimulate the eventual judgment
of election & selection. Yes, it does
zing & zang, it zings & zangs

A fertile imagination applies
what has been learned &
extends perception again & again
awwaaay out there beyond the known

to become thought -
filled feelings that cross pollinate &
create lush hybrids that BLOOM
with fresh clean BEAUTY.

A fertile imagination allows
mindful indulgence. It just IS -
BEST when natural morality remains
grounded in Awe & Wonder

A fertile imagination is
critical

for us & our combined evolution.

And  Survival.

Always ask WHY -
BECAUSE … you SEE …

IF we remove Fertile, all becomes Sterile
IF we remove Imagination, all Collapses
- nothing would remain, only a long & lonely
… …  monotone of monotony … …

But fused TOGETHER

we insta-leap into multi-verse

EVERYTHING BECKONS At Once

CONTRASTS: Hand-processed & Digital Photography – Exhibition @ The Sunrise Gallery, Hamilton, Canada

‘Pastoral Seen’ by M.L.Holton (SOLD)

Opening Reception:

Easter Weekend, Saturday, April 11th, 2-5 pm

Running thru til May 3rd, 2009.

Thurs, Fri, Sat & Sundays 1-5 pm.

@

The SUNRISE GALLERY,

HAMILTON (Beach Area), CANADA

For more info, MAP & phone – link HERE.

‘Planet Forward’ on PBS … Airing April 15th, 2009

The following web-based production struck me as innovative ‘tell-a-vision’:

http://www.planetforward.org/

The ‘idea’ is to draw on the vast resources of the web to whip up an informed ‘citizen’ broadcast that will collate, merge & present divergent points of view about our current energy needs and resources …

Check it out.

My own contribution occured sometime ago … waaaaay back in 2008, over at another blog site ‘wattsupwiththat’ …. If you want to consider that, here’s the link.

The main post there, ‘Top Ten Science Based Predictions that Didn’t Come True’,  acted as a ’spring board’ for a looonnng digression – and TIMELY DEBATE -  about Energy and OUR  Energy consumption. ‘The Debate’ in the ‘comment section’ got very heated & INTERESTIN’ …

Well worth the read.

All in all, this wondrous planet IS our Future …

… we forget that at our peril …