hiatus ends

to the city and back

in a whirlwind of tourism

and family fun.

now back to drawing

and the rural life.

more B I G B A N D

Despite the seemingly bisected bodies above

whose legs do not belong with their torsos,

the sound is complete and replete

with dance inducing tunes.

My favorites: Mercy, Is You Is or Is You Ain't my Baby,

Begin the Beguine, Mooch, and

Stardust.

July 6th afternoon at Mendocino Art Center.

Anderson Valley again

windows and chairs,

herbs and valleys

recur as subjects;

an ongoing allure 

of the near far.

from the pond

little discoveries

Making a salad dressing

you got your classic oil and vinegar mix.

They don't meld.

That shape they make is hard to enter.

Hard to find a spot to bust in.

Resistance to change.

RHYS Vineyards

an unexpected soaking in June

bends grasses, 

tosses their reedy stalks about, and

morphs the land into 

the hump of a giant camel.

more windows to Anderson Valley

bluffs at Albion

absorbing the heat of the earth

watching the sun set 

just feet from the edge.

a garden in Fort Bragg

and a mouthwatering

salmon salad with 

beets and lettuce

and all their trimmings

 homegrown.

Navarro Skies

keeping on

readying for the next gig:

July 6th 

Mendocino Art Center

sometime in the afternoon.

downtown Boonville

and dinner

with chives from the deck.

summer arrives

as defined by first swim, 

not the calendar.

the dock and its surrounding reeds.

streets of san francisco by iphone

Elsie Street

near Bernal Hill last summer

in San Francisco

Big Band Plays On

more windows to the valley

touching your feel

Developing a feel is what most people who make things are after. That and better things (drawings, breads, buildings, concerts). A “feel” suggests deep knowledge born of experience and ready at the fingertips. Drawing with a single line pumps up the demand for precision. It exposes you like an early trumpet.

Watching the Boonville Big Band rehearse weekly for a stretch now, I remain smitten with the charisma of its director, Bob Ayers. Week after week, he brings it - fresh, alive, giving it his all for that swinging sound. He convinces folks, in the most eloquent and erudite manner, of the eventual pleasure that comes through the pain of facing errors and trying again.

I admire the band’s humility. The tolerances are tight. The reprimands are soft and often funny, but they sting. Collective fortitude leads the musicians to listen, correct, get together, even after working at something else all day. Take it one more time from 49, or maybe five or six.  Whatever is necessary to go out on a high note, feeling it. Bob emanates rhythm; you see the music in his hands, radiating up his spine, and out that drumstick.

Call it what you will - skill, technique - the hardest part of developing this touch or feel is doing it when you don’t feel like it or when things are not going well.

Drawing is the same way. Never mind you’ve been practicing for years, even claiming to teach it. Today’s blank page exposes a sense that you’re starting from square one. Though far from true, a lot rides on those first few marks – scale is established; scope or limit of view; and where you are - the eyelevel. It only takes an inch here or too much pressure there, to toss all variables back into the air. My line tracing the boundary between grassy hill and towering redwoods bears no resemblance to reality. Redwoods dogging me again.

I could tear the page out and pretend it never happened. But this paper came all the way from Amalfi. I have to persevere. The paper is moot. It says nothing back to me about my arrangements.

Talk paper, talk.

Tell me where I left them stranded, unable to get over the foxtail hill and across that river of redwoods.

Tell me where the clarinet got lost in her hair.

w a i t i n g

right about now

 i can see her

darting past the buckeye gumdrop,

behind the community house grove,

and if i wait

just 

a 

little 

longer,

chugging up the spine of

diagonoak.

one last hook in the road

to home.

Diagonoak

Looks to me like the leaning oak (diagonoak) 

threw its weight around during 

the forming of the house plan.