Friday, June 28, 2013

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.





Thursday, June 27, 2013

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.




Sunday, June 23, 2013

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.



Wednesday, June 19, 2013

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





Wednesday, June 12, 2013

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 
little 
longer,
chugging up the spine of
diagonoak.
one last hook in the road
to home.






Tuesday, June 11, 2013

Diagonoak






Looks to me like the leaning oak (diagonoak) 
threw its weight around during 
the forming of the house plan.














W I N D O W S








Windows and prepositions got a conspiracy going.

Are we looking through or at?
Do windows direct vision or eclipse it?
Can a single line move from frame to object and back? 
Is the redwood trunk another window pane?

Am I here, where I am, or
there in what I see?