Sunday, July 2, 2017

Saturday, July 1, 2017

Friday, June 30, 2017

Poignant too...


Neighborhood Walk


 "The plain truth is we are going to die. Here I am, a teeny speck surrounded by boundless space and time, arguing with the whole of creation, shaking my fist, sputtering, growing even eloquent at times, and then - poof! I am gone. Swept off once and for all. I think that is very, very funny."

~ Charles Simic via Whiskey River ~


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Wednesday, June 28, 2017

Sing it with me..


Nobody sings it like Eva did.. Nobody.

From Huffpo - 
“Today Victoria Police have charged Cardinal George Pell with historical sexual assault offenses,” Shane Patton, the deputy commissioner for Victoria Police,  said at a media conference. “Cardinal Pell has been charged on summons and he is required to appear at the Melbourne Magistrates Court on 18 July this year for a filing hearing.”
Of course, His Holiness will never see Australia again. He'll never stand trial. He'll never have the pleasure of settling into the hum-drum, day-to-day routine of a maximum security prison.  He'll never have to wear a GPS locator or have the police check in on him at random intervals. He won't have to worry about where he'll live after the conviction, because he'll have a comfy basilica just waiting for him in Rome. He'll live out the rest of his days at the Vatican with a nice pension paid for by the faithful - crimson satin and flowing silk clad to the end.

Still - it's nice to see that Australian law enforcement grew a pair and decided to charge His Eminence. It's a little thing - but maybe the charges against His Holiness will make his colleagues in RCC upper management think twice before they fuck the next kid or help one of their buddies to fuck kids. 

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Sunday, June 25, 2017

Desperation, brokenheartedness and poverty


Jizo at The Peace Pagoda - Leverett MA
 
The last episode of the "On Being" podcast I listened to was a conversation with former physicist and now artist, Enrique Martinez Celaya - a professor at USC.

Professor Celaya said something very sustaining, that, when I heard it, I understood that it spoke right to the heart of The Jizo Project. Here it is:
"...there’s a tendency for us to think that to be a prophet or to do anything grand, you have to have a special gift, be someone called for. And I think ultimately what really matters is the resolve — to want to do it, to give your life to that which you consider important. And if you have no skills to offer, or nothing special to offer, it’s all the more amazing that you do it, the more remarkable. And I think that resolve is all that really matters.
And in the specific case of art, I think the notion that to bring the future forward by throwing yourself desperately — I think desperation is part of what I consider a prophet to have. Once you have made that resolve to launch yourself forward, then desperation is the only factor: urgency, desperation."
Professor Celaya speaks to the audacity that is inherent in The Jizo Project. I am a nobody. I am by all evidence a rank beginner of no special skill working with clay. I can't even produce Jizo figures without the help of my Teacher. The results have been uneven to date. They are not classic Buddhist figures. They seem preposterous (but oddly plucky)  when they stand next to real Buddhist art. When I started the project I often wondered if there was a special Buddhist hell for those poor unfortunates who make lumpy Jizos..

And yet -

There is a desperation - a brokenheartedness actually - that  drives me to make them. The desperation and heartbreak comes from looking at the world that we've fashioned for each other. If you are uncertain what I am talking about - look into the eyes of the next person that you meet - listen to the timbre of their voice - notice the set of their jaw - behold the nervous swaying back and forth when they should be still. Listen to the skittish litany of vacations, new cars, new houses, successful kids... all recited unbidden as if to reassure not the listener, but the teller that things have not yet come (completely) unhinged..

So - these are the things that the Jizo Project is fueled by - desperation, brokenheartedness, and a poverty of skill..  The trio has prodded me along for a year now to make Jizos and to turn them loose in the world. I knew that to be true before hearing Professor Celaya speak. His words helped reframe how I think about the whole endeavor.. To see that my lack of skill may not be as bad a thing as I once thought.. Or - maybe it is - who knows? It was nice though to hear what another artist thinks about these things..

Yesterday, I brought six Jizos to the Peace Pagoda in Leverett MA - a ballsy move considering the glowing, graceful Buddhist figures that live there.. Two Jizos were discovered by a pair of pilgrims after they finished their circumambulation of the big stupa. One was scooped up by a young boy who was visiting with his Mom and sisters. One was taken into the temple and given to the Abbot (below). At the end of the day - two Jizos were unclaimed, snuggled at the clawed feet of a fierce temple guardian.
 
Chanting at the Peace Pagoda

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Sunday, June 18, 2017

Upside Down

 
2017-06-17 Pay Attention 

"There comes the strangest moment in your life,
when everything you thought before breaks free—
what you relied upon, as ground-rule and as rite
looks upside down from how it used to be.

Skin’s gone pale, your brain is shedding cells;
you question every tenet you set down;
obedient thoughts have turned to infidels
and every verb desires to be a noun...."

from "There Comes the Strangest Moment" by Kate Light


~


Saturday, June 17, 2017

Scrubbing

  
Urban jizo 


When one peers into the heart of darkness,
it peers back at one - never a fun time -
especially when one considers
we all have the same 
human heart.

And so - today was folding cranes
and spreading Jizos - simple,
repetitive, quiet acts that
scrubbed away at the
residue of horror.

~

Sunday, June 11, 2017

Making Jizo's


Jizo 

They're a low production endeavor, maybe nine a week get made at a clay studio in Rowley. My studio mates were at first curious / perplexed that these little figures were all I was going to make. One person told me in good fun that I was a "one trick pony." Little does he know that really I am a "no trick pony." Over time though, they've embraced this repetitive, singular, activity and sometimes even ask where they have been placed recently..

That's the thing - the point of the Jizos - is for them to be placed in the world to be found by whomever. The scroll that they carry in their stomachs carries a brief introduction and a confirmation of ownership "Since you found me, I am yours. Take me home."

To a one - they've all been scooped up - all of them gone from where they've been left to wait. As to what's become of them after discovery - well - who knows.

Because it's the 21st century and because there is instagram, people are able to follow along with some aspects of The Jizo Project. I say 'some' because The Jizo Project is uniformly upbeat / positive / funny. It doesn't harbor any of the darkness and doubt of this rag.

The writing tone of The Jizo Project is deliberate. The personage of Jizo in Buddhist stories is shot through with optimism, no-matter-whatness, and cheerfulness. It would not do to have an instagram stream dedicated to O-Jizo-Sama and have it be a sad re-telling of the doubts and darkness everyone experiences every day.

Which is not to say that Jizo is a bright-sider - oh no - he knows shit from shinola. He knows how mightily fucked up humanity is and in turn how fucked up life on this planet is.. Despite this knowledge - which actually caused the Buddha a moment of despair - Jizo committed himself to save everyone everywhere before he attained enlightenment himself.

Whether one believes any of this Buddhist storytelling to be true is quite beside the point. The acts of making, placing, giving away, discovering, and adopting a little lumpish figure are true acts that in and of themselves are momentary breaks from the normal flow of things. And - that - that is what I wish for people who find them - a momentary cessation in the endless loop of wounds, worries and contagions.

On the face of things it's not very much at all - I know. But - some times you can't tell where things will lead you - and I feel lead - to a destination unknown - outcome uncertain.


~


Gloucester Harbor - Sunset

 
Gloucester Fish Pier at Sunset 


~

 

Indra's (fish) net

 
Netting - Gloucester Fish Pier 


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Friday, June 9, 2017

Too bad. I can.


DSC_9546-1

“If you want to understand why America has the shoddiest social safety net of any Western nation, you can start with the deep and abiding faith that you don’t owe anything to anybody. And if you want to understand why liberalism, with its emphasis on community, has had such a hard time gaining purchase here except when Americans are desperate, you can start there, too. You can’t afford health insurance? Too bad. I can. Comparing America to Europe, de Toqueville noted that this overweening individualism was ruinous to a healthy, well-functioning society. He was right. It is also ruinous to a healthy, well-functioning world.”





~

 

Wednesday, June 7, 2017

Tuesday, June 6, 2017

It's what they do..


Jizos 

"The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together.| There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space."

~ Italo Calvino ~




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Sunday, June 4, 2017

The Only Question


Lynnfield Burial Ground


What is this that drags this corpse around?

~

Saturday, June 3, 2017

Unsettled


Sandy Point 
Sandy Point, Newburyport MA

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1-2-3 Drink 1-2-3 Drink

 




~

Holy pony





Half Crazy 

Well we're all half-crazy
And half clear as a bell
Half believer, half goin' to hell
Half goin' to hell
Half goin' to hell
Well we're all half Rama
And half Bonnie and Clyde
Half devoted, half buried alive
Half buried alive
Half buried alive

Shine
On the one you love

Holy pony
Lord, Lord, Lord, what have I done
A cloud of hornets blackened the sun
Blackened the sun
Blackened the sun

~ The Barr Brothers ~
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Learning to shoot at someone who out-drew ya


Just me & you 

"You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong.| You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you're anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you're with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of misperception. And yet what are we to do about this terribly significant business of other people, which gets bled of the significance we think it has and takes on instead a significance that is ludicrous, so ill-equipped are we all to envision one another's interior workings and invisible aims? Is everyone to go off and lock the door and sit secluded like the lonely writers do, in a soundproof cell, summoning people out of words and then proposing that these word people are closer to the real thing than the real people that we mangle with our ignorance every day? The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that - well, lucky you."

~ Philip Roth ~




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Thursday, June 1, 2017

Precisely


Austin TX

 
"I have often run across men (and rarely, but not never, women) who have become so powerful in their lives that there is no one to tell them when they are cruel, wrong, foolish, absurd, repugnant. In the end there is no one else in their world, because when you are not willing to hear how others feel, what others need, when you do not care, you are not willing to acknowledge others’ existence. That’s how it’s lonely at the top. It is as if these petty tyrants live in a world without honest mirrors, without others, without gravity, and they are buffered from the consequences of their failures."

The Loneliness of Donald Trump

~ Rebecca Solnit ~
 

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