The People Who Transform Culture "Too Quickly" Are a Breed Often Hunted to Extinction

Page from a School "Autograph Book," Public School #164, Brooklyn, NY (1944)

I Had Fiction Published at Visual Verse

a little while back and somehow missed it.

The mag tells you that you have to check back (they don't send notifications of acceptance).

Challenge journals like this one are fun.

The journal serves up an image and you can write poetry or fiction based on that.

Mine was a few images back. 

I'll have to check in and catch up with the journal.

Many thanks to the editor.

A Long and Varied Dream

Mostly early Goghiana.

Super Realistic Folk Art Carved Coconut Head Wearing Glasses c1920s

I swear I saw this guy working in a hospital one time.

Good thing I didn't bump into him. His head might have rolled off.

Okay, maybe the hospital was poetry. And the doctor was W.C.W.

Have You Ever Seen This Brilliant Documentary?

This documentary about the Van Gogh forgeries leaves the mind spinning, not because of the fact that such forgeries exist, but because of the way it underscores how people and cultures cleave to narratives and talismans that have less to do with any grounded reality and much more to do with powerful emotions which those narratives energize. Van Gogh exists only to be us.

The story of the Gachet family after Van Gogh is one about which I would love to know much more.

Émile Schuffenecker may just be Big in Japan.

The debate goes on, and I suspect it will for quite some time.

And hey, sometimes they come back. 

In the Extremely Grim Department, there's this creepy news. 

De'Von Bailey Was Murdered

Anyone rational who has seen the video of De'Von's fatal shooting by police will know that he was murdered.

I don't know if one or both officers making the arrest fired the four shots, three of them into the young man's back, but whoever did that was doing it out of anger that the young man was escaping and not from any fear. It's totally obvious.

Anyone who watches that body cam footage can see that young man took off as fast as he could and was not looking back once. There was no way in hell anyone could interpret that as a threat.

Unless I heard it wrong, these officers are already cleared and back on the street after three days of desk duty.

So they're free to murder again when their sense of authority is challenged or their ego gets a little dent in it.

JUSTICE FOR DE'VON!

THE COLORADO SPRINGS POLICE DEPARTMENT IS GUILTY OF COUNTENANCING MURDER.

I Love This Book

Peter Yovu's Sunrise is a book I would highly recommend.

It's a livre d'artiste masquerading as a paperback poetry collection.

Yovu's less is definitely more.

Dark matter everywhere.

Dark energy everywhere.

Folk Art and Inuit Carvings

This was the summer I fell in love with folk art. I don't mean just American folk art, but all folk art,  the folk art of other cultures as well. I can't stop looking at it online and searching for it at flea markets, etc.

I really love theorem paintings and I want to try to update that idea for some contemporary projects involving recycling old clothing that would otherwise go to waste. Old shirts can become new theorem paintings.

Here is a set of folk art carvings I felt very lucky to find. (Photos not mine.)

And I found these burl wood carvings out of Ashbery's home town of Sodus. These remind me of De Chirico so strongly! These two figures really play on my subconscious. Strong in wabi-sabi! They refuse to resolve into the beings we sense implicit in them. More than a little sci-fi. They also remind me of that art show where the Futurists displayed a (natural,unmodified) tree root figure as art. (Photos not mine.)

Here is a small lot of pyrography plaques by Bettie Vretenar. I love the gender-fluid George Washington. Pronouns: they, them. And the spaceman is dishy too. These look even better "in person." (Not my photo.)

And this guy has such an interesting and flexible sense of balance! This piece of early kinetic art can be balanced numerous ways. The artist was quite ingenious. (Not my photos.)

I've started very slowly collecting Inuit carvings. Here are two I didn't nab for my collection, but whose beauty stayed with me. 

This first one is Levi Tetpon, who is just an amazing sculptor and totally under-recognized. (Not my photos below).

And this otter is attributed to Charlie Kasudluaq (b. 1927). This one also broke my heart in several places.

 I'll close with this nonpareil folk art carving of a Southern Baptist snake-handler. This went for over five hundred dollars even with the condition issues. I agree. It's going to haunt my dreams for years. Hard not to see a direct connection to those carved women of Knossos wearing the serpent-skirts. And yet the artist who carved this in the nineteenth century probably never saw those images.