23crows - art

sunset » leaves of grass » sunset

barton cole — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 16:44:03 GMT

My good friend, Drew Kampion, has been sending out Walt Whitman poems every Tuesday for the last year, a practice instituted on the day of the election of Barack Obama as the forty-fourth president of the United States of America.

His selections are pertinent to the times, and have prompted many on his extensive list to explore what the guy had to say, me among them.
I recall studying O Captain! My Captain! (Whitman on the death of Lincoln, which affected him profoundly) in school, but other than that, my exposure was pretty meager.
Along came Drew, though, lighting the Walt Whitman fire.
I don’t know what sort of reaction he was getting with his posts of Whitman’s poetry. I, for one, appreciated it – I have a number of correspondents who are poets, and many who send out poems, which I always enjoy, and sometimes to which I respond.
Also, it was interesting to see Drew’s selections of poems, and their relevance (or not) to our times; or, at least, Drew’s interpretation of it.

Drew has often been out in front in his time on Whidbey Island. He came here in the early nineties (as did I), and soon, established the Island Independent, an alternative newspaper, distributed around our archipelago fortnightly.
[open note to you compulsively-researching Wikipedia editors: why don’t you guys put together a page about Drew Kampion, and one about the Island Independent?]
It was really a great paper, featuring some excellent journalism, and interesting regular features (including, after a couple of years, my food column). A beloved newspaper, for which some still pine.

One of his correspondents, Kim Hoelting, is also a devotee of Walt Whitman. Kim lives out in the Maxwelton Valley, on the southern end of South Whidbey Island, next to a huge, old school, built just over a hundred years ago from native softwood (old-growth douglas fir), and standing strong. Kim uses the hall as his showroom for his imposing lumber selection, which includes book-matched douglas fir planks about three inches thick, three feet wide, and sixteen feet long, and some douglas fir two-by-twentyfours, about twenty feet long, and other large pieces of western red cedar, sitka spruce, Alaska yellow cedar, redwood, maple, you name it.
As I understand it, Kim became a salvage logger after having spent some years as a fisherman in Alaska (Bristol Bay Gillnetters, I think, or maybe a seiner or troller). On his way south, coming down the Inside Passage (relatively sheltered water among the northern end of the extensive archipelago, of which my island is the southernmost), he’d see huge logs on the beach, and began towing them home and milling them up and selling the boards. Often, driftwood, as his supply generally was, are old logs that are completely rot resistant – from natural attributes, and from being in salt water.
Kim began to deal in these specialty planks, and now, does that as his trade. He’s also a construction contractor, having participated in a renovation of the Paradise Inn at Tahoma (known as “Mount Rainier” to the yokels), installing huge Alaska cedar logs along the snow-shedding eaves, low to the ground below a high, steep roof.

Drew and Kim began to talk about working their way through Whitman’s work – which is entirely published in the perpetually-edited Leaves of Grass, deathbed edition, 1892. They had thought about meeting once a week, and continuing until they had exhausted the book, but then came the idea of reading the whole thing in one marathon go.
According to the statistic I saw recently published, the whole work would take about twenty-one hours to read; Drew and Kim made their own calculations (essentially 1.5 minutes per page, having timed various readings with a stopwatch), and determined that the whole thing would take twenty-four hours, one day between sunsets.

They selected a date (I hadn’t thought to ask if it were significant): 28-29 December 2009, beginning at 16:24, the time of local sunset (here in GMT-8 time).

Right on the heels of Christmas, which had me so engaged I hadn’t given his reading a thought, other than to check in when he was looking for recruits to read, and asked for a graveyard shift. I thought I would enjoy that most; I have abundant performing experience, particularly with spoken word, but the idea of not having an audience was appealing – as is my dream of hearing crickets when I get a curtain call, like Daffy Duck would).

Suddenly, it was the day before the event. I had just made arrangements to work in america at my Dad’s house, whipping his garden into shape, and would be leaving for the ferry soon after the reading ended, which felt to me like it was best that I was going to read late at night and early in the morning the night before. I intended to spend the night at my dad’s and commence the garden work the next day, so being short on sleep shouldn’t be too much of a problem. Not only that, but I am as stalwart a campaigner as they come, having slept folded up in the seat of a Fiat to be out of the rain at a trailhead in the Olympic Rainforest, and then hiked twenty miles the next day with a load. Come on, my motto – one of them – is podestis me impedere, sed non me sistere.
"You may be able to hinder me, but you are unable to stop me.”

I checked in with Drew’s email-published schedule (an ambitious piece of work – I have organized poetry festivals, and it’s hard to arrange the timetable), and sure enough, I wa on late.

When I got there, around 11:00 at night, it was well dark, the room dimly lit, and just a few were there. They were nearly two hundred pages into a 455 page book; some hours to go, yet. About a third of the way done.
I hung around until 3:00; I read a bit, I listened a lot.
The book was the culmination of Whitman’s work; originally published in 1855 with a mere twelve poems, it eventually, by the last edition in 1892, featured over four hundred poems, and included the entirety of his published poetry.

The Civil War had a great impact on the nation, and particularly on Walt Whitman. When I left the reading in the middle of the night, they were about to hit the patch of Civil War poems, but I had to go home and sleep, since I needed to get up in a few hours to go off and work.
As tired as I was, I got home just fine; the weather was around freezing, and the roads were a bit icy, but there hadn’t been any precipitation, so they weren’t so bad.
After a mere three hours of sleep, I was up and at it again; I did my morning routine and went off to work for a while.

Around noon, I decided I was too tired to keep working, so I headed back to the reading. They were around page 385; merely seventy pages to go.
Drew and Kim were bleary; Kim’s brother, Kurt, had slept in a sleeping bag laid on a huge plank and piece of foam, so he was fresher than Drew or Kim, but not by much.
Compared to them, I was fresh as a daisy – but still not that fresh; I was quite tired.

I got inserted into the mix of readers – there were about twelve people there, and it was getting down to the end.
With thirty pages to go, Drew halted the proceedings to announce that, and to parcel out the remaining works, so that the ship came into port not by blowing there, but with intention.
I took on a few poems, and was flattered that Kim anointed me to read the last poem, Goodbye, My Fancy.

Whitman suffered a paralytic stroke around 1874; he spent the last eighteen years of his life expecting to die, so much of his poetry from then has an air of finality, and saying goodbye. But not as much as the last.
I read that last poem, and stepped away from the podium. I thought about closing the book, as an act of finality and completion, but left if open, as works of art such as that should remain available for deployment, like an alert fireman.

Silence, for a few minutes.
And then Kim spoke, talking about what a meaningful event it was.
The book from which we read had belonged to Kim’s father-in-law, who died during a marathon reading of it; do you suppose that might have contributed to the power of the event?

People began moving around, and leaving; the twenty-four hours had passed. There was mostly silence. Every word had been spoken aloud; the wooden building would remember it, always.

GOOD-BYE my Fancy!
Farewell dear mate, dear love!
I'm going away, I know not where,
Or to what fortune, or whether I may ever see you again,
So Good-bye my Fancy.

Now for my last - let me look back a moment;
The slower fainter ticking of the clock is in me,
Exit, nightfall, and soon the heart-thud stopping.

Long have we lived, joy'd, caress'd together;
Delightful! - now separation - Good-bye my Fancy.

Yet let me not be too hasty,
Long indeed have we lived, slept, filter'd, become really blended
into one;
Then if we die we die together, (yes, we'll remain one,)
If we go anywhere we'll go together to meet what happens,
May-be we'll be better off and blither, and learn something,
May-be it is yourself now really ushering me to the true songs, (who
knows?)
May-be it is you the mortal knob really undoing, turning-so now
finally,
Good-bye-and hail! my Fancy.

the zen cats

barton cole — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 17:26:01 GMT

I was a cat guy, early on. I grew up with a cat, who came to us when I was a wee toddler, and died when I was nineteen and had left home long before. I never knew a day at home without that cat, Chessie (named after the mascot and logo of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad, since she resembled it so much in demeanor and color - and her name was technically, "Chesapeake and Ohio," which you would deploy if you wanted to scold her - at least I did, since I was the youngest of four and had no authority over anyone but the cat - okay, I have since learned that the cat is at the top of the hierarchy).
Chessie was a great sport, and served, as many cats do around children, as the ambassador for all cats, so I became a cat guy.
After leaving home, I didn't live with a cat, but that changed.

Back in 1983, I had a friend who had a cat. He lived on Seattle's First Hill (known as "Pill Hill," since that's where all the hospitals were - I was born in one of them, so was my son…), and one stormy night, a little black-and-white kitten followed him out of the rain and into the lobby, into the elevator, and into the apartment.
The cat stayed.
A few months later, my friend moved into the University District, which was my neighborhood; he and the cat moved into a house just a few blocks south. Several of us young guys hung out there - we worked in a restaurant, so we kept odd, late hours, and drank a lot of beer. And played with the cat.
I was the only one who seemed to have much regard for the cat - all the other guys would tip him out of their laps if he made a move that way, but not me - the little cat and I were buddies.
So, not long after the cat arrived in my neighborhood, he had to move again - this time, into an apartment with a no-pets lease.
My friend called to give me this news, and to ask me if I could look after the cat; "Just for six months - I only ask you this since I know how close you and the cat are."
I knew it would be a responsibility, and, being young, knew that I wasn't sure I wanted to hinder my functional irresponsibility. But the cat needed me, I thought, so I relented.

We became rapidly close. During the six months, my friend never visited the cat, and when his lease was up, he called to say he was coming over to pick the cat up.
"What cat?" I asked.
He thought something had happened to it.
"What do you mean? Where is he?"
"Well, if you're talking about a black-and-white cat, yes, I have one. You don't, but I do."
I wasn't going to give the cat up, which was the right thing to do -- think of the welfare of the cat; should he live with someone who was devoted to him, or with an ignorant buffoon? As a result, the friendship was terminated, but I didn't care - I had gotten the better deal of the bargain.

He was quite something, that cat, and I soon named him, "Figaro." People thought it was cute, that I had named him after the charming kitten in Disney's Pinocchio, but that wasn't the case. I had named him after Figaro, the Barber of Seville, from Rossini's opera, Il barbiere di Siviglia.
Figaro's great aria: Largo al factotum della citta… "Make way for the great factotum of the city!" That was the way my cat Figaro was, a factotum. Brilliant cat. He would climb up the cedar that grew outside my bedroom window to get in at night, and would even leap the twelve feet from the landing of the upstairs duplex next door to my windowsill. I saw him do it once, and was astonished.
Everything about him was astonishing - including how handsome he was.

The U-District is crawling with rats, more than a wharf, and Figaro would catch them. I saw him drop one at one end of a sheet of plywood leaning up against the house - the rat, spotting freedom at the other end, would make a break for it. When he arrived at the edge of safety - Bam, there was the cat! Back the rat would go, and Bam!
Or another time, I saw Figaro batting a rat, spinning around and around, like a hockey player on the icy street.
Figaro was a clever cat; you knew he was the boss, and he loved me. In fact, I maintain that he taught me to love myself (cats having such a capacity to be avatars), which enabled me to love others, which enabled me to fall in love with the woman who became my wife and mother of my kids. Their existence can be directly traced to a cat who walked in out of the rain.
Everyone knew I was devoted to this cat - beyond Damon and Pythias, even. We were close. So when my future wife fell for me, she knew that she had to get the cat's approval, first (authoritative cats are nothing new; see P.G. Wodehouse's short story, The Story of Webster). Sure enough, though, Figaro fell for her, too, so all was well.

In 1989, I lived in a house next to a woman I had gone to school with in another town; she played the clarinet in the Symphony (we had played together in the band at school - she kept playing hers, mine sits in the corner to this day), and traveled in the summer. She would let Figaro into her house, although her husband was allergic - he was some cat; he had that kind of appeal.
When they would go on trips, I'd look after their mail, and water their garden, and would always be paid with a bag of cookies on my porch the day they left.
One day, I came home, and there was a bag of cookies, and a note, and an art card, a painting of a cat. She had included the card since the depicted cat reminded her so much of Figaro.
We became quite fond of that card - ironically, it was from the Kirsten Gallery, just a couple of blocks away from the house I lived in when Figaro came to live with me in the U-District, but I rarely went there.
Once, though, my wife and I, when she was pregnant with our son, visited the gallery, and while looking around, came upon a framed print of the painting that was the image on the card, by Nicholas Kirsten-Honshin.
Zen Cat Meditates on Essence of Moon and Essence of Iris - All is One

My wife and I looked at each other, wondering: Should we buy it? Could we?
We thought about it. Kept walking around.
And then, just around a corner, there it was: The Original. Much more expensive than the print, but just above the painting was a sign on the wall: "All art may be purchased on time with no interest."
Wow. We had to live with it.
We went upstairs to the desk to make the arrangements; Nicholas was there, and came out to meet us.
"So many times, that painting has almost left, but then, the people changed their minds - and now I know why: it's supposed to be with you."
They took down all my information, but not even a credit card number, and we began contemplating making the payments until we could hang the painting in our home.
But they asked, "Is your car parked in back? We'll wrap up the painting and take it out there."
What? They were letting us take the painting without even a down payment? Yes, indeed they were. An odd transaction, but clearly, we were supposed to live with the painting.
You can still get prints, and art cards (contact the gallery), but you can't get the original. It lives with me.
It's one of Nicholas's well-known works, and one of a few that feature the handsome Zen Cat. We even got to know the actual cat, Crowley, who once favored me by sitting on my lap.
After having the painting for several years, it had acquired a bit of moisture-spotting on the inside of the glass, so we arranged to bring it to the gallery for re-framing. Nicholas's father, Richard Kirsten-Daiensai (much more on him another time), was having a festive art opening, and as my son carried the painting through the garden to the gallery, you could hear the guests fall silent. Someone whispered, "That's the original!" It really is a stunning asset, and, as Nicholas has pointed out, it's done better than the stock market!

Figaro died in 1996, which was a heartbreak. My son's first word, when pointing at the cat, was "Fo." He was enmeshed in our lives, and had changed everything. We still invoke his Number One Rule: "Walk in like you own the place."

I have lived with other cats in my time; Rosina, who was named after the femme fatale in Rossini's opera (she and Figaro were pretty tight), and then Gioacchino, named after Rossini himself, and who was superbly handsome and soft. There was Sophia, who was small, and fey, and had a short life, and then Akira, who was all black, clever, but didn't come home one moonless night.
We were without a cat for some months, and after a while, we noticed that we were tending to get on each other's nerves just a bit more often, and needed that tranquil lightning rod of a cat. It's unseemly for us to go out and try to acquire a cat, but we figure that if we just let the cosmos know that we're open to having one (derived from our standard philosophy; see my previous essay, good dog cosmos), then a cat will appear.

After a few months, we received a call. A woman had a cat who had come in out of the storm, and had been hiding out in her basement for a week, coming up at night to eat her cat's food. When she finally discovered this stowaway, she invited her to join the household, but her own cat wasn't having any part of it - you know how cats can be.
So she called us.

She didn't know that we were in the market for a cat; she worked at the Kirsten Gallery, had for years, and since the cat reminded her so much of the Zen Cat, and she knew we had the painting, she called.

Let me spell out the irony for you:
The painting came into my life since the featured cat resembled my cat, and now a cat was coming into my life since it resembled the cat in the painting.

We collected the cat, and soon named her Guinevere. How nice it was to have a cat again.
The problem was that she had obviously been abused by a man; any time my son or I would go into the room where she was, she'd dash into hiding. She was close and cuddly with my wife, but wasn't going to tolerate me or my son.
This was frustrating. "The hell with it," we would say, "let's just get a kitten so we can have a cat."
Months of this tragic behavior went by, but I kept trying - I'm the one who feeds the cat, and always endeavor to be close to animals - it's my notorious nature - and eventually, my attentions paid off, and we're now not only close, but closer than she is with anyone else. She's like my girlfriend - she likes me to leave a sweater on the bed sometimes, so she can lay on it, and when she sees me in the garden, she comes running; we always spend some time when we're out there together, her rolling around in a patch of grass under the apple tree, and me rubbing her belly and running my hand from the top of her head all the way down her tail.
She's another clever one, too, and lately, we've said to each other, "Are you getting a 'Figaro' hit from Guinevere like I am?"
They are much alike, with one prominent difference - I heard Figaro meow maybe fifty times in the thirteen years I lived with him, but compared to that, Guinevere is a regular chatterbox, meowing maybe a dozen times a day (not like the famous Gioacchino, though - he meowed all the time, with a marvelous voice; once, I thought I would count how many times he meowed in a day, and after an hour, he was up over seventy, so I gave up and called it five hundred for the day).

The best way to get out of this essay? Wrap it up and go to bed - Guinevere's waiting…

the crow screen

barton cole — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 05:37:32 GMT

I couldn't think of anything else to write about, so I'll write a bit about the source image I used for this page - the Crow Screen, a hallmark of the collections at Seattle's Asian Art Museum.
They're a pair of painted, six-panel screens, about fifteen feet long (each), and six feet high? Something like that.
As many times as I have stood in front of the screens when visiting the museum, I have never counted how many crows are painted on the screens, but I would guess there are about one-hundred-fifty in all?
The screens are usually on display at the Seattle Asian Art Museum (SAAM), being, as I mentioned, featured items there.
Once, though, I confessed to a woman I knew, when she asked me what I wanted for my birthday, that I would like to see the Crow Screens when they are not available to the public - a private viewing, I suppose.
Rather bold of me, I was told, but my friend, who worked for years at the Seattle Art Museum, might yet have connections that would enable me to have my wish fulfilled.
It took some doing - such as fielding questions about my credentials, and worthiness for such a private viewing, but my friend apparently held me and my desire in high enough regard to influence the museum staff, her old colleagues, to set the screens up in the basement.
Years ago, my dad was heavily involved with the Puget Sound Maritime Historical Society; the officers would meet weekly at The Museum of History and Industry (which has the iconic stuff polar bear seen widely), and I had the run of the museum.
Among other things, in the summer, I would use the working periscope, which was installed on the roof, but penetrated to the main floor, from which you could see the view outdoors, to stare at girls taking the sun over at the ship canal embankment in their bikinis.
My favorite thing, though, was to scout around in the basement.
That's where the action is, at a museum. Think of it - you won't see more than about ten percent of a museum's holdings on display at a time, but to see the rest of the iceberg, stored some floors below the galleries, is astonishing.
And to see the Crow Screens set up in the basement, under poor artificial light, was magnificent. I was close enough to caress them with my eyelashes, although I made a point of not touching them.
And to see the brushstrokes; the painting is clearly a devotional work, painted by a passionate observer of crows and their demeanor.
For the theme image, Mr. Corax (the graphic designer who does much of our work) copied a section of the screens from a scanned image, then replaced the painted background with a stylized facsimile. You'll recognize the style of the original in the version Andy Corax set up for this site, but his is just enough different, I think.