I'm not Catholic and not much observant of any particular religion (raised Congregationalist, these days I tend to think of myself as a Pagan Buddhist Christian, or vice versa, or preferably something uncategorizable, which probably means I should attend a Unitarian church except that on any given Sunday morning I'd rather be either sleeping or in the woods somehwere.) But I'm digressing into a big topic. What i'm on about today is that it is Lent, so I've decided to be a vegetarian for the next 40 days. Good a time as any. That whole exploit with the jiggling pig flesh got me thinking about the lives we take for our own physical nourishment. Killing to live. All life feeds on other life, and I definitely believe humans evolved as the ultimate natural omnivores, but this is a personal exercise in awareness and the extension of compassion to those fellow beasts we normally take for granted as we grab chunks of their flesh out of the grocery case at Slaveway.
We'll see how it goes. I've been mostly-vegetarian at many points in life, but probably never for 40 days running. And okay, i'm not going whole-hog (!) vegan but you know, there's so many fine points of doctrine I'm just not even going to go further into it than simple "vegetarian."
Observations from a train window, Portland to Seattle on a clear winter day.
Glorious bright blue day. Adams/Klickitat rising far beyond green ridges, river bottoms. Black bedrock in grade-cut, mossy, alders and maples bare but trunks green mossy, green pasture river botom, languid emerald current, smaller rushing side stream, dark fir trees, clearcut ridges and hills, tangled shrub regrowth, doghair alders and firs, endless trees, branches twisting and branching endlessly, fractally, transpiration, respiration, the other half of my lungs;
Outbuildings, shacks, dirt tracks, brush piles, junk piles, blackberries, scotch broom, mossy shingle roofs, chimneys, little towns one then another between the tangled green, neat grids of streets, little wood frame houses, smoke curling up, lumber yard, old brick downtown, Rainier now gleaming great Tahoma to the northeast, cows and cows and cows grazing, burn barrel, dairy sheds, powerline swath thru forest, red sheet-metal "Restaurant/Saloon," wood-piles, gravel parking lot, grain elevator "Washington Milk and Egg Co-op," mobile homes, mobile homes, single wide, double wide, old mossy roofed farm house with trailer house to the side, solitary firs or huge maples or cedars in a swampy field, old truck bed falling into creekbed, classic red barn, unpainted decaying barn, yard full of broken down ATV's, Tahoma now rising vast and shining like a dream mountain, something from a fantasy novel, triple summit in
perfect symmetry from south Olympia the whole sweep of it from base to top, dark green ravine again below, a black watered lake, Nisqually River green in final rush to delta, high gravelly cliff with orange trunked Madrona atop, Nisqually Delta flat, ah now the wide blue water, green-black land across it, Olympic Mountains rising jagged, spit of sand jutting, broken old pilings, water darker deeper blue than the sky, forested island rising, little white Pierce County ferry boat, further across the prison island, MacNeil; up to the right "view lot for sale," hillside trophy homes, brushy hillside and stumps of trees chopped down for the view, and on now into Pugetopolis.
Okay, a few more comments on the meat. Obviously it was grotesque. And though I am not a vegetarian, I am a rather sensitive soul, and seeing (and hacking away at) these chunks of flesh that were part of a living and intelligent being, then placing them on display in a ridiculous manner, as absurd franken-toys: I see quite clearly the sheer wrongness and offensiveness of this. (Several people thought we were making a statement against meat-eating.) Someday such displays will seem beyond the pale, like lampshades made out of human skin. But look. I'm an artist. I perceive the world around me and try to re-present it back to us in an abstracted mirroring. Sometimes what comes up isn't pretty. Art isn't about pretty. For that matter beauty isn't about pretty either. I do like pretty but it is only one component (and not a necessary one) of true art and beauty.
The other thing to say about our Meat piece is that, although not conciously intended as we conceived and created it, it was rawly sexual. An interior of wet red flesh with a vibrator inside jiggling it and sounds of laughter and glee. The title was "Touch My Gogi." Gogi is Korean for meat. At one level we were being silly and juvenile, but we wanted to shield the obvious in a layer of enigma, also it is a reference to the old SNL skit where Dieter the German kraftwerkish guy insists that everyone "touch my monkey" and in fact he has an actual live monkey, whereas what we had was a piece of dead flesh re-animated by the mechanism from a stuffed monkey. Bear actually, but what's the difference?
In Seattle for a few days.
The object in mind: a completed artistic project. A collaboration with my friend Sung Kim, from conception to final execution in 3 days. Less really, because we started Wednesday and the thing had to be in presentation form at Luscious (the art/performance space in an old building downtown) by early Friday evening. But we have one such project under our belts from last summer, the process went so enjoyably (despite momentary challenges) that we're optimistic. Sung and I in this mode together are a collaborative collective called "The Levant." Sung is a fine painter, and i paint and draw, but that's not what the Levant is about. This is more about acting upon an inspiration in tandem and without filters or boundaries, a sort of controlled several-day improvisation and performance in a visual or kinesthetic form.
Anyhoo. What it really amounts to is a bunch of caffeinated idea-spinning and then contructing based upon that, revising continuously as needs be. The whole crux of it though is inspiration. All you need is the good idea. Everything flows out of it. But inspiration is a very funny, elusive thing. The more you directly seek it, the less it is there. But talking about one thing or another, or taking a walk, or whatever, and ideas are suddenly there, from... where? Who knows. A deep question, that. The source and process of original ideas.
So we spent all Wednesday afternoon and again Thursday trundling around to various thrift stores looking for...something, anything, to spark us and serve as the physical basis of the project. Brief euphoria at the discovery of an old tri-folding rice-paper wooden lattice screen. With 256 separate rectangular framed spaces it seemed like the perfect frame in which to display a series of images, oh but what images? The ages of a human life, in sequence and repeated serially. No, don't have time to collect the pictures. Boring and colagey anyway. Medical imagery from old textbooks at Goodwill. Okay, but why? Words then, or words and images, or eyeballs, or a silhouette of something, or poke holes through the rice paper and have people reach through into something, or insert colored condoms into it. Okay, forget the whole rice-paper frame thing.
Hey, check out this fluffy teddy bear! How about we spray paint it silver and suspend it from the ceiling? No. What about this WWF action figure guy, what could we do with him? Ooh, look how this stuffed bear laughs and shakes when you squeeze his paw! And this other one, listen to all these hilarious things he says. And here's Tickle-Me Elmo! How about we take the mechanism out from inside one of these and put it in something else? Yeah! Hmmm, but what? I'm thinking something wet, like make a mound of wet cloth and some kind of goo and put the laugher and jiggler in that. Or jello? Something protoplasmic, something jiggly and slimy but also fairly firm and oddly lifelike. Like, like.... a big slab of meat! Oh god yes, Sung, there it is! Oh come on, it'll be great! Despite it being half his idea, he was reluctant to take it anywhere past brainstorm. So we left the store (Salvation Army) without the animals but two beers (and some cajoling from me) later, he was onboard.
So there it was. An idea. Nothing left to do but execute. Friday noon I headed out and picked up two enormous slabs of cheap pork, shoulder or loin or something, mainly it was cheap as compared to the hams and pot roasts and sides of lamb. And grisly and red and... meaty.
I'm not sure which was the funner part of putting it all together:slicing open the teddy bears removing the mechanisms in an act of crude surgery (all the while the laughter and shaking convulsing the poor eviserated beasts every time I jarred the hair-trigger buttons that set them off. Poor Elmo, that's gotta do a lot more than tickle, my little friend.)
Or the gory mess of carving a chamber out of the inside of 8 pound slabs of raw pork. By this time various people are coming and going from the space, setting things up, and no one was neutral in response. Most people thought it was hilarious, a couple told me I was a crazy, several offered much loftier high-art interpretations than I consciously intended. Though in hindsight I can see how it was maybe about taking the artificial life-mechanism out of a strange (almost fetishistic) fake animal and implanting it in a chunk of formerly living real flesh, to reanimate, the human attempt to manufacture a false better version of nature, to go one better than life and God, to create the inevitably monstrous golem. But mainly it was about the childish glee of assembling them and pushing the buttons (or watching other people push them) and watching a big hunk of pork jiggle and laugh and say "let's play! Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha! That tickles!"
Later in the evening i was serving beer in the next room over when this girl says to me "I can't believe it, when i showed up here with my friends there was this huge hunk of raw meat on the sidewalk outside, it was so weird we almost didn't come in!" So alas some drunk or angry or something person destroyed the piece before its very short time. But hey, a reaction is a reaction, and how often does someone heave your art out a third story window into the rainy night?
All in all the evening was a total blast, I had so many fun interactions I can hardly remember them all. A few linger in particular. Finally crashed out at 5:30 AM.
Later Saturday I saw the film "The Battle of Algiers." Pretty amazing flick. A cautionary tale for sure. Some lessons never seem to get learned.
Well, long time no write. No excuses, only reasons i won't bore you with.
How many of you, no matter what your age, still wonder what you're going to do when you grow up? I've always been in that category. Objectively you might say, "but Dan, look at all the great stuff you've done, all those paintings and songs and multi-thousand mile leg-powered treks, and that whole career in the belly of the beast."
Yeah, true enough my friend, but still... I'm the type who always seems to be in the mode of figuring it all out, getting a clearer sense of who and what i am, and hopefully then acting upon that. Which impulse took me the weekend before last to, of all places... Tacoma. City of Destiny said the grave, mustachioed founders, stinkhole of the Northwest said the rest of us who came after, especially if like me you were born in Seattle, the city that won the battle for civic supremacy in the days of the railroad robber barons and gold-mania, and you grew up hardly paying attention to Tacoma at all, other than as a place to laugh at while driving by holding our noses against the "Tacoma Aroma."
Took a long time for T-Town to live that one down. There's still a paper mill but the aluminum smelter was dynamited over a decade ago and Tacoma smells no worse anymore than any other city of 190,000. And on this visit I discovered that Tacoma is a real city, and one in the process of a long but profound transformation from industrial craphole slum to an attractive and cheap alternative to Seattleopolis and Portlandia. It's got a ways to go yet, sure, but that's part of the appeal. Pacific Avenue used to be one of the most genuinely deteriorating downtown thoroughfares on the west coast. A postcard of urban decay. Now, for better or worse, it has been completely redeveloped around a trio of major public museums, a branch campus of the University of Washington, and a light rail line. The line isn't long, but it goes from near the tacoma dome at one end to the Theatre district at the north end of downtown on the other. Downtown itself is pretty nice looking in my eyes, i especially love the old civic building with the tall brick tower, and the yellow flatiron shaped building just up the hill.
But something weird happens when you climb the hill from downtown up into the neighborhood known as hilltop. The architecture looks right: old victorian woodframes, bay-windowed flats, etc. But it is a slum. No sugarcoating it. Has been for a very long time, victim of gradual post-war decay of industrial employment and "white flight" which left the local African American population underemployed and forced to tenancy in buildings that generally haven't seen renovation since, well, ever. But things are taking a long slow arcing turn, helped I'm told by the city actively encouraging home ownership in the area. But still, its amazing to see all these blocks of decrepit victorians interspersed with weedy lots and cracked pavement in a neighborhood that geographically speaking ought to be prime territory. And probably will be some day, as the UW expands and the port of Tacoma steals business from Portland (going on right now.) I've been meaning to check out Tacoma in some depth for several years but never really got there till now, attending a weekend workshop called "Who Am I?" It's a fairly straightforward personal growth or exploration thing by PRH, which stands for Personalite et Relations Humaine (Personality and Human Relations,) since it was started in France about 30 years ago. Basically it is an excercise in discerning the true aspects or qualities of one's self from the mostly conditioned self image and intellect that so often rules us. Does me anyway. A very nice fellow named Bill Kelly runs the workshops with his wife/partner Judy. I stayed in the home of some wonderful friends of theirs named Brian Flint and Debbie McLaughlin. Brian works for the Audubon Society and Debbie for Pierce College. On Friday night they had their monthly last-friday open house soup dinner social. A bunch of very lively and intelligent people from their extended circle were there, it proved to me that Tacoma has a community of intelligent and creative people.
Saturday night I was happy to be invited by one of the other workshop participants to her house for a celebration of Imbolc ("em-bok") and Saint Bridgette's Feast. This is the observance that eventually got watered down into Groundhog Day. We had a nice little elemental ritual, then ate goodies and made candles and Bridgette's crosses (out of stiff reeds.)
So anyway, that about covers my Tacoma adventure. Also had a really
excellent afternon tea at a place on 6th street near the Kelly's. I took my bike on the train and managed to ride around quite a bit before heading back to Portland. I found a pleasant ravine with a nature trail called Puget Park and creek. Didn't make it to Point Defiance Park but hopefully next time.
From all this I know it sounds like I'm ready to pack my bags for Tacoma, but that's how it is when i discover a new place. Basically I get a crush. It's no different than that. The addictive flush of rose-tinted newness. But don't worry Portland, er Eugene, I mean um Seattle, heh, love ya too Reno, I'll be back I swear, Oh hi San Fran, who loves ya? Chicago, Boston, San Luis Obispo..., hey, i was just passing through those times, remember? Ahem....