Tuesday, September 06, 2005

The control of chaos
by
John Dutton


My perspective
made it arc
And the movement
of the car
Made it look guided
But it was just a
drop, dropping,
Delayed by the
leaves.

After the rain it
chose me
And my eyes were
magnetized
Pulled towards it
But it hit the
windscreen,
screaming,
Glass can be harder
than water.

I thought of the fly
And the shadow of
the swatter
Looming from
our world
But a fly, flying,
Can escape the
moment.

Then I saw the nails
flying
And felt the dumb
awareness
That I was in their
path
But the hate,
hating,
Was controlling the
chaos.

Thursday, July 21, 2005

Kleptocracy
by
John Dutton


Aspiring thieves, don't read any further
if you don't not want to remain in ignorance
of what you shouldn't do to become
the opposite of what you are now.

The way to wealth isn't paved with
good intentions, but is a smooth tunnel
lined sometimes, briefly, with lead.

This tunnel vision excludes the law
and exudes a call to offer forth goods,
chattels, children to the gods.

For those gods bear paper and rules
and rights, and wrong signposts to
ancestral lands that are graves for the
idea that the world was once no-one's.

But the tinkle of taxes, the shuffle of shares,
the bustle of bribes and the trading of titles
hand the kleptocrats their fortunes and
suddenly
Russians own soccer teams
Chinese build Versailles
Congolese fuel private jets
North Koreans strap on warheads
Sheiks prowl in Rolls
And Yanks own the world.

Sunday, March 20, 2005

Where am I?

by Scott Ferry

Where am I?, investigates the "plastic" nature of my artistic visions. A theme of dolls, masked figures, and datura plants links psychologically to my growing up in the prepackaged world of California. Where everything is more real then the real... I have nevertheless becoming infected by this urge to mold and create characters and scenes that magically imply a dark "Disney like" world. Each image takes us metaphorically on a journey where we stand on the edge of what is real, who am I, and what is that.

I am lost, like this doll, in the layers of my own making, but these very same creations are my key to that very same freedom I seek.

In my digital mixed media artwork I utilize a mix of contemporary and classic techniques.

Each image begins with several photographs of with the figure, objects, and backgrounds. I primarily use a SLR camera and a digital camera for the photographs taken. Most images are taken in my studio. The photographs are then saved on disc and then brought into my computer. I mostly use Photoshop for the layering and editing process. Once the images are brought together with the idea in mind, I begin to work on them using my digital tablet and pen. From there the work takes on more of a painting process then a photographic one. I paint in colors, clothing, hair, and backgrounds. I erase and clone textures and skins using the pen. In most of my work I rarely use filters, but now mostly rely on my own ability to bring in light and texture to the right places and mold the work into a completed scene.

Scott Ferry
www.scottferry.com

Tuesday, September 14, 2004

Days of Mauve
by
Margo August Woods


Last Christmas, my parents gave me a word magnet set called Mind Your Mother which contained well-worn phrases like "you'll poke your eye out" that you could rearrange on the fridge. After putting together the words to read "get your finger out of your sister" and "this will hurt me more than it will hurt the dog," I realized none of the fractured clichés in front of me could approach what my mother has said in real life. Her speech is peppered with scatological references and new age jargon: the verbal equivalent of a backed-up toilet in a Unitarian church. A more representative word magnet set would contain words like "jeeper" and "fluff" (her slang for "penis" and "fart" respectively) and her phrase du jour, "I'm codependent."

To understand why my mother talks about the things she does, you have to know her background. She grew up wanting to be a nun, even going so far as to dress in a handmade nun costume to do her homework every afternoon as a child. As she got older, she put off joining the convent and eventually met and married my father. In time, she deepened her interests in spirituality to include self-help and new age interests; this explains her attraction to Enneagram charts and Deepak Chopra. As far as her preoccupation with body functions goes, I can only see it coming from her past as a high school biology teacher. As a stay-at-home mom in suburban New Jersey in the 80s, she lacked a captive audience of students to teach the science of life to; instead, she explained what sphincters were to her children.

Actually, my mom would say "sphinctahs." Due to a Jersey accent harsh enough to scrape the barnacles off a dinghy, my mother doesn't pronounce r's and puts the "w" sound into places where it shouldn't be. "Coffee" becomes "cawfee," "dogs" becomes "dawgs," and "who farted?" becomes "who fawted?" To mimic my mother's accent, it helps to envision yourself as her: a short, plump, mid-50ish woman with puffy pink hair and a fondness for sweatshirts and corduroy slacks on her way to a craft show at the local mall. Once you've gotten into character, peer at someone you've never seen before and ask one of my mom's favorite questions, "Do you know what 'fisting' means?"

After they have run away in fear, find a police officer and confess, "I didn't know how gay men had sex until I was twenty-two." Reminisce with the letter carrier: "On my honeymoon, I ate a bad BLT and shat my brains out." Or start a conversation with a sanitation worker about enemas or smegma or the day you had sex with Dad five times during a blizzard.

These subjects, and others along the same vein, have traumatized me since childhood. I knew what kegel exercises were since the third grade! I learned early that I could never prepare myself for what she would say next; she liked the element of surprise in her verbal assaults. A conversation with her is like watching a plastic bag caught in a stiff wind, tumbling over itself, zigzagging, and twisting inside out. My mother, similarly, might pause and change direction while she's talking, like when she gave me her review of the Todd Solondz movie Happiness-"They weren't really happy, were they?" Suddenly, like a plastic bag that flies into the face of a pedestrian, my mother switched subjects: "A guy I knew in college became a science teacher like me. One day he stabbed a girl scout to death when she was selling cookies. He was embarrassed because he didn't have enough money for the Do-see-dohs."

You really had to be "on the bawl," as my mother would say, to follow her. When I was younger, she would communicate through a series of shouted code words, apparently too busy redecorating the interior of our house in pink and mauve tones to hold any real conversation. "Pick me a winner" translated into "stop picking your nose," "dunk a punk" meant taking a bath, and "TBT" stood for "teeth brushing time." "Feed the monster" began as a command to put your clothes in the hamper, but changed overnight to mean, "put your dishes in the dishwasher." I was too busy wondering why my mother was making our house look like a giant womb to care about the shift in meaning.

Her pet saying at the time was "Crapola!" which she would yell when, after completing one the many elastic-waisted culottes she sewed for herself, she realized the print of the fabric was upside down. (I avoided having her sew for me because it resulted in numerous pins between my legs and her screaming "How does it feel in the crotch? The crotch? Is it tight in the crotch?" as she pecked and poked at my genitals). She yelled "Crapola!" when she found out one of her students she taught in the GED program at the local jail bit off the ear of another inmate. "I always admired C-Dog's assertiveness," she said. (After she quit the job, she referred to that period of her life as "when I was in jail" in front of my friends, who furtively looked for any signs of prison life-tattoos, shiv scars-she might be hiding). She would yell "Crapola!" with fury if you interrupted her exercise routine when the Rolling Stones song "Brown Sugar" was on. Aerobicizing to a song about heroin really whipped her into a lather, especially when she sang along to the "yeah, yeah, yeah, woo!" part.

The angriest I saw her, though, was when we visited my great aunt, an octogenarian who lived in Newark. Aunt Reese had the habit of rapping the knuckles of one hand on any available surface and worrying a rosary in the other, while commenting on the ass size of every black woman in her faltering line of vision. I heard more racial slurs in one afternoon that I have in the years since. A trip to Kmart was the highlight of these excursions, when "try on the God damn sandals" was the nicest thing my mother said to me all afternoon. During one of those outings, I saw some jams on display that I liked. "I want of pair of knickers," I told my mom. Apparently mishearing what I said, and thinking that my great aunt's bigotry rubbed off on me, she glared at Aunt Reese and then at me, and roared "Don't you ever use that word again! Do you want us to get killed?"

While my mother tried to discover the connection between biorhythm charts and bowel movements, my father preferred to drink alone in the garage. Periodically, he squinted at us out of one blood-shot hazel eye from behind the newspaper, breaking his self-imposed vow of silence to yell, "God damn you kids!" My father was the one, however, who sat the family down after dinner one night to announce that we were moving to Wisconsin in a month. I didn't even know where that was. Anywhere past the Appalachian Mountains doesn't exist for those on the East Coast. I only knew that they made cheese there, and all my favorite TV characters lived in Milwaukee: Laverne and Shirley, Lenny and Squiggy, Richie, Potsie, and the Fonz.

At my new school, kids with names like Olaf and Thor ridiculed my slight Jersey accent. I learned that in the Midwest what had once been "casserole" was now "hot dish," "rubber bands" were now "rubber binders," and "soda" was "pop." I gradually lost my old accent, and developed a new one as my long o's got longer, like a stretched piece of bubble gum. "I'm from Wis-CON-sin," I'd say, and sound like a native.

My mother, however, adjusted to our new home state with difficulty. She began to work at a department store and greeted customers by saying, "There's a forty percent sale on selected house wares today. The comforters are discounted, and we just received some new dinner- and glass- ware." If she had been born in Eau Claire, her greeting would have been met with smiles. However, the manager received complaints that an angry woman with pink hair was yelling unintelligibly in the front of the store and frightening away the customers.

On a visit home a few Christmases later, I noticed Mom did not seem to be her typical self. She usually paraded around the house like Judy Garland at an open bar, but instead she acted more like a post-lobotomy Frances Farmer.

"Mom, is everything okay?"

"Of course, honey. It's just the change of life. I'm just dry as biscotti in my drawahs."

A week later, my father called from a hospital. My mother had had a stroke, and although she was stabilized, her thalamus, which controls verbal speech in the brain, was affected. My mother, for once in her life, was speechless.

As I returned home to see her, I thought about how for a while at least, I would no longer have to cringe when my roommates joked that my mom had "cawled" while I was out. She couldn't advise me, as she had done in the past in front of everyone in the drugstore, that my acne problem would clear up if I masturbated more. Or ask me at the supermarket how frequently I had "inta-course." Guilt overwhelmed me. My mother might not ever be able to speak again, and all I could think about was the embarrassment it would save me. What kind of daughter was I?

It was hard to sit with Mom at the hospital. I kept expecting her to burst out into a torrent of her trademark graphic language. I sensed that my father and brother felt the same way. Because her right side was paralyzed, and she couldn't write, the first thing my dad bought her when she came home was a set of refrigerator magnets and a small metal board, so he would know how she felt and what she wanted from the store. I looked at my mother, small and frail, and so eerily quiet as she slowly arranged the magnets.

She smiled as she did this, the first time I had seen her smile since her stroke. Then she turned around the magnetic board. She had put together the sentence "keep your finger out of your sister." I guess it was the dirtiest sentence her limited vocabulary permitted. Well of course, we all came apart with laughter. My family hadn't laughed like that since… well… maybe never. But before that, we'd never needed to laugh that badly either.

Nowadays, we communicate through email. She types like she has St. Vitus Dance in her fingers. It takes awhile to decipher her emails-too much time, in my opinion, when they're about my dog's continuing prostate problem. Occasionally Dad and I talk on the phone. Mom's in therapy and her speech gets better all the time. They plan to move back to New Jersey once my father retires. I never thought I'd miss my mother's way of talking, but I do. Sometimes, just sometimes, I wish she'd call me unexpectedly and ask for old time's sake, "Do you know what 'fisting' means?"

Sunday, May 16, 2004

Pornart 4

Well, I'm not posting often, but I'm now encouraging comments on the posts I make from here on. Please, be my guest: comment.

Sunday, April 25, 2004

Pornart3

Tuesday, September 09, 2003

Pornart2