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Bookends of a Day

Posted on 06/18/201806/19/2018 by Riki Moss

10:45 washing dishes at the sink. I look out the window and see a doe walking slowly across the lawn with her fawn. The fawn runs a few feet, while the mother waits, then the fawn stops and the mother takes a step, In this way they are proceeding across the lawn. I see the dog at the edge of the porch looking at them, but looking in the way she has of not seeing, of seeing over or through what is directly in her vision. So neither of us wants to startle the doe. It is a lovely sight, this obviously bonded family taking a morning stroll across my lawn. Robins are hopping through the grass, a red tailed squirrel suddenly lept off a fence and disappears behind the greenhouse. I’m know the iphone shot through the window will be awful, but I don’t dare go outside, so I shoot anyway. The image is poor but sweet, the washed out colors convey a certain lack of authority, as if it is a photograph of a photograph.

Thursday morning 10:30 out my kitchen window

At 4:45 I take the recyclables to the Grand Island Dump. The huge room is immaculate. All the bins are empty, tons of plastics have been squashed and packed on palettes waiting to be shipped. Two attendants, one who’s a volunteer fireman and the other a selectman, greet me and ask if I want help. I’ve been coming here for 10 years now, but I don’t know his name. I don’t need help. I can’t stop staring at the compacted structures and I walk around, shooting on my phone. The selectman looks amused.

Many years ago, I lived on Canal street in New York City. On Wednesdays, the few small sweatshops left in the neighborhood would bundle up their unused fabrics, drag them out on pallets for the night time garbage pick-up. By the time the trucks arrived, neighborhood artists trolling for found materials would have picked the pallets clean.

It’s interesting, this impulse to reclaim garbage as art, as if by turning our trash into “art” we are doing something for the environment, while in truth we’re only postponing its suffocating release into our environment. It’s a kind of recycling, only not as a useful object, but as a cultural comment, as art. For about a year, I collected every bit of plastic that circulated in my house and studio, and after a year, I had a big closet stacked with tubs filled with bottle caps sorted by color, can tabs, plastic bags, medicine bottles, ties, garden containers, dried contact lenses, packaging sorted by shape, packing peanuts – everything unsuitable for the recycle bins. I had no idea what to make with this stuff. My mind was filled with images of birds and marine life dead on beaches, their bellies slit open, revealing batteries, caps, netting, fuel canisters, milk cartons – suffocated by the litter humans discard in daily life. Reworking those images seemed exploitive rather than helpful, and I wonder what it takes for humans to turn their grief into constructive action. Chris Jordan has already broken our hearts with his images of dead albatross in the Midway Islands, where the birds fly out over the oceans, collecting plastics as food for their young, who fill up with batteries, bottle caps, syringes. What image is more powerful than that of a mother unknowingly poisoning her child.

Another option was to use the garbage, like this Nigerian sculptor to create new art. But his work takes a village and is conguent with the life of that village, and conveys a condition that I have no business appropriating, the bottle caps are the relics of a dark story where liquor was an agent of exchange in the slavery market. I could imagine building reliefs and sculpture, but that would entail additional toxic material, like resins or glues, which would negate anything constructive, so finally, in a grand purge, I throw it all out, with full understanding of my failure and announce, when I get home, that we are never going to buy anything that comes in a plastic bottle. To no avail.

I find this article tracking the Journey of a Plastic Bottle in the Atlantic Magazine.

The refuse associate at the town dump told me that a truck would arrive soon to pick up the pallets. He doesn’t know where they’re going, only that the name on the truck begins with CAN. Canada then? The same Canada that begins 12 miles north of my house on Border Road? It doesn’t seem right that Canada is eating my trash, but then this is the day that my country screws the G7.

So what am I left with? A healthy doe moves across my landscape with her infant at the beginning of the day and at the end, a vision of garbage laden barges plying the oceans.

F**kYou Second Amendment

Posted on 06/14/201806/14/2018 by Riki Moss

Is it easier to imagine the end of capitalism or the end of the world?

Another school shooting. Another message from our bleeding heart president, that’s what I yelled into the wind, F**k You Second Amendment, because I wanted the world, the wind, the universe, my legislators, my unborn grand children, the neighbor hunting in my woods, the 120 high school Freshmen in my county’s school, to listen up. What kind of people are we to sacrifice our freedom to be safe from asault rifle toting lunatics, even if they are teenagers, so that – OK, mostly men – can excercise their f**king freedom to own a gun. Whose freedom is important here? Boys, you don’t need a gun to be men. Really.

Then I thought, better go read the Second Amendment, so you have some idea what you’re yelling about.

Here it is: “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”

In my state of Vermont ,after Parkland, the legislature passed laws requiring background checks, raised age limits for owning guns and banned bump stocks and high-capacity magazines. Nice gesture, but none of these measures would have been effective against our latest 17 year oid mass murderer. He borrowed his dad’s weapons, thereby avoiding the raised age limits and background checks, he didn’t use either a bumpstock or high capacity magazine. He also had no mental health issues (until he shot up his classmates), so wouldn’t have been flagged as a potential killer, In other words, laudible as these gun control measures seem to be, they are ineffectiive.

There’s only one way out of this. No guns, period. The United States’s gun homicide rate is 25 times higher than other high-income countries, according to an article in the Guardian that takes a look at four countries with successful gun control.

In these four countries, action was taken immediately after a mass shooting, with various results. In Japan, guns and swords have been banned since the feudal warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1537-1598) unified Japan. In Germany, despite restrictions, there are guns in the country; but few killings; in Australia, there hasn’t been a mass shooting since the Port Arthur spree that led to stringent restrictions and a massive buy out. In 1946, after a school shooting in the UK, “gun control was in the cards” – escalating to the banning even of small-bore pistols used for target shooters.

It’s the middle of June. There have been 26,1300 incidents with 6,449 deaths so far, 1500 of these are teenagers or younger. The shooting at Santa Fe, Texas, marked the 101st mass shooting (although there is no broadly accepted definition of a mass shooting, the number is considerably more than zero.)

Rusdie and the “Rubble of Truth”

Posted on 06/04/201806/14/2018 by Riki Moss

I start this new day indoors with a warming fire, dog in the vicinity of my feet. Outside it rains hard. I look at my planet from the safety of my window and marvel. How the brown earth is a skin with the color green bursting from every pore with haze sweating off the surface of the pond, how tears flood the gulley, how the lilacs have been and are now gone without protest, how the swallows investigate the eves of my house as further nests, and how I wish they would accept my invitation to stay.

This is from Rusdie in the New Yorker. I’ve always disliked him, but this version of “why we write” reminds us of possibillities beyond ego and mood.

“In Germany, after the Second World War, the authors of what was called Trümmerliteratur, or “rubble literature,” felt the need to rebuild their language, poisoned by Nazism, as well as their country, which lay in ruins. They understood that reality, truth, needed to be reconstructed from the ground up, with new language, just as the bombed cities needed to be rebuilt. I think we can learn from their example. We stand once again, though for different reasons, in the midst of the rubble of the truth. And it is for us—writers, thinkers, journalists, philosophers—to undertake the task of rebuilding our readers’ belief in reality, their faith in the truth. And to do it with new language, from the ground up.”

If you see this woman, call….

Posted on 04/11/201805/18/2018 by Riki Moss

So, say the perpetrator returns the rock to its rightful owner, the river. Does the river owe her $17,500? Does Yoko owe the river for the rocks she took? If she took 200 rocks from the river, that makes $3,500,000.00 minus gallery rental, transportation, labor, taxes, adjusting for inflation. Still, not bad, for a river.

Woman Steals $17,500 Rock from Yoko Ono Installation

The new songbirds of North America

Posted on 03/29/201804/09/2018 by Riki Moss

Today I read there are people who net pigeons in New York City and drive them away in minivans. Where do they take them? Here, in the country, the dawn is empty of sound. Now and then, a pair of flycatchers darts across the lake. A robin rests on the lawn studying my next-door neighbor who is riding around on his lawnmower masticating worms, slugs, grubs, grass, frogs, all their eggs and the footprints of his tiny little granddaughter who runs before the machine trailing a balloon. Four Senatorial black crows shoot across the blades, scream off to the beach where thousands more convene. In the evening, the bunnies show up and my next-door neighbor shoots them from his porch. He also shoots the cormorants nesting on the island off his boat dock because they slime the teak on his 1924 Chris Craft Cruiser that he drives across the bay twice a year for dinner. Also, the raccoon families residing close to his garbage, these he catches in have-a-heart traps and carries them off to shoot in the woods. We still have racoons, but my sky fills with bird song. Sixty-eight percent of the songbirds have vanished. I have been wondering about their replacements. I mention this to my neighbor, who has invited me over for a cocktail. My neighbor doesn’t understand why I am pessimistic. No birds were missing at his place, he tells me. Ditto for the bats and mosquitoes. I ask him, how then does he explain the muteness of the dawn? The lack of Birds on the Wires? The lonely morning dove mourning on my roof? Hasn’t he read Ferlinghetti, I ask, smirking, because I know he believes all poets, like annoying animals, should be shot.

They were putting up the statue of St. Francis in front of the church of St.Francis
in the City of San Francisco In a little side street just off the avenue
where no birds sing
and a lot of old Italians were standing all around on the little side street
just off the Avenue watching the wily workers who were hoisting up the statue
with a chain and a crane
and other implements
and a lot of young reporters in button-down clothes were taking down the words of one young priest who was propping up the statue
with all his arguments
and all the while, while no birds sang any St. Francis Passion
and while the lookers kept looking up at Saint Francis
with his arms outstretched
to the birds who weren’t there
a very tall and very purely naked young virgin
with very long and very straight straw hair
wearing only a very small bird’s nest
in a very existential place
kept passing through the crowd all the while
and up and down the steps in front of St. Francis
her eyes downcast all the while
and singing to herself

My neighbor’s daughter came to my garden to help me pick off the red beetles eating my lilies. She’s hiding from her father because he is teaching her child to step on newborn baby voles. They went for a walk in the woods where he demonstated how to do this. I imagine a giant vole with a mouthful of poisoned teeth scurries up the path to the porch where her father sits drinking gin and tonic. The rodent will climb up his legs, hoist itself on his shoulders and squirt a stream of baby voles up his nostrils.

Then all the songbirds that used to be will open their beaks to sing their hallelujah for everyone in the world but my neighbor to hear.

Egyptian Blue, transmission

Posted on 03/24/201803/28/2018 by Riki Moss

A painter friend visited a cemetery in Egypt. She was walking with her family when she saw in the distance a robed woman who seemed to be throwing something from a bag on the desert floor. She hurried ahead and saw that this woman, amongst others, was tossing handfuls of ground pigment into a tomb, or maybe into several tombs. The pigment color, a dense, bright blue, was extraordinary against the muted neutral tones of the desert landscape. The photos she took show an open, domed beehive structure, a tholos tomb, the floor saturated with layers of this intense pigment, also with dried corn kernels. In one photo, a man stands to the side with a broom. At one point, he offered my friend the broom; for her to do some sweeping? Or perhaps for him to sweep for her? – she has no idea.

The history of the color is intriguing. It was developed around 2600 as an alternate pigment to the rare and expensive mineral lapis lazuli, made from sand, copper, and sodium-carbonate, CaCuSi₄O_10m,a testament to the skills of the chemists of antiquity who understood how to control the temperature needed for successful synthesis. Amazing too was its consistency over time until it was “lost” during the dark ages. Lost and found again, when in 2009 it was discovered that Egyptian blue shows exceptional luminescence (it has since been made into a crayon), indicating its possible use in imaging devices.

But here’s what really intrigues me: new research shows that Egyptian blue produces infra-red radiation like that used by TV remotes. In other words, when compressed into infinitesimally thin sheets and compressed, the infrared quality of Egyptian Blue makes it a communication device.

So, back to the modern Egyptian women spreading layers of artificial blue pigment embedded with corn kernels in desert tombs. Assuming my friend hasn’t happened on a performance piece, maybe we can consider this scene a ritual having to do with decorating a tomb as Pharaoh’s was decorated and also providing the dead with what it needs in the next world, in this case, the color blue, which we now consider a medium for communication. And isn’t this a universal desire, as witness, for example, my dog Bandit buried under a tree with his bowl.

I also like to think that in some cellular way, the ancient world understood that this exquisite color is capable of communicating through layers of existence.

Food In A Box

Posted on 02/14/201803/20/2018 by Riki Moss

This afternoon, on NPR’s On Point, I’m listening to a conversation about Trump’s idea to feed low-income people meals in a box. Trump wants to tell us what to eat? How crazy is that? Look at him, listen to him – do we want to eat what he eats? We know that he likes food in a box, that he eats MacDonald’s because the food is in a box so no one who wants to poison him will know it is his food. The box will keep him safe. Does it follow that by giving poor people their food in a box, they too will be kept safe?

I don’t think so. I think they’ll be kept malnourished. There’s tons of food waste in America, and he wants children to eat, what? A box of what? No choice of fresh vegetables, fruits. Instead, how about canned peaches, Kraft cheese; remember when Reagan tried to convince us that Ketchup was a vegetable?

I’m thinking about the Republican war on poverty, which more accurately means a war on poor people. The rules are: don’t build affordable housing, take away fuel assistance, refuse a minimum living wage, make sure health care and pharmaceuticals stay unaffordable, get rid of food stamps, legal abortions, contraception and keep them in jail.

I’m standing in front of the stove listening to this conversation, scrambling eggs when Robert walks in. He’s the director of a community action program. He runs the food shelf, he knows about poverty, he’s at the heart of our regional conversation about food. The conversation goes like this: when people are hungry, we have to feed them, but feeding them also encourages people staying in poverty. If we don’t feed poor people, the argument goes, they will have to work, even if the work offered is dead end servitude without a living wage and they will be hungry anyway,

Do we have to ask why people self-medicate? Opioids? Alcohol? Junk food? Suicide? Prison? Join the military? Become twitter trolls?

What if we offered all our people a decent life? We live in Vermont. Here, we encourage gleaners, we distribute organic eggs, we give away chicks to families to raise, chicks turn into chickens who turn into pot pies. At the food shelves, there’s meat in the freezers, whole grains in bulk, food that otherwise will be thrown away. This delicate, crude system depends upon volunteer labor, supported by taxpayers with help from the federal government.

This system is shameful, difficult, unreliable, self-perpetuating – but this is what we have. People – more and more each day – come to the food shelves, and sometimes the food is fresh from the farms because we produce more food than non-poor people can eat. Why would it please us to make it worse?

Robert has brought me a Valentine’ gift. A recyclable jar of CBD Gummies in a bright red package. Let’s watch a movie, I say. Let’s eat them all.

The latest in dog evolution

Posted on 02/14/201802/14/2018 by Riki Moss

Dog evolution, a dream:

I brought home a dog from the pound. He was large and dreary, with a matted coat the color of slush. We lived in a border town, on a long dirt road.

The dog’s name was Oscar. The town was at the edge of the ocean. A Dollar Store, some second hand clothing shops across the street from the rocky, littered beach. A desultory craft fair had set up under a tent. Oscar trotted along with me, ignoring what few people or other dogs we encounter. When we arrived at the craft fair, he stopped, composed himself in the grass and fell asleep on his back with his feet in the air.

So I thought, better get him some exercise. We went down to the beach to swim. He seemed to like swimming underwater, rising up now and then to look around. One time, he came up, paddled over and started talking to me. For awhile, we’d bob along discussing Kierkegaard or Samuel Becket, cooking shows or dress making, When the conversations lulled, we would swim, and when we ran out of things to say, he would disappear under water, staying there for longer and longer periods of time.

The last time he came up, he had turned into a turtle, also named Oscar.

As a turtle, Oscar had little of interest to talk about. Mainly eggs. I found it hard to follow and soon lost interest. Then he started shrinking. I grew worried, and brought him ashore. On the beach, an Israeli couple were setting up a concession with some jewelry and parts of computers. They called me over, quite agitated; they knew my turtle and were concerned for his well-being. By this time, Oscar had shrunk to the size of my palm. The woman said she could fix him, so I handed him over. He kept shrinking. First his flippers fell off, then his body fell out of his carapace and he was gone.

What’s in a parade?

Posted on 02/09/201802/11/2018 by Riki Moss

Our great leader wants a parade! He deserves one. After all, he stopped our American Carnage, just as he said he would in his inaugural speech. And didn’t he vow to bring back our borders, (although he never said where they went)? Also to get back the wealth that the world ripped away from the middle class, at least get it back to him, and make “America First”, although this last has not gone over well with some, but hey, they’ll figure it out? And didn’t he invent that great phrase “alternate facts”? Get that old failed Washington Post to add up all his 2000 lies, falsities, misleading statements? Fire an FBI director? Decide to deport a home grown gang? Grab pussy because he could?

So much to celebrate, America.

He didn’t get a military parade for his inauguration, so let’s make up for that. Remember that his inauguration was the biggest crowd ever, that he won the popular vote, but someone stole it, and maybe those are the people who should pay for the parade, like they will for the border wall, although that’s Mexico. Beside, that fatter guy, Kim Jong-un has parades all the time, so why shouldn’t he? Bigger ones, because of his bigger button.

So while it’s will be heartening for us to see all his hardware, and know our great leader and his generals will be there to protect us, I still wonder, is there anyone around to stop him?

Equality?

Posted on 02/01/201802/09/2018 by Riki Moss

Equality is a great idea unless it means we should all be equal white people.

Nowhere in the culture do I see white people expressing a desire to be persons of color. That said, I do see a growing awareness that people of color are not just victims of white people with whom we need to empathize, We’re evolving, to be sure; it’s no longer legally possible to enslave, torture, appropriate other people to do the bidding of white people…except perhaps in the way that white people make celebrities out of black people for entertainment. I experience Beyonce not as a white person in black face, but more as a black person in whiteface (an imitation of her heritage for consumption by others.)

We’ve evolved to the point – with the help of affirmative action, guilt, fury, activism, pressure – of integrating people of color into elitist institutions. As long as the institutions value all imaginations, histories and experiences, this is a welcome step, unless the message is, “how to be white”.

Equality is possible when the imaginations, histories, desires, of “other” peoples and cultures are equally weighted with those of white people; when the imagination of an artist of color is of equal interest, on its own terms, without white interpretation, and is a vital participant in the history of art, music, literature, then we have forgotten the word”tolerance”, which is really a demeaning term.

As usual, the arts lead: Here’s a short list of contemporary artists of color with individual approaches to identity:

Bethany Collins
Rashid Johnson
Kara Walker
Ellen Gallagher
Chris Ofili
Ifeoma Anyaeji
Marc Bradford
Kehinde Wiley
Mel Edwards
Kerry James Marshall
Yunka Shonibare
David Hammons

So many more.

Widewalls.com has an interesting conversation: “The cultural identity is defined by both its own members’ living experience and the search for a definition and the perceptions of others, especially those in power. How does the racial identity of an artist affect the way they create art and the perception of it by the masses?

Where My Girls At? 20 black female artists with current solo exhibitions.

Artnet.com: 10 black artists to celebrate.

Culturetype.com: Major African American Contemporary Artists

Hyperallergic: for a take on some 1971 history