Public Confession

 

Today I got frozen out of Facebook for taking a picture of bails of pine needles I had to spread, and posting it, tongue firmly held in cheek, with the Nazi motto, in German, about freedom and work; a phrase I am afraid of posting again lest I get kicked out of the entire internet. The following thoughts came to me after seeing a friend before I "arbeiten" spreading pine needles in the yard while getting “frei” on a glorious day. I always taught art from a very personal point of view, so maybe this is a teaching moment; though it’s probably just more contemporary exhibitionism from my uncensored mind.

What prompted this reverie is a phrase you never really want to hear from a friend whom you haven’t seen in decades, and whose parents were best friends with yours, while she introduces you to her son.  She said, "When my parents met Katya’s parents, they visited and spent all day at their place; when they came home they said they had an orgy."  Or words to that effect.😆  ….Ahhh the swinging 70’s… Though for my parents it was the swinging 60’s, 70’s and early 80’s. No wonder I was never home while growing up. As a child, I think I was aware of it, but blocked it.  I was aware of something, I just didn't look into it very closely - so very unlike me...  

I’ll hand it to my sex-crazed parents; their fun never happened when I was home. Were my parents actually sex-crazed?  Looking back on it, as I often do these days on my sixth decade on this planet, maybe. Sex certainly defined their relationship; and my mom defined her entire being in terms of her sexuality, something that seriously messed her up. And I am not saying this because I am a prude, I don’t even know how I feel about it; but I saw her mind break down at times, for long periods, due to her lack of having any other center; and then I saw her die a miserable and lonely death because of it.

I kept thinking of this while spreading my pine needles.  And I kept thinking about my parents' miserable relationship at the end of their lives when sex was no longer possible, while my dad, 15 years my mom's senior, battled prostate cancer.  And while doing yard work towards freedom, I kept thinking, as I am prone to do lately, about how all this marked my life.

My mother…  Another thing I often hear from people about her is how they loved her. And my mom could actually be wonderful; and often I loved her too, but like an abused dog who always goes back to its owner because the owner is not always abusive.  People who say they loved her did not have to live with her; I did not have that privilege. On her 3 last miserable years on this planet, after a lifetime of her bamboozling male psychiatrists into diagnosing her with depression, she was finally diagnosed, by a great woman psychiatrist, with Narcissistic Personality Disorder.  And that explained EVERYTHING I always knew, but never had words to explain. …And no, I have not forgotten my beloved father in this story.  Him I really did love unconditionally; but he was complicit, he enabled her.  He should have walked away from her long before he realized, also without words, what the family dynamic was; which with Narcissists is that they actually call all the shots.  He could have maybe saved himself a lot of pain (like the Republican party could have, had they not enabled, to the bitter end, the one who shall not be named).

It has been 3 years since my mom died, and I still don’t know how I feel about her. I want to love her; often, I miss her. 

Teach your children well.

I'm no farmer; but I've been listening to a lot of soy farmers being interviewed by NPR about their predicament due to Donnie's tariffs on China, their largest consumer. Let's face it, a lot of them voted for him; and when asked about him, they ham and haw because they have choices to make that they don't like.

The Chinese system is horrible, their social practices are despicable, their trading practices really do disadvantage us, their political repression is well known, their labor camps continue, so.... fuck 'em. That said, I would like the "fuck 'em" to come in a different form than Donnie's way....

Soooo, here we are: stuck with Donnie's way, and a climate change that Donnie dismisses and that has dumped too much water on the "soy land", making it impossible to get a good crop of the stuff this year anyway. In addition, despite government bailouts and subsidies (because, like every other nation, we do subsidize our farmers, even though the Republicans hate to admit it- and by "farmers”, I mean Big Farma...) the suicide rate for farmers is increasing....

Again, I'm no farmer, I can barely keep up with my garden; but what if, given these political and real changes, we changed farming practices in this country and actually supported that change? What if, instead of giving out Band-Aids to big monoculture farms, we looked for better ways of working the land? It has to be better than current practices for the new world that is coming our way. What if farmers were incentivized to find out what the land can sustain? What if they diversified their production and were supported for doing so? ....Of course, Conagra and ADM etc would balk at lining politician pockets with such an interruption in their profit stream...

And one more again, I'm not a farmer...

In the kitchen

me: putain do caralho!

Curt: He was a French general.

me: who? Putain?

Curt: Yeah

me: and Caralho was a Brazilian one.

😊

The last time I saw Notre Dame was in the summer of the year we elected Donald Trump for President. @curtisjsimon and I were on our way to see Dan Tepfer play in a, I would say hole in the wall, but it is more like a really cool hole in the ground in the Halles neighborhood.  We must have taken a lazy roundabout way of getting there because we ended up at La Cité and, surprised, I happily pointed to the cathedral and said, “Look, it’s Notre Dame!”  We were approaching it from the non-iconic side.  

The thing that always surprises me about Notre Dame is how much of a neighborhood church it feels to be.  It’s this monster cathedral, but it does not feel that way; maybe because the spires were never added to the front towers. There was a mass, complete with priest and enormous choir, in progress when we ventured inside; and when we came out, the bells started ringing and I took this awful video.

In Part, The Role of an Artist is to Offend

Palm Sunday, and at the risk of offending the majority of peoples on the planet, as well as, finding out who my most bad-ass followers are, I posted the above pictures on social media, no captions.  

Truth be told, as offensive, or maybe as embarrassing, as my post might be, this graphic, Sergio Leone-like representation of Christ with its lenticular lens came to me totally sanctioned by The Church.  It was bought in a place of worship (I don’t remember which exact one) in Ravenna, yes Italy, lest there be one or two such towns in the USA.  …Though it might have been purchased at the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, but I think it was some historic church in Ravenna…  

It was bought and carried back to the U.S. by a cherished and much respected student of mine when he was travelling in Europe between his senior and junior years in the mid to late 1980’s (the abstraction of time is a real thing for me, so I am never exact on that).  It has traveled with me ever since.

Truth be told (one more again), I was always a little scared of this thing and kept it wrapped in a flat file for years.  One day, a few years back, while cleaning the studio, I decided to free it from its newsprint constraints and let it oversea my work space.  As Shane knew I would, I do love it, precisely because of all its contradictions.  I decided to post pictures of it this year because it represents the single defining event which republicans running the show right now point to as the excuse for their greedy, egregious, and most unchristian-like behavior.

I agree with Steve Earl that art is empathy; and in so being, it can't help but speak to truth.  In revealing truth, Art also can’t help but be, at times, offensive.  Not that my pictures are in any way art, but my training is one in which art was supposed to reveal things beyond the veil of the everyday; so sometimes, even with my mundane posts, that’s what I do (whether or not, and probably usually, it bites me in the ass (-;).

Vote

🔊 on

...they just might (watch to end)

The fact that numbers project seat gains in the Senate for Republicans is soul crushing. #vote #earlyandoften

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All prints for sale (in groupings or the whole shebang for the low price of $450). Never let it be said that this immigrant hasn’t learned to do what Americans do best: use any and all opportunities to sell shit 😉

Love is a Subaru if Love is Oil Consumption

Love might be a Subaru; but let me tell you what else is a Subaru: Oil Consumption is a Subaru. 

I’ve had two Subarus.  I loved my first one, even though it couldn’t hold the road for shit, and kept it until I could no longer find any parts for it.  And I do love my low mileage, still a stick, handles great, current one as well; but both guzzle oil in different ways.  

My first Subaru had to have all its seals replaced early on, and even after that, left its mark on many a pavement.  My current one just burns, for now, half a quart of oil straight into the atmosphere every 3,000 miles.  No, earth lovers who’ve bought into the ads of Subarus in the great unexplored, your Subaru is not very good for the environment whether or not it is a lemon like mine.  I bought my car new and it started being thirsty before its first oil change.  “Is this the norm?”, you might ask.  I don’t know; it has been and is with mine.

There actually is a bulletin about this problem with a slew of different Subaru models from 2013 including the 2013 Outback, which mine is.  I found out about the bulletin from my fantastic local mechanic, not from Subaru itself; however, once I did point out this relevant small fact to them, they were straight with me and ran an oil consumption test on my car for months in order to determine the rate at which my car was consuming oil.  What that entailed was me driving the 30 miles to the dealer every 1500 miles or when my low level oil light would come on and not go off, whichever came first. 

The Service manager at the dealership where I got my car has been nothing if not super accommodating to this most infuriating of problems.  Although he is the first in a string of barriers between me and Subaru upper management, he is always pleasant and correct; and all my oil changes and oil additions have been free ever since I bought the car.  Also, although I am here complaining about the lemon I was sold, I have to hand it to Subaru for doing the right thing (within bounds). 

Once it was determined that my car was indeed consuming oil at an “unnatural” rate, they did drop a new short block into my car.  The short block is the part with the cylinders, those from which my car is spewing hydrocarbons into the atmosphere.   Did I use the present tense for the verb “to be” in that last sentence?  Yes, I did and will come back to that; but the week Subaru dropped (I am assuming they did) a new motor into my car, I drove my 30 miles back home happy.  

…But here I am talking about this on Facebook, and I never get on Facebook when I am happy (-; 

New motor or not, I never did remove the quarts of expensive synthetic oil from behind my seat, and it turns out that’s a good thing, since yesterday, about 4,000 miles after Subaru dropped a new engine into my car, my oil consumption light came back on.  I called the Service Manager, and he told me to drive the 30 miles over there to get it checked.  I did, and low and behold, my Outback needed half a quart of oil which I again got for free.  The manager actually (dangerously) asked me if I was sure the light had come on and that the girl at the desk had asked if I even knew what the light looked like.  No, people who have seen me explode before, I did not eat his head off, I smiled southern-like and made a joke, but I can fucking draw that damn light if they want me to. I'll even make them a painting if they like.

The new story now, that a corporation has done all it will do to for the little guy (and really do appreciate what they've done), is that this over-consumption of oil is normal, and that I will have to add half a quart of oil in between oil changes which are to occur every 6,000 miles.  

I do remember distinctly being told, when signing on the dotted line, that because the car required synthetic oil, I would be able to drive 10,000 miles between oil changes –> hah. Now I am told to check my oil every 3,000, or whenever the light comes on, and to add half a quart of miracle synthetic oil when needed.  Moreover, I was actually told that the low level oil light is actually a friendly reminder “as per the manual”.  I checked the manual, and this of course is bullshit; or could be if the manual were actually less vague….

My next car will be electric and not a Subaru; though I certainly will miss having a stick.