Redtree Times

Come the Brightening— At Principle Gallery

Young people know less than we do, but they understand more; their perception has not yet been blunted by compromise, fatigue, rationalization, and the mistaking of mere respectability for morality.

–Sydney J. Harris, The Best of Sydney J. Harris (1975)

I came across the sentence above from late (1917-1986) Chicago journalist Sydney Harris and it struck a chord with me, crystallizing several things that have been on my mind lately.

The first thing that jumped out at me was his comparison of knowledge versus understanding among young people. I’ve been closely following the current presidential election, much as I have done in other years going back to 1980. Maybe more so this year since the stakes are higher than normal, demanding more attention.

In every election cycle in my lifetime, there has always been the anticipation that in that year the youth vote will finally turn out in full force and make a loud statement as to how our nation will proceed. And each time, they have never come close to expectations, usually turning out in smaller percentages than other age categories.

But in 2020, they turned out in higher numbers than in the past and may have very much been the deciding factor in President Biden’s victory. In subsequent years, their participation and enthusiasm in the political process have only risen. As this has taken place, I have found myself thinking about how the lives of modern kids are so much different than my own at that age. They have been exposed to so much more of the world, both the brighter and darker aspects, than I ever was. They have had to bear the horrible brunt of our worship of the gun, serving as sacrificial offerings on the altar of that insane cult.

When I see these kids in the aftermath of our most recent bi-monthly school shooting, I am astounded and at their composure, how relatively calmly they respond to reporter’s questions. But I am also dismayed because this only indicates the normalization that has taken place.

And it’s anything but normal. But I think these kids today can see that plainly. To Harris’ point, they may not know why or how it came to this being the case. They may not yet have fully experienced compromise, fatigue or rationalizations for themselves, but they understand that the older generations that were supposed to be looking out for them have failed them. These kids can plainly see our generations’ willingness to compromise and rationalize away their safety. And they can see that offering thoughts and prayers are nothing but a play for respectability, a mask worn to cover the lack of morals and courage in those who should take action but are unwilling to do so.

And I believe they see this in other ways. They see the hypocrisy for what it is when people are demonized for their skin color, sexual orientation, place of birth, religion, or social status. These kids have been exposed to a much wider spectrum of the human experience than I did at their age and thus exhibit a far greater level of tolerance and acceptance than most of my generation as a whole ever did.

They might not know the whole story, but they understand in a way we were never able to.

As someone who has felt deep fatigue of this life, who has compromised or ran away when I should have stood firm and then, much to my shame, rationalized away my failure to do so, I hope my perception of today’s kids is correct.  I see these kids and am heartened that maybe, now that they see that the older generations are not looking out for their best interests, they understand that it is up to them, the younger generation, to take action.

The future is theirs to take and the path to owning their future is in the voting booth.

I have been wrong about many things in the past but hope I am seeing things clearly this one time and that they own that path to the future. We shall see…

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“Guitars pine for the fingers of Bill Mize, who makes them weep, sing and roll around like a cat at his feet.  Thumpin’ good acoustic majesty.”

– WDVX , Knoxville. TN

This is one of those fortunate and rare Sunday mornings when I get to share some great music that has a little bit of my own work connected with it. The other day I received a box in the mail with a bunch of CDs from guitarist Bill Mize, who had contacted me months ago about the possibility of using one of my paintings for his newest album. It didn’t take long, after listening to his music and seeing all he’s accomplished, for me to agree to his request. I loved his music and was highly impressed by his resume.

From Bill’s website (billmize.com):

Bill is a past winner of the National Fingerstyle Guitar Competition at The Walnut Valley Festival in Winfield, Kansas.  Guitar Player Magazine has labeled this event the “U.S. Open of guitar competitions.” Bill received a GRAMMY Award for his collaboration with musician and storyteller David Holt on the recording Stellaluna and has been featured on the popular guitar compilations “Windham Hill Guitar Sampler” by Windham Hill Records and “Masters of the Acoustic Guitar” by Narada Records. In 2009, Bill’s music appeared in the Ken Burns documentary “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea.” Mel Bay Productions transcribed Mize’s second CD, “Tender Explorations,” into a songbook, and his original compositions have been transcribed for Fingerstyle Guitar and Acoustic Guitar magazines. 

His new album is titled The Southwind and features a balance of Bill’s own compositions and his arrangements of tunes from others, which is a mix of traditional songs and the work of well-known songwriters. For example, there are Bill’s reworkings of old favorites such as Shenandoah and Lonesome Valley (a favorite of mine) as well as Dolly Parton’s Light of the Clear Blue Morning and Dan Fogelberg’s Old Tennessee.

It’s a really satisfying group of work, showing off Bill’s considerable talents as both a player and composer. Just plain good stuff, which if you read this blog on a regular basis, is the highest praise for me. The album also plays into my own mindset for my work.  I painted with it playing yesterday and found that it was the perfect accompaniment. It was like riding on a light breeze. I guess The Southwind is an appropriate title.

I should also note that Beth Bramhall, Bill’s wife, played on this album and arranged the song He’s Gone Away. Beth is a pianist/accordionist and an Emmy Award winning composer. Lots of talent in that family. There’s a good interview with both of them online that gives you a lot more insight.

The painting that was used for the album cover is from 2008 and my Archaeology series. It is titled Archaeology: A New Wind. I am really pleased at how it works for the cover.

So, for this week’s Sunday Morning Music here’s a track from the album, written and performed by Bill Mize. This is Advize the Wize.

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Shoot the Moon— At Principle Gallery, Alexandria

I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we should not give up the game before all the cards have been played. The metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose any chance of winning. To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of changing the world.

–Howard Zinn, A Power Governments Cannot Suppress

Complacency never really serves us well. It’s not the same as patience, where you bide your time until you take action. It’s more like biding your time with no plan or intention for taking action.

It’s a settling for things as they are, even when the circumstances are not completely to our liking. Staying put when you should be moving on. Or using the Howard Zinn metaphor above, throwing your cards in on every hand without even looking at them, never daring to risk anything. You may not lose much this way, but you will never know if you have thrown in an unbeatable hand.

That certainly is true in art. I often say that my greatest challenge is in creating excitement in myself with my work. But sometimes even though I find a level of excitement in something, I get a nagging feeling that if I pushed myself, dared myself a bit more, that I might attain an even greater level of excitement.

I go through this all the time and beat myself for not taking that next step forward, for not taking action.

And in this season of presidential politics, the same is true for political participation. As a nation, we face the most important and far-reaching election of our lifetimes. Certainly, of mine. We are at a point that determines who and what we are as a nation. We are as close to being an autocracy, oligarchy, kakistocracy, idiocracy, or whatever you want to call the fresh hell being offered by the lying, grifting, criminal ex-president*** who has served as an agent of chaos for much too long now.

It boggles my mind how many of us refuse to make the effort to vote, let alone studying the issues and forming an informed opinion. I can’t fathom not taking an interest in something that could ultimately affect so many aspects of our lives, possibly for generations to come.

Come on, people. Get in the game. If you don’t play, you can’t win– and you still can lose.

Pick up the cards in front of you and ante up.

You might well change the world.

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Ring of Fire #4 

Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination. Artistic paternity is as wholesome as physical paternity. Moreover, it is worthy of remark that when a poet really was morbid it was commonly because he had some weak spot of rationality on his brain. Poe, for instance, really was morbid; not because he was poetical, but because he was specially analytical. Even chess was too poetical for him; he disliked chess because it was full of knights and castles, like a poem. He avowedly preferred the black discs of draughts, because they were more like the mere black dots on a diagram. Perhaps the strongest case of all is this: that only one great English poet went mad, Cowper. And he was definitely driven mad by logic, by the ugly and alien logic of predestination. Poetry was not the disease, but the medicine; poetry partly kept him in health.

–G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (1908)

I found the passage above from G.K. Chesterton interesting. There were a couple of things in this short excerpt from his book, Orthodoxy, that caught my eye. I liked the idea that creativity and imagination serve as some sort of protection against insanity.

I sure hope so.

Basically, when a creative artist comes across something challenging what they believe to be logical, it doesn’t stop their progress. They find or create a way around whatever barrier is created by this conflict in logic. Maybe even create a new form of logic or imagine a better situation beyond what is in front of them, one to which they can see a path.

That makes sense to me.

It also made me look up Edgar Allen Poe’s short treatise on his dislike of chess and his preference for checkers. As Chesterton pointed out, Poe appears a bit too analytical, too stringently logical. Hardly poetic.

But I did like his final thoughts on 18th century poet William Cowper, who struggled with depression and mental health issues throughout his life and was placed in an insane asylum for periods of time. It was his struggles with logic that bedeviled his mind and poetry that kept him alive.

Art and imagination can do that. It has that power.

The whole thing reminded me of a favorite passage from the 1858 book The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table from Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., the popular poet/philosopher of the time and father to the famed Supreme Court justice of the same name. This passage always makes me both think and chuckle:

Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked. Good mental machinery ought to break its own wheels and levers, if anything is thrust among them suddenly which tends to stop them or reverse their motion. A weak mind does not accumulate force enough to hurt itself; stupidity often saves a man from going mad.

Makes me thankful for art and my own stupidity. Without it, I might go crazy.

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Haven of Spirit— Now at West End Gallery

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,

There is a rapture on the lonely shore,

There is society, where none intrudes,

By the deep sea, and music in its roar:

I love not man the less, but Nature more”

― Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage

I don’t know if solitude is for everybody. Some people might look at the painting above with a little discomfort, seeing only isolation and loneliness in it. But for myself, it represents a total freedom of the self, one that allows one’s absolute truth to emerge. A freedom that allows one to experience clear glimpses of our connection with all being.

The lines above from Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage express this feeling well. Alone on a shore, one can begin to hear and converse with nature. The lap and roar of the sea becomes language as does the light of the sun and moon as it sifts through clouds above. It is in these conversations that we come to better understand that we are both small and large, insignificant yet integral.

Of course, this is not a practical matter for most of us. I have my own little island of solitude here in my studio but am not isolated. My regular life has me out in the world, interacting with people on a semi-regular basis. But knowing that I will soon be back on my island where the only conversation taking place is in myself steadies me on those occasions.

Hermann Hesse put it well in the excerpt below from his book, Reflections. He mentions it as being a way of bitter suffering. I suppose initially, for those who have been always in the society of others and seldom alone, this may be the case when faced with solitude. But, as he points out, when you get past that discomfort, the rewards of solitude are rapturous.

We must become so alone, so utterly alone, that we withdraw into our innermost self. It is a way of bitter suffering. But then our solitude is overcome, we are no longer alone, for we find that our innermost self is the spirit, that it is God, the indivisible. And suddenly we find ourselves in the midst of the world, yet undisturbed by its multiplicity, for our innermost soul we know ourselves to be one with all being.

― Hermann Hesse, Reflections

This post is from about five years. I read it this morning and it fit my mood and the painting above so well that I thought I’d rerun it. I had to laugh reading the original because it said I interacted with the public on a regular basis. This was pre-pandemic, of course. In the intervening years I have withdrawn even more. Moved my island a little further from the shore, to put it another way. I ended up changing that to interacting on a semi-regular basis.  In five more years I might change that to on a rare occasion. or once in a blue moon. Who knows?

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Noon hour in the Ewen Breaker, Pennsylvania Coal Co. / Lewis Hine

It’s such a little song it don’t compare
With all your big ones you hear everywhere
But when it dawns way in the back of your mind
The big ones are made up of the little kind

Union song, union battled
All added up won us all what we got now

— I Guess I Planted, Woody Guthrie lyrics/ Billy Bragg/Wilco

Yet another Labor Day.

I consider myself a workingman. A laborer. Always have. Most of my jobs have required physical labor, even this one. I was maybe 20 years old when I was classified as a Skilled Laborer– a Lead Candy Cook– at the old A&P food processing plant here in Horseheads. I became a Teamsters Union steward for my department around then and saw firsthand the effect the benefits and protections a labor union provides can have on working people.

Maybe that’s why I get a bit defensive about the meaning and background of Labor Day.  If you ask someone what the holiday represents, they will generally say that it is symbolic end of summer. A last picnic. One last real summer weekend at the lake or shore. If you push them harder, they might finally say that it honors the workers of this country.

But it was created to celebrate the American Labor Movement, those unions and organizers that brought about all of the changes that Dr. King pointed in his 1965 speech before the AFL-CIO:

They are the people who built this country. They built our infrastructure– the roads, bridges, railroads, power lines along with the schools and factories. They worked in the fields and in the foundries and factories and manned the trains and trucks that brought the products to market. Moreover, these are the people who consumed the products that were made, moved and marketed here.

These were the people who created the wealth of this nation.

I know that this is sounding like a spiel for the 99% of us and against the 1%. Maybe it is.  I have gotten so tired of hearing about the job creators and how they must be protected and coddled when very few are pointing out that the great wealth that these few possess came from the sweat and pocketbooks of the many.  They didn’t create jobs out of sheer benevolence, for the good of the people. They hire because these employees make even more money for them. They are mere capital investments that produce great returns and once the great returns go away, so do the jobs.

Now don’t get me wrong. It seems that when anybody makes the case for more equality of wealth, they are branded as being anti-capitalist and anti-business. Or communist or socialist which is the preferred nomenclature these days by right-wing political candidates and online trolls.

This is not the case at all.

The greatness of this country comes from this opportunity to succeed in a huge way, to take an idea or an innovation and set the world on fire with it.

You should be rewarded richly.

But remember it comes from the people. Unless you have the people who can afford to buy your product or idea, unless you have the infrastructure these people built to carry that product to these buyers, unless you have the fire fighters and police to protect your homes and offices, an efficient health system to keep people alive, and clean air to breath and clear water to drink, it will never happen.

You can be a hero to many by being a job creator but you must take some responsibility for the everyday heroes who have made you wealthy, probably beyond anything most of these working folks can fathom. It is part of the unwritten contract of our land.

It is only fair.

And that is all the working class has ever asked for–fairness.

After all, though you might be a job creator, they are the true wealth creators.

Okay, I got my spiel out. It’s a mashup of a couple of posts from the past. I’ve added a song from one of my very favorite albums, Mermaid Avenue, from the collaboration of Billy Bragg and Wilco. This is the album where they added music and vocals to unrecorded Woody Guthrie lyrics. Great stuff. Many are pro-labor, which is no surprise to anyone who knows anything about Woody Guthrie. This song, I Guess I Planted, is about the collective power of a union.

How big things are made up of many little things.

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A Song For the Eye— At West End Gallery

For summer there, bear in mind, is a loitering gossip, that only begins to talk of leaving when September rises to go.

–George Washington Cable, The Grandissimes: A Story of Creole Life (1880)

Ah, September is here, at last.

I have expressed my dislike of August here a number of times over the years. There has often been a grimness in its heat and humidity that always seemed to align itself with some of the lower moments in my life. I dread the month each year but made a conscious effort this year to not mention my distaste for August as it seemed to proceed in a way that was not too awful.

It actually felt a little, how do I say this–good? Well, better than most of the Augusts that I have endured in the 60-some years I can remember on this planet.

Good feels odd coming out of my mouth.

However, even with a relatively upbeat August, it feels better moving into September. There is a cool mist in the air this morning that foretells even cooler mornings to come. Maple leaves are beginning to show a slight change of color and a few leaves have fallen to the ground already.

My internal clock seems to slow a bit with the coming of September. I don’t feel quite so pushed or anxious. Oh, the angst is still there but it moves a bit slower and is a little less aggressive. More manageable.

It has become a tradition here that on each year on this first day of September that I play a very favorite song of mine, September Song. It’s a classic from the American songbook, written in the late 1930’s by Kurt Weill and Maxwell Anderson for the Broadway musical, Knickerbocker Holiday. It has been recorded by scores of singers over the past century. I have shared performances of it by Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Willie Nelson and several others on this date on this blog. I have never shared the Frank Sinatra version for some unknown reason. It just seemed to get pushed a side since I am such a fan of the versions from the three mentioned above. But Sinatra’s version is a great one as well. It comes from 1965 when he was about 50 years, just entering the autumn of his life much like the subject of the song, (which was Peter Stuyvesant,  by the way.) Sinatra was at his creative peak when he recorded this which makes for a great version.

So, for the first Sunday Morning Music of this September, here’s Sinatra and his rendition of September Song.

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The Moon Resonates– At West End Gallery

Night, the beloved. Night, when words fade and things come alive. When the destructive analysis of day is done, and all that is truly important becomes whole and sound again. When man reassembles his fragmentary self and grows with the calm of a tree.

― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Flight to Arras

With the calm of a tree…

That says it all for me.

I look forward to the night now in a way that I never did when I was younger. It’s much like the passage above from the memoir of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. That time when day is done and tasks are either complete or set aside.

Time to clear the mind and regroup– to reassemble my fragmentary self and prepare for the mental reorganization that comes in dreaming.

And all with the calm of a tree.

I can’t imagine that having any appeal for me as a young person who restlessly wanted to get to the next thing quickly. However, I now look forward to the end of each day. It feels right. Grounded– like the roots of that same calm tree.

And that’s good enough for me.

And to tie thing up neatly, here’s a longtime favorite Leonard Cohen song, Night Comes On.

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New Day Rising- Now at West End Gallery

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We are living through a revolt against the future. The future will prevail.

–Anand Giridharadas, The Ink, January 15, 2021

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Taking a bit of a break since the West End Gallery show came down and wasn’t planning on writing anything this morning. But I saw Anand Giridharadas this morning on the tube speaking of the Harris/Walz campaign as being the politics of anti-inflammation, that they were normal, caring people whose inclusive stances stand as the direct antithesis to the uncaring, divisive, and inflammatory rhetoric coming from that other guy. He pointed out that we have had a decade or more beset by this sort of inflammatory fever and their campaign seems to serve as a balm of sorts.

I liked that. It reminded me of another article from Giridharadas that I featured here back in early 2021, in the week before the Biden inauguration. That article still seems pertinent today so I thought I’d share it again, as is.

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The words above are the final line in a what I believe to be a brilliant essay from writer Anand Giridharadas that was posted a couple of days ago on his blog, The.Ink that bears the heading We are falling on our face because we are jumping high. I hope you’ll click on the link and read this short essay.

In it, he observes that the chaos that we are experiencing is not the chaos that often comes with the beginning of something but is actually the sort that comes with an ending. I have also felt for years that we were watching of the death throes of a certain type of power and control, that those who were predominantly white and male felt they were entitled.

We are falling on our face because we are jumping very high right now. We are trying to do something that does not work in theory.

To be a country of all the world, a country made up of all the countries, a country without a center of identity, without a default idea of what a human being is or looks like, without a shared religious belief, without a shared language that is people’s first language at home. And what we’re trying to do is awesome. It is literally awesome in the correct sense of that word.

This is one of my favorite passages from this essay. To be the country we desire it to be, one that offers equal hope for each of its citizens, is enormously difficult and unlike anything ever done. No nation has ever aspired to so diversely share its rights and governance among all the groups that make up its citizenry.

There are massive challenges and it will not be easy. And in a nation whose default setting is easy, that means we will have to do much more than that which we normally are accustomed to doing. We will have to work and scrap, to strain far beyond what we believe our limits to be.

But if it succeeds, we all benefit, all boats are lifted and we all become part and parcel of something great, something unique in human history.

Something of which we can all truly be proud.

Please give Mr. Giridharadas’ essay a read. It is short but potently hopeful. Definitely worth a few minutes.

For this week’s Sunday Morning Music [this was a Sunday in January, 2021], I am going with a recent tune, Tough to Let Go, from the Drive-By Truckers, whose last couple of albums have been dark and timely.  I think it says a lot about what we are seeing in the chaos of this struggle between those who look to the future and those who want to hold onto an imagined past. Our beliefs, even when we can see that they defy logic and fact, are sometimes tough to leave behind. They continue to haunt us and dictate our actions until we can fully separate ourselves from them.

It’s tough to let go. But it has to happen.

Do something good today.

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