Redtree Times

Since we’re in the midst of the Labor Day weekend, I thought I would have something labor related. It is a holiday celebrating the working classes after all, something we often forget as we rush to get in that last weekend of the summer. I am a big proponent of organized labor and have talked here before about the labor movements transformation of American life. The middle class rose out of the mighty efforts labor unions in the early 20th century.  Almost every right we now take for granted in the workplace was fought for– and I mean fought for— by workers and organizers who banded together to demand better working conditions and higher wages.

This important part of history that is not well known enough but is something to bear in mind on a weekend meant to honor it.

There were some important names in the labor movement of the early 20th century but maybe none so polarizing as that of Joe Hill, a Swedish immigrant who came to America in 1902 and soon after, as an itinerant laborer, became involved with the labor movement. He joined the Industrial Workers of the World — the Wobblies— and wrote some of the most memorable labor songs of the time, songs which are still played today– The Preacher and the Slave (Pie in the Sky) and There Is Power In a Union.

In 1914, Hill was working in the silver mine areas of Utah when he was accused of a double murder. Many believe that Hill was innocent , that the evidence cited did not line up with the facts of the case, yet he was found guilty. Many believed that his labor connections were the deciding factor in the guilty verdict. He was executed by firing squad in November, 1915.

Hill did little to help himself, remaining silent about a wound that the prosecution claimed was inflicted on him during the murder. Hill’s fiancee later stated that Hill had wrote her from prison, saying that an ex-lover of hers had shot him. But Hill seemed to sense that he meant more to the movement as a martyr.

In one of his final notes to Bill Haywood, an IWW leader, Hill wrote:

“Goodbye Bill. I die like a true blue rebel. Don’t waste any time in mourning. Organize. Could you arrange to have my body hauled to the state line to be buried? I don’t want to be found dead in Utah.”

They honored his request, removing his body to Chicago where he was cremated. His ashes were divided into 600 small packets which were distributed around the world by the Wobblies to be cast to the winds.

He did become a martyr for labor, celebrated in word and song. The name Joe Hill when spoken still draws the attention of those who know their history.

Here’s version of his song The Preacher and the Slave, also known as Pie in the Sky from Utah Phillips, complete with a wonderful story about the song. We all get promised things that will come to us in the future and more often than not– I am thinking of trickle-down economics as much as the afterlife here– they seldom pan out. It’s all pie in the sky.

So, enjoy some real pie this Labor day weekend and ignore those promised pies in the sky.

That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.

–Aldous Huxley

I was going to write abut this quote from Aldous Huxley, the late write/philosopher who gave us the dystopian classic Brave New World. It does, after all, seem to be pertinent to much of what is happening in this country. It seems that we often fail to see or ignore the lessons of history and then go on to repeat many of those same actions. With the same result. Or worse.

I stand by these worlds from Huxley but the interesting thing this morning was that while researching this quote, I found myself running down a long and twisting rabbit hole. The quote, you see, is the first sentence Huxley wrote in a 1956 article for Esquire Magazine titled A Case of Voluntary Ignorance. The first several paragraphs discuss our willingness to ignore the lessons of history, instead believing that we will somehow produce different and better consequences.

But beyond that the article goes into a discussion of the history of mesmerism and hypnotism. and its place in the medical world of the 19th century. It’s not a subject about which I have any knowledge and I found it interesting. Huxley wrote about a British surgeon in India in the mid 1800’s who did a wide range of dangerous surgeries painlessly on patients without any sort of anesthesia — there actually was none yet available at that time– by the use of mesmerism alone. It was also called magnetism from the term animal magnetism which many early purveyors of this pseudoscience used to describe the animating life force of all living creatures.

The surgeon, James Esdaile, would bring in patients– almost all lower caste criminals from a local prison (which means he was actually doing human experimentation that would no doubt border on crimes against humanity) and without telling them would mesmerize them over the course of several hours until they were in a deep trance-like state. He would then operate on whatever ailment needed attention. This included amputation of limbs.

His patients felt no pain and most recovered. The recovery is the most amazing thing because at that time, major surgery in any place on the face of he earth meant that the patient had a very good chance of dying either during surgery or in the aftermath. Surgeons and their staff didn’t even wash their hands beforehand and the idea of antiseptics or anesthesia was still years away.

Most surgeons had fatality rates among their patients well over 25%. Esdaile had a rate of less than 5%.

The article goes on to discuss how his results were debated and denied among the medical establishment of the time. Many physicians believed that pain was necessary and that anything that diminished it was against science as they knew it. However, mesmerists became part of that establishment for a time in the 19th century.

It was an interesting article. Hypnosis and mesmerism are not subjects we discuss often, after all. To see them play so prominent a role in the medical world of that time ( and even the 1950’s as Huxley  wrote about in the article) was eye catching.

I ended up looking through the online historical newspaper to see if their were mesmerists who practiced locally in that era. I didn’t spend much time so I can’t speak definitively but found that mesmerists were mainly entertainment attractions in this area at that time. Several had large following and returned year after year for a week or two at a time at large halls and auditoriums.

One, John Reynolds, appeared throughout this region — all of New York state and much of Pennsylvania– for many years. He eventually retired and began selling magnetic bearing items which were supposed to have curative powers. These were advertised in local papers throughout the region.

The animal magnetism actually had something to do with magnets, it seems.

You probably are wondering what the heck the point is here. I guess there isn’t one. This has no bearing on anything and I have no end to this little bit of writing except that it’s odd how one thing sometimes leads us in directions we weren’t expecting.

If you’re looking for something of more consequence, you can go the Esquire article from Huxley by clicking here. The first three paragraphs certainly pertain to this and any time.

Okay, too much time spent underground in this rabbit hole. Gotta go.

I was recently asked by our local arts organization, The Arts of the Southern Finger Lakes, to take part in a public art installation, ART Lifts Us Up!, as part of their IMAGINE! Public Art in the Plaza event which begins this evening and goes through the weekend, ending Sunday evening.

It is a festival taking place in and around the skating rink at the the Corning Civic Center Plaza and features public art installations, local artists, street performers/buskers, temporary art installations, as well as dynamic open-air theatre, music and dance performances. You can get more info including a schedule of events by clicking here.

As part of ART Lifts Us Up! I was asked to create a large kite. Though I knew the dimensions, I didn’t realize how large it was until I began to actually go to work on it. It was to be 88″ tall and 66″ wide and weigh no more than 10 pounds.

It was more of a challenge than I had anticipated. I have never built a kite and didn’t have a lot of time to experiment. I tied a couple of things but just didn’t like what I was seeing. I decided in the end on basically creating an actual painting on lighter canvas stretched over a kite-shaped lightweight wooden frame. 

The criteria for what I could paint was unlimited. By that, I was told to paint whatever I wanted so long as it expressed my feelings coming out of the pandemic– or, at least, at his point in the pandemic– and going into the future.

I had a lot of concepts but was short on time to create such a large piece on such a large concept.

I mean, how do you, as an artist, sum up the experiences that have taken place in this world in the past year?

Do you focus on the pandemic? The all too many lives lost and the redemptive power of the vaccines?

Or the racial inequality and police violence that led to the widespread protests of last year?

Or do you focus on the political sphere, where fearmongering, disinformation, and misinformation has replaced policy and research for many politicians, particularly those on the far right? Do you focus on those things that divide us? The growing threat of fascism throughout the world or the violence and chaos of the insurrection of January 6 in our own capital?

Or do you put all that aside and focus on our climate which is beginning to show the awful effects—the more severe wildfires, droughts, storms, flooding, etc. –that come with its changing nature?

Without question, the world has gone through a lot in the past year or so.  Everyone has been put under great amounts of stress, more than we have experienced in generations, from all corners.

And it has revealed both our better and worse angels. The good and the bad. The beautiful and the ugly.

It has been a severe test for us all.

Through it all, I found myself desiring little more than a bit of peace, both in the reality of the wider world and in the space of my own mind.

As I considered these things, a phrase came to mind—Pax Omnis.

Peace for All.

It was that thought, that phrase, that led me in the creation of my kite. The events of the past year have shown that we that we are all connected, that none of us is an island unto ourselves. The virus and the quickly changing climate have certainly proven that. We need cooperation and a united aspiration to something greater than our own small, individual concerns, if we are to survive as a species.

Because until there is peace of mind for all, there is truly no lasting peace of any kind for any of us.

Pax Omnis.

I hope you can make it at some point to the IMAGINE! event in Corning this week. It looks to be a great way to see examples of those things that bind us together.

Imagine that…

Charles Burchfield– Autumnal Fantasy

But it’s a long, long while from May to December
And the days grow short when you reach September
And the autumn weather turns the leaves to flame
And I haven’t got time for waiting game

—September Song, Kurt Weill

First day of September, finally free of the drag and slog of August that often feels like an incessant headache to me. Even the air is cooler and fresher this morning. They say the temps might even get into the 40’s early Saturday morning.

Refreshing.

As I have done on every first September morning for the past twelve or thirteen years, I spent a good amount of time listening to different versions of the old standard, September Song.

Written by Kurt Weill with lyrics by Maxwell Anderson, it was first sung, surprisingly, by actor Walter Huston in the stage production of Knickerbocker Holiday back in 1938. Since then it has been covered by literally many hundreds of musicians and singers throughout the world and most of them are pretty good versions.

It’s just that good a song. It has long been one of my favorites and I might even say it is my favorite among many favorites.

Every year on this day, I scroll through YouTube, listening to versions that I know and love and new one that have escaped my notice in the past. I had several choices I could have went with  from among the new ones this year. Some surprising ones, actually.

But I think I will hold onto them for future use. I do hope to do this again next September and for a few years beyond that, after all.

So, for this year’s September Song I am going with a Latin-tinged version from late jazz musician Cal Tjader. My knowledge of jazz is fairly shallow so Tjader is new to me. But his biography and resume is impressive. He was the drummer in the earlier incarnations of Dave Brubeck’s bands, served as a medic in World War II, tap danced as child onscreen with Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, among other notable accomplishments. But he is primarily known as being a vibraphone player and one of the leading proponents of Latin and Afro-Cuban Jazz.

In fact, he is known as the most famous non-Latin Latin musician. He died in 1982 at age 56.

This version has a different feel than some of the others but is nonetheless effective. Let’s hope it portends a better September than the August we leave behind.

George Tooker- The Waiting Room

Painting is an attempt to come to terms with life. There are as many solutions as there are human beings.

–George Tooker

To the point. In my mind, at least.

Thought I’d share a few paintings from George Tooker (1920-2011), a painter whose works never failed to make me pause and consider it whenever I came across one. There is always an air of mystery in his scenes that I find intriguing His handling of the faces and hands in his figurative work has a quality that reminds me of some of the great Renaissance painters– Botticelli in particular. This makes it feel familiar yet not.

Plus, there was a beautiful softness to it that came from the precision and opacity of his tempera technique. This no doubt gave it the dreamlike feel that I see in it, the same that most likely led others to label his work as Magic Realism or Surrealism.

I don’t really care what label is attached to any artist, myself included. Those are just ways for others to categorize and place artists in a broader collective.

That’s not for me to worry about. Or any other artist who is too busy trying to come to terms with life.

I am not going to go into detail on Tooker’s life. I am just introducing him to those of you who might not know his work. If it intrigues you I suggest looking deeper online.

There is also a slideshow below of Tooker’s work. It is worth a few minutes on a Monday morning.

George Tooker- Cornice 1949

George Tooker- The Government Bureau

George Tooker- Girl With a Basket

George Tooker- Subway 1950

“Comforter“- At the Principle Gallery

There are so many bad things taking place in this world where you see people fleeing for their lives with sometimes minutes to decide what things they can grab and take with them. You see it with the Afghan refugees who are most likely forever leaving their homeland to the folks now evacuating before the incoming hurricane down in Louisiana and Mississippi or those who flee the wildfires out in the west. They run fearing the worst but still having hope that they might soon return to find little or no damage. My nephew and his family recently experienced such a thing with the wildfires out in California. They were spared by winds that were favorable to their location but their neighbors in the opposite direction were not so fortunate.

These scenes make me wonder what I would grab if I only had moments to choose what mattered to me. Paperwork, I guess. You know, stuff I might need to prove who I am or what I possessed before whatever I am fleeing came to bear. Perhaps some photos. A change of clothes. Our pets, of course.

But beyond that, I don’t know. I look around here in the studio and there is a wide variety of paintings, artwork, books and other things that mean a lot to me.

But would losing them or losing my home destroy me?

I doubt it. I want to say no but until something like that happens to you you can’t be absolutely sure of your reaction in the moment.

But I have been at the end of my rope before and know how quickly one can adapt to the circumstances at hand. You learn to savor simpler things and experiences that are often overlooked when things are going well. There’s even a sense of freedom that comes in such moments because you don’t feel encumbered by your responsibility to those things that you watched over and maintained before.

I’m not saying it would be a good situation. It would be awful to have to go through something like that, to be forced out of your home and your way of living by events that out of your control. No, I am saying that if it were to happen, that while it would no doubt be a struggle to move on, the fact that I knew I could persevere as I am would be enough to sustain the effort.

Like the song from Hair says: I got life.

And that, in itself, is reassuring.

So, with all hope for and best wishes going out to those before the storms or fires or to those who flee the violence and death of their homeland, here’s this week’s Sunday morning music. It’s Nina Simone‘s performance of her memorable mashup of two songs from Hair— Ain’t Got No and I Got Life.

Powerful stuff and something to bear in mind if ever you have to run from oncoming disaster. Let’s hope that we don’t ever have to do such a thing.

“Faces From the Wood“- At the West End Gallery

I wish I loved the Human Race;
I wish I loved its silly face;
I wish I liked the way it walks;
I wish I liked the way it talks;
And when I’m introduced to one,
I wish I thought “What Jolly Fun!

― Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh

On a morning when I am feeling more than a bit misanthropic, I thought I’d express it in the lightest manner I could muster. I guess the verse above from English poet Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh (1861-1922) might do the trick.

I don’t know much about this particular Raleigh and, feeling as I do this morning, don’t really care. Don’t know if he was descended from the more famous Walter Raleigh, the one I best knew from seeing his face on my one aunt’s cigarette packs as a kid. I would imagine so but what does it really matter?

For those of you more interested, this particular Walter Raleigh was a professor of literature at Oxford and that bit of light verse was titled Wishes of an Elderly Man, Wished at a Garden Party, June 1914.

It might be titled Wishes of a Near Elderly Man, Wished in an Art Studio, August 2021.

I thought of going with a different piece of verse this morning, like this short bit from Ape and Essence, the lesser known dystopian novel from Aldous Huxley:

The leech’s kiss, the squid’s embrace,
The prurient ape’s defiling touch:
And do you like the human race?
No, not much.

Or I guess I could have went with this simple quote from the great German painter Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840):

You call me a misanthrope because I avoid society. You err; I love society. Yet in order not to hate people, I must avoid their company.

It’s not verse but maybe it gets closer to the bone. Perhaps even closer is this passage from Sinclair Lewis, as laid out it in his It Can’t Happen Here:

… he loved the people just as much as he feared and detested persons…

That might best describe my misanthropic urge this morning. And every other morning.

I like and love people individually but on the whole very much dislike persons in the collective sense.

I am not talking about you guys. No, you’re okay.

Really.

I hope you will excuse my curmudgeonly behavior this morning. Now get out of here.

And stay off my lawn…

“Through the Trees” at the West End Gallery Ends Today

Let me give my love to you
Let me take your hand
And as we walk in the dimming light
Oh darling understand

That everything, everything ends…

This edition of my annual solo exhibit at the West End Gallery, this year titled Through the Trees, comes down at the end of business today. I offer many thanks to those of you who were able to visit the gallery to take in the show and much gratitude to those who gave new homes to so many of the paintings in this show.

I don’t know the exact number but I have done somewhere in the area of sixty of these solo shows around the country over the past twenty-some years. Without exception, from the most highly successful show to the least, there is always that same mix of satisfaction and sadness at the end of each of them. 

I always find myself at this point, grateful for simply having the experience and a little wonderstruck that anyone attends at all, let alone purchases my paintings. The idea that someone finds something worthy in something I do never fails to amaze me, even after all the years and the many shows.

I still often pinch myself at my good fortune just to make sure it’s not one of those wonderful dreams that sometimes visit us in our sleep. The ones that feel too good to be true, that leave you feeling disappointed when you wake up and your world is as it was before you closed your eyes.

And I guess that’s where the sadness comes into the picture as each show ends. Even when I feel as though I have done as much as I could with the work in a show and even when it has exceeded all expectations for myself and the gallery involved, it’s difficult to let go of a wonderful dream and get back to the reality of the moment.

But as the songs, everything ends.

And I know how to do it now. I’m an old hand at it and have the scars and calluses to prove it.

So, again, many, many thanks to all, especially to Jesse and Linda Gardner at the West End Gallery, for allowing me to have another wonderful dream. I cannot be more grateful.

Here’s that song I mentioned. It’s Meet Me On the Equinox from Death Cab For Cutie.

Rest in peace, Charlie.

Charlie Watts died yesterday at the age of of 80. He was the rock-solid base, the drummer and the keeper of all rhythms for the Rolling Stones for nearly 60 years. He didn’t have the aggressive flash of Keith Moon from The Who or the goofy affability of Ringo, the other drummers in the holy trinity of British Invasion bands. He was just a stoic, understated presence that provided, along with bassist Bill Wyman, the foundation that lifted so many great Stones songs to greatness.

Growing up in the 1960’s, I knew his work, his sound, long before I knew his name. Some of his work became hard-wired in the brains of many listeners. I know it did for me. The Stones songs that I count among my favorites invariably feature his strong rhythms out in front. Upon hearing of his death, I immediately thought of his work on many of the  band’s early hits, most notably Paint It Black and Get Off of My Cloud.

The latter has been carving a wormhole in my brain since I first heard it all those many years ago. Maybe it was the idea of just telling people to back off, leave me alone and let me do my own thing that made it stick so in my mind.

That’s a powerful thing when you’re a kid.

It’s that same attitude that probably drove me to become an artist. And as I age, I find it’s the same attitude I take concerning most other things– just leave me alone. It’s a song of youth but maybe they should have done a version for old guys that substitutes the word lawn for cloud.

Hey. You. Get off of my lawn!

I don’t know about that but I do know that my brain kicks into high gear when I hear that beat-beat-fill-beat-beat lead in from Charlie Watts’ drum set on this song. Like I said, it’s hardwired at this point and whatever chemical reaction that takes place is firing down those lines instantly when those first beats come out at me.

Thanks for that, Charlie, and for a lot of other great work. It gets me through a lot of hard days.

I am playing the old mono track because it seems to push the drums further out front than the later remastered versions. Plus it reminds me of listening to this and other great songs of that era on a 45RPM single that looked just like the one at the top or hearing it from the speaker of an old Chevy as my dad drove into town.

Give a listen.

Then get off of my lawn.

And off of my cloud.