Forty-six years ago today was a Friday. Not a rainy day in Beverly – but I was indoors. In Mrs. Knowlton’s room, I think. Fourth grade, at Shore’s Lower School. It was afternoon. Not all the usual people were present. We weren’t in class, but we were doing something “schoolish” and organized, Read the rest of this entry »
Watched Beijing with the fam last night. And was seduced, like most I imagine, by the spectacle of the Opening Ceremony, the genuine exuberance and the evident pride of the Chinese. I had blasphemous thoughts: that the poverty, the oppression, and even the emblematic domination of Tibet were all — for a nanosecond — beside the point. Even for the poor. Even for the oppressed. Even for the real Tibetans. Read the rest of this entry »
Now, watch this:
Peter Schumann is the founder of the Bread & Puppet theater…at home for nearly 40 years now on a farm right next door in Glover, Vermont. Unfortunately the Radical Jesters’ video interview of him has been taken down.
Bread & Puppet’s Cheap Art Manifesto reads, in part: “Because art is food…”
Cheap Art Philosophy
The Cheap Art movement was launched in 1982 by the Bread and Puppet Theater in direct response to the business of art and its growing appropriation by the corporate sector. With this fact taken into account art becomes: “political whether you like it or not…”
Cheap Art hopes to reestablish the appreciation of artistic creation by making it available to a wider audience and inspire anyone to revel in an art making process that is not subject to academic approval or curatorial acceptance.
Forget your stupid little Wii games and your World of Warcraft and your boogie boards and your iPods and all that what-have-you. You want excitement? Be 8 or under …in the woods, by water, with two new friends… pull a twig off a cedar and, on the count of OneTwoThree, scream GO!! …and fling it upstream, off a little wooden farm bridge. Then race to the other side of the bridge …and drop in unison onto your bellies… and the three of you hang your heads under the roadway to watch, upside down, while all the leaves bob on the water til the current takes them. When it does, at the top of your lungs, yell I’m winning!! I’m winning!! even if you’re not… because during the month of August, leaves adrift pick up speed in the presence of soundwaves. This is a known fact. Squeal when your little sister’s creased blackberry leaf inches up to and past your friend’s stalk of golden-rod…and groan so the second balcony can hear you when your maple-nose turns lazy in the water and hangs up on a cedar snag. Jump up and down and make the bridge shiver like a plucked string when the leaves set adrift by the other two kids collide and drift off into a bankside eddy. …Inspire your Aunt Margaret to tell you to stop… but also to laugh and not really mean it… An hour or two of that, mister, will exhaust you — happily. You might then come back in… dragging your sandy feet across my clean kitchen floor …and have a bit of homemade raspberry icecream to recharge your summer batteries.
My friend Mary Rowell turns 50 this year. We celebrated last night in her yard/garage/barn in Craftsbury, Vermont where we all live some of the time. It poured down rain outside, and the light was terrible — too poor for video. But this didn’t hinder the audio a bit, as you will hear if you click below. You might just set her going and kick back and close your eyes, but for those of you who cannot tolerate TV without pictures I have tossed in a few stills. The music — provided by friends and neighbors (any guest, really, who brought or borrowed an instrument) — was awesome:
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“In the giardino degli aranci.” Zoë pronounced it slowly and deliberately, her gaze inward, her head bobbing to count off each syllable. Then she looked up and smiled. Our chorus erupted around her. Oh! Oh! we cried. So perfect! So romantic!
She extended her left hand; the ring is a black pearl, set in a tiny frond of white gold.
Oh, Dylan! Oh, Zoë! Oh!, everybody went nuts. Read the rest of this entry »
This summer I am reading Haruki Murakami. Reading is perhaps not the word for it. If I could melt his collected works, I would dunk myself and drown there. No, I wouldn’t: I would grow gills and rejigger my metabolism so I could breathe below the surface. I am besotted. His writing is spare and redolent. It is also lyrical, almost sentimental, and full of magic. He writes about singularities. I suppose everybody does.
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Last Thursday night I was visiting my folks up the hill as I often do when I am home. We were having a bit of a glass-o’ and waiting around for the 8 o’clock re-run of Jon Stewart when I remarked to my dad that he sounded a little whistly and was he all right?
Of course I’m all right, he wheezed, and then my mom who is hawk-eyed on the question of his health asked my resident aunt the retired physician to have a look, and she listened with her stethescope and then all of sudden calls were ricocheting up and down New England to my brother the doctor, my sister-in-law, the vacationing doctor, my dad’s actual doctor and his partner who was taking his call that night. One thing led to another and by the same time Friday he had ping-ponged from the middle of the Northeast Kingdom where he lives to a clinic on our east coast (near St. J) and back across to the Big Hospital at Burlington, 80 miles away on our left coast where he has been ensconced ever since, hooked up to monitors and drips and what-not, under treatment for congestive heart failure.
But I’m not worried about him. He’s got little metal radio-pickups pasted to his chest and four people in front of a bank of monitors down the hall watching every breath he draws, counting every beat of his heart and measuring everything that goes into or comes out of his body. He’s being attended to beautifully, and progressing — albeit slowly. But then he’s 85; his sprinting days are probably behind him.
I’m worried about my mom. She came home for one night (Friday) then packed a bag and headed back over to camp out in his room. Of course I don’t mean literally camping out; he has a roommate so she has to leave at a certain time at night and go to a local hotel.
The local hotel is GREAT, by the way. They offer a HUGE discount (about 60% off) on room rates to relatives of hopital patients, and they run a wonderful little shuttle van from 7 in the AM to Midnight, that takes you over to the hospital and brings you back whenever you want to go visit. WHen she checked in, the concierge asked for my dad’s name also, and always refers to him as “Mr. [vermonter]” when he asks about his progress every morning and night, and even added him to his sunday prayers, which means a lot to my mom.
She spends the day with my dad, and then goes back to the hotel, where she is by herself in the dark. So she gets very lonesome and very worried. At one point we thought he’d be coming home today. For a night or two or three, she’s fine. But now they say not til tomorrow at the earliest — and probably not til Thursday really. And that’s a lot for my mom to manage. She’s almost 80 herself, after all. So I think I am going to go over this afternoon after I do the horse chores and just hang out with her tonight til she falls asleep.
I tell them, “I am holding out for a deaf & dumb orphan.”
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