Title: Outrider: portrait of Anne Waldman
Material: Oil on canvas
Size: 36×36
Year: 2019-20

If I smashed the traditions it was because I knew no traditions.  I’m the girl with the unquenchable thirst.     – Anne Waldman

Poets can take you places you never knew existed with amazing economy, and the view is great.  I find poetry to be something like a hatchet to the head, but a friendly hatchet that only dents my head rather than splits my skull and spills my brains.  But what’s another scar?  It’s what’s inside my head that counts.  It’s what’s inside my head that counts.  It’s what’s inside my head that counts.  (Uh-oh.  Am I doing it again?)  Poets are like other artists in that they are nothing but movers of energy.  Moving energy might account for my hernia and displaced c.4 vertebrate, but my doctor disagrees.  She says they’re because I ate paste and sniffed mimeographs in grade school.

When it comes to hipdom, Anne Waldman is royalty.  She is associated with the core Beat poets – Kerouac, Snyder, Whalen, Ferlinghetti, Duncan, di Prima, Corso, and especially Allen Ginsburg, even though she’s young enough to be their daughter.  Her parents were Greenwich post-war bohemians and she was active in the New York poetry scene, where she befriended Ginsberg, who introduced her to various other NY and San Francisco poets, as well as to Buddhism, world travel, new thought and political activism.  A self-described poet, free woman and “outrider”, her own work shows her sensitivity to contradictions and energy imbalances in our society.  She will aggressively take on sexual harassment, abortion rights, censorship, ecology or anything else that needs taking on.

In 1974 Waldman and some of her core Beat colleagues started Naropa University’s aptly named Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poets in Boulder, Colorado, which thrives to this day.  In this painting I celebrate Anne’s Buddhism with her beads representing peace & harmony and determination, and her hair taking on on the characteristics of Tibetan wind-horse prayer flags.  Her blouse?  Pure hippie chic.

 

Title: Longevity Has Its Place: portrait of MLK
Material: Oil on canvas
Size: 30×20
Year: 2013-2019  SOLD

When natural music is heightened and polished by art, there man first beholds and can with great wonder examine to a certain extent the great and perfect wisdom of God in his marvelous work of music.   – Martin Luther

It’s a good thing Martin Luther had das hodens (the balls) and the distance from Rome to push the big Reset Button the way he did.  No one should ever be afraid to do that.

The squarely square wooden panel is painted in gold to suggest a Northern European altar-piece.  The “95” refers to Luther’s 95 Theses, which he nailed to the door of the church in Wittenberg.  Some of his bullet points

repeated themselves, but almost all of them were legitimate bitches.  In this painting, the hand holding the book that enumerates (but does not itemize) the Theses can’t possibly be Luther’s own hand, so it must be that of an angel or an altar boy.  I’ll go with angel.  Such messages and pointer devices occur frequently in Early Christian art, and this is Early Christian Art.

 

Title: Brando Abed
Material: Oil on canvas
Size: 36×48
Year: 2013-2019

 

Keep your friends close but keep your enemies closer.  – Vito Corleone

This is my second portrait of Brando, the first being a commission for a high-ranking Army officer I knew, who I knew to be a pleasant gentleman, but was sometimes hoarse from bossing weekend soldiers around on Saturdays.  I accepted the general’s commission, so “don’t call me ‘Sir’ – I work for a living!”  (As the cliché in Army movies goes.)  He wanted me to push limits and even court controversy (moi?).  “I want to see Marlon Brando crucified like Jesus Christ!” he barked, assuming the position.  But I don’t like to make assumptions, and the Brando-martyr figure had already been done (Colonel Kurtz, Apocalypse Now), so I opted instead for a pose from a scene in “Last Tango in Paris”, in which the subject, dressed as Stanley Kowalski, is reclining in bed and playing his harmonica, on the planet Krypton.

When I saw “Last Tango in Paris” in a student union in Cincinnati in 1975, the police, opining that the film was not wholesome enough for public consumption, cleared the theater, confiscated the film and arrested the projectionist.  They repeated the procedure in subsequent weeks starting with “A Clockwork Orange” and followed by “Midnight Cowboy” and “Straw Dogs”.   The poor projectionist was a quiet and unassuming 20-year old Jewish kid who loved movies and now had three arrests on his record.

In time, the misunderstanding was cleared up by Cincinnati’s mayor, Jerry Springer (yes, THAT Jerry Springer) and all three movies were re-screened for those of us who were waiting in suspense to find out what ever happened to the films’ main characters: Paul, Alex, and David or Ratso.  (Sounds like a rock band, no?)  Two of them were played by Dustin Hoffman, and one of those died on a bus on the way to Florida.

 

 

 

Title: Tara
Material: Oil on canvas
Size: 48×36
Year: 2020  SOLD

I’ll always have Tara.     –Scarlett O’Hara

I’ll always have Tara.

It’s true confession time, and true confessions are always better than fake confessions.  Those occur during plea deals on court house steps.  But the truth is, the model for this painting was Guanyin, the bodhissattva of compassion, and not Tara, also the bodhisattva of compassion, as well as the mother of liberation, the savior of the suffering, and the sovereign potentate of action – which begins to sound like a ring announcer’s superlatives before a no-holds-barred ring match, which may be necessary for us to determine which of the two is the real bodhisattva of compassion.  So, Tara, here, is actually Guanyin in greenface.

The Chinese statue that informed this painting has been a part of the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, New York (Take that, Sox fans!) since 1920.  It is thousand years old, and is carved from paulownia wood.  I reversed the image because this was a commission, and, in it’s intended location, I wanted the subject to be gesturing away from a wall and down the hall towards the peace and comfort of the client’s bed chamber.

The difference between a buddha and a bodhisattva is a buddha has attained enlightenment, whereas a bodhisattva foregoes her/his quest for the same until the rest of us achieves ours.  How’s that for selflessness?  So the bodhisattva’s m.o. is to help us to shed our layers of attachments, ignorance and anger, to ultimately become awakened.   The challenge then is to stay awakened, and all the coffee in Sumatra can’t help you there.  Sumatra’s only 2% Buddhist anyhow.

 

 

Title: Horseless Miscarriage: portrait of Henry Ford
Material: Oil on canvas
Size: 40×48
Year: 2019

History is more or less bunk.     – Henry Ford

Legacy can also be bunk.

Henry Ford is famed for being the father of Edsel Ford, a hero of many crossword puzzles, along with Oona Chaplin, Yoko Ono, Bono, Elmo, Han Solo, Brian Eno, Shaq, Tina Fey, Eva Gabor, Bert Lahr, Elie Weisel, Erma Bombeck, Mel Ott and Bill Nye.

Speaking of crosswords, Henry Ford had a lot of cross words for Jews, which he used to broad effect in The Dearborn Independent, a newspaper he purchased and re-tooled to broadcast his antisemitic fantasies.  He believed and promoted trendy, half-baked theories about the alleged innate inferiority of any race but his own (Michiganus Americus) — the kind of drivel that was recorded in The Great Gatsby when literary lug-head Tom Buchanan, played in the movie by Bruce Dern, at one point belched “Well, these books are all scientific.  It’s up to us who are the dominant race to watch out or these other races will have control of things.”  (Note: “These books” AND The Great Gatsby were all published by Scribner’s of New York.)

But getting back to Edsel, who I will henceforth refer to as “Ed”, to save ink, his father’s target audience were racists who all of the sudden believed in science so that they could distort it to align with their prejudices.  They like things easy and within reach, like the neck and giblets at Thanksgiving dinner.  They believed that because Ford was a fine mechanic and made piles of money he must also be a brilliant anthropologist.  We sometimes forget how few tricks a clever dog really knows.  The truth is, people have far more similarities than we do differences. For every difference you note I can point out thirty-five similarities.  When we are more concerned with being great than we are with doing good, we become less exceptional.  That’s science.  Right, Ed?

 

 

Title: His Cold, Dead Hands: portrait of Charlatan Heston
Material: Oil on canvas
Size: 60×44
Year: 2020

I’ll give you my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.  – Charlton Heston  (on the first anniversary of the Columbine massacre)

Heston, we have a problem.  This painting began as Charlton Heston in his NRA* leadership role, brandishing an assault rifle, while also playing his signature movie role as Moses and carrying not the Ten Commandments, but rather the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which briefly and vaguely outlined our right to bear the Second Amendment of the Constitution two-and-a-half centuries ago.

Then occurred the awful murder of 11 worshipers at The Tree of Life – Or L’Simcha in my hometown of Pittsburgh, in 2018, during Shabbat services.   As usual, all the NRA did was dig in their cowboy boot heels on the issues of firearm ownership and regulation.  Their only cure is to arm everyone.  They have no plan B, C, D or F.  This painting evolved from there.   Or Stevolved, if you don’t believe in evolution.  And, since it’s a religious painting, I had no qualms about putting extra time into it.

Compositionally, you’ll notice that the painting is divided into three horizontal bands created by two overlapping squares, with all sorts of exciting activity crammed within.  Perspective is rolled flat, like Chinese landscape painting, or a Grandma Moses painting.  Of her own work, G.M. said “I paint from the top down.  First the sky, then the mountains, then the hills, then the cattle, then the people,” in a top-to-bottom hierarchy.  But unlike me, she never painted a religious subject, insisting that she “would not paint something we know nothing about”.  Speak for yourself, G.M.!

*not to be confused with the short-lived Depression-era National Recovery Administration, which was headed by General Hugh S. “Ironpants” Johnson, who didn’t want the job anyhow.  He was called Ironpants because he ironed his pants, I guess.  He later supervised WPA projects in New York City while working for another Moses – Robert Moses.  See how history gets all stuck together?

Wobbly: portrait of Joe Hill Last Night
Material: Oil on canvas
Size: 48×48
Year: 2020

 

A pamphlet, no matter how good, is never read more than once, but a song is learned by heart and repeated over and over.  And I maintain that if a person can put a few common-sense facts into a song and dress them up in a cloak of humor, he will succeed in reaching a great number of workers who are too unintelligent or too indifferent to read. – Joe Hill

When asked where he was born, Joe Hill would reply, “the planet Earth”.  Specifically, he was born in Scandinavia, more specifically Sweden, and even more specifically, in the town of Gavle.  He was named Joel Emmanuel Haggland.  He became a US immigrant, then a labor activist, specifically a Wobbly, which is a term of unknown origin adopted by the Industrial Workers of the World, or the IWW.  Specifically, his specialty was radical songwriting.  For those of you who wish to someday become a radical songwriter for a socialist labor union, his trick was to write new lyrics to familiar tunes, such as “Red River”, “Glory Hallelujah” or any Stephen Foster song, so all a singer had to do was read the lyrics from a little red book (of course) or fake it.

By 1914, Joe found himself in Utah, helping to organize copper miners.  He was arrested one evening for allegedly robbing and murdering a store clerk and was convicted on very thin evidence.  The only witness was a very imaginative 10-year-old boy.  Joe’s only link to any foul play was a bullet hole in his own right hand that was supposedly furnished by a clumsy brother-in-law, but Joe Hill doggedly refused to defend himself, choosing instead to die as a third-rate martyr.  The governor, who was eager to be rid of him, offered Joe a choice of the noose or the gun.  Joe chose both but got the latter.

As Joan Baez sang in the ballad ‘I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night’ on the night she performed at Woodstock, “It takes more than guns to kill a man – I never died, said he.”  Well, he did and he didn’t.

 

Ready, Mr. Muzak?: portrait of Maj. Gen. George Owen Squier
Material: Oil on canvas
Size: 48×36
Year: 2020

If you want to make beautiful music, you must play the black notes and the white notes together.     – Richard Nixon

Long, long ago in a universe far, far away, before the folk music scare of the early 1960s was even a twinkle in Bob Dylan’s eye, and even before the birth of rock-and-roll, background music was invented.  Easy Listening.  Elevator music.  Telephone on-hold music.  And we have General George Owen Squier to thank for it.  Thanks a lot, George.

General Squier invented telephone multiplexing in 1910 and acquired patents in 1922 for methods of distributing signals over existing electrical lines.  He saw the potential for this trick to deliver music to subscribers, without the need for a radio.  Radio caught up to him in the 1930s, so he concentrated his efforts on delivering music to commercial customers.  (All this happened in Cleveland, the town that takes radio seriously.)  In 1934, Squier named his company Muzak, because his product was music and he liked the name Kodak.  No other reason.  By then he’d learned manipulative musical tricks to ease worker-listener stress and to encourage productivity, as well to motivate shoppers.  He next began to record his own music, which became known as Muzak.

He was accused of brainwashing the public in the 1950s, but who wasn’t?  In the 60s and 70s, demand for Muzak became so huge that it found its way back into our most personal and holy sanctum, the private home.

Major General George Owen Squier was buried when he died (not before, though some were tempted) beside his mentor and protégé Major Uptick, in Arlington National Cemetery, which makes him John F. Kennedy’s equal.  But not JFK’s confederate – Robert E. Lee was the confederate, and the man who generously donated his vast front yard to become our nation’s most prestigious boneyard.  We thank you for this, Bobby.