memorial without memory - the sonnet

My Father is gone never to return,

yet he’s going down the road right now with us.

Often he shared from a page where he’d learned

how to have fun without making a fuss

These words right now are new to each of you

which is as close as i can get to Pop,

for that’s how it was with us - always new.

For him, the past was just another stop.

If i had to take a guess, he’d be honored now

to have a hand in such depth of feeling.

He worked for love, and it mattered not how,

going so far as to beg for it kneeling. 

His brave heart asked each to make their choices,

or each find a muse to give us voices.

jts 21 September 2011 stoneartist.com 

my Father's memory - the sonnet

As my father lay dying, I was asleep

until my brother woke me at his house.

I exclaimed to the phone, Pop made no peep;

gone I know, Pop thought of me not a louse. 

Some months from that date I will participate

in festivities to honor his death.

We made our “good-byes before it was too late.

What i learned from Pop weren’t in his last breath.

What i learned from Pop will be how i die,

for he so much loved life’s sweet mystery.

No one knows when and where our souls to fly . . 

that could be his cackle in yonder tree .  .

it won’t matter when or where once we’ve gone;

what counts is what we’ve stacked our love upon.

jts 20 September 2011 
http://stoneartist.com 

fake - the sonnet

i am writing an essay about fake,

this ersatz sonnet was as far as i'd got;

actually i had found another take;

what is not fake? this sonnet? bloody snot?

the death of a parent is very real; 

mowing weeds on a hot day is just that.

selling poison as useful is just spiel -

more sellout violence kept under the hat.

fair weather love, the bluster of hate . . .

the list just goes on and on - life will end,

with it hate, yet love goes on - g_d’s grand fate . .

or .. her final joke - balance does not bend.

what’s good will never be found encoded . .. ...

but by good done with dust of bones long dead. 

jts 22 march 2015 stoneartist.com 

lady on the mountain - the sonnet

there could be more, having so much mountain - 

though at the mount one becomes not lady, 

anymore than being at peace is human - 

neither condition is a malady. 

so why not either, more ladies or peace?

many can fake being at peace or regal,

but being mountainous, mountains cannot cease,

as her soul can but soar like an eagle.

and just how to find one, or better - both?

peace is a mountain; it is there or not, 

and when seeking ladies, leave those who loathe

and go somewhere when not found, peace is sought.

i’m old and betters have said, “ seek your root“

- perhaps - mountainside - a tree - lady fruit?

jts 23 april 2015 stoneartist.com 

Art

As I write this, I am 61 years old; my father taught high school English and was a poet; my mother taught middle school Art and is an artist. I was alone on a ferry between Amsterdam and London for my 17th birthday; pop had picked up a Volkswagen van on his way to Greece with his new wife and her child where he wrote poetry during a sabbatical year. I was on a vision quest and was guided into sculpting by a kindly pottery teacher who also happened to be a Professor of art at the University in Brighton. Vision quest is shorthand for dissipated youth, or "Do your thing" which at that time was more than a commercial on MTV. That I didn’t die with a needle in my arm is due largely to the kind encouragement of that professor. I share this not in false intimacy with you, or to do 12-step on your dime, but so you may sense the scope of commitment I feel toward an activity which goes back to the dawn of our collective history - Art. The possibility that I may be living amongst the last artist/shamans is an irony that cowers from even my vivid imagination however addlepated with age or blunted by fear that once vivid imagination may have become.

Mark Rothko was a color field painter whose demand became stratospheric after his suicide. He was betrayed by fellow artist, friend and executor of the estate Theodore Stamos an instructor at the Art Students League of NYC where I attended some 5 years after the death of Rothko. His betrayal by a friend for profit was background noise to the saintly influence of my friend and mentor Jose De Creeft - a 90 year old Spaniard. There is a photo of him and our class at a Christmas party at the League; he had placed his hand on my head where I had knelt for the group photo. He was always doing funny shit like that. For example, he showed me a painting of him greated by an admirer depicting herself with an arm around his shoulder; in the version he shared with me; he'd painted over her as an elephant with its trunk around his shoulder; in another fanciful piece he'd modeled a rat upright grasping a nut to its cheeks in a cake pan full of nuts and bolts. I am heir to this irreverence which is all that constitutes my bonafides as artist, more so than the 1,000’s of studio hours; erudite lectures or museum wandering which comprise part of the very real and necessary training required to call oneself “artist,” I have never faired well calling myself an artist; it was decades before I’d whisper that word out loud, so strong was my aversion to the  dilettantes I have watched occupy the high ground of creative commerce.

Lucky me - my training became a battle not much different than the one for the soul of Charlie Sheen in the movie “Platoon.” My soul dangled for decades between the heinous betrayal of Mark Rothko and the sacred - the same conflict between time and product over which Michelangelo and Pope Pious struggled; the Pope, according to Vasari, dispatched the political apparatus of the time to retrieve the renegade Michelangelo from his native Florence over a disagreement about what exactly the artist should turn his hand to next. Nor was it as cut and dry as today’s purely venal criteria of successful industrial artists, (however the fuck that is determined), for Michelangelo was a reverential soul believing deeply in the sanctity of his work - today sacred art is the almighty buck; this sad fact plays out all up and down the line, except that today’s budding “creatives” are used as clickbait fisherman with pre and post consumer filters for targeted demographics creating content that is then pushed and prompted into viral celebrity. "Liked" keystrokes are harvested as trending tastes, making some rich fuck a little richer and better able to leverage whatever the puppeteers of the gladiator "art wars" wish to serve up as top tier culture - talk about your hamster on a treadmill.

Art has been hijacked by the profane precisely at that point in our odd human history when a mystical vision for that successful existential hunt which might guide humanity through the horrific danger we face as a species. Nearly every contemporary artist I know today is fully and completely absorbed by the financial reality and need for celebrity status and commensurate business model which provides excess inventory; outsider cache and/or wall space in the “big house” - papa museum. Many artists are diverted from the sacred to commercial validation by the tempting influence of the corporate media. Hypocrite that i am, i too proffer this content to you, an unknown reader, scrapping for “keystrokes” or other viral bounty that might translate into pennies with with which to continue my quixotic petition into that same marketplace - another traitor in the mix. My alma mater, "The Art Students League of NYC” has been subsumed by a bitter internecine squabble over a proposed overhanging shard of "capital" from the newly adjacent highest skyscraper in NYC. This project was shoehorned into the rapidly gentrifying Manhattan and is a perfect metaphor for struggle of our age - human being vs corporation.

A more perfect example of the rich and their role in art training today could not be written into the annals of history regardless of scholarship or arcane grasp of the classics. For some $25 million the developer for the adjacent skyscraper bought the airspace over the League to hang a cantilevered outcropping of penthouses into perpetuity, or until they collapse onto the studios below.  These penthouses provide a clear view of Central Park making them priceless, but hang like the sword of Damocles over the heritage four story art school in midtown Manhattan; understand that the origins of the Art Students League were purely democratic, wherein much like the origin of universities in the middle ages, students intent on organizing and seizing control of their own education, rejected academy doctrines and formed their own “league.” Students at the league when I attended were expected to be responsible for the nature and direction of their own studies, while instructors were hired to provide insights from actual working artists - a proletariate art school of worker artists. Had the league retained this orientation for training hard charging independent creative souls, rather than negotiating away paltry “airspace” rights for a lousy $25 million, the board of control could have sold the entire existing lot for 100s of times more dollars, then relocated the school to a much larger compound and invested that money toward the original mission of art training rather than vetting art harlequins to dance at the dissolution of the human species - today's modern art "scene."

jts 11/21/2014

http://josephtstevens.blogspot.com 

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved 

∞

http://stoneartist.com   

post apocalyptic living

The idea that there will be some demarcation for the collapse of empire is ludicrous, and I’m not referring to the celebrity of the same name. Much of the thinking and emphasis by our wiser counselors today focuses on some timeframe or order of events - this happens before this .  . The reality is we are more like a large ocean going vessel who came at the dock too hard and as a result will cause much damage to the dock and ship, or if your vision is linear, we can listen to our bard Bob Dylan . “ . I think when my back was turned the whole world behind me burned . “ . However you are able to fix in your mind the image of an irretrievable past against an indifferent future you’ll be on your way to preparing your gene pool as possible survivors of the species, if there be any. Dire you say, no actually you say - the disintegration of all human convention into a hollow cutout can be described by the mechanical “thank you” from any harried retail worker; the fake air of authority from that employed bureaucrat declining your loan application or appreciating your time for making the job application. The retail worker is not thanking you anymore than the bureaucrat has any remorse for stepping in front of your ambition. Both are clinging to a portioned out illusion no different than the the stories of heroism in defense of a sacred religion where no congregation on the planet is not without stories of betrayal and excess at the hands of its clerics - not one.

In our world we are no longer given the courtesy of being assured you’re fucked. In the olden days a tyrant would flat out say - you’re a slave, and you are not. Today’s leadership is dodgy and covert having discovered people want to believe the best even at the expense of food, air, water and wellbeing. As long as there is a plausible explanation or identifiable culprit for the momentary lapse - we will not be unlike the “Titanic” merrily humming along until the vessel’s momentum slowly crushes the hull of the ship rendering it useless and destroying that part of the landing which gave purpose to the ship. The degree and extent of destruction is all that is being discussed now because the laws of physics don’t care what you think, feel or believe. The process now becomes one of salvage; which in turn becomes an issue of priority. For example, the mother on the dock with her baby in her arms knows in her heart she and the child are not safe where they are standing. Just like that moment on a bicycle when the physics of falling overcome the physics of riding there is no intellectual consideration, one tucks and rolls with bodies and objects broken relative to the instincts of those involved. In the case of the mother, she runs for higher ground or not.

It is this time for our incinerating planet; some, as Noam Chomsky has pointed out disproportionately represented by the indigenous 1st nation people are instinctively preparing for the collision by focusing on where the planet is showing the greatest stress, water, air and food. Whether this leadership and foresight will mitigate enough of the collision to aid in salvaging the contents of our colliding vessel or leave enough of the dock intact to help in the process of building another ship only time will tell. Though as with all catastrophic events or as Bruce Lee describes the proper pace for boxing, time will slow to a crawl and what happens in an instant will seem like forever. Whether this distortion of time will aid in strategies to ameliorate some of the death and suffering we have begun to enjoy as a way of life is anybody’s guess, but there are many steps that can be taken now, up to and after impact. For one, almost as though g_d in her infinite wisdom provides tools for our salvation equivalent to the potential for destruction. For example at the inception of the Industrial Age humans were treated as farm stock to be worked, fed and clothed no more than was necessary for maintenance. However just as communication improvements were an outgrowth of industrialization and improved technology the close proximity which centralized industrial centers fostered, also created strong inter-community bonds and additional exposure to the world’s stockpile of knowledge.

This gave rise to the illusion that was Marxist thinking - the only thing required for a worker’s paradise was to kill off the ruling class - unfortunately this myopic vision of the human animal evolved as George Orwell opined in “Animal Farm” and one tyrant was supplanted for the next over time. Yet that hopefully informed scenario is not dissimilar to our onrushing Ocean Liner, for as certainly as oppression will be vanquished, our ship shall crash into the “Dock of the Bay.” Like the farm animals in Orwell’s story, we have the technical wherewithal to achieve extraordinary change. Regardless of the pig’s narrow vision and subsequent defeat we have between now and impact, both collectively and individually; not only the knowhow to soften the impact but the capability to hit the ground running. Unless we are to repeat the errors of all previous revolutions this massive undertaking cannot be on our own behalf but on behalf of the human unborn 2, 3, 4 or more generations hence, if we are that lucky. If we can take our cues from the more intuitive 1st nation members of the world body, luck has has a place in human history - look at Bill Gates for example, bought Quick and Dirty Disc Operating System (Q-Dos) for a song and then sweated bullets until IBM sold the farm distracted by its manic greed for absolute control over hardware with absolutely no clue what software even meant - now Billy will be the world’s first trillionaire and IBM has become a faded “hasbeen” like the Republican Party and it lilywhite adherents.

Unfortunately the chimera of 0s and 1s that constitute that remarkably ethereal fortune are little different than the hash marks on the first clocks when they could make a second hand sweep - of little import other than a gross approximation for concept of time from which we spring from and back into completely unaffected by war, money, fame or sorrow. The pool of human wisdom as distinguished from the chaff of today’s information gluttons should be ruggedized, standardized and decentralized such that fire, flood and famine in any one location will not impair the ability to immediately redistribute itself. The ecosphere itself must gain legal protections as Bolivia has begun by attributing legal rights to mother earth herself. Communities for self-sufficiency will needs be the standard organization as the empty product of the corporate overlords becomes increasingly desperate in its attempts to retain market share, for once the ruse of the infinite growth paradigm becomes crystal clear for its role in the exhaustion of the world’s resources politically, intellectually and economically, as Edward Colver has said there will not be walls high enough behind which the ruling class may hide. Fury cannot be the barrel of this assault; we do not have that margin. Socrates said,”the secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.” For those amongst you who’d shrug off Socrates , I say to you “oh well.”

see more @ http://stoneartist.com

greed

Courtesy of native-languages.org :

"Wašicun - wašin icu" (the white man, takes all the fat.) Wordplay is common in the Sioux languages.

While growing up, my family had 6: 3 boys and a tough-as-nails sister; both parents were “depression era babies,” so my friend Lyles’ expression “no blood, no foul” could well describe the otherwise genteel mealtime table my mother aspired to. The expression “slow down, nobody’s gonna take it away from you” seems quaint in the days we are living with talking heads formulating remarkable insights about when we can expect the “water wars” to commence and where. Even as I struggle to express how astonished I am that my nation is ranked second to last for childhood poverty in developed nations, my mind falters at how something so utterly unnecessary as poverty could exist in a world capable of repeatedly landing our species on other worlds, but cannot restrain a confused hunger for too much? The scale of grasping sadly now far exceeds any parallel to appetite or really any human image save that of the truly deranged. The blind pursuit of “more” has taken on other worldly aspects which with the resources available to such extreme power, real or perceived is transforming what had once been a largely humane planet into a pustulated reflection of its former self.

Not that the cultural compass of our lauded poets and artists hasn’t at times complicated matters with potent images of riches, power and splendor rewarded for heroic efforts against impossible odds. Nor is the unreasoned grasping characterized by greed restricted to wealth and power; I’m 3 times married and when she once again shows me the error of my ways, it’ll be 4. Does this make me greedy as Leonard Cohen sings of needing “ .  . so much to have nothing to touch, I’ve always been greedy that way . . “ ? As an aging fine artist content to dictate the pace and access of my work, I’m guilty of greed and would have been whither way I turned - japing for the art industrialists or as I do, savoring the deeper recesses of our feeble consciousness while trying to fathom what cave artists knew - who defines what is greedy? In the opening line of William Blake’s Proverbs of Hell he wrote “the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom,” and we’ll never know what he might have said about Bill Gates’s achieving the remarkable feat of owning $1,000,000,000,000 one trillion dollars; back in the day, think 1980’s, the example for any Rockefeller was if you started saving $1,000 a week from the time of Christ you still wouldn’t be as rich - approximately $104 million. To mimic Mr. Gates you’d have to have started saving $1,000 a week better than 19 million years ago or roughly the beginning of the Miocene Epoch. 

The drive to amass more than you can use is unfortunately the flip side to the poet’s coin; and were a 3 headed coin possible, that added face might reflect the ceaseless shoveling of food, or liquor for the alcoholic, or needles for the addict. The arrogance of appetite that drives a human soul to own a brand new Ferrari while mothers protected by plastic trash bags mop up the Ebola Virus is the same contempt for the human spirit which motivates a violently connected multinational corporation (comprised of breathing humans) to reduce regenerative seeds to a single crop for gain, or find a profitable purpose for owning the Ebola Virus. This behavior is a perversion from the original utility for provisioning that drove our species to harness waterways and cultivate food in communities. That cooperation for the greater good has been twisted into the fallacy that we are incomplete, whether that be from an existential vacuum or financial vulnerability. Lao Tzu says the objective of existence is to defeat want, to know satisfaction with what you have and this confuses me, for he also says the 3 greatest treasures are simplicity, patience and compassion. I read of those three treasures and wonder about Ralph Waldo Emerson’s admonition, “moderation in all things, especially moderation.” From which treasures are we to be free of want, “simplicity, patience and compassion” or the filthy lucre the haters dangle out of reach like a carrot on a stick for our modern day horse and carriages. If for some odd reason Lao Tzu was laughing at posterity and advocating we free ourselves from civil restraint, would we be free to unleash our rancor on the heads of our oppressors raining down but again another human revolution and it’s illusion for change except in this revolution it won’t be workers of the world unite, but “Lord of Flies” meets George Orwell.

Is it greedy to demand justice or attack the ruling class with any leverage possible, even logic? I shun any belief that equates punishment with justice, up to and including the traditional drawing and quartering as punishment for endangering a ship and its crew - we are a ship and they the billionaires have put our vessel in great peril. Some number of the 1,467 billionaires on this planet of 7 billion human beings pose the greatest single threat to our survival. They must be brought up on a short leash, as in given a one room walkup with no more to live on than what is paid the local kindergarten teacher. It is what my uncle Dwayne recommended to me as a young thrasher - “if you are jumped by any number of others, you begin with the biggest of the cowards and work your way down,” but Socrates has said “The secret of change is to focus all your energy, not on fighting the old, but in building the new.” To me this says find a way to supplant the illusion of material wealth with an insatiable desire to “make the world a little better than you found it” - Aunt Jane. I have tried with this essay to better understand greed and so help the world. I am no closer to understanding, so if I can’t help myself, how will I help you? What I am doing is what HH the Dalai Lama advocated which is “if you cannot help, at least do no harm.”

When someone or some entity has demonstrated antagonism to your wellbeing, but then experiences a reversal of fortune; it is still misfortunate, for to take pleasure in suffering of any kind is simply self-righteous greed. Until we are able to disconnect from the desire for payback we will be divided and conquered. The mistaken concept of a balance sheet for violence, but not one for the dignity of life and the welfare of all people is a curiosity. Not so much for the stupidity of eye for an eye, but how easily people are diverted from the problem at hand - justice and adequate resources distributed fairly to the greatest number of people. There is no other overarching demand in the world we live in, not spiritual, economic, or political, not even what happens next on Dr. Who. We as a species are about to perish for the sin of having docilely satisfied the perverse demands of a handful, large handful, of amoral sociopaths who by luck and and circumstance have convinced themselves that having more than they know what to do with at the expense of 7 billion other humans beings is scientific confirmation of survival of the fittest, or some such shit. I’m old, older than you Bill Gates, so whenever you are are up for it I’m challenging you to fisticuffs; name the time and place, Queensberry Rules, or no; as many rounds as it takes . Know this Bill, I am not calling you out because I wish you to suffer at my hand, or because I’m mocking your self-serving incompetence, but because one) I say I got more heart than you; two) I’m willing to prove it, 3) Uncle Dwayne said to start with the biggest and work your way down - Uncle Dwayne was a standup guy and I want to help you learn what it is to be standup; be not afraid - I’ll stop when you fall down or say “uncle.”

p.s. does this essay make me greedy ?

see more @ http://stoneartist.com