Jefferson City had a little “Art in the Park” thing today. I thought it much better than these things usually turn out. I especially liked the Statue of Liberty piece and the giant eggs.
Jefferson City Art in the Park
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Category Archives: Art/Style/Culture
Nostalgia by Billy Collins
Remember the 1340s? We were doing a dance called the Catapult.
You always wore brown, the color craze of the decade,
and I was draped in one of those capes that were popular,
the ones with unicorns and pomegranates in needlework.
Everyone would pause for beer and onions in the afternoon,
and at night we would play a game called “Find the Cow.”
Everything was hand-lettered then, not like today.
Where has the summer of 1572 gone? Brocade and sonnet
marathons were the rage. We used to dress up in the flags
of rival baronies and conquer one another in cold rooms of stone.
Out on the dance floor we were all doing the Struggle
while your sister practiced the Daphne all alone in her room.
We borrowed the jargon of farriers for our slang.
These days language seems transparent, a badly broken code.
The 1790s will never come again. Childhood was big.
People would take walks to the very tops of hills
and write down what they saw in their journals without speaking.
Our collars were high and our hats were extremely soft.
We would surprise each other with alphabets made of twigs.
It was a wonderful time to be alive, or even dead.
I am very fond of the period between 1815 and 1821.
Europe trembled while we sat still for our portraits.
And I would love to return to 1901 if only for a moment,
time enough to wind up a music box and do a few dance steps,
or shoot me back to 1922 or 1941, or at least let me
recapture the serenity of last month when we picked
berries and glided through afternoons in a canoe.
Even this morning would be an improvement over the present.
I was in the garden then, surrounded by the hum of bees
and the Latin names of flowers, watching the early light
flash off the slanted windows of the greenhouse
and silver the limbs on the rows of dark hemlocks.
As usual, I was thinking about the moments of the past,
letting my memory rush over them like water
rushing over the stones on the bottom of a stream.
I was even thinking a little about the future, that place
where people are doing a dance we cannot imagine,
a dance whose name we can only guess.
More Billy Collins poetry
The poem I couldn’t remember was by Billy Collins. Here’s another:
Flames
Smokey the Bear heads
into the autumn woods
with a red can of gasoline
and a box of wooden matches.
His ranger’s hat is cocked
at a disturbing angle.
His brown fur gleams
under the high sun
as his paws, the size
of catcher’s mitts,
crackle into the distance.
He is sick of dispensing
warnings to the careless,
the half-wit camper,
the dumbbell hiker.
He is going to show them
how a professional does it.
Visions of the Prairie Garden
is a collection of photographs by Henry Domke featuring images celebrating the Prairie Garden Trust, a nature restoration project in central Missouri. I attended a reception for the exhibit today. I didn’t think I’d much care for “nature” photos but these jump right past that. Art might be as simple as showing us things we look at but never see.
When I close my eyes
Every year the Missouri Department of Mental Health puts together a showcase of art created by people with mental illnesses, developmental disabilities and assorted addictions. Therapy for the artists and PR for DMH. This year I volunteered to put some of the pieces online for them. My personal favorite is #24.
“a virtual, centralized grand database”
“Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every Web site you visit and e-mail you send or receive, every academic grade you receive, every bank deposit you make, every trip you book and every event you attend all these transactions and communications will go into what the Defense Department describes as “a virtual, centralized grand database.”
From a William Safire Op/Ed piece in the NY Times.
Iowa graffiti
Subway cars. Or those plywood walls they throw up around big city building sites. These are the proper canvases for graffiti (I think it’s called tagging these days). But if you live on a farm or in a small town in southeast Iowa, it’s a long way to the closest subway. On Highway 92 just East of Columbus Junction, Iowa, there’s a farm building that looks like it might house vehicles of some kind. There are no windows and the building was originally painted white so it makes a near-perfect service for local artists/vandals. I first saw the building ten or twelve years ago and each time I drove past I vowed to bring a camera next time. Next time was October of 1998.
This is my kind of art. A performance piece with an unknown number of artists who might or might not know each other. Maybe it’s that the “piece” is never complete. There’s a farm house just a couple of hundred feed up the road. Does this building belong to the people that live there? If so, they must see the artists in action. Or do they only come at night? If so, do they paint by head light? Or do they work in the dark? I find that notion kind of interesting. Do the young people of the area have a name for this building? Has this been going on for years (I didn’t look for dates)? How do you paint so near the roof line? With a ladder? Do you bring one with you?
And do the property owners ever start over with a fresh coat of paint or do they tell themselves four, fresh, gleaming white walls will merely start the cycle again? Does Mrs. Brown ever greet Mr. Brown with, “The kids wrote ‘fuck you’ on the barn again. How do you want your eggs?”
Update: Sorry, but the images referenced above got lost in the move. If I can find them, I’ll update this post.