the same

Two days ago I was mentally composing what I thought would be another pithy post about painting. It was going to be glib yet intelligent and of course, packed with insight. Then there was an earthquake.

I have already written about the abundant ethnic diversity that exists in Brooklyn. It has one of the largest populations of Haitians living outside of that country and my heart truly aches with them and for those still there. In a country so impoverished, the loss and devastation is only magnified.

Humanity often demonstrates impossible cruelty, but it also possesses a tremendous capacity for love and generosity. I am grateful for organizations such as Doctors Without Borders and the Red Cross who have so quickly responded to this event. If you are able to donate to either of these organizations, please do.

Hidden within every tragedy is an opportunity. This disaster may illuminate our sameness. In fact, my prayer is for sameness, in which we finally recognize that we are all the same, no matter our gender, age, color, country, sexual preference or Belief. Then perhaps our acts of love and kindness will occur not only in response to calamity, but each and every day.

carol jean

Five years ago today my mother died. The offending event, a massive stroke, came quite unexpectedly. Her death was one of a handful of seminal events in my life and bookended her period of mourning following the death of my father in 2001. I believe that her grief could only be relieved by the companionship of someone she loved, lived with, raised a family with and battled for more than fifty years. I do believe that they are together today.

Time alone in my studio facilitates reflection, and I have been thinking about her a lot lately. I think about the night before she died, and how I had planned to stay with her at the hospital. She was in hospice care, and with the decline of her brain function, her breathing became a loud, labored rasp followed by a wailing inhalation kicked into action by oxygen and CO2 levels. It’s called Cheyne-Stokes respiration. She was unconscious and in no pain, but the sound was unbearable and at about midnight, I had to go home. She died very early the following morning. This is a deep regret. I’m sorry I left you alone Mama.

What little there is that is remarkable about me is at least fifty percent due to my mother. As a young woman, and throughout her life, she was a great beauty. (My sister looks so much like her!) She had wanted to be a cartographer or stage set designer, but as with so many young women of her generation, the opportunities presented to her were nursing or teaching and she chose the former. She never lost her interest in the Arts and in her fifties returned to college to get her degree in the Humanities.

Though much of her adult life was afflicted by the same demon that is a constant companion to myself and several family members, she passed on her visual acumen, her sense of style, and the understanding of color, line, shape and proportion that affords me attendance at one of the finest art institutions in the United States. In addition, thanks to her, my sister and I are both excellent cooks.

Now nearly fifty myself, almost three quarters of the way through Graduate School and with the 20/20 vision of hindsight, I recognize all that I inherited from her. In May, when (God willing) I walk across the stage at Radio City Music Hall and collect my Master’s Degree, I can celebrate that this is indeed the stage set she designed. Please take a bow Carol Jean. With all my love and thanks.

salad days

Yesterday was a cloudless and temperate late-summer day in Brooklyn - a perfect day for a street fair. I’ve now lived here for just over a year, and my love for this Borough continues to grow. Prior to 2008, I imagined it as the neglected, illegitimate sibling of a spoiled and privileged Manhattan. Though one might consider its history noteworthy only for the Bridge, the Dodgers and Coney Island, Brooklyn has a rich and storied heritage. To me, it felt immediately familiar.

Archeological evidence demonstrates that the Native American Lenape people populated this area as long as 12,000 years ago. In 1646 the village of Breuckelen (Brooklyn) was chartered by the Dutch West India Company. Though the approximately 2.5 million residents remain largely working class, Brooklyn is also home to a roster of artists, musicians, writers and scholars too large to individually name. In fact, I have heard that Brooklyn boasts more Guggenheim Fellows than any other municipality. It is also responsible for the Teddy Bear, the Roller Coaster, Twizzlers™ and single-packet sugar.

As with any large city, Brooklyn has its share of problems. Yet the culturally diverse residents genuinely appear to love and share their community. The population represents the largest number of people from every cultural, ethnic, and racial background, thus making Brooklyn more like a salad bowl than the proverbial melting pot. Each unique flavor adds to the spice and vitality of the community. Then too, gentrification appears to have been kinder here.

With so much malice and divisiveness occurring in the country today, Brooklyn seems a better angel of the United States’ nature. I wish everyone could experience its magic.

You can have your Tea Parties – I’ll go Brooklyn!

Good-Bye Dear Freak

Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the New York City Council announced plans this week for the revitalization and redevelopment of Coney Island. The rejuvenation would include a new amusement park, luxury hotels, restaurants, retail stores, movie theaters and a new roller coaster. And so continues the homogenization of New York, and the eradication of that which made it unique.

Coney Island should be left alone.

I am not one for nostalgia. People tend to romanticize the past, just as they romanticize country life, their youth, family relationships, and Christmas. The nostalgic images we conjure of the past are often what we wish something had been. There is little today that reflects Coney Island’s heyday. In fact, Coney Island makes people uncomfortable, it is one of the United States’ last authentic freak shows. It is its wonderful freakishness that makes it attractive to those who don’t mind being uncomfortable and who don't mind seeing a part of our culture as it really is.

Although Mayor Bloomberg states that the plan will restore Coney Island to its grander days, he is indeed creating a simulacrum: a prepackaged, sterile and codified reproduction of something that never existed in the first place. What will be missing from Coney Island are the derelicts, carnies, and thousands of average families who, via subway, haul their beach chairs and sunscreen there each summer weekend. I find it difficult to imagine the Mermaid Parade, the hot dog eating contest, and the headless woman on view in a glass enclosed entertainment environment. Coney Island may be seedy, but its sleaze is out in the open for everyone to see and recognize. I will miss it.

in love and love

What "love" is I don't know if it's not the response of our deepest natures to one another. ~William Carlos Williams

This week has given me an opportunity to reflect on love and the state of being in love. Often casually referenced in the same context, they are, I believe, quite different. Being in love carries a measure of biological urgency. It is a heightened state of impracticality and idealism. Similar to a concussion, it can be accompanied by nausea and blurred vision. You don’t look, you gaze, and the object is imagined as near perfection. Those in love can rarely be apart and when together, are oblivious to the rest of the world. It is new and startling. It is electric. You are bullet proof when in love. You can be mysterious, damaged, emotional and brooding when in love. It fuels the desire of the beloved. There are aspects of the beloved that you believe you can change. You can’t, but you don’t know that yet. You merely shelve those ambitions for a rainy day. It is also extremely easy to fall out of being in love. I have done it at a moment’s notice at least 10 times. Though being in love is a conduit to love, in the end, it does not guarantee its actuality.

Love is the trenches. It is perhaps the least human characteristic humanly possible; it is a complete state of vulnerability and inflicts a loss of self. Love is sight. Sometimes it is straining to see across a vast distance (literally and figuratively.) It allows one to reveal the absolute truth about them self and still remain standing. It is forgetful, as layers of scar tissue grown around a million tiny pinpricks. It is fortification bolstered by each worldly and time-inflicted wound experienced together. It is calloused fingertips resting on your inner thigh. Its physicality is loaded with intellectual intimacy, much like an equation resulting in a single organism. As an infiltrating condition, love is far more difficult to extract oneself from. It will leave a permanent scar.

When you are in love you cannot imagine the profundity that is the mundane, day-to-day experience of sharing a life with another person. Being in love is an intense state of mind based on expectations and plans. Love carries the patina of time and experience, accomplishment and disappointment, and while you sometimes cast fleeting glances at the headiness that is being in love, you quickly recall the nausea and blurred vision. As with any long journey, you sometimes put the map in the glove box, and wait to see where life continues to take you. It has taken you amazing places already.

Diz

One week from today, the elder of my two beautiful goddaughters, Elizabeth, is getting married to a lovely young man named Tony. The first time I was introduced to Tony was at Liz’s college graduation party. Liz kept nudging me and asking, “Aunt Sioban, isn’t he cute”? I suspected his bachelor days were numbered.

In her published journal, Daybook[1], sculptor Anne Truitt wrote,

“The first feelings of marriage are so heavenly. I remember I used to wake up on purpose just to feel how happy I was. The heady potpourri of marriage delighted me: the lavish closeness, the just balance between delight and responsibility, household decisions, the openendedness (the whole rest of our lives!), and the incredible beauty of being allowed to love someone as much as I wanted to”.

It is my experience that these feelings can continue throughout a marriage. I wish this for Liz and Tony.

What is it with we Nora’s and our Italians? Denise, Susan, Mat? I suspect that Liz’s Great Grandfather would secretly be very proud. After all, an early U.S. Census recording from Northern Michigan lists his given name as Domemico.

Pass the Fettuccini, please.

---

[1] Truitt, Anne, Daybook, The Journal of an Artist, New York, NY. Penguin Books, 1982.

likes and dislikes 7.11

The studios are very quiet right now, summer is here and schedules far more relaxed and non-specific. Summer is good.

Listening to:

general shuffle of my iPod

Build, Build

Four Concepts, Banana Twins

All titles, Mat Lombardi

4 harmonica pieces, d. stine

Reading:

I and Thou, Martin Buber

Collected Poetry, W.H. Auden

Likes

Dixon Ticonderoga No. 2 pencils

that men in Brooklyn still wear seersucker suits in the summer

blue 9 burger

fancy ladies & gentlemen at Lincoln center

gingham

Iconoclasts

bunnies

old Catholic hymns

the human face

Dislikes

the smell of the subway in summer

the flu in summer

non-specific, tentative edges

when people talk around each other

mumbling