In creative endeavors like architecture and painting one is continually at risk of perpetuating the banal. Banality is disappointing and avoiding it is getting more difficult. Perhaps this is a function of getting older (everyone is a poet at twenty). All of the usual excuses for not delivering excellence are so reasonable and understandable to all. Excellence is unreasonable. It is an aberration. It is freakish. It is hiding all around us. It is in small places. It is crouching in corners and scurrying into myriad cracks in our rude and hectic culture. There are many imposters: shiny stuff, new slick things and fast things as well as things with mighty advertising budgets. Excellence is usually quiet and it must be captured by stealth. Excellence is a very sharp knife. It cuts through all of the clutter that surrounds us and it makes the agents of that clutter embarrassed. Excellence is buoyant and radiant and fresh and fun. Look! I ‘ve found some right here. Hey! There’s some over there! How do you know when you have found it? Banality is noisy and shiny as well as dull and common. Excellence is quieter and it engages your imagination. It makes you happy.
Jim Blake,Sr. - Bridges in the Western States
My father was a civil engineer. He received a degree in Forestry and Civil Engineering at the University of Washington in 1950 and started an illustrious, international career building transcontinental railroads (southern Australia) Atomic energy plants (Hanford, WA) Cement production plants (California), mining facilities in Peru, tunnels in the New Guinea jungle for a copper mine and Highway bridges in California (2), Washington and Montana. I had a chance to see him in action as a construction superintendent at two of the bridge construction sites in 1964 and 1969. He was generous enough to find me useful employment at both sites. During the construction of the Central Ferry bridge in Washington state, he telephoned a state official of the Columbia River watershed and had the volume of the river reduced for a two weeks while his crews installed coffer dams in the middle of the flowing water. This was probably the most God-like thing I saw him do. He was a great leader of men. On the Libby Dam Reservoir Bridge near Rexford, Montana in 1969 he was directing a few hundred men and having the time of his life. He loved to figure out all of the steps required for a massive project and then mobilize his men to make it happen. He was a great communicator who could stand up on a wooden crate in front of the entire work force and firmly deliver the site policies, directives and schedule outlines. He was like Abe Lincoln at a political rally: good-humored, forceful and to the point. He was a great problem solver who could invent dramatic and immediate solutions to very difficult construction emergencies. I was with him one morning at the Crystal Springs Bridge (Eugene Doran Bridge - San Mateo County) when a footing excavation had begun to fill with water after an underground spring was hit by a backhoe. His team was worried. He decided on the spot to fill the sixty by sixty foot excavation partially with loose dirt, soak up the water, use a backhoe to put the mud into trucks thus de-watering the big hole then we raced down to a construction supply warehouse and bought a few submersible pumps (Flygt) and some flexible hose and had it installed into the excavation. These pumps kept the hole dry until the cage of number eleven rebar could be installed and the concrete poured. later in his career he was a superintendent on a section of the Alaska Pipeline, Oil production facilities in Daching, China, Radar Towers in Argentina, Earthmoving operations in Yanbu, Saudi Arabia and many, many others. During my childhood he was in demand all over the world so I rarely saw him. He had hearing problems from guns firing on his destroyer and deep diving mine-setting work, PTSD from World War Two heroics (bronze star) and he had a bad temper, I consider his domestic absence a blessing. He was a great man but in his chosen element which was the dynamic playing fields of construction sites around the world.
It is interesting to note that his work was part of the heroic age of post WW II civil engineering when the United States was financing projects all over the world to great acclaim. Today he would be called an "Economic Hit Man" who participated in the destruction of tropical jungles, the creation of hydrogen bombs, the building of facilities that exploited indigenous populations etc etc. I'm glad most of my memories of him are from the era of the American hero. He was a hero to me although he thought artists were pussies and he hated my paintings (and said so!) after 1969. the "Montana barn" ("art" this blog) is where I lost him as a fan of my painting.
Re: The pussy thing. We had a contest in his backyard in Mission Viejo, California one afternoon to see who could do the most one-legged deep knee bends, one of his benchmarks for strong legs. He could do fifty or so on each leg. When my turn came, I started and after fifteen minutes (a few hundred) he stopped counting and suggested we go have a bourbon.
Station Point - Definition
Station Point – 1 March 1, 2007 The station point is the location in a linear perspective construction of the observer of the scene being depicted. Brunelleschi’s conceptual breakthrough in 1412 was to pin the station point in a perspective construction to one specific place allowing the accurate identification of points of intersection of rays of reflected light with his picture plane, light traveling on its path to the single eyeball of the viewer of the scene represented by the station point. It was Brunelleschi’s awareness of the picture plane as a device, a window, a flat, transparent plane for the recording of visual information received by a viewer from the temporal world that provided him with an abstract, self-referential, internally consistent planar context for the development of such notions as the horizon line, the vanishing point, the measuring line, the picture plane in plan and elevation, which enables the cross-coordination of the paths of light rays and so, the uncannily accurate representation of three- dimensional space on a two- dimensional plane such as a canvas, wood panel or the wall of a church. Painting had represented three-dimensional space and forms revealed by light since the prehistoric cave paintings and three-dimensional imagery was elaborated in ancient Greece and Rome but it was the elucidation of the rules of perspective during the early Renaissance in Italy that provided the means to an artist to develop a rational, accurate and convincing pictorial space and then to populate its public plazas, private rooms and deep vistas with the personalities and the architecture of the age as well as with the creatures of mythology and the dramas of history.
The pinning of the station point was a momentous event in human history, it symbolized man’s renewed analytical encounter with matters of the surface of the earth. The pinning of the station point symbolizes the Humanist project, the acknowledgement that the affairs of men on earth are of primacy that the temporal world is comprehensible on its own terms without the intervention of faith. Guided by a passion for the works of the ancients, Renaissance man set out to explore the world, to redirect his vision from the heavens to a line of sight parallel with the surface of the earth toward his own distant horizon, his own vanishing point. During the previous medieval epoch, human vision was upward toward God in heaven or down to the plowed soil. Life on earth was brutal and short. It was matters of a heaven, of grace and forgiveness or visions of everlasting damnation in the fires of hell that captured the imagination. With the pinning of the station point the vision and dreams of mankind were fixed upon a distant but achievable horizon. Men now demanded to see that horizon in their images where it remained for five hundred years until it was assaulted by Cezanne and swept away by Picasso and Braque in Cubism. The pinned station point had a five hundred year run from 1412 to 1912 the epoch of reason and rational exploration.
Norman Mailer Society Speech - draft (not delivered)
A Tale of Two Modernisms – 2/27/07Notes for presentation at Norman Mailer Society convention October 2007, Provincetown, MA
Preparatory note: During the mid- eighties, after a run of several years, the television sitcom “Happy Days” starring the greaser “The Fonz” took a downturn. It became clear that the writers for the show had run out of ideas when they developed a weird and non-sensical story line that had The Fonz jumping his motorcycle over a tank of sharks a la Evil Kneivel. Since this episode, the term “Jumping the Shark” has meant the point where any endeavor takes a turn toward its eventual demise.
Kodalith photography paper divides the gray scale in half turning all shades deeper than 50% gray into black, washing out all shades lighter than 50% gray into white. It is time to examine the zeitgeist of Western Civilization in these severe terms in order to clearly identify the antipodes of our politics, architecture, music, literature, physics, dance, and methods of scientific pursuit in order that the moiling mush of the center, the soft, gooey, contradictory, ambiguous, and uncertain center might realize some definition by default from clearly conceived extremes.
We live in the epoch of two modernisms: the Citra and the Ultra, the black and the white, the lateral and the linear, the Dionysian and the Apollonian, the left and the right, the liberal and the conservative, the right brain and the left brain, the intuitive and the analytical. This is not a news- flash, we have lived with this schizoid intra-cultural convection, this upwelling, since the dawn. The schiz is our engine, our driving force, our built-in, guaranteed turmoil. The universe delivered mankind two brain types as a cleansing mechanism. The pendulum swings. There have been epochs when Citra is center stage (pre-history, Medieval, Twenty-first Century), There have been epochs when Ultra is center stage (Ancient Greece, The Renaissance epoch of the descended grid (1412-1912). The Twentieth Century was the period of great chaos that occurs between epochal paradigm shifts. Two Modernisms at war with each other. The phenomenon of the domination of a hemisphere of thought (right / left brain) in a society is as inevitable as gravity or cold dark matter. If you have one hundred people and all of them are pinned, gridded, left-brained Apollonian rationalists you live in an Ultra culture. If sixty of those people are pinned / gridded and the remaining population of the one hundred are unpinned, off-grid, right-brain Dionysian creatives then you still live in an Ultra culture but it has a powerful overtone of the Citra. Most people struggle to contain both types simultaneously. For many, it is our All-American, cold, wet washrag to infant genitals that sends the Citra into remote fastnesses of our consciousness prior to ripening. Our culture guarantees schizophrenia and a thriving pharmaceutical industry. It is no small irony that our present, fiercely accelerated Ultra culture has produced a hyper-grid computer technology and the internet that has given a growing voice and gravity to the non-white, non-industrialized people of the world and has bred a CitraDemocratic global ethos in the youth of the West. The Grid eats itself! The late Twentieth Century fever of rationalism is the fiery blast of a supernova prior to collapse. Our public schools with their six daily periods of preparation / brain-washing for the disappearing jobs of the grid have become the ten percent who never got the word. The Enlightenment Project with its worship of rationalism jumped the shark by the end of World War I. The Fonz fades. The George Bush phenomenon with his stunt in Iraq book-ending Teddy Roosevelt’s snatching of a little bit of Columbia, is proof, that the Titanic has sunk, the smart rats, having leapt from the yardarms, are swimming either to shore or to oblivion.
During the Dark Ages from 300 to 1400 AD Apollonian rationality in the West was buried. After a six hundred year run, we are now in an age of exhausted Apollonian UltraModernism colored now by the burgeoning vitality of a maturing CitraModernism. The third world has reared its head with its aching presence of population, disease and devastation of nature. The Earth continues to be dominated and abused by the UltraModern industrial ethos, tortured offspring of the Enlightenment Experiment . It spreads through China, India, Indonesia Eastern Europe and Russia. The Earth is in open rebellion – the ice caps are melting.
The American Revolution and the U.S. Civil War had a deep effect upon Europeans. Our revolution of 1776 reified the notion that all men are created equal, spawning the French Revolution. The U.S. Civil War drove this point hard and deep into Western consciousness. The death of 600,000 Americans in the cause of acknowledging the humanity of black people softened France in particular to the idea that non-white, non-industrial cultures are fully human and that their way of life and their artifacts are of interest and of value. Picasso got the message and by his conflation of Sub-Saharan sculpture and Cezanne’s swerves from the pinned station point, he invented Cubism – Cezanne extract. Picasso and Braque along with, Joyce, Mieles, Einstein, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Pound , Diaghalev, and Frank Lloyd Wright, each in his own endeavor, expressed the distillation the emerging unpinned, multi-valent, ambiguous ethos of the CitraModern. Picasso, encouraged by exhibits in the Museum of Anthropology in Paris; Stravinsky, inspired by the primal rituals and rhythms of a pre-modern forest people; and Wright inspired by the poetic/organic Japanese, created the lateral, intuitive, Dionysian CitraModern.
Norman Mailer, America’s philosopher, delivered the CitraModern to a mid-century United States just as Picasso and Braque delivered it to Europe in 1912. With Mailer’s sixty year gift of right-brain, deep intuition and lateral thinking, beginning with his gut-felt novel The Naked and the Dead in which enlightened and well-armed man returns to the jungle, to life immediate, to the stink and sweat and fear of the unknown . Later in 1956, Mailer, in the role invented by Picasso, acknowledges the power of the black gift, the mojo, in his seminal essay “The White Negro”. In this work Mailer discusses a cross-racial transfer of cultural signifiers. The signifier of the anxiety of living life in the moment, the uncertainty of a life of relentless risk and danger, the Hipster ethos embodies the ambiguity of Foucault’s “Other” not only of Other’s existence but his possession of qualities worth emulating, and perfecting: sexual prowess, sexy music, dance, and language, the mano –a- mano dominance rituals steeped in risk of self. Mailer explains Elvis in “the White Negro” and in so doing explains all of rock and roll and so all of the Nineteen-Sixties Boomer counter-culture which was saturated in black music, black dance, black civil rights, the celebration of black heroes in Muhammed Ali, Malcolm X, Shaft, Eldridge Cleaver and Martin Luther King. Every white kid with a garage all across America got in touch with the 4/4 beat of his inner black. One half of a generation of negroes white and black goes to war in Vietnam and the blacks re-up for an extra year of jungle firefights to delay their return to the guaranteed daily violence of the inner city with no jungle cover. The UltraModern war machine gets dismantled in the tangled, putrefying foliage that it first encountered in the Phillipines from 1909 to 1924 then again During World War II as recounted in Mailer’s the Naked and the Dead. As the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 symbolizes the jumping of the shark of UltraModernism, the Vietnam War symbolizes its final throes and the Iraq war its twerpish but deadly last gasp. Norman Mailer, the voice of the CitraModern ethos in America for sixty years. Mailer is the chronicler and an accelerating force for the demise of the UltraModern. The Enlightenment Experiment, now tainted by a century of war and holocaust, tucks its tail and slinks to the sidelines of Western Civilization with our daily newspapers in tow. Mailer is a clarion of expanded consciousness – a realization of our connection to a deep, visceral, tribal power. If Norman Vincent Peale was our expositor of the power of positive thinking then Norman Mailer is the Godfather of the power of lateral thinking, of thoughts big and broad, of thinking not just black and white but deep, thinking from the reptilian brain, from the whole body.
Norman Mailer is fascinated by Picasso. During the nineteen-seventies he examined over 60,000 images of Picasso’s artwork in preparation for a tome. A text emerged, his intense distillation, Picasso as a Young Man. In this work Mailer describes the personal, cultural milieu that super-saturated Picasso, Cubism was distilled, crystallized from a great density of ideas discussed in this book. Picasso locates the deep fear and resonance of tribal existence and gives it expression in painting. Norman Mailer sensing a brotherhood with Picasso defines and conveys this broad avenue back to the surface of the earth in the written word. Mailer’s writing has tribal passion, rooted as much in Africa as in his own dark, ancient forests of Europe. Mailer slipped the stifling conventions of the UltraModern zeitgeist beginning in the 1950’s as he slipped a punch or two from Jose Torres. The UltraModern wants to bury you, dominate and separate you, to mother-smother you and kill you with science, precision and high-fructose corn syrup. The UltraModern is being dismantled now with the passion and precision of art. Norman Mailer is a relentless, powerful and courageous weapon of the CitraModern against a stifling, strangulating grid. Mailer has explained Picasso’s great achievement from so many angles in his sixty years and counting on the American stage. A Cubist onslaught of ideas and language.
If the Civil War introduced the non-industrial people of the world to the industrialized West as fellow humans, Picasso announced their presence in the heart of art, delivered tribal seed into the wilted vagina of high, white art, laid it wide, inseminated and invigorated it with new life. Elvis sings from the shoulders of Picasso as Steven Weinberg postulates from the shoulders of Einstein. Frank Gehry stands on the shoulders of George Braque waiting to fly. Mailer is telling this story. He is our American Picasso. He turns the soil of the life of our time and our mind so that this culture might survive. With his novel The Castle in the Forest, the story of the early life of Hitler, Mailer has once again penetrated into the heart of the matter. It was Hitler who tried to undo the Civil War with 600,000 deaths times 10 but to no avail. There is no turning back, the sterile grid is dead. Lincoln, the enabler, ushered in our new epoch, Picasso distills the epoch with a new language, Hitler the disabler tries to revive the dying UltraModern, Mailer enacts the new CitraModern epoch in a great nation and explains it to us in word and deed in a life that continues to reinforce our founding creed: All men are created equal.
*
Design Exercise - Montana State University
SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE MONTANA STATE UNIVERSITY Spring 2007
Architecture 551,2,3 Jim Blake – Instructor
Project: Bozeman Art Center – “A Tale of Two Modernisms”
Exercises:
Exploring Cubism – simultaneity, multiple station points, shallow pictorial space, democratized picture plane – the fractured lens.
Sculpting human figure from live model – work at ½ life size with 1/16” corrugated cardboard, box cutter, heavy duty stapler and glue gun. – Two hours Charcoal drawing from resulting sculpture – fifteen minute toned drawings (2) Contour drawing from sculpture – 1” wide “Postermat” marker –5 @ ten minutes Drawing from memory – Tone drawing: facture, passage – the technics of Cubist space – two hours Painting the cardboard sculpture – controlled palette (sepia, ochre, gray, black) Diagramming the positive and negative space of the sculpted figure Diagramming the drawings: Digitizing the sculpture : Rotations, deconstructions, , peel, slice, poke: topological excursions.
Exploring the Grid - stasis, deep pictorial space, imperial picture plane – the pristine lens
Imagine driving up and down four Bozeman streets, turn a corner and drive up and down four more that are perpendicular to the first group and think of the dominance of the rational grid in the fabric of all of our lives. Recall walking / driving through the streets of Athens or Rome and imagine the Medieval cow path as a generator of street geometry. Notice Thomas Jefferson’s township / section divisions of the American landscape the next time you fly, notice where Jefferson’s grid is violated. Note ten things that can be described well in plan, section and elevation and ten things that cannot. Select one of the things that cannot and try it anyway. When does the grid enable? When does the grid disable? Write a ½ page essay on each notion as it applies to architecture. Would it be a violation of an implied or stated rule of esthetics to create an architecture that mixes UltraModern with CitraModern forms? Write a one page essay using examples of the success or failure of such conflation. (Gehry @ the Weismann Gallery @ Uof MN if stumped for an example) Daniel Liebskind said that he was inspired by the Rocky Mountains while developing the geometry of his Denver Art Museum. Is there an implied grid at work in these forms (however distorted) or is this a CitraModern building with its roots in Cubism? Write a paragraph.
Find or create an 8-1/2” x 11” image that illustrates the following:
Cardo and Decamanus: an early urban grid Wide bay / narrow bay: Corbu @ Garches, Villa Savoye, Venice Hospital The horizontal datum: Kalman and McKinnell’s “Zone of Human Occupation” Tartan plans: LeMessurier’s valorization of structure and hvac Transformations: Rotate, peel, extrude, Literal / phenomenal transparency: layering the façade (Rowe, Slutzky essay) The gridded landscape: Tschumi’s LaVillette Park Transformations/ oppositions: Eisenman / Terragni Structural and commercial imperatives – office space (hide your stapler) The poetics of the logarithmic grid Grid warp: Hawking space – imaginary topologies Popcorn, Fried eggs and Salami: Seligman’s rational hierarchies
In conjunction with the design and documentation of the Museum of Steel each student will be required to develop the following:
Left Bank Folly sketches –One sketch per 3” x 5” card. Create 10 follies per day through schematic design after you have analyzed the building program via color-coded area swatches.
Left Bank Follies
An architect is an artist. An artist spends a lifetime developing a language of expression. This studio is an opportunity for you to explore your relationship with your medium (light / inhabited built form) your esthetic politics, your culture, your city, your colleagues and primarily, your understanding of the poetry of light. The work you do this term will inspire you until the end of your life. The architectural design process is rooted in the notion of a concept, a direction, an attitude, a belief as manifest in an organizing principle, a parti which in turn will suggest form. The search for the source of your concept will be like peeling a vegetable – an onion one would hope with many layers perhaps some tears, no potatoes in this class. Think and feel as deeply and as broadly as you can and then stop, stand and deliver your answers.
Some architects, upon being given the opportunity to design this building would, before reading the program, create a sketch on a linen tablecloth and with this evidence of a eureka moment, would proceed to massage the program into the linen vision and thence to bricks, mortar, steel and glass. The Sydney Opera House, the Denver Art Museum and the East Wing of the National Gallery of Art are examples of this process. Some architects would spend a month or two studying the program and the site, circulation patterns, precedents and projected patterns of use and then create the eureka sketch. Some would avoid the whole notion of a burst of inspiration and methodically arrange the served and servant spaces, refining the space and the structure until a resonant pitch is attained that may transcend inspiration. Explore (and record) your own process. American culture claims to treasure the magic of inspiration but it is the hard-won resonance of imaginative, integrated and consistent quality that endures. This quality is manifest during all phases of the architecture delivery process from programming (Wright reinvents the American home, Saarinen reinvents the airport, Kahn reinvents the bio-research center) to design development (Kahn at Exeter Library, Kimball Art Museum, Saarinen at the Ford Foundation) to the most tediously reviewed realities of an enclosure system (Blake checks shop drawings for roadway expansion joint plates at San Francisco International Airport Terminal).
A large part of the work performed in school is schematic design, always a very small percentage of the total time spent on building delivery by the architect. When all of the players in a building project are included, it is a microscopic amount of time. Schematic design is emphasized in school because you will never have the luxury again in your career of thinking for such extended periods about light and space. Although design happens throughout a project and at all levels and phases of a project, it is during the schematic phase that form congeals from mists of language and intent i.e. when rubber hits the road. When you are designing a building you are in the ring with Mohamed Ali. Recalling Ali’s musical analogy: “You better C-sharp or you’re gonna B-flat”. You will train every day to be a designer. You will make design decisions every day at every opportunity. It is only by becoming a thinker who is comfortable with the responsibility of design decisions that you will hear the bell for round two let alone round fifteen and or victory. So how does an architect, the artist, the form-giver, the team leader train for the ring? If one waits until the commission is firmly under contract it will be too late. We are surrounded by missed opportunity, by designers who were distracted before the second round. We’re training fighters here, survivors, ring magicians.
Training exercises:
Left Bank Follies: Carry blank 3” x 5” index cards with you at all times and a pen with water soluble ink (Pilot razor point, Papermate Flair). Doodle in class, before dinner, at the bar, before the game, as a break during reading. This is not ordinary doodling but a series of mini-exercises in exploring your inner linen eureka sketch. Get these images out of your system and into the light of day. Don’t spend more than a few minutes on a single card. Fold up a second card into an airplane/paintbrush and dip it into your glass of water, coffee, or iced tea and add a bit of tone, scale figures, shade and shadow. Select your favorite follies for development. Enlarge them to 11” x 17” and develop them further into forms and spaces that might generously be interpreted as buildings. Bask in your own private Idaho in these exercises –a place that you would not necessarily wish to share with the competition judges, a design review board, the planning commission or your clients. This is play with an agenda, brainstorming, making connections with your subconscious. You may recover a single form worth exploring in one of a hundred of these follies but the strength, agility and reflexes you develop in their creation will serve you well. The usefulness of these follies will depend upon the extent to which you have internalized the programmatic and thematic issues prior to your explorations.
"Strawberry" - 18" x 36" - acrylic - 2008
"Revel at the Little Fox" - 18" x 24" - acrylic on panel - 2008
"Splash" - 18" x 24" - acrylic on panel - 2008
"Corb at Black Rock" - 18" x 24" - acrylic - 2009
"Sexy Santa Fe" - 24" x 36" - acrylic on panel - 2009
"Mass. Ave - Cubist" - 18" x 24" - oil on canvas - 1979
Night at the Opera - the birth of Mr. Gasoline
In 1980 I was working in Athens as an architect designing a large section of a new city to be built from scratch in the desert in Saudi Arabia. This new city was to have a projected immediate population of 500,000. It was going to be constructed on a site adjacent to the Red Sea, that at the time, held a single one-pump-gas station on the two lane road to Jiddah. My responsibility was to design twelve public buildings including a police station, several government office buildings, a supermarket, a large parking structure, a medical clinic and miscellaneous structures and systems. Each person on the fifteen member team had similar responsibilities. Each team members performed more design work than most architects do in a career. There is fast track project scheduling, there is hyper-track and there is warp-track, the Yanbu project was warp-track. We were in the un-air conditioned office every waking hour for the first six weeks of the summer completing the schematic phase. It was an intense, very high-pressure experience for an architect just one year out of school. At one point during the early autumn I got incredibly frustrated on my design team and sought an alternate creative outlet away from the architecture.
This new outlet manifest itself very late one night while on a date with a Greek aristocrat. We spent the hours after a candlelight dinner strolling around her Athens. We walked down streets where she pointed up to the sign, her last name! We walked through farmer’s market stalls (Greeks shop late into the evening) she pointed to fruit stands that bore her family name (they owned entire islands thus the fruit species name) She told colorful stories of her dashing father’s exploits during WWII, of her mother dating famous American public figures. Heady stuff. It was a drizzly night at first then later a full moon was revealed as we walked and talked for a few hours. At around one in the morning we were walking near the American Embassy compound not far from the office where I worked. There was an opera house under construction. I was curious. We entered the site and walked into the darkness and up stairs trying to find the stage. The place smelled of lumber, concrete form oil, familiar smells from my time on construction sites. The moon had come out so there was a bit of light that allowed us to sidestep large openings in the floor and edges that were many feet above adjacent spaces with no railings. We stepped over debris on the floor and around puddles.
We finally made it to the stage. The roof had not been built yet so I could look out in blackness to the dim back of the hall and see the moon rising. I began to test the reverb time in the space by singing a few bars of spontaneously invented blues melody. The hall had great acoustics even without a roof. Geez, I sounded great. This was much better than any shower. I didn’t know I had it in me. I began to sing louder and more rhythmically. Then months of creative frustration burst like a dam and I began singing at full voice some deep, raw, gut-bucket blues. Channeling B.B. King, Albert Collins, Muddy Waters. I looked over to my friend who I hoped was amused but I could hardly see her in the darkness. After about three songs of loud and resonant Delta shouting I saw shadows moving in the back of the hall. UH - OH ! WTF ! I stopped singing and stood frozen on the stage watching the shadowy black profiles move toward the stage. My God! There were more than just five. There were waves of them. Must have been twenty figures dressed in black converging at my feet. My heart was beating like hell.
These figures in black each had a machine gun pointed at my head. A bold voice called out in Greek. It was Greek to me, but my date understood and we both jumped off of the stage to greet the Athens Chief of Police surrounded by the entire Athens SWAT Team with their weapons still raised. My date and the police chief had a brief conversation during which she let it be known who she was and that I was her nutty American date for the evening. The chief motioned for the SWATs to lower their weapons. She assured him that we meant no harm, that we were not protesting the American presence in the Embassy across the street and that we would go home immediately. WHEW! - she kept me from getting arrested or shot or both, thanks CM! This was the beginning of the songwriting career of Mr. Gasoline.
Footnote: Twenty eight years later while I was teaching at Montana State University in the architecture program, the University held a gala “International Festival Banquet” where students from all over the world who were in attendance dressed in their native costumes and served native cuisine. I walked over to a group of Saudi Arabian Students and, of the five, three were born and raised in the city I had designed, Yanbu.
"Sexy Sedona" - 24" x 36" - acrylic on panel - 2009
Jump the Shark
The phrase “jump the shark” captures the idea of exhausting the thematic potential of a concept and continuing on with work after the source has become depleted of all possibility of freshness. There is an episode in each television. series where the idea -well runs dry. The episode of “Happy Days” where Fonzie jumps over a shark tank on his motorcycle is the inspiration for the phrase . The series was downhill from there. It had jumped the shark. Has the United States jumped the shark? Did the events of Nine-Eleven force the hand of our leaders, our government officials, to straddle the motorcycle of our military, rev up the engine of the international will and zoom out over the shark tanks of Iraq and Afghanistan? Do these events signal the exhaustion of our epochal paradigm? If Western Civilization is a sitcom (as it must be on some outer-galactic network) have we exhausted our good ideas? No, we haven’t. We have exhausted the idea of fossil fuel capitalism. This era is ending. The Iraq/Afghanistan exercise becomes the jump-the-shark episode of our exhausted era of The Big Engine. The beauty of our shark event is that it is a powerful signal that The Big Engine is dying and that we stand informed by global circumstance to harness our best effort to the development of The Bliss Engine. (see The Bliss Diet Book for definitions of engines)
Comfort Food Uncomfortable
Don’t eat comfort food. The comfort is short-lived, the calories are forever. Cultivate contrast in your daily life. Alternate pain and pleasure, hunger and satiation, noise and quiet, anxiety and bliss. Reduce the scale of your food contrasts. Allow simple fare to satisfy by cultivating your hunger for an extra hour before each meal. If you are not hungry enough to eat oatmeal you are not hungry enough to eat. Make The Bliss Diet work for you not against you. It takes twenty-four hours to recover from a glass of wine. Don’t lose your bliss to alcohol. The Big Engine prefers that you keep your bliss to a minimum That is why wine is available in every supermarket and glorified in newspapers, and cigarettes are all around us, and prescription drugs and drug-filled meat. Bliss is the enemy of The Big Engine. Your spiritual fulfillment is the very last item on its agenda. The Big Engine fears your independence, your fulfillment, your happiness. Be defiant!
Bliss and Fear in Art
Bliss may be small in its manifestation and large in its effect. If one examines the drawings of the masters, one sees a quality of line that radiates the presence of bliss. This line quality is that of assurance, grace, truth and so - beauty. Without this quality of bliss there is no mastery. A knowing eye can see, smell, feel fear in the drawn line. Fear is the absence of bliss. Fear is the black hole to the radiant star of bliss. There are times when fear in art is compelling and it may be a driving force for remarkable and popular art but it is not a factor in the poetics of mastery. In mastery all fear has been translated into bliss. If a draughtsman misses the bliss, he must proceed to his bag of tricks to deliver a work worthy of sharing. If you miss the bliss in oil paint, then toil on the canvas may suffice. If you miss it in watercolor try again another day. A painting produced in a state of bliss allows room in its being for the full participation of an enlightened viewer. There are blank places, rest stops, easy places to enter the work, to share the joy. Paint speaks: “join me on a journey to a magic place, a stunning place, a vital, vibrant and powerful place.” Matisse invites you in, Turner invites you into his storms, Chardin invites you into his kitchens and dining rooms. Jasper Johns and Eric Fischl invite. Inferior art tries to seduce with vague or arcane concepts, hyperglycemic colors, crowded composition, over-worked technique – work that transmits of a fear of not pleasing an audience. Inferior painting reeks of the fear of failure. It is blah. Bliss allows you entry and takes you on a journey of delight. You share the bliss of the creator - the artist. Fear art is a one-trick pony, a one-note Johnny, a one night stand. It is worth a one minute perusal in a museum and can inspire reams of text. It is often over-sized. Inflated scale is the first trick of bliss gone south. The second trick is polish and shine. Knowing that the human touch will reveal you - erase the mark altogether, thus our Warhol induced, celebration of the machine-made object. See Murikami, Koons, Hirst: active masters of the assembly line. Although the bliss of the act of creation may be missing from this work, it is nonetheless conceptually rich and fun to look at. Russell Chatham’s postage stamp size watercolors carry more bliss-freight per square inch than even Turner’s late vapor. Blissful art attracts, blah art explodes in your eyes then bores you forever after, see Caravaggio.
Bill Spooner (TUBES) and Zorba the Greek
Bill Spooner, mastermind of The Tubes, is a great songwriter, arranger and guitar player. Bill was the music director-guitar wizard in my band Mr. Gasoline for two years. We played a few dives but no gig was a throw-away for Bill. He played as masterfully in the rat holes for an audience of ten as he did for 100,000 people at Knebworth or during a sold-out week at London’s Hammersmith Odeon. Bill had the spirit of Zorba. Don’t wait for bliss. Track it down and harness it to your small tasks. Allow it to fill your heart wherever you are no matter what you are doing. Great ideas will sneak up on you - be prepared. Doing mundane tasks is always an excellent opportunity to think, to plan, to dream.Listen to one of Bill's great solo Albums "Mall to Mars" @ CD Baby
Listen to "Wing Tank" and "Meet Miss Match" by Mr. Gasoline @ CD Baby
Bliss Bubbles and Hell Holes
Bliss and Hell are balanced on earth. Bliss is manifest in bliss- bubbles and is balanced by hell-holes. The following are bliss bubbles: Mozart, Chardin, Cezane, The Beatles, LeCorbusier, Louis Kahn, the Kronos Quartet. The following are hell-holes: Jonestown, John Gacy’s crawl space, Jeff Dahmer’s apartment, Auschwitz, The Vietnam War. Rings of fire are combinations of both: Frank Lloyd Wright, Jimi Hendrix, Andy Wilf, Johnny Cash. As the war in Vietnam accelerated during the sixties, the Beatles condensed out of the ether. Hell sells, bliss is a bore in the realm of mass media. Given the scope of pain we read about daily, there has got to be a lot of quiet bliss out there to account for the balance we experience. Quiet bliss is the warm, dark matter of our civilization. There must be a lot of it to keep the mad force of the civilization from tearing us apart.
Bliss is not Seduction
Bliss is not seduction. Bliss requires no polish, it glows from within. There is nothing seductive about a bowl of oatmeal. A healthy mind and a radiant spirit are attractive. Many Americans do not know they are being seduced or they know and don’t care. Children used to be disciplined, deprived and ignored, now they are coddled and seduced by the corporatocracy as future consumers. Children are now programmed to accept seduction in every transaction, sugar with every bite of life. The essence of seduction is that after the immediate pleasure evaporates, you have been reduced. After that expensive dinner at the upscale yuppie seafood restaurant, you are fatter, poorer, stuffed, hung-over, bliss -deprived, and tired. Was she impressed? Were you seductive? If you employ seduction to achieve your ends you are a seducer. If you harness the seduction of others to your ends – you are a seducer. A seducer is a spiritual thief.It is easy to fall into a cycle of seduction via food. The Bliss Diet will cure you. It will remove seduction from your eating habits. It will restore the pleasures of your mind. If you currently derive your sense of well- being from the SAD HEN: serotonin, acetylcholine, dopamine, histamine, epinephrine, nor epinephrine i.e. from food, alcohol and smoke and the neurochemicals they release, you are depriving yourself of the spiritual resources that can make you consistently happy.
Theory of Additive Negatives
Two wrongs not only do not make a right but create a reality that is worse than the sum effect of two isolated wrongs. There is a synergy of dissolution, negatives are additive. Civilization is a great reciprocating engine whose mechanism is the storm of opposing synergies both positive and negative. An individual can easily lose control of geometrically multiplying negatives they inherit, assume or pursue. This loss of control initiates nervous collapse and may lead to over-eating. Additive negative meltdown may lead to psychic convulsion and projectile ejection of whole cultures from the surface of the earth.