·:[ Stephen Vincent ]:·
• • • • •

At least somebody has a sense of humor in the neighborhood. That kind of humor that goes way down deep into the core of the stomach. Ain’t no bad spleen inside this guy. He’s just laughing it up. I wish I knew what “it” is. I don’t know if he’s actually a Buddha. It must be, at least, an acoloyte of some deity somewhere. He is great, however, just takes me right out of my mind, and, maybe, your mind, too?

Go with this story where yee may. Tickled-Pink I am just still astonished to find him or her looking reasonably happy at home under a bush up this ordinarily very quiet street. No telling what really lurks behind the restraints of local walls!

My life - a building full of rooms - it stood for all to see -
An open book.
The way things announce themselves on the street!
The blank canvas, the white pages, irresistable!

Someone kindly suggests, these spaces would be great for the haptics,
a wheeling explosion of non-commodity Energy into the center of the City. Framed on such walls, such ‘pages’. That would be nice!

It took me a while to ferret out the echo in the opening sentence here:

My Life had stood — a Loaded Gun –
In Corners — till a Day
The Owner passed — identified –
And carried Me away –

Interesting to ever imagine Emily Dickinson on the downtown streets of any metropolis! Unlike Walt Whitman - his eyes and arms so open to the polyphonous visual character of space - I suspect Emily would totally freak. However, back to those blank pages, blog pages, what have you.

Well, as I was walking on Liberty Street, I thought I had run into/chanced upon an original Raushenberg. Here was a dusty window, a white door leaning up inside the room against it with intervening angle of wallboard against the glass. The board appears as if a torn piece of paper in a fragment of a Braque or Picasso circa 1910. My initial impression is that of a collage so simple it might be called Erased Raushenberg, obliquely so, in the manner of Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning. No way. I take the picture and bring it up on the monitor screen and I am suddenly looking at a poor man’s version of Walt Whitman. Look at all the crazy detail! Reflections of branches and leaves layered over the window frames a shingled house across the street, and, looking closely, a reflection of a San Francisco skyline in the bottom right corner. So it is and it isn’t a Raushenberg. It is one of those Raushenberg ghosts! That is, the way a significant body of an artist’s work will keep refracting fractions and portions of itself through out the culture. Rauschenberg, when I think about him much, is actually similar to Whitman in his energy and celebration of objects and people. Rauschenberg is also similar to another poet, Frank O’Hara - they clearly had an influence on each other, the way both artist and poet took whatever might float up from the street and/or the media to embrace, illuminate and make a unique music from these objects.
The other day I asked my 92 year old mom what she most enjoyed now about her life.
“Seeing the music,” she answered.
In their work, O’Hara, Rauschenberg and Whitman also love to make and see the music. As one might see ‘the notes’ in a street window.

For the first time, it took me several days to complete one of these large (20 x 23′’ vertical haptics). I started by responding to Ornette Coleman’s mostly percussive album, Mega Body. Then I switched back to listening again to John O’Keefe’s video performance of Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself. Things were still coming up too nice, too shallow. Then I put on the NBA playoffs, Washington Wizards versus the Cleveland Cavaliers. Simultaneously my brother let me know my mother was being put in the hospital for ‘observation’. (Her appetite is good, but she is sleeping and unwilling to get up. This all can be side effect from an antibiotic she is taking for an infection. Nevertheless, at 92!) Then, down to my last brush, I brought up the velocity to a level of the game, a very close one, letting myself respond to the crowd, the announcers, & the speed of the players. I let the whole piece wax volcanic. Here is one detail shot:

Haptic Detail

I try to imagine there is a relationship between my ‘haptical’ motions/marks and basketball, the game that I have loved most of my life, but do not ever play these days.