Games Artists Play With Themselves

Birds Make Flowers Bloom

noreply@blogger.com (Pat) — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 16:40:00 +0000

This painting, "Joshua Blossom Dreaming" was inspired by a photo supplied by my friend Lupe Lightning Turtle. Here's Lupe:

"Joshua trees don't bloom every year. Sometimes they skip a year or two. When they bloom it's usually around March or early April. Before the bud opens, it always has faint purple on the underside of the petals. As the blossom opens up fully and the petals spread, they are a beautiful creamy white.
"The picture was taken of a branch of a Joshua tree that was hanging very low to the ground, and the top of the branch with the blossom was pointed head-on directly at the camera. That particular tree stands in the area inside the circle driveway in front of my cabin. That year, an unusual number of birds were perching on that tree early in the morning, waiting for me to scatter bird seed on the driveway and also for a turn at the bird feeder. In January, the tree was full of birds singing and chirping all day long.
"One day I picked up this book that mentioned something about the reason you don't hear birds singing in the wintertime. Their theory being that birds serve a purpose by helping trees to blossom with their singing in the spring. 'Aha!', I said to myself. 'I can test this theory out right here.'
"Come February, as I was driving out on my way to town, I passed in front of the Joshua tree and, lo and behold, there at eye level was that beautiful blossom staring me right in my face. I looked up and sure enough some of the other branches had started to bloom. None of the other trees in the area had any blossoms. That was the blossom that proved to me the theory of how birds singing help to wake up the blossom."

Artist Christmas Cards

noreply@blogger.com (Pat) — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 06:23:00 +0000

Brag of the Day: Venice Historical Society

noreply@blogger.com (Pat) — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 03:43:00 +0000

This article, "The Devotee's Labyrinth," was in the Fall 2009 issue of Venice Historical Society's Journal. The author is Delores Hanney. First the graphics, then the text of the same piece. I've been asked if the cover art is mine. No, it's a Venice CA postcard from over a hundred years ago.

--------------------------------------------------
The Devotee’s Labyrinth
by Delores Hanney

Pat Hartman is a compulsive devotee of Venice, California. She reads about it, writes about it, paints it and serves as handmaiden-in-charge of an online shrine for its veneration. Actually, she defines herself as the “webslave.” Virtualvenice.info is like an intricate little labyrinth, all twists and turns crammed full of Venice facts, fancies and lists. The unwary visitor might find herself lost in it for days. It’s best to take a sandwich along.

Hartman arrived in Venice in 1978, called to it like a lemming, unaware that it would consume her with the inevitability of the cliffs lemmings are notorious for overrunning. She settled right into the area called Oakwood, which at the time was distinguished by its status as L.A.’s #2 crime scene. She and her 11-year old biracial daughter moved in with a roomie (and her daughter) met through an ad in a publication called The Recycler. To the left of them were WASPs with a fine vegetable garden, to the right a multi-unit hive of recent border crossers playing loud Mexican music, across the street were Chinese living next door to a large and rowdy black family, behind was an alley, above an actor and a musician. Radical diversity was a big part of the neighborhood’s appeal.

She lived in Venice for six years, chronicling her term here in detailed diaries that upon attaining distance in geography and epoch, Hartman would translate into writings for general consumption. In language possessed of an amiable, jaunty swagger she tells of her strangely mystical sojourn in books that are something like an ant farm fostering a view of the life of its inhabitants inside. Hartman divided her “farm” into two parts: the public life and the private.

Sassy and saucy, her account of the private, Ghost Town: A Venice, California Life, is like a would-be model for a sad, hilarious, multihued television sit-com just lolling around waiting for a producer with the prescience, guts and integrity to take it up.

Call Someplace Paradise opens with the statement, “Venice is a Los Angeles coastal community like sex is a biological function.” It hurtles forward from there to document the fervor-fomenting politics, the seething arts scene, the community’s at-once congenial and combative character as they existed twenty-five or thirty years ago. Pat Hartman’s passion and presence and participation suggest a level of energy generated by nuclear power plant and a brain that’s the size of Minnesota.

She’s also written a raft of unpublished short stories set in the Venice milieu. One of them, “Bent Out of Shape” can be seen and read on her website.

Pootling about Hartman’s Virtual Venice is like eating an artichoke: each leaf a separate indulgence. Behind the colorful little flags acting as doorsills to the site’s variety and vagaries lie variations on the theme of her philosophy that “Venice, like the sun, is both gravity and radiance.”

The website has a bulletin board upon which Venice residents – past and present – thumbtack word snapshots of their tenure here, most of them tinged with grateful nostalgia for a halcyon era of freedom. Then there’s a lengthy catalog of books, in which Venice figures, and a similar inventory of movies. There are to be found old postcard images, a collection of Venice quotations, archives of the Free Venice Beachhead. Here are sections given over to the poetry and to the music and to the visual artists of Venice. There are other sections on Hartman’s own books and her paintings and a “virtual boardwalk” where stuff is for sale. The whole of it throbs with the eccentric liveliness of Ocean Front Walk.

Earthy and arty herself, Pat Hartman was drawn to the arty weirdness of Venice and during her stay here she invested her heart and soul in it; but then it was time to move on. She had learned that “Venice is a state of mind” and that it is therefore portable. Besides, her volunteer web slavery keeps her connection alive.

“Who can explain the allure and mystique of Venice Beach as a place of legend, a New World Shangri-La?” she asks. Hartman, herself, does a pretty good job of it. Here is the link to her Internet labyrinth: http://www.virtualvenice.info

Retro Art: All Is Vanity

noreply@blogger.com (Pat) — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 21:10:00 +0000

A print of "All Is Vanity" by Charles Gilbert hung on my grandma's bedroom wall. It wasn’t just for Halloween, and it wasn't ironical. She was dead (ha) serious. The illustration dates from 1892.

This looks like a cheap knockoff of Gilbert's concept but that's only a guess.

This, I'm still guessing, is some kind of Old Master original drawing that predates both of them.

And this is a modern update of the Gilbert, by an artist known on Etsy.com as "sweetheartsinner."

Game - Gum

noreply@blogger.com (Pat) — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 23:27:00 +0000

Separated at Birth: An advertisement for a game, and Seattle's infamous Wall of Gum.

Recent Brags July 09

noreply@blogger.com (Pat) — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 16:49:00 +0000

Allan Cole's Tales of the Blue Meanie has one of my paintings stretching all around the front and back cover.

In The Forensic Examiner, three of my online articles about the Tim Masters wrongful conviction case are quoted, and cited in the bibliography.

I know Todd Shimoda and Linda Shimoda too.

Some work I did for Patron Saint Productions was featured in their brochure

Veteran journalist Tim Van Schmidt runs a delightful version of the home-town paper at Fort Collins Life-Times, which has a cool page of my Fort Collins paintings.

The new Ace Backwords book, Acid Heroes. Edited and prepared for CreateSpace publication by Pat Hartman. Also, I designed the cover from the author's collage/sketch.

Synchronicity #1

noreply@blogger.com (Pat) — Sun, 17 May 2009 20:22:00 +0000

Around 1975, a friend gave me a stained-glass butterfly that she had made. I had it for about 25 years, and it shows up in a couple of my paintings, like this one, for instance.

But when I moved out of one place, I left the butterfly behind accidentally. (And left the painting behind, too, but that was on purpose.) Though my abandonment of the butterfly was unintentional, by the time I realized, it was too late to do anything about it.

Some butterfly-less years went by.

Within the past week, another woman friend who knew nothing about any of this, gave me a butterfly. It’s approximately the same size as the old butterfly, and although it’s made from thousands of beads, rather than sheets of glass, it is pretty much the same color scheme, some version of red and blue, and light shines through.

The two women who gave me these butterflies - both have the same first name.

Mama Said.....

noreply@blogger.com (Pat) — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 18:08:00 +0000

This painting is by Dale Hartman. I don't know what he calls it.

I call it "Mama Said There'd Be Days Like This."

Leonard Cohen

noreply@blogger.com (Pat) — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 03:21:00 +0000

Photo courtesy of Tim Van Schmidt -
see all his original concert photos at King Koncert

Celebrities I Almost Met:

What was Leonard Cohen doing in 1960? Trying to get an artistic grant from the Canada Council. According to biographer Ira Nadel in Leonard Cohen: A Life in Art, the poet "borrowed money to hire a limousine with a uniformed driver, and smoked marijuana with a friend in the back while cruising to Ottowa, and then 'terrorized' the Canada Council staff by chasing them about in a wheelchair, occasionally serenading the secretaries. His unorthodox visit resulted in funding....."

A few years later, in the Mediterranean area Cohen wrote the novel Beautiful Losers "in a frenzied, drug-induced state from which [he] required a twelve-day fast partially to recover; combined with a bad sunburn, however, this state led to exhaustion, a fever, intravenous feeding, and nearly two months of rest," Nadel says. There was also a complication in mailing the manuscript, because a close friend was arrested for hashish and brutalized by the Athens police. This was in 1965.

After he introduced Judy Collins to his song "Suzanne," he was visiting from Canada when she brought him onstage during a New York concert. He got partway through the first verse of a song, said "I can't do this," and left the stage. Over the subsequent years he became much more at ease in front of crowds. Still, he did take a long hiatus from performing, the source of one of the two biggest regrets of my life.

The first regret: Some time in the late 70s or early 80s, when Cohen lived at Big Bear, California, I went up there with a band who'd arranged to play at a club, a rough-hewn little roadhouse type of place. Life had been stressful lately, and I didn't even want to go in. Catching up on some sleep, in the car, seemed a much better option. Later, the guys told me Cohen had been in there and heard part of their set. He even liked the drummer's voice, which everybody in the band thought was awful. If I hadn't been zonked out in the back seat, I would have been in the damn club. Thus, Leonard Cohen became one of the celebrities I almost met.

The other regret came later, when I read about a concert Cohen booked at some famous old theater in the middle of Los Angeles. I thought about it wistfully, but there was money to think of too, and child care… Later, someone told me it had been Cohen's first concert in 12 years. If I'd realized it was such a rare event, I would have moved heaven and earth to get there. Dylan showed up, and several other top-level luminaries who would no more miss such a chance than they'd miss a visitation from the Buddha. Spotlight on my ignorance, again.

Musician Neil Busch once said of Cohen, "He has influenced all songwriters who wish their lyrics to stand alone as poetry. He's less whimsical than Bob Dylan; his words strike a deeper chord on the gut strings of the soul."

Here's an inexplicable phenomenon: After the 9/11 event, Jeff Buckley's cover of Cohen's ineffable "Hallelujah" somehow came to be the unofficial official song of America's reaction. I don't see the connection at all, unless Buckley wrote all new lyrics or something. Strange thing is, many years ago Leonard Cohen also wrote a song called "First We Take Manhattan." It was written in the voice of, from the point of view of, an international terrorist, and with considerable empathy.

Photo courtesy of Tiago Pinhal via this Creative Commons license

RELATED:
Leonard Cohen at Red Rocks 2009
Leonard Cohen Quotations
Suzanne

I'm Dreaming of a GAPWIT Christmas

noreply@blogger.com (Pat) — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 04:25:00 +0000

Redneck Christmas Tree
This is one of those things that fly around the email circuit. I condensed it and made a composite picture.

It reminds me of the Christmas Ladder. Dale Hartman and I had just moved to a new town, with no furniture, and our landlord left this item in the house for a while to help us get the place together. It worked fine as a seasonal decoration, too.

Making it Go Away
I knew a guy who, one year, had such an aversion to Christmas that he flew to Australia, crossing the International Date Line in such a way that, for him, there was no December 25th.

The Politically Correct Days of Christmas
This arrived in my email box last year, and I like it:

On the 12th day of the Eurocentrically imposed midwinter festival, my Significant Other in a consenting adult, monogamous relationship gave to me:
TWELVE males reclaiming their inner warrior through ritual drumming,
ELEVEN pipers piping (plus the 18-member pit orchestra made up of members in good standing of the Musicians Equity Union as called for in their union contract even though they will not be asked to play a note),
TEN melanin deprived testosterone-poisoned scions of the patriarchal ruling class system leaping, NINE persons engaged in rhythmic self-expression,
EIGHT economically disadvantaged female persons stealing milk-products from enslaved Bovine-Americans,
SEVEN endangered swans swimming on federally protected wetlands,
SIX enslaved Fowl-Americans producing stolen non-human animal products,
FIVE golden symbols of culturally sanctioned enforced domestic incarceration, (NOTE: after members of the Animal Liberation Front threatened to throw red paint at my computer, the calling birds, French hens and partridge have been reintroduced to their native habitat. To avoid further Animal-American enslavement, the remaining gift package has been revised.)
FOUR hours of recorded whale songs
THREE deconstructionist poets
TWO Sierra Club calendars printed on recycled processed tree carcasses and...
ONE Spotted Owl activist chained to an old-growth pear tree.

Merry Christmas Happy Chanukah. Good Kwanzaa. Blessed Yule. Oh, heck! Happy Holidays!!!! (unless otherwise prohibited by law)
*Unless, of course, you are suffering from Seasonally Affected Disorder (SAD). If this be the case, please substitute this gratuitous call for celebration with suggestion that you have a completely adequate day.

Another email thing: "Encounter"

And another: "Let me know your sizes - Christmas is tight this year."
How to make bedroom slippers out of maxi pads:
You need four maxis to make a pair. Two of them get laid out flat, for the foot part. The other two wrap around the toe area to form the top. Tape or glue each side of the top pieces to the bottom of the foot part. Decorate the tops with whatever you desire, silk flowers, etc. These slippers are
*Soft and Hygienic
*Non-slip grip strips on the soles
*Built in deodorant feature keeps feet smelling fresh
*No more bending over to mop up spills
*Disposable and biodegradable
*Environmentally safe
*Three convenient sizes: Regular, Light day, and Get out the Sand Bags.

And some personal ones: a picture/song my daughter made when she was a kid.

Great-Grandpa's White Fruitcake Recipe
In this wicked world, fruitcake gets no respect. I've heard all the jokes about how the same gnarly fruitcake gets passed around from one person to the next, year after year. And its innocent name is a synonym for an unfortunate individual who is a few bricks shy of a load.

In Boulder they even have an annual Fruitcake Toss, with three weight classes and choice of propellant: physically hurl the poor fruitcake with your very own pitching arm; or use a throwing device of your own invention and construction; or load it into the Pneumatic Spud Gun; or utilize the committee's catapult. It's an event guaranteed to bring out the yokel in the local college students. This is sacrilege.

The past couple of years, because the candied fruit was half-price the day after Christmas, I made a huge batch of Great-Grandpa's White Fruitcake in the spring. We're not talking about commercial-grade fruitcake packed with mystery ingredients and horrid little hard things. What we're dealing with here is an old family recipe, one that originally resulted in a huge vat of batter - this was a professional baker, after all. Even the fractioned-down version makes quite a lot. And just between us, the whole process, from individually inspecting the raisins for stems, to testing for doneness, is pretty much a pain in the ass.

Yet and still, I feel that Great-Grandpa's recipe could rehabilitate the reputation of fruitcake overnight and take the nation by storm, the way Famous Amos chocolate chip cookies once did. Venture capitalists, call me!

TM Pie
Another family tradition, a thing my mother and grandmother occasionally made as a very special Christmas gift, is the TM Pie. Using a small disposable pie tin, you make a bottom crust and then fill the pie with crumpled tin foil to hold the lid up. Then fit a top crust over it, crimping them together. And don't forget to poke a fork through the surface, to let the steam out. After it's baked and cooled, take the top crust off and remove the padding. Inside, place a crisp new unit of currency. Put the lid back on, carefully place in a box, and tie a ribbon around it. There's also a poem that goes with it, that I can't find, but it explains that this is a 'Tis Money Pie.

Most Enchanting Christmas Memory
It was a large but non-alcoholic and non-noisy party, sponsored by the workplace. Spouses were invited, and in some cases it was the only time they were seen all year. There was a guy everybody liked who brought his wife, a troubled woman who was frankly kind of problematic to relate to. And it was known to be a troubled marriage. They had a reason to leave early, but just before they reached the door, she turned around and said, "I want to sing a song for you." With no accompaniment she sang "O Holy Night" and it was pure magic. Absolutely splendid. And then they left.

And my all-time favorite amongst those things that circulate around the Web: the all-purpose greeting card

Jesus Swept

noreply@blogger.com (Pat) — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 07:22:00 +0000

Duke Andrews and Quantum Foam

noreply@blogger.com (Pat) — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 04:54:00 +0000

Here we see a page from American Scientist magazine, the July-August issue from 1995. At the lower right, the drawing is labeled,

An embedding diagram (with a 0.02 percent probability) illustrating the quantum foam thought to reside in the singularity inside a black hole. From Black Holes and Time Warps.

Pasted over that page are three drawings by Duke Andrews, an artist whose work sometimes appeared in Salon: A Journal of Aesthetics.
The Andrews drawings date from 1986-87, predating the Quantum Foam illustration in American Scientist by eight or nine years. What does it all mean? Beats the hell out of me.

Shrubbery

noreply@blogger.com (Pat) — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 03:16:00 +0000

This drawing was made while I waited for someone to pick me up. No psychoactive substances were involved.

Go with the Flowchart

noreply@blogger.com (Pat) — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 03:08:00 +0000

I made this diagram quite a long time ago, but looking it over, I still think it's valid and possibly even definitive.

Disco Ball and Mirror Matrix

noreply@blogger.com (Pat) — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 22:53:00 +0000

Discoball 1

According to Venice, California historian Paul Tanck, what we now call the disco ball was invented by Arthur Reese, town decorator for Abbot Kinney, founder of Venice of America. Reese seems to have been on the job in Venice from the year of its inception, 1905, and some time in the first or possibly second decade of that century, he designed a many-faceted ball to hang from the ceiling of the famous Venice Ballroom. This postcard from 1910 may or may not represent what we are talking about here. The spheres seem to have some kind of reflective material on them, maybe, but they're not covered solidly.

Someone else says that mirror balls were used in Europe, to repel witches. So that would make them considerably older than the 1900s, by a long stretch.

Discoball 3

In 1912, at the Milwaukee Hospital for the Insane, the sun parlor for TB patients had a faceted mirror ball. Further research reveals that multifaceted mirror spheres first hung from nightclub ceilings in the Twenties. A 1927 German film shows one in a Berlin nightspot, and there's one in the 1942 movie Casablanca. A garden created for the Exposition des Arts Decoratifs in Paris, 1925, by Gabriel Guevrekian, featured a rotating mirror ball on which spotlights shone at night. As if that weren't enough, water was poured onto the turning sphere from another statue, so the light also played on the rebounding droplets and spray.

Around 35 years ago, I sent away for something advertised in a magazine: a light show kit. The kit included a prism, some sheets of translucent colored paper, and other odds and ends I forget. But the best part was the "mirror matrix," a piece of heavy fabric about ten inches square, with myriad tiny squares of glass glued to it in rows. You could stand by a window, capture sun rays, and manipulate the mirror matrix, causing tiny trapezoids of light to dance all over the room.

Better yet, you could automate the process. Take a high-intensity reading lamp and mask off part of it, so only a small ray comes out, then put a color over it, and focus it on the turntable of your old-fashioned record player. Arrange the mirror matrix on the turntable with a small object underneath, so it isn't flat. Turn it on, shut off the lights, and Voila! Instant light show! I loved that mirror matrix, and kept it until just a few years ago, and it's about the only thing I regret having given away. That was a lovely little item.

This person has taken advantage of modern technology to make a disco ball from those annoying CDs that arrive in the mail.

Discoball 4

Discoball 2 courtesy of Bruno Girin
Discoball 3 courtesy of Vagamundos
Discoball 4 courtesy of Duruk
Record Player courtesy of Couchia
via this Creative Commons license

Discoball 2

Upside Down Face Painting

noreply@blogger.com (Pat) — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 02:50:00 +0000

You may never have noticed, but looking at someone's face upside down is a bizarrely unsettling experience. Add some paint and some props, and you've got a real freak show.

Face Painting

noreply@blogger.com (Pat) — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 02:43:00 +0000

The ones that aren't me (female) are Dale Hartman (male).

Suzanne

noreply@blogger.com (Pat) — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 02:23:00 +0000

Celebrities I have known, or almost

She was one of the legendary women of the Sixties, and still is, Suzanne Verdal McCallister, who was also at some point Suzanne Vaillancourt. Leonard Cohen wrote a song about her. First recorded by Judy Collins in 1966, it's since been covered by more musicians than any of his others, and remains one of the emblematic love songs of a generation.

In this 1998 interview, Suzanne said she and Leonard never actually were lovers, though there was an opportunity, years after the song was written, and she was the one who said no. As of 2006, Suzanne was living in her car in Venice, California, according to this article, which also says, "Verdal claims that she and Cohen never had sexual relations, contrary to what some interpretations of the song suggest." Leonard Cohen corraborated this in an interview with the BBC in 1994, and probably in many others besides. It's amazing that there's so much interest in whether or not these two particular people got naked together, back in nineteen-sixty-whatever.

Suzanne isn't exactly a celebrity I knew, but some people I knew did. It's one of those "degrees of separation" things. Many years ago in California, my friends Maria and Luke lived in an outlying community attached to Los Angeles. About five years before I met them, Suzanne had stayed with them for a while, and was the only person their cat ever attacked without provocation. She was originally from Paris, and had once driven over a cliff and landed, still in the car, upside down in a tree. She was still driving the same car when Maria and Luke knew her. She's said to have turned her room into a sort of Turkish harem/circus funhouse - velvet fabric, beautiful art objects that had been given her by lovers, and many ornate antique mirrors, all cracked and shattered into facets.

At that time Suzanne was around 42, but Maria swears she could look 12 years old at will. She had milk in her breasts, and was wet-nurse for Allen Ginsberg's boyfriend, who was involved in a therapeutic mode that must have included rebirthing and then some. They say she liked to shock people by peeling her clothing up or down, and squirting milk at them. She would also show anybody the tattoo located just above her pubic hair, which originally represented the name CARL, and later on was changed to CARE.

Suzanne told her hosts that she'd known Jim Morrison (presumably when he and the other Doors lived all together in Venice house). They say she picked up Charles Manson hitchhiking in Topanga or thereabouts, and later met him at a party at Beach Boy Dennis Wilson's, and took him home and balled him. When she told Manson she couldn't have any more children, he asked her "Do you want me to give you a baby?" To humor him, she said yes. The next day Leslie Van Houten showed up at her place, with some of Charlie's other girls. They gave her a baby boy and said she could keep him, on one condition: that she give him a blow job every morning. To which she said, "No thanks."

Suzanne told Luke and Maria about her friendship with actor Bobby Driscoll, who was in Song of the South, Treasure Island, and a lot of other Disney movies. As a grown-up, he became a junkie, and corresponded with Suzanne from prison. She made a collage of his letters, and her other collages hung all over the house. She taught her collage technique to Maria, who was pregnant at the time, and the two women spent some quality time doing this art form. She moved on before Maria's child was born, but came back the day he was brought home from the hospital, just to see him. And that was their last meeting.

I'm not sure which of the collages shown here were the work of Suzanne, and which were done by Maria. You can see them much bigger by clicking on them. I did used to own an object made by Suzanne, a piece of 4x4 wood, standing on end, about a foot high, that had been stained, then collaged and varnished. When a used bookstore owner in Madison, Wisconsin bought my painting of Leonard Cohen, I knew he was the right person to pass the Suzanne artifact on to, because he would cherish it. I thought there was a photo of the object, somewhere in my stuff, but apparently not.

Picture of Suzanne on TV, courtesy of Sheila Steele via this Creative Commons license

Related: Leonard Cohen at Red Rocks 2009

One Life-Goal Accomplished

noreply@blogger.com (Pat) — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 23:45:00 +0000

When I was a kid, this illustration by Garth Williams, from the Giant Golden Book of Elves and Fairies, captured my imagination. I wanted to live in a cool place like this some day.

It actually came true, in a basement apartment that had the same ambiance as the elves' root house. The ducts that ran along the ceiling were the tree roots. It was peacefully dim, and a whole lot of creative work got done. (click on the picture to see it bigger.)

4 Cartoons

noreply@blogger.com (Pat) — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 00:45:00 +0000

Crafty Christmas Tree Ornaments

noreply@blogger.com (Pat) — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 01:34:00 +0000

It's hard to believe, but a lot of these Christmas tree ornaments sold at a co-op gallery, and I gave others for gifts. The thing is, I had a lousy camera and knew nothing about taking pictures. The other thing is, this is a great cheap craft that comes out looking pretty good. You might already have fabric scraps, paints, glue, and canceled postage stamps with Christmas designs. Styrofoam balls, sequins, beads, trim, and pins need to be bought, and caches of these items can often be found at yard sales. The loops to hang them from, I got them at the hardware store, probably for cheaper than craft-store prices.

One lucky find, at a fabric store, was a long strip of gauzy, almost transparent material with peace signs embroidered on it in white. When cut up, it fit perfectly with 4 peace signs per each ornament. I added colored embroidery before fastening the strip around the ornament.

What They Said About Creativity

noreply@blogger.com (Pat) — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 06:30:00 +0000

Here’s the thing about this collection of quotations: it was compiled with very little search engine involvement. Some of these great sayings, by an incredible range of people, can’t even be found anywhere else online! This is because most of the quotations were collected over many years, starting long before there even was an “online.” And they were mostly collected the old-fashioned way, i.e. hand copied from the pages of books, or torn from magazines.

You can tell the collection is made with maximum human intervention. In the quotations about creativity, not all of them contain the keyword “creativity.” Yet, that is what they are about.

The creativity quotations, several pages of them, are at Virtual Venice.

Rama of Hollywood: Frederick Lenz

noreply@blogger.com (Pat) — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 20:47:00 +0000

In June of 1983, a musician friend found (probably in the Recycler) a $6000 synthesizer for $2000. He went to Malibu and bought it. Thus begins another case in the annals of Celebrities I Have Known; or, in some cases, not quite known. Actually, the connection is very tenuous.

The seller of the marvelous electronic music machine was the guru known as Rama, who had bought it to make meditation tapes, and then changed his mind. At least, that was what I heard at the time.
Yet Zazen, the ensemble that Rama put together, released their first album in 1984. So he must have changed his mind back again in a hurry, or maybe he found an even more wonderful synthesizer, or maybe another musician brought along his own… who know?

Perhaps intrigued by that incident, Dale Hartman and I went to a theatre somewhere in LA for an introductory lecture by Rama, a.k.a. Frederick P. Lenz III. He was a handsome, Shirley-Temple-haired young man with, as I remember the occasion, some interesting ideas. The take-away literature was enclosed in two different folders, one with a gorgeous aerial photo of metro Los Angeles at dawn, a folder in which I still store papers (see picture.) The other featured an equally opulent shot of the city by night. It’s still around here somewhere too.

So yesterday, curious about what he’s been up to all these years, I looked up Rama. As it turns out, he’s been dead since 1998. I hesitate to use the word “facts” in connection with information gleaned from the Internet. But certain things have been said about the sordid circumstances of this suicide by a Buddhist who lived in a $1 million (or perhaps $2 million or $4 million) piece of Long Island real estate. (See what I mean about the Internet?)

Roughly, here’s what happened:

Brinn (or Brynn) Lacey was staying with Rama. I don’t know why their ages matter, but people seem to care about that, so she was 37 (or 33) and he was 48. On April 11 they both took a lot of pills. Maybe Valium, maybe phenobarital. One source says Rama took 150 tablets and Lacey took 50. Rama wore a suit and tie, and he, or someone, secured around his neck the cloth collar of his favorite dog, complete with rabies vaccination tag. (He had also fed fatal doses to the dogs.) For some reason, he and Lacey went out to the dock, and Rama fell in the water.

On the 13th, a law enforcement officer passing Rama’s house noticed the night lights on in the daytime, stopped to investigate, walked in through the unlocked front door, located a caretaker, and then found Lacey, who was described as “incoherent.” At some point, however, she conveyed the information that Lenz had drowned. Divers found the body in Conscience Bay, 60 feet from shore, in 20 feet of water.

Here are some of the things said of Rama: Phi Beta Kappa; Magna Cum Laude; made his rent in grad school as a builder of dulcimers. Listed his previous incarnations on his resume’. It is also said that, contrary to the teachings of many religions and even some brands of Buddhism, he emphasized that women could be enlightened too. So enlightened, in fact, that according to Wikipedia,

In 1998, one of Lenz' female students founded Funwomen.com, a softcore website with photos of many beautiful topless and nude women students of Lenz.

This site apparently still exists in some kind of archival form.

A former adherent to the Rama philosophy says the guru was very fond of birds, which he regarded both as power symbols and as spiritual beings in their own right. In 1979, he is said to have bought 14 macaws. This same man says that in 1984, he helped his guru to navigate a bad acid experience by telling him a story about a bird. The Freedom of Mind website offers an in-depth exploration of the legal battle over Rama’s estate, which was claimed by the Audubon Society. Some kind of accommodation was eventually reached, it seems.

Rama taught that it’s much easier to explore the spiritual realms when the needs of the material world have been taken care of, and there’s nothing wrong with wealth. Unlike many other gurus, he actually had a program through which people willing to do the work and follow his plan could become very well paid computer consultants. One follower went on to produce the film What the Bleep Do We Know? which appears to have found its audience.

Against critics of Lenz’s emphasis on money, there are two main arguments: he held a lot of free and reduced-rate classes, which someone solely interested in money wouldn’t do; and he washed out hundreds of prospective devotees who just didn’t seem like Rama material, whereas the truly greed-motivated guru will take whatever he can get from anybody. According to Rama, what matters is not how much stuff you have, but how non-attached you are to the stuff.

In holy-man mode, Rama could levitate, heal, teleport, shape-shift, project rays of light from his hands, and control the weather. Telling followers that he "wielded the power to create and demolish the universes," he also predicted that his enemies would either get cancer or be hit by cars.

So, why did a guy who had everything, kill himself? According to one of his security staff, the guru was looking at endless lawsuits from families of disenchanted followers, and the depression overwhelmed him. Why didn’t he just zap these troublesome pests with cancer or have them hit by cars? We don’t know. Maybe because he didn’t believe in violence, and felt that removing himself from the scene was the best karmic career move. So he intended suicide by drugs, but accidentally accomplished it by drowning. Or maybe it was always his plan to do both, just to make sure. Or maybe…. There’s a screenplay in this, and I’m sure somebody has already written it.

RELATED: great article by David Diamond in Wired
Rama’s own website

I'd Be a Rotten Belly

noreply@blogger.com (Pat) — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 01:02:00 +0000

Not long ago I wrote about a great interview with Danforth Prince, where he was asked what role he would fill in a tribal society. He said he would be a shaman, and explained why.

Naturally, that got me thinking about the tribal role I settled on, some time ago. Among the Cheyenne and other Plains Indians, some individuals were directed by visions from the Thunder Beings to be...different. Membership in the Rotten Belly Society was a cultural safety valve, allowing non-conformists to exist without being outcasts and exiles.

Like Younger Bear in Little Big Man, the contrary people would sleep on bare ground, abstain from sex, sit backwards on a horse, make noise during quiet ceremonies and so on - teaching the children by negative example.

Not that it’s an exact analogy, but in our day and age, artists seem to fill the spaces allotted to members of the Rotten Belly Society. They certainly are contrary – caring more about other values than money and success, for example. They will sit on bare ground or do whatever else is necessary to complete a creative mission. The more militant artists will certainly make noise during quiet ceremonies, or for that matter, put a banana cream pie in the face of a dignitary. These days, they may show their contrariness by having an extreme amount of sex (although abstemiousness is not unknown.) And they are definitely directed by visions from the Thunder Beings, an assortment of creatures that may be known as the Muse, the Lady, or any number of other titles.

And I'm not sure the art life is a negative example.

RELATED: Danforth, Prince of Blood Moon

More Celebrities I Have Known

noreply@blogger.com (Pat) — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 07:51:00 +0000

Well.... have known or at least been in the same room with....

Probably the most intense celebrity encounter I ever had was with Mary Miles Minter, a star of silent movies, whose career had ended in scandal way back in the twenties when director William Desmond Taylor was murdered. He was fifty and dating Mabel Normand, but 22-year-old Mary's monogrammed pink nightie and a love letter on her monogrammed pink stationery were found in Taylor's bungalow. Apparently he had also been seeing Mary's mother. Was it the sweet-faced ingenue who killed the famous director, or her jealous mom? Nothing was ever proven, but MMM's career was in the toilet. You can read all about the sordid case in Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon. The movie Whatever Happened to Baby Jane was loosely based on Minter's remaining years, with a few details changed to protect the guilty.

(In the same room with Robert Redford, many years ago…when this was written:)
I went to a seminar put on by LA Course Network at the Market Street studio. Dudley Moore rents an office in the building. The Natural occupies several offices for post-production work. Randy Newman has moved a grand piano into Tony Bill's apartment, to work on the score. The program was in the screening room. Around 9:00 three men walked past the door on their way out for the day. One of them was Robert Redford and he said, "Hi folks."

In the same room with…… Liv Ullman, Jerry Brown, at a studio screening.

Somewhere back in the late 1970s or early ‘80s I briefly met Ron Rifkin, who played the district attorney in LA Confidential, as well as about a million other movie and TV roles. People I knew who’d met him before said he was real nice, and they were right.

Gary Shusett, founder of Sherwood Oaks Experimental College is one of the people I feel blessed to have met. Though not a celebrity in sense of having a famous name, he’s been influential and inspirational to hundreds, probably thousands, of people in the film industry. This brilliant innovator is one of my top-level heroes. In April of 1982, Gary visited me in Venice and asked a question I love being asked – “What are your ten favorite movies?” At the time, two of them were Picnic at Hanging Rock and The Last Wave. Gary said that when director Peter Weir spoke at Sherwood Oaks, they went out afterward to the Magic Castle. He also talked about some of his brother Ron Shusett’s experiences as producer of Alien.

(Not actually met, but felt eminently satisfied by just seeing….)
October 1980 - Wednesday evening we took a ride down to Papa Bach's book store where Tom Robbins was autographing copies of Still Life With Woodpecker. They had him seated at a card table in the alley alongside the store. A band on a flatbed truck played country music. Scads of people waited outside a roped area. I stood back a way and watched for a few minutes. He wore slacks, sneakers, and an expensive-looking light purple sweater, and has medium length graying hair and a nice smile. I had a look at the man and felt the trip worthwhile.

Emerson Symonds was a member of the American College of Sexologists (really, these are serious professionals) and a pioneer in the training and deployment of sex surrogates as an adjunct to talk therapy and other modalities. We had a lengthy, lively correspondence, and met at least once. He was a true original.

RELATED: Celebrities I Have Known Part 1