SOLSTICE

Yeh that was yesterday and . . . well . . . it’s been awhile . . . remnants of the past have reared it’s dusty head in the form of paintings that I had forgotten or just didn’t know that I had made! Rewind to 1966 . . . a time in space before 1968 . . . just got back from Santa Fe nueva Mexico had been to San Francisco for 6 months and was living in the Mojave desert . . . Antelope valley . . . Lancaster to be specific . . . Don van Vliet’s stomping ground (Captain Beefheart) still thinking I was bound for glory in the “art” world . . . didn’t come to my senses until about 1979 or 1982 . . . then I realized I destined to slavery in the workplace . . . teaching . . . freelancing . . . the day “laborhood” . . . you know standing on the sidewalk waiting for Godot . . . where was I?

Oh yeh . . . paintings . . . “art” . . . more like “zines” . . . sold two recent paintings over the past week . . . and I’ve stepped into the world of the self-published “zines” . . . did the mail-art thing back in the late 1970’s a precursor to the “zine” phenomenon . . . working on three zines one on the “zine” concept comma one about fish and another one on the Owens Valley Paiute language (illustrated – lino blocks) so I’m feeding my need to be two-dimensionally creatively poetic something like that . . . decided to be retro and revive imagery based on the old paintings.

I’m using a few iPad apps to manipulate the old paintings adjust colors etc.

Ciao 4 now . . .

31 October 2022

According to legend . . . like push the notification bell subscribe and the stars will align themselves pointing to the true north as the polarity shifts from positive to negative causing the wormhole to pulse making the portal to Uranus visibly visual . . .

Yeh . . . right !

So another Halloween has come and faded over the horizon . . . and I’m one year older than last year and 150+ people died in Itaewon land of the Morning Calm (South Korea) “celebrating” . . . in Shibuya Japanese po-leece had everything under control . . . blowing whistles waving blinking neon batons and shouting “something something kudasai” through their electronic magic megaphones . . . Japan . . . Land of the Rising Sun and cosplay anime make believe furry animals and intrusive ketoh gaijin.

Oh yeh . . . Burning Man officially returned to the Black Rock Desert . . . I heard on the YouTube grapevine that there was a NINE hour dust storm this year and I thought, “we have that same shit here in OV . . . like 3-4 times . . . during the summer!”

Burning Man is now a 301c non-profit global tax dodge.

Another late breaking item . . . to celebrate my day of birth I visited Manzanar National Historic Site and hobbled out to renew my acquaintance with the pear orchards and reminisce about days gone by . . . 20 some years . . . stopped off at sanshi-en (Block 34 Mess Hall Garden) transporting back in time through the minds eye . . . feeding the koi . . . truly like Simonides of Ceos recalling the past.

My oldest daughter asked me what I wanted for my my birthday . . . I said, “idk . . .” and after 2 or three day of serious thought I sent her a text in reply, “I want to go to Manzanar!”

And now I’m working the final draft of 36 Views of Manzanar . . . a collection of prose and poems about my time working as an interpretive guide at Manzanar National Historic Site.

I started writing the collection in August 1997 . . . it was finished in November that same year . . . so WTF happened you might ask . . . dunno . . . sloth doldrums . . . sidetracked.

Lot of old men doing things that they put off . . . YouTube writing books etcetera etcetera etcetera . . . got time on my hands . . . time to get them hands out of my pockets get’er done . . .

G&G

G & G

If yer of a mind

to grunt & grind

keep this in mind

there’s mice in the defibulator

that damn dog is on the fone.

Damn dog is on the fone

the banker wont be home.

Screen is off the window

if you’ve a mind to roam . . .

screen is off the window

‘n I’m so alone.

Dog’s still on the fone

it’s wrong to be alone

when night’s so damn long.

Streetlight in the moonlight

boop boop a doop

sittin’ on the stoop

in the starlit night

‘til the cows come home.

Hey,

diddle just a little

cat got his fiddle

in the middle of the street

tryin’ to make the ends meet.

So ask yer mother for fifty cents

I can jump the fence

‘an watch elephants land on the moon.

Ram-a-lam

ram-a-lam

bang that spoon

last day of joon . . .

I know wat I’m doin’.

Special thanks to Samuel Andreyev for seeing me nodding off.

Cry Song

Let’s get personal . . . I’m not what is too often referred to as a “Native American” . . . Oh . . . yeh I’ve got the brown hued skin and my hair used to be black but I am a member of the Big Pine Band of Owens Valley Paiute . . . not Oglala Souix or “Apache” or Dineh . .. . I added the “h” cos you pronounce “Dine” dih-neh . . .

Anyway this morning at approximately 10:00 hours I witnessed my mother’s burial. The “deacon” delivered the catho-holic/Christian Jesus rose Lazarus from the dead rhetoric and a black & yellow swallow-tail butterfly flew over the casket . . . it was just checking out the flowers nothing symbolic or significant . . . just a butterfly doing butterfly thangs.

When my dad’s mother was being interred we were standing off to one side . . . and he said, “. . . that little rain yesterday washed away her footprints . . .”

Oh shit! . . . and yesterday there was thunder and it was cloudy and rained a little . . . just enough to stipple the dirt erasing tire tracks footprints etcetera . . . you draw your own conclusions.

I’m an “old” Indian . . . not just chronologically but culturally . . . a traditionalist . . . one rooted in the material and cultural practices of the Owens Valley Paiute lifeway before Cristoforo Columbo and the Euro-American intrusion . . .

When I knew my mother was dying I began singing a “cry” song . . . as my cuhnu said, “. . . a song over death . . .” in this case a pending death . . . I sang a short version of the cry song over her casket after it had been lowered into the grave symbolically finalizing the funerary aspect of her death.

I shook hands with relatives and friends . . .

Being of Pima ancestry (akmil o’odam) as well as OVP heritage, the handshake is a Pima funerary custom . . . and I told them (friends & relatives) that I was acknowledging their condolences on behalf of my Pima tribal traditions.

A mantra from the Buddhist Heart Sūtra . . . tadyathā gate gate pāragate pārasaṃgate bodhi svāhā . . . a simple translation is: gone gone gone away gone far away to the other side . . . in essence the cry song says the same thing . . . it’s closure.

Ciao . . .

Saragasso

Well . . . after lounging around corrupting my mind on YouTube watching a multitude of football games I realised I been neglecting the blog . . .

I restarted the paint machine after moh-ping round in a funk mode cos I be feeling like I got no purpose in life . . . sounds like I’ve been reading mucho Vaughn Bode junkwaffel and my minds infected with them lizard critter speech patterns . . . whatever . . .

So . . . my oldest daughter was glimpsing a painting that I was birthing . . . acrylics . . . a medium I hadn’t worked with for like 20 some years . . . and was was like “. . . you should do some stuff (paintings) for Santa Fe.”

Shit! Santa Fe done rose up out of the past like a fucking Phoenix . . .

Anyway she said I could make greeting card sets out the images I’d painted and since she’d sold card sets of my illustrations before yadda yadda yadda . . . and since I was on hands-n-knees desperate for some oasis of salvation I took the bait . . . and I been slaving away cutting stencils buying paints Posca pens some new bructhes stretching the canvas and the stuff that all good artist do . . .

I was just thinking that I would post something on Instagram (@bookindian) . . . you know like photos of my works-in-progress etcetera so on & so forth.

What I be painting you ask? Well I guess I have to say that Robert Motherwell’s series “Elegy to the Spanish Republic“ is/was influential as was Philip Guston . . . expressionistic dada style action painting . . . oh yeh . . . I can’t forget the “merz” man Kurt Schwitters . . .

I don’t be no “Bambie” school plains Indian teepee style painter . . . No way! No way! I be depicting myth . . . recounting the hunt . . . like crossing over . . . does that make any sense? Prolly not.

WTF!?

I posted a short video on Instagram (@bookindian) about what I bought at the art supply store today . . . like some Montana paint pens . . . Posca pens . . . reglur penskuls (thank you Popeye the sailor man) and I got so excited that I ordered a 9 can set of Montana Black spray cans with an assortment of 10 different nozzle shapes from Amazon so’s I can get down & dirty . . . yeh . . . I’ll post a few pics of the paintings I be working on . . .

Y’all know wat a “NFT” is? I didn’t until about 11:00 o’clock this morning.

And people just discovering cardboard as a paint surface . . . was teaching that 20+ years ago to elementary school students. LMAO !!

Ciao . . .

Well . . . just sittin’ here thinking watching the sky for what might be a UFO . . . the mothership cloaked in a circular cloud . . . lenticular majesty hovering over this here yamatani . . . eating my oatmeal with diced pears and drinking pruney juice with that marimba from Zappa’s Inca Roads sounding in woody stillness of the ether . . . t.v. white noise masked by electric fan hum of space heater . . . keeping the pending cold snap at bay . . . wondering WHY YouTubers can’t do anything other than review other people’s work or jump on the “trend” wagon . . . posting content shit just cos it be “trendy” . . . you know like . . . like every fucking Tuber got to say crap like “subscribe” and “push the notification bell” . . . WTF?!

Pressure relief valve just popped . . . vented some steam . . .

I feel mo bettah na-ow . . .

Speaking of Patti Smith . . . “Birdland” specifically . . . when I first red the song title on the album notes I thot the song was going to be about Charlie Parker . . . you know jazz bebop sax cat . . . “Bird” . . . OMFG! SURPRISE!! . . . it’s about . . . dream of the mothership . . . William Blake . . . everybody got to believe . . . in something.

Listen . . . Patti Smith’s “Birdland” is out there . . . on the fucking edge . . . dark emotional . . . and the Kate Bush “Cloudbuster” song is just infantile shit musically & storywise relying on visuals (video) telling you wat to think . . . no imagination altho both songs were “inspired” by Peter Reich’s “A Book of Dreams”.

Yeh . . . I red the book . . . and maybe Katie’s fans should give a listen to some Patti Smith . . . or read the “Birdland” lyrics . . . or the goddam book . . . there’s a kindle version.

Gone . . . gone to the other side . . . svaha-ha . . . Heart or Diamond Sutra . . . I forgot which . . . Yo! . . . Heart Sūtra mantra Bubba . . . mentioned it before . . . Gate Gate Paragate Parasamgate Bodhi Svaha . . . “completely gone to the further shore” . . . you can chant this while listening to “Birdland” or Charlie Parker.

Poema

Poema de alba

Ravel’s Bolero. . . solida del sol . . . sunrise . . . it’s like that . . . when I hear the beginning . . . the flute . . .

In the purple light it is born . . . in yellow light it is born . . . it spills white over the dim shoulder of the eastern horizon . . . from the east it comes . . . a pink blush lighting the tips of the mountains . . . then a flood of light slowly filling ravines . . . dry washes . . . creosote forests . . . my closed eyelids flame like the flesh of a blood orange in its light . . . the cadence of the snare drum . . .

Miles Davis . . . trumpet sketching a sun drenched Spanish elegy . . . Picasso standing on the sand of the bullring in the afternoon . . . the finality of the estocada . . . muleta sliding effortlessly between the shoulder blades . . . Dali’s jewel encrusted heart bleeding ruby tears . . . Selena’s ruby ring lost . . .

Ay! mi corazon . . .

El naranjo en flor drifting across the road as I ride . . . Therese . . . la mujer . . . Rowena mi alba . . . in the shadow of las montañas Sangre de cristo . . .

And in my bed I dreamed a dream . . . about her black hair . . . a light breath against my face as I slept . . . alone . . . dreaming . . . in the dark night.

I listen to Ravel’s Bolero often . . . quite often . . . whenever I feel need to clear the darkness away . . . the London Symphony Orchestra, Valery Gergiev conducting (looks like he’s using a toothpick baton) . . . Orchestra Joven de la sinfonica de Galica . . . Vincente Alberola conductor . . . São Paulo Brasil – a flashmob . . . Algemesi, Placa del Mercat Valencia (Spain), where they gather on the tiled floor of the town square and celebrate the French composer.

Influencers

Influencers . . . not the fucking YouTube TikTok Facebook sewage that social media addicts put in the viral “spotlight “ but real influencers . . . not necessarily in order of importance or significance:

Henry Miller Celine Vivaldi (Four Seasons) Nigel Kennedy

Jan Cremer (Jane Mansfield) Sofia Loren Bob Dylan

Robert Rauschenberg (Gemini G.E.L.) Basho

Kim Bong Tae – mentor (Otis-Parsons)

Georgia O’Keefe Alfred Stieglitz Brassai

Randy Sprout – mentor (UCLA)

Fritz Scholder – sempai mentor (IAIA).

Michael Martin Murphy (Buffalo Bill “Wildfire” cowboy) Leadbelly Yusef Lateef Miles Davis

MMOG (muse) Marilyn Monroe Ezra Pound

David Zack (SFAI & L.A.) Johnathon Spaulding (L.A.) Ansel Adams

Brigitte Bardot Jimmie Rodgers Gene Autry Dale Evens

D.H. Lawrence (the Plumed Serpent) Malcom Lowery (Under the Volcano)

Ken Marcus Barbara Pearlman-Ross – mentor/muse (UCLA – photography)

Jerry Burchfield (Laguna Beach)

Russell Kaldenberg Helen Wells Federico Garcia Lorca y Lucientes

Therese – the unfaithful Banker’s. Wife (1st muse)

Anita Ekberg Pablo Picasso Salvador Dali Juan Miro

Robert Motherwell (the Spanish Elegy series) Larry Poons Andy Warhol

Charles Bukowski P. Maldonado (muse GF)

Jan Peevy Cindy W. (GFs)

Un Chien d’Andalou Man Ray (solarization-photography)

Kurt Schwitters (merz – collage) James Joyce (Ulysses)

I Ching – The Book of Changes

Miyamoto Musashi (Book of 5 Rings) Katsushika Hokusai

Edward Weston (the daybooks) Tina Modotti

Julian H. Steward (Owens Valley Paiute Ethnography) Claude Levi-Strauss (briqolage/briqoleur) – archeologists.

Lawrence Durrell (The Black Book)

Mark Rothko Minor White (photographer) Rembrandt

Fellini (8 &1/2 La Dolce Vita)

Rashomon Gojira (Godzilla) Seven Samurai

Spain Rodrigues – Trashman

R. Crumb Rick Griffin Ukiyoe (woodblock prints)

dada (Tristan Tzara Hugo Ball)

Francisco Goya (Los Caprichos)

William S . Burroughs (Naked Lunch the Exploding Ticket) Brion Gysin

Willem de Kooning (women paintings) Roy Lichtenstein

Glenn Miller (Big Band).

Thelonius Monk

John Handy – Spanish Lady

Lawrence Ferlinghetti (City Lightly) Gregory Nunzio Corso (mafioso)

Moscoso (underground comix) Lina Wertmuller (Seven Beauties Swept Away)

Woman in the Dunes In the Realm of the Senses

Robert Heinlein Pol Andersen Frank Herbert (sci-fi)

William Conrad(Heart of Darkness)

Frank Lloyd Wright – Falling Waters (Oak Park)

Kenneth Patchen e.e. cummings

Claes Oldenburg – Gemini G.E.L.

Ed Keinholz – Backseat Dodge ‘38.

Aaron Copeland

Morton Gould (Gould Ballet Music) Anna Andrade Hector Villa-Lobos

Toshiro Mifune Akira Kurosawa

Dirty Harry

Juanita Slusher/Candy Barr

Marilyn Chambers (Ivory Snow Green Door SF porn queen)

Hugh Hefner – Pepsi naked bunnies Chicago L.A. nuff said.

Sonny Rollins

Hunter S. Thompson (the Curse of Lono) suicidal in Colorado.

Lenny Bruce (How Talk Dirty and Influence People)

Toyo Miytake (photographer – Manzanar) Bill Michael Billy Clewlow

Linda Lovelace

Blaise Cendrars – la prose du transsiberien

Sharona and the girls from Cleveland.

Mostly artistas poeta/writers composer/musicians . . . some I knew personally and some known only as having heard or read their stuff . . . crap! I almost forgot to mention Traci Lords . . . 1000 Fires.

Watcha thinks . . . anyone you recognized? Yes/no . . . maybe?

Looks a TOC fer an autobiographical mem-wah don’t it . . . OMFG!!

Caddy

Well I was just cruzing along enjoying the scenery feeling good about everything . . . and then I hit a speed bump! a bloody anomaly . . . had to grab the steering device with both my hands and pull to the side of the road . . . metaphorically of course.

Kinda reminded me of this meteorologist fella back in the 1950’s . . . developed a computer program to “predict” the weather . . . well it was doing a fairly decent job until there was a power failure or something and it became necessary to reboot the program . . .

Back in the old days punch cards were used to input the program data . . . WTF?! you say!

Yep! . . . that’s right boyo . . . gotta load them cards . . . by hand . . . analog.

O.k. mission accomplished . . . let the program roll!

It was going along smoothly and then . . . and then something started happening . . . little anomalies began popping up . . . oh shit! He ran a printout of the program and started troubleshooting . . . somewhere he found why he lost predictability . . . couple of the cards were out of sequence!

Well . . . here’s the part no comprende . . . seems he was using some code with six numbers . . . six numeric places on the right side of the decimal point and I read that he had to re-enter the program manually . . . using a keyboard and when he did so he had entered only 5 digits instead of six past the decimal point on one line . . . whatever.

After sleeping on my new dilemma and after dragging my body out of bed figuratively speaking . . . I was hauling the trash bin out to the street and wandering around taking pictures of the monsoon clouds . . . coming to grips with some shit I’d read the night before.

I had to edit a previous post . . . “The King” . . . and in so doing I stumbled on an interview with Mr. Sulu . . .

I realize . . . or . . . I know that when the people of Japanese ancestry were snatched and put in the internment camps they lost everything . . . homes businesses farms fishing boats . . . I know all that!

They got the shitty end of the stick and then when the camps were closed . . . a bus ticket to some “trailerhood” and 25 bucks.

Thank you FDR . . . the Boy Scouts weren’t prepared.

U.S. government tried to right the wrong years later offering the former internees $$$ ($20,000) . . . did the same thing with the Indian tribes for the lands that had been “appropriated” for the fucking settlers miners etc. . . the white folks.

I got a reparation check for $200 the first time and sometime later one for $2500 . . . appeasement.

Stop yer whining Mr. Sulu . . . Amazon’s not making any “entertational” series about indigenous tribes that I know of . . . and there ain’t no fake tear in my eye.

11 July 1863 . . . forced removal of the Owens Valley Paiute . . . marched . . . walked to Fort Tejon . . . no Hupmobile bus ride.

About this same time the Navajo made their “Long Walk” to Bosque Redondo down in west Texas from the New Mexico/Arizona territories . . . and the republican Lincoln was freeing the slaves . . . called it the “Emancipation Proclamation”.

Here’s the irony . . . it wasn’t until 1924 that the indigenous tribal people of North America were “given the right” to become citizens of the United States of America . . . the American Indian Citizenship Act . . .

Hmmm . . . about 60 years after abolishing slavery . . . freeing the black man . . . and we’re still confined on “reservations” . . . wards of the federal government . . . are you listening Mr. Sulu?

That was the “bump in the road” . . . the glitch . . . the anomaly.

Wes Studi won’t be in any movie singing my song . . . oh yeh . . . Geronimo’s Caddy was no Caddy . . . it was a Hupmobile . . . sorry Michael.

Y’all have a good day . . . hup hup hup . . .

Welcome

Begin at the beginning . . . where it all started . . . tell the whole story.

Well . . . it was after 1982 . . . I know that much, because it was after my wife gave me the boot . . . actually I gave her the boot cos she was . . . doing me wrong as they used to say.

No worries . . . I was taking some “art” classes at Otis-Parsons in Los Angeles and my printmaking instructor had arranged for a student exhibition in the school gallery space.

The instructor says, “. . . so Mr. Richard, what are you going to do?”

At that point in time I really hadn’t done much of anything in the class . . . but I had been working on a project . . . an installation piece . . . 7 panels each mounted on thin sheets of wood I’d salvaged from the bottoms of some old kitchen drawers I had found in the trash . . . trash man . . .

The imagery was a combination of color Xerox transparencies, etched zinc plate imagery, sumi ink on rice paper and offset lithographic text . . . Rauschenberg in miniature.

I called it “7 Night Journey“ . . . alluding to Bashô’s “Journey to a Far Province.”

Ah ha! . . . Bashō . . . the plot thickens.

So I was already seeing my life as some sort of journey . . . I think because I’d read a lot of Japanese literature . . . seems the Japanese people during the Edo period had a thing for traveling.

If you were rich you rode in one of those little boxes slung on a pole . . . or maybe you rode a horse . . . and if you be a common man you fucking walked carrying your own luggage on yer back while wearing straw personnel carriers . . . that was before LPCs . . . y’all know what those are.

I still have two of the original panels and several other unmourned components of the installation . . . mementos from the gone world.

This morning while out and about I got to participate in the long awaited monsoon phenomena . . . rain . . . it actually rained while I was driving home!

The sun was shining . . . peeking under a layer of gray clouds . . . I could smell the pending rain . . . then little flecks of moisture like bugs on the wind screen . . . the asphalt was showing dark down the road like it was wet and then . . . then I drove into the rain storm like stepping into a shower stall with the water running . . . the smell of rain . . . the dry road . . . wet road . . . monsoon downpour.

20% chance of precipitation the Weather Channel said . . . doppler radar this doppler radar that . . . like I said . . . if it’s gonna rain it rains . . . don’t matter what the weatherman says.

Bob Dylan said it too . . . thing about the weatherman . . . don’t need one to know which way the wind blows.

Rewind rewind . . . Japanese . . . travel . . . one night in L.A. after finishing a photo assignment for a Japanese painter we were sitting drinking sake eating rice and medaka . . . 3 sheets to the wind . . . a small forest of sake bottles on the table . . . Hideo pushed a few of the bottles aside creating a clearing . . . a path . . . he was looking at me intently . . . and he said, pointing a finger into the air, “I know who you are . . . you are old Japanese come back as Paiute Indian!” . . . he laughed and poured more sake into my cup.

I am haunted by the past . . . nothing vengeful . . . just my memories . . . my ghosts.

One of my tour participants at MNHS said I was like Simonides . . . a poet in Cicero’s time . . . me . . . recalling the locations of a vanished place and the people who had been there . . . WTF?! . . . at the time I didn’t know Simonides from Simonize car wax . . . now . . . after finding out what I did about the art of memory . . . I get it . . . Je comprends . . .

The Pima Indians in Arizona use a mnemonic device to recall significant historic events . . . a notched stick . . . the person recalls events by running a finger nail over the notches retelling the events as he feels each indentation . . . my notches are geographic locations on a topological map situated on the convoluted ridges of my brain . . . ars memoriae.

BTW . . . I’m more Pima in terms of blood quantum than Owens Valley Paiute . . . but I’m a duly enrolled member of the Big Pine Band of Owens Valley Paiute . . . I was raised in eastern California far from Arizona.

Back to work . . .