earth day

Sai Baba died today.

TODAY!

the reason this fact is so notable
besides, of course, all the regular reasons,
is that i first heard about him, even saw a film about him,
40 years ago... today.

i had to double- and triple-check to believe my eyes --
that the one time i look him up is the day he dies.

•

but i get ahead of myself.

•

If you're going to San Francisco
Be sure to wear
some flowers in your hair
If you're going to San Francisco
You're gonna meet
some gentle people there





For those who come
to San Francisco
Summertime
will be a love-in there
In the streets of San Francisco
Gentle people
with flowers in their hair




All across the nation
such a strange vibration
People in motion
There's a whole generation
with a new explanation
People in motion people in motion





For those who come to San Francisco
Be sure to wear
some flowers in your hair
If you come to San Francisco
Summertime will be a love-in there



If you come to San Francisco
Summertime will be a love-in there

•

and so i went. the first commune i lived in was called "free city," wherein among many other things, a young man named David Lloyd-Jones transcribed, printed up, and circulated a speech by R. Buckminster Fuller. he, like so many others of that moment, could see further into the future than many republicans can see to this day. he could see that it was a world of abundance, and that it could be made to work for every soul on the planet.

•

skip to one day early in 1971, i began to hear commercials on the then very cool KSAN, fm radio. they were for this thing called, "World Game," a series of workshops, and classes and discussions, all about ways to make the world work, a brainchild of R. Buckminster Fuller.

and it was indeed very cool. to simplify to the extreme, Bucky had worked it out so that if all nations would cooperate (yeah, right) in allowing there to be an international grid, there would be more available energy for each person on the planet to have what americans have today.

the sources of all this power: tidal, solar, and wind. it's all there; it's just not hooked up right.

to the left is his Dymaxion Map (or Globe). Bucky believed that to view the planet from this perspective, not only was it more accurate, but it also relieved the viewer from having to try to figure out what's up. for, of course, there is no up, or down for that matter. only in and out.

very quickly we students formed a gang, and did all and sundry things. we dropped acid and had profound discussions out on the grass. we had massive thanksgiving dinners in a Russian Hill mansion someone had donated for the duration.

we went to the Institute of Ability where we attended Enlightenment Intensives. we had dinner at the Swami Satchidananda ashram which was right up the hill from where i lived.

and, forty years ago today, we went to University of California at Davis's first Whole Earth Festival, held on the very first Earth Day. it was concerts, and dancers, and craftspeople and lectures and yoga and huge "Om" circles and so much more.

there was the woman who had come down from the mountains, who walked around all day with a green parrot on her shoulder, wearing nothing but a green crocheted bra-top, and a large piece of yellow satin wrapped around her hips.

she sold earrings she had made with feathers from her parrot; i still have one green feather earring today.

•

and there was the Fairfax Street Choir (hear them here).
singing full-of-light songs and dancing, even tap dancing; how heavenly.

and, in a classroom, in a building a bit away from the rest,
we saw a movie about Sai Baba.

Belle Jardiniere • (the calendars)

EUGENE GRASSET
& DECORATIVE ART IN FRANCE

by OCTAVE UZANNE

November, 1894.

Among those most deserving to be signalled out in an essay of some length is Eugene Grasset, whose recent exhibition of work displayed so rare a talent as to assign him a place in the first rank of those who strive to become innovators, and to point out the road for others to follow. Aesthetes and those who look about for original work were last summer united in a common enthusiasm at the Exposition de Cent, organised by a young school of artists and literary men whose acknowledged mouthpiece is the journal La Plume.

When confronted with the extraordinary versatility of his style, the infinite contrast in his conceptions, applied as they are to everything that can contribute to the decoration of our houses, everyone ignorant of the existence of this modest and painstaking artist was struck with astonishment. It is easy to understand their amazement, because Grasset proved that he was endowed with talent in the triple character of scholarly illustrator, skilled architect, fantaisiste and brilliant decorator, one who was quite as clever at the composition of cartoons for tapestry as at realising the combinations possible in textile fabrics, lace and furniture.

Grasset revealed himself to us as an illustrator about ten or twelve years ago, when there appeared one of the most beautiful books of the century, It is here, among these pages, at once so elaborate and so lucid, that one can appreciate the apostle of new conceits, new styles of ornament, never before given to the world, but dug out of some decorative botany that is still unpublished.

Although at first sight one would think that Grasset has consciously bowed to the influence of the Japanese, the Hindoos, or Persians, and assimilated in a vague way some of their methods, one has only to exercise one's criticism with greater perspicacity and observation to realise the mistake based on first impressions. It is from the study of rural life, from the grouping together of oft-repeated sketches, from the soundness of his taste mellowed by work, and from the contemplation of nature, that he has distilled the best part of his originality and talent.

A slower moment was a golden opportunity to thoroughly master different styles. It was then that he realised how his talent should be exercised; in the evenings he attended an academy for a course of drawing ; he familiarised himself with Japanese art, dipping into the encyclopaedias of Hokusai and Utamaro, or the works of the master-illustrators of Nippon; in studies and conscientious observation, that nature is the great teacher, the true educator, but that the mission of the true artist is less to copy than to express and interpret her; to metamorphose her by making her pass, so to speak, through the alembic of an individual temperament.

His insight was, as it were, doubled by his desire to master everything and know everything. His predilection for the occult in respect to apparitions equals that of a Japanese artist, for he recognises the element of terror in the phantasmagoria of hallucination ; and imparts a frisson nouveau (new shudder) into compositions of this kind. And I believe that in illustrating a book from the unscientific point of view, Grasset would give us a something unusually creepy.

For several years past this great artist, with the deliberation of a thinker and philosopher, has lived a retired life in Paris in his studio in the Boulevard Arago, indifferent to all flattery. There, with his beautiful work about him, I have learned to know and honour him, and have held him in the greatest affection. His life is solitary, for solitude only admits of any real work, engendered gradually, and matured in an environment of that silence so favourable to pregnant minds. Impervious to the theories of painter-cliques, or of men of the day, careless of fashion, without vanity of any kind, he seems to hide his personality with as much care as he does his works, with which he never allows himself to be satisfied. In spite of his reputation as a craftsman not often pressed to hand over a design "copyright free," Grasset has thrown into all branches of industrial art the spirit of a commanding personality.

His cartoons for stained glass are, numerically speaking, quite extra- ordinary; his posters, his chromo-typography, his catalogue and book- covers, his tapestry panels, his designs for furniture of all sorts, his architectural work, his lithography, his innumerable decorative works, might furnish material for an iconography far more important than we would think. Among his principal achievements, his glass ware and stained windows do him the greatest credit, and those aerial transparent paint pervading his compositions, but to his care in selecting beautiful iridescent glass, shimmering, striated and rich in tone, all of which he knows how to arrange.

This portion of his work is assuredly the most beautiful and elevated, because, as M. Arsene Alexandre, a discerning critic, has judiciously remarked, "Grasset, without shirking the strict limitations of the craft, on the contrary revels in them, and manages in these stained windows, by the means of the lead lines, to produce perfectly legitimate surprises due to broad original experiments, and to his steeping himself with colour and light. Moreover, like every true decorator, he has taken care to appreciate when and how Nature's colours lend themselves to transposition in the harmony of a composition. What matter if a sky be green, trees red, coursers and animals of mystic forest blue, running water a yellow sulphur tint, if the general effect of the fresco is enveloped in a pleasing atmosphere of gradations, and produces a startling unearthly impression.

Nature is synthetic in her colouring ; she never guarantees more than three tones—the tone of background, the tone of light, the tone of shadow. Such and such a plant, flower, or object only betray their true colour under atmospheric conditions when the light strikes from above, as is usually the case. To endow them with artificial colour, to transpose the value of backgrounds, shadow, and light should be the supreme achievement of decoration. The masters of all countries and all times have never acted otherwise, and our most celebrated tapestries charm us by the fantastic and agreeable unreality we detect in them.

It is one of Grasset's strong points that he has understood these things, and he has applied his principles with great courage to the execution of his works; for him the search for the beautiful does not cease to be the longed-for goal; he takes lessons from the past, and from exotic decorators new impressions ; but from Nature alone he claims inspiration. In the domineering and banal eclecticism of these days, it is fortunate that our decorative art can still boast a few artists of Grasset's vigorous calibre —artists who enable us not to despair of the future. 1

the calendar is from around 1895

AC-CENT-TCHU-ATE THE POSITIVE

Gather 'round me, everybody
Gather 'round me while I preach some
Feel a sermon comin' on me
The topic will be sin
and that's what I'm ag'in'
Settle back and just sit tight

You've got to accentuate the positive
Eliminate the negative
Latch on to the affirmative
Don't mess with Mister In-Between

You've got to spread joy
up to the maximum
Bring gloom down to the minimum
Have faith or pandemonium's
Liable to walk upon the scene

To illustrate my last remark
Jonah in the whale, Noah in the ark
What did they do
Just when everything looked so dark

Man, they said
we better
Accentuate
the positive
Eliminate
the negative
Latch on to the affirmative
Don't mess with Mister In-Between
No, don't mess with Mister In-Between

please click arrow to listen....via

i found this yesterday and it made me so happy

apple picking

AFTER APPLE-PICKING







My long two- pointed ladder's sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there's a barrel that I didn't fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn't pick upon some bough.

But I am done
with apple-picking now.
Essence of winter sleep
is on the night,
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.


I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight
I got from looking through a pane of glass
I skimmed this morning
from the drinking trough
And held against the world of hoary grass.

It melted, and I let it fall and break.
But I was well
Upon my way to sleep
before it fell,
And I could tell
What form my dreaming was about to take.

Magnified apples appear and disappear,
Stem end and blossom end,
And every fleck of russet showing clear.
My instep arch not only keeps the ache,
It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.

I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.
And I keep hearing from the cellar bin
The rumbling sound
Of load on load of apples coming in.
For I have had too much
Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.

There were ten thousand thousand
fruit to touch,
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.

For all
That struck the earth,
No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,
Went surely to the cider-apple heap
As of no worth.


One can see what will trouble
This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.
Were he not gone,
The woodchuck could say
whether it's like his
Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,
Or just some human sleep.

Robert Frost

the friday quiz

(how often does it happen, the only result that google finds for your search is a jstor article? okay, that happens a lot. but how often do you

suddenly realise that you have that issue of that magazine! from 1993 -- i used to have a subscription -- ! and it doesn't appear to ever have been read! see what doing this blog is making me do: READ MY OWN BOOKS AND MAGAZINES !!!!)

there is one thing that all of the artists featured here have in common.




they started 'japonisme'? you guess. well, that's a great guess as steinlen, grasset, and vallotton were certainly amongst its earliest practitioners.



the missing link, perhaps, between the pre-raph- aelite and the art nouveau movements? well, i can certainly see the connection in styles and subjects.

or perhaps the originators of impres- sionism? well again, yeah; i can certainly see your reasoning.



surrealism? oh come on, yes, i get why you say that, for some of them, easily, but my initial question specified all.



and the drench- ingly, over- whelming beauty of the work, the variety of wonderful interpre- tations of japonisme from these artists, all of them, and more, many more.

click that link and you have your answer. isn't it a fascinating surprise! (or did you guess?!)

sunday, actually

SIXTY

Because in my family
the heart goes first
and hardly anybody makes it
out of his fifties,
I think I'll stay up late with
a few bandits
of my choice and resist good advice.
I'll invent a secret scroll
lost by Egyptians
and reveal its contents:
the directions
to your house,
recipes for forgiveness.
History says my ventricles
are stone alleys,
my heart itself a city with a terrorist
holed up in the mayor's office.
I'm in the mood to punctuate

only with that maker of promises, the colon:
next, next, next, its says, God bless it.
As García Lorca may have written:
some people
forget to live as if a great arsenic lobster
could fall on their heads at any moment.
My sixtieth birthday is tomorrow.
Come, play poker with me,
I want to be taken to the cleaners.
I've had it with all stingy-hearted
sons of bitches.
A heart is to be spent.
As for me, I'll share
my mulcher with anyone
who needs to mulch.

It's time to give up
the search for the invisible.
On the best of days there's little more
than the faintest intimations.
The millennium,
my dear, is sure to disappoint us.
I think I'll keep on describing things
to ensure that they really happened.

Stephen Dunn

song

SONG

You are as gold
as the half-ripe grain
that merges to gold again,
as white as

the white rain
that beats through
the half-opened flowers
of the great flower tufts
thick on the black limbs
of an Illyrian apple bough.

Can honey distill such fragrance
As your bright hair--
For your face is as fair as rain,
yet as rain that lies clear
on white honey-comb,
lends radiance to the white wax,
so your hair on your brow
casts light for a shadow.

h. d.