Bo's Request (an Art Thread)

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Been writing cover letters for job applications (two submitted yesterday). More of a movement artist than a wordsmith but, to get things started, here is something I wrote for Migrant, my section in Train.

Where is home?

Moved twelve times in the last 16 years. The transient in transit. Pierce Transit runs through it. Before I came here I was in Rush Limbaugh’s home town before I was surrounded by corn fed Norwegian bred Lutherans singing praise in perfect four part harmony to that Home on the Plain before I’m taken Home – Praise Jesus. I grew up in Iowa, Little Town on the Prairie an island afloat in the ocean of corn. Lived in SoCal, in the Desert where golf and plastic surgery reigns, might have the grit to stay in rainy Tacoma, but, I always say I’m from San Francisco - though I rarely visit anymore.

Home, where is home?

Home is where you are. Correction, home is where you and the two cats are.

What is home? That safe place. That place with love. I love that old car, it always brought me home. The ’75 Westphalia could be home. Or rather, the place that used to be home. Too old, too unreliable to be trusted anymore. Baling wire and duct tape. Just like the U-Haul I drive to the next place, hoping for home.

Searching for home. Migrants with heavy furniture. U-haul. Our orange travois with wheels keeps getting bigger. Full of stuff. Heavy Stuff. Stuff that anchors us. To a home of nostalgia. Anchors to a home that never really existed. That place. This is the place! Well bully for you Brigham Young. Bring ‘em young. Not young anymore, with more stuff each move to stuff in the moving van and every move leaves behind anchors that are mourned in passing.

A house burns down and the anchors are cremated and the past has passed on.

The bubble is burst. The house is on the market. The anchor is weighed. The trees we planted are left behind. Do the new owners love that Japanese Maple we planted as our 10th anniversary gift to our dream of home? Have they maintained the landscaping? Have any of the plants, the dreams, the love we planted been cared for in our absence? Or have they been torn up by the roots to make room for the next owners’ dream of home?

Where are the anchors? Is there a home port? Adrift. Without a home. Drift wood is picked up for beach fires to warm the beach rats without a home. Their shacks have been bulldozed like West Bank ancestral olive groves to make room for more condos and home-loving dreamers blowing a bubble. Pop!

[waldopaper]

Beanfield Hank   

She'll treat me fairer then me darlin sportin Jenny  -- Gilgarry Mountain    

Learned to fly a C-170 out of his daddy's Indiana bean field when JFK was president.  One spring dad mounted spray equipment on Jenny and saved days of disking for weeds.  Rachel Carson's book was troubling... but the fuel savings alone were worth it.  Hank couldn't stop talking about it.  The guys in boot camp called him Beanie.  And it stuck.  The L-19 was a fucking death trap and everybody knew it.  Slower than a loach... and much easier to hit. Artillery spotter.  Right.  Nobody wanted that fucking job.  Except Beanfield Hank.  Jenny was an officers' toy anyway.  Warrant Officer Hess was almost an officer.  Beanie was just a taxi driver for Major Pratt.  But the guys always smiled when they "saluted" Beanie and called him "sir."  

At least he got to dump that piece-of-shit M16 and carry an M3.  Grease gun.  Thompson for real Chicago gangster.  Fuck me GI?   Fuck YOU gook fucking dink fuck. Me beaucoup dinky dau. Number ten doom on you asshole.  Me Chicago.  No fuck around.  Got any touk-fen? You get number one smoke for Chicago.  Beanie pay you beaucoup jing.  Where is Angelique?  Sure she your sister.  Onetwothreefourfive C-notes.  Get the dope before I blow yer guts out yer ass.  Tell your sister Officer Henny is here.  The slicks were whup-whipping as they brought the grunts back.  A lot of dead motherfuckers.  At the officers' club some of the chopper pilots looked pretty bad.  Major Jack had tears in his eyes.  Goddam gooks.  Jumped our boys along the highway.

 

Major Pratt, sir.  Beanie whispered.  Don't call you Happy Jack for nothing.  Beanfield Hank is here to lighten your load.  Fuck you Beanie.  We took ground fire.  Fucking ground fire.  Where the fuck were you?  I got eyes, boss.  But not in the back of my fucking head.  Angel said they were all headed south.  Happy grins and says angels never lie.  Tri the bartender nods toward Beanie and Cecil.    Better drink up boys.  Plenty dragon business coming for you.  Plenty wampum brass for you, Teepee.  Gimme a red-eye.  Redeye coming up pilot-boy.  Then Teepee go to turn up air conditioning. Right on cue. full birds come out with the Mourning Star.  Best diddi now boss.  Wanna do an immelmann like you do sir.  We'll open an antique store.  

 

Fuck you Beanie.  You wouldn't even give me a fucking reach-around.  

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A further episode from DBS?

[waldopaper]

yep it is.  sorta.  heard a story from a chopper pilot who saw civil war ghosts in Vietnam.  they threw a bunch of dead and wounded in back of the Huey and when they got airborne the rear deck was awash with blood.  that's when he saw them.  they were Union... he could tell by their uniforms.  and they were NOT happy campers.  When the pilot got back all the motherfuckers in the back were dead.  He never told anybody about the ghosts.  Until now that he's too old and feeble to fly.  Hanger talk.  Pilots are superstitious.  yeah we are.   

[waldopaper]

III Corps Tac Zone, Republic of VietNam 1968    

Goooooooooooooooooooooo (old Morning VietNAM).  Henry popped off the cot and shut off the Japanese radio. Still in-country.  Still smells like a latrine. Beautiful day in the neighborhood,  good day to fly.  But Harney was wailing.  The huge black mechanic was inconsolable.  Got the dear john letter.  Nobody would go near him.  General George gotta be in Saigon by noon.  Gotta go over Cambodia.  Gotta run like a watch.  You the best motor man in the fucking Army.  Fuck you Beanie. Sit down Harney.  But Harney wouldn't sit down.  He shook the letter in Henry's face like a ragged clump of wet toilet paper.  Sit down man.  Bitch aint worth it.  And that made shit even worse.  Sgt. Harnish grabbed a head-bolt spanner.  And not for the fucking engine.  Poor Harney.  He ain't gonna be no good today.  But we got through it.  Jenny and me.  And Henry was up well after dark cleaning Porgie's shit puke and piss out of the airplane.  Henry laughed out loud through a six-pack of warm beer and the best dope in the world.  Some things are funny beyond comprehension.   

 

Then there was another day.  Jenny was really Major Jack's airplane.  Jack could fly Jenny better than Henry ever could.  Young 19-year-old Henry watched and learned.  Jack taught Henry the donut-hole maneuver.  Roll inverted and dive through a hole in the clouds.  Watch your speed.  Don't fly the wings off.  Watch your engine temp.   Super-cooling can cause a cracked head.  And then you're fucked.  Level off at treetops.  They can't hear you.  They can't see you until your're already gone.    When you're climbing out, they can't hit you.  You're too small.  When Henry did it today, Major Jack would have been proud.  But they hit us anyway.  And there was too much going on in the headset. There was a dull thump. Look back and Jack was Thanksgiving turkey. After the whole family has spent the day watching football. Mostly bones and a little meat.  There was no blood.  That was all over the back of the airplane.  But Henry didn't know that yet.  Henry delivered his load of Thanksgiving turkey.  Fell out of the airplane and puked his guts out.  Then tried to drown himself in the puke. An hour of listing to the wind whistle can do that. 

   

The giant black mechanic from Blackstone Avenue scooped Henry up like an infant.  Harney got you boy.  Doncha cry none now boy.  Doncha hurt.  Harney's gotcha.  You gonna be alright. Old daddy Harney's gotcha boy. You gonna be alright. And he was.  Harney tucked Henry into bed that day.  And made sure he said his prayers.  Henry never told the kids about his old fight with Harney.  Harney hit him *so* hard... Henry ain't been right since. If you've ever been beaten up by a *real* tough guy... you know what I mean.  The radio woke Henry a lifetime later.  Gooooood morning... Henry fired a burst at the radio with his M3. Harney never left a mark on Henry.  Henry made sure he gave Harney an eye-mouse and a split lip.  Where everybody could see it.  It must have been humiliating. I'm so sorry Harney.  But that's that between shit and syphillis.  Remember?  I'm so sorry you shot yourself so long ago.  Homeless and alone.  Well.  Better you than me, man.  The radio was gone.  Debris was gone.  And when Henry arrived on the flight line that morning... all squared-away:  Jenny looked as good as new.   

 

He had the nerve.  And he had the blood.  And there never was a horse like Tennessee Stud.   

 

       

  

ReplyForward

[waldopaper]

Industry figures and scientists claim pesticide use and GMOs are necessary in ‘modern agriculture’. But this is not the case: there is now sufficient evidence to suggest otherwise. It is simply not necessary to have our bodies contaminated with toxic agrochemicals, regardless of how much global agribusiness firms try to reassure us that they are present in ‘safe’ levels.

Art thread?  You betcha.  Because we should living life like performance art.  Because it is.  And it's high time (cannabis) we joined in the dance:   

March 10-13: Hundreds of small farmers, ecologists, gardeners, and naturalists converge on Weelaunee People’s Park to convene a Food Autonomy Festival; the majority of them camp in the forest. Throughout the weekend, presentations and discussions take place in the Living Room and parking lot area. Hundreds of fruit-bearing plants and trees are planted in the area.

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Been househunting in northwestern North Carolina/southwestern Virginia. Fairly recently Christmas Tree farms have become the major industry there.  Farmers get double in rent for the trees that they would get by farming crops for food. The tree farms spray insecticide - if neighbors are lucky the plot is small enough that the corporation sends out Mexican laborers with little protection to walk the fields with backpack sprayers - but where the fields are more contiguous they send out the crop dusters with all the uncontrolled drift....forget about our idea to have a small, sustenance organic plot if we ended up near one of those.  And, if it is upstream from our water supply....

All for a seasonal decoration that will be thrown away in less than a month...

[waldopaper]

When I got kicked out of SLC it was either Duckburg or Durham NC.  I tried hard for Durham- but couldn't raise no peeps in the time I had left... so it was Duckburg by default.  Front row at the freak show.  Wow.  

Still got to see the place where the civil war ended.  For a while.  I guess.  

[waldopaper]

https://waldopaper.wordpress.com/2023/11/24/draft-dodge-city/

Doing better in a healthier environment  off the reservation  

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My most recent art project is paulyrhythms (yes, an annoying pun) an exploration of polyrhythms created by layering various tracks on Garage Band. I'm enjoying exploring different sounds and words and the unexpected and quite complex resultant rhythms that arise. I've also been discovering the power of chance derived erasures to create unexpected juxtapositions and context as well as imposing a rhythmic structure.

The most recent utilized the manifesto Jo and I wrote and texts by George Maciunas and Joseph Beuys.

[waldopaper]

Nobody clicks the links.  And these days, it's dangerous anyway.  Ja it's the superimposition of image and sound.  

https://waldopaper.wordpress.com/2024/01/   

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I'm averaging about 4 views per video I'm posting. Not sure if that is counting both me checking it and Jo watching on her computer as part of her conjugal duties.

[Mouse]

I have seen other people’s squirrels, sleek and sweet, suave and athletic.  Mine is not like that.  He is muscle bound, fierce; and noted by the absence of all the fruit and nuts in my garden.

We didn’t have squirrels before here, on this side of the valley.