Four birds killed & a dead friend revived

Working in the media, you get buried in information. On the arts tip, this is good because you see how much is actually going on, and in St. Louis, that's way more than most people imagine. It is bad because you see how much you are missing, which is way more than I can stomach.

As a committed parent of a third grader with very few nights to myself, I stake out things that happen during the day, so I was delighted to get a press release at work announcing a gallery lecture for noon today by Daniel McGrath, curator of a show at one of the Sheldon Art Galleries titled I'll Be Your Mirror.

By attending, I was killing two birds, the getting out to actually see local arts programming and building on a new connection. Daniel and I were in the group of sculptors and poets invited to collaborate recently on the Poetry in Place: The Platforms events at Laumeier Sculpture Park. I thoroughly enjoyed that experience and met a number of smart, talented new people I promised myself to keep track of.

I killed a third bird as well. One of my best friends these days works next door to the Sheldon at The Pulitzer. Amy agreed to spend her lunch with me listening to Daniel spiel, so it was off to the lecture with my buddy.

We got there early enough to look at the show first, which was cool. I appreciated the mix of local, national and international artists, treated (I hope obviously) as equals; can't get too much of that in this town. I also gather that some of these artists from elsewhere are sort of "it" artists in the art world now, something of a coup for Daniel and the gallery, and I understand the value and appeal of that sort of thing without being compelled by it personally.

Daniel wrote a really eloquent essay that tied the show together and made connections that it would not be possible to make just looking at the work, which seems just the right way to go with a curator's essay. Reading his notes definitely enriched my experience of the show, though I also had a positive sensual experience of many of the works without having the contextual overlay. A painting of a mouse looking down into a mirror really did it for me, as did a video by Slater Bradley of a man in a moon suit playing a music box to stuffed animals in their diorama habitats.

Not surprisingly, given the premise of the show, I spent the most time looking at the piece that most closely resembles the kinds of things I try to do. Local artist Robert Goetz took a series of photographs of traffic passing (or not) the same four roadside smokestacks. He then did prints to accompany each photograph where the bands of color in the print related to how the smokestacks were intersected in the photograph. Photograph and print were then conjoined. As a final touch, he scored his own images musically, though the music pod for his piece wasn't working when I was there, so I didn't get the entire effect. Robert and I used to do similar work together in Poetry Scores, and though we have lost touch it was a pleasure to see he has continued in the project of scoring texts and translating between media.

Amy and I went to the Tap Room to talk about the show, which made for some interesting, mirroring connections. I tried to explain my prior working relationship with Robert, making the connection that he and I had played in a band together with Hunter Brumfield. Amy and I also had Hunter in common as a friend, until Hunter killed himself. When I made the connection, Amy blurted, "Hunter and I sang 'I'll Be Your Mirror' together!"

The coincidence with the Velvet Underground song that themed the show we had just seen was interesting. So was this. One of the pieces in the show was a sculpture by Hannah Greely made to resemble a bottle of beer crusted in dirt. I thought of Hunter when I looked at this piece, because I have the last bottle of beer he drank before he killed himself, given to me by his girlfriend at the time who knew I'd probably appreciate it.

This left me with the pleasant feeling that a fourth bird had been killed today, that the spirit of our dead friend who died too young had been recycled in our coming together to experience art today. The dead are only as dead as we allow them to be. We can be their mirror.

Why I love St Louis & baseball but not the Cardinals

Left-handed batting stance on the rock & roll road, ca. 1993.

I love St. Louis to death and love the game of baseball almost as much; yet the St. Louis Cardinals just battled through a Cinderella August worthy of the record books to win the National League penant and advance to the 2011 World Series, and I really don't care. Don't give a hoot. Didn't watch one single out of the National League Championship Series. I'd probably even silently root against the Redbirds in the Series, were it not for the fact that their American League opponent, the Texas Rangers, previously were owned by George W. Bush.

What gives? How the hell could all of these things be true?

Let me start with my baseball bona fides. I may be an oddball by many measures -- I read Turkish poetry for fun and make zombie movies based on Turkish poems -- yet I am a fully acculterated American boy when it comes to baseball. Not only did I memorize the backs of baseball cards, I have held onto my entire childhood baseball collection over an itinerant life that has included periods of being "between homes." Not only did I grow up playing the game, it was the one game I was good at. Most sports, I played precisely well enough to earn a starting position, wear a jersey on game days, attract the girlfriends who could be won in no other way. In baseball, I played third base, picked a mean hot corner, and always batted in the heart of the lineup, a line-drive hitter with longball power. I even played competitive baseball as recently as this century, when I co-founded a vintage baseball team that played barehanded ball by 19th century rules in New York City's Central Park. I played third base and batted in the heart of the lineup.

Baseball; okay. But St. Louis Cardinals baseball, and me?

Sure. I grew up on Jack Buck and Mike Shannon. I knew, like everybody knew, that we were sitting at the heels of genius there. I grew up on Ozzie Smith and Al Hrabosky -- magical, mystical, supernatural ballplayers and characters. Visual evidence exists of this: a photograph of me from a Granite City Halloween party in the early 1980s, when our entire friendship clique came in costume as St. Louis Cardinals players: a portrait of the artist (in my case) as a mediocre second baseman (Tommy Herr).

What happened? A whole lot of things happened.

I'm slightly phobic about filling out forms. I was really good at high school, but not good at all about applying to any colleges. So a guidance counselor sent a U.S. Navy recruiter to me. He filled out all of my forms, and suddenly I was a Navy Midshipman studying biomedical engineering at Boston University with a full-time job as a NROTC Cadet. I was also a fanatic for rock music suddenly thrown into one of the great rock music cities, Boston, with indie rock exploding all around me. I looked at my course schedule, my Navy billets, the gig calendars at Boston rock clubs, and I realized something had to go. My baseball fanatacism had to go, if I was going to make it through this NROTC university thing. And so the boy who used to interview himself as an imaginary famous baseball player while stocking shelves at Cohen's Market went pretty close to cold turkey on Major League Baseball. It amazes me to remember this, but I lived a year in Boston, able to replay in memory any number of Freddy Lynn catches in its center field, in the shadow of the Green Monster, and stepped inside Fenway Park exactly once.

I lived in Boston one year only. Me and the Navy didn't work out. That's another story. I ended up back home, though not in Granite City; now I was in St. Louis proper, at Washington University. There might have been time to take up baseball again, but not in the poring-over-box-scores-every-morning manner I was accustomed to -- especially not with this rock music thing taking me over, more and more completely. In fact, I ended up running away from the academy (where I was doing fine, at least on paper, the only place that really matters in the academy) to play rock music myself.

When I got off the rock & roll road towards the end of the 1990s, there was a window there when the St. Louis Cardinals might have won me back. This was exactly when Cardinal Nation, as Cardinals fans style themselves, lost its damn mind. The owners brought this big ugly redheaded guy with bloated muscles here from Oakland. His specialty was what I emphatically consider to be the single dullest play in the game of baseball, from the standpoint of a spectator: the homerun. It's the only play that ends with the swing of the bat. In every other play, even a foul ball or wild pitch, someone else has a chance of being drawn into the play, to make an even better play or perhaps some catastrophic mistake. In the quintessential team sport, however, the homerun is the most solitary play, the solipsist's play. Yet it ascended to dominate the game. Bloated muscles and a shallow, cowlike response to big stats from fair-weather fans turned the chess of team sports into a meat-musclehead strongman dinging a bell.

Remember: I was a third baseman. I like infield defense, not infielders watching a speeding white blip sail over a distant fence while the constipated strongman touches four.

Then I met a lady on a plane and ended up living with her in New York. I did the thing you have to do when you're living with a lady, I got my own job. I ended up editing the travel section of a magazine. Let's face it, that's not the most demanding job in the world. To a guy who had scraped and hustled for the Navy, studied at world-class research universities, figured out how to run a touring rock band from scratch, and eked out a living writing freelance journalism at a dime a word, it was kind of like being paid to do nothing. But suddenly I had to be at the same place all the time, with the same people (when I wasn't traveling to write a travel story). Like millions of office workers before and after me, I found myself with a little time on my hands to discuss athletic contests. I crept back into baseball.

I was in New York, okay? And the hometown team, the Cardinals, had fallen for the bloated strongman who dings the bell. What was I going to do? Go over to the Yankees? I went over to the Yankees. I got some good haiku out of my first visit to Yankee Stadium. Yeah, Yankee Stadium. I started to feel some of the old magic come back. But we are talking about the Yankees here, or much more disastrously, the Yankees' fans. Though they play their games in the Bronx, this was Manhattan's team, and Manhattan had become the rich man's island. This was the rich fan's team. I went over to the Mets.

I know, the Muts, I know, the Pond Scum. But the Cardinals had fallen for the ugly bloated redheaded strongman who dings the bell. I owed them nothing. The Mets were my hometown team now. I could even walk to the stadium, and I did just that many times. My best friend in New York lived right along the way, Rosco Gordon, the jump blues legend who recorded with Sam Phillips before Sun Studios, when Elvis was still strumming a tennis racket as a guitar and interviewing himself as an imaginary famous musician. I'd walk through Jackson Heights, pick up three snacks from three different ethnic kitchens, pick up the jump bluesman, and we'd watch the Mets at Shea.

Remember, I was a third baseman. The third baseman for the Mets in those days was Robin Ventura. That is, first of all, one of history's great names. Robin Ventura. It's ridiculous. And then I met the man, an incredibly nice man, and all those Mets, by coming up with feature stories for the (now defunct) Connecticut page of The New York Times. Robin Ventura lived in Connecticut, as did Todd Zeile, the kooky Mets manager Bobby Valentine (another immortal baseball name) and a number of other guys on the field and in the front office. My editor at The Times was a Connecticut guy and a baseball nut, always looking for a reason to green-light a Connecticut baseball feature. Connecticut and baseball have been very, very good to me.

My sketch of a cameraman made from the press box at the old Shea Stadium.

This next part is very important. The people who most need to hear it, Cardinals fans, will never hear it. I have tried to tell many Cardinals fans this, and they would not hear it. They never hear it. But it is true. Shea Stadium has the sharpest baseball critics in the world. When I say this to Cardinals fans, they say in a chorus, "No, Cardinals fans are the best fans in baseball!" And then I say, while that may or may not be true, in terms of cow-eyed adoration of the home team, it's not what I said. I said: best baseball critics. In Shea, they love baseball, but love or hate the Mets precisely according to how well or badly they measure up to the great game of baseball. I am not talking about see-sawing manic-depressively from cow-eyed adoration to drunken despondency that my team is out of the Wild Card race. I am talking pitch by pitch, infield adjustment by infield adjustment, pitching change by pitching change criticism of the game as the game is being played.

I moved back home. That's another another story. And I saw St. Louis sports through new eyes. It's really very simple. New York is a two-team town. It's a competitive democracy for sports fandom. Nowhere in New York can you say "the game," as in "can you turn on the game?" as if there is only one game in town. The game. In New York, there is always at least two games in town. Now don't get me wrong, I don't love New York. I vastly prefer St. Louis. But what I like about St. Louis least is what so many people from St. Louis thinks makes them so special: how much they love their sports teams. In fact, this is the most typical, bush league thing about this great city. Ever been to a college town on a game day? That's St. Louis, 162 days of the year, or more, if the Cardinals make it into the post-season. If New York is a competitive sports democracy, St. Louis is a rigid, inflexible, one-party system. It's the Soviet Russia of sports cities.

And lo and behold, these Cardinal fans now have embraced another California import who totally rubs me the wrong way. I never liked the cocky look of this manager. Eventually, he would take his upturned nostrils and self-infatuation to a conservative rally against President Obama organized by a cheap shot of a conservative talk show hack, but long before that he violated my sense of humanity once and for eternity when he threatened a press conference full of reporters with a fungo bat he was holding in his hands. Tough guy. Sorry, Charlie. I was done with you and your team, whichever that team might be and wherever it might be getting its taxpayer subsidies, then and forever.

There is that political point to be considered there, the paying for these owners to make money off us, but I won't whine about the "pay for my new stadium" game, which everybody plays, everywhere. Hey, I'd take some help refinancing my mortgage too, if I could get away with it, but I can't.

But then I also can't fathom how the chump hometown fan is exactly the last person suited up for this game with an iota of geographic loyalty. The owner of the team may not live in the team's town (the Cardinals' owner doesn't). The players play for the highest bidder, wherever that bid may be paid. That's the way the fans want it, presumably, because they holler pretty fast for the owner to let any player go who's fading in exchange for the next better thing. Everybody is always looking for the next team, or the next player. Everybody is in it for the money or the glory, except Joe Chump Hometown Fan. Joe is supposed to root robotically for whoever happens to be playing for whoever happens to be owning the team that happens to be situated in his town -- until, of course, the owner moves his hometown team to another hometown. And then they wait for another owner to move another team to their town so they can love that team and only that team with that same cowlike look in their eyes.

I don't get it. I grew up in the Free Agency Era, which started right here in St. Louis, by the way, in 1969. I was a boy of three probably chasing a baseball across the carpet when Curt Flood said hell no, I don't want to go. I want to stay. And by wanting to stay in St. Louis instead of submitting to a trade to another city's team, ironically, he paved the way for a game of baseball where nobody stays in one place anymore. Except the chump hometown fan, who even when he or she moves, is still supposed to remain nostalgically loyal to the team that happens to be situated in their hometown, until it isn't.

I'm not like that. Take me and the Mets. It's over. They've moved on, and I've moved on. The Mets I cared about are gone from New York. Robin Ventura is now managing up in Chicago (I'll have to find a reason to go and say hello). Todd Zeile is producing movies (I'll have to find a reason to go ask him for money). Bobby Valentine talks about the game on TV and has a city job in his Connecticut hometown. They might be somebody's Mets, but they're not mine anymore.

I now live in a house with two females, and one TV. I think you know what that means. I haven't seen a television in years, at least not the one I co-own. I could listen to baseball on the radio, but I still prefer music, if I have to pick one or the other. In fact, I would say it's time for me finally to retire as a journeyman freelance baseball fan. I quit. I'm out of here. If the game ever decides to remember me for my contributions to the game, not that I expect it will, and I have to pick a jersey to wear when I enter the Cooperstown of freelance baseball fans, it won't be the Cardinals jersey. It won't be the Red Sox jersey. It won't even be my most recently Mets. It will be the Sans Souci Poeteasters, my imaginary dice baseball team composed of nothing but poets. But that's another another another story.

Three incoherent poems to be read at Occupy St. Louis

Kristin Sharp does a lot of good work organizing and promoting performance poetry in St. Louis. I see that she is organizing poets for tomorrow (Sunday, October 16) at Occupy St. Louis in Kiener Plaza. At that time I will be managing an aspiring child actor with a non-profit gig, but I wanted to post a few of my poems and invite Kristin or anyone else to read one of them there.

**

ON DEADLINE


We came out of the mud, out
of the dark, out of the heat. Here today, I
empower you to screw up
something (I’ll give you the real answer, later).
Take an overweight person
eating chicken-fried steak, smoking cigarettes,
It makes a lot of sense, yeah,

for Alaska. The monkey in the middle.
Fly in low, the ambulance
outside your door (if you even have access
to ambulance services).
That’s a lot of dead people. Money came here.
In Mexico, I’m sure, there are seminars
going on, right now, asking
what happened to all the jobs they "stole" from the
American South. We are
all, always, on deadline, not Acme Widgets.

-- Chris King

*


THIS IS NOT AN INDICTMENT


The apple is the sweetest,
the closest to the core. The sweetest and most
difficult to eat. Guilt is
a Calvinist virus that makes your cue ball
incident look like punk stuff,
soul insurance, Boddishatva of the porn,
a store called Experience.

The people who bid this shit up never have
put anything on the line
because they don’t even know where the line is.
Throw their money around like
a cudgel. It’s not an indictment, I’m just
talking about what’s really
going on, with my twin pistol butts showing.
It’s just a poisoned Old World
predatorial system. Sneeze! Scat! (Devil!)
Dude, you can’t eat soul, yours or
mine. You’re falling far afield again tonight.

-- Chris King

*


VOCABULARY LESSON
FOR THE LAST PERSON
OF THE TRIBE TO SPEAK
THE LANGUAGE
OF OUR PEOPLE


For arrow poison, we boiled
gall down. The hair was plastered with clay a full
day, to impart gloss and keep it from splitting.
Now, the exterminating
influence of missions was discouraging,
sure, but courage, for us,
was really a curse. A is for Absence,
B is for Bayonet in
the Back of C, or Crazy Horse, D is for
Don’t You Speak Your Mother Tongue,
E is for Entrails Emptying Out Our Soul.

-- Chris King

**


These poems are cast in the 7/11 form innovated by St. Louis poet Quincy Troupe, which calls for alternating 7-syllable lines with 11-syllable lines. I add to that rule an attempt to alternate 7-line stanzas with 11-line stanzas, or at least to use only 7-line and 11-line stanzas.

The Occupy Wall Street movement, which includes Occupy St. Louis (as I understand it), has been criticized from the left for being incoherent. So I have chosen some poems that are indeed somewhat incoherent, yet all say something important (I'd like to think) if you are patient with complexity and polyvalence.

As for Occupy Wall Street, or what I have heard about the movement from the distance of a busy parent and working artist with a demanding day job, it reminds me of what I loved about the intentional community movement when I first encountered it. I really liked the communal approach to resources and the consensual approach to decision-making. It's my impression that these approaches have worked for the human being for many more centuries than the approaches concentrated on Wall Street. It always seems possible that the time will come when they will be widely practiced again, either out of choice or, more likely, grim necessity.

***

Image borrowed from Peter.

One more Saturday for "Poetry in Place: The Platforms"

On Saturday I was part of something new, for me certainly, and maybe for anyone anywhere. Dana Turkovic, curator of exhibitions at the mighty Laumeier Sculpture Park, put it together. It was titled Poetry in Place: The Platforms. "The Platforms" were six constructed sites to read poetry (or, for that matter, to spout rants). Five poets were then invited to read poetry on these platforms and encourage others read or speak. I was one of the five invited poets.

I liked the idea very much, once I fully grasped it, which didn't happen until we were actually doing it. I do not fault Dana for this. In fact, I liked very much the way she organized the event. It was all very familiar to me, from my own efforts with Poetry Scores -- coming up with a group project that no one had ever quite thought of before, and then pulling together the group to pull it off knowing full well they can't imagine it in advance because it's a totally new thing.

The good news -- and another clever part of the design -- is we are going to do it again, next Saturday, October 8, from 1 to 3 p.m. I'll do my best to get more people out to Laumeier this time to experience this unique approach to public poetry and sculpture.

Here is how it works. There is a circular trail of platforms crafted around a small section of the vast sculpture park. (Signs point the way.) If you follow the trail, you come upon platforms with poets.

Coming down from the parking lots, you first encounter Douglis Beck's platform. Its main features are a wheel you spin and a cone that acts as a megaphone, like a carnival barker.

Next you see Daniel McGrath's platform, a faux stone, like something an ancient philosopher would stand upon to declaim.

Then you see Sarrita Hunn's platform, a glittery box that also has a multimedia component that was described to me. Since my phone is a dumb phone, I didn't quite get it, but if your phone is smart your phone can play with this platform too.

Then you come upon Noah Kirby's platform, which is more like a rusted old phone booth, since you step into rather than up on it. You can kind of hide in this one, while projecting your voice out of another megaphone-type construction.

From there you take a turn into the woods, where you soon come across the platform designed by Axi: Ome (Sung Ho Kim and Heather Woofter). This one is basically a bridge.

Finally, at the end of the woodlands trail is B.J. Vogt's piece, kind of a simulated forest of white trees with stepping stones.

It's an enormous park, there were six platforms for simultaneous poetry, poetry is a tough draw in any event, and (as I've said) this event was intrinsically difficult to promote in advance. So even with six local artists and five local poets -- I was joined by Julie Dill, Chris Parr, Stefene Russell and Buzz Spector -- the turnout, or walk-by traffic, wasn't quite equal to the ambition of the project or the quality of the work.

Still, it was a magical experience for those of us who did experience it. My favorite moment as a performer was hiding Noah Kirby's rusted metal structure and reading almost my entire chapbook of painful lost love poetry, A heart I carved for a girl I knew. It was the perfect environment for that poetry.



As a listener, my favorite experience was watching Buzz Spector read in B.J. Vogt's faux forest nestled in the actual woods. The poetry Buzz read was full of artifice and contrivance, very self-consciously so, and it was neat to see him read these poems while standing in a little artificial forest.

Now that we have a better sense of what to expect, I think all of the artists and poets involved will be able to bring more people out next Saturday. I certainly hope so. A lot of working artists in St. Louis (me included) tend to grouse that our major arts institutions don't do enough to partner with and co-promote with local working artists. I know we all enjoyed the rush of collaborating with a major international institution like Laumeier, but I feel we owe the institution a better return on its investment in us -- namely, local visitors who would not be at the park that particular day were there not these particular local artists included in the day's exhibitions.

Of course, this being St. Louis, that depends entirely on the St. Louis Cardinals being knocked out of the post-season between now and then.

British Red Cross pumps me up to read at The Platforms

So tomorrow (Saturday, October 1) and the next Saturday (October 8), I'll be a performing poet at Laumeier Sculpture Park as part of its Poetry in Place: The Platforms project, organized by Dana Turkovic. The St. Louis poets Julie Dill, Christopher Parr, Stefene Russell, Buzz Spector and I will be reading poetry on platforms invented and constructed by local artists Axi:Ome (Sung Ho Kim and Heather Woofter), Douglis Beck, Sarrita Hunn, Noah Kirby, Daniel McGrath and B.J. Vogt.

I was very happy to be asked to participate, if for no othe reason than to make two trips to Laumeier in this beautiful Fall weather we're having. At the same time, I have plenty of doubts about myself as a "real poet"; I've always written poetry and even published a bit, without ever thinking of myself as a poet. But I was certainly willing to play one at Laumeier Sculpture Park!

Then this morning, the day before the first of the Platforms gigs, I woke to some remarkable good news for me as a poet, of all things. It came from, of all unlikely places for poetic confirmation, the British Red Cross.

It is our pleasure to inform you on behalf of the British Red Cross that your entry "Recipe for Hallelujah" has been highly commended by our judges. You are one of only twelve entrants to receive this commendation. We received more than 750 entries from all over the world but yours was marked out to be above and beyond the others. On behalf of the judges and organisers we would like to wholeheartedly congratulate and thank you. We hope to have the commended entries published in a Red Cross publication, and will keep you informed of progress.

This relates to a competition the British Red Cross organized around The International Day of the Disappeared. I read about the competition on Twitter, though I'm not sure I even would have remembered entering it or with what poem had I not received this good news. Here is the poem that their judges "highly commended":

RECIPE FOR HALLELUJAH

Take Mississippi after
its native peoples have all been disappeared,
lynch the intelligent men
of color, form the women into a choir,
add the Bible, translated,
assassinated African idioms
disguised in murky backbeats
no white man in Mississippi could fathom
(let’s leave Elvis Presley out
of this …) and make it sweat its ass in the sun
until it ripens, or explodes.

It's not like I started chewing on a pencil when I heard about the competition until I spit this out. I did what I always do when entering a writing competition (as I do more and more nowadays, thanks to Twitter alerts) -- I looked for something I'd already written but not published that fits the theme.

This is a poem about the American South, a place better known for very public terrorist murders (lynchings) than for the stealth terrorism associated with the disappeared (abducting someone secretly and then trying to make sure no one ever sees them again). In my experience as a writer, reader and activist, this is the American South contrasted to anti-Communist Central America. But there are shared themes, so I made one small revision to the poem to bring it closer to "the disappeared" and sent it to London.

The poem is a holdover from my days on the road, when the Mississippi Hill Country was a beloved place to hide away with friends. I wrote a baggier version of the poem back then, in the 1990s, but never did anything with it; I was too far out there on the road, too busy hiding away with new friends in obscure place.

I revisited this, along with many of my older poems, earlier this year after hearing the poet Quincy Troupe read here in his hometown of St. Louis. Quincy introduced a poem by saying it was a 7/11, a poetic form he had invented where seven-syllable lines alternate with eleven-syllable lines. That sounded just right to me, just exactly as uneven and off-kilter as me. I literally ran home that night and started pulling out old poems and counting syllables on my fingers. In my 7/11s, I try to alternate seven-line stanzas with eleven-line stanzas, or at least to break stanzas at seven or eleven lines. This poem is one eleven-line stanza.

This 7/11 thing has really been working out for me, it's really been helping me to shape up underthought or unfinished poems. In fact, I will be reading only 7/11s at Laumeier tomorrow and the next Saturday. Hope to see you there!

*

Image from pag-kilos ng kultura.

My acting debut opposite Bill Streeter in George Malich's brain surgery series

My friend George Malich is producing and directing Life is Meant for Living, a series of improvised sketch comedy pieces based on the amazing experience he currently is undergoing with brain cancer and brain surgery.

In his new episode, "Day 9: The Conspiracy," George retells a remarkable experience from his brain surgery earlier this month. The expert brain surgeons at Barnes-Jewish Hospital kept him awake and talking for much of the surgery, to monitor what parts of his brain he was using so as to avoid cutting into any of his functional tissue while removing as much of the tumor as they could.

By all accounts, George was good, loquacious company while his brain was under the knife, as he depicts (with a fetching comic overlay) in the previous episode "Day 8: Awake Surgery." But when his surgeons woke George up, he pitched into a three-hour rage.

Curiously, the targets of George's rage were two local directors, Bill Streeter and me, Chris King. Bill is far more accomplished than me as a director, so I was flattered to be somehow sequestered in the directors' corner of George's brain with Bill.

With Poetry Scores, I have directed only one movie, though George has a prominent role in our second movie, currently in production, Go South for Animal Index. As I described in a recent post, "You Never Know What is Going to Happen, George Malich," we really had to rush and work George hard to get in his last scenes before his brain surgery. If there is a rational reason for such things, that's probably why George came out of a brain surgery in a three-hour rage at me.

But, as Rachel Cosic's character muses in this sketch, "Why Bill Streeter?" Bill -- who has never directed George -- asked himself the same thing. "Maybe George subconsciously wants me to direct him," Bill suggested.

That sounds good to me! I'm standing by to help that future project in any way. Given my highlight reel from this episode, my screen acting debut, I suspect it won't be as an actor.

"The Big Dipper" by Rick Hawkins & eleanor roosevelt (picture, song)

My friend and colleague Rick Hawkins posted this photograph he took of the Big Dipper on his typepad.

He snapped it at a summer camp (in central Tennessee, I'd guess, where he lives). Rick has a deep personal connection to the camp, he said. Also, as an artist, he appreciates "the absence of ambient light pollution. The sky is bright with stars."

His post reminded me of the song my band eleanor roosevelt wrote and recorded titled "The Big Dipper". I sent it to Rick and will post it here.

mp3
"The Big Dipper"
(eleanor roosevelt)
eleanor roosevelt

It's not our greatest work. It didn't make the cut for the next batch of songs we intend to release, Water Bread & Beer. But I like it enough as an excuse for a blogpost with Rick's picture.

I stumbled on "the absence of ambient light pollution" far from central Tennessee. I was on the wide plains of Western Canada, coming back from Edmonton, Alberta, when I saw  the sky bright with the stars of the Big Dipper and wrote the words and melody to the song. When I saw the Big Dipper, it looked like "a heavenly trickle". I took it from there, attempting an extended metaphor for what I consider to be one of life's greatest pleasures.

Not only a visual artist, Rick is a musician and singer I really want to work with in Poetry Scores. His projects Jackson Pollock Microphone and Magna Man Remembered are close in spirit to what we do. It's almost embarassing that we haven't incorporated Rick's work into one of our poetry scores by now.

Rick did host a successful event at his home in Murphreesboro for Poetry Scores' one and only (thus far) Southern Poetry Tour, and we have every intention to screen our first movie Blind Cat Black at his place.

Going back to the beginning, Rick was a cofounder of Hoobellatoo, the field recording collective that spawned Poetry Scores. Rick was with Lij and me when we met and first recorded the late Leo Connellan, the first poet we scored. Rick's striking portrait of Leo, standing on the foyer at his publisher, Curbstone Press, graces the back of our first poetry score CD, Crossing America.

Bootblogging #22: Five by Bob Reuter

St. Louis songwriter and bandleader Bob Reuter is turning 60 and celebrating this Saturday, August 13 at The Tap Room (2100 Locust) with a really excellent lineup: The Union Electric, Wormwood Country and Bob's band Alley Ghost.

I have multiple, deeply rooted connections to the leaders of all these bands: Tim Rakel (of The Union Electric), Lindy Woracheck (of Wormwood Country) and Bob himself. It would tire the patience of most blog readers to rehearse it all, so I'll just say a few words about our birthday boy and then bootblog a handful of his songs.

Bob was already a veteran of the St. Louis music scene when I sprang up in the late 1980s. His band then was Kamikaze Cowboy, and they rocked hard on Bob's country-tinged songs, which more or less describes all of Bob's bands I've heard since. He had the reputation then, which he's maintained for twenty years, of being one of the best songwriters in town. He's still that.

Like most frontmen, Bob is a fairly self-absorbed guy -- a rap that has followed him, alongside the master craftsman songwriter reputation. That makes it somewhat paradoxical that he also is and has always been a highly encouraging enthusiast for other bands and songwriters. It's this generosity and passion towards other musicians, matched with those eloquent and catchy songs, that has ensured Bob always has an ace band populated by some of the best players in the scene.

Speaking from experience, my band Enormous Richard was slightly controversial among other musicians when we burst on the scene in the late 1980s. I was a terrible singer, and I recruited talented musicians by inviting them to learn new instruments onstage. I stayed with these same guys until today, so twenty years later I make music with talented multi-instrumentalists, but in the early days we could be pretty hard on the ears.

But I think we had some good songs, and we played them with abandon -- a guitar player who joined the band called it "messy hilarity". Among serious musicians in town, Bob was absolutely the first to look past our surface imperfections enough to enjoy the songs and appreciate the gusto we brought to the experience of playing in a band. To this day, twenty years ago, I still remember Bob calling me out of the blue to talk about an Enormous Richard song that he liked. He carried on like a goofy fan, rather than one of the best songwriters in town.

Having had that experience, having been touched by Bob's passion for music in that way, it does not surprise me that he has enticed gifted musicians like Robin Allen, Michael Martin and John Horton to play in his bands and serve as his sort of de facto musical directors. Since Enormous Richard were one of the kids on the scene, then, and he was the veteran, it also does not surprise me that Bob has been able to renew his band and songs in recent years by attracting some of the best musicians in St. Louis who are literally half his age to back him up.

That band, which we will see on Saturday, is Bob Reuter's Alley Ghost. They are terrific, and I have one of their CDs (which I like); but when Bob gave me the go-ahead to bootblog some of his songs for the occasion, I had to pull out what I consider to be his finest work: the Michael-Martin produced this much I know (1994).

Here are five of its sixteen songs. I'm not sure I can name a single better record recorded in St. Louis in the twenty years I have been on the scene.

mp3s

"Outside Your Class"
(Bob Reuter)
Bob Reuter

"It Don't Matter"
(Bob Reuter)
Bob Reuter

"Other Shoe"
(Bob Reuter)
Bob Reuter

"Second Hand Smoke"
(Bob Reuter)
Bob Reuter

"10% of Nothing"
(Bob Reuter)
Bob Reuter

More in this series
Bootblogging #1: Three by The Lettuce Heads
Bootblogging #2: Three elegies for local musicians
Bootblogging #3: Michael Shannon Friedman
Bootblogging #4: Three more by The Lettuce Heads
Bootblogging #5: Chuck Reinhart's guitar circle hits
Bootblogging #6: The silly side of The Lettuce Heads
Bootblogging #7: Songs for "Divorcing God"
Bootblogging #8: More songs for "Divorcing God
Bootblogging #9: Adam Long presents The Imps!
Bootblogging #10: More Michael Shannon Friedman
Bootblogging #11: The Adversary Workers
Bootblogging #12: The May Day Orchestra
Bootblogging #13: Solo Career live in Santa Monica
Bootblogging #14: Four from The Funhouse (Seattle punk)
Bootblogging #15: Four more from The Funhouse (Seattle punk rock)
Bootblogging #16: I will be your volunteer! (for Bob Slate)
Bootblogging #17: Yet more The Lettuce HeadsBootblogging #18: Four by Russell Hoke
Bootblogging #19: Krakersy (is Crackers in Polish)
Bootblogging #20- Four by Grandpa's Ghost
Bootblogging #21: Eight by Jaime Gartelos

The history of rock & roll, country music and me



Bascom Lamar Lunsford


Yesterday began with the news that my friend Dan Durchholz has landed a new gig teaching the early history of rock & roll at a university in St. Louis County. My roots as a musician and music writer are all tangled up in his.

The next thing I did yesterday, after read my social media news, was to visit The Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville. Its first display was a reel of three films of primitive rural music that pre-dated country music. One of those films showed Bascom Lamar Lunsford playing "Doggett's Gap" with a small group of musicians. I'm co-producing a boxed set of Bascom's recordings that will make his performance of this song available to the public for the first time.

With all this history of music stuff touching so personally upon me, on a weekend when our nation looks back to celebrate its own birth, perhaps I can be forgiven for continuing to experiences exhibits at the Country Music Hall of Fame and events of the day in Nashville from the Forrest Gumpesque perspective of my tiny cameos in them.

Uncle Elvis

In the center of the third floor of the museum, where the tour starts, is parked "Elvis Presley's Solid Gold Cadillac." The love of my eldest sister's life, Lori King, was a man named Mark Presley. Mark's grandfather was first cousins with Vernon Presley, Elvis' dad. I have in my personal museum a photograph of Mark as a child, standing on the steps of Graceland, when Elvis was alive, during a family visit to his Uncle Elvis.

I told this story to the group visiting the museum with me, which included by 8-year-old daughter. Leyla was very struck by this information. "You mean I'm related to Elvis?!" she exclaimed. "Yes, by marriage," I said. Technically, my sister never married Mark, though he never left her side during the long illness and death that interrupted their loving relationship.

Hank and Chicken Truck

Speaking of Cadillacs and premature death, I thought often about my early days as a musician, in the formative days of alternative country. Hank Williams is all over The Country Music Hall of Fame, as well he should be. I was writing about music when I was first starting scruffy country rock bands in St. Louis, and I was the first scribe to write about Brian Henneman, who has gone on to have a strong career with The Bottle Rockets.

Brian was fronting Chicken Truck when I stumbled into Cicero's Basement Bar to hear them. That band's memorable early tape LOUD MUSIC included a twisted homage to Hank Williams in which Brian growls, "I want to be drunk, stoned and famous and dead in the back of my own Cadillac." This refrain cycled helplessly through my brain my entire time in the museum.

Dizzy's big toe

I thought of Brian's songwriting partner and former high school basketball coach Scott Taylor at an adjacent exhibit, where you can listen to rare recordings at listening pods. One such rare recording was "Wabash Cannonball" recorded by baseball legend Dizzy Dean. The Chicken Truck guys backed Scott in an early side project that recorded a song called "Dizzy Dean". I remember Scott sharing that song with me, observing all sorts of protocols of co-conspirators, which I didn't understand.

"You know," Scott had said, "Dizzy Dean? Big Toe? I always liked how you referenced that." I had no idea what he was talking about. My first band had been Big Toe, but the name didn't reference anything but a big toe.

"The big toe is essential to balance," Scott had explained. "A line drive shattered Dizzy Dean's big toe. He kept pitching with his balance all disrupted, and it ruined his pitching arm." I think that was when I realized how songwriters learn to take credit for being much smarter than they really are.

Slim, svelte Garth

If there is an antithesis to Hank Williams and Chicken Truck, it would be the gerbil of country music stardom, Garth Brooks. Garth is featured in the museum on a highlight reel documenting country music on television. His career in music got started exactly at the same time as mine. He became an international star while my nose was buried in obscure comic books on the road to obscure gigs.

After one Enormous Richard gig in New York City, the pretty barmaid after-partying with us described our drummer, Matt Fuller, as looking like "a slim, svelte Garth Brooks". I remember this 20 years later because of her outrage and amazement that Garth Brooks had the No. 1 hit in the world yet not one member of our band had any idea who he was!

Maybelle's Gospel Ship

On the walls that sheltered the little theater where the country music on TV reel was playing they had hung historic musical instruments on pegs. There was Maybelle Carter's Gibson L-5. It was our own "slim, svelte Garth Brooks," Matt Fuller, who learned Maybelle's licks and brought some of that old-time feeling into our bands Enormous Richard and Eleanor Roosevelt. We were playing the Carter Family song "Gospel Ship" at Cicero's in those early St. Louis years when Uncle Tupelo was playing their song "No Depression." In the case of Uncle Tupelo, the rest is history.

Jimmie's guitar at the depot

Next to Maybelle's Gibson hangs Jimmie Rodgers' Martin 00-18 guitar. I was strolling the exhibit with Elijah "Lij" Shaw, a partner in all of my bands and musical projects. After Eleanor Roosevelt burned out, we had stayed on the road as a field recording collective, Hoobellatoo. Hoobellatoo did some old-time music recordings at an old train depot in Marshall, North Carolina. Jimmie Rodgers had once left one of his other guitars behind at the depot, we were told, and it remained in a local private collection.

No credit

At that time in the exhibit, I received a call from a musician named Frank Heyer. Frank called to thank me for sending him the most recent Poetry Scores record which includes a piece of his music, Jack Ruby's America by David Clewell. However, he said (without being a jerk in any way), I made a mistake on his credits; he was playing keyboard, not fretless guitar. I told him we would "fix it in the reprint," the label's version of "fix it in the mix."

I told Lij how ironic it was, just as I was basking in my tiny roles in the history of music, to have pointed out a mistake I made on the last piece of music I produced. Lij said that was nothing. He reminded me of the come-back record he and I had produced for the jump blues legend Rosco Gordon. "My buddy Hags played bass on that record," Lij said." He was more excited than anybody. I forgot to credit him!"

Hotel California in Nashville
After a hotel pool swim, we finished our day at Lij's home in East Nashville. Out back he has built a commercial recording studio, The Toy Box. Lij throws opens its doors to Poetry Scores, the project that our bands and Hoobellatoo has evolved into. He also rents it out to other producers.

He called me down to the studio to hear some mixes a producer just did in his studio. The Toy Box is getting a name as a mix studio, in part, because Lij bought and installed the mother board on which many iconic Southern Californian recordings, including The Eagles' Hotel California, were mixed.

Paul Westerberg's Deer Tick

This project is the new record by the band Deer Tick. Lij wanted me to hear it because they are one of Paul Westerberg's favorite bands. Westerberg, of course, led The Replacements, which influenced all the rock musicians of our generation. Westerberg had even written a song for Deer Tick that appears on this album, "Mr. Cigarette," sung to the tune of "I've Been Working on the Railroad". It's not the best song on what sounds like a great album.

"On this board, the brights can sound too bright," Lij remarked critically. "Listen to that high-hat. It's just like on Hotel California -- a little too hot."

Ghost World garage

I pulled a comic book off the shelf while we were listening. It was Ghost World, by Daniel Clowes, which the publisher had affixed with the sticker "Now a Major Motion Picture". That major motion picture was filmed, in large part, in a strip mall in Hollywood. That strip mall sits right across the street from a home owned by the sister of Matt Fuller, the "slim, svelte Garth Brooks" of our songwriting partnership. For many years, Matt has used his sister's garage to write songs and record worktapes. The records we have made for many years started in a garage that looks out over onto the strip mall where Ghost World was filmed.

Emmylou's giant poodle

I guess if you get old enough and stubbornly keep doing the same thing -- make music -- it gets to be like this, where everything you pick up bears a trace of something you have been a part of. Since this could go on forever, I'll end with an anecdote that ranks as unforgettable.

After the Deer Tick listening session, we went up the house and listened to Lij's mixes from Bonnaroo. Bonnaroo is a mjor music festival in Tennessee where Lij has been getting the contract to do live backstage recordings of the acts. The great producer Daniel Lanois was one of the acts this year. As we listened to Lij's recording and watched the video of Lij recording Lanois, I remembered a story Lij had told just that morning at breakfast.

We had breakfast in East Nashville, at a French-styled cafe called Marche that sits right across the street from Woodland Studios. Some twenty years ago, in his earliest days in Nashville, Lij had interned at Woodland. He was forbid to enter the studio recording rooms during sessions and assigned busywork instead.

Lanois brought in Emmylou Harris to make the Wrecking Ball record while Lij was there, and one piece of busywork he was assigned was to stop Emmylou's giant black poodle from escaping. Unfortunately, the dog did escape on Lij's watch.

Lij fled out the studio door and followed the giant poodle across Gallatin Road. The dog ran around Oprah Winfrey's former high school and darted into what was then a section of low-slung housing projects.

Fortunately for LIj and Emmylou Harris, the dog stopped to pinch a turd, and Lij tackled the giant poodle while it was taking a shit in the projects behind Oprah Winfrey's former high school. My carried and dragged that giant poodle out of the projects, past Oprah Winfrey's former high school, across across Gallatin Road and into Woodland Studio, where musical history was being made.

There is a mirror that has seen us for the last time

St. Louis is home to one of the world's great small museums, The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, which hangs a show for a long time, then constantly cycles community programs through its doors. This method has a way of bleeding Pulitzer shows into St. Louis' bloodstream. The current show is Dreamscapes, and today I noticed St. Louis had taken on the quality of a dream.

My friend Ray is being evicted. It happens. I have sympathy for the transient, been there for years, and I'd do anything for Ray. We go back to the rock band road trips of my transient youth. So I borrowed a truck from our friend Michael and helped to evict Ray tonight.

Driving into Ray's Carondolet neighborhood in Michael's hot-wired Sonoma, I was also driving into my dead friend Paul's neighborhood. Paul was shot dead in his backyard on Idaho back in May. Ray lives right around the corner from where Paul lived and died. Ray dropped everything and helped me clean out Paul's garage and basement. He even mowed the dead man's yard before the bank took it back.

So there we were again, Ray and me, cleaning out another South City garage. This time it was Ray's stuff we had to pack up and move out. Not a dead man this time, only bounced a man, homeless between couches until something else works out.

I kept picking up stuff and asking Ray if I should pack it. Ray never had a ready answer. He wasn't really ready to leave this house on Alaska Street. It was as if part of him hadn't accepted that he had to move all of his stuff out of there.

I picked up a nice leather artist's portfolio. "Should I pack this?"

"That's hers," Ray said. A girlfriend had moved out abruptly, and that was one reason why Ray couldn't afford to stay here anymore.

"She was an artist?"

"That's what she said. Then she left and left that behind. So I looked at her portfolio. It's all empty pages."

When I needed something to protect Ray's mirror I was packing in the truckbed, Ray handed me a bedspread that had once been Paul's. The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges had strong feelings about mirrors and the dead. There is a mirror that has seen me for the last time.

Paul's bedspread protected Ray's mirror as I drove it down Grand to Meramec, up Meramec to Morganford, across Morganford to Juniata, and then around the block to Hartford and the house where Ray would be storing his stuff for awhile.

We were helped by Doug Golden and Andee. Andee was driving one of those minivans that look like every other minivan. We lugged Ray's stuff out of our trucks and Andee's minivan into another man's big, cool, bungalowy house and basement.
"I felt so good in that house," Andee said between trips in and out of the house. "It feels like a big bungalow. I feel at peace in that house."

When I went to back Michael's hotwired truck up into the driveway, it stalled; and once it had stalled, its hotwire was no longer hot. Michael had showed me to start his truck by grasping a knob from the guts of the ignition with a pair of plyers and pulling it toward me. This trick was no longer working. The dead truck was now blocking Hartford. We endeavored to unload it in a hurry while no traffic was coming down the one-way street.

Ray called to me as I was coming back down from the big, cool, comfortable house. We had to move the truck out of the street, he said; he would push, if I would steer. I got behind the wheel. Then the man whose way we had been blocking on the street got out of his minivan, I would have thought to holler at us and complain. Instead, he put a shoulder to the truck and helped Ray push Michael's truck as I steered it to the curb.

"Oh, hi, Riley," Ray said to the guy who left the minivan to help us push Michael's truck out of his way.

Riley looked as if he had stepped out of a comic strip, or a dream. His arms were floridly tattooed. Both ears had rings. He had this cute little hat tilted on his head. He had the cleanest shave I have ever seen and his nostrils appeared to have been tended to, immaculately. He had a hole in the ass pocket of his Levis almost exactly the shape and size of his wallet, yet his wallet was not falling out through it.

Riley was Ray's friend. He lived down the street. He wanted to help. Ray told Riley we were done for the night and he needed a whiskey. Riley said he needed a whiskey too. Riley said he lived a block away and would help tomorrow, so let's go get a whiskey tonight. Riley and Doug Golden disappeared into the night, bound for a tavern named Riley's.

Or, no. They had piled into Andee's minivan, which looks like every other minivan. Riley and Doug Golden sheepishly stepped back out of Andee's minivan, shuffled over to Riley's minivan, and disappeared into the night, bound for Riley's tavern.

The it was just Ray, Andee and me. The streetlights had come on in South City. Ray and I make movies together. The yellow light of the streetlight on Ray made him look like an actor in a movie, or a dreamer in a dream.

He wanted to tell Andee about an ex he had called tonight and who had been nice to him. I really didn't want to hear this right now. It was an evil ex Ray had fallen for again who was responsible for his eviction.

Andee suddenly doubled over as Ray started the story. "I swallowed a gnat!" she gasped.

"You don't want to hear it, I know," Ray said.

"No, I swallowed a gnat!" Andee gasped.

Andee was my ride back to Michael's house, where I had left my car when I had picked up his truck. We talked about transience along the way. We had both been transients. We talked about dislocation, sickness and death. There were a lot of dislocated and sick people in our lives, a lot of death in our lives.

That reminded me. My friend Amy was waiting at a different tavern that was sort of on our way to Michael's house. She had with her at the tavern the work of art she had bought for me as my proxy bidder at the silent art auction benefit for Bunny. Bunny was sick.

We picked up the art from Amy and put it in the minivan. It was a really nice piece. Andee vaguely remembered the benefit, though she didn't know Bunny. "There have been a lot of benefits lately," Andee said.

There really had. The last time I had borrowed Michael's truck, in fact, was to move the art collection of my dead friend, Paul. We auctioned off his art as a benefit and gave the money to his son. I told Andee about that and how Ray had helped with the benefits for Paul.

While helping me with a benefit for a dead man with one 20-year-old son, I told Andee, Ray quietly dropped a reference to a benefit he was doing for a friend of his with three small children who was dying of testicular cancer.

Ray is a funny man. I thought he was trying to be funny. I told Ray that was funny, as if he were joking about how worse it could be. Ray said there was nothing funny about it. He really did have a friend who was dying of testicular cancer and would leave three small children behind.

"When is that benefit?" Andee asked. I said it already had passed, about a month ago. They keep coming and going.

We drove through South City. Andee is this really neat, slim, quiet, sincere, thoughtful, attractive woman. She said, "I grew up right around here." I had never met anyone who grew up around South Grand. I was curious about that. I tried to imagine her childhood on these streets familiar to me only as an adult artist type. I asked about her parents.

She said her mother was a secretary and her second father was a city cop. Just then we saw a city cop we both know, another Michael. I like this guy. He was walking his tough guy little dog. I called his name, and Michael came over.

"What do you have against the Brentwood firemen?" he asked me.

I took a break from work this afternoon to deliver a DVD of our movie Blind Cat Black to Susan Story in Brentwood. I never go to Brentwood. I took the opportunity of being on strange streets to drive local roads back to work. I passed a Sno Cone stand. I saw two Brentwood Fire Department fire trucks parked there. The Brentwood city manager was just busted for embezzling. So I posted in social media a wisecrack about the idle Brentwood firemen and maybe not all the bums being off the Brentwood city payroll.

"They do 24-hour shifts," Michael said. "What are you going to do for 24 hours?"

Maybe you'd go to the Sno Cone stand for a few hours. "I'll delete that," I said.

We got going again and passed a house where Andee had lived as a child. "No wonder," she said. "No wonder I felt so good in that house on Hartford, where we dropped off all of Ray's stuff. It felt like a bungalow. That house I grew up in was a little bungalow."

Andee had said "second father". I asked her about that. She explained it to me. Her reproductive father had not played a parental role in her life. She didn't sound at all bitter about that, though. It sounded like the man her father married next had been good for her.

She told me how her mother had met him. Her mother was a secretary in a business downtown. A disgruntled former employee came in one day with a gun. The person he took hostage while acting out with the gun happened to be her mother. The city cops were called in. One cop shot dead the disgruntled gunman holding Andee's mom hostage. One thing led to another after that, between her mom and the cop.

"How old were you at the time?" I wanted to know.

"I was seven," Andee said, "but I only learned about it much later. My mom is a quiet woman."

By now, we were at Michael's house. I pointed out my car on the street. "Oh, that little car," Andee said, pulling up beside it. She said, "I was born on this street." It was a dead end street.

*

Image is The Village of the Mermaids by Paul Delvaux (1942), presently hanging at The Pulitzer in St. Louis as part of Dreamscapes.

Blinded by brilliant colors carefully wrought: New Paintings from Michael Hoffman

Michael Hoffman is a consistent and consistently brilliant presence on the St. Louis visual art scene. His consistency and brilliance definitely affect the way one relates to his work. In the many shows I have visited or curated that included work by Michael, I knew his pieces instantly and instantly knew what to expect: consummate artistry that is both uncanny (how does he DO that?) and totally pleasing to the senses. As a matter of fact, it would look nice next to your couch, or table, or desk, or executive corridor.

As a result, over the years, I have probably spent less time deeply absorbed in Michael's work than I do with work that is less accomplished but more demanding-of-attention. Michael's art is exactly like the prettiest person in the room: Well, there is THAT. Okay. Now, let's go contend with something more our slower speed. This situation is amped up a little by the fact that Michael himself is personally always one of the most attractive and pleasant people in any room he is in. Last night I looked closely at his one-man show at Hoffman LaChance while Sunyatta Marshall also was in the gallery, and I reflected that there wasn't a small room anywhere in the world that had the bases of male and female physical beauty covered any better.

So I wanted to look at Michael's new one-man show, New Paintings from Michael Hoffman (June 10th - July 2, 2011 at Hoffman LaChance, 2713 Sutton in Maplewood) because I wanted to encounter his paintings when I couldn't take the easy out and spend all my time on work that is less brilliant and pleasing to the senses. As I result, I spent an hour or so circling a small square room, pleased and illuminated.

I think there are 17 numbered pieces, and a few others hanging unnumbered in passage spaces (it is, after all, Michael's gallery). I started by jotting the numbers of the pieces I thought I had the most to think about, and then going back and thinking about them.

The 5th numbered piece uses a motif I have seen Michael use before. It reads like a brilliantly colorful concentric target (or shield, an icon he shares with his buddy Jon Cournoyer). Like so much of Michael's work, this piece has that amazingly composed surface that is the main thing that makes people shake their heads and wonder how he does that: how do you make a highly wrought object that looks like God just smoothed it out by hand?

This highly wrought but seamless circular figure is then engrained with another Michael Hoffman obsession, the 3-D grid of a globe. That's another gift he has: he makes paintings that take on some characteristics of sculpture without breaking the plane. He has taken that work all the way out to a logical extension in paintings that almost become ceramics sculptures without ever ceasing to be a painting.

Next to this new take on old favorites in the show are two pieces (numbered 6 and 7) in a Michael mode I have not seen. This is where I would have been spending my money, if I had any money to spend and wall space for art. They are vertical pieces that look like Jasper Johns flags reimagined as envelopes, though with patriotism to nothing but color, shape and design.

These pieces relate to the design idea that dominates the postcard Hoffman LaChance made for the show: thin, bright lines running tightly parallel with no other ornamentation. When Michael paints (or hangs) pieces in this mode vertically (13), it strikes me as an homage to a certain style of candy-striped shirt or necktie. Painted or presented vertically (11, 17), it suggests a visual pun. The pattern evokes window blinds, so it's as if you are being blinded by brilliant colors carefully wrought, which takes us right back to the core phenomenon of Michael Hoffman: being blinded by brilliant colors carefully wrought.

Speaking of core Michael, the show concludes (except for the bookend of the second brilliant blinds painting) with a trology of Michael Hoffman horizons. It is really interesting to see three of these horizon paintings on a wall next to each other. It gives you a chance to pay more attention to variation and its tonal effects. He makes small variations in landscape (all drawn, Cournoyer reports, from beloved islands near Seattle) and more sweeping changes in color to tell quite different stories (a rare appearance of the narrative element suggested in his work). Big dark reds in the sky and sea that dominate the landscape (14) tell of a blood red sunset with blood in the water. More blues and greens in the sea (15) whisper of a peaceful harbor at dusk. A stronger emphasis on the landscape elements and more control on the red pedal (16) warn of smoldering island volcanoes.

I picked up the one-sheet for the show, and learned something genuinely new about Michael: he has a gift for titles. Here are the titles for the pieces that caught my eye and notebook:

5) Catalan Spring
7) Playa Cadaques
11) Spanish Candy
13) Confluences
14) Rosario Strait
15) Way Out West
16) December Islands.

That just gave me some more things to think about, so I walked back through the show, then walked out onto the city street still thinking about it.