The Texture & Specificity of Life

September 28th, 2023 Colfax, California.  Colonial camp, railroad town.   I've spent most of my life and creative energies in searching for order, meaning, harmony in abstraction: considering the implications of biology and neurology in social construction and broader cultural currents, expressions and institutions.  Or, trying to understand the process by which history, personal or cultural, becomes drained of specificity, agglomerated, symbolized and thus transformed into myth.   In many ways, this drive towards abstraction has been a defense mechanism against the confusion, terrors and pains the my specific difficult experiences and the aspects of my personality/life/family circumstances have engendered in me.  Even as I write this, I am reluctant to give concrete examples. I tend to want to save them, be strategic, as I feel they can be quite shocking, or have other powerful effects....for example, to illicit jealousy.....pity....etc......how much to make one's story into a

 Just do it.  Get it out, get it done.  Fifteen minutes, and, go. There is a very specific smell in the Sierra Nevada in the summertime.  It stirs my deepest memory centers.  I've know that smell my entire life, but I just learned what plant actually makes the smell, what it is called.  Like most things, it has many names.  Chamaebatia foliosa. Bearclover. Mountain Misery. And, my personal favorite, the Miwok work Kit Kit Dizze.  It has small white flowers in the spring, delicately shaped foliage, almost fern-like, and grows in dense mats and shrub-stands in the understory of the mixed conifer forest starting at about 2000' elevation and continues up into at least the the lower alpine, about 6500'.  It fills-in over erratic glacial boulder formations & fills the hot, dry, steep, exposed canyon walls on the Western Slopes with it's aroma in the summer months.  There are many other amazing smells in the forest in the summer--Douglas Fir, which has a sweet citrus small

 July 2nd, 2023 I wanted to write.  When I was thirteen.  Thirty years ago.  I wanted to be one who was mad for life.  Whose ghosts haunt the teenage mind, part of the pantheon of culture heros who burn bright and light the connections of the past with the present, who transcend that terrible limitation, and ultimate gift, human mortality. I want to write, now.  I want to write and do yoga and walk in the wild places and make pictures and shine my light on the curiously complex net of being that is in and around me.   Movement heals.   My brother who has dealt with terrible pain and injuries told me that.   Does anything ever really heal?  Is that an illusion on the chopping block, as well?   Like the synchrony of artistic merit and some ultimate value as an existing thing?  The counselor said that when we do deep healing work, we heal seven generations back, and seven generations forward. It's hard to even get enough sleep so that my brain doesn't electrocute itself violently

'This selection of matte, surface-oriented work from 2010-present presents a case for the artist's work being primarily concerned with gestural, primal, instinctive mark-making.  There seems to be a consistent deviation from rationality; moments of brilliant representation are hand in glove with interrupted illusions, a cell- phone-at-the-opera disrespect for politeness, rationality, prettiness, and other pristine western aesthetic traditions.  However, through his soulful dedication to pure instinct and intuition, the meta-and-subconscious zeitgeist of the early internet age is boldly and energetically declared, and Quintero's finished works transcend the rudeness of their age, and become celebratory, as much as they are defiant (and elegiac) of the high art of the hitherto defunct Western canon, in favor of a celebration of space, of wildness, of an amor fate that links him as much to the existentialism of mid century modernists as it does to the street art of Banksy.'

AprApril is the cruelest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain -T.S. Eliot, “The Wasteland”      Today, I am hiding out from the atrocious pollen count in California (I always thought that Elliot was talking about allergies--as it turns out, he was talking about  the cruelty of hope in a hopeless time , according to Michael Austin (thanks Google!)) by staying in my apartment with the blinds drawn and furiously eating bee pollen to try and force my immune system to bee friends with it (get it?).  It has been more than a year since I have written a blog post.  I can't seem to crack the algorithm on the old facestergrammers, and, at any rate, there is no slowness there, no space for thought and reflection, for development, for depth. And, so.... The Post Covid Post, or, Unfinished Business                    I chose a profession that is also a dream.        That is an interesting metaphor-- A dream.     [It is hard