some things never change

fading light

As I listen to cicadas fade in and out through the window behind my head I am thankful that the weather has been fairly kind to us this year. The mosquitoes seem to be as brutal as ever but the temperature is softer... warm to hot in the afternoons and cooling off most nights. We haven't turned on our AC this season which allows me sit here surrounded by two open windows with content cats perched in them.

My laptop is the warmest and brightest thing here as the light fades outside. This quiet time is something I cherish.

DIng Dong the King is Dead

Most of my friends and colleagues have no idea of my personal relationship with Elvis. It is something we don't talk about - like one's personal relationship with God. I was born in 1960 and grew up two hours south of Memphis on hwy 61. Elvis was a presence that could not be denied. Every morning the Memphis DJ Rick Dees would do funny impressions of Elvis giving away Cadillacs to forlorn housewives or forgotten vets... I had a framed picture of Elvis on my bedroom wall. It was torn from the Parade Magazine and featured a cerulean blue background.

During the late 1960's or early 70's the Ellis Theatre would feature a double billing of Elvis movies for the pre-teen matinee crowd. I was there with my girlfriend Meg who was was present every Saturday in order to flirt with the boys. I was there to look at Elvis. Yes, yes, the movies were dumb - but it was the place to be on a Saturday afternoon in Bolivar County.

I just liked the way he looked when we were both SO young. He resembed a Greek God and I didn't even know what those mythic figures looked like in 1972. It is an aesthetic I continue to embrace today though the origins are closer to Rome or Greece, via Paris and NYC; than Memphis.

As time passed poor Elvis became a joke to everyone but the most dedicated fans. When we had 50's day (very big when I was in junior high) the loyal few would come dressed as the young, cool Elvis and his entourage. When I learned of Elvis' death thirty years ago today I was standing on a scaffold which was installed on top of the roof of our high school. I was painting the 1978 class motto on the top of a smoke stack in the hot Mississippi sun. It's amazing what one can take when one is young because I know I didn't drink a lot of water back then. Mostly light beer and diet coke - though not on campus! Drinking age was 18 back in the late 7o's. I remember being amazed when my German cousin told me drinking age was like 14 in her hometown... but, I digress.

I was expecting to be "spelled" by a few of my classmates that afternoon but they failed to show. It seems Ward and Meg had taken off for Memphis to attend Elvis' funeral. They weren't the Graceland types - but they understood Elvis and wanted to show their respect. I remember Ward's interpretation of Elvis - who was blonde - and he died his hair black - and wore levis so tight that they split up the rear when he arrived at school. He had someone paint "I love Elvis" with lipstick on the white underpants showing through the split. He wore a while short sleeved button down shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He was a big hit. Still, I am surprised he wasn't sent home. Ward was a preacher's son. He was pretty outrageous - even for the 70's - even for the Delta! I think he's a lawyer now. I'd love to see him in action.

As always - I finished the mural, such as it was. I contemplated what Elvis' funeral must have been like as I sat on my front lawn in the late afternoon haze. The cicadas were buzzing and between their cycles one could hear David Bowie's "Spiders from Mars" and Bruce Springsteen's "Born to Run" blaring from of my bedroom window via eight track tapes.

Elvis' presence and my Delta origins became less prominent as I weathered six years of undergrad and graduate art school. Finally in the late 80's I attended a SECAC conference in Memphis. My incentives? Professional Development... Travel money from my department... AND the final banquet was to held at GRACELAND! I'd never been to Graceland though we'd driven by its gates many, many times during my childhood. Christmas Shopping and most any occassion that took us to Memphis would take us right past those famous musically noted gates...

The banquet wasn't that memorable because there was an open bar and in true Elvis Fashion I indulged in too much vodka. I think. Bloody Marys, maybe? Before my turn on the dance floor with Bloody Mary I was able to tour Graceland with a group of about a dozen art professors. Voila! It was authentically fabulous in every sense of the word. I'll always remember his zebra decor in his lounge... everyone's mouth was hanging open.... I think because it was all so real and so fake and so Elvis. No one knew what to say. Needless to say the next day I woke up in my colleagues room, which we were sharing with art students- with one of the worst hangovers of my life. I have no idea how I made it to the plane or how I kept from spewing all over the people surrounding me on that flight.

I remember seeing a few familiar faces on the plane but I don't think they recognized me because I was literally green. (Still, I didn't drink enough water. I was still young and stupid although, like Elvis, I was old enough to know better.)

Finally, as the years passed I found a mate who finds my Delta origins to be exotic. They charm him when things are right with the world. We were married in 1996 and his wedding present to me was a signed photograph of Elvis french kissing a mystery woman in the Mosque theatre in Richmond, VA. To this day no one knows who the woman is. No, it isn't me!

Mr. dd met the famous Albert Wertheimer while researching this mythic image and asked him to sign the print he purchased for me. Elvis story is one that can be read from so many perspectives. He was mythic, tragic, bigger than life, naive, a force, a waste, mislead, etc. Still, they broke the mold. There is no other. We can enjoy the brilliance he inspires in others with fake Elvis, rockabilly, kitch, etc - as long as we appreciate someone who if nothing else was authentic.

Neither photo is a film still!
Elvis films werevery candy-coated.
These were taken by Albert Wertheimer
who Elvis allowed to shadow him on his first big tour of his
career. No one has ever been able to identify the woman
in the black dress. oooh la la!
Mr. dd purchaced the one on
the top as a wedding tribute to
our bliss.

Down for the Count

left: a study of a Thomas Eakins
drawing by one of my students.

Most mornings I wake up with a slight headache that goes away after I sit up and do some breathwork. Not yesterday. It was a doozy likely the result of the high pressure system that brought us a high yesterday of over 100 degrees F.... and several glasses of cabernet and merlot consumed the previous evening. I normally don't drink red wine in the summer for this reason but it was a special night, an open bar with a very fine complimentary buffet at a four star steak house. I could have chosen the local mircrobrew, which is very, very good, but I really shouldn't consume wheat. Beer is generally off limits for me although I'll make an exception for Guinness!

My head wouldn't stop throbbing yesterday. I tried a barrage of remedies to eliminate the stuffiness (one sinus passage was swollen) that resulted in the headache. The sum total of my day yesterday: Olba inhalers, saline solution, steam heat on my face (the most effective thing), peppermint oil, breathwork, pain pill, cold shower, head massage, spicey food - etc. The most I could accomplish was researching on line for any new miracles in pain relief from places like the curezone. I am always looking for a new home remedy since the other stuff really doesn't work (aleve, ibuprofen, etc) and it's hard on one's liver.

This morning I am ok and ready to make up for yesterday. It rained last night so at least the high pressure front moved on. There really is no good way to escape the weather. Acceptance is key to surviving it. We hadn't turned on our air conditioners until this past weekend since we knew this brutal heat wave was headed our way. One thing I've learned is that when I work overseas there are no airconditioners and it can get very hot. One learns to work around the heat and accept it as the organizing factor of one's day. In Europe they close the shutters during the hottest part of the day and take a long lunch. Here I've learned to get up early and use the cross ventilation and blinds to keep the heat out... as a result we've adjusted to the heat this year and I hadn't had a single bad headache all summer.

Now that the AC is on it's a different story. I'll continue to refer to my homeopathic prevention kit to keep my headaches at bay. The heat index is supposed to be 111 degrees today. Why do people get sinus infections during the summer? AC. If my life were different I'd spend the entire afternoon at the pool as I did when I was a teenager. I did my chores in the morning and spent the afternoon reading at the pool. Now that I look back there were moments when it appeared to be a pretty cushy life. C'est la vie.

Sunflower County

It is hot. I am sitting in my studio, a little sticky. Just writing. It's nicer outside where I can water the garden and admire the sunflowers... but that's a fifteen minute task. My paintings are inside and waiting to be finished. There are also headlines to ponder and cats to feed.

I've been distracted by the collapsed bridge in Minneapolis. I have friend that teaches at the art school there and I'd love to know she's ok. Readers may also have noticed that I have a great respect for the Mississippi River. It isn't a body of water to be taken in stride or to be considered a place for recreational boating. I've posted my memories of the Mississippi before but most of my tales take place on the other end of da rivah.

A musician friend once spent several months sleeping at the mouth of the Mississippi in NOLA. It was back in the day when one could hear David Bowie break out into spontaneous version of Fame at Pat O'Brien's. Of course he was surrounded by drunks who didn't seem to notice. It probably wasn't his crowd. Sometime before that childhood friend also watched a friend's car roll into the Mississippi River from the huge levee that runs the length of the Delta.

I doubt it was like that scene in Risky Business since my high school buddies were more concerned about the ounce of pot in the glove compartment of their ancient land yacht than they were about explaining the vehicle's loss to any person of authority. He wrote a song about it. I don't remember the lyrics but it was definitely performed to a blues beat.

Present Tense

holding patterns

Silence and strange weather patterns can create unexpected connections. Earlier this week I was on the prowl with Mr. dd. He's writing a piece about a cemetery that contains a mass grave (trench) of confederate soldiers who were of both African and European descent. The cemetery is nearly forgotten with plaques for memorial plantings that are long dead and flag poles for flags that aren't flying.

For every stob one sees in the landscape there are three soldiers buried underneath. A few have markers and each one is numbered. If one wants to find their ancestors here it is theoretically possible.

For some odd reason as I wandered around in the unusually soft light of a July afternoon I was reminded of an afternoon I spent at St. Cloud last year. Located on the outskirts of Paris, this grande jardin is also nearly forgotten and difficult to find. The locals use its formerly opulent paths to walk their dogs, jog and the occassional picnic. The estate the gardens were built around is long gone. The boxwoods are as old as the French Republic and the statuary has witnessed it all. I wandered around the grounds in the overcast light and recorded its faded glory with my digital sketchbook.

A dark and stormy night...in the middle of the 80's

Last night a girlfriend I met my freshman year of Uni stopped in for a visit. She is traveling with her godson and they were wearing the same uniform - t-shirts and jeans - or khakis.

She's a genuine character: an army brat who has lived by her own rules since the day she left home for college. Truly. Last night she told a story I'd heard long ago and now I'll relish its retelling since I fear I'll lose it again if I don't tell it now.

GF happened to be hanging out in my hometown with two young men I'd known since grade school. They were walking on the levee smoking homegrown, no doubt. I was away at grad school and missed these middle 80's years in the south.

At the end of the evening she planned to drive back to campus, an hour or so away. The weather had turned since she's left home that morning. Folks from the Delta generally take the weather in stride. Farmer's anticipate the worst and compensate for it. Delta rats are accustomed to the black, blue or green skies of tornados when the rain can be like sheets of broken glass. Add hail to the mix and it is be a recipe for danger and fear. Funnel clouds are like large spinning dice. They are most terrifying because one never knows what they will hit and or do. They can pick up cars or houses or rearrange them in an elemental, implosive way.

Most Delta natives tend to take tornados in stride because of the low elevation and a strong levee system. It was constructed in the early 20th C by the army corp. of engineers before it was fashionable and acceptable to cut corners. Tornados are a game of hit and miss so the locals stay inside as far from the windows as possible.

My girlfriend has little experience with dramatic weather since she grew up in Germany. She's an excellent marksmen and very independent but she was terrified. The radio warnings and sirens convinced her she should stay the night. She didn't remember how she found the house I grew up in but she did. She knocked on the kitchen door, soaking wet with a six month old puppy in her arms. My grandmother, who spent weekends there since my mom left, opened the door. GF said she was a friend of mine and that she was wet and scared and asked to come in. My grandmother said sure. GF dripped into the kitchen only to see a handgun on the counter. She then realized that she was truly terrified. She asked my grandmother if she should be scared! "Oh, no." My Dad was still at work. It was a dark and stormy night.... My grandmother is and always had been a god- fearing, gun-toting Baptist who won't take crap from anyone but my grandfather who'd died in the 70's.

GF asked if she could watch the television to see where the storm was headed. She was, to say the least, freaked. My dad finally came home and while my grandmother prepared dinner for them both my father held court - which is what he does best. When he learned that GF's father was at the same Uni, the same time he was, he broke out the yearbook and looked up GF's Dad.
"He pointed his finger at my father's face, god rest his soul and proceeded to tell me many things about my father that I didn't know." My Dad said of her father "This man shot a lot of pool and played a lot of cards."

It turns out GF's father, who I knew as a man of the military, put himself through college hustling pool and cards before he enlisted. GF said they shot pool once. He hadn't had a stick in his hand in 20 years and he never missed a shot. He was the real deal.

My Mamaw made sure GF was comfortable in my old bedroom upstairs. At some point during the night GF was awakend by her hysterically barking pup. She got up out of bed and looked down on the mezzanine level of the "suite" I called home during my teenage years (my ivey tower, according to my Dad.) "There was a man wearing a top hat and 19th C clothing looking at his pocket watch on the landing. He looked up at me and then turned and walked straight through the closed door into my closet." Ghosts? Hmmm.

GF says that the night she spent with my family was one of those pivotal points of her youth. Although I was raised by a very colorful family I think my GF may have enjoyed some exceptionally strong weed with those college boyfriends. STILL... it makes a great story.

I'd left home by then. When I left for Uni I lived in the independent state of moi and when I left my home state for grad school that was it. I wish I had known then what I know now and that I hadn't always been in such a rush to grow up.

I was the oldest child and fiercely independent. I could have lived at home and gone to art school on scholarship - but no. I made my own way and paid for it with grants, other scholarships and a great of work study.

Fields of plenty

It was almost a year ago that I fell in love with Sunflowers. After a lifetime of living with paintings of Sunflowers, not quite as ubiquitous as magnolias, I finally GOT IT. My parent's bedroom featured a series of Van Gogh reproductions from his sunflower series. They were curious images but I never gave them much consideration as a child. I was more interested in the blue boy and pinkie hanging in the living room.

Fields and fields of sunflowers in all stages of bloom. It was August and in southwest France sunflowers are harvested for their seed. They are left in the field to dry much like cotton. Their figurative stance, posture and expressiveness hit me like a wall. Finally I really understood why Kiefer uses sunflowers in his latest work (beyond their references to art history and allegory)! He lives in France now on a vast compound surrounded by countryside. I fell in love with the sunflower, absconded with one or two from the local fields, scanned the sunflower, drew them, painted them, wrote about them. This summer I tried cultivating them.

I come from a long line of agrairians but did not inherit my ancestor's green thumb. I did inherit their persistence and I do spend a great deal of time in the garden. Unfortunatly I am a trial and error gardener and what thrives in my neighbors' gardens doesn't always thrive in mine. I haven't resorted to purchasing plastic sunflowers yet but with a pending drout it could happen. Sigh.

The Long Hot Summer

The passing of June is always tough for me. July and August are hard - even for a southern girl like me. June is a month of optimism. Summer spreads out before us... everyone is still making their summer plans. Parties, cookouts, home projects, creative endeavors are all possible. During July and August anything could happen. Hurricanes, drought, ticks, mosquitoes, poison ivey, etc, etc. When things go a certain way I manage to escape and do business elsewhere - an elsewhere that is either more forgiving or airconditioned.

When things don't go that way I somehow manage to get through it here, working in an unairconditioned studio with a car that has no ac either. I can't tell you how much I hate it. We aren't car people anyway... so its a test of endurance. If we could get away without having one we would. Our work requires we pay to have a car sit in front of our house 90 percent of the time... but that's another post.

One way I manage to endure the heat is the reward of something cooler and sweeter happening in late August... a trip, perhaps. Not this year! Mr dd and I both have big deadlines in the early fall and have taken a trip or two earlier this season due to weddings and family gatherings... SOOOOO.... we'll be counting the days and watching the forecasts and getting through the long, hot summer. Maybe the sounds of Paul Newman and Joey Woodward will echo in our heads to remind us of the prolific art that can born of summer heat.

A little rain, a lot of wonder. Aren't these children lovely? I wish they could tell me about the temple we've just visited. It could be warmer but it could be colder. We're lucky out Koren hosts have the time, resources and patience to drive us from site to site, regardless of the weather.