chordata||| anodyne2

I was raw,but now I'm cooked !
A lover goes to the door of the adored. She knocks at the door
and when the dearly beloved asked: "Who's there?"
"It is me."
"Go away."
She goes away and stays a long time,but then comes back.
She knocks at the door again.
"Who's there ?" and she says,
"It is you."
"COME IN."

(A Sufi story passed on many years ago and a simple truth we keep trying to learn about

Love)

ANARCHAEOLOGY

File Entry 1974-Ephemera

Bulletin Board under the microscope circa 1974,Lyme Regis
Snapshot of an accretion at 17. Statuses: Married to stay legal in UK (!),Performing Musician,Songwriter/Composer,Living in Uplyme,Lyme Regis,fossil hunter,community arts organizer. "Ley Lines",local folklore,geology,history,science: Mentors:Professor Howard Barr, Historian Geoffrey Ashe ,Robert Duncan(poet),Ann Jones ,farmer & businesswoman.


Upper Left Hand Corner:

David Amram conducting in sneakers /NYC (photo by dad,Jim Thom)
Joan Baez,NYC
The Dakota
Postcard from Tate/Gaugin..Horses
London 18thc Skyline
Keats
Indian Miniature
Photo Detail of Maze by David Damrosch
Friend playing lute in UK
Interior Byzantine church
Ricky performing
Hazrat Inayat Khan
Rev Kirkpatrick +Clearwater performers
Pete Seeger,Nyack NY
Liz's Mom + Dad live on radio,early 60s
David Pyle
Greek tomb relief/friends
Otters on their backs
Tigger with brown paper bag ,NYC
Detail.Unicorn Tapestries
Picasso painting with light
David & Lori Damrosch
Liz & Ricky in Lyme Regis,performing

Mrs. Shulka Adhikary:Love Song #1

I studied the songs of Mirabai and Tagore
(from red velvet -covered books,now long gone)
through my Bengali teacher who'd sing and count the meter
dada DIN ! out.
One night,wading through floodwaters
up to my knees in the London Underground,
holding the tambura in its cloth bag high above my head
in case it fell apart like tissue paper,
I missed the last train home.
No trains were running
so I walked in a Northerly direction
just like I was walking the New York streets alone
always a tramp for beauty.
All London was drowning from Christopher Wren's church
to houseboats in Camden,
I was in love like I always am
and was thinking of my Bengali teacher and the rhythm
caught in what she called her loveless arranged marriage
singing transcendental love songs
in her Council housing cage there-Clapham tube stop?
But remember this:
Lace on the windows,so far away from her home,
her heart flew to Tagore,the only true love
she said she'd ever known
and she told me
that it was enough.

4/4/2009 (On occasion of "I Love You" day on Twitter)

DayBook Pages,London 1973 with writing to David Damrosch in car coming from Connecticut into

New York on brief trip back from UK...looks like I scribbled:and riding home in the rain,windshield

wipers slapping a gentle rhythm,we spoke of the wonders of life,and what more wonder my friend

than sitting down to a poem to one you love or building an ingenious box or drawing a maze with

I Love You at every turning. David had built a box maze for Lori that was a magical thing full of hieroglyphs

and treasures.

Pages from DayBook,1973,These weeks back in New York from England.  British Airways flight back again.16 yrs old,I see there was a D Amram concert scheduled there and was taking a workshop with musician Pandit Pran Nath somewhere in a downtown lofty space.

Same Daybook (1973/74): London Tube Map and bus route map.

Ricky with Punita Gupta,one of his teachers and a performer of rare grace. 1974

Lately, I have had the feeling of coming full circle, and have been re-visiting my teenage years in New York City (had strong interests then,as now, in UnSchooling and people like John Holt,Paul Goodman) and later years back in the City, studying Social History of the Arts (in the academy I resisted and came to resist again. ) My study and focus then was on radicalism and alternative arts communities,artist self-portraiture, Joseph Cornell and New York.

While I was a musician from a young age and obsessed with music/performance/poetry ,I spent almost every Saturday either at MOMA or the Metropolitan Museum,lost in paintings.

I had,all along, followed Robert Hughes’ critical writing,mainly in the New York Review of Books,as his deep,erudite love of painting resonated and he was one of the few eminently readable critics.

His responses to the debacle marketplace the New York City art world became in the 1980s tightly corresponded with my own experiences, although I had left the City at this point and was doing a lot of arts organizing, writing, and building in Vancouver.
I encourage all with an interest in Fine Art to read or re-read his introduction to Nothing If Not Critical, a collection of essays published in 1990,just pre-dating the explosion of the interwebs. His comments are as timely now as they were then.
I plan to respond here with some further thoughts about painting in the digital age and other strands he touched on and plan to reprint some of my writing from the same period in Canada (a series called The Neiman Marxists in particular).
I just caught an exchange on Twitter between two people I follow with great interest : @pareidoliac and @RebeccaTaylorLA and this prompted me to
clip this Robert Hughes piece on Art and Money (1984). Their discussion was about Damien Hirst and if he or his work would be remembered farther down the line.He was not the “protypical” art marketer…He simply represents the tail end of the decline and , frankly, the hollowed out (by money) world of art today. This has been going on for a long,long time.
Chordata’s interest is how to deepen the humanity (the feeling) part of tech and this is why the direct experience of painting and what that does for your own thought process, is one of the areas we are interested in…that and the direct experience of anything beyond the surface ! So here, for the moment , for Rebecca and Leon is Art and Money in pdf form.

artandmoney/roberthughes

I was struck recently by how Paul Buchanan sees Blue Nile's four albums more like "books" and feels you have to "earn" the right to sing to every day people. Humble, in the true bardic tradition and ,like Tom Waits,brilliant.