firesong cat-tears

Listening to Johnny Cash sing "The Ballad of Ira Hayes" holding kitty in the rocking chair in front of the fire, for some reason she always senses silent tears, twice she looks up:"Mom why are there tears?" don't worry kitty we cry over any & everything, always have, always will. I didn't know (or forgot) that "Ira Hayes appeared in the 1949 John Wayne film, Sands of Iwo Jima, along with fellow flag raisers John Bradley and Rene Gagnon. All three men played themselves in the movie. Wayne hands the flag to be raised to the three men. (The actual flag that was raised on Mount Suribachi is used in the film.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ira_Hayes
'The Ballad of Ira Hayes,' is by Peter LaFarge. Covers of this song were done by Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson, Smiley Bates, Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, Kinky Friedman, Tom Russell, Hazel Dickens, Patrick Sky, and Townes Van Zandt."

Ira Hayes,
Ira Hayes

[CHORUS:]
Call him drunken Ira Hayes
He won't answer anymore
Not the whiskey drinkin' Indian
Nor the Marine that went to war

Gather round me people there's a story I would tell
About a brave young Indian you should remember well
From the land of the Pima Indian
A proud and noble band
Who farmed the Phoenix valley in Arizona land

Down the ditches for a thousand years
The water grew Ira's peoples' crops
'Till the white man stole the water rights
And the sparklin' water stopped

Now Ira's folks were hungry
And their land grew crops of weeds
When war came, Ira volunteered
And forgot the white man's greed

[CHORUS:]

There they battled up Iwo Jima's hill,
Two hundred and fifty men
But only twenty-seven lived to walk back down again

And when the fight was over
And when Old Glory raised
Among the men who held it high
Was the Indian, Ira Hayes

[CHORUS:]

Ira returned a hero
Celebrated through the land
He was wined and speeched and honored; Everybody shook his hand

But he was just a Pima Indian
No water, no crops, no chance
At home nobody cared what Ira'd done
And when did the Indians dance

[CHORUS:]

Then Ira started drinkin' hard;
Jail was often his home
They'd let him raise the flag and lower it
like you'd throw a dog a bone!

He died drunk one mornin'
Alone in the land he fought to save
Two inches of water in a lonely ditch
Was a grave for Ira Hayes

[CHORUS:]

Yeah, call him drunken Ira Hayes
But his land is just as dry
And his ghost is lyin' thirsty
In the ditch where Ira died

lyrics from http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/johnnycash/theballadofirahayes.html

The rate of people losing their jobs is the worst that it's been in 60 years.

fruity duty

Fun with Fruit (early stage, oil pastel plus warp and digital watercolour)

Handfuls of rotted globs from gutters,
remake the couch pour kibble break limbs fill with rainwater freezer dishes clothes checks boots notebook gas soup labels tea coffee pretzels

all see, all draw, be, am

Flaxseed toast rolled up morning glory strings, planted lamb's ears runners.

Glass storm doors, water runs out the hose, onions from the yard into the tabouli, fresh bite of tomato, parsley, olive, lemon juice.

Stacking wood, pile it high, make it tall, little mice run, stop, look up at me, and a Carolina wren calls.

Gooey oak wood mushrooms, transplanted asters ad infinitum, two four six eight clumps, soil solid, dark, resistant.

Ted washing down the yard with gasoline around the little boy scrubbing.

Cat has lost its bell, meter man walks reading spinning electricity, chef with a wounded shoulder is not cooking, should we sieve her homemade laundry soap?

Fallen leaves are a soft carpet speckled brown.

Gets dark, Jupiter and moon come out together prance beyond the branches, the surf of interstate eighty ebbs and flows with dark imaginings - does she go West or go East - a diesel-throated choral call.

Coast2Coast guest: "well, yeah, but it's not that technology makes it too easy, it's that we don't spend enough time sitting in the dirt anymore."
Heidegger and a Hippo Walk Through Those Pearly Gates: Using Philosophy (and Jokes!) to Explore Life, Death, the Afterlife, and Everything in Between by Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein

Coloured bowls of coloured fruit on a wooden table pastel oils running dry on paper in the shadows no effort, all see, all drawn,

up

be

am.

open the toy box & dump them all on the floor

Create your own Easter Egg at dumpr.net

"What made my dreams so hollow
I was standing at the depot
With a steeple full of swallows
That could never ring the bell
Oh I've come ten thousand miles away
And I ain't got one thing to show
Must've been a train
Took me away from here
But a train can't bring me home"

http://www.tomwaits.com/songs/#/songs/song/28/Train_Song/

"And when the whistle blows I gotta go mama, don't you know
Well, it looks like I'm never gonna lose the freight train blues.

Well, the only thing that makes me laugh again
Is a southbound whistle on a southbound train
Every place I wanna go I never can go
Because you know I got the freight train blues
Oh Lord mama, I got them in the bottom of my rambling shoes."


http://www.bobdylan.com/#/songs/freight-train-blues

Mona Lisa Mosaic Mural Unveiled

Mona Mosaic at Niles Mall
Originally uploaded by
stormbirdstudio my photo album on FLICKR

They say several hundred folks came out for the unveiling of the mosaic mural of approximately 70 individual panels depicting one large Mona Lisa - representing artistic views of the community. Each panel is a creation of local individual artists. The huge canvas will hang indefinitely in the concourse, but is expected to be eventually relocated.
Photos of each individual canvas contained in the 15' x 20' mosaic are on display in the Eastwood Mall’s Art Outreach Gallery (Niles, Ohio) along with an explanation of the work by each of the 80 artists involved.

Each tile in all 3 stages along with each artist's story can be explored here http://www.communityartworks.com/Completed%20Mural.htm

This video fills in some other details:

I really don't know if anyone has even gotten a view (straight-on) from more than 40' away due to it being installed on the side wall of that mall hallway to really see if the illusion happens! The view from far away is at an angle but it seems to achieve the goal - I think if judged against earlier ones (only found in Canada till now) it looks like we've almost copied the balance between unique & "creating the whole".
Compare with this Ark Mosaic
Assorted Mosaics and Adam, scroll down, David & Mankind here (all Canadian projects)

twist of colour

Collecting firewood, cat dashing madly across the yards; pumpkin lights are up through out the village and coloured leaves cover the trails in the woods.
Some other yummy flowery artwork can be seen here: wildflower mixed media

northern state of mind

Rolling with a cattle truck through dark Indiana swales and vales

wondering what if anything separates us from the living things riding ahead

Earlier: floating high above the flowing river in the second story dark on a bed of air, the amber light of the street sweeper flashing four times on the wall

Cooking zucchini grown in Ohio, closing the storm windows, the wallpaper smells like my life in 1965.

After I leave it snows.

The guest on coast to coast is confused and host george noory asks a question
george noory the host asks a question and the guest is confused late at night a Wyoming woman truck driver describes the snow coming down and traffic stalled on mountains...

and the conclusion is that we are all one mind maybe even a wormhole mind
and we see the truck weaving down the midnight road carries not cattle but grain

40 30 40 50...30 40 50...50 40 30 40 hours go by

1300 miles 17 hours one hundred twelve dollars

Erie Islands Coffee from Alex 48 minutes after five in the Friday morning for one and a half dollars.

Parsing the alternate route so we may have geese, windmills, black walnuts, fields heavy with purple cabbage and an iron bathtub spewing bubbles in desolate Burnett and the Honey Fluff Donuts in Huntley;
and five miles north of Burnett in Dodge County four white cranes stand*,
and before Twinkling Star Road south of Atkinson: two sandhills, probably a bald eagle where 89 joins 14 in Wisconsin, and south of Woodstock, Illinois: two more sandhills.

Earlier: lentil soup, homemade cornbread, fingering a burgeoning burgundy beauty of a canoe born locally, Boris leaps over the fridge, pumpkin pie and Bolivian women wrestlers**, the laugh of Vali.

Boot Lake is heavy with snails, their shells heaping against the shore, twenty-five cent coffee at Karla's cafe "Where Rick Is" in Townsend in the North and homemade food at Carol's in Bonduel where a waitress is in the hospital.

Red wintergreen berries and maple, yellow aspen, white birch and a pair of loons trolling back and forth, fishing and people wading out to bring in their boat dock: this is Wisconsin.

Birchbark and red pine needles start a fire and loons cry under moonlight, mingle with coyote (or wolf?), faraway an owl, some geese flying south

Later: sketching craters of the moon

Crossing the sandstone with some dolomite and shale, undivided; including Trempealeau, Tunnel City and the Elk Mound groups; past intermediate to granite intrusive rocks generally discrete, weakly to moderately deformed bodies; past banded layered and migmatitic gneiss with subordinate amphibolite and biotite schist, past Rapakivi of textured quartz monzonite near Waupaca, past quartz monzonite near the Red River, Shawano County to the edge of granitic and syenitic rocks of Wolf River batholith, undivided.

Making Affluenza art, bridge under construction, riverside thickets muddy with rain, dark with night where they catch fish too toxic to eat

Frank shows me Where the Lions Are

* These cranes are numbers 24-08, 27-08, 28-08 and 30-08, two females and two males that were hatched in the spring of 2008. They have spent most of the summer in and south of the area where you saw them, and were sometimes associating with 5 other whooping cranes, also from 2008, who remain in that general area as well.
Ultralight-led Migration: 21 Whooping Cranes and crew with Operation Migration are ready to begin their fall migration south! Tomorrow’s (Oct. 13) departure from the Necedah National Wildlife Refuge is tentative--the flight is heavily dependent on the weather and the cooperation of the birds. The flight generally takes place around 6:45 a.m. The decision to fly is decided in the morning, so it is not possible to call ahead to check on the flight status. If the Whooping Cranes and crew from Operation Migration do not fly tomorrow, they will continue trying on subsequent days until they get suitable weather conditions. The public is welcome to visit the Necedah NWR and observe the departure (150 miles northwest of Milwaukee, Wisconsin).

** Also See: The Fighting Cholitas are a group of female lucha libre wrestlers who perform in El Alto, Bolivia

Grey Islands journal

working on how to present pages, work in progressJuly and August 2000 -- using an old ledger frfom the 50's as we wandered Islands of Newfoundland

dark under the trees

Listening to Vietnam veterans recalling how they let their minds be trained to dehumanize the enemy, being the only way they themselves could survive

cat snug in a warm sweater nest

leaves wet with rain

A man writes a poem about a too early snow in Buffalo, and the leaves are still on the trees, these young men going off to war.

Walking in the dim woods thinking of another young man, 38 sounding 15, speaking of the Humane Society of the United States as if it were one of the 3 branches of government, this is how his black and white world appears to him, at first it's oddly funny but then with a pang, one wonders what our country would be like if we did have a third of the government that only cared about living things?