"It's all here in your head." - what to be or not to be.

Oscar Pistorius as a paradigm of hope ...

“You could be great, you know. It's all here in your head.” – Sorting Hat, from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.

Nothing but thinking makes it so.

You may oppose me. My circumstances may make it difficult. I can think of myself as subject to these circumstances. I may dwell on my poor luck, my pain, my lack of opportunity, the unfairness of life and others – but then that is all there is because that is all there is then.

My circumstances may or may not improve of their own accord. To wait on this improvement makes me powerless. This is what I have now. These are my circumstances and if I want I thing – if there is some goal to be achieved then I had better find the work around. I had better find the patience and the perseverance otherwise I am a victim, otherwise I am a leaf on the stream without the ability to affect the course of my life.

I do not wish to be a victim, not yours or anyone’s. If I want a thing I had better engage in the process and not allow a single moment or circumstance to define me.

@ Bill Busta's

I will be in the Gallery with my work at Bill Busta's Saturday, June 9th, 2 pm to 4 pm.

My show is up through June 16, 2012. Be sure to check it out and to support all the other great art things Cleveland has to offer.

William Busta Gallery



Panoramic view of install at Busta's. My work is now in the front gallery. photo: Mike Wallace



Somnabulist III, acrylic on canvas, 2012, photo: Mike Wallace



Bill Busta maintains a beautiful space. A rare professional space here in Cleveland where we haven’t yet developed enough of an art market base to support a lot of these – but we’ll get there.


My work is currently up at Busta’s, along with Don Harvey’s, Darius Stewart, Susan Umbenhour, and Andrea Joki. Really excellent company if I do say so myself.



Andrea Joki, Reservoir, 2012, oil and acrylic on linen

Other notes:

This Friday there’s an opening at the Sculpture Center – Cleveland: The Sculpture Center Show Details

On View at Zygote through July 7, the 2012 Quarter Exhibition:
Zygote Press Website

At SPACES through July 13, Essence Unique Shrine and Showroom, + :
SPACES Website

Coming soon Baazarbeque III @ Forum Art Space:
Forum Art Space Blog

MOCA Cleveland Gala Opening Weekend October 5 - 8, 2012:
MOCA Cleveland Website

interior

The primary ingredient of our humanity is a search for relevance. All of us crave a place in the world, the feeling that we somehow matter. It is kindness, compassion, the greatest sort of good to allow for this. It is for this that we perform. It is for this that we do all that we do. At the root of this longing is a personal sense of identity. How we see ourselves is the script to our performance. This identity is formed by the voices in our heads. These voices will tell us what we will allow ourselves. Am I to be a victim? The servant of others? A liar, a thief, a misanthrope? A saint, a star, an artist? A lover of small things and large? A heart of ambition? – an internal permission to love and be loved. Somehow these things I want to say remain unclear. The things I have dwelt on it seems like forever. Let me confess it. One there is a god – it is the voice in our head. We can rescript that voice. There is a god – it is the chorus of voices that makes culture; that makes meaning. There is a heaven and a hell – it’s all right here – in “your” head. Really, really, really – we make the world we live in. If you want a kind world, then you must be kind. If you want a happy world, you must be happy and you must share it with others. You must trust to be trusted. You must give the benefit of the doubt. To be free you must be free. If you want to be loved, you must love. Whatever ethic you say you hold, you must enact it. – You must see the horizon to know the curve of the earth. I have decided to give over. I am giving over.

Bill Radawec retrospective at Brett Shaheen

Check out the following article by Steven Litt on the Bill Radawec Retrospective at Brett Shaheen. Bill Radawec at Shaheen Contemporary

mal amant.

Je t’aime. Toujours. Ma entité assiégé, mais mon coeur est fort. Je n’oublie pas.

42

I don’t believe, not for a second, not at all, that deprivation and suffering, for the sake of deprivation and suffering, makes people good. In other words an ascetic life – not merely ascetic but one which is stripped of pleasure – is a wasted life.

To be given and granted all that is desired without exchange is equally a waste. When everything is free and easy it is meaningless, valueless.

Life is meant to be lived to its full capacity. It should be seasoned with laughter, good food, good work, kind words, and the arms of friends. The greatest good is to live in this manner and to contribute to a world which is not mean and stingy with such things but makes them more abundant.

This is the meaning of life.

Ever vigilant in internal dialogue … set your guards against the enemies of this life.

Bill Radawec: Into the Blue

Bill Radawec: Out of the Blue

Statement on Bill Radawec's Website

Bill Radawec Website

Bill's Facebook Page

I have come recently to believe that it’s more important to live an interesting and engaged life than it is to live a “happy” life. It occurs to me that these two conditions are sometimes in opposition to one another. An interested person is awake, aware, eyes are open, a state that doesn’t always make for happiness.

I moved to Cleveland in January 2001 and thus I came to know its strange energy. A tension of opposing identities, on the one hand, rich and replete with possibilities, on the other, shrouded in a veil of self-doubt. Cleveland is a place in transition and it rests rather uncomfortably in this liminal space. It waits still to know what it will become next.

Within this clear medium of Cleveland’s particular time and place are suspended defining moments of intensity. From opening to opening, from event to event, I have made my way. Again and again, I would see him, meet him, be introduced, and reintroduced to him. Eternally coming to know, never knowing, never coming close – ever the thought “sometime in the future …”

Un temps perdu.

What I can tell you about Bill that I do know? That he exuded energy in every meeting. Smiles beamed forth and some spark radiated from within him. He seemed both happy and interested. An anomaly within the world for there was no doubt, from seeing his work, that he was thinking, thinking, thinking, and to this uniqueness he added an even rarer condition when he married Ibojka. He became, clearly, a happily married man. The two of them together magnified and redoubled the energy that had been Bill’s alone. There was a joy between them.

Ibojka and Bill, together, moved through the world filled with the wonder of discovery. It was a way of living the two of them carried through what became Bill’s final illness. Ibojka and Bill let the world into their lives with an unimaginable generosity, sharing this most intimate part of themselves.

We know, don’t we, that we all have times like these to come, and in their generosity they have shown us how to do it best, with joy, love, and grace.

Cleveland is going to miss Bill Radawec.

Bill Radawec passed away on July 5/6, 2011

happiness ...

some part of being happy is giving oneself the permission to be happy.

happy is maybe not the most satisfying state to live in.

it is more important to be interested i think.

yearning to be free

Tangled Webs by James Stewart


We are free.

Free to choose, to act.

Free to decide where we will put our energies, what we will sow and to some degree, what we will reap.

It seems sometimes that our culture has lost any sense of ethic. Lying … and it doesn’t seem to matter if someone knows that you’re lying … as a way to manipulate situations and people … has become a matter of course … and next to that as strategies are anger and manufactured drama.

How do we shift this?

Personally … I have chosen to eliminate those who regularly lie as a strategy of control from my life. The only thing I can do is to choose not to participate.

thank you Mr. Cave ...

Harry and Herminone: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 - O Children by Nick Cave



There’s something potent about this song and it was genius on the HPDH1 director’s part to give it to this scene. It at once embodies the promise of youth – beautiful, strong, alive – married to the inevitability of loss and gain. The song is poignant and thrilling … It sounds like being in love.

Ignorant, arrogant beautiful youth – it possesses us still – even those of us left on this rocky crag and lost to its breathlessness.

the use of cheesy movies ...

I love cheesy, escapist fantasy movies. They shelter my soul and embedded within them is the ancient wisdom of all our cultures and to prove it here's a quote from a cheesy movie that I doubt I'll ever watch but the trailer had this ...

"I'm not here to save you. I'm the main character of my life." - Daydream Nation.

And it's true ...

Art Farm and other such things

here in are the images you've been seeking ... Charles Tucker on Residency at Art Farm with his intrepid assistants Scott and Carey ...

The Weasley's Burrow, aka: The Barn
The Artist's Garden
Charles Tucker: Cottage
Residents' House: Victoria
Charles Tucker, with intrepid assistants - Scott Bowers, Carey Tucker
Scott Bowers, Carey Tucker, Charles Tucker
Scott and Carey working on their roof bench
Life on the Farm

being here now

Revelations

On loss and other real things

I have been thinking … maybe way too much … these past months. The summer especially has been a time of contemplation. I have had a need to come to terms, to find a way of thinking about “things” that is tolerable.

over beer with a friend…

We all die. To everyone there comes a death. For those who love the dying that death is never fair or good enough or kind enough … It is always cruelty that our world should be diminished and that the ones we love eclipsed. The death of the loved is always a portent of our own end.

To each of us comes a death and never can that death satisfy.

---

All is metaphysics … while all may be knowable, there is never knowing enough to hold it all. The mind is at once infinite and finite … its capacities endless yet never all encompassing so that no matter how much is known there is ever the unknown but not the unknowable.

---

There is the “stuff” of being. It is being and it is thought. Thought is pattern and organization it is inherent to a being which arranges and rearranges, endlessly playing out every possible configuration, every possible reality. To ask if there is intelligence in this design is a misconception, intelligence is the substance of being.


---

There is no time.

We can only know now because we are in this configuration and it is necessarily this configuration that we know. We can only know the now we are in.

If one could travel back in time, time would either collapse, all nows becoming now, or multiple nows co-existing, segregated from one another. If I go back in time and change my own past then I become two … twins out of joint … One of me with my “original” history and one of me with my “altered” history and those two can never be rejoined. Once a thing has happened it can never unhappen and that is to say it has always been.

This is the nature of infinity … all possible moments beyond our ability to hold them all exist. It is only our knowing of now that creates time.

searching for venus ...

I realize now the importance of competition
Without competition there is nothing to push against
No standard against which to measure the quality of production

There are infinite reasons not to achieve
Infinite reasonable reasons not to give over to …

All will understand the limits of our success
Because there are reasons
A thousand reasonable reasons
That all our friends will understand
And commensurate
Over the slings and arrows
Which impede our progress

There is nothing to measure
But what we do

an unseen tether

Saint Catherine of Alexandria

It is easy and it is difficult to know how to surrender and how to give permission.

We live with the unseen witness and we ascribe to this witness many judgments. We believe that somehow if we suffer others will know our suffering and we will gain worthiness through this suffering. Somehow through debasement, by prostrating before others we prove our goodness. Those few exempted from these interior recriminations are those who through some fluke of rearing or through some internal dialogue have managed to persuade themselves, or are raised to believe, that they are worthy … some believe this in excess.

It is nothing more than a contemporary self-flagellation with the same degree of usefulness. While the diseases it spreads are perhaps less virulent than the plague they are none-the-less damning in their outcomes.

No doubt the content of this witness’s character was formed in the early days of Christian guilt. It is no doubt the descendant of those cultural beliefs that allowed the aristocracy to believe that God had ordained them to their places and had just as firmly placed their lessers rightly beneath them. Conversely, those lessers, equally convinced of their place, were satisfied to have a sense of ego/goodness fed through the virtues of their self-sacrifice. (I am made better than you in my suffering.)

Always it is a balance … how to silence this witness and reconstruct the being in some more helpful form… to know and accept that we are somehow worthy of our happinesses.

It is true that faith must be internal … it is the content of that faith we must reconstruct.

blue

always back and forth
A struggle to do this simple thing
To see and know what has been done
And to know what yet needs to be done

It is the struggle
The knowing of the limits of patience
The standing still
The absolute aloneness of that struggle
of seeing

The community of the lovers of solitude
Those who will stand
And take responsibility for what they have put into the world
A profess-ion
A declaration of the self

It has always been this
This secret love

You are wrapped in its folds of
Forever blueness
My fingers stained

Is it not worthy
Of all my time
Is it not worth
My life
And is it too much
That I profess
My love
In this act of struggling

afterall

Gustav Klimt, Danae

So why not
Give over
To the life deferred?

Waiting no longer for the validation of
An other
But the self embrace

Why not
Give over
To the love of life?

To joy?

What virtue
To deny the imagined life?

Laugh

Give over

No more waiting
Now to what is loved

zoe home safe!

the universe smiles ... zoe has returned home.

zoe is missing!!!

today and everyday ...

i'm thinking of you. happy birthday.



actions reveal motives
motives decode actions
the choices of a life … write a truth …

in other words …
if you want to know someone
look at the consistency of what they do
a single moment might be an anomaly
a thousand moments writes the story

petition

note to self:

the people who would say evil things ... are usually evil.

put another way:
don't let the bastards get you down.

a toast and an adieu...

a toast to the greatest cat who ever lived … (raise a beer and down it) … there was this animal that impacted my life in a way and to a degree and in such a positive manner that I grieve his death as much as I have grieved many others and more than some others I’m afraid … to have him in my life added a texture and a personality that frankly surpassed some humans. stupid to think this… maybe … but I believe that these lives are as potent and as lived and as felt as many an other. I know people who will never get the simple joy from living that he did … that will never value their companions as he did … that never had the courage that he had, nor his devotion… thanks William for finding me and having the kindness to share our lives. i love you always.

learning to live ... finally

Mama cat
Home
My room, my bed
Pictures of grandfather, sister, mother, father, me
Clothes
My life like it was

RAF
Grandmother
My heart
You
My life like it was

My righteousness
My obliviousness
My innocence
Grandmother
Him
My Youth
Mike
Bobby
A close friend
Daddy’s mind
My heart
Alabama
Mother’s voice
Daddy
My life like it was

Mother
Part of Me
Him
Trust
My life like it was

Lucy
William

--

The true marker of commitment, the signifier of devotion is to bear witness to a lifetime of moments.

i don't even have time to write...

I'm so busy and I'm thinking of so many things. I so want to get them out before they slip away but the clock keeps ticking and it's already eleven and I have to go to bed.

oh well...

summer... the living was easy...

back to the fray...

but first a glimpse back at the summer of love...

Dumbledore

Harry and Dumbledore: Ethical Statement

sometimes i ponder...

the living cannot intrude on the dead.

the dead do not fear death. the dead do not regret the manner of their passing. the dead are not haunted.

traveling to unknown destinations...

Katherine and her father, on our journey...

sitting...

red hot chili peppers is in the background. the conversation is as always intellectual intrigue and then... i love that phrase "and then..." certain phrases are pregnant with tomorrow. did you know there's someone who reads my blog who won't read this post most likely because it doesn't have the right title or search words. no search words! search me. (ok i'm smiling now).

so sitting at a table with conversation and always imagining the future and remember the past but beer at least erases some of that.

i am filled with love, beer and happiness and music right now, right now.