Deep in Their Roots

I take pictures with my phone of stuff I see as I go about my day.  

 

I don't search for beauty, and I definitely don't search for any kind of meaning when I do this.  In fact, I try very hard not to think about anything at all.  A little spasm goes off in my head, and I think:  what the hell?  The most uninteresting shit is what I'm looking for, to be honest:  the interregnums, the gaps between moments that don't really justify jpegs but still I do it, and then I look at it and post it and it's gone.  It's kind of like a form of prayer, like I'm absorbing meaning by cancelling out the pursuit of it.  And posting them on Facebook lets them come back at me as if they never were photos in the first place, just little digital burps trapped inside other nonessential information. 

 

If you stare at things long enough you find what you need to find, but still you won't have any idea what you've found.  These stupid pictures are evidence of that.  A solitary silver light-switch menacingly daring you to talk to it, fluorescent tubes above a urinal humming themselves to sleep, a couple of cigarette butts staring at each other longingly on a parking garage platform.  These images don't lie because they don't have to.  They just do their jobs, being meaningless and factual and then gleaming toward a poetry you can't really publish or even most of the time translate into actual poetry.  They don't need language and they really don't need you. They are pretty close to unconsciousness and yet they are fully aware of what they are, what they are supposed to be doing.  It's like that last beautiful glimmering burst of knowing something right before you forget it and it's gone forever.  

 

So here are some of these pictures I've taken.  I used to do the same exercise back in the day with a Polaroid camera.  And those milky-shiny pictures turn into jumping-off points for short stories, novels, poems, whatever.  Maybe some of these will spawn something else, not too sure, but they make me feel sharper somehow.  They give me a reason to contemplate without connecting to common sense.  One of my favorite poets, Theodore Roethke, wrote this in his journal:  "Deep in their roots, all flowers keep the light."

 

That's kind of what these photos are:  unobtrusive and homely flowers keeping the light deep down inside a network of roots and tunnels and tributaries that flow into and out of one another without anyone noticing, caring or even feeling the need to see. 

 

All of the Above

 

 

Five years.  When I think about it, it's kind of dumbfounding and inevitable at the same time.  Bill and I have been doing Thunder-Sky, Inc. for five years.  We've had a lot of help from a lot of great people, but we've kind of been the ones who push and prod this whatever-it-is (gallery/studio/fan-club/clubhouse/limbo) forward, very slowly forward, the way Raymond kind of moved:  intent, focused, but also nonchalant, maybe insouciant, not caring and yet caring, building and demolishing simultaneously because he knew how the world works. 

 

Above is a photo from October 30, 2009.  That was the debut gig at Thunder-Sky, Inc., when we opened a show called "Raymond Nation."  Looks like a stalwart ghost dangling in a walk-in freezer.  I love that chill Raymond imparts.  He never really let you know exactly how he was feeling or what he was thinking; he was cryptic in the best possible way.  I respect that so much looking back, how he just followed through on his own strictly self-determined purpose, how he built a life out of demolition and fury and happiness, how it all became what he wanted it to become till the very day he died. 

 

And that's why I keep beating this dead horse.  Because Raymond's purpose was to make something out of nothing and to do it without a lot of bull-shit or a lot of attention.  He had a purpose beyond all that and yet he wasn't above any of it.  He relished obscurity as much as relishing those tiny moments of appreciation he was allotted at the end of his life (a few shows of his work at Base Gallery, Visionaries + Voices, and other places we were able to find to exhibit his drawings).  But he also understood the joke of his existence so much so that the joke became his kingdom.  He played it all up -- clownishness, construction-worker-ness, his strangeness and alienness given superhero qualities by his own hand.  And in those drawings he left behind you feel him laughing, sneering a little, letting us know he does not give really a shit, except for the big things like prisons crumbling and being replaced by card-tricks and clownishness, a whole industry of trickery and sarcasm.

 

He was punk.  He was innocence.  He was experience.  He was a freak who made that freakishness a route to grandeur and hilarity and self-knowledge.

 

Most of all he was what he was, without apologies.  He was scary in the way clowns can be scary.  He was lovely in the way clowns can be lovely.  He was hard-working, he was mysterious, he was very simple. 

 

And so this is why we keep doing Thunder-Sky, Inc.:  because I truly can't find any other role-model, any other reason, to organize/coordinate artistic endeavors outside of that stream of light.  Maybe it's obsession or stupidity or stubbornness (probably all of the above), but somehow Raymond's life was too elementally metaphoric and wildly outlandish and secretively productive to forget, to be placed in a pile of other file-folders marked "outsider art" or "people with disabilities" or "folk hero" or "mysterious stranger."  He deserves his own little hall of fame, and so here it is, at least for a little while.  At least another year. 

 

This is a year to year thing.  It has to be.  We don't want it to become bigger than it needs to be.  So Thunder-Sky, Inc. has an under the radar quality, a homespun do-it-yourself-ness that tries to run away from being labeled or even being appreciated.  It is a little place that does not want to be anything except exactly what it is in the very moment you see it.  And for most of the year it's doors are closed anyway.  Open only on weekends, and on the Fridays we have opening receptions (6 times a years), or when someone wants to do a poetry reading, or any other special occasion that seems worth it. 

 

Thunder-Sky, Inc. is a non-profit ghost in the machine.  We do what we have to do to make things move, but not a lot of anything else.  Like Raymond and his drawings:  elemental, precise, completed, on to the next thing.

 

We're celebrating the five year anniversary next Friday, October 24, 2014, with a show called "The New Clownville Amusement," with Raymond-inspired works by Robert McFate, Curtis Davis, artists who use the Visionaries + Voices studio, artists from Able Projects, Antonio Adams, the Waldecks and friends, and many wonderful others.  This show came together like all of the other ones we do, things piling up and then somehow organized into a semblance of order through just doing it.  The five year anniversary means Raymond has been gone for ten years.  Ten years.  Good Lord.  He won't disappear.  Even if Thunder-Sky, Inc. disappears Raymond won't.  He is building and destroying things in all kinds of ways right now that we can't even fathom, which is the way it always was anyway.

 

 

  

Flight Pattern

 

 

Bill had an experience in February and just wrote about it yesterday.  Needed to share it via 2 + 2 = 5.  A great example of that ongoing spirit and conundrum.  Here goes:

 

Several months ago, I went to a sheltered workshop to meet with a young woman who goes there.   She was very excited because they were going to do a performance of “The Lion King” that morning and she had a starring role.  It was about 15 minutes till the whole thing was to take place, so I said I would wait till after the performance to meet with her.

There was a crowd to see the show.  We gathered in a large open area that separated the glass door entrance from the work floor.   It was one of those raw February mornings. The air was cold and rainy.  The clouds outside moved slowly across the ground like sleep walkers, causing the florescent lights in the ceiling tiles to glow unnaturally bright.  Several minutes passed with a lot of frantic talk echoing from the other end of a long hallway.  Last minute pep talks and cue reminders etc.  All I could see were those slow moving clouds out the front entrance. 

Eventually the music started and after what seemed to be a long time without seeing anything a fluttering bird girl appeared.  This bird girl was a tiny woman wearing red sweats, yellow socks, a yellow beaked bird mask that covered her face, and yellow pool-floaties for wings.  I was entranced at that moment first seeing this delicate creature flutter high then low, swooping into the audience and back down the hallway out of view. 

I am probably one of the only people still left who hasn’t seen the movie or the play.  I am pretty sure this performance however took many liberties.  The young lady I was there to see played the lion’s mother.  As excited as she was before it began, her performance was delivered with minimal effort.  It was as if she had worn herself out from all the excitement.  The performance was a beautifully clumsy mess.  However, seeing this bird girl moving, dancing, flying through this florescent lit space into and out of the performance itself, with grayest of gray clouds moving behind her, struck me in a profound way.  It was a silent and delicate thing like Kabuki. It was like she was channeling some ancient bird spirit.  Her flight pattern seemed to carry a message of joy uncomplicated and completely mysterious. 

I will never forget it and only wish I could do something that powerful.



Word to Your Mother

I love this photo montage featuring Mike Weber, whose work is featured in the next Thunder-Sky, Inc. gig:  "Ice Ice Baby! New Works by Bob Scheadler and Mike Weber."  Bob is Mike's brother-in-law, and he did the pic above, featuring Mike as the Iceman rocking it out with some polar bears.  Both Mike and Bob are totally excited about the works they've made, and the results, both collaborative and solo, reflect that energy.  Mike has truly taken some giant aesthetic steps forward, pushing his experimentation with paint and texture into new territory, honing in on a subject that's both abstract and concrete:  anything below 32 degrees Fahrenheit.  His pictures are like meditations on the way ice is both experienced and represented, and some of the works even push image into spectrum, ice into ornament.  Bob's photos and prints have both an austerity and a grit, like crystalline images from a science textbook chopped up and sprinkled into a kaleidoscope from Mars.  When we were talking at the gallery last Saturday, both artists were riffing on all kinds of ice-inspired variations:  how ice controls the temperature of the planet, how if you eat too much of it ice can chip the enamel off your teeth, how they want to talk to Dave down at the Comet about having an "Ice Ice Baby" cocktail for the night of the opening.  Which is January 7, 2011, 6 to 9 pm.  Both Thunder-, Inc's gallery and the basement underneath will be featuring their works.  It promises to be a great example of 2 + 2 = 5 -- not only because Mike and Bob are sharing the same inspiration, but also because Adam Maloney will be installing a "soundscape" that night called "In Space No One Can Hear Your Tractor Beam."  Word to your mother.