At Home

 

 

We walked downtown for a while last night, hitting some of our favorite places.  Cincinnati is a great joint on Fridays like yesterday, blue sky with effervescent clouds, too many great restaurants to choose from, and the promise of a big festival being setup near Fountain on the Square (Taste of Cincinnati starts today), day-laborers and cops and managers getting ready to set up tent poles and shut down streets and transform the whole cityscape into festival-scape. 

 

And then, down near the river, this carousel (pictured above in all its glory).  It's just glorious.  No other word for it.  It could feel cheesy if you wanted it to, but somehow tucked into its tidy little concrete and glass parlor, surrounded by fountains and sunshine, cattycorner to the baseball stadium, with a sweeping view of the Roebling bridge in its big picture windows, the thing has a personality and tiny grandeur that feels storybook without too much effort or kitsch.  Thanks to the painstakingly executed frontispiece paintings by Jonathan Queen, and the whole get-in-the-spirit camp of the actual carousel ponies and insects and birds, the thing is artful in ways a lot of contemporary art can't be because contemporary art often wants to comment on itself so much it loses the spontaneous silliness/insouciance needed to make it transcend itself.  Looking at the carousel yesterday I just felt at home, and also a little giddy, because here's this thing that nobody really needs given such tender loving care that I almost wanted to ride on it, to put up with the humiliation a bald fifty-year-old overweight guy riding a carousel might have to endure. 

 

I didn't get on.  But I stood there and soaked in the whole Cincinnati-loving iconography and glossy commemoration of it:  each Queen-produced panel depicts a zoo animal enjoying different Cincinnati landmarks, each carousel-creature  (sponsored by some rich family or foundation or organization) is a homage to a Cincinnati icon of some kind or another.  All of that is kind of like the too-sweet maraschino cherry you take off your sundae before eating it of course.  Basically it's an amusement park ride given a serious, joyous revamp, shiny and vivid and maybe close to perfect in its nostalgia and open-endedness.  Anybody can ride.

 

So I thought about Raymond Thunder-Sky, as I usually do, and how much he would have loved this thing.  Lord would he have ridden this carousel for sure, drawn it as it got constructed, basking in its glorious nighttime glow on his way back from drawing demolition sites.  I bet you anything it would have been a sort of command-center for him, a fortress and hub he would return to again and again.  He loved carnivals, circuses, anything like that.  Back in 2001, when we went to Hollywood CA with him for a conference where we sat up a booth to exhibit his drawings, he didn't really participate; he spent almost all of his time at Disneyland.  So that's informing my love of the carousel too, that sense of Raymond-ness, that hope of magic (even in its most sentimental, candy-colored form) restoring a kind of sanity to the world.  This carousel would have been a spiritual place for Raymond I think.  The way it revolves slowly on its own accord, ending each set of revolutions in intervals to let people on and off. 

 

The way it's just there, shiny and unreal, birthed for no other reason than it would be neat to have in the world.  

Last to Know

 

 

 

We stumbled into Orchid's, a restaurant on the ground floor of the Omni Netherlands Hotel a couple Fridays ago.  It's one of those places in downtown Cincinnati you should know about, but Bill and I are always the last to know somehow, which is the way I like it.  That way you're always amazed.  It's a 4-star restaurant with a plush art-deco interior, all smooth maroons and creams and marble and brass, and when you enter you feel both charmed and on the verge of disappearing.  It has ghostliness, a feeling that something has been lost and never replaced, but it's that very lack that makes the atmosphere plush, spilling over into your thoughts while you drink you drink and start to feel encapsulated by the presence of what used to be here and kind still is but not.  We sat at the bar and a middle-aged man played "Someone to Watch Over Me" on the guitar on a marble-ensconced stage, and it was heaven.  You want to sink into that moment, first sip, first slipping away.  It's dark, the lighting old-school elegant, frosted and  blurry so that every bottle and glass seems to glow.  You could just slide into that light, the alcohol vaporizing into your blood in that preliminary tingling, and then there you'd be again, perfectly still, satiny, like a pillow on the floor in one of the beautiful hotel-rooms above.

 

Casino Living

 

Last night we went to the new Horseshoe Casino in downtown Cincinnati.  It's right next door to the county jail, a blank slate of conspicuous consumption, gold-plated and sort of monolithic.  As we walked toward the edifice, firetrucks were pulling up to the main entrance.  Someone had collapsed just outside from the front doors.  What a beautiful introduction.  The anonymity of emergency workers attending to an emergency.

 

And once inside it smelled like a brand-new house, plastic and clean and slightly chemical.  I wanted to write a sonnet or something about the feeling:  the newness of it all, and how vice has a sheen to it when it is first born that can only last maybe 6 months, and then everything just starts smelling like old mop-water and burnt nerves.  Right now though there is a cheer in the air, and all the lights in all the signs are shining bright.  People are comfortably seated before gambling machines, like blank-eyed fighter-pilots in cockpits, and it's heaven.  No one pays attention to anyone here.  They are focused.  It's a lovely sensation, everyone all super-obsessed with what they know they have to do.  In this case, it's winning.  But mostly they'll just lose.  Which is okay too because there's a big buffet called Spread and Bobby Flay has a new burger restaurant.  And over there is a Starbuck's.  And Jimmy Buffet's got his whole cantina-thing going on. 

 

I like the desperation inherent in this thing, that fever that seems to percolate through the ductwork and into the velvety atmosphere.  People are alert to the pulsations of their own sad little pleasures.  But it's not actually "sad" until after.  Everything glitters right now.  It feels like you aren't anywhere when you're inside here, which is the suspended animation people need to escape what they need.  This is all want and beautiful abandon.  You can say it's recreational of course, and it is I guess, but gambling is keen on the stress of its own practice.  The anxiety of losing/winning/losing/winning is the kick, the reason for the season.  Without that danger, it's just a big plush bar.  Or a zoo for people-watchers to stroll through.  That's me.  I don't gamble, but I sure do appreciate the glow of it in people's faces, and that sensation of knowing it's all sin, and sin is just like everything else.  That's sort of comforting. 

 

I hope the guy who collapsed out front last night is okay. 

 



Missed His Shadow When He Was Gone

Missed his shadow when he was gone.  He was a silhouette mostly.  Sometimes though I caught him whole, looking down, like a bear wanting into a cave. 

Still think about him when I'm down there, looking up from wires and cables, breathing in that damp-rat smell.  One night it was cold as hell, crystal-clear sub-zero cold, and we were working on laying in new cable-pipe, and I remember just looking up and I could see him almost floating up there like he was stuck in glass, motionless, just staring down at me.  I saw his eyes, open wide like he was taking in all in, his brain just a big camera inside his skull.  He needed to know.  You got that feeling, and I looked up there and said something hey buddy or whatever and as soon as he heard me say something, as soon as he realized I was looking back he was off. 

But then he'd be back an hour or so later and I understood. 

This was our relationship.  I didn't even know he drew pictures.  Just thought he was interested in the work we were doing. 

Still miss him.  Even now.

"Fish sandwich, Coke, fries."

He walked into Wendy's holding a toolbox in his left hand.  A huge yellow one.  He wore a green hard hat and olive-colored overalls and black boots.  The dude just stomped up to the front almost like he was doing a dance or maybe more of a sleep-walk.  Just stood there, and I looked at him from behind the cash register.  His face was burnt-looking and a little bloated, dark eyes pointed right at me and then away, like he did not want me to know he could see.  I asked him what he would like and his voice was a grunt more than a voice, a machine-gun grunt, but you could understand "fish sandwich" somewhere in there, and so that's what I pressed in.  "Fish sandwich, Coke, fries."  He said it like he had committed it to memory and he was afraid he might forget before it got out of his mouth.  He stood there not looking at me when I asked him what size Coke.  Something was not right but I guess since he could order what he wanted I didn't get freaked out too much.  I didn't know what to think really.  He was round-bellied, not too tall, but he had the presence of a statue that had come to life.  You were supposed to be afraid of him, but still he was not terrifying.  Just intense and silent, standing there not answering my question about the Coke, so I just wrung in large, and he pulled out a ten dollar bill and put it on the counter, and then I took it and gave him his change.  He swept it up and quickly hid the money away somewhere in his overalls. 

 

 

As I got him his Coke, and the cook put his fish into the fryer, he stood at the counter completely quiet, looking over at the fryers, staring as if somehow his stare might make things go faster.  He was not comfortable waiting.  He had some salt-and-pepper hair hanging down from his hard hat.  He had ruddy jowls and the yellow toolbox had a "Danger High Voltage" sticker on it.  He gripped that toolbox real tight.  I told him I was sorry he had to wait because I could see it was killing him, but then I explained that we don't make fish sandwiches ahead, and he grunted like he understood, and even though I had never waited on him before I kind of knew him from riding the bus and seeing him walking on the sidewalk in that same get-up, but it never dawned on me what he would sound like close up, or look like either.  He had the presence of a visitor from another planet about him.  He had a pride about himself that shined out of his stubborn face.  He did not look scared as much as just stubborn and ready to do what he had to do.  He did not fidget but he did not stand still either, as if his stillness vibrated inside him, through his bones.  He had gray chapped lips.  You could tell he worked outside.



The fish timer went off and the cook slid the wrapped sandwich onto the tray while I got the fries.  I turned around and saw the dude put his toolbox into a booth over by the front windows.  He came back and got his tray of Coke and fries and fish sandwich and walked back to the booth.  A couple of boys came in and ordered something and I got them what they wanted, and by the time they were gone he had eaten and drank it all and was throwing away his trash.  Two minutes, tops.  Then he walked into the bathroom.  I looked over at the cook and the gal who ran drive-thru.  We were a little, I don't know, unsettled I guess.  He was the only one out in the dining room.  It was about 3 pm on a Wednesday in February.  Snow was starting outside, gray light and snow.

 

You could hear him stomp out of the bathroom, the door slamming behind him.  As he turned the corner I saw what he had done to himself in the bathroom and it felt really completely shocking for a few seconds.  He had put on a clown costume in the bathroom.  It was blue, green, red, purple and yellow polka-dots.  Big old clown outfit, with the boots still on, and the overalls underneath the costume.  He was carrying the tool-box still too, and he had also donned a big fluorescent green clown collar to complete his ensemble.  His face above the polka-dots was unchanged.  No clown smile, no clown anything in his eyes.  The blankness of his expression gave the whole thing a dream-like feeling, as if it were a moment I would need to come back to many times, just to convince myself it had actually happened.  This big, dark-complected, round-bellied construction dude going into the Wendy's bathroom and coming out a clown, like Clark Kent turning into Superman.



 

Me and the cook just looked at each other.  It was like we were witnessing a new way of seeing people, like after this nobody would have any secrets.  People would just come in, go into the bathroom and change into who they really were.  The dude took off into the snowy afternoon, stomping away.  He'd spent maybe all of five or six minutes in here, but he had left a big impression.  I wondered where he was off to on foot.  He disappeared into that snow, a clown erased by falling snow.

 



The photos are close-ups of Raymond Thunder-Sky's many clown costumes he would wear all over the city.

"Nothing Would Sleep in That Cellar"

I went to the opening of a show at Museum Gallery/Gallery Museum last night, in its new space in Brighton here in Cincinnati, and as soon as I walked in I felt like I was in the middle of nowhere.  Which is a good thing.  "Buy an Hour," a two-person gig starring artists Jacob Isenhour and Will Tucker, comes complete with a one-page Xerox explanation about the genealogy and purpose of hedge-apples, the credentials of the artists, and some abstract notions about "discipline, regimented labor, and deterministic time systems."  But all that is truly just hokum when you experience this show in the flesh.  Words spin and melt away like your dead grandpa's pills tossed into the commode, and you are at once confronted with a feeling of awe, comfort and nausea.  The gallery space has been transformed into what happens when boredom meets ambition, when all the crap left behind at construction sites intermingles with nature's dross and the desire of a couple of really serious artists to grapple with re-imagining what "country living" actually means, and can do to you. 

The art on the walls and floor is beautifully curated and oneirically off-kilter.  All of it is lit in a mishmash of lighting reminiscent both of a barn in a horror movie and a one-act play about loneliness in a small town.   A strand of gangrene-colored hedge-apples are tossed onto the floor like a giant's horrible, tacky jewelry.  Hybrids of potted concrete and rotting hedge-apples with sticks sprouting from the top anchor the whole gorgeous mess, and catercorner to the hedge-apple necklace are two spinning pickle-buckets, making a noise kind of like hamsters on amphetamines.  On the walls are blond-wood framed detritus, beautifully unfinished yet completely "there" paintings/collages/whatever captured from demolished rooms. 

Serendipity transforms into perception in this show.  Both Isenhour and Tucker re-purpose to the point of no return, and beyond even that -- conjuring a backwoods laboratory where hedge-apples morph into heroin-tumors, and "crystal-meth" is just another word for nothing left to lose.  The gallery space is a limbo of objects and waste, a place between Heaven and Hell where you go to wait for bad news, and the only solace is that you are indoors.  Industrial, sleek, bluesy, creepy, working-class, and very distinct, "Buy an Hour" is one of the best shows I've seen around here in a while. 

I kept hearing Theodore Roethke in my head as I walked through.  One of the greatest 20th Century American poets, Roethke's works often celebrate the dank and dark place where man tries to find peace in nature, and nature doesn't actually ever return the favor.  His poems about ditches and graves and journeys into the wild represent a dangerous world of objects and emotions preserved in a silence you can only hear when you're not there.  I'll end with one of my favorite Roethke poems, which for me is a replacement for the perfunctory "Buy an Hour" Xerox:

Root Cellar

Theodore Roethke

Nothing would sleep in that cellar, dank as a ditch,
Bulbs broke out of boxes hunting for chinks in the dark,
Shoots dangled and drooped,
Lolling obscenely from mildewed crates,
Hung down long yellow evil necks, like tropical snakes.
And what a congress of stinks!
Roots ripe as old bait,
Pulpy stems, rank, silo-rich,
Leaf-mold, manure, lime, piled against slippery planks.
Nothing would give up life:
Even the dirt kept breathing a small breath.

  

Down to Earth

U-Turn Art Space is about to come to an end.  It feels sort of like the last episode of Friends , that weird nostalgic ache, that sense that a group of people who made something both approachable and unique, culturally aware but also down to earth, is over.  And there's nothing that can take its place, not even reruns. 

I first stumbled onto the space last July and got mesmerized by the glamour and chutzpah of a show called "The Place You Made to Find One Another," featuring the works of Eric Ruschman and Patricia Murphy (two artists who also helped run the space).  The exhibit had a ghostly cast of misfit sculptures and intricately conceived paintings, but also a sense of finish and what I call "there-ness," meaning it just seemed like a show that came fully intact from somebody's brilliant brain, like Athena busting out of Zeus's skull, or a crazy chandelier dropping out of the sky and landing without breaking right in front of you.  There was an easy-going pretentiousness that I loved in that show, and every other show I saw there also had that knack to be both sophisticated and unfussy, brave without showing off.  Each show examined the limits of what art can be, while expanding the way you can appreciate those limits, like Duchamp without fustiness.  Each exhibit, it seemed, offered a new brand of readymades, a new centerstage urinal.

But something else:  an enthusiasm and naivete tempered with glittery wisdom.  Nothing heavy-handed, but a sort of gravity through the curatorial choices made, the careful consideration of how art got installed and lit and talked about.

So thank you Matt Morris, Molly Donnermeyer, Zachary Rawe, Patricia Murphy and Eric Ruschman.  What an incredible sitcom you created.
 
Here are the shows I wrote about:

"The Mechanics of Joy"
"moon in the wall, hope it don't dissolve"
"The Place You Made to Find One Another"

The final show at U-Turn, "Aloha Means Both Hello and Goodbye" opens this Saturday, June 4, 2011, witha a reception at 7 pm to 10 pm.  (Bill and I were asked to be a part of it, and we're so happy to be.)  U·turn Art Space 2159 Central Ave.  Cincinnati, Ohio Please come and show the U-Turners how much they meant to Cincinnati art, and just plain old art in general.