Wednesday, June 24, 2009



“... everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence.”—George Santayana

RESERVOIR GEESE

Canadian Geese were scattered about the running track Tuesday morning—all the way around! Runners and walkers alike stopped to look and wonder what, exactly, had made a goose leave the safety of the waveless body of water on the other side of the fence and plop itself down on a busy running track, its plumpish breast pillowed onto the cement embankment. I had already done my morning run, passing clusters of them and the occasional loner goose at the railing. I decided to race home for the camera. They were still there at the north end where I returned to the running track. As I photographed them a few people stopped.

“Oh, I'm so glad you are taking their picture! Send it to the newspapers!” exclaimed one smiling woman who looked like she might be on her way to work.

Then an older man in a tracksuit paused on his run and stood watching as I photographed. I guessed from the lilting cadence of his speech that he might have been from a Caribbean island. “Dey are many around de track,” he said. I noted some concern in his look and offered reasonable assurance. “I think they have seen the ducks doing this and so have followed their lead.” He thought for a moment. “Or maybe dere is sometink in de watah.” Taking account of their placid demeanor, he added: “But I hope you are right.”

Many runners swept around us and most never batted an eye at the assembled gaggle. Women were more apt to slow down or stop and comment. Men generally just hurtled around the geese having undoubtedly passed the others further back on the track. The geese—six of them at this point on the north end of the reservoir—had settled in an orderly row before the fence as if waiting for a performance across the reservoir at the south end, perhaps a Bill Viola-inspired event of tsunamic proportions in the midst of the water. A carefully coiffed woman, older than me, in stylishly comfortable walking attire, halted and watched me for a few moments. “Have they always done this?” she asked. No, I told her, this was the first time I had seen it. The ducks have been waddling around the track for years, usually in couples and not in such big groups as these geese though. “Really?” she responded, clearly surprised. And then she looked wistful, almost sad. “I always took my morning walk around the bridle path with my dog.” She cast a mournful expression towards the stony swathe below the running track. “He died recently. So, I’ve come up here after all this time.”

My opinion is that the geese had seen a few duck couples make the leap onto the track, decided to see what the fuss was about, and discovered the view. As they are the bigger, bossier fowl on the reservoir, it stood to mind that the geese would make the leap as a gang.

From what I could tell they weren’t causing any trouble. They weren’t smoking cigarettes or pot, nor were they guzzling cheap wine from paper bags, impractical at any rate for a winged creature. No boom boxes were in evidence to shatter a tranquil morning. They weren’t dealing drugs. I expect our mayor would be hard pressed to find a reason to round them up and throw them in jail. Political banners and placards were nowhere to be seen, and besides, their numbers were small enough and could not possibly constitute a protest demonstration. A Patriot Act—hastily rammed through Congress—that mocks our Constitution has not hobbled their honks. Like the geese on the running track we turned our backs, only not from focused runners but from compromised freedoms, which were hustled past us until out of reach.

Geese don’t have to confront the antipathy that a civic-minded, freedom-loving protester meets with during ‘a time of war.’ The only fence was elegant and circling the reservoir for safety reasons, no signs indicating the area to be the designated, so-called, free speech zone. Police Commissioner Kelley would be guaranteed a furious hue and cry from onlookers had he instructed his force to ignore perfectly respectful passive resistance and hurl netting over the geese before rounding them up. Mounted police would only be disappointed when they charged at them anyway because the geese, though they may look sedentary, would create quite a flap and soar over their heads and out of reach of hand…er…wingcuffs. Goose-stepping is an innocent exercise in their web-footed world.

No, studying them in their contemplative state, gazes fixed in the same direction across the reservoir, I expect they were taking in the same fascinating skyline of midtown that I get to see nearly every wonderful day. Their idea of spacious skies, majestic purple mountains, and fruited plains had no relation to patriotic fervor that denies others who might have different religions, skin color, sexual preferences, or political ideas. Among the flock there existed no policy of ‘with us or against us.’ I don’t know if the geese hold the same tolerance for the ducks and cormorants that share the pond with them, although they seem to co-exist. The cormorants, I would guess, could hold their own and just comically slapstick their way out of a bad situation. For the geese the sky is the open road from their homeland in Canada so they can fly south over the mountains and plains and settle in Manhattan for an urban summering.

Chuntering quietly among themselves, they were seemingly unconcerned about conflicting reports twittered from Tehran, that their Canadian embassy in Iran was turning away injured protesters. None of their kind will be spirited from the reservoir undercover and flown to an undisclosed location to be hung by their wings in a foreign cell. Orange jumpsuits will not have to be refitted to their well-padded, feathered bodies. Their bills are lifted to the southern end of the reservoir for the view beyond of mid-Manhattan. They aren’t watching YouTube for the grisly footage of a young woman downed by a sniper at a protest in Tehran. They don’t understand what it means to be the face of such a revolution. The phrase “The revolution will be televised” means nothing to them.

Some of their flock might end up as dinner for the disenfranchised, the homeless, the hungry, especially if the economy continues its downward spiral and drives those unfortunates into Central Park to set up a tent city. It has happened before. Right where the geese are now, the reservoir was once emptied and called “Hooverville.” However, the survivors of the slaughtered goose, unlike the families of the protesters killed in Iran, will not be charged a bullet fee (or arrow fee or stone fee, or whatever fee).

The geese had found this openly protected body of water, scrupulously maintained by genial employees of the Central Park Conservancy. Kitted out in denim shirts and cargo shorts they guarantee against a growing mountain of plastic rising up from the bottom of the reservoir, taking 700 years to decompose or ending up in the stomach of an unsuspecting water fowl.


Black-faced parents of a cherished gosling would not have to worry about anything other than natural catastrophes, or perhaps the errant human child with a stone to throw. Their babies, hopefully, would never feel the taser of a steroidal trigger-happy cop because they just happened to be where they were, when they were. They won’t ever be wrongly accused when there is no evidence to convict and much to overturn a conviction. Their beautiful black faces won’t ever face a human death chamber.

Health care is not only not a crisis in their avian world they don’t even know what health care is. They take care of their own.

When others fuck up—humans who are bigger and richer—who wear expensive suits to their offices in banks and insurance companies and rob the citizenry blind, a goose might crane an elegant neck, tilt its well-formed head and blink: “What’s a suit?”


The water is calm under an overcast sky. Mesmerized by the skyline an introspective goose might wonder why he or she had never thought before now to take this position along the banks of the reservoir. Not a moment would be wasted thinking about why the government spent some eight trillion dollars to bail out the banks and insurance companies, money that could have provided adequate health insurance coverage for every man, woman and child in the United States. A debt that will fall squarely on the already rounded shoulders of the citizenry

Simplistic, you say? Well, aren’t I a silly goose.

“Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others.” Jonathan Swift

Monday, June 15, 2009


But a bird that stalks
down his narrow cage
can seldom see through
his bars of rage
his wings are clipped and
his feet are tied
so he opens his throat to sing.
Maya Angelou


UNCAGED

A centenary retrospective of the paintings of Francis Bacon brought me to the Metropolitan Museum of Art recently. After a brisk walk downtown through Central Park—a gentle explosion of freshly scented expectation spiriting me along a path almost unhinged with blossoms and lush foliage—I decided to detour from my objective and first take in whatever was on view at the roof garden of the museum.

I stepped from the elevator into brilliant shards of light reflected off a chaotic tangle of industrial piping. It was as if I had wandered out of the realm of Nature’s gentler forms into a postmodern forest of chaos where there was, conveniently, a wine bar. The decidedly impressive site-specific installation, Maelstrom by the artist Roxy Paine, will be on display until October 25th. Twisted tendrils of stainless steel pipes and rods—he calls them Dendroids—lattice the view across Central Park, high above the treetops bound by the recognizable architecture on the park’s southern and western borders.

It was early and so I took advantage of the scarcity of tourists and quickly photographed the installation. The roof garden began to fill with culture seekers (Do you want red or white with that experience?) Directives from one digital camera laden visitor to another hung over the terrace: “Stand over there for a good shot of the Dakota!” Really? I was about to make my way to the exit when a mirthful chorus rose above the conversational knots around me. I looked around for the source of the magical tune and saw only one little gray bird perched atop the main structure of the artist’s installation, cresting the über Dendroid I guess you could say. Later a friend responded to the photo I e-mailed and noted the garrulous little fellow was a Northern Mocking Bird. And indeed he packed an impressive repertoire, appropriating the varied trills and warbles of many other birds. Expecting a brief performance before he flew off I became one of many among the growing audience of humans who remained captivated by his joyous parody for nearly three-quarters of an hour.

Unbelievably, it seems we have more and more birds in Manhattan these days. Free of the cage they soar above city streets, nest in treetops and alight on a shiny bit of sophisticated artwork if they so choose, eschewing the wine bar and telephoto lens that would only take them artificially where they, in reality, could fly any time. It's marvelous. They sing really loudly here to compete with street traffic noise. So I have been told.

New Yorkers have also seen the return of the Monarch butterfly. In summer the shrubbery surrounding the reservoir is speckled with these orange and black beauties. Alight on fragrant boughs, their fragile wings slowly open and close like visual heartbeats. Their reappearance is due to the disappearance of the WTC towers. The flight path of migratory birds and butterflies has been re-opened and they come soaring back here. Everybody wants to be in New York!

Light hearted I left the roof garden for the Bacon exhibition. Francis Bacon, just behind Vincent Van Gogh, is an artist I admire who was a great influence on me as a young painter. Along with other painters and some writers like Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust, they contributed to how I learned to see the world around me, what details I learned to focus on, and what to see beyond.

I had not seen any works of Francis Bacon in a long time, a more youthful penchant for museums and galleries having dimmed a bit. This was an exhibition I was looking forward to, and after a quick stop among the Expressionists for a customary greeting to Vinny Van, I made my way to the exhibition.


Over 60 paintings in all and as many archival objects are on display to mark the centenary of the artist’s birth in Dublin. Bacon’s work is described by some as torturous. And indeed he did not shy away from portraying physical and emotional suffering and pulls the viewer into his personal recognition of pain—his and his subjects’. Pacing myself, I strolled through the galleries. It was like coming into a roomful of dysfunctional friends who had suffered great torment in their distant past and now were gathered together again with a kind of new found strength, still twisted by the artist’s brush but stronger somehow. The canvases, all systematically wrangled into uncomplicated heavy gold frames, felt fresh. Particularly moving is the triptych of his lover George Dyer, painted in memoriam.

As with all painters who make an impression on me, I often see something new—something missed—even in canvases I consider I am very familiar with. One aspect that is still very much present in Bacon’s work is the cage, either blatant or implied. In every scene, there it is, the cage.


Next day I headed for Harlem. The CEDP bunch unfolded their table under the non-working public telephone on the corner of 125 and Frederick Douglas Boulevard. We were handed a sheaf of fact sheets, copies of The Abolitionist and a clipboard. We needed signatures on a petition. An innocent man was in a cage and he needed to be set free.

Well, the man is Troy Davis. He is in a cage, yes, but his freedom is not so simply got by opening the cage door. He’s on death row. How he got there is the crux of the matter. And a matter so unhip, so under the tabloid radar, so where-is-the-story-if-it’s-just-another-black-man-on-death-row that it will take legions of pavement pounding volunteers to secure signatures on petitions that will be presented to the newly elected DA of Chatham County Georgia so that man—an African American man—can say, ‘Stop bugging me with this shit.’ But nearly every day another person or group in the news comes out in Troy’s defense. The leaders of Georgia's NAACP are gearing up for a national fight to save his life. In a May 31st op-ed piece in the New York Times the writer, Bob Barr—an oppressive policy maker himself—leads off with an astounding statement:

“There is no abuse of government power more egregious than executing an innocent man. But that is exactly what may happen if the United States Supreme Court fails to intervene on behalf of Troy Davis.”

And while, sadly, he reaffirms his belief in the death penalty he concludes with:

“To execute Troy Davis without having a court hear the evidence of his innocence would be unconscionable and unconstitutional.”

I was back uptown on Saturday for a meeting of CEDP’s book club at the Hue-Man Bookshop on Frederick Douglas Boulevard. The last book discussed was Lockdown America: Police and prisons in the age of crisis by Christian Parenti. Our prison system is horrible almost beyond words. It's no wonder a U.S. soldier can dole out tortuous methods without blinking. It's kind of in bred here, this taste for blood. One wonders if Jesus had been murdered in an electric chair, what little gold symbols the crucifix wearing Christian Right would have draped around their necks today.

Currently we are discussing Mumia Abu-Jamal: Jailhouse Lawyers. Prisoners defending prisoners v. the U.S.A. I came to this group because a life-long antipathy for capital punishment needed to be re-educated and activated. Angela Davis notes in the foreword to the book:

“Mumia argues that the passage of the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA) is a violation of the Convention against Torture, for in ruling out psychological or mental injury as a basis through which to recover damages, such sexual coercion as that represented in the Abu Ghraib photographs, if perpetrated inside a U.S. prison, would not have constituted evidence for a lawsuit.

The man in the White House who supported this act? Wait for it…Bill Clinton!

A frightening number of our so-called Liberal politicians have given their support for the death penalty. Why I could not in good conscience pull the lever for Hillary or Bill Clinton or Al Gore or finally John Kerry when he flip flopped from his anti-death penalty stance to land squarely on the side of executing terrorists. I did not for Barack Obama, who supports capital punishment. I guess many caved when the specter of a Palin/McCain administration (her description) reared its very ugly right-winged head.

In early June this year, Texas marked an abominable milestone. Presumably without batting an eye, Governor Rick Perry presided over the 200th execution of a prisoner, handily beating trigger-happy George Bush’s numbers.

Troy Davis's case has, indeed, gone global and that's what this poor misguided murderous country needs; a global urgency that reflects what we do here as detestable, so much so that we retreat from an unwanted spotlight and all states end capital punishment.

The size of the Francis Bacon exhibition demands that I return. “Weather permitting” says the Metropolitan Museum regarding the opening hours of its roof garden exhibition. Well, ‘conscience permitting’ we will see Troy Davis’s cage opened and finally set him free.

You can read his story online and more importantly, sign Amnesty International’s petition and the petition at the Campaign To End the Death Penalty.


AN EYE FOR AN EYE
MAKES THE WHOLE WORLD BLIND.

“My optimism rests on my belief in the infinite possibilities of the individual to develop nonviolence…In a gentle way you can shake the world.” Mahatma Ghandi 1869 - 1948

Friday, June 5, 2009


NOT JUST A MAN

don’t know what i’m in for today
traffic light says go or stay
just like every other day
falling through the atmosphere
landing in the who knows where
just like every other day
and then a kind man comes along
learns the secret to your song
and lights the way

he’s not just a man
with serious eyes
there will be time
when you will find
the heart that beats within
just below the skin
he’s not just a man
he’s nobody’s fool
he knows what you do
comes from the truth
all that’s been held within
will see the light again
he’s not just a man

don’t know what i’m up for today
the willing have a way they say
to keep themselves
from giving in
he takes your hand & weaves a spell
leads you from the wishing well
leads you to the love he brings

he’s not just a man
with serious eyes
there will be time
when you will find
the heart that beats within
just below the skin
he’s not just a man
he’s nobody’s fool
he knows what you do
comes from the truth
all that’s been held within
will see the light again
he’s not just a man

standing apart from him
letting the moment in
letting the heart begin to see
standing apart from him
letting the moment in
letting the heart begin to see

he’s not just a man
with serious eyes
there will be time
when you will find
the heart that beats within
just below the skin
he’s not just a man
he’s nobody’s fool
he knows what you do
comes from the truth
all that’s been held within
will see the light again
he’s not just a man…