Butler

The most important thing is one another. Bob Briggs said that to me last Sunday as we sat on milk crates and talked, as we do each week. He seems to look forward to it as I do. He is a milk or dairy person, has thirty odd cows. Struggles. He also said to keep a smile and he does.

I shall send you some of my vids that I do for local tv. I have done seventy or so and do it to pass the time and to say a few things since I don't teach any more. I write scripts and then score them with pictures, mostly from magazines I get at the dump. I do this to keep my mind active and also to be in touch with the ancestors, my real relatives and the old Greek ones. Much of my work has to do with Greece and my place in the diaspora and some has to do with my being an American and liking it. I am in love, wildly in love with the illustrator, NC Wyeth of Needham, MA. The incomparable Charles Burchfield, watercolorist from upstate NY. Stanley G. Chilson of Franklin, MA, one of our own boys from good old Massachusetts. From the place you and I come from, Massachusetts, home of so much greatness and genius. Catherine, his plates were taken to the dump and thrown away. I found a video of some of his moving pictures taken in the thirties and the forties and Stan changed my whole life.

I dream Chilson's figures. I love him so and his people, like one would love Shepard's illustrations of Winnie the pooh or Wyeth's of Treasure Island.

What I did was begin speaking of Stan by doing a series of vids. I have done ten or so and keep churning them out. I am using his images to say life was better then than today because we loved more and were a lot leaner. Then. In those days. I blend my thoughts of today with his world and make vids I find absolutely beautiful and grand. I just adore Chilson and speak on occasion with his nephew, Buck Buchanan who lives ten minutes away in Medfield. He watches my work and may like it, I am not sure.

He is one of those yankee types who are cold and distant. I love everybody and go around saying this and that about how beautiful the world is and he is not like that. You might say he has no feeling but that is not the case. He is just cold on the outside. Anyway he says I understand his uncle and that pleases me.

I just go on trying to get the Massachusettsians around me to see they have a local child to admire even though they don't do it or even see it. My mission is to bring his pictures back so we can see our immediate and recent history as a region more clearly. Chilson is the cat's meow. Really!

I am a street vendor. To feed myself I sell sweatshirts and stuff. I get to peddle and see the world from that vantage point. It is my preferred place to be. Outside listening to the seagulls and the traffic in front of Bob's Discount in Revere on Squire Road, next door to Sozio's. I have been there for years and am happy about that. I write and do vids about the parking lot and the people I meet there. I have a sense of the eternal. I grasp for it as we are Greeks and do that as a matter of course. We search constantly for the divine as a matter of everyday concern. Here is Vrettakos, one of our poets with the line "and the rabbit erect heard the infinite" or some such thing.

I am an artist of sorts and have decided if I live right the work will come. So I do t he vids and trust in god. I have done a series on Armenian culture, using the photos of Project SAVE which is a repository of eighteen thousand photos in Watertown. The thing is run by Ruth Thomasian who is an heroic figure to me. I know a little Armenian poetry and wrote a dynamic script for "Kharpert," a piece on a town wiped out by the soldiers of the Ottoman empire. Seems a lot of those folks whose few relatives survived the pogrom came to Worcester. The piece was done in Continental studios in Watertown. I work in CVI studios. Dover is one place and Canton another. Cablevision was recently taken over by Time Warner and it is just a matter of time until all local tv like what I do is shut down. As the four bigs, divide up the known world to make it safe for sex, violence and trivial stuff. TW, America west which is Continental's new parent, TCI, and maybe Fox or Disney or some such thing. Local cable does not bring in money for them and we go around documenting insignificant things they don't care about. First day of school, a basket ball game, an intergenerational concert, a fouth of July parade. An obscure photographer like Stan Chilson. I have get back to work just now. I am thinking through a new Chilson. I stay one ahead and am looking at the turn of the century photographer named Eugene Atget for some understanding of the character of Chilson. I see parallels in their intentions, and spend hours at the Regis College library studying the book on Atget. I was there this past week because it is too cold to work and could barely stand the pain of the arthritis I am blessed with. The ideas don't come fast some days and so I just wait. Seferi, the greek poet said, "perimene, prota na sou thothoun." Wait my baby, first that things be given you." Fortunately I am now more patient and I just sit there in the lovely lobrary and look out the window. They haven't thrown me out yet and I love the smell of the books, the cleanliness of the place, the order of it and the fact that people leave me alone to work. No one really knows me there except for some staff who know and like my vids.

Please take care. I have always been thinking of you. You are but a step from my elbow at any one time and I wish you well.

t from upstate NY. Stanley G. Chilson of Franklin, MA, one of our own boys from goo��+�{��

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