Stars

Piece on Mary's superman vid. "T'astra mazevoun." The stars are gathering. To praise Mary. It is five in the driveway and I get to go to Revere today. The night's bounty, the stars, are in full view and glory.(title-The Night's Bounty.)

Things don't make any sense to me. Why do a song and a tv show to make a third thing? That is what Mary Van Deusen does.

One has to look at beauty where you find it. Her work has beauty, is beauty. She is famous in her circle of video artists.

The cup with cat on it is lead visual. As well as bear on tea box. Plus liberal use of Brillo box.

Essay on heroic figure. Scene in vid of refrigerator, dog and Benny.

Lone, poor, empty, but he fill mark of a great soul."

The mark of a great soul. A totally fine subject of the K piece. This piece will be of a comic figure. The totally funny Katsimbalas a man who is so close to Seferi. He is Seferi's comic side. The comic side-kick.

Pictures. Do them first and then the Katsimbalas thing will come out for you. The warrior on the plate. The mass picture on the victrola.

Miller says we have no place for the gods in our world, and puts it, "We too have myths. But no place for the gods in them."
We too have myths. But no place for the gods in them."

K is the detergent ad. The sexy man in a clothes ad. As flower sniffer. Go to the book on him and just pull the images. He lives in my Dover, in my revere, in my mind. He is garrulous, crazed, funny, drunk, oafish, loud, eats too much and belches. He is in Rowlandson, in Marsh, in all the forms that inhabit me at any moments.

That is the point of our art today. The wealth of images and the need the artist has to put it all together.

The Greeks...."They come to you brimming over and they fill you to overflowing. They ask nothing of you except that you participate in their superabundant joy of living. They never inquire which side of the fence you are on because the world they inhabit has no fences."

"They make themselves invulnerable by habitually exposing themselves to every danger."

K is a bumbling Patriot, a devious pilgrim, a hapless pioneer. Who does he look like? He looks like me.

I go on to say he reminds me of Stan. The tightness of his universe. The little world he loves. Ok that is the title. The little world he loves.

The little world he loves.

K and Stan see that life needs scale, community, and care of one for the other.

Of not judging others, of working hard for the world and not for oneself.

That is what Mandela does, what k does for his literary Greece, what Seferi does. What Stan does for Wrentham.

`diamonds on the souls of her shoes. People say she has ...she's crazy. Taken me for granted. Forgotten she slips into my pocket with my car keys. She has diamonds the souls of her shoes. Ordinary shoes. upper broadway. sleeping in a doorway.

a title for Stan. Like it. Ordinary shoes. to lose these walking blues. Stan makes me soar. As does Mary. Soaring. Like the seagull. Nothing to lose. He's a poor boy. Like me. Paul Simon. Professor Nutmeg. a rare spice. People say she's crazy. Waiting. because I please you you've taken me for granted. "You've taken me for granted."

Combine song words and story. Puts on aftershave. Honey take me dancing.

SO much for Simon.

Miller says of the other George. "He knew Katsimbalas as well as one man can know another." If I can understand that, I would be able to know something of Sweet Seferi.

There is a lot of rich imagery here to play with. The idea that the images can be handled if one says to stay cool.

Monday. 1230 This is a ramble with some ideas. continue or start again.

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�Ð8�d�2g�ÿÿÿÿ��ÐDg�–<c� Piece on Mary's superman vid. "T'astra mazevoun." The stars are gathering. To praise Mary. It is five in the driveway and I get to go to Revere today. The night's bounty, the stars, are in full view and glory.(title-The Night's Bounty.)

Things don't make any sense to me. Why do a song and a tv show to make a third thing? That is what Mary Van Deusen does.

One has to look at beauty where you find it. Her work has beauty, is beauty. She is famous in her circle of video artists.

The cup with cat on it is lead visual. As well as bear on tea box. Plus liberal use of Brillo box.

Essay on heroic figure. Scene in vid of refrigerator, dog and Benny.

Lone, poor, empty, but he fills the air with himself. He creates himself in his environment. Which has nothing else in it. What a heroic and only a heroic can do. Give life to space.

12-29-addon. The idea is that the thing in one'e head is what propels life. Not the surroundings which are irrelevant. History stands still. There are no economic or biographical conditions. The heroic figure is in space, time space, emotional space and only has his own view to satisfy. This would make a hero lonely, only the hero like Benny or Chilson has the idea to nourish him. It could be religious or secular. In the cases above it is clearly secular, but has a religious intensity.

The scene with column and the flag.

The two hosses at end.

Saves pretty maid.

him'n Ray. Use the friendship plaque in kitchen

The piece will have an introduction as follows. Mary Van Deusen is a vid maker from Wrentham. What makes her special for me is the wide variety of work she manages. Views of her beloved Wrentham, birds, a Halloween show, expert analysis and appreciation of a range of tv shows and American music. Among them "Due South," the tv show.

She did for me this; made me aware for the first time in my long life that commercial tv was a thing of beauty. I can never thank her enough. It was a sudden and terrific shock for me to know this. I am a prejudiced and narrow-minded two-bit intellectual who was ever snubbing commercial tv as something beneath my dignity to look at and take seriously. If Mary did nothing else, she cured me of this belief forever.

The vid on Superman and Benton Frazier is a work of great beauty. I don't know how to approach it to appraise it. So I will do what I have always done. Take one step and do a vid. And then another and do another vid on the work at hand. It may take me two vids to look at what she is doing or it may take a hundred. It doesn't matter, as I have all the time in the world. Her work, as all good work, has many levels of meaning, and thus levels of beauty. It fits into some of my concerns with heroes and that is good.

Art is in the second room.

That is where Mary's art is. Everyone who sees her work senses this. It makes what she does special. Mary is really a humble person. She knows what her work is about and the reaction of her fans worldwide. I have read letters from Australia on her visual art.

I have seldom done a piece on a living artist. It is such fun to have direct access to a person I am writing about, and being able to go talk to her. She never makes a big deal about her work. I mean she never says how good it is and the only feeling I get is she can not wait to tackle the next challenge that will get thrown her way. She, as all great artists only cares about the next work. She trembles in anticipation. Take that as a good sign because pompous artists are always a bore and Mary is not one of these.

You just travel fast and hard when you dare look over one of her works. Here is the vid I will examine. Enjoy. I will come back to explain some of what it means to me.

Superman's Song

Crash Test Dummies

Tarzan wasn't a ladies man

He's just come along and scoop 'em up under his arm

Like that, quick as a cat in the jungle

But Clark Kent, now there was a real gent

He would not be caught

sitting around in no

Junglescape, dumb as an ape doing nothing

Superman never made any money

For saving the world from Solomon Grundy

And sometimes I despair the world will never see

Another man like him.

Hey Bob, Supe had a straight job

Even though he could have smashed through any bank

In the United States, he had the strength, but he would not

Folks said his family were all dead

Their planet crumbled but Superman, he forced himself

To carry on, forget Krypton, and keep going.

Supeman never made any money

For saving the world from Solomon Grundy

And sometimes I despair the world will never see

Another man like him

Tarzan was king of the jungle and Lord over all the apes

But he could hardly string together four words, "I Tarzan, you Jane."

Sometimes when Supe was stopping crimes

I'll bet that he was tempted to just quit and turn his back

On man, join Tarzan in the forest

But he stayed in the city, and kept on changing clothes

In dirty old phonebooths 'till his work was through

And nothing to do but go on home.

Superman never made any money

For saving the world from Solomon Grundy

And sometimes I despair the world will never see

Another man like him.

And sometimes I despair the world will never see

Another man like him.

"Enterprising Women. Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth" Camille Bacon-Smith. U.Pennsylvania Press 1992.

"Textual Poachers. Television Fans and Participatory Culture." Henry Jenkins Routledge 1992

12-29 a person I seem to go to is Rowlandson who is a comic giant of the late seventeen hundreds and early eighteen. He is incredibly amusing and full of life and I connect Grundy with Mary's song. It is Mary's song that is done in the vid as it is my story that is done with the visuals I put to the piece here. I call it Mazevoun t'astra. The stars.... they gather. I don't really know what that means, but it fits for me. "Gather, they do, the stars."

I connect to another commercial artist, Analatos, who painted on urns and big jars that went off over the Aegean in the seventh century, pre. She travels over the seas of Internet. They are her voyages in the world of commerce in the late twentieth century.

She takes one-dimensional characters, basic stick figures and gives them location in the world of myth and fairy story. She takes the male hero who just saves the hapless maiden and transforms him into a living and breathing thing. A person who lives and breathes before our eyes. We look and call it an art. What she does. She never says much to me about it, except to tell me about what may happen in a future episode. I mean she gives me hints as we look on an episode of "Due South". together.

Her body sways as she watches. It is like she is in some swimming pool and she sways with the grand rhythm in her head. She hears a music like I imagine Chilson does. He also worked in Wrentham as Mary does. Wrentham is special because of the water of Lake Pearl. The place spawns great genius, like the artist, the local historian guy told me about who did the nudes back then. An odd guy. I went to his house and forget his name now. Get to him and do a piece on the artist. Grimes and Michael. Two more artists. Wrentham as art-place. The work of Gordon Woodhams.

The modern world feeds on the image of some sort. The brillo pad box. The sweet swoosh. The Patriot logo. All this is wonderfully claimed as exclusive by the company that owns the product. And people go around dreaming of same. Of owning a piece of the rock... of the Patriots or Nike and that swoosh.

Mary looks at the filler between the ads. Says they are prime myth, primordial story and shows their depth somehow. I am interested in the ads which bring us the shows and how they are a form of expression. Analatos drew pictures which were bootlegged when they reached Sicily or Syracuse in Sicily by some anonymous artists who took the Greek style and made it their own. The pots in Italy take on their own style and meaning based on the work of Analatos.

She makes a myth of her own. Makes it of music, words, and pictures. A form of her own. Shows the interdependence of all living things in her work.

It seems like the world is hurtling through space. Going faster than is normal. But that is illusion only. The world is always just the world and we just imagine things. When we see it early it has the old familiar style to it. When it is quiet and before the ocean of commerce begins. That is why I do the empty parking lot or the town of Dover on a quiet Christmas day. Or why Estes does the city of Manhattan empty. It has to do with the essential aspect of a thing. Or the back water area of the Fryer property.

Addon the world empty before the commerce fills it. The world early. DOver or Revere or Manhattan. Then go to next. the attaching of the divine to the human.

I think in a way it is a try at reattaching the divine and the human.

Why is Van Deusen so special? First because she is so funny. All great art is funny. Her vids overall are funny. Then because she links the human with the divine. She takes figures in a technological and urban universe and makes them have human emotions. She energizes Chicago in the same way Louis Sullivan did. With grapes and vines and birds climbing his incredibly lithe sky scrapers.

I saw the Sullivan yesterday and it is quite powerful to me. Still. The idea that the creation of things is important, nay crucial to the movement of the U.S. The sheer magisterial power in a great building.

Only Van d. does it with a blend of song and words and pictures. The pictures and movies, things that move come from "Due South." The words from Mr. Richards of the group, Crash test dummies and the song from the same group he leads. She creates another thing entirely. A vid of beauty that demechanizes the universe, the gives the characters we see on the screen a whole new and powerful life. She shows how in our dreams what we see on tv leads us toward our own divinity. How Benny makes us see how special the human really is.

In Goodrich's terms as he talks on Marsh, she counterposes the insistent object, the refrigerator with the human and the animal object to create some beautiful thing. A vision of a sort.

One theme is the primitive or natural object, the wolf in the urban jungle. The human is there too in Benny. You can see the original thing in a painting of Rowlandson's and then go up to Shady oaks and see it again, as I will today. Some people stay whole at incredible price. Bob Briggs does.

Bob. The most beautiful thing in the world is one another. Not money and stuff. One another and he goes on to say to make a smile and let things go. At that. Then he talks about people who care only about money.

Bob of Bob's seems to. He stays whole but doesn't smile. Does. Mary does too in her vid-myths. At one level she connects the centuries. The insistent object in the form of the old frig unites her, the fore figures of the wolf and man to give us a view of early man and early wolf as they cohere in the modern world. She says it is, as it has always been. The human and the animal facing a harsh universe, far away from home. In their case they are from the frozen earth of Canada and they locate in Chicago, I think to find the murderer of Benny's father. Some such thing. I don't know or care to know the real story of Benny. That myth would confuse my own take. I don't want to know what Van Deusen is doing. I only want to know how I feel about it and react to it with the pictures that float in my head. Only my own pictures will lead me to the place I want to go which is not the same place as Van D. is headed. The point of art is the artists all have slightly different destinations. That is what makes Benny an Artist, the producers, artists, the interpreter, Van Deusen and artist, and me one.

Addon The idea is to put the pictures to Frazier and see what I have. The idea is to connect the Frazier program to Mary and to my own mind and unconscious.

We all plumb the same small mine and gather from it what we find. The stars, they gather to observe the small humans acting large. That is why the bird seems the symbol for Van Deusen. They are the animus that connects sky and earth. The wolf does it for Benny. It connects him to nature and god.

I use two things to tie me to the other world we will enter when we die. One is the statue or column drum, the Greek one and the other is the .... I forgot. Never say forgot. You don't forget. It just leaves you because it is not time to find it. What you are looking for.

The other may be the old photo. The old pic is but a memory of the time gone. Not to be reseen unless we will it. The thing frightens us but need not. If we will have the courage to see that the past is but the present in disguise. Man never changes but alters a few props to provide a little novelty and spice.

You use the picture, the still picture to locate things. Old fotos which connect to new inspiring images. THe latter are always still and many are ads. The ads are our guides to the old living forms and together they constitute the bridge through time. When we say insistent objects we are just talking about one device the connects the human to a thing that has its own lovely life and meaning. When you then take an old insistent object with its person and connect it to a modern scenario, you come closer to understanding the sense of the human in history. How the human is special and how the thing is. Together with words, the vid I do is a bridge to the dream state, the third connection, the special road and all that.

Marsh creates mega-humans aside their objects. The merrygoround horse. Van Deusen does it with her cars, refrigerators, street scenes. Rowlandson does it when he shows the carriages tipping their cargo of fat-butted women.

It is but general mythmaking the modern way. We are surrounded by myth. We always have been but today there are not enough of us analyzing it. The sociology of forms and stories, sort of.

Let's hop a star and go to the next planet. Mary has always done it. You can't pin her down because she is not here. She's on the next star. (The Next Star) What I wrote at Manhattan Bagel. "Marsh 'creates ones who dwell in the stars, hop from one to the next.' " At the end he dares look at ghouls and goblins, shadow ghosts, in his last paintings." He is frightened of death like us all and he tells us what he sees. The power life has to render us unable to live from human dread and fear. Bourgeois said to conquer fear. The tao book says courage is important even when you haven't any. It is a test of a sort.

Miller micronizes the world. The Greek world in Colossus. He does it with his George. Gorgeous George. George Katsimbalas. Our very own George.

"If men cease to believe they will one day become gods then they surely will become worms." Page 235.

The way to do Mary is to use the insistent object as Marsh does. As his bud Goodrich describes it. The lampost or the horse or the thing and then do it with van D. Vandy. Now back to Henry. In u.s. we need a world view.

world must become small again. 'as the old Greek ;world was-small enough to include everybody."

The tragedy of greece is the that we aborted the great vision.

The greek vision came of reality, not of grotesquerie.

IN Rowlandson's book by John Hayes,hd1942'.r64 h39 Page 47 and 48, I think we have the key. The syle of thing they did was called a "droll." It was at base a comic form. Only Hayes understands Rowlandson for me. He is very mature and imaginative. and he says.

These were prints for sale and called, "Caricatures." They were a salable object and how Rowlandson would make some money. They were a prefoto. We are predigito. The music vid, the morality-whatever it is that mary does. Is predigito. Soon we will scramble forms at home as we would put bakery items in a pot. I do the still picture and combine it with words. The heard word and the still. Mary takes a moving picture from the teevee and combines it with a some-song. We can create a new form of the two. The digito will be a combination easily made of all forms of life the techno world can create. Music, heard words, move-ies,all together. It seems to me Chilson is a master at the moving image. His world rocks and rolls to some sound I can't find but don't really need to.

Mary does moving images like Chilson does. It is fitting both do so much in Wrentham, as it is such a special place in the universe. Chilson is priceless. I need a hook for the next picture of Chilson.

Just go a pace with Miller. On the Greeks and their world and see it is what Stan and Mary both do. What Woodhams does with his Wrentham. I don't belong with these great artists and that is why they ganged up to throw me out. But I am a pesky godd too. We are waging a great turf battle.

Miller goes to argue as follows. "We are building an abstract, dehumanized world out of the ashes of an illusory materialism."

Now I stand in an empty parking lot and see it is not empty but pulsing with images. The lady of the lot has to guard the thing. I will have 10 copies today. She is its insistent profound object. I located her in the dark and Sozio knew to light her up somehow. There is a drama to the place as we all wonder what will come of us and Bob's. Will it be a fire station or a complex of apartments and why are they digging up the street and laying some new pipe as they were a few days ago? Stuff happens and we don't know why. Why is Bob sick and how it unsettles me. To see him suffer so like a helpless being which we all are.

Get from Mr. Maccaulay the photos of the land as airport and as a place where a tank rumbles all day for twenty cents. The way Sully paces. When they dig up in front of the store. It unsettles him. The palace called bob's is very powerful in him. More than in me. The place is his as it is in his childhood.

Only the comic will save us.

"Mia fora k'ena gairo." My life is like a storybook story. But its as real as the feelings I feel. From the Princess Bride, and Mark Knopfler

Only myth can save us now. We are too far down the information hiway. A psychic crunch complicates things. Too much unconnected imagery. Only pioneers and madmen can make the connections. Too much genius gets in the way.

The warrior on the plate is vibrating. Mark says things not so complex.

The past according to Miller......not as something dead and forgotten....and according to Katsimbalas

storybook loves always have a happy ending.

Miller of K. says,"Something we carry within us, something which fructifies the present and makes the future inviting."

"He spoke of little things and of great with equal reverence; he was never too busy to pause and dwell on things that moved him; he had endless time on his hands, which in itself is theo much is going on. I may be working too hard at the sox and have not the mind to go further. A sublimation. A summing up on the song vid. Mary does a parable on the vid. She is predigito, but summarizes the fate of the hero in our universe. She is on the next star from us. Just a bit ahead of her time. Always she is the guide, the teacher. She says to me to keep trying to combine the elements of the modern equation so as to help people see where they are now. Of all the things that is going on, the most important is the relationship. With none we cease to be human and that is why Benton and Ray too are so important in that they try to maintain an order in a disorderly Chicago. The same of black jazz chicago, or Richardson's Marshall Field Chicago or the one of the good book I read on the Art of Chicago. The place is a ballfield of art and emotion. A great city in the thrall of life and evil and people and scenes. The battleground of life and doings. Like any place. Only Mary has an exquisite sense of the known world. The Chicago she grew in. As a child. She dares reach back to find her mother and father and puts her eggs in a basket with Benton and Ray as she examines this holy city. SHe knows what to do, does it and gets out fast, quick, before the walls fall in as they did to Richard Nickel who dies in a building of his master, Louis Sullivan as he explores for Sullivania in the wreck of the stock exchange building. The thing is she is explicating a wondrous piece of America with song-vid and that is a remarkable achievement if only we will llook at it. That is what is called for.

It should be six minutes but I don't really know. Only know to keep going. I don't know how or why. Mostly how as I am very tired and worried and confused. Down deep weary and in pain. THe last days of long review of my and Mary's wo rk have convinced me that her work is important and needs to be studied and understood. What we do is look and then go on to another thing. We can use her work to teach us what we should do. We need to explore our issues, ou r fathers and our mothers with the vid. As a kind of visual celebration. I think it important as a first step to reproducing the old in real life as we are now able to do. Mary's tea room. Mary Van Deusen's world of good ;and evil in Wrentham in the most productive little place in the known world. Mary's place. The idea is to learn who and what these people who come down stairs are about. Why they come down stairs. Whose dream they enact? What the beauty of their Sunday dress is all about. Why they exemplify America as they do to such an extent.

So much of my past work is so forgettable. I rue that but only have to expect it and go on if I can but do so. Go on and trust in Katsimbalas and Mary Dudra and Mary Van Deusen. I don't know really.