AND HE GOES WOW

Chilson gives us the world as it was meant to be. No sense of the human as a mere consumer of sensate matter. The person, as receptacle for some beer or other, some hairproduct. No human can handle this avalanche of sensation the world gives us daily and not go mad.

The seventy incredible varieties of Swatch watches. They are so very beautiful and artistic. God knows what magic they will render on one's wrist. The Budweiser frog who calls to his mate, to come and have a drink with him. He will make it worth her while. Or there is the Folger ad where a man comes to borrow some sugar from next door. I may not have that right, but the she, entices the he, with the aroma of her Folger's, and the rest you know. Love and romance around the coffee bean, the Budweiser beer.

This surfeit of sensation is part of everyone's life today and we are mad from it. We are Odyseus, boating between the straights of Scylla and Charybdis. These sirens on the rocky shore beckon him, as he strains on the ropes that have tied him to the mast. He wants so, to get free to sample the delicious sex these tricky maids offer.

Chilson offers a world that is not dominated by blown and gaudy image. His world is not ours. It is pre-ours, and has in it, a feeling we might relook at, for some relief.

It is a universe untrammelled by the modern. One where mum is at the door beckoning you in, with a lemonade on this very hot day, and a peanut butter sandwich. The world pure, not the world, as a massive commercial. Not the human as some sack you put things in and on. Chilson sees what he does, and he goes wow!

I see his figures and go into a dream world. I dreamed him last night, I think. I can take his dream figures, process them in the modern idiom, and put my dream and its analysis on the tv, watch it from the couch. I take the first fifty years of the century, 20, that is represented by Chilson. Add the last fifty of the century as found in commercial and art, and blend the two to see what the year 2000 may have in it to interest me. I believe, we Americans will combine the two rich images to form a whole new and revived world in the future. In 2000. One with the excitement of the Swatch watch and the quiet beauty of Chilson's Franklin,MA.

That is how to deal with Century 21. You have to mix the two fifty year periods of the twentieth century to get it right for 2000.

I will list some of the qualities Stan engages, in his foray, up the street in his beloved Franklin. I also include some of the remarkable footage he shot in Wrentham over the years.

In his promenade he creates a thing I will call indelibility. Self-consciously, he photographs the daily life he sees and renders it eternal. He carries his images in his knapsack, on his back, in his head, wherever he may go. They become permanent, indestructible. In short, they become art.

An American art. An art of our very own. An American one. Burchfield's buildings in the depression period in Buffalo. Hopper's lonely scenes of gas pump, allnight restaurant, a lone figure in a sparse hotel room. The Coney Island pictures of Reginald Marsh and another painter of mass scenes at the beach, Paul Cadmus. Art of a daily sort. That reminds us of what is no longer there, but of things we wish still were there. America stark, and plain, before some big changes that occurred. Daily art, community-based art, small art. Painting, photo, moving picture. A view of the thirties and the forties comes to us. And we watch, as they walk and they talk . The wonderment of the daily life.

The magic of Main Street. The fun in dailyness. Stan blends people, their machines and their buildings and causes drama. Not with a plot as in a play or novel, but drama that arises from the movement and the placement of the figures in their space. The common person in his or her town, Franklin or Wrentham.

Art is always kind of desperate. It may be the last piece Stan will do. He is ever aware of mortality. His function as crime photographer, fire and accident recorder, makes him aware of his fragile status on the earth. Anybody's art, may be, his or her last act on the earth, so one should try to make it good. Do a good job. Stan does. He gets it on tape and we get it from him. He does a very good job.

He gets down the beauty of everyday life. The joys of community. The sense that the world is a joyous place. Where people will be glad to see ya.

It is a place where kids play hard at sport. Where people are willing to work and work hard.

He sees the calm and majesty of daily scenes and events. He celebrates dailyness and in the process leaves us with a pretty picture.

He documents the ordinary, so we will appreciate it more. So we will remember the folks we see, as locational relatives of ours. They just occupied our space a few years before we got to. In Wrentham, Norfolk, Franklin or Dover. We are related to them through the land and the space we now occupy. It is the same space, the same buildings in many cases. It looks different, but there it is.

Chilson is local royalty. A person who is in the midst of all the rest of the townsfolk, yet is someone, maybe the only one, who will remember to remember, and will note it. Burchfield does it in Buffalo, remembers and leaves us the images of these huddled houses. The poet, Seferi, does it with his image of the Greek summer solstice. It is part of one of his poems. N.C. Wyeth does it with an illustration of the Native American, noble and handsome.

Certain persons are just plain special, because they phrase what they see in such a manner as to entertain and enchant us. To remind us and to show us who we are.

There are people who remember to remember, and then make it as a gift to us. Anyone can view an N.C. Wyeth masterpiece at the Needham library, a Burchfield watercolor in a book. One can read aloud a poem by Seferi in Greek or English. Or watch a Chilson masterpiece crawl across a tv screen.

Free. Free art. Today, we are all looking for the mouse. I mean to say, the new cartoon figure, that will rival Mickey the Mouse who is the cornerstone of the Disney world. The new cutesy that will make us a million.

We look for what will sell, then try to own the images, rather than giving them as a gift to the world. We look for "cute," something that will sell and make us dollars. We want to control images and community with it.

When we just do art, something else happens that is not contrived or searching for a cute thing that will make dollars and t-shirts and mugs with a slogan or a figure on them.

Chilson offers us moving icons, a living dream, an ancestral procession, an orderly crowd moving down stairs, an encomium for a good people. A good people seen in a moving picture or in one of his many still photographs. Standing, walking, parading, tearing a thing down, plowing in winter, taking down the flag, standing in a group in front of a school, the Vogel School in Wrentham.

He says, don't waste the gift. I can best phrase it in my first language, Greek, as" my spatalas to thoro." Don't you squander the gift. That is what he says to me, at any rate. Don't ever waste the gift. It is public. Not to be owned, but by us all. Never forget it. To forget it, is to be damned. By the dead, your ancestors, who have the power to destroy you from there on the other side. They will come back and smite you down from the land of the dead. Such is the power of the ones we live for, the dead ancestors of ours.

He goes step by step, Chilson does. To show how god is good. He shows the citizens of Franklin in parade. He helps them talk. You can hear them. If only you believe. One shot in the community to the next. Such drama.

Like the Red Sox as they try in September of this year to make the wild card in the playoffs. Only three games behind the Orioles and Roger is on the mound. What excitement! A communal beauty. A scene of familiar excitation. Or maybe it is sometimes more quiet but still lovely. Like some fella tryin' to help his little kid tie a shoe that may trip him up. Then tapping him and saying go on and play some more.

Like my new neighbor across the street, breastfeeding, as we stand on the side of the road we live on. Little dramas. A parade in Wrentham. A dad helping his kid tie a shoe unlaced. Or Kerrie feeding her child unconcerned as we talk about the world, standing there at the head of my driveway. Little dramas. How Chilson excels in showing them.

It is a small beat.... of the heart. A step. A word. A notion. Life is the universal village. Life moves a bit, then some more. Day begins. Then another.

I like the day when it is young.

Chilson is so common you miss his specialness. His body of works is so large, you begin to think of it as a throw-away. So common it is disposable, forgetable. However, it has an unusual quality. It has the power to become indelible. When you register it, you can not throw it by. It lodges into your unconscious. There it is judged as great. So we go wow with him.

He shows us a whole scene. Building, machine and human, doing some thing or other on a main street.

He may specialize in folks goin' down stairs, but he covers a lot of other scenes to fill in any blanks we might have on the life then.

He glorifies the common.

He is very, very funny.

He likes old people and sees them as important.

He knows he's doing this for the artists and viewers who will follow him in the life of America, the beautiful.

He is a compulsive and obsessive. He has to get everything down. It is a plus not pathology in the way he does it. The negative becomes in him a positive.

He takes his spirit for a spin. Takes us with him if we are patient and willing to go for the ride. I know people who watch him on Franklin tv where they put raw footage on tv. Folks I chance to meet, like Pandora Carlucci who lives there, and is Dover's town planner, just watches his work, as it steals across her tv. She likes it. Understands its value and its finer qualities.

What is it we want? What is it we lack? Community.

We fear it because we have lost the ability to let walls come down, the ability to get close. The American is suspicious of others because the last often lets him down; so the Americans go to machines for stimulus.

Car. Tv. Computer. Major error. Chilson shows we can build, have fun, live well. As citizens in our local communities.

If only we stop negative behaviour and get positive. A great time is in store for us. We need set roots in location, in a place, not a corporation. Location won't downsize you. Won't abandon you, if you have faith in self and neighbor, in village-mate.

Location is stability. A root. A neighbor-place, what it means to have a home.

The American culture has it all. Just celebrate. Don't worry. Let your kids alone. Stop molding them, so they will be like you. You ain't that hot. Just sit back and scroll Chilson. Look at it, for its pristine-ness. Its beauty, its un-clutter.

Its gorgeousness. Its wholeness. Its good-ity. Its pace, dance, inclusiveness, its humor, its power, and more too.

It is a soap, a sit-com, a tragedy, a comedy. A drama. All in a piece.

It is a lesson we need heed. Live community. It will never let you down. These five thousand souls or whatever number in your town or village or neighborhood..... you'll find a few who'll love you. There will sit a church or a synagogue or temple where some or a few will care. A neighbor, a person at the local A.A. or the Visiting Nurses' Association. A funny person, an odd nut, an old person who gives you some courage. What is community? A permanent, support system. A place you come home to.

Not an internet. A street, a neighborhood. A hood. Like in cold, you put up a snug hood to keep you warm and the cold off your neck.

What is everyone so scared of? The village is always there. Why lock the doors of your heart?

Let your cable access station in. Let the milk man come in, to put the milk in your frig.

Let me in your heart. I won't hurt you. I have no ulterior motive. I just want to tell stories. Nothing in particular. Just want to let my spirit run, play, go sky-high.

Some spirits just want to say, hi. That is all Stan does. Let him in your heart.