What Do Fleet, Massengill, and the Name of a Rush Album Have in Common?; or, My Apologies to Lee, Lifeson, and Peart

Something in me, dark and sticky

All the time it's getting strong

No way of dealing with this feeling

Can't go on like this too long

I'm digging in the dirt

Stay with me I need support

I'm digging in the dirt

To find the places I got hurt

To open up the places I got hurt

----excerpted lyrics from "Digging in the Dirt" by Peter Gabriel.

Tonight my county is beginning the observation of Domestic Violence Awareness Month a day early. The community event is called A Show of Hands.

For myself, the irony of naming the event after the easiest, and therefore, one of the most common weapons of choice in domestic violence situations is somewhat uncomfortable.I don't much care for the term domestic violence. It sanitizes it: pretties it up somehow.

For instance, in spoken language and in what is written on the package, an enema is just that: an enema; even the graphics on the box are generic, straightforward.

Yet a douche? It's feminine cleanser. The graphics on the box are most often limpid, flowery. Most importantly, those things aren't really of any use: a woman can actually do more harm to her body than good in using such a product.

Just tell it like it is: get rid of the crap; then leave well enough alone.

But I'm uncertain as to what to call it, this very specialized form of violence: a product of any silence that has ever met any violence against those perceived as weak---be it stranger-to-stranger; familiar-to-familiar. Putting words to things has never been my strongest suit.

But A Show of Hands?

Maybe my visual way of thinking is too informed by images of experience. I'll take good intentions wherever they may be found, dear reader; and really, we all help each other that way, don't we?

A Show of Hands

Hospital photo circa 1992

Nurses holding back hospital gown to show bruising---some of it taking the shape of the hand of the abuser.

Preview of Coming Attractions; or, ...Silence Is the Mother of Violence (Silent All These Years)

October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month here in the U.S.
Here at neroli.108 we will not only observe this, but look at the topic of violence against women in total.
I'm going to be digging in the dirt.
I invite you to stay with me, dear reader:
most likely I will need your support.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Do60c1OtEf4

Random Non-attachments; or, A Short Post

Pop culture has been a consistent source of amusement for me, particularly when it behaves as its name suggests: when it "pops" out of nowhere. You know me, dear reader---cognitive dissonance is one of my favorite jokes.
Madder was having one of his verbal episodes yesterday, on the way to the bathroom:

Man Raid, Man Raid---
the Dir-ty Bub-ble! the Dir-TY BUB-ble!
(repeats)

And, dear reader, if Frida coming in November doesn't already make that month extra-special, look what else does!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuiH9jzHr_U

And also: Myanmar is very much in my mind.

My faith practice asks me to see all these things as "pop."
Sometimes that joke just isn't as funny.

Namaste, dear ones, all.

I Can Only Dance with the Ones That I'm Given; or, Don't Go Changing to Try and Please Me

Today Cobalt's mother hurried up to me as she was dropping Cobalt off for school.
She was flushed, excited.
I don't often see her with this kind of smile, dear reader.
She began to tell me how she had been doing a lot of reading. And that she had a plan for Cobalt.
She wishes to cure Cobalt of autism.

Autism can be reversed, she said. I've seen it.
Cobalt is doing very well here at school, I say.
But Cobalt could be doing so much better, she says.
She pats Cobalt on the head as she says this, in front of all our students who I've brought on this sunny day to greet their friend.
Jenny McCarthy and Oprah have unwittingly caused more people to feel---well, a strange happiness that comes from promises of changing unhappiness: the kind one feels when it is felt that what you have just isn't good at all.

I think about Cerulean, who is, at last account, on the fifth classroom placement in four years.
I wonder if Cerulean yet receives plankton, hyberbaric oxygen, crystal therapy, and the like.
I think of Cerulean's family.
Of how they would be over-the-moon happy---if Cerulean was at the same place that Cobalt is.

I thought yesterday about beginning a different meditation practice into my routine: the making of enso. One every day.
After my encounter with Cobalt's mother, I think tomorrow is a good place to start.
Namaste, dear reader.
Namaste:
Cobalt
Naples
Vermillion
Thalo Blue
Rosegold
Madder
Camouflage
and
Cerulean

Pop Art?; or, More Topography of Motion

Find this image, and the explanation behind it, here.
I find it most beautiful.
What do you think, dear reader?

Topography of Motion; or, Another Short Post

I love videos, as they are a way of showing motion as a visual. It's a favored form for me.
Often, when I hear sounds, they process for me in a very visual way; just as when you twirl a sparkler in the air, it leaves a light trail behind, ever so briefly, ever so brightly: topography of motion, fading to a still as it dims on the retinas, slowing to silence.
It looks something like this: though I see motion, not specific images that speak to a referent.
It's something that makes me happy.
How's your week been, dear reader?
I'm always glad to see you.

And Pinch-Hitting for Neroli...; or, A Short Post

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cE6Pg2q3lI

Business As Usual; or, I Get By With a Little Help from My Friends

Dear reader, yesterday wasn't a Perfect Day.
But I managed to be able to approach the challenges that presented themselves as a more refreshed and reinforced person: in no small part due to the community that you bring with you and that you share on your visits with me.
I do so love a reality check.
Blue skies, dear reader: they are always there, though often obscured.
It's the knowing that they are there that matters.
Enjoy the day, knowing that blue skies are only a matter of time, dear reader.
Thank you for visiting. I look forward to seeing you again soon.

All Is As It Should Be; or, Why Bread and Chocolate Make Neroli Cry

Will you do me an occasional favor? A friend in need is a friend indeed.

http://www.indiana.edu/~liblilly/valentines/valentine3_1.html


Dear reader, today was Not A Very Good Day, for all manner of reasons I won't go into here.

I worked very late and arrived home long after everyone was finished with dinner. Being the sole vegetarian in the household, it is not unusual for the rest of the family to start to eat without me. They know I'll pull up a chair with a salad bowl in hand if I'm particularly rushed for time. Tonight, out of sorts and out of time, I didn't want my usual quick salad; I didn't want to eat the same food that I'd been eating all week---food that I had cooked for myself on Sunday to warm up at work: in truth, feeling my not very good day still weighing on my shoulders, I really wished someone to make something for me.
The closest I come to this is the local Taco Bell and its bean burritos, dear reader. And so I went.
It was just one of Those Days: even my mail was not delivered properly; I know this only because a strange car pulled into our driveway in the late evening bearing a package for me---delivered by mistake to the wrong household. Inside: the starter from Bee and Jai, complete with instructions folded into a lovely card---and a container of fudge brownies.
Opening this package, and seeing this kindness, my wise friends arrived in spirit with their gifts of bread and chocolate.
On a day I most needed it, it was good to have someone fix something to eat for me.

See, I hear them say, it's just as it should be.
Thank you, my friends: it's just what was needed.
Namaste.
Tomorrow is another day.
Rest assured there will be a brownie in my lunch tomorrow.



Accept this tribute of my sincere regard.
http://www.indiana.edu/~liblilly/valentines/537.html

There's a Bakery Past the White-washed Pooh; or, A Short Post

http://www.mcgeeproductions.com/art.html

Tonight I was driving home from university.
I passed a commercial bakery, and smelled a yeasty, dense, slightly chemical smell, as if I were the proverbial Princess of the Pea , sitting on a pile of mattresses---if the mattresses were all plastic sacks filled with spongy white-bread hot dog buns.
It made me laugh.

I laughed imagining myself as such a princess; I laughed imagining that the bread starter making its way in the mail from Bee and Jai must smell so differently, so elemental and alive in its fermentation.
It's funny to me how things dance together, as if they are so much dough and freshly ground spices, dry fruits soaked to swollen, rising up in the heat of the oven: absolutely delicious, absolutely worth passing around to share.
Don't you think?

The Importance of Being Earnest; or, Can You Hear Me Now?

Julian Schnabel Ethnic Type #14 1984 oil, animal hide, wax and modeling paste on velvet; 108 x 120 http://www.artcritical.com/DavidCohen/SUN98.htm

Ecstasy of St. Theresa Gian Lorenzo Bernini, 1647-1652
Marble, height 150 cm
Rome, Santa Maria della Vittoria
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Ecstasy_St_Theresa_SM_della_Vittoria.jpg

One of the things I enjoy about my friendship with the blogger Artist Formerly Known as Purple Worms is our ongoing dialogue about the nature of art, and the relationship of art to artist. We've been engaged in this topic, off-and-on, for several years now.
It never gets old.
So when I wrote an earlier post about kitsch in response to reading Howard Gardner's take on the matter, I was fairly confident that AFKAPW would definitely be game to engage in the matter. And so she did!

AFKAPW wrote about kitsch yesterday in response to my earlier post. She informs us as to the origins of the word, and all the cultural attachments that are both origins and results of the word's usage. Please follow the link to read; she is ever more erudite than I, and I therefore won't attempt to paraphrase her words.
In her conclusion, she ekes out the relationship, if any, of art to kitsch:
Is kitsch art? So that gets me back to one of my all time favorite paradoxes - trying to define Art. (Capital A art.) When push comes to shove, I guess I resolve the issue by narrowly defining what I believe to be art. FOR ME (please note that narrowing there),
Art must

1. Communicate some kind of message or meaning (The meaning may simply be that art in the past has been ovely wrought and fraught with meaning and I am protesting against this past idea or that art has ignored the craft of working carefully with its materials.)

2. It must have access to and address society and issues important ot more than one person (thus be seen or heard - if it stays in the bottom drawer - for me it is not art - it is creative expression.)

3. (And here is the one that upsets lots of my colleagues in the Art department) It must have ideals, and have more than a superficial level - it must communicate about something metaphysically important (yes the nature of art itself fits in this category) In short for me art must speak to truth, justice, beauty or some such form.For me this solves the problem of kitsch. If the object is superficial with no depth, then it is kitsch. Now we have the question of audience - for me - if there is a group that finds depth in the object (it has a social/societal component) it is art. Of course that doesn't make it good art, but it is Art.

As is our custom, her words are most thought-provoking for me.

So under these conditions, how do each of the works above measure up?
One is Bernini, one is Schnabel; each labeled as Serious Art: yet the frequency of the transmission, the style of the communication is very similar.

Or is it?

AFKAPW speaks to the referent.
Is the referent absolutely necessary?

If so, how can each of us agree to the referent? Perhaps one could agree with others that the best referents that Art may address are the examples that AFKAPW gives: truth, beauty, justice, or some such form. Yet if this is the case, does it not also seem appropriate that such referents, such ideals, by their very nature, need many ways to be spoken of, the proverbial elephant to the blind men?

She then writes that :
I get tremendous joy in kitsch and alas I have to report it is in a different way than my tender and compassionate friend Neroli finds kitschy joy. I am at heart a nasty and critical individual. While my generous friend Neroli joys in the abundance of feelings and its excessive expression in kitsch, I have to admit to enjoying it as Schadenfreude 9another one of those untranslatable German terms). May the universe forgive me, but I get a certain vindictive glee out of laughing at the grotesquely exaggerated nature of kitsch and looking down my nose at. I just can't quite escape that one-up-man-ship inherent in being an insider looking at the ostracized outsider. In short I am the worst kind of snob. While Neroli laughs with, I alas laugh at. Now I will go to my zabuton and try to meditate on the nature and necessity of compassion and yes after all that I still love kitsch and find it stupidly reassuring.

And it is here that my experience with kids on the spectrum of autism and pervasive developmental disorders comes to bear: my feelings and thoughts about kitsch have everything to with my life experiences and nothing to do with any positive character attributes; all of us have generousity and compassion.
Communication, in all its forms, has become more and more my focus of interest. When I first came out of the gates of early adulthood, I thought that art was my passion; since my experiences of living so long with violence and isolation, and the subsequent implications of their workings in living without them, I've come to understand that it is really communication(Perhaps that in and of itself could be a component of a working definition of art?), particulary outside of the verbal realms , that engages me. Working with autism has brought this fact into focus.


Often, our kids with autism will speak to the same kind of referent that our kids without autism do; yet will do it in such a manner that would appear, if I may, kitschy: they are often displaying behaviors that anyone would be able to produce, and would be considered socially exuberant, exaggerated, or without any congruency at all to situational context. Yet, these behaviors are communciation nonetheless.
To extend the metaphor: often, these kids will produce opulent velvet paintings when their general-education-population peers are producing Zen brushwork: both are happy responses to the same experience.
For example, I've known one little person that we'll call Naples Yellow. In response to a happy feeling, Naples would jump up and down, pigeon-toed, all the while with one arm half-extended to the front, elbow bent, as if drawing another person into a one-armed hug; the opposite arm extended out, its hand moving in rapid circles, hitting that one-armed-hug-hand on the downstroke to affect a rapid and rhythmic clap, all in time to the jumping.
The other students?
To continue the metaphor: once they understood that this was Naples' way of saying "I'm really happy about this," they made room to hang this baroque, kitschy work next to their own.

Generousity? Tenderness and compassion?
Children making room for one another, often despite the models given to them by less enlightened adults.
Arguably the best Art of all; art with a capital 'A.'
There's the makings of that kind of Art within us all; there's the means of receiving that sort of communication within us all; and there's most definitely room to hang it all on the wall.
You'll know it when you see it, dear reader.


http://handicraft.indiamart.com/gifs/velvet-painting.jpg
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/cd/Original_face_enso.jpg

The Fashion Show; or, A Short Post

Lucy, to Ethel: Why must you act like such a rube?
Ethel to Lucy: Because I am a rube!

I just adore Ethel's attitude.

This Is the Good Stuff; or, I Go Dancing In (Thanks, Peter Gabriel)

It seems a long week to me this week, dear reader.

I'm looking forward to the weekend; I'm looking forward to visiting those of you who have your own blogs.

Keep the light on for me, okay?

Coming to the end of the first week of school and of the fall semester of grad school, I'm thinking so much of all the good stuff we managed to wring out of the last week of summer.

Come and remember with me.

LG and I went peach-picking with Vermillion and his parents.

Snowy and I enjoyed being outside in the backyard with our kiddos running about.

LG picked apples in our apple tree, from the vantage point of the "raft" that he and BG had built. See the red Crocs?

BG, being a Very Tall Person, did not need the vantage point of the raft in order to pick apples.

We went to the river. See BG, wearing a white shirt, searching for crayfish?

LG and Snowy climb a Very Big Hill at the river together. Here they are at the top.

See Snowy in an orangey shirt and LG in a light blue one? They've reached the top! They are about to come full-speed-ahead, running back down.

I love to think about these things when I'm tired, and wondering if I'm just spinning my wheels.

It helps put things in perspective for me.

What does it for you, dear reader?

Truth in the Platitudes; or, No Old Sayings Were Harmed During the Writing of This Post

weaving draft (pattern for a woven design)http://www.cs.arizona.edu/patterns/weaving/books/SAMPLES/hj_draft.gif

Dear reader, you know how you can view an old saying: as a glass half-full; as a glass half-empty.
Just this weekend, as a matter of fact, I was listening to the Roykos, parents of a son with autism, describe their reaction to platitudes on the radio program This American Life---old sayings such as that well-worn war-horse of expression, the one that exhorts us that we will overcome hardships as we are never given more than we can bear as our lot in life.
I believe the Roykos recommended the proffering of that platitude as an invitation from one who was just itching for a fight---as the saying goes.

It's been a challenging year this year, and continues to be so.
Just when I have been feeling as if the wind is somewhat slack in my sails, so to speak, our new school year begins.
Enter one particularly tiny, affectionate, happy little person: a brand-new kindergardener, cute as a button, who walked into his new classroom for the first time, face solemn with the magnitude of his excitement, and melted into an illuminating smile and into my arms, giving me a bear hug and several quite hearty thumps on the back in the process.

Can I tell you what a special thing that is?
Can I tell you what makes it all the more special?
When I was a little girl, my grandparents lived in one half of a house; the other half was occupied by another couple their age. These good people were as grandparents to me as well, after a fashion---or at least a flamboyant aunt and uncle. I played with their grandsons as a girl, even though they were a few years younger than myself.
My new little friend, of the thumping bear hugs, is the great-grandson of my grandparents' neighbors, son to one of my childhood playmates in my grandparents' backyard.
As always, in her fashion, my grandmother seems to support me in deep and quiet ways.
This is the picture, this life says to me. See the pattern?

Life's full of the good stuff: the surprises and the guffaws, and a few thumps to the back from a tiny fellow with a huge heart can dislodge whatever may stick in your throat.
Free from obstruction, you are free to say yes.
Free to say yes to the good stuff; free to laugh at everything else: warp and weft, all part of the whole cloth.
I wish the same for you, dear reader.

That's my story. I'm sticking to it.

Happy First Day of School; or, Neroli's Little Helper

Dear reader, as you might imagine, our kiddos often require their teachers to bring as much energy to the day as they can muster.
Sometimes music is just the thing to bolster one's energy levels.
Here's the music that was running through the back of my head today, on the first day of school: it saw me through cartwheeling in the classroom to shoes removed and thrust in my face for smelling to insulin checks to the understandable impatience of a kindergardner who wants his pizza, please---all the while having to wait for a twenty-minute-long-wait in line in order to get it.
Happy first day of school!

I'll talk with you soon, dear reader.
Take good care.

A Private Showing; or, Out and About

Today we all went to see Mr. Bean's Holiday. Choosing to attend the early matinee, we had the entire movie theater to ourselves, something we enjoyed immensely.
The movie is perfectly beautiful, and beautifully happy. The ending was perfectly wonderful, and in what is becoming more and more my usual fashion, I got a little teary-eyed with happiness.

What a wonderful thing to laugh out loud, dear reader.
You know what I mean?