Painting in-progress, based upon a poem by Tomas Transtromer.
Tryangles
Two paintings, both 3/4 completed, made up mostly of triangles, drying during the pandemic.
An Idea for a Sculpture
Pistachios and ink.
What do you think?
Schwittering Trump
Democratic strategy to get rid of Trump no later than 2020: forget impeachment. Have Pelosi and Schumer co-create a collage, in the manner of Kurt Schwitters, that includes the Articles of Impeachment, a select list of Trump lies, the latest Pew Charitable Trust polling results that show Trump 42% approval rating, the divorce decrees from Trump previous marriages, along with a picture of Stormy Daniels and a tabloid headline of the steamy affair, and the official US Gov. portrait of Trump cabinet member Elaine Chao. Then coerce Barack Obama, with a $1 million honoraria, which Obama will donate to charity, to present the thing to Senate Majority leader, Mitch McConnell, at the American Academy of Arts ‘Lifetime achievement’ gala.
AND THEN launch a Twitter barrage, supported by Evangelical Liberals for Socialism and Abortion, AND THEN, a national tv-:30 ad blitz using the video of Trump entering the swank NYC steakhouse a day or two after his 2016 victory over H Clinton, saying to fellow patrons, “don’t worry, I’m going to cut your taxes” with the kind of friendly wink favored by complete and utter political novices. End with BOLD OVERSCREEN—Make America Great Again—soundtrack by Thelonius Monk’s ‘Blue Monk.
Newspaper clip to be deployed in Trump collage to be composed by Democratic Party leaders in the style of Kurt Schwitters and presented to The Honorable Mitch McConnell.
Nuclear pie?
The questions begin after Thanksgiving dinner: what is this thing that is pictured below and has been brought by an invitee to the Thanksgiving dinner, and just what constitutes a pie?
It’s purported to be a pie by the maker, though no one is sure to have heard him say “it’s a pie” when he brought it up the steps through the front door and into the kitchen, insisting it be put into the refrigerator to be able to ‘cool’.
We all gather around the table to eat our Thanksgiving feast—turkey with dressing, three kinds of salads, homemade cranberry sauce, green beans, homemade rolls, a Chateaubriand with Bernaise, and more. Then we take a break before we eat dessert.
The man who’s made the pie that’s pictured has disappeared: he’s dutybound to take someone who has to be somewhere else home.
When he disappears the desserts are presented, including homemade lemon tarts, a pear pie, a pecan pie, a chocolate torte, vanilla ice cream. Every one of them is delicious.
Nobody touches the pie the man who left early brought to the party. The pie just sits there; one person who looks at it says it looks like Tikka masala, another sees a toilet bowl, and a third person says it looks to her like a cooling tank at a nuclear power plant where nuclear waste is stored.
An important announcement from The Committee of Anonymous Patriots
The Committee of Anonymous Patriots is pleased to announce that the Garage de Eau Award has been bestowed upon Brooks Roddan, the multimedia poet cum artist biographer abstract realist painter—perhaps the finest of his generation.
Typewriter
Backyard Composition
Vissicitude
Where was I that evening?
Here I am
Illusion of Modernity
Not this painting
Untitled and Anonymous
Anecdotes Baltimore and DC
As a young man something I’d read of Hemingway and never understood until the day I spent yesterday looking at paintings in The Cone Collection at The Baltimore Museum of Art, something autobiographical, stayed with me all these years: as a young man living in Paris, very poor of course as his own story goes, Hemingway visited The Louvre daily to look at the paintings there, especially Matisse as I remember it, and made a point of saying so in the memoir he wrote as a much older man about his time in Paris.
All these years I’ve misunderstood what I’d read in Hemingway, thinking then he was meaning to say that he was getting something to feed himself as a young writer from looking at the paintings. It wasn’t until I looked at the Matisse’s in Baltimore that I saw how wrong I was: Hemingway was simply hungry, starved for what was in the pictures, for if you stand long enough in front of them they fill you up.
At The National Gallery in Washington D.C, for where else could the national gallery be, I discover Cubism again. It happens in the West Wing in the presence of my wife Lea Ann and the museum guard Marylyssa Smith.
There’s a beautiful Picasso and an even more beautiful Braque there. I go up close to one of the Braque’s, “Harbor”, as close as I can without touching it, and see what I’ve never seen about Cubism before: that it breaks down the beauty of a thing into its component parts, and then invites the viewer to reassemble the broken thing into a new thing of his or her own making.
Looking at the painting I remember reading somewhere that Braque would never answer the telephone without first putting on his gloves. I’ve always loved that story, whether it’s true or isn’t true.
Detail, “Harbor” Georges Braque, 1909, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art (East Wing) Washington D.C.
(below) Marylyssa Smith, museum guard, and Lea Ann Roddan, in front of a Picasso at the National Gallery, June 22, 2019. Marylyssa says she likes Cubism but prefers the Vermeer's and Rembrandt’s in the West Wing.
Laundromat, Franklin, North Carolina
She says, “my father never told the same story twice...heck, he never told the same story once.”
He says, “I remember my grandmother using words like ‘Lordy’ and ‘the dickens’.”
They’re sitting and waiting in the laundromat on their clothes, first for them to be washed and then for them to be dried.
During the wash cycle there are a couple of kind, gentle people to talk to—an older lady dressed in a white t-shirt and bright red Adidas sweatpants and her grandson who’s going to Europe for three weeks later in the summer—but they began their waiting a good hour earlier and get up and leave the laundromat the moment their laundry’s dry and their clothes folded and put away in the bag they use for such things.
Meanwhile, the owner of the laundromat, at least I presume it’s the owner, has placed a stack of books on one of the ‘folding’ tables for people like us—people waiting on their laundry in a laundromat—to read while they’re waiting for their laundry. Unfortunately, they’re the kind of books written by writers who write books to be read by people who belong to bookclubs: therefore, neither of them are interested in any of the books. And so she sits and he sits and they watch their clothes tumble around, first in the soapy water of the washer and then in the hot air of the dryer.
As he watches their laundry go round and round in the dryer, he thinks, ‘fortunes used to be made in cotton and tobacco but now fortunes are made in laundromats, quarter by quarter.’ He doesn’t know what she thinks but he thinks she would agree with what he’s thinking.
Man reading whilst waiting for his clothes to dry, Franklin, NC. June 12, 2019. Photo by author.
Booksmart: movie review as liberal media interpretation
At the movie in Asheville, people laughed at all the wrong things. Rather they laughed when I least expected them to or laughed at things I didn’t find funny, and didn’t laugh at all at the things I laughed at.
After the movie—a sweet, somewhat comic cinematic tale of teenagers and their cultural/sexual identities that caused me to wonder afterward ‘what did I just see?’ though not in the same way seeing a Bergman film, for instance, always causes me to think ‘what did I just see?’—I wondered: is ‘Booksmart’ one word or two?
Walking to the RV after the movie, a sudden downpour shifted everything in my thinking. Maybe the movie had more information for me than I thought it had, and that by seeing it again I’d understand why the people had laughed at things I hadn’t found funny and why I had laughed at things they hadn’t.
The Sunday New York Times—the first we’ve been able to procure on our cross-country trip which began in late April—purchased at a Starbucks Coffee shop in Asheville, NC, June 9, 2019. The Times was kind enough to pose for a photo on the dashboard of our RV. Photo by author.
At the symposium of empty lawn chairs
The convocation is interrupted: Pretty Boy Floyd has robbed yet another bank and the state troopers have posted a dragnet, closing all roads from Macon to Milledgeville. The police sirens are deafening.
We at the convocation, which is called a “symposium” in the marketing materials, stop talking. Any word that might be said from this point forward becomes an act of listening rather than of speaking. We’d been sitting outside in a nice semi-circle behind the big white house talking literature amongst ourselves and then, rather suddenly we all got perfectly quiet.
Just before we vote to temporarily disperse, the quietest one among us says, “now our gathering has become a symposium of empty lawn chairs.”
Dispersing, some of us get up and go inside the big house and some of us go for a walk in the woods.
The path is narrow, the trees tall, the insects whirr. A snapping turtle breaks wind in the pond. Then it’s as silent as it is hot and as hot as it is silent. We keep walking. Some of us slap mosquitoes with our right hand, some with our left. The atmosphere feels almost as swampy as truth, serenaded by a backup-band of police sirens in the unseeable distance.
“Gee whiz” one of us says, breaking the hot silence, “this is just like walking through one of those amazing stories by Flannery O’Connor.”
‘Andalusia’, Milledgeville, GA, the family farm on which the writer Flannery O’Connor lived with her mother Regina for the last 13 years of her short life. O’Connor, a practicing Catholic, once wrote, “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you odd.” Photo by author, 2019.
William Eggleston’s drama
After two days in Memphis I finally ‘understand’ William Eggleston and why his photographs are so acclaimed and considered so wonderful, though first I must pass through four museums and two nights of sleeplessness to come to this understanding.
Graceland, where Elvis is buried beside his parents Vernon and Gladys Presley in the Mediation Garden beside the swimming pool, is Museum #1. The Sun Records Studio where Elvis cut his first hit record, “That’s All Right Mama”, is Museum #2. Museum #3 is the marvelous Stax Museum near the intersection of College and McLemore where Elvis isn’t even a ghost but the real live ghosts of Otis Redding and Aretha Franklin, Rufus Thomas and Albert King and so many other worthwhile musicians are delivered straight into my ears. Museum #4? The National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Hotel. This is where I’m panhandled at the entrance and exit, before and after the exhilarating four-hour history lesson on innate American white supremacy, both fact-finding mission and guilt-trip, culminating with racist white man James Earl Ray shooting civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. from a boardinghouse as King stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Hotel in 1968.
From Memphis I drive to Trace State Park, near Tupelo, Mississippi and camp for the night. Exhausted, I sleep like a photograph of a dream I’m having of a mosquito who turns into a poet and then a short-story writer and finally into a novelist. It’s the best night’s sleep I’ve had since I left Jackson.
Eggleston? His photographs investigate the tension between the ‘official’ story and the ‘real’ story. Some are uncanny this way, either allowing me to see that all the better days to come are available right here in the present, or forcing me to imagine I am either the artist Jacque-David Louis painting Marat/Sade or Marat/Sade himself.
Homage to Eggleston, Memphis, TN, a block from The Lorraine Hotel, just outside the front door of the Arcade Restaurant.
Announcing the world’s first ‘Driverless’ RV
Somewhere between Norman, Oklahoma and Port Arthur, Texas I was gifted with the idea of a ‘driverless RV’, at least I’m taking credit for the idea: I actually worked with a team.
We’d meet at a German restaurant not far off the interstate and sit in the beer garden there and drink beer brewed from kernza, the ‘new’ wheat I engineered several years ago that’s a perennial, not an annual, and for which I won both the Nobel Prize and the Congressional Medal of Honor, accepting that award, by the way with no other than Tiger Woods and from no other than President Donald J. Trump in a ceremony at the Rose Garden at The White House.
The testing of the vehicle is nearly complete. I’m pleased to report, no I’m excited to report, as they say in the language of corporate literature, that I was a passenger yesterday in the prototype model of ‘driverless RV’ for 1.2 miles along an empty stretch of road on Pleasure Island near Port Arthur, while reclining on one of the two beds in the rear of the vehicle and drinking a 16 oz. Lone Star beer.
I’ve entered into negotiations with Google and Elon Musk to partner on the project. The rollout is expected this fall. Patents are pending also for a ‘makerless frozen yoghurt machine’, a ‘one person roll-up potable toilet’ that can be conveniently carried in a small backpack or purse, and a bug repellent made of peanut butter.
Prototype of the world’s first ‘driverless RV’, parked amongst eighteen wheelers in a rest stop alongside Interstate 10 east of Houston, Texas.