Today was the anniversary of the death of my mother, Helen Ida (Smith) Chern. So, I have been a motherless child for 17 years. That is every bit as long as I was a child living (for the most part) with a mother. It is starting to sink in.
She really was a wonderful, magical person when she wasn’t under the shadow of her depression, illnesses, chronic fatigue, suicidal episodes, and a certain stubborn dramatic holding on to that state of mind once it had set in. I think that some of that was a desperate mechanism to get the rest of us to back off and leave her alone for a moment. Intellect really can be as much of a curse as a blessing. I guess we were a couple of the last of our kind, since I failed to pass along any genes. (as far as I know. as of yet. as they say.)
Then of course there was the decades long darkening shadows bringing on the decline of that intellect, ending finally in full-blown dementia. Though, once she had finally let go of all effort, she seemed as happy as I had ever seen her.
One of the last times I saw her in the hospital, I asked her if she knew who I was. Apparently you’re not supposed to ask that, but it didn’t seem to phase her. Maybe she did, maybe she didn’t. She might have been dodging the specifics. But, she replied, “Yes. You’re the love of my life.”
Now I can look back to my early childhood and see the vivacious, beautiful young version of her, prancing about the house singing during the chores when she wasn’t hating and being oppressed by them. “Today is Monday! Today is Monday…”
This is just a little promo video for this amazing concert video I watched last night. Well, this morning actually. I suppose I should have taken a break in the middle and gone to bed around sunrise but I got caught up. This is Pete at what I think of as a peak for him. He was just beginning to become one of the biggest influences on my life, although almost entirely excluded from American media. He had only recently had his Federal prison sentence for contempt of Congress commuted. I was starting to hear his concerts through Folkways records I found in the basement of the Grandview Library, along with copies of the hard to find Sing Out! magazine in which he had a regular column called Johnny Appleseed, Jr. A new contract with Columbia Records, his first major label since the Weavers got blacklisted in the early ’50s while they were top of the hit parade, resulted in a great Carnegie Hall concert recording from this same year, but I never imagined there would be a way to actually see him performing. At the time he was blacklisted from the TV show named after a phrase he and Woody had made popular. I wonder how it would have affected me at 13 to see him as a human rather than just a disembodied voice and some dramatic still photos. Standing alone in the middle of 3,000 people who sing along reluctantly, and for some apparently cynically, at first; but by the end transformed into an emotional choir. He closed his show, before encores, with a song by “a young friend” of his, Bob Dylan. (Pete was a member of The Old Guard of folk music, 44 years old here.) “A Hard Rain…” Bob’s own record of it had barely been released when Pete did it at Carnegie Hall, and I don’t think it was being heard that much yet. If people knew of Bob at all, it was as a guy who wrote some Peter, Paul and Mary hits, but sounded too funny to actually listen to. It was interesting to see that Pete was still using crib notes on it here. He wasn’t reading it, no music stand nonsense, but you can see him glancing down at his feet between lines to check what came next.
One thing that weirdly stuck out to me, having had my ears ruined by the age of electronic tuners, was that he was never quite in tune through the whole concert. He would take a few seconds to tune, usually not the string that I was noticing was bad, but he didn’t obsess about it. Went from Drop D to standard on the 12-string, kept moving the capo up and down sometimes in the middle of a song when he decided it was not in the best key for everyone to sing, and therefore having to change the 5th string on the banjo. It seemed so obvious to me during the brief attempt at tuning that he hadn’t got it. But, he just charged right on, and once he got going it really didn’t matter a bit.
That studio clip where he is chopping the log was during a long segment on some TV show devoted to a salute to Leadbelly. After he finishes chopping through the work song, he looks up at the camera and says “Well that’s a ridiculous thing to do on TV, isn’t it? It doesn’t belong on a screen! Well, face it, folk music doesn’t belong on a stage, either.” Then he goes on and chops along to a film of Leadbelly doing “Take This Hammer.”
It’s just such a fascinating contradiction how he continually had massive success in industries he considered essentially wrong, and made a virtue of it.
I built a tiny hut in my mind
To live in briefly
in the backyard of my brain
where neurons flash rich complicated colors
just before they fail and fall.
But, intruder thoughts in
Giant gas-guzzling vehicles
Their flabby arms covered with
Tattoos of large muscles
Came by and broke it all to pieces.
Squished the exotic fruits
Set fire to the drying leaves
So flashed and flew in panic
Before a grey ungraceful fall
Now I meditate in the embers and ashes
It's warmer, anyway
In a way.
I searched and searched for tips on turning my longtime ballpoint habit (mostly fueled by sitting at a desk at work and school, and ease of carrying on a bus) legit with an archival ink. Turns out there are some common brands that use inks that conform to certain industry standards, and there are lots of mailing list and blog posts about these issues. But, actually finding the right implements cheap in my locality took a lot of hours (as always.) But, for now I’ve got my answers, even if it did require ordering stuff from China and Japan and Germany, and the most expensive pen has already had the pocket clip break so thanks, Tombow. But, the Tombow refills are more for writing, as they are a smooth flowing liquid ink.
If you want to get that pencil like feel and value range you need an old school funky ballpoint, none of this gel and liquid and glide what-not. Well, Schneider’s got it, and the Schneider Pulse (not the Pulse Pro, which has some kinda smooth glide ink) ended up being the compromise weapon of choice. I got one at a reasonable price, and then a handful more shipped from way out for a very reasonable price. And some extra refills. Now, actually getting my broken hand and mind to usethem up is a whole other issue. Most of these drawings were done after being up all night and then finally having a craving to do what I should have been doing all along after the sun starts coming up and I’ve turned the lights out.
I keep remembering, hours after I should have gone to bed, that reviving my lapsed focus on drawing, starting in reverse order of problems with getting the broken hand back in action, was supposed to be some sort of priority. I mean like, when the sun is coming up.
But, why should it be a priority, anyway? The world is overrun with people wandering around with sketchbooks now, and blogging about their practice and their techniques. Back when I was really in it no one else could be seen doing it in these parts (unless you were in the vicinity of the art school), and no one cared that I was.(Isn’t she cute, though? Less than an inch square in real life.)
I have been using the old Pentalic Mark X, which when new seemed like a sad replacement for my favorite reasonably priced sketching fountain, the Pelikan 120. Although I have purchased a couple more 120’s off of ebay, at not so reasonable prices these days, I still do not have one working the way it used to. The Mark X just keeps flowing along, with no maintenance in the 35-40 years since it was new.
