Natural Selection

The Judgement of Paris, Anton Raphael Mengs

“Please make sure to mute your phones, or turn them off altogether. They can be incredibly distracting to the presenters.”

We shouldn’t have needed to be reminded of this. We were all adults. All professionals. I looked around the conference room as the others fumbled their devices into the mute mode. Most of us positioned our phones close by, angled in such a way that we could steal little glances at them, to monitor the flow of "messaging” that demands our near-constant attention - none of it remotely related to the reason we were gathered together in this all-purpose meeting room.

So here we were finally, landscape architects, park planners, local government representatives, arts organizers and administrators, a handful of designated citizen-advisors, and me, the one artist on the panel. We were assembled for the purpose of reviewing final proposals for a public art installation in one of Denver’s neighborhood parks. This was the culmination of a five month selection process. By the end our meeting we would recommend one of three artist-finalists for a project that boasted a budget well into the six figures. It was heady business, at least for me, and I was thrilled to be on this selection committee. When I was asked to join this panel, I was given a packet detailing the qualifying guidelines for the various positions. Among other things, the description for “Artist” said the panelist should have strong peer-recognition. I know it’s a cheap thrill to let yourself feel like a so-and-so over something like this, but given that the practice of being an artist involves long hermetic stretches of self-doubt and no feedback whatsoever, to suddenly have a piece of paper in front of you that confirms your status among peers, well, it felt good. It just did.

A few minutes into one of the presentations my iPhone screen blinked on and I squinted down at it without moving my head, so as not to distract the speaker. I read the first line of an incoming email that began, “Dear applicant, we regret to inform you that your artwork was not chosen…” The message was from an art publication I’ve been submitting to every year for the past seven years. I’ve never gotten in. Each year the juror changes, as does the work I submit, yet after seven tries I still can’t seem to match my work to the juror. I have no idea how close I’ve come, whether I’ve been eliminated in the first round by a grad school intern, or whether some fancy curator agonized over my exclusion in the final moments. The process of jurying is necessarily opaque.

I reached out and powered off my screen. Prickly heat ran up the back of my neck as I felt a quick flush of humiliation. A dark pit opened up and beckoned me inside, but I’ve had plenty of practice avoiding that pit, so I took three deep breaths and returned my attention to the meeting. Total elapsed time of my crushing “fail” was about 45 seconds. I doubt anyone noticed my mini-crisis. Other rejections have hurt more. This one I’m getting used to.

The presenter in front of the room was struggling with momentum. His proposal was likable, but wasn’t blowing anyone away, and you could feel it. This was his big moment and he wasn’t selling us. I felt a pang of guilt for harboring a vote that would not go in his favor. He was probably the nicest of the presenters we saw that day, and I pictured myself having a beer with him. His work was solid, but it didn’t generate the right kind of excitement among the twelve people in the room. And so it was that nearly half a year after the process began, a process which saw nearly 200 qualified applicants narrowed down to this final three, this artist would be eliminated in the last few minutes of our final meeting.

Rejection isn’t a thing. Or it doesn’t need to be. This is what I told myself the other day as I juried an open-call show at a local gallery. The idea I was trying out was that I would select the work that I found strongly compelling, rather than singling out things to reject. That was my intention anyway. And while the net effect would be the same either way, I wanted to curate from a perspective of positivity. Probably I did this because I knew feelings were going to be hurt, and I wanted an out. These are the sorts of ethical gymnastics you practice when you are the one doing the exclusion. This is why rejection letters, like the one I deleted the other day without reading, always take a passive stance. Most say something like “regretfully, your art wasn’t included” rather than “regretfully, your art was excluded.” This is all they can do to soften the news.

For my part, I wanted to be as blind to bias as possible in my selection process. I went out of my way not to see the names of the applicants. But there is nothing you can do when the work is well known to you, except to try to adhere strictly to an aesthetic or thematic framework. Curating a themed exhibit isn’t simply about picking what you like, it’s about building a cohesive story of some sort. That was the challenge I was excited about, anyway. Naively, I figured I could pull it off and somehow avoid any ugly emotional fallout from my choices. This error was unpleasantly clear to me as I held a small artwork in my hands and regarded it closely, knowing it was done by a friend, and that it wasn’t right for this show.

Expulsion from Eden, Michelangelo

According to evolutionary psychologists, the intense feelings that accompany rejection are useful for our survival. In the days of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, the thinking goes, rejection was akin to a death sentence, since to be ostracized from the tribe meant we would have to fend for ourselves in the wild. Interestingly, it is also known that the pain of rejection activates the same neurological areas in the brain that are associated with physical pain, therefore: “Evolutionary psychologists assume the brain developed an early warning system to alert us when we were at risk for ostracism. Because it was so important to get our attention—those who experienced rejection as more painful (i.e., because rejection mimicked physical pain in their brain) gained an evolutionary advantage—they were more likely to correct their behavior and consequently, more likely to remain in the tribe." citation

Some of my creative friends and colleagues flat out refuse to jury local art shows. For them, there is too much potential for wounded friendships and ill-will as a result. I know one Denver gallery owner who still gets creepy emails from a guy whose work he rejected more than five years ago. And as for the applicants, juried shows threaten the possibility of soul-crushing self doubt. Even the toughest of us have survived the initial shock of non-inclusion, only to be thrown into a tailspin later when we see the artwork that was selected. Most of my artist friends who are well established in their careers pooh-pooh the very thought of entering work into a juried show. Why subject yourself to the whims of someone you don’t fully respect, who has nowhere near your level of experience, or whose gallery isn’t critically regarded? And yet these same artists routinely risk exclusion by applying for fellowships, residencies, or public art commissions. It seems that no matter what level of success we achieve, we continually subject ourselves to the possibility that someone whose favor we seek will simply give us a big thumbs down.

So if rejection is so bad for us, in terms of the survival of our species, then why do we engage it so regularly? From that person you'd like to mate with who rebuffs your best attempt at charm to the roomful of muckety-mucks at your job who give a collective “meh” to your best thinking, each of us exposes ourselves to negation fairly frequently. There’s no avoiding it if you want to achieve a level of self-respect, not to mention success. No risk, no reward, as the saying goes.

As for juried shows, I’ll continue to accept invitations to curate. I’m trying to get better at it, and I’m convinced that the local art scene can benefit from more thoughtful, rigorous and challenging exhibitions that are self-produced. Juried shows are also a good venue to showcase emerging talent and can help those artists establish an exhibition record. I can’t think of a better way to get traction in an art community that relies so heavily on DIY methods for career growth.

And the art publication I keep failing to impress? I’m already working on a new body of work I intend to finish in time for next year’s entry deadline. Eighth time’s the charm. Don’t they say that somewhere? China, maybe? In any case, should I find my work vetoed yet again, I already have a plan. Take three deep breaths. Slowly, and as deep as I can make them.

Who am I? Where am I? And where did these pancakes come from?

I am not normally one to jump on social media to talk about a recent medical procedure - unless it involves a funny drug story.

The background is simple. I’ve been having difficulty swallowing lately. That’s the long and short of it. For weeks it was more of an ongoing annoyance than a cause for freaking out. I figured I could finally lose that ten extra pounds I put on over the holidays while waiting to see if my condition changed at all. My next step, when the pain got worse, was to jump on Google and begin some ad-hoc self-diagnosis. It didn’t make sense to visit my doctor unprepared to steer him toward my own conclusions.

The list of maladies associated with difficulty swallowing is long and contains no pleasant surprises. Down at the ugly end of the scale are tumors caused by HPV. Yup fellas, we can get that too. I have a friend who’s dad - a high-rolling, heterosexual business man - is undergoing elaborate and painful treatments for throat cancer right now due to years of unprotected oral sex with strangers. Or so goes the family lore. The fact that his adult children can acknowledge his lusty prowess (hundreds of women!) while heeding the tale’s cautionary conclusion seems straight out of a Greek tragedy. Though my own much less-worldly history would suggest looking elsewhere for causes, don’t think I haven’t found a way to worry about HPV. The human mind is capable of assembling rickety narratives for the purpose of preparing ourselves for all manner of doom.

In my case the culprit is actually likely to be much more mundane. So mundane that most of us grew up watching our favorite TV shows get interrupted with commercials about it. Acid indigestion. I’ll spare you the mechanics, but simply considering the words “acid and “in-digestion” together suggests it’s not something that should be happening in your throat. Unchecked, the acid can scar the esophagus and damage the muscles responsible for swallowing, and all of this can happen without a person knowing about it. That was the scary bit for me. I always figured the warning signs would be pretty obvious, but it turns out not everyone experiences heartburn. And thus I found myself with an IV in my arm signing papers this morning to allow a camera down my throat so a specialist could “have a look around.” Oh, and there was the part about biopsies they might take, and a balloon they might inflate to help dilate my esophagus “a little.”

So where’s the funny drug story, Howell?

The short-circuiting of thoughts and language is what gives the stupefied mind it’s comedic potential. I imagine anesthesiologists must crack up all the time at the funny things their patients say. At least I hope they do. It’s sad to think all that unhinged nonsense would be wasted on humorless technicians. In my case, I never run out of things I suddenly need to say, even when my conscious mind is tumbling far away from my body into narcotic depths. This is why I asked the doctor if he didn’t wan’t to know my birthday, just as I slipped under his spell. “You've already told me your birthday, mister Howell. We’ll see you in a little bit.” Since I arrived at the hospital I had been asked multiple times what my name and date of birth were. It was the password that opened all the doors. It was the password for the drugs that took me under. I wondered if I’d need it to wake up. That was the last thought I remember having until I realized at some point during my endoscopy that someone was building a Lego castle in my throat. “It’s too big,” I struggled to say. “The castle in my throat is too big. Take some of the pieces out.” This is what I was trying to tell them. It seems that my mind was a good ways away from the lego castle and the discomfort it was causing, but still I needed to let them know there was a problem. What I heard back from above the surface was, “Just relax, mister Howell. We’ll need you to swallow. Just try and swallow.” I made my throat have a little feeling - something like what they seemed to be asking for, but I wasn’t sure what “swallow” was supposed to feel like from such a great distance. Just then a chorus of voices sang “Very good, mister Howell. Very good.” and suddenly the Lego castle was gone, and I fell backward slowly into nothingness.

The best damn glass of ice water of all time was being held out to me by a nurse. I blessed her like I thought I was a priest. I had to stop talking to take a drink. It seems I was partway through telling her a story as I began to regain consciousness. Apparently what I had thought was a Lego castle tuned out to be a Lionel train set. I was telling this to the nurse as if it were a critical plot twist in my adventure. “Can you believe it? A train set was in my throat,” I said. Meanwhile, Kae was helping me to get dressed. Her well-practiced patience masked a resolve to get us both the hell out of there. “Let’s just concentrate on getting your pants on” she said. And that’s when I felt blessed by a moment of earthly perfection - a moment so subtle it could easily have been missed. The person who’s been helping me out of my pants for all those years was there to help me put them on when I finally needed it. What more could anyone ever want, I wondered. I don’t know whether I said any of that out loud, but I do remember saying “Let’s go to Old Country Buffet.”

I imagine most of us have a place of regressive, almost infantile comfort, where we dare not often go. Mine is Old Country Buffet. If the wheels ever do come off my little wagon, you will find me in an Old Country Buffet. With two desserts. “How about Udi’s instead,” Kae suggested. “They have pancakes. We can get them to-go.”  Being of sound mind, she wasn’t about to sit across from an opiated brunch companion who thinks he had people playing with toys in his throat. And the truth was, round two (or was it three by now?) of the drug’s after-effects were pulling me back down into incoherence. 

A short while later I was at my own kitchen table staring down into a to-go carton of blueberry pancakes. I couldn’t possibly eat them. Not that I was in any pain from my procedure. It was more a matter of my wobbly and tenuous version of reality giving out on me again. Still I thought, I’ll sit here in front of my pancakes, pretending to eat until Kae goes off to work. Hadn’t I insisted she buy this breakfast?  Just then I found myself being led upstairs by the hand, and into the guest bedroom which was darker and cozier than my own bed, or so I thought. Kae was still in the kitchen. I never did get a clear look at the person who led me up the stairs, but her name was Versed Fentanyl and she had the whole afternoon planned out for me in the nether regions of narcosis.

I opened my eyes to see both dogs sitting nearby in the rays of late afternoon sun. Both were staring at me, panting. The cat, also wide awake, sat beside me on the bed and regarded me with somewhat less concern. I had returned finally - with my own Greek chorus of pets wooing me back into their realm. And so it was I found the floor perfectly solid under my feet, and the handrail on the stairs altogether unyielding. From here it seemed my world would be less magical but a lot more trustworthy, and I was happy for that. I remembered a book I read a while ago about a Carmelite nun who experienced intense mystical visions that were accompanied by debilitating headaches which turn out to be caused by epilepsy. The book is called Lying Awake, by Mark Salzman. He gives his character the choice between medical intervention that will save her life, or continued religious ecstasy which will plunge her into mental illness. The novel is not a simple tale of science-versus-religion, rather it finds its meaning exploring the existential nuances of a life of faith and questions what it is that makes experience authentic.  Like the author, I suspect many of these big conundrums are false dichotomies. What is essential is that we seek to make meaning and relevance of our experiences. This is what I was thinking when I remembered my pancakes. A wave of anxiety washed over me as I considered they may not have been real, but only a concoction of a junked-up brain. I needed them to be real, not only for reasons having to do with mental continuity, but because I was extraordinarily hungry. I hadn’t eaten in almost a full day. So I made my way to the kitchen and paused to steel myself just before opening the refrigerator. But there they were, as truthful and reassuring as leftover pancakes can be - which, it turns out, is quite reassuring. I devoured them like a pothead takes to a bag of chips, but not so quickly that I couldn’t taste that they were genuinely delicious, as leftovers go. What’s more, for the first time in weeks my throat didn’t hurt. Not even a little. It could have been the drugs, or the throat dilation, I didn’t care. For the time being, that alone was worth celebrating.

Gently down the stream

Me, Late Pearl Jam Era

I don’t remember whose idea it was, but one fall day in ’96 my buddy John Dzielski and I set out to canoe a forlorn stretch of creek that ran under the highway near the office park where we worked in suburban Chicago. We were into exploring urban wildlands - those forgotten places you see at the edges of the built-world where nature flourishes in the cracks of the municipal infrastructure. It took some research to learn this creek had a name, the East Branch of the DuPage River.

The morning was crisp and bright as we slipped our borrowed canoe into the stream, with no real foreshadowing of the absurdities about to unfold. The East Branch is more of a creek than a river, and in several heavily-engineered sections it’s more of a glorified drainage ditch. It runs south through back yards, under toll roads, behind strip malls, and at one point it snakes - in a very planned way -  through the Western Acres Golf Club. If you ever canoe through a golf course, let me strongly suggest you bring a helmet. Putting greens are often located near water features, referred to as “hazards,” to make the game more challenging. I’ve done a lot of canoeing over the years - many hundreds of miles in all kinds of conditions, and I can assure you that paddling through a bunch of novice golfers is right up there with being stuck on open water during an electrical storm - much to be avoided. I can still see the stunned looks of the golfers as we rounded a bend alongside their fairway. “Mornin, fellas!” we hollered as we drifted past. They said nothing back, just stared, slack-jawed. The trick to pulling off absurdist behavior is to do it with utter confidence, like Bugs Bunny or civil war re-enactors. It was our challenge to make the colored-pants men feel like they were the ones who didn't belong. John and I choked back our giggles for several long minutes until we were out of earshot.

East Branch of the DuPage River

In several places the creek was choked with fallen trees and floating wads of plastic debris. Aquafina and Pennzoil bottles, Starbucks cups, sticks and leaves and pieces of fence, a baseball cap, KFC buckets, six-pack rings and tampon applicators. On and on it went, in places so dense we had to take the canoe out of the water and portage around the clogs. It was clear that beavers had something to do with some of these stretches, though it was hard to tell whether the junk was simply snagged in their dams or whether the beavers had actually incorporated trash into the structures. Nature’s little engineers being above all, practical. But the most surreal surprise of the day was just beyond the golf course, where the river fanned out into a marsh. The tea colored water was only a few inches deep at this point, and I kept seeing these round whitish things on the bottom that I figured were some sort of eggs, except many had algae on them. Finally I reached down and scooped one up. It was a golf ball. So this is where they came to rest. In the slow waters of the marsh they settled out among the cattails by the hundreds, maybe thousands, to degrade in whatever way that golfballs do in six inches of tannic midwestern bog water.

John Dzielski

Further downstream the river became wide and shallow and we began to scrape bottom. The old canoe had been lent to us by a friend who warned us that it’s days were few. The fiberglass was worn and cracked along the keel and with each scrape and bump we began to take on more water. Finally we pulled ashore to assess our options. When we flipped the boat over we were dismayed at the ragged state of our hull. John and I hiked up the steep bank to take a look around. We were thrilled to see a Target less than half a mile away. I was hoping to find some sort of fiberglass patch, maybe in their camping or automotive departments, but that proved a fool’s errand. Instead we made due with duct tape. Lots of it. We made our way back to the boat which was left hull-side up to dry in the sun, but the frayed fiberglass was still water-logged. The tape wouldn’t stick to the damaged areas, so we extended it way up onto the sides of the boat for increased gripping power. It worked. For a while we were thrilled with our ingenuity and continued on. But eventually, as all half-ass duct tape solutions go, our patches failed and we were forced ashore again. By this time it was getting dark and we were cold and wet and the hilarity of our misadventure had dimmed considerably. We had a pretty good idea where we were since most of the bridges were labelled with street names on their undersides, for some odd reason. I figured we were a mile or so from where we’d left the second car, but walking along suburban highways at night would have been idiotic, so instead we crunched our way across a dry cornfield toward the lights of a middle school that I figured backed up to the forest preserve we had parked on the far side of. Bingo!

Back at the car, I rummaged my backpack in the waning light for my keys. A plastic shopping bag caught high in a nearby tree flapped in a stiff breeze and made a disconcerting buzzing sound. Nature had made a wind instrument of trash and was blowing a hellish protest tune. For a second I wished I could photograph the bag, but then I thought of all those tiresome trash-in-nature photos you see in Beginning Photography classes, and thought better of it. It seems no matter how startling the juxtaposition of garbage in nature, there is rarely a photo created that can disarm the cynicism by which we regard such images as hackneyed, preachy or naive. So commonplace is the degradation of the natural world we live closest to, that if we were to see its wounds, abuses and insults as they truly are we'd find that world unlivable. The creative challenge, which I did not feel up for, would have been to find something ineffable, haunted, or elegiac in the buzzing plastic bag, and thereby restore its irony. But instead I just drove home. There would be other days to make art about such things.

Wet and bone-tired, I pulled the car to a stop in front of my house and turned the engine off. Rivulets of water from the battered canoe on the roof ran down the windshield. After collecting my thoughts in preparation for my return to the normalcy I craved, I went inside to a dinner already in progress. In a little while I’d make the call to let my friend know about his boat’s last voyage, but for the moment I was deeply content to enjoy the sweet disorientation of being home with my loved ones on an otherwise ordinary evening. I was happy for the experience of seeing my world from a jarringly different angle, the details and texture of my strange day already settling into a tale.

In Clover

Photo by Mike Sheridan

No one could hit the ball into the outfield. The balls that did make it out there were all grounders. I was in third grade gym class learning to play for-real softball. During the warm up drills it was quickly determined that I couldn't catch, so I was banished to the outfield with the other sports flunkies. My loser status wasn't based solely on athletic shortcomings, it was already well-known that I spent more time in daydreams than in the real world, so in most activities that required alertness, I was a pure liability. In the outfield, I was instructed to throw any ball that came into my vicinity to the nearest base ahead of a runner - provided the runners hadn't already cleared the bases. During one inauspicious game, as I stood in right field waiting for the inning to end, a pair of bugs began fluttering around my head. I was busy waving them off when the ball hopped out past me. The jeers of my classmates dogged me as I chased the ball past the edge of our field and into the next ball diamond where another game was underway. Some kid from that game got to my ball first and hurled it over my head back to our infield. Above the shrill mayhem of my classmates my gym teacher roared at me for "Chasing butterflies like a girl." Later on the bench, I explained that I was trying to shoo the bugs away, and besides, they weren't even butterflies, they were two dragonflies stuck together. I was hoping this clarification would somehow clear me of shame, but it wasn't to be. The kids were having too much fun imitating me waving limp wrists at imaginary butterflies, like a girl – or worse.

I'm certain no one present that day, even the gym teacher, troubled themselves long afterward with the unpleasant memory of taunting an awkward kid. Most of them would have forgotten it later that day. But for me the memory lives on vividly in whatever brain cells are set aside for the task of self-loathing. I can recall it in detail whenever I want to, as if it had happened to me just now. And in this way, the trivial events of an ordinary life can become monuments of dread in the minds of those given to shame.

By that point in my school career I was already marked as easy pickings by the bullies. Each fall term offered the renewed hope that I could reset my classmate's expectations, but every new tormentor that came along was hardwired to sniff me out. And so it was that the following year one particular kid began taunting me for acting like I was "too smart." My glasses seemed to set him off, as if I was wearing them just to piss him off. One day he challenged me to meet him after school on the south lawn over by the buses. He promised to wipe my stupid glasses off my stupid face. So later that day when I made the long trek across the bare grass to my demise, it wasn't bravery or self-respect that caused me to do it, it was simple obedience. I knew If I didn't show up, that things could get way worse in days to come. Perhaps I thought he would be impressed and think me courageous, and that maybe we would talk it out. Whatever "it" was. So with utter dread I met my oppressor after school, and as promised, he beat me up. It only took one punch to the stomach, but my glasses actually did fly off and hit the sidewalk some feet away, while I fell to the ground unable to breathe. Some kids I didn't know stood close around laughing in their pre-pubescent falsettos as I gasped and heaved, crawling over to where my glasses lay blankly staring back at me. Suddenly I hated them too. When I regained my feet I was surprised and thankful that the bully didn't strike again. Instead he issued a stern warning to "never let me catch you looking at me again." That was it. I was never to look at him. That was something I could do. I ran off to catch my bus, where I was quizzed about why I was crying. I made clear it wasn't because I had been punched, but because my glasses were broken and I knew my dad would be furious. I couldn't own the humiliation of letting a bully punch me for no good reason. I had to make it about the glasses, which weren't broken, but I kept them hidden in my pocket. Later I taped them up and wore them to school that way for a week just to prove a point.

To my great fortune, a miraculous growth spurt occurred that summer which cleared me from the radar of most subsequent mean kids. Also I'd learned to catch balls well enough to get me through the prescribed number of gym classes in following seasons. Baseball stopped haunting me. In fact, by the time I was twelve I actually began to enjoy it. It wasn't a matter of suddenly "discovering" the game. It had always been there, spread out against the background of each summer. It was simply a matter of choosing to play. So that year I scraped enough kids together from our new subdivision to have two bush league teams that could play one another. Though our neighborhood was small, there were plenty of kids since none of the parents much believed in birth control in that part of the Bible Belt back in the 60's. One family even had exchange students, so with additional conscripts from England and Kenya, I was guaranteed to not be the worst player on the field. The trouble of not having a place to play was solved when one kid prevailed upon his farmer-grandfather to surrender an acre of cornfield next to our development for use as a ball field. The farmer plowed the corn stalks under, graded the parcel, and replanted it with clover -  a perfect playing surface for us, but also a useful crop that he was able to harvest for hay at the end of our season. It was a true win-win deal. Next, I made myself manager of both teams, as it was my job to schedule the games when no one had a TV show they needed to watch. So with nearly everyone's participation, including girls and way-too-young kids who ended up getting hurt a lot, we bumbled through a season of mostly-completed games, and succeeded in convincing the farmer it was worth his trouble to set aside that swatch of clover for our use the next season as well. When enough of us outgrew the game, such as it was, the farmer still had his crop.

It would have been beyond impossible back then to imagine that only a few years later I would be paid to eject bullies from a National League ball park, yet in the strangest convergence of skills and interests that my life has yet presented me, I was able to parlay a series of crappy security guard jobs into a position where I was managing crowd control for the Chicago Cubs. It made perfect sense. Only a few years out of college, I had been trying to make a go of it as an artist in Chicago, without a clear career path. I worked two double shifts as a security guard on the weekends, which left me all week to paint in my studio. In the summer this meant I had plenty of time for baseball, and since I was living literally in the shadow of Wrigley Field at the time, I fell hard for the Cubs. I'd spend mornings in the studio, and afternoons in the bleachers. Not everyday, but often enough that it distracted me hugely from my fuzzy goals as an artist.

As the 1986 season approached, I received a tip that the Cubs were going to be hiring seasonal "Protection Services" staff. I applied, took some tests, shook some hands, and before I knew it I was being fitted with the official blue and white security uniform of the Chicago Cubs. Thankfully, that was the year management switched the uniforms from the traditional rent-a-cop outfits to sporty warm-up suits, complete with baseball caps and starter jackets. It was the first and only work-wear I ever felt proud to be seen in.

On our first day at Wrigley Field, the new employees were taken out onto the diamond as part of our orientation. We strolled around the flawlessly engineered infield grass and were regaled with facts and figures about Wrigley's history. We were meant to be awestruck with the grandeur of the place. And thus we were. I had wanted to work in the park so I could see some ball, even if just occasionally, but any position within sight of the field was a plum assignment, not for the new guy. Instead I found myself stationed on the main concourse by the Cubs front office. My official title was "Crowd Control Specialist." It was my job to escort broadcast announcer Harry Carey, and any of the front office personnel across the public areas of the concourse to the employee elevator and up to the broadcast booth. Harry never said much to me. "Nice job, kid" was his standard line. It was about as boring a job as you could have in a major league ballpark. I didn't see any games that year. I could hear the crowd roar when something happened, but I wasn't stationed near enough to any of the TV monitors to get any sense of the action. That wasn't part of my job. My job was to help keep order on the concourse, and the concourse was, by design, pretty orderly.

Plenty of fans are troublesome in the ballpark, but few actually get ejected from the stadium. The ones who do are always over-served quarrelsome men who pick fights with their neighbors and yell obscenities at the umps.  Whatever it is about the game that triggers that kind of behavior, it's easy to imagine those guys suffer from some sort of undealt-with rage caused by things that happened to them outside the ballpark, and probably long ago. If a visit from Protection Services staff didn't help them see the error of their ways, then we quickly called in the real Chicago cops who made easy work of removing them from the stadium to a nearby police station. It was a regular part of our business to make this happen efficiently and with minimal fuss. Disorderly conduct was the usual charge. A special punishment for the worse offenders was banishment from Wrigley Field for life. Though it was all but unenforceable, we were regularly given photocopied mug shots of people to be denied entry to the park. The irony that I was being paid to help rid baseball of bullies was not lost on me. And though I couldn't say it was my calling, I was plenty proud to help make it happen.

The one bright spot in my time with the Cubs was Marla Collins, the ball girl. She was the first ball girl hired by any National League team, and it was my job to escort her through the public areas of the park when she went on or off the field. It took about ten minutes, twice a day, and it was pretty much the only thing I looked forward to. Marla and I barely knew each other. It was my job to protect her, not chat her up. The year I worked there she got in big trouble. She blew her whole career in fact. Marla was immensely popular and had dated a succession of ball players and entertainment types. Eventually it all went to her head and she said yes to the publishers of Playboy magazine when they asked if she could take her clothes off for their cameras. They promised her the pictures would be tasteful, but apparently they weren't tasteful enough for Cubs management. Word about the Playboy shoot was on the streets and people were suddenly incensed. Letters to the editors of both Chicago newspapers and local talk radio callers were demanding her removal. And still she came to work every day and tried to make it normal. The part of her job that she did with my help was in stark contrast to all the furor. At the end of each game she would autograph game-day balls (those used during play that day) for people in various states of physical and mental decline. Old people in wheel chairs, Make-A-Wish kids, anyone with special-needs could line up outside the front office and one by one she would greet them, smile and laugh and have her picture taken with them, and make each person feel the right kind of "special" for a change.  She would do this even as fans badgered her with insults and cat calls. After half a season of this distraction, management called her in. It seemed the front office was okay with dressing her in short shorts, and allowing Harry to blabber on-air about how she was "All grown up in all the right places," but when it came right down to it, Cubs management would rather enable their fans to mentally undress Marla every day than have her expose herself for real. So the Cubs balked, and fired her for violating the "family-oriented spirit" of their organization.

Marla Collins

Bullied by a bad decision, Marla was fired a week after the All-Star break. Her big story was over. She would go on to reinvent herself as a suburban mom, interior decorator, and more recently as an electrocardiogram specialist. Whether or not any of us endures a similar career crash-and-burn, most of us will bravely make ourselves over at least once in our lives, or at least quietly tweak our fate at key moments. Kids will grit their teeth through harassment to be rewarded with growth spurts.  Balls will bounce into and out of gloves. The Cubs will continue to hire and fire their way toward some workable combination of talent that they hope will lead them to a World Series win after more than a century of striving. Each of us indulges the the hope of renewal, the promise of a better version of ourselves "next year." It's natural and fitting to consider these things in spring, as the earth begins to warm and life in all its forms resumes competing and cooperating in varying degrees. And the future - whatever will be made of it - spreads itself out, like a field of clover sewn for one purpose, but perfectly useful for another.

Momento Vivere

Len and Tessa

It's a really strange thing to lose track of friends these days, especially given the over-exposure we indulge via social media. But it happens right under our noses all the time. Last night I was thinking about Len, a friend from North Carolina I hadn't heard from in a while, so I Googled him. I suppose it was only a matter of time before I'd learn unwelcome news by pointing search engines at old friends, but I wasn't prepared for the dozens of results detailing Len's brutal murder, and it's aftermath in the little town where we were neighbors. Did Google get the wrong Len Willson? Did I forget the double "L" in his last name?  A fresh search reaffirmed his death with precision. It happened just over three years ago during a home invasion. Len was beaten to death with a shovel and a pitch fork by a teenage boy he'd been mentoring. He was 53. The assumption I had that he was still out there, available for me to reconnect with was betrayed by ugly facts on my screen. But there it was. Three and a half years had passed since my friend was killed, but for me, Len died last night. Somehow none of our friends from that little town had mentioned it.  Was it such big news they had assumed I knew? Or was the burden of repeating the story to someone who moved away not worth the emotional investment?

In corralling these thoughts into something of a eulogy, I sought more information about Len's background, but mostly what I kept finding were details about the young men charged with his murder. I can sympathize with the rage that survivors of psychopaths and mass shooters feel when they see so much attention given to the perpetrators. It perpetuates the power they hold over our imaginations. Instead I want this to be about Len, but I'm left with little besides my own anecdotes and fading memories to build you a picture.

Fate double-crossed Len a long time ago. For starters he was wheelchair-bound by the time we met, paralyzed from the waist down by an auto accident when he was 22. Determined to live on his own, Len bought a historic fixer-upper on the waterfront in Bath, North Carolina, just across the street from Kae and I. We got to know each other while walking our dogs. Occasionally I would go over to Len's place to hang out since he couldn't negotiate the stairs to get into our house. The first couple of times I visited I was disoriented by the look of his home. What first appeared a cluttered mess turned out to be an efficient system for negotiating his belongings. Everything was low to the ground and arranged by function, with wide areas of access for his wheelchair. Nothing was put away in a cabinet or closet. Cookware, cups and plates were all set out on the countertops for ease of access. It took a while for the order of it all to become apparent to me.

The strongest impression Len made on those he knew, and even among many he didn't know well, was the intentionality and self-reliance with which he lived his life – more so than most able-bodied people I know. While his lower half was all but useless to him, his upper body took up the slack. He gardened, fished, cooked all his own meals, read voraciously, and biked all over the backroads of Beaufort County on his hand-cranked recumbent bicycle. When I asked why he never wore a helmet he squinted at me for a moment, and then with the slightest smile said "Because I'm already paralyzed." 

Whatever frustrations Len endured as a paraplegic, much of that energy got refocused on external causes. He taught English as a Second Language at the local community college and was an active member on the town's Board of Adjustments. He also mentored youth in the community. At home, he was endlessly figuring out how to do things by himself. When his companion dog Tessa developed advanced hip dysplasia, Len fixed the old Belgian Shepherd up with a wheeled harness for her back legs so the two of them could still go on "walks" together. The image of them out rolling around the streets of Bath was a curiosity to some, but to me it expressed a kind of sacred love and perfection between two wounded companions. The kind of sacred that will nonetheless make you smile.

Sometime after 10 pm on the night of October 5, 2010, two teenage boys broke into Len Willson's residence while he was home. One of them was a sixteen year old with a troubled history whom Len had mentored and employed doing odd jobs. They met through the boy's mother, when Len taught her English. She thought that maybe Len could help straighten her son out. The boy saw things differently and eventually decided to rob Len. Whatever the intruders intended when they broke in that night, things got nightmarishly out of control. The 16 year old set to work beating Len to death with nearby garden tools. He later confessed that he did it because he "needed to put Willson to sleep." And while it would be a small comfort to hope Len died quickly, the medical examiner's report indicated that was not the case. Len fought to defend himself, but he was a middle aged man in a wheelchair. An easy target. His cause of death was blunt trauma to the head. The local District Attorney said it was the most brutal beating he had ever seen in his 23 year career.

Vexed. It's an old-fashioned word, but it comes closest to describing the mess of emotional and cognitive chaos I feel when trying to wring any meaning out of this. Vexation refers to a type of distressing puzzlement, a harassment of the soul. It forces unanswerable questions. Why did this kid turn on the man who reached out to him? Why didn't any of the neighbors hear? How could a loving god, or a benign 'universe" have failed to step in on Len's behalf? Having grown up in the evangelical Christian church during the Kumbaya era, I have this lingering image of a deity who takes a personal interest in the minutest of details in the lives of his followers, and in particular, their successes. This version of God is the one that football players point to in the end zone and actors thank when they win fancy awards. But this all-powerful being seems strangely absent when whole villages get swept away in floods or your friend is getting hit over the head with a shovel. There's another, older and less popular version of this same divine creature that identifies more directly with human suffering. Evangelicals abandoned it a long time ago. This is the Jesus depicted in old catholic churches, betrayed, broken and dying. If you can see past the kitschy trappings and creepy statues, this image of a dying god seems more authentic and meaningful in light of the wounds humans perpetually visit upon one another. But regardless of whether you have faith in this god or any other, it's hard to shake the notion that fate alone owes each of us a fair shake. Or put more simply, that the law of averages wouldn't at least have offered Len Willson a break. But that wasn't to be. Lightning often does strike the same place twice.

The last time I heard from Len was in 2006 when he came out to Colorado to receive a controversial treatment to stop his increasingly severe leg spasms that were making it impossible to even sleep through the night. The out-patient procedure would mean intentionally severing even more nerves - not something many neurosurgeons care to specialize in. The choice to have it done meant any future breakthroughs in the treatment of spinal injuries would be out of the question for him. But after waiting a quarter of a century for some new therapy to come along, and with the spasms taking over his life, Len flew out to Denver for the surgery. The treatment ended up not offering much relief. The doctors said he'd need another round, where they'd cut still more nerves. Len was confused, depressed and out of money. He needed some space to figure things out, so he flew home to North Carolina instead of heading up into the mountains to pal around with me as we had planned. Thus we began to fall out of touch. The last I heard he was doing better and was teaching English at the local community college. I kept thinking we should get caught up.

Grief can creep further into the psyche than we imagine, and the time it takes us to work through it is incremental at best. As I begin to surface from the raw brutality and loss at the center of this story to join the rest of Len's family, friends and neighbors in coming to terms with his death, I'm clear on one thing. Each time a light like his is forced out the world gets a little darker. We can either let our eyes adjust to that darkness or burn a little hotter to make up the difference. Whether he died in vain is a choice the rest of us make. While he was alive, Len Willson was the kind of guy who reminded you to quit your whining. Not because he was so much worse off than you, but because he lived his life with more purpose and grace. So that's the lesson I'm choosing to take away - to live mindfully, and to look for places to seed kindness in this world. It's a goal anyway. And if Len's life was any indication, with practice I know that way of living becomes second nature. Seamless. Transparent.

Rest in peace
Leonard Alfred Willson III
1957-2010

Bath Creek, North Carolina

Making Faces

Faces. Nothing causes me to procrastinate like the task of painting faces. It's not the blank canvas that intimidates me. It's the one with half sketched in figures, ready for fleshing out. The dread of getting started can stall me for hours, days. Painting faces is what I am specifically not doing as I write this blog.

Faces are intimidating almost by design. Anything that can be thought, said or felt is reinforced (or contradicted) by a dense vocabulary of facial expressions. Many great works of art derive their power simply by accurately re-staging these fugitive gestures. The eyes alone are capable of articulating emotions as well as language can do, and most of us are born with the ability to decode those looks intuitively. In explaining the difficulty autistic people have with processing facial expressions, one activist for Autism Awareness describes the pain of looking another person in the eye as equivalent to having his hands held in a fire. No one needs to be told how powerful eye-contact can be. Even animals share this language of looks with us, which is why you can't fake bravery when trying to stare down a mean dog, for instance. They're not just smelling your fear, self-doubt is written all over your face.

For some artists, painting the figure comes considerably easier than for me. The pressure to correctly depict the human face is the most daunting challenge I subject myself to on a regular basis. I need to know I'm at the top of my game before I can even begin to work. This involves being properly caffeinated, which means just enough to feel fully awake, but not enough to make my hand unsteady. I also need to have recently eaten, since there is no worse distraction than hunger. Intoxicants are out of the question as they erode judgement and make hours of re-painting inevitable. Of course the lighting has to be just right, but so does the music (if any), and even the smell of the room is critical, which usually means attending to that damn cat box in the far corner of the basement, and then selecting the right incense. Seasonal considerations apply. Amber is good in the fall, but not lavender. Did I mention tea? I like the herbal kind that claim to focus the mind. I'm guessing those claims are a load of crap, but I'm willing to chance it. If all this sounds a little O.C.D., I'm fine with that. Most of us have our successes propped against some neurosis or other. Mine just happens to be over-preparation of my my work environment, but when I get it right I can disappear completely into the rabbit hole of creative experimentation for whole days without even knowing I've been away.

When an artist draws, paints, or in some other way manipulates materials in attempt to depict something accurately, we call that rendering. To render something is to create a representation of it. Another definition of rendering is to melt down, extract and purify. Rendering is also the word used for the process of breaking down animal carcasses into the components of skin, fat, bone and protein for "reuse." Artists understand how closely related these definitions are. In order to draw something correctly, we first have to break it down into intersecting planes, angles and curves, and then we have to recreate those relationships one by one on a flat, blank surface.

It's no secret that I use a projector to help me rough in my compositions from images I've worked up digitally.  I'm fine with people knowing that. My work has about it the sense of accumulated iterations, one of which is digital composition. Many of my source images have had a previous life before I acquired them, and the echo of that prior purpose is what helps give my paintings context. Even the original photography I work from is staged in a way to interact with these appropriated images. A fair amount of improvisation and reworking can happen at any point in the process, with the final painting being just the most recent instance of a palimpsest of ideas. But regardless of the combined-media origins of my paintings, there are still dozens of hours of good old fashioned rendering that go into making my figures "convincing." I may white-out a face two or three times, starting from scratch each time, until I am happy.

But what does it mean to get a face right? Those who study faces quickly learn there is more deviation than norm. Relaying that deviation faithfully is what helps convince the viewer that an image is realistic. Even the most beautiful faces are "out of true" with traditional notions of idealized beauty. There is not a face out there where one eye isn't higher than the other, or the nose slightly bent to one side. Ears are often the least match-y things that make up the human countenance. If you see a face that looks perfectly symmetrical it will somehow look wrong. It's the minute deviations in symmetry that make a face seem believable.

Recently I was painting a face where the nose was a little off center. Just slightly. Something you would never notice in real life about the model I had photographed. I kept trying to center it, but it never looked right. Finally I stopped resisting what was in front of me and put it down as closely to what I was seeing as possible. I remembered a drawing instructor back in college who was watching me in a figure-drawing class. He wasn't looking at what I was drawing, just watching me draw. Finally he said, "you spend too much time drawing and not enough time looking." I'm sure he said that ten thousand times in his career, but it was so perfectly right for me at that moment, and it still is.

Later that day a friend stopped by to chat and I showed him the painting. He said, "Dude, that girl is super hot but she's kind of creeping me out because of the way she's staring." This wasn't exactly what I was going for. It wasn't the whole effect anyway, but it did let me know I'd gotten the nose right. In fairness to my friend, if he had seen the painting on the wall of my gallery he would have put more effort into a context-appropriate response. Still I was happy for the bluntness of it. It helped break that spell you fall under when you're deeply immersed in your work and you're thinking it's doing one thing - usually something heady, but you're missing something much more ordinary. 

When I think a painting is done I'll usually post an image of it on my Facebook artist's page just to get some reactions. My favorite thing lately is the way their facial-recognition software kicks in and that little floating box pops up over the faces in my paintings and asks me to tag my "friends." I realize how tawdry it is to allow yourself to be flattered by computers, but I still find it amazing that an accumulation of brush strokes that I put together can be blended in a such a way that even algorithms are tricked into interacting with them. It's a powerful and seductive thing to portray the human form, if even just reasonably well, and it raises questions for me about the moral responsibility of the artist. The context in which the art is received by its public is informed by social values, norms and expectations. Most artists possess some awareness of this dynamic, or at least they pretend to. I'm certain the ethical stakes aren't any higher for figurative artists than abstract or conceptual or what-have-you, but because humans are also animals, we are programmed to respond to representations of our kind in ways that are visceral, not just intellectual. That's what sometimes creeps ME out now that I'm edging further and further into figurative art, but it's also what makes it more fun than I've had in forever.

Semi-Transparent, acrylic on canvas, 2013

Perfectly Lost

I'm laying in a tub watching clouds through a little skylight while listening to Brian Eno streaming on a nearby stereo. I have no idea where I am, or very little anyway. I know I'm at the end of a winding country highway somewhere outside of Paonia, Colorado. But I've never been here before, and Paonia is just a funny sounding name I have no associations with. I haven't even looked at a map today to see where it is.

Depending on what Brian Eno piece you happen to be listening to in the tub, you may come to notice that it sounds exactly the same whether your ears are above the water or below.

We started out this morning in Gunnison, Colorado, did some hiking near Crested Butte, then took the Kebler Pass seasonal road through the largest stand of mature aspen trees in the state. At some point on the switchbacks in and out of a canyon carved by the North Fork of the Gunnison river, I began to lose my sense of direction. One moment the sun would be in my eyes, the next it would swing around behind my left shoulder and reappear over my right. None of this much mattered since Kae was doing the navigating, still, by the time we got to our rental house I had no solid sense of where I was.

North Fork of the Gunnison river, Elk Mountains Wilderness, CO.

I've always liked that bumper sticker that says, "Not All Who Wander Are Lost," though I usually make sure my own wanderings include lots of detailed maps. For me, the urge to map one's experience is really just a desire for greater context, a way to know the world more thoroughly. At least that's what I tell myself. By contrast, I know plenty of people who don't bother with maps and never know which way north is - and they couldn't care less. I imagine that their sense of the layout of the world is informed by a personal narrative unencumbered by literal space. Indeed, there are other ways to map the land than with birds-eye schematic approximations of topography. Among indigenous Australians there is a tradition of "songlines." These are navigational song-maps which are sung while crossing vast stretches of the continent's interior. The words of the songs detail landmarks and watering holes as the landscape unfolds before the singer. Even the contour of the melody is intended to describe the lay of the land.

A different sort of verbal mapping helped me explore the limestone caves of central Kentucky when I was a teenager. There were lots of stories about these caves circulating among the more outdoorsy kids at school, but no one I knew had ever been in them. My brother and I had hiked the creek below them plenty of times and knew exactly where to look on the cliffs above for the vegetation that nearly crowded shut the mouths of these wet caves. We'd done some research and knew that wet caves were more inherently stable than dry caves, so while the constant flow of water presented its own challenges, we knew the cave would not collapse on us.  Finally, together with my brother and a couple of buddies, I worked up just enough nerve to chance a trip inside the fabled Chrisman Cave. I  had obtained a hand-drawn map of the cave from some kid's older brother who was in college. It contained a couple of squiggly branching shapes with the words "vestibule" and "chimney," which we knew were words used by professional cave explorers, and so our map seemed legitimate to us. It turned out to be accurate enough to not get us killed, but over subsequent visits to the cave we found that keeping elaborate verbal descriptions was way more useful than trying to picture it. This is how I still remember it: "At the far end of the vestibule look for a small opening down near the floor, about ten feet across and three feet high in the center. Water will be trickling out of this opening. Crawl into it. After about 20 yards the ceiling will come down to less than two feet. You will have to shimmy through a series of very tight spots for the next 200 feet. Wear long pants and a long sleeved shirt, since the floor of the cave is covered with gravel. You will also be in one to two inches of water. Pay close attention to the ceiling. You are looking for a chimney that will give you passage to the upper reaches of the cave. The chimney is a narrow slit that you will be able to stand up in. It widens as it ascends, so you will have to work yourself into the corners to find enough hand/footholds to scramble up the forty or so feet to the next level of the cave. At this point you will be able to stand mostly upright while exploring several winding passages, but mind the floor, as there are several more chimneys coming up..." And so on and so forth. Every time we explored the cave we stayed in there until we were exhausted or freaked out, and each time our descriptions got a little better, yet every time we tried to draw it, we could never agree on how it should look. We explored Chrisman Cave many times but never knew who Chrisman was, and the cave wasn't on any maps.

It turns out the name Paonia is an intentional misspelling of the Latin name for the peony flowers which were brought here by the area's first white settlers. At a loss for a better name to describe their new home, the word "Paeonia" was submitted as the official place name in 1902 when the town was incorporated. But in a draconian effort to enforce simplicity and clarity, the U.S. Postal service decided to approve the name only if the silent "e" were dropped. Hence, Paonia.

Twenty minutes into my soak the water has gone lukewarm and Brian Eno is still nowhere near wrapping up his musical thought.  Out the other window in the bathroom I can see clouds piling up on the horizon in various hues of gray. The view overhead through the skylight is still just wisps of white against the late summer blue. Two versions of the same sky. Two different stories, depending on cropping.  At the moment, I'm content with the blue depiction of the sky overhead, and it occurs to me that lying here is as good a way as any to begin my acquaintance with a place. You've got to start somewhere. Besides, at some point tonight I'll certainly get the maps out.