Running for Your Life: Artists Talk

(A meditation in the hours after reading a conversation between American landscape artists Chris Martin and Cy Gavin in a recent issue of BOMB magazineJ

Modern landscape painters – how they are in such an expansive phase.

How exciting, literally, to read (and hear, if you listen closely) the print conversation between Martin and Gavin.

They are not experimental, not mainstream, what comes of BOMB, the idea that perceptions are to be blown up.

We are creating anew, from a place of beauty, or more from a place of contact, take in the changes – as poet Stanley Kunitz says in “The Layers,” “I am not done with my changes” – and express them.

The conduit is not hollow, sterile like a tube of stainless steel pipe but the sum total (on a very good day) of your human soul.

Words are important, and life lived that draws upon the undiluted attempt to express what you see, feel, hear, taste, smell and envision will be art that matters.

Creation. Better than the human species? Certainly far better than the worst of same, which, sadly, is always dominant; it just seems more so these days.

Next: Running for Your Life: Finding Sebald

Running for Your Life: The Old Ballgame

This December marks my thirtieth year as an American resident.

The move to the US surprised friends in my native Canada.

In fact, in my chosen profession, journalism, I was a reporter and editor known for an independence of mind who took seriously his responsibility to get to the bottom of a story.

A friend convinced me that the best way to selflessly serve the community was to belong to no outside organizations or groups beyond the public library.

The books I read reinforced a strong belief that reporters were about doing their utmost to provide, to the best of our ability, the first draft of a history that we wanted to read.

Employed to seize the noble task of yielding an honest version of the public record.

Democracy. Or at least a path on that road. Tipping our hats to those like-minded on similar routes: teachers, social workers, police officers, firefighters.

I’m still in the news business, all these years later.

What’s changed? Social media has eroded the places where people first acquire their “news.”

Google raided the sacred space of what constitutes information. Who needs a news professional devoted to constructing the public record?

In fact, in our democracy today, there is no such thing as a public record of events the way there was during those innocent days.

And yet there is a hunger for democratic values.

On Tuesday (Aug. 21) I went to see a ballgame: once known as America’s pastime.

The Star Spangled Banner plays and one senses the partisan suspicion all around.

Who is not standing? Who is not singing? Who is not doffing their cap and standing erect? Who is too boisterous in a fever of support to the motherland?

Is it democracy? Or a wink to authoritarianism? Whatever, it certainly doesn’t seem as though we are joining hands as one.

Later, though, the hunger for something we can all agree on … In this we show that we are still enthralled with democratic values. In these brief moments in which it seems everyone is on their feet singing their lungs out, I am hopeful.

Each line of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” reinforces a togetherness, one that shines with the crazy ideal that we can be one with this.

That it would be a “shame” if our side lost, but not the withering one that comes with authoritarian intent.

Rather one that celebrates the very notion that we can accept “1-2-3 strikes, yer out” as long as we can be taken out by friends and family and feel the surge of commingled joy – however fleeting – at the old ballgame.

Next: Running for Your Life: Artists Talk

Running for Your Life: More “Spoke Words”

I can’t leave this “spoke words to” idea without this observation.

Imagine the following:

A young mobile phone addict happens upon my blog post and says:

“Yes, I’m game, I’ll ‘speak words to’ someone. You know, meaningful words.”

Trouble is, he can’t think of any meaningful words to speak. The whole idea being so foreign.

Here’s the answer:

Take a word form that is infinitely larger than the 20 seconds of topic matter that is the average consumed bite of content on the mobile phone – and binge.

As in “speak words” from these two must-read novels.

When it comes to meaningful words you can’t do any better than “Gateway to the Moon” by Mary Morris (my wife) and “The Overstory” by Richard Powers.

Do that, feel the rhythm in the sentences, the mystical courage in the belief in the power, the beauty of the human soul.

It’s a helluva start to getting to a place where you can't help but speak meaningful words.

Next: Running for Your Life: Artists Talk

Running for Your Life: “Spoke Words” to Him

Overheard on the Long Island Railroad, two teenagers in rapt, breathless conversation. Very loud!

“Like, I haven’t even ‘spoke words’ to him.”

Then, one teen expresses shock … shock! when discussing unfriendly behavior from that person she had previously regarded as a friend. I mean, really!?

One would think that friends ARE exclusively those people you “speak words” to. But maybe not.

It seems obvious that the teen is implying that the boy she hasn’t “spoke words” to isn’t in a position to benefit from her intimate opinions. It used to be, of course, that was how we came to be connected to people. You know, “speaking words” to them.

That leaves us with two distinct types of “friends.” Those to whom we “speak words” and those we have decided, for now at least, it isn’t in our best interest to “speak words” to.

It’s strange to me (anyone else?) how social media, especially followed on mobile phones, shapes (infects?) human behavior. Who under thirty actually “speaks words” into their smartphones?

There are times – long rides on the LIRR being one – when I can be persuaded to think that brains as I used to know them are finished.

Next: Running for Your Life: Artists Talk

Running for Your Life: Hot Running: Don’t Knock It Till You Try It

For years now boys and girls of a certain age (9-14, is my guess) have spent a good part of Prospect Park summer camp whaling away at each other, fencing with play-swords as long as their arms.

Straight, pointy things that don’t hurt from a wallop, or so it would appear to see the pint-sized warriors in action.

They pepper the trails in clusters of privilege, public paths that they swarm in league with untutored “counselors,” who encourage the land seizure so that literally as I run along I must dodge past them, often to avoid being struck by these “swords,” as one does a gauntlet during some lame male rite of passage.

Oh, youth, is that your sting?

Doctors will tell you not to over-exert yourself in searing heat and high humidity.

Better to exercise, race your heartbeat to aerobic health in the comfort of an air-conditioned gym.

Don’t hot-run, though, whatever you do. You’ll be sorry.

Sounds reasonable, and for most runners it’s the way to go.

But for me, summer running is a joy, a personal triumph. I run outside in all kinds of weather in part so that I will be in the kind of shape to be able to handle running when the temps and humidity spike.

A badge of pride, if you’ll excuse it.

Next: Running for Your Life: Artists Talk