Celebrating Lee!

    My little animation celebrating a family members birthday! Here's to you, Lee!

Lee Paige in blue!

     ;-)

    

     Here is the YouTube link

A Blow to My Innocence [This post is still under heavy construction.]

     Today in short hours following the graphic murder of a truly contemptible human being, whose person I would usually prefer not to allot the slightest bit of copy space, I learned a depressing piece of information. 

     Omigod! This hate-mongering Christian Nationalist considered himself a member of the Calvary Chapel Association! A fact I stumbled across skimming over his bio.

    CCA was the direct outgrowth of Pastor Chuck Smith's Calvary Chapel of Costa Mesa, the one and only teen church of early seventies fame so prominent and influential in evangelical Christian culture and music! I

    Calvary Chapel, with its message of loving acceptance, almost single-handedly begat the Jesus Movement or hippie Jesus Freaks. Even Time Magazine did a cover feature on the social phenomenal.

    The church also pioneered the nascent genre of Contemporary Christian Music, giving us Love Song and Maranatha Music. In 1971, these were like the melophonic and spiritual pinnacles of my young born-again days. Indeed, for the truly saved, they were part and parcel of the Jesus experience, love being the defining factor.

    It was deciding factor, three years prior to the movement's peak popularity, that made me come to  Christianity of my own accord. I did so precisely because the love, life and person of JC for me, epitomized so much of the anti-establishment, give-peace-a-chance, love-is-all-you-need, pacifistic, caring, world point-of-view I strove to emulate. 

    He was the quintessential hippie I dug back then.

 

 

   Whatever happened to the central premise that was Calvary Chapel's original emphasis, and Maranatha Music's literal theme if you like?! So I assumed. What became of their core notion; their working "tenet"? Somewhere along the way, the ministry lost its heart. 

     That I was dismayed by the tidbit I accidentally learned, was understandable to say the least, but that I was altogether surprised - the truth be told, I wasn't.

    More likely than not, I am a victim of my own projections, my desire to want to believe the best of people, beliefs, motives, and institutions. All too soon forgetting they, just like myself, are all too human. 

    What occurred? The 80's I believe. As evangelical Christianity grew with the influx of the young, it began feeling its political oats, especially that mainline, conservative part of the church that wasn't of the incoming youth set. We Jesus People were just the frivolous trimmings, the side show they tolerated, all the while envying our numbers. Pliable minds and fertile ground were we to inculcate and till - their way.

   Many of us, like myself, disenchanted with the conservative direction of the church, dropped out. I fell away, because at heart, I also believed in pursuing hard after truth. Truth with a small "t". Even as a born-again, I valued the right; the need to question - everything, including The Truth. Too much of far left progressive and pacifist was I, smack dab in a den of right-wingers and Republicans, to ever capitulate! So their political ideology was never going to sway me, and those like me, to their ulterior, uncompassionate, world view. 

   Love drew me to the church, lack of it led me to leave. I wish my skepticism had played a role in my departure, but that 'muscle' was only just beginning to develop in me at the end of my tenure as a Christian.

    Eventually, I became an atheist, a "eupraxsophist" to be specific, with the philosophy of "practicing good" towards others as well as towards myself. Love and pacifism still motivate me. Art, fer sure, as well. Science too.

    What has all this digression to do with my topic?  Well, despite the cynic in me, the years of watching the depths of inhumanity we humans can reach, I still want to believe the better of things. Perhaps, to the point of coloring over the past. I want to believe we were capable of innocence and can still achieve it, if only briefly.

   I know better.

   That the church I once admired from afar, that touched my youthhood can produce or allow such a vicious, vile, vehemently spiteful, callous and cruel hatemonger - antithetical to all its earlier professed values - to associate themselves with it. Well, my innocence still has the capacity to be stunned and shattered..

     Nothing is sacred.

 

T

 

 

Time Magazine June 21, 1971. Cover art by Stanislaw Zagorski 

 

From Time Magazine's feature story. Pastor Chuck Smith carries a young paralytic to a mass baptism in the Pacific at Corona del Mar, California. Photo by Julian Wasser. 

An early poster from the Jesus Movement, whose text Time Magazine quotes at the start of their exposé.

'The Christ' (1962) The Richard Hook painting popularized by the Jesus Movement.

T

 

 

 

T

 But I am not surprised.

 All sound and fury, signifying nothing.

 Helpless rag doll.

 

Cut down

By their fruits

Live by the sword Die by the sword

Reap what they sow

"Hoist with his own petard" William Shakespeare's 'Hamlet' Act 3, Scene 4 (The speech, to which the relevant phrase was a part, was deleted in a number of Shakespeare's early and later manuscripts, leading some authorities to believe this was an actual cut intended by the Bard. Other experts disagree.)

 

Despised empathy

Collateral damage 

 

Betty Bowers remark 

How You Die Does Not Redeem How You Lived

 

Unfriended a "family" member who said they were going to 'unfriend" anyone  expressing little pity My parting comment "Empathy for a man who despised it? I'll save you the trouble and goodbye."

 T

 

    Not to be flippant or facetious, but I am reminded of an old Gahan Wilson cartoon from Playboy. 

 

     Nope. Not even my supposed innocency.

T 

 

PVK, Ten Years Out

Low resolution copy of one of my favorite, Peter Van Kleef images. Photo credit pending.

    Today marks the ten year anniversary of Peter Van Kleef's passing. He was an extraordinary man, whom I almost did not meet. Were it not for the concerted efforts of another good friend of mine Di Anne Love, Peter and I would likely have slipped past each other in life."There's this person you just gotta meet, whose place you're just gonna love!" 

    She was right.

    Needless to say, I am ever grateful to her for having coaxed me to step out of my shyness and into the enchantment that was Peter and Cafe Van Kleef.* 

    I remember the particulars well..

     For months Di Anne Love, my employer at The City of Oakland Crafts and Cultural Arts Gallery, was doing all she could to introduce me to this amazing guy who she told me had some kind of fascinating art space., she was certain I would really love. Albeit, reticent as I was to meet people unknown to me or to enter unfamiliar territory, I simply hemmed and hawed, putting it off.

    Luckily Di Anne never gave up trying. She merely had to wait for the opportune moment and propitious of circumstances. In reality however, she didn't have that many chances available to her. This was because Peter's accessibility at the time. His schedule didn't exactly make it easy.

     For in 2001, Cafe Van Kleef, was still largely an on again - off again affair, its doors were literally sometimes open for business and not as the budding business underwent a couple of trial incarnations from bistro to bar. In the meantime, Di Anne would simply have to bide her time.

    That opportunity finally presented itself one afternoon, when on the occasion of returning to the art gallery from lunch, we chance to drive pass CVK** with its front gate momentarily up, although the nascent was currently in its "closed" phase.

     Catching sight of the open gate and acting fast, Di Anne immediately parked the car, and asked me to follow her inside,the establishment on the sudden pretext that she had something to hand its proprietor. This, she later confessed, was merely a ruse to get a diffident me "in the door". Suspecting nothing, I obliged her, completely unaware this, in fact, was that very place and person to which she had been trying, and almost in vain, to introduce to me! 

    Once she succeeded however, I was simply agog at the artistry confronting us. The sheer eclecticism, wall to wall; floor to ceiling; front to back as far as the eye could see was astounding!

     Seconds later, Peter stepped under the gate behind us with some items retrieved from the basement. When he saw me my awe and staring moments later at the "flying aquarium" mounted high in the wall overhead, he mused "I bet you're wonderin' how I feed them?!" (Indeed, there were live fish in the tank!) "I do it with this!" 

    Standing beneath a huge, parabolic mirror, mounted on a tripod he himself had cobbled, Peter winked. Then coming around to the back side of the bar, he extended his hand. After that, a drink followed.    

   When Cafe Van Kleef permanently opened to the public, I was there at his side as his employee on that first business day. Peter, myself, and his nephew, Lance Cardenas. We three. Peter had won me over, although Di Anne was probably not expecting the degree to which he did. To her credit, she graciously let me go, as the position Peter extended to me was full time. My work for the Crafts and Cultural Arts Gallery was only for two weeks every other month.                                                                                                                                                             

    Peter the man I came to know, work for, and remember, was the living living embodiment of one my favorite quotes from the 1964 comedy 'What a Way to Go!' - the first half of the maxim in particular: "Art erupts!" His prodigious creativity was nothing short of volcanic.

    To me, Peter's personality was larger than life, and I was fortunate, thanks to Di Anne, not only to have made his acquaintance, but experience the fleeting wonder of it.

 

 

 

 

*Sadly, Di Anne preceded Peter's death by about a year. Di Anne, by the way, was the one also responsible for introducing me to Trish Keefer, a remarkable person in her own right. Trish is still my best female buddy to this day.

 

**CVK (Cafe Van Kleef) is now CRVK (Cindy Reeves Van Kleef). Cindy, all along, the true owner of the business, was Peter then wife.

 

 

Open 'n' Shut

    My sister bought this house plant (no, I do not know its name - and it isn't Arthur). She then noticed its shutting its leaves at night and opening them wide on the morrow. 

     Intrigued I wondered, I could video-record a time-lapse of the sleep-movement (nyctinasty is the name of the phenomenon), but that would tie up the portion of the kitchen demarcating the dining room, preventing access to the latter, and doing so for the entire duration. That would only be in the way and no good.

    So I instead set up my still camera* with the aim (no pun intended) to take only two photographs and construct a GIF. Carefully noting the camera's placement and position, I snapped the daytime shot, then broke up shop, keeping my physical presence on site to a minimum.

    Thus the space was open and free for business as usual. 

    Later that night, turning on the lights, I returned to the dining room, and following my notes, set the camera as close as I possibly could to its original spot. I was off, it turned out, only by a few centimeters. Next, adjusting for exposure, I released the shutter a second time. 

    After the shoot, I then brought the camera to my PC, and tweaked the files, to further align and finalize the transition between images.

    Here is the GIF:  

 

 

 *In actuality, the "camera" I used, was my Samsung A35 Smartphone, so kudos to my recently acquired, Movo PR-3 Rotating Smartphone Grip Handle Rig, making use of the cellphone possible. Additional kudos to PhotoFiltre Studio and PhotoScape X Pro for the finishing software.