i am waiting for the bough to break — or, to be severed by proxy at my behest.
earlier this week on my daily walk-about, i noticed that a primary limb, the major artery, on a nearly 80’ tall and likely nearing 100 years-old, elm tree on the land i occupy, had cleaved and that the fracture was migrating down into the trunk — and dangerously so.
i don’t know the cause: if it was the abrupt shift in temperature to freezing here in southwest Michigan — or, if the tree was stressed from a standing-water-wet spring followed by a very dry summer, or if “it” is simply at the end of their life — all the elms here had unusually held onto an abundance of their prolific leaves until the fourth week of November.
no matter.
the matters:
the massive limb of the elm stretches high and precariously over the old barn, and depending on the wind direction, there’s a chance if it falls, it could clip the back of my house or take the whole tree down with it.
i await the tree surgery & removal crew. i am at their and the northerly and westerly gusts’ mercy.
in the meantime, i have also been wrestling with the possible choice of whether to have the crew amputate just the cleaved limbs — if the tree is in fact salvageable — or, to remove the entire tree at once instead of forestalling the inevitable.
There’s a simple term for the look in Frida Kahlo’s eyes: self-possession.
The gaze is not that of the (putatively male, white) viewer looking inwards. It is her own. She’s the one who does the looking. Her preternaturally long neck holds her head completely still and completely erect so that the eyes are front and centre.
But it’s important to remember that Kahlo didn’t become iconic. She created herself, quite literally, as an icon. The process is one she controlled. Though it’s not a comparison I’ve encountered in art history, Kahlo seems to me to be, among other things, a precursor of Warhol. Her images seem to be made for mass reproduction.
the iconic Matriarch of Grand Teton National Park & the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem
Monday morning, June 22, 2020, Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming, US The iconic and prolific female grizzly bear [399] — a mother and grandmother was in forage with her own eldest adult daughter [610] — also a mother, along with her cubs and grand cubs.
399, pictured here, who should be referred to respectfully as Grand Mother Bear, at the age of 24, in Spring of 2020 birthed four cubs [a rare, large litter no matter the age of the grizzly, but at 24, was truly astounding] was with 610, whom should be called Daughter Bear, who birthed two cubs as well. All but two of the six cubs were mostly hidden by the deep sagebrush and dense fog.
What wild majesty to behold. Lodged in my mind’s eye forevermore.
photo by: author
“Grizzly 399” is gone,
and this Autumn, and last, and every season in between have required so much Auden
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as i sit here on my deck on a beautiful, late August, Sunday morning in rural southwest Michigan reading an article about surviving a bear attack at Signal Mountain in Yellowstone in May 2024,
i am reminded that
one of my very favorite things as a kid was to visit my great grandmother and to sit in her rocking and folding lawn chair, all by myself on the tiny porch — of her modest, peach-colored stucco bungalow at 2229 West Oakdale Avenue in Chicago — because we didn’t have a porch, only a stoop at CHA’s Julia C. Lathrop Homes where i lived as a child (privacy, peace and quiet were rare there) and comb through her Reader’s Digest magazine collection for stories of wilderness experiences and encounters with wildlife — especially the ones with predators: sometimes, not everyone survived in those excerpted stories /
but the intense desire to experience the outdoors that those stories inspired in me was almost entirely extinguished when i went, *with zero experience* on a three day/two night camping-canoe trip along the Fox River for our 8th grade class graduation trip; me and another 13 year-old female classmate were paired together in a canoe in a group of 5-6 canoes / i went [un]prepared with a borrowed, indoor Barbie slumber party sleeping bag from one friend and my best friend Jill’s dad’s old army reservist mess kit — everything stuffed into a single, tripled black garbage bag to keep my “gear” dry in case we tipped and went into the water/ Jill couldn’t go herself because that winter she was suddenly stricken with Raynaud’s Syndrome and was quite sick from another, yet-undiagnosed autoimmune disease /
my classmates and i slept outside on the ground without a tent and woke covered dew and very cold both mornings (while the adults occupied two very dry and warm pup tents) // we peed (and presumably, some of us also pooped) into holes dug in the ground within earshot of our 13 & 14 year old [boy] classmates and male teachers // the only other girl on the trip got her period the first night and had to use a sock as a menstrual pad because none of the male teachers thought to come prepared in event for that routine bodily function — and apparently, none of our mothers suggested this to us or to them — or planned for it either //
around the campfire the first night, which was a Friday, our teachers told us in a very serious manner that the camp in the film Friday the 13th — “Camp Crystal Lake” — was actually based on a true story at nearby youth camp— we had, in fact, passed a road sign for “Crystal Lake” en route; while, i had not yet seen the film — but the others filled me in in great detail — and it no longer felt good or safe to be on the trip with them — even after the teachers’ retractions and promises that they were “just joking”.
fwiw: admission to the Krasl Art Center is free. I didn’t pay to enter the exhibit.
Shepard Fairey no doubt has a seminal presence in street art — that is, art in public space — in sticker culture, in wheatpaste postering and in muralism. But, he’s also problematic as fuck — problematic to “fair use”, to social movements — and to art itself. I want to be more precise and say: he has an ejaculative presence in art in public space: his stuff is ubiquitously and frequently splattered — and sticky in the public consciousness — like a true Mad Men, note Ad men and marketers and PR consultants are not artists: they are not even tricksters — they are influencers, marketeers, cons, liars and grifters.
Fairey perhaps most famously helped to elevate Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign with his iconographic HOPE image — Fairey, (perhaps) like tens of millions of us, including myself, bought into Obama’s community organizer/activist history and “hope and change” schtick back in 2008. The shame and pain of decades of systemic, racialized disenfranchisement and inequity were transformed into an incredible electoral energy that was earnestly and hopefully deposited into Obama’s candidacy and presidency; it was then almost immediately disregarded and wasted — and ultimately, profoundly regretted by progressives. Only after his first term was nearly complete did “we” learn and process that Obama was a neo-liberal capitalist centrist cloaked in folksy voice and progressive-populist clothing — we witnessed him betray us again and again — and become a prolific drone-strike-executioner-in-chief as well as Wall Street’s and Rahm Emanuel’s punk-ass bitch.
I want to be more precise and say: he has an ejaculative presence in art in public space: his stuff is ubiquitously and frequently splattered — and sticky in the public consciousness.
The Obama HOPE image stands as a reminder and a joke of hope placed in any Democrat or Republican politician — any. Thank you for that, truly, Shepard Fairey.
Fairey has also reproduced and exhibited images of actual, bonafide Black power and liberation icons (Angela Davis notwithstanding) — and has been rightly interrogated about his cultural appropriation. On the surface, his work may pass as homage to great People and powerful movements, but it can also be interpreted as an artistic “black face” — and as an attempt to co-opt that which is not his in order to elevate his own vanilla, half-woke vibe — and of course, to cash-in. He remains defiant in his approach to cultural appropriation.
foremost Earthling, crone, and mother to a golden boy; nightly traveler into liminality; mostly obeisant to intuition & premonition; poet, writer; heart-sleeved, bleeding heart pessimist; devoted friend of crows (at last), meadow-restorer/tender, & long-lost sister to snakes, bats and coyotes, deer & bluebird whisperer, seed saver, food grower, an admirer and propagator of lilacs, hydrangeas, sycamores, mulberries, pawpaws and oaks; dna-tested kin to goldenrod, milkweed, bison, cottonwoods, thistle and monarchs; wader into ephemeral and glacial lakes and deep snow; Moon’s luminous, loyal daughter & Sun’s prodigal, ever-questioning shadow equally; devout, ecstatic desert, forest and river worshipper; reverent of and humbly deferent to bear, wolf, moose, elk & bighorn sheep and hummingbirds; a mountain, canyon, valley, prairie and beach walker;
noun: the time and space of the thresholds; attendance to or presence in, the in- betweens, the interregnum — of becoming and nonbecoming; of beingness and nothingness; of the material and ethereal; of sacredness and profanity; of love and hate; of calm and rage; of the authentic and the engineered; of inertia and energy.
limineen is both mood and State of this author, an Earthling, human, woman and entity, who finds her self present within and attendant to the thresholds of the corporeal, incorporeal and surreal.
from liminal / lim·i·nal /ˈlimənəl/ adjective
occupying a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold.
relating to a transitional or initial stage of a process.
the limineen | earthling, poet & crone 