I'm back, hopefully... and some Banksy

After being on hiatus from this blog since July 2012, I'm thinking of taking it up again. I'm not sure what my focus will be this time around - more art and less politics? More personal? Music reviews? A little of everything? Hmmm. Going to need to *feel it for a bit and see what pulls me.

There is also the question of Twitter - I'm busy there @dancingdiva, and maybe 140 characters and a link is all I need to express myself on social media (and you need to read). We'll see.

But today, to celebrate the return of Upside My Head, here is my favorite street art by Banksy. Maybe this will be the theme because it's true. Life is Beautiful.

And while we're talking about Banksy, a friend posted this great YouTube compilation of some of his images. Enjoy! Talk with you soon.

We were just kids, too

A couple of weeks ago I finally read Patti Smith's remarkable book, "Just Kids." I captured my immediate reaction to the book in this brief review on my Tumblr:

READ THIS BOOK! 

Patti Smith has delivered a love song, a prose poem, a elegy to her life with Robert Mapplethorpe, and to a time and place when the word of possibilities was cracking open for those of us who came of age in the 60s and 70s. If you are of that age, this book will make your heart tremble with memory. If you are a young hipster, this book will tell you who the people are that you may see only as aging baby boomers, or your parents.

Read this review of the book, which includes a recent video of Patti Smith performing “Because the Night.” I love watching her perform this classic at her age now, being as authentic to her soul as she was 30 or 40 years ago. She looks fabulous — an older version of her younger self, not attempting in any way to be anyone other that who she is.

A friend, who is a young, queer hipster in her late twenties, responded with this:

[Just Kids] just totally made me lustful for living in the Chelsea Hotel while catching glimpses of boroughs and digging through used book bins and traveling to Paris with zero money.

Me too, my friend. But more than creating a longing for Patti Smith's time and place gone by, Just Kids cracked open for me with vivid clarity another time, not long after hers, when I was a young artist who was part of the art scene on the West Bank in Minneapolis during the mid- to late-seventies. So indulge me as I remember my own time and place gone by.


We were just kids, too. Many of us met as BFA (Bachelor of Fine Arts) students in the studio arts program at the University of Minnesota. Most of us, but not all, were recent arrivals from our white, suburban, middle class childhoods (one exception was a neo-Croatian, Iron Range refugee), which made it possible to romanticize our roach infested run-down apartments, our student loan-financed poverty, and the self imposed austerity of thrift store clothes and broken down furniture as artist's chic (I once dragged a mattress from a dumpster for my bed). We imagined ourselves bohemians, visionaries, artists, and activists. 


We were a decade too young to be hippies, born in the mid-fifties (Smith, born in 1946 is ten years older than me). So as we created and lived our own wannabe version of her New York art scene, we were copying the recent past.


We drank coffee by day and pondered the meaning of life and art, liberally quoting from Anaïs Nin, Allen Ginsberg, Nietzsche, and all the beat poets. We roamed the West Bank by night, frequenting the Viking, Palmers, and the 400 Bar where we listened to Koerner, Ray, and Glover and other local greats. We danced to Willie Murphy and the Bumblebees at the Mixed Blood Theater and in the old Dania Hall. Our Chelsea Hotel was the Holtzermann Building on Cedar Avenue, a block long string of storefronts with oddly shaped converted warehouse one-room apartments above them.


Many of the music influences Smith references were also ours, such as Jim Morrison and the Doors, but she was our influence, too. Horses was released in 1975. When I first heard Gloria on that album, which begins with Smith seductively, defiantly declaring "Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine," before cranking into a punk rock cover of that old classic, she became my female artist/musician hero. When I later learned that line was from "Oath," a poem she had already written, I loved her even more and knew that in her art l could find inspiration for the art I longed to create. 


Like Smith, I knew I always wanted to be an artist and starting writing poetry and painting when I was twelve or so. I would walk from our suburban rambler to Southdale, where there was a bookstore with a large art section. I'd stand there with all the adults paging through arts books of Modigliani, Monet, Van Gogh, Matisse, and Rothko, astounded and inspired. I'd then walk home and paint feverishly or write poetry.


When I got to college my goal was to become a great artist. My urge was to mix mediums, genres, and to make experimental, performance art. In the seventies, the studio arts program at the University of Minnesota was housed in a run-down former warehouse and the professors were hugely influenced by abstract expressionism and the New York art scene of the forties and fifties. de Kooning was to be our model by which our own art should be judged.


There wasn't a lot of room for experimentation, but I gravitated to the teachers who encouraged it. I scribbled lines of my poetry into drawings and painting, blurred lines between paint, pencil, and oil pastel. But I wanted more. I wanted performance art. So when a visiting artist offered a course in just that, I leaped to enroll. I vividly remember my first attempt at a "performance piece." On an early spring day, I walked the teacher and class single file into the woods outside the studio arts building and near the Mississippi River to the discovery of a small pond I had fashioned with goldfish swimming (and dying) in it. Traffic's "The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys" was playing on a cassette deck and then as I turned down the sound, I read a poem I had penned about the environment, how "man" was destroying it, and how all the pollution would one day kill all living things. 


Really, really bad stuff. Forgive me for I was just a kid. But know this - without Patti Smith, I would have never imagined I could stretch the boundaries of what I could claim as art.


After finishing Just Kids and having this flood of memories open, I was wild for Patti Smith all over again. I downloaded Horses, played it on repeat in my car for a week, and watched a recent live performance of "Because the Night" on You Tube over and over. Most of all, I yearned to know more of who Patti Smith is now, in her mid-sixties. I imagined sitting down the two of us - me, a regular person, and her, the godmother of punk, famous poet and writer, and a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of fame - and chilling and chatting about music, art, poetry, kids, motherhood. About our aging selves and that time really not so very long ago when we were both... just kids.

Patti Smith, then and now.

Latecomer blogger -- let me introduce myself

Welcome to my brand new blog! Let me introduce myself. I am a 52 year old artist, connector and wannabe DJ. I am also a mother and grandmother and queer girl extraordinaire. Got legally married to my handsome wuzband in MA 2 1/2 years ago. I am the white girl in a brown family and a mostly brown community of friends. So my life crosses a lot of interesting intersections. I am going to blog about those intersections and more.

For example, I will surely be blogging about what it's like to be a whitegirl in my world, some of the things I've learned along the way, and how the world looks through the lens of my specific eyes -- which are near sighted, far sighted, and full of astigmatism -- so it's sometimes an interesting worldview.

I will likely blog about what it means for me that our new president is biracial, and was raised by a white mother and white grandparents given that I raised two biracial kids. I could say a lot about that. A lot. But not now, later. This is my intro blog.

I am very interested in blogging about getting older. That could be the topic of most of my blogs. I did not realize I was passing out of regular adulthood into older adulthood until I was almost 50. Seriously. I was still a regular club goer and general merry maker. I had no idea I was shifting into the young side of the golden years until I realized most of the people in the clubs were the age of my kids -- until I ran into my actual kids in the clubs. I'm just sayin. I was shocked into reality.

So aging has become a subject of endless fascination for me as I really have no idea what it means to be getting older but I do know I am extremely happy to be alive, having survived a lot so far. Aging thought for the day: Billions in advertising dollars are spent each year to tell women how to look younger. What if those same dollars went into telling us how to live better?

Oh, and I stay up on world events and feel compelled to opine from time to time. My favorite TV show ever is "The Wire." That's the kind of stuff you might find me blogging about here. Politics. Race relations. The media. Poverty. Prison reform. Father's rights. The needs of undocumented people. You know, light fluffy stuff.

I love music and am an armchair critic. So I'll tell you what I think about a musician, a concert, or an album now and then. Artist recommendation of the day: Ruthie Foster. Favorite song: Up Above My Head (there is music in the air).

Since I am an artist of sorts, you never know when a poem or piece of creative nonfiction might get posted here as well.

So an anything goes blog. We'll see how it goes!

Let me end this introduction by saying I try to live by this African proverb: Don't look at your feet to see if you're doing it right. Just dance!

And remember, embrace your age cause you livin'!

Welcome! I invite your comments!