A Brief Freedom

For My Friend B.B.

1970-2012


Death is inevitable here, my friend. As sure as rape and theft and overcrowded subways, death, for some of us, is just a station stop away. If we’re lucky… if we’re Blessed, Life slows down a piece... and grants us a sweet reprieve. It is released inside this freedom of poetry.

My Highest, Most Greatest Good is a dueling dream. It is fueled by the urgent SCREAM heard from others expectations of me, versus, this unquenchable hunger, this insatiable thirst of my undying ambition. Quite simply: I am a slave to this shit.

In the frosted fields between the sheets of my sleep, I am haunted by this duality. It is always hiding, like a shy ghost, inside of my deepest self. Life, for me, has been this journey through streets of Sadness and Euphoria, with a brief but necessary escape inside the plains of poetry.

And I’ve known some poets... Real Poets... such Beautiful, Living, Breathing Poets; scribes so much Higher and Greater than me.

And after living their heroic little lives, they’ve died their invisible deaths.

This weekend someone else’s earthly suffering came to an end. This weekend, another poet friend of mine expired.


Today, once again, Life for me has become this brief excursion into the freedom of poetry.

I am reminded of how some vile thing or some monstrous entity always comes along to kill this poetry in us.

Death, it just keeps chasing us, stalking us, walking beside, and then, running after us.

Death by winter... in a cold-shouldered America. Death by failure’s sharp and jagged needle. Death by trigger-fingered cop. Death by a city’s speeding stopwatch. Death by some incorrect, mistaken identity. Death by some ignorant-assed vigilante. Death by merciless abject poverty. Death by a lonely man’s disease. Death by some obscene and unnatural cause will come for us, just as it came for him…

And we will grieve.

As blackly beautiful and brilliant as he was, his life should have never been cut so damned brief! I get it, though. I do. Between us there are few differences. We are bittersweet slaves to an Art, a Mistress, and to a World of thieves that will ultimately betray us! I get it!

Life, for me, is this brief and tragic hesitation. I fill in the gaps and gaping holes with broken prose and poetry.

His life was terse, composed of heavy heart and crying verse. His life, it should have been a song. Instead it proved to be... a broken stanza... an aborted passage.

Yo! Would someone please throw him a jazz funeral, damn it!





And send him home most righteously! Let those dark cherubic-faced men blow their horns through the streets for him!

Celebrate him! His life! His gift! Speak poems, say odes, sing hymns to his spirit! And then, being that we are such carelessly foolish humans, we’ll forget just what made his soul so rich and special, so unique, and beautiful.


It happens all the time. I’ve seen this shit happen to my own father; the way people just forget the Shine from his Star. I’ve come to expect nothing more, nothing less than this, for it is his plight, and my plight, and perhaps all of our plights.


My Highest Good is a dueling dream. It is fueled by the urgent scream of divergent expectations of me. It remains this unquenched, insatiable thirst of undying ambition. In the frosted fields of my sleep, I am haunted by this duality.

Life, for me, has mostly been this reed-thin freedom I find in poetry.

Life, for me, has mostly been this reed-thin freedom I find in poetry.

LIFE, for me, has mostly been this reed-thin freedom I find in poetry.


I wish you golden days and lyrical nights of radiant riffs and open mics and Gabriel blowing Cool Jazz on his horn... and from the neon-lit clouds on the hipper side of Heaven, I wish you Thunderous fingersnaps.


That's it. That's all.

Au revoir, Bonne nuit, Mon Ami.


One.

Honoring Romare Bearden, Harlem Renaissance Man And Black Picasso

He was OUR Picasso. He Was Our Shining and Most Artistic Prince. Unfortunately, unless you were/are a hardcore art groupie/consumer, historian or appreciator of Fine Art, chances are you may never have even heard of him. His name was Romare Bearden.




Romare Howard Bearden was born on September 2, 1911, to Richard-Howard and Bessye Bearden in Charlotte, North Carolina. He died in New York City on March 12, 1988, at the age of 76. His life and art reveal an exceptional talent, encompassing a broad range of intellectual and scholarly interests, including music, performing arts, history, literature and world art.




Bearden was also a celebrated humanist, as demonstrated by his lifelong support of young, emerging artists.


Romare Bearden began college at Lincoln University, transferred to Boston University and completed his studies at New York University (NYU), graduating with a degree in education. While at NYU, Bearden took extensive courses in art and was a lead cartoonist and then art editor for the monthly journal The Medley. He had also been art director of Beanpot, the student humor magazine of Boston University. Bearden published many journal covers during his university years and the first of numerous texts he would write on social and artistic issues. He also attended the Art Students League in New York and later, the Sorbonne in Paris. In 1935, Bearden became a weekly editorial cartoonist for the Baltimore Afro-American, which he continued doing until 1937.




After joining the Harlem Artists Guild, Bearden embarked on his lifelong study of art, gathering inspiration from Western masters ranging from Duccio, Giotto and de Hooch to Cezanne, Picasso and Matisse, as well as from African art (particularly sculpture, masks and textiles), Byzantine mosaics, Japanese prints and Chinese landscape paintings.


From the mid-1930s through 1960s, Bearden was a social worker with the New York City Department of Social Services, working on his art at night and on weekends.




His success as an artist was recognized with his first solo exhibition in Harlem in 1940 and his first solo show in Washington, DC, in 1944. Bearden was a prolific artist whose works were exhibited during his lifetime throughout the United States and Europe. His collages, watercolors, oils, photomontages and prints are imbued with visual metaphors from his past in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, Pittsburgh and Harlem and from a variety of historical, literary and musical sources. In the process, he would go on to become America’s Greatest Collagist.



In 1954, Bearden married Nanette Rohan, with whom he spent the rest of his life. In the early 1970s, he and Nanette established a second residence on the Caribbean island of St. Martin, his wife's ancestral home, and some of his later work reflected the island's lush landscapes. Among his many friends, Bearden had close associations with such distinguished artists, intellectuals and musicians as James Baldwin, Stuart Davis, Duke Ellington, Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, Joan Miró, George Grosz, Alvin Ailey and Jacob Lawrence.




Bearden was also a respected writer and an eloquent spokesman on artistic and social issues of the day. Active in many arts organizations, in 1964 Bearden was appointed the first art director of the newly established Harlem Cultural Council, a prominent African-American advocacy group. He was involved in founding several important art venues, such as The Studio Museum in Harlem and the Cinque Gallery. Initially funded by the Ford Foundation, Bearden and the artists Norman Lewis and Ernest Crichlow established Cinque to support younger minority artists. Bearden was also one of the founding members of the Black Academy of Arts and Letters in 1970 and was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1972.





Recognized as one of the most creative and original visual artists of the twentieth century, Romare Bearden had a prolific and distinguished career. He experimented with many different mediums and artistic styles, but is best known for his richly textured collages, two of which appeared on the covers of Fortune and Time magazines, in 1968. An innovative artist with diverse interests, Bearden also designed costumes and sets for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, and programs, sets and designs for Nanette Bearden's Contemporary Dance Theatre.


Among Bearden's numerous publications are: A History of African American Artists: From 1792 to the Present, which was coauthored with Harry Henderson and published posthumously in 1993; The Caribbean Poetry of Derek Walcott and the Art of Romare Bearden (1983); Six Black Masters of American Art, coauthored with Harry Henderson (1972); The Painter's Mind: A Study of the Relations of Structure and Space in Painting, coauthored with Carl Holty (1969); and Li'l Dan, the Drummer Boy: A Civil War Story, a children's book published posthumously in September 2003.


Bearden's work is included in many important public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and The Studio Museum in Harlem, among others. He has had retrospectives at the Mint Museum of Art (1980), the Detroit Institute of the Arts (1986), as well as numerous posthumous retrospectives, including The Studio Museum in Harlem (1991) and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (2003).




Bearden was the recipient of many awards and honors throughout his lifetime. Honorary doctorates were given by Pratt Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Davidson College and Atlanta University, to name but a few. He received the Mayor's Award of Honor for Art and Culture in New York City in 1984 and the National Medal of Arts, presented by President Ronald Reagan, in 1987.




When he passed, it marked not only the end of an era, but the death of one of the last Great Artists whose work primarily focused on the lives, the joy, the pain, the reality and the celebration of African American culture.



We thank you, Mr. Bearden, for so eloquently helping to tell, illustrate and define our story.



One.

About Art, Artists And Integrity...

The following piece is an essay of sorts, created by this writer, with several quotes attributed to their original authors. It is not my intent to take, steal or profit from the hearts, intellects, and spirits of others.

I hope you will read it, especially if you are a starving, budding, or even a successful creative artist.~ L.M. Ross

"I am for integrity, if only because life is very short and truth is hard to come by." ~Kermit Eby

What is the purpose of Art and True Artists? Is it not to be a vessel, a conduit of the truth inherent in human nature... and to reveal its glorious beauty and the ugliness of its underbelly, too?

From a very early age (seven), the creative arts have been my rescue, my best friend, and my salvation. It began with turning observations and internal sensations into rhyme schemes penned well enough to be called a Poet... then this morphed into other forms of expression: a Portrait Artist, Photographer, Lyricist, Short Story Writer... and finally, Novelist.

The great poet Langston Hughes called people like myself: "Genuis Children."

Please, don't get it twisted! I wouldn't dare go so far as to claim I possess any stroke of genius. WE are all stars, and my star has existed without even a miniscule inkling of self-important brilliance.

I was, however, always that different kid... you know, the wierdo, a little too mature for cartoons and comic books, and a tad too cerebral for childhood games. Always happiest or at least more content to find other ways of expression, I sought to create a world all my own.

Truthfully, I'm not sure I was ever cut out to do or be anything else, other than to be creative.

As Creatives, I believe this becomes our calling. It is what keeps us alive and breathing air. And we breathe out loud... with either our esoteric voices, or our observant eyes, with our communicative bodies, or our brazen brushes, with our curious minds, or with our miraculous pens. We breathe and we lean into the winds of Truth. That truth is all the things we as human beings are. It is ineffably beautiful and radiantly mysterious. It is hauntingly hopeful and precariously pessimistic. It can be pleasingly sensual... or hideously ugly. What we do is primarily speak the truth, lead with truth, and we continue to push those staid white envelopes in order to convey a core message of some essential Truth. This is the essence of Real Artistry. This is the path, the promise, and the purpose of what true artists seek to convey.

I'd like to think that people who are artists are placed here by God to narrate human existence; and then to make some divine sense of it.

This is probably His way of channeling His Voice, His Vision, His Hope and His Dream for us as a society.

Or maybe it is His way of playing a very cruel joke on us.

In a more perfect world, I would like to believe, that as artists, we are men and women of honor. Of course, sadly, that is not always the case. Dishonor runs rampant in the world and in the arts.

This ramble is really about putting one's life, experience, mind, heart, soul, blood, sweat, tears, years, and faith into the oiginal creation of a thing, and then for its creator to be cheated, taken, stolen from... by who who poseeses great hubris. but who lacks a soul...

"Count no day lost in which you waited your turn, took only your share and sought advantage over no one." ~ Robert Brault


Still, we endeavor to stand strong, tall and fearless in the face of philostines and narrow-mindedness, haters and ignorance, and most of all those steely, unfeeling monsters of greed and avarice that seek to stand in our way.

"Integrity has no need of rules." ~Albert Camus


I have known my share of teachers and innovators, of masters and muses and demigods, too. Some of those wondrous teachers have held my hand, kissed my cheek with the brush of confidence and lifted my spirit by their sheer unfaltering belief in my talents. Thank You, God, for placing those beautiful people in my path!


"The voice within is what I'm married to. All marriage is a metaphor for that marriage. My lover is the place inside me where an honest yes and no come from. That's my true partner. It's always there. And to tell you yes when my integrity says no is to divorce that partner."~ Byron Katie



I have also witnessed the acts and the actors acting out in actions of artificiality. I have seen the rise and fall of true genuius... and heard that rusted crackle of jackals who SWOOPED down out of nowhere and schemed to engineer their fall.


"A life lived with integrity - even if it lacks the trappings of fame and fortune - is a shining star in whose light others may follow in the years to come. ~Denis Waitley



There are always monsters among us. Although they may take on human form, these are, in fact, the vilest serpents of pestilence. Their main objective is to put a plague upon the house of creativity. They may not show their slimy tails, their razor-like saber teeth, or openly display their blood-dripping claws, but they DO exist. They may look like people you know, and people you might even trust, but they are, in actuality, demons with an insatible lust to corrupt and destroy the rushing breath of a dream.


"There are many winds full of anger, and lust and greed. They move the rubbish around, but the solid mountain of our true nature stays where it's always been." ~ Rumi


I have tried, even in my weaker moments, to always stand tall in the face of demons; to not topple and fall from that perch I'd erected from the words and deeds of my life, or from the actions of my own dreams. Still, I am a human being, in some ways fragile, as a guilded bird, with one poetic beak of song.

I get lost in the utter wrongness of it all, caught up in the perpetual b.s... become frustrated and angry... and I falter sometimes. You see, I have been dishonored! I AM BEING dishonored! The monsters have torn into my flesh and sucked my blood with a ravenous greed.


"In art, the only one who really knows whether what you've done is honest is the artist." ~Bruce Nauman


Note to the struggling Artists who may some day read this:

As creatives, I, and you, and we all must continue and perservere, to fight and bleed, to rally and breathe through the attacks, through the assaults, through the attempts to break us in two, and yes, even through the failures. Through it all, we must remember that we are only spirits having these intensely (sub)human experiences, many of which, can rob our souls, IF we allow them! We must never be victims of man's avarice, but instead become keen students of it. We must never define ourselves by mishap or circumstance, but instead, be examples to the massess of how we rise!


"Be faithful to that which exists nowhere but in yourself – and thus make yourself indispensable." ~Andre Gide


Success, True Success is in The Rising from the fall. The deepest and most pure Truth of all lies in one's own personal integrity at any cost. And although we may not always know the rewards and glories from our accomplishments, and we may not be on receiving end of what we are truly owed, God Pays Attention!



"The elegance of honesty needs no adornment." ~ Merry Browne

And so, we MUST press on, with our spines erect, steadfast in our mission; even if we might never become those happy shiny people dancing in the fool's gold bling of some shallow and fraudulent man-made fame. Still we remain... Artists! Chosen people who innately possess the gift to express and exquisitely narrate, who sing and manifest all the songs within this wondrous thing called humanity.

For this I will always be happy and proud. For this, I do not whisper in shame, but instead, Shout Out Loud: I AM AN ARTIST!


And would like to thank the, perhaps, tens of thousands of people who'll I'll never meet, who have experienced my work, who were encouraged, touched or repulsed by it; who were alarmed or informed, who were either soothed or moved by it. I find my glory in those golden moments when I have channeled and connected, when I've sang and danced with those shimmering, beauteous, mercurical muses... and made them whisper YOUR naked name.

"Honor is self-esteem made visible in action." ~Ayn Rand


That's it. That's all.

Snatch JOY!



One.

L.M. Ross





copyright © 2010 by L.M. Ross

Freak Comes Clean

Let me tell you a secret:

When I first saw you, I wanted you. I wanted you physically, spiritually, emotionally, too. I wanted to kiss me so badly… I kept stuffing that urge in a cool place, hoping my hunger wouldn't show so much. I wanted to do you… but even more, I wanted to hold your wholeness.

And now I want to make an Art of you, to let my fingers crave Love upon your body, like warm wet Plaster of Paris. Imagine it: me, with my chisel, hard as diamond, hammering into your hot marble flesh…. me, with my chisel… molding and erecting this brand new shape to your heart.

Yes… you would be my art's food, my chisel's muse… as a carve and drill and erect this space inside you, where your caged freak soul flies free.

Let me tell you a secret:

I'm one of those romantic fools, those Sensitives who sometimes holds tenderness too close to the heart and the bone. Am alone to sometimes think of sex as Art?



So ponder: Does this make me, a freak, or simply an Art Groupie?


Some tend to see, to think of Love as a Science, a question of Chemistry; a continuous series of complex equations. E=Mc2. See. You've lost me? I always sucked at science of scientifics. I excelled instead at fitful poetry. I could never recite the Table of Elements, but I can be your creative idiot savant.

Let me tell you another secret:



I sometimes some nights forget to be so tender. I sometimes want to grind your mind in time with mine; to grind you finer than you mill your coffee. See you with your flava, and me with my vintage beans… imagine what a brouhaha we could be together!


And my kisses… oh, my kisses might begin so butterfly soft, and then the intensity of them increases… and that butterfly becomes a freakish raven.



That kiss alone might cause tongues to chafe like flint and kindling igniting flames of desire…wild hot fiery flames that smolder, smother and consume us both to ashes of moist lust.

Let me tell you my final secret:

Love makes me artful, thoughtful, sensitive and tender, angel and devil, madman and savage. Love and me… we've this running history with schizophrenia, baby.




See… I'm not a ho.



I'm a freak, yo.



I just told you.



Now you know.



One.