Paul Jimerson's Blog

A Twisted Piece of Stained Glass

Paul Jimerson — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 01:07:03 +0000

Martin Luther King Day

Martin Luther King, Jr. Day always has a special resonance for me. I was just a child when my father gathered up a charred, twisted bit of the stained glass window from the rubble of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham that was bombed on September 15, 1963, killing four young girls. As Director of the Alabama Council on Human Relations, it was his job to act as a mediator between the black and white communities. As part of his job, he had worked with such luminaries as Andrew Young and Fred Shuttlesworth, and had met Dr. King. His lawyer wrote a book and devoted a chapter to my dad. I was very proud.

One of the few memories I have of his work during that time, 1961 to 1964, was traveling with my father to visit the mother of a young black boy who was shot off the back of his bicycle by a group of white teenagers driving by in a car. I can still picture the dirt yard, the small house, the large woman, little faces peering around from behind her apron. It was my first real look at poverty, and it had an indelible impact on my young mind.

For many years, that twisted fragment of stained glass graced my mother’s hutch, long after my father’s death. It was eventually given to the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, and is a cherished object there. (My father was asked to speak at the inauguration of the Institute in 1992.)

Stained glass has been used for a thousand years to decorate churches, usually depicting the life of Christ and His disciples, an aesthetic symbol of hope and redemption. Growing up with a twisted and blackened bit of the 16th Street Baptist Church was a reminder of the violence that twists and distorts the human psyche, the distortion of racism and hatred, but also a symbol of hope. My belief was always that if people could talk and really communicate about the violence and hatred that is symbolized by that twisted clump of glass, racism could finally be eradicated. Obama appropriated the word “hope” in his campaign, and his election was, for many, symbolic of the eradication of racism. Of course, we need more than symbolism to eliminate racism, but talking about it is a start. It is my hope that we can have meaningful national conversations about racism and hatred, so that these evils can come to light and be, once and for all, a thing of the past.

Butterfly

Paul Jimerson — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 23:15:50 +0000

Not far from my home in Capitola is a gorgeous place, The Forest of Nisene Marks State Park. Lately, I have been traveling there for brief hikes with a friend. It’s not old growth forest, and, in fact, was clearcut a century ago, but the towering Redwoods give some perspective on our brief, often seemingly rootless lives.

The other day, a friend and I were walking along a road in the forest, and spotted a butterfly with black wings spotted with orange and white. (I later discovered that it is a California Sister butterfly.) She said, “This is great animal medicine!” Not being versed in Native American spiritual practice, and wary of attributing significance to such events, I simply enjoyed the kismet of finding a healthy butterfly just “hanging out” in the road. “He is completely unafraid!” my friend said, noting that it was able to move, but not moving. I placed my finger next to its head, and allowed it to crawl up on my hand. My friend took some photos. She offered to give me some readings later about the significance of the butterfly.

After our healing walk amongst the welcoming redwoods, I went to a healing session with a local practitioner. He had me stand on the floor, feeling my rootedness to the Earth, “like a tree,” feeling the power of the Earth. During the session, he asked me to recall a time when I was feeling particularly good and powerful. “Building my house,” came immediately to mind. Fulfilling a lifelong dream, in 1992 I designed and built a small house in the rugged woods of central New Hampshire. He encouraged me to feel that energy, and associate a color with the feeling. “Green” was an easy choice. The profusion of evergreens, towering pines and majestic hemlocks populated the mixed New Hampshire forest, with it’s steep cliffs, huge boulders, hollows and small stream. “Green house energy.” He said I could take that energy into “building my life.” As I lay on my back, acupuncture needles embedded in my body, I felt the green house energy coursing through my body. Something shifted, and I felt freer, stronger.

I transitioned from the healing session to a writing class at a local college. I have not been able to write for the past year or so, and the class has helped me open up and begin to share some of my stories. I decided, despite the butterflies in my stomach, to read part of my recent story to the class. Apparently, they liked it, and I got some very nice feedback from class members. Another opening.

Later, when my friend showed me the Medicine Card for the butterfly, it spoke of transformation. Perhaps the grieving over all the losses of the past few years is transmuting into something less painful, more joyful, like the colorful wings of the shamanic butterfly. In any case, I feel more rooted, more powerful, and am ready to move into the world with a renewed determination to build my life.

Happy Birthday, Mr. Vonnegut!

Paul Jimerson — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 22:16:53 +0000

Many years ago, when I was in high school, I procured a copy of Slaughterhouse Five, and read it with interest. Apparently, not enough interest to actually finish the book, but I found it engaging. In all fairness, I rarely finish books. I blame it on ADD, but I have a hard time staying with a book until the bitter end, especially novels. I don’t remember anything about the book, and I don’t believe I ever read another Vonnegut novel. Sad for me. I’ve read about Vonnegut, and followed his career with interest, including his wonderful drawings.

A few years ago, when I was living in Northampton, Massachusetts, home of Smith College, Woodstar Café, and several people quite dear to me, I heard through the local ivy vine that Kurt Vonnegut had moved to Northampton to be near his daughter, who was enrolled at Smith. Come to think of it, I remember thinking, I had seen a guy who looked an awful lot like Kurt Vonnegut on the streets of Paradise City. I had fantasies of having coffee with him, hanging out, talking, shooting the breeze. Can you imagine anyone more interesting to chat with?

One day, as I boarded the small elevator in my apartment building, an old schoolhouse with huge walls of windows, I looked up to see, of all people, Kurt Vonnegut! I said, without hesitation, “Are you Kurt Vonnegut?” He smiled, thrust out his large hand, and said, “Yes. And you are?” I introduced myself. At that point, I ran out of things to say. Struggling to say something meaningful, I blurted out the following words, knowing, before they traveled the few feet from my mouth to his ear, that it was not good. “I haven’t read much of your work,” I needlessly confessed, “but I consider you a cultural icon.” OMG. I think by then I had left my body. Mr. Vonnegut looked down at his shoes. The few seconds of silence felt like an eternity. “Nice meeting you,” I said as we got off the elevator on the first floor. I never saw him again.

I’ve met a few famous people in my time, and have always managed to maintain a modicum of decorum, despite my excitement. Mr. Vonnegut, I’m sure, forgave and forgot me fairly quickly. But, I still want to have coffee with you, Mr. Vonnegut, wherever you are. And Happy Birthday!

Car Week, 2010, Monterey Peninsula

Paul Jimerson — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 22:08:57 +0000

Custom MG, with maple wood extension, Concours, Pacific Grove

Custom MG, handbuilt

Custom MG, door detail showing rows of screws

Cocteau & Glass

Paul Jimerson — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 20:50:46 +0000

Cocteau and Glass

Listen to Today’s Show:
http://www.elabs7.com/ct.html?rtr=on&s=fj6,lrvx,dv,2pf9,c7df,5ezt,ekwg

How to listen: http://www.elabs7.com/ct.html?rtr=on&s=fj6,lrvx,dv,5mq3,fe78,5ezt,ekwg

Jean Cocteau was a French novelist, playwright, stage and film director, poet, essayist, painter, set designer, and actor. And if that wasn’t enough, at the end of the First World War, Cocteau also became the unofficial spokesperson for “Les Six,” or “The Six,” a group of young composers that included Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc, Arthur Honegger, Louis Durey, Germaine Tailleferre, and Georges Auric.

In 1945 Cocteau directed his own cinematic adaptation of the classic fairytale “Beauty and the Beast,” and in 1950, a modern-dress retelling of the ancient Greek myth of “Orpheus.” Decades after Cocteau’s death in 1963, the American composer Philip Glass prepared new musical accompaniments to both these classic films. In an interview Glass said:

“For me, Cocteau has always been an artist whose work was central to the ‘modern’ art movement of the 20th century. More than any artist of his time, he again and again addressed questions of art, immortality and the creative process.”

This music is from Glass’s version of Cocteau’s “Beauty and the Beast,” which debuted in Gibellina, Italy on today’s date in 1994. The original soundtrack for Cocteau’s film was replaced by synchronized live performances by the singers and instrumentalists of the Philip Glass ensemble, who accompanied a screening of Cocteau’s uncut 95-minute film.

TIME magazine called this new version of “Beauty and the Beast” “an exhilarating and original ride . . . Remarkable not only in conception but also in execution, brimming with freshets of melody and surging with Wagnerian power in conjuring up a magic kingdom.”

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Music Played on Today’s Program:

Philip Glass (b. 1937):
Beauty and the Beast
Philip Glass Ensemble;
Michael Riesman, cond.
Nonesuch 79347

Earth Day, from The Writer’s Almanac

Paul Jimerson — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 19:12:29 +0000

Today is Earth Day. And it’s also the 40th anniversary of the first Earth Day — held on this day in 1970 and widely considered to the birth of the modern environmental movement.
Earth Day’s founder was a senator from Wisconsin, Gaylord Nelson. His goal was to force environmental issues onto the national agenda. Before 1970, stories about the environment were almost never reported. One Earth Day organizer said that back then, ‘Environment was a word that appeared more often in spelling bees than on the evening news.’
In 1969, an oil pipe ruptured just off the coast of Santa Barbara, California, causing 200,000 gallons of crude oil to burst forth and then slowly leak out and spread over an 800-square-mile slick. It took 11 days to plug the hole. The oil poisoned seals and dolphins, whose corpses washed up onto California beaches, and it killed thousands of seabirds as well. Senator Nelson visited the site of the enormous ecological disaster and was outraged that nobody in Washington seemed to be concerned about the great devastation to the natural environment. And then he realized that many people simply didn’t really know.
So he proposed a national ‘teach-in,’ an event to take place on universities campuses around the nation, one that would educate the public, raise awareness on environmental issues, and make politicians pay attention to these things, so that they would make laws to protect the environment in order to, as he said, ‘stem the tide of environmental disaster.’
He saw how successful the anti-war protestors were at getting media coverage — and therefore, making politicians take notice — and he decided to base his campaign for environmental awareness on their model. He also hoped to infuse the same student anti-war energy into the environmental cause. He proposed setting aside one day a year as a national day of observance about environmental problems. The New York Times picked up the story in late September 1969, a great boon to the grassroots organizers of the campaign, who had no Internet to spread the word.
At first, Senator Nelson called it National Environment Teach-In Day, but his friend, a New York advertising executive suggested ‘Earth Day,’ especially catchy since it rhymes with ‘birthday,’ and that’s what the press began to call it. Historian Adam Rome has called Earth Day the ‘most famous unknown event in modern American history.’
About 20 million Americans participated in the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970. They gathered at assemblies in high school gyms, at university plazas, in suburban city parks. At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where Gaylord Nelson had graduated from law school, people met up at 4:45 a.m. for an ‘Earth Service,’ where, according to one report, they ‘greeted the sunrise with a Sanskrit invocation and read together from Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, Thoreau, and the Bible.’ Girl Scouts distributed pamphlets that Wisconsin grad students had written, which gave household tips for helping to preserve the environment. Tens of thousands met up in Philadelphia’s Fairmont Park — and stayed there for days — and 100,000 streamed into Fifth Avenue in New York City. People celebrated spring weather and gave impassioned political speeches about environmental issues.
Though unstructured and somewhat incohesive, Earth Day was hugely successful. Environmental issues found a prominent place on the political agenda. Earth Day in April 1970 helped lead to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency by the end of that year (the EPA was created December 2, 1970), as well as to the passage of legislation like the Clean Air, Clean Water, and Endangered Species acts.

Precious Bodily Fluids in the Ferragosto Pictures

Paul Jimerson — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 04:24:19 +0000

OK, so maybe it’s not worth a whole blog entry, and it’s too long for Twitter, but I’m very proud of a title for a grad school paper I wrote on the painter Cy Twombly. My prof made me shorten the paper: too broad. So the title had to go.

Twombly is one of the great painters of the 20^th Century; expressive, evocative, painterly. While his friend Robert Rauschenberg was doing huge collages and “Combines,” Twombly was creating large canvases with various types of scrawlings, markings and mysterious geometric forms and numbers. These canvases are remarkable for their seeming spontaneity and order.

In 1961, Twombly was living in Italy, “while holed up in Rome during August, when the town was nigh abandoned and the heat was stifling” (according to a “lot note” on Christies.com), and the brilliant paintings that he produced were stratling and unfettered. The so-called “Ferragosto” pictures were eruptions of (metaphorical) blood, feces and – how to put it delicately….

Child-like scratchings of gushing pink penises, blood-red breasts, and messy smears of brown paint (scatology) cover the huge canvases, and are testament to a painter who was not bound by the niceties of Abstract Expressionism, and certainly not the stoic rigors of Minimalism. They are viscerally, powerfully erotic, in the sense that they evoke a child-like shock at the primal power of the erotic impulse.

The paintings have a jazz-like power and inventiveness, and dance like the best improvisation (as in, for example, scat singing). There are no bourgeois conventions separating us from the primacy of the aesthetic experience.

At the same time, one could argue, like all great art, Twombly’s Ferragosto pictures evoke the Sublime, and, therefore issues of life and death. They are agitated, quivering, questioning. In that sense, they deal with the soul, and even, one could argue, Death.

So, here’s the punch line: The title of my paper was to be, “Scat, Scatology & Eschatology in the Work of Cy Twombly.”

Image: Ferragosto V, 1961. http://www.tate.org.uk/tateetc/issue13/cytwombly.htm

Twombly Painting

Paul Jimerson — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 03:43:49 +0000

Petite Flowers Growing Out of a Crack

Paul Jimerson — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 23:49:59 +0000

I was walking up the stairs at the Monterey Plaza Hotel on Cannery Row, back to my “office” (Cafe La Strada), when I noticed some flowers on the steps. Upon closer inspection I noticed that they were growing out of a small crack in the concrete steps. As I was stooping to photograph them, a woman walked by and marveled at the little white flowers. “We’re all striving to come into the world through obstacles.”

Trip to Pfeiffer Beach

Paul Jimerson — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 04:38:40 +0000

Holes in the Offshore Rock

Once in a while I remember why I moved to CA: The Beach. I am fortunate to live a 10-minute walk to a sublimely rocky coast, and I visit regularly. But when I want to go “Archetypal California,” I head for Big Sur. Since I don’t have a car, I’m a bit geographically challenged, but fortunately, the #22 goes to Big Sur and back. It only makes two trips, and this time of year only deigns to travel on weekends. But it gets me there.

This morning, I took the 1X into Monterey, which arrives at the top of the hour. The only 22 leaves at 10:45, so I have 45 minutes to kill, and I was killing it Twittering on my iPhone. I looked at the clock, which said 10:44, so I raced over the bus plaza, and, long story short, missed the bus. I was feeling downhearted, and a guy on the #2, who grew up in Big Sur, encouraged me to take the 24 to Carmel, and, “Maybe a [Big Sur] local will show you some love.”

I got to Rio Road, walked over the turnout on Route 1, and stuck out my thumb. Now, I’m 56, and haven’t done much hitchhiking since my hippy days, and it felt a bit weird, but I was determined to get to Pfeiffer Beach. About 15 minutes later, a black Mercedes SUV pulled over, and I got in. The driver was a jazz pianist from New Orleans, heading for a Joseph Campbell conference at Esalen. So, we had a great time talking about jazz, his trauma around Katrina, and New Orleans lore. He handed me his card as I slid out the door.

The walk to the beach is a beautiful winding two-mile road, but I stuck out my thumb again so I would have a bit more time at the beach. A nice older couple picked me up in a moss-colored Prius; they were working on the Census, trying to track people down in the Big Sur wilderness.

I had to remove my shoes to ford the small stream passing over the road, and wandered down the path through the woods to the beach. The only thing keeping it from being perfection was a headache. It was a bit overcast but sunny and warm, and as I lay on the beach, it got to be hot. I wandered up the beach, taking photographs of the rocky shore, the rocky beach. A hawk drifted overhead. I took off my pants so I could wade out to a little rock outcropping, and found a smorgasboard of black turban snails, anemone and mussels. The sun beat down, and the salt spray tinted my glasses.

I was tempted to go in; a couple of people were in the water. The guy attempting to surf wore a wetsuit. I felt a little strange wandering along the beach in my underwear, but, hey, it’s California.

I left myself plenty of time, in case I had to walk all the way back uphill to Route 1. I forded the stream again, and stuck out my thumb. Shortly, a new black Altima pulled over, and I squeezed in behind the couple. They were both art teachers, escaping the overheated Inland Empire. Before we reached the main road, the guy driving said they were going north, and could take me into Monterey. Great! We had a wonderful time, talking about art, teaching, the Rez (he teaches on a reservation), and I have them some incredibly helpful hints as to where to go in the Monterey area. We had a great time.

Last time I was down that way, I got a travel tip from a seasoned hitcher, a tall young man with long reddish hair, long beard and a huge dirty pack. “The cops don’t bother you on Route 1 between Carmel and San Luis Obispo.” I told him about my run-in with the authorities on a recent hitchhiking debacle.

I got into town earlier than if I would have if I had taken the bus, so I meandered along the bike path to Café La Strada, got an iced tea, and sat outside in the sun and looked at my photos. My goal is to get to Big Sur, or at least Point Lobos, every weekend, and, after today, I’m thinking I will skip the bus altogether.