Retrieved from a forgotten email written two years ago....

as always, a draft -

I refuse the dark side of stars,
The moon
When it's worn out its shine.
Your light holds me
Like a tiny child carries a brand new cat.
Inside me, the match catches,
Holds again,
A fresh light,
Wobbly and soft,
Like the cat
In its circle of arms.

pearlbamboo

everything's copyrighted here

Bruno Sashi Uetake, my third husband, age of my older son, 43 now, 27 and 2 years out of Tokyo in the US when we married.  You may find reflections on our relationship here (a live link, really), here  and here,

You'll  find his website here (he's still doing those non-homoerotic, narrative or factual male nudes I mention in the third link above...).  Scroll down for links to the various painting groups. 

The color on the ones from Chicago is truly awful.  He's working from old but good slides, not digital photographs, as most of those paintings are off stretchers and rolled up in a huge roll since the late 90's when he moved to NY,   Pity.  

His use of color, I've always found exquisite.  I've a some choice canvases and a number of works on paper in Chinese ink, sumie,  and have a few pics.  The colors really zing in these so I've posted pics of the only two Chicago paintings with Japanese subjects he did, both of which I have here, both painted within the first two months of when this self-taught artist started to paint. . 

When he left Chicago in the late 90's, he stopped painting, saying at one time that he didn't find it satisfying anymore now that I wasn't there as muse and critic,.  After several long, long stays in Japan working for a major, major US accounting firm's Japanese accounts he began painting again, both of aspects of Japan not commonly seen by westerners, and of himself, identifying after sort of traveling full circle,  as both as citizen of the world and as a Japanese man.  How these new paintings echo off the two of the earliest below fascinates me.

An aside - in a show of independence that finally revealed the person I knew he was when we first met, him looking for a place to wash his clothes in the neighborhood, riding around on his bike, stopping me to ask, he was about to make junior partner last year when he told everyone there was no one there who inspired him at the partner level, no one at all.  Then he quit and has been painting and traveling about New York City in a fundoshi (the traditional men's wrapped underwear that was the Japanese male's underwear cum swimsuit from 1900 till after WWII and appears frequently in his new paintings....), geta  (elevated wooden sandals) and a man's version of a kimono, telling me that it was seldom that he saw Japanese men in traditional dress in NY, though he often saw men from other countries wearing their traditional dress, so he wanted to remedy that.....

There is a striking painting in the NY section of the website of Sashi wearing geta and a rich blue, damn, what do you call it, not kimono,  fundoshi invisible except perhaps in an imagined brisk wind, ....  I sometimes amuze myself by envisioning him walking about NY thusly garbed, with his hair bleached blonde, something he learned to do from his mother, who did fancy hairdos for neighbors because she enjoyed it....

Sashi just took a twenty-year amble through the Japanese category "salaryman" to get to where he already was when we met, perhaps proving to himself en route that he could succeed there in spades before he allowed himself to go deeply into his true self.

In Young Japanese Couple below left, the girl is a limp dishrag of a girl, the typical Japanese female that I so was not and that he had trouble with, a bit of a feminist way way before his time.  In the new paintings she is, if not a partner, at least a fellow participant. He continues to use flowers, imaginary wild and wonderful flowers I always loved, even in his self-portraits, though they are now representations of cherry blossoms representing the transient and fragile nature of  beauty and life.

There is nothing to compare to the Mother and Daughter at the Bath House in the new paintings, neither in subject nor concept.  Having once followed Matisse's use of mirrors as a compositional and referential element in his paintings from Nice, I find myself quite taken by the use of the mirror in this painting.

This one is done in sumie and acrylics, although the sumie looks faded out here, almost brownish instead of rich black.  The idea of ink outlines, applied with the stump of a big brush, his thumb, whatever worked, on the bath painting continues in full force in the contemporary ones done in NY, even though they are now painted in acrylics rather than of sumie.
 
 

Yes, on Flickr,.  http://www.flickr.com/photos/gingerlilydesigns/   'Nuff said.  I've had plenty of space in this blog, lol, already. Coincidentallly, I met Sashi within a few days of starting to design and make jewelry.

My new grandson, 2 month old Kaj (prounounced "kai" to rhyme with "eye.") Singh Kirkwood-Datta, and hence his father, my younger son, has a  flickr account.  So I decided to keep my archive/gallerylthere for the moment, at least in part because I hope someday he and his father look at it.

The son?  He left home before I began to design and has only a nodding acquaintance with that part of me, though, when he visited some 5 years or so ago, he went through what I had kept from earlier efforts and unerringly identified the very best work as what he liked the best.  He's now in design school in San Francisco, studying to be an industrial designer, after several bends and turns in other directions. 

He doesn't talk to me, but I go often to look at the new baby pictures and puzzle some more about if there is ever a statute of limitations on a mother's unwitting mistakes, made from ignorance or out of a terribly damaged place in herself, hurting, yes, but never the need to hurt, to maim, that my mother visited upon me, more deeply a natter of regret than he could ever know even if I spoke "I'm sorry" nonstop for twenty years.   Perhaps not....

pearlbamboo

copyright 2008  ep hodges

To Barak Obama's Campaign -

I want to bring together here Harold Fineman's recent critique on Obama and how he can escape the "elitist" pigeonhole http://www.newsweek.com/id/133790 and an observation about how we "know" people, how we learn to "know" someone.  

Two of Fineman's suggestions in particular, "tell us in concrete terms where you are from," "welcome us to your neighborhood,"  got me thinking...

My therapist used to tell me, "tell me what you are feeling, what you are thinking. If you do not tell me then the only way I can "know" is to imagine.  Chances are I will not imagine correctly, so then who you are in my mind will not be "you" as you show yourself to me, but rather "you as I imagine you to be based on how much, or how little, you have told me and how I fill that in with my imagination.  You then become a construct of m y imagination, rather than a true person."

Take that concept, that what you haven't been told directly by the person in question, you fill in with your imagination, based on your deductions, information available from others, etc, and think for a moment how that might apply to the responses we see to Senator Obama.

As Fineman points out, the public knows really very little about Senator Obama, unless it reads widely and well.  I asked friends in a Chicago surburb to tell me what they knew for sure about him, outside his views on policy matters, what they knew about him as a human, as a man.

Their list?

Black, member of radical racist church, possibly Muslim., can't  bowl.....

That was it.  Frighteningly short.  Shallow.  Very much a product of the blogging/YouTube culture, not information gained from reading more widely.

What's missing?  For instance -

Child of a single mother,  at one time on food stamps - putting him squarely in the middle of the generational cohort of kids of single mothers (including my own who got free lunches at school) coming into their own now, recently in the news.

---if I haven't run across this information, I cannot include it in my mental picture of Obama.

Community organizer.  - SOOOO non-elitist, and when I heard of  it, I thought, "Well, now everyone will understand he is not elitist."  But that didn't happen.  The media didn't pick up on it, neither did the campaign.  (This may be one area when the campaign's skew towards youthful staffers has let the campaign down.  Brilliant though you are, I think your relative youth has you missing things that someone with a little more gravitas might pick up.)  Nowhere do  I see this played up.  I'm a Berkeley girl of the 60's.  I know what a community organizer is.  So should everyone else in America by now, because it speaks directly to Obama's willingness to engage in non-eliteist activity.   This should have already been made vivid, with pictures from the time, efforts to find some of the families he worked with, etc. 

---if I do not know this, I cannot include it in my "knowing" Obama.

Sports - I do not care a fig about sports.  Many Americans do, including Obama himself, who plays basketball.   This is part of the man, Obama.  It has appeared in the national media now, but not enough.   

---if I do not know this, I cannot include it in my "knowing" Obama. 

Lawyer in civil rights firm --(I didn't know this until I read Newsweek's cover article today.) "Politics didn't lead me to working folks," he says, "working folks led me to politics."  THIS should be the lead-in to a TV spot

---if I do not know this, I cannot include it in my "knowing" Obama.

Quoting from this week's Newsweek cover story, "In Pennsylvania exit polling, on the critical question of which candidate is "in touch with people like you," 67 percent said Clinton was, versus 66 percent for Obama—a virtual tie." (http://www.newsweek.com/id/134398/page/3) Obama's civil rights law and community organizer background, if well-known, should raise this 66%,  so Make It Known.

I am not talking about just giving out information in interviews.  That, in today's media/internet culture, is much too fleeting.  

What my friends in the Chicago burbs know, for sure, is info they almost couldn't avoid (hello, youtube....) 

Such information as i have listed above about Obama  is not sensationalist, so it won't be endlessly repeated, but, clever as you all are, the campagn should be able to find ways - What about a short biographical film?  on youtube, on TV in primary states, etc - to get this humanizing information up and out there so that when someone asks, "Who is this Obama?" the universe of widely available information to draw from includes more than "black, member of racist church, maybe Muslim....., that's all I  know for sure."   

l. hodges

This isn't fun if I stick to styles and ways I know.  I found this wonderful face bead on ebay.  I've only used a face bead once in all the years I've been designing, earlier this year on the geisha earrings.  The expression and colors  resonated so much that I snagged it after a little bit of a bidding war. 

I dug some old brass African beads, a lantern-shaped turquoise 50's art plastic bead from West Germany, Swarovski dark coral ("new") aurum (gold) crytals, some vermeil daisies, a marvelous little 3-tiered turquoise bead, some vintage turquoise ceramic sharp-edged rondelles and three tiny brass dangles taken from a 30's gypsy necklace and polished up a bit, some black plastic flowers which I affixed with exquisite vermeil headpins that look like stamens in exotic flowers, a jet glass lily flower, some tiny jet glass drops to suggest a coif.... 

I cogitated upon all these bits of magic-to-be and came up with The Goddess of the Blue Nile -

OK, Rainydame, thank you very much for your compliment.  Click HERE to see where they are selling. Free shipping for Xanga folk for now. Email me through xanga if you want to discuss a piece - different earwires, make them longer or shorter, even the price is negotiable, sometimes.

love ya,

pearlbamboo

everything's copyrighted 

e.p hodges 2008

These came together almost instantly after I opened the little package with the Russian dolls inside.  They were  originally 5 of  them hanging from a kilt pin.  I chose them to work with because they already had a way to hang them from a loop in place, having been drilled and a hanging wire, or head pin, put into place.  Wgen looking for some dolls to work with, I found I was taken by the colors, the half-daisy painted on the gowns, and the expression on their faces.  (lots of the dolls used for rhe pins are not as well painted as the matryoskha dolls themselves.   

I had a  60's necklace made up of bracelet-like links of white thermoset flowers, as you see in the earring on the left.  The little gold circle with the green bead wired into it is one of the links connecting to the next flower.  I used it as a design element, wiring the little green handmade vintage glass bead from Venice into it crosswise, saving the link below to use as a jump ring from which to hang and hang the doll, flowers and crystals.

I went into my glass flower box and found the little yellow flowers, found the right color Swarovski crystals, old, familiar emerald and a  "new" chalk white (until the 50's all white glass was milk glass, a slight blue tinge from cobalt, a little translucent.  The new formula for chalk white glass was put into production in the 50's, resulting in the production of a large amount of white glass jewelry -  the color fell out of favor; no one used it for years.  It's cycling back into designs, hence Swarovski's making it again and calling it "new.")

From a  box  I reserve for enamel flowers, I plucked the daisy and the enamel leaf, reached for the E-7600 glue and added the daisy to the leaf.  Later I glued a little filigree piece on the back of the leaf so that I could  use the openings around its edges for hanging things from. Add the doll and little yellow flowers, white crystals....

and here is what you get -


                             

hugs to you all,

pearlbamboo.

Once in a while, little bits and pieces of crystal, brass, porcelain, glass, held together by gold wire and chain, transform themselves in my hands - unplanned, really, just a amorphous outline I'm working from - into a kind of magic.  

This started out as porcelain floral bouquet earrings from the 50's, sold on ebay as "celluloid," an early plastic, and a little transferware (i.e., not handpainted) pendant.  I had on hand some Swarovski crystals in newer colors, chrysolite satin, vintage rose, and older ones, the brighter rose and light green. The pink crystal drops finishing the chains are a relatively new Swarovski product  as well (on all of this I am a true "early adaptor" as each new product that suits my way of working is another color and shape in my color box, allowing me new flights of fancy....)  The handmade green leaves arrived last week, the little pink and white flowers a couple of months ago, scored from one of my favorite glass flower sellers.   

The all take shape as I work, not from a preconceived plan. 

So this is what I came up with -

I thought they had to be on youtube, Tahir and Amena Chishty Qawwal.   The recordings are not outstanding in quality, done in a large echoing open space, with people moving around all the time. It's a tradition to shower the musicians with money....and traditionally, at least, South Asian audiences are much more participatory than Western ones, and in one of the youtube videos, there is a young girl 7? 8? dancing a few feet from the singing troupe the entire length of the video.

But this brings me back....

Watch, then think upon that I'm as comfortable in such a situation as I am shopping at Macy's, perhaps even more so.  I could slip into place next to the singers and feel as at home as I do now typing at my Dell in Chicago, my posture and gestures altering almost instantly, loosing the need to translate as I go and slipping into a monolingual state with Urdu in a few minutes.  Oh, I wish I could go back, even for a short time, oh so much do I wish that, so much so that it nears longing.  I find myself remembering lessons on the very different placement of the singing voice in this tradition, singing along when I can catch the words, singing open tones when I can't. 

If I've got it right, the fellow with the white hat with the stripes around it singing  is Ustad Dildar Hussain, the late Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan's tabla player, and Amena's teacher.  Remember is Nusrat's nephew and successor, Rahat, who teaches Tahir, the singer.

I prefer a different clip to the one embedded here, so click if you don't mind going directly to youtube.  Embedding this one is disabled.

my deepest regards to you all

pearlbamboo.

I'm working on this somewhere in my head almost
all the time, espea place cially during the time I'm not figuring out how to
manage my stash of vintage clothing I'm not yet ready to sell (there is
an awful lot of that.......) so that Guitarman and his 19 guitars will
have when he finally moves in this summer.  It often requires
my working in draft, using cheap wire, until I get the proportions,
scale, etc right and has become a meditative process not to be
hurried. 

pearlbamboo

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

Aldous Huxley

In earlier posts, I have stashed youtube, golly, I love youtube, videos of the late qawwali master, Ustad Nusrat  Fateh Ali Khan.  In a movie about him, also on youtube, the narrator states that since it is forever forbidden for a woman to sing and perfom qawwali, sufi songs meant to bring the singer and the listener into a dissolving of the self in the divine, Nusrat's daughter would not be his successor.  He, instead, taught his nephew, Ustad Rahat Ali Khan, who now is the head of this 600 plus year old family of qawwali singers.

Poking around, always looking for more into about women who play the drums, I came upon the website of a American couple who studied the art of singing qawwali  in Pakistan with Rahat and his family musicians.  Amena Chishty Qawwal is the first woman to perfom publically with a qawwali troupe in over 600 years, most likly in the entire history of qawwal.  She plays tabla and appears to be a side singer in the troupe.  Her husband, Tahir, is the lead singer and is really strikingly good for an artist who didn't grow up drinking in the music with his mother's milk.  There are many moments in the music of his I've heard where he does cross into that state and I'm not aware I'm listening to a foreigner singing, although his pronouncation of the last syllable of "shakr" keeps pulling me back.  In all fairness this is a difficult sound for a westerner to get correct.  His musicianship is such that I've no doubt that, if he can continue his exposure to the sources of this tradition and the language, these small issues will disappear.....).  

I'm too tired to make this a tidy looking link, so here you are  - Fanna-Fi-Allah, or "Annihilation in the Divine," the qawwal troupe of Amena Chishty Qawal and her husband, Tahir Qawwal.  http://fanna-fi-allah.com/index.html.  

The video, on the home page, top right, is wonderful.    It shows their troupe performing at a major sufi shrine in pakistan, Baba Farid Ganj-e-shakr at the urs, a yearly death anniversary festival.  The wild men dancing are malang, wondering mendicants who act strangely, sometimes, as you see, and  live outside the rules of normal existance, waiting for messages from dead or living sufi saints to tell them in dreams what to do next.   There is a lot to say about malangs and one of my housemates from Pakistan days, Katherine Ewing, wrote on them (will have to dig that paper up....), but that is too intricate a subject for today's post.

While you are at it, listen to the radio interview.  It's quite interesting, in part for the light it throws on being a westerner in Pakistan.  Their positive experiences paralleled mine. 

You know, I'm envious of Amena.  I studied classical singing while I was in Pakistan, but nusic was not at the front edge of my life at the time and I passed by my teacher's wish that I be the first western woman to perform in North Indian classical styles.  I've more than a few regrets that, having played western classical music much of my life, it took Bird's telling me about rudiments and my spending hours tracing the drum beats (excluding in my head, hard at first, the melody lines, and then, as I could hear better, discovering how the bass guitar and drum fused in a great groove) in my old sweetheart's Mudboy and the Neutrons blowing loud and free across my own personal airwaves to break loose inside me that part of my heart and spirit that is transformed by North Indian/Pakistani classical music and musical forms like the qawwal and the beats of my most dearly beloved drumset drummer, Levon Helm , of the late great The Band. 

I can see a generation of women drummers sneaking up on the scene, and I'm glad to have been out there marching and protesting and being a party to a women's class action law suits, enduring all the insults and harassment, some of which finally broke me, all of which in its small way helped offer shoulders to stand on to the next generation of women, who now, as do their daughters, accept as a matter of right that "girls can do anything." 

Oh, my dears, it was such a short time ago that the cultural limits on women were a virtual straitjacket.   Be thankful you were born when you were, and don't ever forget how hard-won your seat at medical school, law school, MIT or in the first violin section of a major symphony were/are.  It is so easy to forget that it was hardly yesterday when we were not welcome there. 

And while you are at it, if that's your thing, claim your seat on the drummer's throne and start playing a totally in the pocket groove.  My spirit is with you.

love from

pearlbamboo

copyright   ep hodges 2008

Bird's remained a constant in my life, tho he and I each have other partners.  Although we speak (he now eschews IM and email for the human voice, at last) frequently, I've not seen him for almost a year as he lives far away and h as little reason to find his way to my neighborhood.  

I didn't sleep last night, after the contretemps with the housemates, was drowsy, in need of a shower, when Bird called, asking if he could drop by.  Would I say no?  No, so scrambled for a fast shower while one of the housemates threw a couple of things under the bed and couch and tidied up, frantically. 

And so, Bird and Lil, friends forever, truly loving each other, spent two hours this afternoon - looking at Lil's creations and tuning the vintage Yamaha snare.   He also, as he is often want to do, laid out the roommate paradigm, when he said, "you know, it sounds like 'Mommy, she won't let me have my cheerios,' and 'Mommy, he won't share the cheerios"   Sums it up.

He tuned the snare a little higher, having first landed on a wonderfully resonant sort of baritone sound, to five mem more bounce, more action on rebounds.  I've not one minute to spend today playing, but tomorrow one may have to drag me away....

My spirit goes to a different time in Bird and Lil's relationship, back to when he relied on IM, serving as a sort of screen, a veil, and the wild creativity that would sometime surface when we wrote poems together, line by line on the IM, pushing each other, teasing, luring, demanding, asking, stroking - line by line exchanges. 

Childhood Dances in Forbidden Rain  is one of those, the only one I've recorded.   Here's the recording, itself a tribute to shared creativity, to how Bird understood to throw me words that opened me up and let me fly.   As he, not I, once said, "writing these is like having sex..."
 

Love from

pearlbamboo

copyright ep hodges 2006, 2008