Dutton Hill, at dawn, seen from the bottoms:

Diagrammatical:

This coming weekend will be the first workshop for You'll Always Come Back. 18-some of the artists, thinkers, dancers & musicians that I've asked to participate are coming to dandyland, so there's a flurry of getting ready. This morning I finally made the diagram that I've been plotting in my head for several weeks, and tacked it up on the conference room wall. (old studio)
I'm hoping that it will help everyone make some sense of how the mythic, personal and historical intersect in YACB.

As Little Edie said, "I've got to get it all coordinated in my mind."

Oft the Loner ~ (looted images:)

Heckle & Vibes new Deathslab recording, "Oft the Loner" (songs of solitude) is complete, and soon there will be a website of it.
I was shuffling through the stacks in the studio, looking for drawings that have to do with the Loner songs to use as icons on the site, when I landed on the illustrated book version of The Approach of the Mystery. As a couple of the Loner songs, Glass Steps and A Kite, were in the Approach sequence, I started to wonder if the images might be recycled for the website to be.

The Approach book is accordion style, with 16 paintings, one for each dance in the opera. Here's 10 of those:

Dabbing completed:

The Banjo Player:

I thought I'd sworn off tesselation until I saw some sequined and beaded flags in "The Sacred Arts of Haitian Yodou" (Donald J. Consentino, editor). Now I have days of bead-sized dabs ahead. At least it isn't quite pointillism.

An extract from Wole Soyinka's essay "Tolerant Gods":

I count myself lucky in having the honor of corresponding a few times with Wole Soyinka; a child, if I'm not mistaken, of Ogun, and one of the world's great playwrights, a poet and champion of human rights. Here's an extract, much to the point of You'll Always Come Back:

"Between fanaticism and Community, we choose Community, and orisa is Community. Community is the basic unit, the common denominator and definition of humanity - this is the lesson of the orisa. And in the strategies for regulating and preserving community, the orisa have ceded the right of choice to humanity and to the deductions of its intelligence - not to intuitions and their interpretations by any self-serving priesthood. Even the collective manifestation of faith is constantly selective and exclusive, unlike the secular order that necessarily embraces all - this Ifa recognizes, and this it is that nerves us to say, go to the orisa and be wise. Religion, or profession of faith, cannot serve as the common ground for human co-existence except, of course, by the adoption of coercion as a principle and, thus, the manifestation of its corollary, hypocrisy, an outward conformism that is dictated by fear, by a desire for preferment, or, indeed, the need for physical survival. In the end, the product is conflict and the destruction of cultures. Let this be understood by the closet champions of theocracies where religion and dictatorship meet and embrace. Let us resolve to say to them: you will not bring our world even close to the edge of combustion. The essence of orisa is the antithesis of tyranny and dictatorship - what greater gift than this tolerance, this accommodation, can humanity demand from the world of the spirit?

And thus, for all seekers after the peace of true community, and space of serenity that enables the quest after Truth, we urge yet again the simple path that was traveled from the soil of the Yoruba across the hostile oceans to the edge of the world in the Americas - Go to the orisa, learn from the orisa, and be wise."

Haystack Tango:

Haystack Tango:

Anyone who loves grazing animals
Loves haystacks. In the white glare of midday
They cast humped shade on the glowing emerald
Of the fields, densities of time spent thatching this way
And that, combed like a giant’s shag, stacked by forkfuls
To the searing sky, straw flake dust
Shimmers gold in a cloud, grasshoppers whir, buzz, and unfold
pied wings as they
Leap into flight. One’s picked off in a mockingbird sweep.
I’m mesmerized by haystacks ~ leaned back
Under an oak
With a dipper of spring water. I let the coolness
Pour down my throat
As I swallow.

Some hay in a barn, once the work is done –
Sometimes men sprawl on it
And talk quietly. I remember.

The hay, we watch it grow. Spring it’s an
Enlivening of color barely emerging – soon long, full
Of water and soft, easy to bruise – too much of it
Isn’t good for cows to eat ~ they gorge and scour.
By summer the stems are long enough to
Wave when they bend, the breeze undulates them.
When it’s just in bloom, or nearly, that’s the time to cut it.
That’s right. The energy is at its peak just then – you watch
It close and if the weather’s good and your timing too,
The haystacks will be perfect. On a twinkling midsummer eve,
Shakespeare’s Bottom would rhapsodize on sweet hay like this, viewing the orange
Orb of the full moonshine rise in a sky of black tree shapes and aqua ~
Wouldn’t that be something?

Lovers may discover it ~ A gypsy lilypad floating in a meadow
of nocturnal fiddlers. Fingers linger on a zipper, the hay's perfume, and
nearby there’s even an owl, thrumming a steady soft round note.
Who doesn’t love this sort of haystack,
even if it feels itchy later, gazing into the infinity
of pinprickly stars in silence?

In the winter you walk by them, crusted with snow,
Just as twilight sets their straw aglow
And it reminds you of the tumbled hair.
And you go back, growing warmer as you go
Deeper into the evening. What I wouldn’t give to hold
You again.