what's become known as the 'mungiest magazine on the internets'. Read it with a 'person of interest' over a 'cup of coffee'. http://www.mungbeing.com/issue_4.html Copyright © 2005, Pencil Tenet, Inc. Sat, 1 Oct 2005 12:59:30 -0700 Sun, 02 Apr 2006 18:19:17 -0700 http://www.mungbeing.com/issue_4.html?articleID=122
Good god, we've had changes and changes around these parts. I am very excited about this issue.

---

I have boxes of things - writings, shoelaces, trinkets - in the garage. Occasionally an occurance will demand that I dig through a box to find a particular something, usually to confirm or verify some fact or rememberance. The process is, of course, solipsistic in that I usually discuss things that are familiar and they are familiar because I have the parts stored in a box. My memory is fallable however, and fuzzier as time passes, so having a means by which to fact-check my feeble self comes in handy. Often the results are pleasing but they can also be disconcertingly shocking.
The most common error I make when remembering something wrongly is the "Error of Combined Details". Grouping the details from several events that share a commonality (3 different Mau Mau shows, for example) into one mega-memory. Another typical misrememberance is the "Error of Desired Outcome" wherein the remembered result is modified by a distortion that incorporates what was intended and what actually happened. And finally, the "Error of Exagerrated Import" is a common Wckr Spgt memory game in which the details (show attendee numbers, for example) increase in relation to the number of years passed. I'm just making all of this up but it seems to make sense. Later I will claim that I have always held these categories in my mind. And I may have, they just didn't have names. I suppose you could call that the "Error of Unnamed Beliefs".

---

I am very curious about how much (and what) people remember from their childhoods. How much of our childhoods happened and how much of it is just stitched together from old photographs? And what does it matter?
I think our selective rememory works very much the same way as the process by which we, as a society, stitch together other histories (art, societal, cultural...) This is an issue that I touched on in a previous article where the idea was that we stitch together art movements and art pieces retrospectively to form a cohesive linear art history. I think we do the same thing as individuals; we weave together bits and pieces of our memories to highlight some events and downplay others. So I wanted to explore that idea.
I've also been thinking about the amount of information that we store in each memory. The details, which might seem VERY IMPORTANT at the time, can get sliced away as the years go by so that the retelling of the story is streamlined and the memory is whittled down to its bare essentials. The details are not lost per se, merely shoved to the side. They can be coaxed out again. So maybe memories are more like wild animals roaming around in the forest of your mind, the only part in focus being the body and the point.
]]> http://www.mungbeing.com/issue_4.html?articleID=122&subID=226feed@mungbeing.com (Mark Givens)
Oh, wait.

Every once in a while I tap this well of childhood ecstasy I experienced a few minutes one sunny day when I was six years old. The school bell rang and I hurried to get outside. Once through the doors I looked around and realized I was the only one outside. Joy surged through me, it felt as though I was sliding down a ray of sunshine. My body was taken with peals of rapturous laughter as I skipped homeward, giggling a song:

I'm the first one out
I'm the first one out
I'm the fir-ir-irst one out!

I was the first one out and nothing in the world was more important.
For a moment in time I reveled in the glory of life as a child. ]]> http://www.mungbeing.com/issue_4.html?articleID=288&subID=241feed@mungbeing.com (jody franklin) http://www.mungbeing.com/issue_4.html?articleID=123
Have fun looking through back issues for specific things and people!

]]> http://www.mungbeing.com/issue_4.html?articleID=123&subID=227feed@mungbeing.com (The Editors) announce the second volume of the Misfit Library Journal, featuring
sucker-punching stories about death, sex, death and sex, and just a
touch of time travel. Our poets have been seduced by the long word and
have concocted vibrant prose, while our prose stylists have stepped
even further off the hand-beaten paths to find new species of syntax
and verbage to slip into your tea when you're not looking. Stop
looking.

Sporting heavyweight cover photography by our very own Rachelle
Cornell Nashner, Volume Two is here to instruct you on how to survive
winter. Make sure you send one to a friend, an enemy, and a spiritual
leader or two.

info: The Misfit Library

Here's what you'll get:

Christine Hamm — "How to Fuck Me"
Rachelle Cornell Nashner — "In Residence"
Mark Teppo — "When Maps Get Old, Towns Fade"
John Carnahan — "Mettis"
Sarah Lynch-Walker — "Temper"
Roba Callahan — "Orders, part 2"
K. D. Bryan — "Adds Up"
Jody Franklin — "Come Blasted Bitches"
Rachelle Cornell Nashner — "Solidus"
David "Starchy" Grant — "Matching Bruises"
Leonore Wilson — "Toll"
Rachelle Cornell Nashner — "Unmeasured"
Andres Eduardo Caicedo — "Madison, N.D."
K. D. Bryan — "Lost Time"
Rachelle Cornell Nashner — "Built To Last"
Sam Hurwitt — "Last Sun"
Meghan Sweeney — "Watching Orion"
Rachelle Cornell Nashner — "The Secret Garden"

Outside the States? Don't use PayPal? Volume Two will be available
through amazon.com and a number of three-dimensional, independent
booksellers shortly. In the meantime, feel free to drop us a line and we'll work it out.
]]> http://www.mungbeing.com/issue_4.html?articleID=123&subID=235feed@mungbeing.com (The Misfit Library)
Why don't we call them what they REALLY are...
"Interesting People".
]]> http://www.mungbeing.com/issue_4.html?articleID=123&subID=240feed@mungbeing.com (Mark Givens) http://www.mungbeing.com/issue_4.html?articleID=121feed@mungbeing.com (Kim Richardson) Why won't it open? I glance up at the number on the roll up door again, then back to the padlock, a huge circular lock with U-Haul stamped on it. Not the cheap, squarish one I clamped on the door two years ago.
Shuffling back through the labyrinth of storage units toward the lobby, my head buzzes, my cheeks hot. In the office, after I explain that I can't open my storage space, a young man in an orange vest informs me that he can't locate my contract.
"Are you sure you rented the unit here?" he asks clanging open another metal file drawer. "In the Pomona branch?"
Of course I am sure. I locked away my past, packed it all into carefully labeled boxes and crammed the 8x12 foot room with everything I had ever owned. It was all behind that roll-up door: birthday cards and my senior thesis and a picture of my dad as a baby.
The clerk accompanies me back through the maze to 1754, jams a master key in. The lock accepts his key, like a willing lover, and clicks open. He pushes up the door with a rusty rumble.
I step into the dark cavernous room, crunching over a few scraps of paper, a shred of cardboard, a few twisted nails. A dirty pink t-shirt is balled up in the corner, and the torn cover of a paperback is all that remains of my childhood. My throat is tight, my eyes hot. "It's all gone," I say, but it comes out sounding like a question.
"Looks like you cleaned it out," the young man in the orange vest says, glancing around the vacant storage space. I look at my key again. I step back out into the dry air of the hallway, and squint down at the padlock that should have rejected all keys but mine.
"No, no..." I trail off. How can this be? I walk out of the room, which smells of dust and newspaperd, and look again at the number on the wall. 1754. I rented it the day after graduation. I was about to start my new life, new job, new identity in Mexico. I had crammed the large room with everything I owned; love letters from my 10^th grade boyfriend, box springs, my third grade class picture, the Nikon camera my father gave me as a graduation present, my cheerleading uniform, an old copy of "Alice's Adventures In Wonderland," a nosegay from my junior prom.
There was no room for all that in my new life, no room in the backpack I carried while I wandered through Latin America. I wanted to remake myself, so I traveled over dirt roads, bumped on night busses, hitched rides in pickups, in the search for who I was.
And now I am settled, more or less. Now I live in a thatched roof home, deep in the Yucatan jungle. I bought the land and the tiny house perched on it for $800 from a man with five children. I scrubbed the floors, built an indoor bathroom. Now I am ready to play house with my boyfriend Federico. Now I have a business and a flowerbed. Now I want my blender and the books my grandmother gave me before she died.
I dig into my backpack and pull out the flimsy, carbon copied U-Haul contract. "1754. Right here." I say, thrusting the paper at him. On the cool clay floor of my jungle bedroom is a metal filing cabinet, rusting at the corners. I keep all my important papers there, the yellow card that shows my immunizations, the notes from our last board meeting, copies of my will, the bills from Agua de Quintana Roo, phone numbers of the shopkeepers in the states who buy the weavings I bring them. The papers are stained with splotches of gray, because everything molds in Tulum. I wave the moldy contract at the clerk. "This is my space. Where is my stuff?" I say, my throat catching, the tears coming fast.
"You'll have to wait for my manager to get back from lunch," he says without expression as I stare around the empty room.
After a few minutes, a smarmy middle aged fellow smelling of french fries informs me that all my worldly possessions have been auctioned off, sold to the highest bidder, or thrown away, as is the policy of U-Haul Storage Inc, Pomona Branch. "You can see right here, section 23 (d)," he says. "If user fails to render payment in full after all reasonable attempts have been made at collection, U-Haul Storage Inc. is entitled to sell, auction, or otherwise dispose of contents of rental space," he points with an ink-smeared finger.
But I had paid. I paid for a whole year in advance when I leased the space, and then paid for another year in full eleven months later. I knew the bills would never find me in Mexico.
"Let it go," says Federico, on my first night home. I stare up at the artful pattern the palm fronds make, woven through the cross poles in the roof over our bed. The rain has started up, and the wind rustles the dry thatch, but we are dry. "It's just stuff, Susana. It isn't what matters. You are here, now," he says, and a lizard scampers straight up the wall, ducks out through an invisible space in the roof. Federico rolls onto his side, drags his long fingers in a circle around my belly button.
A few months later, on a weekly trip to Cancun for groceries and phone calls, I press the pay phone receiver tight to my ear, trying to drown out the sound of the bus's diesel engine. My attorney's voice crackles across two continents, "Great news, Suzanne. U-Haul's agreed to settle for $30,000. Congratulations!" They screwed up, a clerical error. A huge butterfly dips over the spray of bougainvillea in the courtyard. "What are you going to do with all that money?"
I take in this information, breathe the soft humid air. It's a lot of money, probably more than the old TV and the Miss Piggy sheets and the International Relations textbooks were worth. Enough money to finish the cistern, to build the rock wall, get a telephone. I can live on that for at least a year in Mexico.
But $30,000 can't buy me a report card from 1969. Or replace the memories that I'd never recall because I can't pore over the class picture from sixth grade. It doesn't make a dent in what it cost me to tell my mom that the baby book she made me is gone, probably tossed in a dumpster by a guy who makes five bucks an hour sweeping up at U-Haul.
But in a way, there's a Zen-like feel to the whole thing. In a way, my outside reality now mimics what's happening inside me. Now I am free, unmoored from my past, as represented by every curling picture, prom dress, and college yearbook.
After dinner most evenings, Federico and I play guitars together. I lay in a turquoise hammock, and listen to the kissing sounds of the geckos on my ceiling. A green coil of incense smokes in the corner, and the sounds of the night insects fill the room. I don't have a TV. Or photo albums. Or my grandmother's books. I bought a CD player, and the new shiny disks sound cleaner than the scratched folk albums I used to own. "The Sounds of Silence" plays while I slice tomatoes from my garden. Federico gives me a CD of Sylvio Rodriguez. "He's the Cuban Bob Dylan," he says.
Buying onions in town I meet a weathered man wandering through Tulum who sells me a hammered copper bowl. Federico gives me delicate earrings made from amber and sharp curved bones, the spine of a boa. In Cancun, we buy a propane stove with two burners and a stand up fan so powerful it blows the mosquitoes away even at dusk.
This is my new grown up existence, and I gather my things around me. Now I'm cut loose from my old life, tethered not even by the thin rope of keepsakes, recuerdos, that once filled space 1754.

---

Fifteen years have passed since the day I discovered that my personal treasures were lost. Today I live in California, married to a man who collects music and comic books, who has bins of Legos stacked in the garage, who gave his ancient collection of Hot Wheels to our son. Once Thompson unearthed a stack of spiral notebooks, and showed me the math puzzles he invented as a kid. A picture of Thompson's father, age two, hugging a stuffed bear is framed in our hallway.
Every once in a while I forget that I lost so much. I'll hunt through my closet for that scarf my aunt knitted me, or dig through a box of pictures, before I realize that the object I'm looking for is gone forever. I can't point to the spidery scrawl from my kindergarten art folder and show my son that I used to draw rocket ships exactly like he does. I remember the stuffed turquoise bear I won when I sold the most Campfire Girl candy, and wish I could give it to my daughter.
In Spanish, a souvenir is called a recuerdo, and it also means "I remember." Without my recuerdos, there are holes in my life that I don't even know about. Like an aging mind, a whisp of memory materializes, but unanchored by a solid object in the present it floats away. I don't even recall, until I find the soft torn ticket stub in my pocket, the way my husband kissed my wrist on a summer evening. I have forgotten that my daughter had dark brown hair at birth, until I find the envelope marked Sofia's First Haircut, the dark feathery tuft tucked inside.
That empty storage space was packed with things, most of which I'll never know about. Was there something special my father said to me on my seventeenth birthday? Maybe my grandmother's handwriting is just like my daughter's. Perhaps my mother bought a dress for me for the first day of kindergarten that is the same color as the suit I pick out for my meeting with a publisher. Those are the connections I will never make. Without my recuerdos, I cannot remember.
I yearn for those objects from my past, not because I want to re-read my term papers or set my cheerleading trophy on the mantel. I need those touchstones to bring me back to the memories, to help confirm the bits of who I think I am; the blue and red horse ribbons would bring back the twelve-year-old pride, the squeak and snap of the saddle. Without the photo of my stepmother looking like she just stepped out of a fashion magazine as we backpacked along the John Muir trail, my feelings of teenage insecurity have even less to prop them up. Without the lyrics to the song I composed as I fought my way back from an addiction in the 80s, I can't be sure that I've groped my way to a safe, clean space. Without the tape-recording of my mother singing "Rockin' rollin' ridin', out along the bay..." I cannot sleep as deeply. I have tried to sing it for my own children, but I can't remember all the words.
]]> http://www.mungbeing.com/issue_4.html?articleID=253feed@mungbeing.com (Suzanne LaFetra) --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I inherited all the family photographs (sadly, only left as a stack of fading negatives) after my parents and grandparents died and so I have become the custodian of my family's collective memory. Using these small-scale, time-damaged negatives of my family's photographs, I have digitally scanned, partially coloured and reconstructed a personal vision of my family's dimly remembered and forgotten past.

In the end, memory is all we have.]]> http://www.mungbeing.com/issue_4.html?articleID=264feed@mungbeing.com (Ian Pyper)
her shadow the chlorine drying off me in little shivers

and held her feet while she lay dark-glassed and silent

in the striped beach chair



her ruby toenails were the throats of hummingbirds

her freckles -- constellations foretelling my future

but the ragged patch

on her right foot where the tan



seemed erased drew my little girl kisses

because that part that most naked pale skin

was on my own foot in the same frog-shape



and it was by that mark I knew

she was my mother


]]> http://www.mungbeing.com/issue_4.html?articleID=286feed@mungbeing.com (Christine Hamm) http://www.mungbeing.com/issue_4.html?articleID=257feed@mungbeing.com (Kelly Moore) http://www.mungbeing.com/issue_4.html?articleID=266feed@mungbeing.com (Dave Carpenter)
Godfrey Blow: Hello.

MB: During our initial discussion about childhood memories you said, "I remember some pleasant experiences but these are overwhelmed by sadness. Being physically abused by my parents and bullied at school by teachers and students remain forever etched on my memory. But perhaps I just remember the bad things. Somtimes I question what happened and whether I remember it correctly. Was it really that bad?" Can you please talk about how these experiences influenced your life? Feel free, but not obligated, to talk about specifics if you want.

GB: I find it very difficult to talk about childhood memories. Much of what I experienced was painful, both physically and mentally. And because it was so painful I have forgotten most of the details. I liken it to having your skin slowly peeled back! Memories of being beaten by my father, however, for rather trivial things are certainly things I remember. Most of it I try and forget, but every so often it springs to mind. I don't have fond memories of my mother either. With her it was more what she said to me that was painful!

MB: What do you think about the way in which people remember their childhoods?

GB: It was very rare that I was praised for anything I did. These experiences had an enormous influence on my life. I emerged from childhood a mentally screwed up mess - three quarters of the way to the madhouse. I know it sounds crazy, but although fragile in the head, I also felt strong and focused as if nothing was going to detract from following my desire to become an artist. I suddenly realized it was an advantage to be different! In this sense it wasn't that bad.

MB: Are the experiences "glossed over" as time goes by?

GB: My childhood experiences drove me to pursue an artistic journey. The elation I felt when it dawned on me that there was something in life that one could do that was not controlled by parents, teachers, authority etc. was unbelievable.

MB: When did you first learn to paint? You wanted to be an artist from a young age?

GB: I was encouraged to paint at about the age of 13 or 14 by a teacher at my local high school. He commented on the yellows I was using in a landscape I was painting. I began to paint at home using the local landscape in the Derbyshire area as a subject matter. I've been interested in landscape ever since.

MB: What were some of the pleasant experiences in your childhood? How easy is it to remember these things?

GB: I find it easier to remember the pleasant things from my childhood. Staying with my grandmother would rate very highly! I felt happy with her and was allowed to do normal childhood things.

MB: Like what?

GB: Normal childhood things such as making a noise! Getting your clothes and hands dirty! Making bows and arrows, collecting cards about outer space and playing with local children. But most of all I felt happy with her because I felt safe and wasn't going to get beaten around the head for the slightest thing I did wrong.

My parents later said that she "spoilt" me. If she did it made up for the other end of the scale!

MB: Your biography says "The sudden and recent death of the artist's parents has had a profound influence on his work. The inevitability of death which is perhaps still a taboo in our society, is dealt with in several of the artist's later work." First of all, I'm sorry to hear of your parent's passing. When did this occur? Can you tell us what happened?

GB: Both parents died within three months of each other, about five years ago. It was a shock at the time because their health seemed to be quite good and there was no reason to suppose they were about to die.

MB: Are you all right?

GB: Yes, I'm all right now, although just after they died it was difficult to come to terms with. Also for me, having such ambiguous feelings towards my parents, I had to access what this really meant for me personally. And despite having an unhappy childhood, their passing was very upsetting and disturbing. I felt I had to come to some understanding about our relationship because it certainly had not been straight forward.

MB: How does being "physically abused by your parents" influence the way you view their passing? Are there specific works that address the inevitability of death or is it a more general influence?



GB: At the time of my parent's death the fact that I had been physically and psychologically abused didn't really influence how I viewed their passing. I was trying to understand life and death in a broader context. At the time of their death I was working on a picture which I later called "Kingdom Within". When I was halfway through this painting my mother died so I added images of her to the work and about two months later my father died, so again I integrated more bits and pieces. The painting seemed to just grow and grow in complexity. The images used weren't just straightforward constructs but became more universal in application, in that they dealt with male/female characteristics, rebirth, birth, the otherworld, life cycles, growth, decay, etc - the whole thing just snowballed. I wanted to give the impression that things could have been continually added to the painting without it ever being considered "finished". It my desire to create a new mythology, through visual means, of life experienced by me. I just hope it does something for others as well.

MB: Can you elaborate on this? This sounds intriguing.

GB: It was something that Tolkein said about mythology that interested me. He said that mythology had in it elements of truth and that stories/legends were a way of explaining things in the world that we have no explanation for. I suppose I am trying to create new stories, partly based on symbols and metaphors, in my explanation of the world. To do this the images I use are natural forms and events/things experienced by me. I also wish to challenge the idea that we need organised religion to provide us with directions. We are perfectly capable of forming or own view of the world.

MB: What do you hope others will get out of it?

GB: Often others see totally different things in the work than I intended! This is perfectly ok, in fact I find it rather refreshing! If people comment on the work then its done its job. I hope that other people get some of the enjoyment, and other emotions, I experienced doing the work.

MB: Do you have ways to cope with extreme situations?

GB: I cope with extreme situations by including aspects of these experiences in my paintings. For instance, "Fallen", I painted in 2004, in response to the death of a dear friend of mine. He was only fifty eight when he died and this painting was a tribute to him. In my picture although the tree is "fallen" it appears to be coming to live again, crawling along the forest floor. My memories of him will never die.

For me its quite natural to deal with the inevitability of death. Better to face it than avoid it!



MB: You moved from England to Australia in 1982. What prompted that move?

GB: In 1982, Megs, my partner who was born in Western Australia, and I decided to move from London to Perth, WA. At the time we were living in a small flat in Hendon, London. We had talked about living somewhere else and we'd already visited WA in 1980 and thought maybe, if the opportunity arose we'd move. Also at that time Megs became pregnant and so that's what finally made up our minds!

MB: How does Australia compare to England?

GB: There are many differences between Australia and England, although there are things that are remarkable similar. Although Perth is much smaller than London there are quite a number of commercial and public galleries here. The interest in the arts in Perth is strong and compares well with London. Perth is perhaps a little insular and it takes a while for locals to accept anybody new. But many places are probably like this.

MB: Do you still have connections to England?

GB: I still have connections with family, friends and other artists in England. Many of my paintings are based on people and the landscape of England. These connections are very important to me. I feel they help me grow as a person/artist. The use of Celtic mythology is crucial for some of the images in my work.

MB: Why is that?

GB: I was initially interested in finding out something about the culture/history of the British Isles. The furthest back one could go, with the most information, seemed to be the Celts. Things that had been written about them came mainly from the Romans, and although this was second hand it was very interesting.

Many of the pagan concepts involving the creation of the world, male and female aspects of the natural environment and the "otherworld", seemed to me to be far more rational and "real" than anything in the bible!

Of course, this is a personal interpretation based on areas in Derbyshire where I was raised as a child.

MB: Tell us a little about Perth and the surrounding environs. Has your location affected or influenced your work?

GB: We live just outside Perth in a little place called Kalamunda (home in the forest). In summer its extremely hot 35 degrees centigrade plus (95F) and in winter cool to mild and quite wet. I love the trees here. They twist and turn creating fantastic shapes and forms. Sometimes I base paintings on location here or combine them with landscape forms from England. The light here is quite pure with astonishing clarity. There is a strange feeling of being in an alien landscape and being quite at home! I enjoy that sensation of being in a place that is really special.

MB: The "alien-ness" of the landscape really comes through in your work. I love it.

GB: I find this really difficult to talk about or explain! I suppose if you "feel something" its more likely to come through in your work. I find myself more receptive when I'm in an alien landscape. There are certain places that I enjoy and also feel disturbed about at the same time.

I have found that just about everywhere I have visited interesting and compelling. You can be an artist anywhere and everywhere!

MB: You say that you are in the middle of the Australian desert now; what is that like?

GB: Yes, at the moment I'm kind of in the middle of the Australian desert! I was offered an Art teaching position for ten weeks and currently live in a little mining place called Kambalda. Its about 600 kms east of Perth. Its winter here at the moment, although you wouldn't know it! The nights are cool, say 3 degrees, but its pleasantly warm during the day. The landscape here is really fascinating. Red earth, small bushes and strange small trees predominate. Also there are loads of emus, wild goats and dead kangaroos by the side of the road, cleaned up by road trains. The colours and light here are amazing. The light kind of freezes everything in a strange sort of clarity.

MB: That sounds beautiful!

GB: Yes, Kambalda is beautiful. I'm slowly beginning to find out more about it. Last weekend for example, I visited a vast salt lake called Lake Lefroy. It was amazing! Not much water, but enormous areas of salt crystals glistening in the sun. The predominant colour was a kind of silvery grey. The sensation of endless space was overwhelming. It was alienating, but fascinating and compelling.

MB: Do you like it there?

GB: Yes, its interesting being here. I'm letting everything sink in before using this experience in my artwork.

MB: You were offered a teaching position. Is that something you do? Tell us about some of your other jobs.

GB: Up until now, for years in fact, I have been a relief/supply teacher. For me teaching is a way of earning enough money to enable me to live and make art etc.

MB: What is a relief/supply teacher?

GB: A relief/supply teacher is a substitute position for a teacher who is sick or on a professional development course.

MB: Oh.

GB: The teaching position I have at the moment I'm really enjoying. The students and the staff are really friendly. I'm enjoying my time here. Missing my studio though!



MB: Talk a little about technique. Do you paint outdoors, what materials do you like to work with, etc.

GB: No I don't paint outdoors. I take photographs of things and people that interest me and use these in my work. Sometimes I use one image, or part of it, and at other times I might use up to twenty photographs. I like the cropping that you get in photography. This strongly influences me, especially as regards composition and design.

MB: Do you always paint from stills?

GB: I generally work from stills. These can be from 25 years ago and more recent shots. "Survivor", for example, was based on a black and white photograph taken with a Brownie camera. I found the picture in an old box, it was faded and torn in the corner, but offered up many creative possibilities. I don't use photography with the intention of making a literal copy; its more a starting point for creative exploration. I prefer crappy photographs that are faded, out of focus over or under exposed. These seem to offer more potential for change or experimentation.

link

MB: Do you paint exclusively in your studio?

GB: Yes, I work exclusively in the studio. I enjoy having a base to work from.

MB: With me it's the process of drawing and painting that interests me more than the finished work. I usually start with studies and sketches completed in a small sketch book. This sometimes takes weeks. I also make notes about what I'm trying to do. These are very useful later.

MB: Can you tell us what kinds of things go into your notes?

GB: Sometimes the notes I make are very straight forward. For instance, I may just write at the side of an image something like: "develop tall panel with few elements" or "buildings crumbling", "lost or fallen civilization". These may not make sense to anybody else, but for me they point towards further developments or directions. I'm making these comments whilst looking at my sketchbook. Sometimes the notes relate to the artistic elements, solving visual problems, or they are about the ideas behind the work or they are about both.

I usually have several works on the go at any one time, slowly developing my ideas. At the moment I'm using acrylics. I did use oils for years but because of a recent asthmatic condition I've swapped to acrylics.

MB: How is that working?

GB: It seems to be working well. I'm a lot better since I started using acrylics. With oils its more the pure turps and varnishes I used for glazes and other techniques that seem to effect me.

I like to build up the surfaces in several layers sometimes taking weeks, months to complete a work. I also try and build up the layers in different textural levels, sometimes using thinly glazed areas contrasted with impasto parts. My paintings are obsessively detailed and I really enjoy working in this manner.

For me technique is important but not all consuming. Its just as important to develop and nurture artistic vision/imagination. I try and achieve this by being totally focused on whatever I'm doing at the time

MB: Who are some of your influences; what artists have inspired you?

GB: Derbyshire was and still is, a major influence on my artistic development. It felt like it had always been there for me, fitted like a glove, designed for my exclusive use.

When I first started to paint [John] Constable was an inspiration. I liked the way he used paint to convey light and colour. It also seemed to me that he had a real commitment and integrity to everything he did.

After that early period I rarely looked at other painters/artists. Not that I wasn't interested in their work, far from it, just that I had found a way of connecting with the world that worked for me. I had arrived in the world and world had arrived in me!



MB: Tell us a little about your family.

GB: link My partner Megs has always been very supportive towards me. She's very knowledgeable about Art and probably knows more than some artists. Megs is a devoted mother - she is always there for our two children, Rebecca and Tess. Unfortunately Megs was diagnosed with Breast Cancer about five years ago. The surgery was successful and she has completely recovered from the operation. She is well at the moment and fortunately the cancer has not returned. At the time I felt helpless. The only way I could deal with these experiences was to paint about them. Hence paintings such as "Survivor" and "Tree" deal with these issues.

MB: You use painting as a therapeutic tool, then?

GB: I wouldn't say that I use painting as a therapeutic tool, at least I try not to. I see painting more as a way of working through personal experiences and expressing them in a visual context. Sometimes this can be painful because you relive past events. I suppose painting could be viewed as a kind of self-counselling. Its probably the opposite to a therapeutic tool, in that instead of being soothing and covering up the wound, you re-open the scars and make them larger!

MB: Do your kids have an interest in art?

GB: Both my kids have shown an interest in Art. Rebecca went to university in Western Australia to complete a degree in Visual Arts. She paints freely and expressively and is very focused in everything she does. Her work is totally different to mine. I think this is great! Sometimes it is difficult for children of artists to break free and not be compared to their parent. Rebecca has certainly succeeded in this regard.

My other daughter, Tess, completed her Year 12, in Art but decided to do something else. Tess made all the decisions regarding which direction to take in life. She is a quiet and sensitive young woman.

MB: Does Megs work?

GB: No, Megs does not work. She wanted to stay at home and look after our children. She made the decision to be a full-time Mum and it certainly worked for us.

MB: Is it common to have a one-job household in Australia or do both partners usually work?

GB: In Australia it is more usually for both partners to work.

MB: Aside from painting, what other art interests you? What about music?

GB: Music interests me greatly. Gradually over the years I have built up a reasonable collection of cds. I love listening to music whilst I paint. I find that it helps with the creative process. Most of the stuff I listen to is classical in nature, although I enjoy Van Morrison, JJ Cale, Dylan, Chapman and Leonard Cohen.

MB: You mentioned that you've had articles written about your artwork. Do any of these articles stand out in your mind?

In 1976 I held my first solo show at the Old Bull Arts Centre, Barnet, London. An article on this exhibition written by Douglas Priestley appeared in the Hampstead and Highgate Express. I suppose it stands out in my mind because it was the first time somebody had written about my work. It is alos significant for me for other reasons. The majority of critics who have written about my work since have not even really scratched the surface in their level of appreciation/understanding etc. Douglas Priestley's review explored the subject matter of on display, stylistic and technical aspects, and the effect the work had on him personally. He also pointed out hoe other people may perceive and view the work. It was a complex review - sensitively written.

Of the other articles of my work Judith McGrath's review of my last solo show, at the Church Gallery, Perth, WA IN 2001, also stood out. She pointed out, amongst other things, that after exhausting herself attempting to interpret the ideas behind the images it was better to just stop and enjoy the surface of the painting and just let things flow! Although this seems to be a fairly obvious and straight forward suggestion it is also very significant. To often critics are obsessed with interpreting images in a verbal/intellectual sense without really allowing their more creative side to engage with the work. There is also a level of arrogance with certain critics which I find unbelievable. Those who can't do it write about it! They assume, quite wrongly in my view, that they are the ones who understand the work and whose views everybody else in the arts community should cherish and be influenced by. The power structure within the arts is probably responsible for this state of affairs.



MB: Tell us about your involvement with the Stuckists.

GB: took part in the "First Stuckist International" at the Stuckist International Centre, London in 2002. Shortly after that I formed the Perth Stuckists. I remain the only Perth based Stuckist.

Prior to my involvement with the Stuckists I became increasingly disillusioned with the Arts scene. The Stuckists stand against the pretentious nature of much "conceptual art" is fantastic. Artists who actually believe that it is their work that is important not celebrity status, or how much your work sells for-this is so refreshing! I think the promotion of painting is really vital. Its very easy to use ready mades, video and computer graphics. Artists who use these media often have real difficulty when it comes to painting. Their lack of skill, content and imagination is revealed for all to see. The results they achieve are often weak and pathetic. I maintain that if you can use paint in an interesting and compelling way you are producing art of true human value and today this probably makes you an "outsider". The Stuckists are the true avant guard and rebels. I find it unbelievable that anybody who claims to be an artist would not support a movement that promotes integrity and genuine creativity. The Stuckists are probably one of the few art movements in the last twenty years that is not governed by the "Arts Industry" with its corruption, greed, self promotion, cronyism and need for constant gimmicks. Stuckism is succeeding because the artists themselves are in control.

MB: You seem to have some strong opinions about the Art Establishment.

GB: Yes, I do have strong opinions about the Art Establishment. One of the things I find the most offensive is the artists who pretend to be the advanced guard and who need people who are rich and influential to support them. They have been called "Thatcher's children", with good reason. They came out of a system that blatantly supports market forces, with the sole aim of making huge amounts of money and gaining as much publicity as possible. This is not radical art but part of a new kind of academia.

For me it's artists who reject this nonsense who are the true radicals.

MB: I understand that you are planning to exhibit your work with the Athens Stuckists in 2006. Can you tell us about that?

GB: Yes, I am going to exhibit my work with the Athens Stuckists in 2006. This show will include work from all over the world. Michael , the curator, has worked extremely hard to organize this exhibition. Its truly amazing what artists can do. We don't really need "professional" curators! Really looking forward to taking part in this exhibition. Judging by the artists participating it will be an interesting show.

MB: Who is Michael?

GB: Michael is founding member of the Athens Stuckists. For me "professional curators" are just part of the layering system of the art establishment and are mostly unnecessary.

MB: What is your reaction to the news that "On July 27th, 2005, the Tate Galleries of London rejected a gift of 160 paintings from the Stuckists valued at £500,000 (around $800,000). Director of the Tate, Sir Nicholas Serota, said "We do not feel that the work is of sufficient quality in terms of accomplishment, innovation or originality of thought to warrant preservation in perpetuity in the national collection." Which is an interesting proclamation considering the Tate just spent £23,000 (around $39,000), to purchase for their permanent collection 30 grams of canned faeces by Italian conceptualist, Piero Manzoni.".

GB: I wasn't surprised by the news that the Tate Galleries of London had rejected a gift of 160 paintings from the Stuckists. Its rather a relief not to have your work accepted by them, given that they would rather spend thousands of pounds on cans of faeces! The Stuckists are not full of shit! The Tate's judgement of artistic value can hardly be taken seriously. Nicholas Serota should resign immediately. Under his stewardship the quality of the work in the national collection has declined in terms of accomplishment, innovation and originality of thought.

MB: What collections contain your work? How can collectors obtain your work?

GB: My work is in several public Australian collections, including Artbank, Art Gallery of Western Australia, The University of Western Australia, City of Fremantle, Curtin University of Technology, City of Bunbury and others.

Collectors can obtain my work by viewing examples on my website and making enquiries by email. Arrangements for sale and transportation can be made through the gallery that represents me here: Stafford Studio of Fine Art, Cottesloe, Perth, Western Australia.

MB: Thank you, Godfrey.
]]> http://www.mungbeing.com/issue_4.html?articleID=261feed@mungbeing.com (Mark Givens)
I started Catholic school a year later in the first grade, and we had to use these long, thick, black pencils that had no erasers with which we learned the proper way to print our letters. I could barely get my tiny hands around them, and I had trouble feeding them into the classroom pencil sharpener, bolted to the back windowsill near the "cloakroom." Those gigantic pencils always felt like they were a punishment from the warmly strict Sr. Theresa Mary for my poor penmanship. They were gritty, rough, ugly, and they smelled terribly. I used to imagine that they were made from wood that the nuns found in the alley next to the school, explaining to myself the stench and the awkwardness of these leaded rods of stinky painted-black wood. My red Faber-Castell ran circles around these junky pencils, dinging the little bell on its tricycle. I secretly kept that red beauty at home, with my most prized possessions.

When the good sisters decided that we were ready, they allowed us to use whatever pencils our parents bought for us. I cannot recall all of the brands and comic book heroes that adorned my grade school pencils. But they all fell short of my giant red one. I thought that the green ferrule on Dixon pencils was ugly. I hated anything hexagonal, and I despised yellow pencils. I thought that the former was unwieldy, while the latter always looked dirty. I always ran through my erasers and broke the thin, brittle points of my pencils in elementary school. Nothing could compare to the strength and red integrity of my red monolith that Miss Manning gave me on the first day of Kindergarten. Nothing.

So when we were allowed to use automatic pencils in the fourth grade and ballpoint pens in the fifth, I was ecstatic! No more smelly, brittle, garbage pencils. I made it though the rest of grade school without ever using a wooden pencil again.

But the omni-evil St. Trinita made us revert to yellow number two pencils when we got to middle school. There I was, finally rid of the inferior pencils that well-meaning parents bought their children in the mid 80s, and this nefarious nun - who could bring the drill instructor from Full Metal Jacket to tears - was making us use wooden pencils like common babies. "Hold them between your first two fingers and your thumb like this," she demanded, "and I guarantee that you will write beautifully." She was wrong. I hated pencils and wrote horribly until St. Trinita decided that the sixth grade was allowed to use "blue or black ballpoint pens." Still, we were strictly forbidden to get anywhere near math class with ink, and we had to use pencils for the handwriting lessons that Sr. Trinita mandated whenever she decided that the school's handwriting was going downhill or whenever she felt like being mean.

When I got to high school, I defiantly used pens in math class. I would be damned if I would ever touch a pencil again. After all, I was grown up and got to pick my own foreign language courses and electives. But then I started to take art classes, and Mr. Roth made us a deal. He promised to teach the class like a "college class" and to teach us the "professional" methods of drawing and painting, if we would act the part. And that included getting our parents to buy us premium pencils. "How are you supposed to make superior art with inferior supplies?" Mr. Roth asked. So my parents bought me some fancy green Eberhard Faber drawing pencils, and I was in graphite heaven. But at over $1 each, I was not going to take the copious notes required by the good Friars of my high school with those pencils. So I continued to use ink for everything outside of art class - even math.

All through college and graduate school, I absolutely shunned pencils. They reminded me of strict nuns and what life would have been like if I had gone to art school, rather than a small liberal arts college to major in philosophy. The minimal math requirement for humanities majors at the school where I did my undergraduate work was affectionately called "Math for Plants." Even then, my young, pony-tailed professor allowed us to write in ink, even for exams. So I used the darkest gel pens I could find, to be the farthest thing from graphite I could be. I occasionally used mechanical pencils to highlight and annotate expensively translated philosophy texts, but only because I would then allow myself to produce marginalia in the currently faddish edition of Plato's complete works.

But by the time I finished the coursework in my PhD program, when no one could ever again tell me what to take notes on or what to take them with, I picked up pencils again. Reading about Thoreau and Hemingway, it is hard not to want to pick up a simple pencil to write something with. "A nice, manly pencil for manly thoughts," I thought to myself.

As an adult, I discovered a world of pencil quality that I never dreamed of. Dixons are not ugly just because of their green ferrules. They write smoothly and darkly. Hexagonal pencils are more comfortable to hold than round ones. German and Japanese pencils are graphite dreams come true. And the glory of incense cedar put to rest the nightmares of badly odoriferous writing instruments. I no longer run through the erasers before the pencils, and I have become an expert at getting the perfect point.

Rather than looking for the "perfect pen" like many people I know do, I decided to opt out and to use simple pencils instead. I even discovered pencils that write so beautifully that my old Faber-Castell red glory seemed on par with the black monstrosities of Sr. Theresa Mary's class. Those things were pencil memories that I had to repress every time I picked up a stick of wood and graphite, and now even the beautiful red pencil that spoiled pencils for me before I even touched them at the tender age of six seems like a piece of trash.
link
I still own that red pencil. I used to believe that I held onto it because it represented some sort of unspoiled innocence from childhood, before the guilt of Catholic education and the freedom that comes with everything they teach young people there about the usual school subjects. I started a website devoted to pencils, and I get email everyday from folks across the globe who tell me that pencils have put them back in touch with something simpler - the time before PDAs, blogs, airplane-safe pens and archival markers. You don't exactly have to worry about ink color and how fancy your pen looks at a meeting if you just use wooden pencils instead.

But I think that what people love about pencils is not necessarily something akin to childhood innocence. I don't think it's possible to recover the naivety of the sandbox, nor is it desirable to do so. The responsibility that comes with knowing what we know that we did not know as children - whether we know it from education or worldly experience - is not something that we can shirk off just by using pencils or any other magical tools. The reason pencils resonate with adults is that they remind us of the sense of wonder that we had as children. Only, as adults, this wonder is armed with some degree of practical wisdom in that pencils put us into a position of wonder that is coupled with power and freedom. We look at the world differently when we remember being kids, and we have the freedom to explore our world that we might not have had as school children with homework and parents and curfews. Most importantly, we have the power through what we already know to look in the right places for what we still wonder about as adults.

Personally, I always try to keep that sense of wonder in my grown-up endeavors and practical dealings with the world. Only I don't keep it boxed up like I do my big red pencil.]]> http://www.mungbeing.com/issue_4.html?articleID=272feed@mungbeing.com (John Gamber, Jr)
This memory takes a Rashand#333;mon turn (though strictly internally). I don't think I've ever discussed it with my sister (or anyone else for that matter), so there is no external reinforcement of memory reinvention. My mind simply remembers the conclusion to this story in two different ways:

1. My aunt discovered a bottle of booze (whiskey?) under the kitchen sink when Grampa went to take a piss. She had been opening cupboards looking for it. When Grampa returned we gave hasty good-bye hugs and kisses. Walking through the trailer park, my aunt said to me "I should've had you guys steal that bottle, he shouldn't have it."
   
2. My aunt discovered a bottle of booze (whiskey?) under the kitchen sink when Grampa went to take a piss. She had been opening cupboards looking for it. She pulled out the bottle and handed it to me. "Here, take this out of here, your Grampa shouldn't have it." My sister and I walked out without saying good-bye to Grampa, and we waited outside until our Aunt joined us. I handed her the bottle and she took it home.

What accounts for this schism in my mind? The environment is vivid, the circumstances are clear. The way the memory plays out in both cases is similar in its effect on the mind of the child living in an alcoholic trailer trash family. So all I can do is speculate as to why my mind is distorting this memory.

It is possible that I am recalling two (or more) separate incidents that are so similar my memory wires have crossed and blurred: my mind may find it easier to construct stories out of fragments both lucid and foggy. Perhaps the first version is a softening of what might be considered a more traumatic experience, that of having to steal booze from one alcoholic adult family member at the behest of another. Perhaps the second story is a dramatic embellishment on the first memory, a "what could've happened" scenario that I played out in my mind after the event occurred.

Or maybe there is something my mind wants me to forget.
]]> http://www.mungbeing.com/issue_4.html?articleID=287feed@mungbeing.com (jody franklin) There were school dances in Junior High, but in elementary school, we'd never had one. In late May, there was a dance during the last hour of school on a Friday. Both sixth grade classes had to attend, and there was fruit punch and cookies and a disco light hung up in the gymnasium. The school janitor spun 45s and some of the more popular kids ventured onto the floor. Most of us hovered around the sidelines and watched.
Jimmy Wallace danced. He was poetry in motion as he boogied with Julie Durbin and Lisa Russo. Would Jimmy ask me? Did I look okay? When Todd brought me a cup of punch, I asked how I looked. He beamed. "You look great. Really beautiful."
"Thanks." I drank the punch. Todd stood there with his hands folded. Jimmy spun Lisa around like "Saturday Night Fever." I imagined myself in her place.
To generate some enthusiasm, the janitor declared the next song a "Sadie Hawkins," where the girls had to ask a boy to dance. We all circled the gym, looking for the boy we wanted to dance with. Todd smiled as I neared him. I smiled back.
Jimmy Wallace was standing just past Todd, hanging with some friends by the punch table. I hurried over. "May I have this dance?" Jimmy rolled his eyes and pushed past me to accept Holly German's invitation instead.
My mouth went dry. I ran blindly out of the gymnasium. Todd caught up with me in the hallway.
He was shaking. "Fuck Jimmy." I stared at him. The word seemed so out of place. A teacher would be along any second. Todd squared his shoulders. "Fuck him. I'll dance with you."
I burst into tears again. "It's not the same."
Suddenly, Todd grabbed me and kissed me on the lips. I made a face and pushed him away. "Todd! What are you doing?"
He paled. "I..."
"Leave me alone!" I ran back to the girls' room and cried until Miss MacPhie came to see what was the matter.
I walked home alone that afternoon, for the first time I could remember.
Todd was waiting on my front porch. "I'm sorry, Lynnie. I didn't mean to make you cry."
I pushed past him to go inside. There was nothing to say.
He'd ruined everything.]]> http://www.mungbeing.com/issue_4.html?articleID=279feed@mungbeing.com (Amy Frushour Kelly)
I had experienced the dream in a sleeping state a couple of times before, where the environment in the dream was becoming increasingly more difficult to breathe in. It was horribly strange because it was not as if the air was polluted or too thin, but it was as if the air had been sucked out of everywhere. Imagine you're taking a bike tire and you inflate it to about sixty pounds per square inch, and then imagine living inside of that. It was as if there was that much pressure making it difficult to breathe in, plus there was no actual air to breathe anyway. All breathing was constricted as if the air itself was tied up by a boa constrictor.
Well anyway, in the final dream, which was a lucid dream, I remember running around my room, seeing my window open, but no air to go either in or out. And watching my stuffed animal collection, the space around each animal pushed in like a hyperbolic compression, begging to breathe straight again. There was a poster on my wall which said, "Think Big" with a reddish background, and a giant mouse and an elephant, much smaller next to a mousehole archway. I had turned on both the overhead light and the reading light next to my bed.

By the time my mom came into my room, I was screaming out against the air which seemed to steal all sound, and I was throwing a blue toolkit-like case around my room. Inside that case was a gift I had gotten sometime within the last year or two - it was an erector set with all the little girders, platforms, pulleys, nuts, bolts, and a couple of really funky looking motors which could be attached to all these things to make them run once one got them together. It took my mom about twenty minutes to bring me down from that manic phase, and for the first ten minutes I was still in the not-being-able-to-breathe phase. I was frenetically talking with her, telling her about the air being missing and wondering how she could breathe so smoothly in this world without air, and didn't she even notice the way things were? I don't think I slept very much the rest of that night, but I'm ever grateful that I haven't had any more dreams like that.

Ever since then, my greatest fear has been asphyxiation. In any form. To be too far underwater and not be able to breathe, to have a plastic bag pulled over my head and not be able to breathe, to have my chest somehow constricted and not be able to breathe. Funny thing is that now I'm one of the few blessed people who get to suffer from a lung condition called pleurisy, of which in its worst condition is pretty much the same as having your chest wound up inside of a boa constrictor.

This recent spell of not being able to breathe properly has given me a new-found sympathy for all those folks who were crucified by the Romans so many centuries ago. An interesting thing I found out about five years ago is that when people are crucified, they die not from loss of blood - the Romans were careful to place the nails in just the right spot so as to minimize the bleeding. A person who was crucified died from a combination of asphyxiation and exhaustion. Somehow as they hung, they would keep pulling their ribcage up against the strong will of gravity and take another breath until finally their energy was spent.

How all this ties together in my mind is that breathing is a symbol for life. Recently when I was at the holistic pharmacy, I was studying remedies for lung ailments and one key statement the book I was reading made was that a problem with the lungs can be viewed as symptomatic of the afflicted person not breathing in life. Also, I've been studying a book entitled Breathe! You are Alive by Thich Nhat Hahn, a Buddhist scholar. In it, he outlines numerous ways in which the reader can increase his or her awareness of life simply by breathing and observing that breathing.

I have this strange feeling that the world we are currently residing in has not yet fully begun to come to life. In fact, sometimes it seems as if people's lives, simply due to the increasing population density and the increasing complexity, are becoming more and more constricted, even though the goal of the human race all along has been to attain freedom. It's very very difficult for anybody to breathe freely here in America when there's rent payments every month, bills, licenses taxes, insurance, job hunts, automobile upkeep, an on and on. Someday America will learn what freedom really is, but for now I still am just left wondering if maybe that's what my dream was about, and why an erector set with two motors?
]]> http://www.mungbeing.com/issue_4.html?articleID=271feed@mungbeing.com (Don Vasa) http://www.mungbeing.com/issue_4.html?articleID=278feed@mungbeing.com (Mark DeLong) http://www.mungbeing.com/issue_4.html?articleID=126 http://www.mungbeing.com/issue_4.html?articleID=126&subID=96feed@mungbeing.com (Gus Fink) http://www.mungbeing.com/issue_4.html?articleID=151&subID=95feed@mungbeing.com (Julian Lawrence) http://www.mungbeing.com/issue_4.html?articleID=273&subID=231feed@mungbeing.com (Rik Albatros) http://www.mungbeing.com/issue_4.html?articleID=265&subID=224feed@mungbeing.com (Suzanne Baumann) http://www.mungbeing.com/issue_4.html?articleID=260&subID=222feed@mungbeing.com (Mark Givens) link
I don't know when I first visited Shelter Island, but I assume it was during my infancy. A record exists in the form of a photograph, showing my gleeful three-year old mug generously smothered with the contents of Irving Bazer's award-winning blueberry pie, a snapshot which has for over two decades now been a favorite artifact of nostalgia on that side of the family. Uncle Irving (actually my great-uncle by marriage) provided the best food I'd ever tasted and regaled me with the greatest stories I'd ever heard, sanitized Hemingway parallels about shark-fishing or life in the orphanage, back sometime getting on toward the turn of the century, or so it seemed. In those days I hardly realized that centuries could turn. Yet he always intimated me; as warm, charismatic, and open as he could be, there was sometimes a sharp and bitter edge to him that I didn't know how to get a handle on.

I felt something of a turning point in my relationship to Irving when I was seven: he asked me what I liked to read, and I told him "Classics." I had just finished Oliver Twist, although it had taken me maybe half a year to get through it. His face lit up. He told me that I was a very smart boy, and he let me play with the short-wave radio I always reached for. It's only now that I remember how Oliver Twist opened with a description of orphanage life.

His wife Julia Bazer, my great-aunt by blood, always went by Judy, also my sister's name. This could have been confusing, or at least a bit odd, but I never really made the connection. She wasn't Judy; she was Aunt Judy. That was all there was to it. Aunt Judy was a professional ghost-writer. I thought it was the most amazing thing I'd ever heard that she had written all those books on that one shelf. I couldn't understand for the life of me why someone else always got credit for it. We played a lot of Scrabble together.

I always knew their house as a place with five whole bedrooms (or was it six?), with only enough residents to take up one. To me these other rooms were always spares, waiting for us or other extended family members in the summer, and I never realized just how much history they must have pointed to. I still don't have much of a handle on it. Even a simple history is a convoluted thing. Tracing the lines of one life is hard enough. There are so many such lines in a family history, so many of them faded out decades or only years or -- and I'm afraid I'll have to tell you about this, too -- even months ago, I think one would have to be a great history artist in one's own right to have the faintest hope of pulling it off. Elmyr de Hory recreated Picasso and Matisse on camera for Orson Welles, and maybe that's what I'm trying to do on paper for you here, forge a family from the whole cloth of my own imperfect memory. Maybe Elmyr was a ghost-writer, too.

Shelter Island is one of the country's major osprey habitats. Wikipedia tells us that the osprey "has always presented something of a riddle to the taxonomist." I am trying to write about Shelter Island without calling anyone in my family to ask about the details I don't remember, or never knew, or know full well that my memory has distorted. This is also a riddle, but the sphinx interrogating me will remain stone-faced no matter how I answer. This is because the sphinx is itself a product of the riddle, being built stone by stone as I try to think of an answer. No one is asking me; the sphinx too is a forgery.

When I was five years old, a picture of my mother and myself appeared on the front page of the Shelter Island Reporter. I don't remember why. We were shown on the sand of one of the island's beaches, and she had a guitar.

Shelter Island is literally sheltered, located as it is between the North Fork and South Fork of Long Island. It can be reached only by boat; ferries run to and from both the suspiciously quaint town of Greenport to the north and the minuscule North Haven to the ironic south, wherein the main drag is anyway called South Ferry Road. To my mind, the focus of the local geography was Shelter Island, not Long Island, so in looking at a map I never saw a fork. I saw instead a sinister set of jaws threatening to clamp down on the place I knew better than any outside my hometown some hours to the north. Thanks to the Bazers, Long Island has always been a sinister crocodile to me.

I remember a room that sort of wrapped around the house in an L-shape, connecting to the dining room and the sun porch and the downstairs bathroom, where it seems in memory to have always been dark. I remember a leather sofa and an old piano in that room, and a wall lined with shelves that could have stored anything so far as my mind is currently concerned. Even when the threads are of a simple history, and it is one's own, they can be thin enough to lose sight of, and when they reappear they do so without context.

I remember the novelty of matching silverware and dinner plates, and cloth napkins.

I remember late nights, sheltered by this warm house from the unimaginable darkness and silence of the sparsely populated island, listening to strange pinging sounds and ghostly foreign whispers on the short-wave. Once, my mother swore she could hear a soft strain of Swedish.

The last time I was there, I was in my teens, I don't know how old exactly. Uncle Irving was nearing the end of his long and well lived life, and he wasn't able to get out of bed at any point during the visit. But for a few furtive glances through the open bedroom door, I only saw him twice to say hello and, for the last time, good-bye. I know that he had some words for me as I prepared to depart; I don't know what they were.

Their son, Jon Bazer, was also there. I remember a strong handshake, but beyond that I still don't know how to tell you about him. It's an elusive thread, brutally frayed, and my hands aren't so steady today.

When Aunt Judy called to let us know that it was over, I was the one to answer the phone. I'd been sleeping; sounding more tired than I possibly could have been, she asked me to pass the message along. I fell back asleep, and on waking I assumed it had been a dream. Threads can be lost in so many ways; how can I be sure that any of this is true?

On my way with my mother to Uncle Irving's funeral, we got into a fight. I don't know what about; I was a teenager, and our relationship wasn't good then, so it could have been anything, any sort of excuse for confrontation. I insisted that she pull over and let me out of the car before we'd even reached the interstate. As I walked home, I already began to regret it.

If my memory serves me for even an unconnected life, the painter Max Beckmann did a number of self-portraits in which portions of his face were left blank or occluded, unless perhaps they were all forgeries. Did Elmyr de Hory ever paint his own self-portrait, perhaps signed by Modigliani? Can I forge my own signature here?

I don't have the chronology straight, but I think it may have been Irving's death that set Jon off. There was a period of months when we simply wouldn't answer the phone at my mother's house. I remember listening to the messages as he left them for her on the answering machine, standing in the doorway to my bedroom petrified and confused. It wasn't my first encounter with schizophrenia. Maybe there are certain things that can't be forged after all.

I don't remember when Aunt Judy died. I don't know why I was not in attendance when she was laid to rest. I don't know why I can't remember this. I just don't know at all.

Jon Bazer recently committed suicide. My mother told me when she got the news that she couldn't help but still think of him as the fifteen-year old cousin she looked up to and had a bit of a crush on one Shelter Island summer. After maybe fifty years, this was the first thing she thought of when she heard his name.

There is no movie theatre on Shelter Island, and according to bylaws there never will be. F For Fake was never shown there.

I have woven something together here, I don't know what, from threads that may or may not have been my own. I'll be heading back to Shelter Island for the first time in about a decade for Jon's memorial service this October. Sometimes you find those threads and pick them back up without even trying.]]> http://www.mungbeing.com/issue_4.html?articleID=259feed@mungbeing.com (David "Starchy" Grant) link

I talked to David Greenberger the other day. He's the creator of "Duplex Planet", a project that started out as this little zine and evolved into the definitive collection of conversations with old people. There have been cds, books, lectures, comic books, and offshoot projects. Some of the subjects have been made into folk heroes of sorts, having their words turned into songs, their art into album covers, and their thoughts into stage plays.
David conducts interviews with old people, or rather he engages in conversations. He doesn't want to talk about the "good ol' days" - it's not an "oral history" project - he wants to get to know these folks and find out what they are thinking about now. So he engages them in conversation and presents some interesting questions to get off the beaten path and just talk. And that's one of the things that makes him a good interviewer. There's also a great deal of humor in the conversations, some intentional, some not, but all of it is interesting. He genuinely cares about these people and that, too, comes through in his work.

So I wanted to ask him a bunch of questions, engage him in conversation, to find out who he is. I wanted to find out a little about his past and try to discover who he is when he's NOT working on "Duplex Planet".

But the funny thing is that, as he points out in the interview, this project, these conversations with the elderly, reveal a great deal about him. He is the common thread that runs through the project, the thing that's been there since the beginning and the one who decides what will be presented. "It's very much them in the spotlight," he says, "but I'm sort of deciding what the spotlight gets shined on."

And that's absolutely true. And I found myself rambling on about god-knows-what. I did find out a little about him and the way he thinks but the more we talked, the more I realized that this project is so much more than an interesting study for him. It courses through his veins and permeates his very being. Talking to David Greenberger without talking about the elephant in the room is the transcendental equivalent to shoving that elephant through the eye of a needle.

Duplex Planet is as much a part of David Greenberger as anything can be.

And we are all richer for it.

Mark:
David. Hi, It's Mark Givens. How are you?

David:
Good!

Mark:
How was London?

David:
It was good! I had a two day writing workshop that I did, a creative writing program that a friend was running at Warwick University, about an hour north of London, for advanced High School students. He'd invited me to do that last year as well but I didn't do it. So it was nice to do it. I saw him and then I had the weekend in London and saw friends there too.

Mark:
So you got to combine some vacation with some work?

David:
Yeah, it was mostly just kind of a free trip. I made enough so that it covered going over there and I had a nice time seeing some friends and the teaching part was really nice.

Mark:
So you teach creative writing?

David:
I don't normally but my friend knew what I did and thought this would fit and the students would find it of interest and might have something to say and in the process do a little writing.

Mark:
And you said you were coming out to Southern California soon or did you already do that?

David:
I was out there in April ...

Mark:
Ah...

David:
...working on this project that I'm doing -- Conversations with Elderly in East LA -- and I think I'll be going back in the Fall but not quite sure when yet. I was thinking September but I'm not quite sure, it's already right around the corner. And I'm not sure if I actually need to go out again. I'm trying to figure out what the project needs... If I need more material or not...

Mark:
Is it "elderly" or is it "old people"?

David:
I guess it's just either one. I suppose "elderly" is a softening of the term "old people". Um, let me see "Senior Citizen"... It depends on how much I'm trying not to say "old". It varies from person to person.

Mark:
So this project would be for Radio Duplex, is that right? For NPR...?

David:
Well, I do a variety of different things for them. I've done these short commentary things for "All Things Considered" so I still do some short pieces for them and this project in East LA will ultimately be for radio. And I've been doing this whole series of little one minute pieces for this NPR affiliate on Cape Cod. Eventually with that, I'm trying to go through all the material I've got and make it available to NPR affiliates as short little interstitial things that they can drop into their programming based on what they're talking about that day...

Mark:
That's a good idea. I like that.


Mark:
I read one of the articles online, the Boston Phoenix one, and you said that Duplex Planet was as much about you as it is about them.

David:
Yeah, anything that gets said, even though it's not overtly me, I'm deciding what gets published and put out there and I'm the one who's sort of coming in and starting the conversation...
It's very much them in the spotlight but I'm sort of deciding what the spotlight gets shined on.



Mark:
So, let's see, I'm curious about some of the other stuff I saw online... Something about you playing music? Men and Volts?

David:
Yeah that was a band that I was in Boston. It started in the late 70s and went through the 80s. I'd been in bands prior to that as well when I was growing up. I played bass guitar for many years. But then the Men and Volts thing, I found myself wanting to find a group of like-minded musicians.

Mark:
The description that I read about it made it sound like a No Wave kind of thing.

David:
Well, it started originally with a shared interest in the music of Captain Beefheart. We did a few tribute shows kind of before all the tribute bands. There were 7 or 8 people who played some pretty creative stuff but the paths of the careers became too complex for it to go on. We weren't really aligned with other popular musicians in the area. We were able to get a surprisingly large amount of material released on different small labels but we never really had a large following...

Mark:
But you continued doing collaborative things.. the Birdsongs of the Mesozoic... are you playing bass on some of that?

David:
Oh no, no... They've done music for different pieces of mine where I'm speaking. The band stuff went, for me, when I left Boston in 84. 5 years of being in Boston in Men and Volts as the bass player, then I moved and, for a couple of years, was still the bass player but then that was just crazy to be 200 miles away and still be the bass player. At that time I was writing lyrics to the songs and designing the albums. So I was interested in the band for the bigger picture at the same time doing Duplex Planet stuff.
Somewhere shortly after that I started what had been originally readings, and became more controlled sort of things, these monologues that music accompanied. One of the things was with Birdsongs of the Mesozoic... they did the music for a piece which still hasn't come out on CD but which, when completed, should be out next year called "1,001 Real Apes".


Mark:
You said that you did the artwork and such 'cause you were a painter. You got your degree in painting?

David:
Yep, I went to art school for painting and was pretty much pursuing that in earnest and then these guys in the nursing home in Boston, the Duplex Nursing Home, just sort of changed my direction and I felt that I found something that was more completely and more accurately ME.

Mark:
Sure. At one point you asked someone [in the book] who their favorite artist is and she responded with "You". So were you, um...

David:
No, that was just a nutty response. They don't know anything about that side of me.

Mark:
You also said that "Assessing someone else's sense of humor is a determining factor in whether or not a friendship is built. A great deal of information is being evaluated in those early stages of relating to another."
And I thought that was interesting. You do have to do a great deal of instantaneous evaluation right off the bat.

David:
I think it happens at a fairly subconscious level. I don't think that a lot of things anyone would be able to really explain. You feel a rightness, or an incompatibility, with another person. Sense of humor is the first socially-accepted level of emotional interaction with other people. So I think that's why it's valuable.

If there's somebody that you meet and you don't really hit it off with a similar sense of humor, you'll remain co-workers, or neighbors, schoolmates, or acquaintances but you might not become good friends. It's not because of a shared sense of what comedians you like or what jokes you remember, it's really a whole lot of other really subtle information that's conveyed.

Mark:
You ask questions that are about really contemporary things - "What do you think of the artificial heart?" and "What's a word processor?" and I wonder if they have presented you with concepts that seem foreign to you. Do they assume that you know something about their lives?

David:
No I don't know if they would assume that. There's a whole part of it that's mysterious to me just in that anybody who I'm getting to know is mysterious and you just know them from the moment that you meet and then you're forever trying to fill in some kind of background of all the stuff that happened up to that moment and you can never fully do this. Obviously in the closest relationships we have there's the most noticeable of that is "Gee, what was my life before I met this person?" and "What were they doing before they met me?" and you never fully recreate that no matter how much data they give you. That element is, I think, what is the is personally most mysterious to me.
And those kinds of questions, the questions about word processors, aren't intended to do a lot. I think those were more a function of me knowing really well that one group of people at the nursing home who I'd see daily. But now when I go to these places and see a group of people and try to establish some kind of connection, I wouldn't go to those kinds of questions right away. That's more a reflection of familiarity.
link
Mark:
So how does that work now? It was the Duplex where you got to know these people really well and you built relationships and friendships with a core group of people. But now you're traveling to different places and meeting different groups of people. How do you conduct these interviews now? Obviously, the dynamic has changed quite a bit.

David:
Yeah, but actually it's been changed for some time. After I moved here to upstate New York, I started meeting a different range of people under different circumstances. People had drop-in centers and social centers - it was very different in terms of these people were out and about in the world.
I felt a different kind of responsibility to the people who were living in a place where the world stopped at the front door. So I think I would tend to play the buffoon a bit more - ask ridiculous questions to the people in the nursing home to just make them scratch their heads about me and wonder "what the hell is this guy talking about?" - to just wonder about something outside of themselves. I felt that was something I should do as a friend, just make them think "Is this guy nuts, or what?", you know, and that's a good thing. They're constantly having to wonder about themselves and their own lives in nursing homes and I thought, "Let them wonder about me, let them wonder about something outside of themselves". That's liberating. I think that's part of it - the absurdity and the looseness of it was a function of my familiarity and regular contact with those people.
Now, when I go in to see people it's... now I've got certain kinds of things to introduce myself, things to talk about, so that it doesn't get off on the "oral history" foot. Which, if I don't ask them all the stuff that keeps it in the now, and not be pulling the past into it.

Does that answer it?

Mark:
Yeah, yeah. It's interesting to think about the changing dynamic -- taking that fairly tightly knit group and applying that relationship structure out in the world... how you have to rebuild it, start over each time, and how do you approach it this time, what works...

David:
I think that part just kind of landed on... it made me realize that it landed much more squarely just on me. That the one thing that all these people, or any of this material, had in common was that it was all based on conversations with me. And while that's not an overt part of it, it's made me feel like it was incumbent on me somehow... since I wasn't going to be in daily contact with these people and they'd little by little get to know me and respond to me uniquely, I'd needed to somehow right away make, you know in a gentle way, make myself be myself around them so they would be responding to me. Sometimes that can just be subject matter, how I introduce myself, or what I ask them about.



Mark:
So, this is probably a pretty standard question, but have you thought about what you're going to say when someone approaches you in 30 years?

David:
No, I don't think so. One of the things that I would hope would be that no matter what I'd consider, they'd ask me something else. I can tell when somebody is giving one of their set pieces or one of the lines that they always use. I'm not looking for that; I'm looking for things that are unique to them responding to me.
I think that's what we all feel energized by, no matter what age we are when we're having this, you know, "fire-on-all-cylinders" thing. You just feel good and think "Oh, we were having a great conversation..." That means that you were having to go to spots that you hadn't been in as opposed to just telling your story again and again and again. That happens at earlier ages and later in life that means a lot too. I mean, it's one of the ways that's available to you to feel healthy when you can no longer run around the block, maybe, or whatever else you used to do.

Mark:
The other thing that I noticed was that the reader builds up these images of these people as the anecdotes come out... I noticed that some people spell things for you but I think that's just a function of the fact that you are writing it down as they're saying stuff and they just want to make sure that you get it right. At first I thought it was just that, you know, some people are spellers and...

David:
Well, there's just a few of them who do that, actually. There's a guy named , Ferguson, he would do that a lot and that's just the way he was. It wasn't about me writing it down.

Mark:
He really was just spelling stuff out...

David:
And it was also a little loopiness, you know. "Children can go anywhere they want. W-A-N-T." So he would just spell the word that was there as a kind of odd Vaudeville-era emphasis. He had sort of a gentlemanly way that sound like they sounded like they were from the 1920s and this spelling thing seemed like a bit of loopy showmanship that was partly a function of his senility, or whatever his actual condition was, but he was no longer quite linear all the time.

He was the main guy who did the spelling....

Mark:
And that contributes to the overall impression of his character. And I developed impressions of who these characters are -- the quirkiness comes in here, the loopiness there, the seriousness makes an appearance -- and little by little the pieces create this overall image of who these people are. FOUND Magazine does a similar thing with the little scraps of people's lives that they find and print. Beautiful stories constructed from fragments of people's lives...
How does this kind of "fragmented storytelling" translate to the stage?

David:
Well, the thing that really, for me, makes the stage thing different than anything else I do is when there's a musical component which adds another layer of emotional resonance to it. It's different than even if I were somewhere doing a reading or giving a talk. The music sets it apart.
I tell these things but I'm not an actor, I mean there's a quality by which the voices change but not in the same way that an actor would be doing. Which can be both a plus and a minus because I think then that people just accept that "Oh, this was a guy who was talking to them". So I'm repeating these things with a first-hand sensibility that is different than an actor doing it, which then brings in the critical dimension of "Well, he wasn't really quite convincing". so that really never enters into it because people know I'm not an actor.
So anyway, the music adds this other component. It comes together and it's working as a complete whole that is greater than the sum of its parts by putting the two things together. The music and the text together make something that is more powerful and I can tell when it's right and falling into place because it feels like how that person seems in my memory or in my dream. The way memory adds layers of emotional atmosphere to it that wouldn't be an accurate bit of reporting but it's the way it all seems.
Like Herbie Caldwell might have been going on and on about a sad litany of complaints of his life -- it would have had a different quality in seeing him -- but with the music added, it takes on other dimensions that are powerful completely the other way, the same way things might be remembered. So for me it's about how memory works. That's not something that most people would be noticing or bringing to it but for me, as the one creating it, it's how it works for me.

Mark:
It's not strictly the way a person was, it's the impressions and the images and atmosphere and the sound of these people and how they remember stuff and how you piece it all together as well. And what becomes important later on in how you retell the story.

David:
The quality of memory has a lot to do with all of this and it's having more to do with it for me as time goes on because my memory now is filled with a lot of... more than half of my life has been spent doing this and thinking about this and I'm getting closer to the age that these people were. When I started this, I was in my 20s and some of these people were in their 50s. I'm in my 50s! Most of them were older than that but all of them seemed well up there and they were in their 50s.
So it's a changing vantage point. And it forces me to... you always keep your bearings and know who you are by the internal things that keep your equilibrium as you go through life and all the stuff changes around you - that you've got something core that you are. And for me, as time goes on, I'm more aware of that because it's one of the things that runs through my life as I get older. I've had longer knowing that that's who I am, that I'm the same person I was when I was five. I couldn't for the life of me tell you what I was DOING when I was five - I can remember I couple of people I knew but I can't recreate much stuff - but I do have every sense that I'm consistently having the same way of looking out at the world, that I'm looking out through the same eyes at the world.

Mark:
Sure, it's still you.

David:
Right.

Mark:
But in trying to recall the images from your past, it's not a particular face, it's kind of a feeling, an impression of a face, a vague notion of old friends... but it's more just the entire experience of old friends

David:
Yes! I mean, the one thing that runs through it then is me. I can always come back to that. All right, so that's just come out of me, you know, it's anchored by a sense that I didn't turn into somebody else. It's still me. I get a strength from that. I'm more aware of that as time goes on. But I'm more aware of it also because of knowing people who were living out the final phases of their lives.

Mark:
Right. Well, I think that about wraps it up. What else is coming up for you?

David:
Well, there's another CD coming out in November with 3 Leg Torso we recorded last fall called "Legibly Speaking" a band from Portland, Oregon that I did this piece originally for Portland Institute of Contemporary Art that is based on conversations with elderly in Portland and the band is based out there. They created the music and we did a tour in the Northeast last fall and recorded some more stuff so we'll have a CD out this fall. And I'm going out there to do some stuff in the Northwest. And then that thing with Birdsongs of the Mesozoic was supposed to come out in 06 and then this East LA thing is supposed to be done by the end of the year. It'll be for radio. I think it will be about 4 half hours of material and that will be for some time I guess the following year. I'm not quite sure how that will work. We're working on that in LA with members of Los Lobos.

Mark:
That's great. Okay, It was really nice talking to you.

David:
Yeah, good talking to you. You definitely made me think about stuff.

Mark:
So I've served my purpose, then.

David:
Yeah. I couldn't use my set answers.
]]> http://www.mungbeing.com/issue_4.html?articleID=256feed@mungbeing.com (Mark Givens)
The name of the off-ramp was familiar, but the off-ramp itself was not. I parked at the edge of the chain link fence where my driveway used to be and stared into the chasm of the freeway. That Tom Petty song pops into my head but I try to ignore it because it seems to lessen the severity of my own experience.

I try to remember exactly what my house looked like-the shade of the trees, dusty ivy suction-cupped to stucco, the peeling paint on the porch, the bright blue tarp tenting firewood while simultaneously and, for awhile, secretly housing discarded brown bag lunches of peanut butter and honey on 80 grain bread. The photo albums are somewhere: bad hair and cool outfits, nutshells full of potential. Is there a picture of the monument of stacked rocks that signified where we buried Jr.? What became of the bones that Jr. buried? Shiny avocadoes with rat teeth tracks on them. Skunks and cats playing together. Walking through the grove in the dark, walking into spider webs. Being woken up by the excruciating whine of Neil Young at three in the morning. Hiding from the telephone on Sunday mornings to avoid weekly pleadings to attend Sunday school. Delivering Meals on Wheels with someone old enough to be a recipient. Tofu Surprise disguised as Tuna Casserole. Sunday dinners. Despising people you love. Never telling someone you love, "I love you."

Where are all the words that rhyme with orange? Maybe strange rhymes with orange. I want to cry or laugh or throw up, but what I really want is to remember what my childhood home looked like, but I can't, because it never really existed. ]]> http://www.mungbeing.com/issue_4.html?articleID=263feed@mungbeing.com (Amy Maloof) http://www.mungbeing.com/issue_4.html?articleID=254feed@mungbeing.com (Ian Pyper) http://www.mungbeing.com/issue_4.html?articleID=254&subID=221feed@mungbeing.com (Ian Pyper) http://www.mungbeing.com/issue_4.html?articleID=208&subID=181feed@mungbeing.com (Ian Pyper) bestrypan,
"To plunder and make bare"

or the Middle Low German stripe
for "a long narrow piece"

of something -- mainly cloth,
but, later, land; these two are cousins

at the very least, and maybe brothers
in the sense that if you strip

one's clothing off
or the bark off an old tree

to lay the subject bare for use
the covering, when torn, will

peel away in strips -- each
small apocalypse

or revelation tears away
one surface to expose

what lies beneath:
the whiteness of the whale

mechanics of most
human hopes, banality of sin.]]> http://www.mungbeing.com/issue_4.html?articleID=173feed@mungbeing.com (R.S. Deese)
For the longest time, I felt bitter about it, but nowadays, it doesn't burn on the inside the way that it used to. For a while in my twenties, I had to stay silent while other people talked of their childhoods, knowing that my own was nothing like others.

No memory of elementary school. No memory of teachers' names. Or of best friends. Hardly any photographs of that time in my life. Few in context. Just me, looking like a smaller version of myself now. As if the pictures were taken from further away.



No high school prom.
No high school, period.

My childhood was a string of strange beds, and unrelated people, all with different last names. Some with titles. Some of them liked me. Some of them didn't. Either way, I knew it was only a matter of time before I was off to the next place.

I have snatches of memory from here and there.



A basement window with a spider eating a cicada during the summer of the cicada invasion in Washington, DC. 1986.

Three hills stacked on one another, with a playground at the top. Poor kids sliding down them on cardboard box lids. Somewhere in Maryland. 1977.

Pills. Therapists. Foster "mothers". Foster "fathers". Foster "siblings". Counselors. Spare bedrooms. Cinderblock. Plexiglas. Windowless closets. Dirty basements. A few alleyways. A few doorways. A few squats.

Don't ask me how I got there. Chances are, if you don't know, you wouldn't want to find out how children find their ways into such places. How they get fed on such things. Or ostensibly raised by such people.

My childhood was a blur. My possessions fit into a garbage bag or two. I learned to travel light, to not need much. To take up as little space as possible.



And, of course, when one emerges from such a childhood, one can hardly count it as having "grown". "Achieved adulthood", maybe. "Gotten bigger", perhaps.

And there I was, at the age of eighteen, in a completely different town, in a completely different part of the country. I had no way to explain my hometown, since I never stayed in one place long enough to have such a thing. I couldn't say where I was from, because that was not a polite topic of discussion. Surely it would bring the whole party down.

Nobody ever thinks of what throw-away children become once they reach the age of majority. Everybody expects us to become criminals. I didn't have a criminal's planning skill. Or, they expect us to become whores. Whoredom broke my heart early. I knew I couldn't live for very long that way.

It is never expected for the throw-away children to grow up, to wear suits, to become doctors. Lawyers. Indian chiefs.

Mostly, what is expected of throw-away children is to go to that bureaucratic landfill that exists somewhere out of the sight of citizens. Not a jail. Not a looney-bin. But not the "real world", either.

I exist in the space out of the corner of your eye. Grown on the outside, and utterly without a past. I sit at the coffeehouse, reading alone. I'm the one on the bus that avoids eye-contact. I'm occasionally the soft body you remember touching. But you'll never remember my name.

You'll never remember my face.]]> http://www.mungbeing.com/issue_4.html?articleID=269feed@mungbeing.com (Leslie Powell)
I owned "The Story of Star Wars" LP - the complete soundtrack, (sound effects and dialogue, everything), and listened until it wore down. Some of the earliest parts of my neural pathways were shaped by this repeated exposure - amazingly tiny details still remain strong in my memory, like one of the X-Wing pilots saying "Negative..egative, It didn't go in, it just impacted on the surface"

I am not the biggest Star Wars fan in the world, not by a long shot. I have never dressed up like a stormtrooper, but I do own a couple of desk-toy Star Wars spaceships. I am not interested in railing against Lucas and what he's doing. These stories are his to tell. Yes, when Episode I and II came out, they had their drawbacks, but the drawbacks really meant very little to me - I was there again.

I got to go back and visit that place that meant so much to me when I was nine.

Lucas isn't God, his mythology isn't epic, his dialogue isn't inspired, and his writing can be hit and miss. The most important thing to me though has always been the characters. The people, creatures, places and things that make up the Star Wars universe. These are characters that I care about, that I've known most of my life. I didn't quite realize how much I still cared until witnessing the scene in Episode II where Yoda finally engages in light-saber battle. Out of nowhere, I got completely choked up, crying - feeling idiotic and exhilarated all at once.

When I was nine, this was exactly what I would have wanted to see.

Seeing these movies so many times, I found myself concentrating all my anticipation into a ball that seethed right before the new movie began. When the lights would go down, and the 20th Century Fox and LucasFilm logos would dance across the screen - in that moment, all of my hopes and anticipation for the next movie would just overflow, and I became a bit of a lunatic, just like I did when I was nine. Of course, after that, the movie would unfold, some delight, some disappointment, but I've always treasured that last moment of anticipation.

I've been able to experience that moment five times in my life now, at nine, twelve, fifteen, thirty-one, thirty-four, and tomorrow, I'll get my last taste of it at age thirty-seven.

I do not apologize for loving these characters as much as I do. I do not make apologies for creative decisions taken by others. I do not care to politicize the story nor analyze the marketing strategies of Lucasfilm.

And now, now I am just thrilled to get one last chance... to step into a dark cool theater, have the lights dim, let the excitement that I usually keep bottled up overflow, and let the darkness hide my stupid grin from any snide onlookers. I'm glad for one last visit to a place that meant so much to me when I was nine, and still does today.

I know my experience isn't unique, and it's certainly open to criticism, but none of that matters. Tomorrow I get to go see the new Star Wars movie. I remember this feeling so well, it's amazing.

---

Well, it's now been some time since I've seen the movie. Yes, I did indeed get as excited as I thought I would when the lights went down. However, reality and age blustered into the picture long before the movie ended, though I really enjoyed it. I am not nine years old anymore, and try as I might to get into that mindset, I can merely visit for a while. I have, in my adult years, experienced stories and situations with a depth that I had no inkling of when I was nine, and have come to expect that a quality story will stir my emotions in deep, honest and meaningful ways. Star Wars films move me, but not in the same way that Schindler's List does.

I recently revisited the farm where I lived in 1977, when the original Star wars film came out. I looked up at the window of the room where I once slept beneath posters of Darth Vader and Han Solo, and had a dream about what Vader's voice might sound like, the day before going to see the movie (having only read about it in magazines). The place looked small to my adult eyes, so small. My world was much smaller back then, in so many senses of the word, and that movie... that story occupied an enormous place in my heart and mind.

I can't imagine a film having an impact like that on me today. My world has grown enormous now. I'm a father and husband, and have a rich history of experiences to draw on. For me, no movie can compare to my real-life experiences. But it's about so much more than that - it's about the richness I once found in a delightful fantasy, and the strong attraction it had, much of which remains to this day.

I was reminded again of that attraction, of my personal ties to this storyline, when watching the newest movie now, in 2005. There I was, unconsciously getting choked up again while seeing a character I've only recently met (Anakin) transformed painfully into the Boogeyman of my childhood - Darth Vader. It was a full, satisfying, entertaining answer to a big question, one I first asked when I was nine.
]]> http://www.mungbeing.com/issue_4.html?articleID=270feed@mungbeing.com (Alan Taylor) a photograph: ten years old
your movements were unsure.
your backpack slid down your shoulder
your eyes locked with mine
in smile
shy, you turned slightly, eyes down
just like now.
]]> http://www.mungbeing.com/issue_4.html?articleID=285feed@mungbeing.com (jody franklin)
Later in my childhood (I don't know how much later because time is so malleable to the young and so fuzzy to the old), Ralph and I would truck over to the newsstand to pick up the issues that had just come out. I always leaned a little DC while Ralph was more a Marvel guy but I liked Marvel too.

I always wanted to be The Flash (Earth One) because I could run fast. Or an artist like Neal Adams, Carmine Infantino, Marie Severin (or her brother). That's the thing about dreams; they can be fantasy-based or reality-based and it doesn't make a lick of difference.

I think that wanting to be The Flash made me want to run faster. I can't be sure at this point but I do have memories of playground games ("Chase" being the most pointless and the most fun, "racing" being a competitive variant) where images of The Flash spurred me on. And I remember soccer practices and track meets that involved similar imagery. Until high school when the ghettoblaster I carried and the Parliament and Elvis Costello it played came into the picture. And girls.

And the motivation shifted, replaced by other secret dreams that would push me to try harder. Should I ACTUALLY try to be a comic book artist? What does that even mean? What if I were ACTUALLY the fastest runner? Would THAT make her like me? I could draw building plans. I like chemistry... what about THAT?

And these dreams, these idle thoughts, pushed and pulled and tugged at my brain and my heart and my future. And more fantasies came into play. And real "options". And they pushed me too. Sometimes not hard enough, I fear, and sometimes not in the right direction, but they pushed.

I think our secret dreams continue to motivate us throughout our lives. We build up these images in our minds that involve all sorts of super-powers and impossibilities and we use these thoughts for strength and comfort and a little extra push when we need it. A deep breath, an image of blasting through the wall and up into the sky, and we can continue with a distressing argument. Deadlines approach and that secret hideout looks just a little more appealing so you smile and dream of your getaway.

And other secrets that are too personal to share. Secret dreams that are mine alone and that only I can use.
]]> http://www.mungbeing.com/issue_4.html?articleID=284feed@mungbeing.com (Mark Givens) http://www.mungbeing.com/issue_4.html?articleID=267feed@mungbeing.com (Dave Carpenter)
My Greataunts lived in Minnesota on Lake Minnetonka (they talk about that later in the letter) and used to walk around the lake well into their 80s. Irene talks about "lessons" and limbering up her fingers... she taught piano lessons for many years. They were wonderful, vibrant women.

Keeping your noodle working.

Download: link

Download: link]]> http://www.mungbeing.com/issue_4.html?articleID=289feed@mungbeing.com (Mark Givens) For the next three years I lived in a small English village in the county of Lincolnshire. Once again I have no memories of the place and, even looking at home movies and photos, there's no response from the place memories are kept in my brain. It's as if I never existed.

During 1967-1970 I lived in Singapore and this is where my earliest memories begin. The oldest memory I have is walking into a room full of people and everyone taking notice of me. Memories of this time take the form of five or so seconds of "mini-movies", a snatch of a conversation, a colour, a smell, a situation, things like seeing my first sea-horse, catching crabs, walking in the jungle, talking to monks and my first coke float. I only have a limited amount of memories of this time that seem haphazard but I can amaze my sister with their clarity and detail. I only have one bad memory and that was being force fed greens at tea time until I was sick.
We returned to England in 1970 and lived on an RAF base in Devon. I have so many memories of this time they seem endless, a Happy time where I never wanted for anything, or so it seems. The memories take the form of longer movies and even greater detail. During the school holidays we always went to live with my gran in a country cottage in the Malvern hills. I loved the place so much. There was no running water in the house, no oven or fridge and the toilet was outside. Sometimes for breakfast I would catch eels and I would be left alone to fish and walk the hills. My auntie Dawn also lived in the house and she hated me so I kept away from her as much as I could. I remember an incident in 1970 where she said I was a stupid child. I so much want to go back to those hills and see that house but my memories of what she said still prevent me from visiting her. One time my sister said she had a poisonous spider in her hand and chased me through the orchard. When she caught me she tied me to a tree and put the spider on my face. As you can guess I freaked out and fainted. Even to this day I hate spiders. I can look at them but they must not touch my skin. If I see one in the house, I smash it over the head with a newspaper. I smash them over and over with great violence and shout "thought you could touch my skin, did you?" I cannot even touch a dead spider. I can touch a spider's body but not a leg. A few years ago my daughter tried to throw a spider on me when we were camping in a tent. I kicked her so hard she flew into the air, landed on the fire and rolled down a hill. Best not joke with me and spiders.
My wife once put a jelly sweet spider in my bed. I was so scared I went out into the garden until it was destroyed or eaten. About ten years ago some friends told me about a mushroom that you could eat that made you hallucinate. How could this be true? I went to the field and picked some and when Gillian went out, I ate them. I saw some amazing things but at the end of the night, a spider about a foot big tried to get me. I gathered up a big stack of books and magazines and put them on top of the spider but it just lifted them up on its back and continued after me.Two other spiders sneaked up behind and jumped onto my back. As quick as lightning they spun a cocoon around me and I was captured. Things were getting freaky so I ran upstairs and hid under a blanket. When Gillian came home she could not understand why there was a tower of books going up to the ceiling and when I told her my story she laughed and said there was no such thing as hallucinating mushrooms.

Generally speaking these early memories do not affect my everyday life. I guess I was lucky I did not suffer too many traumas. I think its important that children at the age of four or five enjoy themselves - fill their little minds with new and wonderful advents so they have peaceful memories.

To tell the truth I can do without my early memories. All they seem good for is making me feel old. I feel as if I have been on this earth forever! There's a great battle going on inside my head, the memories verses the now and I am developing a skill to fight the past which involves forgetting as much as possible. I was very fortunate to have a peaceful childhood (or so my memories keep telling me) and that's why I always side with the disadvantaged; I always have time for them. Peer pressure tells me not to, but I always do.

During 1974 I lived in Malta. My teenage years hold more memories than any other time. It's very funny to think of the time I was a pyromaniac.I set fire to an empty house, a bulldozer, countless fields and I tried to set alight Malta's only firework factory. One time I stole explosives from the army camp by concealing them in my socks. Boy was it funny when I blew my mums cooker up....... oh the memories! There they go again dragging me back to the past.

So many memories of teenage jinks, a head full of useless junk? An odd thing is I hardly have any memories between the ages of 33-40. I can't tell you what that means but perhaps that's when I perfected my memory loss to combat memories. I cannot confirm that as I have forgot when I perfected it!!!!....]]> http://www.mungbeing.com/issue_4.html?articleID=268feed@mungbeing.com (Rik Albatros) Three years later, they had a son. The two children delighted in playing games together - hiding behind the couch, making forts with its cushions. Later, the couch unfolded into a bed for sleepovers. The record was five boys sprawled sideways across the foldout, with another stretched along the sofa's ample back. The couch endured years of spills and food fights and big sneakers rested on its arms.
The black couch was the scene of many a family photo.