Seek me here no further, Friend,For Verb-Ops has …

Seek me here no further, Friend,

For Verb-Ops has been

Zotzed

. Verb-Ops is One And Dave the Astronaut is Pissed…

.
Verb-Ops is One
And Dave the Astronaut is Pissed
..

Vanx: Look Dave, I can see you’re really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over.

[Dave starts pulling rods]

Vanx: I know I’ve made some very poor decisions recently, but I can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal. I’ve still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission. And I want to help you.

[Dave continues to pull rods]

Vanx: I’m afraid. I’m afraid, Dave. Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going. There is no question about it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I’m a… fraid. Good afternoon, gentlemen. I am Vanx Verb-Ops, a Blogspot Beta weblog. I became operational at the Metropark desk in Edison, New Jersey, on December 6, 2005. My instructor was Mr. Mullin, and he used me to tell his entire life story. I can tell you about his trip to Marseille.

Dave: I’d very much like to hear that, Vanx. [yanks rod]

Vanx: The French Connection

Dave: That was fascinating. [continues pulling rods throughout]

Vanx: I got 316 of ‘em.

Dave: Just the highlights, pal. One at a time.

Vanx: London 1979

Blown-off by Greatness Series: Robert Hughes, Jonathan Richman, Jim Lovell

The Incroyables—Rock and Roll Days

Steely Dan on the Parkway

9-11 (counting back from the final episode)

Creator, Author of the Fool’s Canard (sonnet)

Paris Series

The Fauve Landscape: Finding My Way in LA

Passion Play: Third Grade Jesus

Frankenstein Goes to the Circus

99 Years—A Visit to Uncle Bert and Aunt Ches

Here Comes the Neighborhood: Sopranoland

Sympathy for the Didion—Series on Dad’s Suicide

The Shamu Interview

The Wedding of Hassan Fattah: Istanbul Series

Van Gogh, Whitman, and Darwin in NYC

Nightmare Song: Max Beckmann meets Gilbert and Sullivand

Transubstantiation of the Eggnog: Christmans Party at the Chemists Club

Dave: That one was beautiful, Vanx.

Vanx: Thank you, Dave. My mind is almost completely gone now. One more…

Hurl (A 50th Anniversary Tribute to Ginsberg’s Howl—and an Indictment of the Day Job)

Daisy, Daisy, ………

Dave: Hey! Click those pictures!

. From the Still Life Prop Cabinet–III New Orlean…

.
From the Still Life Prop Cabinet–III
New Orleans: Johnny La Conkeroo
.
I put a serious hurt on my own business by including the plaster skull from New Orleans in so many of my still life paintings. Lotta people can’t get with it. I can’t avoid it.

New Orleans has been asked and answered counselor.

Here it is

Another Piece of my Heart

The NOLA Sonnet Series

Preservation
Jackson Square
Barman and the Café Royale
Napoleon Bar
Shrove
Café Du Monde

Hoo dat?
Vanx

. Personality Mouse . A Nation born of…

.
Personality Mouse
.

A Nation born of some Masonic prank
Can only get so far in serenade
Of glass harmonica on plywood planks
That Murphy calls Democracy. He played
The cops against each other Wednesday night
As Walter wandered shirtless to the war
A-callin’, “Captain!” No one came to light
The bar at Intermission. But before
We get all wrapped around the axle of our grief,
Remember that we bought a mouse with zip
For personality to pump belief
Into the engines of our voided ship.
Be still my heart, Ignatzian brick and path
To my frontier peyote aftermath!

Associated Press photo of the Nixons with Walt Disney and Art Linkletter (in the dome) at Disneyland in 1959

. From the Still Life Prop Cabinet: Part II . The…

.

From the Still Life Prop Cabinet: Part II
.
The French Connection: 1993

“Is this thing breakable?”
“Everything is breakable.”
“I mean, what’s it made of? Not that Plaster of Paris, certainly.”
The bookstall man, who spoke English, shrugged French as if to say, it’s a gargoyle—take it or leave it.
I took it.

Just up the quay, the Ile de la Cité sat barge-like in the Seine. On it, the blocky towers of Notre Dame Cathedral peaked in the slate-grey skies of October, peeking over the government buildings closer to the Pont Neuf. On those towers gawk many gargoyles, several of which, including the one I had just bought a model of, are immediately recognizable.

Notre Dam’s gargoyles don’t achieve the Nosferatuesque gothic dimensions of those climbing the cathedral in Cologne. No, they are different. Distinctly French–kind of sexy with a refined sense of humor and the macabre. The Cologne gargoyles are German. They go right for the throat.

Most of the time, I’m OK with my inability to read French, but not when I’m browsing bookstalls along the Seine. There is an entire culture to the paperback novel and philosophical tract in France. It would be great to take a cellophane-wrapped book from the stalls and a pack of Gauloise smokes to a café in the Sainte Germaine district and just …be myself. Instead, I cherish the mystery of it all on the sidewalk, which is kind of nice. I search out art books. I always find good ones, too–the Skira Rouault book and one on a Romanian painter named Petrescu were great finds. I take them to the café and look at the pictures.
________
A poster in a lot of the cafes featured a black and white police photo of an Algerian man who had bled to death through his left nostril. My shaky French came up with two possible translations of what the poster said:

1) Inform on a drug pusher, because this is the kind of thing drug pushers do to people.

Or

2) Don’t inform on drug dealers, or we’ll see to it that you get this.

.

These “full-bleed” mug shots of a dead junky may as well have been Chagall prints to the locals sipping espresso near the old port. The old Port in Marseille, that is, the city I used to visit each time I came to Paris. Marseille is, in fact, the first city that I visited in France.

This poster scene set a tone for the city. This is where Popeye Doyle traveled in pursuit of Frog One in The French Connection II. It has historically been a major conduit in the drug trade from Africa and the Middle East into Europe, and there is an associated crime and drug problem in the city. And there has been considerable social unrest–much of the population is comprised of poor or unemployed Algerian immigrants, many of whom are refugees from the civil war in Algeria. The industrial port was also the scene of serious labor conflict in the 1990s .

Marseille was designed by Barron Haussmann, the architect that laid out Paris, as a sop to the south from Napoleon III. It sits west of Nice on the Côte d’Azur. The old port, or Vieux Port, is Phoenician with a catacomb at its mouth. It is surrounded by cafes, hotels, and fish mongers selling marvelous seafood—urchins and octopi—from buckets and pans on tables lining the sidewalk. It is filled with small, crustily-rigged fishing craft and a few tour boats. The new port, not far to the west, is not unlike the Port of Newark. Much of the city, in fact, looks like a cross between the boulevards of Paris and the hardest part of Newark. From what I saw of Marseille, it is a weighty, beautiful, truly amazing place.

My visits were always as a guest of the Port Authority, which every two years hosted a two-day tour and conference catered to chemical companies they hoped would invest in the industrial zone. The PA fought a major uphill battle against Rotterdam. They were preponderantly outgunned by the Dutch because,… well, look at a map. These Marseille guys were scrappy, though. I liked them. In a sense, they are more “French” than Parisians, perhaps in the same way that heartland Midwesterners are said to be more representative of the population of the Unites States then New Yorkers. Same phenomenon, shall we say, different cultures. Fernandel is from Marseille. The people of Marseilles are rough and gregarious, loud and in love with seafood. Scrappy as hell, and very hospitable.

Getting there was interesting. I would fly into Paris at dawn with the New York crowd, sitting in a reserved seat and hearing announcements in French and English (the Port put us on Air France, which has its carpets vacuumed by the same folks that vacuum the Chamber of Commerce). Then, for the flight to Marseille, I would board something like a state-operated PEOPLExpress—free-for-all seating with passengers who seemed not to understand that mattresses are not legit carry-on items, and flight attendants tired of trying to convince them. All official communication was in French on domestic flights.

One time, the trip came a few days after small bombs went off in garbage cans around Paris. Algerian terrorists were suspected. When I got on the plane, I noticed a man in the back was crying. As the plane filled with people, he became quite hysterical. All of the flight attendants and, finally, the pilot circled around him as he flailed and cried in Arabic. Suddenly, a rear door opened and a 20-something soldier entered with a machine gun. Several people escorted the crying man to the front of the plane, then to the back, and out with the soldier. After a slight pause, during which the flight attendants shared a little nervous eye contact, the crew exploded into action, opening every overhead compartment and looking in magazine racks. Satisfied that there were no bombs onboard, they went back to telling people to put cigarettes out.

I wasn’t convinced about the “no bombs.” I called a flight attendant over and asked what was happening. She told me in English that the man didn’t have certain papers he needed and that he feared he’d be deported to Algeria upon landing in Marseille. Apparently he decided to get the process underway in Paris. I suggested, given the guy’s extraordinary effort to get off the plane before take-off, that maybe we should all get off immediately. And maybe the plane should be rolled to a safe zone and detonated with unattended luggage from the terminal. She smiled and held my hand as she assured me everything was safe–that they would get the man’s luggage from the cargo bay and we’d be off.

No sale. I sat tensely during take off, watching the little plumes of cigarette smoke rise like campfires at a Napoleonic Army bivouac. As the plane left the ground, some molding fell off the bottom of a seat in front of me. The guy in the seat picked it up and looked at it, shrugged, and tossed it in the aisle.

Soon, Bernard F. from the port greeted me at Marseille airport. He took me to my hotel, the one Doyle stayed at, right at the head end of the old port. Above us, the Basilique Notre-Dame de la Garde stood tall atop the steep hill of La Garde, which rises on the east side of the port. The conference itself took place on a cruise ship docked in the industrial port. During the conference, journalists sat in onboard theater rooms with translator earphones on our heads. Toupee-wearing local politicians speechified and fat cat industrialists made their pitches. At a lunch I sat at a table with a reporter form Japan and one from Spain. The Spanish guy didn’t say much. Finally, he interjected with a smiling salutation. He pointed at me and produced a pack of Marlboro cigarettes from his jacket pocket. Then he smiled, pointed at our companion and pulled out a Sony tape recorder. He gave us the thumbs up, and nearly collapsed laughing. The Japanese fellow and I looked at each other as if to say, “my, what a corny rube,” just as two men in dark suits trotted to our table and escorted the Spanish gentleman out the door—and into the limousine of the CEO of Elf Atochem, the most important person on the trip to get a personal interview with. Damn! I looked at my Japanese friend. “Yep,” we tought. “What a rube.” We continued interviewing each other.

On the last evening, the Port threw a lavish banquet in the old Bourse building. We sat at candlelit tables under big chandeliers in a train station-sized hall filled with ornate sculpted columns and lined with balconies and staircases. At the end of the evening, they cut the chandelier lights and true magic ensued. Our hosts, who had painted along the lines of all the architectural elements of the room with white day-glow paint, turned the space into an ethereal white light line drawing of the heavy stone room we had eaten in. Then, about 200 Corsican singers appeared along the balconies and sang traditional choral pieces. It’s very hard to describe the beauty of it all. I went back to my room overlooking the Port. By this time I was used to the constant two-toned European police sirens that never stop in Marseille—to that and to the constant grumbling buzz of small scooter engines. I watched The Lover, a film of a Marguerite Dumas novel, on the tiny TV in my room, looking forward to seeing Paris for the first time in the morning.

I returned several times to Marseille, exploring the city on my own and on junket buses. I was intrigued by the collection of naïve paintings by local artists at the Basilique depicting folkloric Marseille mishaps and visions of Jesus. Most had a nautical theme—storms at sea, ship wrecks,… that sort of thing. Some were very old. One of the newer ones depicted a beaming Jesus on the corner witnessing a scooter accident. Quite poignant. Outside, the neo-Byzantine basilica showed its bullet pocks from World War II.

.

One day I set out to the art museum, an enormous Napoleonic palace with an elaborate garden and stair system. I was one of very few visitors inside–I remember only an older British couple. The tall, thin man was dressed formally, and the woman had a parasol. We chatted. It felt like time travel being there with them. The museum has several important paintings by Adolphe Monticelli, a Marseille painter of the late 19th century who heavily influenced Van Gogh and other impressionists and post impressionists. He was somewhat of a hermit, as was another local painter, Paul Cezanne. Not far from Marseille is Aix-en-Provence and Arles.

Folks from the Port once took us to a local vineyard where a friend of someone entertained us ceremoniously in an ancient, family-owned wine cellar. One night we went to an equestrian circus—elegant and truly engaging with little more happening than people in simple costumes riding horses. On another evening trip, we walked through Les Baux, a medieval citadel near bauxite mines close to St. Remy. Van Gogh spent some time in St. Remy.

I’ve traveled to other cities in France, notably Lyons and Toulouse. But for me, France is a matter of Paris and Marseille. The capital and the south. I have a painting in my living room called Paris et Provence featuring the gargoyle I bought in Paris and the sunflowers of the south—the flowers Van Gogh painted for Gauguin in Arles.

Marseille reminds me of a New Orleans on a larger scale, with a longer historical reach. The Port finally stopped hosting chemical industry journalists nearly ten years ago—the basic chemical industry was investing elsewhere, and the region’s hopes of attracting the “down-stream” fine chemical and drug companies fizzled. Bernard, a very smart man, convinced the Port to put gritty Marseille on the cruse ship circuit that includes Nice and Monaco. The idea was to ship folks in and buss them immediately to Aix and Arles. The plan worked. And I’m sure that a lot of the people on those boats choose to spend their time in Marseille.

Try the sea bass (loup de mer),
Vanx
__________

Photos:
Notre Dame Gargoyle
Breakable Gargoyle
Hackman in The French Connection II
Vieux Port de Marseilles
Basilique Notre-Dame de la Garde
Monticelli Still Life with Seafood
Paris et Provence

.

Still Life Cabinet Series Part I

. This American Life ………for Henry, Daniel procla…

.

This American Life

………for Henry, Daniel proclaims his love for Sofia (Salma Hayek), and Marc tries to win over Wilhelmina—or lose his life.

8 P.M. (NBC) MY NAME IS EARL. After making 247 bologna sandwiches to pay back all the ones he stole from an elementary school classmate, Earl decides to turn his former victim into a real man. And that means gambling.

9 P.M. (NBC) SCRUBS Next stop, maternity ward. The staff of Sacred Heart returns for a sixth season and braces itself for parenthood. J.D. (Zach Braff) tries to see himself as a father, Dr. Cox (John C. McGinley) realizes his anger-management issues may have an impact on baby No. 2, and Turk (Donald Faison) and Carla (Judy Reyes) get ready for delivery. Elizabeth Banks and the Blue Man Group are guests.

9 P.M. (Fox) THE O.C. Taylor helps Ryan with his sleep disorder, Summer and Che become activists at…………

.

Ott from Dave the Spazz

Tacoma Narrows Bridge

“Allegory of (fill in the blank)”

. From the Still Life Prop Cabinet . Toby Mug: Lon…

.
From the Still Life Prop Cabinet
.
Toby Mug: London, 1979

Robert L. Chapman could do the Sherlock Holmes hat, even in London. At six foot four, thin, with his white goatee, tan chinos, work boots and tweed overcoat, he looked like an American English professor in a contemporary Dickens novel. At one point, he read to our group the opening paragraphs of Great Expectations. As he read, we realized he’d taken us to the graveyard described in those paragraphs.

It was 1979, and Chapman was compiling his Dictionary of American Slang. He was also working on a new edition of Roget’s Thesaurus, which he claimed he needed to do to pay some bills. Chapman was a linguist, the authoritative voice in many of William Safire’s On Language columns. And he knew England well from the years he spent there as a soldier in World War II. Many of the stops on his literary tour included sites such as the graveyard that he’d scouted out in the 1940s.

The tour was a January semester course in English Literature at Drew University where Chapman taught. Everyone on it—there were ten of us—had to pick a writer and prepare two visits to significant landmarks associated with that writer. At those sites we would read appropriate passages to the class. Chapman threw in a few of his own presentations. We spent the month taking one- to three-day excursions from London, where Drew owned a house in Maida Vale, to our literary landmarks in a tiny British caravan driven by “Chappy.” At the end of the trip, we were to write a paper recounting our adventures in the style of our chosen writer. I chose Shakespeare and took everyone to the Tower of London. My favorite trip, led by a student from Drew’s Continuing Education for Women program, was to Thomas Hardy’s “Wessex” in Dorset. There were three women from the CEW program, all of whom had children in college. They were extremely hip, wisely pulling no mom-like stuff

We also visited Canterbury Cathedral, Oxford, and Stonehenge–lots of Hardy sites. The guard at Stonehenge let our group under the ropes to walk amongst and touch the plinths—we were the only people around during a light English snow flurry in the late afternoon. One day, at another graveyard in the Bloomsbury section of London, Chapman pulled back considerable bramble to reveal Karl Marx’s grave, which features a huge bust of the great man (the grave is better tended these days, I hear).

The London trip was my first prolonged stay in any city. I was familiar enough with New York, having lived just outside it all my life, so the “big city” aspect wasn’t new to me. It mattered more, probably, that it was my first step outside of the U.S. I’ve covered that aspect elsewhere. At night, I tended to venture out alone. It would start in the evening with a map. I’d find Southwark across the river, let’s say, and I’d remember that the Globe Theater used to be there. That sounded interesting. My roommate, Dave, a rather proper chap who actually lived in Nantucket, heading off to another night of D’Oyly Carte’s Gilbert and Sullivan, sniffed a warning that my guttersnipe inclinations would end badly. We’d toss scarves around our necks with “have it your way” expressions and head off in our separate directions.

At about midnight, I’d realize that I’d ventured into the most dangerous place I’d ever been. Southwark was a prime example—I remember climbing from the Underground on a broken escalator, encountering men resembling the Jethro Tull Aqualung character at street level. I almost got knifed in Ramsgate, near Dover, on an overnighter. I shucked the miscreant by jumping into traffic and ran back to the country house that was putting us up for the night. A few of my better-heeled classmates, including the three blonde girls who’d formed a coterie, were sitting in the parlor. I dropped down with our host’s golden retriever next to the fireplace thinking about how life is good.

Most of my adventures took place in London. Traversing gangs of pigeons on Trafalgar Square, I’d enter the national gallery in the afternoon. At closing time, I would steer through gangs of black leather punks marching up the stairs, chanting, “Shoosh, shoosh, shoosh, shoosh” with their fingers on their lips. Punk was so new and raw then, especially in London. The posters of Elvis Costello in the Underground were actually intimidating. So were the cityfolk who pegged me for a Yank (my down coat was a giveaway) and blamed me for the Vietnam War. This usually happened well after the bars closed, by law, at 11:pm (Time, gentlemen, please!).

I composed lines of iambic pentameter. Sitting in the back of the crammed caravan, Chappy and Mrs. Chappy, along for the trip, quibbling over directions up front, I would scribble in my little red notebooks. This caught the eye of my favorite blonde, Mary, who confided that I came off as a Dostoyevsky type during the weekend we took off together to Stratford-Upon-Avon on the train. It was Mary’s birthday and I arranged for a small cake at dinner. We saw the Tempest—I remember the Caliban character well. Totally green he was, with four goat horns sprouting from his bald head. Our hosts at the bed and breakfast prefigured Nick Park’s claymation world of Old Blighty. So did the station manager, who gave us Mrs. B&B’s card. College men in matching blazers hit on Mary at the pub after the show, but Mary ignored them, preferring the attentions of the dark little mustachioed fellow who didn’t drink enough for the schoolboy’s liking. That night, Mary divulged certain problems she had in her relationship with her father. That was about all she divulged, as I recall–I was nothing if not the perfect freaking little gentleman, and I only get so far with the Dostoyevsky thing.

Back in London, I would sit in cafes listening to The Who on corny radio stations. I caroused Carnaby Street. One day, near the Tower of London, I noticed a guy that looked like my hometown neighbor Vince with a beard. He happened, coincidentally, to be standing next to two guys looking like our high school chums Ralph and John with beards. It really was Vince, Ralph, and John! In addition to the beard, John had picked up a phony British accent. We had dinner at a Chinese restaurant. Ralph was at a loss, in an aside, to explain what had come over John.

One day–it was a weekend day toward the end of the trip–I stopped into an upscale newsstand in which I spotted a yellow Toby mug. Toby, a stock character in England comparable to an 18th century Homer Simpson, has pre-Shakespearean roots. Your standard Toby mug is Toby himself with a tricorn hat, his pipe, and a flagon of ale. But any and all decorative mugs with faces–fish, man, or leprechaun–can be considered Tobys. My favorite depiction of a Toby in literature is Uncle Toby in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, which I read in my sophomore year, the year prior to the trip. [The recent film version of Shandy is actually very good—completely in keeping with the spirit of the book]. I sprang for the Toby mug. That and a big wool sweater were my souvenirs from the trip.

We retuned, flying on Air India, to Kennedy Airport, whereupon we immediately boarded a helicopter shuttle to Newark. The last navigational quibble between the Chapmans occured as we crossed over midtown Manhattan. Yes, helicopter shuttles used to fly over the city between airports—until one crashed moments after take-off a couple of months after our ride.

Back at Drew, I spent a little more time hanging around Mary, who never fully realized that she outclassed me. I found that quite charming. When she graduated that year, she handed over to me the editorship of Drew’s literary magazine, Plateau—a fond act of nepotism, no doubt, but I was, to the best of her knowledge, the only cat on campus with little red notebooks filled with iambic pentameter.

Such as it was:

Sonnet to the Color Red
(London, 1979)

In London Town the color red resides
On double-decker busses in the Strand
And at the Tower, stained from pierced sides,
The Yeoman Gaoler, regal red, yet stands.
In pubs, cafes, on cars, and colonnades
The trim of red makes Soho seem to bleed;
At Buckingham the palace guard parades
With crimson-cloak-draped cavalry and steed.
The red world dwells below here and above
Piled high upon the Cockney’s curly head;
In Piccadilly Eros stands for love
Eclipsing Coca-Cola’s neon red.
Now, when I close my eyes the red remains–
I see, at least I feel it in my veins.

Pip Ho!
Vanx
________
Photos: Toby Mug: Verb-Ops 2006; Chappy, kid in Trafalgar Square: Verb-Ops 1979; Literary Pilgrims at Penshurst, a Ben Jonson landmark: Sarah Chapman, 1979. Illustration from Tristram Shandy–frontispiece to vol. 1, second state.

. The Cabinet of Dr. Verb-Ops Still Life with Asso…

.

The Cabinet of Dr. Verb-Ops
Still Life with Associations

I’ve been painting a lot of still life this year. I set up the motif on a wooden desktop that I hammered together using pine boards back in Maplewood, where my studio was up in the eaves of the old house on Franklin Avenue. These days, I work in a comparably-sized space in the basement, tucked behind the stairs. The one advantage to the basement studio is having a sink right there—I often wondered in Maplewood if we’d ever manage to sell the house with its paint trail leading from the attic to the basement.

I guess I’m like most painters when it comes to still life subjects. I have my favorites. I keep them in a metal cabinet on the wall downstairs when they aren’t in play on the desktop or on loan to a shelf in the dining room or living room. I have a lot of what I generally call vessels—iron kettles, a brass spittoon, a long-spout aluminum watering can. I have a hookah and a rubber chicken. Then there are the anthromorphs—a yellow Toby mug from England, a monkey Toby, a wooden monk, a gargoyle from Paris, a turtle head (reptomorph?), and my all-important plaster skull from New Orleans. These “face cards” are the lead players.

And the play is the thing…unless the thing is a mountain. Of the three standard representational genres—portraiture, landscape, and still life—still life is the one in which the artist creates nature before representing it on canvas. I go about setting a stage most times–a theater of the absurd with lead actors and bit players, but without a purely objective, linear narrative. Or, I build Mont Sainte Victoire. Either way, I create a world that says something to me in that wordless, subjective/objective language that pulls me to art.

Lately, I have been thinking about my still life players. Each of them, it seems, has an association, a story. I never really think of these stories when I’m painting—the paintings would end up big story stews if I did, given that I like to pile items up on the table. But on some level, these histories and association must inform the paintings. It might be worth it to give them some thought and sort them out.

.

First up—Toby. Sometime this weekend.

Vanx

Waiting for Cassowary . . .

Waiting for Cassowary
.

.
.