Mark and Mick

In the end it does not matter what the words say,

nor what the man promised,

The end says it all.

And if the the man promised greatness, and he faltered,

Or if the man faltered and rose to excellence…

Who should care?

A man has only his own weight and bears it as best he can.

There are pivotal obstacles that no one outside can measure.

These make a great man lesser

And a leeser man seem great.

We learn through the lens that traffics constant effort.

A relentless effort.

A great untireless struggle. Yes I say yes! Bare the pain.

We win because we do it in love.

Give us each our time

And see us as the eager tendril

That once trampled on, has finally pushed through.

In the end it does not matter what the words say. nor what the man promised.

The end says it all.

And if the man promised greatness...and he faltered,

Or if the man faltered and rose to excellence,

Who should care? A man has only his weight and bears it as best he can.

There are pivotal obstacles that no one outside can measure.

These make a great man lesser

and a lesser men seem great.

We learn only through through the lens that traffics constant effort.

A grand solar tropic gamble.

Give us each our time and see us as the eager tendril

that once trampled on , has finally pushed through.

Betrayed ll

Ah, once this person showered me with praise and all thoughts lovely and with equality… called me Uncle as if we were family.

But then we entered into business and the terms of our discourse upset me greatly as negotiations were shaded with mistrust and questions as if we were not observant of those ties that bind a family into unwavering loyalty.

And now I know that blood is blood and everything else is a promise that may shatter with the next wind.

It is a pity, a great pity ……an even greater sorrow.

Glenn Gould and...

Notes

Entrusted to me were Garbo’s ‘notes’.

Years before they were published I came across this entry that I found rather peculiar in that I heard a voice I hadn’t heard before, a plaintive probing voice. Judge for yourself:

“Some time ago I saw an interview by ‘x’ with Glenn Gould. The interviewer asked him why he chose to re-record the Goldberg Variations. Remember that his original recording some twenty plus years earlier was what brought a heretofore unknown Canadian pianist to the forefront of the classical music’s world in terms of a profound musical interpretation of what had been considered Bach’s exercises for piano studies.

Gould’s foundation was therefore challenged by Gould himself. Those hearing the new recording were confused by the ostensible contradiction in interpretations. The two were said by some to be analogous to the physicist’s apparent quandary whether to describe light as wave or particle. So I was most fascinated by what Gould himself would say. I ask you to forgive my paraphrase but I believe it is close enough.

Gould said, ‘Ahh, There was a good deal of PIANO PLAYING on that early recording and I don’t mean that in a good way’.

I have puzzled over what Gould called piano playing and what he much later believed to be the very deepest expression.

Today I saw a painting show at the Getty Museum of some of the finest works by Jean-Leone Gerome. And I found his work most intoxicating, and as satisfying as many of us found in Gould’s first recording of the ‘Variations’.

The Gerome show was on loan at the Getty, but on this same day I saw, in the permanent collection at the Norton Simon Museum a Rembrandt self-portrait.

I spent some time this evening thinking about Gerome, Gould, Bach, Rembrandt and somehow without belittling Gerome I felt the difference between Great Painting and the depth of a great soul showing itself. Do you follow me?

Performances (Garbo)

Performances (Garbo)

After a bit more Ouzo than usual, Garbo went over to his stereo and played Maria Callas : Casta Diva from Bellini’s Norma. His head was bowed and as it faded, he turned and said,

“I was there, I heard her sing this alive. It was a very moving moment. In Vienna where Beethoven shook boots off. In the great hall that Kokoschka painted. I walked up those gleaming marble stairs and waited for Maria. She brought Greek tragedy to the twentieth century and beyond. I don’t go to live concerts anymore; I have spoiled myself by listening to my favorite performances over and over.

You know I paint with the great music every day, every day all day for 40 or more years. So that now I have no leeway in the sound or feeling of it. Tempo tempo. There is only one tempo to Shostakovich 5^th. I have to leave. Not that I am correct in my assessment of a performance. I have, as I said, denied myself the capacity to appreciate any other interpretation of Bach than Glenn Gould, and that is a very sad thing. I’m a poorer being because of it. But Gould it has to be.

But there was a time it was not so. When I heard Renata Tibaldi (Turandot) in Barcelona. You know they carried her limo as they cheered. I was speechless but she sat unruffled in the back seat and waved. Or Leontyne Price, a voice like rosewood or teak. In London I heard her make a sound like it had been resonating throughout the Universe forever.

I heard the great pianists as well: Rudolph Serkin, Richter, Gilels, Rubenstein, and Casadesus, on successive weeks in Florence during the May Music Festival. I heard Casals play in the great Cave in Rhondo. One of the enormous limestone caves in southern Spain. One cannot describe such a tremolo. I missed Toscanini but saw one of the last performances of Serge Koussevitzky. And Leonard Bernstein, I went in ready to see histrionics but found myself yelling for another curtain call. I love Lenny and prefer his Mahler to any other.

One thing more, Give me Di Stefano who makes me believe.”

Garbo was a little red in the cheeks as he finished and tossed his head as if to say ‘There I go again.’

Prayer Song

PRAYER SONG

What happened to Rapture

Who took Sublime

Ecstasy vanished

Joy ran out of time

Sacred’s forgotten

Man has a new flaw

Wonder is absent

Nobody’s is Awe

There’s dust on the Relic

The Prophet grows dim

His lesson’s forgotten

What happened to him

Man’s best face

Is fast asleep

As to make the Angels weep

The message of Clerics

Is not what it seems

Men guided by dogma

Don’t listen to dreams

The warning of Wise Men

Is seen as a rouse

The Wisdom of Ages

Is replaced by the “News”

Who hid compassion

Lost is the Source

How long until Reason

Is moved by remorse

Man’s best face

Is fast asleep

As to make the Angels weep

The thief that stole Greatness

Is now King of fools

The Scepter is Passed

Mediocrity rules

The Dam stops the River

The Ax fells the Tree

The Mine rapes the mountain

Waste now fills the Sea

The Symbols have faded

The Myth is obscure

The Story, forgotten

The Moral, a blur

Man’s best face

Is fast asleep

As to make the Angels weep

I pray for Deliverance

From man’s cunning hold

Take me from his Temple

His God’s made of Gold

I pray for Redemption

I pray we embrace

A longing to live in

A true State of Grace

A longing to live in

A true State of Grace

Amen, Amen Amen

Garbo Says

Garbo says:

Here is my question to you? When you look at a string of dixie cups hanging on a gallery wall or a series interlocking bands of naugahyde that are arranged across a corner of a museum, do you get the same kind of feeling I got when I first saw El Greco. Is there the same paralyzing feeling I get in the pit of my stomach. The same sort of wonder or the level of respect I get when I see Re!mbrandt. Is it like that ? is it visceral?

Or do you admire something else in the Dixie cups? Is it something that you can love like I have come to love in Velazquez. Do you see neon tubes like I see brush strokes in Manet? Is that what it is? That you ‘get it’ the way I get Caravaggio. And are they the same kind of genius… and Michelangelo did it on a ceiling and your guy does it with grafitti or squirts of piss?

If it is so, that the deepest recesses of your soul resonates upon being witness to a giant slab of cor-ten steel somehow precariously placed corner to corner in a sixty foot room having been designed by an artist using a maquette of foam core and sent to a steel mill (ratio: one to a hundred). Then I envy you because you can get yours from so many sources and I have to travel so far.

Last trip to Madrid I wrote to the Director of del Prado Museum. He granted me permission(vis a vis) my 'Museum Suite' series, to be alone with the rooms and the paintings I so love. Alone with Goya and Zurburan. Just us. On a Monday when the museum was closed, save for me.

I had been there when I was twenty. Obtained permission to copy. I told the director . He said ‘come’. I paid my respects to Velazquez as did John Sargent earlier. I didn’t know it then but we made copies of the same ones.

It’s tradition. It’s homage and respect for ones ancestors.

What have your guys built lately?... I forgot…. a stuffed shark. Whoopee!

Garbo's Murder

Garbo’s murder

Towards the end when his once nimble fingers now splayed in awkward pointings and his ravaged body, frail and quiet sought refuge in wine and percocet, Garbo muttered something about a murder on a Greek Island back in the seventies. I thought he referred to something he heard or read about and let it pass, The old man often muttered semi coherent withered garbling that I regarded as the random engram of a mind straying back and forth in time and fantasy.

A few days later in a more lucid state we were engaged in a game of chess and I mentioned his reference to a murder on a Greek Island years ago.

“What did I say?”

“ Just something about a murder and a Greek man with pointed ears and the name of an island I couldn’t understand.”

“ Ah, Spetsae, I lived there for quite a time when I was young. I shared a room with a famous bouzouki player from Athens who played at the Taberna Skoppina . We drank Ouzo and danced every night. Me and Christo (the barber) & Nikos. There were no cars and we rode to the Taberna in a cart/ taxi pulled by a mule. My greatest summer!”

“And was there a murder?”

“No, no… the murder was years later when I went back with Cassandra.”

“Was it some Greek matter of honor between families.”

Here Garbo paused and wiped his nose while he raised his spectacles.

“The only other two people who know this are dead. “

My turn to pause and gesture inquisitively.

“ The dead guy, Cassandra and me. I killed a guy.”

In Terms of Quality

In Terms of Preference

In his 70’s Garbo wrote the beginning of an essay that he never completed. He had been working on the Museum Suite.

“Until today I never gave a second thought to the way all museums are set up chronologically. The Quatrocento never invades the rooms set aside for Expressionism. One never sees a Rembrandt self-portrait and next to Picasso’s.

Quality and importance should be qualified by comparison, and should be judged by the same standard. It now seems to me, that we are directed by the dictates of Museum floor plan paradigm to keep our observable standard of excellence determined by the context from which it came. They are saying ‘that was then … this is now… don’t confuse this century with the last…. They have nothing to do with each other.’

Here I agree with James Whistler who stated

‘A work of Art has no connection with the environment in which it is produced and has no meaning apart from its beauty.’

I believe this is the basic cause in the irrefutable permissiveness in what today is accepted as fine art. Please don’t quibble on the grounds that Duchamp’s Nude descending was once besmirched and is now considered masterful. Or Warhol’s soup cans were once laughed at and now bring record prices. Or that Hirst’s stuffed shark is worth 12 million.

I propose these modern/contemporary works be put in a museum setting next to Botticelli’s Primavera, El Greco’s Assumption (either one) and the second coffin of Tutankhamun.

Why have you settled for less? Why have you gone for the mediocrity of Saatchi’s profiteering? “

Look at them next to each other.”

Here Garbo left off… I think he knew that as long as there was money involved, the Philistines would win.

The Romantic

Double self portrait with Rousseau

The Romantic

He was always a ‘ romantic’. Early on he read an essay by Einstein who said that the impetus behind all human endeavor was either fear or longing and Garbo certainly connected to the longing part.

He wrote while on an extended stay at the American Academy in Rome:

"I have found myself in love again… at my age (a Steppenwolf, I suspect has lay hidden in a chrysalis of my own making). She is so utterly beautiful to behold …I am smitten.

‘An hundred years should go to praise

Thine eyes and on thy forehead gaze' …yes I am in love.

She willingly submits to my most suspicious scrutiny and ignores all my approval , for she has yet to give me even the smallest hint of noticing my arousal, my covet-ness, or my coy gestures aimed at gaining entrance to the secrets of her grandeur.

I willingly yield and pray for her to rejoin, but her very nature is to demure and lay silent beneath her exquisite façade, her patina of unreachable beauty.

Would that I slave for an eternity, I fear I should never approach the awesome beauty of my love

And her name is painting."

-------------------------------------

Years later he read to me some passages from his ‘notes’ and after reading the above, removed his glasses and turned toward me speaking rather sheepishly:

“I forget which ancient Greek said, ‘Though the power is lacking… the lust is nevertheless praiseworthy.”

Celestina

Celestina 1986-92

My real name is Celeste but Garbo started calling me Celestina the first time we had coffe. Actually we met a few years earlier but he didn’t remember. But I remembered him. He was the artist in the studio of the woman who let us use her canyon for our sweat lodge. I’m Black Foot (Montana, Nitsitapi Tribe)

We had our feast in his studio after the ‘sweat’. He was always cordial but did not eat with us. Archie told me he was a sober alcoholic. Archie Fire was our chief. Archie had been sober for nine years. He and Garbo used to drink coffee in the afternoon before the sweat and talk about their days as crazy drunks. I knew all about drunks. My ex- husband showed me all I needed to know about alcoholism.

But then in ’86 I was working in “women’s studies” at UCSB and our office happened to be next door to the Art Dept. Garbo was teaching a summer semester and our eyes met a few times as he passed the window to my office. I remembered him and thought I saw some kind of recognition in his eyes. But he never stopped. There was just that flicker…

Finally I asked Janet, a friend of mine, who worked in the Art Dept Office to ask him if he thought he knew the woman in the office next door. She added: she thinks she knows you. He turned and walked over to my door and peeked in.

Do you think you know me?

Yeah, aren’t you Janos from Laura’s studio?

Did I meet you there?

Not really but I knew who you were.

Do you have time for coffee?

We took it so slow I thought nothing was ever going to happen. We talked and had dinner. He met my kids. We walked and had coffee, and talked some more. He asked me and my kids to a beach bar-b-q. He had all his shit together for the fire and buns and all of it. A blanket and kids drinks too. He let Sam my 6-year-old boy cook the burgers. And even though Sam was way to slow and everything was over cooked, Garbo never corrected or meddled in Sam’s effort. I think that was the moment I lost resistance and mentally gave in. That night when we said goodnight Garbo held my head in his gentile hands and kissed me on the forehead.

Still it was a year before we held hands in the worst movie we ever saw. It didn’t matter. We held hands and stroked each other’s arms. Just thinking about it makes the hair on my arms stand up. And the next time he came for dinner, he came for good.

Garbo’s Journal

Began as a sort of “see, I’m thinking” kind of journal, Garbo soon realized that ‘thinking about his own thoughts’ really wasn't worth remembering. A lot of self-pity and self- indulgence embarrassed him weeks later.

His “notes” as he called them evolved into a catechism of things he read that he wanted to remember. He once told me that the stacks of copybooks represented the sum total of everything he ever read that was worth remembering.

One day in 2010 six tears before his death (typo, but tears is better than years) while he nodded off I copied out one page of his ‘ notes’:

12/23/09

Bonobo (genetic difference than Chimp. We and Chimp got the war gene)

2/10

Aristarchos of Samos (216 BC) calculated that the Earth revolves around the sun and the illusion of the movement of the stars is due to to the Earth’s rotation—pre-dates Copernicus by 2,000 years.

3/10 To be ahead of the curve means… they can’t see you.

4/10 “ current food production requires 16 calories of input to yield 1 calorie of grain and 70 calories of input to yield 1 calorie of meat.”

4/10 plasma= 4^th state of matter: electronically charged gas…. Makes up 99 % of the Universe (IONIZED ATOMS)

5/10 to look upon the face of rapture…

5/10 (my joke):

Did you hear the one about the horney Paleontologist….. He was reduced to dating fossils.

5/10

350,000 kinds of beetles make up 1/6 % of the total number of species on Earth.

Garbo Vents

Garbo was venting one day in class. Someone had brought in a reproduction of what the author of the accompanying article called “the next Basquiat”. This character had just landed a solo shot in the Whitney. The hounds were on the scent.

Garbo banged his fist on the desk

“Look” he said, “During the protest period around the middle of the Viet Nam War. The students mobilized to protest the draft, the war and the establishment. Swept up in the iconoclastic energy was “Don’t trust anyone over thirty and by extension “don’t trust the old icons”. I was a grad student at the time and leaflets were being passed around the art classes. I spoke with a friend of mine at Harvard who said the leaflets were there too. So this was no local movement these guys were of Bolshevik proportions and Nazi zeal. The pamphlet said we had all been brainwashed by a corrupt system of aesthetics that came to claim that a value system of appreciation that conformed to certain ideals of beauty had bankrupt the single artist who might choose another mode of self expression a priori. We all thought Rembrandt was good because we had been told so. The Louvre and the Met were simply protecting their interests.

At the forefront to this attack was a guy (charismatic: aren’t they all?) named Allen Kaprov who began on a soapbox and ended up charging large fees for his blaspheme. He had two mutually exclusive axioms that no one seemed to notice. ‘Non Art is more Art than Art Art’ and Art is best served spontaneously … he called this ‘a Happening’. “

Garbo paused to light up a Clove Cigarette and finished his tirade. “The point is this: the generation of students that burned their draft cards and toilet papered the dean’s office. That generation has become the curators and art dealers of our time. They fought for the right to exhibit their feces and that right has become contemporary taste that eschews quality and skill as priorities in order to call for innovation and self- expression. “’

“After all it takes a degree of ‘culture and connoisseurship to discern quality and skill from the marks of one’s buttocks pressed vigorously on a wet canvas. Especially if that smear fetches a handsome price a next years auction. For now the Philistines are winning.”

Some of Janos Garbo's paintings have recently surfaced. Several have brought huge auction prices.

The above 2010 painting titled 'Flanders' brought a phenomenal $750,000 for the exceptional work that combines wit and irony to his now famous 'Museum Suite' series. Years after his death the art world has reconsidered the USA/Hungarian, who has managed to bring connoisseurship and eclecticism back into acceptance if not appreciation.

A receitly uncovered blog site has uncovered images of some unknown masterpieces: http://wwwdvortcsakinthestudioblogs.blogspot.com/2010/04/recent-paintings.html

Professor Peter Langerhans ‘The Final Report’

To: Probation Service Board

Restricted Incarceration Division

From: Doctor Ephram Srtook PHD Psychiatry

Harvard Clinical

Dear Sirs:

After three months evaluative council and exhaustive interviews with the subject using various subliminal techniques, the staff of Harvard Clinical of which I am Chief Interrogator, has offered this final report on the matter of the State of California vs. Peter Langerhans: to wit:

The subject seems to have mental and physical capacity within normal range of his age group. He is alert and capable of general responses to questions pertaining to his youth and years as Professor of Art History at The University of California. There is a threshold in his neurological reflexes past which an alternative reality (somewhat hallucinatory) that re-directs his limbic cortex (that is to say) his cognitive memory, onto a landscape of his own imagination. This is a landscape that attempts to re-create the years of his love and study of Baroque Art into a self-delusional tapestry of treachery and corruption into which he instills himself as a lone voice of reason amid a background of the machinations of war and the politics of the Renaissance. His frustrations as a result of being ignored (his fiction) create a violence hitherto unimagined in the ostensible measured behavior of the Professor.

The trigger that fires him into his alternative state (his causa sui reality) revolves around a relationship with one of his students, a Janos Garbo who attended his classes in 1956-57. A relationship that terminated with a minor wound to the students thigh from some sort of writing instrument inflicted by the Professor entering, for the first time, into his strange new world of deranged betrayal and Baroque imagery. Think for a moment of the image of the Beheading of John the Baptist painted by Caravaggio that now illuminates and informs a now paranoid mind.

We have a term for this type of schizoid personality, “Pseudo neural psychosis”,a pathological breakdown of certain neural transmitters through an irreversible atrophy of synaptic response in the lower limbic cortex as to render the subject incapable of differentiating his own from consensus reality.

Our conclusions hope to impose a de-criminalization overlay to the matter. We are of the opinion that Peter Langerhans acted without willful intent or knowledge of its consequences during the actions and consequences of his attack on the Judge.

Grumpy

Sometimes things have to be said.

Disinformation permeates what we have held to be reality to such a degree that one’s choice of fiction determines how one lives.

Integrity absent… your choice of news determines your ‘Reality’.

The person you trusted to be looking out for your interest has just accepted substantial remuneration for services rendered in a matter in opposition to yours. And this is a man you voted for because he promised to be on your side.

Mostly ignored is how government really works.

Our American government represents the most responsive, most compassionate government that money can buy. Come on guys, when Obama looked like a possible winner, GM, Westinghouse, Bank of America climbed on board. Big money poured into a campaign that had been financed by the lower middle class, dollar by dollar.

As it did before 2009, lobby money rules! MultiGlobal Corporations have democracy in a strangle hold.

Guess who made out during the big financial crisis? Ruben, Paulson, Gietner, Somers (the happy boys of Goldman-Sachs} Check their net worth before and after.

Guess what else? War is big business. As long as there is profit there will be more of it!

Real Democracy is about people who debate issues in order to arrive at a consensus. When was the last time your voice was heard by anyone who could make a difference.

My aphorism for the 21^st century” WHERE THERE IS OPPORTUNITY, THERE IS GRAFT.

Most of my friends are artists and we have long understood that the quality of our product is of no interest to those who act as ‘middlemen’ Quality has no bearing on what is promoted. There are many more artists than outlets. Middlemen can pick and choose what is shown and given status by superficial appraisal by “the validators”

The contemporary validator is not a connoisseur. A connoisseur is someone who has a background in looking and remembering. This is someone who could walk into a room full of Cézannes and have a reasonable notion which one was the superior. And could tell you why. This is a person who could look at a specific work of art and judge it by it’s own merit.

Who are the validators? Curators, writers, high-end collectors who collaborate with dealers to drive up prices with chandelier bids at auctions and other collusions.

These are newcomers to the world of art. Their education has more to do with Harvard business school than to the research at the Fogg.

Dying breed, the connoisseur. Dying breed the rich connoisseur, Dying breed, the rich connoisseur who finds interest in collecting.

If a High-end dealer, a writer, and a museum get together on a product (Artist), sales and assured fame are a given. Usually for short term. Turn- over is a necessary element in the profit scheme.

No matter what they say, the big world of corporate takeover of governments and the smaller world of Art takeover by business has one thing in common.

Janos’ Mother

Moments before dying the nurse gave her a dose of morphine to ease the transition. Janos stood by, holding her hand as the drug loosened the vestige of tension that held her frail flesh.

Her eyes met his and a tiny flicker of a smile came across her lips. The wrinkled hand withdrew from his, lifted above her chest came down with force on her heart. Twice and then again. “Stop” she commanded.

Rosalie Emanualina Vallone

As the youngest girl in a strict Sicilian family of five boys and three girls it was her charge to attend to her mother stricken with iron deficiency anemia and bed ridden. Rose was 13 when her mother died. Now she would attend the meals and care of her father and siblings. Their combined employment and income was sufficient to sustain the basic necessities of a large home in South Buffalo.

By 1935 the older brothers and one sister had married. Papa Vallone sold the house and bought a smaller one in the ‘suburbs’. The patriarch retired in 1937 and died soon after from a stroke while walking to get cigarettes. Brother Bernie took charge of the family. Rose got a job jerking sodas at a drug store chain and met her future husband who delivered ice cream on Tuesdays and Fridays.

For Janos, the only child of a Sicilian mother, whose life had centered on caring for others, unconditional love, was inevitable. Showered with affection from Rose, the boy was raised with a mother’s love and a father’s indifference.

Although her formal education ended in the sixth grade, she felt that the boy she called Gianni had a spark of something that needed to be recorded. On pink paper she typed a rudimentary biography that was found among her belongings after she died. They are included here intact. without edit or changes of any kind:

1940

One year old. Tho he couldn’t understand ,we would sit by the hours reading nursery ryhams. Come bed time as long as I would sing 3 songs, “ School days, Rock-a-by-baby, and than hum The Skater’s Waltz, He would go to sleep. At birth he wieghd 9 lbs. Height 27in. That’s apretty big baby for little me, So at one year old he was a big baby to hold.To top it off a livelyr baby There was none. He always wanted to dance There I was with Gianni bouncing up and down, up and down.

1940

At the age of 2 Gianni was the center of attraction for his brilliance and personality He carried a tune perfect, and knew the words to several songs, such as Chatanooga Chu-Chu. No baby talk for him, every word as clear as a bell.

1941

At the age of three his talent for music was improving. As long as he had the radio going and a ball in his hand he was happy. He could spell his name and reciet avery nursery rhym in the book. His favorit being “Taffy was a Welchmen”

1942

At the age of 4 he lived on La Force PL. the street his dad was born on. This was a tough year for Gianni. He got all of his chield hood sicknesses such as Mumps,meazels chickin pox And to top it off His tonsils were removed. Than he developed cronic appendicts.Dr.said he may outgrow them.

1943

Gianni started school in Sept. of this year. Lindberg Elementry School. Living on Nassau in Kenmore, N.Y. His playmate and school chum was Wilma?? His first day of school was a happy day for him. In fact I felt a little hurt because most of the kids were crying because their mothers left them. But not Gianni. He happily waved and said “ By momie see you later” and turned to one of the little girls to comfort her.

1944

Five years old, in first grade. His pal at the time was uncle John D. What times they had together. Gianni turned out to be a very poor eater. I had all I could do to get him to drink milk. His favorit lunch was creamed eggs on toast He was a great companion to me. He would wipe the dishes and together we would sing. His harmoney was perfect. He got pnumonia this year and was a very sick boy.

1945

Six years old and full of vim and viger. Good at his school work. Reading fairly well. Reading Comic’s was his favorit pass time. His hight was 53 in. and weighed 53 lbs. Getting better looking every year.

1946

Seven years old. We moved to Californi9a. A lot of changes for Gianni. He enterd 3^rd grade at Willard School, in San Gabriel he got his first byke. And He was getting aquainted with new friends. He liked California right from the start. It took him a year to get himself in cerculation and adjusted.

1947

At 8 years old and in the 4^th.Grade He made the Pee Wee base ball team. Of course he sat on the bench for several months. However he was so very happy thinking some day he would be on the field playing. He never failed attending a game, wether it was a practice or a real one.

Some tips

To my faithful readers (all six) and to the wayward fish that might find themselves caught in the net… I offer an explanation to the origin and nature to “My Blogg”.

My talented and wonderful daughter, “Wine and Words”, having enjoyed the world of blogging offered to set up a blogg site for me. Whereupon, I thought to myself “yes… now I can post new paintings since my web site operator is no longer able to post new work”.

Instead I found myself entering into a semi fictitious semi-autobiographical novel that pretends to be a blogg.

One may start from blogg #1 January 2010 titled “Paris in ‘63” or work backwards from here. It doesn’t matter as long as you keep in mind that all the pieces are part of a whole and that different characters are recalling past events concerning a painter named Garbo or are characters that are being asked about certain events that relate to Garbo.

A novel in the form of a blogg is a novel idea.

Miguel 2014

‘The myth that survives is called truth’

Miguel 2014

I came to the States from Guanajuato, Mexico on a teaching assistantship in the UC graduate program. My father’s success insured that there would be no monetary problems. My mother, an American ex patriot insured that I was bi-lingual.

I was assigned to assist a lower division painting class taught by Janos Garbo. It was 1988. Garbo had been asked to teach by the faculty that had denied him tenure ten years earlier. But being fired by the University meant he could paint full time and he soon became something of a celebrity in the art world with a series of paintings based on a post apocalyptic destruction and a rebirth of all life on earth not carbon based but as a result of the accumulation of radiation garbage that somehow organized itself into sentient playful ‘beings’. Sorry about the long sentence.

The anthropomorphized heaps of glowing garbage morphed into exquisite forms that fit in nicely with Garbo’s propensity for organic form. But his so called celebrity lost momentum when his friend and Art dealer ran off to Europe with a great deal of Garbo’s earnings.

Now in need of an ‘income’ he gladly accepted the one year teaching gig. This I learned later from others. Garbo and I spoke of other matters.

Within a few weeks I was indoctrinated into the bizarre quirky thinking that made up his view of things. Not that he offered up his philosophy. I had to argue with him to pull it out. He was uncomfortable talking about his “quiet world”.

I was somehow able to gain his confidence and his affection. Half the time he is serious but the other half is a romp.

He began by stating we had to know the limits of the seeker (man) before we could report his findings. And there he turned to Lau Tzu #1 it begins:

“ Existence is beyond the power of words”

And ends:” If words be needed wonder names them both. From wonder into wonder existence opens.”

Garbo felt that man’s searching for truth while it can be enjoyed for its own sake should not be considered as culminating in an ‘objective truth’ since it ultimately relies on words to define itself. He went farther:

“Real objective truth does not exist except as tautology. Every other utterance of fact is conditional.

Science is contemporary myth. If the myth is believed long enough it will be called truth. It may last as truth for a hundred years. Or a thousand. Until it spends out itself.

Reality is the consensus of myth.

Scientists are our storytellers. They spend years examining data from more and more powerful and sensitive instruments. These data lead them to speculate and conclude. Only to be overturned by a new set of speculations defined by words.”

Intuition and dreams were more useful and therefore more relevant. Garbo identified with the Hindu triad of realities:

1. Karma… an early variation of ‘as you sow so shall you reap'

2. Maya …. ‘ The surface of life is an illusion’

3.Lila…… ‘The play of the divine untiring unending cosmic dance by a grace born of infinite vitality and variety'

Garbo saw Lila as God’s play. He kept a kind of journal where the ideas he read or thought were printed out in a neat delicate script. Some poems too: Shakespeare, Hart Crane, William Blake, who he claimed as birth mate since they shared the same birthday.

Many years passed and we have become very close. Fate has granted that we live near enough to see each other from time… to visit each other’s studios and keep up with each other’s ideas on painting. Garbo is Godfather to my first-born. Her name not coincidentally is Maya. He is always yelling at me to stop painting like a ‘Mexican’. I don’t know if he is kidding or testing cause there is that twinkle in his eye.

Sally (1963)

Sally (1963)

Oh God! What a freak. We were all fleeing the Village on to Tangier to live and die wasted on Majum or Hash or whatever. I was a nineteen, snowy Norwegian blonde from Minnesota but lived the last four on East Fourteenth with my sister in law Maureen who was kind enough to take me in when I ran away. She ran away first leaving my brother. I ran after her when I realized that this was my only way out of the bowling, all you can eat buffet, sub culture of Lumneck, Minnesota.

But what a freak that Garbo was. 23 of us on the Yugoslav Freighter bound for Tangier. All of us from Lower Manhattan and here comes number 24. We spotted him right away, all tan and jock looking California schmuck. Turns out somebody who booked passage, overdosed and Garbo grabbed the vacancy at the last minute.

We were asked to gather on the prow before sailing. It was a most beautiful morning on the battery. Captain Valid, spoke tolerable English. He kind of spelled out the rules of the voyage. I just remember the part about dinner hour and don’t disturb the crew, and that our assigned quarters were posted in the mass hall. So it broke down 12 girls and 12 guys. Two dorms with six double bunks each. Toilet and shower down the hall. What do you want for $129?

The day passed as everyone waved goodbye to the statue and watched Manhattan disappear. Then it was dinner and we were all starved since there was no lunch that first day. This was the first time we were all together in one room. Our waiters were so young, cool and foxy with their Marshal Tito moustache (later Garbo told me this was the moustache he would emulate). The food was rich and tasty but I have no idea what it was. Rice, I could identify. After dinner we all hung around not knowing what else to do.

Some of us knew each other from the Village or around the East End. We were all young, nobody looked over thirty. And this guy, Sandy, stood up and kind of became a master of ceremonies. He asked everyone to stand and say our name. He was a portly, utterly lovable guy with a mischievous twinkle in his eyes and a Jewish affable warmth that took over the room.

“ I’m Sandford Cohen call me Sandy, this is my wife Sarah and on behalf of this half kilo of Sahara Red, I ask who can roll a decent joint?”

Then we were all pulling out our stash and smoking good weed, except Garbo who politely declined. Turns out he was a dope virgin!

But no party pooper… Garbo went into the pantry and came out with a giant bottle of Yugoslavian Vodka with a steward carrying a tray of small glasses. Following close behind: another steward with a record player.

It would appear that Sandy had a competitor. But no! They hugged and seemed to really dig each other. Soon we were drunk, dancing, and or stoned. I know I thought in my doped up daze,’ is we going to party like this for fourteen days at sea?’

Somehow we all spilled out on to the moonlit deck where Garbo proposed we all play a “California Game” he called ‘pile’. The game he said begins with all of us in a pile. Well… we were all fucked up enough to play along and onto the main hatch we went, Garbo directing us, “You on top of her, that’s it… now you three get closer, up you go, make the pile higher, good” So we are all discombobulated into this giant pile of protoplasm, and Garbo yells,“Get what you can”. Laughing hysterically we start grabbing dicks and tits and howling along not in a sexual way, but in a fun way … What a freak.

After… we lay outstretched looking up and enjoying the stars and giggling at it. When this loud bell begins to ring.

Sandy appears and yells “Oh my god, Garbo rang the bell to abandon Ship!”

Interrogation ll

Interrogation ll

Let’s resume shall we Professor, or is it Grubner? Perhaps I should call you Doctor Langerhans? Sometimes you like that.

Don’t waist your time trying to trick me Agent Perkins, I’m on to those deceptions.

All right. It’s Garbo we want to deal with today. Forget names other than Garbo. The argument remember? He was your friend and there was an argument. The wound, the 911 call, the hospital, the trial, and what happened after.

That’s what we have to focus on. Try to remember!

It was Grubner who sent me in to face the enemy. I said it before in the courtroom in front of that idiot Judge. I wouldn’t have gone if he let me stay. He let the others stay, but me he sent to face him.

Who was the enemy? Who was it that you were sent to face? Was it Garbo? Think man, think. Everything depends on your recollection.

Grubner begged me for the sake of the agency to stop him from telling what he knew about Perugino and Raphael and the rest. The whole movement was in my hands. Sfortza and the Venetians could have taken over and it lwould have been the end to our cause. Don’t you see? I couldn’t let the weapon fall into their hands. Not now! Damn you! not now that Brunelleschi had come up with the solution to the Dome. Don’t you fucking see? It could be built. I had to stop him.

Garbo Senior

Garbo Senior

It may surprise you to read the words of a dead man.

Those of us who pass over have the right to set things straight. Especially if we kept it all in during our ‘live time.’

Looking back to my own youth, I had been trained to keep it in, to pretend things were the way they were supposed to be. My father was a formidable man who ruled the household with an iron fist.

I followed his model when I got married. It was the middle of the great depression and I was smitten by Rose’s great beauty and innocence. I wooed her and tried to bring her to bed in so many awkward ways. She always successfully held me off with that Catholic crap about “not till we are married”.

“Rose, will you marry me?” I hear it now… the echo of my lust. I paid the priest. His wife was the witness. We had no money so that was it. No family no friends invited.

The sex was short and the upshot was a pregnant wife in a depression, me working two jobs and along comes Janos. Sickly weak, eye problems and me having to support them and pay the doctors bills. We moved in with her Sister and that Jehovah Witness Minister husband. I hated it because I was not the guy who said what happens. He said how much coal we got. How much electricity we could use.

Luckily one of my jobs was in a munitions plant and I got exempt from the military.

After the war her family moved out west. I was promised a job with Rose’s brother George who was in the plastering business.

California was booming in construction and despite my misgivings about leaving Buffalo, Rose and I drove out west in the spring of ’46. There was the problem of money and again we were forced to move in with another of Rose’s brothers. (She had five). Oh yeah… Janos was now in school.

I worked my ass off and saved every nickel of what I made as a hod carrier, then as a plasterer. Eight months later we put a down payment on a two bedroom house 5 miles away in San Gabriel.

Then I was boss. I said what goes. Rose got a job as a file clerk and we started to put away a few bucks each month, I had to keep the lid on spending…like when Rose wanted to send Janos to a dentist. Nobody in my family got sick. We didn’t need nobody.

I was sick of needing help from them. I could take care of Rose and the kid.

From day one Janos was a momma’s boy. I told her “No more kids”, so she seemed to give her attention to him over me . I was just ‘ the good provider’. He was the apple of her eye:

“Janos imitate Frank Sinatra” “Do that dance I showed you” “ Play your harmonica for Uncle Johnny”

He was soft. Not like me and my brothers growing up in South Buffalo. We had to fight for every god damn nickel.

I tried to teach him how to look out for himself by taking advantage of certain opportunities. But he was afraid to grab what was in his reach preferring to take only what came his way.

He left home at 15 to go off to Catalina Island to be some kind of artist. We never talked much. As I say he was really a momma’s boy. I saw nothing in the boy that I admired.

When all is said, I made the home and put together everything that made a family . I worked hard to make it all as perfect as a man could do. Yet nobody said, “Hey Mike , what do you need?”