and now for the news:

And now for the news:

Many people died today because of differences of opinion. Some died in anger and some accidentally. The number of births far exceeded the number of deaths but hunger played a more prevalent role than in years past. Pharmaceuticals promised cures for disease in an ever-increasing rate but recent tests have shown scientists not funded by corporate money question optimistic findings.

On Capitol Hill spokesmen for ‘Health reform’ debated whether the President’s proposal would cost taxpayers more than the reform that it promised. Heated words were exchanged and rose to vigorous challenges on both sides of the isle. But both parties agreed to explore a common goal. Later the combatants retired to a fashionable Georgetown restaurant to re-examine the issues.

A large amount of forest was cut down today by peasants hoping to sustain their families through farming. The youth of these regions have migrated to the capitols to explore a meager living through the exploitation of excess labor.

Multi-national corporations extended their hold on world governments by controlling monetary resources, bribery or intimidation. Laws are being passed to allow liaise-fare to predominate the option regarding graft.

Lobbyists prevailed in ongoing complaints by people who decry a lack of government regulation vis-à-vis the lethal contamination of food, water, and radiation. Politicians have vowed to look into the issue after November’s election.

Non-nuclear countries have issued a decree that justifies renewed production of fissionable material despite the threat of boycotts by the UN Security Council. Many annalists see a global arms race as idiotic and not in the interest of anyone. However hundreds of thousands massed in Zagreb today in support of “The Why Not Us” congress, which met to re assure the world of its peaceful intent.

NASA is bewildered by the failure of its last six missions due to collisions by “Space Junk” (nuts, bolts and other debris that now comprise a veritable ring around the Earth) Traveling at 7.78kms, a mere fleck of paint can disable a space station. However NASA warns of unsubstantiated fears concerning future missions.

Wall Street ended on a positive note today amid speculation that a merger was eminent whereby General Electric, Exxon Mobile and Bank of America will join forces in a consolidated effort to promote their interest.

The dollar fell as many countries besmirched the petro-dollar in favor of the Yen.

“One Slimy Shit” toped box-office traffic this weekend and reality show “One Fuck too many” won the Neilson Rating despite a close second by cooking favorite “ My Cake is Bigger than Yours.”

In sports today: Cricketer, Nelson Gibbsley pleaded ‘not guilty’ to alleged performance enhancing violations. “My wickets ain’t tainted, “ pleads the Bloomsbury Center Cupper.

Variable clouds persist in the north while seasonal averages elsewhere tend to follow the norm.

Penalty Phase

If it please the court, may I have permission to address the Jury? Thank you your honor.

Ladies and Gentlemen: We have been engaged in a titanic struggle to find the truth in the matter between the accused and my client. And while you have found guilt, as it were, we must ask ourselves if we have, in FACT, found truth. It is my understanding that only in your deep and unflinching wisdom can truth be said to have prevailed.

Dear Jury: my client has not sought punishment nor has he asked for monetary compensation for the stabbing. It is not he who brought the accused before the court. No! My client, Janos Garbo only asked for medical attention to his thigh after the incident … notice the word incident as opposed to ‘attack’ or ‘assault’. Zealotry in the guise of justice (so timed as to possibly influence the re-election of the District Attorney Alhread) is the instrument that motivates these proceedings.

Yes it is a fact, an undisputed fact that on the night of November 28 of last year Professor Langerhans did cause, through loss of muscular control, a wound to the left thigh of the art student Garbo. But subsequent to the injury, the matter would have floated away like a leaf in the breeze of time, unnoticed and inconsequential, had it not been for the kindness and due diligence of the condemned man before you. The very man you have been assigned to sentence.

The good professor did, perhaps in an over agitated state of pathos, make the 911 call that brought attention of not only the paramedics but the honorable District attorney Dorothia Alhread who whereupon seized the opportunity to impugn, degrade, prosecute and convict the kindly Professor whose only impropriety was a weakness for Dry Sherry and the consequence of ‘ unrequited love’.

So, good people, consider the forgoing in submitting your sentence. Paraphrasing the words of Dostoyevsky’s ‘Crime and Punishment’: There was no crime, there is no punishment.

Let me invoke yet another sage another wise and careful moderator of human conduct. William Shakespeare “ the quality of mercy is not strained it dropith like the gentile rain from heaven”

Think probation… think probation… have mercy, think probation. I believe you will be wise… you will bring truth to light the lamp of JUSTICE.

Applause

Betrayal

Betrayal

On a crisp Saturday morning just after his ninth birthday his father told him that he would be needed to ‘help the old man’. His father always referred to himself that way. Janos knew not to protest although he would miss baseball practice.

In the truck neither spoke. At the lumberyard they quietly stacked two by fours on to the truck bed and walked toward the office. His father broke the silence.

“When we get into the office they will ask how many two by fours did we load. I will ask you to go back to the truck and count them. Come back to the office and when I ask… say 12. Got it?”

It went the way his father predicted. The boy in somewhat of a daze returned to the office and leaned against the counter for support. Although he counted 20 two by fours, Janos somehow managed to mumble the word twelve.

On the walk back to the truck Janos’ father issued his next assignment.

“ Walk behind me. I will step on a piece of flagstone. Pick it up and put it in the back of the truck.”

Pulling away from the lumberyard his father glanced at the boy.

“What’s the matter?”

Janos fixed his eyes on the dash. “Nothing” he said.

The sound of it seemed to come from a long way off.

Drawing Class

Drawing Class '68

He seemed not much older than we were, having so much fun reading the names on the roll call, trilling the R’s on Latin names adding a prefix of Sir or Mademoiselle. Later, when we got to know him better we realized he was just stoned or drunk. I remember he sat cross-legged on the desk and gave a little speech about the options at hand. He said we were going to pretend to be great draughts men like Raphael or Del Sarto and that he would give us the understanding and the tools to do so. But we had to take it seriously or it wouldn’t be fun and it had t be fun or we would be bored and being bored led to dreadful things. He said that to be something you had to first pretend to be it. That’s the way we learn he said.

It was a contradiction (the first of many) So serious, so flakey.

It was my first year of College. I had, in High School, become something of a competent cartoonist and I thought of myself as a terrific artist. Everyone said so. I even got a summer job drawing caricatures at Southern California tourist resort. But having been where I came from left me thinking that Walt Disney was as great as there was. So I remember being adrift of this guy who was so hyped on some old fart from Italy.

Drawing from life # 86: (required of all Art Majors ) Tu-Thrs 9-12am - 4 units

Before any of that he wrote in great flourishes on the black board:

Doctor Julius Garbo ( at your service)

We soon learned that he wasn’t a doctor and used many first names. We just called him Garbo.

Later, when I succumbed to the rigors of his discipline and felt ‘the calling’ to be one of them… to live and feel the fraternity of Caravaggio and Velazquez and to feel that although you walked in their shadow, theirs was a shadow of pure radiance.

Ojai 2010

"PIPER" from "The Museum Suite" 24x30" 2009

I paint this way now. Last twenty years anyway. On the left:

an imaginary portrait of me and Franz Kafka. I sobered up in 1977. Hadn't painted for 5 years. So when I started again I thought I should explore what painters did after 1949. It took another twenty years to find my way back to a kind of realism. I like the story telling and the ability to be near what I love in with pictures. Above: a painting of my Grandson Niko.

" Ya got to show the love" That's what I told a young painter friend who came by for advice. I hadn't had that thought before the moment it spilled out. But I like the thought.

I started a series of paintings about people looking at paintings. I go to museums a lot and I have begun to feel that museums are repositories of trust. I guess by that I mean that the works of art are acts of creation without any evil or sinister intent. The world outside the museum seems filled with false idols or seductive intentions. The masks of commerce, politics,

,government, religion, often have an agenda that does not feel consistent with my well being.

People in museums are curious, attentive, polite and full of wonder. So, the kind of people I love meets the the kind of art I love and the interaction becomes subject for my Museum Suite.

Strangers on a train

Strangers on a train ( Barbara)

I met Garbo in the 60s on a train in what was then Yugoslavia. I was returning to my studies in Florence from a summer on the Dalmatian Coast. We stopped at some little station and that’s where Garbo must have got on. He burst into our compartment sweating and flustered and looking tan in a white Greek sailor shirt.

“Scusi, che un posto…permesso?” As he squeezed in directly across from me.

For a while the six or seven in our compartment sat quietly until he pulled out a salami and some bread and offered it around. Suddenly there was wine and smoking (not him) and a cacophony languages and translations.

I must have been smiling cause he asked right away the usual “getting to know you,” questions, and I must say he was fun to talk to from the get go. But when I mentioned that I was studying art restoration at the Academia de Belle Arte in Florence, he got real serious and we talked painting . I could tell he was a “romantic” by that I mean he was all about the passion. I liked that and I liked him right away.

We had an hour layover in Zagreb and went into a bar and had some beers.

By hour’s end we made sure our tickets would be good the next day, found a cheep hotel, fooled around, made love, drank a lot of Vodka and

Garbo told me the most amazing story about one of his Professors in College who had a crush on him, and in a rage of jealousy stabbed him in the thigh.

Garbo and I have been friends and lovers on and off for twenty years but that story of the stabbing is most vivid and memorable not so much in and of itself but what came out later…during the trial.

Interrogation

If you care to, you may smoke. No..? well it doesn’t suit you. You’re the healthy type aren’t you?

Thank you for returning my call and agreeing to make your way down to the station for our little chat. I know you don’t drive so I trust the bus was not too much bother with the weather being so foul. Ah… so you did take a cab, all the better. I do like a man who likes a little comfort over parsimony.

So lets get on with it shall we? Grubbner, my boss asked me to review your dossier and while it usually takes an hour or two to review the dossiers of our citizens when called upon, I was quite taken with it’s contents and actually spent the entire weekend studying the details of a really remarkable combination of facts and figures. Some passages brought me to a state of great excitement and the kind of expectation explorers get when entering a dusty tomb. Dossiers such as yours come along once (if one is lucky) in a career. Not that anything in it is of particular astonishment nor even out of the ordinary. On the contrary you seem at first glance to have made it your goal in life to exist without distinction of any kind. That certainly was what caught Grubbner’s attention. When all seems normal to our staff, Grubbner’s nose itches. That, my dear young man, is what separates Grubbner from the entire Investigative Body. Grubbner walks into a room and people sweat. Other agencies tremble when Grubbner asks for a meeting. But lets leave Grubbner for now shall we? With any luck we can resolve your predicament… well lets use a more suitable word. Predicament implies a certain uncomfortable position. And that is certainly not the intention of this inquiry.

And thus it is that we have come together today to clear up the fragments of ostensible inconsistencies I may have uncovered within the depositions taken with regards to your file. Constancy is the measure of all dossiers. Thus my mandate is bring yours up to that standard.

I’m going to have to interrupt you here Professor Langerhans. When our last session ended we agreed to discuss the falling out you had with your friend Garbo. You had a violent argument with Garbo… remember?