I Must Slow My Blinks

"Memory Wound in Roses"

A look,

that may never be

seen again;

special, worth

a fortune, and

so on, but where

are the words

to explain how

some of these

feelings wring

your heart,

take your

breath away, and

leave you

longing to

repeat them

and you can

never re-capture

the event again.

To re-create it

would turn it

into cinema, a

universe away

from your realm.

Feeding my

inner self with

feelings; my

sight drawn to

softly illuminated

vistas between

the hard places.

The tiny sprouts

of green grass

growing between

long tiles laid

end to side bor-

dering the side-

walk speak of

finding a

resiliant spot

within a hard

world.  That micro

size microcausm

that nourishes

your growth in

the same way

those magic

moments you

were remem-

bering did in

times past. They

sent you out to

shine.  They kept

you from drying

up and curling

in on yourself.

They kept your

ears tuned, your

senses keen, your

reason for

communicating

with a trans-

parent green

bug on the

plate glass win-

dow, and once I

blinked it was

gone.  Is that

what life is

like?  I believe

so.  I must

slow my blinks

or stop blinking

altogether.

Copyright © 2010 Nicole Rigets

Yesterday’s “Anthrax” of Life

"Morning Glory"

I’m having a day of disorder,

I can feel I’m wearing

my Father’s expression

along the sides of my mouth.

The misery lines

lead nowhere.

I walk and write.

Yesterday I found anthrax

in my life.

I stop to

see a crow

selectively picking up

soft white under-feathers

to line his nest.

A blister forms on my

best toe,

from a pair of shoes

I thought I could trust.

Copyright © 2010 Nicole Rigets

Abstraction in Klein

Spring at the Royal Vancouver Yacht Club

Cumulous Clouds under Ultramarine Sky Blue

Abstraction

City of Vancouver

Detail

City with its Knees in the Water

Close-In

Copyright © 2010 Nicole Rigets

Mother Junk: I’m Calling Oprah!!

We’re living in a Birdcage.  The floor is covered in seeds and feathers… pumpkin seeds that slip out of our hands or out from between our fingers as we pop them in our ‘beaks’ while watching movies.  Feathers have been squeezing out of seams around the bottoms of the cheap, made in China, slippers that were purchased at Daniadown.

We are taking refuge from the elements.  The sky’s pouring cold ice-rain and blowing it hard against all the windows.  The wind is howling provocatively and the treetops echo these sounds.  Parts of the wind escape the outdoors and squeeze inside through aluminum moldings loosely holding the windows in place:  a lovely day!

A lovely day is then followed by a day of reality… never my favorite.  Still I make an effort to ease into this kind of day and try to savor parts of it.

“Clutter Composition a.k.a. Mess Makes Music”

My daughter came by and looked into the room at the far end of the apartment and let out a LOUD proclamation:  ”We’ll take a photograph of the “disaster” and send it to Oprah!

She has no idea of the mountains I move but goes on to say Oprah will get me a therapist! I have three already, and a friend who used to do therapy.  A game of Scrabble laid out, ready to be played, cuts the contention short and I make another promise to get to it.  It being the:  I don’t know if it will be an office or a studio.

A trip to the library for help leads to “Clutter’s Last Stand” written by Don Aslett. It was a quick read and more enjoyable than retackling the “zone.”

Here goes:

First off:   “You may have a serious junk problem if:  you have to think about how to cross a room!”  I can hear laughter but I didn’t find it all that funny!:   I had a map to cross the floor!

I’m not the only culprit.  Aslett writes:

“Paper weight… is a psychological ton.”  My dear friends, Katherine and Gavin Hainsworth, authored “A New Westminster Album,” and collected mountains of paper while researching it. Gavin has taught special needs kids for eighteen years and Katherine is a full-time artist and an historian.  Cartons proliferated filled with files from all their pursuits.  I always felt relieved after I visited knowing I was not the only one staggering under the remains of days working on projects.  One weekend I was surprised to hear that Gavin had made three trips to the paper recycling dump.  Each time the van was filled to capacity with these cartons  of paper.  The weight of his deliveries was calculated at one and a half tons.  Yes, tons!!!!!  What are we all sitting on in our own spaces??

Some people stack newspapers up in and around their homes.  I have a modest half banker box of clippings clumped into a half dozen yellow file folders.

At one time there were plastic bags full of New York Times Week-end editions I had hoarded and bunched about so I could sit and clip.  Here’s the reason I stopped saving them:

I was formerly a Real Estate Broker and had gone to visit a couple in shaky health whose house I had listed.  They were in their last decade of life at best.  This couple lived on one acre and their flower and vegetable garden had attracted visitors and won awards in the past.  The ocean was a couple of minutes drive away yet the newspapers had taken priority over nature. When I saw the wife sitting at a card table surrounded with stacks of newspapers arranged in the middle of the livingroom, cutting away, newspapers became an arm’s length item for me. No longer something to follow but a quick peek at now and then; I only went for the arts, and books and fashion anyway.

Aslett goes on:

“Keep files up to date and when you need something you won’t have to mount an expedition or perform an excavation to find something.”

“Shrines need to be tended.”………and dusted!

“Keep a piece, a symbol, or a sample of a big object or item and let go of the rest.”………….Huh???

“Storage units are the ghost towns of clutter, a testimony of shame.” …………….Oops!

“A rental unit is a kind of oversized Emotional Withdrawal Box.” ………………..Is he talking about an apartment-sized storage unit?

I laugh a lot as I read what Aslett has to say next: “A varnished horse pooh with a few wires for legs, wings, and a beak:  The “Turd Bird” @ $5.99 each which tourists flocked to the store to buy.”

“We’ve junked up simple pleasures – everything needs accessories, costly ones, or else it seems impossible to do.”

“New – improved:  it failed, and we want you to guinea-pig the second round.”………..Top Producer in the nineties anyone?

“Kids don’t get much satisfaction out of elaborate toys because there’s really not a lot a kid can do with them – toys do everything themselves.”

“Accumulate good health, talent, friends, experiences, and sensations.”

“You can get used to what you are instead of what you have.”

I followed Lagerfeld on Twitter and found this advice:  Karl Lagerfeld admits: “I try not to be sentimental and obsessive about possessions. I love collecting, but I hate owning.”

The Story of Stuff:  The Important Information in this Video must be embraced by Everyone ASAP!  Every Mother and Child is well positioned to organize and bring much-needed change into the world.

http://www.youtube.com/user/storyofstuffproject#p/a/u/2/9GorqroigqM

The Book is also available, but this short video is so thorough, we may not need to add a book to our overstuffed shelves.

Copyright © Nicole Rigets

The Shrill

"The Shrill"

Answers sparring with doubt,

heavy padding masks the will.

The voice cut at the neck,

floats above a shrill.

Too many breaks in a china day.

Your eyes memorizing both sides,

Your fingertips pause above the jagged edges.

Copyright © Nicole Rigets

tttttCROSSttttt

R-I-P

First they

stopped

clapping.

Then they

stopped calling.

Then they

stopped coming.

They gave my

mother a

traditional

burial.

Then they

buried

me.

Copyright © 2010 Nicole Rigets

Become an Artist and Create More than Thursday’s Meatloaf

I have read of women with a family of 5 children and a business to run, a husband and meals to cook, going to University to get their Master’s or Doctorate degree and still doing charity work, socializing, and looking immaculate; that’s where I got the idea I could go to University to get a BFA.

I hesitate to write this.  Yet it saddens me to frequently hear from women I meet, who would love to become artists, how they stop themselves with notions of so-called sensible reasons.

This was:  My Journal entry August 6th, 2001.  It came from a hand-held cheap, Mead, Five-Star in a class by itself, spiral bound,Neat Sheet Perforated Pages, with 200 ruled sheets, and 400 ruled pages.

Runnng a family is at best fun and rewarding but a woman needs to be as free as her husband and children to be an artist, even if it only means designing her life to fulfill her dreams. Dreams that don’t cost her her family, but allow her to feel proud of accomplishing her vision.

When we are in our teens we have a million ideas – do these ideas get pushed back – do they become expanding waistlines, huge backs and hips?

If you had a short sentence period of life left to live because you are dis-eased would you make certain that you cleaned the house, picked up the cleaning, paid the bills, washed the car, and did lots of laundry between doing all the other self-imposed obligations you didn’t want to do when you felt forced to say yes.

Taken from the Series 'Cold Cereal'

Each day is so precious even when you are not compromised in your health.

My personal discovery is that nothing in the house changed while I went to University full-time for two years.   (Notation:  two years for a diploma worked into being five for a degree).  The dust still sat on the top of everything.  The house still looked the same at the end of a day even when I hadn’t spent ten hours wandering about in it.

The same little imperfections were on the walls.  The messy areas, where there was no other place to use the messy items or to store them, still struck me in an uncomfortable way; even though I had not walked past them a million times a day, as in the past, wondering what to do with them.

But while the house lived its life without me, I created hundreds of projects, got a diploma in Studio Art and following that a BFA degree, showed my work in galleries, was published on the cover of two literary journals, wrote, painted, entered juried competitions, and put my work on the Internet.  And I didn’t know I had it in me when I was taking the garbage out regularly for something to clean up.

Art School was one of the dirtiest and messiest places I had ever worked in.  I learned we were focused on the project not on our surroundings  We had great relationships; we learned what we had never known about ourselves and each other.  The mystery of life came upon us and we had feelings; strong feelings!

We became sleep deprived and were told to do things we had never dreamed of.  We were let loose!!  I called the courtyard full of industrial junk our play pen:  our toybox. Sometimes we felt isolated when we worked and sometimes we worked in groups.

There were many times I ate pizza, celery and peanut butter, plain bread, cereal, or junk near the end of a term, but it did far less harm than resenting the doing of something I no longer wanted to.

There was one time when I had to wear the same clothes for three days – that’s about as much inconvenience as I remember. (Notation:  This is when I remember feeling like a REAL artist having read up on Louise Nevelson, one of my favorites, who would roll on and off a small bed in her studio wearing the same clothes for days while she worked on a wall-size sculpture.)

I never knew a house could run itself.  My family was amazed and thrilled with the difference in me.  My secret self shone.  And to my amazement they all knew how to look after themselves.  It wasn’t a slice; I have never worked harder in my life; had only 5 hours sleep a night, worked 7 days a week, and pushed myself to the, and beyond the, limits of my imagination.

Every new term Dad would go into the hospital for a couple of days for cancer treatment. Usually he announced it without any warning and always when a printmaking project was due. Our business dropped when Bailey, our soft-coated wheaten terrier of 14+ years, got old suddenly and collapsed.  For seven months I was sick at heart with the thought of soon losing her. Bills piled up and at one point I measured the pile:  it was over 10 inches high. We had a robbery in our home and lost $25,000 in property that we were very fond of; some was sentimental.

What a blessing to have something so rich to focus on as my art:  my heart’s desire.  It was a ten year dream that still continues.  Our wheaten had a seven month old age and died a natural death, my Dad died in the hospital on the 3rd day after an operation a year before my graduation, and a very close friend died soon after.  I couldn’t prevent the deaths and I couldn’t control other lives either.

What I have learned to do is concentrate my attention on my gifts and talents and make something from these instead of living through other people’s lives:  ie. family, friends, people in newspapers, on TV, celebrities in magazines, etc.

How does your own life look, could you write a story about turning down a different road now and becoming what you dreamed you would when you were still in high school?

Start here!  This space is for you…………..

Copyright © 2010 Nicole Rigets

Uncapturable!!!Something That Will Not Stay Still

"Goodbye Without Leaving" from the Series: 'Cold Cereal' by Nicole Rigets

Where do I find the words to

describe

a flutter,

an instant,

something that

will not stay still,

something fleeting,

precious,

more valuable

than any gem,

ephemeral,

stardust,

mist,

momentous

visions,

uncapturable;

love so strong

it hurts when

it embraces you;

only for today,

impermanent

of course.

Copyright © 2010 Nicole Rigets

Rose Colored and White Insanity

In my second year at Grad School I was taking Media History.  We were watching films to learn about the conceptual and constructed components that go into the making of them.

Unlike many arts, films exude prophecy and memory.  I would sit in the dark theatre and write in my heavy black sketchbook with the refrigerator white pages laid open.  The pen scratched across the toothy paper but I could only hear the steadily increasing sine wave of piercing electronic sound; which accounts for the words below that are typed in capitals as I routinely thought of getting up to leave. The sound increased in pitch and volume slowly over a 45 minute period.  I wrote and fought myself.  Every few minutes someone left and I still don’t know how I sat through it.  The sound was marginally muffled by thoughts of my grade point average and whether Fiona, our teacher, would mark me absent if I left before it ended. I recently read the sine wave contributes largely to the uncanniness of the film.

Here’s what was written by feeling my way along on the pages of my book as I wanted to emit the same sound as the sine wave:

Viewing “Wavelength” by Michael Snow

Extraordinarily loud traffic

(noice) noise.

empty apartment with bookcase.

strawberry fields playing and

the room turned pale red… for

a few minutes or a minute.

Traffic noise begins but the

window has been shut by 2

women that came in before &

have now left. Yellow, red –

orange, yellow-green trucks

make a loud noise  s.

sunset in the window &

it comes into the room.

psychedelic colors paint

the interior white

light strikes the room.

Flash, lightening ? or

car lights shining in like

an angry dragon, no traffic

now and a foghorn playing

a long note & vibration —

color & vibration . white &

neutrals & negative exposure

pink cellophane windows

rose colored & white insanity

green gel interior . chalky

white dark with outdoors

showing through windows.

Daylight flashing & zoomed

in on room’s interior.

WHEN   WILL   THE   NOISE   STOP

The voice of the noise is

becoming hoarse . iciy blue

The noise will dye soon.

I meant die

The room is disappearing.

green shot popcorn. &

grainy film now perfectly

exposed with person on floor

What’s wrong with this picture?

klear whitewashed flashed

noise is annoying

a-noising  dark red like

a burst body vessel.  STOP IT

Tune out Tune off. TUNES

not much room left now.

a white blob passes.

and we just sit here &

take it!!

yellow chair yellow

light_ ‘ . _ Double ghost image

institution   .    office of

A d mission to a clinic for

nervous & mental breakdowns

In one ear & out the other .

Fading but not the sound.

A black phone appears &

I can call for help who’s

going to listen, who will

listen ??  LET ME OUT !?!

Clarity again in the image.

outdoor signs are visible

hardware store.  In the left

ear now.  nowpictures on

the wall. & woman dials phone.

she reports a dead person on

the floor in her room.  She

becomes ghostly.

MY SINUSES ARE ACHING FROM

THE SOUND.  White wall now.

pictures of 2 white forms of people

standing multiplied then became

only 2 again . now multiple &

floaty . Layers of the same

B & W picture (one over the other)

not quite aligned.  mis-matched

out of synch . spaces between

your ears . Down that tunnel

that people who have a near-

death experience go . WORSE THAN

A TOOTHACHE when will this

noise be pulled or filled??  Conden-

sation on the glass window pane

and there is a squiggle drawn

in it.  TURN UP THE PITCH BITCH

This sound is searing my

eyeballs & scraping my nerve

endings as fine lines

show up now vertically

on the screen (on the scream in my skull) . S/B 2

fine lines.  sirens now on

top of this  B & W photo of

water & rippley waves

becomes the picture & a

new noise is added like

a trolley bus starting away

from a curb . and a siren

at a distance ._ these two

combined  .  The texture of

the waves is full screen

but they do not move at all

SILENCE AT LAST.  They

diffuse into mist.  The END!

at last.  no maybe not.  Yes.

Some bold color blocks at

the fine.

Before watching a 10-minute version of “Wavelength” at the link below, scroll down on You Tube and get a load of the five or six comments.  I hope you will watch it and go on to read the following link for a worthy explanation of what Canadian Filmmaker Michael Snow’s award-winning film is about. The “Aha!” moment follows Wikipedia’s article and discussions.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzPwuP6AmCk

Wikipedia on “Wavelength”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wavelength_(1967_film)

Bio of Fiona Bowie, my Media History teacher at Emily Carr University on Granville Island, Vancouver, B.C.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiona_Bowie

Copyright © 2010 Nicole Rigets

Jazz Berries

I met Lisa at L.K. Thayer’s Poetry Juice Bar: Lisa’s poetry Blog.  Since discovering the ‘Juice Bar’ late last year it’s been my destination of choice for a ‘good squeeze’ as Lisa would say. This “Web Mistress” publishes submissions from writers and poets, celebrities and artists; many of them in the L.A. and NYC regions, 24/7.   Thayer’s recent poem, “Find a Way,” struck a chord with me.  Lisa squeezes my poetry and I wanted to introduce her to my viewers.

"A Way"

“Find A Way”

if it’s around the corner

under the overpass

between the seats of your sofa

behind the door

in another country

across the hall

up the elevator

on your knees

or

in front of your face

you can find a way

to make it worth

this moment

on earth

Photo by L. K. Thayer

Here is what Roz Levine has to say about Lisa, and the Poetry Juice Bar that inspires and offers an atmosphere of friendship.

“Jazz Berries”

Ah, Lisa, queen and empress and regal directress of the Juice Bar. We fly to your Juice Bar for fattening and feasting, plumping ourselves up to ripe and ready with words and art and the god damn jazzy mysteries of creativity shaking its head from the womb of the creator.
Thank you, merci beaucoup, muchas gracias, danke shein or thanks for the rootin’, tootin’ shots of energy we need to keep us going, going, going till we are gone and out of the sometime of this ordinary world and can see with our own eyes on fire burst just how beautiful, how very beautiful is the holy.

Love you, girl with the hats galore and the words of pussy willows wafting across the wide of this world.

Roz

Roz Levine

Photo by L.K. Thayer

2010

Stephen John Kalinich is a New Yorker and writes in a variety of fields that includes poetry.  He has written lyrics for talents such as the Beach Boys and Diana Ross. Kalinich was spot-on when he told Lisa, quote: “You are the Juice Bar’s Hot Mama!” Lisa’s vibrant personality and love of the arts has yielded hundreds of friends and viewers for her blogs and her profile on Facebook.

Thayer’s latest ‘Love’ is Photography and they are now a steady item.  L. K. Thayer’s Foto Fetish is where you’ll find her capture of angles, colors, architecture, people, and popular culture in a spirited pulsating L.A. http://www.fotofetish.wordpress.com

Link to L.K. Thayer’s Poetry Juice Bar for viewing and details for submissions.   http://lkthayer.wordpress.com

BTW – checking out the comments can prove very entertaining.  I look forward to seeing you there!!!

Copyright © 2010 Nicole Rigets